Read it.

With great interest for sailing, boatbuilding and vikings the project to build and sail the greatest viking ship of modern times started. The curator of the project, Sigurd Aase, wanted this extraordinary ship to follow in the wake of one of the most challenging viking explorations – the Viking discovery of the New World.

It always warms my heart to hear of things like this, apparently of no practical utility, being done just because people find it interesting.

Wired.

“Globally, the debate is fixed—there are more countries not changing the clocks,” says Ariadna Güell Sans, co-coordinator of the Barcelona Time Use Initiative for a Healthy Society, an organization focused on time-related policy. Research has shown how moving the clocks forward and back, even by just one hour, negatively affects the economy, road safety, and health. Still, the US, Europe, and a few other nations are finding it hard to break the habit. The issue, says Güell Sans, is whether we stay on standard time or daylight saving time forever.

One of the plainest of indicators that our political systems are dysfunctional is the fact that it is apparently impossible to change a situation that evidently everybody agrees needs to be changed.

Read it.

Mean scores on IQ tests rose generally in the U.S. beginning in the 1930s, apparently reflecting better nutrition and improved schooling. But that trend has now been reversed.

Read it.

I don’t even have to say anything.

Read it.

Colin Kaepernick:

An actual black man:

Read it.

What happened: Max Boot, the Washington Post columnist who wears a fedora to conceal his agonizingly hairless dome, formally renounced his neoconservative affiliation on Friday.

And there was much rejoicing.

Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo is front and center in Dominion’s defamation suit (L.A. Times)

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch dismisses $1.6 billion defamation case revelations as ‘noise’ (CNN)

Fox News’ ‘craven hypocrisy’ on alleged voter fraud runs deep (Tampa Bay Times)

Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country (Mother Jones) Dunh dunh DUNHHHH…. I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Fox News Editor Overseeing Crime Fearmongering Is Felon Himself (Daily Beast) Who would know better?

House Republicans Launch Probe Into Jan. 6 Panel

The FCC could choose to act against Rupert Murdoch for Fox News’ election lies, but few expect it to (NBC News)

Beware The Nonresponsive Response To Tucker Carlson

CLOWN SHOW: VA Governor Glenn Youngkin Ambushed at CNN Town Hall

Ron DeSantis is just getting started with his rightwing agenda. That should worry us all (The Guardian)

Ron DeSantis Loves to Bash the Press. Will That Playbook Work in a Presidential Race? (Vanity Fair)

In Florida, far-right groups look to seize the moment (NPR) For NPR, of course, there is no ‘right’ but the ‘far-right’. I’ll leave you guess how many times NPR has warned about ‘far-left’ groups.

Playbook: The GOP’s 2024 picture snaps into focus (Politico) Forging the new Narrative ahead of the election.

NBC’s Lester Holt Leaves Republicans on the Cutting-Room Floor

Colbert Labels GOP Bad Christians For Budget Priorities  Colbert wouldn’t know a Christian if one bit him on the ass.

Meet the ‘Ghost’ Woman Fox Relied on for Voter Fraud Claims (Daily Beast)

GOP Presidential Field Rallies Around One Idea: Declare Drug Cartels Terrorists  Which they obviously are.

MSNBC Compares Florida To Jim Crow To Urge MLB To Denounce DeSantis

Heckler’s Veto: Judge shouted down at Stanford law school with help from Dean of DEI (Hot Air) The ‘Dean of DEI’ is, of course, a fat ugly black woman

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Trump Official Gives Marjorie Taylor Greene Exactly What She Wants (Newsweek)

Sealed hearing in DOJ’s attempt to force Trump attorney to testify ends without a ruling (CNN)

Will Oprah Sue Donald Trump? Book Revelations Could Land Him in Hot Water (Newsweek)

New York prosecutors indicate Trump criminal charges likely, report says (CNBC)

A camp icon

The election-denying Republicans who aided Trump’s ‘big lie’ and got promoted (The Guardian)

2024 Trump Is Even Scarier Than 2020 Trump (The New Yorker)

‘Racist’ Trump is blowing up because he can’t stand being prosecuted by Black lawyers: Former GOP strategist

Daylight Savings Time: If Only Trump Would Pick a Side, Then We’d Know Which Side to be on

Trump Gets a Taste of His Own Medicine (The Atlantic) I wouldn’t mind The Atlantic getting a taste of its own medicine.

