Wretchard.com

New at the Belmont Club. No government plan survives contact with nature.

The Long, Long March Back to Normal

The race with viral evolution

The progressive project to water down the Second Amendment, enact hate speech laws, change the voting rules, open the border and expand the Supreme Court are paradoxically a sign of weakness, not strength. It is frank admission that the old elites can no longer govern by the former rules and need new ones to maintain control.

I used to think there were subjects so important that public officials would never lie about them. Nuclear war for instance or an earth-wide pandemic. Then gradually it became clear that no one, not even politicians at the highest levels, consciously makes decisions about whether to tell the truth however important the matter.

New at the Belmont Club. Seabed warfare vs the Great Underwater Wall of China. Robots beneath the waves.

Undersea Kingdoms

Mission to the bottom of the sea

When the large scale history of the 2020 pandemic is written the key factor for success will turn out to be how well individual societies mobilized their human capital, not how ruthlessly they shut it down.

Researchers Are Hatching a Low-Cost Coronavirus Vaccine

A new formulation entering clinical trials in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam could change how the world fights the pandemic.

New at the Belmont Club. The relationship between Washington’s desire for global leadership and the progressive project to reinterpret America.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

The course of true accession never runs smooth

A Harvard study shows that meeting the Covid-19 pandemic required more than following conventional wisdom.

Fallacies, hard truths, and lessons learned from the global response to COVID-19

Researchers from Harvard and other universities are comparing what went right and what failed in 18 countries’ handling of the pandemic.

The Russians are pushing Biden in Ukraine.

Top US national security officials call counterparts as Russia and Ukraine tensions rise

Top US national security officials have spoken with their Ukrainian counterparts, and America’s top general held a call Wednesday with his Russian opposite number amid concern over Russian military activity in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, including what the US deemed a violation of a ceasefire by Mos…

China to form small group to vet Hong Kong elections: SCMP

The changes are expected to be unveiled later Tuesday.. Read more at straitstimes.com.

HONG KONG (BLOOMBERG) – Chinese lawmakers plan to put fewer than 10 people – all chosen by national security officials – on a committee to vet any candidates for top elected positions in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reported.

The report said vetting committee members would be chosen by Beijing’s National Security Office in Hong Kong as well as the Committee for Safeguarding National Security chaired by the territory’s chief executive – two bodies created under a sweeping national security law imposed last year.

Bloomberg

New at the Belmont Club. How does the progressive project advance against China?

Washington mandates and China supplies.

Solar Is on a Roll—and Needs More Sunlight from Washington

Twenty-nine states are already pursuing renewable portfolio standards that require the increased deployment of solar systems and other green technologies.

New at the Belmont Club. Frozen evil loosed upon a sensitive, Woke world. It looks funny but it has a power long forgotten.

North Korea: Lockdown as a Strategy

Too deliberately brutal for sophisticates to understand

Is climate change anxiety codespeak for ‘white fragility’ asks the Scientific American.

Climate Anxiety Is an Overwhelmingly White Phenomenon

Is it really just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or to get “back to normal?”

Stealth destroyer gets turned into a floating command node. Unmanned vehicle doctrine is being tested by the fleet. PACFLEET Preparing for 2021 Unmanned Fleet Battle Problem.

Zumwalt Destroyer Will Control Unmanned Ships, Aircraft in Upcoming Fleet Battle Problem – USNI News

The Navy will get a first glimpse of what future operations could look like, when a Zumwalt-class destroyer manages long-range surveillance and fires by manned and unmanned platforms in an upcoming exercise in the Pacific. U.S. Pacific Fleet will host its most complex exercise to date involving unma…

Progressive intellectuals explain how they could not see monsters in their own ranks because they were blinded by Donald Trump. The dazzle of Trump made them mistake Cuomo for a feminist hero.

It was way too easy for America to be fooled by Andrew Cuomo

There’s a special sting to discovering the man who convinced you he could assure your safety turns out to be dangerous himself.

Biden’s foreign and domestic policy appears to consist largely of virtue signaling. Whether about the border with Mexico, Covid, murders in Georgia, Putin, Uighurs, Burma the signal contains a large measure of Wokeness. The question is whether the policy is all virtue signaling or whether there is something solid behind the appearance.

New at the Belmont Club. Clutching at reality. How epistemology became a modern political crisis.

“Now it’s the Left’s turn.” The radical Democrats make a play for power. Inevitably Biden will be the next target. Can a nonentity who was once Obama’s creature resist?

Andrew Cuomo’s Reign Is Over. Now It’s the Left’s Turn.

After years of bullying, brutal austerity, and massive giveaways to the wealthy, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s rule in New York is finished. His allies are in disarray, never expecting their prince’s fall from grace. Now it’s time for the Left to step up and reshape New York for the many, not the few.

Hell is a place where nothing exists that we cannot conceive. It is a totally sterile place with no surprises and in Shannon’s sense no additional information. Safety is where we know all the outcomes and nothing unexpected happens. And nothing unexpected happens.

The scales fell from his eyes while tormented in Iranian prison

The Princeton Historian Mugged by Reality

Since being freed from Iranian detention, Xiyue Wang has been unrelenting in his criticism of the authoritarian country—and some American elites’ attempt at rapprochement.