Media Disinformation on Operation Epic Fury in Iran

If you think that Operation Epic Fury in Iran, launched just over 2 weeks ago on February 28, is a major blunder, you can blame the legacy media in the U.S. and globally for misinforming the public. Regular updates from the White House and Israel illustrate the remarkable achievements of the campaign so far, and even Al Jazeera, the most popular news network in the Middle East and not known to be pro-Israel and pro-America, manages to report the excellent progress.

The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why (Al Jazeera, 16 March 2026)

But the Western press generally ignores the good news as they doggedly search for and highlight the rare operational failures that they think support their negative narratives because most journalists are leftists.

Trump and his staff have explained several times exactly why he decided now was the time to attack.

March 2 (2 days after initial attack)

Marco Rubio explained in a press briefing (see video) that there was an imminent threat of Iran launching missiles against U.S. military bases and personnel in the Middle East in response to an upcoming Israeli attack on Iran and that the first objective was to preemptively destroy their missile capability.

March 3 (3 days after)

U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff explained why negotiations with Iranian envoys (see video) failed again. As if years of negotiation failures with several previous administrations weren't enough proof that the Iranian regime had no interest in stopping long-range missile and nuclear weapons development.

March 4 (4 days after)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (March 4), laid out the four objectives of Operation Epic Fury, simply and clearly.

• Destroy Iran's ballistic missiles and their missile industry so they can't threaten Israel, the Middle East, Europe, and eventually the United States.
• Destroy Iran's navy so they can't block oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which are the territorial waters of several countries.
• Destroy Iran's support of its proxies waging war and terrorism in other countries in the Middle East and around the world.
• Destroy Iran's nuclear weapons materials and infrastructure and ensure it can never build a nuclear weapon.

Any presumed objectives other than those stated by the White House are just wild speculation by the media and pundits.

The media tries to portray the Trump administration as bumbling their way through, making it up as they go, not fully anticipating the scale of retaliation on Israel and U.S. bases in the Middle East and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the impact to shipping. For example, CNN reporting from 'unnamed sources close to the matter' that the Trump administration 'significantly underestimated' Iran's Strait of Hormuz closure. What nonsense.

Months of Planning

It takes months of intelligence work assessing thousands of targets and numerous possible outcomes to make a target list this big and coordinate dozens of ships and hundreds of planes to neutralize those targets in careful sequence with the Israeli military to quickly reduce Iran's ability to retaliate against Israel (also here), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and other countries and completely dominate Iran's airspace. The fact that they waited until much of Iran's top leadership were meeting so they could topple their command structure shows that they had detailed and comprehensive plans in place well before and were choosing the optimal moment to start the operation to minimize Iran's ability to retaliate.

Trump warned the regime not to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world's oil and gas is shipped. Anticipating that the mad mullahs would do it anyway, when the regime started attacking commercial ships, the U.S. quickly destroyed all the military installations on Kharg Island on March 13, from where 90 percent of Iran's oil is shipped to other countries, primarily in Asia. They destroyed the main IRGC base in Ahvaz that protects the oil pipelines that send oil to Kharg Island.

To know what to hit, the U.S. had to have gathered intelligence and selected those targets well ahead of time to avoid hitting the oil shipping infrastructure itself. President Trump warned them that if Iran continued to impede shipping in the Strait of Hormuz the U.S. would also destroy the oil shipping facilities.

The regime quickly backed down, saying that the Strait of Hormuz is open and "only closed to American, Israeli ships and tankers and not to others." No Israeli- or U.S.-flagged tankers pass through the strait anyway so it's effectively open. After the Kharg attack, only one Kuwaiti-flagged tanker was hit with a projectile, causing minor damage. Before the attack on Kharg Island, several commercial vessels had been hit.

This wasn't a hastily-conceived response to cover for a supposed blunder. It was thought through and anticipated well ahead of time. The Iranian regime's main revenue stream is from oil shipped from Kharg Island and they know they would be cutting their own throats if they can't ship oil to their biggest customers, like China. Trump appears to be preparing to send Marines to secure the island to prevent the Iranian regime from being able to restore their military installations and hold their main oil shipping infrastructure. This would be a major playing card—if not the most important card—to hold in later negotiations with the regime.

Why Now?

The better question is: why wasn't this done long ago before Iran had built up a big stockpile of highly-enriched uranium and a prolific missile and attack drone industry and shipped thousands of rockets and drones to its proxies in the Middle East? Every negotiation over the last 20 years to get them to stop has failed.

