Wretchard.com

The online fashion magazine [Nylon] warns readers that Strange Planet’s Nathan Pyle is maybe pro-life and “we should be more careful with what we’re sharing.”

Reason

Cartoonist Nathan Pyle, whose Strange Planet alien drawings you’ve definitely seen everywhere, was discovered to be anti-abortion today, which serves as a valuable reminder that you should know about the person whose content you’re sharing.
Pyle shares his artwork on Instagram on an account called @NathanWPyleStrangePlanet, which boasts almost 2 million followers. But, he also has a personal Instagram account and Twitter, which reveals a lot more about where he stands on important issues, like a woman’s right to choose. Twitter user @anarchopupgirl found a tweet that he posted back in 2017, in which he talked up the anti-abortion March for Life in a post about his former girlfriend. He shared a screenshot of a Facebook post that she had written, which thanked “the courageous mothers” who did not have abortions, and added, “When I think of the #MarchForLife, I first think of the life story of my girlfriend, Soojin. I am thankful she was given the gift of life.”

Nylon

There are plots everywhere. Thankfully, someone went back to 2017 to unearth the fact he was really happy to discover his girlfriend was born. There are all these Sleeper cells around just waiting to be activated, if you get the drift.

The Cold Civil War now has the paranoid atmosphere of the 1950s. “Beware Comrade. He’s unreliable. He harbors secret capitalist tendencies.” We’re back in the bad old days. It’s interesting to revisit the movies of the period. One on YouTube, The Iron Curtain with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney depicts how a man’s life could hang on his utterances. The worst threat was “we will send you home to Russia!” Incidentally it has a score by Alfred Newman, consisting most of Russian classical music but ending in a stirring rendition of the Red, Red Rose.

My own personal view is that we don’t know enough to literally bet the farm on it. The key feature of all these climate change solutions is they require total commitment. The therapeutic dose has to be global, massive and expensive or else it’s no good. Listen to Beto O’Rourke:

“Let us all be well aware that life will be a lot tougher for the generations that follow us, no matter what we do,” O’Rourke said. “It is only a matter of degrees. Along this current trajectory, there will be people who can no longer live in the cities they call home today. There is food grown in this country that will no longer prosper in these soils. There is going to be massive migration of tens or hundreds of millions of people from places that are going to be uninhabitable or under the sea.”
“This is the final chance,” O’Rourke continued. “The scientists are unanimous on this. We have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis. My gratitude is to them for the young people who stepped up to offer such a bold proposal to meet such a grave challenge. They say we should do nothing less than marshal every resource in the country to meet that challenge, to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, to get to net zero emissions, which means not only must we emit less greenhouse gasses, we must plant things that absorb greenhouse gasses and carbon and invest in the technology to allow us to claim some that are in the air now. Can we make it? I don’t know. It’s up to every one of us. Do you want to make it? “

Daily Wire

Of course O’Rourke might be right. But is he completely right? Right as to direction but not tempo or scale? Or is he wrong? Most of the climate change proposals are really about imposing taxes. It’s a tax scheme. In case nobody has noticed that is precisely what caused the unrest in France that simmers to this day. In case you think it’s just the French Australians are now realizing somebody’s got to pay real dollars and cents for “climate change” and it won’t be China.

WAFarmers chief executive Trevor Whittington said the policy signalled that “Australian farmers will be picking up a large part of the tab”.
“You don’t get to force the public to double the number of electric vehicles without loading up the taxes on four-wheel-drive utes,” he said.
“You can’t bury all the the carbon footprint from livestock into the soil without turning the paddock back into bush.
“We have yet to seen the hidden formulas but all indications are that the agricultural sector with our tractors and stock will be paying a carbon tax by the end of the decade.”

Australia is facing the strange situation where it’s power prices have gone through the roof yet the grid, which used to be rock solid, is becoming increasingly fragile.

A bungled transition from coal to clean energy has left resource-rich Australia with an unwanted crown: the highest power prices in the world.
New Yorkers pay half as much as Sydneysiders to keep the lights on, despite Australia boasting among the world’s largest coal and natural gas reserves, as well as ideal conditions for clean power generation. A decade of political dithering and climate policy missteps have set its patchwork power system adrift, ratcheting up manufacturing costs and hurting consumers with a doubling in electricity prices since last year and rising risks of blackouts.

