A SMALL VICTORY FOR WHAT REMAINS OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: Nikole Hannah-Jones Won’t Teach at Carolina.

COLLUSION: NIH: Yes, a Chinese scientist asked us to delete his data from early Wuhan COVID samples — and we did.

WELL, OF COURSE: Federal Judge Dismisses Harvard Law Students’ COVID-19 Tuition Refund Class Action.

As I discussed in The Judiciary’s Class War, the front-row kids in the judiciary seem especially solicitous of their fellow front-row kids in academia.

FIGHTING CANCERS with mRNA vaccines.

BIDEN AND GUNS: Joe Biden is not Mr Normality: His comments on guns show how far removed he is from the average American.

THAT’S WHO THEY ARE, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: FBI tears innocent New Yorker’s life into shreds after Jan. 6.

Keep this up and people will decide the Jan. 6 “insurrection” didn’t go far enough.

UPDATE: The insurrectionary crime of “parading.” “Now the press hypes up a bunch of people protesting in the Capitol as some sort of combination of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. How different it was when Marxists stormed the Senate Building in October 2018 to protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.”

CORBYNIZATION IS WORKING: Why American Jews are looking to Israel. “For much of the past century, America has dominated the Jewish world. It has been a semi-sacred ‘safe place’, where anti-Semitism only rarely impinged on the national political culture. Yet today, American Jews face levels of anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s, with half saying they have observed anti-Semitic incidents over the past year.”

Ilhan Omar was unavailable for comment.

GET READY FOR CHAOS IN CONTAINER SHIPPING.

The world’s cargo ships just can’t seem to get their act together.

First there were the queues at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which left as many as 40 container vessels awaiting a berth in early February amid a flood of traffic.

Combined volumes at the terminals hit a record of 1.9 million containers in May, nearly double the Covid-19 low in March 2020.

Then the Ever Given, a 20,124-container behemoth, got stuck in the Suez Canal for nearly a week, delaying hundreds of ships on their way between Asia and Europe. Now, the port of Yantian in the Chinese city of Shenzhen is joining the fun, thanks to a coronavirus outbreak that’s thrown out schedules for the entire month.

Wait, a coronavirus outbreak in China? I thought they had eradicated the disease with the kind of superior socialist management our oligarchs want to emulate.

Plus:

If you think this is mostly a bit of local bother that will smooth itself out as the dislocations of a reawakening global economy ease off, you might be in for a shock. The factors that have driven Asia-Europe container rates to record levels of more than US$10,000 (RM41,500) per 40-foot box aren’t simply a temporary coordination problem. Returning to a semblance of normality could take years.

The container shipping industry is usually such a well-oiled machine that we barely notice it. Vessels carrying 10,000 containers can arrive at dawn and depart with new cargo by sunset.

Rates have at times drifted so low that in early 2016 you could shift a tonne of goods from Shanghai to Rotterdam for about US$10 (RM41.47) – and even then, the world’s biggest shipping line, AP Moller-Maersk A/S, was able to turn a modest operating profit.

The flip side of that is that when things go wrong, they go seriously wrong.

Part of the problem has been that containers aren’t in the right places. In global terms, trade enjoyed a remarkably short and sharp pandemic. By September last year, volumes were already running ahead of their seasonally adjusted levels in January and February, as demand for medical equipment and spending on durable goods picked up in rich countries.

Trying to make all those deliveries on time meant that many vessels started making their return journeys empty, saving a few precious hours that would normally be spent picking up vacant boxes to ship back to China.

That’s resulted in a glut of containers in European and North American ports and a shortage in Asia, pushing freight rates to astronomical levels on export routes.

Remember, the inflation we’re seeing now is transitory.

IMAGINE:

OH: Planned Parenthood sex-ed flyer telling 11-year-olds they could have sex, as long as the partner isn’t older than 13, distributed in WA public school.

SAY ANYTHING: Did Joe Biden Threaten American Gun Owners with F-15s and Nuclear Weapons?

AR-15-BASED SHOTGUNS ARE THE BIG NEW THING: Best Seller: Citadel Boss25.

“DO IT TO JULIA. NOT ME!”: First Capitol Rioter To Be Sentenced Receives Probation After Condemning Fellow Rioters In Court.

TODAY AT 3:30PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ Live Chat with Kruiser, Preston, VodkaPundit.

Cold drinks, hot takes.

GOOD GOVERNMENT (FOR A CHANGE): The DeSantis doctrine.

‘Maybe the best way to understand Ron DeSantis — who came out of nowhere for a lot of Americans outside Florida — is to know that he was a longtime Rush Limbaugh listener,’ says David Reaboi, a political communications consultant who lives in Miami Beach. ‘It’s not surprising that the governor has been on the leading edge of things conservatives care about, like Big Tech censorship, the trans issue or critical race theory. Conservatives really get a sense that DeSantis is “one of us”, because he is.’

Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, thought she would retain the base’s loyalty after she refused to implement a mask mandate. But that goodwill vanished when she vetoed a bill banning biological men from competing in women’s sports. DeSantis signed a similar bill in Florida, then took on Big Tech, the Chinese Communist party and the cruise lines that wanted to require vaccine passports for passengers.

DeSantis’s critics claim his legislative victories are merely performative and will get struck down by courts. Others worry he is seeking state solutions to federal problems. DeSantis insists that he won’t sign ‘symbolic’ measures because there would be ‘no point’. When I asked him about potential lawsuits in response to his bill fining Big Tech for deplatforming political candidates, he had a coherent legal defense ready.

John Cardillo believes DeSantis is a ‘brilliant’ policymaker who understands how to use the law to his advantage.

He fights, to coin a phrase.

OLD AND BUSTED: Welcome Back, Carter.

The New Hotness? Welcome Back, Smoot-Hawley! Here’s How Biden Is Making It Even Harder to Buy a Home:

One important question to ask, for instance, would be how does the tariff impact American industries that purchase lumber? The answer: they have to pay higher prices.

The burden of these increased production costs inevitably ends up being passed onto consumers. Basic economics tells us that when the price of one resource used to produce a good goes up, the price that the consumer eventually pays for that good rises as well.

This is exactly why home buyers — and consumers of products that use lumber in general — will be the victims of Biden’s lumber tariff.

A shortage of lumber as a result of the pandemic led to its price in May being up nearly 400 percent over the past year. But prices have begun to drop again because production has started to ramp up. To increase the tariff — which is just an import tax — would serve to restrict the supply of lumber. This would not allow prices to decrease back to pre-pandemic levels.

The natural consequence of high lumber prices is the increase in price for all of the goods that use lumber in their production. This does not just stop at houses, but rather includes things such as furniture and storage appliances as well. The average consumer will then have to pay a higher price for all of them.

Why, it’s almost as if, Biden believes that “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” And we’re all paying for Biden’s rejection of sound economic policies. “The irony is that Biden’s rejection of Friedman’s teachings on money, taxes, and spending may bring about the same circumstances that established Friedman’s preeminence. In a year or two, the American economy and Biden’s political fortunes may look considerably different than when Janet Yellen blurted out the obvious about inflation. Voters won’t like the combination of rising prices and declining assets. Biden’s experts might rediscover that it is difficult to control or stop inflation once it begins. And Milton Friedman will have his revenge.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

EVEN THOSE IN THE CNN FAMILY DON’T WATCH CNN:

● Shot: Enough is enough: Say no to bullying.

—Anderson Cooper, CNN, March 8th, 2013.

● Chaser: Brian Stelter’s newscaster wife accused of workplace bullying: ‘People would avoid her.’ ‘It appears Brian isn’t the only bully in the Stelter family,’ [TV news blogger] Scott Jones said.

—Fox News, yesterday.

● Hangover: Brian Stelter’s revised anti-Trump diatribe Hoax tanks with less than 2,000 copies sold in its first week — despite massive book tour and launch party — as ratings for his CNN show drop to its lowest of the year.

—The London Daily Mail today.

(Updated and bumped.)

FASTER, PLEASE: Rocket Mining System Could Blast Ice from Lunar Craters.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY: Facebook’s New Announcement on Satire Doesn’t Bode Well for the Babylon Bee. “Facebook will clarify the “satire exception” to its ‘Hate Speech’ rules, but the platform’s language suggests it may target The Babylon Bee.”

ALIENS: Astronomers Identify The Star Systems That Could Be Watching Earth From Space. “If there were alien civilizations in other star systems, would they be able to detect our presence here on Earth? This is a question that could lead us to new ways to search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, but not one that is necessarily easy to answer.”

DAN MARKEL UPDATE: THIS CASE JUST GETS WORSE: Defense Lawyer Produces Letters From Inmate Saying Prosecutors Helped Hit Man Sigfredo Garcia Lie In Fingering Katherine Magbanua In Dan Markel’s Murder.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Microsoft Exemption From Antitrust Bill Followed Company Donation to Top Democrat.

MARK RIPPETOE: Women’s Olympic Weightlifters Should Take a Knee if Trans Athletes Are Allowed to Compete.

FASTER, PLEASE: Research provides a roadmap to HIV eradication via stem cell therapy.

JIM TREACHER: John McAfee, Rest In Power.

John McAfee was crazy as hell, possibly a murderer, and definitely a swindler. And I really liked him.

He was no role model, which is precisely why he would’ve been a good president. He would’ve gotten $#!+ done, regardless of who hated his guts or kissed his ass. Well, no, probably not, but so what? It still would’ve been fun. He would’ve owned the libs and the cons at the same time, every single day, all while drunk off his keister.

And he wouldn’t need to sneak around with any interns, either. He’d be honest about his needs and fill the Oval Office with hookers.

Read the whole thing.