LABOUR WILL BURY BRITISH STEEL, NOT SAVE IT:

In a rare Saturday sitting of parliament, MPs voted this weekend to allow the UK government to assume operational control of British Steel. The emergency legislation will be used to block the firm’s Chinese owner, Jingye, from closing down its two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. Full nationalisation is likely on the way.

There is no doubt that government intervention was necessary to prevent the plant’s closure. Jingye, which claims it was losing £700,000 per day from the Scunthorpe steelworks, was clearly determined to cut its losses and run. Negotiations over a support package broke down last week when Jingye rejected the government’s offer to cover the costs of the iron and coal needed to keep the furnaces running. It also rejected what business secretary Jonathan Reynolds described as ‘one of the largest government grants in British history’. It then became clear that Jingye was selling off its stockpiles and refusing to pay for past orders of raw materials, and thus had hoped to starve the furnaces and render them inoperable (without coal keeping the temperature high, furnaces can sustain permanent damage). Restarting the furnaces would not have been impossible in this event, but it would have been a costly and complex process.

The loss of British Steel’s blast furnaces would have been devastating for the plant’s 2,700 employees and for Scunthorpe, which has been a steelmaking town since the 19th century. But it also would have been devastating for the UK. The nation that invented modern steelmaking would become the only G7 nation incapable of producing ‘primary’ or ‘virgin’ steel. This is essential for carmaking, infrastructure, the defence industry and many other critical manufacturing sectors.

* * * * * * * * *

Labour’s intervention has brought British Steel some time. It may well have prevented the disorderly shutdown of Britain’s last blast furnaces, which would have had devastating consequences for the economy as a whole. Yet far from ‘saving’ British steelmaking, Labour continues to bury it. It’s hard to see heavy industry surviving another four years of eco-vandalism.

But at that point, who will be making plans for Nigel?

THE PEOPLE WHO CAME FOR YOUR PLASTIC BAG AND STRAW NOW WANT YOUR DOG:

From the people who turned your Mustang into a Prius and made it so your dishwasher does not actually wash dishes comes a new villain, not quite straight from central casting, in the imaginary war on the planet: dogs.

“We are all too aware of the negative effects of cats,” Australian academics Bill Bateman and Lauren Gilson write at The Conversation, “both owned and feral, on wildlife…. Our pet dogs seem to get a free pass.”

With all the charm of Almira Gulch and the subtlety of Michael Vick, Bateman and Gilson argue that man’s best friend really sits, and rolls over, as mankind’s great enemy.

The authors argue, “Our beloved pet dogs have a far greater, more insidious and more concerning effect on wildlife and the environment than we would like to be the case.”

How so?

“The medications we use to rid our pet dogs of fleas or ticks can last weeks on fur, and wash off when they plunge into a creek or river,” they write. “But some of these medications have ingredients highly toxic to aquatic invertebrates, meaning a quick dip can be devastating.”

They point out, “Dogs largely eat meat, meaning millions of cows and chickens are raised just to feed our pets.”

Sod off, swampy.

STEVE GREEN AT THE PJ MOTHERSHIP: Ford Has a ‘Chief Learning Officer,’ and He’s Exactly What You’d Expect.

In the case of Ford’s CLO, Barrett Evans, his function seems to be harassing an elderly guy in a wheelchair for watching Fox News and then bragging about it on social media. Here’s the first part of his post, which I believe (but not 100% sure) is from Facebook:

Elderly passenger on my flight from San Diego yesterday enjoyed Fox ‘News’ for the entire ride. Deplaning and I notice he and his wife getting into their airport wheelchairs to be pushed to next gate. My filter was malfunctioning…

‘Love to see you supporting DEI.’

‘Not me!’ ‘Yes – you. That wheelchair, and the human pushing it, are provided at no direct cost to you – rather by a subsidized cost attributed to every passenger in this airport. Provided to level the playing field – for you.

I won’t recount all the details and humorous responses here because my Twitchy colleague Sam J. already crushed it, and I’m not about to bust into her wheelhouse.

For what it’s worth, wheelchair accommodations are legally mandated by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Even before then, airlines generally seemed happy to accommodate almost any paying passenger. The point here is that Ford’s CLO doesn’t seem to understand that the D in DEI doesn’t stand for Disability. You’d think a guy with a seat in the C-suite would at least know the fundamentals.

The story also has one of those telling details that I almost missed the first time around.  Evans’s social media account — posed in front of a Pride decoration — uses the handle “chivalryandchampagne.” My advice? Skip the bubbly, Barrett, and rediscover the chivalry.

The automobile company that published the Dearborn Independent in its salad days doesn’t seem to have made much progress when it comes to executives harassing innocent people and then boasting about it in the media.

