VICTORY GIRLS: Varsity Blues Cheating Scandal Is A Desperate Elites Tale. “While the rest of us honorable schmucks were paying for college board prep tests (my son wouldn’t go) or at least begging our little cherubs to get a good night’s sleep prior to the test (nope to that one, too), these elitists, who are so much better than we are, schemed with a weasel named William Singer to phony up the test scores for the college boards, create phony elite athlete profiles and get their kids into college as athletes or just plain bribe college officials. And, then as if these elitists didn’t disdain us enough, they claimed the costs as charitable contributions on their tax returns. You cannot make this excrement up.”

They call it a meritocracy, but it’s more of a kakistocracy.

Related: Don Lemon: College Admissions Scandal Shows Why Trump’s Message of a Rigged System Resonated With People. Yes, even Don Lemon.

WELL, IT’S AN UNDERSERVED BEER MARKET: A beer fit for an ugly feminist.

THIS IS EXACTLY RIGHT.

PARTY OF SCIENCE:

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Off The Richter Scale: Can the Pacific Northwest prepare for the cataclysmic quake that’s coming? “Americans have long dreaded the ‘Big One,’ a magnitude 8.0 earthquake along California’s San Andreas Fault that could one day kill thousands of people and cause billions of dollars in damage. The Big One, though, is a mere mini-me compared with the cataclysm forming beneath the Pacific Northwest.”

Plus: “Local governments can’t possibly stockpile enough food to feed millions during a disaster; they aren’t, in fact, stockpiling anything. People will have to feed themselves until FEMA arrives, and the agency won’t be on the scene in a day, or even a week. Not a single road will be passable. An entire region 100 miles wide and 600 miles long will be ravaged. Many Americans have bemoaned the federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico, but we’ll have hundreds of de facto islands in the Pacific Northwest. . . . Local governments once told everyone to have at least three days’ worth of food on hand that can be prepared without gas or electricity. They have since raised the bar to two weeks. Is that enough?” No. Next question?

Also: “‘If you have a community in rural Oklahoma hit by a tornado,’ he says, ‘the volunteers can render aid until the proverbial cavalry arrives. After a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, the cavalry won’t show up for weeks. So my volunteers need to know more than simply first aid. They need to know wilderness first aid.'”

But beware: NAACP Declares Portland Earthquake Warnings To Be Racist.

Meanwhile, a New Madrid quake would be almost as bad, and economically might be worse, since it would effectively cut the country in half for months.

THEY DON’T CALL HIM “CREEPY UNCLE JOE” FOR NOTHING: Joe Biden Is Probably Running for President. He’s Got a Lot of Baggage.

OPEN THREAD: Make it worth everyone’s time.

AT AMAZON, The Enchilada Queen Cookbook: Enchiladas, Fajitas, Tamales, and More Classic Recipes from Texas-Mexico Border Kitchens.

ALL THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TO DO IS NOT BE CRAZY, AND THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THAT: AOC, Ilhan Omar, Emergency Climate Change Powers—Suddenly, the Democrats Are Making Trump Look Mainstream.

“Suddenly.”

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Even Air Is Racist Now.

It’s “pollution inequity.” White people have a “pollution advantage” because we breathe less pollution than we generate. Every time we go pretty much anywhere or do pretty much anything, we’re widening the atmosphere gap. We’re creating air disparity. Presumably we owe some sort of oxygen reparations. A wind windfall, as it were.

What is this…“atmosphere” your speak of? RFK assured me that I’d be breathing through a gas mask long before 2019.

JUST IGNORE THE YAMMERING, IT’S ALL BULLSHIT: The Culture of Fake Outrage Comes for Tucker Carlson.

OUT: THE GREEN BOOK. IN: THE RED APP. Which restaurants are safe for Trump supporters? There’s an app for that.

NO, PELOSI’S IMPEACHMENT REMARK DOESN’T TAKE THE ISSUE OFF THE TABLE: Much of the reporting and commentary on the Speaker of the House’s comment to the Washington Post that she opposes impeachment of President Donald Trump seems to assume that Nancy Pelosi is trying to protect her Democrats from themselves.

But veteran political strategists from both the Democratic and Republican sides are cautioning that the Chief Executive would be well-advised not to fire all those lawyers he’s got defending him just yet because Pelosi’s statement is subject to multiple levels of meaning.

WAR ON SCIENCE: “Not a week goes by without yet another research study, popular science book, or mainstream news article promoting the idea that (a) any differences between men and women in the brain are purely socially constructed and (b) these differences have been exaggerated beyond any meaningful relevance. More recently, this argument has evolved to contend that (c) there are, in fact, no brain differences between the sexes at all. . . . How anyone familiar with the neuroscientific literature can argue this with a straight face is puzzling. Even if we were to neglect the thousands of studies documenting the effects of prenatal testosterone on the developing brain, we can look no further than the largest neuroimaging study examining sex differences to date, published just last year in Cerebral Cortex. In a sample of 5,216 brains, the study found significant differences between the sexes.”

