Archive for 2025
April 22, 2025
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IT’S EARTH DAY. AGAIN. CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENT:
Even the left finds the day more than a little glum just now though that’s because the world hasn’t ended yet. Remember—end-of-the-world doomsday scenarios make environmentalists happy, so when the end of the world fails to arrive on schedule, they get the sads.
Like The New Republic, which [asked] this week [in 2022]:
Remember When Earth Day Used to Be Cool?
A person could be forgiven for being cynical about Earth Day in 2022. Even ExxonMobil celebrates the holiday. . . ExxonMobil doing Earth Day is a lot like arms and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin co-opting International Women’s Day—a holiday which began as a protest of capitalism and war. . .
Many contemporary defenders of the planet despise Earth Day. In fact, at this point the hatred is an annual ritual, observed with headlines like “I’m an Environmental Scientist and I Hate Earth Day,” “I’m an Environmental Journalist and I Hate Earth Day,” and “I’m an Environmentalist and I Hate Earth Day.”
The author’s answer? More “mass protest.” Cue Greta Thunberg.
Well, that was the old Greta Thunberg. The current version is too busy hating Jews to worry about the environment:
Speaking of mixing anti-progress and anti-semitism: Coachella 2025: How the festival’s sustainability efforts inspire Earth Day activism.
Also at Coachella this year:
ExxonMobil “celebrating” “Earth Day” is a classic example of big business learning in the 1990s “that it’s pretty easy being green,” as Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason wrote in 2006:
Ask Bob Langert about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he starts to chuckle. “When we meet the regulators, it’s kind of nice,” says the senior director for social responsibility at the McDonald’s Corporation. “We just got an award from the EPA. When we see the regulators, we always hope it’s because they’re giving us an award.”
* * * * * * * *
The idea of the rich corporate villain gleefully dirtying Mother Earth is powerful and appealing. Children of the 1980s encountered this supervillain in comics, movies, public awareness videos, and science textbooks. Times were good for mandatory recycling, for mandatory emissions reductions, for anything mandatory aimed at restraining corporate polluters.
But in the late ’90s, something peculiar started happening. The men in suits were still middle-aged, round, and white. They were still just as concerned with profit and golf. Very few of them sported tie-dyed attire, aside from the occasional whimsical Jerry Garcia tie. But the men in suits started caring. Or at least acting like they cared. Which, if you ask a spotted owl, is the same thing.
So environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it’s pretty easy being green.
All the way up to Obama’s crony corporatism and beyond, which helped birth Tesla, which are currently being burned and vandalized by the same side of the aisle that demanded we switch to electric cars in the first place. But apparently not those electric cars. Best to look for something more “ethically sourced,” as the kids on the left like to say:
Related: Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of [2024].
54 years on, to paraphrase the late Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse:
Flashbacks:
- “Earth Day” Turns 50. Half a century later, a look back at the forecasters who got the future wrong—and one who got it right.
- “Earth Day” Founder And Notorious “Unicorn Killer” Ira Einhorn Has Died In Prison At Age 79.
- On the eve of 2011’s “Earth Day,” NBC stumbled into this headline and subhead to describe Einhorn: Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend. Ira Einhorn preached against Vietnam War and violence, but had dark side.
Meanwhile, live look at how they’re celebrating Earthy Day in North Korea:
Exit quote, found via Jim Treacher: “Everybody wants to save the earth; no one wants to help mom do the dishes.” — P.J. O’Rourke.
UPDATE: Like I said, former environmentalists declare Mission Accomplished on Earth Day:
The Tesla store in Manhattan, which has been violently protested in recent months by leftists, was targeted for political vandalism on April 22. Leftists and Democrats have been furious that the federal government is making cuts to overspending. pic.twitter.com/3ewRW4vteU
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 22, 2025
ALLIES: America’s NATO Allies Have Underfunded The Alliance By $827 Billion.
Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty requires NATO members to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” There are legitimate concerns that many nations may not be fully capable of defending themselves, let alone aiding the collective capacity to support one another in conflict.
