Read it.

In state after state on Super Tuesday, people turned out in record numbers to vote for President Donald J. Trump in Republican primaries that weren’t even contested. Think about that statement for a moment — in an era when voter apathy has been on the rise and turnout has been on the decline, record numbers stood in line to cast a ballot for the President in a race he had already won.

Damn that Putin!

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An emergency room physician, initially unable to diagnose a disoriented patient, finds on the patient a wallet-sized card providing access to his genome, or all his DNA. The physician quickly searches the genome, diagnoses the problem and sends the patient off for a gene-therapy cure. That’s what a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist imagined 2020 would look like when she reported on the Human Genome Project back in 1996.

This is why you don’t take your science from journalists.

Read it.

This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V, VI) series I expect to roll out taking a historian’s look at the Siege of Gondor in Peter Jackson’s Return of the King. We’re going to discuss how historically plausible the sequence of events is and, in the process, talk a fair bit about how pre-gunpowder siege warfare works. As with other Collections posts, this series will come out one-per-week, on Friday, until it’s done. This is, after all, a very long and involved sequence and there is a lot of context to work in.

Steve Sailer reviews Frank H. Buckley’s new book American Secession.

Born in Saskatoon, Buckley (no relation to William F.) imports the Canadian assumption that territorial unions, like political parties, come and go. Canada evolved into independence from Britain over a long, mostly peaceful expanse of time. Newfoundland didn’t join Canada until 1949, and the people of Quebec very nearly voted to secede in 1995.

Read it.

Well, it worked well enough for the British….

Half of world’s beaches will disappear by 2100 because of climate change, experts say  And they’ve always been right in the past, haven’t they?

The UK’s first climate change refugees?  Any excuse to get out of the Turd World.

Svalbard Norway now has more polar bear habitat than it did two decades ago

Climate “crisis” to eradicate world’s beaches by 2100  Don’t tell the people in Malibu.

Does Information About Climate Risk Affect Property Values?  Evidently not.

GMA Lectures: Listen to Climate ‘Better Angels,’ Ignore ‘Devilish Instincts’

Read it.

But will they? Especially in ‘Sanctuary States’.

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In theory, a Supreme Court ruling allowing so-called “faithless electors” would add a new level of uncertainty to the race, with no guarantee the winner of the popular vote in a state would get the state’s full number of electoral votes.

Actually, that’s what the Founders intended. It was only the Progressive ‘let’s have more democracy!’ movement in the early part of the 20th century that changed things.

Last May, the Washington state Supreme Court held that the state could regulate the vote of an elector either directly or indirectly, upholding a $1,000 fine for the Clinton defectors. In August, a federal appeals court said a similar Colorado law was unconstitutional. Now, the Supreme Court will have its turn.

Read it.

Bet the DemLegHump Media don’t cover it.

Joel Kotkin.

Politicians across the Western world like to speak fondly of the “middle class” as if it is one large constituency with common interests and aspirations. But, as Karl Marx observed, the middle class has always been divided by sources of wealth and worldview. Today, it is split into two distinct, and often opposing, middle classes. First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle class, now in ascendency, is the clerisy, a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.

Standing between the oligarchs, who now own as much as 50 percent of the world’s assets, and the growing population of propertyless serfs, the traditional middle class increasingly struggles for survival against those with the greatest access to capital and political power. The power of this modern-day equivalent of the Medieval aristocracy, what the French referred to as the Second Estate, seems likely to grow; a recent British parliamentary study projects that, by 2030, the top one percent will expand their share to two-thirds of the world’s wealth, with the biggest gains overwhelmingly concentrated in the top .01 percent. One of the upshots of this concentration of economic power is that entrepreneurship is now declining even in the capitalist hotbed of America.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #411

Anti-Greta Knocks ‘Climate Alarmists’ During CPAC Speech

NASA Selects New Instrument to Continue Key Climate Record

Think Flash Floods Are Bad? Buckle Up for Flash Droughts

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

You may have heard of the Molekule air purifier. It pops up in ads left and right, design-minded businesses such as InterContinental Hotels and the MoMA Design Store have embraced it, and influential media outlets including Wired, Time, Popular Science, Architectural Digest, Town & Country, New York Magazine, and The New York Times’s own T Magazine have sung its praises.1 Those places bought into the company’s claims, but the only two publications to actually test it—Wirecutter and Consumer Reports—found it to be abysmal, or, as we put it in our air purifier guide, “the worst air purifier we’ve ever tested.” Now the company is back in the news making some big promises: Founders say they’re “very confident that this technology will destroy Coronavirus” and that the virus is “a rather simple structure for us to be able to be destroy.” And the company just got $58 million in new funding. So is everyone getting duped by simply taking Molekule’s word for it?

