DL Open Thread Monday May 2 2022
I like Zelenskyy. He is always on message, “Great. Thanks. Send More.”
Pelosi Goes to Kyiv
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised Ukrainians’ “ferocity” and promised military and financial support after leading a top-level meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv over the weekend.
Pelosi, the most senior American lawmaker to visit Ukraine since Russia’s war began more than two months ago, told reporters in Poland on Sunday that the U.S. congressional delegation she led was proud to convey to Zelenskyy “the message of unity from the Congress of the United States, a message of appreciation from the American people for his leadership and admiration for the people of Ukraine for their courage.”
Hundreds of US Cities Composting Their Food Waste Gives Farmers A+ Soil and Cuts Tons of Emissions
Last week, new water restrictions issued for millions of residents of Southern California highlighted the need to make agriculture more efficient—and a new statewide composting mandate is providing the solution.
California leads the nation in food production, which requires a lot of water, and now because they became the second state in the nation after Vermont to make large-scale composting required by law means we can have our produce ‘cake’ and eat it, too.
Compost Awareness Week, which begins today, may sound superficial, but we need to know that farms can grow up to 40 percent more food in times of drought when they use compost—and when citizens dump their coffee grounds and banana peels into a bin for pick up, they are feeding the soil, while guarding against water shortages.
City composting programs produce thousands of truckloads of finished compost that go onto farms, orchards, and vineyards, creating a natural sponge that attracts and retains moisture. Not only that, the recycling loop is combatting global warming.
Food waste makes up nearly 20% of the stuff in our landfills. When that food decomposes, it releases methane; tens of times more potent than carbon dioxide, it’s one of the main greenhouse gasses fueling the climate crisis, and landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions in the U.S.
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The ultra left’s anti-anti-Putin stance is just stupid.
What If I Told You Russia, Not America, Invaded Ukraine? My wildest Putin conspiracy theory: He’s been behind the war all along.
This week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters that one American goal in arming Ukraine was to weaken Russia. The anti-anti-Russia coalition of commentators on the right, and elements of the far left, cried out in vindication.
The key thing to understand about anti-anti-Russia thinkers is that their worldview treats the war in Ukraine as if it is being waged by the United States. Absent this premise, their arguments are unintelligible. But if you read them with the assumption that Washington has masterminded the conflict, everything clicks into place.
Anti-anti-Russians had already arrived at the conclusion that Ukraine’s war was an American plot to undermine Russia. “Is the purpose of the arms shipments to strengthen Ukraine’s hand in reaching a negotiated settlement to the conflict — a process from which the Biden administration and allied governments have so far held themselves aloof?” posited the leftist Branko Marcetic last week. “Or is it, as some U.S. and British officials have suggested, to turn Ukraine into an Afghanistan-like quagmire for Russia, weakening it and perhaps even triggering regime change, while sending a message to China in the process?”
