OLD AND BUSTED: “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”*

The new hotness? It’s necessary to increase pollution in order to fight global warming: A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate.

A startup claims it has launched weather balloons that may have released reflective sulfur particles in the stratosphere, potentially crossing a controversial barrier in the field of solar geoengineering.

Geoengineering refers to deliberate efforts to manipulate the climate by reflecting more sunlight back into space, mimicking a natural process that occurs in the aftermath of large volcanic eruptions. In theory, spraying sulfur and similar particles in sufficient quantities could potentially ease global warming.

It’s not technically difficult to release such compounds into the stratosphere. But scientists have mostly (though not entirely) refrained from carrying out even small-scale outdoor experiments. And it’s not clear that any have yet injected materials into that specific layer of the atmosphere in the context of geoengineering-related research.

That’s in part because it’s highly controversial. Little is known about the real-world effect of such deliberate interventions at large scales, but they could have dangerous side effects. The impacts could also be worse in some regions than others, which could provoke geopolitical conflicts.

Some researchers who have long studied the technology are deeply troubled that the company, Make Sunsets, appears to have moved forward with launches from a site in Mexico without any public engagement or scientific scrutiny. It’s already attempting to sell “cooling credits” for future balloon flights that could carry larger payloads.

To be fair, it’s an idea that’s Obama administration approved:

But why is Make Sunset thinking on such a small scale? Go for the big time! Could A Small Nuclear War Reverse Global Warming?’

* Flashback: Peter Arnett: Whose Man in Baghdad? “Remember the phrase ‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it’? It has become totemic. Arnett was the originator of the phrase. The trouble is, as first B.G. Burkett and then I discovered after a little investigation, the report was wrong. It wasn’t the U.S. that destroyed Ben Tre, (a town, not a village) but the Vietcong. And the soldier Arnett was most likely quoting remembers saying ‘It was a shame the town was destroyed,’ not the fatuity Arnett made famous.”

YESTERDAY WAS A VERY IMPORTANT ANNIVERSARY, JIM TREACHER WRITES:

January 6 is a day that will live in infamy. On this date, a brutal crime was committed. A miscarriage of justice. A blot on our nation’s history.

That’s right, I’m talking about this:

July 6th is apparently also a very important anniversary: Joe Biden accidentally says ‘what happened on July the 6th’ while discussing Capitol riot.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT LAST NIGHT: Kevin McCarthy Elected 55th Speaker of the House. Here’s How It Went Down.

Earlier, during the votes’ Groundhog Day phase: Look at All These Journalists (And Other Nerds) Cracking Jokes About Our Cherished Democracy: “Normal people with actual lives could not care less. They are smart enough to understand that choosing a party leader in Congress is part of our cherished democratic system of government. Politics nerds, meanwhile, can’t stop talking about it and trying to impress each other with their witty quips and comparisons to sports and pop culture. This is their Super Bowl[.]”

15th TIME’S THE CHARM: House of Representatives officially elects Kevin McCarthy to serve as House speaker.

BREAKING: Republican Kevin McCarthy elected House Speaker after 15 rounds of votes pic.twitter.com/XMrO1uxdvB

— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) January 7, 2023

UPDATE: Kevin McCarthy Elected 55th Speaker of the House. Here’s How It Went Down.

MCCARTHY LOSES BY ONE VOTE IN SHOCKING 14TH ATTEMPT, FURIOUS FLOOR LOBBYING FAILED TO SWAY OPPONENTS.

UPDATE: Kevin McCarthy Confronts Matt Gaetz on House Floor after Losing 14th Vote for Speaker.

REPORT: Written deal for McCarthy emerges.

LOOK AT ALL THESE JOURNALISTS (AND OTHER NERDS) CRACKING JOKES ABOUT OUR CHERISHED DEMOCRACY: “Normal people with actual lives could not care less. They are smart enough to understand that choosing a party leader in Congress is part of our cherished democratic system of government. Politics nerds, meanwhile, can’t stop talking about it and trying to impress each other with their witty quips and comparisons to sports and pop culture. This is their Super Bowl[.]”

ELISABETH FINCH: The Grey’s Anatomy Liar Confesses it All.

