☕️ HOT DIGGETY DOG ☙ Thursday, March 13, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

EPA chainsaws climate regs; inflation drops, eggs, & gas prices; DOE downsizes in brutal cage match; Russia levels Kursk, sets terms; Trump speeds peace talks; WSJ exposes science fraud; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Today’s action-packed roundup includes: EPA announces largest regulatory cuts in history; falling inflation becomes big news; eggs and gas; the Department of Eduction’s final mission begins in earnest with massive workforce reduction; Russians respond to Ukraine’s ceasefire offer by leveling the Kursk salient and offering counter-terms and Trump’s negotiating team sets new records for brokering peace; and, late but not out, a WSJ story rightly slams science for being a cesspool of fraud and deception.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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At dinner yesterday, Michelle and I discussed the day’s great news about falling inflation rates, widely covered in exquisite detail by Fox News. She was happy but perplexed; she asked me, it’s great but how could this happen so fast? The inflationary problems, like Biden’s massive dilution of the currency, seem so intractable and structurally difficult. Plus, experts keep warning everyone who’ll listen that Trump’s tariffs “will for sure increase prices.” The budget is bonkers. Yet Trump keeps announcing more tax cuts.

I explained it to Michelle, and I will now explain here just how Trump is doing it. Coincidentally, like yesterday we’ll begin with another New York Times story complaining again about terrific new EPA Director Lee Zeldin, this article headlined “E.P.A. Targets Dozens of Environmental Rules as It Reframes Its Purpose.” The crabby sub-headline added, “the E.P.A. administrator said the agency’s mission was to make it cheaper to buy cars, heat homes and run businesses. (He did not mention protecting the environment.)”

Womp womp!

Yesterday, in what the Times called a “barrage” — a concentrated artillary bombardment over a wide area — Zeldin carpet-bombed “dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, protections for wetlands, and the legal basis for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases that are heating the planet.”

It was already terrific news, especially if you know anything about those listed categories of environmental dictatorship that never make anyone healthier. But it got better.

The Times then mentioned Zeldin’s “two-minute-and-18-second video posted to X” — which it churlishly did not link,but here it is. In the short video, the director described taking a chainsaw to thirty-one major environmental regulations. “We at EPA will do our part,” Zeldin said, “to power the Great American Comeback.”

CLIP: EPA Director Lee Zeldin explains the end of the “Green New Scam” (2:18).

Director Zeldin called Wednesday’s batch of orders “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history,” and he is probably right. He added, “today, the green new scam ends, as the E.P.A. does its part to usher in a golden age of American success.”

One standout example of a target for Zeldin’s de-regulatory chainsaw is a 2009 legal opinion known as the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” that allows the EPA to regulate “carbon and greenhouse gases” whenever the agency decides some extra carbon somewhere might add to global warming and endanger “humanity.” Like when you breathe out, or when Jerry Nadler emits his carbon from other orifices.

Unlike yesterday’s hatchet job, this article did include quotes by people who favored Zeldin’s cutbacks, although in each case, it sneered at them as “lobbyists” and “climate change deniers.” But, at least, it did include opposing views. (So, it was heavily biased, and probably should’ve been an op-ed, but it wasn’t quite propaganda.)

📉 For instance, the Times quoted radical Marty Durbin, a senior vice president at the Chamber of Commerce. Marty focused on prices. He said, “American businesses were crippled with an unprecedented regulatory onslaught during the previous Administration that contributed to higher costs felt by families around the country.” He said, “The Chamber supports a more balanced regulatory approach that will protect the environment and support greater economic growth.”

In other words, lifting these EPA regulations will not only lower costs for nearly everything, it will also unleash dormant business activities halted as it became increasingly expensive to do whatever that thing was and also comply with Biden’s climate rules. Zeldin, quoting Trump, called those regulations the ‘Green New Scam.’

The benefits won’t appear overnight. Changing EPA rules is not like flipping the lights back on in the massive federal buildings-slash-ghost towns to let workers come back to the office. Zeldin’s new rules must be formally proposed, published for public comment, and then carefully follow a laundry list of other administrative procedures to avoid lawsuits. Nevertheless, they remain part of deflationary pressure now, because business planners are starting to take things like this into account.

📉 Some products are benefiting from more direct assistance from the other agencies. Egg prices, for example, are returning to levels affordable by ordinary people who aren’t Saudi oil billionaires. That magnificent result occurred because Trump’s CDC has stopped making chicken farmers cull flocks in the name of stopping bird flu. CDC also kiboshed the new bird-flu chicken vaccines, which would have been one more damned thing farmers would have been forced to pay for.