I have a Molekule, and I find these results quite disappointing. I can’t, however, say that they are wrong. My wife and I both have seasonal allergies, which is why I bought it, and at first it seemed to help a great deal. More recently, however, it doesn’t seem to have any beneficial effect.

Read it.

In eastern Congo efforts to deal with the Ebola virus epidemic are being disrupted by continuing civil disorder and various armed groups blocking medical aid efforts. The major impediment is the persistent anarchy and warfare in Ituri and North Kivu provinces where 100 to 120 militias and rebel groups continue to operate. The number of new “cases per day” has dropped. From February 18 to 23, there was only one new confirmed case in North Kivu Province. As of February 23, there have been 3,444 total cases, with 3,310 confirmed and 2,264 victims died. This is a 66 percent fatality rate. There are 1,167 survivors, but that some of these are patients still undergoing treatment.

The huge desert locust swarm sweeping across eastern Africa reached Congo’s Lake Albert region in late February. This is the first major locust swarm to strike Congo since 1944. Locust swarms are already ravaging neighboring Uganda.

Read it.

And, if I’m not mistaken, the poorest.

The Democratic Presidential nomination: That’s what you can do when you’re old and rich.

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So far, I don’t see that anybody outside of the Left Coast has anything to worry about.

Read it.

They want opportunity, just like the rest of us.

Freeberg is on a tear.

And I’m far from the first to notice…this is the party that’s going to save us from a plutocracy run by rich old white men…and the white men they’re offering us have never been older, or whiter, or richer. Now, what is that? Is it fair to call it “irony”? That word would imply some sort of an accident, and it’s getting harder and harder to call this an accident. An election year comes about, the democrats put together a platform of “Don’t ever trust any rich people” and then they implore us to cast our votes for…their rich people. It just keeps happening that way.

Read it.

No, it’s just going to bankrupt California that much sooner.

Climate Skeptic Freeman Dyson Dies at 96

Freeman Dyson takes on the climate establishment (2009)

Pew Research: US Climate Concern is Soaring – Amongst Democrats

Any resemblance  between the guy in the yellow shirt and Jonah Goldberg is (I’m sure) completely coincidental.

Why Are Polar Bears Going Extinct? (Spoiler Alert: They’re Not!)

State of the Polar Bear Report 2019: Are polar bear researchers hiding good news?

NYT: White Supremacy Goes Green

Extinction Rebellion Accused of Faking a Miners Protest

Greta Thunberg tells 20,000-strong UK climate march: ‘The world is on fire’

Read it.

Do recyclers focus on people? Obviously not. Everything about recycling lacks any attempt to make it understandable and easy for people to obey the proper rules. We find it difficult to find the rules that apply to where we live. The rules are continually changing. The rules that are applied where we live are often different from those where we work—or wherever we might be. And even when we find the rules, we cannot always understand them.

Recycling is only one small part of the entire system. It starts with the mining and drilling that allows us to extract raw materials from the earth. Then it includes the complex mechanical and chemical processing to make raw materials usable. To lower costs and enhance performance, new materials are invented as well as clever combinations of existing materials. We meld wood and leather, paper, plastic, metal, and cloth. When the manufactured goods are shipped, they are often placed in complex boxes and packaging made from material that may not be recyclable. The system is not designed to solve the problem: The system is the problem.

Recycled Nuclear Waste Will Power a New Reactor

La Nina may form in the equatorial Pacific Ocean later this year and, if so, it could have wide-ranging ramifications

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Last year yielded a bumper crop of narco-submarines, and it looks set to continue. These purpose-built vessels are one way Colombian cartels smuggle drugs towards the United States. The number discovered by authorities are at an all-time high. Based on open source intelligence there were 36 reported incidents in 2019. This compares to just two a decade earlier.

Check it out.

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

We used to learn this stuff in the Boy Scouts, before they went all Diversity on us.

