HOMESHORING: Eli Lilly says it will spend billions to move drug manufacturing to U.S. soil. “Eli Lilly said Wednesday it will build three manufacturing plants in the United States to make the key raw ingredients in its medicines, a push to bring home a critical part of the pharmaceutical supply chain that largely comes from foreign sources.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
February 28, 2025
FIRE THEM, FIRE THEM ALL: Warfare at the Washington Post: Journalists in ‘Open Rebellion’ Against Jeff Bezos.
HIGH SCHOOL HALL MONITOR COMPLAINS ABOUT FUSSY STUDENTS:
I'm sorry, but NOW the NYT Editorial Board is concerned about "language police"?!? pic.twitter.com/hMVbl2pXaN
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) February 28, 2025
However much you mock the media, it isn’t enough.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE:
From 1950 to today, there’s been a 100% increase in the number of students in public schools, a 243% increase in the number of teachers, and a 709% increase in the number of non-teaching staff, which are largely administrative positions. Only 47.5% of people in the public school… pic.twitter.com/JmCgQVPHTL
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) February 26, 2025
Any time you read that School District X spends Y per pupil, understand how few of those dollars actually reach the classrooms once all the bureaucratic cruft is accounted for.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Can We Send DOGE to Deal With the ‘Free-Palestine’ Brats? “Columbia hasn’t handled any of this well since the unrest first began. There are no adults in charge at Columbia, and the ones who pretend to be are complicit in everything that the miscreants are up to. The case for burning Academia to the ground keeps being made.”
SEA STORY: The Fall of the USS Gettysburg.
This report begins with the technical details of what went wrong the night Gettysburg mistakenly shot down an F/A-18. But the broader problems are even more disturbing:
Going even deeper – and this is perhaps more concerning in the long run – USS Gettysburg completed all the pre-deployment training required for a ship to be certified to deploy. However, the ship had performed at what would have been, as recently as the first decade of this century, a failure-level. Indeed, Gettysburg’s substandard performance continues to be a matter of jest in the strike group to which Gettysburg belongs – the strike group responsible for certifying the ship as ready for deployment, and assignment to the Truman Strike Group. Indeed, the training performance of the entire strike group appears to have been sub-standard, and not just Gettysburg.
How does this happen? Why would we send a ship or a strike group to a war zone if they aren’t deemed to perform at an acceptable level?
The fact is that there are too few ships of the type and capability of Gettysburg. That fact is that there are too few aircraft carrier to meet the unquenchable demand of the military’s Combatant Commands. Everyone wants aircraft carrier strike groups in their neck of the woods, and the fact that the Navy is steadily decreasing in size, is not the Combatant Commander’s problem. It is incumbent upon the Navy to say, “no.” Yet, the Navy does not say no. The Navy is determined to pull its own weight and respond to the demand signal. The result is that the Navy will not say, “let’s take a pause here. This ship isn’t quite ready, and she needs more work. We will fill the gap with another, more ready ship.” There simply are not enough ships – and certainly not enough Aegis cruisers and aircraft carriers – to allow for this. Instead, the ship is certified.
Of course, this is a different Navy, today, and as is the case with the shortage of cruisers and aircraft carriers, this is a larger issue and one which should concern us all in any future conflict.
Indeed.
STAY FOCUSED:
I’m Staying Focused On These Goals
▪️Flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court 🟦🔜🟥 on April 1st
▪️Flip the New Jersey governorship 🟦🔜🟥 on November 4th
▪️Defeat THREE democrat Supreme Court Justices in Pennsylvania by voting ❌NO to retention on November 4th
— ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) February 28, 2025
Flipping Wisconsin and making New Jersey a swing state would put the Democrats in a painful electoral college bind.
CHANGE: ‘Everything has changed’: UK embarks on biggest arms drive since cold war.
Sir Keir Starmer told MPs on Tuesday that Britain was confronting a “world where everything has changed”, as he shredded the country’s overseas aid budget to fund a rearmament programme not seen since the cold war.
