Read it.

Not enough Magic Dirt, apparently.

Jonathan Turley.

Roger Stone’s defense team moved to force the recusal of Judge Amy Berman Jackson from the case for bias. These motions have a very low success rate and this particular motion likely has an even lower likelihood of success. Jackson is a respected and experience judge. I actually was taken aback by a couple of her comments about the case but courts of appeal are extremely reluctant to force such recusals. Moreover, the main thrust of the motion is a statement about the jury which would be viewed as virtually standardized language for courts.

The Stone team seems particularly aggrieved that Jackson said that the jury in the case had “served with integrity.” There is a pending motion for a new trial based on the alleged bias of the foreperson of the jury and the defense feels that the comment prejudges the merits of that motion.

Rather late in the process for such a motion, I should think; rather like asking for a different horse after the race is run.

Read it.

I must confess that I spit soda all over my keyboard when I saw the phrase ‘feminist thinker’.

Read it.

Since its founding in 1910, 130 million American boys participated in Scouting. Tuesday this week, the Boy Scouts of America declared bankruptcy. Like the Roman Catholic Church, Joe Paterno and his Penn State Football Program, one more conspicuous source of traditional masculine values has been scapegoated and deemed worthy of extraordinary punishment being culpably responsible for failing to prevent homosexual access to adolescent boys and sleazy lawyers and opportunistic inverts are lined up to sue for alleged damages.

Read it.

Last year, Alabama passed into law a ban on abortion, except when the mother’s life is in danger. Democratic state Representative Rolanda Hollis wasn’t too happy about her state seeking to protect life, even though the law was blocked by a federal judge. In response, she’s introduced a bill requiring men to pay for their own vasectomy a month before turning 50, or after their third child, whichever comes first.

I would all ‘upon their second felony conviction’, but that would be raaaaaaacist.

ZMan passes the popcorn.

Last week, famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins outraged all of the rage heads on Twitter by tweeting out, “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology” The rage heads responded with outrage and demands that he be thrown into a well for bad think.

It was one of those events where people revealed things about themselves that they probably wish they had kept private. The “world’s foremost philosopher” managed to step on a series of rakes responding to Paul Ramsey. Not satisfied with his twitter performance, he did a full hour on YouTube, where he must have broken a record for the number of logical fallacies committed in one sitting. Apparently he has yet to reach the chapter on Hume’s law or the masked-man fallacy.

Read it.

Since 2000 use of the Internet has gone from 400 million users to over four billion. Governments around the world have taken notice and in the last decade many have made vigorous efforts to control what they consider a “disruptive”, to their control over the population, technology. Some rulers, usually of dictatorships, have been surprisingly successful in censoring and controlling Internet use by their subjects. Despite that the disruption to central control of information has been fundamentally changed in favor of the ruled rather than the rulers. When it comes to the Internet you can delay or distort the signal but you can’t stop it and what it does.

“You can’t stop the signal, Mal.”

Steve Sailer peers into the swamp.

Reading all these NYT opeds by black women about how there’s very little validation available in the media for black women, I’m reminded of anorexia, a psychological disorder where women stare in the mirror at their 80 pound bodies and see only fatness. Similarly, a lot of black women are convinced that the media are out to promote whiteness.

Read it.

An experimental nuclear reactor in Idaho could be the first of its kind in the United States: a commercial reactor providing power using fuel that reduces nuclear waste. The small power plant could power about 1,000 homes and can run almost autonomously for 20 years.

UPDATE: Exclusive: Why Oklo’s Demonstration of HALEU Could Be Groundbreaking for New Nuclear

Read it.

Your mouth is currently teeming with giant viruses that, until very recently, no one knew existed.

Unlike Ebola or the new coronavirus that’s currently making headlines, these particular viruses don’t cause disease in humans. They’re part of a group known as phages, which infect and kill bacteria. But while many phages are well studied, these newly discovered giants are largely mysterious. Why are they 10 times bigger than other phages? How do they reproduce? And what are they up to inside our bodies? “They’re in our saliva, and in our gut,” says Jill Banfield of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the team that discovered the new phages. “Who knows what they’re doing?”

Read it.

When you want to learn something new from reading, read the stories around that thing before you read the thing itself.

This pretty much matches what I do, which has proved very successful.

Read it.

The knives are out for Bernie.

