The Supreme Court struck down some of EPA's rules regulating the discharge of treated sewage. The rules allegedly enforced the Clean Water Act. In a 5-4 decision, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing to join three progressive justices, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA can't play Humpty Dumpty and say the legal standard "means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

It started when the EPA fined the City of San Francisco nearly $10 billion because of alleged violations of its sewage discharge into the Pacific Ocean. There were $313 million in assessed fines and about $10.6 billion in mandated upgrades to its treatment plant. San Francisco did not deny that the EPA had the authority to police sewage discharge; its objection was that the standards were so vague that the city could not meet them because they were forever shifting.

“We simply want to understand our prohibition limits so we can comply with them,” Tara M. Steeley, the San Francisco deputy city attorney, told the justices.

This is how Justice Alito described the situation in his opinion.

Instead, this case involves provisions that do not spell out what a permittee must do or refrain from doing; rather, they make a permittee responsible for the quality of the water in the body of water into which the permittee discharges pollutants. When a permit contains such requirements, a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards. For convenience, we will call such provisions “end-result” requirements. //

This case marks the latest entrant in the list of court cases that roll back the incredible authority that the EPA has arrogated to itself to manage the US economy.

anon-maty
an hour ago
Culturally, Russia and Russians are much more akin to Europeans than Asians. The royal families of all of old Europe were intermarried. Russians can arguably be said to have a penchant for strong rulers, sometimes to their detriment, see Stalin, Josef.
Putin is one as well. He and Russia may not be our friends. Yet. But they are not the enemy.
The enemy are the globalists. The EU. The UN. The WHO. The World Bank. Every central bank in the world.
These are the enemies of people everywhere.
Perpetual war.
Perpetual debt.
Perpetual suffering, poverty and death.
There are two teams. But they are not liberal (modern sense of the word) and conservative.
They are free and slave.
Think about who wants 15 minute cities. Think about who wants you disarmed.
Think about who wants your speech censored or prohibited altogether.
Think about who wants to erase family, God, country and tradition.
If you do you'll realize it isn't the big bad Russians. It's the financiers and governments dependent upon them, puppets on strings.

FamilyShield is a special service offered by OpenDNS distinct from our standard packages. Meant for home users who want to keep their children from seeing inappropriate images on their computers, FamilyShield will always block domains categorized in our system as Tasteless, Proxy/Anonymizer, Sexuality, or Pornography. Unlike our standard Home service, you don't need a registered network to use FamilyShield, and it's just as easy to configure. If you have any questions on FamilyShield not answered here, feel free to open up a support ticket or ask in the forums.

To use FamilyShield, you should set your DNS server entries as: 208.67.222.123 and 208.67.220.123.  On our website, you may notice that OpenDNS' DNS servers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220, but these do not apply to FamilyShield customers. 

"Every single thing was clockwork... We got some Moon dust on our boots." //

Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial company to make a picture-perfect landing on the Moon early Sunday, touching down on an ancient basaltic plain, named Mare Crisium, to fulfill a $101 million contract with NASA.

The lunar lander, called Blue Ghost, settled onto the Moon's surface at 2:34 am CST (3:34 am EST; 08:34 UTC). A few dozen engineers in Firefly's mission control room monitored real-time data streaming down from a quarter-million miles away.

Of course, many women who aren’t expecting a positive pregnancy test do experience all those feelings. It’s compassionate to meet women and their emotions where they’re at. But not once does Natural Cycles balance its we-understand-this-is-the-worst-thing-to-ever-happen-to-you attitude with Hey, this might not be what you were expecting, but your baby is worth celebrating, and you can do this!

Instead, it apologetically admits “the sad truth is that any sexually active woman is always at risk of pregnancy.”

The sad truth? That’s how human sexuality is designed, guys! You’re not actually pro-woman or body-positive if you think the procreative nature of sex and a woman’s natural ability to bear children are a “sad truth.”

Alternatives to hormonal contraceptives are appealing because they recognize a woman’s cycle is an amazing, intricate design to be understood, not suppressed with synthetic hormones. But treating the biological fact that sex creates babies as a bad thing sends women the same message that pumping them with carcinogenic pills and abortion drugs does.