There was a sense in a sombre House of Commons that what Starmer called the “great postwar order” was being redrawn, as Britain and the rest of Europe adjust to the detonative impact of Donald Trump.
The pace is accelerating. On Wednesday UK chancellor Rachel Reeves will meet EU finance ministers at a G20 meeting in Cape Town to discuss a new funding mechanism to rebuild the continent’s enfeebled defences.
On Thursday Starmer meets President Trump at the White House to plead with him to maintain the US security guarantee in Europe, while the UK premier looks to host a new round of defence talks with European leaders in London on Sunday.
Amid the flurry of activity, Britain’s foreign policy posture has shifted overnight. A country that once prided itself as an “aid superpower” that spent 0.7 per cent of its national income on foreign assistance is now going to be far less generous.
“It’s not an announcement I’m happy to make,” said Starmer, as he revealed that the aid budget, already cut to 0.5 per cent by former Conservative chancellor Rishi Sunak during the pandemic, would shrink to just 0.3 per cent in 2027.
Like the UK’s increase in defence outlay itself, the decision to raid the aid budget is likely to win the approval of Trump, whose administration has begun dismantling America’s own development programme, USAID.
They keep blaming Trump for Britain finally perhaps getting back to looking after its defense like that’s a bad thing.
WITH MORE TO COME, YOU CAN BE SURE: More Woke Craziness Uncovered by DOGE.
February 27, 2025
DRAIN THE SWAMP: Researchers Discover Sen. Ruben Gallego Benefited from ‘Smurfing’ Contributions.
Some election integrity researchers are expanding their investigation of politicians who benefitted from questionable “Smurfing” campaign contributions and discovered that Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) received many of them. Smurfing refers to using straw donors to make campaign contributions; usually, elderly and unemployed people are unaware their identities are being used for money laundering. Many contributions are made under one name, sometimes thousands of them, and they are usually small amounts, often around $10 each, to escape detection.
Peter Bernegger, one of the key researchers who discovered the Smurfing phenomenon, posted on X on Tuesday, “Arizona @SenRubenGallego caught Smurfing, i.e. criminally laundering money into his campaign! Note that this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is a ‘quick’ data run of the top Smurfs found to have had their identities stolen by Gallego’s campaign. Smurfing found by Chris Gleason @immutablechrist Phillip Allison @TheTVConsPiracy , myself and others exposing Smurfing. This is another form of election fraud. We are running all 100 US Senators, Tom Cotton and Jon Ossoff already ran – see the tweets below.”
More daylight, please — Congress needs some serious disinfecting.
MY THURSDAY VIP ESSAY AT VODKAPUNDIT: Ding-Dong the Witch Is (Almost) Dead.
If Kathleen Kennedy had been made chief of all of Disney instead of just Lucasfilm, she’d have done a “reimagining” of “The Wizard of Oz,” featuring a misunderstood lesbian Wicked Witch, and the Munchkins would all have been genderfluid.
Pause for a moment here, not to imagine 30 tiny trannies dancing around Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, but in silent prayer that the one-woman wrecking ball of beloved movie franchises is finally exiting stage left. “After more than a decade in a galaxy far, far away, Kathleen Kennedy is charting a course toward retirement,” I read in Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday.
Neither Kennedy nor Disney/Lucasfilm have commented.
There have been countless rumors over the years — wishful thinking, really — that Kennedy might finally release her death grip on Lucasfilm. But this week’s reports are well-sourced and widespread enough that I think we can almost breathe a sigh of relief.
But only almost. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Let’s survey the damage, starting with Indiana Jones.
Much more at the link.
AND THE NEWS JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER:
I'm feeling sad for Jeff Bezos. He sent out a blast yesterday, hoping for change. The paper today absolutely sucks. It is biased, stupid, partisan, packed with pathetic tropes, pounding the same worn bongos every single day. It's awful. He might just have to fire everyone.
— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) February 27, 2025
Exit question: Might?