But perhaps the greatest anti-inflationary effect comes from falling gas prices. Gas prices are baked into the cost of everything, since everything must be driven to a store or delivered to your house. Thus, lower gas prices means lower costs for suppliers, which translates to lower retail prices.

Trump began working on increasing oil production on January 20th and hasn’t looked back.

Again, even though many of the Trump changes have yet to come into being — like new oil drilling leases — producers are already counting on there soon being more oil. More oil means more supply; the basic laws of economics demand that when supply increases, prices fall. Prices start falling as soon as producers expect a supply increase.

Yesterday, in the Oval Office, President Trump described those same three factors: eggs, gas, and inflation (1:08).

The answer to why inflation rates are stabilizing is that it’s a whole of government effort. Egg prices are down due to targeted common sense by CDC, and the EPA’s rule-cutting counts as a broader line of attack. Gas prices are chipping away at the cost of everything through lower transportation costs. Thus, inflation rates are already coming down.

Corporate media’s reaction is unhinged panic. Yesterday, for example, the Washington Post’s top story ran under the buffoonish headline, “Trump vowed to fix the economy. His voters are still waiting.” As if anyone expected Biden’s disastrous four-year economic wrecking ball to be reversed in the first ten weeks. But miraculously, it’s defying expectations and already reversing, so corporate media has rolled out the classic narrative strategy of trying to undermine consumer confidence, which you can expect them to continue enthusiastically doing for the next four years.

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Yesterday, the LA Times ran an unintentionally terrific story headlined, “Trump guts the Education Department with massive layoffs; shock waves reach California.”

Newly confirmed Education Secretary Linda McMahon has leapt into the educational ring holding a folding chair. “The Trump administration,” the Times reported, “has begun dismantling the U.S. Department of Education by laying off about half of the agency’s employees.” In San Francisco, the regional branch of the department’s Office for Civil Rights will be closed.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. Immediately after her confirmation, McMahon issued a staff memo titled “Our Department’s Final Mission” — which was shutting itself down. But the LA Times’ article was packed with Chicken Little quotes about this being the latest worst thing that has ever happened. “These reckless layoffs will sow chaos and confusion throughout our nation’s public school system,” promised Guillermo Mayer, president of Public Advocates, a California-based law firm and “advocacy group.”

Trump plans to delete the Department of Education and simply send the money straight to the states instead. Every Republican president has promised to cancel the Department of Education since long before I was a fetus and before Linda McMahon grappled with her first costumed wrestler.

Now, for the first time, it is actually happening. Cage match.

🔥 The idea of direct grants to states terrifies Democrats worse than the prospect of an hour in the ring with The Undertaker. Block grants can be canceled or withheld. They can be (broadly) conditioned. Last week, for example, the Trump Team cancelled a $400 million dollar grant to fabulously wealthy and far-left Columbia University. (Columbia, exceedingly generous with your money, did not offer to replace the grant money from its own vast $20 billion endowment.)

Somehow, progressive virtue-signaling never extends to progressives’ own pocketbooks. “Government,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (0.02% Native American) infamously said, “is the stuff we do together.”

Now, progressives are wailing about how dangerous it was to cancel Columbia’s grant, which the Trump Team blamed on the school’s nurturing of violent, anti-American, foreign student activists. But that complaint is a red herring. First of all, Columbia’s grant didn’t come from the Department of Education. Second, federal education dollars always come with all kinds of bizarre ideological strings attached, forcing states and school districts to enforce woke curricula, DEI mandates, transgender books, and federal oversight that often overrides local school control.

But sending lump sums (“block grants”) to the states instead of the DOE’s splintered system will delete Washington’s ability to micromanage school policy. States can set their own priorities—like funding charter and home schools, scrapping DEI bureaucracies, or (in red states) focusing on actual academics, like STEM. Yet the federal government will still keep broad powers to condition the block grants — boundaried by Supreme Court limits on coercive federal funding — to trim ideological overreach.

Not only that, but under the DOE, a shockingly small fraction of federal education dollars actually reaches the states anyway, after the massive agency consumes its generous bureaucratic portion, and after paying for a dizzying array of loony, progressive pet programs only slightly related to primary education.

This should be good news for education activists. But, you know. Hysteria! Another progressive gravy train is pulling into its terminal station.

