March 12, 2025

I’M ALMOST SURE WE DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING. But ocean fertilization would almost certainly solve any CO2 problem. This would cause any number of green energy scams to collapse, which is why environmentalists killed it:  The reason you’ve never heard of Ocean Fertilization.

Posted at 1:30 am by Sarah Hoyt 7

March 11, 2025

BREAKING: Ukraine War: The Peace Ball Is Now in Putin’s Court:

Late on March 11, the Trump administration announced Ukraine had agreed to a 30-day ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine War.
A joint American-Ukrainian statement said the U.S. will “immediately” resume full intelligence sharing and military-security aid to Ukraine. The Trump administration also said Ukraine had agreed to the strategic minerals deal President Donald Trump offered as payment for U.S. financial and material support.

Trump makes the case that the deal serves as an informal security guarantee for Ukraine — meaning the minerals-for-support deal tells Moscow the U.S. has a strategic interest in peace, in Ukraine’s political existence, in Ukraine’s economic viability and in its independence from Moscow’s destructive absorption and totalitarian corruption.

The deep logic behind Trump’s deal is based on historical common sense that even a megalomaniac like Russian dictator Vladimir Putin should grasp: Peace empowers genuine economic viability and sustainability.

Why? War kills workers and consumers (human beings), destroys railroads and sinks ships (disrupts economic supply chains) and, in the case of U.S. access to Ukrainian strategic minerals in which it now has an international agreement ownership interest, presents Putin with the threat of U.S. economic sanctions and — the clincher — possible armed conflict with the U.S. if he continues to wage war.

Suggest you read the entire column.

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Posted at 11:02 pm by Austin Bay 111

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1581

WELL:

Posted at 9:24 pm by Glenn Reynolds 61

OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER: Rosie O’Donnell Confirms Move to Ireland, Will Return to U.S. ‘When It’s Safe for All Citizens to Have Equal Rights.’

I’m not sure how much of that she’s going to find that in Ireland. While “In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce same-sex marriage through a national referendum vote,” that worldview has to coexist with other Irish values:

● The truth about Ireland’s hatred for Israel.

● Antisemitism has made life in Ireland unbearable, say Israelis.

● Ireland Goes Fascist: “Urgency to pass the anti-free speech bill increased after a Muslim immigrant stabbed three children in Dublin, and fed-up working-class Irishmen rioted.”

● Subway removes ham and bacon from nearly 200 UK & Ireland stores and offers halal meat only after ‘strong demand’ from Muslims.

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 96

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT ABC NEWS: Whoopi Doesn’t Include Republicans as People, Slotkin Insults America.

The liberal ladies of ABC’s The View seemed to be having a rough week and were in a pretty sour mood during Tuesday’s episode. Moderator Whoopi Goldberg was so irked by Republicans calling out the Biden administration’s bad economy that she seemed to suggest Republicans weren’t people. The lashing out also came from their Democratic guest Senator Elissa Slotkin (MI), who compared America to “angry” suicidal teenagers without “fully form[ed] brains.”

That’s a curious metaphor coming from a show produced by ABC News, since that was pretty much the late Peter Jennings’ reaction when the GOP won the House and Senate for the first time in decades in 1994:

To hear the big news media tell it, Nov. 8 was Armageddon, Doomsday and the end of civilization as we’ve known it. And there has been no let-up in the three weeks since the election.

ABC’s Peter Jennings slandered the voters, comparing them to toddlers throwing a fit. “It’s clear that anger controls the child and not the other way around,” said the Canadian-born Jennings in a radio commentary. “The voters had a temper tantrum. . . . The nation can’t be run by an angry 2-year-old.”

Why do liberals such as Jennings refuse to believe it was their failed ideas — not voter anger — that did them in?

—Cal Thomas, “The Big News Media’s Temper Tantrum,” the Orlando Sentinel, November 27th, 1994.

