Read it.

The “resignation” of star New York Times science writer Donald McNeil Jr. has sparked a furious back-and-forth among Times staffers, many of whom are outraged over the Gray Lady’s handling of his departure.

The Washington Free Beacon reviewed a series of postings to a Facebook group for current and former Times staffers, where a tense debate is unfolding over McNeil’s exit. One camp argues that his dismissal was justified and another asserts it set a troubling precedent, which the New York Times union should have done more to prevent.

Read it.

Joe Biden is a corrupt politician of the old-fashioned variety. He has no fixed convictions about anything. That’s why he has been on both sides of so many important issues.

Biden has never been in the business of accumulating power in service of a policy agenda. He has always been in the business of accumulating power to feed his ego and enrich the Biden family.

Read it.

Thank you, President Trump.

America’s Top Union Boss Nervously Slams Biden Over Keystone XL Decision

Biden Justice Department Pick Opposed Enforcing Civil Rights Laws Against Blacks

A Little-Known Emergency Health Order Has Secured Our Border. It Is Now Dismantled

US Will Rejoin UN Human Rights Council As An Observer

Democrats’ Minimum Wage Increase Would Kill 1.4 Million Jobs, Congressional Budget Office Finds

Illegal Immigrants Guilty of DUI, Assault Will Not Be Deported Under Biden Plan

‘Americans Will Not Be Safe,’ Maryland Sheriff Warns About Biden’s Immigration Policies

Claim: Global Warming May have Started in 1825

Researchers Warn Sea Level Rise Worse Than Feared

Green Groups Object to Swedish Climate Geoengineering Experiment

Sen. Chris Murphy: ‘No Comparison’ Between Comments Made By Maxine Waters, Other Democrats And Trump  Yeah, they’re much worse than Trump.

White House Reporter Compares Kayleigh McEnany To ‘Bad Ex-Boyfriend,’ Says Biden Has ‘Blue Wall’ Of Staffers Blocking Press

Conservatives Sit Down For A Relaxing Evening Of Being Insulted By Every Major Corporation In America  Babylon Bee.

Myanmar orders blocks of Twitter and Instagram on top of Facebook ban

National Guard And Razor Wire Everywhere: DC Gets Dystopian As Impeachment Trial Kicks Off

Want Some Championship Football with Your Race Discussion?

On MSNBC, House Democrat Trashes Trump’s Right Against Self-Incrimination

Uighurs: ‘Credible case’ China carrying out genocide

Maxine Waters tries walking back violent rhetoric against Trump  Oops.

Calls for Pelosi to pay fine she imposed after bypassing metal detector intensify  Rules are for thee but not for me.

BRAZEN SF ATTACKS: San Franciscans question their safety after brazen daily attacks

‘Drag All Of These People Into Prison’: Joe Scarborough Wants 20-Year Sentence For Everyone Who Got Inside Capitol

And so it begins: UK Government mulls emergency measures that would enable networks to switch off your electricity without warning or compensation

Obsessed: The Media Have Never Stopped Lobbying for Trump’s Impeachment

CNN’s Trump-Hating Fantasy: A Witness That Trump Told to Storm the Capitol

Texas To Vote On Whether To Force All Other States To Secede  Babylon Bee.

SINKING SHIP: Just 3 of 8 Founding Members Remain at Scandal-Plagued Lincoln Project

AP Foresees GOP Doom in Virginia: ‘Pro-Trump Extremists’ vs. ‘Mainstream Moderates’

New Twitter App Blocks Over 800 New York Times Journos In “Fight Against Disinformation”

‘How Long Until We Start Trashing Her?’: Meghan McCain Says Media Will Turn On Liz Cheney

Rep. Waters Claims She Didn’t Encourage Violence As Trump Lawyer Plans To Show Video

Nets Swoon Over Leftist Divider Springsteen Preaching Unity in Super Bowl Ad

Texas Follows Florida, Preps Own Bill Against Big Tech Censorship

Majority Of GOP Voters Would Join A New Trump-Led Political Party, Poll Shows

“We Cannot Mince Words”: San Francisco Education Official Denounces Meritocracy As Racist

USA Today: Tom Brady Epitomizes White Privilege

‘Family Demands Answers’

Morgan Wallen’s Album Sales Triple After Video Surfaces Of Him Using N-Word

‘Why Should Non-Citizens Be Treated Better?’: Texas AG Blasts Biden Decision To Vaccinate Illegals

Even ‘Scientist’ Models Now Forecast The COVID Scourge Ending By The Summer

The mystery of the flu-Covid ‘twindemic’ that never happened  (CNN) It’s a Mystery!