One State Generates Much, Much More Renewable Energy Than Any Other—and It’s Not California (Inside Climate News)

Texas leads in harvesting wind for power (Bloomberg)

Guess which state is a national leader in green energy (HotAir)

Climate change: New idea for sucking up CO2 from air shows promise (BBC)

How to Make Carbon Capture Way More Efficient (Gizmodo)

New material captures CO2 from air and stores in ocean as baking soda (Interesting Engineering)

The CDP Awards: rewarding cities and businesses taking on the environment and biodiversity challenge (EuroNews)

Do back-to-back disasters show first climate tipping point is upon us? (New Scientist)

Bill Gates: Shunning Luxury Won’t Fix Climate

Doug Casey On The Rise Of “Climate Brats” And Other Useful Idiots

UK Scientists Propose Rationing To Combat Climate Change

GOP’s Graham Plans Carbon-Import Fee as Idea Gains With Party  RINO alert!

US neighborhoods with more people of color suffer worse air pollution (The Guardian) Well, perhaps they ought to bathe more frequently.

Environmental Justice Lost a Champion. Congress Must Build on His Legacy (Newsweek) ‘Environmental Justice’ is the latest meaningless proglodyte buzzphrase.

Racist Roads

Colin Kaepernick Accuses His Own White Adoptive Parents Of “Perpetuating Racism”  Arguably by not drowning him while he was young.

Megyn Kelly blasts Fauci: ‘He didn’t give a s–t where COVID originated, because China!’ (N.Y. Post)

Fauci says Redfield’s testimony of COVID call was ‘unequivocally incorrect’ (The Hill)

People Are Far Less Likely to Get Long COVID After Omicron, Study Finds (TIME)

The Tale of Anthony Fauci

COVID Conspiracy Theories Become Conspiracy Facts

Watch: Fauci Defends Gain-of-Function, Mocks Lab Leak Censorship

Fauci Previews His Defense

FLASHBACK: Remember When COVID Made in a Lab Was a ‘Conspiracy Theory?’

Victor Davis Hanson.

Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a good Samaritan in Portland, Oregon, confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods.

More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage—of the thieves!

Read it.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S.-Mexico border, at this point, is one of the most chaotic, overtrafficked, and outright dangerous borders in the world. Vicious cartels, such as Sinaloa and Jalisco, engage in gang shootouts in outlaw fashion, with nary a Mexican law enforcement agent in sight—and even those in sight are more likely than not to be bribed and in the cartels’ pockets.

Human trafficking rings, often working hand in hand with the cartels and opportunistic “coyotes” who promise to smuggle vulnerable migrants into the U.S., parade hordes of Central American and Caribbean migrants through the Mexican interior and right up to the border. The humanitarian conditions on these migrant “caravans” are typically abysmal: Drugs are rampant, children are exploited, and far too many women are raped.

Drugs flow across the border like never before. The U.S. drug-overdose crisis, which is primarily a fentanyl crisis, is nearly exclusively a phenomenon of the cartels. Drug-overdose deaths in America last year reached an unconscionable 106,000-plus, or more than 290 daily. That is the functional equivalent of a midsize commercial airliner falling out of the sky each day, and here, as is the case with fentanyl, those proverbial airliners falling out of the sky would be predominantly packed with those under the age of 35.

This tragedy is America’s single greatest humanitarian failing at the present time.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the on again, off again debates on this side of the divide is about what to call the current system and how we got to this point. The old language is either inadequate or loaded with moral connotations. Calling the Biden people fascist is not entirely wrong, but not entirely accurate either. That and the word fascist comes with so much baggage that its descriptive value is completely lost.