It is abundantly clear that their maniacal pursuit of a global totalitarian, repressive Muslim regime, as stated in their constitution, and their open threats against the United States of America (the Great Satan) and Israel (the Little Satan) since 1979, have become imminently serious as their stockpile of highly enriched uranium grows and they continue to manufacture and improve long-range ballistic missiles and attack drones that will soon actualize their decades of threats to annihilate Israel and cripple and destroy the West. Having nuclear weapons aimed at Israel effectively negates any ability to prevent their expansionist agenda. Israeli intelligence produced evidence in 2018 that they exfiltrated from a warehouse in Tehran that Iran had been lying about the scope of their weapons programs and there was no reason to believe that they weren't still lying about not developing nuclear weapons.

Trump dispatched Witkoff and Jared Kushner several weeks ago to see if they would stop enriching uranium to a level that served no civilian purpose. They told the team on the first day of the negotiations that they have 460 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium and had every right to continue their enrichment program and build missiles. Most countries don't enrich their own uranium for power plants and buy it from other countries. Witkoff and Kushner even offered to give Iran uranium for their nuclear power plants for 10 years if they stopped enriching to weapons-grade. Their offer was vehemently rejected.

It looks like Witkoff's assessment of their declared resolve to pursue nuclear weapons and long range missiles to threaten Israel, other Middle Eastern countries, Europe, and the U.S. may have been the last straw that affirmed to President Trump that the only way to stop the Iranian regime's growing and imminent threat is to destroy their capabilities. Israel's intelligence had already determined that years ago, but Trump hasn't always accepted Israeli intelligence analysis and probably wanted to prove to himself that their assessment was correct; that negotiations were futile—as they always have been—before giving the order to attack.

Iran's Proxies and the IRGC are Devoted to Toppling Countries 

The Iranian regime has been funding their proxies in other countries for decades and supplying them with weapons like missiles and attack drones to advance them toward their goal of a global Islamic caliphate. Some of those proxies are Hezbollah in Lebanon, a designated terrorist organization, Hamas in Gaza, also a designated terrorist organization, and the Houthis in Yemen. They believe their goal is sanctioned by Allah, so the end justifies the means. The Iranian regime is the most prolific state sponsor of terrorism on the planet, killing hundreds of Americans and thousands of others in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, and around the world. Decades of violence demonstrate that the Iranian regime is a real and deadly threat not just to Israel but to Americans and others. They have publicly stated their maniacal mission publicly on numerous occasions, but Westerners keep pretending that they aren't serious even though their actions clearly support their rhetoric. Their constitution explains that the role of the IRGC is to force Islam on the whole world.

the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are...responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God's way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God's law throughout the world

Demonstrations Against the Iranian Regime Increase Opportunity for Change

Millions of Iranian people bravely took to the streets in January to protest the regime. Living under the regime's brutality and mismanagement and its crazed obsession with an apocalyptic vision has brought crisis after crisis upon Iranians, exacerbated by U.S. and international sanctions on them for their various nefarious actions. With the economy in freefall and the devastating water crisis in Tehran, they'd had enough. They have lived under 47 years of oppression and living conditions that continue to worsen. With no weapons other than growing anger and hope that others would join them, they risked their lives in open demonstrations to show their solidarity with each other against the regime. Maybe the attack on their nuclear weapons and missiles infrastructure in 2025 by Israel and U.S. showed them that the regime isn't as powerful as they had feared. Unfortunately it was still deadly. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) under orders from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei slaughtered more than 30,000 unarmed protesters in the streets, murdered the injured in hospitals, and executed those sent to prison. Quelled but undefeated, the Iranian people continued to protest quietly and loudly from their apartments at night, signaling their willingness to reject the regime and endure unthinkable horrors to finally end the 47 year reign of terror.

Help Is On the Way?

President Trump issued several public messages of support in January and assured them that "help is on the way," but Westerners watched in horror as the regime slaughtered the unarmed protesters by the tens of thousands. Calls for the U.S. to take action to stop the bloodshed came from Iranians in the country and around the world. As days turned into weeks and no help arrived many started to become disenchanted with the U.S. and Trump. Some began to think that Trump was blustering; that perhaps he was hoping that the people themselves would overthrow their own government without the U.S. getting involved; a virtual impossibility for a disarmed populace against a heavily armed and brutal government and its military. Many misunderstood that meaningful and successful help takes months of planning; something that no one knew had already been in the works for some time. It appears that Trump was sending encouragement, knowing that plans were in place, without giving the game away so that Israel and the U.S. could choose the opportune moment to execute a brilliant operation to topple much of the leadership in the first stroke to pave the way for systematic dismantling of their weapons and military infrastructure.