THE DIVINE SECRETS OF THE SUBORBITAL YA-YA SISTERHOOD: Blue Origin’s all-female space flight was a step backwards for feminism.

Far be it from me to spoil the party, but this is not space exploration. Sanchez is a former TV presenter, about to get married to one of the world’s richest men who just happens to own the space rocket.

Katy Perry has also been drinking from the same fountain of delusional self-indulgence: ‘I’m really excited…We are all made of stardust and it’ll be exciting to see them twinkle from that site and have such an appreciation for Mother Earth when we see it that way’. She went on to suggest the trip would encourage young girls to go into space in the future with ‘no limitations’. Really? Previous passenger trips with Blue Origin have cost more than $1 million (£760,000) a seat. Only for rich girls, then.

It has been reported that the crew trained for all of two days ahead of the trip. Rather depressingly, much of the coverage of their journey into space featured talk of flared jump suits and other fashion accessories. The female crew appeared more than happy with this agenda, saying that lipstick, eyelash extensions and hair styles matter. The bible of female empowerment, according to Katy Perry, goes like this: ‘Space is finally going to be glam…We are going to put the “ass” in “astronaut”’.

Is it churlish to point out that she is not an astronaut, or certainly not in any conventional sense of the word?

No, it’s accurate. In December of 2021, NBC-DFW 5 reported: No More Commercial Astronaut Wings, Too Many Launching: FAA. Just as sitting in a seat on a 737 doesn’t make you a pilot; sitting in a seat on a fully automated suborbital flight similarly counts as passenger status. Or as former MTV VJ Kennedy writes:

These chicks aren’t astronauts. They’re leg-humping fabulists who ingratiated themselves with a billionaire for a little publicity. They’re space tourists, and their dumb stunt does nothing for humanity or space exploration, regardless of their gametes.

Sorry, sisters, but you’re no Valentina Tereshkova — the first woman in space, who flew on a solo mission in a flimsy Russian craft in 1963 during the Cold War.

That took some real asteroids. And no make-up.

University of Birmingham space scientist Dr Garrett Dorian said it best: ‘Let’s call it what it is and not tell ourselves that this is contributing meaningfully to science or space exploration. I am afraid I do still think these flights are essentially just joyrides for the super-rich.’

Hear hear! Or should I say, Her Her?

Heh, indeed.

SEE BITTER SCOLDING: Woke. In. Space! CBS Host Apologizes for Saying ‘Mankind:’ ‘I’m Sorry. I’m Sorry.’

In space, no one can hear you scream; but the aliens can apparently pick up your virtue signals on their scanners. CBS Mornings co-host Vlad Duthiers was sending out distress calls during Monday’s show after he was scolded by Dr. Mae Jemison (the first black woman in space) because he used the highly offensive term “mankind” to refer to the entire human species.

* * * * * * * * *

Duthiers immediately stepped in it again with his comments about space travel being a benefit to “mankind.” Again, he drew a swift scolding from Jemison:

DUTHIERS: So, explain to our audience why even a trip like this one, all the trips that we take into space, benefit mankind.

JEMISON: Um, so, it benefits humankind.

“Humankind, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Duthiers pleaded.

She then proclaimed that she was, “going to keep correcting the mankind and the man-made, and the man-missions because this is exactly what this mission is about, is expanding the perspective of who does space.”

Jemison’s high horse had legs that stretched up past the Karman line (international line that denotes where outer space begins).

As Thomas Sowell wrote 30 years ago in The Vision of the Anointed, on the left’s sustained attack on “The Generic ‘He:’”

Trivial as such crusades may seem, they have been very successful in changing the way people talk in the media, in academia, and in government. Not only is the generic “he” taboo in many quarters, the speech controllers have pressed on to new conquests, attacking such words as “layman,” “craftsman,” “actress,” or “matron,” which violate their unisex view of the world, and also proscribe such phrases as “to master a language” because it uses a sex-specific word. These examples are from an official guidebook put out by the Australian government, which shows how far such crusades have spread. An American guidebook, distributed internationally, declares that there is “a perfectly scientific, completely foolproof, and highly theoretical model for avoiding sexism on the job.” As so often happens, pretensions of “science” are the last refuge of those who offer neither the evidence nor the logic that are integral to science.

The net effect of all this is that young women, especially in educational institutions where they are bombarded with radical feminist propaganda, are led to believe that every use of the generic “he” in books of the past is proof of disdain or hostility toward women, when in fact such usage simply avoided cluttering up the language or forcing writers into strained constructions and awkward phrases. In short, the anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.

