THE CAPITALISTS SOCIALISTS WILL SELL US THE ROPE WITH WHICH WE WILL HANG THEM: How Churchill’s Successor Gave Stalin the MiG.

In the middle of the great fiscal crises that enveloped Britain between the end of Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan, [Clement] Attlee personally authorized two export transactions with the Soviet Union for the sale of jet engines manufactured by Rolls-Royce—specifically, 10 Nene and 10 Derwent engines in May 1946, and a further 15 Nenes and 20 Derwents in March 1947. The transactions were small in scale: The two sales to the USSR earned Rolls-Royce the rather limited sum of £364,000, with the Nene priced at £7,300 and the smaller Derwent at £6,050. The Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust has not provided any comparative information concerning the company’s sales in 1946 and 1947. Nonetheless, it is possible to say that the money could not have been of much significance to Rolls-Royce. As for Britain as a whole, it was a trifle. By comparison, Britain imported grain and flour worth £3,248,000 from the USSR in September 1948 alone.

Since Bevin was comparing Stalin’s regime to the Nazis in January 1947, it was not the case that Attlee’s cabinet was seized with optimistic delusions concerning the nature of the USSR. In fact, already on June 5, 1946, Attlee had adopted Churchill’s phrase, “the Iron Curtain” when speaking of disagreements with the Soviet Union. At the same time, Attlee cynically called on Britain to “try and understand the Russian mind and Russian history” in pursuit of better relations. Remarkably, this attitude toward Russia, practically verbatim, is still common in 2025.

Attlee, at least, would quickly drop the act. In a speech on the occasion of May Day 1948, Attlee called Soviet methods as “ruthless and unscrupulous” as those of the Nazis. But the damage had been done. The 55 British engines, including five improved Nene IIs, were all delivered by November 1947. Attlee’s cabinet had handed over a critically important military technology to a regime that it had compared to the Nazis, in private before deliveries were complete, and in public shortly after the contracts had been fulfilled.

Postwar Soviet jets were made by reverse-engineering British Rolls-Royce jet engines (and as the above article at Tablet goes on to note, mounted inside fuselages whose swept-wings were designed by captured German engineers). The postwar Soviet bomber program was begun by reverse-engineering commandeered American B-29 bombers. And the Soviet A-bomb was created using top secret information smuggled out of the States by communist spies (including the Rosenbergs).

“In October 1985, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited France where he met with French President François Mitterrand. In candid conversations, Gorbachev told Mitterrand that the USSR was a Third World country with nuclear weapons.” A Third World country that made the most of the technology that had fallen into its hands after WWII.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Don’t Hide Your Drugs in a Cop Car. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, you’ll learn the worst place to hide your drug stash, the worst time to strip down naked and break into your neighbor’s house, and why they ought to call it a people cage instead of a shark cage.”

ABOUT TIME: NASA astronauts Butch and Suni emerge from recovery after long Starliner mission. “Wilmore and Williams, who last year set off for an eight-day Starliner test flight that swelled into a nine-month stay in space, have had to readapt their muscles, sense of balance and other basics of Earth living in a 45-day period standard for astronauts returning from long-term space missions. The astronaut duo have spent at least two hours a day with astronaut strength and reconditioning officials within NASA’s medical unit while juggling an increasing workload with Boeing’s Starliner program, NASA’s space station unit in Houston and agency researchers.”

CHANGE? DC mayor proposes repeal of sanctuary city law. “The law currently bans local police from working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain illegal immigrants. The sanctuary city status prevents the city from asking about a detained person’s immigration status or releasing them to ICE or from allowing the federal agency to interview a suspect in local custody without a court order.”

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Well, Well, Well, Look Who the FBI Is Investigating “The mean streets of Seattle and their Antifa shock troops have caught the eye of the FBI. And it’s about time someone investigated this continuing criminal enterprise on the West Coast, Messed Coast™— especially after this past week’s assault and battery spree on cops and Christians.”

YES.

OH MY: Giant Russian Nuke Info Hack. “Given computer security standards in most organizations, the idea that sensitive information was just sitting on a publicly accessible server for years at a time is entirely too plausible.”

Tons of details at the link.

STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT:

Shot:

Chaser:

JULIE KELLY CORRECTS THE RECORD:

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?

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Sydney Sweeney To Start Selling Soap With Her Own Bathwater Mixed In.

Famous actress Sydney Sweeney joined forces with Dr. Squatch Soap Co. to make her dirty bathwater available for fans across the globe.

The superstar just made soap a little dirty, according to an Instagram post shared Thursday by Dr. Squatch, a personal care product company. Sweeney will dunk herself in bathwater that will be bottled up, turned into beauty soap, and sent to those that want to lather up with this intimate item.

“You kept asking about my bathwater after the @drsquatch ad… so we kept it. Introducing Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss! A very real, very limited-edition soap made with my actual bathwater,” Sweeney wrote May 29 on her official Instagram page.

Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide.

YUGE:

THEY STILL SOMEHOW BELIEVE GOV. JAZZ HANDS IS MANLY:

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.