This election cycle is really stressing the joints between the various factions of the Democrat coalition.

Moscow Mules: NYT Secret Sources Claim Russia Backing Trump Re-Election

ABC, NBC Hide Polls Showing Trump Leading, Cry Russia Interference

Matthews, Pals on NYT Item: ‘Dictator’ Trump Is ‘Collaborating with the Soviets’ to ‘Attack’ 2020

Conspiracy Kook Larry O’Donnell: ‘The President Is a Russian Operative’

Brian Williams: NBC Gave Trump a TV ‘Pilot’ for the Presidency on ‘Apprentice’

#NeverTrump Circus: Ex-GOP Voting for Bernie Sanders Because ‘Principles’!

CNN Invites Stone Juror to Bash Trump’s ‘Baseless’ Claims of Political Bias

‘He Can’t Read’: Movie Studio Behind Award-Winning ‘Parasite’ Hits Back After Donald Trump Criticism

CNN’s Keilar Can’t Get Her Facts Straight With This Anti-Trump Rant  I don’t usually associate ‘facts’ with CNN….

‘Putin’s Puppet’: Hillary Clinton Takes Shot At Trump Based On Vague Reports About Russian Election Interference

MSNBC Decries: ‘The President Welcomes Russian Attacks on Our Election’

‘View’ Erupts at Trump Invoking Gone With the Wind: He Wants to ‘Bring Back Slaves’!  These people are insane.

CNN Panel: ‘No One’ Is ‘Saying’ Trump Is Illegitimate, ‘Colluding with Russia Again’  Except CNN, of course.

Maxine Waters: Gang Members Have More Integrity Than Trump  And both have more integrity than Maxine Waters.

Bankers JP Morgan Warn of “Catastrophic” Climate Change

Colorado River flow shrinks from climate crisis, risking ‘severe water shortages’  The Guardian.

Climate change has stolen more than a billion tons of water from the West’s most vital river Washington Post.

Beaverton company using invisible bar codes to revolutionize plastic recycling

China and India rejecting renewables for coal-fired futures

UK weather: Flooding runs risk of creating ‘ghettos’ because properties cannot be insured

Iowa Agriculture in consideration of climate change

Florida Bill to Ban ‘Nature Rights’

Wall Street Has a $1 Trillion Climate Risk

Consumers at risk of being ripped off in ‘wild west’ carbon offsets market

Floating Nuclear Power Plants Are Ready To Shape Global Energy Market

Brooklyn Fractivists for Freezing in the Dark

JPMorgan: Climate Change Threatens ‘Human Life as We Know It’

PBS Panel Wails About ‘Climate Crisis,’ GOP ‘Deniers’; Touts Gore as ‘Global Paul Revere’

Read it.

Save this for when civilization collapses again.

Read it.

The Israeli company Tactical Robotics is partnering with US aerospace giant Boeing to develop “flying cars” using “ducted fan propulsion” technology, called “fancraft,” for piloted and autonomous vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) air-crafts.

The Israeli company has already developed an unmanned vehicle, called the Cormorant, that is powered by internal lift rotors that allow takeoff and landing in small areas, which could revolutionize the way militaries deploy and rescue troops.

Check it out.

I like it. it has texture, and scope.

Read it.

I’ve been waiting for that to happen once we had ‘gay marriage’.

Read it.

Gee, you’d think that all of those illegal aliens were depressing wages in this country.  Seems as if I heard Trump talking about that.

Read it.

As George Carlin famously said, ‘If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it.’

Read it.

So-called digital natives still crave opportunities to use libraries as libraries, and many actively seek out physical texts—92 percent of the college students surveyed in a 2015 study, for example, said they preferred paper books to electronic versions. (Plus, a growing body of evidence shows that physical books and papers are more conducive to learning than digital formats are.) The dean of learning and technology resources at one of the six campuses of Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) recently told me about a student he had met: Upon learning that her campus library had only the e-book version of a text she needed to read, the woman opted to make the trek to another campus a nearly half-hour commute away that had the hard copy. A 2016 survey of students at Webster University, which is based in Missouri but has campuses around the world, also illustrates limited use of digital resources, finding that just 18 percent of students accessed e-books “frequently” or “very frequently,” compared with 42 percent who never used them.*

I must be a wierdo, then; I have no problem reading a book on screen rather than juggling it around in my hands. Electronic copies allow text searches, non-destructive highlighting and annotation, and easy cross-referencing. Just lazy, I guess….

