THAT’S A SHAME BECAUSE I WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO HAVING AN EASY WAY TO SPOT THE MADE-IN-CHINA CRAP: Amazon Just Backed Down So Fast That It’ll Give You Whiplash.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 30, 2025
CHANGE? House Judiciary sets Wednesday markup of immigration policies in GOP agenda bill. “It would establish a minimum $1,000 asylum application fee, charging asylees for the first time in U.S. history. It would also establish a $1,000 fee for parolees, a $3,500 fee for sponsors of unaccompanied children and a $550 fee for work permits for a number of applicants, among other new fees.”
STAYING CALM AND BEING HONEST GO A LONG WAY: Other Companies Take Note: Here’s How One Australian Business Is Handling Tariffs.
April 29, 2025
TRANSLATION: IT BOMBED.
It's been a full WEEK and Disney still has NOT released #Andor viewership data… just like they didn't with Skeleton Crew. This follows nearly two years of Disney precedent where they had been releasing such data for new shows. What do yall think happened?
— Valliant Renegade (@ValliantRenegad) April 29, 2025
I’ve been told Andor is the best Disney+ streaming Star Wars show, which is damning with faint praise.
UPDATE (From Ed): “Revenge Of The Sith Humiliates Disney Star Wars.” New video from the Critical Drinker:
“…AND IT’S MUSLIMS RENEWABLES”: Spain’s Blackout: They Did the South Park Meme.
BOTTLENECK: If manufacturing booms, will we have enough job-ready workers?
“Even before Trump took office, a 2024 report from Deloitte forecast a need for up to 3.8 million additional skilled manufacturing employees by 2033,” Pondiscio writes. The report also predicted that “half of those could go unfilled if skills and applicant gaps go unaddressed.”
Career Tech Education (CTE) is expanding, and helping young people enter the workforce, he writes. High school CTE “concentrators” (students who take multiple CTE courses) tend to outperform classmates in earnings and employment rates, and are much more likely to be earning above-poverty wages seven years after high school.
However, CTE programs don’t always align with local job markets, Pondiscio writes. Furthermore, “only about five percent of CTE concentrators focus on manufacturing.”
I think educators and parents see manufacturing as exclusively blue collar, and fields like health and business as giving students college options.
For all the worry about steering students away from college, many don’t have the academic skills for college or for job training.
Those declining math scores are a “flashing warning light,” Pondiscio writes. Robots do the repetitive jobs. “If three-quarters of our students can’t master middle school math,” how will they learn to program the machines?
People will learn a lot for the right pay, even math.
I VOTED FOR THIS SO HARD: Woke DOJ Lawyers Self-Deport After Being Told They Have to Protect Religious Liberties.
BLUE STATE BLUES:
LAWFARE: Delaware is experiencing a mass exodus of companies as a result of Supreme Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick unhinged attacks on Elon Musk's companies. The Senate introduced SB21 to reign her in, but the bill faces legal challenges, and McCormick has reportedly chosen… pic.twitter.com/qC63Z45t4V
— @amuse (@amuse) April 29, 2025
McCormick doesn’t care if she kills the golden goose because she already has enough eggs.
VIDEO: Is Russia Running Out Of Tanks? “Their initial satellite images showed a total of 6107 tanks in all depots in 2021, whereas their most recent count only shows 3,345. However: ‘Virtually every one of these tanks left is in absolutely horrible condition. Before the war it was probably closer to 50/50, but those good ones since have been the ones that were grabbed from storage first.’ They also note that the initial number was almost certainly higher than the ones they could count, as they were probably better vehicles stored in garages. They estimate that pretty much all of those are now gone.”
Probably true, but I’m not sure how much it matters. Drone warfare hasn’t made tanks obsolete, but they also aren’t needed in the same numbers as before.
ASKING (AND ANSWERING) THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Do Arabs Chop Off Hands? “Why do Arabs chop off hands? The short answer to the question is that they suffer from a chronic plague of theft, a perennial social disease in their culture. The hand-chopping is an effort to limit the behavior. Not only is there no conscience in the culture to suppress the urge to steal, but there is even admiration for the thief who gets away with his crime. That admiration goes to the very roots of Islam.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Thanks, Amazon — Tariff Transparency Might Backfire Bigly.
YOU STAY CLASSY, JALEN: Jalen Hurts Will Not Attend Eagles’ White House Visit with Donald Trump.
NBC News White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor reported a few hours before the visit that the Eagles quarterback would miss the trip, along with other members of the 2025 Super Bowl championship team.
“A White House official confirms to me that @Eagles quarterback @JalenHurts will not be visiting the White House when the Super Bowl champions come later this afternoon,” Alcindor wrote in a post on X.
“The White House says Hurts and other players who can’t attend had ‘scheduling conflicts,’ ” she added.
The Eagles are scheduled to visit President Donald Trump at the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl victory from February, a customary practice for the winning teams, but one the team skipped during Trump’s first term.
Scheduling conflicts, eh?
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.
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.”
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.
THIS IS A CHARMING STORY: Protester Confronts Vivek at a County GOP Event. What Happened Next Was… Unexpected.
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.
DINOSAUR LEGACY MEDIA SUICIDE WATCH: Trump’s Blue Suit and the Death Throes of Legacy Media.