May 1, 2025

DID YOU KNOW THAT BIDEN’S “STUDENT LOAN FORGIVING” ACTUALLY WAS A SCAM: Most of what he forgave, he had to. They’d lost all documentation to. And most of those people had already paid many times the principal in interest.

Did you know most doctors these days make 1/4 what they did sixty years ago? No, not adjusted for inflation. H1B visas.  Did you know most engineering jobs are going to H1B visas and that the starting salaries are about what they were in the eighties?

The people you hear about demanding their student loans be cancelled? The ones who studied puppetry and such? They’re the ones who can talk without losing their phony baloney jobs. One of the things Biden did was rewrite how things could be paid back, so most responsible people making their payments will never be done. EVER.

Listen, I know you’ve heard a lot of things about “kids these days” but it’s not the kids fault. They didn’t do this. And you don’t get to pile live coals on their heads by demanding they marry and have kids when they’re barely surviving.

You don’t GET to tell the eunuchs to be fruitful and multiply. Not eunuchs made on your watch.

READ WHAT I WROTE. REALLY READ WHAT I WROTE, NOT WHAT’S WRITTEN INSIDE YOUR EYELIDS. THEN COME UP WITH BETTER ARGUMENTS, BECAUSE YOURS STINK OF ENVY AND IGNORANCE:  Why, Yes, Revisiting Student Loans again.

Posted at 2:32 am by Sarah Hoyt 19

April 30, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1374

THE ART OF THE DEAL: U.S., Ukraine Sign Minerals Deal in Major Breakthrough for Peace Talks.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials have signed a long-anticipated deal that gives the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in exchange for a promised security guarantee to protect Kyiv from future Russian aggression, signaling President Donald Trump’s commitment to ending the war.

The deal was signed Wednesday afternoon on Trump’s 100th day in office by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, as the latter visited Washington, D.C., to finalize the details. The Treasury Department confirmed the signed deal, called the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.

“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term. President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine,” Bessent said in a statement. “And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”

The minerals deal grants the U.S. access to Ukraine’s natural resources, including aluminum, graphite, oil, and natural gas, according to Bloomberg. It also lays out details about the economic partnership between the U.S. and Ukraine.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 207

STAINLESS STEEL IN SPACECRAFT. AMAZING, WHERE DID THEY GET THAT IDEA? China is making stainless steel tanks for its future super heavy-lift rockets. “The 10.6-meter-diameter, 9.0-meter-high tank is part of the development of the Long March 9; a future reusable super heavy-lift rocket designed for large lunar and infrastructure missions which would transform the country’s launch capabilities. It is also being used in early mission concepts for crewed Mars missions.”

What will these creative Chinese think up next?

Posted at 9:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 82

CANCEL CULTURE VS. MCCARTHYISM: THE DATA IS IN — Cancel Culture is happening on a historic scale, part 5

“The best way to compare McCarthyism to Cancel Culture on campus is by finding a source of data that was gathered at the same time McCarthyism was going on, in order to compare it to the data we have today. And thankfully there was a massive 1955 study by Paul Lazarsfeld that covered the number of professors dismissed during McCarthyism. According to that data, approximately 100 professors were targeted and 62 were fired during this period, either for being communists or members of the Communist Party.

“Now, compare that figure to the number of professors who have been fired on campus since the beginning of the Age of Cancel Culture in 2014. In the last decade, FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire database has logged almost 1,300 campaigns to get scholars punished for their First Amendment-protected speech. Nearly two-thirds of those campaigns succeeded, leading to censorship, suspensions, demotions, resignations, and even mandatory administrative training (remember: this is disciplinary training in response to protected speech). But to compare things more directly: From 2014-2024 more than 200 scholars ended up being fired or forced out of their positions for their thoughts and opinions.

“That’s more than triple the contemporaneous estimate of the number of communist professors fired, and more than double the estimate of professors fired overall, during McCarthyism.”

Posted at 8:52 pm by Greg Lukianoff 16

WELCOME BACK, DAVE BARRY!

In another of his recent columns, I’m pretty sure that Dave Barry is the first person to have analogized a prostate exam with accessing Tallahassee from a backroad in Alabama.

There are times when it’s not easy to be a male. I experienced one of these times a few days ago when, within a span of 20 minutes, three different people, two of whom I had not previously met and one of whom was a member of a completely different biological sex, asked me to lower my pants so they could handle parts of my body that I will refer to here, out of respect for their privacy, as my festicles (not their real name).This happened at the office of my urologist. Like many older men, I see a urologist regularly, and I believe I speak for all of these men when I make the following urgent plea to the urology community: For the love of God, please find a way to get to the prostate gland other than the way you’re getting to it now.

When you visit your urologist, he or she always examines your prostate, which is a tricky procedure because of where it’s located. If we envision the male reproductive system as a map of Florida, the prostate would be Tallahassee. The problem is, there is no easy way to get to Tallahassee. So the current procedure is for the urologist to approach it via the back road from Alabama.