The same can be said for words like communist and authoritarian. Even the term managerialism has been abused to the point where it often just means “bad” rather than a specific sort of organizational outlook. One of the weird parts about being trapped in the 20th century, as is the case with the West, is we are left to use moral language that no longer works in this century.

Read it.

As the school board adjourned the meeting, I asked from the press area: “How was the document edited? Can you claim how the document was edited at all? Can you cite how the document was edited—since you leveled the claim that it was falsified?”

Board President Mike Hanna then ordered officers of the Pendleton Police Department to remove me from the premises.

Read it.

Authors Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz encountered screaming protesters Wednesday night in Manhattan at a launch party for their book “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.”

The protesters, described as young white women, threw their drinking glasses at the wall where the pair’s books were displayed, Markowicz told The Daily Wire, and Mandel had books and drinks thrown on her, leaving the author soaking wet.

Guess they were right.

Read it.

Rebecca Chobat’s TikTok videos have garnered the interest of budget-conscious shoppers, particularly as food inflation continues to persist at its highest level in four decades. Through her videos, which reach an audience of 742.5k followers, she explains how to make meals using products from the discount retailer with a weekly budget of $35.

Read it.

Jurors deliberated Thursday without reaching a decision in the death penalty phase of a man convicted of killing eight people on a Manhattan bike path in 2017.

…

Shortly before noon, jurors started to decide anew whether the 35-year-old Uzbekistan citizen will get the death penalty or will spend the rest of his life behind bars at a maximum-security prison. The addition of a juror required them to scrap the results of 2 1/2 hours they spent discussing the matter on Wednesday.

Washington Post.

You don’t have an anxiety toolkit? Well, you’d better get with the program.

Read it.

How Anthony Fauci manufactured consensus on the origins of COVID-19 with the help of science writers and the media.s

DOJ takes on the Jan. 6 Tucker Carlson tapes (Politico)

Adams unveils NYC migrant blueprint with national resettlement implications while stumping for Biden (Fox)

Adams joins Biden 2024 team, insists it won’t soften push for migrant billions (N.Y. Post)

Graham says he will introduce bill to ‘set the stage’ for US to use military force in Mexico (The Hill) Scott Adams has been pushing for this for months.

The Mexican government is not willing to do anything serious to the cartels: Bill Barr (Fox) Of course not. The cartels have both more money and more guns than the government.

What Biden’s deeply troubling asylum limit means for the economy (The Hill)

Archives: 9 Boxes of Biden Docs Left to Check

Feds Retrieve 9 More Boxes of Biden Docs From Lawyer’s Office

FDA’s Procedure for Approving Abortion Pill Was Unlawful, Lawsuit Claims

Biden to propose 25% billionaire tax (Axios) Eventually it will reach a point where it will be cost-effective to have Biden whacked … and don’t think that billionaires don’t know it.

FACT CHECK: Biden’s Press Sec Says Fentanyl at the Southern Border Is at Historic Lows

In Biden’s Tax-the-Rich Budget, Capital-Gains Rates Near 45% (Bloomberg) You’d think that Creepy Joe was TRYING to cause a recession.

Biden Wants to Increase DOJ Civil Rights Division Budget by $62 Million  Can’t find white supremacists without funding.

Jill Biden Gives International Women of Courage Award to Biological Man

Senate Confirms Biden Nom Who Suggested Microaggressions Can Kill You

fThe Tucker Carlson Schtick Melts Away (Politico)

Carlson hates Trump but needs his base — like the rest of the right (Washington Post)

Karl Rove’s 2012 meltdown on Fox News was quite revealing in hindsight (MSNBC) The Narrative Media love to focus on the past and irrelevant fossils like Karl Rove.

Arkansas Senate OKs transgender bathroom bill that critics call extreme (NBC) Name a measure that ‘critics’ won’t call extreme. I dare you.

Arkansas transgender bathroom bill, that some label ‘anti-trans’, headed to House Thursday (KARK) Some!

