Good Thursday, March 26, 2026, to you. Among other things, it’s Major League Baseball’s opening day, National Spinach Day, and Purple Day for Epilepsy.
And yes, you caught me yesterday. I said it was Tuesday when it was actually Wednesday, yesterday. Until yesterday, I had a faux digital clock that used film strips to display the time and day. I kept it around because I’ve had it for many years, since the 70’s in fact. The “Day” strip mechanism failed. It was still displaying “Tuesday” as I wrote yesterday’s column. As a result, I spent a good deal of yesterday afternoon reprogramming and repurposing an old cell phone to be a clock. (Shrug) It’s free and deadly accurate as well, since I have it tied to the Navy’s Nuclear clock. I’m betting it will be a conversation piece. One of these days, I’ve got to compile things you can do to make old tech like that useful again.
1484: William Caxton prints his translation of Aesop’s Fables.
1820: Future Mormon church leader Joseph Smith has his “First Vision” in a wooded area of New York, according to Mormon scholars.
1885: Eastman Film Co manufactures the first commercial motion picture film.
1910: The U.S. forbids immigration to criminals, anarchists, paupers, and the sick.
1936: Corning Glass Works ships a 200″ telescope lens from New York to Cal Tech. At the time, it was the largest mirror in existence.
1937: For National Spinach Day, spinach growers of Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue of Popeye.
1945: Allies led by the U.S. Marine Corps secure the island of Iwo Jima from the Imperial Japanese Army, after 18,000 Japanese & 6,000 Americans were killed.
1953: Dr. Jonas Salk announces that he has successfully tested a vaccine to prevent polio, and clinical trials begin the following year.
1976: Queen Elizabeth II sent out the first royal email, from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment.
1980: Bombay hosts its first rock concert in 10 years, featuring The Police.
1999: A jury in Michigan finds Dr. Jack Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder for administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man.
Birthdays today include: Robert Frost; Duncan Hines; Guccio Gucci, Italian founder of Gucci fashion house; Viktor Frankl, Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor; Tennessee Williams; Gen. William Westmoreland; Strother Martin, American actor; Sandra Day O’Connor; Leonard Nimoy; James Caan; Nancy Pelosi; Bob Woodward, American author and investigative reporter; and Diana Ross.
If today is your day, too, have a good one!
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Much has been written, and much has been said about the EV debacle — that the automakers have been dumping billions into the government-mandated shift from gasoline power to battery power, only to find that the resulting vehicles are not selling nearly enough to cover the cost of the tooling and new technology research. It would be a narrow-minded sort who wasn’t wondering if all of this wasn’t designed specifically to cripple these United States. The list of ills to befall us if we didn’t agree to the draconian restrictions they offered sounded like the Ghostbusters:
Peter Venkman: Well, you can believe Mr. Pecker…
Walter Peck: My name is “Walter Peck.”
Peter Venkman: …or you could accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor Lenny: What do you mean? Biblical?
Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor. Real wrath-of-God type stuff!
Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Egon Spengler: 40 years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes!
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!
That’s what they told us would happen if we didn’t follow the government’s dictates and what caused us to march down the road that essentially has eliminated Detroit automakers and priced any new car on the road well out of the reach of Joe and Jane Average, and much, much more.
America isn’t alone, of course. We saw during Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament the other day, Keir Starmer properly taking serious heat even from his own MP’s for not opening up the North Sea Oil ranges. He, of course, is on board with the Climate Change scare mongers with their “Net Zero” nonsense. Conservative Woman UK says:
Ed Miliband has finally let the cat out of the bag. It has nothing to do with lower prices, as he has claimed in the past – prices have risen year by year because of Net Zero. And it has nothing to do with energy security either, which he is happy to farm out to China. He told MPs last week that the biggest threat is the so-called climate crisis.
Saner people disagree. With the world in the middle of an energy crisis and Middle East oil and gas stuck the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, they argue that we should be making the most of our own reserves of the stuff below the North Sea. Even the Climate Change Committee accepts that we will still need oil and gas for years to come, and lots of it.
And then we see California’s Gov/ Newsom trying to block oil and gas operations in his state, which President Donald Trump has bypassed. Of course, now, California is suing Trump over it. The New York Post suggests that California is heading for collapse. I think that’s right, without a very quick turnabout, and perhaps the state still won’t be able to recover from the damage.
Gavin Newsom’s green agenda and global oil turmoil will risk sending California’s gas prices above a wallet-crushing $8 a gallon — potentially returning drivers to the desperate fuel rationing not seen since the 1970s, state lawmakers and industry experts warned.
With drivers in the Golden State already facing the highest gas prices in the US, Southern California state Sen. Suzette Valladares has urged the governor to scrap California’s cap-and-invest program that charges oil makers for carbon emissions. She dubbed Newsom’s program the “cap-and-tax” scheme, and warned that closing any further oil refineries in the state could trigger economic collapse.
No kidding. You’ll recall that Chevron just pulled out of California. A report on that point by WSPA suggests what’s been lost by pushing Chevron out:
- 536,770 jobs in California are supported by the oil and gas industry. That’s enough people to fill both NFL stadiums in California almost 4 times.
- $338 billion was the industry’s total economic contribution to California’s economy in 2022.
- $64.3 billion was contributed in local, state, and federal tax revenue to support schools, roads, public safety, and other vital services.
If you really wanted to cripple our economy, how would you act differently?
Not that any of this is new, of course. We’ve been allowing leftist governments to raise the cost and complexity of our transportation, our stoves, our washers and dryers, how we heat our homes, every use of electric power, literally everything for generations now. Tim Graham over at NewsBusters properly notes:
The “climate emergency” pushers have pompously predicted planetary doom within ten years for more than 30 year Why are they never checked? Author Kevin Mooney has a new book titled Climate Porn, and we discuss the remarkable imbalance of climate coverage and the nasty tendency on the Left to punish people who even gently question the panic.
That other side of the coin is now showing up, however. People are starting to ask questions about all of this, mostly asking, as Graham does, why are we not fact-checking these people? The Media Research Council posted this video a couple of days ago.
One of the most embarrassing alarmists of our times, the biologist Paul Ehrlich — who became famous with his book The Populaton Bomb in 1968, has just passed away at the age of 95. The New York Times was mocked on X when they suggested “his predictions proved premature.” He predicted mass famines in the 1970s. In 1989 and in 1990, NBC gave over chunks of the Today show to Ehrlich. He was not interviewed. He was the reporter-slash-narrator. We never stop talking about his prediction that soon, you’d tie your boat to the Washington Monument. That never happened.
Here’s the clip he’s talking about:
Remembering Paul Ehrlich with one of his wackiest predictions from the Jan 11, 1990 Today show. One Day “You Could Tie Your Boat to the Washington Monument” pic.twitter.com/Cnlk4yNyXb
— Geoffrey Dickens (@GCDickens) March 17, 2026
But scientists lost their grants for being on the wrong side of the “emergency.” State climatologists were shown the door. One scientist in Britain was compared to the KKK for being skeptical. Joe Romm suggested climate deniers might be strangled in their beds when doom becomes true. The leftist site Talking Points Memo in 2017 asked “at what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?”
And people actually took the suggestion seriously. I’ll bet a firestorm would erupt today if I wondered aloud at what point we start jailing the people pushing the global warming scare.
I won’t do that, but I must wonder if there will be ANY consequences for the damage these people have caused us.
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