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Matthew Continetti brings us back to Abramson v. NYTimes. This piece is a hoot.

Reading the New York Times’ report on the defenestration of the paper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, and the coronation, at a hastily arranged meeting Wednesday, of her replacement Dean Baquet, I could not escape the feeling that the Soviet press must have covered the comings and goings of Politburo members in much the same way.

There was the strange construction of the headline, “Times Ousts Jill Abramson as Executive Editor, Elevating Dean Baquet,” in which the identity of the man behind the ouster, Times owner Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was masked by his institutional affiliation, and in which Baquet was not promoted but—and here the metaphysical tone is intentional—“elevated” to his new position. There were the plodding, ceremonial, and forced statements for public consumption: “I will listen hard, I will be hands on, I will be engaged,” Baquet was quoted as telling his new underlings. “I’ve loved my run at the Times,” Abramson was allowed to reveal in a prepared statement.

There was political criticism of the outgoing commissar, made by anonymous sources using the passive voice: “As a leader of the newsroom, she was accused by some of divisiveness and criticized for several of her personnel choices.” And there was a hint of samizdat irony smuggled into the article via the closing sentences: “An annual meeting for senior executives at the newspaper had been planned for Thursday and Friday. Ms. Abramson was scheduled to be one its leaders and to deliver a talk Thursday morning, titled ‘Our Evolving Newsroom.’ The meeting has been canceled.” With that Jill Abramson joined the ranks of Zinoviev and Kamenev, becoming, as far as the New York Times is concerned, a nonperson.

But still a dangerous one. …

… What makes the story so enjoyable, on the most superficial level, is its lurid combination of identity politics—Abramson was the first female editor of the Times, and Baquet is its first African-American editor—and liberal hypocrisy. Equal pay has been one of the rallying cries of the American left, a category that very much includes the New York Times, and the possibility of sexism at the paper is rich indeed. But I have to say I am less interested in equal wages, in comparable worth, and in what the New Yorker calls the “inescapably gendered aspect” of the Times’ latest scandal than I am in how that scandal confirms one of my pet theories. The theory is this: The men and women who own and operate and produce every day the world’s most important newspaper are basically children. …

,,, Nor is it exactly common for 60-year-olds to get tattoos. Abramson has three: one of a subway token, one of an “H” to represent both Harvard and her husband, and one of her former newspaper’s famous gothic “T.” Somewhere in Manhattan, a tattoo-removal parlor is about to get a customer. …

… Not even identity politics can withstand the crush of money, the global flow of capital. Leave it to Sulzberger, though, to execute that firing in a haphazard and immature and rather embarrassing way.

“This is incredibly un-Times-ian,” one female staffer told Gabe Sherman. Really? She must not get into the office much.

Jennifer Rubin calls it “conservative schadenfreude.”

… there is much for conservatives to enjoy as the liberal media thrash  and squirm, caught on the hook of identity politics. Whatever you believe and whichever telling is the truth, it should be a lesson for reporters who reflexively side with everyone with a good yarn about victimhood, for liberals who confuse the Times for their religion and for those who reduce every human encounter to race, gender or sexual orientation. (As an aside the Times recently ran a piece bemoaning the lack of openly gay CEOs at big companies. Before leading a new diversity quest, maybe the Times should see how many openly gay people run media outlets and if there are none, consider if this factual nugget is meaningful.)

Conservatives can enjoy this comedy while it lasts. After they finish ripping each other’s reputations to shreds, the liberal media will be back to attacking conservatives in the “war on women,” running interference for Democrats and pursuing the next quest to show Justice Sonia Sotomayor had it right in the recent affirmative action case (i.e., American rubes are hopeless bigots). But their pristine image of moral superiority will be a bit blemished and their knee-jerk accusations of bias might just be met met with a tad more skepticism.

One of the world’s leading climate scientists has gone over to the dark side and become a warming skeptic. And Der Spiegel, who you would have thought would savage him, has a fair interview. 

The debate over climate change is often a contentious one, and key players in the discussion only rarely switch sides. But late last month, Lennart Bengtsson, the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world’s leading climate research centers, announced he would join the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

GWPF, based in Britain, is a non-profit organization and self-described think tank. Conservative politician Nigel Lawson founded the organization in 2009 in order to counteract what he considered to be an exaggerated concern about global warming. The organization uses aggressive information campaigns to pursue its goals.

The lobby group’s views markedly differ from those of the UN climate panel, the IPCC, whose reports are the products of the work of hundreds of scientists who classify and analyze vast amounts of climate knowledge accumulated through years of research. The most recent IPCC report states that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are leading to significant global warming, with serious environmental consequences.

