There are some people in the US who fret that Trump will offend our foreign "partners"; I'd say we already have, and I'd say F**k'em

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UN Nominates Iran to Anti-Terror, Women’s Rights Committee

The Iranian regime recently massacred perhaps as many as 40,000 of its own people, has been bombarding civilian targets in multiple nations for weeks, and has spent decades practicing international terrorism and domestic tyranny. So, of course, the United Nations just nominated an Iranian representative to its committee overseeing women’s rights and anti-terrorism measures.

Watchdog group UN Watch posted furiously on April 10, “SHAME: The Islamic Republic of Iran has just been nominated to the U.N. Committee for Program and Coordination, which meets soon to shape policy on women's rights, human rights, disarmament, and terrorism prevention.” The group’s executive director, Hillel Neuer, followed up by asking:

Might as well rent, then, rather than buy

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Alarming study reveals the universe will end much, much sooner than previously estimated

The new calculation is that it all ends in 10⁷⁸ years, down from the previously estimated 10¹¹⁰⁰. Bummer.

Some might wonder at the Post’s headline and ask, “alarming to whom?”, but those same people are probably still consuming micro-plastics and don’t wear their bicycle helmets when performing yard work during acorn-dropping season, so ….

Birthright citizenship?

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Now, Nancy Pelosi has apparently changed her mind

Resurfaced clips from top Democrats echoing Trump on birthright citizenship spark online uproar

Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein both made arguments in 1993 now echoed by the Trump administration

In fact, these clips, and others, have been circulating on the internet for years, but in view of the current Supreme Court case, it’s fun to bring them back again.

“If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant?" Sen. Harry Reid said on the Senate floor in 1993. 

"No sane country would do that. Right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and [a] guarantee of full access to all public and social services this society provides — and that’s a lot of services."

Liars, liars, pants on fire

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Right off the bat, the BBC is lying: the US is not the biggest carbon emitter, China is, by a huge margin:

(We’ll ignore their Fox Butterfield lead)

AI Overview

China is the world's largest annual emitter, producing over 12 billion metric tons (Gt ) in 2024—more than double the U.S.. While China's emissions continue to rise, U.S. emissions are declining, with roughly 4.9 Gt

Key Comparative Metrics

  • Annual Emissions (Current): China accounts for ~32.9% of global emissions, while the U.S. accounts for ~12.6%.

  • Per Capita Emissions: U.S. per capita emissions (approx. 14-17.6 tons) remain roughly double that of China (approx. 8-10 tons).

  • Cumulative Emissions (1850–2024): The U.S. has released significantly more historical

    (approx. 500-532 Gt) compared to China (approx. 258-312 Gt).

  • Trends: U.S. emissions peaked in the 2000s and are trending downward, while China's emissions have surged over the past two decades.

  • Source Drivers: China's emissions are heavily driven by industrial coal consumption, while U.S. emissions have a higher proportion from transportation.

So, after kicking off with a false premise, the BBC builds upon it a tower of prevarication:

No, BBC, Disaster Losses Can’t Be Tied to Climate Change

The recent British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus publication “The US is now paying more than any other country for climate change damage, study suggests,” claims that the United States is “now paying more than any other country for climate change damage,” citing a study estimating $16.2 trillion in U.S. losses since 1990. This is a fabricated falsehood. Decades of peer-reviewed research on disaster losses show no detectable long-term trend in normalized weather-related losses attributable to human-caused climate change and the BBC is wrongly conflating weather with climate.

The BBC based its story on a study from researchers at Stanford University, who write “[c]limate change is causing measurable harm globally.” They admit that no research links loss and damages from extreme weather to climate change; a gap in knowledge they attempt to remedy by applying politically motivated, flawed social cost of carbon estimates to econometric models tying carbon dioxide emissions to aggregate economic output in simulations of what output might have been had the Earth not warmed slightly.

The study’s model-derived GDP estimates don’t, as the BBC story implies, represent documented observed damages.  There is a critical distinction between econometric modeling and real-world loss data.

Roger Pielke Jr., Ph.D., in his 2023 comprehensive review “Climate Change and Disaster Losses,” surveyed the peer-reviewed normalization literature and found overwhelmingly that increases in reported disaster losses are explained by increased exposure, wealth, and development—not by climate change.

That is not a fringe claim. It reflects the dominant conclusion in existing scientific literature.

So:

  • We are not the world’s largest CO2 emitter — China beats us, 33% to 12.6%, and while our emissions are dropping, China’s building 2 new coal-fired power plants a week

  • Climate change is not tied to “severe weather”

  • The US has seen increased monetary damages from hurricanes because a storm or wildfire blowing through a developed area has more to destroy now, than when those same areas were Florida swampland and empty forests.

