CHANGE: One-way Zipcars could change carsharing for the better.

DID GLOBAL WARMING PAUSE OR NOT? Yes, no, maybe.

The debate between researchers and doubters reached a crescendo last summer, when scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration updated their temperature records and concluded that global warming has not slowed down in the 2000s (ClimateWire, June 5, 2015).

Now, a group of prominent climate scientists are challenging NOAA’s conclusion in a commentary published this week in Nature Climate Change.

“The interpretation [the NOAA group] made was not valid,” said John Fyfe, a climate scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada and lead author of the commentary. “The slowdown is there, even in this new updated data set.”

Don’t you remember the science being settled?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1023.

WHY SO PHALLOPHOBIC, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN? ‘Snow penis’ erected during snowstorm reported as ‘bias incident’ at University of Michigan. Sounds like a hostile education environment for male students.

HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC. Here’s the founder of Miramax in early 2014, channeling the left’s post-Tucson “new civililty” tone:

A day after he announced he was going to make a film taking on the NRA with Meryl Streep, Harvey Weinstein — the producer of several violent films — told CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview to air tonight that he has had a change of heart about violent content in film. Asked by Morgan about his hypocrisy of making these violent films, Weinstein said, “They have a point. You have to look in the mirror, too. I have to choose movies that aren’t violent or as violent as they used to be. I know for me personally, you know, I can’t continue to do that. The change starts here. It has already. For me, I can’t do it. I can’t make one movie and say this is what I want for my kids and then just go out and be a hypocrite.”

As Deadline Hollywood noted at the time, “Harvey Weinstein Has Change of Heart On Violence In Films.” But not violent eliminationist rhetoric in his language, as this Hollywood Reporter headline from yesterday vividly illustrates: “Oscars: Harvey Weinstein Discourages Boycott, Predicts Chris Rock Will ‘Annihilate’ Hollywood.”

Well, I’d tune in for that — as Red Skelton famously said after all of Hollywood seemed to show up for the 1958 funeral of Harry Cohn, an even more reviled studio head, “It proves what Harry always said: give the public what they want and they’ll come out for it.”

PLAYING FAVORITES IS WHAT THEY’RE ALL ABOUT: Treasury Department Plays Tricks With Puerto Rico Debt:

Obama administration Treasury officials want to discriminate against holders of Puerto Rico’s general obligation bonds and give retired public employees a better deal as the island’s debt mountain collapses. . . .

The impulse to aid Puerto Rico’s civil servants is understandable and the idea is well-intentioned, but this plan is seriously misguided. General obligation bondholders bought Puerto Rico debt under a clear and transparent set of rules—that these were senior obligations taking priority over everything else. Meanwhile, grotesquely incompetent and venal politicians promised generous pensions to civil service employees without making sufficient provision to cover those pensions when the bills came due. Now, sure enough, the territory doesn’t have the money to cover its pension obligations, or to pay back the money it borrowed from bondholders.

The Treasury seems to have decided that the best way to handle this mess is to play tricks—to decide which group of debt holders is most “morally worthy,” and to give that group the first claim on the island government’s resources regardless of contractual obligations. There’s a good argument for helping out pensioners, many of whom are now too old to go back to work, and who in any case played by the rules and did their jobs. But, as Walsh notes, it isn’t so simple. Many of the people who own Puerto Rico general obligation bonds are themselves old, retired people on limited incomes who bought these investments on the promise that they would be the first debts to be repaid. So who has the better claim: The retired teacher in New York who bought Puerto Rico bonds or the retired teacher in Puerto Rico who has a pension from the system?

Worse still, as investors everywhere realize that the U.S. government no longer thinks that enforcing the law of contract is a sacred trust and obligation—choosing instead to privilege some groups of debt holders and punishing others based on the perceived moral or political standing of each group—the value of all municipal debt in this country will fall. Cities and states will have to pay more to borrow money once bondholders realize that they can’t trust the fine print. That means fewer new schools, fewer public services, fewer repairs to bridges and tunnels, fewer mass transit projects, dirtier parks, and less safe streets all over the country.

