HMM: Credit default swaps are back in fashion — even if the panic might be overblown. “Credit default swaps are like insurance for investors. Buyers pay a fee to protect themselves in case the borrower — in this case the U.S. government — can’t repay their debt. When the cost of insuring the U.S. debt goes up, it’s a sign that investors are getting nervous.”
Hey, Congress — think this is maybe another indicator you might want to cut some spending?
YUGE:
🚨BREAKING: Personal income skyrocketed by 0.8% in April which is 3x the expectation.
The Trump Effect.
pic.twitter.com/mUoLy8rnmF— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 30, 2025
THEY STILL SOMEHOW BELIEVE GOV. JAZZ HANDS IS MANLY:
Every post by a Democrat about White guys is like, "We have to figure out how to appeal to White men, but it's hard because they're evil." https://t.co/nShX7U8Id1
— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) May 30, 2025
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: No-zero grading lets no-show students graduate: ‘Just crazy.’
In Chicago, where fewer students are showing up and more are earning diplomas, some high schools are abandoning no-zero grading, report Mila Koumpilova and Sarah Karp on Chalkbeat.
At Richards Career Academy High School, which primarily enrolls Hispanic and black students from low-income families, “grading for equity” was introduced in 2019 to help ninth graders pass courses. “Students could redo assignments repeatedly and turn in work late. Even if they didn’t complete the assignment, the lowest score they could get was 50 rather than zero — a concept known as no-zero grading,” they write. When the pandemic closed schools, leniency spread to all classes.
No-zero grading is supposed to encourage students to keep trying after a missed assignment, but teachers say students can pass with little effort, and without learning the importance of showing up and doing the work. They worry they won’t be prepared for college or the workforce.
That’s because they won’t be.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Open Borders Dems Can Never Wash the Blood Off of Their Hands. “Democratic politicians and their rancid lapdogs in the mainstream media keep prattling on about how mean the Trump administration is as it rounds up and deports people who shouldn’t be here. In their decades-long fictional immigration story, it’s only sweet people who are looking for a better life who come into this country illegally. They completely ignore the existence of cartels and act as if brutal tragedies like this one are anomalous.”
TURNAROUND? Boeing CEO says company is ‘pretty confident’ it is ready to increase 737 MAX output.
Boeing is currently trying to stabilize production at 38 per month, where it was capped by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in 2024 after a midair accident put the planemaker’s safety and production quality program under new scrutiny.
After the FAA approves Boeing increasing output to 42 a month, “we do have subsequent rate increases in our plan,” which will typically be in increments of five aircraft a month and at least six months apart, he said.
Ortberg has previously stressed that production must be stable before any rate increase.
Production defects on the 737 program are down by 30%, Ortberg said. “Virtually every one of our customers is reporting a higher quality of airplane at delivery.”
Increasing production is critical in getting Boeing back to being cash positive, which Ortberg has previously said he expects to achieve in the second half of the year. The company burned through $2.3 billion in cash during the first quarter.
“I think the financial performance will follow the production performance … and I think we need to think about it that way,” Ortberg said.
Focus on the quality and the profits will follow.
ANYBODY WHO TRUSTED HAMAS, FOR STARTERS: Whose Fault Is the Gaza Aid Fiasco?
THERE’S STILL SOME LIFE LEFT IN THE LEAD SLED: F-4 Phantoms Sought By Private Space Launch Company Starfighters International.
The Kennedy Space Center-based research, test, and now space launch company Starfighters International, which has been flying F-104 Starfighters privately for decades is now, is in the process of acquiring a dozen F-4 Phantoms. The deal would see the iconic third-generation Cold War fighters fly primarily in service of the firm’s space launch operations, which aim to provide rapid and flexible access to low Earth orbit (LEO) for small satellites, as well as suborbital offerings.
Starfighters International began as a company around three decades ago, and grew from doing air shows to becoming largely a research and development support firm with a very unique address. The company and its fleet of antique Mach 2-capable F-104 Starfighters, which includes seven airframes today, moved into Kennedy Space Center in 2007. There they would have access to arguably one of the most famous and largest runways on earth, the Shuttle Landing Facility. Now they are in the process of building a 150,000-square-foot facility in Midland, Texas, to support the firm’s more ambitious space launch aims.
And this is precisely where the F-4 Phantoms come into play.
While the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter is capable of zooming up into the stratosphere at high speed, they cannot carry heavier, outsized launch vehicles at the required performance that will allow larger payloads to be inserted into low Earth orbit. The F-4s — at least in concept — can.
More lift is always better.
THAT’S GONNA LEAVE A MARK: Gad Saad Gently Shreds Kyra Sedgwick’s Anti-Trump Fears. “This is the stuff I so often talk about when I discuss parasitized minds as being the most dangerous force of nature… This is a functioning human being who supposedly does not suffer from a mental illness, although one could argue that baffling imbecility could be a form of cognitive impairment.”
WITH PURPOSE AND ENTHUSIASM: How California Has Destroyed Its Middle Class.
While the Trump interregnum has slowed the march of neo-feudalism in the rest of America, in California, the plan continues to move relentlessly forward. If you’re extremely wealthy, California’s abusive cost of living is not a big concern, and you stay for the scenic beauty and abundant sunshine. If you’re extremely poor, you stay because California’s taxpayer-funded assistance programs—financial aid, food assistance, healthcare, and other support services—offer a lifestyle orders of magnitude better than what you may have previously endured in the barrios of Tegucigalpa or the suburbios of Maputo.
But if you’re not rich, and you’re not poor, but just work, pay taxes, and pay for everything you need with after-tax earnings and without government assistance, California is a hostile environment. The numbers on out-migration are unequivocal. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an astonishing 8.5 million people have moved out of California since 2010. In 2023 alone, the last full year for which estimates are available, 690,000 people left. In 2022, 818,000; in 2021, 841,000. No other state has sustained anywhere near this 15 years of unrelenting mass exodus.