In March, Finch’s grandiose ruse, which included a head-spinning web of deceptions that started with a fabricated debilitating cancer diagnosis, abortion and kidney loss stretching back nearly a decade, was first made public in a story by The Ankler after Disney (whose ABC broadcasts Grey’s Anatomy) and production company Shondaland had put one of their best-known writers, now 44, on leave. Even in an industry famous for celebrating and accepting fabulists, charlatans and con artists, the nature and extent of Finch’s lies crossed an unspoken line. No, she hadn’t physically hurt anyone like, say, Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey. But Finch, by fabricating and dramatizing huge swaths of her life story, broke the trust of one of the most successful writers’ rooms in Hollywood history — and made fools of Shonda Rhimes, the town’s most powerful TV producer, and Disney, the most family-friendly maker and distributor of TV in the world.

Of her time at Grey’s, days where she taped a dummy catheter to her arm and shaved her hair to feign that she was undergoing chemotherapy, she now says, “I really miss it. I miss my fellow writers. It’s like a family and… one of the things that makes it so hard is that they did rally around a false narrative that I gave.”

Today? She’s an absolute pariah. The mere mention of her name in certain quarters of the industry causes visible revulsion. Her phone doesn’t ring. Her emails go unanswered. Her wife left her, family members disowned her and she’s no longer allowed to see the children she helped rear for several years. She fills her day taking long walks and talking to her therapist. And she’s sitting down with me, the reporter who first broke the story about her lies, to tell her story. This time, she says, a real one. Because there is nothing else she can do.

“What I did was wrong,” she says. “ Not okay. F*cked up. All the words.”

If she’s out of work in Hollywood, she sounds like she would fit in absolutely perfectly in DC in 2024: Let’s Face It: Joe Biden’s Serial Lies and Embellishments About His Biography Are Shamelessly Weird.

‘EVERYTHING TRIPLED:’ Rapper Cardi B Slams Biden Economy.

Rapper Cardi B on Wednesday gave a profanity-filled rant about unprecedented inflation under President Joe Biden.

“When I go to the f*cking supermarket … I’m seeing that everything tripled” in price, the rapper said in a Twitter video. “Lettuce was, like, two dollars a couple of months ago, and now it’s, like, f*cking seven. … If I think that sh*t is crazy, I could only imagine what middle-class people or people in the ’hood [are] motherf*cking thinking!”

“I do want anybody that’s responsible [for] these f*cking prices to put that sh*t the f*ck down,” she concluded.

Cardi B, meet Cardi B! Joe Biden, President Of Cardi B(abylon). Biden gave Cardi B (whose real name is Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar) an interview (of sorts) that was published by Elle magazine on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in August of 2020.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Your tax dollars are paying for woke reeducation at NASA, the VA, and more.

TYLER O’NEIL: Orthodox Jewish Group Condemns New York Times ‘Crusade’ Against Hasidic Schools Amid Jump in Antisemitic Hate Crimes.

DAMAR HAMLIN UPDATE: Buffalo Bills player asked in writing if team won the game, doctors said.

Related: AP sources: NFL will not resume Bills-Bengals game.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: LA Times: White supremacy is a rainbow coalition.

LATEST ‘TWITTER FILES’ REVEAL ‘STRUGGLE’ WITH PUBLIC AGENCIES, AND ADAM SCHIFF’S PUSH TO CENSOR JOURNALIST.

JOHN NOLTE: Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street Review: Portrait of Another Spectacular Government Failure.

Madoff’s family, who knew nothing about his crimes, were also victims, and with the help of the vicious media, Madoff annihilated that family. He also annihilated countless families guilty of nothing more than working hard and following the rules. The Monster of Wall Street doesn’t forget them.

If there’s a takeaway from this fascinating and tragic story, it’s that our government sucks. It’s all so broken, so corrupt that for two decades, a world-famous man said he was investing billions of dollars, didn’t invest even one red cent, and got away with it. Even after a portfolio manager named Harry Markopolos laid it all out for them on some five occasions, the SEC let Madoff get away with it.

The federal government has one job — to protect our rights. From Madoff to the wide-open southern border, we can all see how that’s working out. 

Flashback: Reminder: Bernie Madoff Donated Mostly to Democrats.

As did most of the people who trusted Madoff with their money.