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A narrative battle raged yesterday following the Ukrainians’ brokered agreement to negotiate. First, the ballyhooed Kursk salient is almost finished, relegated to a dark, embarassing footnote in Ukrainian history. CNN ran the story headlined, “Russia says it has recaptured key Kursk region town, as Trump says peace is ‘up to Russia now.’” Ukraine’s top general Syrskyi confusingly said Ukraine’s surrounded forces were retreating from the ill-conceived invasion. President Putin, wearing atypical military garb, visited Kursk and encouraged his enthusiastic troops to complete the mission.

Meanwhile, this morning the UK Guardian ran a story headlined, “Proposed ceasefire just ‘temporary respite’ for Ukraine says Kremlin aide, as US team heads to Moscow.” As expected, when the Russians responded to the new proposal, they expressed willingness to talk but underscored prior conditions: No NATO, no temporary ceasefires letting Ukraine regroup — what the Russians rightly called an “imitation of peace” — and a long-term resolution accounting for everyone’s security concerns, including Russia’s.

I’m just a lawyer, dammit, not a military historian. But this might be the fastest peace negotiation in history, racing toward resolution at a pace measured in hours and days rather than months and years. If Russia and Ukraine finalize a ceasefire or permanent peace in the coming weeks or months, it would be absurdly fast compared to the drawn-out, years-long negotiations that ended past wars of similar scale.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for corporate media to point out that astonishing, record-shattering fact. That’s why we need C&C.

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The Great 2025 Egg Price Fracas wasn’t the only narrative cracking up yesterday. The Wall Street Journal ran an astonishingly honest story headlined, “Retractions, Walkouts Plague Science Journals Eager to Churn Out Research.” It’s funny what a little cancelled USAID money can uncover.

Never forget that, during the pandemic, we were repeatedly hammered and hectored with the endless and unbelievably annoying refrain follow the science. The academic journals were so sacrosanct that they were above being questioned at all. We weren’t even supposed to read them for ourselves — don’t do your ‘own research,’ dummies! — but instead, just gullibly gobble up corporate media’s low-calorie interpretations of the science. We’ll tell you what it means.

Welp. Times have changed. The Journal reported that over the last ten years — i.e., spanning the pandemic — editors at over 40 journals have rage-quit in protest of “editorial differences” with publishers related to the poor quality of their published science. Indeed, exactly ten years ago in 2015, Richard Horton, then editor-in-chief of the blue-ribbon journal The Lancet, penned a striking critique of the scientific publishing industry. In a Lancet editorial, he prophetically wrote:

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

You would think a scathing critique of science like that from a top science journal’s top editor — half of published science might be false! a turn toward darkness! — would have swelled into a tsunami of brutal self-reflection and reform. But no. It hardly even splashed. Horton’s complaint sank right into corporate media’s putrid pond of conformity with nary a ripple.

Not even “peer review” — science’s so-called ‘gold standard’ — can be trusted anymore. Last year, 23 disgruntled scientists penned a public letter to Springer Publishing that said, “Some of the work that has been published is so seriously flawed that it is not credible that it underwent any meaningful form of peer review.”

In other words, we think you’re lying.

Peer review is an antiquated and obscure process that anonymizes the peer reviewers, hding them behind a Wizard of Oz-style blanket of privacy and implied elite disinterest. Consumers of academic pabulum must trust pure-hearted journal editors to remain free from influence and bias and ensure the sanctity of the peer review process. The argument over peer review is not just a rarified controversy among elites. As we saw during COVID-19, the most ridiculous conclusions can be lifted right from the pages of peer-reviewed papers and then institutionalized as public policy mandates, while we are told to shut up and never ask questions.

The science is settled, dummies!

The Journal’s article blamed big study money and too many papers, apparently advocating for even more gatekeeping by small groups of anointed, priestly elite editors. I disagree. The solution is more transparency. Crowdsourcing. As Justice Brandeis sagely observed in 1927, “the answer to bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence.” Publish all the papers, every one, then let other registered scientists add “peer” community notes under their own names, while also disclosing their income sources. Let the readers vote on the community notes. Then show those notes voted most helpful at the top, like Amazon reviews for combo hotdog and bun toasters.

It’s a simple, inexpensive solution that they will resist to the last Ukrainian.

Science’s comeuppance is long overdue, but it is finally coming, and not a second too soon. What do you think? Is my idea of letting science defend itself all wet?

Have a terrific Thursday! I’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning, for another robust and insightful roundup of all the essential news and commentary.

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