But they’ll make life easier for loyal Democratic Party government-employee apparatchiks, and that’s what really matters. Party before country, as always with this crowd.

LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT CHECKERS AND EDITORS: Time: Evelyn Waugh Is One Of The Most-Read Female Writers in Colleges.

Somewhere, center-right founder Henry Luce is alternately weeping and roaring with laughter over what’s happened to his namesake publication.

And as Glenn mentioned yesterday:

As with many employed in today’s DNC-MSM, Matt admits to deliberately lying from time to time, but I’m willing to take him at his word on this one.

Related: Annals of Liberal Illiteracy.

WHAT PASSES FOR GOOD NEWS DURING THE OBAMA RECOVERY: The U.S. economy’s slowdown in the final three months of 2015 wasn’t quite as bad as initially thought.

Let the good times roll.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Americans Abroad Pretending To Be Canadians.

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SO THIS IS GOING WELL: ‘Soldiers of Allah’ to counter ‘infidel’ Soldiers of Odin in Norway.

QUESTION ASKED: “Has there been any investigation into the possibility that this Republican primary season is actually a Kobayashi Maru simulation?”

Perhaps, considering that the Kobayashi Maru simulation was bested by an oversexed chubby man in garish attire with a gigantic ego and a not-entirely-lifelike coiffure who went on to conquer the galaxy, in what could turn out to be an eerie bit of foreshadowing.

ANALYSIS: TRUE:

FOLLOWING HILLARY’S LEAD, Pentagon deletes potentially incriminating files about ISIS.

Committee Chairman Devin Nunes of California blasted the Pentagon, citing the allegations that classified intelligence files and emails about the war on ISIS were deleted.

“We have been made aware that both files and emails have been deleted by personnel at CENTCOM, and we expect that the Department of Defense will provide these and all other relevant documents to the committee,” Nunes said at a hearing Thursday on worldwide threats.

The U.S. Central Command based in Tampa, Florida, oversees the war against ISIS and all U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

Nunes’ assertions led to an extraordinary public acknowledgment from Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was testifying before the committee, of the “unusually high” dissatisfaction inside the agency responsible for providing military intelligence on ISIS.

There is already an ongoing Defense Department Inspector General investigation into allegations that intelligence analysts at CENTCOM were pressured into changing their analysis to make their reports sound overly optimistic. Congress is conducting a separate investigation.

The committee has information from whistleblowers that both intelligence files and emails were deliberately deleted at Central Command, but that copies remain in the hands of analysts, a congressional source told CNN.

While Nunes never mentioned who might have been responsible, or at what level of leadership, Central Command provided CNN with a response that specifically referenced senior military leaders.

Hmm. Who’s the most senior military leader?

WHY ARE LEFTIST MILLENIALS SO RACIST? “Ever since Larry Wilmore launched The Nightly Show on Comedy Central on January 19, 2015, the black comedian has lost 55 percent of the audience he inherited from Stephen Colbert, who moved from The Colbert Report on that cable television channel to The Late Show on CBS. According to Joe Concha of the Mediaite.com website, the columnist asserted that Wilmore’s huge drop is due to two factors: ‘He’s not funny. And … pretty much no one is interested.'”

By “no one,” he means the young white leftists whom Viacom’s Comedy Central directs its programming toward. Which brings us to a related query from a month ago: “‘Why Are Americans Ignoring Trevor Noah?’ …Is this a trick question?”

STUDIES LIKE THIS — NEVER VERY GOOD — SEEM TO GET WORSE IN ELECTION YEARS, AND ALWAYS IN THE SAME DIRECTION: Student loans aren’t racist.

A new study purports to show that student loan debt is racist, because areas with higher concentrations of minorities have higher levels of debt.

As with any study claiming that correlation equals oppression, this one has some flaws. One big one, in fact. The bigger reason minorities have more student loan delinquency, which the study’s authors even acknowledge, is that more of them choose lower-paying majors. For example, according to the linked chart from Georgetown University, the field with the second-largest concentration of black majors is Human Services/Community Organization. It may be a noble calling — it’s something President Obama believed in — but it’s also the major that promises the second-lowest payday of all the majors black students tend to choose. Also ranking near the top: Sociology, social work, public administration, and interdisciplinary social sciences — all fine things to study, but none of them promise especially high-paying careers.