Viscount Ridley pokes into a dark corner.

My question is: Why have so many of our recent viruses come from China?

The ZBlog Power Hour is one of the best podcasts out there.

eeling a little worldly this week. I have been finishing up travel plans for the spring hater’s season, so I have been thinking about the world quite a bit. People noticed that the candidates did not field any questions about foreign affairs in the Democrat debate this week. That was supposed to mean something, but the truth is Americans have lost interest in the world under Trump. That’s not a terrible thing, as we have plenty of problems to deal with in our own backyard.

Still, it is important to keep up with what is going on in the world, especially in the provinces, where there are some good lessons for dissidents. The Europeans have been doing right-wing populism and nationalism for a long time, so they are better at it than we are in the States. That’s because they have been dealing with left-wing terrorism for a lot longer too. They had to contend with groups like Antifa long before they became an issue for Americans.

Of course, as the center of the Empire, the problems of the world will always end up at our doorstep, so there is no hiding from it. The plagues in Africa will be a problem for the West, just as the Wu-tang fever will be a problem. Both are warnings about what’s coming our way if we remain on the present course. When you build a house of cards, even a gentle breeze is a dire threat. That’s the result of globalism. The small problems on the fringe of civilization become huge problems.

The Washington Post is a firm advocate of our modern fake economy.

‘Cash’ once referred to a silver Chinese coin. That, of course, was a while ago.

Back in the Good Old Days, when ‘money’ meant silver (and gold) — it’s amazing how many languages use ‘silver’ for ‘money’ — if you damaged money, it didn’t care; ‘damaged’ silver was still silver, ‘damaged’ gold was still gold. That, of course, was a while ago, too.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Paul Graham usually has something useful to say.

What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That’s what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.

To start with, that means it should be correct. But it’s not enough merely to be correct. It’s easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. That’s a common flaw in academic writing, for example. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can’t go wrong by saying that the issue is a complex one, that there are many factors to be considered, that it’s a mistake to take too simplistic a view of it, and so on.

Though no doubt correct, such statements tell the reader nothing. Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.

Progressives are the reason this country’s culture is dissolving into madness. Hey, that was easy.

Female Islamic State supporter admits plot to try and blow up St Paul’s Cathedral

US, Taliban Reach Afghanistan Truce Agreement

US and Taliban Reach Truce; May Lead to Peace Agreement and Withdrawal of All US Forces

Yemen’s Houthis Shoot Down Saudi Jet With Advanced Surface-To-Air Missile

US: Saudi Airstrikes Kill Over 30 Civilians in Yemen

Rockets Hit Near US Embassy In Iraq

Rockets Strike Near US Embassy in Baghdad; No Injuries

24 Killed In Brutal Terror Attack On Burkina Faso Church; Local Pastor Targeted

Gunmen Kill Christians, Pastor In Burkina Faso As Attacks Against Christians Increase At An ‘Alarming Rate’

Here Are Some Reasons Why China Is Imprisoning Muslims

Geert Wilders: “The Koran is Full of Jew-Hatred”  Who doesn’t know that?

Libyan Pro-Haftar Forces Attack Turkish Ship “Loaded With Arms” At Tripoli Port

Inmate ‘launched jihadist attack against guards in Winchester jail’

Indian police open case against hundreds in Kashmir for using VPN

A Syrian Success Story From Sweden

Ayatollah Tweets “Wealthy Zionists” Control America Amid Push To Get Him Banned From Twitter  Welcome to our world.

Turkey Threatens “Imminent” Large Scale Invasion Of Idlib To Halt Syrian-Russian Advance

Macron Ends Unsupervised Imam Program Over Risk Of ‘Separatism’

South Sudan: millions of lives at stake as ‘unity government’ announced

NYT Reporter Accuses Iran Of ‘Covering Up’ Coronavirus Outbreak

US Sanctions Iran Election Watchdog For Excluding Thousands Of ‘Moderates’ Day Before Vote

IG: US Lost Track of $715M in Weapons to Fight ISIS in Syria

Iran’s Sham Parliamentary Elections Aim to Strengthen Hard-Liners’ Hand

Houthi Missiles Target Aramco Facility Just After Pompeo Arrives In Saudi Arabia

UK Court: Sharia Marriages Not Valid Under English Law

New Stats Reveal Nearly Half Of All Criminals In Paris Ghettos Have Migrant Background

Someone at The Atlantic is fed up.

