Trump attempts to bypass Congress on coronavirus relief, though his power to do so is unclear  Boy, that almost sounds like something Obama would do, doesn’t it?

The economy is not Trump’s strong suit | TheHill  I guess those improved unemployement numbers were just a mirage, then.

Trump walks out of news conference after reporter asks him about Veterans Choice lie he’s told more than 150 times  CNN.

I was a Republican, and I drew my red line too late. I’ll answer for my choices for years to come.  CNN loves these ‘true confession’ types of stories.

Brian Williams and His Obama Guy STILL Claiming Trump’s Russian-Owned

CNN Guest Says There’s No Network On The Left Dedicated To Tearing Down Trump  Of course not. There doesn’t need to be. The Herd all moves in the same direction because they all want the same things.

Riot Declared as Fire Burns in Portland Police Union Offices

The COVID Crisis Has Helped Make The Blueprint For A European Superstate

NPR fires weatherman for comparing Seattle riots to Germany in 1938 on his personal blog

Nancy Pelosi Admits On CNN: “China Would Prefer Joe Biden”

Aussie Covid-19 Response: Warrantless Home Invasion, Smashed Car Windows  Australia appears to have degenerated into Just Another European Police State after all. Pity.

STOP the Presses: NYT Commits Journalism, Finds Antifa Thuggery in Seattle

False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg; Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger – review  The Guardian.

Undeniable Truths

Read it.

There have been peaceful protests violent riots every single night in Portland now for nearly three months straight. There appear to be many different groups involved, with many different messages, from “Black Lives Matter” to “Antifa” to people carrying signs with the Soviet hammer and sickle. But there is one thing all the rioters have in common. They all hate Donald Trump. All the riots have signs saying things like “Dump Trump” and other more explicit words saying the same thing. The rioters are urging people to vote against Trump in the next election. Remember, these riots are in Portland, Oregon.

In 2016, Donald Trump won 17% of the vote in Portland. Who are these people trying to convince? There hasn’t been an out-of-the-closet Republican sighted in the wild in Portland since the Reagan administration. And such exotic fauna will most certainly be scarce in Portland in today’s hostile environment. So the Portland riots are essentially Democrats trying to convince Democrats to vote Democrat, while they destroy one another’s property. I don’t get it.

Read it.

Could have fooled me.

CNN chief medial reporter Brian Stelter beclowned himself yet again during Sunday’s no-so Reliable Sources. Between raging at right-wing media and talk radio for questioning Joe Biden’s mental lucidity, and claiming left-wing hacks like himself weren’t dedicated to “tearing down” President Trump, Stelter was out to prove that he was willing to lie with impunity. And at one point, a guest floated the idea of weaponizing the Federal Communication Commission to target and presumably shut down right-wing talk radio.

Gaslighting his viewers from the get-go, Stelter hoped they wouldn’t remember how he was among the first in the liberal media to demand the press start questioning Trump’s mental health, as he railed against right-wing media for now questioning Biden’s.

Read it.

In my prior life as an insurance executive, it was my job to deceive Americans about their health care. I misled people to protect profits. In fact, one of my major objectives, as a corporate propagandist, was to do my part to “enhance shareholder value.” That work contributed directly to a climate in which fewer people are insured, which has shaped our nation’s struggle against the coronavirus, a condition that we can fight only if everyone is willing and able to get medical treatment. Had spokesmen like me not been paid to obscure important truths about the differences between the U.S. and Canadian health-care systems, tens of thousands of Americans who have died during the pandemic might still be alive.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Suspend the price mechanism, put the government in charge, and, sure enough, lo and behold, shortages and quality problems result.

Read it.

So President Trump has decided to pet the unicorn. He has set himself up to act in the peoples’ best short-term interest and dared the opposition to sue and stop him (and thus them). He is bringing to life the meme that “They are not really after me. They are after You. I am just in their way.” And that is what voters will come to believe if the Democrats try to stop him.

For all of his alleged impulsiveness, ignorance, and stupidity, Trump keeps sinking those baskets.

Read it.