Other than that, the BBC’s produced a fine piece of reporting.

As if to prove the point of the previous post on morons and liberals …

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Powerful: Blindfolded Women Perform Protest Dance Aimed at Trump and Epstein

It was February when a troupe of dancers reenacted the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in front of the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Washington Post just happened to have a cameraman there. Here it is again, if you missed it.

[I did miss it, but I don’t miss it — Ed]

Funny … The Washington Post's cameraman just happened to be passing by this week when he caught another troupe of dancers, this one a "protest dance" aimed at President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

Engaging in futile performance art on an empty mall is as pleasant a way to spend a sunny Friday afternoon as any, I suppose; less productive than flossing one’s teeth, say, but certainly more fun than attending yet another 3-hour seminar discussing white racism/ceramic art at your college down the street, but who is supposed to be moved by this? Washington Post readers already believe that Donald and Melania ran Epstein Island under the supervision of Ronald Reagan, so a few gyrations and backflips won’t accomplish anything further with that crowd, and the rest of the country could care less about Caribbean goings-on from twenty years ago. To borrow from a different post I read this morning,

There’s a classic scene in “Hoosiers” where the interim coach offers to help Gene Hackman’s character. Hackman declines, and the coach delivers one of the most memorable lines in sports movie history:

“There’s two kinds of stupid in this world. One is the kind where a man gets naked and barks at the moon in the middle of the woods. The other is the man who does the same thing in my living room.”

Or in this case, in front of a memorial to a man who’s been dead even longer than Epstein has.

Desperate for funds, NPR resorts to immitating the New York Times

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NPR CEO Miss Katherine, “facts can be a distraction” maher

Previous to moving to NPR in 2024, Mahere was CEO of Wikipedia. Let her tell you how that went:

NPR CEO: You Better Believe I Partnered With Gov't to Suppress 'Misinformation' About Pandemic, Elections

Christopher Rufo has done extensive digging into Maher's track record, none of which had anything to do with journalism until NPR made her its new CEO in January. Maher did work at Wikipedia as its CEO during the pandemic and the 2020 election, where she took an active role in content control. And by content control, Maher made clear in a remote address to the Atlantic Council in 2021, she means imposing censorship on any information or discussion to which the government objected on both topics (transcript via RealClearPolitics):

KATHERINE MAHER: We took a very active approach to disinformation and misinformation, coming into not just the last election, but how we supported our editing community in an unprecedented moment where we were not only dealing with a global pandemic but a novel virus, which by definition means we know nothing about in real-time. And we're trying to figure it out as the pandemic went along.

We really set up, in response to the pandemic but also the upcoming U.S. election as a model for future elections outside of the U.S., including as number happening this year.

The model was around how do we create a clearinghouse of information that brings the institution of the Wikimedia Foundation with the editing community in order to be able to identify threats early on, through conversations with government, of course, as well as other platform operators to understand what the landscape looks like.

Good news for CT ratepayers

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Eversource backs out of three solar projects supported by state

In a blow to Connecticut’s ongoing efforts to procure new sources of clean, carbon-free electricity, Eversource informed state officials last month that the utility company was opting out of three publicly-bid contracts to purchase 54 megawatts of solar power on behalf of its customers.

Eversource Deputy General Counsel Duncan R. MacKay sent a letter to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and legislative leaders on March 27, slamming the agency’s latest round of clean-energy purchases as overpriced and likely to result in an increase of the public benefits charge.

For those reasons — as well as what he described as the lack of “comprehensive” energy strategy in Connecticut — MacKay said the company would decline to enter into the contracts.

“The prospect of committing another $238 million of customer money over the next 20 years is concerning to Eversource and is a clear divergence from a much-needed affordability lens,” MacKay wrote. “Because the pricing for the contracts is over-market and the contracts do not add value to customers in terms of materially increasing available generation supply and offering a pathway to lower generation costs, contract execution does not appear to be in the customer interest.”

And then the usual bullshit from the DEP, including the endlessly-repeated lie that solar energy is cheaper than gas or coal

In an emailed statement on Monday, DEEP spokesman Will Healey called the company’s decision to back out of the contracts “surprising” given the need for new power supplies to meet growing demand on the regional electric grid.

“The solar projects selected in this procurement will lower costs for Connecticut ratepayers and scored the highest in our evaluation during the bid review process. Eversource was part of that bid review process and had voiced no concerns or objections at any point of the evaluation and selection process,” Healey said. “Additionally, Eversource has raised no objection to signing contracts with Massachusetts for the very same projects they claim are unaffordable or unsupportable in Connecticut.”

An Eversource spokesperson declined to comment further on the letter.

As well it should.