There’s a huge market for a hormone-free alternative like Natural Cycles among pro-life women who want to avoid the anti-birth industry and its risks to their health. For Natural Cycles to shove abortion propaganda in their faces isn’t just bad business, it’s also insulting.

By promoting abortion, Natural Cycles is buying into the same lie as the pharmaceutical contraceptive industry: that women’s bodies and their potential for baby production are a problem. Even worse, it’s ensuring that one of the first reactions an expecting mother receives about her new baby is “here’s how to get rid of it.”

Every baby and every pregnancy deserves to be celebrated. The sad truth is that Natural Cycles doesn’t see it that way.

The federal response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and Tennessee could have been easily mistaken for a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing. The White House ignored the storm damage in Appalachia, taking over a week to even acknowledge it existed. //

The slow-rolling of repairs on I-40 appeared to be just another part of the plan to depopulate North Carolina's Appalachian region and flip the state from purple to bright blue. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who'd already displayed his particular brand of incompetence by taking "paternity leave" (lol) and the Third World response to a container ship dropping the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, said, "It will take billions of dollars and months, if not years" to reopen I-40. //

The newly opened road section does have speed restrictions and can't be used by trucks with oversized loads, but that will gradually improve. For the time being, the communities and businesses along I-40 have a functioning highway.

Officials estimate it will take another two to three years to fully restore I-40 to its original four-lane capacity. However, this timeline is contingent on several factors, including material availability and weather conditions.

It could take that long if enough governmental entities drag their feet. I'd just point out that it didn't take three years to build this section of I-40 during its original construction in 1958.

EU member states bought €21.9bn (£18.1bn) of Russian oil and gas in the third year of the war, according to estimates from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea), despite the efforts under way to kick the continent’s addiction to the fuels that fund Vladimir Putin’s war chest.

The amount is one-sixth greater than the €18.7bn the EU allocated to Ukraine in financial aid in 2024, according to a tracker from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).

Dear Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences @TheAcademy: “Reagan” is a historic biopic. Were they supposed to include made-up characters? //

Fan-favorite presidential biopic “Reagan” has been disqualified from consideration for the Best Picture Oscar this year — because it failed to meet the judges’ DEI requirements.

The movie, starring Dennis Quaid as the Republican president, couldn’t hit any of the criteria that the Academy for Motion Pictures requires of Best Picture nominations, including that their casts be at least 30% from traditionally underrepresented groups such as minorities, women and the LGBTQ community.

“By these new rules, many previous winners would never have been recognized,” said “Reagan” screenwriter Howard A. Klausner to The Post. //

“We were among 116 films that were eliminated for consideration this year,” Klausner said as the famed awards ceremony was set to be held Sunday evening. “Obviously, there needs to be a conversation about this policy.”

In observing the trajectory of Western civilization over the past 70 years, one is hard-pressed to honestly assess that the modern global order has truly been good for mankind. Rather than ending warfare, it has spread fighting far beyond the realms of land and sea combat to mass informational war and lawfare waged both internationally and domestically among our fellow citizens.

Decades of American involvement in wars overseas have desensitized Westerners and their militaries. In the U.S., we hear choruses about willingness to die for freedom. Yet when tyrants violate the freedoms of U.S. citizens on American soil, the allegedly brave roll over. “To the guns for Ukraine,” we hear… though we never see those who sport "I stand with Ukraine" iconography deploy to the fight. //

In a just world, Vladimir Putin would be driven from office and sent to the gallows. But his evil nature does not by default bequeath the character of George Washington on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. //

Unlike much of the current "Give war a chance"/Ukraine flag as social media banner mob, I went to war. It's not pleasant. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman rightly described combat as a cruelty that cannot be refined. Thus, it is right that we should seek the option of armed conflict as a last resort—that if war must be waged, we should fully commit to overwhelming force to bring it to an end and work to expeditiously restore peace and ordered liberty. Those who insist on the necessity of a prolonged conflict to "defeat Russia" often fail to recognize the moral costs of such an approach. War should always be a last resort, and when it is waged, it should aim for an expedient resolution. Yet, in the case of Ukraine, many are advocating for a war of attrition that sacrifices human lives—on both sides—in the hope of a political outcome that seems increasingly distant.