According to a recent analysis by the Heritage Foundation, America’s NATO allies have collectively underfunded their defense commitments by more than $827 billion. Notable shortfalls include Germany ($249 billion), Italy ($150 billion), and Spain ($150 billion). These shortfalls represent a decade of underinvestment in capabilities and maintenance. The end result is less-capable militaries.
During this period, the U.S. averaged defense spending equivalent to 3.42 percent of GDP, while the average NATO member spent 1.59 percent—less than half as much as the U.S. spent and well below NATO’s 2 percent benchmark first articulated in 2006 and reaffirmed by all members at the 2014 Wales Summit.
Poland, the Baltic states, and (increasingly) the Nordic countries are welcome exceptions.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Dalai Lama Quietly Cancels Scheduled Meeting With JD Vance https://t.co/c5kO0r9fFm pic.twitter.com/eRLa9aDKEU
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 21, 2025
IT’S COMPLICATED: NASA snaps detailed photos of ‘strikingly complicated’ asteroid.
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Can Democrats Pivot to the Center?
In a post at the Liberal Patriot, the disaffected Democratic strategist Ruy Texeira notes that it is “magical thinking” to believe that voters will suddenly forget about Democrats’ cultural radicalism and inept governance if the party focuses on class war. Much of Trump’s populist appeal, he observes, comes from working-class resentment of progressive cultural politics—“soak the rich” messaging will do nothing to address it.
But a pivot to the left would have at least one advantage: delaying any reckoning with the party leadership that brought the Democrats to this point. Reading Rhodes’s fulminations against the “rigged” system of the “oligarchic global elite,” it’s easy to forget that these are the words of the man whose identification with Obama was so total that George Packer judged the phrase “mind meld” insufficient to describe it.
It was, after all, the Obama administration that oversaw the rise of the new identity politics and its nationwide implementation through the coercive power of the federal bureaucracy. It was the outgoing Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign that cooked up Russiagate and tried to use the resulting hysteria to consolidate the national security establishment against Trump. It was the Obama and (contrary to myth) Biden administrations that oversaw the tilt in American foreign policy away from Israel and Saudi Arabia and toward Iran, paving the way for the Gaza war that, ironically, ended up inflaming the Left against Biden and serving as an electoral millstone around his neck. And it was the Biden administration that pushed an economic agenda that pundits described as “economic populism” and “social democracy” and inspired regular comparisons of Biden with FDR. That agenda yielded the inflation that voters last November cited as a key reason for giving Democrats the shove.
In the Italian novel The Leopard, set during the nineteenth-century movement for national unification, a young Sicilian nobleman urges his uncle, a powerful conservative landowner allied with the Bourbons, to flip his allegiance to Garibaldi’s nationalists to avoid being caught on the losing side. As the young man explains, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Democratic leadership seems to be thinking similarly. What advocates of the pivot to the left are suggesting, in effect, is a rehash of what they have pushed as party leaders over the past decade and a half—albeit with fresh young faces and “radical” new antiestablishment branding to “meet our moment.” Given the institutional strength of the party, they may succeed. But as Donald Trump proved in 2016, a party exhausted of ideas, with a leadership class sporting a record of failures, makes a prime target for a hostile takeover.
RAYMOND IBRAHIM IS BACK WITH ANOTHER PODCAST: Oxford Caught Promoting Anti-Christian, Pro-Islamic Propaganda Through Fake History.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Look at the date pic.twitter.com/THTPyqZqoU
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 22, 2025
HOW CAN YOU BE DEPRESSED AROUND ALL THAT GREAT KOREAN FOOD? Living alone with depression and anxiety raises suicide risk by more than 500%, study of Korean adults suggests.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Houston’s comeback: Structure, direct instruction are paying off.
“Traditional education, discipline, and careful monitoring and data analysis” are improving student performance in Houston’s New Education System (NES) schools, writes Neetu Arnold of the Manhattan Institute in City Journal.
When Mike Miles was appointed superintendent in 2023, only one in five students could read or do math at grade level, she writes. More than 120 of the district’s 274 schools had D or F ratings. The state education agency took over the district, and put Miles in charge.
Houston schools have a long way to go, but reading and math scores are improving, especially for disadvantaged students, Arnold writes.
Under NES, the district’s worst-performing schools now use the highly effective and highly structured Direct Instruction (DI) method, Arnold writes. Teachers guide student learning instead of asking them to “construct” their own learning.
