If the Democrats had anything on William Barr, they would have forced him to answer questions. They don't, so they just talked over him.Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing with Attorney General William Barr was really something to behold. Almost every Democrat played from the same playbook, starting with Chairman Jerry Nadler, who told Barr he should be ashamed of himself. One after the other, they heaped scorn on the attorney general in a build up to some question that they refused to allow Barr to answer.There is a serious giveaway in this tactic. When a member of Congress thinks he or she has a witness dead to rights for having made mistakes, or made false statements, the lawmaker tries to compel the witness to answer hard questions, not refuse to allow it. The problem Monday was that Barr clearly had very good answers for every question he was asked. There was no gotcha because he did nothing wrong and could explain that. //

This had nothing to do with finding out what is happening across America and why the Department of Justice is undertaking the actions it is, but purely about political theater.

If you need further evidence of this, note that there was not one successful line of questioning that left Barr with no good answers. Had such a moment occurred, not only would it have been newsworthy, it would have been plastered on every screen in the country. //

The United States is very lucky to have William Barr as the attorney general. There may be no more essential person in the government at the moment. Time and again, he applies the law and only the law to his sound decisions. For this, he is rewarded with media scorn and threats of impeachment.

But Barr isn’t on the ropes. He remains in the center of the ring, impervious, throwing his punches.

After Michael Shellenberger, leading environmental and climate change expert, presented his evidence-based testimony concerning energy policy in America in a congressional hearing Tuesday, Democratic house members mocked his findings.

Shellenberger was invited to speak at the special House Committee hearing to evaluate the Democrats’ proposal allocating $2 trillion to renewable resources and other climate programs.

Democrats were likely interested in including his testimony, Shellenberger said, because of his history advocating for a similar proposal between 2002 and 2009. After years of supporting climate change reform and other environmental legislation, Shellenberger is now an outspoken opponent of such policies for their unproductive and often ignored negative impacts.

Recently, Shellenberger published several articles and a book explaining his change in sentiment. Seeing the corruption surrounding climate alarmism and other environmental issues, he said he feels compelled to stand in opposition to what people expect in support of the truth. Serving as a climate change activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, the majority of Shellenberger’s life has been fully dedicated to the pursuit of positive environmental change.

Despite his work, however, Reps. Sean Casten (D-IL) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) criticized Shellenberger for his testimony, discounting his qualifications as a well-known environmental expert.

“Mr. Shellenberger, I am not going to ask you questions because it would be a waste of time,” Caston said.

Rather than give him time to ask questions, the two congressmen used their time to criticize Shellenberger without giving him a chance to respond. Once Shellenberger referred to his book, which contains much of his energy research, during the hearing, Huffman accused him of using the testimony for his own promotion. //

Shellenberger argued during his testimony that nuclear energy is far more favorable to renewable energy due its cheap and ready supply as a clean source of electricity. There’s a more pressing facet of the nuclear argument as well, he said. Russia and China have proven to be leaders in this type of energy and the United States is falling behind.

“We do not have a National Nuclear strategy to compete with the Russians and Chinese. Every time a nation does a nuclear power project. It’s an extension of soft power…” he said. “I think the United States needs to step up its game and be competitive with the Russians and Chinese in building new power plants abroad, and that’s going to require building more nuclear power plants at home.” //

Several members claimed renewables are cheaper than existing grid electricity, so Shellenberger inquired about the billions of taxpayer dollars they supposedly require to operate.

“Instead of answering that question, Democrats claimed that solar and wind projects were somehow part of the battle for environmental justice. In reality, I noted, solar and wind projects are imposed on poorer communities and successfully resisted by wealthier ones.”

He also listed numerous human rights abuses imposed by renewable energy resources in contrast to the jobs and opportunities that nuclear energy is guaranteed to provide for generations to come. He pointed to corruption among Democrats’ largest donors, including Rep. Casten, who depend on this bill to make a lot of money as renewable energy and natural gas investors.

“Now, if the Democrats’ $2 trillion climate proposal passes into law, a lot of very powerful people stand to make a lot of money, from winning tender for industrial projects such as building wind turbines and transmission lines all the way to the outright cash payments that we saw during Obama’s green stimulus.”

Just installed on Archer C7 V2(US). Had a lot of problems installing DD-WRT and thought I would show what worked for me.

I had been running it with the TPLINK stock firmware for a couple years and had updated to the latest factory firmware. When trying to install the factory-to-ddwrt.bin file I kept getting the 18005 error. Looking it up it seems this is because the later factory firmware tries to lock out unapproved updates. I tried to downgrade to several older versions of factory firmware and got the same 18005 error.