At the conclusion of her 10-minute suborbital jaunt, CBS’s Gayle King gushed, “You look down at the planet and you think that’s where we came from? To me it’s such a reminder about how we need to do better, be better.”

Indeed — excellent advice for Jemison to take to heart.

EUROPE IS THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE THESE DAYS:

EU energy policy is the biggest reason why Europe cannot unite against Russia in the long term.

Germany is hooked on Russian oil & natural gas like a drug addict is on crystal meth.🤢🤮 https://t.co/otXlo5fc78

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) April 14, 2025

EVERGREEN: German Tanks Fail on Russian Front: German tanks are failing in Ukraine for the same reasons they lost World War II.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Pentagon Must Go on the Offensive to Defeat Politicized Officers.

Your politics don’t matter when you are a military leader. At all. Politics have no place in the military. None. I was becoming more and more prominent politically and in the media as a civilian while I was becoming a senior field grade officer as a reservist, but I was actively apolitical around the troops. I never talked about politics on duty. I never asked about it or told anyone about it. You know the command sergeant major I mentioned? I have no idea who he voted for. None. That’s because he was a consummate professional, and I tried to be the same. When we put on the uniform, we did our job whether the President was named Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, or Obama.

But apparently, some officers these days think there is a Trump Exception to their duty as officers to be apolitical, just as there appears to be a Trump Exception to every other rule, regulation, norm, and standard in our society and government. They are wrong, and their utterly bass ackwards conception of their duties as leaders is poisonous to the organization. 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.

What’s stunning is the sheer cheesiness of their tiresome acts of resistance. The commander of Fort Igloo decided to throw away her career by mass emailing a cloying letter that emphasized how she didn’t support the political leadership’s initiatives re: Greenland. What was she thinking? Another officer at NATO headquarters refused to post pictures of the new commander-in-chief and vice-president, as is a rule on military installations. That’s almost too petty to believe (I initially did not believe it – too insane – but my sources tell me it’s true).

Read the whole thing.

NVIDIA STOCK LEAPS AFTER MASSIVE U.S. INVESTMENT SURPRISE:

Nvidia unveiled plans for a massive investment in its U.S.-based manufacturing Monday as the ripple effects of President Donald Trump’s tariff gambit, as well as China’s retaliation toward the tech sector, continue to reverberate.

Nvidia said it planned to produce an American-made supercomputer from a U.S. platform, and planned to produce as much as $500 billion in artificial-intelligence infrastructure over the next four years as part of a partnership with Foxconn  and Taiwan Semiconductor.

The plants are expected to be built in Arizona, to test Nvidia Blackwell chips, and in Texas, to test AI supercomputers.

“The engines of the world’s AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time,” said CEO Jensen Huang. “Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency.”

Meanwhile, in recent Apple news:

IT’S COME TO THIS: As Concert Ticket Prices Soar, More Than Half of Coachella GA Attendees Are Buying Tickets Through Payment Plans.

Tens of thousands of music fans will descend on the California desert this weekend for the first of two iterations of the Coachella Music and Arts festival outside of Palm Springs, Calif.

Approximately 80,000 to 100,000 fans each weekend will have coughed up the $599 ticket price to see headliners Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day and Post Malone. But ticket price is often just the cost of entry — many of those fans will spend more than a $1,000 per weekend on lodging and cough up hundreds of dollars more for food, drinks and merchandise. It’s a substantial spend for any of the 20-somethings in Coachella’s target demographic. But festival organizers have increasingly helped finance their purchase through payment plan programs.

Approximately 60 percent of general admission ticket buyers at this year’s festival opted to use Coachella’s payment plan system, which requires as little as $49.99 up front for tickets to the annual concert. The desert festival isn’t alone — Lollapalooza, Electric Daisy Carnival and Rolling Loud all sell the majority of their tickets using some kind of payment plan system.

Representatives at Goldenvoice, which puts on Coachella, declined to comment for this story. One source, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, told Billboard that payment plans have fundamentally changed how festivals are marketed to the public.

“Festivals are now marketing a cheap down payment as their main call to action,” the source says. “The messaging is $20 down gets you in the door, or $50 down gets you started. It’s no longer about the artists, or the festival lifestyle — the message is, ‘You can afford this if you act today.’”

Yes, but it’s not just Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day and Post Malone. There was also this brilliant veteran rap star spitting bars, and dropping some dope verses, straight fire: Bernie Sanders urges Coachella crowd to stand up against ‘US oligarchy.’

Senator Bernie Sanders held celebrity-backed rallies across the US as he emerges as one of the most vocal opponents to Donald Trump’s presidency.

