NJ commuters vow to fight pending Manhattan congestion tax

‘Third World’ NYC drug store shelves empty amid shoplifting surge (NY Post)

NYC drug store shelves are left empty (Daily Mail)

Progressive Democrats draw strength from muscle-flexing in Congress (The Guardian)

Is The Small Business Sector Being Deliberately Targeted For Destruction?

California Law Requires Gender-Neutral Area in Some Stores

Yellen Confident Congress Will Pass Global Minimum Tax  Because why wouldn’t they?

Facebook Using Incorrect AP ‘Fact-Check’ To Censor Posts: Report

California moves toward ban on gas lawnmowers and leaf blowers

Toobin Goes Off On ‘Complete Outrage’ Abortion Court Ruling

PBS Uses Misleading Poll to Make Abortion Seem Popular

AG Garland’s son-in-law’s company issues ‘resource’ claiming Trump supporters are White supremacists

Jim Acosta to Andrew Yang: What the Hell Were You Doing on ‘Tucker Carlson’? (Daily Beast)

A New Confederacy: Trump and the Republicans have already seceded (Salon) All Trump! All the time!

Idaho’s Rogue Lt. Gov. Storms Off When Pressed on ‘Absurd’ Behavior (Daily Beast) Rogue!

GOP lieutenant governor walks out of interview after being pressed about going rogue (CNN) Rogue!

Parents of high school students started a petition to remove a principal who loves classic heavy metal band Iron Maiden (Insider)

Stop calling Joe Manchin ‘moderate’ – he’s just a greedy reactionary (The Guardian) Well, compared to Bernie Sanders ….

Debt for Trump’s business estimated at $1.3 billion: report (The Hill) All Trump! All; the time!

Tom Morello: ‘We came within a baby’s breath of a fascist coup in the US’ (The Guardian) And of course a rock guitarist is our go-to guy on fascism.

Road to nowhere: Oklahoma’s Donald J. Trump Highway runs through the Dust Bowl (Salon) All Trump! All the time!

Texas Abortion Law Foes Target Lawmakers’ Corporate Donors

Here’s how states like South Dakota have become global tax havens (CNBC) It’s amazing how popular one can be by simply deciding not to steal as much of people’s money as the other guys.

Foreign money floods U.S. tax havens. Some of it is tainted (Washington Post) But we’re going to act as if it all were, because that’s what a witch-hunt is all about.

Bill Maher Shocks Liberal Audience With Trump 2024 Predictions: “I Hope I Scared The Shit Out Of You”

UNHINGED CNN: GOP ‘Dumping Anthrax’ In Our Water, Fox News Is ‘Killing People!’

100 Degree Days Poised To Double: Texas Climate Report (NBCDFW) Poised!

Enjoy It While You Can: Dropping Oxygen Will Eventually Suffocate Most Life on Earth (‘Science’ Alert)

Solving the climate crisis requires the end of capitalism (Salon) Of course it does.

In Global Energy Crisis, Anti-Nuclear Chickens Come Home to Roost

Climate scientists should pay more attention to fish poop. Really. (Vox)

The Antarctic Refrigerator Effect

Having Fun Watching Wind And Solar Failing To Step Up To Power The World Economy

Steve Koonin & The Factcheckers

Well Done Greta: Energy Crisis To Send Carbon Emissions To All Time Highs

University of Michigan professor ousted from class after playing Othello film where star wore blackface

Texas Teachers Told to Vet Class Libraries After Mom Freaks Out Over Anti-Racist Book (Daily Beast)

Reported racist comment by Raiders coach Jon Gruden draws NFL rebuke (The Guardian)

Art Institute of Chicago Fires Unpaid Docents for Being Too White, Replaces Them with Paid Ladies of Color

Is the Problem with Unwoke AI That Robots Don’t Feel Fear?

Georgia Police Officer Gunned Down Outside Station During First Shift

Read it.

Late last month, several Orthodox Jewish residents of a New Jersey apartment building—all elderly, some handicapped—filed a federal lawsuit because their co-op board would not let doormen press the elevator button for them on the Jewish Sabbath.