HOWEVER MUCH YOU HATE THE MEDIA…
I’ve been studying and working in the area of language and translation since 2011.
I can categorically say that this is the single worst breach of professional ethics I have ever seen. A deliberate mistranslation to hide genocidal antisemitism. I am truly floored.
This is a… https://t.co/zA5hnvdA0A pic.twitter.com/upOdQsY1bD
— Rachel Moiselle 🧡 (@RachelMoiselle) February 25, 2025
…it still isn’t enough.
SPACE: The Moon’s next robotic visitor is lining up for landing this weekend.
Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away.
These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace hope that their robotic spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, will become the second commercial mission to complete a soft landing on the Moon, following the landing of a spacecraft by Intuitive Machines last year. This is the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace, a company established in 2014 to develop a small satellite launcher.
Since then, Firefly has undergone changes in ownership, a bankruptcy, and a renaming. Recognizing that the company had to diversify to survive, Firefly executives began pursuing other business opportunities—spacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a medium-class rocket—to go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.
From a business perspective, Firefly’s foray into lunar transportation has been worth the effort. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has awarded the company three contracts to deliver experiments to the Moon’s surface. Under the first deal, NASA is paying Firefly about $101 million to transport 10 payloads to the Moon on the company’s first Blue Ghost lander.
Now, Firefly is about to find out if its lunar program is a technical success.
Godspeed…
HE’S HAVING FUN DOING IT, TOO, AND IT SHOWS:
🚨 NEW: Questions from the press taken in the first month, various presidents
🔵 Barack Obama: 161
🔴 Donald Trump [2017]: 199
🔵 Joe Biden: 141
🔴 Donald Trump [present]: 1,009National Journal pic.twitter.com/wIgNxWa3wa
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) February 26, 2025
IT’S NICE HAVING A FEW MORE BILLIONAIRES ON OUR SIDE: Seismic Shift: The Billionaire Boys Club Goes Full MAGA.
TEXAS: Colony Ridge Swept For Illegal Alien Criminals. “Remember how three illegal aliens were arrested in Colony Ridge for carrying 350 pounds of meth in last week’s LinkSwarm? That, and the Trump Administration’s crackdown on illegal alien felons, finally seems to have prodded authorities into launching a crackdown on illegal alien and cartel-infested Colony Ridge.”
Exit quote: “It’s great to have an administration willing to work with Texas to enforce the law, rather than break it.”
NOPE, STILL NOT SICK OF ALL THE WINNING: Trump’s HUD Ends Racist, Disastrous ‘Zoning Tax.’
I DON’T KNOW IF THERE WERE ANY PREVIOUS MARTIANS, BUT THE NEXT MARTIANS WILL WEAR SPACEX SPACESUITS: Ancient beach on Mars discovered by China’s Mars rover: ‘This strengthens the case for past habitability.’
OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY:
This audit was repeated at the Department of Labor. Initial results:
– 380 Microsoft 365 licenses with zero users
– 128 Microsoft Teams conference room licenses; only installed in 30 rooms
– 250 VSCode licenses; only using 33
– 129 Photoshop licenses; only using 22.
– 5… https://t.co/xnY8TkKOWv— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) February 26, 2025
NOPE, STILL NOT SICK OF ALL THE WINNING: Trump Revokes Biden’s Concessions to Commie Venezuela.
RELEASE IT ALL: Attorney General Pam Bondi says ‘some Epstein information’ will be released Thursday.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has announced the scheduled release of documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The release, set for Thursday, is expected to include flight logs and names of individuals associated with Epstein.
Bondi emphasized the importance of protecting the identities of over 200 victims involved.
“Breaking news right now, you’re going to see some Epstein information being released by my office,” Bondi stated during an interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Wednesday night. “This will make you sick,” she added, highlighting the gravity of the contents.
Bondi noted that the delay in releasing the documents was due to efforts to redact sensitive information to protect victims’ privacy.
I wonder how many victims there are.