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.

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

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.

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.

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.

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

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.”

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

HEH:

If only Chavez had put the right people in charge.

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.

POWER, UNLIMITED POWER! Lithium-Ion Pioneer Introduces New Battery That’s Three Times Better.

94 year-old John Goodenough, one of the co-inventors of the lithium-ion battery that now powers everything from phones to Teslas, has developed a new solid-state battery formula that promises to hold three times more energy than li-on. Goodenough and his team also say the new battery, which replaces a liquid electrolyte with glass, would charge quickly, never explode, and perform well at low temperatures that cripple today’s batteries.

The battery is still in the early stages of development, with a recent paper describing it published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science. That stage of battery research would normally merit caution, since most ‘revolutionary’ new battery ideas in recent years have turned out to be impractical to produce or unfit for the real world.

But Goodenough, even at 94, demands attention. In 1980, he pioneered the cobalt-oxide cathode that forms the heart of lithium-ion batteries. The li-on became the backbone of the mobile electronics revolution, with some calling its impact as big as the transistor’s.

A battery that convenient would be a real boon, but more important is having enough sources of cheap energy to keep them charged at rates anyone can afford.

IS THERE A BACKGROUND CHECK FOR GLUTEN-FREE AMMO? Liberal Preppers Continue to Ready for Trump Apocalypse.

PAULINA NEUDING: The Truth About Sweden.

This peculiarity of Swedish public discourse has often allowed politicians and public authorities to deny the problems caused by the country’s migration and integration policies, without being seriously challenged. The Swedish foreign ministry, for instance, launched a PR campaign in response to the debate following Donald Trump’s remarks about the country. It tweeted last week, as part of the campaign:

Does Sweden actually have ‘No-Go Zones’? No, we don’t.

You think that Swedish police have lost control? The ‘no-go zones’ are in fact ‘go-go zones’. #FactCheck

But no-go zones cannot simply be dismissed as a myth. Gordon Grattidge, chairman of a Swedish ambulance trade union, explained to me that no-go zones are a reality for paramedics in Sweden. There are areas where first responders can’t enter without police escort. Grattidge’s assessment is that ambulances are forced to retreat from such areas on a weekly basis.

Yet the government’s use of taxpayer money to deny the existence of no-go zones has not been met with protests from Swedish journalists.

How, then, should we understand the connection between crime and immigration in Sweden? Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt had the facts right when he tweeted in response to Trump: “Last year there were app 50% more murders only in Orlando/Orange in Florida, where Trump spoke the other day, than in all of Sweden. Bad.” That comparison, while correct, misses the point. Of course Sweden has not turned into Orlando or, for that matter, Chicago. But in a short time—maybe as short as two decades—Sweden has gone from a nation rightly considered a model of social cohesion, equality, low crime, and political stability to a society with growing enclaves of social unrest.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE: Drug overdose fatality rate higher than suicides, cars, guns.

NOT ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL: Schumer’s plan to stop the wall.

• Schumer’s thinking: There’s nothing the Republicans would be willing to offer that could get Trump the eight Democratic Senators he needs to fund the wall. Mitch McConnell’s only other option would be to invoke the nuclear option and bypass the filibuster. But Democratic appropriators are betting the Republican leader won’t be willing to undermine such a fundamental Senate tradition just to pay for Trump’s wall.

• The evolving plan, being discussed by Schumer’s office and Senate appropriators: If Republicans put money for the wall into a bill, Democrats block it. It doesn’t matter what else is in the bill — Schumer will make it about the wall. The way Democrats see it, if they can block the wall, they’d crush a central feature of Trump’s political identity. And as the face of the strategy, Schumer would thrill the Democratic base (though less so the red-state Democratic senators up in 2018).

Whatever Schumer or others might think about the justness or efficacy of a border wall, the concept remains a popular one. If that’s the place where he and his Senate caucus want to make a stand, then help them make sure it’s a very public stand.

RUSSIAGATE: Clapper Denies His Agencies Monitored Trump; Panetta Alleges White House Obfuscation.

NYET: Comey Asks Justice Dept. to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

What did the former president know, and when did he know it?

CHANGE: Amid Kim Jong Nam Furor, South Korea Hikes Reward For North Korean Defectors.