Iranians have been loudly cheering the decapitation of their brutal leadership, both in Iran and around the world, in mass spontaneous demonstrations and social media posts publicly thanking President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, the U.S., and Israel, for finally doing what needed to be done to bring down the worst destabilizing force in the Middle East and the most prolific state sponsor of terrorism. Naturally, the press which overwhelmingly supports leftists and despises President Trump, can't countenance such vocal and widespread support for him and generally ignore it as they focus on minutiae, perpetuate leftist lies about a CIA coup that supposedly prevented a democratic revolution in Iran in 1953, and ignored the oppressed women of Iran. Those brilliant and brave women have been subjugated by the savage regime since 1979. They've experienced, daily, real oppression, not the imaginary "systemic oppression," "toxic masculinity," and "patriarchy" claimed by radical feminists for two centuries. They have courageously risen up against the regime, while leftists decry the war to destroy their oppressors, tacitly supporting a government in Iran (and in Gaza—Hamas) that would imprison and kill those same leftists if they were under their rule. The ironies are epic.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces and the United States military continue to execute a brilliant campaign to end the threat of the brutal Iranian regime.

Carbon dioxide isn't pollution, NewAtlas

Report says plug-in hybrids are almost as polluting as gas-powered cars

The article highlights a report from the European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E) which purports to show that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) pollute almost as much as internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

I submitted this comment:

A review of basic chemistry: carbon dioxide is not pollution. It's an essential trace gas, without which there would be no life on earth. No carbon dioxide, no plants. No plants, no animals. Hybrid engine cars emit a lot less actual pollution—carbon monoxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide, etc.—than internal combustion engine cars because they produce propulsion more efficiently. But leftists fudge the numbers to suit their agenda.

Guess which comment didn't get shown?

Leftists don't like it when you don't stick with their narrative and their contrived definitions. Carbon dioxide makes up 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere and is critical to all plant life. Calling carbon dioxide "pollution" is perverse, yet here we are. Leftists pervert words and meanings to promote their fantasies.

The Leftist Lexicon highlights some words leftists have usurped to mean something entirely different.

I chose the image above from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which coincidentally, isn't actually a bulletin published by nuclear physicists. It's a leftist political organization masquerading as a scientific publication. They purposely edit (distort) the image to make it look like coal power plants are emitting a thick pall of dark smoke. Here's another, published by the AP, in an article about West Virginia challenging the EPA's unconstitutional Good Neighbor Plan that requires states to reduce ozone that crosses state lines, which the Supreme Court has stayed pending court decisions. Once again, they distort the image to look like dark clouds of smoke polluting the air.

Here's what the smokestack emissions of a modern U.S. coal plant actually looks like.

Those thick clouds are white clouds of water vapor, not dark clouds of smoke like in Victorian England. U.S. coal power plants have expensive scrubbers that extract most of the pollution from the emissions. Modern technology has done a remarkable job of reducing air pollution.

But that wasn't good enough for leftists. They've decided that the harmless, beneficial carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels is a pollutant, contrary to science.

Leftist Lexicon - Big Lies and Doublespeak

The Big Lie

Adolf Hitler coined the term "big lie" (große Lüge) in Mein Kampf to explain how people could be convinced to believe a gross distortion or colossal lie because they wouldn't believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." He claimed that Jews implemented the Big Lie to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general and nationalist politician Erich Ludendorff who himself blamed Jews and others for a conspiracy that resulted in Germany's defeat and ignoble standing in Europe after World War I. The irony is that Hitler and Ludendorff were promoting big lies about Jews; lies that led to the extermination of 6 million of them by Hitler.

The notion that repeating a lie often enough will transform it in the public's mind into a truth has been attributed to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and other notorious tyrants, but the idea was probably around centuries before them. It appears in the 1869 novel The Crown of Life in a form that may be the basis for the current expression of it.

If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.

Doublespeak – Doublethink and Newspeak 

In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell invented the term "doublethink" to describe indoctrination by the totalitarian government to compel people to accept conflicting beliefs as truth, usually contradicting their own memory or sense of reality. He also invented "Newspeak," a fictional language invented by the government to limit critical thinking. Doublespeak, which doesn't appear in Orwell's book, is a modern contraction of those two terms. The doublespeak names for government offices were contradictions of their mission. The Ministry of Love interrogated, tortured, and brainwashed enemies of the government. The Ministry of Peace waged war. The Ministry of Truth distorted history, destroyed historical records that conflicted with their agenda, and generated lies and propaganda to promote their dogma.