Appearing for his war on extreme wealth tour – called Fighting Oligarchy – at the exclusive Coachella festival this weekend, he said: “This country faces some very difficult challenges and the future of what happens to America depends on your generation.”

Taking to the stage after a performance by the British pop singer Charli XCX he told the 36,000-strong crowd: “We need you to stand up.”

“You can turn away and ignore what goes on but you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up to fight for justice.”

“Fighting Oligarchy” is definitely Bernie’s greatest hits package, crafted from years of extensive jamming on the road, and presumably went down well with the young potentially violent socialists in the crowd:

😂
pic.twitter.com/pQCzmRMrah

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025

Related: Festival guests report stolen belongings from hotel rooms during Coachella.

Multiple Coachella festivalgoers contacted News Channel 3, saying their belongings were stolen from their hotel rooms while they were away at the festival.

Ellie Brownridge said she’s attended Coachella for years with her best friend, Zoe Grober.

Grober said they’ve stayed at La Quinta Resort & Club before.

“We always love this property,” Grober said. “It’s just so disappointing that something like this happened and it’s totally tainted the experience.”

Brownridge and Grober, staying with their husbands, said they returned Saturday morning after the first day of Coachella to find personal items missing — including vintage bags, jewelry, family heirlooms and sunglasses.

They told News Channel 3 they called hotel management and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department — and quickly learned they weren’t alone.

“We met two other groups. In total, I think it’s like 15 people that we know of that this has happened to,” Brownridge said. “I think we’re looking at over $100,000 worth of stuff that’s gone.”

I was told in 2020 by Bernie’s supporters — including the New York Times and NPR — that this sort of five-fingered wealth distribution was perfectly acceptable. I’m glad to see that’s apparently no longer the case.

UPDATE: California punk rockers call for an ‘army of Luigis’ during brash Coachella set.

Shortly after ending a blistering rendition of “Coup D’Etat” during their Coachella set, Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris made a clarification to the moshing crowd. Although that last song ended with the words “kill all,” he made a point to say that the band does not condone what it describes, including kidnapping government leaders for ransom and leading a coup. “That song, that last line, ends with ‘kill all.’ That’s a pretty f—king ugly statement,” Morris said. “In ugly times. Do not think that we encourage that.”

Then, Morris went in a different direction. “What we do encourage — what would be totally f—king happening — would be an army of Luigis,” he said, in reference to Luigi Mangione, who is currently facing both federal and New York state charges for the alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson late last year.

Tay-Tay and Donie smile.

UNEXPECTEDLY: California has the highest impact fees for homebuilding in the country.

When property owners apply to the government for building permits, they’re often required to pay impact fees: fees meant to cover the strain additional buildings have on public resources like roads, sewers, schools, and parks.

There’s nothing wrong with properly set impact fees. But some local governments set impact fees that are excessively high or that aren’t related to the actual impact of construction projects. In addition to violating property rights, these improperly set exactions increase the cost of construction during today’s housing crisis, as a new Pacific Legal Foundation report reveals.

While this is a problem across the United States, California’s impact fees are much higher than anywhere else. Our report found that the average total impact fees for a typical U.S. home grew from almost $5,000 in 2004 to more than $9,000 in 2019. However, California’s average impact fee in 2019 was more than triple the national average, at almost $30,000. And it was much higher than the next-two-highest states: Maryland and Oregon charged the third- and second-highest exactions on average in 2019—nearly $13,000 and $17,000, respectively.

When breaking this down by locality, the situation paints an even starker picture of how much higher impact fees were in California. The five cities with the largest average total impact fees in 2019 were all in California, and all exceeded $50,000. Ironically, the smallest exactions were found in California’s next-door neighbor, Nevada. Las Vegas and Mesquite had average total impact fees of $165 and $43, respectively.

Somewhat relatedly, Thomas Sowell has written about “The Housing Price of Liberalism.”

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.” San Francisco is a crumbling, endlessly multifaceted example of precisely that.

And as we linked to earlier today, Adam Carolla knows who California’s local governments will invariably roll first:

Full episode here.

KYLE SMITH: Eve of Destruction.

Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World is an exhaustive look at the enduring appeal of works about how civilization might end, from the Book of Revelation to 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, I Am Legend, and whatever extinction-level event Hollywood next brings to screens. (“Extinction-level event,” by the way, is a phrase popularized by the 1998 blockbuster Deep Impact, starring Robert Duvall and Téa Leoni, about what happens as Earth prepares to receive an asteroid the size of Texas.)