…

Yet though the solutions are easy, some are unwilling to make space for religious practice. In the present case, Kurlansky v. 1530 Owners Corp., the plaintiffs have alleged building policies and comments from co-op board members that, if proven true, can only be described as discriminatory. Some of the plaintiffs have alleged hearing co-op board members say that they did not want “too many of those types of Jews” in the building. The building—referred to as the Colony—provides, according to its website, a wide range of amenities, including concierge and delivery service. Yet service doormen are, allegedly, expressly prohibited from pressing elevator buttons for Orthodox Jews on the Sabbath.

The totalitarian impulse arises naturally.

Read it.

“Distrust of government isn’t baseless cynicism. It’s realism.” – Ben Shapiro

We have seen the truth of this aphorism made clear many times over the past year. Lawlessness on the part of the national government is virtually institutionalized. The latest example occurred earlier this week as the Justice Department declared parents protesting the institution of Critical Racism Race Theory being taught to their children as “domestic terrorists.” It is a clear attempt to criminalize political dissent, a process that began with the treatment of the January 6 protestors.

But in the larger sense, it does not matter whether those in government are Republicans or Democrats, your friends or your foes, or whether we are talking about government on the federal, state, or local level. You should never trust your government. Even (or perhaps especially) when you agree with their actions, never blindly accept them. Always check what they are doing and verify that they are doing what they said they would do – and that it is actually what should be done. Certainly that is what I do on the local level, where I am politically active and several local politicians are friends. They may be friends, but because they are politicians, I still don’t trust them.

Read it.

Five years ago, after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, I set out in search of the origins of the word “xenophobia.” Its birthplace seemed obvious. In ancient Greece, it was said, a wise man combined “xénos” — which connoted both stranger and guest — with “phobos,” their word for fear. Since xenophobia was an eternal and ubiquitous human problem, it made sense that its origins lay near the start of Western civilization, when some Aristotle-like figure opened his eyes and spotted it before him.

All that, I discovered, was nonsense. The ancient Greeks — or the written record we have of them — never employed this term. Instead, in a historical moment with similarities to our own, the word emerged alongside troubles fostered by rapid globalization. And lingering by the starting blocks, off to the side, stood Jean Martin de Saintours.

Read it.

Following a Twitter outcry, a scientist was stopped from giving a lecture at MIT for reasons that had nothing to do with the lecture itself.

Read it.

When President Joe Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans, he stated that these measures were necessary to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” But isn’t the vaccine itself supposed to be what protects the vaccinated? Not well enough, apparently. So whose interests are served by mandating a leaky vaccine that prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease that is chiefly dangerous to people over 75 or with serious preexisting medical conditions?

 

Read it.

In other words, we’re all screwed.

Read it.

For years, advocates of ending American support for the government of Afghanistan pontificated that withdrawal would have no adverse consequences: That fractious country had no geopolitical significance. If the Taliban took it over, that would mean not much more than a jihadi conquest of Pluto.

In one sense, they were right. It has been a mere 40 days since Joe Biden ordered our soldiers to scuttle away like frightened rabbits, leaving billions of dollars of weaponry behind. Thousands of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, along with tens of thousands of Afghans who aided our armed forces, are trapped inside the Taliban’s domain. And already attention has drifted elsewhere. As I type this post, the “Latest Headlines” page on the Wall Street Journal’s web site lists 50 stories. Not one is about Afghanistan.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

One of the strangest phenomena of our time is the whitewashing of the Chinese Communist Party by American liberals. Fifty years ago, everyone knew that the CCP was vicious, cruel and evil. But over the years, economic self-interest–the desire to take advantage of what is at best low-wage labor, and at worst slave labor–has triumphed over moral judgment. With hindsight, maybe Richard Nixon’s famous opening up of China and Bill Clinton’s admission of China into the World Trade Organization were mistakes. Donald Trump briefly tried to rationalize our relationship with the Evil Empire of the 21st Century, but that was too much for the establishment to take.

Politico.

To anyone who’s spent time in Democratic politics in the past decade, a certain type of young person will immediately be familiar: bright-eyed, old enough to drive a car but not old enough to rent one without insurance fees, maybe taking a gap year before starting college or else filling a period of post-graduation, pre-employment idleness.