If we go by ABC “logic,” if voters were “angry two year olds” in 1994, they’d be 32 today, not teenagers. But let’s run with Slotkin’s metaphor for a moment, anyway:

When I wrote up my review of September 5, the recent movie about the 1972 Munich Olympics Palestinian terrorist attack, I pointed out the the film’s Mad Men-style approach to the primitive technology that ABC used to cobble together a live television broadcast. But that film is also a reminder that while presumably everyone depicted working for ABC in 1972 was either a JFK or McGovern-style Democrat, they were still grownups who understood the gravity of their jobs as broadcasters. The same cannot be said for today’s version of ABC News.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 36

IS BIPARTISANSHIP MAKING A COMEBACK? There are encouraging signs here and there on Capitol Hill. Check out my latest Substack column and share your thoughts in the comments.

Posted at 9:03 pm by Mark Tapscott 41

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Let Them Fight.

However inevitable [Kamala] Harris may be once she gets into the race [to be California’s next governor], she hasn’t done that yet. And “the end of summer” (Harris’s announced decision deadline) sits many long months away at this point. That’s why, mere hours after this piece went to press, we got news that Kamala had not, as it turns out, preemptively cleared the field: Former Democratic Representative Katie Porter has decided to pip the entire field and announce her candidacy to replace Gavin Newsom in office as governor. Porter, for those unaware, is a thoroughly unpleasant “moderate” Democrat from Orange County, an emblematic representative of how that once-bulwark Republican stronghold demographically shifted into Democratic-leaning territory as educated elites shifted left nationwide. She left office in 2024 to run for Dianne Feinstein’s vacant Senate seat, and was unsurprisingly trounced among Democratic voters in California’s open primary by rival Representative Adam Schiff, who now simpers uselessly in the seat with his “Resistance” brand.

Harris hasn’t even decided whether she’s getting into the governor’s race or not yet, but now I actively hope she does, if only because I’m desperately eager to see which of my two least favorite politicians will survive the bloodsport to lead America’s most cursed state to doom over the next decade.

It is a time of choosing for California; pick your fighter! On the left: Kamala Confuses Crowd at AI Conference With Doritos-Based Word Salad.

And on the left: Holy impeachment! Democrat Katie Porter is slammed on social media for dressing up as Batgirl in Congress on same day as historic inquiry vote.

And for holding up a self-help book she’s clearly never read — because she would benefit greatly from having done so: Katie Porter Reads the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck During Speaker Vote:

Gooder and harder, Golden State.

Posted at 8:46 pm by Ed Driscoll 86

THIS MUST HAVE BEEN PAINFUL FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE TO PUBLISH: ‘The lockdowns were never really effective:’ New research shows COVID stay-at-home orders did more harm than good.

Sumbul Siddiqui remembers every detail about the morning of March 10, 2020. She remembers feeling anxious as she walked into a Somerville conference room packed with masked-up mayors from around Boston. She remembers grim-looking doctors from Italy appearing on a big screen, describing the horrors of people collapsing and dying from a mysterious respiratory illness.

After that, Siddiqui, then mayor of Cambridge, did what she never imagined she would have to do: She called top city administrators and the school superintendent to begin the process of shutting down every school and municipal building in the state’s fourth-largest city.

“We all left that meeting terrified,” she said. “I remember saying, ‘OK, we have to shut things down. We have to stop the spread. I don’t want people to die.’”

Five years later, Siddiqui is still torn about the implications of that decision. On that same day, Governor Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency in Massachusetts and, within days, suspended in-person learning at public and private schools and banned on-site dining at bars and restaurants across the state.

Knowing what we know now, she wonders, did public officials react appropriately? Did they adequately consider the trade-offs among competing values, including the devastating costs of closing schools, businesses, and places of worship?

No. Next questions?

Found via Jordan Schachtel, who tweets:

Posted at 8:15 pm by Ed Driscoll 165

THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND:

Posted at 6:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds 147