A writer and podcaster whose previous books include 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), Lynskey seems to have pored over hundreds of books, many of them obscure, and watched nearly as many movies and TV shows to shape this definitive account. “There is always enough misery and mayhem in the world to support a claim that it is the end of days,” he writes. The seismologist Charles Francis Richter noted that when the Gospel records that “there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places” (Luke 21:11), Jesus wasn’t exactly going out on a limb: “Assuredly, no safer forecast was ever made.”

* * * * * * * * *

The most celebrated of this supposedly brilliant crew was the spectacularly erroneous neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich (“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” he promised in 1970), who boldly accepted a bet in 1980 by the techno-optimist economist Julian Simon about the future price of any five precious metals chosen by Ehrlich, which under his catastrophic-scarcity theory would necessarily become more expensive. Prices instead fell across the board. Lynskey sniffs, “Simon was lucky because commodity prices were unusually high in 1980 and Ehrlich had a weak grasp of economics.”

The most sophisticated of the sophisticated see climate change and overpopulation working in tandem to hasten our mass demise. For Lynskey, the 1973 Charlton Heston flick Soylent Green, which pictured a 2022 New York City (population 40,000,000) as a “smoggy, sweltering, desperate shanty town” is “a remarkably far-sighted movie about climate change.” Yet any long-time resident of New York City will tell you that the place is considerably cleaner and more pleasant than it was in 1973.

To Lynskey, no climate-change prophecy is ever wrong, merely premature; he occasionally sounds like a Millerite re-calculating the future arrival date of Armageddon. Why, after mocking so many doomsayers, does he include only two glancing mentions of the leading alarmist of our age, Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) won an Oscar for its sci-fi speculation, warning that the planet would be doomed in ten years unless a “drastic” reversal of course were taken? Lynskey seems entirely to have forgotten that Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, was taken far more seriously than nearly all of the dozens of (other) nuts and cranks whose wrong predictions get detailed, multi-page summaries. Reaching the end, one feels a bit worn out by the endless zombie-march of unearthed factoids. A greater effort to make sense of it all would have been welcome. But then again, it’s always a good time to panic.

It really is: On climate change scare tactics.

1971: New ice age coming by 2020 or 2023!

1972: New ice age by 2070! Oil depleted in 20 years!

1974: Space satellites show new ice age coming fast! And another ice age just around the bend! Ozone depletion a ‘great peril’ to life!

1976: Scientific consensus planet cooling; famines imminent!

1977: Department of Energy says oil will peak in ’90s!

1978: No end in sight to 30-year cooling trend!

1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes! Peak oil in 2000!

1988: Regional droughts (that never happened) in 1990s! Temperatures in DC will hit record highs! Maldive islands will be underwater by 2018!

1989: Rising sea levels will obliterate nations if nothing done by 2000! New York City’s west side highway will be underwater by 2019!

1996: Peak oil in 2020!

2000: Children won’t know what snow is!

All this doomsday talk gives me a serious case of nostalgia. The apocalypses haven’t been nearly as much fun ever since Orson Welles wasn’t available to pick up a quick paycheck narrating them:

POLICE: Arson Suspect Admitted ‘Harboring Hatred’ Toward Gov. Shapiro.

[Cody] Balmer faces numerous charges including:

• Criminal Attempt – Criminal Homicide
• Aggravated Arson – Person Present Inside Property
• Terrorism – Affect the Conduct of a Government

6ABC reported that the police “have not ruled out Shapiro’s Jewish faith” as a possible motive.”

Duane Patterson adds:

What little is known about Balmer, the suspected Jew-hating arsonist, paints the picture that he isn’t a resident of either side of the political aisle. He seems to be A) a nut, and B) an anarchist, which if you look up the definition of an anarchist, it’ll say see A). He once proclaimed on social media that he was a socialist, but there’s not much other evidence out there to back up that claim. What is there is that he hated everybody on both sides.

I hope that Kash Patel at FBI gets to the bottom quickly of what made this person snap, and I hope that Attorney General Pam Bondi, if he did it out of religious bigotry, throws the book at him, despite whatever political affiliation, if any, he currently espouses.

I am grateful that Governor Shapiro and his family are safe. As for the Governor’s ‘both sidesism’, we all have eyes and ears, and functioning brainstems. It’s not hard to see where the bulk of the outbreaks of anti-Semitism are falling on the ideological spectrum recently. It’s not on the right. It’s on the left. Using moral equivalence to downplay the explosion of hate against Jews on the Democratic side isn’t going to make the problem go away. Putting political expediency over morality reduces the spotlight on the true offenders of evil instead of shining the light brightly on these cockroaches wherever they surface.

I want to help dig a giant pit and assist the rest of the country in dropping every anti-Semite into it, regardless of whom they voted for in the last few cycles. If this latest fire outbreak of hate is happening mostly on the left, however, perhaps that’s the direction where we should be applying the most water.

