MAURICE STUCKE AND ALLEN GRUNES: Data-Opolies.

HEH: Russian Hackers Reemerge, Now Said To Demand Bitcoin Ransoms From Liberal Groups.

This little story is the closest thing we’ve seen to hard evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump Administration.

MARK LEVIN: OPEN LETTER TO CNN’S BRIAN STELTER, YOU ARE THOROUGHLY DISHONEST. “I simply put together the stories that YOUR profession reported, on the public record.”

A LOOK AT Silicon Valley Elites’ Vision Of The Future.

THIS WILL HELP YOU THIN OUT YOUR NETFLIX QUEUE: IMDb adds F-rating to feminist films.

AN INVESTIGATION BEGINS:

YOU CAN BE SURE SURE IT WILL BE DIFFERENT IF THEY DO IT: Democratic senator says they could shut down the government if Republicans stonewall on Russia investigation.

BECAUSE SCIENCE IS ALL ABOUT HONORING FEELINGS OVER FACT: Anti-Trump ‘March for Science’ Forced to Apologize for Calling Women ‘Females.’

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Did Obama spy on Trump? It isn’t out of the question. The former president’s administration wiretapped journalists and spied on Congress.

Watergate brought down a presidency, but if the worst suspicions here are borne out, we’re dealing with something worse. Hopefully not, but there’s no way to tell at this point. As The Washington Post has been saying lately, “Democracy dies in darkness.” Let’s shine some light on what the Obama administration was doing during this election.

We need a special prosecutor. Weirdly, the commenters over at USA Today disagree.

ARKANSAS GOVERNOR ASA HUTCHINSON: ‘Listen to the States’ on Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Package.

Obama called his top-down approach to infrastructure “nation-building at home,” but judging by the condition of our roads, airports, and schools, nothing much came of it.

ANN ALTHOUSE: The weasel word of the day is “Ordered.”

I’m tired of reading things like “President Trump’s astonishing and reckless accusation that he was wiretapped on orders from President Barack Obama should finally be the tipping point in how the country views him and his presidency.” (That’s E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post.)

From what I’ve read, “ordered” is the weasel word that allows anti-Trumpsters to make flat statements portraying Trump as out of his mind. But the notorious Trump tweets do not say that Obama “ordered” a wiretapping. They ask if it is “legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election?” and refer to what a court had done. Though Trump didn’t precisely say this, any “order” came from the court. He then said “President Obama was tapping my phones,” which isn’t to say that he “ordered” it. I think the story Trump is relying on is that the FISA court granted a warrant (after some funny business to get around a previous denial), not that Obama just “ordered” it. Then, Trump tweeted that Obama had gone “low… to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process.” Trump portrays Obama as doing something, not “ordering” it.

Unless the anti-Trumpsters can speak clearly avoid the safety of that word, I will not trust what they say.

There’s been a lot of weaseling.

SHELBY STEELE: White guilt gave us a mock politics based on the pretense of moral authority.

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.

Indeed — and on the assumption, of course, that moral authority translates into political power.

FAKE NEWS: Same NY Times Reporter Said Trump Team Was Wiretapped In Jan., But Said TRUMP Lacked Evidence of Wiretapping In March. “In January Michael S. Schmidt perpetuated the rumor that team Trump had Russian connections, and to support his point he said that Trump’s people were wiretapped. However when President Trump claimed his people were wiretapped, the same guy, Michael S. Schmidt said there was no evidence. Either the Times editors and Mr. Schmidt are trying to skew the story, or they are all suffering from a form of dementia and have no memory.”

So it seems to work this way:

Press: Leaked transcripts of Trump wiretaps show Trump was being investigated by the Obama administration.

Trump: Obama wiretapped me!

Press: Transcripts? What transcripts?

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

ROGER KIMBALL: “Remember when, during the Presidential debates, Trump said that, if elected, he might have Hillary investigated by the Department of Justice?  Cries of horrors from the locust gallery.  But it turns out that Obama had actually done what Trump only threatened to do: conduct a secret investigation against a political opponent… I suspect that the factions behind these unremitting and partisan efforts to delegitimize a democratically elected head of state are about the discover that two can play at their game. And I’d wager that they are in for a rough time. I certainly hope so.”

Read the whole thing.

WELL, GOOD: A Fit U.S. Shale Industry Challenges OPEC Once Again.

Long a world leader in multi-billion dollar oil developments that take years to build and even longer to profit, Exxon is diverting about one-third of its drilling budget this year to shale fields that will deliver cash flow in as little as three years, Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods said this week. In January, Exxon agreed to pay as much as $6.6 billion in an acquisition designed to more than double the company’s footprint in the Permian basin of west Texas and New Mexico, the most fertile U.S. shale field.

Add to the mix the election of President Donald Trump, carrying the promise of fewer regulations, added pipelines and energy independence, and you see why the mood at CERAWeek, the conference that every year gathers oil executives, bankers and investors in Houston, will be far brighter next week than in 2016.