Who knew that methods proven to work, work?
[Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY)] immediately called Tanden out for fabricating a vote he never took part in.
“Actually, not,” he said after being falsely accused. “But nice try.”
“You voted against the reconciliation bill that had actual child care in it. You did. And the child tax credit,” Tanden insisted without backing off an inch.”
She added, “You voted against it back, way back in 2022.”
“I wasn’t elected until ’22. So, I didn’t come to Congress until ’23. But thank you,” countered Lawler. “So, you apologize for lying?”
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Tanden was not, in fact, going to apologize.
“I‘m not lying,” she said after very clearly lying.
Lawler notes that since coming to Congress, he has “supported the child tax credit” and “co-sponsored legislation to that effect.”
Tanden responds by fully admitting that her entire false narrative was shellacked in epic fashion. Just kidding, she reduces his efforts, which go back to her original argument, with a dismissive, “Okay, great. I think that’s wonderful.”
I lied. You proved it. The proof counters my entire argument, so I’ll just pretend, hey, everything is cool.
* * * * * * * *
Tanden has a rich history of lying, which makes it confounding why CNN would use her as a guest on its programs in the first place.
To be fair, it’s not that confounding:
Much more on Tanden here: Biden’s OMB Pick, Neera Tanden, Is a Conspiracy Theorist Who Pushed False and Disputed Election Information on Twitter.
WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:
“It goes beyond the government’s authority to not give me other people’s money to break anti-discrimination law” https://t.co/59DPAve7uW
— Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) April 22, 2025
I’d ask if Harvard realizes how they sound but clearly they either don’t know or don’t care.
FAUXCAHONTAS SPEAK WITH FORKED TONGUE: ‘Sharp and on his feet:’ Elizabeth Warren can’t stand by last year’s defense of Biden’s mental health.
her whole body briefly rebelled against her. kind of amazing.
— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) April 22, 2025
WHEN SAN FRANCISCO IS HOME TO YOUR CENTRISTS…: You’re Not Going to Believe What Group of Democrats Wants to Push the Party to the ‘Center.’
YOU WANT YOUR GLOBE-RULING AI TO BE LESS NICE? HAVE YOU THOUGHT THAT THROUGH? Annoyed ChatGPT users complain about bot’s relentlessly positive tone.
SURE, THAT TRICK WILL WORK: Democrats See MS-13 Gang Member as Their Next George Floyd.
HMM: Somebody’s Lying About Chinese Exports. “Somebody, somewhere is lying about the strength of China’s economy and the health of their export sector. Remember, there were already plenty signs of a slowing economy in China before Trump took office. Is China Observer overselling economic difficulties in China? Probably some. Gloom and doom is their stock in trade. You never get any ‘Everything in China is honky dory!’ videos from them (with good reason). But I don’t think they’re making things up from whole cloth.”
It could also be that China is flooding overseas markets (the numbers back this up) like never before and they have a serious problem with excess capacity.
FELIZ “DÍA DE LA TIERRA” DESDE MÉXICO! Mexico Sends Tons of Sewage to San Diego, and Lee Zeldin Is Doing Something About It on Earth Day.
OUT THIS WEEK FROM KURT SCHLICHTER: Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip.
THE SCHIZOPHRENIA OF THE GORACLE:
Shot:
Former Democratic Vice President Al Gore: The country “must join together to wholeheartedly and unequivocally condemn political violence,” and “the former president and those affected today are in my prayers.”
—“What political leaders have said about the Trump rally shooting,” PBS, July 13th, 2024.
Chaser:
BREAKING: 'Inventor' of the internet shatters internets oldest law…Godwins Law
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) April 22, 2025
Hangover: Gore jumpstarted the modern corporatist radical environmentalism movement in 1989 with the emo headline in the New York Times, “An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.” So if the earth’s temperature and (more importantly for Gore) the temperature of your air conditioner can be considered Hitler, everything can.
Incidentally, the creator of Godwin’s Law gave his blessings for everyone to trample it — during Hitler’s first term in office — after the dictator [checking notes] left the White House and was in the process of running in a national election to return to it last year.