The day after Balmer’s arson attack on the PA governor, CNN was in a festive mood regarding political violence in general: CNN blasted for segment calling Luigi Mangione a ‘morally good man. “’CNN is a bad joke of a new org and Lorenz is a nut job. She said Mangione is a ‘morally good man’ which is absurd, as he killed a man in cold blood,’ another said. ‘The more I think about the Donie O’Sullivan interview with Taylor Lorenz the more astonished I am that they were laughing when talking about a guy who shot a man in the back in cold blood,’ a third person fumed.”

NAKED LUNCH: San Francisco Humiliates Itself Further, Erects 45-Foot Tall Statue of Woman—but Leaves Out Key Feature.

San  Francisco was once a shining example of a great American city, but now it is mostly a punchline. The metropolis that gave us epic Mark Twain quotes, Levi’s, an iconic music scene, the Golden Gate Bridge, and so much more is now known more for excrement on the street, crime, mass drug addiction, and homeless people sprawled across the sidewalks. Given that, you’d think they’d figure out what to prioritize to improve the lives of their citizens.

Their answer, though, will make your head spin. They’ve decided to erect a 45-foot statue of a woman in Embarcadero Plaza to “jazz up” downtown.  They might certainly achieve their goal, because the sculptor decided that the woman didn’t need something most of us would want when standing in the center of a city square: clothes.

That’s right, this lady is buck nekkid.

“Quick, darling, pack the bags—let’s take the kids to San Francisco!”*

I’ve decided not to put a photo of this atrocity here because you get the idea, but if you’d like to take a look, here’s the link.

* I’d say “Or raise them there,” but “unexpectedly” that hasn’t been happening very much in SF for decades: In 2013, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Frisco had the lowest percentage of children of any major American city. In 2005, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal spotted an AP article that noted, “‘San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city,’ the Associated Press reports. ‘Just 14.5 percent of the city’s population is 18 and under.’”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Best comment: “I mean- the biggest shock of all of this is that SF has acknowledged what a woman biologically should look like, and erected it into a 45-foot statue to celebrate.”

RIP: Jean Marsh, Upstairs, Downstairs actress and co-creator, dies, aged 90.

GOODER AND HARDER: Adam Carolla Exposes What’s Really Destroying California (Video):

Full episode here.

GEORGE CLOONEY WISHES YOU GOODNIGHT AND GOOD LUCK WITH A CAPITAL-F: Irony: Clooney’s ‘Goodnight and Good Luck’ Ends With Image of Musk That Proves Media Trust is Dead.

Earlier: Legendary Hollywood Leftist Pines for the 1950s. Exit quote: “After a decade of seeing leftists doxxing people and getting them fired for expressing a forbidden opinion, I have to ask what’s their beef with Joe McCarthy?”

(Classical allusion in headline.)

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: How Sweden’s multicultural dream went fatally wrong.

Barely a week passes in Sweden today without a teenager being arrested for such a hit, keeping Salihu extremely busy, and the public in the grip of a national crisis like no other before it. A softly-spoken former tabloid journalist, the 41-year-old could be a character from a Scandi-noir novel, shining light in society’s darker corners. The body count on his beat, though, is far higher than any Stieg Larsson novel, and holds out little prospect of a satisfactory ending.

For the story he has pursued for the last decade is, in effect, one giant, unsolved murder mystery: why has Sweden, long the envy of the rest of Europe for its peace and prosperity, suddenly seeing so many gangland killings?

Why, in a land that prides itself on welcoming migrants, are so many gang members from migrant communities? And is it Swedish society that is the ultimate culprit, or the migrant communities themselves?

* * * * * * * * *

So what has gone wrong? Part of the blame, Salihu says, is down to the social blights common to most of Europe’s more impoverished multi-racial neighbourhoods. Joblessness and discrimination limit many youngsters’ sense of prospects. TV gang dramas, meanwhile, often “highlight the flashy parts of gang life – money, respect, power – but leave out the trauma, manipulation, and tragic consequences.”

Yet the sense of failure is all the more acute in Sweden, long an open door compared to other European nations. Ever since the 1960s, when it first styled itself as a humanitarian superpower, it has taken in those fleeing trouble abroad, be it Americans fleeing the Vietnam war draft, Soviet dissidents, or Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime. In the 1990s came refugees from the Balkans, and in the last decade asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived. Anxious not to create “parallel societies”, Swedish governments have long funded social integration programmes alongside the waves of migration.

Earlier: Nearly two thirds of convicted rapists in Sweden are migrants or second generation immigrants.