There’s a Simple Way to Store Renewable Energy, And We Already Have The Technology

Hypocrites Preaching Green

MSNBC Food Series Hits ‘Criminal’ Behavior of Climate ‘Deniers’  We all ought to be eating fat people because their farts are destroying the planet.

Heathrow third runway ruled illegal over climate change

Read it.

Dean Koontz for Coronavirus Czar.

Dean used to be a very respected SF author until he decided that there was more money along the Stephen King road. Perhaps this will boost his career … or Hillary Clinton’s dacoits will take him out. One never knows.

Read it.

After confirming on Thursday that its ‘official’ death toll from the outbreak had reached 22 with 141 cases confirmed (lawmakers have claimed that the death toll as of Monday was up to 50 in Qom alone), Iranian state media reported that the country’s vice president for women and family affairs, Masoumeh Ebtekar has tested positive for the virus.

Turd-world nations just aren’t up to handling a crisis of this nature.

Read it.

Bill Kristol has announced (tweeted actually) that he is a Democrat, and, somewhat presumptuously, that you are too: “We are all Democrats now” was his claim, to which people brought up on black-and-white television might reply, “Whaddya mean ‘we’ kemosabe?”

Kristol hasn’t liked Donald Trump from the beginning. But Donald Trump hasn’t changed much from the beginning either, so Kristol’s change of parties must have more to do with the allure of the current Democrat candidates for that party’s nomination for president than with the performance or behavior of the current president.

And one has to admit that the behavior, and the statements, of those candidates are … remarkable.

… and good riddance.

Read it.

The U.S. Supreme Court has dismissed a case in which Lee Boyd Malvo, who was 17 when he took part in the deadly 2002 “D.C. Sniper” shooting spree in the Washington area, was challenging his life without parole sentence.

Read it.

Recall that at the end of January, a team of Indian scientists wrote in a now-retracted, scandalous paper claiming that the coronavirus may have been genetically engineered to incorporate parts of the HIV genome, writing “This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature,” meaning – it was unlikely to have occurred naturally.

‘

Anti-Greta’ teen activist to speak at biggest US conservatives conference

Conservative group hires German teen Naomi Seibt to rival Greta Thunberg’s climate views

Why are polar bears going extinct? (Spoiler: They’re not)

We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech

Hollywood’s Carbon Footprint

Babylon Bee.

Hey, it could happen.

Read it.

Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark.

‘Berkeley of the East’ seeks to ban fossil fuels as part of sweeping climate plan

Tom Steyer says he’ll declare a climate emergency on day one

See record-high temperatures strip Antarctica of huge amounts of ice

Climate change could be a ‘catastrophic’ national security threat, report warns

Sea level rise: A small California town embraces managed retreat

Cost Of ‘Net Zero’ Will Be Astronomical, New Reports Warn

How Dare You! Libs Mad at German Conservative Answer to Greta

Using Twitter Volume as Scientific Measure of “Climate Change” Is a Very, Very, Bad Idea

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Despite Trump’s hard-hitting domination in the media, most other Republican politicians haven’t yet been able to replicate the success. Capitol Hill hasn’t had a focus on digital communication, which is essential to winning the culture war online. Democrats have the assistance of leftist “Big-Tech” giants in Silicon Valley such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. This has been a huge problem facing conservative messaging, but the CPI, a nonprofit organization, has a plan to help republicans succeed in the digital arena.

Trump realizes that, in the modern world, the President is not just a politician but also a performer, like the British monarch, and that his performance can help or hurt his agenda.

“The conservative movement needs highly-trained communication professionals now more than ever. The messaging battle begins and ends online: where news breaks, opinions are formed, and ideas go viral. Getting digital right is a seminal part of an effective communications strategy.”

Exactly right.

Read it.

Even the Republicans in Oregon are very odd.

If they have to do this more than once, perhaps they ought to consider moving to a different state.

Texas, say.

Read it.

The short answer is maybe. The long answer won’t make you feel any better.

Ours are too lazy, but other peoples’ might.

Read it.

Slow news day.

Read it.

Hidden behind the good economic news is a disturbing new phenomenon – one more far-reaching — and disturbing — than the latest up or down of the business cycle. It is that our economy is now increasingly bipolar, with a traditional economy at one end and a virtual one at the other.