Archive for 2025
April 29, 2025
READER FAVORITE: AIPER Surfer S2 Solar Pool Skimmer with APP Support. #CommissionEarned
YOU REALLY HAVE TO ASK YOURSELF WHY:
BREAKING: Assembly Public Safety Chairman @VoteNickSchultz confirms AB 379 will be changed by committee tomorrow to exclude felony charge for those who buy 16 and 17 year olds for sex.
He says he wants to host info hearings on the issue in the fall. https://t.co/D8qS0SqBeo
— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) April 28, 2025
They should at least name the bill for Jeffrey Epstein.
ANSWERS TO 21st CENTURY QUESTIONS: The Truth about Drone Deliveries! (Video.)
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS (OR THE LACK THEREOF): The Junior Anti-Sex League Gets Results!
‘THE CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND’ PAPERBACK HITS SHELVES TODAY!: With an entirely new epilogue and FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings!
DECOUPLING: Firm Predicts ‘Empty Shelves’ And Recession By June.
Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok on Sunday released a report outlining the timeline for Trump’s tariffs to result in empty shelves, layoffs in the trucking and retail sector and a recession this summer.
Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs on April 2 and it takes about 20-40 days for container ships to sail to the U.S. from China, according to Apollo. Slok estimates that container ships coming to U.S. ports could come to a stop by mid May.
It then takes about 1-10 days of transit time for trucking/rail to bring goods from the ports to cities. Apollo Global Management predicts that my late May domestic freight demand will “come to a halt” and that there will be “empty shelves” with companies responding “to lower sales.”
By early June, Slok forecasts there will be layoffs in the the domestic freight and retail industries with a recession hitting the U.S. this summer.
I don’t doubt Wall Street or the media’s willingness to inflate costs and risks, but we’ll see.
Also, decoupling was never going to be easy.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Fat, Drunk, and Governor of Illinois Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son. “It’s a safe bet that Pritzker won’t be mobilizing himself — the dude is one Chicago Italian beef sandwich away from exploding like Mr. Creosote in ‘Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.’ Yeah, I’m doing fat digs here because Pritzker’s bad*** shtick is in desperate need of a reality check. He’s a privileged rich boy from the family that owns the Hyatt Hotels who fancies himself a champion of poor minorities.”
IF YOU MAKE IT PAINFUL, THEY WON’T DO IT ANYMORE:
Lol I love these humiliation rituals.
The universities just want to leave this stuff behind and pretend it never happened.
This is what I voted for. https://t.co/kU86nJvpuc
— Coddled affluent professional (@feelsdesperate) April 28, 2025
STEPHEN L. MILLER: The media must admit to covering up Biden’s decline.
A number of reporters are releasing volumes about Biden’s conspicuous cognitive decline, that many of them supposedly only became aware of on the debate stage last June. Many of these journalists actively worked to smear anyone who had noticed the former president’s state of mind, including right-leaning commentators and Republicans, as far back as 2021. But Biden’s cognitive and physical deterioration were not first apparent on the debate stage. They didn’t even start in January of that year, when Axios’s Alex Thompson began to take notice. That would be the same Alex Thompson honored at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner for his reporting.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House regardless of party is capable of deception,” Thompson told the 2,500 journalists present. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it.”
But throughout most of his term, any mention of Biden’s age and physical decline was met with attacks by parts of the media, including CNN, the AP, the Washington Post, the New York Times and NBC News. The Biden campaign and White House labeled incidents of him wandering off or losing his train of thought as “cheap-fakes” and the media echoed the same terminology, right up until the moment when the real Joe Biden fully revealed himself on June 27.
It was a lie — one that the media used its considerable (but waning) influence to sell.
If there’s any turnaround for CNN et al., it starts with an apology, but they seem fully committed to slow-motion suicide.
YES:
— Randy Barnett (@RandyEBarnett) April 28, 2025
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: 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.”
REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES:
BREAKING: A prominent Black Lives Matter activist threatens war against the Jewish community as a mob marches towards the Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights.
Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? The media would be all over it. https://t.co/sXAILoq2LD
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 29, 2025
THIS IS A CHARMING STORY: Protester Confronts Vivek at a County GOP Event. What Happened Next Was… Unexpected.
WHY IS THE IVY LEAGUE SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM, BIGOTRY, AND HATE?
Princeton should be hit with both private lawsuits and massive Justice Department action. And Eisgruber, who had to know what he was ordering was illegal, and his minions in the Princeton administration, should be sued in their personal capacities. https://t.co/JShuzV4ypb
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) April 28, 2025
Sounds like the Chinese cultural revolution. Wasn't pretty. https://t.co/PoygWPIgEE
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@HarmeetKDhillon) April 28, 2025
READER FAVORITE: Monocular Telescope 80×100 High Power with Smartphone Adapter. #CommissionEarned
COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Actual headline (still up) at The Atlantic — Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.
Three weeks later, The Week reported that the Mull’s dark dreams fortunately did not come true: We should be grateful for good news in Georgia.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Atlanta is not burning. Bodies are not piled up in the streets. Hospitals in Georgia are not being overwhelmed; in fact, they are virtually empty. There is no mad rush for ventilators (remember those?). Instead, men, women, and children in the Peach State are returning to some semblance of normal life: working outside their homes, going to restaurants and bars, getting haircuts, exercising, and most important, spending time with their friends and families and worshipping God. The opening that began more than three weeks ago is continuing apace.