As NPR’s Elise Hu notes, the boost to reward pay is intended to alleviate the financial burdens of defection. “Defecting from North Korea is not only dangerous,” Elise tells our Newscast unit, “it’s expensive, as many defectors rely on networks of human smugglers and brokers who demand large payments.”

“One of the biggest reasons why North Koreans are hesitant about defecting is because they are fearful of making a living after they come to South Korea,” an official with South Korea’s Ministry of Unification explained, according to Yonhap. “The planned changes can alleviate such worries to a certain extent.”

And South Korea is interested in obtaining North Korean military equipment, too. The country is offering payouts to North Korean soldiers who turn in weapons such as armored vehicles and artillery.

The reward is rising “from roughly $217,000 up to $860,000,” which is a significant increase.

KURDISH PRESIDENT: Independent Kurdistan is loyal response to Peshmerga sacrifices.

The fall of Mosul is likely to mark the beginning of the breakup of Iraq, as has been the case with countries who have come out of ethnic and religious conflicts, such as Czechoslovakia, Kurdish President Masoud Barzani says, adding that an independent Kurdistan would bring more stability to the Middle East, a region that otherwise has been troubled with massacres and conflict since the two world wars.

Barzani went on to say “independence and complete liberation” will be the loyal reward for the past and present sacrifices of the Kurdish nation.

President Barzani made these remarks to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, published on March 5, coinciding with the anniversary of the Kurdish uprising against the former Iraqi regime in 1991 which eventually gave birth to the present autonomous Kurdistan Region with its own parliament, government and armed forces.

“The desire to keep the united Iraq is there, but the reality is that today Iraq is already divided by unsolvable problems,” Barzani said when asked whether Iraq will come out of the war against ISIS as a united state, “Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for 1400 years and we Kurds are the victims of this war. We have to find a new formula of coexistence.”

Joe Biden was ahead of his time.

OBAMA’S LANDMINES: ‘This Is Is the Revenge of the Losers.’

THANKS, OBAMA! Iran Tests Russian S-300 Anti-Aircraft Missile System.

It said the test targeted various flying objects including missiles. With a range of up to 200 kilometers (125 miles) the S-300 is capable of simultaneously tracking and striking multiple targets.

State TV aired footage of the missiles launching from the back of trucks. It said the test was carried out in Iran’s central desert.

Russia delivered the S-300 system to Iran in 2016, nearly 10 years after the initial contract had been signed. Iran signed the $800 million contract to buy the S-300 missile system in 2007, but Russia suspended their delivery three years later because of strong objections from the United States and Israel.

You can buy a lot of Russian missiles after pallets of cash are delivered right to your door.

COST-SAVINGS: Ohio Hospital Pharmacist Accused of Shorting Doses of Antibiotics.

THE STREETWISE PROFESSOR: Obama v. Trump: Strictly Correct & Misleading v. Not Strictly Correct But Fundamentally True.

I won’t comment in detail on the substance of today’s latest outbreak of our fevered politics: Trump’s accusation that Obama ordered wiretapping of Trump Tower and the Trump campaign. I will just mention one fact that strongly supports the veracity of Trump’s allegation: namely, the very narrow–and lawyerly–“denials” emanating from the Obama camp.

Obama and his surrogates – notably the slug (or is he a cockroach?) Ben Rhodes – harrumph that Obama could not unilaterally order electronic surveillance. Well, yes, it is the case that Obama did not personally issue the order: the FISA court did so. But even if that is literally correct, it is also true that the FISA court would not unilaterally issue such an order: it would only do so in response to a request from the executive branch. Thus, Obama is clearly implicated even if he did not issue the order. He could have ordered his subordinates to make the request to the court, or could have approved a subordinate’s request to seek an order. Maybe he merely hinted, a la Henry II – “will no one rid me of this turbulent candidate?” (And “turbulent” is a good adjective to apply to Trump.) But regardless, there is no way that such a request to the court in such a fraught and weighty matter would have proceeded without Obama’s acquiescence.

I therefore consider that the substance of Trump’s charge–that he was surveilled at behest of Obama has been admitted by the principals.

Read the whole thing.

JOE THE PLUMBER: Be Patient, ‘Lot of Things to Unscrew’ from Obamacare.