Kyle Rittenhouse, the MAGA Star That Wasn’t (Mother Jones)

Murdoch said Fox hosts may have gone ‘too far’ in covering stolen-election claims (Reuters)

Tucker Carlson ‘passionately’ hates Trump, and eight more key revelations about Fox News from new Dominion filings (CNN)

The Media Can’t Handle the Tucker Clips

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is not credible, White House says after Jan. 6 coverage (Reuters)

MSNBC’s Hayes Smears The Daily Caller, Claims NYT ‘Not a Liberal Paper’

Colbert Labels Alito A ‘Turd,’ Compares Roe’s Demise To Iran, The Taliban

Internal text reveals Tucker Carlson reads the work of a Holocaust denier at a white nationalist hub  (Media Matters for America) Here’s a pen–go smear Tucker.

‘It’s a Sh*t Network’: New Texts Reveal Ex-Fox News Reporter Claiming Network ‘Muzzled’ Her for Fact-Checking Trump (MEDIAite)

Teacher In Need Of Vacation Tells Class There Are Only Two Genders (Babylon Bee)

MSNBC Condemns ‘Fascist’ DeSantis As He Debunks Their Fake News

George Santos masterminded 2017 ATM fraud, former roommate tells feds (Politico) George! Long time no see!

The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (The Guardian)

Methane from one of Earth’s largest wetland complexes is set to soar (Nature) Think ‘wetlands’ are a Good Thing? Well, think again….

A clean sweep: China’s renewable energy capacity outshines coal power for first time (The Economic Times)

China’s energy transition sees ‘staggering’ progress on renewables — and a coal power boom (CNBC)

How light pollution disrupts plants’ senses (BBC)

Claim: Climate Change will Cost Germany $960 Billion by 2050

Met Office Peddle Extreme Rainfall Lies

Pollution cleanup method destroys toxic “forever chemicals”

Former CDC director slams gain-of-function research: ‘Probably caused the greatest pandemic’ in history (Fox)

New York mayor’s message to bodegas: ban shoppers who won’t remove masks (The Guardian) And get shot by the ones who are there to rob the place. Great advice!

Singapore admits it should have explained COVID app data could be used by cops

COVID “Not Deadly Enough” To Justify Risk Of Fast-Track Vaccines, Chris Whitty Told UK Govt

No One Knows if You Need Another Covid Booster

‘It’s legal, there’s just no precedent’: the first US town to demand a rent decrease (The Guardian)

NYC Mayor Adams says stumping for Biden’s reelection won’t stop him from criticizing feds’ migrant crisis response (N.Y. Daily News)

The US central bank is poised to cause untold hardship to millions of Americans (The Guardian) Robert Reich gets it wrong again.

The commercial surrogacy industry is booming as demand for babies rises (CNBC)

Most in new poll view ‘woke’ as positive term (The Hill)

Rich countries should pay their fair share for American drugs (The Hill) Who determines what’s ‘fair’? Why, the Narrative, of course.

Veterans group: Ban Fox News on military bases (The Hill) I wonder how long it took them to find a ‘veterans’ group’ that would agree with the Narrative.

How an incredible Jon Stewart interview exposed the GOP’s ‘freedom’ hypocrisy (MSNBC) Gotta keep pushing that Narrative!

Fox News Journalists Sound Off on ‘Soul-Crushing’ Dominion Filings (Daily Beast)

New Mexico Moves To Hobble Private Paramilitary Border Patrols

Adams Ally Moves Quickly From City Hall to Lucrative Real Estate Work (N.Y. Times)

Cori Bush’s Bodyguard Says He Can’t Be Anti-Semitic Because He’s a Jewish High Priest

The Future of the Republican Party Is on the Line (Politico) Ask yourself why Rich Lowry, managing editor of National Review, is writing this piece instead for Politico.

Details in a lawsuit against Texas’s abortion ban shock the conscience (Washington Post) Whose conscience? Jennifer Rubin must have borrowed one for the occasion, since she’s shown no trace of one up until now.