They probably majored, or are majoring, in political science or public policy or whatever the equivalent area of study offered by their school is. Raised on a steady diet of West Wing optimism cut with a healthy dose of Veep pessimism, they’ve likely spent a summer or two sweating it out in Washington, D.C., cranking out esoteric policy memos for a junior member’s assistant deputy legislative director, or else doing research for a grizzled senior fellow at an upper-Massachusetts Avenue think tank. They might have a faded campaign button from some bygone presidential race dangling from their Fjällräven backpack — maybe for Bernie, or more likely for Pete.

Or Grievance Studies. They’re very into Grievance Studies.

“‘o traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.’

— Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)

Biden Exempts Some Crimes by Illegal Immigrants as Basis for Deportation

Anger in U.S. Customs and Border Protection as Biden administration’s vaccine mandate looms

Taliban Say They Won’t Work with US to Contain Islamic State  My, what a surprise.

The Assault On Merit Continues: MIT Cancels University Of Chicago Professor

CNN’s Stelter Complains That One America News Is Allowed to Exist  In a world that contains Brian Stelter, literally anything is possible.

CNN Tries to Blame Pro-Gun States for Crime in New York, California

Accused war criminal’s foundation forced to refund MAGA donors angered by anti-Trump posts (Salon)

Pence and Haley Aren’t the Future of the GOP—They’re Roadkill (Daily Beast)

Let’s get real about Nikki Haley (CNN)

‘If He Makes a Successful Return in 2024, Democracy’s Done’ (Politico) All Trump! All the time!

Dave Chappelle’s Pointless Transphobia and Homophobia (Daily Beast)

CNN Attacks Fox for Saying It’s Wrong Treat Parents Like Terrorists

The energy crisis couldn’t have come at a worse time for climate (CNN)

Kamala Harris skips US-Mexico border-security meeting, goes to New Jersey instead

Kamala Harris makes quick detour to get some cupcakes with Murphy, Booker in Newark

Threatened by climate change, a California winemaker switches to carbon farming and hopes more vineyards join (Washington Post)

Speakers, Schedule Set for ‘Climate Realism’ Conference Oct 15-17, 2021 in Las Vegas  Nothing says concern for the environment more than holding a convention in a luxury resort in the middle of a desert.

Nuclear waste is a solved problem

Sustainable Electricity-Free Air Conditioner Can Harness Solar Energy To Reduce Temperatures on Hot Days  Sustainable! (What does that even mean?)

L A Times manufactures “extreme heat” propaganda to comply with Biden’s climate alarmist agenda

Why The Swiss Electorate Put The Brakes On Climate Policy

Last Six Months for Antarctica Coldest on Record  Gotta love that Global Warming.

Aussie School Denies Censorship, After Cutting Climate Skeptic Speech

Pandora Papers: Stop the enablers that help billionaires dodge taxes (The Hill)

Progressives may hate it, but Manchin just saved the financial health of every American and showed Democrats how to beat McConnell (Boston Globe)

Nature: Researchers Voice Dismay at All-Male Science Nobels

Can’t Say That? NPR Morning Host Triggered by Utterance of the Word ‘Abortionist’

Hungary Backs Poland In Sovereignty Clash With EU

New York Times Writer Bruni on Oppressive, Mean-Spirited Texas ‘Seething With Rage’  Time for proglodytes to ask ‘Why do they hate us?’

Iceland Bans Moderna Vaccine Use Due To Heart Inflammation Risk

FLASHBACK: Barbara Walters Cheering Cuba as ‘One of the Freest Nations on Earth’

Social Media Permits? No, Thanks!

Biden Administration’s DoJ Gives Up on Persecuting Kenosha Cop Who Shot Jacob Blake

MSNBC’s Cross Slams ESPN’s Sage Steele as a ‘Stepin Fetchit Minstrel Show’

Ibram X. Kendi vs. Yglesias and Douthat

Iceland stops using Moderna Covid-19 vaccine

Florida State Board Sanctions Eight School Districts For Defying Ban On Mask Mandates

One US State Already Has A De Facto ‘Vaccine Passport’ Requirement Just To Enter

Aussie Freedom Blogger Arrested At Home For Alleged ‘Breach Of Public Health Act’

Real-world data show that filters clean Covid-causing virus from air

“So Deeply, Deeply Wrong” – Lithuanian Without Vaccine Pass Describes Life Under Medical Tyranny

Survey Finds COVID Mandates Hurting Small Businesses

Southwest Pilots Union Sues To Block Airline’s Vaccination Mandate

Read it.