South Africa Halts Vaccine Rollout As AstraZeneca Jab Ineffective At Combating Mutant COVID  MUTANT COVID! AAAAUGH!

Leftists on Twitter Have Collective Meltdown Over Tom Brady Not Wearing A Mask

Vaccines Or Not, Scientists Now Believe COVID Is Here To Stay  It’s just too handy for the ruling class.

CDC: ‘Just Because You Got The Vaccine Doesn’t Mean You Should Go Outside Or Ever Experience Joy Again’  Babylon Bee.

‘Florida Is Going To Kill All Of Us’: Sunny Hostin Blasts Ron DeSantis After Super Bowl Partiers Ditch Masks

San Francisco Teachers Union Agrees To Return For In-Person Learning After City Threatened To Sue School District

Beyond Parody: CNN Reporter Brags about Calling Cops on Maskless Floridians

Read it.

The ‘gender reveal’ trend appears to be counter-evolutionary. The kid will discover the challenges of being an orphan.

The Other McCain points and laughs.

Timothy Wilks had a great idea for a YouTube prank — fake a robbery by charging at people with a giant knife. The result wasn’t funny.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

I suspect that removing the humans from the process is designed to insulate against charges of racism.

If it has the added benefit of selecting intelligent over unintelligent people, that’s gravy.

Read it.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high-speed rail. That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives, all technologies that were once revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today.

Michigan GOP Rep. Meijer tries to defend anti-Trump impeachment vote, angers voters

PAC pressures GOP senators to convict Trump in upcoming impeachment trial

Trump impeachment lawyer says he’ll use video of Dems’ own remarks at trial

Why has Donald Trump not faced charges for criminal incitement? (The Hill)

Sen. Rand Paul is wrong. The Trump impeachment trial is constitutional, and here’s why (Louisville Courier-Journal)

It’s Time to Talk About Violent Christian Extremism (Politico)

Republicans can run from accountability, but they can’t hide (Washington Post)

Marjorie Taylor Greene is just the latest radical White woman poisoning politics (Washington Post)

Raskin: Trump’s Decision Not To Testify May Be Cited As Evidence Of His Guilt

CNN’s Lemon Sugarcoats Omar’s Anti-Semitism While Bashing GOP

Twitter Permanently Bans Gateway Pundit For Violating “Civic Integrity Policy”  I.e. ‘undermining the Narrative’.

Catch-and-Release: How Liberals Destroyed Law and Order in California

Alcindor Links ‘White Supremacy’ to Trump ‘Torturing’ Illegal Immigrants

China Rights Activist Missing After Being Stopped at Airport

BBC: China Using Rape Squads to Destroy Uighur Minority

Mob Threatens Arson During ‘F*ck The Police’ March In DC  I wonder whether they will be pursued with the relentless focus that the Capital protestors were?

ABC Praises Biden’s ‘More Aggressive Use of Executive Action’  Even though it made Trump Literally Hitler.

Cheney Refuses to Concede To State Republicans Call For Her Resignation  Dead woman talking.

Rand Paul: ‘You Can’t Just Criminalize Republican Speech And Ignore All The Democrats Who Have Incited Violence’

Biden To Reverse Trump’s Terror Designation Of Yemen’s Houthis

Biden Ending Deals with Central America Restricting Asylum  Acting quickly to re-break everything that Trump fixed.

Border Agents Release Migrants Into US in Shift From Trump

Professor Who Made Barron Trump Joke At Impeachment Hearing Is Joining The Biden DOJ  Top Men.

Climate change “may have played a key role” in coronavirus pandemic, study says May have!

Study: Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID Shot Less Effective Against S.African Variant  But don’t you dare call it the ‘Wuhan virus’, that’s racist.

Did the Covid-19 virus really escape from a Wuhan lab?

Climate change may have driven the emergence of SARS-CoV-2  Climate Change – is there anything it can’t do?

Do Pharmacy Deserts Represent Systemic Racism or Resistance to Gentrification?

Biden Is Employing Kamala as a Token, Not Trusting Her with Responsibility

‘A Metaphor For America’: Rep. Ayanna Pressley ‘Haunted’ By Black Custodial Staff ‘Cleaning Up After White Supremacist Mobs’  No mention of non-black owners cleaning up after BLM rioters.

Check it out.

I like it, but I can’t see it handling tomatoes or beans or corn.

For hipster staples like kale or arugula it’s probably just the thing.

Read it.

