“Remember the Paris Agreement? Signed a decade ago today, it was hailed as a historic milestone in the fight against climate change, with practically every country promising drastic action to keep global warming below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. And, at the time, the stakes couldn’t have felt higher. As Western politicians and activists endlessly warned, unless carbon emissions were urgently and drastically reduced by 2030, climate change would have apocalyptic consequences, potentially extinguishing humanity — if not all life on Earth. … Ten years on, then, one cannot help but ask: did the Paris Agreement, and the broader UN Conference of the Parties (COP) process, actually achieve anything?” (04/21/26)
“It’s a proud day for American toughness! Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has officially done away with the U.S. military’s WOKE flu vaccine mandate, and I applaud that decision from the bed I currently can’t get out of due to a high fever. TRUE warfighters know their lethality is only enhanced by bacterial pneumonia, and soft and so-called proven public health tools like vaccines are for weenies. Simply put, the libs will never understand that a fever is just God warming your body for the battle ahead.” (04/21/26)
“[Douglas] Kelley was brought in to assess the 22 Nazis charged with various war crimes and crimes against humanity to assess their mental health to see if they were fit to stand trial. It’s an engrossing story And even though we know the substance of the story, the horrors of the holocaust and the death sentences accorded eleven of the defendants, the reality of this horrific time in history is brought home with the documentary footage of the liberation of the extermination camps. They were shown at the original trial in 1946 and are shown in the film [Nuremberg]. But the bulk of the movie and the focus of the story is the relationship between Kelley and the prisoners. Kelley, a well-credentialed very knowledgeable psychiatrist, set out to find out what made these Nazis tick.” (04/21/26)
“I am not a catastrophist when it comes to artificial intelligence. But, given Norway’s experience with iPads — or our own with smartphones — I worry that the mass introduction of AI, particularly in schools, will be very bad for children. As a curmudgeon and as a writer, I hate nearly all of the cliches about children, even the ones that are accurate. With that caveat, it’s simply true that children are the future. They will be the next generation of parents, voters and citizens. And all of the cliches about how kids learn by doing are true. AI removes the doing. Just as you can’t learn how to ride a bike from reading a book, you can’t get the benefits of reading by asking AI to read a book for you. The same holds for math, science, computer programming and nearly every other aspect of education.” (04/21/26)
“Of course, no one wants an overbearing church, like the 12th-century papacy, locked in a bloody struggle with secular authorities. We are not calling for heavies to chase after archbishops, or Keir Starmer, like Henry II, to be whipped by monks through the streets of Canterbury in his underclothes for his manifold offences (the prime minister would surely find such a prospect displeasing). But spats like that between Trump and Leo show that the church is contributing to political debate in a way that other actors are not able to manage. The frequent fury directed towards the church and Christian advocates demonstrates that their messages – even in this apparently post-Christian age – are still able to pique the conscience.” (04/21/26)
“In 2020, news of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin swept the nation. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which had been formed seven years earlier in response to the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, saw a massive re-emergence. Protests were held across the country, including in conservative and rural areas. Governments were faced with calls to “defund the police,” re-evaluate policing strategies, and hold police officers and departments accountable. That year, the Boston Police Department (BPD) saw $12 million of its funding reallocated to community programs and police reforms. This of course was a drop in the bucket of the department’s $404 million (now over $430 million) in overall funding at the time. In addition, Boston officials created the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, which was supposed to receive and investigate reports of police misconduct. But this project has seen little success.” (04/22/26)
“Over ninety years ago, muckraking author Upton Sinclair ran a failed campaign to become California’s governor in 1934. He later recounted the experience in his very forgettable book, except for one quote, ‘I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked.’ The one quote that stands out in Sinclair’s account of his campaign stumping is this one: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!’ There is perhaps no better quote to understand California’s politicians.” (04/21/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Nancy Gallagher, Clay Ramsay, & Samuel Hickey
“Nobody should be surprised that the war launched on February 28 did not accelerate anti-government protests in Iran. The survey we fielded soon after the Twelve-Day War showed signs it had a rally-around-the-flag effect. Trump also had pre-war warnings from the intelligence community that his assumptions about the Iranian public’s response were flawed. After weeks of bombing, Reuters reported that U.S. intelligence saw no imminent regime collapse. CISSM’s polling consistently finds real discontent in Iran. But Iranian discontent is not America’s to command. The favorable minority in our polling is more outward-looking, more skeptical of the domestic order, more favorable toward American people, and more interested in diplomacy than the rest of the public. But it is not a regime-change base waiting for Washington’s signal.” (04/21/26)
“No hijackings. No bombings. No ‘national security’ related hostage situations. Just life, as usual, minus paying out big bucks for a useless bureaucracy that we got along just fine without from 1789 through 2002 … and can clearly get along just fine without now. Even starting a war with Iran wasn’t enough to give DHS anything visibly productive to do. Political and media hysteria over supposed ‘Iranian sleeper cells’ quickly dissipated after it turned out that those cells either don’t exist or didn’t set their alarm clocks. Any sane policy discussion, at this point, should center around how quickly DHS can be defunded permanently and abolished entirely.” (04/21/26)
“Escalation is unfortunately quite likely because the president and his allies don’t understand how to do anything else. Whenever they encounter resistance, they assume that the answer is always more pressure, more threats, more attacks. It never occurs to them that they are destroying any incentive that the Iranians might have to compromise. Like every mindless hawk before them, they believe that they will win if they just inflict more pain. They can’t fathom that other nations might value their dignity and independence highly enough that surrender is not an option. It is the same morally and stategically bankrupt approach that has failed the U.S. many times before, and it will fail again here.” (04/21/26)