Bengtsson was known for maintaining moderate positions even during the most vitriolic debates over global warming during the 1990s. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he discusses why he made the shift to the skeptics’ camp. …

However, Human Events reports Dr. Bengtsson is getting slammed elsewhere.

… The climate change cult is so important to socialist politicians, and so protected by the media, that it survived the massive Climategate scandal, which featured the publication of emails that demonstrated climate scientists were conspiring to suppress inconvenient data.  The dirty little secret of the Church of Global Warming is that its apocalyptic warnings are based entirely on computer models that can supposedly predict the future.  There is very little empirical evidence to support the notion of man-made climate change, few experiments that claim to prove out any of the key hypotheses linking human activity to disastrous changes in the global environment.  Not even the shibboleths taught to schoolchildren about carbon emissions and “greenhouse gas” rest on any conclusive experimental proof.  Efforts to “prove” a climate surge due to Twentieth Century industrial technology, such as the famous “hockey stick” graph, have utterly collapsed under sustained inquiry.  Everything else is just conjecture based on computer models, which include a variety of assumptions about the interaction of complex forces… and as the intensive data-mining of the past half century moves forward, it becomes increasingly clear that many of those assumptions are dubious, because the climate models have been almost entirely wrong.  Nothing predicted in 1980 or 1990 has come to pass.  The actual behavior of the real world is overwhelmingly different from what it was supposed to do.

It would be fair to say that the idea of human industrial activity having minimal impact on the planetary climate (or maybe even beneficial impact, if we really are fated for a new Ice Age, which human activity is holding at bay) is also a hypothesis.  The issue is whether people should allow themselves to be dominated by politicians and robbed of their livelihoods on the basis of apocalyptic theories that get repeated more loudly and insistently as the science behind them grows weaker.  Nobody’s calling for an end to climate science… except for the Church of Global Warming, that is.

Which brings us to ClimateGate 2, the new scandal about climate-change cultists using Stalinist tactics to suppress inconvenient data and destroy a “denier,” in this case Swedish climatologist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson.  Bengtsson declared himself skeptical of climate change dogma and joined a London-based think tank called the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is not explicitly dedicated to denying either natural or man-made climate change – they’re concerned with exaggerated alarmism for political gain.

All hell broke loose as fanatics from the Church of Global Warming came after Bengtsson with a zeal that would make any old-time Inquisitor proud. …

Steve Hayward of Power Line does a neat job on the “97% climate consensus” canard.

… Where did this 97 percent figure come from?  This story has become interesting over the last few days.  The most prominent form of it comes from Prof. John Cook of the University of Queensland in a paper published last year that purported to have reviewed over 11,000 climate science articles.  Does anyone really believe that Cook and his eight co-authors actually read through all 11,000 articles?  Actually, the abstract of the paper supports the point I made above that most papers don’t actually deal with what the Climatistas say:

We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming], 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. [Emphasis added.]

Pause here and note that it is odd to see that some folks apparently haven’t gotten the memo that you’re not supposed to call it “global warming”—“climate change” is the term of art now.  Anyway, to continue, read this slowly and carefully:

Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus.

Let’s translate: Among the one-third of papers that “endorse” the “consensus,” there is near unanimity.  In other words, among people who agree with the consensus, nearly all of them agree with the consensus.  Again—the only mystery here is that the number isn’t 100 percent.  Perhaps this would have been too embarrassing to report, like a North Korean election.  For this exercise all climate scientists may as well be called named Kim Jong Il. …

Bad news. A study shows there are no health benefits from consuming red wine and chocolate. However, Instapundit says until confirmed by more studies, he’ll keep drinking lots of red wine. The story comes from HNGN News. No, never heard of them. You figure it out. We report. You decide.

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We spend time on Ukraine and Russia today. Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands; Europe between Hitler and Stalin, writes on the history of Ukraine.

… Ukraine was at the center of the policy that Stalin called “internal colonization,” the exploitation of peasants within the Soviet Union rather than distant colonial peoples; it was also at the center of Hitler’s plans for an external colonization. The Nazi Lebensraum was, above all, Ukraine. Its fertile soil was to be cleared of Soviet power and exploited for Germany. The plan was to continue the use of Stalin’s collective farms, but to divert the food from east to west. Along the way German planners expected that some 30 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union would starve to death. In this style of thinking, Ukrainians were of course subhumans, incapable of normal political life. No European country was subject to such intense colonization as Ukraine, and no European country suffered more: It was the deadliest place on Earth between 1933 and 1945. …