If this was 2012, the liberal media would be worshiping President Obama for using his pen and phone to get around an obstructionist Congress to help hurting Americans during an election year pandemic. But after President Trump signed an executive orders to continue weekly unemployment checks and halt evictions Saturday, ABC’s Good Morning America was up in arms. They siding with Democrats, claimed it was a “game” to Trump, and hyped the legal battle that would delay the aid.

Apparently aid is good only when it comes from Democrats.

Yeah, that would do it.

(Who leaves their basement door open with dogs in the house?)

Read it.

There is a number of online “alternative lifestyle” movements that have been gaining steam among millennials. They are appealing in their leanness: do more with less. At first, they seem cute and liberating. Scores of Instagram influencers and bloggers romanticize these lifestyles, and their subreddits are buzzing with zealots

…

Ultimately, these movements romanticize and hide the true generational poverty of millennials. This is a generation of people who will never retire, who may never even buy real estate of their own. In terms of intergenerational wealth, these people are screwed. And I would like to see that point raised and addressed, instead of making do with solutions of desperation.

Steve Sailer.

Has this Dunbar number theory ever been tested? It’s quite popular, but I mostly see it used in an “As everybody knows” sense.

…

A lot of people can’t deal well with criticism. They feel like they are about to be attacked by a mob and murdered when they get a few dozen tweets making fun of them. I think that’s a better application of this Dunbar Number: If people get 76 negative responses on social media, they worry, “Oh, no, the majority of my tribe of 150 has spoken out against me! I will be made an outcast and forced to wander along in the wilderness.”

Read it.

Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.

Read it.

Cities—especially coastal cities in blue states—are the stronghold of Democratic political power. They’ve been the social base for radical left-wing ideas now breaking into the mainstream. Yet as Mr. Cuomo’s plea highlights, those same states and cities depend immensely on the affluent to fund their hugely expensive government programs.

Mr. Cuomo’s friends with Hamptons homes may donate to liberal causes and willingly pay higher taxes for New York’s amenities in normal times. But they probably don’t support confiscatory taxation, and they’re wary of the revolutionary mood on the left insofar as it is producing crime and disorder where they live. The pandemic may cause some to move permanently, leaving cities like New York with fewer resources to finance progressive policies.

If Democrats win the 2020 elections, they promise to raise taxes. Will they try to spare the liberal rich? If they don’t, progressive governance will come under more strain, and liberal high-earners may take a second look at a GOP offering lower rates all around.

Steve Sailer.

Egg and sperm banks like to open offices near famous colleges in order to conveniently harvest the gametes of students most in-demand by their customers. This may sound like the Pseudoscience of eugenics, but, well, you aren’t supposed to think about that.

Read it.

Previous research suggests that it’s much easier for young children to pick up a new language than it may be for their parents or even older siblings. A new study offers a solution to jump that evolutionary hurdle.

Specifically it improves the ability to pick up a language’s sounds. That’s helpful, but not all that much.

Republicans have to let Donald Trump lose if they want victory | TheHill

Trump mocked after calling Thailand ‘Thighland’ in latest speech blunder  The Independent (British tabloid), being sophomoric.

Trump’s desperate attacks are revealing the scam Republicans have been pulling for years  Washington Post.

‘It’s a Peaceful Protest’; Trump NUKES WashPost Hack Concerned About Press Conference Crowd

They Need Help: MSNBC Freaks Over ‘NO LIMITS’ to Trump’s Madness

Whatever your take on the jobs numbers, the economy still needs a federal boost  Washington Post. Because it just does!

Raise taxes on the super rich. They have it, we need it  Los Angeles Times.

Bernie Sanders proposes 60% tax on wealth gained by billionaires during pandemic  Bernie has never seen a wallet he didn’t want to lift.

Karen Bought a Printer and a Roll of Duct Tape

100 Children Shot In Philadelphia Year-To-Date

Diamond & Silk to Newsmax TV: ‘Jim Crow Joe’ Doesn’t ‘Own Blacks’

Bike Store Cancels Contract With Austin Bike Police After “Woke” Employees Complain

NJ principal calls pro-police flag ‘racist’, angry parent joins ‘Tucker’

If Black Is Capitalized But Not White, Shouldn’t Woman be Capitalized But Not Man?, by Steve Sailer

Undoing MLK’s Work: CNN’s Harlow Wants People to Be Judged by the Color of Their Skin

“All Republicans Are Racist Scum…”  Now, if he’d said that about Democrats, he’d have been cancelled already.

