Archive for 2025
April 15, 2025
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Missouri House Votes to Allow Guns on Public Transit, Lower Concealed Carry Age.
DECOUPLING CUTS BOTH WAYS: The latest tariff fallout: China reportedly tells its airlines not to take any more Boeing planes. “Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, said the order extended beyond Boeing planes to include aircraft-related equipment and parts.”
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Leftists Got Nasty With the UGA College Republicans, but the Group Vows to Fight Back.
CLEAN YOUR KEYBOARD: Solareye Compressed Air Duster – 180000RPM Electric Air Duster. #CommissionEarned
HARVARD: Govt Has No Right To Tell Private Universities What To Do.
And Harvard has no right to (or even expectation of) taxpayer money.
I hope that clears things up.
Regardless, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance adds, “Harvard’s fighting the Trump administration harder than it’s ever fought antisemitism.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Detained Columbia protester Mohsen Mahdawi threatened and intimidated Jewish students, State Department says.
The Palestinian Columbia University student arrested by ICE agents in Vermont led disruptive anti-Israel protests on campus, and engaged in “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” against Jewish students, State Department sources tell The Post.
Mohsen Mahdawi, who hails from the West Bank, was at an interview to obtain his US citizenship on Monday when he was picked up by immigration authorities, his lawyer said.
“Mahdawi, through his leadership and involvement in disruptive protests at Columbia University, has engaged in antisemitic conduct through leading pro-Palestinian protests and calling for Israel’s destruction,” a senior State Department source said.
The peace sign flashed by a man who in most of the other photos (including an April 2024 60 Minutes interview) is wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh speaks volumes of his hypocrisy.
GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: Garrison Keillor: A few words from your elderly uncle.
I dropped my glasses in a café in New York and couldn’t find them and a young man got down on his knees and got them out from under a table. I thanked him, but it wasn’t enough. I said, “I really appreciate good manners more than I ever used to.” He said, “I know what you mean.”
There’s a lot of ugliness going around. I’ve never been called “scum” or “sleazebag” that I’m aware of though motorists do sometimes curse us slow pedestrians in rough tones but now that national leadership has embraced these particular terms I suppose the day is coming when TSA personnel will feel free (“Is that your briefcase, white trash?” “Hold your hands over your head, buttface, and stand very still.”) and give us a full-body patdown if we object. Security as an excuse for ugly manners, we’ve seen it before.
Some readers have called my writing “garbage,” but that’s literary criticism and I don’t take it personally. Same with “I used to like your writing back when you were funny”: each person is the judge of funny/unfunny. But “sleazebag” and “scum” deny a person’s humanity, and now that they’re accepted in high places, we are in for a rough ride.
Flashback:
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
—“We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore,” Garrison Keillor, August 26th, 2004.
LEFTISTS ALWAYS WANT TO AIRBRUSH THE PAST: Home Alone 2 Director Wants Trump’s Cameo Removed: ‘I Just Wish It Was Gone… if I Cut It, I’ll Probably Be Sent Out of the Country.’
“Home Alone” director Chris Columbus said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that he wishes he could remove Donald Trump‘s cameo from the 1992 sequel, “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.” The filmmaker said Trump’s seven-second appearance in the movie has “become this curse. It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”
“I can’t cut it,” Columbus added on a sarcastic note. “If I cut it, I’ll probably be sent out of the country. I’ll be considered sort of not fit to live in the United States, so I’ll have to go back to Italy or something.”
Evergreen:
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Guardian Is Coming After My Dogs and This Means War.
NOT JUST NO BUT HELL NO:
NEW: Gavin Newsom is asking for a $2.8 billion BAILOUT for CA’s Medicaid program after he opened it up to illegals. This is on top of a $3.4 billion loan issued last week.
This marks nearly $6.2 billion in just a few weeks. Why should taxpayers fund Medicaid for illegals? pic.twitter.com/qOW0fXwx6t
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 15, 2025
Well, maybe if the bailout hinged on federally-supervised elections for the next few cycles…
THEY’RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND THEY’RE HERE TO HELP: Many NJ restaurants could close under a new tipping rule, owners warn.
Under New Jersey labor law, a tipped employee is any worker — full-time, part-time, or temporary — in an occupation in which they “customarily and regularly receive more than $30 per month in tips.”
Bill A5433 was introduced last month by Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, D-Mercer, and was up for consideration by the Assembly on Thursday.
Individual restaurant owners and operators are calling the measure a dire situation.
“This is bad legislation for servers, bartenders, restaurant owners, and diners,” according to a social media post shared by the team behind sister restaurants Lita, Judy and Harry’s, and Heirloom Kitchen.
“It threatens the flexible, high-earning potential that tipped employees currently enjoy, and could drive many beloved local establishments to close their doors for good,” the post also said, saying small businesses “are already operating on razor-thin margins.”
A similar move in Washington, D.C., already phased out the tip credit for employers —with harrowing results, Klim said.
