“SCIENCE!” Meet the Liberal Climate Scientist Biden Tapped to Serve on His Intelligence Advisory Board: Brown University’s Kim Cobb entered ‘acute mental health crisis’ following Trump’s 2016 win. To be fair, she was joined by millions of fellow Democrats. Many of whom still haven’t recovered.

JUST NBC THE HYPOCRISY: Suddenly Domestic Terrorism Charges Are a Problem Now That Atlanta Is Using Them Against Antifa.

YES: It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives.

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science.

This is how they can begin to restore public trust, but statements like this one are few and far between.

LIGHTNING DEAL: Coofandy Men’s Business Dress Shirt. #CommissionEarned

HONESTLY, THIS DEBT CEILING APPROACH SOUNDS FINE TO ME:

Many on Wall Street believe that the Treasury Department, in order to avoid defaulting on U.S. debt, would “prioritize” payments on its bonds if it could no longer borrow funds to cover all its expenses. They expect that America’s lenders — the bondholders who own U.S. Treasury debt — would be first in line to receive interest and other payments, even if it meant delaying other obligations like government salaries or retirement benefits.

Plus:

A number of prominent financial experts at Bank of America, Barclays and other major firms are confident that the U.S. will avert a global market meltdown by continuing to pay its bondholders if the Treasury Department crosses the threshold where it can’t cover all its other bills. They think the U.S. can do so by withholding funds for things like benefits owed to individual Americans or payments to firms doing business with the government.

It’s a view that aligns with those of conservative lawmakers, who argue that payment prioritization on Treasury securities — the bedrock of the international financial system — is a viable contingency plan as they push for budget cuts opposed by President Joe Biden.

The White House and Treasury are already putting up resistance to the idea, which Treasury says would amount to a default. But disclosures over the past several years — driven in part by investigations by House Republicans — have revealed that officials believe the government has the technical capacity to implement payment prioritization, though it would be experimental and risky.

And:

The key in both stories is that some on Wall Street are open to the idea of a default not being a financial catastrophe. A thorough read of both articles suggests that there are long odds on that. But note that just having this reportage out there reframes the conversation from “a default will be catastrophic!’ to “if a default happens, how would we muddle through?” The moment the framing shifts, suddenly the inconceivable becomes a little more conceivable. At that point, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, now we are just haggling over the price rather than sticking to principle.

It’s a way to shrink government obligations without defaulting on actual creditors. Since the political system is too broken/parasitized to do that, it’ll have to happen another way. Remember: Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

HOW IT STARTED: PayPal Still Threatens $2500 Fines for Promoting “Discriminatory” “Intolerance” (Even if Not “Misinformation”).

— Eugene Volokh, Reason, October 9^th.

How it’s going: PayPal to cut 2,000 jobs in latest tech company cost-cutting.

—AP, Tuesday.

THAT’S NICE, BUT FOR ME TO USE THIS TECHNIQUE AND LOOK GOOD IN A FUTURISTIC ONE-PIECE, I NEED MY BODY 30 YEARS AGO:   A Serious Temptation.

Not that I begrudge Sgt. Mom who is a friend. Maybe I should write steampunk. DIL and DIL in training both like sewing period clothing.
It’s worth a try.

MORE OF THE PUBLIC’S MONEY GOING TO PEOPLE WHO MAKE THINGS MOST OF THE PUBLIC DOESN’T WANT: Biden Administration Looks to Revolutionize the EV Industry With Huge Tax Credits for Battery Makers.

#JOURNALISM: “Objectivity Has Got To Go”: News Leaders Call for the End of Objective Journalism. “Notably, while Bob Woodward and others have finally admitted that the Russian collusion coverage lacked objectivity and resulted in false reporting, media figures are pushing even harder against objectivity as a core value in journalism.”

Oh, it’s gone already. They’re just dropping what’s left of the mask.

THE STATES POWER DOWN: Ambitious renewables mandates by local governments are eroding the electric grid’s reliability, with alarming consequences.

Making people’s lives worse is the goal. The climate is just the excuse.

NOT-NEWS YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO USE:  Pencils.

WE’VE GOT TO STOP WITH THE MADE UP HISTORY:  Reviewers have entirely predictable response to 1619 Project on Hulu.