“North American oil companies are going to increase their spending by 25 percent in 2017 compared to last year,” said Daniel Yergin, the oil historian-cum-consultant who hosts the CERAWeek. “The increase reflects the magnetism of U.S. shale.”

A fitter U.S. shale industry enjoying a lower breakeven point and increasing its spending by 25% in just one year has got to be causing some sleepless nights in Moscow and around OPEC.

Have you hugged a fracker today?

WAIT… WHAT? Drastic cooling in North Atlantic beyond worst fears, scientists warn.

In 2013, drawing on 40 climate change projections, the IPCC judged that this slowdown would occur gradually, over a long period. Its findings suggested that fast cooling of the North Atlantic during this century was unlikely.

But oceanographers from EU emBRACE had also re-examined the 40 projections by focusing on a critical spot in the northwest of the North Atlantic: the Labrador Sea.

The Labrador Sea is host to a convection system ultimately feeding into the ocean-wide MOC. The temperatures of its surface waters plummet in the winter, increasing their density and causing them to sink. This displaces deep waters, which bring their heat with them as they rise to the surface, preventing the formation of ice caps.

The algorithm developed by the Anglo-French researchers was able to detect quick sea surface temperature variations. With it they found that seven of the 40 climate models they were studying predicted a total shutdown of convection, leading to abrupt cooling of the Labrador Sea by 2C to 3C over less than 10 years. This in turn would drastically lower North Atlantic coastal temperatures.

I wonder if this phenomenon was behind Medieval Europe’s “Little Ice Age.”

ROGER SIMON: “#ObamaGate Is a Lot More than a Hashtag. If I were a Democrat, I’d be afraid.  I’d be very afraid.”

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

SOCIAL JUSTICE SYNDROME: ‘Rising Tide of Personality Disorders Among Millenials’

HEH:

If only Chavez had put the right people in charge.

BORDERLINE INSANITY: Schengen Still In Shambles:

The revelation here, in case you missed it, is not that the EU is working to refine its common entry-exit tracking system, but that no such system currently exists. The clueless European bureaucrats who set up the Schengen Area, in other words, did so without creating a common mechanism to monitor and share information about who is crossing its external borders. This is hardly the kind of information that inspires confidence in the wise stewardship of European elites.

Meanwhile, EU officials who once welcomed migrants with open arms are now taking a different tack: lock them up. . . .

However this particular move will be spun by Brussels, the essential reality is grim: the EU has moved from welcoming refugees to effectively setting up detention camps. Sadly, this is yet another demonstration of the familiar lesson that Obama policies kill Obama values: if you dither and appease while Russia turns Syria into a charnel house, your commitment to humane treatment of refugees will collapse under the human catastrophe resulting from your fecklessness.

Both of these reports tell a version of the same story, about the failure of blinkered European elites to foresee the migrant crisis or establish adequate systems to cope with it. Western leaders who enabled the slaughter in Syria and then opened their borders to mass refugee flows are only now facing the music, hastily constructing systems that should have been in place long ago and harshly clamping down on migration—all to solve a crisis that need never have happened.

Our best and brightest are neither. And Europe’s are even worse.

OLD AND NEW: Superb USAF publicity photo, on par with the Bomber Trifecta. It was snapped on February 17.
An “A-10C Thunderbolt II and a F-35 Lightning II fly in formation with a P-47 Thunderbolt and a P-38 Lightning.” The formation is banking. A beautiful photo.

JAYVEE UPDATE: Iraqis Tell of Islamic State Brutality in Mosul.

Islamic State had planted a bomb just outside Mr. Khalif’s front door in western Mosul to prepare for an expected advance by Iraqi troops. The family saw the extremists set up the booby trap and was forced to live with it, and a few days ago, Mr. Khalif’s wife went to milk the family cow and accidentally stepped on the trigger.

A day later, the 76-year-old patriarch and his family crowded into his home to prepare for the burial. They said a mortar fell on the gathering during breakfast, killing the other family members.

“When the fighting started, Daesh wouldn’t let anyone leave their houses,” said Mr. Khalif, a shepherd from rural Mosul, using an Arabic acronym for the terror group. He said Islamic State forced him and his family to move into the embattled northern city when the Mosul offensive first began in October to serve as a human shields. Mr. Khalif and surviving family members said they had fled to safety elsewhere in Mosul as fighting erupted in the neighborhood.

As Iraqi forces have squeezed the militants into a fast-shrinking patch of territory in the western half of Mosul over the past week, stories of Islamic State’s trademark brutality are proliferating. The offensive has already sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing with tales of the terror they endured.

That ISIS was dismissed and allowed to fester for so long is probably the Obama Administration’s second-most disastrous foreign policy mistake, right after the Iran Deal.

NATION STATES REASSERTING THEMSELVES: That’s how Marine Le Pen sees it.

Excerpted from a CNN interview with the French presidential candidate:

And now, nations are forcing themselves back into the debate. Nations with borders we control, with people that we listen to, with real economies, not Wall Street economies, but rather factories and farmers.