Choice of field is one of the leading causes of the gender wage gap as well. Women dominate nine of the top 10 lowest-paying fields while men dominate nine of the top-10 highest-paying fields.

Related:

UM: Oil Must Fall to $0 to Meet Current Inflation Expectations.

American frackers are good, but they aren’t that good.

THE BARRETT .50 IS THE NEW TENNESSEE STATE RIFLE, and the WaPo goes with Brady-inspired hype: Tennessee’s new official state rifle is so powerful it can “destroy commercial aircraft.”

Actually, most any rifle can do that, if you hit in the right place. But keep up the hype — if it keeps effete Yankees from moving here for the low taxes and friendly climate, it’s a win!

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: The Deteriorating Fiscal Outlook. “This deterioration has happened without much fanfare and, even with a fall in projected interest rates working in the other direction, the estimated changes are large.”

CHANGE: Voting underway in Iran elections with moderates forced to the sidelines.

I had been assured by no less than the U.S. President and the Secretary of State that signing a deal with Iran concerning that country’s nuclear program would empower the moderates there.

HEH: David Mastio: Think Trump’s troopers are racist? Don’t be so smug: Goofy poll cited by ‘New York Times’ reveals 29% of African-Americans aren’t sure Emancipation Proclamation was a good idea. 40% of Hispanics agree.

In the same Economist /YouGov poll:

15% of American Hispanics agree with those racist Trump supporters: The Emancipation Proclamation was a bad idea. A quarter of Hispanics are not sure.

32% of American blacks back President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to round up Japanese-Americans and put them in camps during World War II. According to The New York Times analysis of the poll results, that is almost exactly the same percentage as among Trump voters.

More than 30% of those UNDER 30 are not sure that President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating the U.S. military was a good idea. 15% are sure it wasn’t. (Incidentally, those who were around back then, the 65 and up crowd, are significantly more likely applaud Truman’s desegregation order than kids today.)

43% of likely Democratic primary voters, a very liberal slice of America, approve of President George W. Bush’s pro-torture executive order after 9/11.

So, are America’s Hispanics nearly as racist as Trump supporters? Do a third of African-Americans have it in for their Asian countrymen? Are kids raised in the 1980s and later more resistant to desegregation than Americans born when Jim Crow was a thing? Do liberals love waterboarding?

Uh, no.

Here’s something that might put things in perspective: If you dig deep into the confusing Economist/YouGov online poll, you find that only 71% of American blacks approve of the Emancipation Proclamation. Five percent definitely disapprove of Lincoln’s action and 24% just aren’t sure.

It’s as if America’s educational system — and its pollsters and media — are run by people who just don’t do a very good job.

HOPE: Western countries are quietly stepping up military action as the ranks of the Islamic State grow in Libya.

The Libyan branch of ISIS staged a gruesome attack Wednesday on government-security headquarters in the western city of Sabratha. According to the AP, the group beheaded 12 officers before taking control of the complex.

“A second security official said that the militants used the headless bodies of the officers they killed to block the roads leading to the security headquarters—which they occupied for about three hours,” the report added.

The attack came less than a week after American airstrikes hit an ISIS training camp in the city, killing about 40 people, including two Serbian hostages. The renascent U.S. efforts in Libya speak to a growing concern shared by a number of countries about ISIS’s increasing ability to flourish in the North African country.

Hillary Clinton has some ‘splainin to do.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I GIVE YOU THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: “If Donald Trump is the nominee, I’m open to support anyone [else], while I’m also reserving my ticket to get out of here if he wins, only because he’d probably have me deported anyway,” says veteran NBC anchor and Comcast spokesman Al Sharpton. Resist we much!

Related: The View’s Raven-Symoné goes one better; vows to leave US “If any Republican gets nominated.”

HILLARY ON GUNS: THERE’S A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, TOO: “There is? Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s copy of the US Constitution has bleed-over from a page containing the Declaration of Independence.”