WELL, GOOD: Feds to Unseal Epstein Documents Revealing Scope of Billionaire’s Int’l Child Sex Trafficking Ring.

On Monday, a Manhattan appeals court gave billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s former alleged partner in crime, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, until March 19 to establish good cause as to why documents detailing the scope and size of their international child sex trafficking operation should remain sealed. Failing to do so would mean these documents will be made public.

“We’re grateful that the court ruled the summary judgment papers are open and they are moving to expedite having them unsealed,’’ said Sanford Bohrer, the attorney representing the Miami Herald. “This is very unusual for a court to do this.”

The Herald reports that the appeal is supported by 32 other media companies, including the New York Times and Washington Post.

Good on WaPo and NYT for pursuing this.

And, needless to say, “protecting rich and famous people who might be embarrassed by having cavorted with a convicted pedophile to Sex Island” is not “good cause.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: No, Zoo Animals Don’t Want Selfies with You.

EVERY DIME ONLINE. IN REAL TIME: That’s the motto of OpenTheBooks.com, the amazing web site that is putting trillions of dollars of spending at all levels of government online and accessible to everybody.

Adam Andrezejewski is the founder and top poo-bah there and he’s the subject today of The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” series of video interviews.

I’ve known Adam for more than a decade and as a journalist have turned to him countless times for data that made big stories on waste, fraud and abuse in government. The guy deserves a medal and I hope somebody in the Trump White House is listening.

WHOOPS! BEN RHODES ‘JUST UNDERCUT THE ENTIRE RATIONALE FOR THE GREEN NEW DEAL’ (AND HE’S TOO DUMB TO REALIZE IT):

He’s also deeply undercutting his former boss. In January of 2009, the London Guardian ran the headline, “President Obama ‘has four years to save Earth.’” A couple of months later, Obama’s “Science” “Czar” John Holdren told AP that he took global warming so seriously that he was considering fighting the effects of pollution with, err, more pollution:

If things were so grim back then, why didn’t Obama and the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress during Obama’s first two years in office do more to encourage him?

Now Rhodes claims that the effects of global warming are “irreversible.” So why ban farting cows and planes (or is it the other way around?), as the first draft of AOC’s “Green New Deal” manifesto demanded? And speaking of AOC, as Caleb Howe tweets, Rhodes’ complaint is ultimately self-correcting: “I thought Democrats said it’s immoral to have kids during global warming so .. problem solved?”

Earlier today, Glenn linked to the Babylon Bee’s latest headline: ‘Everything Is Bad And The World Is Ending And You Shouldn’t Have Kids,’ Says Party Of Progress.

The “Party of Progress” is where time has stood still for almost half a century. As Fred Siegel has noted at City Journal, since the first “Earth Day” in 1970, “Progressives” have been shouting that the world is ending and we shouldn’t have kids. For most of us, the doomsday-themed movies from the period are the late show camp rerun equivalent of Reefer Madness. For today’s “Progressives,” they’re how-to guides:

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Reed College Trains RAs to Recognize Covert White Supremacy. Examples: ‘Colorblindness’ and ‘Assuming Good Intentions Are Enough.’

Related: Coming Home From College — When you send your child to college, you are playing Russian roulette with their character.

THE SOCIALISM OF FOOLS. Multicultural Jew-Hatred: Failed Ideologies Bond Over Scapegoating.

BREXIT BETRAYAL IMMINENT: Theresa May’s terrible deal that would put the UK in permanent bondage to the EU was voted down tonight by a huge margin. Tomorrow, the Mother of Parliaments will vote against “no deal,” because there are enough MPs scared of flights being grounded and borders clanging shut on March 29th. That means on Thursday the House will probably vote to delay Brexit. The EU has said it’s not going to negotiate further. The likelihood of a second referendum rigged to ensure remain wins (by pitting the May Deal against Remain, perhaps) has increased significantly.

It will be interesting to see if the weekend brings protests at the imminent betrayal of Brexit or whether (as I suspect) the British public are just so tired of the whole thing they’ll put up with remaining the way they put up with socialism for 40 years.

This will of course be touted as a win for “democracy.”

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES TO effective Every Day Carry.

PORTLAND STATE SAYS “HECK(LERS) YES!” TO VIGILANTE CENSORSHIP: Last week’s incident where a guy with a cowbell disrupted a College Republicans event for an hour while police did nothing wasn’t even the first time this year that Portland State let hecklers control campus speech. FIRE’s been investigating; my favorite part was when the entire college claimed to have fewer A/V abilities than you probably have in your pocket. For more, hit the link — where you can also feel free to comment to PSU about it, if you’re so inclined.