Maybe this is a trend. I’m sure that there are a number of California, Oregon, and Washington counties that would rather be a part of, say, Nevada or Idaho. Indeed, I rather suspect that the non-coastal counties of California would rather be their own state.

UPDATE: Texas Republicans endorse legislation to allow vote on secession from US  That didn’t work out so well the last time.

Read it.

Rather than leaving your money to your kids (or, God forbid, charity), Democrats will force you to leave it to somebody (anybody) else’s kid. What’s not to like?

Read it.

Works for me.

Roger Scruton liked to say the the core of the contemporary left is a “culture of repudiation,” in which the inheritances of our civilization must be denied and rubbished precisely because it is our civilization, rather than the imaginary one of the left’s making.

Read it.

“How To” books are a dime a dozen and cover every imaginable topic, or so it seems. But one might think another genre would also be popular, even important: “How Not To” publications. That advice can often prove more valuable. It can at least help one avoid missteps.

Take the role of White House Press Secretary, filled since January 20th by former Obama Administration Communications Director Jennifer Psaki. I’ve never seen so many rookie mistakes in a spokesperson in a relatively short time, even while granting her some grace for being “in the arena” in one of the toughest White House jobs, even while performing before a friendly, even fawning audience.

ZMan nails it.

There are many things that one can point to in the current age as the cause of what we are experiencing. Social crisis is always the result of many factors. There is never one single cause. Even so, examining the individual causes has some utility. It helps provide a little sanity for those living through it. If nothing else, it is like the band playing on the Titanic in that if provides those who are condemned to live through the crisis with a bit of dignity as they sink into the abyss.

Anyway, one of the things that has made modern life such a mess is the vast chorus of nitwits who fill our lives with their voices. They repeat whatever has been placed in their hymnals by people with agendas. One person says something that gets them some attention and then everyone repeats it. The thing is, these people position themselves as authorities on various topics, so when they repeat what they hear, they inevitably lend authority to it. The fact is, they know not what they say

…

Few people in any type of media job have ever worked in the dreaded private sector.

Read it.

The coming wave of digital regulation may claim to target “Big Tech” but will inevitably end up harming citizen-innovators most because regulators have forgotten to include them in their process.

No government has yet succeeded in writing a law that manages to hit the assholes and miss the heroes.

Read it.

That’s what you get for putting your new high-tech toy in your shirt pocket.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Not to mention vulnerability to any jihadist with an airplane. Yeah, it attracts attention, but the military has a technical term for ‘attracting attention’: It’s called ‘drawing fire’ and that’s not a good thing.

Scott Alexander.

In most journalistic settings, you can’t just write “here’s what I think”. You have to write “here’s what my source, a recognized expert, said when I interviewed them”. And the experts are pretty sparing with their interviews for contrarian stories.

The way my correspondent described it: sources don’t usually get to approve the way they’re quoted in an article, or to see it before it gets published. So they’re really cagey about saying anything that might get misinterpreted. Maybe their real opinion is that X is a hard question, there are good points on both sides, but overall they think it probably isn’t true. But if a reporter wants to write “X Is Dumb And All Epidemiologists Are Idiots For Believing It”, they can slice and dice your interview until your cautiously-skeptical-of-X statement sounds like you’re backing them up. So experts end up paranoid about saying potentially-controversial-sounding things to reporters. And since reporters can’t write without sources, it’s hard for them to write anything controversial about epidemiology.

Scarborough Slams Evangelicals For ‘Bizarre, Bizarre, Bizarre’ Concern About Abortion

NBC Hails 50 Years of Doonesbury Comic’s Left-Wing Hackery

What Ulysses Grant Can Teach Joe Biden About Putting Down Violent Insurrections  (Politico)

Crowdfunding hate: How white supremacists and other extremists raise money from legions of online followers (USA Today)

College Scales Back ‘Bias Response’ Teams After Legal Challenge

French President ‘Very Upset’ Big Tech Undemocratically Censored Trump, His Supporters

Man Convicted Of Double-Murder Approved For Parole Eligibility, Prosecutors Barred From Hearing Under LA’s New Laws

Minnesota Governor Signs Executive Order To Activate National Guard A Month Ahead Of Former Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin’s Trial

NYT Reporter Originally Given ‘Another Chance’ Forced Out After Co-Workers Express Outrage To Managers When the Mob comes for you, you don’t get another chance.

Fox News Cancels Host Lou Dobbs’ Show

House Republicans Say Pelosi Broke Her Own Rules And Bypassed Metal Detectors, Demand She Be Fined

House Impeachment Brief Against Trump Threatens Freedom Of Speech Of All Americans: Dershowitz

PolitiFact Warps Reality About Left-Wing Activist Inciting Capitol Riot

David Hogg To Release Line Of Extra-Absorbent Pillows For Liberal Tears  Babylon Bee.