This means that the prostate examination is quite unpleasant for everyone involved.
Q. How unpleasant is it?
A. When it’s about to happen, both you and the urologist are quietly hoping for a direct meteor strike.

Like most politicians, SMOD talks a great game, but he’s never around when you actually need him.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 63

“JUSTICE:”

Posted at 8:44 pm by Glenn Reynolds 128

HOTS ON FOR NOWHERE:

It’s an evergreen stance for the DNC-MSM whenever there’s a Republican in office. Bill Maher in August of 2019: Yes, a recession would be worth it to get rid of Trump. Earlier that same week, Fox News host Martha MacCallum said to Victor Davis Hanson,  “I was listening to a lot of different news networks this morning, as I often do…getting a read on what everybody’s saying about what’s going on and, you know, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a bit of sort of enthusiasm for the possibility that maybe the economy might tank.”

Similarly, in February of 2020, NewsBusters noted: MSNBC Hopes for ‘Global Financial Crisis’ Helping Dems in 2020.

Then in April of 2020, when the lockdowns were full swing, but a month and a half before riot season, Kurt Schlichter wrote: The Democrats Totally Want A Depression.

Way back in December of 2008, in order to position BHO as the next FDR, Virginia Postrel spotted the DNC-MSM full of “Depression Lust, and Depression Porn.”

Or as the AP “objectively” reported that summer, “Everything Seemingly is Spinning Out of Control[!]”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 30

GOD AND MAN AND THE GRAY LADY: The New York Times just ran a 1,400-word story to explain what cross necklaces are.

Look at how they describe women in the Trump admin like strange creatures:

Cross necklaces have, in a way, become the jewelry of choice most associated with President Trump’s second administration.

Ms. Bondi owns several cross necklaces but most often appears at official events in a diamond-set version purchased at Mavilo, a jewelry store in Tampa, Fla.

Ms. Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has frequently worn a large cross pendant at press briefings. But Ms. Leavitt is not the first press secretary to wear a cross: Kayleigh McEnany, a press secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term, also wore one.

In an email, Ms. Leavitt, 27, called the cross necklace ‘the perfect accessory to any outfit,’ adding that she wears the cross ‘because it serves as a reminder of the strength that can only be found through faith.’

These conservative women … who can understand their strange ways??

As Rod Dreher wrote in his classic 2003 article, “The Godless Party:”

True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “This is not a religious city,” he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It’s not that this editor despises religion; it’s that he’s too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what’s right in front of him. There’s a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, “I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”

In the main—and I’ve had this confirmed to me by Christian friends who labor elsewhere in the secular media—the men and women who bring America its news don’t necessarily hate religion; in most cases, they just believe it’s unimportant at best, menacing at worst. Because they don’t know any religious people, they think of American religion in categories that have long been outdated. For example, to hear journalists talk, Catholics are berated from the pulpit every Sunday about abortion and birth control; reporters think I’m putting them on when I tell them that I’ve been a practicing Catholic for 10 years and I’ve only heard one sermon about abortion and none about contraception. For another, outside the Jewish community, there are no stronger supporters of Israel than among American Evangelicals, and that’s been true for at least a generation. The news has yet to reach American newsrooms, where I’ve been startled to discover a general assumption among Jews and non-Jews alike that these “fundamentalists” (i.e., any Christian more conservative than a Spong-ite Episcopalian) are naturally anti-Semitic.

In a further comment, that New York Post city editor inadvertently revealed something else important to me about the way media people see religion: As far as he was concerned, Catholics and Jews were the only religious people who counted in New York City (he himself is a non-practicing Jew), because they were the only ones who had any political pull. Because journalists tend not to know religiously observant people, they see religious activity in the only way they know how—in terms of secular politics. Thus, when your average journalist hears “Southern Baptist,” she immediately thinks of an alien sect whose rustic adherents lurk in the shadows thinking of cunning ways to manipulate Republican politicians into taking away a woman’s right to choose. The trouble is, she doesn’t think much further, and it is unlikely that anyone in her professional and social circles will challenge her to do so.

 That’s a trend that’s only gotten worse in the uber-woke version of today’s Gray Lady. But between their “Gorillas in the Mist”-style takes on crosses (and religion in general), and Tim Walz’s spectacular ability to “code talk to White guys watching football, fixing their truck and put them at ease,” why does the modern left act like the cast of the original Star Trek whenever they had to beam down to 20th century earth when it comes to interacting with flyover country? (Actually, I know why they do, but it’s a curious pose when it keeps losing them elections.)

Related: At about the seven minutes in, Mel Brooks as the 2,000 Year Old Man explains to Carl Reiner how the cross’s ease of manufacture helped it massively take over in popularity from the Star of David:

Posted at 8:16 pm by Ed Driscoll 79

A BIG WIN FOR SCIENCE:

Posted at 7:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds 42