“The question out there for parents and educators is why should our kids spend any time doing handwriting,” says cognitive scientist Brenda Rapp from Johns Hopkins University. “Obviously, you’re going to be a better hand-writer if you practice it. But since people are handwriting less, then maybe who cares?”

“The real question is: Are there other benefits to handwriting that have to do with reading and spelling and understanding? We find there most definitely are.”

Read it.

Read it.

Harnessing the ability of natural killer cells within our own immune system, researchers at Canada’s McMaster University have developed a new form of cancer immunotherapy.

The team engineered natural killer cells to not only attack cancerous cells — including in solid tumors, a problem for some other kinds of immunotherapy — that also to distinguish between those malignant cells and healthy cells that only look like them.

Read it.

Without lithium, the all-electric vehicles of today wouldn’t be feasible, and with an increasing demand for EVs expected to exhaust reserves on land by 2080, this might become inevitable. But there is another way to extract the vital element, or rather another place.

The oceans contain roughly 5,000 times more lithium than land, but at unconscionably small concentrations of roughly 0.2 parts per million (ppm). And a team of researchers has developed a new system capable of extracting concentrated lithium from seawater, according to a recent study published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Washington Free Beacon.

According to a Washington Free Beacon analysis, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the bald weirdo. Of the 14 Senate Democrats seeking reelection, two are completely hairless on top. Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) and Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) are both running in swing states, where they must win if Democrats are to have any shot at holding their slim majority in the Senate.

Steve Sailer.

It turns out GPT-3 disproportionately associates Muslims with violence,

And as we all know, that couldn’t possibly be true because it’s a stereotype.

It seems that Artificial Intelligence software isn’t subject to Wokeness.

Joel Kotkin.

Driven partly by fear of infection, and by the liberating rise of remote work, Americans have been increasingly freed from locational constraints. Work continues apace in suburbs and particularly in sprawling exurbs that surround core cities, while the largest downtowns (central business districts, or CBDs) increasingly resemble ghost towns.

People who aren’t forced to work downtown will avoid doing so if possible. When given the choice of ‘urban density’ or space in the suburbs, the suburbs win every time.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Which brings us to the present moment, and the crusade being waged against my old graduate school classmate John Eastman. In giving legal advice to President Trump and Vice President Pence in the aftermath of the election, he can’t be charged with any plausible crime, so the mob is attempting an implausible one: that he was conspiring to overthrow our Constitution—essentially a coup. “A Trump lawyer wrote an instruction manual for a coup,” reads the breathless Washington Post headline, to give just one of the many many hyperbolic headlines. Beyond this, there is a crusade to have Eastman “investigated” by the California State Bar, which is clever lawyering, since the lawyers making the charge know there is no chance the California Bar would move to suspend or disbar Eastman (unless they completely cave to the mob, which I suppose is not impossible), but the general public doesn’t know this, so it is effective innuendo.

Read it.

So, it turns out that Karina Ruiz, the Latina dreamer who filmed herself accosting senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Nevada) aboard an airplane about her stance on immigration reform, is an immigrant rights leader, as per a Telemundo News report about nationwide protests calling for an immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

In previous reports over the Spanish-speaking press, Ruiz had insisted that it was a surprise encounter and that she took advantage of the moment to “let her voice be heard”. Quite the happenstance considering her prominence as a renowned immigration activist.

White House Fakery Defended by Fact Checkers

LA Times Absurdly Skips Reporting on Hunter Biden’s Hollywood Art Show

Let’s Go, Brandon!

Hunter Biden Sells 5 Art Reproductions for $75K Each  The phrase ‘thinly disguised money laundering’ leaps immediately to mind.

Biden Posts Worst Jobs Report Since 2020  Well, when you fire people because they won’t get vaccinated, this ought to come as no surprise.

Biden’s Taxes Hit Americans at the Top and Bottom

Biden Hits Record Low Approval Rating On Economy, Foreign Policy, Pronouncing Words, Standing Upright, Continence, Inflation, Math, The Alphabet, Remembering All The Animal Sounds, Respecting Personal Space (Ran Out Of Room, See Article For More)  Babylon Bee.

