Archive for 2025

November 18, 2025

INSURRECTION, STRAIGHT UP:

Posted at 3:35 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

THE RELUCTANCE, I THINK, IS THAT THE “INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY” IS WOUND THROUGH AND THROUGH WHAT WAS GOING ON:

Related: Matt Taibbi: The Epstein Circus Will Shatter Our Last Delusions: Do we want to know how the world really works, or is it too disgusting to countenance?

Democratic Party hysteria over this issue is obviously absurd because “all of the Epstein files” could have been released over the last four years. There must be reasons why the last administration didn’t take that step, and there should be scandal in MAGA-world if those reasons overlap at all with the Trump administration’s. Between Epstein’s own hysterical rants about Trump in the newly released documents (he sounds like Kathy Griffin in some of the emails) and the blue party’s seeming entanglement with Epstein from the Clintons to Larry Summers to Reid Hoffman, it’s hard to imagine where that overlap might be, unless it involves major corporate names and/or overseas relationships. Some of that is suggested in Plaskett’s story. . . . Such realizations make for a wince-hard moment for the whole American population, which may have to adjust its estimation of our politicians down from totally corrupt if all these files are released. As was the case with the Russiagate documents, these releases continue an education in the rotten way things really work in this country that I suspect both parties will quickly regret voting to serve up.

Like I said.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 18th, 2025

MATH: Ford can’t find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade.

Ford pays auto mechanics $120,000 a year, but can’t find enough workers, said CEO Jim Farley on a podcast. Nationwide, employers “have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”

Farley complained that “we don’t have trade schools anymore,” reports Avi Zilber in the New York Post.

The Ford CEO’s grandfather was one of the company’s early employees, hired to work on the Model T. “We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle class life and a future for his family,” Farley said.

Ford is spending $4 million to fund scholarship for auto technicians.

They ought to invoice the Department of Education for the $4 million, just to make a point.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

JUDGEMENT OF NUREMBERG: The film Nuremberg is almost unforgivable.

● The sub-Dynasty style soap dialogue. For example: ‘Ah’m gonna put Hermann Goering on the stand and ah’m gonna make him tell the world what he did!’ A story like this, ideally, demands a respect for the facts, a verbatim approach where possible and a sober, low-key dynamic. The more you amp it up, the more grotesque it potentially becomes.

● The heavy handed MAGA references. Near the end of the film someone says – or rather shouts – something like: ‘EVIL DOESN’T HAVE TO WEAR A UNIFORM FOR YOU TO KNOW IT’S EVIL!’ Yes, Trump has his flaws. But comparing his administration with the Third Reich is, as even his enemies would surely acknowledge, moronically reductive.

● The ‘Allo ‘Allo! style accents. (E.g. Goering: ‘I em going to es-cape zee hengmen’s noose!’ If only the director had followed the example of Kenneth Branagh’s Conspiracy, about the 1942 Wannsee conference, when Nazi officials discussed details of the Final Solution. Branagh, wisely, told the actors to use English accents as he feared that giving it loads of ‘zis’ and ‘zat’ would be distracting. As a result the film worked well. It became relatable, bureaucratic and, as Hannah Arendt might have said, chillingly banal.

Speaking of Kenneth Branagh’s Conspiracy, that made-for-HBO movie, shot during the election year of 2000, has a line early in its run time, when the actor playing Nazi undersecretary Martin Luther says, “Where will we be in four years, do you think? Living in the White House?” Plus ça change.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 18th, 2025

THIS:

Going back at least to the Obama years, China’s most important export might not have been cheap consumer goods, but deflation.

Xi has gotten even more aggressive with exports, trying to keep his economy afloat. While I’m not always a huge fan of them, tariffs are the necessary defense mechanism to Beijing’s mercantilism-on-steroids.

Plus, we need to re-shore vital industries.

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

WORST. HITLER. EVER:

As for being the first “authoritarian” in history to reduce the size of government, Calvin Coolidge would like a word here: In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR smeared the laissez–faire Coolidge era of the 1920s as “the spirit of fascism.”

FDR ended that speech with one of the most disgusting exhortations against his political foes — and liberty itself — ever offered by an American president in a major address. He said, in part:

One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920′s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.

Ah yes, if we go back to the 1920s, an era of rampant prosperity and expanding liberty we will have surrendered to Fascism. That is grotesque.

But it’s a grotesquerie that refuses to die. Which seems odd; as Charles Cooke asked the left during the 2016 election, “Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 18th, 2025

AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM CP:

More:

I don’t do this for a living, I have an actual full-time job that is not X, I never ragebait, I never engagement farm and I always just shoot straight with what I think is happening.

I know ~250,000 followers sounds like a lot, but it’s really not. Not when you consider how many accounts have millions of followers.

Now look at what they pay me and multiply that exponentially for the really big accounts who, BTW, are also raking in dough on YouTube, podcasts, TikTok, etc.

So next time you get fed some theory about “I know who really killed Charlie Kirk” or “Trump is an Epstein pedo” or, really, anything else that is fringe and conspiratorialist and inflammatory, realize that those people really don’t care about you or the truth.

They only care about the money.

You have been warned. This is my public service message for the day.

Indeed.

Posted at 12:58 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

UNDERREPORTED STORIES: Has Mexico Had Enough? “This isn’t the first protest against cartel violence, but it may be the first to reach the center of government.”

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

CHANGE:

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

HEH:

System-builders never seem to take into account that the first thing people do with a new system is figure out how to game it.

This is also known as the Law of Unintended Consequences, and it’s as immutable as the Law of Gravity.

Posted at 11:56 am by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

MARK PULLIAM: Are Blue States (and Rogue Judges) Itching for a Civil War? “What else could explain their brazen defiance and rebellion, calculated to cause chaos and division?”

Civil society is how humans escape from the anarchy and predation of the state of nature. Public safety is, therefore, the primary goal of government. This requires laws to protect our rights, and law enforcement to make sure that the laws are obeyed and offenders are punished. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that insurrectionists seeking to overthrow or de-stabilize a democratically-elected government focus on promoting law-breaking and undermining law enforcement. This is exactly what left-wing Democrats are doing by creating “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens; suspending enforcement of laws against drugs, vagrancy, petty theft, prostitution, etc.; de-funding the police; and installing Soros-funded prosecutors, who thwart the enforcement of laws.

Opening our national borders, restricting gun ownership, providing shelter for illegal aliens, condoning urban lawlessness, refusing to punish criminals, and punishing self-defense all represent the left’s campaign to undermine the rule of law and create anarchy, chaos, and fear—leaving confused citizens clamoring for change. The left also seeks to create a constituency of moochers dependent on the welfare state, who will eventually demand socialism to provide for their needs. This is sometimes referred to as the Cloward-Piven strategy.

With this in mind, the motivation for the soft-on-crime policies in blue states and blue cities (and the open-borders agenda of the Biden administration) becomes crystal clear. Blue city mayors actively encourage crime as a strategy to create chaos, induce a sense of helplessness, and foster submission to a cradle-to-grave welfare state. The fruits of this strategy are apparent in the election of avowed socialists in New York City and Seattle. The Democrat Party is becoming indistinguishable from socialism, so the rest of the blue cities, especially Chicago, are well on their way to joining NYC and Seattle.

But it begins with creating an epidemic of crime.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

I SUSPECT THERE ARE AN AWFUL LOT OF DOGS THAT DIDN’T BARK:

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025

LUXURY BELIEFS ON DISPLAY:

Posted at 10:54 am by Stephen Green on Nov 18th, 2025
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