Bloomberg

College admission scandals yields guilty pleas

Felicity Huffman and a dozen other wealthy parents swept up in the far-reaching college admissions scandal have agreed to plead guilty after being charged in the scheme, according to court records.
The actress and 12 other parents, including Los Angeles marketing guru Jane Buckingham, will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. Bay Area real estate developer Bruce Isackson will plead guilty to one count of money laundering conspiracy and one count of conspiracy to defraud the IRS. His wife, Davina Isackson, will plead guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit fraud.

LA Times

Turkey’s ruling party said Sunday it will appeal for a full recount of all votes cast in Istanbul’s mayoral election, which the opposition narrowly won in a major setback for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The opposition’s mayoral candidate urged the ruling party to accept defeat.
In the March 31 local elections, the opposition not only prevailed in a tight race in Istanbul, a city of 15 million residents that is Turkey’s financial and cultural center, but took control of Ankara, the capital. Erdogan’s party, which had held both cities for decades, contested the results, claiming the elections were “tainted”.

LA Times

Who says they’ve learned nothing from Europe?

That the UN was warned about the Rwanda massacre and told the peacekeepers not to intervene.

Rwanda’s president said the country had become “a family once again”, while marking the 25th anniversary of the genocide that killed 800,000 people.
Paul Kagame, who led a rebel force that ended the slaughter, lit a remembrance flame in the capital Kigali.
Rwandans will mourn for 100 days, the time it took in 1994 for about a tenth of the country to be massacred.
Most of those who died were minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, killed by ethnic Hutu extremists.

BBC

The UN did nothing.

In late 1993, Dallaire received his commission as the Major-General of UNAMIR, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda. UNAMIR’s goal was to assist in the implementation of the Arusha Accords, a peace agreement intended to end the Rwandan Civil War. The UN attempted to negotiate with the Hutus in the Rwandan army and with Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu who was president at the time, and with the Tutsis, as represented by the rebel commander Paul Kagame, who led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). (He later was elected as President of Rwanda as of September 2017.) When Dallaire arrived in Rwanda, his mandate was to supervise the implementation of the accords during a transitional period in which Tutsis were to be given some positions of power within the Hutu-dominated government.
There were early signs that something was amiss when, on January 22, 1994, a French DC-8 aircraft landed in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, loaded with ammunition and weapons for the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR). (FAR was the Hutu army under Habyarimana’s control.) Dallaire notified the UN by telegram, suggesting he seize these weapons to prevent violence, but the UN deemed this action to be beyond his UN mandate.[citation needed] In addition to the arms deliveries, he learned that troops from the Rwandan government began checking identity cards, which identified individuals by ethnicity as Hutu or Tutsi.

Romeo Dallaire

The UN had an efficiency problem. In an effort to achieve results they eventually hired mercenaries.

The other problem was that they won. EO soundly beat back the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), complicating the peace deal that the U.N. was trying to broker. EO was enough of a threat that its ouster was a precondition for the rebels agreeing to the accord. Some Sierra Leonean military officers openly resented the presence of foreign advisors and quietly accused them of human rights violations, while privately colluding with the rebels. And, as everyone from EO predicted, the peace deal fell apart the moment they left.
What followed was a series of horribly bungled interventions, first by the Economic Community of West African States, then the U.N., that accomplished little beyond confirming its critics’ worst prognostications about the wisdom of such endeavors. The RUF restarted its brutal campaign with renewed enthusiasm. The war that EO had largely won continued for several more years at the cost of thousands more innocent lives. What became the largest U.N. intervention in the world almost became its biggest failure. The British Army would eventually enter the conflict to quell the violence, but separate from the U.N. peacekeeping mission.

Three American service members and one contractor were killed Monday after a bomb exploded near Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Defense Department officials said.
In a statement, the Defense Department said that three additional troops were wounded in the blast. They were evacuated and are being treated.
A United States military official said that the blast was part of an attack on a convoy of trucks transporting American service members near Bagram Air Base in eastern Afghanistan. The official said that the Taliban are believed to be behind the attack.
Fighting between the Taliban and American-backed Afghan forces has continued in recent weeks despite continuing negotiations on a framework to end the nearly 18-year war.

NYT

What’s the use of making a deal with the Taliban? It’s not like they’d keep it.