PolitiFact, AP, WashPost Leap to Defend AOC’s Riot Claims; CNN’s Alone in Flagging Her a Bit

Two House Republicans Introduce Bill Named After Ilhan Omar, Whose Campaign Paid Millions To Her Husband’s Firm

Super Bowl Halftime Show To Feature Robin DiAngelo Reading ‘White Fragility’  Not the Babylon Bee.

Romney’s Child Tax-Credit Plan Hailed as Ambitious, Innovative Romney cements his membership in the vote-buying government-dependent-creating ruling class. Next up: Universal Basic Income.

Seriously? ‘View’ Hosts Accuse Van Jones of Providing ‘Racial Cover’ for Trump

Nick Cannon “Uncancelled” After Brief Timeout

None Dare Call It Anti-White Racism

Apple TV+ picks up 11 NAACP Image Award nominations

Inmates at St. Louis Jail Set Fires, Break Windows

Catch-and-Release: Career Criminal Arrested in Deadly San Francisco Crash

NYT: Tipping Is a Legacy of Slavery

TSA Says Mask Violators Could Get Hit With Fines Of $1,500 Or More

Shorter quarantines with careful testing may be more effective than two-week isolation, Yale study finds

Rural community in shock after Georgia raids clinic vaccinating teachers

Parents Slam School District After Kids Seen On Campus For Apple TV Commercial Shoot

Canada single-handedly destroys the Alaska cruise industry

Get the Vax, or Mutti Will Ground You!

CDC And TSA Form Federal Mask Police… And Enforcement Is Up To Officer Discretion

US Customs: China Flooded the USA with Counterfeit Covid Tests and Masks in 2020

Rep. Issa: Newsom Recall Bigger Than Gray Davis

UN Climate Envoy Bloomberg’s Private Jets Emitted More Than 500 Times The Carbon Footprint Of A Typical Car

Climate Researcher’s New E-Book: IPCC Significantly Overstates CO2, “The Sorry State Of Climate Science”

The problem with climate models

Biden Bars “Erratic” Trump From Receiving Intel Briefings Customary For Former Presidents

US Reversing Iran-Backed Houthi Movement’s Terrorist Group Designation

Read it.

One of Facebook’s original Oversight Board members tasked with handing down binding rulings on content moderation is leaving to join the Justice Department. The move marks a growing pattern of Facebook employees adding to the ranks of the Biden administration.

“Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.”  Luke 16:9

Read it.

The Oversight for Members And Relatives, or OMAR, Act was introduced Friday by Wisconsin Reps. Mike Gallagher (R.) and Tom Tiffany (R.), and specifically references the millions of dollars Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.) has sent from her campaign to her husband’s consulting firm. In the most recent cycle Omar’s campaign sent $2.9 million to the firm, accounting for nearly 80 percent of its political business.

Read it.

Franklin Roosevelt with the apparently untouchable achievement of 3,721 executive orders. FDR signed nearly as many executive orders per year that all other presidents averaged over their entire presidencies (many of which were two terms). Interestingly, the executive orders of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson make up 43% of all the executive orders of all of our presidents in history.

Equally interestingly, the tyrant Donald Trump signed 220 executive orders, which is 3,500 less than FDR. Since the year 1900, the only presidents with fewer executive orders than Trump were JFK, Ford, and Bush I. Trump apparently did not like executive orders. Odd behavior for a tyrant. But never mind.

Read it.

“Disinformation” and “misinformation” are used to excuse incompetence and punish opposition.

Read it.

Now Omar is the first member of Congress to be recognized in one of those bills whose titles make for a relevant acronym. Yesterday Wisconsin Seventh District Rep. Rep. Tom Tiffany and Eighth District Rep. Mike Gallagher introduced the Oversight for Members And Relatives Act, which would put an end to the practice of candidates for office tapping their campaign accounts to enrich their spouses (and themselves). Rep. Tiffany’s press release on the proposed OMAR Act is posted here.

Read it,

If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em (and suck up the government subsidies).

Read it.

In a speech delivered at a degree ceremony at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, a noted physicist and Nobel Prize winner in 1974, compared the social sciences to the cargo cult. Representatives of the social sciences, he argued, imitate the behaviour of other sciences but to no effect. Feynman did not end with this comparison, but added examples from the fields of rehabilitation, psychotherapy, and parapsychology. He stated that despite the enormous effort invested in researching and perfecting teaching methods, students’ results are worse every year. The same goes for criminality and the other problems which the social sciences attempt to resolve. Was Feynman right?

