Read it.

“Those still getting paid” would be, oh, let’s see, politicians, government employees, academics, people in the ‘news media’ — all of the panic-mongers.

Read it.

Don’t hold your breath.

UPDATE: ‘Leave The $$ For Those With The Greatest Need!’ DeVos Applauds Stanford For Surrendering Coronavirus Funds, Calls On Harvard To Follow

Read it.

Had to! Just HAD TO!

UN climate change fund calls coronavirus an ‘opportunity’ to re-shape the world

How Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Affecting Climate Change?  Wired ‘Science’.

Guardian Notices City Beachside Homeowners are Wealthy Enough to Ignore Sea Level Rise

Finally! “North Pole soon to be ice free in summer” – Why did it take so long?  Humanity can’t do anything right.

Pandemic Moves Earth Day Events Online  Good enough for virtue-signaling.

Read it.

You won’t believe it. The newest liberal idea for funding coronavirus relief, as explained in the New York Times this morning, is—wait for it now!—a wealth tax on the rich! Since we’re not supposed to be touching our faces right now, you’re not allowed to smack your forehead and exclaim, “Why didn’t I think of that!? Why is it that liberals have all of the best new old ideas?”

I have an idea: Let’s tax the Chinese. They are more to blame than “the rich”.

Read it.

Cheatsheet reports Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck has joined fellow renowned chefs Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Dominique Crenn to form BIG, (Business Interruption Group), a new national legal, political, and communications campaign launched in partnership with an industry-savvy insurance attorney.

I predict that both sides will come to Washington with their hands out, and the taxpayers will wind up holding the bag.

Audacious Epigone does some sociology.

An April 8 article in the New York Times breathlessly revealed that the coronavirus is killing blacks and Latinos in New York City at twice the rate of whites. This fits in with the Times thesis that race has been the most important issue influencing American politics and society since 1619. This allows the Times and other liberal commentators to bash right wingers, who “everyone knows” are racists.

But the issue with coronavirus, as with so much else in America, isn’t really about race; it’s about class. The middle class is winning, which isn’t surprising since most policy decisions today are made by middle-class bureaucrats and managers. Meanwhile, the working class is losing, which is sad because it actually forms the majority of people. If there is a right-left divide in the battle between middle-class elites and working-class victims, then the left is firmly on the side of the elites while Trump has brought working-class whites, at least, to the right side.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #406

9 Well-Intentioned Efforts That Actually Aren’t Environmentally Friendly

Is fungus the answer to climate change? Student who grew a mushroom canoe says yes.

Among the ‘climate monsters’ that afflict California, Megadrought is the most reliable

Climate Change – Ebb and Flow of the Tide – Part 3 of 3

Defenders of the Faith

Sierra Club Hammers Trump’s EPA For Trying To Help Out Plants Struggling With Compliance Due To Coronavirus

NBC Fears ‘Environmental Benefits’ of Pandemic ‘May Not Last’

Read it.

That would seem like a good idea.

Read it. And watch the video.

The French virologist Luc Montagnier headed the team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris that discovered HIV in 1983. In 2008 Professor Montagnier was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in recognition of his work.

In the video below Professor Montagnier discusses his conclusion that the COVID-19 virus is a product of genetic manipulation in a laboratory. He says there is no other plausible explanation for the HIV gene sequences that have been inserted into the RNA of the virus.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you an Enemy of the Crust.

Can religiosity predict cultural climate beliefs?

Read it.

Prof Valsa Koshy, an expert in maths education at Brunel University, said: “Importing maths teaching from Far Eastern countries means there has been an emphasis on children needing to master the basic facts and traditional skills such as times tables. This used to be laughed at as too old fashioned.”

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

Want to know how you can tell when the lockdown became a new great depression? It’s when the media starts experiencing large layoffs. Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of media layoffs currently under way that makes for the feel good story of the week for sure.

…

The mendacity and mediocrity of our major news media have seldom been on display more clearly than during the COVID-19 crisis. While the media pretend to be “objective” and are now clearly on the side of the Democrats’ narrative that Trump was negligent and slow in responding to the virus, there is plenty of evidence of the media downplaying the threat of the virus and criticizing Trump’s early moves, especially his China travel ban, which the media decried as “xenophobic.” And then there is the media’s lack of interest in the Tara Reade allegation about Joe Biden, which is so blatant that even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez gets it.

Homework assignment: Identify which ones are Democrats. You’ll be surprised.

Read it.

Read it.

The sheep rise up.

Read it.