Adam Schiff Pledges To ‘Save Democracy’ in Cringey Video on Chinese Spyware App

Climate change: New idea for sucking up CO2 from air shows promise (BBC)

Global warming is changing Canada’s boreal forest and tundra (The Conversation) The Conversation ought to tell the truth and call themselves The Narrative.

Biden Gives ‘Black American Of Courage’ Award To Robert Downey Jr. For Role In ‘Tropic Thunder’  (Babylon Bee) He deserves it.

How white and affluent drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color (L.A. Times) The swine!

Colin Kaepernick accuses white adoptive parents of ‘problematic’ upbringing, perpetuating racism (N.Y. Post) Sharper than a serpent’s tooth….

White Supremacist Propaganda Soars to All-Time High in 2022 (Anti-Defamation League) Funny how an organization founded to protect Jews from hate have pivoted to spouting hate against white people … presumably including Jews….

Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump

Trump-backed candidate pleads guilty to accepting illegal campaign contribution (NBC News)

January 6th: In the End, Trump Wins

Is anyone investigating Trump allies’ multi-state effort to access election systems? (L.A. Times)

Prosecutors Signal Criminal Charges for Trump Are Likely (N.Y. Times) So they keep saying.

Read it.

I’d live there.

Washington Post.

The Post, of course, thinks this is a Bad Thing. Freedom-loving Americans, however, think it a Good Thing.

Read it.

It is commonplace for politicians and scholars alike to refer to “history” (or sometimes a more solemnly invoked “History” with a capital H) as the final arbiter of political actors and of history and statecraft more generally. Let History Judge, as the dissident Soviet Marxist historian Roy Medvedev called his massive indictment of Stalinist terror published in the West in 1971. But what does this appeal to the judgment of history finally mean? In some larger philosophical or ontological sense, it is a non sequitur since history in and of itself judges nothing. Human beings make history, but history as an impersonal process (or as one event after another) itself is bereft of any capacity for moral or civic judgment. When people evoke the judgment of history, they mean the judgment of future generations, or even the reigning consensus among (often small-souled) academic experts and specialists. They should hardly be confused with Thucydides, Plutarch, Macaulay, or Henry Adams, who were capable of exercising judgment in a manner both sublime and judicious.

‘History’ is from the Greek word for ‘research’ (thank you, Herodotos), and so ‘history’ merely means ‘information that somebody has dug up’.

Is the judgment of future generations always superior to those who had a direct experience of men and events, who immediately saw what was at stake in the great and enduring drama that is the sempiternal rivalry of men, regimes, nations, and parties? With good reason, Aristotle insisted that the spoudaios, “mature” or “serious” men (and we would add women) informed by the full range of the moral and intellectual virtues, should set the tone for moral and civic judgment and for decent political life more fundamentally. Without prudence, discernment, courage, and moderation, the fashionable preferences of academics and academic historians are hardly worthy of having pride of place when it comes to serious and sustained historical and political judgment.

Read it.

One might describe the vice president’s speaking style as “self-medicating kindergarten teacher.” Harris employed this style at a recent event at which she giddily marveled at the country’s “more than half a million miles of transmission lines, enough to wrap around the globe 24 times.”

Read it.

You know, as you do.

UK Daily Mail.

And here I suppose you might have bought the Narrative Media spin that they were just harmless tourists, huh….

ZMan.

We have a couple of recent examples that are useful in understanding what truly matters to the elites. First is this case involving a couple of fringe goofballs using robocalls to mock black people. Americans receive billions of bogus calls, despite it being illegal, but these two warranted special attention. The judge makes clear that if they had mocked Irish people, for example, it would have been fine. They targeted black people and no one is allowed to mock the gods.

We have this case of four black people who drove to Mexico so one of them could get cosmetic surgery, but they got carjacked instead. Sadly, thousands of Americans are attacked by Mexicans around the border ever year. Of course, tens of millions of people from around the world stream over the border. This not only damages the lives Americans near the border, but it has ruined life around the country. This is cheered by the political class as the browning of America.