Yes, Emissions Have Fallen. That Won’t Fix Climate Change  Wired ‘Science’.

How falling solar costs have renewed clean hydrogen hopes

This worst-case climate scenario might be the most realistic  Popular ‘Science’.

Rising Waters on Lake Michigan Are Threatening Luxury Homes

In Colombia, ‘climate-smart’ villages show how the future of farming could look

Shellenberger’s Optimistic, Viral Take on Climate Future Challenged by Scientists He Cites

Is the EU’s 30% climate budget greenwashing?

Revisiting the global hydrological cycle: is it intensifying?

Read it.

The New York Times loves the public sector, and it mimics our most dysfunctional governments in one respect: it is just about impossible to get fired.

Consider Times opinion columnists Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, Nick Kristof and Maureen Dowd. They have all been at the Times for something like fifty years, and none of that quartet has had a fresh idea in at least the last decade. Does anyone still read them? I remember as recently as 2006 there were controversies over a number of Dowd columns, and the Krugman Truth Squad catalogued Krugman’s howlers. But no one bothers anymore.

Steve Sailer.

Homicide statistics in St. Louis, next door to Ferguson, MO, were perhaps the first fairly big city to reflect the Ferguson Effect of rising homicide numbers in the First BLM Era. If you stare closely at this graph of homicides in the city of St. Louis, you can that homicides were notably more frequent from late 2014 through spring of 2020 than in the half decade before BLM debuted at Ferguson (August 2014).

But in St. Louis, the Ferguson Effect is dwarfed by the Floyd Effect in June (33 homicides) and July (54) of 2020.

Read it.

Mail in ballots belonging to more than 84,000 Democrats in New York City who were seeking to vote in the presidential primary were disqualified according to newly released data from the Board of Elections.

According to the NY Post, the city received 403,103 mail in ballots for the June 23 Democratic primary and the certified results on Wednesday confirmed that only 318,995 of these ballots were counted.

The 84,108 ballots that were not counted represented 21% of the total mail-in ballots.

And this is just among Democrats, so the classic Democrat machine techniques of stealing elections by ballot fraud were presumably not in operation.

Read it.

Are American freedom and individualism to blame for the failure to contain the coronavirus? That was one premise of the lead story in Friday’s New York Times by David Leonhardt: “U.S. Is Alone Among Peers In Failing to Contain Virus – 2 Major Causes: Individualist Tradition and Trump Administration Missteps.”

It comes as no surprise that the basic message of any New York Times article is America Sucks.

It also ought to come as no surprise that the cultural Marxists that man (excuse me, person) the Gray Lady are committed to the platform Individualism Bad, Collectivism Good (although how that squares with the dystopia patent on the daily news in the world’s biggest collective society, Red China).

Read it.

President Trump says he will sign an Executive Order to ease the suffering of those harmed by the pandemic-related shutdowns and to stimulate the economy. Congress has failed to agree on a new package to accomplish these things.

Trump’s Executive Order would include these four components: (1) a payroll tax holiday until the end of the year, (2) an extension of enhanced unemployment benefits until the end of the year, (3) an extension of the eviction moratorium for federal subsidized housing, and (4) a suspension of student loan payments until further notice.

Questions surround the legality of accomplishing at least some of these things via executive order. Trump’s response to that might be, “so sue me.”

Which they won’t dare do, because it would make them look like insensitive assholes.

I’m curious as to how the vast throng of people who look at Trump and see an aging teenager, impulsive and ignorant and bigoted who can barely make it out of bed in the morning, explain this brilliant political move, worthy of Bill Clinton at his prime. I expect that the popping sound you hear in the distance is heads exploding in D.C.

Read it.