Russia was unjustified in starting this war. The U.S. has been unjustified in merely prolonging it. If lawmakers want to argue that American interests are at stake and that destiny demands that the U.S. fight in Ukraine, let them make the case to the public and follow the constitutional rules for committing America to the fight. Otherwise, the choices are to sit this one out, or use the other instruments of national power to help negotiate a lasting peace. But waging proxy war of attrition against fellow human beings who have not lifted a finger against Americans—without a clear victory strategy—does not place us on the moral high ground.

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Elon Musk reposted
More Births
@MoreBirths
A Pronatal Culture is the Clearest Path to Solving the Birthrate Crisis
Many worry that we won't be able to solve the low fertility crisis without terrible costs on society. Some fear women will lose access to birth control and abortion, like in Ceaușescu's Romania.Ceau Others imagine a religious theocracy as in The Handmaids Tale.
A slightly better possibility is the Scandinavian model, where significant sums are spent on subsidies for children. That's not a bad idea. But it seems to take big spending for only modest increases in fertility. Norway, Sweden and Finland all have a fertility rate below 1.5 anyway.
There is a way to solve the fertility crisis that is compatible with reproductive choice, reasonable government spending and a broadly freedom-oriented society. What is that? A society that priorities having children as one of the highest values.
Don't all societies do that? No, it's actually pretty rare in the modern world. Israel and Mongolia are two examples of countries that achieve healthy birthrates through a directly pronatal culture.
In December I wrote "Understanding High Israeli Fertility" about the only rich country with above-replacement fertility.
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1870911221630685465
In August I wrote, "Elevating the Status of Motherhood Solves Low Birthrates" about how Mongolia achieves triple the fertility of its neighbors with the help of national celebrations of motherhood. (The top image shows a Mongolian mother of four receiving the Order of Maternal Glory award, at the presidential palace in Ulaanbaatar.)
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1827418468813017441
That thread went viral thanks to @ElonMusk.
Both of these countries solve the fertility crisis in the most straightforward way possible. The fact that society needs more children is communicated openly and sincerely, over many years so that everyone in society understands. Having children became not just a personal choice but a national cause.
Building society-wide pronatal belief may not be easy. But that has to be the foundation of any successful pronatal strategy.
What is so great about having children as a national goal? A lot of things:
(1) It is honest about what society needs from people.
Society needs children and will fall apart without them. Most countries aren't willing to openly say it, but nations that do say it, and have a sense of national identity, can see profound results. //

Having children may bring happiness to adults, but so can fine dining and travel to beautiful places. Why should someone choose the first one which is hard instead of the latter two, which are easy? Are we willing to make the ask, to say we need people to have more children?

(2) A pronatal culture makes parenthood and especially motherhood higher status. //

(6) A pronatal culture solves fertility simply, mainly by getting existing parents to have more kids!
One the few examples of a country that went from below replacement fertility to above is Kazakhstan, whose TFR went from 1.8 in 2000 to 3.0 today. It did it much like Mongolia did, by celebrating motherhood and directly urging people to have more children for a brighter future.
What happened in Kazakhstan? First order births hardly changed but third, fourth and fifth+ births rocketed upward.

This has to be the easiest solution! People who aren't ready for kids don't have to have them. Those who already have kids just choose to have more!
Guess what: That is also how the Patriarch of Georgia got his country to raise its birthrate, by persuading parents to have more.

Justin Murphy @jmrphy
The NYT this morning criticized Elon Musk's call to impeach federal judges, accusing him of violating constitutional norms. Well, I looked into the data and it's insane: We stopped impeaching federal judges, despite having more of them now than ever!

The impeachment rate now seems implausibly low.

Either federal judges have become saints, or something is suppressing impeachments.

What is the probability we'd observe zero impeachments from 2011-2024? Using the Poisson distribution, I think it's somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it's very fishy.

What's even crazier is that there is a clear political story behind all of this.

The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred.

Democrat Senator Chris Murphy (CT) and presumably others encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to reject the prospect of a peace deal without so-called "security guarantees" (a euphemism for American military commitments) just before the now-infamous Oval Office blow-out. //

One of the big questions was how we even arrived at that point. What caused Zelensky to walk into the White House with the sense that he could bully Trump in front of the press and scoff at any diplomatic negotiations? A post made by Murphy gives the game away.