… Although Hitler’s main war aim was the destruction of the Soviet Union, he found himself needing an alliance with the Soviet Union to begin armed conflict. In 1939, after it became clear that Poland would fight, Hitler recruited Stalin for a double invasion. Stalin had been hoping for years for such an invitation. Soviet policy had been aiming at the destruction of Poland for a long time already. Moreover, Stalin thought that an alliance with Hitler, in other words cooperation with the European far right, was the key to destroying Europe. A German-Soviet alliance would turn Germany, he expected, against its western neighbors and lead to the weakening or even the destruction of European capitalism. This is not so different from a certain calculation made by Putin today. …

… More Ukrainians were killed fighting the Wehrmacht than American, British, and French soldiers—combined. …

… The greatest threat to a distinct Ukrainian identity came perhaps from the Brezhnev period. Rather than subordinating Ukraine by hunger or blaming Ukrainians for war, the Brezhnev policy was to absorb the Ukrainian educated classes into the Soviet humanist and technical intelligentsias. As a result, the Ukrainian language was driven from schools, and especially from higher education. Ukrainians who insisted on human rights were still punished in prison or in the hideous psychiatric hospitals. In this atmosphere, Ukrainian patriots, and even Ukrainian nationalists, embraced a civic understanding of Ukrainian identity, downplaying older arguments about ancestry and history in favor of a more pragmatic approach to common political interests. …

… Putin now presents himself as the leader of the far right in Europe, and the leaders of Europe’s right-wing parties pledge their allegiance. There is an obvious contradiction here: Russian propaganda insists to Westerners that the problem with Ukraine is that its government is too far to the right, even as Russia builds a coalition with the European far right. Extremist, populist, and neo-Nazi party members went to Crimea and praised the electoral farce as a model for Europe. As Anton Shekhovtsov, a researcher of the European far right, has pointed out, the leader of the Bulgarian extreme right launched his party’s campaign for the European parliament in Moscow. The Italian Fronte Nazionale praises Putin for his “courageous position against the powerful gay lobby.” The neo-Nazis of the Greek Golden Dawn see Russia as Ukraine’s defender against “the ravens of international usury.” Heinz-Christian Strache of the Austrian FPÖ chimes in, surreally, that Putin is a “pure democrat.” Even Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, recently shared Putin’s propaganda on Ukraine with millions of British viewers in a televised debate, claiming absurdly that the European Union has “blood on its hands” in Ukraine.

Presidential elections in Ukraine are to be held on May 25, which by no coincidence is also the last day of elections to the European parliament. A vote for Strache in Austria or Le Pen in France or even Farage in Britain is now a vote for Putin, and a defeat for Europe is a victory for Eurasia. This is the simple objective reality: A united Europe can and most likely will respond adequately to an aggressive Russian petro-state with a common energy policy, whereas a collection of quarrelling nation-states will not. Of course, the return to the nation-state is a populist fantasy, so integration will continue in one form or another; all that can be decided is the form. Politicians and intellectuals used to say that there was no alternative to the European project, but now there is—Eurasia.

Ukraine has no history without Europe, but Europe also has no history without Ukraine. Ukraine has no future without Europe, but Europe also has no future without Ukraine. Throughout the centuries, the history of Ukraine has revealed the turning points in the history of Europe. This seems still to be true today. Of course, which way things will turn still depends, at least for a little while, on the Europeans.

Craig Pirrong posts on a farce created by Russian agitprop.

… “American mercenaries in Ukraine” is a major Russian propaganda theme.  Lavrov reiterated it only yesterday, in his long interview with Bloomberg. He did it in his characteristically oily way, saying that Russian questions about American mercenaries had not been answered. In fact, they have been, rather emphatically.  It’s just that Lavrov is not willing to acknowledge this, wanting to keep the story going.

Given the impossibility of proving the negative, the mercenary story cannot be disproved. But everything about the story undermines its plausibility, not least its all too convenient echoing of Russian propaganda.

No. This has every sign of being a specialty of Russian information operations: a laundered story, originating from Russian sources and then put through several spin cycles involving western publications, emerging clean enough to convince those who want to believe that the US is the malign actor in this drama.

It cannot be emphasized enough that information warfare has been a central part of Russian operations in Ukraine. It also cannot be emphasized enough that the Ukrainians, but also the Americans, have been woefully overmatched in this war.

And speaking of overmatched, there is no doubt that Lavrov overmatches Kerry, and ridiculously so. Although every word out of Lavrov’s mouth was more mendacious than the one that preceded it, he is a far more impressive figure than Kerry. Whereas Kerry comes off as a posing, bloviating, superficial grandstander (probably because he is  a posing, bloviating, superficial grandstander), Lavrov comes off as a formidable and focused foe, and one who speaks English impeccably. No wonder he pwns Kerry every time they meet in Geneva.

Or to put it another way: it’s no wonder Lavrov takes Kerry to the cleaners. Just like he launders agitprop like the US mercenaries in Ukraine story.