Cartel Violence Spills Into US as Border Patrol Treats Gunshot Victims

White House Fakery Defended By ‘Fact-Checkers’

Biden Refuses to Take Reporters’ Questions After Jobs Briefing  Apparently he has no answers.

Amazon Looks At Leaving Seattle Over City Council Hostility

Here are the 11 Senate Republicans who joined Democrats to break the debt limit deal filibuster (CNN) Makes you wonder why we even bother.

Elon Musk Says Tesla Will Relocate HQ to Austin Amid Abortion Ban Fallout

Florida mom gets standing ovation in Virginia after calling for ‘mass exodus’ from public schools  And she’s a Person of Color so they can’t cancel her.

PolitiFact Face-Plants As Grassley Notes Polls Show Voters Favor Voter ID Laws

‘Arrest Me!’: Mom Challenges Attorney General’s Call for Probing Threats to School Boards

Terry McAuliffe Taps Election Denier Stacey Abrams to Lecture Opponent on ‘Democracy’

Journalists Who Took on Putin and Duterte Win 2021 Nobel Peace Prize  Note that the prize is given, not for actually promoting Peace, but for pissing off the appropriate witch-hunt culture targets. Actually working toward peace (as Trump did with North Korea and the Middle East) gets ignored.

Google to Ban Ads Appearing Next to Climate Denial Content  Time to leave.

NYC Mayor de Blasio Refuses to Pay Back City $320K for Presidential Detail

Shadowy Liberal Donor Network Stands By Activists Who Harassed Sinema in Bathroom  I surely hope that the NRA is sending the good Senator some literature.

Nearly 140 Countries Reach Deal on Corporate Minimum Tax  Governments know what economists know, that corporations don’t pay taxes, they merely collect them from their customers and pass the money on to the government. So this is a general tax hike on EVERYBODY in the Clever Plastic Disguise of Class Warfare Virtue Signaling.

How Texas’ Heartbeat Act Is Still Protecting Life After Judge Suspended Law

NY Times Hates Covert Righties Who ‘Spy’ and ‘Lie,’ But Embrace Lib’s ‘MAGA Masquerade’

Paul Bryan on Steven Koonin: Cancel Culture at Work

Harm from War on Hydrocarbons Exceeds Harm from Climate Change

We need to talk about your gas stove, your health and climate change (NPR)

Climate change killed 14% of the world’s coral reefs in a decade, study finds (Washington Post)

Motivated by commerce, not conscience, Google bans ads for climate change consensus contradictors

What Governments Got Wrong About The Global Energy Transition

These Are The Countries With The Most Nuclear Reactors

Google Demonetizes Websites Which Contradict Their Climate Narrative

Trump loyalists can’t hide this truth (CNN) What truth? They don’t know; they can’t find it. (All Trump! All the time!)

Texas Temporarily Forced to Recognize Women as Humans (The New Yorker) Unless they’re unborn babies, in which case they’re not human still.

Trumpworld goes to war: Former Trump staffer sues former Trump staffer (Salon) All Trump! All the time!

Days before Jan. 6, Trump pushed “murder-suicide pact” in desperate bid to subvert election results (Salon) All Trump! All the time!

Trump had dinner with Mitt Romney to “torture the guy”: book (Salon) If it weren’t for Trump, what would Salon have to write about? (All Trump! All the time)

California sheriff admits he once was member of far-right Oath Keepers group linked to Capitol rioters (Washington Post) There is no right but the ‘far-right’!

DC reporter mocked for inadvertently tweeting pro-life arguments

Canada invited Chelsea Manning to visit — so that she might be deported (Washington Post) They must have mistaken it for Trump.

Sick Trump Says Haiti Has an ‘AIDS Problem’ and America Has a ‘Death Wish’  (Daily Beast) All Trump! All the time!

Trump Will Order Top Aides to Ignore Capitol Riot Subpoenas, Says Report (Daily Beast) All Trump! All the time!

Depravity: A Real Sickness is Growing in America.

CNN to Planned Parenthod Prez: How’s the ‘War’ Against Pro-Lifers Going?

Democrats Clarify That Men Are Allowed To Have Opinion On Abortion As Long As They’re For It  Babylon Bee.