Leftist Lexicon of Doublespeak

In a spectacular modern example of Doublespeak—almost as if they were the totalitarian government in 1984—leftists have perverted language to mean things disconnected from their original meaning. Some of the terms are a big lie, like "climate change" (see below), which have been so widely and uncritically adopted that they have become a perverse form of received wisdom, even though they are gross exaggerations that are demonstrably false.

Here's a partial lexicon of leftist terms that mean something completely different to them than the original meaning the rest of us understand:

racist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

fascist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

misogynist noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

bigot noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

homophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Islamophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

xenophobe noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Nazi noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

Hitler noun: someone winning an argument with a leftist

democracy noun: any system designed to let leftists rule, often referred to as "our democracy" (which some of us write as Our Democracy™), means government by leftists. When Republicans win elections, it's fascism (see above) and a threat to Our Democracy™

climate change noun: catastrophic, imminent, human-caused global warming and imaginary disasters from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is now 0.04%, up from 0.03% a couple centuries ago, formerly called global warming

climate denier noun: a pejorative term meant to demean people and conflate them with Holocaust deniers, it means someone winning an argument with a leftist about so-called climate change

A couple more just for fun:

literally adverb: figuratively

ironically adverb: coincidentally

See Steven Hayward's Lexicon of Current Political Terminology for more.

Dramatic Decline of Public Trust in Media

Trust in the media has fallen a lot since the 1970's, when about 70% of Americans trusted them. Now it's around 33%.

See the long-running Gallup poll details here.

Why has trust fallen? The Internet and alternative media has made it easier to fact-check the legacy media. Most journalists and editors lean left politically. What they report and the way they report is influenced by their biases. Not a lot of people knew that in the past. Now they do.

Timothy Groseclose published a landmark study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics quantifying media bias while he was a professor at UCLA, entitled A Measure of Media Bias.

He concluded that the "political quotient"—the degree to which Americans lean one or another on issues—is shifted leftward (he calls it "liberal") by around 20 points, which significantly influences the way they vote. Groseclose went on to publish a book on this bias, "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind."

For a recent example of how a simple, quick check of the facts contradicts the claims in an article on CNN, revealing their bias, see my post "Comedy News Network on Water Crisis in Afghanistan."

Trust in the media by leftists (in other words, Democrats) is still fairly high, which is understandable because it's normal to trust those who have similar views as you, although their trust waxes and wanes according to who is in power, which is pretty funny.

When it's a Republican president or Congress, their trust in the media increases because the media is far more critical of Republicans than Democrats. When it's a Democrat president or Congress, their trust in the media drops because occasionally—rarely, actually—the media will be critical of Democrat leaders.

Republicans don't generally exhibit this oscillating trust because they tend to be better informed on issues, as numerous polls illustrate, and have come to understand the longstanding leftist bias in the media.

What the Public Knows about the Political Parties (Pew, April 11, 2012)

Media Twists a Mother's Heartbreaking Story to Support Hamas

Here is a classic example of why trust in the media has fallen dramatically since the 1970's. This is what they've been publishing this week, this heartbreaking image of an emaciated child.

And this is what the real story is:

The Truth Behind the Viral Gazan Famine Photo

David Collier says:

"There’s another layer of cynicism here. From everything I’ve learned, Mohammed’s mother is simply trying to find help for her child. She’s not hiding the truth. She tells the full story to anyone who asks. Yet every journalist who has spoken to her has made the same cynical decision: ignore the medical reality, strip the context, and turn her child into a propaganda weapon. No one is trying to help. No one is interested in telling the truth. All they seem to ask is: 'How can this image hurt Israel?' — and they build their coverage around that."

David Collier points out that the image has cropped out his brother who is clearly healthy, and that the mother has never claimed her son was starving but is in need of specialist care for a congenital health problem he's had since birth.

The media cynically ignores her real need for her son and uses her as yet another prop to condemn Israel for trying to eradicate the Hamas terrorists, a story that is completely unrelated to what's going on in this poor family.

The legacy media reporting on the Hamas war with Israel tends to promote Hamas propaganda with little, if any, fact-checking, while carefully scrutinizing and contradicting Israel's claims, usually without supporting evidence.

Most people think that Israel started the war, which illustrates their unconscious bias influenced by the way the media reports the conflict. Hamas has been at war with Israel since before 2006 when they were elected as the political leadership of Gaza. They fired tens of thousands of mortars and rockets at Israeli civilians between 2001 and 2023, before Israel invaded Gaza. Israel responded to their constant attacks by building a rocket defense system.

After the large-scale slaughter of Israelis on October 7, 2023, Israel realized that walls, fences, checkpoints, and rocket defense wasn't enough to protect Israelis. Hamas had to be removed; a campaign that continues until Hamas either surrenders unconditionally or is destroyed.