If there’s anything corporate America has a knack for, it’s inventing new, positive words that polish up old, negative ones. Silicon Valley has recast the chaotic-sounding “break things” and “disruption” as good things. An anxious cash grab is now a “monetization strategy,” and if you mess up and need to start over, just call it a “pivot” and press on. It’s the Uber for BS, you might say.

If there’s anything that proglodyte journos have a knack for, it’s hating on what other people do that they don’t like.

Read it.

s this the end of the roaring hearth? Domestic coal and certain types of wood are to be banned from next year in an effort to cut air pollution. George Eustice, the Environment Secretary, said the move was necessary as wood-burning stoves and open fires were considered “the most harmful pollutant” affecting people in this country. The Government is keen to be seen at the forefront of global efforts to tackle climate change and air pollution. But it risks accusations of targeting consumers rather than industry as it approves a new deep coal mine. Bags of traditional house coal will be banned from sale by next February, while deliveries of loose coal will be phased out by 2023. The ban, which will affect mostly rural households, also includes wet wood.

UPDATE: The best wood burning stoves that will survive Michael Gove’s new laws

Read it.

A chronicle of today’s fight over housing in California.

Read it.

From blood storms to honeycomb lungs, here’s an organ-by-organ look at how COVID-19 harms humans.

Oil and gas firms ‘have had far worse climate impact than thought’  The Guardian.

For India’s Karnataka fishermen, climate change’s just barren sea

How Warming Winters Are Affecting Everything NPR.

Red-State Utah Creates Long-Term Plan to Tackle Climate Change

Plausible Scenarios for Global Warming

Canadian Government: Anti-Pipeline Eco-Extremists Sabotaging Railway Lines

Jeff Bezos’ $10 billion to fight the climate crisis can make a difference—if spent correctly

Counter-Protesters In Alberta Tear Down Anti-Pipeline Barricade As Trudeau Contemplates Action

Hell and high water: eco-anxiety dominates Jenny Offill’s latest novel

Christopher Bedford: The Pathetic, Cruel Reality of the Media’s NeverTrump Gimps

Neil Young: Trump ‘A Disgrace to My Country’  It’s not your country, Canuck.

‘Another Slap In The Face’: Media Melts Down After Trump Picks Grenell As Acting DNI

ABC, NBC Huff ‘No Remorse’ from Blago, Ignored Obama Releasing Terrorist

Why do NeverTrumpers think they can run the Democratic party?

CNN’s Camerota Frets: ‘Hurtful’ ‘Dangerous’ for Democrats to Compare Bloomberg to Trump!

GOP Ex-Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Confirms Assange Deal Offer  I don’t believe that. Assange had already said that the Russians had nothing to do with it — you don’t offer a guy a pardon for something he’s already done. This is fake news.

Rep. Adam Schiff Warns Trump After Roger Stone Sentencing: Pardoning Would Be ‘Breathtaking Act Of Corruption’  He’s welcome to try another impeachment.

NYT Reporter: U.S. ‘Leadership and Credibility’ Will ‘Collapse’ If Trump Wins Reelection

Chelsea Handler Tries to Say Trump Only Pardons White People, Gets LEVELED on Twitter

Read it.

U.S. immigration agents arrested two people at a Northern California courthouse, including a man detained in a hallway on his way to a hearing, flouting a new state law requiring a judicial warrant to make immigration arrests inside such facilities.

Let’s see California get into a pissing contest with the Feds. That would be entertaining.

Read it.

Show him your scars, Steve.

Read it.

She fits perfectly in the modern Democrat party.

Read it.

If I were President I’d tell ’em to suck on it — but that’s me.

The Other McCain looks at the news.

One of the most amazing things about American journalism is the continued employment of political pundits whose penchant for failure would disqualify them from being hired in any other field. All the experts who were wrong about the 2016 election are now confidently making predictions about the 2020 election, as if their credibility were undiminished by their previous mistakes.