President Trump conducted an impromptu press conference yesterday at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Those at the club were invited to watch the president meet the press. The American Thinker’s Andrea Widburg notes that one of the reporters opened, not with a question, but with an accusation: “You said that the pandemic is disappearing, but we lost 6,000 Americans this week, and just in this room, you have dozens of people that are not following guidelines in New Jersey, which say we should not have more than 25 people….”

Without cracking a smile, Trump put his preparation on display (video below). Andrea explicates Trump’s response with reference to Alinsky’s rules 4 (“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”), 5 (“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”), and 6 (“A good tactic is one your people enjoy”).

You know that somebody is trans if ‘he’ watches the Three Stooges and doesn’t laugh.

Read it.

That would do it for me.

No word as to whether she now has to sleep during the daytime.

I’m curious as to whether the bat looked like Maxine Waters. A lot of bats do.

ZMan understands the dialectic.

The petty tyranny of the Covid panic has gone from a genuine response to a public health concern to just another aspect of post-sanity America. People now wear all sorts of silly face coverings when going about their day for the same reason they wear pants or shoes. It’s just another thing that is required. Soon, it will be custom, like not wearing white before Memorial Day. The ever changing rules issued from local tyrants are now taken in stride like, the weather or earthquakes in California.

The mask issue is another great example of how American politics is just a morality play with the same roles every time. The Official Left strutted onto the stage warning about the great monster and how the democracy was at risk. Their solution was mandatory mask wearing like their sponsors in China use. The Official Right tried to minimize the issue and resisted for a while, but the Official Left whipped up their partisans in the crowd and the Official Right eventually relented.

You keep using that word….

Read it.

The problem is simple but vicious circular logic. In the 2006 case sanity was able to reassert itself because there was a much slower test which was considered reliable. It defined what we call the ground truth: the final arbiter of reality. PCR tests could be cross-checked against the ground truth after enough time had passed, allowing the big reveal that the error rate on the PCR was 100%.

But with COVID-19 there is no other test. And it’s a “new” virus, whose exact effects are unknown, so it was decided that the obvious choice of using symptoms as the ground truth would be taking too much risk.

In this situation something new and very nasty has happened. The PCR test has itself become the ground truth. Despite having had an error rate of 100% in the past, it now by definition has an error rate of zero.

Read it.

Ohhh, never thought of this hypothesis: that the act of getting drunk together might be a social technology that helps us verify the trustworthiness of others by inhibiting their higher cognitive functions and thus making it harder to consciously fake things. That would make sense.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

To enhance our natural thin-slicing abilities, humans have therefore also developed various cultural practices that make these instant assessments more reliable. These techniques take advantage of the fact that deception is fundamentally a cold-cognition act and relies on cognitive control centers. This means that if we can impair the cognitive control abilities of people we’re trying to judge, we’ll do a better job of sussing them out: they will be less able to confuse our cheater-detection systems.

And it puts those of us who don’t drink in the driver’s seat. I like that a lot.

Steve Sailer.

The NYT won’t call them Antifa yet in the hopes that readers assume these are the terrifying white supremacist wreckers they’ve heard so much about and thus not be offended by this article by not getting the point.

Read it.

A top U.S. intelligence official put out a report today that U.S. adversaries China, Iran, and Russia were trying to influence the 2020 presidential election. Published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it found both China and Iran want Joe Biden to win the election, while Russia prefers Trump. Can you guess which election meddling bothered the three evening news broadcasts the most?

Read it.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pandemic planning documents state non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing are ineffective once a disease infects 1% of a region’s population. Literature on this subject is unanimous worldwide.

…

Nature always finds a way. No respiratory virus ever needed a “lockdown” to dissipate. What it needs is herd immunity, preferably sooner than later, preferably developed by the young and healthy to minimize mortality. Politicians know the disease will eventually leave, yet they strive to convince a critical mass that their actions — modern-day versions of the rain dance — brought about that result. They count on us behaving like renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner’s superstitious pigeons.

Georgia teens shared photos of maskless students in crowded hallways. Now they’re suspended.