So far, Hama shows no inclination to surrender. They prefer to use their own Arab civilians as both cannon fodder and propaganda to appeal to Western media and their governments to stop Israel because they know they can't win on their own. They are radical zealots whose founding charter declares their intent to obliterate Israel and replace it with a Muslim Arab government "from the (Jordan) river to the sea." They have never wavered from that goal and refuse to accept the existence of Israel, which is a secular democracy that guarantees all of its Jewish (73%), Arab (21%), and other citizens equal rights. Arabs have far more rights in Israel than they do under Hamas (in Gaza) or Fatah (in the "West Bank"). The reason every proposed "two-state" solution has failed is because Hamas and Fatah refuse to accept them. Israel is happy to live peacefully alongside the Arabs in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, and has made many unilateral concessions to try to promote peace. Palestinian leadership, however, does not want to live alongside Israel, and Hamas in particular has built a vast terrorism infrastructure to continually attack Israel.

Read the 1988 Hamas Covenant to understand why Hamas has never accepted a "two-state solution" and never will. Pay attention to Article Seven, Article Eleven, and Article Thirteen in particular if you don't want to read the whole thing. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood from which they derive their principles believe that all of modern Israel is part of an Islamic waqf (an inalienable endowment) declared by Allah in perpetuity for occupation by Muslims under Islamic law. They believe that any claim to that land by anyone other than Muslims—for example, by Israel—violates Allah's endowment and is therefore invalid. Never mind that Jews lived on that land for thousands of years before the religion of Islam emerged in the 7th century AD. The 1988 covenant was updated in 2017 to remove some of the antisemitic language and replaced references to "Jews" with "Zionists" but it hasn't changed the fundamental character of the charter.

The United States of America designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 1997. The European Union designated the military wing of Hamas as a terrorist organization in 2001 and all of Hamas in 2003. The United Kingdom declared the military wing as a terrorist organization in 2001 and all of Hamas in 2021. Many other countries have also designated Hamas as a terrorist organization but the UN refuses to, despite the well-documented record of thousands of indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, even in so-called "peacetime."

Comedy News Network on Texas Floods

 

This is the summer of flooding across the US, and scientists know why (CNN 2025-07-20)

Fossil fuel pollution — alongside other compounding factors — has transformed these months into a time of mounting peril, punctuated by relentless heat waves, rampant wildfires and catastrophic flooding.

“These events are of course much more frequent *because* of human-caused warming,” [climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania] said in an email.

there is absolutely no doubt that climate change, caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, is making extreme rainfall more extreme.

Mann is the author of the infamous and debunked "hockey stick" study purporting to show that tree rings showed a dramatic increase in temperatures in the late 20th century. He excluded tree rings that didn't fit his hypothesis and applied a statistical method that produced a hockey stick even from random noise. His analytical techniques haven't improved.

Meanwhile the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report tells us:

The SREX (Seneviratne et al., 2012) assessed low confidence for observed changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods at the global scale. This assessment was confirmed by AR5 (Hartmann et al., 2013). The SR1.5 (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018) found increases in flood frequency and extreme streamflow in some regions, but decreases in other regions.

See section 11.5.2 Observed Trends in Chapter 11: Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate. Most of the contributers to the IPCC reports are biased toward the hypothesis that human CO2 emissions are the primary cause of climate change. They rely almost solely on computer models to support their hypothesis but if you take the time to dig through the observations chapters—measurements of climate and weather—the data generally contradict their model-based hypothesis. I suppose they don't notice the irony that the measured data refutes their computer-generated predictions.

This report in the Journal of Hydrology from July 2017 finds no increase in frequency or magnitude of floods and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data for Texas shows no increase in the number of floods over time.

It doesn't seem to occur to the prognosticators of climate doom that their predictions are contradictory and the contradictions make them look silly; for example "relentless heat waves, rampant wildfires and catastrophic flooding." In other words, they predict more droughts and more rainfall. All caused by humans. Go figure.

Watts Up With That? (wattsupwiththat.com) and its Reference Pages are an excellent resource to fact-check the incessant fear-mongering about "climate" from the predominantly leftist media about weather and climate; for example:

Texas Flood Hysteria: Media’s Climate Blame Drowned by History and Data (2025-07-20)

Comedy News Network on Water Crisis in Afghanistan

For the first time in modern history a capital city is on the verge of running dry (CNN 2025-07-19)

Population growth, the climate crisis, and relentless over-extraction have depleted groundwater levels, experts say, and nearly half the city’s boreholes have already gone dry.

