February 25, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SEE ALSO “WHITE SUPREMACY.”

Posted at 6:34 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CULTURE:

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM: Cuba Becomes The First Country To Reach Net Zero. Shouldn’t We Be Celebrating?

There it was on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times: with a small assist from the United States, the island nation of Cuba has almost entirely ended the use of fossil fuels. Finally, we have the first country in the world to achieve the climate movement’s Holy Grail and nirvana — Net Zero! Or at least a very close approximation. This should be cause for a huge celebration.

You would think that the Times, which has been demanding the elimination of fossil fuels for at least a couple of decades, would be leading the celebrations. But weirdly, now that Cuba has finally shown the way, the Times chooses to put a completely different spin on the achievement. The headline and subheadline are (print edition): “U.S. Choking Oil Deliveries To Cuba Ports; Military Action Brings a Nation to Its Knees.”

The piece reports that the Trump administration is helping Cuba to achieve Net Zero by preventing oil tankers from landing there. Somehow in this piece, that is spun as a bad thing. It has brought Cuba “to its knees.”

The funny thing is that here in the U.S., it was just over a year ago that we had President Biden and an administration full of zealous environmentalists who were using every governmental power at their disposal to force Americans to stop using fossil fuels. By Executive Order 14057 of December 8, 2021, Biden had directed all federal agencies to pursue an aggressive “all of government” operation to achieve “net zero” on an accelerated schedule. Goals number 1 and 2 from that EO are “100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity on a net annual basis by 2030,” and “100 percent zero-emission vehicle acquisitions by 2035.” In 2023, the Department of Transportation released a “Blueprint” for eliminating all carbon emissions from the transportation sector. In 2024 EPA released a plan to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity generation. Similar initiatives were everywhere in the government.

Presumably, Trump helping Cuba reach Net Zero has the backing of the German Greens, who dusted off the Morgenthau Plan to return Deutschland to the Dark Ages,  Scientific American, and Kamala Harris:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

“THERE’S NOTHING MORE PATHETIC THAN AN AGING HIPSTER,” AS DR. EVIL ONCE SAID: Here’s Why U2, Springsteen Joined Anti-ICE ‘Resistance.’ “One look at recent Legacy Media outlets should reveal part of the answer. The rockers are generating endless headlines across the digital landscape.”

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

ROGER SIMON SCORES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Sigmund Freud Analyzes the SOTU.

RS: And when President Trump said of the Democrats, “These people are crazy!”… What did you think of that?

SF: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

RS: You’ve said that before.

SF: In another context, yes.

RS: So you think they are crazy. How’d that happen?

SF: From what I called “the narcissism of small differences.”

RS: Which is?

SF: A common enough occurrence at many dinner tables. Family members, wittingly or not, gradually assert positions—not all that different from those of the others, but enough—from their own egotistical needs and desires, with the deliberately obscured intention of singling themselves out, of taking control, and continue to do so over time until the original normative family position changes, sometimes for the better but more often for the worse.

RS: You’re saying this is the same pattern but writ large?

SF: Indeed… and with possibly catastrophic results. What was, not so long ago, your Democratic Party is pretty much what your Republican Party is today. Social programs and reforms that originally made some sense kept expanding, when a number of Democrats, impelled by this form of narcissism, demanded more and more, building on each other, until reaching the absurdities we see today in the realms of sexuality and identity, among others, that depart from any version of reality and make their holders seem, well, “crazy,” as Donald Trump put it in layman’s terms.… No doubt you read Carlyle on the French Revolution. It’s the prototype.

RS: Democrats are today’s Jacobins?

SF: So far, no guillotines, but beware… Unfortunately, the Republicans aren’t much better, only on the margins. Your entire Congress reeks of corruption. You can even smell it up here.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:41 pm by Ed Driscoll

JD VANCE REVEALS WHAT HE SAW FROM DEMOCRATS DURING THE STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH THAT MOST VIEWERS DIDN’T:

“First of all, obviously, most Democrats didn’t stand up or clap, and what a shame that is,” Vance said. “What a sad commentary that is on the Democratic Party, that the idea that the American government should stand for American citizens, not illegal aliens. That shouldn’t be controversial, but apparently it was to the Democrats.”

But that wasn’t all.

But I will say, Bill, something that I saw that probably most TV viewers didn’t see was really the cowardice, because there were a few Democrats who sort of politely clapped. They didn’t want to stand up. I guess maybe they were worried about being primaried by the far-left fringe of their party. But they were all looking around. They weren’t actually saying, you know what, I’m going to stand and support this because this is a common-sense, obvious statement. They were all looking around for cues from their colleagues, because they didn’t have the courage to stand on their own.

The pattern continued even as the president introduced his guests, many of whom were hailed as American heroes. They deserved immediate applause, yet several received only muted or delayed reactions from the Democratic side of the chamber. Whether that hesitation stemmed from, as Vice President Vance suggested, fear of a far-left primary challenge or from an entrenched refusal to celebrate anything associated with the president remains an open question.

Perhaps the port side of the aisle were simply too dazzled by the appearance of the man behind Trump:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

ALMOST HUMAN: