April 24, 2025

GOOD LUCK, I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW WE’RE ALL COUNTING ON YOU:

Posted at 10:56 am by Ed Driscoll

DECOUPLING CUTS BOTH WAYS: China sends Boeing planes back to US over tariffs.

Kelly Ortberg said two planes had already been returned and another would follow after trade tensions between the two countries escalated.

Boeing’s chief executive told CNBC that 50 more planes were due to go to China this year but their customers had indicated they will not take delivery of them.

The US put 145% tariffs on imports from China and it hit back with a 125% tax on US products.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said he was optimistic about improving trade relations with China, saying the level of tariffs he had imposed would “come down substantially, but it won’t be zero”.

However, Mr Ortberg said China “have in fact stopped taking delivery of aircraft because of tariff environment”.

Boeing is America’s largest exporter with about 70% of its commercial aircraft sales outside of the US.

Mr Ortberg said Boeing was assessing options to re-market 41 of the already built planes to other customers as there was high demand from other airlines.

Left unanswered: What Chinese airlines will do without their American jets. It isn’t like Airbus can suddenly summon up an extra three dozen.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green 29

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

UPDATE (From Ed): Why are the Brits trying something so crazy that Barry O. himself refused to implement it, even at the height of Hopenchange fever, when his administration could have done pretty much anything they wanted to do?

Still though, could be worse:

James Lileks writes, “I was somewhat alarmed by this story:”

“Experiments to dim the SUN in bid to curb global warming will be approved by the UK government within weeks.” (Daily Fail, but they’re quoting a Telegraph story.) Of all the countries to come up with the idea of reducing the amount of sun its residents get, England would seem to be last on the list. Also, this is how the Matrix got started. Also, I think a poll of most of England outside of the government, universities, and tanks of Cogitating Boffins would regard the idea as utter tosh, because Climate Dread is quite low on the list of concerns for most UK residents. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have it so good they can devote all their mental activities to appeasing the contentious relationship between the Sun God and the Earth Mother, with an hour set aside each day to worry about Knife Crime (blades are just jumping up from the gutter into the hands of people and wiping away their entire personal moral construct, forcing them to stab without thought) and the Growing Peril of the millions of proto-Adolescent young men who are being drawn to the dark side by gormless dorks such as Andrew Tate, but outside of these types, maybe there’s a general assumption that the government should not muck about with the Sun.

Or to put it another way: Democrats Move to Destroy the Earth.

To paraphrase Peter Arnett, it was necessary to destroy the Global Village in order to save it.

Posted at 10:16 am by Stephen Green 522

CHANGE, PART I: Jordan bans Muslim Brotherhood after alleged sabotage plot against Hashemite Kingdom.

Jordanian Interior Minister Mazen Fraya said all Muslim Brotherhood activities would be banned in the country and anyone promoting the group’s ideology would be held accountable by law. The ban includes publishing anything by the group and closure and confiscation of all its offices and property, he added.

Fraya said Muslim Brotherhood members had planned attacks on security targets and sensitive locations in the kingdom, aiming to destabilize the country, but did not disclose what these targets were.

Faraya told reporters that “members of the so-called Muslim Brotherhood… are operating in the shadows and engage in activities that could undermine stability and security.”

Change, Part II: Abbas calls Hamas ‘sons of dogs’ and demands release of Gaza hostages.

The president of the Palestinian Authority told a meeting in the occupied West Bank that Hamas had given Israel “excuses” to continue its attacks on Gaza, and told it to “release the hostages and be done with it”.

The remarks were the strongest against the group that the president has delivered since the war began 18 months ago.

Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it looks like more and more of the locals are sick of them both.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green 50

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trans Hill Is the One Dems Want to Die On, So Let’s Help Them. “What used to be a crime is now something that leftists have twisted into a civil rights issue. If you are at all outraged by a hirsute pervert exposing his genitalia in front of a little girl in the name of trans rights, you’re called a bigot. In the diseased minds of modern day Democrats, the child predator in the above scenario is viewed as a brave pioneer fighting for rights.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green 72

EXCLUSIVE: Trump Executive Order Will Bar Decertifying Colleges Over DEI.

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Wednesday prohibiting higher education accreditors from participating in unlawful diversity, equity, and inclusion discrimination, five sources familiar with the directive told The Daily Signal.

Ensuring that accreditors don’t require colleges and universities to require unlawful discrimination, such as DEI policies, could protect conservative colleges like Hillsdale and Grove City, which don’t record students’ races or abide by racial admissions quotas.

The Wednesday order will ensure accreditors comply with federal anti-discrimination law like Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order prohibiting DEI practices in federal funded education. It will also create accreditation processes that reduce barriers to streamline programs; instruct accreditors to give more deference to state law; and target credential inflation, the devaluation of educational or academic credentials over time, a senior administration confirmed to The Daily Signal.

Yuge.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green 44

CNN HAS ALWAYS HATED THE COMPETITION: Watch: Showdown at CNN As Sneering Campaign to Diminish New Media Voices Crashes and Burns.

JENNINGS: “What the right wing is taking advantage of is finally the American people saying enough is enough. They’re tired of feeling like the mass media screens out one viewpoint versus another in political coverage. They’re tired of media institutions favoring one party over another. They’re tired of narratives over factual stories. If I had any advice for 60 Minutes or anybody else, it would be: just cover the news and try to be fair about it and stop putting your finger on the scale, especially during campaigns.”

[…]

PHILLIP: “Let’s be honest, Scott, a lot of this is driven by the rhetoric on your side of aisle.”

JENNINGS: “You think it’s driven by the rhetoric and not the performance?”

PHILLIP: “Absolutely.”

JENNINGS: “If you’re CBS or any other news outlet, the reason that you have lost trust ought to be obvious to you, and the way to fix it also ought to be obvious to you, and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump and everything to do with the product. Just try to make a better product that appeals to more people. And the way you appeal to more people is by not crapping on half or more than half of the country because of their values and political viewpoints!”

JEFF JARVIS: “What you’d end up with in that press room, is, and these are my words, the freak show that Trump wants. Trump tries to devalue media. Why should we value his freak show there? Let’s leave it to the freaks!”

JENNINGS: “Calling them freaks is something. He called these new media sources the freak show. They’re not freaks. They have audiences. They have audiences, and there’s a reason that they’re thriving – is because people are starved for information that they think they can trust. They’re not freaks. They’re filling a need in this country.”

Twenty years ago, Jarvis actually knew this. Found scrolling the Instapundit archives: Pot calls kettle hot.

Because a blogger does something you say is wrong, [then-NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin], all bloggers are now amoral? By that logic, then, when someone at NPR says something liberal, then all of NPR is liberal. (Hmmm.) And if a reporter lies then all reporters lie?

NPR screwed up but when that’s discovered it’s the bloggers who are amoral?

Few rules? Actually, there are many rules — but they’re not necessarily your rules, they are the rules of the public you serve. They sometimes have different rules and often, sir, you and your network and our profession fail their rules. Who made Dan Rather honest? Journalists or bloggers?

You dismiss bloggers and their rules and thus your audience and the public in one broad slap. You separate yourself from the public you want to serve.

And you do so with attitude: “Once again,” you say without links or citations, “once again” blogs prove to be amoral. Give us your evidence, please.

Civic responsibility? I’d say that blogs are a living expression of civic responsibility — they are the citizens holding the powerful responsible. What could be a better expression?

And: Blogging white male.

In this medium of all media, we must get past throwing our fellow citizens into big, messy buckets: left, right, male, female, white, not…. The lesson of this medium is that we’re individuals and we don’t fit those broad and shallow definitions: Read us and you will hear more diversity from every voice than you have ever heard in any medium that ever came before.

And can we use more diversity? You bet we can. But that’s not a problem. That’s an opportunity.

“Diversity problem?” Kneejerk crock, that.

At the end of his column — after lumping all this in with the Estrich-Kinsley shrill media shriekfest — Levy challenges the blogosphere to find 50 new voices to link to. I’ll turn it around, Steven: Let’s see you and Newsweek find and quote and listen to and link to 50 new voices never heard before in mainstream media every week.

In the mid-2000s, when much of the rest of the DNC-MSM were dismissing those nascent bloggers as Cat Food Eating Pajama Wearing Extreme Bloggers In Boardroom Bathrooms, Jarvis was defending them. Now that they’re attending White House press briefings, and he’d like to keep his access to the CNN green room, they’re “freaks.” (I’m old enough to remember the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when liberals considered calling someone a “freak” to be something of a backhanded compliment.)

But then, attacking the competition is nothing new for CNN; Ted Turner was comparing Fox to National Socialists in 1996, even before it went on the air, only to be thrilled less than a decade later to visit firsthand a regime that takes its form of a highly nationalistic socialism quite seriously.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll 50

SOMETIMES, PREDICTIONS ARE EASY: Predictions for the German Economy Call for No Growth and Blaming Trump.

The forecasts are out for the moribund German economy – which suddenly and conveniently no one can remember was already in the toilet and has been circling for the past two years – and darned if they aren’t downright gloomy.

I mean, they’re coloring it as ‘down to zero’ when it was only optimistically predicted to come in at around 0.3% growth at its best anyway.

Shave and a haircut difference, but ‘nothing, no growth, nada’ is pretty dramatic when you’ve just sold your soul to the European Union for hundreds of billions of euros in debt service to be determined later.

It’s a brilliant bunch they have in charge in that country.

Who might that be?

Well, basically the same losers who got them in this pickle to begin with, only their precedence in a governing coalition has been shaken and stirred – that’s all.

Germany is the new sick man of Europe — and they infected themselves.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green 36

THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC CALLED AND SUGGESTED THAT 2025 DIAL IT BACK A NOTCH OR TWENTY:

Here’s the rest of the text:

Imagine going back in time to any point—even just a few years ago—and explaining that this is considered a serious argument. What I find most remarkable about the exchange is the attorney’s acknowledgment that their intent is to “influence” children. He begins to explain that the goal is to install “civility,” which is the “natural consequence of being exposed to—” before he is cut off. Was he going to say that “civility” results from exposure to sexual content at a very young age? What could “civility” possibly mean here?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Pride Puppy was the book that was used for the pre-kindergarten curriculum. That’s no longer in the curriculum.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: That’s the one where they’re supposed to look for the leather and things—bondage, things like that, right?

MR. SCHOENFELD: It’s not bondage. It’s a woman in a leather—

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Sex worker, right?

MR. SCHOENFELD: No. That’s not correct. No.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: I thought—gosh, I read it.

JUSTICE BARRETT: It’s a drag queen in drag.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Drag queen in—drag queen?

MR. SCHOENFELD: So, correct. The leather that they’re pointing to is a woman in a leather jacket, and one of the words is drag queen in this—

JUSTICE GORSUCH: And they’re supposed to look for those?

MR. SCHOENFELD: It is an option at the end of the book, correct.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. Okay. And you’ve included these in the English language curriculum rather than the human sexuality curriculum to influence students, is that fair? That’s what the district court found. Do you agree with that?

MR. SCHOENFELD: I think, to the extent the district court found that it was to influence, it was to influence them towards civility, the natural consequence of being exposed to—

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Whatever, but to influence them.

MR. SCHOENFELD: In the manner that I just mentioned, yes.

My God. More details (and a Republicans pounce! moment) here: Supreme Court Leans Toward Parents on Opt-Outs for LGBTQ+ Lessons.

The argument tended to keep returning to the books.

Jackson said it was her understanding that the Montgomery County district was explicit that the LGBTQ+ storybooks “were to be used only to supplement the English/language arts curriculum as reading instruction and not to teach about gender or sexuality.”

She said it seemed “infeasible” in elementary school English lessons that “every time this particular kind of book comes out, we have to start letting people leave the classroom.”

Throughout the long argument, none of the justices or the lawyers representing the parents and the Trump administration had mentioned two books that were initially part of the Montgomery County program but were later pulled, My Rainbow and Pride Puppy!

So it was a bit of a surprise when Schoenfeld, the district’s lawyer, brought up Pride Puppy!, a book aimed at 3- and 4-year-olds which has drawn controversy from some quarters for asking readers to search, on pages of an LGBTQ+ pride parade, for images including “underwear,” “leather,” “lip ring,” and “[drag] queen.”

When Gorsuch asked about what kind of lessons were being offered to pre-K students as young as three, Schoenfeld noted Pride Puppy! and that it was no longer part of the curriculum.

Gorsuch pounced.

“That’s the one where they are supposed to look for the leather and things, and bondage—things like that, right?” he said, adding “a sex worker?”

Schoenfeld suggested some of those descriptions were inaccurate and that even Pride Puppy! helped influence students “towards civility.”

A decision in the case is expected by late June or early July.

Earlier:

 

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll 96