QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Texans Are Getting Blackout Warnings in June. Why?

In February 2021, the entire state froze over. That demand for heat along with human errors strained and broke the grid. It was a historic disaster in which dozens died.

Now it’s June, which we know will be hot, but we also know we’re not yet at the peak of a Texas summer. It’s hitting the low 90s now. It will top 100 in July and August. This is an immutable fact of life, at least where I am in central Texas. It’s Texas. It gets hot. Hopefully, it’ll at least burn up the mosquitoes outside. But we need A/C inside or we’ll all be living in saunas.

Not only will this dog not hunt, it won’t even get up from its cool spot under the shade tree to go get a drink of water.

Read the whole thing.

FANATICS: Politics has become a religion.

As a cultural invention of the United States, woke ideology bears a specifically American religious stamp: that of Calvinism. The Calvinists believed in Predestination. From the moment of your birth, they were convinced, you were destined for Heaven or Hell, and you could do nothing over the course of your life to change that. As the German sociologist Max Weber explained in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this doctrine bred in the Calvinists of the early United States an obsession with discerning who among them was saved and who was damned. They surveilled each other constantly, searching for signs of who did and who did not belong to God’s “elect.” They policed their own behavior relentlessly, guarding against any possible indication, both to themselves and to others, that they stood outside of God’s grace and were hellbound. Desperate to reassure themselves, they became ostentatious in their displays of austerity, humility, the sacrifice of their egos to a higher calling, and other visible signals of their devotion to God. Their lives became a performance of piety and virtuousness, born of constant, pervasive dread.

Nobody believes in Predestination anymore. Many of us don’t believe in God. But the cultural residues of Calvinism and other puritanical Protestant sects remain with us, in our binary moralism, which divides humanity between the virtuous and the damned, in our scrutinizing of ourselves and others for ethical imperfections, and in our use of public shaming to enforce moral conformity. All of these tendencies fit as comfortably into American left-wing social justice culture as they did in right-wing Christian evangelical culture in the 1990s. Liberal Twitter in 2021 is one big digital Calvinist village, everyone trying to out-virtue-signal one another to prove their ever-tenuous membership in an amorphous club of the morally elite, picking over everyone else’s tweets for signs of political heresy, and calling them out to the mob in a desperate attempt to deflect scrutiny from themselves. The same political culture prevails on college campuses, media outlets, and the non-profit industrial complex. Increasingly, it is becoming the norm in Congress.

Since we’re currently living in the version of the Matrix that was programmed by Tom Wolfe before his death in 2018, it’s worth quoting from in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s love of paramilitary cosplay.)

‘NICE MANSPLAINING:’ Vox’s Aaron Rupar explains why Kaitlan Collins’ question for Biden was a ‘problem.’

Also at the same press conference: Joe Biden falsely claims ‘criminal’ US Capitol rioters ‘killed’ cop Brian Sicknick despite DC’s medical examiner ruling he died of natural causes.

SUPPORTERS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY THREATEN TO GET VIOLENT. “Last night in Moorhead, however, a group of extremists showed up, determined to disrupt our event. While they comprised no more than ten percent of the crowd, they tried to take over the meeting and eventually got violent, to the point where police had to be called. One woman was led away in handcuffs.”

Sue ’em. Sounds like a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights by shutting down their free speech.

MEMORY: That song is stuck in your head, but it’s helping you remember. “We typically think of earworms as random nuisance beyond our control, but our results show that earworms are a naturally occurring memory process that helps preserve recent experiences in long-term memory.”

I had some related thoughts on why I can remember cigarette jingles from when I was in preschool: “For the vast majority of evolutionary history, people were preliterate, and songs were the chief means of longterm information transmission. (Rhyme and meter, etc. even serve as primitive error-checking mechanisms.) So being able to remember the songs that told you where to find famine foods, etc., had definite survival value.” I think my colleague Ben Barton originally proposed something like this.

Obligatory reference: Arthur C. Clarke’s The Ultimate Melody.

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? ‘No yellow!’ Hunter Biden used slur to refer to Asians in 2019 texts with his cousin Caroline who asked if he preferred ‘foreign or domestic’ women — as he’s already been blasted as racist for using the n-word.

CHICAGO’S MAYOR MORPHED INTO JACK TORRANCE SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Newly released email reveals Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot dressing down staffer.

I’m reasonably certain that Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick didn’t intend The Shining to be a guide to effective interoffice memos.

WELL, “SCRAPPING” IS A FORM OF REDRAFTING: The Internal Revenue Code Should Be Be Redrafted.

LEADER OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY QUITE CROSS WITH ONE OF HIS OPERATIVES WITH A BYLINE: Biden Erupts At Reporter For Asking About Putin: ‘Where The Hell, What Do You Do All The Time?’

President Biden went off on CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at the end of his post-summit press conference and suggested she may be “in the wrong business” after she asked why he was “so confident” that Putin will “change his behavior.”

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Reporters have started to react negatively toward Biden’s refusal to answer more questions from the media and toward his attitude sometimes when answering the few questions that he does take.

“Any analysis of President Biden that doesn’t sound like praise inspires people to leap to defend him by pointing out the obvious: ‘He’s not Trump!’ He’s not, but he’s not made of glass, either,” New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi tweeted following Biden’s meeting with Putin. “The most powerful person in the world doesn’t need to be cocooned from criticism.”

President Klain obviously disagrees with Nuzzi.

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO ANTI-SCIENCE? Warnings about processed meat fail the test of science.

A new re-analysis of the science concerning links between processed meat and chronic disease indicates that studies showing a relationship between the two are very low quality and suffer from, as the authors put it, “serious risk of bias and imprecision.”