In D.C., Initiative 82 was approved by voters in 2023. The move was a main factor in 3,000 workers losing their jobs and the closure of nearly 75 restaurants, according to Klim.
The true minimum wage, as always, remains zero.
TO BE FAIR, WHO COULD TELL? Keith Olbermann Finally Snaps in Unhinged Video.
RAPE HISTORICALLY IS A TOOL FOR ESTABLISHING DOMINANCE OVER A CONQUERED PEOPLE:
I am sick to my stomach that this rape gang scandal was ever allowed to happen in what so many call a ‘civilised country’.
We cannot claim to be civilised while children were abused and failed like this. And yet every time the truth surfaces, it’s buried again under the next… pic.twitter.com/MWTh9hC3oe
— Ellie Hodges🇬🇧 (@elliehodges62) April 14, 2025
23 PERCENT OF AMERICAN 17-YEAR-OLD BOYS HAVE AN ADHD DIAGNOSIS:
One of the greatest evils of my 90s childhood was the sedation and casual drugging of young boys for acting like boys in a school system built for little girls.
And it’s only now that we’re finally allowed to ask questions. Decades too late.
The New York Times article screen-capped above notes that:
For some children, a different school, or a different kind of school, might produce the same profound shift that the M.T.A. subjects experienced when they enrolled in film school or began studying hair styling. For others, a prescription for Ritalin or Adderall might help make school feel like a better fit. But for them and their parents, the experience of taking medication might feel quite different if it was presented to them not as a medicine to fix their defective brain but as a tool to make an inhospitable environment more tolerable.
As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in 1995, when ADD was the pop culture disease of the decade:
I have children in school, and I am intrigued by the faith parents now invest–the craze began about 1990–in psychologists who diagnose their children as suffering from a defect known as attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this “disorder” is an actual, physical, neurological condition or not, but neither does anybody else in this early stage of neuroscience. The symptoms of this supposed malady are always the same. The child, or, rather, the boy–forty-nine out of fifty cases are boys–fidgets around in school, slides off his chair, doesn’t pay attention, distracts his classmates during class, and performs poorly. In an earlier era he would have been pressured to pay attention, work harder, show some self-discipline. To parents caught up in the new intellectual climate of the 1990s, that approach seems cruel, because my little boy’s problem is… he’s wired wrong! The poor little tyke –the fix has been in since birth! Invariably the parents complain, “All he wants to do is sit in front of the television set and watch cartoons and play Sega Genesis.” For how long? “How long? For hours at a time.” Hours at a time; as even any young neuroscientist will tell you, that boy may have a problem, but it is not an attention deficit.
Nevertheless, all across America we have the spectacle of an entire generation of little boys, by the tens of thousands, being dosed up on ADD’s magic bullet of choice, Ritalin, the CIBA-Geneva Corporation’s brand name for the stimulant methylphenidate. I first encountered Ritalin in 1966 when I was in San Francisco doing research for a book on the psychedelic or hippie movement. A certain species of the genus hippie was known as the Speed Freak, and a certain strain of Speed Freak was known as the Ritalin Head. The Ritalin Heads loved Ritalin. You’d see them in the throes of absolute Ritalin raptures…Not a wiggle, not a peep…They would sit engrossed in anything at all…a manhole cover, their own palm wrinkles…indefinitely…through shoulda-been mealtime after mealtime…through raging insomnias…Pure methyl-phenidate nirvana…From 1990 to 1995, CIBA-Geneva’s sales of Ritalin rose 600 percent; and not because of the appetites of subsets of the species Speed Freak in San Francisco, either. It was because an entire generation of American boys, from the best private schools of the Northeast to the worst sludge-trap public schools of Los Angeles and San Diego, was now strung out on methylphenidate, diligently doled out to them every day by their connection, the school nurse. America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! It never lets you down!
If anything, the diagnoses of ADHD are even more out of control in England, Brendan O’Neill wrote in Spiked at the beginning of the year: You don’t have ADHD – you’re just annoying.
ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some vogue ailment to boast about? There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. The Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – yikes – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18 per cent hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man that’s a lot of annoying people.
The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder’. Its reasoning was solid: much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ is just ‘ordinary human traits’, it said. It’s so true. Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganised, agitated? We’re not sick, we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from the pathologisation of life’s ups and downs. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific American said back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. One wonders if Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.
The ADHD epidemic, like all faux disorders, started in the US. They’ve been drugging kids there for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one sceptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘[suppress] all spontaneous behavior in normal children’, he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.
Yes. Jonah Goldberg concluded his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism, thusly:
The twentieth century gave us two visions of a dystopian future, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. For many years it was assumed that 1984 was the more prophetic tale. But no more. The totalitarianism of 1984 was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World was a dystopia based on an American future, where Henry Ford is remembered as a messiah (it’s set in the year “632 A.F.,” after Ford) and the cult of youth that Huxley so despised defines society. Everything is easy under the World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, what’s wrong with it?