Less than 5 minutes of searching for "Dams in Afghanistan" turns up this:

Water Management Policy in Afghanistan After the Fall of the Afghan Government (tearline.mil)

The root cause of the water crisis in Afghanistan is unique in that it is not a shortage of water resources. Afghanistan is rich in water, with a total of 75 billion cubic meters available. This abundance of water resources also supports neighboring countries. Instead, the intensity of Afghanistan’s droughts are primarily a result of inadequate hydrological infrastructure, decades of infrastructure damage during war and political instability, and institutional failures in water management practices.

There is no evidence that "climate change" has any effect on Kabul's water supplies. Extracting more groundwater than is replenished is definitely a contributing factor, and the population has grown dramatically—nearly 10 times by some estimates—between 2004 and 2024 putting intense pressure on limited infrastructure, but neither of those "caused" Kabul's water crisis. They have abundant natural resources that can supply more than enough water, but they mismanage it. Mismanagement is the primary cause of their water crisis.

Look at Israel as an example of a well-run country that anticipated population growth and depleting water resources and solved it by various methods like pioneering technological advances in hydroponics and drip irrigation to drastically reduce water used in irrigation, and on the supply side, built desalination plants to extract water from the sea. Unlike Afghanistan, they have limited water supplies and natural resources, but because they are a free, representative republic, they don't restrict or limit their human capital and the ability and incentive of their population to innovate, so they are prosperous.

This is kind of misreporting is what happens when your staff's minds are so infested with leftist drivel that there is little room for rational thought, healthy skepticism, or even something as simple as 5 minutes of fact-checking.

Rampaging control freaks vs. helpful solutions

I ran across this anguished heart cry from a sanctimonious control freak agitated park visitor.

Hiker shares photo after national park tourists blatantly disregard warning signs: 'It really does ruin it for the rest of us'

Here is the Reddit thread that inspired the article.

Others taking risks doesn't "ruin it for the rest of us." It ruins it for the risk-takers when things go wrong.

I responded to the thread with a sardonic comment, milder than the ones that got the most upvotes, and was promptly blocked from seeing the thread. It wasn't hard to see the thread by opening an anonymous browser session, and I noticed that a few had replied similarly, but the comments that got the most upvotes, by far, were the ones offended that people would do something so sociopathic as to take a measured risk to walk out to a rocky point to see the view.

Many years ago my family hiked the Sol Duc Falls trail in Olympic National Park to the bridge over the falls. I wanted to get a picture from downstream like the iconic image I'd seen in calendars.

When we reached the bridge, I backtracked to find the side trail that I must have missed; the one that led to the viewpoint where so many pictures had been taken. There was none. What I saw was a sign along the log fence bordering the trail a hundred yards or so before approaching the bridge, warning people to stay on the path because landscape or habitat restoration was in progress. A path on the other side of the fence through the undergrowth had seen a lot of use. It led through the trees to the edge of the gorge with an unobstructed view of the bridge. It was a treacherous place, a tiny cliff edge barely wide enough to stand on, perched fifty feet or so above the narrow gorge. One slip and you would fall off the cliff into the rushing water below. But people regularly took the risk to capture a spectacular photo.

I thought about the Park Service blocking a trail that thousands of people had trodden over the years. Clearly it was a spot that many people wanted to visit, despite the danger, to see the view and take a picture. The sensible thing to do is build guardrails at the cliff edge to prevent people from falling. But they decided to block the trail with a warning. And the warning wasn't about potential danger, probably because they thought it might encourage the people who were looking for the view they had seen in pictures. It was a strange response.

Over the years I've noticed similar perverse responses. I remember chuckling about a well-worn path across a lawn on a college campus that students used as a shortcut between sidewalks. The grass was worn away to the soil, which was compacted from regular use and turned muddy when it got wet. It was a blemish on a beautifully maintained lawn. The administration tried for years to dissuade its use by roping it off and erecting signs, but it remained heavily trafficked, for obvious reasons. Finally some bright soul realized that nothing worked and paved the shortcut. Problem solved. Students regularly use the handy shortcut now, the lawn on either side is lush, and the path never gets muddy.

Too bad we don't have more creative problem solvers in government. And fewer people looking down their noses on those who do things that don't affect them.

Florida redistricting complaints are racist

ProPublica posted a review leftist political screed complaining that the redistricting done by Governor Ron DeSantis was racially oriented and illegal.

How Ron DeSantis Blew Up Black-Held Congressional Districts and May Have Broken Florida Law

As with all leftist grievances, the facts don't support the allegations. Before reading the article, which is heavily tinged with racist views of voting and congressional districts, just glance at the voting districts in question before 2022 and in 2022.

