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BETTER MAKE SURE THOSE EARTHQUAKE KITS ARE UP TO DATE: Risk Of Cascadia Quake Elevated As Puget Sound ‘Slow Slip’ Event Begins.

SPONTANEOUS DEMONSTRATIONS ALWAYS FEATURE PRE-PRINTED SIGNS! Liberal groups deny ‘astro turf’ charges about anti-Trump protests.

Related: Here’s how liberal activists astroturfed town hall protests against Rep. Tom Reed (#NY23).

CHANGE: GOP Leaps on Congressional Review Act to Kill Obama Rules: Little-used law now wielded to tremendous effect, but could see legal challenges.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): A detective says cell phone video taken at a local assisted care facility shows a care worker performing lewd acts in front of a 100-year-old man. “She is touching him. This was not something he wanted.”

WHO CAN ARGUE WITH SCIENCE? Hundreds of scientists urge Trump to withdraw from U.N. climate-change agency.

More than 300 scientists have urged President Trump to withdraw from the U.N.’s climate change agency, warning that its push to curtail carbon dioxide threatens to exacerbate poverty without improving the environment.

In a Thursday letter to the president, MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen called on the United States and other nations to “change course on an outdated international agreement that targets minor greenhouse gases,” starting with carbon dioxide.

“Since 2009, the US and other governments have undertaken actions with respect to global climate that are not scientifically justified and that already have, and will continue to cause serious social and economic harm — with no environmental benefits,” said Mr. Lindzen, a prominent atmospheric physicist.

Signers of the attached petition include the U.S. and international atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, physicists, professors and others taking issue with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC], which was formed in 1992 to combat “dangerous” climate change.

The 2016 Paris climate accord, which sets nonbinding emissions goals for nations, was drawn up under the auspices of the UNFCCC.

“Observations since the UNFCCC was written 25 years ago show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign — much less than initial model predictions,” says the petition.

I guess the science is settled. You don’t want to be anti-science, do you?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD HARSHES THE NARRATIVE: Trump Isn’t Sounding Like a Russian Mole: Trump’s core global strategy is intended to destroy any illusions in Moscow that Russia is a peer competitor of Washington’s.

A Trump administration is going to be four years of hell for Russia: a massive American doubling down on shale production along with a major military buildup. Trump is, in other words, a nightmare for Putin and a much, much bigger threat to Putin’s goals than President Obama ever was or wanted to be.

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran

That Trump is planning to do precisely the opposite of these things may or may not be good policy for the United States, but anybody who thinks this is a Russia appeasement policy has been drinking way too much joy juice.

Obama actually did all of these things, and none of the liberal media now up in arms about Trump ever called Obama a Russian puppet; instead, they preferred to see a brave, farsighted and courageous statesman. Trump does none of these things and has embarked on a course that will inexorably weaken Russia’s position in the world, and the media, suddenly flushing eight years of Russia dovishness down the memory hole, now sounds the warning that Trump’s Russia policy is treasonously soft.

This foolishness is best understood as an unreasoning panic attack. The liberal media hate Trump more than they have hated any American politician in a generation, and they do not understand his supporters or the sources of his appeal. They are frantically picking up every available stick to beat him, in the hopes that something, somehow, will Miloize him.

So blind does hatred make them that they cannot understand how their own behavior is driving American public opinion in directions that bode ill for liberals in the future. In the first place, suppose Donald Trump does not in fact turn out to be the second coming of Benedict Arnold. Suppose instead, as is much more likely, that he turns out to be a very hawkish president, one who quite possibly will make George W. Bush look like Jimmy Carter. The media and Democratic Party leaders will have staked huge amounts of credibility on a position that turns out to be laughably untrue. Six months or a year from now, they will have to flip from calling Trump an anti-American traitor and Russian plant to calling him a dangerous, fascistic ultranationalist whose relentless hawkishness is bringing us closer to World War Three.

The press and the Democrats — but I repeat myself — will make that flip without a moment’s hesitation or acknowledgment.

Plus: “The media wants to cast Trump as both Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler; but you can’t give the Sudetenland to yourself.”

NO, BECAUSE THEY’RE ASTROTURF AND THE TEA PARTY WAS A GENUINE FLOWERING OF NEW POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT: Do anti-Trump protests really compare to 2009 Tea Party?

First, from its earliest days, the Tea Party was defined by bold imagery and clear symbolism. The immediate naming of the movement and use of images, such as the coiled “Don’t Tread on Me” snake, alluded to popular notions of American history. These communicated an easily understandable political message of personal freedoms and liberty.

And, while many of the strategies used by the Tea Party were directed at opposing President Obama at every turn, the movement’s messaging suggested broader ambitions for political change and an overhaul of Washington.

The new protests are just anti-Trump.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: It’s Really A Thing. “In her 35 years as a therapist, Arlene Drake has never heard so many clients talking about the same issue. Week after week, they complain of panic attacks and insomnia because of President Trump. They’re too anxious to concentrate at work. One woman’s fear turned into intense, physical pain.”

And, as always, Trump manages to expose the dishonesty behind claims of neutral professionalism:

Drake was trained not to reveal her personal beliefs, but now will agree with clients if they say they don’t support Trump.

“If this were just another session, if this weren’t such a big thing, if this weren’t so evil, I wouldn’t,” she said. “But I have to stand for what I stand for and that does cross over into politics.”

In so many settings, neutral professionalism seems like a lie now, doesn’t it?

CROWD OUT THE ASTROTURF: Pence Urges CPAC Activists to ‘Make Voices Heard’ at Angry GOP Town Halls.

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Most scientists ‘can’t replicate studies by their peers.’

FASTER, PLEASE: New Drugs May Stop Migraines Before They Start.