Perhaps now, at last, we’re prepared to answer that question.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN:
No due process for illegal… regulations: I'm often harsh with NYTimes @CoralMDavenport but today I congratulate her for reporting on a major Trump Executive order from last week. Hardly anyone else has. The President directed agency heads to delete, without notice and comment,… pic.twitter.com/LO7Owt75HG
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) April 15, 2025
Full text:
No due process for illegal… regulations: I’m often harsh with NYTimes Coral M Davenport but today I congratulate her for reporting on a major Trump Executive order from last week. Hardly anyone else has. The President directed agency heads to delete, without notice and comment, federal rules that are inconsistent with recent SCOTUS decisions — e.g., 2022’s West Virginia v. EPA (major regulatory programs need express Congressional authorization) and 2024’s Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (federal courts can no longer automatically defer to agency judgment in the absence of congressional direction).
Next step: Ride those agencies hard until they follow through.
CHIPS ARE HARD: The Semiconductors Tariff Yo-yo. “You can’t just take an existing building and turn it into a fab, it has to be specially built from the ground up with exacting standards for cleanroom air filtering, concrete slab level uniformity, etc. You need extremely exacting air purity handling equipment, as well as a system for running de-ionized water throughout the plant. Then you need to purchase, install, bring up and qualify all the hundreds of pieces of semiconductor equipment necessary to run a modern fab. And 2-3 years is probably the lead time to get an ASML EUV stepper, if you’re going to be building a cutting edge fab.”
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! The Husk of Joe Biden Will Attempt to Speak About DOGE Reform of Social Security.
Biden’s speech risks being more about political posturing than solutions. His approval rating, a dismal 39 percent in a January Gallup poll, reflects public disillusionment after a term marked by economic struggles and a chaotic debate performance that ended his reelection hopes. Some argue Biden’s return is an attempt to rally Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms, leveraging Social Security as an emotional wedge issue rather than confronting its structural flaws.
Conservatives agree Social Security must be protected but insist on reforms—like raising the payroll tax cap, adjusting benefits for high earners, or incentivizing private savings—to prevent insolvency. Biden’s critique of Trump’s agenda may resonate with his base, but without addressing these realities, it’s little more than a nostalgic defense of a broken system. As he speaks in Chicago, the question remains: Will Biden offer a path forward, or simply yell at us and then whisper old talking points to score points against his successor?
I hope that ol’ Teleprompter XD-235 is up to the task — he’s facing his ultimate opponent today.
COLD WAR II: This Is China’s Real Problem and Trump’s Real Strength. “Chinese Communist Party boss Xi Jinping has a problem, and the answer is — MORE COWBELL!”
YEAH, GUYS, DOUBLE DOWN ON THAT ONE:
Libs: "We have a 21% approval rating and just got our doors blown off in the last election. How can we improve our standing?"
Also Libs: "How about we hate dogs." pic.twitter.com/MSvQCi957R
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) April 15, 2025
I have heard from some anti-Trump officers that it is acceptable for them to challenge Trump and be “disloyal” to him on political matters because while the enlisted oath of office includes the phrase “that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States,” no such words regarding the president appear in the officer oath of office. This idea is highly disturbing.
It suggests that officers are not bound to follow the lawful orders of the president if they disagree politically. Not only is this contrary to the sacred officer tradition of being apolitical, but it is also contrary to the part of the officers’ oath that requires officers to “support and defend the Constitution” (after all, the president’s military role arises in the Constitution). Finally, it is contrary to the actual commission of all U.S. military officers, which states in part: “And this officer is to observe and follow such orders and directions from time to time as may be given by the President of the United States of America.”
The trends we are seeing feel dangerously close to an embrace of 1970s South American-style military juntas. Think about Gen. Mark Milley telling China he would warn them about U.S. military activity. Think about Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman using his position on the National Security Council as a springboard for impeaching a president because he did not like the way that president was lawfully discharging his duties. These are not the marks of healthy civilian control of the military. They are instead marks of a military approaching the rationalization of a coup.
I have heard numerous theories as to how we got here, ranging from “Obama purged all the good generals” to “Gen Z are too narcissistic for selfless sacrifice,” but I attribute the breakdown quite directly to DEI policies and practices. I do not mean that the advancement of officers for DEI reasons is the cause. Rather, the inculcation of DEI policies as a core ethos of military service has been monstrously destructive. Our military has always been driven by core values, such as, “Don’t give up the ship,” “Duty, Honor, Country,” and “Always Faithful.” Traditionally, those values have been apolitical and solely revolved around the military’s fundamental mission of defeating America’s battlefield enemies.
As Kurt Schlichter wrote yesterday, The Pentagon Must Go on the Offensive to Defeat Politicized Officers. “If you aren’t loyal to the commander-in-chief, who are you loyal to? Your own personal conception of right and wrong? Well, Soldier, you are in the wrong career field. There are a wide range of jobs you can do where you can freely share your thoughts about our political leadership and its policies, but being a military leader is not one of them.”