HEALTH: Steroid Shots Do Little for Knee Pain of Arthritis.

DECADENT FOLLOWER OF GOLDSTEINISM RESISTS NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Chelsea Manning — ‘Man’ & Masculine Pronouns Should Not Be Illegal.

Related: Less than 20 percent of Americans said they would be open to dating a transgender person.

You will be made to care, to coin a phrase.

Update: “Since gender is a social construct, why aren’t all sexual preferences discriminatory?”, Ben Shapiro asks on Twitter.

FAKE NEWS: Byron York: Harvard study: CNN, NBC Trump coverage 93 percent negative.

FRANCE CHOSE . . . POORLY: Macron’s Nuclear Mistake.

The newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron is busy assembling his cabinet these days, but it looks like he made a misstep in his choice for the country’s new energy minister. Macron tapped the nature documentary filmmaker and prominent green Nicolas Hulot for the position, and overnight shares in the French nuclear company EDF fell by 7 percent. That’s because Hulot, despite his avowed respect for the environment, is a staunch opponent of nuclear power, the zero-emissions energy source on which France relies for roughly three-quarters of its power. . . .

Hulot’s opposition to nuclear comes out of an emerging trend of thinking in France—and in Europe more generally—that holds that nuclear power ought to be phased out as soon as possible and replaced by renewables. Germany, motivated by an irrational fear of the energy source following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, is leading this charge to its own detriment. Berlin hasn’t been able to replace its shuttered nuclear plants with wind and solar, but has instead been forced to increase its reliance on lignite coal, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels around. As a result, the country’s emissions have risen, an entirely predictable consequence of snubbing the only source (other than hydropower) of zero-emissions baseload power.

Germany’s experience hasn’t been enough to phase France’s greens, though, and Hulot’s new position of leadership suggests that Paris is preparing to follow in Berlin’s footsteps. That would be a grave error, though, especially during a time in which Europe is placing such a heavy emphasis on emissions reductions. EDF itself has pointed out that environmentalist plans to replace France’s nuclear fleet with 100 percent renewables by 2050 are “not based on technological realities.”

They’re lefty policies. Of course they’re not.

COMMENTARY: Lieberman at FBI? Don’t Do It.

FAKE NEWS AND FAKE SEARCH: Does Google Have a Liberal Bias? Search Results for Roger Ailes Speak Volumes.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases Freshly Updated Each Hour.

Plus, Save Big on Amazon Bestsellers by Category.

And don’t miss Big Savings in the Kindle Daily Deals.

Also, fresh savings on Today’s Digital Deals.

WANNACRY RANSOMWARE UPDATE: An analysis of WannaCry that includes a short but handy glossary of basic hacker terms.

Example:

Social Engineering- Exploiting human nature to get malware onto a system. This is what fishing and spear fishing attacks depend on.

Nope, it isn’t left-wing social engineering of society, though that’s also a crooked racket.

TO BE FAIR, WHO DIDN’T HACK THE U.S. IN THE OBAMA ERA? Did China Hack The CIA In Massive Intelligence Breach From 2010 To 2012?

And back then, nobody much cared about foreign hacking. But then, that was before it was thought to cost Democrats power. Now it’s a crisis!

NORTH KOREA’S UNIT 180: It’s Pyongyang’s key cyber warfare unit.

North Korea’s main spy agency has a special cell called Unit 180 that is likely to have launched some of its most daring and successful cyber attacks, according to defectors, officials and internet security experts…

…Cyber security researchers have also said they have found technical evidence that could link North Korea with the global WannaCry “ransomware” cyber attack that infected more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries this month. Pyongyang has called the allegation “ridiculous”.

The crux of the allegations against North Korea is its connection to a hacking group called Lazarus that is linked to last year’s $81 million cyber heist at the Bangladesh central bank and the 2014 attack on Sony’s Hollywood studio. The U.S. government has blamed North Korea for the Sony hack and some U.S. officials have said prosecutors are building a case against Pyongyang in the Bangladesh Bank theft.

The Pentagon makes a point:

The U.S. Department of Defense said in a report submitted to Congress last year that North Korea likely “views cyber as a cost-effective, asymmetric, deniable tool that it can employ with little risk from reprisal attacks, in part because its networks are largely separated from the Internet”.

Read the whole report.