Disgraced Brian Williams and Disgraced Lincoln Project Trash GOP

Mixed Race Refugee from Black Genocidal Decolonization Wins Nobel Literature Prize for Being Black and and Having Been Colonized

Milwaukee Teen Killed by System Racism and High-Speed Head-On Collision, But …

Is This Stephen King’s Next Thriller? “AI Flaws Could Make Your Next Car Racist”

New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program  Can’t have that racist shit hanging around.

Terry McAuliffe: Parents Concerned About CRT Using ‘Racist Dog Whistle’ to ‘Create Division’  Remember: If you hear the dog-whistle, then you’re the dog.

Update: White Showrunner of ‘Dear White People’ Cancels Chappelle (In Controversial New Netflix Special, Dave Chappelle Just Reads From A Biology Textbook) I guess it surprises progressives that black people can read.

Texas School Shooting Suspect Freed On Bail

Feds Won’t Seek Charges Against Cop in Jacob Blake Shooting  But I’m sure somebody will.

Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.

Read it.

A new report out Friday finds that the number of concealed carry gun permits in the country rose 10.5% in the last year, growing to more than 21 million people.

Add to that the entire population of Texas, who now don’t need a permit for open carry. (Colt Peacemaker, here I come….)

Read it.

Immigrants who, like me, came here from totalitarian nations are warning us: we must open our eyes and realize we no longer live in a free country.

We slid down this slope so swiftly because what happened to us is unprecedented. Although the Biden administration is adding the state’s fat thumb to the Woke side of the scale, much of the Woke Regime’s crackdown to date was engineered by private entities: elite private universities and private corporations in media and in tech. This is a key point of differentiation between the Woke Regime and all the repressive kingdoms and empires in human history. Those imposed their restrictions from above, using the coercive authority of the state itself. We have gotten to the point, however, where large corporations and the groups whose preferences they channel and amplify intrude into every aspect of our lives to enforce the regime’s wishes—a degree of control the envy of any totalitarian tyrant of centuries past.

Babylon Bee.

Deeply needed.

Read it.

Whistleblowers pay a heavy price for standing up for truth, for humanity, for life. Haugen is simply shoring up one elite path of several to more deceit, more suffering, more death.

John Stossel.

Jim Caruso, CEO of Flying Dog Brewery, calls his business a “First Amendment brewery.” That’s because he keeps going to court to defend beer labels.

…

After six more years in court, he won again. The court said, “Banning a label for vulgarity violates the First Amendment.”

You’d think the bureaucrats would have known that, since the federal government already approved Caruso’s beers. In fact, every brewer in America must first submit every label to a federal bureaucracy called the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

Which makes me wonder: Why does every state need separate regulation?

I suspect the answer is: Bureaucrats want jobs, and politicians are eager to waste our money.

Read it.

Anyone on the right can look back at the last 50 years and see the long string of losses to the left. They have set the agenda and they have set the direction. A Republican made nice with China and took us off the gold standard. While Reagan won the Cold War and cut taxes, everything else on the domestic front went the Left’s way. Bush and Clinton both raised taxes. Deficit spending has been the way of the nation in almost every year I have been alive. We no longer need any sort of war to spend and spend. Each President of the last generation more than doubled the previous president’s debt.

The Left controls all the big companies, all the universities, and thanks to the administrative state, they write all the new rules that are effectively laws. From Sea to Shining Sea, the Left has moved from victory to victory, and the Right goes from defeat to defeat. I will admit we have made progress on guns, but that looks to be a lot less safe a win for the Right, than say Obamacare was for the Left.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Even now with the economy having problems at the retail end, people are more focused on the less tangible stuff like CRT or Covid policy. The massive Build Back Better bill stuck in Congress gets little attention. Regime media talks about it as a magic elixir so the crazies have something to chant, but otherwise they have left it alone. Twenty years ago, Conservative Inc would have been organizing a campaign against it, but today they cannot generate much interest in the thing.