So you want to get a Mac. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Bronze swords have been found by the thousands in graves, rivers, and bogs all across Europe. But because the alloy is so soft—and easy to mangle compared with later iron weapons—historians have long wondered whether these swords were battlefield tools or mere status symbols. Now, a team of archaeologists has staged modern fights with bronze swords to measure the resulting microscopic dings and dents. Sword-on-sword contact was a “big part” of Bronze Age fighting, they found, done with specific, artful moves that spread from region to region over time.

Bronze is actually harder than you might believe. If you can find a hardware store that sells bronze piping (not as available now as it used to be) or a marine supply store that sells bronze fittings, check it out.

More Than 400 News Outlets Partner With A Project Seeking Media To Beef Up Climate Coverage Amid Pandemic

Climate Change – Ebb and Flow of the Tide –Part 2 of 3

The pandemic could steer us toward a sustainable, resilient future

2020 expected to be Earth’s warmest year on record, scientists say

Climate change: US megadrought ‘already under way’

Alarms ring as Greenland ice loss causes 40% of 2019 sea level rise

Impact of a second Dust Bowl would be felt worldwide  Well, so would another asteroid strike.

Read it.

Though the bar exam is traditionally administered in July, the National Conference of Bar Examiners has already scheduled alternative dates for the fall. Meanwhile, a growing number of state bars have declared that they will permit new grads to practice law under the supervision of a licensed attorney until the bar exam can be offered again. Other states are considering waiving the exam requirement entirely for people who complete a term of supervised practice.

All of which raises the question: Was the exam necessary in the first place? In an era of specialization, few lawyers will ever use more than a tiny fraction of the material covered on the bar exam. But, for state bar associations, the exams are a useful way to hold down the number of lawyers.

Read it.

We have an early example of a fully-formed “lawyer foyer” – a full two-story entryway featuring a curved or otherwise showy staircase and a chandelier that can be seen from the outside via a transom window larger than the door above which it sits.

Let’s all have some fun laughing at somebody else’s taste. (They’re rich, so they don’t care what we think.)

The Other McCain is on the case.

For some time now, it has been apparent that a large percentage of people infected with COVID-19 are either asymptomatic or have such mild symptoms that they have never been tested for the virus. From an epidemiological perspective, this is a double-edged sword. If you’re infected but asymptomatic, you can spread the disease without knowing it. This probably explains, for example, why New York City went from having just one known case in early March to having hundreds of cases within a couple of weeks. It’s possible that many who spread the virus never knew they were infected because they never had symptoms.

Babylon Bee.

An unknown masked man was attacked by a group of masked men, but he was saved when a mysterious masked man fought off the attackers.

Soon to be a major Netflix series … maybe … sometime….

Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

EnergySails Aim to Harness Wind and Sun To Clean Up Cargo Ships

Climate Claim: President Trump’s Travel Bans Shows We Need More Global Governance

Read it.

Amid 20 years of fanfare about how big, dense cities are the future, the country had kept spreading out with nearly all population growth since 2010 occurring in the urban periphery and smaller cities. As a new study from Heartland Forward, where I am a senior fellow, demonstrates, both immigrants and millennials—the key groups behind urban growth—are increasingly moving to interior cities and even small towns.

The coronavirus, which has hit major American cities hardest so far, is likely to accelerate that trend.

Duh. Any urges I had to live in a dense city core in a high-rise apartment just evaporated. The woods are more and more inviting.

Both cases and deaths have been overwhelmingly concentrated so far in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New York. Gotham has been the American epicenter; dense regions seem especially susceptible to pandemics. This has also been the case in Europe. Half of all COVID-19 cases in Spain for example have occurred in Madrid while the Milan region accounts for half of all cases in Italy and almost three-fifths of the deaths.

Not to mention that major metro areas are behavioral sinks and, not coincidentally, ruled by Democrats.

Read it

One thing is likely: higher education is in for severe belt-tightening. Enrollments are likely going to decline—maybe a little, possibly a lot. State subsidy monies will likely decline given the financial blow governments are suffering. Private gifts will decline, as will, in time, endowment income (in the short run, schools will probably raid their endowments some to assist with cash flow shortfalls).

…

The financial reality is this: colleges are going to have to change, for example by shedding massive administrative bloat or by having some classes taught online very cheaply by foreign academics working for a fraction of American academic pay. COVID-19 may hasten the demise of a distinctive academic institution, tenure.

Which of those do you think college administrators will choose?