De Blasio suggests Cuomo is wrong to ask New York City’s wealthy to return, says residents shouldn’t buy cars

Supermodel Bella Hadid Throws Up The Middle Finger To New York Cops Not Wearing Face Masks

Economics Professor Says University Blocked His Anti-Marxism Class From Being Available To All Business Students

NRA Announces Lawsuit Against New York Attorney General  Saw that comin’.

Trump Suggests NRA Relocate To Texas After New York AG Files Lawsuit Against Them  Works for me.

Dozens Of Minneapolis Businesses Consider Leaving, Cite Possibility Of Police Being Dismantled

Iowa Teachers Write Their Own Obituaries After Governor Pushes Schools To Hold In-Person Classes

Forty-Five Businesses Mull Leaving Downtown Minneapolis Over COVID, Police Dismantling

People Renouncing US Citizenship Jumps by 1,210 Percent

Protesters Who Caused Thousands In Damage In Utah Could Face Up To Life In Prison For Gang Affiliation Charges

Portland Protesters Cause Mayhem Again, Police Officer Hurt

Portland Mayor Turns On Protesters, Accuses Them Of ‘Attempting To Commit Murder’

Portland Police: Protesters Disguised Themselves As ‘Press,’ Harassed Officers  I’m sure I couldn’t tell the difference.

WNBA Players Start Full-blown Campaign For Democrat Senate Candidate

‘You Want To Buy Crack?’: NYC Homeless Staying In Luxury Hotels Urinating In Public, Harassing Residents

How climate change affects allergies, immune response and autism

New Series “Idiots guide to Climate Change” aims to Educate

‘Climate Scientist Explains …’

Canada’s Last Intact Ice Shelf Collapses Due to Warming

Trump advisers hesitated to give military options and warned adversaries over fears he might start a war  CNN.

Trump advisers were wary of talking military options over fears he’d accidentally start war: report | TheHill

It has suddenly dawned on Senate Republicans: They’re doomed  Washington Post.

Lefty Journalists on MSNBC Mock Trump ‘Scaring White People’ by Calling BLM Marxist ‘Anarchists’

ACLU Has Filed 400 Lawsuits Against Trump Administration

3 Teens Arrested After Scaling Mar-a-Lago Wall With AK-47

Complicit Morning Joe Covers Up Clinton’s Epstein Connection, Tries to Smear Trump  As they always do.

CNN Urges Dems Unite Around ‘Very Moderate’ Biden Against ‘Existential Threat’ Trump

Hayes Imagines Trump Conspiracy to Prop Up Kanye West’s 2020 Bid

MSNBC Touts Ex-Trump Voter Who Wants Trump ‘Nightmare’ Over

ABC/NBC More Outraged Trump ‘Pounced’ on Biden’s Racist Comments

Ted Wheeler Warns Protesters They Might Re-Elect Trump If They Keep Trying To Murder Cops

Read it.

Brent Scowcroft is the perfect East Coast Establishment name

Well, except maybe Strobe Talbot….

And maybe Stensfield Turner….

But it’s certainly up there.

Read it.

Guess there’s a limit to how ‘woke’ women are prepared to be.

Read it.

Heh.

Read it.

The tunnel intended for smuggling ran from San Luis, Arizona, to a Mexican neighborhood and had a ventilation system, water lines, electrical wiring, a rail system and extensive reinforcement, federal officials said Thursday.

“This appears to be the most sophisticated tunnel in U.S. history, and certainly the most sophisticated I’ve seen in my career,” said Carl E. Landrum, acting chief patrol agent with the Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector.

Homeland Security Investigations found the tunnel in late July. A camera was sent 25 feet (7.6 meters) underground after federal agents discovered a sinkhole in the area of a tunnel investigation, authorities said.

Read it.

Fifty years after the Public Broadcasting Service launched, we’re still seeing our taxpayer subsidies transformed into Democratic donations in election years. On August 4, the PBS NewsHour hatched a love-in with Jill Biden.

Read it.

For the last week, I’ve been lobbying for our local private schools, which have been closed until at least October 1st by the executives in Montgomery County, Maryland. You may have heard about the controversy, which could become a battleground for private school parents across the country.