Ten years ago it would be unthinkable that El Salvador would be considered safer than Sweden.

But now that has happened.

Malmö is now ranked as dangerous as Baghdad.

There has been almost daily bombing attacks in Sweden.

Something went very wrong in my home country.

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) April 10, 2025

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS THE ECONOMIST: The Economist Declares Europe the New ‘Land of the Free,’ and Holy Cow, the Replies.

Our “closest ally” arrested a 64-year-old woman for silently praying outside an abortion clinic.

A 64-year-old woman was convicted Friday of standing near an abortion clinic in southern England and holding a sign saying “Here to talk, if you want.”

The case provides further evidence of an erosion of freedom of expression in the United Kingdom, which has recently become a diplomatic issue with the United States.

During the 2024 incident that was brought before the court, Livia Tossici-Bolt was standing silently holding the sign and having “consensual conversations” with people passing by, according to her legal team. However, she was within what is called a “buffer zone,” which criminalizes the “influencing” of people within 150 meters (about 500 feet) of an abortion clinic in the U.K.

Isn’t it weird that The Economist didn’t mention that in their article? Or how about the case where two men were arrested for posting negative views about immigration, accused of stirring up “racial-hatred?” Both received over a year in prison. In an unrelated incident, another man was arrested and charged for burning a Quran.

And early this month, Greater Manchester Police arrested a man “on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence” for publicly burning a Quran. An assistant chief constable said police “made a swift arrest at the time and recognise the right people have for freedom of expression, but when this crosses into intimidation to cause harm or distress we will always look to take action when it is reported to us.”

Europe has become obsessed with combatting what they call “Islamophobia” while Islamist migrants create no-go zones and commit heinous crimes. In Sweden, one Iraqi refugee was assassinated by Muslims for burning the Quran. What did the Swedish government do? It charged another man who also burned the Quran with “incitement.” No, I’m not kidding.

And then there’s Europe’s free and fair “elections:” The EU’s Stranglehold on Democracy.

UPDATE: This Is Britain: Mother Jailed For 2 Years Because of a Tweet She Deleted After 4 Hours.

MORE:

British police warn an elderly, partially-deaf man that saying "speak English" is a hate crime.

This is absolutely insane. pic.twitter.com/4XR3qNl23A

— Turning Point UK 🇬🇧 (@TPointUK) April 13, 2025

UNEXPEXCTEDLY: Say What? CNN Claims Only the Right Has an ‘Extremism Problem.’

“[W]hen it comes to extremism in this country, I mean, the issue very much so is on the right, on the far-right from — you know, from Charlottesville to — to January 6. There isn’t exactly an equivalent on the left in this moment,” [Donie] O’Sullivan claimed with a straight face.

Seriously? Has O’Sullivan been living under a rock? President Trump has survived two assassination attempts in just the past year. Let’s not forget the 2017 congressional baseball shooting, where a deranged MSNBC viewer nearly gunned down an entire group of Republican lawmakers. Or the BLM riots of 2020, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, and the rise of Antifa violence.  How about the leftist cheerleading for Hamas on college campuses across America that has made Jewish students feel unsafe? And, of course, there’s the #TeslaTakedown movement, with extremists firebombing dealerships and vandalizing vehicles.

But I guess none of that qualifies as “extremism” in CNN’s warped worldview.

Not over the past decade:

UPDATE: Taylor Lorenz Laughs Off Obsession With ‘Handsome’ Luigi Mangione to CNN: He Seems ‘Morally Good – Which is Hard to Find.’

Lorenz sat down with CNN’s MisinfoNation host Donie O’Sullivan for Sunday’s episode of the series. O’Sullivan shared a snippet of the conversation to his X account early Sunday morning, showing Lorenz speaking candidly about why she believes Mangione’s actions – and his looks – have struck a nerve with fans of the alleged assassin.

“To see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone stanning a murderer when this is the United States of America,” Lorenz said, “As if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stan murderers of all sorts, and we can give them Netflix shows. There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and the angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels.”

When O’Sullivan asked about the groups of women who have gathered outside Mangione’s court hearings in New York, Lorenz laughed.

“You’re going to see women especially that feel like, Oh my God, right? Like, here’s this man who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who is young, who’s smart,” she said. “He’s a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.”

O’Sullivan quipped, “Yeah, I just realized women will literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me. That’s where we’re at.”

The two agreed sympathy for Mangione was not unlike fandom for supporters of President Donald Trump.

That last sentence neatly, if unintentionally, sums up CNN’s woes perfectly.

