April 11, 2025

WELL, GOOD: Trump is already winning his trade war with China. “Behind the global economic chaos provoked by president Trump’s tariff tsunami, there are growing indications of a strategic purpose. It is now conceivable that plunging into, and then retreating from, a generalised trade war was actually a deliberate means to a truly geostrategic end: to thwart China’s ambition to replace the US as the dominant world superpower. . . . In this light, the suspension of tariff combat for 90 days with most countries, while doubling down on the levies imposed on China, leaves Beijing isolated and in the firing line.”

Do tell.

Posted at 5:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WAGES OF OPEN BORDERS:

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THIS COULD BE A BIG DEAL:

American shipyards produce about two Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyers each year. That South Korea’s shipyards can kind of casually offer to add five more to their production runs for our use shows just how far we’ve fallen.

Still, we should take advantage because expanding domestic production takes time.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

YOU DON’T WANT TO WEAR THE RIBBON?! YOU HAVE TO WEAR THE RIBBON!! The BBC expected contrition from Kemi Badenoch. It owes us an apology instead.

“Have you seen ‘Adolescence’?” Yes, Mein Fuhrer: but I’m starting to wish I hadn’t. Oh, to inhabit the world of Kemi Badenoch, who innocently went on BBC Breakfast imagining they’d talk solely about tariffs, China or thermonuclear war – the sooner it comes, the better – but was invited to review the telly instead.

“Have you watched ‘Adolescence’ yet?” asked Charlie Stayt. The “yet” was impatient, as if Charlie were tapping a baseball bat in his hand. Kemi is notorious for not yet watching the TV show everyone who works in TV is talking about – and when she replied that she still hadn’t and “probably won’t”, co-host Naga Munchetty looked tempted to call Prevent.

“It’s prompting conversations about toxic masculinity,” she said, plus “smartphone use… Why do you not want to know what people are talking about?”

“All important issues”, replied Kemi. “But in the same way I don’t need to watch ‘Casualty’ to know what’s going on in the NHS, I don’t need to watch a specific Netflix drama to understand what’s going on.” BBC Breakfast’s viewers sat up in their hospital beds. Finally: someone speaks for reality! The only thing Kemi got wrong is that ‘Casualty’ has little to do with the NHS any more. Or medicine. I think it’s mostly about sex.

More here: Kemi Badenoch is right about Adolescence.

On BBC Breakfast, Naga Munchetty reacted to Badenoch saying that she had not seen Adolescence as if Munchetty was the Vatican’s scariest cardinal hearing that a Catholic had not been to confession. “Everyone” is talking about Adolescence, claimed Munchetty. Everyone! If you haven’t been talking about Adolescence, reader, then bloody well start. (Talk about Adolescence, I tell you. Why are you not talking about Adolescence? Talk about Adolescence, damn it!)

Clearly, journalists of Britain think that watching Adolescence is some sort of cultural obligation — as if it is the Queen’s funeral and the finale of The Sopranos rolled into one. Still, they keep forgetting what it actually is. Like the Prime Minister, Munchetty made the mistake of calling Adolescence a “documentary”. (Unfortunately, Badenoch picked up the tic and called it a “fictional documentary”.) Should the recurring nature of this mistake not have taught Netflixophiles something about the error of their ways?

To be clear, I am not for one moment suggesting that it is bad to watch Adolescence. Nor, indeed, am I calling Adolescence bad. I haven’t watched it — but not because I think it is unworthy of my time. No, I hate the groupthink that surrounds it. Suggest that I have to watch something — that I have to do so to be “in tune” with Britain, and to join the “national conversation” with the likes of Nick Ferrari and James O’Brien — and I am going to find an old WWF main event to rewatch.

In the early 2000, the DNC-MSM got their Underoos in a twist when President Bush told them he didn’t read their newspapers or watch their TV shows — he had staffers who did that for him, summarized the day’s news, and briefed him on what was most important. The BBC is going one better, asking the leader of the Tories why she hasn’t watched a fictional drama.

By the mid-2000s, since the left couldn’t be seen as promoting America’s War on Terror, it decided to go with that hoary old substitute, the Moral Equivalent of War, and obsess over radical environmentalism instead. In 2006, Julia Gorin wrote a column for the Christian Science Monitor in which she noted how inexorably tied together the two “battles” seemed at the time:

It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV*. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

That’s why in 2004 we got “The Day After Tomorrow” – so we could worry about junk science that may or may not kill us in 1,000 years instead of the people who really are trying to kill us the day after tomorrow.

This is effectively what Adolescence serves for England’s establishment left, Brendan O’Neill writes:

All this talk of ‘public conversation’ is driving me mad. Munchetty told Badenoch she must watch Adolescence if she wants to ‘know what people are talking about’. I’ll tell you what people are talking about, Naga: ‘grooming gangs’. Those gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men who exploited and raped white working-class girls in towns around the country for decades. Once again, the government has let down the victims of those sick crimes, this time by saying it might not proceed with the inquiries it promised. And you want us to talk about a crime someone made up?

That those BBC hosts interrogated Badenoch about Adolescence the day after the government said it wouldn’t be holding inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’ is mind-blowing. Nothing better captures the aristocratic aloofness of the BBC, its unworldly disregard for our concerns, than the fact that it badgered Badenoch about a fictional crime on the day the rest of us were talking about the real crimes inflicted on working-class girls under the noses of mercilessly blithe officials. If a fictional assault on a fictional girl troubles you more than the horrors those real girls endured, you are lost. Your neo-religion has rendered you heartless.

Freud called it displacement.

* Now the left are taking actual strikes at electric SUVs. Plus ça change. 

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CORN, POPPED: If This Is What It Looks Like, NY AG Letitia James Is In a World of Trouble. “A word about my source for what you are about to read: Sam E. Antar was one of the biggest fraudsters of the 1980s. In his role as CFO of the ubiquitous Brooklyn, N.Y.-based electronics chain Crazy Eddie, Antar was convicted of multiple federal fraud-based felonies in 1991, although he scored a plea deal that kept him out of prison.”

Posted at 3:38 pm by Stephen Green

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: MQ-9B Shown with Airborne Laser at Sea Air Space 2025. “The new laser is part of the General Atomics Laser Weapon Systems portfolio, centering around the scalable High Energy Laser (HEL) Weapon System. The laser is in the 25kW class and scalable to 300kW in both pulsed and continuous wave systems, capable of operating in all environments.”

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Voted ‘Best-Dressed Drunk in the Applebee’s Parking Lot.’ “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week we have the best-dressed drunk trying to open the wrong car door in the Applebee’s parking lot, how not to ask for a free refill, and New Mexico man’s bologna smuggling operation.”

Posted at 2:19 pm by Stephen Green