April 29, 2025

TRANSLATION: IT BOMBED.

I’ve been told Andor is the best Disney+ streaming Star Wars show, which is damning with faint praise.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

MICHAEL WALSH: Can We Handle the Truth?

Like it or hate it, one of the upsides of the second Trump administration is the way in which it has forced everyone (except, of course, the remnants of the legacy media) to reconsider the unexamined premises of life in these United States, and with it comes the dawning realization that things we once simply accepted as true perhaps are not. After eight long years of “resistance” against the duly elected government of the United States, the country is finally awakening from its poisoned inertia and seeing things as they are.  In fact, now the enemy has done of the courtesy of naming himself: the legal profession.  The Resistance 2.0 is now being fought by white-shoe law firms in the halls of justice and Congress, its Lilliputian hordes attempting to hamstring Donald Trump’s second term — not in the streets and with a phantom electorate, as they did the last time — but in the courtroom. Call it by its name: lawfare.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: SCOTUS Will Not Hear Minnesota Appeal On Carry Age Restriction.

The United States Supreme Court has refused to hear Minnesota’s appeal of the state’s carry age restrictions on 18 to 20-year-old adults, which were previously determined to violate Constitutional protections.

Minnesota enforced the now-defunct age restriction law throughout the appeals process, beginning in 2023 when a district judge sided with challengers, through 2024, when that ruling was upheld by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and right up until Monday, April 21, this year, when the case came to a sudden and decisive halt after being rejected on appeal by the Supreme Court.

The previous 8th Circuit decision cited the state’s failure to present evidence of a suitable historical analogue, making it clear that while a government is permitted to disarm individuals who threaten the safety of themselves and others, “Minnesota has failed to show that 18- to 20-year-olds pose such a threat.”

Freedom.

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BOTTLENECK: If manufacturing booms, will we have enough job-ready workers?

“Even before Trump took office, a 2024 report from Deloitte forecast a need for up to 3.8 million additional skilled manufacturing employees by 2033,” Pondiscio writes. The report also predicted that “half of those could go unfilled if skills and applicant gaps go unaddressed.”

Career Tech Education (CTE) is expanding, and helping young people enter the workforce, he writes. High school CTE “concentrators” (students who take multiple CTE courses) tend to outperform classmates in earnings and employment rates, and are much more likely to be earning above-poverty wages seven years after high school.

However, CTE programs don’t always align with local job markets, Pondiscio writes. Furthermore, “only about five percent of CTE concentrators focus on manufacturing.”

I think educators and parents see manufacturing as exclusively blue collar, and fields like health and business as giving students college options.

For all the worry about steering students away from college, many don’t have the academic skills for college or for job training.

Those declining math scores are a “flashing warning light,” Pondiscio writes. Robots do the repetitive jobs. “If three-quarters of our students can’t master middle school math,” how will they learn to program the machines?

People will learn a lot for the right pay, even math.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

BLUE STATE BLUES:

McCormick doesn’t care if she kills the golden goose because she already has enough eggs.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH: NFL Hall of Famer Blasts Shedeur Sanders for Costing Himself Millions.

As Shedeur Sanders stunningly plummeted down the 2025 NFL draft board, there was a belief among some pundits that the league had unfairly evaluated the former Colorado Buffaloes star. But Pro Football Hall of Famer Cris Carter disagrees.

Carter believes Sanders cost himself millions and only has himself to blame for his fall to the fifth round of the NFL draft.

“You’re going for a job interview,” Carter said during an episode of the Fully Loaded podcast that was released Monday. “So for his job interview, he was so concerned about what his outfit was, his necklace was over a hundred grand. Like, he hadn’t even convinced people that you’re the face of our franchise.

“Matter of fact, he had convinced people that they were better off going in a different direction even with people who had lesser talent. That’s the rub he put onto people…He threw away at least 30 to 50 million dollars.”

So, where does Carter think it all went wrong for Sanders?

“…But Shedeur and his family, they overplayed their hand,” Carter said. “Them thinking that he was in the same evaluation mode as Eli Manning, they didn’t play that right. Them trying to narrow the teams that he was going to go to, that didn’t do right.

“Not working out at the combine, that wasn’t the right thing. His interview process—obviously he could have done a lot better in that. A lot of people left that meeting and felt he was very, very entitled.”

As Matt Walsh notes in his latest video:

To the commentators in sports media, it was a national tragedy. Shedeur’s brief draft slide was ESPN’s 9/11. This was the NFL Network’s Pearl Harbor. They’ll never forget where they were when it happened! They were shell shocked! They were dumbfounded! Grief-stricken!