Looks that way to me.

Read it.

Another attempt in the ongoing proglodyte effort to convince people First World Bad Turd World Good.

Look at the ‘categories’ of stuff this web site deals with. They’re obviously ‘artists’ aimed at other ‘artists’, and (as Scott Adams never tires of pointing out), they’re idea of ‘science’ is ‘stuff that sounds good and agrees with our preconceived notions’. (As a general rule, if an ‘artist’ – someone whose job is working with words, art, music, or film – tells you something arguably scientific, don’t believe it. They work in a world of feelings, and feelings aren’t science.)

Note that I do not say that the information presented is false; I think the information is probably true. But it is presented in a tendentious way that attempts to canonize a viewpoint a being Objective Science. And this disease affects all such fora, even ones that use to be trustworthy, such as ‘Scientific’ American, Popular ‘Science’, and Wired ‘Science’, and it’s even infecting purportedly rigorous scientific journals like Nature

CNN

Investigators are struggling to build a federal murder case regarding fallen US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, vexed by a lack of evidence that could prove someone caused his death as he defended the Capitol during last month’s insurrection.

Authorities have reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick engaging with rioters amid the siege but have yet to identify a moment in which he suffered his fatal injuries, law enforcement officials familiar with the matter said.

Emphasis added. Notice the entire attitude: We have to find somebody to pin this murder on, and REALITY IS JUST NOT COOPERATING WITH THE NARRATIVE. They obviously think this is a bug, not a feature.

This is what passes for journalism these days. And nobody seems to care.

Scott Alexander on a problem of modern life.

WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice. Consider drug side effects.

…

Drug 1 is aspirin. Drug 2 is warfarin, which causes 40,000 ER visits a year and is widely considered one of the most dangerous drugs in common use. I challenge anyone to figure out, using WebMD’s side effects list alone, that warfarin is more dangerous than aspirin. I think this is because if WebMD said “aspirin is pretty safe and most people don’t need to worry about it”, people might use aspirin irresponsibly, die, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. Or if WebMD said “warfarin can be dangerous, be careful with this one”, people might refuse to take warfarin because “the Internet said it was dangerous”, die of the stuff warfarin is supposed to treat, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. WebMD solves this by never giving the tiniest shred of useful information to anybody.

Read it.

ust one week after making the decision to close its Union Square store, b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby announced via Twitter on Wednesday that the Hayes Valley store is now closed “indefinitely” as well due to a store manager having a gun pointed at him during a robbery.

“Our story is not exceptional,” Norby said. “I think the city will say it’s a b8ta-specific problem because we have a visible storefront and high-value merchandise, but everybody’s witnessing this.”

He said since his story has been covered in the media, other Hayes Valley merchants have reached out to share stories of their break-ins. Norby said he won’t reopen the store until he sees a month free of break-ins on the block.

The Union Square b8ta store closed last week because there were three muggings on the street it is on this year. “It doesn’t matter how expensive it is,” Norby told SFGATE in January. “We can’t send our employees into a store where there’s even a 2% chance they get mugged.”

The basic problem with Democrats running a city is that they can’t even get right the essential job of a government, protecting the people from harm. They can’t (or won’t) protect them from riots, they can’t protect them from crazy people wandering the streets, and (appently) they can’t protect them from violent crime.

B8ta has stores around the globe, and Norby told SFGATE last month that the crime in San Francisco is unlike anything the company experiences elsewhere. “This actually doesn’t happen anywhere else in the country,” he said. “We have 17 other stores, including three internationally. This just doesn’t happen anywhere else. It’s only here.”

Read it.

Watching American liberalism in action always reminds me of Churchill’s observation about Stanley Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

Hunter Biden Still Hasn’t Sold His Stake In Chinese Investment Fund

Read it.

Don’t ever say we never have useful stuff here.

Biden Vows To “Defend Democracy Globally”, Says “Days Of Rolling Over” To Russia “Are Over”  Is there anything in Joe Biden’s career that would give any credibility to this bloviation?

Biden’s Energy Plan May Be Costly For Consumers  Oh, ya think?

US Government Spends $500 Million for Guard Troops in DC

Anti-Israeli staffers keep joining the Biden administration

Biden Won’t Cut Down $1,400 Stimulus Checks: ‘That’s What The American People Were Promised’  Hey, votes are expensive these days.

Hunter Biden’s New Book ‘Beautiful Things’ Listed As No. 1 Under ‘Chinese Biographies’ On Amazon