FASTER, PLEASE: Damar Hamlin appears to be ‘neurologically intact,’ team says; teammate adds player is ‘awake.’

DEBBIE STABENOW ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT IN 2024 — AHEAD OF BRUTAL DEM CYCLE: “The Senate session has only just opened, and Democrats have their first retirement already…In 2024, Democrats have to defend eleven more seats than Republicans, and Michigan wasn’t even one of the tougher seats to hold. Seats in red states like Montana, Ohio, West Virginia, and maybe even Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin would be tougher to defend with current incumbents than Michigan. Stabenow’s retirement will mean a significant shift of resources to hold that seat, especially with an unpopular president like Biden topping the ticket.”

60 MINUTES PROMOTES PAUL EHRLICH’S FAILED DOOMSAYING ONE MORE TIME:

Stanford University biologist and perennially wrong doomster Paul Ehrlich appeared on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday where he once again declared, “I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Ehrlich made himself (in)famous when he in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb: predicted that “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Instead of rising as Ehrlich predicted, the global crude death per 1,000 people has fallen from 12.5 in 1968 to 7 in 2019 before ticking up to 8 in the pandemic year of 2020.

At least CBS correspondent Scott Pelley acknowledged, “The alarm Ehrlich sounded in ’68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine. He was wrong about that. The green revolution fed the world.” Nevertheless, Pelley credulously reports Ehrlich’s assertion that the world is undergoing a Sixth Mass Extinction owing to humanity’s rising population and consumption. Paleontologists have identified five previous mass extinction events during the past 450 million years in which something like three-quarters of species disappeared due to events like supervolcano eruptions and asteroid strikes.

How wrong was Ehrlich back then? This wrong: (Video) Paul Ehrlich in 1970: “The FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television.”

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Elderly man, 78, has half his face and ear chewed off exposing his skull in horrific attack at a train platform in Portland: Police are investigating if 25-year-old suspect was on drugs.

Further thoughts on this horrific attack from Clay Travis and Jesse Watters:

Hopped on with @JesseBWatters to talk about why woke white people are the worst humans on earth. And how they’ve destroyed Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/VYMB7Lw8Xm

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 5, 2023

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: In Overnight Vote, Buffalo Guy Elected Speaker Of The House.

YAS QUEEN: Amber McLaughlin Becomes First Trans Woman Executed by Lethal Injection.

TYLER O’NEIL: ‘Twitter Files’ Reveal How the Left Uses Big Tech to Create an Illusion of Scientific Consensus and Stifle Debate, Especially on COVID-19.

DON SURBER: Let’s not have World War Three.

On June 28, 2015, Serbian film director Emir Kusturica unveiled and kissed a new statue to Gavrilo Princip in Belgrade. It was the 101st anniversary of Princip, 19, triggering the Great War, the war to end all wars. We now call it World War One because it did not end all wars, it merely expanded the arsenal of war to include tanks and aircraft. Princip was the young man who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Europe had a hodge-podge of mutual defense agreements that instead of deterring war fueled it.

The Dual Alliance, Triple Alliance, German–Ottoman alliance, Ottoman–Bulgarian alliance and Bulgaria–Germany treaty created the Central Powers (the German Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria). They took on the Allies, who were led by France, the British Empire and the Russian Empire. They were intertwined by treaties as well. The war dragged in a score of other countries on the Allies side including Brazil, China, Japan and of course, the United States. The war destroyed four empires and birthed the Soviet Union, which would devolve into an evil empire far worse than any of the others.

31% of the population of Serbia perished in the war, and yet Gavrilo Princip, who died in prison before the war’s end, is a hero in Serbia. Madness. That he brought devastation to the land matters not. His statue reminds me of the statues of Robert E. Lee, who led the South to its ruin. The statue of Princip is proof that one man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot.

It is with this in mind that I view Volodymyr Zelensky.

Read the whole thing.

PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ! Watch: Fetterman’s Painfully Awkward Swearing-in Renews Doubts About Ability to Serve.

PARADE OF THE VANQUISHED — 57,000 GERMAN PRISONERS, MOSCOW 1944: New video from Mark Felton. (Which for some reason is marked as “age-restricted and only available on YouTube,” so I can’t embed a playable version here.)