This conclusion is unsurprising, as it follows a recent set of analyses that rocked the nutrition world. That earlier set of studies, published in Annals of Internal Medicine earlier this month, concluded that guidelines warning us to consume less red and processed meat are based on evidence with very low certainty. The researchers who performed those analyses asserted there is no way to determine, for any given individual, what the risks or benefits of eating meat might be.

In that regard, this new study, published October 17 in PLOS ONE, is similar not only in its contradiction of decades-old dietary guidance, but in its indictment of the science behind nutritional guidance in general.

Believe the science!

SHE OUGHT TO BE BOOTED FROM CONGRESS: McCarthy Vows to Boot Omar From Foreign Affairs Committee if GOP Takes Back House.

21^st CENTURY HEADLINES: Osama bin Laden’s niece protests Biden-Putin summit with ‘Trump won’ boat parade.

THE HORSEPOWER IS HUGE, THOUGH: Why Does Every New Car Look Like Every Other New Car?

OH: Facebook’s CCP-Linked ‘Fact-Checker’ Is Now Censoring Stories Critical Of Zuckerberg-Funded Wuhan Lab Partners.

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN BILL KRISTOL WAS STILL A CONSERVATIVE:

NOW #1 IN ECONOMIC POLICY & DEVELOPMENT: Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell.

LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE: Hungary Bans LGBT Content for Minors.

“DISASTROUS. TEAM BIDEN CAN’T EVEN ORGANIZE AN ORDERLY POOL SPRAY,” Charlie Spiering of Breitbart.com tweets.  Details here: Russian Security Tried To Push U.S. Reporters Out Of Biden-Putin Summit: Reports.

Just before a U.S. president meets with a foreign leader, at home or abroad, reporters and photographers from both countries are trotted in for a few minutes for what’s called a “pool spray,” to ask questions and snap a few pictures. The kabuki theater usually goes off without a hitch — except when the Russian are involved.

* * * * * * * *

In a later pool report, [Anita Kumar, a reporter for Politico]  wrote: “There’s an extremely chaotic scene at the door. Both pools being denied access. At 1:39 pm, part of the pool was ushered in but we were pushed and shoved by security officials and Russian media. Poolers tripped over cords.”

She offered more detail in another report, one in which she put some of the blame on the U.S. press corps.

“The shoving match began at a side entrance immediately as the two presidents entered the villa from the front door. Journalists from both countries rushed to enter the building but were stopped by U.S. and Russian security and government officials. The pool was repeatedly told to line up separately and in single file but neither side did. Instead, the journalists pushed and shoved trying to enter the building,” Kumar wrote.

Exit question: ‘Why would Trump do this?’ Joe Biden smiles as US journalists yell at and fight with each other before getting shoved by Russian security (pic, video).

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Branded Viagra Is Vastly More Expensive Than Its Generics: For some brand-name drugs, prices don’t go down when generics crop up; Viagra still an outlier.

RENT-SEEKING: Major Proterra Investor Al Gore Lobbies White House on Infrastructure.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: Woman Who Hunter Biden Fathered Child With Was Sasha Obama’s ‘Basketball Mentor’: Report.

QUESTION ASKED:

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden’s Europe Trip A Bumbling, Stumbling, Blundering — And Embarrassing — Debacle.

While throughout his trip, Biden took few questions from the press — and always from pre-selected members of the friendly mainstream media — he ended up clashing with one reporter who (gasp!) asked a tough question. In answer, Biden leaned down close to the microphone, and in an odd voice said, “120 days. Give me a break. Need time.” In fact, Biden had been president for 145 days, so he even got that wrong.

In the end, Biden dodged a joint press conference with the Russian leader — something every president has held at summits for decades. Instead, he will hold a solo presser Wednesday, where he’ll once again take softball questions from a pre-selected handful of friendly members of the establishment media.

But you won’t hear about any of this in the MSM. Instead, Biden’s trip will be portrayed as a ringing success and the media will sell the idea that the Democrat — like the Chosen One, Barack Obama — has raised the stature of America.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

What’s the point of Biden doing press conferences with Putin, when he can get his own Pravda-level propaganda at home?

A prime example of The Sovietization of the American Press.

SPENDING: Senator Schumer Will Trigger Reconciliation on Wednesday. “Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he will meet with the 11 Democratic members of the Budget Committee to begin the process of passing a 2022 budget resolution. Included in next year’s budget will be Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill and his $1.8 trillion ‘American Jobs Plan’ using the reconciliation process to ram it through Congress on a party-line vote.”

WELL, THAT’S NOT GOOD: A Potential Downside of Intermittent Fasting: A rigorous three-month study found that people lost little weight, and much of that may have been from muscle.

The new research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is one of the most rigorous studies to examine time-restricted eating, which involves fasting for 12 or more hours a day. Many followers of the diet, which has been popularized in best-selling diet books and touted by celebrities, routinely skip breakfast and eat all their meals between roughly noon and 8 p.m., resulting in a daily 16-hour fast.

Research over the years has suggested that the practice spurs weight loss and improves metabolic health, although much of the data has come from animal experiments or small studies of relatively short duration in humans. Experts say the diet works because it allows people the freedom to eat what they want so long as they do it in a narrow window of time, which leads them to consume fewer calories over all.

But the new research found that overweight adults who were assigned to routinely fast for 16 hours daily, eating all their meals between noon and 8 p.m., popularly known as the 16:8 diet, gained almost no benefit from it. Over the course of the three-month study, they lost an average of just two to three and a half pounds — only slightly more than a control group — and most of the weight they shed was not body fat but “lean mass,” which includes muscle.

The Insta-Wife tried it to no result; I know other people who swear by it.