Yo soy un perdedor … I’m a loser baby

A beleaguered dictator barely hanging onto power against a rising tide of popular unrest. An economy in shambles, both from years of economic mismanagement and the crushing weight of U.S.-imposed sanctions. With a long-time client on the brink of collapse, the Kremlin injects troops and supplies in a desperate gambit to keep an ally in power. Confronted by what it sees as a Russian provocation, a U.S. administration struggles to define an appropriate and effective response while trying to decide whether it should define a red line that would prompt a military intervention. This could be Syria circa 2014, but it’s not. It’s Venezuela in 2019.

Military.com

We’ll give Cuba our last barrel of oil.

Venezuela will “fulfill its commitments” to Cuba despite United States sanctions targeting oil shipments from the South American country to its ideological ally, Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said on Monday.

Reuters

If you’re the last airport on earth Iran’ll fly to you.

An Iran airline blacklisted by the United States for allegedly transporting military equipment to Middle East war zones began direct flights between Tehran and Venezuela on Monday, signifying a growing relationship between the two nations in the face of U.S. sanctions and growing upheaval.

Fox

But the last corpse on earth may have to bury itself in a country where the morgues don’t work.

“Manuel’s mother died last night.”
This is what my friend texted me this morning, telling me about our colleague’s loss.
I’m just about to text my condolences when the phone pings again, and I see something I’ll never be able to unsee.
The body of a woman, covered by a thin white sheet, spread out on an old maroon couch. Next to her are plastic bottles that once contained some sort of off-brand soda, now filled with frozen water and used to keep the body of my friend’s mother from rotting in the heat.
I have spent almost two months in Venezuela and seen more atrocities than I expected in a lifetime, but this, this complete loss of human dignity, may be the worst yet.
A few weeks ago I visited a public hospital here in Caracas and next to it I saw the barred-up doors of the central morgue, closed for weeks because they lacked both refrigeration and personnel. At the time I was wondering what happened to a society with no means to care for the dead and now I have the answer, staring back at me from the screen of my phone.

Daily Beast

An overconfident Joe Crowley opted against using negative ammunition against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because he believed that he had the Democratic primary locked up and didn’t want to look weak in a race he was expected to walk away with.

Crowley, a longtime political power broker from Queens, was widely considered to be perfectly situated to become then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s successor before his stunning defeat last June that propelled the former waitress to the halls of Congress.

“It wasn’t just that Crowley didn’t want to go dirty; he thought it would be a sign of weakness in D.C. if he was seen in a tight race against Ocasio-Cortez. He was supposed to be the next Democratic leader, not someone who had to fight for reelection”.

NY Post

He didn’t realize he was up against a star.

AOC of course is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first-term congresswoman who has exploded like a supernova across the political sky since last summer, when she defeated Joe Crowley, the boss of the Queens County Democratic Party and someone widely thought to be the next speaker of the House. And when she lands back in her district, her reception is no different.
“It’s like if Camelot came to Queens,” said one onlooker. On this day, Ocasio-Cortez is the star upon which the whole room seems to revolve. Politicians who have been working in the trenches since before she was born come by to pay tribute (and of course to grab the quick selfie).
It is hard to not pick up a faint air of resentment in some corners.
“I send a tweet when I see something I think is cool, and it gets, like, six likes,” John Liu, a state senator, former city comptroller, former city councilman and one-time candidate for mayor told the crowd. “AOC sneezes and it gets a half-million retweets!”

Politico

The British plans would create a statutory “duty of care” for social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to protect people who use their sites. The plan, which includes an independent regulator funded by a levy on internet companies, will be open for public comment for three months before the government publishes draft legislation.

AP

This is obvious but it is blasphemy.

NYT

The Marxist baroness of Partick is a mild-mannered woman with an immodest aim. She seeks the dismantling of the British state and a socialist reordering of the constitution. You may scoff, but if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister she will be midwife to a new United Kingdom.

Times

As it stands, if the EU refuses to grant the U.K. an extension to June 30 (or counter-propose a longer extension) the U.K. could be faced with a stark choice on Friday April 12 — leave the EU without a deal in place or revoke the whole departure process (known as Article 50) entirely.

CNBC

Remainers only have days to stop a no deal Brexit

Either Parliament finally unites around an agreed approach, which seems unlikely, or there is a further extension to the Article 50 process, possibly for a year or more.
There is, however, another option which is being talked about openly for the first time, and that is to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit.