WELL, YES: A Wooden Sword Can Actually Do Some Serious Damage. I mean, that’s basically what Indian “war clubs” were.

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IT AIN’T NO C-130: The C-130 Hercules rules, with good reason. Spain has asked Airbus to explain the 400M’s deficiencies. This isn’t mansplain’ femni-psycho agitprop to get HuffPo links. This is a real world defense issue.

Spain has invited the head of Airbus to travel to Madrid next month to brief defence officials about its troubled A400M military transport plane, the defence ministry said Friday.

The A400M was commissioned jointly in 2003 by the governments of Germany, Belgium, France, Britain, Luxembourg, Spain and Turkey, but since its delayed launch in 2013 it has run into difficulty, with delays in delivery of the plane.

A spokesman for the ministry told AFP Airbus CEO Tom Enders had asked to meet representatives from these countries, and Spain’s junior defence minister Agustin Conde had responded by inviting him and defence officials from those nations to Madrid.

“He sent him a letter inviting him to attend a meeting with the programme’s partner countries, on March 30 in Madrid,” the spokesman said.

Airbus refused to comment when contacted by AFP.

THE INSTA-WIFE: Men: Quit Providing. “Seriously, how dare anyone ask women to appreciate anything?”

TO BE FAIR, SHE’S STILL NOT AS DUMB AS BARBARA BOXER:

DRAGON LADY WITH A MILESTONE: On February 2 a U-2 spy plane surpassed 30,000 hours of flight time. This is a USAF propaganda photo — and a good one. Just so y’all know, I missed it when StrategyPage’s webmaster posted it.

In October 2007 I saw one of these classic planes take-off on a mission. I was at an “undisclosed airbase somewhere in the Middle East.” Shortly after the U-2 take-off, a Global Hawk UAV landed.

Extract from a very old essay:

The U-2 is no beauty, either, though over time my opinion of the Dragonlady’s looks has changed for the better. On the ground, its huge, thin wings are awkward, but once aloft the black spy plane has the stubborn elegance of an ocean-hopping seabird.

I wonder if that’s the way Kelly Johnson and his Lockheed Skunk Works engineers envisioned the U-2 when they designed it in the 1950s — a manned albatross with the altitude and range to take pictures of the Soviet Union so we could count the Kremlin’s missiles, bombers and tanks.

The Soviet Union no longer exists, and the U-2 on its silent vigil helped defeat it, as did its snazzy, hypersonic offspring, the SR-71, another example of Skunk Works genius. Information gleaned from these planes and satellites first helped contain the Cold War (for example, we learned there was no bomber gap), then win it.

The downside of the U-2, however, hit the headlines in 1960, when U-2 CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. A spy plane with a man in it runs that risk — all manned aircraft do.

This is one of the upsides of UAVs like the Global Hawk, Predator and the new, improved attack UAV, the MQ-9 Reaper. When a UAV goes down, we don’t lose an American pilot to death, injury or the humiliation and torture of a Hanoi Hilton.

Aw, go read the whole, old thing. The column discusses the supposedly “au courant new improved invented six minutes ago” concept of mixing UAVs and manned aircraft. Hey, I’ll wager there were U.S. military officers thinking about mixing manned aircraft and semi-autonomous unmanned air frames (in a coordinated strike scenario) at least three decades ago.

LAW: Hugging employees may create a hostile work environment, appeals court rules. “In a decision Thursday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived a sexual harassment lawsuit against Yolo County Sheriff Edward G. Prieto, who was charged with hugging a female correctional officer more than 100 times over a 12-year period.”

100 times! That’s a lot, the lawyers who no doubt framed it this way want you to think. But there are 4,380 days in 12 years. That means he hugged her approximately once every 43.8 days.

THE LIVERY STABLE BLUES: February 26, 1917. It’s still a controversial recording. But then, man, like, “what qualifies as jazz?”

Strange contemporary resonance:

The New York Times published editorial after editorial throughout the late 1910s and 1920s touting the dangers of jazz, which had historically been associated with the brothels where it was initially played…

Why, that’s racism and sexism, straight up. Will CNN and the Huffington Post condemn?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why should elite universities get more taxpayer support than regional public colleges?

Public institutions frequently go begging because they are supported by a combination of steadily rising tuition and declining tax revenue. And state legislatures must publicly balance the share of tax revenue allocated to these colleges against competing budget demands, such as highways, health care and public K-12 education.

In contrast, taxpayers, for the most part, unknowingly support private institutions primarily through tax deductions and exemptions. For example, gifts to university endowments are tax deductible and the earnings on these endowments are exempt from taxation, as are the endowments themselves. For elite private institutions, those with endowments in the billions of dollars, the size of these tax breaks can dwarf the direct subsidies that taxpayers send to public institutions.

These tax breaks are rarely debated because they are hidden in the tax code. Meanwhile affluent private universities, claiming their importance to the realization of the American dream, do everything in their power to silence any questioning of their right to enrich themselves through favorable tax treatment. However, it is important to remember that these tax breaks are not divinely ordained.

No, they’re not. Plus: “Few students attend these elite private schools. In contrast, the vast majority of American students enrolled in four year schools attend regional state universities. These unassuming institutions are the workhorses of American higher education. Yet compared to the level of taxpayer subsidies received by their rich private brethren, these regional campuses are grossly disadvantaged.”

GREENLAND VIKING DISAPPEARANCE UPDATE: And you thought the science was settled…FWIW, the article treats the Medieval Warm Period as the fact it is.

MALE PRIVILEGE: Women’s life expectancy on track to hit 90 in some nations. “The men who could look forward to the longest lives in 2015 were in Switzerland, Iceland and Australia — all within a few decimal points of an 81 year lifespan.”