There’s plenty of “churn” in any state’s population, as people move around the country. But California’s churn in large part is middle-class Americans moving out and poorer Americans and foreigners moving in. The percentage of Californians living in poverty increased nearly 50% this century, to 18.9% in 2023 from 12.9% in 2000.
WELCOME TO The post-woke world.
The sudden rise in the early 2010s of critical social justice ideology – that sprawling, complex and disparate movement known colloquially as ‘woke’ – has meant that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have lost much of their utility. Definitions of ‘woke’ are as varied as can be imagined, but it is best understood as a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means. Yet for all its institutional clout, this ideology has never enjoyed popular support. Estimates by More in Common, a nonprofit organisation committed to the promotion of social cohesion, suggest that, at its height, the woke movement was endorsed by approximately eight per cent of the population of both the US and the UK. As such, its power could only ever be sustained through misdirection and imposition.
We now find ourselves entering a new phase of the culture war, one in which the woke ideology is being tamed and will soon relinquish its chokehold on the Western world. The death rattles have become so audible that they can no longer be gainsaid. Major companies such as McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, Amazon, Google and Meta have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Black Lives Matter is now a largely discredited movement. Leftist politicians, such as Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former US secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, have quietly removed the pronouns from their social-media profiles. Multiple sporting bodies have barred men who identify as women from competing in female categories. Gay-rights groups are rejecting the forced teaming with divisive LGBTQIA+ campaigns. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ means ‘biological sex’ for the purposes of equality law, meaning that men who identify as women have no legal right to enter women-only spaces – the Telegraph ran with the frontpage headline, ‘Trans women are not women’.
Good news, except for Britain, where the “authoritarian means” are already established well enough to survive whatever becomes of wokeness.
CONSTITUENT SERVICE: Democrats Want To Keep Repeat Offenders On The Streets. “There’s been lots of chatter that Democrats need to start cracking down on crime if they want to win back the middle class voters that flipped to Trump to 2024. If so, that news hasn’t been relayed to Democrats in the Texas legislature, who seem determined to keep repeat offenders out on bail at any cost.”
SIGNED THE PARDONS HIMSELF, TOO: We Didn’t See That Coming: Trump Pardons Reality Stars.
BLUE CITY BLUES: Zohran Mamdani makes massive gains in NYC mayoral race — but still can’t topple Cuomo’s lead.
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is seemingly gaining ground on Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary race — but the ex-gov continues to come out on top, a new internal poll shows.
The survey, released Tuesday by Mamdani’s camp, has the state assemblyman from Queens coming in with 27% in the first round of rank-choice voting, with the next candidate failing to even register in the double digits.
But Cuomo maintains his lead in the crowded field, nabbing 40% of the vote — with the Democratic primary just four weeks away.
Eight million people in the city and these are the best Dems that New Yorkers have to choose from.
NOT ANTI-WAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:
The same people who spent the last months claiming that it is a war crime to deny aid to Gaza spent today claiming it is a war crime to deliver aid to Gaza in a way that does not allow Hamas to steal it.
Kind of gives the game away.
— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 27, 2025
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Starship Flight Test 9: Another Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Venus Harbors Secret Asteroids That Could Threaten Earth, Study Warns. “These so-called ‘Venus co-orbitals’ share a similar path around the Sun with our neighbor planet but aren’t harmless tagalongs. According to a paper under review for the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and currently hosted on arXiv, a yet-undetected group of the asteroids could pose a threat to Earth.”
ROBERT SPENCER: King Charles Undercuts Canada’s Sovereignty While Trying to Affirm It. “Yeah, this was really a great idea from the beginning: show Orange Man Bad that you’re a sovereign state by reminding the world that you’re a part of an international conglomeration of former British colonies under the sovereignty of the English king. But when he actually spoke on Tuesday, Charles made it even worse.”
THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: Tesla Rival BYD Tumbles After Launching China EV Price War. Several Rivals Fire Back.
BYD is generally viewed as the low-cost producer in China, reflecting its in-house production of batteries and many key components as well as its ability to extract volume discounts from suppliers. So it has more scope to get prices lower than rivals, many of which are not profitable.
Rising inventories at BYD dealers reportedly spurred the automaker’s move, along with a desire to reach 5.5 million in sales this year, up from just over 4 million in 2024.
The EV maker’s discounts don’t apply to its surging overseas sales. Those already tend to have higher margins. That gives BYD another edge over rivals that are almost entirely reliant on the cutthroat China market.
Still, hefty price cuts will likely squeeze BYD’s profit margins.
China price wars are nothing new. Tesla helped kick off big discounts in early 2023, as the U.S. EV giant slashed prices worldwide.
In early 2024, BYD spurred a wave of price cuts.
The market has too many producers and not enough growth, even with mandates and subsidies.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Reports of the Dems’ Return to Relevance Are Greatly Exaggerated. “Where Politico takes this is so ridiculous it’s like reading an old copy of Mad Magazine. The Who’s Who of leftist whackos in its fever dream for this shadow cabinet is chuckle-worthy. Bill Nye the Fake Science Guy is on it. The Democrats’ media mouthpieces are even less serious people than the party leaders are.”
CHANGE: Trump admin issues pause on student visa interviews at all embassies.
The Trump administration on Tuesday reportedly issued a blanket pause on the scheduling of student visa interviews at embassies and consulates while it mulls the implementation of social media vetting for foreign students.
The interim pause came via an order from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Politico reported.
“Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued septel, which we anticipate in the coming days,” it read.
Somewhere, a Biden or Obama judge is trying to figure out how to put a stop to the stoppage.
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