Telegraph

But when the Leave voter asked Nigel whether he thought the Brexit she voted for could still happen, he gave her an honest answer.
“I’m going to tell you honestly, in the short term it is not going to happen,” he said.
“Even though we are supposed to leave on April 12th but of course into that gap we now have a piece of Parliamentary legislation.
“But also, the Prime Minister was never going to ever do it and frankly she has openly lied to the nation.”

LBC

“One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States —maybe it’s true here as well — is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’ and then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad,’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues. And when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens,” he said.

Hill

The Red Guards were used as a weapon to destroy Mao’s enemies in the Party and sweep away the “Four Olds”. The Four Olds were: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. The campaign to destroy the Four Olds began in Beijing on August 19, 1966, shortly after the launch of the Cultural Revolution.

When the Red Guards had accomplished their task they were in turn suppressed. Who in America are the Four Olds?

Chevron, Occidental Petroleum and the Australian mining giant BHP this year have invested in Carbon Engineering, a small Canadian company that claims to be on the verge of a breakthrough in solving a critical climate change puzzle: removing carbon already in the atmosphere.
At its pilot project in Squamish, an old lumber town about 30 miles north of Vancouver, the company is using an enormous fan to suck large amounts of air into a scrubbing vessel designed to extract carbon dioxide. The gas can then be buried or converted into a clean-burning — though expensive — synthetic fuel.

NYT

One thing they don’t tell you is that CO2 is food for plants. As this NASA study says:

Studies have shown that higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide affect crops in two important ways: they boost crop yields by increasing the rate of photosynthesis, which spurs growth, and they reduce the amount of water crops lose through transpiration. Plants transpire through their leaves, which contain tiny pores called stomata that open and collect carbon dioxide molecules for photosynthesis. During that process they release water vapor. As carbon dioxide concentrations increase, the pores don’t open as wide, resulting in lower levels of transpiration by plants and thus increased water-use efficiency.
Global climate impact assessments for crops have focused primarily on the impacts of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide on yields, said Delphine Deryng, lead author and a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City. “There has been very little impact assessment analysis that looked at the dual effect on yield and water use and how they play out in different regions of the world, which is critical to anticipating future agricultural water demands,” she said. …

Results show that yields for all four crops grown at levels of carbon dioxide remaining at 2000 levels would experience severe declines in yield due to higher temperatures and drier conditions. But when grown at doubled carbon dioxide levels, all four crops fare better due to increased photosynthesis and crop water productivity, partially offsetting the impacts from those adverse climate changes. For wheat and soybean crops, in terms of yield the median negative impacts are fully compensated, and rice crops recoup up to 90 percent and maize up to 60 percent of their losses. …

The larger spread for gains and losses in rainfed maize is attributed mainly to the drier growing conditions. “The impact on crop water productivity and yield is strongest in regions like southern Africa where water is a limiting factor,” Deryng said. “Maize in these regions experience the most relief from better water-use efficiency.” …
But Rosenzweig said that more field experiments are needed. “The uncertainty of carbon dioxide effects are greater in arid regions because experiments have been carried out mostly in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere,” she said. “We need field observations in these drier regions in order to validate and further improve our models.”

NASA

A lot depends on the models and how accurate they are. But at first glance less CO2 may actually be bad for Africa.

Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke on Sunday described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “racist” whose outreach to far-right interests as he seeks to hang onto political power has seriously damaged the chances of peace in the Middle East. …

His comments came one day after President Trump played up his pro-Israel agenda in a speech before an influential conservative Jewish group. Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Trump accused Democrats of “advancing by far the most extreme, anti-Semitic agenda in history.”

Washington Post

as China’s Government limited both developers and individuals from getting money out of the country for this purpose

ABC Australia

If they were protesting abortion they would be a hate group

Who writes the new Einstein-Szilard letter?

Legal Insurrection

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air…

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.

Yours very truly, Albert Einstein

The most dramatic aspect of the A-Bomb saga was that it was a real-life race for the secret. Fritz Lang tried to capture the suspense in his post-war “Cloak and Dagger”, complete with OSS agents trying to exfiltrate atomic scientists from Europe.

Did Heisenberg deliberately sabotage Hitler’s A-bomb program? The New York Times cites new evidence that he did not.

With bacteria and fungi alike, hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of being seen as infection hubs.

Star Tribune