What ever happened to ANTIFA? You would think, with state governments being fascist right and left (mostly left), they would be Occupying The Streets. But … nothing.

For that matter: If, as we are told by The Media, blacks are suffering disproportionately to The Virus, where is Black Lives Matter

How The Green New Deal’s Renewable Energy Mining Would Harm Humans And The Environment

Amazon Fires Employee Climate Warrior Leaders

Read it.

Obeying government diktats is for thee but not for me.

ZMan lays out politics.

If the starting point for a political philosophy is a set of universal truths about the human condition, then it is necessary that those truths be based in reality. Marxism has been a bloody disaster, because it assumes things about man that are contrary to the reality of the human condition. Marxists tried to remedy this by killing off the inconvenient, but it turned out that you just can’t kill enough people to make it work. Transforming society into an abattoir lowers productivity, rather than producing plenty.

Similarly, but without the bloodshed, libertarianism has been a complete failure as a political movement, because homo economicus is not real. Material self-interest is certainly part of the puzzle, but humans are motivated by all sorts of things. More important, the assumption that people will deal with one another in good faith, once the monopoly of the state is removed, is false. Every society has some portion motivated to rule over the rest. Someone will always be in charge.

Have We Won?

TONE DEAF: CNN Cheers Cleaner Air Caused By Corona Pandemic

Green New Deal goes viral, and fails

Read it.

In the early part of the digital age the résumé—newly permanent, accessible, and social-media ready—took on added weight. We downloaded the right templates. We kept databases of the appropriate verbiage. We learned to match the way we presented ourselves online to the flowery language of college brochures fervently and indiscriminately distributed by our school guidance counselor.

In one way or another, then, we were indoctrinated in the art of self-promotion—not the collection of qualifications in an objective, matter-of-fact kind of way, but the arbitrary fusion of our subjective identity with algorithmically desirable qualities and credentials. No good deed went unpublished.

…

In America, unmoored liberalism (social and economic) frees us from all convention. It leaves us with no past and no future, no beginnings or ends. The present-day American is, by and large rootless historically, geographically, spiritually. Broad deracination primes the individual for isolation, relational anxiety, and, ultimately, desperate conformity. As a result, all is dissolved into the same manic desire for recognition, manifested perfectly in the fetishism of the résumé.

ZMan calls it.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the great zombie apocalypse of 2020 is not going to live up to the hype. At this stage, the models and their experts said we would have bodies in the streets and chaos at the hospitals. Instead, what we have is a shuttered country and hospitals furloughing staff due to a lack of sick people. The curve benders keep changing their forecasts, but the virus keeps letting them down. The big question now is how will everyone retreat from this debacle.

To his credit, President Trump has sensed the end game from the very beginning and has been talking about “reopening the country” for a while. He knows this cannot go on much longer and his job will soon shift from battling dingbats in the press room over the virus to battling dingbats in the press room over the economy. If he is to continue in his role, he will need the promised V-shape recession. If it is a depression, then he will be replaced with the first Alzheimer-American to run for president.

Read it.

The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed Mongolia has been returning to its linguistic roots. A generation has grown up without learning Russian, and in 2003 it was replaced by English as the mandatory foreign language in schools.

And, of course, English is written vertically … oh, wait….

Two steps forward, one step back.

I’m a sucker for infographics.

Study suggests the ocean is soaking up twice as much CO2 as we thought

Yet Another Consequence of the Pandemic: More Plastic Waste  Wired ‘Science’.

Fauci-Birx climate models?

Monday Mirthiness – Gleick and Mann cluelessly trash Fred Singer’s NYT obit

Read it.

More accurately, 12 Democrat governors want it.

Apparently the trek to socialism isn’t proceeding fast enough.

The Other McCain.

Long before anyone heard of the Wuhan coronavirus, America was already gripped by a pandemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Our news media were particularly hard-hit by that illness, and unless you were immune to TDS, it was not safe to expose yourself to CNN or MSNBC. An irrational desire to blame Trump for this disease from China was a typical symptom of the comorbidity between TDS and COVID-19….

Read it.

Foxconn’s Wisconsin offices remain empty a year after the company said it would “correct” statements about them being unoccupied, says a new report today.

Read it.

One of India’s leading newspapers has reported that President Trump’s much-touted ‘miracle’ coronavirus drug cocktail hydroxychloroquine, which is produced in large amounts in India, is being used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to negotiate Indian workers’ continued ability to access employment in the United States.

Climate Change and Capitalism

Clifford A. Brown: AG Barr: Microbes Are the Real Threat, Not Climate Change