I read through this thread https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=287073 and several posts detailed very complicated procedures that seemed more trouble than I wanted to try. One post by "eginnc" sounded simple so I tried it.

He started with factory firmware 160719 so I went to TPLINK, downloaded that version, and it installed ok on my router. I then went to http://download1.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/downloads/betas/2017/04-24-2017-r31899/tplink_archer-c7-v2/ and downloaded factory-to-ddwrt-US.bin since that was the file he used. I powered on the router with the WPS/reset switch pressed and held it for 30 sec. Then was able to connect to factory configuration pages and do a firmware update using the r31899 factory-to-ddwrt_us.bin and it worked. I then was able to update to DD-WRT build 41892 from the DD-WRT config pages and it is working fine for me.

“Congressman Kelly Armstrong really got out of Google an admission that they’re not just interested in controlling all of the ad space as they do right now. They’re interested in driving others out of the ad market so that they have total control to demonetize sites as they deem fit,” Domenech said.

Last week, Newsbusters reported a number of conservative sites were temporarily blacklisted from Google’s search engine results, including the Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent, Breitbart, the Media Research Center, and CNSNews, among others.

Domenech said this is not just anecdotal, but there is data and traffic numbers to confirm that “from the outside, this looks like it was someone inside turning a knob, pulling a switch, that prevented these sites from having any kind of the organic traffic that they had already earned.”

Domenech noted that this move by Google “absolutely represents an attempt to influence the conversation during an election.”

What a mess this would be... //

One local news station was curious, so they decided to try an experiment to see what would happen if they did “mail in voting,” as CBS’s Tony Dukopil explains. They set up a P.0. Box to be their receiver and then went around to various locations all around Philadelphia and mailed 100 letters the size of a ballot and the same class mail to the P.O. Box. They then did it again a couple of days later with a second batch. All told, they sent themselves 200 ‘ballots.’

Needless to say, there were issues, as they found out.

First, the Post Office had trouble even finding them. Then when he finally got what they had, he found that 21% of the votes hadn’t materialized after 4 days and from the batch that they mailed the week before, 3 were still missing. So that’s 3% of that batch who were just disenfranchised. As they note, in a close election, 3% can turn the tide of an election.

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo received another round of backlash on Tuesday over his repeated attacks on Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Florida, and his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. 

This database contains all cases reported to News21 of alleged election fraud across America since 2000. Search it to find specifics about such cases by state, individual and category of fraud. Read our story and the methodology explaining how the data was gathered and its limitations.

The nation has 2,068 cases of alleged election fraud since 2000. By category, Unknown had the highest percentage of accused at 31 percent (645 cases), followed by Voters at 31 percent (633 cases). The most prevalent fraud was Absentee Ballot Fraud at 24 percent (491 cases). The status of most cases was Pleaded at 27 percent (558 cases). Responses to requests for public records varied from state to state. Some state and local officials were quick to respond by sending available records; others failed to provide a single document.

In conjunction with its second-quarter results announcement, planemaker Boeing has confirmed that the production of the 747 will…

Cassettes and vinyl are cool again, so what about MiniDisc? Sony’s pint-sized digital format hit the market in 1992, but failed to make much of a splash until around a decade later.

Despite ultimately losing market shares to flash-based MP3 players, MiniDisc has seen something of a revival. Transferring music from your computer to a MiniDisc recorder is also now easier than ever.
What Is MiniDisc?

Sony came up with the MiniDisc after the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format failed to take off with consumers. The company went head-to-head with Philips’ Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and won the initial battle (the DCC was discontinued in 1996).

MiniDisc was first conceived in the mid-1980s but wasn’t commercially available until a decade later. It took even longer for the format to see mainstream adoption outside of Japan. After Sony relaunched the format on the U.S. market in 1998, it finally became profitable around 2000.

DD-WRT will let you boost your router’s range, add features, and more.

DD-WRT has a ton of features—more than we can cover in this guide, which is focused on helping you get your router upgraded. Stay tuned, as we’ll go into more depth in a couple more days on all the great things you can do with it, but even if you don’t use the additional features, DD-WRT is worth installing to make your router work better.
Here’s our router. Behold: the Netgear WNR2000, revision 2.