SO IT’S LIKE SLEEPING WITH BILL CLINTON, THEN: Single mosquito bite might be enough to transmit multiple viruses, study finds.

A new study published today in the Nature Communications journal reports that mosquitoes might be even more adept at spreading disease than previously thought. The researchers wanted to find out if the infamous Aedes aegypti mosquito may be able to spread multiple diseases at once. The insect, also called the cockroach of mosquitoes, is known to be among the primary way diseases like chikungunya, dengue and Zika virus spread.

Researchers from Colorado State University exposed hundreds of mosquitoes to either chikungunya, Zika or dengue and different combinations of the three. They also exposed 48 mosquitoes to the three viruses–chikungunya, Zika and dengue–to see if one or all three of the diseases could appear in the saliva, which could then potentially infect a person.

The researchers examined the saliva, gut and legs of the insects for signs of viral infection. They found that 92 percent of the mosquitoes tested positive for all three viruses.

Bill: “Only three? Amateurs!“

W.H.O.’S PERKS?: Bureaucrats at the cash-strapped World Health Organization (WHO) fly business class and stay in five-star hotels.

Since 2013, WHO has paid out $803 million for travel. WHO’s approximately $2 billion annual budget is drawn from the taxpayer-funded contributions of its 194 member countries, with the United States the largest contributor.

After he was elected, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted: “The UN has such great potential,” but had become “just a club for people to get together, talk, and have a good time. So sad!”

More:

…Other international aid agencies, including Doctors Without Borders, explicitly forbid their staff from traveling in business class – even having the charity’s president fly in economy class, a spokeswoman said. With a staff of about 37,000 aid workers versus WHO’s 7,000 staffers, Doctors Without Borders spends about $43 million on travel a year.

NOT A FAKE SCHOLARLY ARTICLE: Problem: Focus on “rationality” makes students reject feminist ideas.

GOOD IDEA: GOP talks of narrowing ‘blue-slip’ rule for judges.

GOP senators are talking about changing an obscure Senate tradition to make it more difficult for Democrats to block certain judges from advancing to a confirmation hearing.

The change to the “blue-slip rule” would involve preventing individual senators from blocking nominees to circuit courts that have jurisdiction over several states.

If the rule change were made, it would make it easier for President Trump to win confirmation for his circuit court picks. Trump currently has 20 vacancies on the lower courts of appeals to fill.

GOP members on the Senate Judiciary Committee say this would leave the tradition in place for district court vacancies, meaning a single senator could still hold up a nomination to those courts.

“I want to separate it,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).

“Blue slips for district court judges has been time honored and I think needs to stay,” he said. “There is a question now does it apply to circuit court judges. That history is a little more mixed and I don’t think myself it ought to apply there.”

Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, seemed to agree.

The “blue slip” rule is antidemocratic, and probably racist. It should go.

OUCH:

HINT: IT’S NOT IN THE SOUTH. And the state with the most voter suppression is. . . “Voter suppression begins with eligibility, and New York’s parties have long history of trying to minimize participation in primaries.”

REMEMBER, THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS AN “INDEPENDENT NONPARTISAN INVESTIGATION.” Stephen L. Carter: Can the Special Counsel Uncover the Truth? Dream On.

AT WHICH POINT DO WE STAGE AN INTERVENTION? Even After Arizona Backlash, UCLA Will Hire ‘Social Justice Adv.ocates,’ Too

HOW DO YOU MINISTER TO MILLIONS OF MINDS DISEASED? Funny Fake Liberal News on Trump ‘Impeachment’.

ONE OF THE MANY REASONS I CELEBRATE HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT HOUR AND HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT DAY: Go Humans! We Inadvertently Created Artificial Protective Barrier Around Earth, NASA Says. (Earth what?  Nah.  Why would anyone celebrate a holiday started by a man so deranged he composted his girlfriend?)

FASHION NEEDS A SENSE OF ITS LIMITATIONS:Fashion is trying to make adult floaties happen.

UNFORTUNATELY NOT WITH ANY KIND OF CLINICAL DETACHMENT: Professor will study Snowflakery.

IF THE MEDIA DIDN’T HAVE DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY WOULDN’T HAVE STANDARDS AT ALL: Questions about Trump’s alleged “I fired Comey the nut job” remark.