…

Any experienced poker player can perhaps sympathize with the plight of Never Trump Republicans; I once went all-in with a full house and lost when the other guy turned over four of a kind. But I’ve never claimed to be an “expert” on poker, the way Boot and his cohort assert their expertise about politics and policy. The whole crowd — including former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Bush-era campaign operative Rick Wilson, and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, to name a few — simply could not believe that Trump might actually be elected, and they have never forgiven him (or the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him) for proving them wrong. None of Trump’s policy successes — crushing ISIS, promoting a robust economy, appointing two conservative Supreme Court justices and numerous other federal judges, and more — can ever redeem him in the eyes of the self-appointed political “experts” whose credibility is further diminished every time Trump wins again.

ZMan passes the popcorn.

Bloomberg is the Democrat version of Ross Perot. He’s not really a candidate, but more of a foil for the other candidates. Last night all of them went ham on him in an effort to show they are the most virtuous of the bunch. Warren went full rage head over Bloomberg having called women “fat broads and horse-faced lesbians.” For the rest, Bloomberg was the cartoon rich guy. They took turns flinging their poo at him. For the most part, he just smirked it off, dismissing them as sideshow clowns.

Read it.

The fast-breeding desert locust has invaded Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, creating a state of emergency.

…

Yet, instead of rallying around African nations in this time of great peril, more EU-funded NGOs have descended on the Kenyan parliament to demand that the government disarm itself in the battle against locusts. They want the Kenyan government to outlaw the pesticides used to fight locusts, the only effective tool that can stop these insects, and prevent the crisis from spiraling out of control.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

I wouldn’t have thought that stealing bees was a big thing, but apparently it is.

Read it.

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

Read it. (warning – long)

Against all odds, and despite the best efforts of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, old-fashioned, analog, motion-picture film is suddenly making a comeback. What’s the magic in this old medium that digital technology can’t seem to match?

Steve Sailer.

Crime isn’t hugely high in Southern California at the moment *, so the local police blotter tends to be dominated by news of aspiring rappers doing in expiring rappers, such as last year’s World’s Most Important Man Nipsey Hussle and now Pop Smoke.

A group of people, including one wearing a mask and armed with a handgun, burst into a posh Hollywood Hills home early Wednesday and fatally shot up-and-coming rapper Pop Smoke, police said.

One reason the crime rate isn’t all that high is because Los Angeles County has a black lady district attorney Jackie Lacey. So the Soros folks are trying to do something about that by importing white male San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon to run against Lacey.

Read it.

Back in April of 2013, in a little-publicised incident that was featured a few months later at Gates of Vienna, an electricity substation serving Silicon Valley in California was put out of action by what was initially and inadequately described as “vandalism”. It was nothing casual.

Deliberately, a critical telephone cable, accessed by a manhole with a cover too heavy for one person to lift, had been severed beforehand. A shooter or two with AK 47 rifles had conducted an attack at one o’clock in the morning, lasting some nineteen minutes. They knocked out 17 transformers and slipped away into the darkness before police arrived. It seems to have been a test run, and a highly successful one, of domestic warfare by persons of hostile intent. No group has claimed responsibility.

Kurt Schlichter is delightfully dyspeptic today.

et’s review how our guardians of justice have covered themselves in glory in recent days. And by “glory,” I mean “Scat Francisco sidewalk sauce.”

The scumbag Democrat donors remaining in the Mueller lynch mob decided that Roger Stone, an absolutely harmless gadfly whose real crime was being aligned with Donald Trump and therefore with you, should be sent away for seven to nine years for “crimes” that the Department of Injustice promptly gave a pass on to the loathsome Andrew McCabe. This is the same institution that also gave a pass to Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, Comey the Looming Doofus, and those fugly FBI sexting twins.

You would not get a pass.

Read it.

Notice that articles such as this always frame the situation as being either the fault of (a) consumers who are bad people for improperly recycling things or (b) manufacturers who are somehow at fault for how they mark stuff as recyclable or not.

Perhaps we ought to give some thought to creating recycling centers who could actually recycle more kinds of stuff?

Read it.

Thanks to support from the U.S. Forest Service and the Softwood Lumber Board, developer Placetailor and Boston-based architecture firm Generate have collaborated to design a carbon-neutral apartment block in Roxbury, a neighborhood in the south end of Boston. Named Model-C, the 5-story, 19,000-square-foot building will contain 14 residential units above an affordable co-working space on its ground floor.

I love the way journalists tag some building as ‘affordable’ or not, as if that were some objective measure rather than just one person’s opinion.