HE’S RIGHT, YOU KNOW?  People should be free to talk about mental health.

YEAH, I AM FULL AWARE HOW SILLY AMERICANS ARE ON RACE:  The Idiocy of America’s Racial Classification System.

My view of American-born-and-raised people and their views on race is that Farside cartoon with the penguin bathrooms with identical images and “only they call tell the difference.”

About the third time total strangers approached my family while we were out at something public and asked what race we were because they couldn’t tell I decided the only cure to all of this is Thorazine in the water supply. Either that or filter out the Quaalude.

Look, as my mom said when she visited “Americans. You can’t tell what anyone is. They’re all so mixed.” At the time I added “And proud.” We should still be. The idea our society can have a race war is like lines having a sphere war. You can tell the left is insane because sex, which has a proper, biological definition, they’ve decided is actually a social construct. Meanwhile race, which is a slippery phantom, they want set in stone.

Bah.

OR, HERE’S AN IDEA: WE ABOLISH THE FBI AND SALT THE EARTH:  Planned New FBI HQ Is Twice the Size of the Pentagon.

AND SPEAKING OF THINGS THAT ARE CREEPY:  Tucker: This is a matter of national survival [VIDEO]

Sure, sure. It’s a conspiracy theory. Sure, sure, plants burning and what not is completely normal. But you know, I remember that the egg crisis was supposed to be maybe three months, and not keep getting worse.

Other things I remember…. these days conspiracy theories tend to be revealed as truth in a month or two.

It’s not like I like clown world. It’s just where we live right now.

THE LEFT WANTS TO CREATE A NEW CITIZENRY:  The Unacceptable Cost of Open-Border Mission Creep.

An illegal, illiterate, easily manipulated one.

EVEN I THEY HAVE TO INVENT IT:  Race Everywhere.

And largely they do.

OH, NO. IT’S NOT TOO LATE. THE RECKONING IS JUST NOT GOING TO BE WHAT ANY OF US WANTS:   It’s Far Too Late For A ‘Reckoning’ Of The Trump Years. The Corrupted News Media Are Irredeemable.

They refused to let us fix things the easy way, through elections. That means the reckoning is coming. I am not threatening. I am predicting. These things always have a payback, and it’s far more terrible than the idiots trying to control the systems can imagine.

GOOD. WHY WOULD DISTRIBUTING THE CONSTITUTION BE A PROBLEM IN AMERICA?  Pushback: Student appeals conviction for distributing Constitution on public campus.

I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT:  Covid Emergencies Will End On May 11, Per White House.

WOW. SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED:  Hunter The Pig Paid An Employee For Sex.

SALENA ZITO: Centralizing Power Is Always A Bad Idea.

OPEN THREAD: It’s all about you.

CHANGE: Hunter Biden finally admits infamous laptop is his as he pleads for criminal probe.

So much for, the laptop “could be” mine.

First son Hunter Biden’s lawyers admitted late Wednesday that the infamous laptop the now-52-year-old abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop in the throes of his crack cocaine addiction does indeed belong to him.

The revelation came in a petulant letter from Hunter Biden’s lawyers seeking a criminal probe into what they called, attempts to “weaponize” its contents.

In the 14-page letter to Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings, Biden attorney Abbe Lowell claimed that repair shop shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac unlawfully accessed Hunter’s laptop data and worked with former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to “weaponize” sordid and incriminating contents on it against Joe Biden.

“This failed dirty political trick directly resulted in the exposure, exploitation, and manipulation of Mr. Biden’s private and personal information,” Lowell wrote.

“Mr. Mac Isaac’s intentional, reckless, and unlawful conduct allowed for hundreds of gigabytes of Mr. Biden’s personal data, without any discretion, to be circulated around the Internet.”

Flashback: Who is Vijaya Gadde, the Twitter exec involved in censoring Post’s Hunter Biden laptop bombshell?

In other Hunter news today: ‘Set phone up so I can spy on you showering.’ Hunter Biden threatened to withhold cash-strapped assistant’s pay if she didn’t FaceTime him naked, texts show — as it’s revealed she’s the f0urth employee with whom he had a sexual relationship.

As Mickey Kaus asks, “If Hunter Biden were a Hollywood studio head who did this, would he still have a job?”