Chris Murphy 🟧

@ChrisMurphyCT
·
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Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine.
4:15 PM · Feb 28, 2025. //

Chris Murphy isn't going to be writing Ukraine a check. All he and his cohorts can do is virtue-signal, and that's not winning any battles against Russia. If things are going to be patched up with the Trump White House, Zelensky has to accept that reality and stop believing that he can bully his way to American military commitments by appealing to the press and Democrats.

Trump will only recoil further at that, and he is never going to set up any "security guarantees" that result in U.S. troops fighting Russia. There's still a path for Zelensky to get much-needed aid for his country, but he has to stop operating like it's still 2022, and the first step in that is to stop listening to Democrats who can not help him. //

Soundwave
2 hours ago
The Democrats are vile. Willing to sacrifice the Ukrainians to the Russian meat grinder just to “embarrass” Trump. They disgust me.

As for the Europeans. Feel free to fund the war without us. Let’s see how long you losers last without us paying for your defense. //

Political-Paige
2 hours ago
My question is: what was the end-goal of the Dem interference?
Was it just to create an embarrassment for Trump? If so, that failed. Trump isn't at all embarrassed, and Zelensky was unceremoniously kicked out of the White House.
Was it to assure WW III for their donors? If so, that failed. We aren't engaging.
Was it to get even more freebies for Ukraine? Why? And if so, wow: was that ever a failure.
Or was it simply to interfere for the sake of interference, because they've been rendered irrelevant and need some pretense to power?
I think the last one is most likely.

RedStater In a Blue Apocalypse Political-Paige
9 minutes ago edited
...to interfere for the sake of throwing mud at the wall at every thing they see as an opportunity to oppose. Undermine any successes that Trump could achieve, whether they miscalculate or not.

...because this is what a panicked crew does on a rapidly sinking ship.

They have nothing left to lose.

For John Morgan, the sky has never just been a career—it’s been a lifelong journey. A journey that has taken him from the left seat of a Cherokee 140 at age 17 to the controls of the world’s last Douglas DC-8 flying humanitarian missions around the world.

As recently as two years ago, there were five operational Douglas DC-8s around the world. Sadly, with the retirement of NASA’s DC-8 last April, N782SP became the sole operational DC-8 after more than five decades of service. Between 1958 and 1972, 556 DC-8s were built at Douglas’ (later McDonnell Douglas) Long Beach, Calif. factory.

That makes John a member of a very elite club in aviation today.

So this really could have been and should have been a positive moment for Ukraine. And then we go to further negotiating with the Russians, bring this war to an end, and, and move the world forward, stop the death and destruction.

But instead, what became clear, and I think what has the president so, uh, so frustrated, and frankly angry, is that it's not clear that Zelensky truly wants to stop the fighting. And he came in, even though he was warned not to, determined to litigate all that in front of the entire world. And the vice president said enough is enough, the president said enough is enough, and I gotta tell you, this was the wrong approach, wrong time in history, and definitely, the wrong president to try to do this kind of thing. This was not Joe Biden, this was Donald J. Trump. I think the entire world saw that, crystal clear. //

If President Zelensky did, for some indecipherable reason, wish to prolong this conflict, what would he have done differently on Friday? //

anon-fht2
9 hours ago edited
If Molly Hemingway is correct, it WAS an ambush, for Trump. Zelensky has supposedly been in communication wth a Democrat/Deep State team that included Rice, Blinken, and others inluding “somoness” from CIA, DHS, and DoD. According to Hemingway, the operative assumption was that Zelensky would embarass Trump. Trump, anxious to save the deal, would capitulate to Zelensky in the public broadcast, destroying his credibility.

If true, this is treason on the part of Rice, Blinken, and the other Obama gang of idiots involved.

It also proves that a massacre in all the agencies is going to be required to root out resisrance collaborators, with sugnificant penitentiary time placed on some worthy exampples to encourage others to turn. This is a war and to lose is to put Americans in place as no longer citizens , but subjects of the bureaucracy. 2 million plus in th4 government bureaucracy; if a quarter of that still exists a year from now the Deep State will just keep coming back.