Luigi Mangione shot a man in the back as he was walking to work, and @donie is on CNN laughing about it. https://t.co/7b8dw2onBL

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) April 13, 2025

GENE KOPELSON: RIP Thomas C. Reed: Reagan’s First Campaign Manager.

The world of President Ronald Reagan’s colleagues and friends continues to suffer losses with the recent deaths of speechwriter Tony Dolan and national security adviser Richard V. Allen. Those men have received due tributes, but one figure who has not gotten the acknowledgment he deserved was Thomas C. Reed (1934-2024). Tom passed away a little over a year ago, and I knew him well and worked with him. Tom and his critically important roles in the history and life of Ronald Reagan remain largely unknown to the world and even to almost all Reagan historians. Consider this a belated farewell and tribute.

I first met Tom via a phone call in 2012, as I was starting work on exploring Reagan’s first presidential campaign, in 1968. That campaign itself is often forgotten, written off as a last-minute waste of time by almost every other Reagan historian (most people think Reagan’s first presidential campaign was in 1976). Tom quickly assured me that, in fact, those historians were wrong. Tom’s generosity surfaced, as he shared the meticulous notes he had kept of the entire first presidential campaign, which began a scant nine days after he had won the governorship of California in 1966, and ended at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach the summer of 1968.

Read the whole thing.

STEPHEN MILLER: The left gives up on saving the planet.

Another famous Tesla owner in Congress has her eyes on the White House. Hipster congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who is alleged to have illegally parked her Tesla outside a DC Whole Foods – is champion and co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. She is also sympathetic to EV mandates. How is she going to explain her activist base’s sudden turn against the only real EVs people want to buy?

And what of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who captured the hearts of the global climate elite with her scolding speeches and theatrical arrests? Greta seems to have abandoned the climate cause recently for something much closer to her heart – donning a keffiyeh and preaching solidarity with Palestine after Hamas’s massacre of Jews in Southern Israel on October 7.

Perhaps it was all performative all along. Perhaps they really have leaned into the doomsday cult cliché their critics have all accused them of being. Or maybe they truly believe the planet is no longer worth saving. Either way, they have set all of their climate credibility on fire.

Related: Great moments in Luddism: That’ll Teach Elon a Lesson! Soy Boy Lefty Throws a Pie at Optimus Robot Display (Watch).

A leftist chucked a pie at an Optimus robot display inside a Tesla dealership.pic.twitter.com/Jr7908LoHp

— Department of Government Efficiency News (@DOGE__news) April 10, 2025

PENNSYLVANIA GOVERNOR JOSH SHAPIRO’S HOME SET ON FIRE BY ARSONIST WHILE HIS FAMILY SLEPT: “Shapiro and his family were forced to evacuate the governor’s mansion after an arsonist set it on fire overnight while they were sleeping, he announced. The blaze broke out just hours after the governor posted a picture of his family celebrating the first night of Passover on Saturday, ABC 27 reported.”

THE PASSWORD IS: Oligarchy!

😂
pic.twitter.com/pQCzmRMrah

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025

Curiously, as long as Bernie were in charge, Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism would suit him just fine.

UPDATE: The Song Remains the Same: Bernie Sanders urges Coachella crowd to stand up against ‘US oligarchy.’

Senator Bernie Sanders held celebrity-backed rallies across the US as he emerges as one of the most vocal opponents to Donald Trump’s presidency.

Appearing for his war on extreme wealth tour – called Fighting Oligarchy – at the exclusive Coachella festival this weekend, he said: “This country faces some very difficult challenges and the future of what happens to America depends on your generation.”

Taking to the stage after a performance by the British pop singer Charli XCX he told the 36,000-strong crowd: “We need you to stand up.”

“You can turn away and ignore what goes on but you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up to fight for justice.”

Exit quote: “Bernie Sanders making a surprise appearance at Coachella to sermonize on the evils of wealth in front of a crowd of people who paid at least $600 a ticket to be there is peak 21st century Democratic Party.”

OUT ON A LIMB:

Fox Butterfield, call your office!

“The Butterfield Effect” is named in honor of ace New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield, the intrepid analyst responsible for such brilliantly headlined stories as “More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime,” and “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,” not to mention the poetic 1997 header, “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”

Mr. Butterfield is truly perplexed at what he calls the “paradox” of more criminals in prison coinciding with less crime in neighborhoods. An observation that might appear obvious to an 8th grader (crooks + jail = fewer crimes) is simply beyond his grasp. Butterfield of the Times is the poster boy for the greatest conundrum facing the American Left today: How do you explain to people who just don’t get it that the problem is they just don’t get it?

Michael Graham wrote that in 2004, likely not anticipating how the entire establishment left would fall prey to the Butterfield Effect in 2020.