Which map looks more obviously gerrymandered? In other words, which one looks like it was drawn to purposely incorporate a large and disproportionate population of a specific racial group in one district? 

The pre-2022 map of District 5 was drawn to include specific parts of one large city (Tallahassee) then stretched across the state to include specific parts of another large city (Jacksonville) over a hundred miles away. Compare that to the districts in the 2022 map which have large contiguous areas that look like they weren't drawn on purpose to overrepresent a specific racial group which also happens to vote for Democrats 90% of the time. For reference, blacks are about 13% of the population of the United States nationally, though they are more concentrated in many big cities. It makes sense that voting districts that have large black populations should also have representation that is higher than the national average but this is definitely "stretching" the point. Heh.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 states:

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

Section 5 allows redistricting as long as it:

does not have the purpose and will not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color

The 2022 districts are clearly legal and also accomplish representation of the higher percentage of blacks living in those districts despite all the complaints in the article. It's astonishing that the Florida Republicans in the majority left the District 5 map alone when it was clearly drawn by the former Democrat majority in a way that favors Democrat candidates. Apparently they haven't learned yet how the Democrat Party has been running circles around them with redistricting and voting procedures that heavily favor Democrat candidates. It's time for them to wake up and even the playing field.

It's interesting that leftists spend so much time viewing the world through the lens of race. The allegations of racism they levy against their political opponents look an awful lot like projection of their own unconscious racism.

Sea Level Perspectives

We are told by the media and other climate alarmists that sea level rise is unprecedented, disastrous, and accelerating, but measurements by tide gauges and satellites show us something completely different. Here is a plot of current (29-year) global sea level rise measured by satellites. (See here for the latest.)

Here is a plot of sea level rise for more than 160 years at Battery Park in Manhattan, New York; one of the longest tide gauge records available anywhere in the world. (See here for the latest.)

Sea level has been rising for roughly 18,000 years since the last glacial maximum when the two-mile-thick glaciers covering huge swaths of North America and northern Europe and Eurasia began to melt. Here is a plot of global sea level over the last 18,000 years.

120 meters of sea level rise is 394 feet. This cycle of global warming and cooling has happened several times over the last million years or so. Here is a reconstruction of sea levels over the last 1.8 million years based on the content of the isotope oxygen-18 in deep ocean sediments.

The important points:

• Global sea level rise and fall has been happening for billions of years.
• The rate of sea level rise and fall changes for numerous reasons, all entirely natural.
• What causes global warming and cooling and the subsequent glacial and interglacial periods isn't fully understood, though Earth's periodic orbital changes over tens of thousands of years is among those postulated to have the greatest effect. 
• The current rate of sea level rise is insignificant when viewed in historical context.
• It is impossible to measure the theorized effect humans have on sea level rise but the rate is so small compared to natural forces as to be inconsequential. 
• Based on measurements, the claims of 0.6 meters or more of sea level rise by 2100 are clearly unrealistic. The current rate measured by satellites suggest about 0.3 meters. It's even less according to the rate measured by tide gauges.

Humans have been dealing with sea level rise for thousands of years. The Dutch and others have successfully protected their land from sea level rise and even reclaimed land from the sea thanks to clever engineering. Humans can adapt to the current rate of sea level rise with the same clever engineering. The cost of doing this is far less than starving the world of fossil fuels and destroying economies in a vain attempt to "stop" global warming.

You can see for yourself what the current rate of satellite measured global sea level rise is at the University of Colorado Sea Level Research Group website.

Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) measured by satellite 

Historical Global Tide Gauge Sea Level

Sea level rise, and sea level decline in many place in the far north, is not uniform. It differs a lot because of land subsidence and uplift (post-glacial rebound). You can easily see it in this interactive map of tide gauge data from NOAA.

Sea Level Trends

The tectonic forces, gravitational perturbations, and even potential influences from beyond our solar system over the eons that shape our planet and its climate and weather are endlessly fascinating, but they happen so slowly that the ingenuity of millions of humans engineering solutions to their local problems can easily adapt to it. Beware of "global" solutions. They are always, without exception, a really bad idea with a plethora of destructive consequences.

GOP is the party of real racial justice

I know that will blow some minds but it's true. Virtually every mainstream media and social media platform has been propagating the theme that Democrats unite Americans and Republicans divide them. It's exactly the opposite.

The Democratic Party has been promoting black subjugation and segregation for over two centuries. Before the Civil War they were the party of slavery. The Republican Party was formed in 1854 specifically to resist the expansion of slavery. Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican President in 1861 and the Republicans gained control of Congress.