One category of evidence comes from laboratory studies of respiratory droplets and the ability of various masks to block them. An experiment using high-speed video found that hundreds of droplets ranging from 20 to 500 micrometers were generated when saying a simple phrase, but that nearly all these droplets were blocked when the mouth was covered by a damp washcloth. Another study of people who had influenza or the common cold found that wearing a surgical mask significantly reduced the amount of these respiratory viruses emitted in droplets and aerosols.

But the strongest evidence in favor of masks come from studies of real-world scenarios. “The most important thing are the epidemiologic data,” said Rutherford. Because it would be unethical to assign people to not wear a mask during a pandemic, the epidemiological evidence has come from so-called “experiments of nature.”

A recent study published in Health Affairs, for example, compared the COVID-19 growth rate before and after mask mandates in 15 states and the District of Columbia. It found that mask mandates led to a slowdown in daily COVID-19 growth rate, which became more apparent over time. The first five days after a mandate, the daily growth rate slowed by 0.9 percentage-points compared to the five days prior to the mandate; at three weeks, the daily growth rate had slowed by 2 percentage-points. //

“Three W’s to ward off COVID-19:” wearing a mask, washing your hands, and watching your distance.

“But of the three, the most important thing is wearing a mask,” he said. Compared to wearing a mask, cleaning your iPhone or wiping down your groceries are “just distractors.” There’s little evidence that fomites (contaminated surfaces) are a major source of transmission, whereas there is a lot of evidence of transmission through inhaled droplets, said Chin-Hong.

Responses to the coronavirus pandemic are exposing both the folly and the danger inherent in many of the environmental movement’s favorite causes.

Amidst the panic, most people probably forgot to acknowledge “Earth Hour” on the last Saturday in March. People are traditionally urged to turn off all their lights for an hour that day to “spark global conversations on protecting nature.” But, realizing the “exceptional challenge” of the coronavirus, organizers this year sought to “realign our Earth Hour work appropriately.”

One of those more appropriate ways was to turn off the lights while turning on a computer.

Too bad a laptop uses about the same amount of power as a light bulb.

Plugging in and powering up would seem to defeat Earth Hour’s goal. But then you’d miss Greta Thunberg talking about “mass extinction” and the “need to stop burning fossil fuels.”

Actually, fossil fuels are vital, especially now. Not only are they powering many of the hospitals treating coronavirus victims, but there are countless ways fossil fuels are helping humanity fight for survival against an invisible enemy.

An N95 respirator, for example, often depends upon polypropylene fibers derived from fossil fuels. A lot of the plastics used today are made with oil, natural gas, and coal. Aspirin and penicillin are made with petrochemicals, as are the coatings and capsules for many other drugs. MRI scanners are cooled by natural gas byproducts.

Another thing made with fossil fuels is the much-maligned plastic shopping bag. While city and state governments spent the last few years acceding to environmentalists’ “Ban the Bag!” campaign to tax or outlaw plastic grocery bags, new fears of spreading the coronavirus have led some jurisdictions to ban the reusable bags that were touted as the future of shopping.

San Francisco, which was the first municipality to ban “single-use” plastic grocery bags in 2007, just enacted an emergency ordinance banning people from bringing reusable cloth and plastic bags and mugs into stores for fear they would spread the coronavirus. Mayor London Breed said she “can’t reiterate enough how important it is for all of us to continue to comply, for all of us to continue to be good citizens” by not abiding by the 2007 law that only allowed for reusable bags.

These are the same types of people who also ban plastic straws. San Francisco banned them in 2019, and paper straws can only be given out upon request. There is an exception for medical need, and that need will now only be increasing there and everywhere. Bendy straws are a staple in hospitals.

In those same hospitals, you’ll also find paper towels—another environmentalist target. While green scolds tut-tut America’s alleged obsession with them, don’t expect health-care professionals to mess around with hot-air hand dryers like you find in so many public bathrooms—and with good reason.

A study by researchers at the University of Connecticut and Quinnipiac University found that these dryers blast fecal and other unhealthy bacteria circulating in a bathroom. A petri dish left standing in a bathroom for two minutes might grow one colony of bacteria, but researchers found one under a dryer for just 30 seconds grew more than 250!

Use GlassWire to Monitor Your Bandwidth

is a great firewall application for Windows that does a lot more than just block incoming connections. It’s also really amazing for monitoring your bandwidth usage.

The default view when you launch it shows you a graph of all network activity in real-time, which is pretty great, but once you switch over to the Usage tab you’ll see the real power of this application.

You can see your bandwidth usage by connection, whether it’s incoming or outgoing, and even drill down into individual apps to figure out exactly what is taking up so much bandwidth.