Oh, my apologies, you were waiting for bad news? Sorry, I forgot, we were actually not supposed to be rooting for the virus. Despite the apparent relish behind headlines like “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” one assumes that most Americans, even the ones most committed to omnidirectional prophecies of doom, were actually hoping this would happen. While it really is a shame that we do not get to gloat about the cravenness and stupidity of yet another GOP politician, I think on balance most of us will be glad to hear that Gov. Brian Kemp was not badly wrong here.
What is happening instead of the widely predicted bloodbath? Confirmed cases of the virus are obviously increasing (though the actual rolling weekly average of new ones have been headed down for nearly a month) while deaths remain more or less flat. This is in fact what happens when you test more people for a disease that is not fatal or even particularly serious for the vast majority of those who contract it, for which the median age of death is higher than the American life expectancy.
How was this possible? One answer is that the lockdown did not in fact do what it was supposed to do, which is to say, meaningfully impede transmission of the virus. In fact, data both from states like Georgia and from abroad suggests that the lifting of lockdowns is positively correlated with a decrease in rates of infection. This could be because lockdowns are inherently ineffective at slowing down a disease whose spread appears to be largely intrafamilial and nosocomial.
Georgia’s Republican governor earned bipartisan attacks when he wisely reopened his state in late April: Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior.
In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”
The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.
That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:
“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”
Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”
“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”
“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”
Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”
The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”
At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”
Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”
Of course, by 2023, Trump was far from the only former official distancing himself from the debacle of 2020: Anthony Fauci Says Don’t Blame Him for COVID Lockdowns and School Closures.
Amanda Hull of the Atlantic’s about-face was much faster, taking only a month: Atlantic writer who warned of Georgia’s human sacrifice by reopening says New York’s 8 p.m. curfew is ‘absolutely insane.’
HMM:
BREAKING:
The Spanish operator has released the timeline of the blackout.
They still don’t say what exactly caused it.
They also revealed that the power generation in the Iberian peninsula fell to 0% at one point. Previously it was thought it didn’t go under 10% 🇪🇸 pic.twitter.com/uEUVJ2ZiSN
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 29, 2025
Another thread suggested that a huge surge in solar power generation was responsible. If true, maybe Madrid would rather people not know that.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Just Bomb Iran Already.
Nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles are a direct threat to the United States of America, as well as our friends and allies around the world. That’s indisputable. Those hand-waving away the mullahs’ sordid track record of murder and atrocity committed in the name of that bizarre dictatorship are simply not facing reality.
And I like a lot of the people doing that hand-waving. I respect them, and their opinions should be considered. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m willing to be talked out of this. I would prefer not to go to war. But I’d also prefer not to be obliterated by a bunch of lunatics trying to resuscitate the 53rd missing ayatollah or whatever the hell they’re on about. These guys hate us and want us dead. Pretending that America doesn’t have enemies around the world who want to butcher us is both crazy and wrong, and we dare not be guided by that childlike and sophomoric fantasy.
Nor do I want to hear any crap about how “America started it.” It’s objectively false – we did not start this, except in the sense we refuse to embrace their brand of primitive fanaticism – but I don’t care if we did. You don’t ever get to threaten or kill Americans, two things these savages have been doing for nearly half a century. They took our people hostage in 1979, and eight of our men were killed trying to rescue them. They were behind the Beirut bombings that killed hundreds of American diplomats and Marines. They backed terrorists who slaughtered Americans around the world. They armed and led the Shia thugs who maimed or killed thousands of our troops in Iraq. Payback is in order.
We talk a lot about a Jacksonian foreign policy, where America doesn’t go looking for trouble. But there’s another side to that coin. And that side depicts us wiping out anybody who dares kill Americans. The fact that we’ve allowed these barbarians to murder our people without retaliation is not only a moral disgrace but an invitation for every psychopath with a religious vision and an IED to make some Americans dead.
This is intolerable. The proper state of the world is one in which the mere thought of harming an American never arises because of the certainty that to do so will bring death to the terrorists, to everybody around the terrorists, and to everybody who helped the terrorists.
Andrew Jackson wasn’t just a big talker. If you messed with him, you died.
Read the whole thing.
The Middle East as a whole might become a lot less dangerous with fewer mullahs in Tehran.
STANDING UP AGAINST HATE, BIGOTRY, AND DISCRIMINATION: Trump Administration Launches Probes of Harvard Law Review’s Racial Preferences: The Education Department and HHS will investigate whether the journal violated civil rights law. “The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services will conduct separate investigations of the university after the Washington Free Beacon published a news report Friday revealing that the law review uses race to select both editors and articles for publication. The report was based on a trove of internal documents.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Amazon launches its first satellites to rival Starlink. “Amazon’s Kuiper broadband internet constellation is starting to take shape, with its first batch of satellites shipped and deployed into space on Monday. The launch is just the first of 80 that Amazon has lined up to take all 3,236 Project Kuiper satellites into low-Earth orbit as part of the retail giant’s effort to compete with Starlink — SpaceX’s market-dominating satellite internet business.”
The launch was by ULA, not by Blue Origin.