This case is different. You see, the four people involved are black and no one is allowed to lay a hand on our sacred black people. Lady Bugs Graham is now demanding we go on jihad against Mexico as retribution. Official Washington is suddenly ablaze with angry rhetoric about what is happening south of the border. Mexicans kill white people every day in America, but when they killed a couple of black people, they crossed a line in elite moral code that must be addressed.

Treehugger.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Steve Sailer.

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, Australia used to have a big shortage of Aboriginals in esoteric jobs like astrophysicist or conceptual artist. But once a judge ruled in the Bolt case that nobody is allowed to publicly question assertions of aboriginalness, that problem has been rapidly disappearing.

A trend not confined to Australia–half of the Congressional Black Caucus look whiter than I do.

Read it.

On Jan. 31, the ATF published its final rule regarding pistol braces to the federal register. Entitled “Factoring criteria for firearms with attached stabilizing braces,” this rule essentially amends the definition of “rifle” to include millions of firearms previously classified as pistols.

For those unfamiliar with firearms law, what that means is that ATF can then classify all pistol-braced firearms with barrels under 16 inches (most, if not all pistol braced firearms on the market fit this definition) as Short Barreled Rifles, or SBRs which the National Firearms Act or NFA regulate.

Owners of these firearms now face a choice. Destroy their guns (or at least the brace), register them with ATF as SBRs, or turn them in.

This rule essentially functions as a massive registration scheme for pistol-braced firearms, and the ATF knows this. ATF is no stranger to using existing federal law to create “regulations” subverting the legislative process, as they used a similar method in 2018 to “ban” bump stocks.

Read it.

Next year a racist country will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Segregation has made a comeback at colleges with racially separate dorms and graduation ceremonies. Corporate employees are expected to join the affinity groups of their race and employers and activists closely scrutinize the race, gender and sexuality of officials, executives and creatives.

Read it.

An illegal immigrant from Morocco who had previously applied for asylum in Germany was arrested on Monday in Milan after a series of knife attacks that wounded six people.

 

Read it.

Adidas announced on Wednesday that it would slash its dividend by 79% because severing ties with “Yeezy” designer Kanye West has decimated earnings to the tune of $1.3 billion.

What goes around, comes around. “Get woke, go broke.”

Read it.

The former sheriff “tolerated, if not rewarded” deputy gangs, according to the report

 

Read it.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Not a problem for some of us.

Read it.

In the Good Old Days, a town had to have a cathedral to be eligible to be named a city. Nowadays, of course, everybody gets a Participation Trophy.

They passed up a wonderful opportunity to name the new arrival “Mitt”. Pity.

Joel Kotkin wrings his hands damned near off.

An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides, as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in ever fewer hands. The good news is that the working and middle classes are not yet out for the count, and are showing welcome signs of pushback against both state and corporate power.

A lot of current journalism is like this: The author lays out a bunch of things that he says are happening (without any attempt to describe just exactly why that is; one hopes that he gets around to it eventually, but such hopes are frequently disappointed), and he just assumes that the results of these evil processes are as disturbing to his readers as they are to him.

Personally, I don’t have any problem with ‘concentration of wealth in even fewer hands’ when the ‘fewer’ refers to hundreds of thousands if not millions of ‘hands’, ‘fewer’ only in comparison with the total population of what is (let’s face it) one of the world’s largest countries, AND knowing as I do that ‘concentration of wealth’ is necessary before that wealth can be used to generate even more wealth. Presumably increasing dispersal of wealth would be a better outcome in the author’s eyes,  but dispersal of wealth merely means that it will be used for consumption rather than investment (dammit, there’s that pesky Econ 101 again), which makes a lot of people slightly better off in the short term at the cost of making everyone worse off in the long term.

Further fisking is left as an exercise for the reader–and I would encourage you to do so; the mental muscles required by this process rarely get enough work in these degenerate modern times.

Read it.

Thank you, Joe Biden.