Last month, the public schools announced that they would not be opening for in-person instruction until at least January. In part as a result of that announcement, their projected enrollments saw a significant drop-off. Local media reported, “MCPS was expecting over 2,500 new students by the end of August. As of July 1, only about 300 K-12 new students had been enrolled.” There’s no word about how many kids who were enrolled have been pulled out, but it’s likely as significant as the lowered projected enrollment numbers. Schools are funded by the number of bodies enrolled, and this exodus is an existential threat to the stability of the public school model.

If private schools opened and offered a refuge for these parents, the public school system would suffer a crushing blackeye, not to mention guarantee their numbers (and cashflow) wouldn’t bounce back whenever schools do reopen. And so, what did the county do? They kneecapped the private schools, declaring that they would not be allowed to reopen until the day after public schools would receive money for an enrolled student. The county hopes that if a family are forced into choosing between online-only options, they’ll choose the school without tuition.

Culture-Enrichers Fight With Knives in Lugano

India police patrol ahead of construction of temple on bitterly contested site

Muslims perform Eid prayers with social distancing, masks

Hamas Prioritizing Naval Attack Force Build-Up

Haj pilgrims keep distance at usually crowded stone the devil ritual

Irish Muslims perform Eid prayers on symbolic Croke Park pitch

Barr Willing to Drop Death Penalty to Prosecute ISIS ‘Beatles’ for Beheading Americans

Syrian Army Uncovers Organ Trading Hub Of Turkish-Backed Militants In Southern Idlib

German Muslims Discuss Islam’s Final Solution

Artifact Looters on Facebook Helped Fund ISIS

A Kuffar-Pusher Strikes at the Station in Waghäusel

Mass jailbreak in Afghanistan as IS fighters battle Afghan forces

One person is dying of COVID-19 every seven minutes in Iran: state TV.

Pakistan says mediation between Saudi and Iran going slowly

Israel hits squad that placed explosives along Syria frontier, army says

Video: Five Things You Should Know About Osama Abuirshaid

MSNBC Gives Daily Show To Former Al Jazeera Host Who Attacked ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle As ‘Racist’

US Confirms American Company Has Signed Deal With ‘Rebels’ To Take Syria’s Oil

Israel strikes Syrian targets in response to attempted terrorism

The U.S. Is ‘Reconsidering’ the Death Penalty for ISIS Terrorists

Beirut “Like A War Zone”: Terrifying Blast Shockwave Rips Through City

300 ISIS Terrorists At Large: Mass Prison Break In Afghanistan After Hours-Long Firefight

At least 30 injured in grenade attack in Pakistan at Kashmir rally

Culture-Enriching Rape in Monte Stella Park

ZMan understands the dialectic.

The forest fire of anti-white agit-prop that spread across the mass media this summer was not as coordinated as it appeared from the outside. Most forest fires are the combination of disconnected events. Government neglect, the right weather conditions and some negligent migrants camping in a dry forest. The same is true of this cultural forest fire that still rages in parts of the country. The dry, brittle minds of the mass media makers felt the spark of racial outrage.

The thing is, the people who are at the top of the present social order are operating under two delusions. One is they think the country can be united. That’s why they can’t stop talking about the idea of uniting the country. For them, democracy means everyone spontaneously and enthusiastically agreeing with them. Everyone comes together in one voice, another common trope from our rulers, and belts out some show tunes from Hamilton, then sets about creating the perfect society.

The other delusion is they truly think they are the moral leaders of our society and they are fully in control of this machine they have inherited. It’s not reasonable to say they created it, as the people responsible for the current forest fire of agit-prop are too stupid to create anything other than a mess. The people responsible for staging the current racial theatrics are as much a product of the system and its drama. Like the elements of any forest fire, they came to power by unhappy accident.

Victor Davis Hanson.

We know where to watch in the next few weeks but have no real idea what we will be watching. Yet pundits, the media, and the Left seem giddy that their polls show a Trump slump, as if they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from 2016. But in truth, the news cycle over the next three months may well favor Trump — a scenario his opponents no doubt deem preposterous in these dog days of August.