* * * * * * * *

Now to be clear, they are not talking about somebody who, I don’t know, survived a school shooting. They’re talking about an already wealthy and famous athlete who had to wait a day longer than expected to be drafted into the NFL and get paid millions of more dollars to continue playing football. It’s like weeping in the street because a trust fund baby got the wrong color Ferrari for her sweet 16. I mean, most of the human population would kill just for the chance to experience this kind of disappointment*. But the sports media treated Shedeur like a Holocaust survivor because of it. All of this would just be kind of funny and embarrassing but not really worth discussing after all sports media embarrasses itself in some form pretty much every day. They embarrass themselves even more often than the news media does, if you can believe it.

And of course, this is all leading to a weekend of performative race baiting over Shedeur’s slide in the NFL draft:

* QED: Cleveland Browns backup QB drafted in round five is absolutely living his best life: Shedeur Sanders partied with ‘a million’ in Louis Vuitton cases after NFL draft — Deion Sanders Jr. reveals wild party details.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

VIDEO: Is Russia Running Out Of Tanks? “Their initial satellite images showed a total of 6107 tanks in all depots in 2021, whereas their most recent count only shows 3,345. However: ‘Virtually every one of these tanks left is in absolutely horrible condition. Before the war it was probably closer to 50/50, but those good ones since have been the ones that were grabbed from storage first.’ They also note that the initial number was almost certainly higher than the ones they could count, as they were probably better vehicles stored in garages. They estimate that pretty much all of those are now gone.”

Probably true, but I’m not sure how much it matters. Drone warfare hasn’t made tanks obsolete, but they also aren’t needed in the same numbers as before.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED! Spain experienced a nationwide power outage one week after reaching 100% “green” energy. Come enjoy the ironic videos.

From El Pais:

The outage suddenly set Spain back to the 19th century. Traffic lights out of service, traffic jams forming across the country, pedestrians wandering around cities without public transportation, desperate families trying to communicate with their loved ones, passengers left stranded without trains or flights, canceled medical appointments, rescues underway in subway stations and elevators, lines forming outside small shops due to supermarket closures…

I wonder what could have caused this?

For no reason at all, here’s a video of Spaniards celebrating the destruction of a nuclear power plant three years ago.

Exit quote: “Anyway, good luck with your new windmills, Spain. Don Quixote would be proud.”

Related: We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Tony Blair is a voice of sanity: Blair attacks Starmer’s Net Zero plans as ‘doomed to fail.’

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

FATCAT J.B. PRITZKER CALLS FOR MASSIVE RESISTANCE. Not the first Democrat to do so. . .

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, THEN, THEY’RE GOING TO GET WHAT THEY WANT:

Posted at 1:28 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHUCK TODD GOES FULL MINISTRY OF TRUTH IN RANT ON COVER-UP OF BIDEN’S DECLINE AND I HAVE THOUGHTS:

So, three weeks ago, Todd was admitting the media’s reluctance to cover Biden’s decline because they were worried it would help Trump, and yet now he’s saying it wasn’t the media’s fault that there wasn’t more coverage of it? How does that even make sense? This is Ministry of Truth-level stuff, here.

Similarly, James Clyburn tells CNN that he had no idea that Joe Biden was in severe mental decline:

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Arena,” Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) responded to a question on President Joe Biden’s decline by stating that “I was not around Joe Biden enough to tell you anything about his decline.” And “for us to sit here and talk about Joe Biden as if we are physicians and can make these kinds of evaluations, a lot of us are interacting with him [who] could not make an evaluation like that, and I still can’t.”

Clyburn began by saying Biden was, substantively, a great president and no Democrat has had a record as good as Biden’s since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

Well, that’s one way to shiv Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But as Scott Jennings points out, Clyburn’s doublespeak on public access national TV is astonishing to witness:

And thus, Clyburn comes full circle: The man who’s never failed to compare Republicans to Nazis is now in his dotage pretending to be Sgt. Schultz. He knew nothing — nothing! — about Joe Biden’s Trunalimunumaprzure issues!

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): At White House Correspondents’ Dinner, fake remorse over Biden ‘mistakes.’ “Imagine a neurological disease that changed your perceptions in subtle, damaging ways. Stubbing your toe would bring pleasure. Rotten meat would taste delicious. Deadly cold would feel comfy. Meanwhile, a gentle neck massage would make you feel sick, and fresh food would taste disgusting. You wouldn’t last long with such a disease. But our society is facing something similar. The news media, which are supposed to act as a sort of nervous system for the body politic, instead give us misinformation.”

Plus: “Journalists didn’t ‘miss’ the story. They lied about it. They chose not to cover what Americans could see with their own eyes.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

ASKING (AND ANSWERING) THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Do Arabs Chop Off Hands? “Why do Arabs chop off hands? The short answer to the question is that they suffer from a chronic plague of theft, a perennial social disease in their culture. The hand-chopping is an effort to limit the behavior. Not only is there no conscience in the culture to suppress the urge to steal, but there is even admiration for the thief who gets away with his crime. That admiration goes to the very roots of Islam.”

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green