Wretchard.com

New at the Belmont Club. The individually guilty representatives of collective virtue.

The Illusion of Necessity

Lying in a good cause

“The Chinese government has no room for compromise,” Wang said.

China tells Biden to reverse ‘dangerous practice’ on Taiwan

China’s foreign minister has warned the Biden administration to roll back former President Donald Trump’s ”…

Politicians get astronomical speaker’s fees also. Their literary skills must exceed Tolstoy’s.

And he got $245 for each copy of his other book | National Review

For reference, a real writer might expect to be paid perhaps $4 or $5 for every copy of a hardcover book he sells.

Nowadays, many relevant actors of the industry claim that mining is going through the first stages of a deep changeover from the hand of digital transformation. It is said that this process could change how mining is done, passing from human-run operations to autonomous or semi-autonomous remote-controlled mines. Independent if fully automated operations are achieved in the near future or not, the digital transformation is already impacting the industry and will continue doing so.

Did cats fake domestication?

Ancient DNA Shows Cats Domesticated Themselves – Why Are We Not Surprised?

Cats domesticated themselves without becoming domesticated, shows a study looking at 9,000 years of cat DNA history.

“U.S.-China tensions rise over investigation as group of scientists presses for fresh inquiry, including into lab escape theory”

WSJ News Exclusive | WHO Investigators to Scrap Plans for Interim Report on Probe of Covid-19 Origins

The World Health Organization team’s decision comes as tensions mount between Beijing and Washington over the investigation and one international group of scientists appeals for a new probe.

The problem with linear projection is tomorrow won’t be like yesterday. Politicians with hardcoded 5 or 50 year master plans will almost always get it wrong.

Abundant Rain Turns Namibia Green

The landscape has been transformed by the wettest rainy season since 2011.

As pandemic restrictions increase demand from China and suppress American ports, logistics.

Americans stuck in their homes have set off a surge of orders from factories in China, much of it carried across the Pacific in containers — the metal boxes that move goods in towering stacks atop enormous vessels. As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports. …

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company. “All the links in the supply chain are stretched. The ships, the trucks, the warehouses.” …

Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected, because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.

New York Times

The political response shipped masks to Africa and TV sets to the fat, old Western populations

Covid-19 death rates 10 times higher in countries where most adults are overweight, report finds

The team examined mortality data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the World Health Organization (WHO) and found that of 2.5 million Covid-19 deaths reported by the end of February, 2.2 million were in countries where more than half the population is overweight. …

Vietnam had one of the world’s lowest Covid-19 death rates, with 0.04 deaths occurring per 100,000 people. The country’s overweight population comes in at 18.3%. Other countries on the low death rate list with similar patterns include Japan, Thailand and South Korea. …

n the US, where 152.49 deaths were recorded per 100,000 people, 67.9% of the adult population is overweight, according to the report.

CNN

I was mulling a New York Post report that half the employees at The New York Times are afraid to say what they’re thinking when it hit me. It’s time for Free Speech Insurance.

Deadline

Free Speech Insurance: An Idea That Could Even Help The Oscars

I was mulling a New York Post report that half the employees at The New York Times are afraid to say what they’re thinking when it hit me. It’s time for Free Speech Insurance. This is nothin…

The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.

New York Times

Cuomo Aides Rewrote Nursing Home Report to Hide Higher Death Toll

The intervention was the earliest action yet known in an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo that concealed how many nursing home residents died in the pandemic.

So Dr. Seuss has joined the list of unpersons. The Woke should keep canceling and soon all the quality will be on the other side.

An Oasis of Hope in the United States of Lunacy

From the canceling of Dr. Seuss—If Theodore Geisel was a racist, I’m a Martian—to the President of the …

The legislation passed, 220-210, without any Republican support. One Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, voted against it. The bill’s fate in the Senate is uncertain.

WSJ

This implies that one couldn’t reliably duplicate the outcome of the 2020 elections without also duplicating some of its ‘desirable’ circumstances.

House Democrats Pass Voting-Rights Bill Opposed by GOP

Democrats passed legislation to expand voter participation and curb the role of big campaign donors over the objections of Republicans, who claimed the measure would weaken safeguards and spur mistrust in elections.

New at the Belmont Club. Ready for the next Pearl Harbor but not the foes with no name.

Biden and the Nuclear Codes

Solving the last century’s strategic challenge

It’s interesting to consider the extent to which stovepiped and group thinking conditioned the global response to the pandemic. The contrast between the relatively similar public health approaches (masking, social distancing, lockdowns etc) and the much more diverse vaccine development effort is stark.

A Guide to Global COVID-19 Vaccine Efforts

Only a year after the new coronavirus emerged, the first vaccines to protect against it are being administered. But production challenges, vaccine nationalism, and new virus strains are all presenting hurdles.

Democratic progressives are beginning to suspect the party establishment lied to them. Trump not impeached … Syria bombed … minimum wage dumped. But … but …