After the Republican Party passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution between 1865 and 1870 reinforcing civil rights for black Americans, a large block of the Democratic party continued to denigrate black Americans by instituting Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the South until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in schools and public accommodations was unconstitutional and ordered all states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed" but without an enforcement mechanism. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower proposed a civil rights bill to enforce the order to desegregate. Though they had lost their brief, slim majority in the House and Senate by then, Republicans managed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 over Democratic Party dissent to protect the right to vote, and to establish the Civil Rights Commission and Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 likewise was passed with enthusiastic support from Republicans, far greater than Democrats (see House and Senate vote counts).

Civil Rights Act of 1964

In June 1963 Democratic President John F. Kennedy proposed what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but it was held up in the House Rules Committee by Democrats to prevent it coming to a vote. In August 1963, the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place with Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Five days after Kennedy's assassination in November, newly-installed President Lyndon Johnson urged Congress to push the stalled civil rights bill forward as a legacy to the late President. The Democratic Party had a solid 60% majority in the House and despite their even larger 67% supermajority in the Senate, they didn't have enough votes in their own party to pass it in the Senate. Only 46 of the 67 Democrats in the Senate voted for it. Republicans, ever dedicated to the self-evident truth and American ideal that "all men are created equal," enthusiastically supported the bill while Democrats were bitterly divided over it. Here's the vote tally in the House and the Senate.

House vote

Democrats: 153 yea (60% of Democrats), 91 nay, 2 present, 12 not voting

Republicans: 136 yea (76% of Republicans), 35 nay, 2 present, 5 not voting

Senate vote

Democrats: 46 yea (69% of Democrats), 21 nay

Republicans: 27 yea (82% of Republicans), 6 nay

Republicans were even more supportive of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with 80% of Republicans in the House and 94% in the Senate voting for it, compared to 75% of Democrats in the House and 69% in the Senate.

Change in party affiliation

The Democratic Party's support for labor unions and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's anti-poverty programs began to attract black Americans toward the Democratic Party. The outreach by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the fact that the Democratic Party held both houses of Congress and the Presidency at the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act began to persuade even more black Americans to the Democratic Party, despite the dirty secret that Democrats were less enthusiastic about minority rights than Republicans. The nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate for President in 1964 drove them away en masse from the Republican Party. Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act (21 Democrat senators voted against it). Though a supporter of civil rights who had voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act, his declaration that he voted against the 1964 Act because he thought it was unconstitutional was dismissed. The Democrat Party misrepresented it for political purposes as Republicans suppressing minority rights, despite the obviously better voting record of Republicans than Democrats. They succeeded in promoting the lie and drove a wedge between Republicans and black voters that has lasted to this day.

Over the next 60 years, Democratic Party politicians pandered to blacks by dangling legislative trinkets that amounted to essentially nothing. The bulk of the work to secure equal rights and opportunities for racial minorities had already been done by Republicans. Those legislative trinkets that did pass resulted in disastrous social changes for urban black communities and generational dependency on government handouts which weren't modified in any meaningful way until the Republican House and Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 to reform the welfare system.

While Republicans have long sought the goal of being "color blind" and treating all Americans equally, the Democrats continued to view Americans through the lens of race. In the modern era Democrats have adopted a "soft bigotry" of low expectations and race-based college-admissions. They are attempting to eradicate voter ID laws supposedly to "help" black voters who Democrats think can't get a photo ID. Their platform is centered on a social theory that segregates people by race and other categories and promotes the idea that white people are inherently racist. They inflame racial grievances, especially against the police, promote false narratives of racial inequity in arrests and incarcerations, and have celebrated thugs and criminals and denigrated accomplished black Republicans like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Their supposed "compassion" for blacks looks awfully condescending.

Republicans continue to promote policies that measurably improve the lives of black people instead of offering platitudes and unfulfilled promises. Here are a few recent ones:

• School choice that allows parents to move their kids out of underperforming schools. This is very popular with urban parents and is supported by 76% of black Americans.

• Prioritizing a strong economy and ending onerous government regulations to allow the business sector to grow and provide jobs, which has resulted in the lowest unemployment rate for minorities in U.S. history, 5.1%. See also here.

• Strengthening police forces and budgets to better patrol crime-ridden urban neighborhoods and reduce crime.

President Donald Trump has signed laws and executive orders and initiated other plans to improve educational and business opportunities for black Americans and economic prospects for poor people. All of this has been noticed by black Americans who are increasingly throwing their support to him as they distance themselves from decades of failed promises and policies by Democrats.

If you would like a copy of this graphic to print as a 24" x 18" yard sign, you can download the PDF file here and submit it to a print shop.