One could argue that Arizona Senator and 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was the pre-Reagan. He was one of the early champions of today's conservatism, of small government and low taxes. He famously said:

“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”. //

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan famously said. No doubt he believed it.

Donald Trump is doing something about it. //

Ron Paul has been happy about this. On February 7, he wrote glowingly, “DOGE is ripping through the federal government like a tornado. This morning it has been reported that DOGE sent out firing notices to 9,400 USAID employees, leaving only 611.”

“Democratic politicians are furious, of course. But we hope that when it’s all said and done, ALL politicians, Democrat AND Republican, are furious with DOGE,” he added.

“Then we will know that it was a job well done for the American people.”

Per the CDC, here are the following cases/outbreaks for the last few years. (Per the CDC, an outbreak is defined as three or more related cases.)

2024- 285 cases reported in 33 jurisdictions
2023- 59 cases reported in 20 jurisdictions
2022- 121 cases in 6 jurisdictions
2021- 49 cases among 5 jurisdictions
2020- 13 cases among 8 jurisdictions
2019- 1,274 cases (amongst 31 states)

https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html#:~:text=Measles%20cases%20in%202024&text=There%20have%20been%2016%20outbreaks,59)%20were%20outbreak%2Dassociated.

CNN asked HHS whether the secretary recommends people get the measles vaccine. The agency responded with, "Vaccination remains the best defense against measles infection."

Now here we are, he's trying to bring an end to this conflict, we've explained very clearly what our plan is here, which is we want to get the Russians to the negotiating table, we want to explore whether peace is possible.

They understand this. They also understand that this agreement that was supposed to be signed today was supposed to be an agreement that binds America economically to Ukraine, which to me, as I've explained it, I think the president alluded to today, is a security guarantee in its own way, because we're now involved, it's us, it's our interests. //

I've asked people, what is the European plan to end this war? I can tell you of one foreign minister told me, I'm not going to say who it was, but I can tell you what one of them told me, and that is that the war goes on for another year, and at that point Russia will feel so weakened, that they'll beg for a peace. That's another year of killing, another year of dying, another year of destruction, and by the way, not a very realistic plan in my point of view. //

It takes two sides to end a war, but only one side to perpetuate one. Ending this affair will require both Ukraine and Russia to come to the table. Once the shooting stops, then the parties involved can start talking about how to prevent a recurrence in a year, a decade, or a century hence. But first, the shooting has to stop.

OrneryCoot
4 hours ago
Zelensky failed to realize that Trump WAS giving him a real, tangible security guarantee. He was promising American shoes (not boots) on the ground in the form of American workers and executives to work the mineral deal. I think he doesn't realize just how far Trump would take that responsibility to protect those American workers. The first time Putin endangered those citizens would have brought him a whole lot of pain. Putin knows this about Trump, which would have stopped him from trying it. No, they weren't soldiers. With our country, it didn't need to be. Zelensky had what he wanted but couldn't realize it due to his arrogance and basic misunderstanding of American culture. Now, he's left to either squeeze blood out of Europe's turnip of military might, or be replaced by a less narcissistic Ukrainian leader.

If you’ve got an old Kindle laying around, you may be interested in this write-up from [Hemant] that shows a practical example of how the popular e-reader can be pushed into service as a weather dashboard.

Obsidian has made managing my work significantly easier
For someone who struggles with organization, it really helps

There are a lot of note-taking apps out there that I've tried, but Obsidian is the first to have finally captured me. I don't need overly complex notes, I just need something to help me keep track of my day-to-day life... and this finally does it for me in a way no other app has before. //

CJ
Key features:

• Sync across devices
• Data control of your files/data
• Ease of dropping a note from your phone or desktop
• Ability to organize your notes based on your method

I feel like the author was trying to convey they chose a new note taking methodology that worked for him.

You can apply a note taking methodology to anything, including the trusty pocket notebook.

This author chose a new methodology and chose to use obsidian. That's it. Not that obsidian is better at note taking apps.

So far for the literal speed to note taking onenote and Trello seem to be the winners. They also sync flawlessly. There may be other apps too.

All that being said, you can make a mess of your notes in any app too.