One reason for this is that people have come to realize that caring about the economy, tax policy or government programs changes nothing. Those who vote Republican have come to terms with the fact that none of the things they want in terms of taxes and spending will ever happen, so they have lost interest. The far-left still dreams of the socialist paradise, but it is mostly a show of piety. Medicare-for-all may as well be unicorns-for-all and they probably know it.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Kevin Roche has posted striking data on relative death risks in the matter of Covid-19. While the Star Tribune continues to wage a campaign of fear consistent with the Democrats’ agenda, I asked Kevin for a set of bullet points drawing inferences with public policy implications from the data — “broader commentary on where we are with the epidemic, in light of my relative death risk tables,” as he put it in his message responding to my request. As always, we take Minnesota data, trends, and public policy issues as representative. Kevin comments in the form of 10 bullet points.

The bottom line is, our elites are panicking and JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND why the Dirt People aren’t panicking, too; totally oblivious to the fact that the government and media have consistently lied to everybody (a) how bad it was to start with and (b) how bad it isn’t now. The Pandemic Panic shares exactly the same Usual Suspects as the Global Warming Hysteria, the same dependence on one-size-fits-all coercive solutions, and the same Shut Up And Do What You’re Told attitude on the part of people who see themselves as On The Right Side Of History.

I have so often wanted to do this sort of thing….

Scott Alexander.

You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. And yet, without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t).

I have read this book, and it has a lot of useful stuff.

Reading between the lines, I think she learned pretty much the same thing a lot of the rest of us learned during the grim years of the last decade. Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias – our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds. This is the bias that explains why your political opponents continue to be your political opponents, instead of converting to your obviously superior beliefs. And so on to religion, pseudoscience, and all the other scourges of the intellectual world.

But she also learned that just telling people “Hey, avoid confirmation bias!” doesn’t work, even if you explain things very well and give lots of examples. What does work? Research is still ongoing, but the book concentrates on emotional and identity-related thought processes. Above, I made fun of everyone and their brother having a “mindset”, but this book uses the term deliberately: thinking clearly is about installing an entirely new mindset in yourself in a bunch of different ways.

Read it.

Solar Water Solutions (SWS), a Finnish water technology company, has come as close as anyone to being able to offer the world essentially unlimited fresh water through its unique, zero-emissions, zero-running cost, and non-polluting desalination technology.

Now it’s being deployed, thanks to backing from the Dutch group Climate Fund Managers, in Kitui County, Kenya as part of a long-term goal to provide water for 400,000 rural Kenyans by 2023.

Read it.

(Hint: Yes.)

Pressure to get vaccinated against covid is immense. Liberals demand that non-vaccinated people be denied medical care. In New York, you aren’t supposed to be able to enter a bar or restaurant without a certificate of vaccination. Questioning of the efficacy or desirability of vaccination is banned on social media. And Joe Biden says the fight against covid will be won when 97% or 98% of our population has been vaccinated, an impossible figure.

Despite all of the hoopla, it is pretty obvious that the vaccines are not working as well as had been hoped. Originally, it was understood that being vaccinated would prevent you from getting covid. When covid cases and deaths continued to rise after vaccines became available, we were told that it was an “epidemic of the unvaccinated.” But the goalposts have moved; now the claim is that you may still catch the disease, but you probably won’t get as severe a case.

Colbert Ruins Stephanie Grisham’s Trump Book So No One Will Buy It (Dayly Beast)

MSNBC Warns Parents Pushing Back Are Mentally Ill, White Nationalists

AT&T, Which Owns CNN, Helped Build Far-Right One America News  In the Narrative Media, the only ‘right’ is ‘far-right’.

Pipeline company paid Minnesota police for arresting and surveilling protesters (The Guardian)

Biden Slams ‘Dangerous’ Republicans in CEO Meeting as Debt Limit Chaos Looms

CNN’s ‘New Day’ Crew Nukes Nikki Haley—Again

Your Bias Is Showing! Twitter Lets Jezebel Call for Sen. Sinema to Be ‘Absolutely’ Bullied

NYT Gives Russia-Gate CPR, WSJ Pronounces It Dead

The Demeanor of the Warmalarmer Witness

US Desperate For Coal Miners To Meet Soaring Global Demand

Oil Surges After Energy Department Says No Plan To Tap Oil Reserves  Makes you wonder why we spent all that money on oil reserves in the first place, doesn’t it?

Claim: Government Policy Must Curb the Climate Excesses of the Rich