LABOUR WILL BURY BRITISH STEEL, NOT SAVE IT:

In a rare Saturday sitting of parliament, MPs voted this weekend to allow the UK government to assume operational control of British Steel. The emergency legislation will be used to block the firm’s Chinese owner, Jingye, from closing down its two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. Full nationalisation is likely on the way.

There is no doubt that government intervention was necessary to prevent the plant’s closure. Jingye, which claims it was losing £700,000 per day from the Scunthorpe steelworks, was clearly determined to cut its losses and run. Negotiations over a support package broke down last week when Jingye rejected the government’s offer to cover the costs of the iron and coal needed to keep the furnaces running. It also rejected what business secretary Jonathan Reynolds described as ‘one of the largest government grants in British history’. It then became clear that Jingye was selling off its stockpiles and refusing to pay for past orders of raw materials, and thus had hoped to starve the furnaces and render them inoperable (without coal keeping the temperature high, furnaces can sustain permanent damage). Restarting the furnaces would not have been impossible in this event, but it would have been a costly and complex process.

The loss of British Steel’s blast furnaces would have been devastating for the plant’s 2,700 employees and for Scunthorpe, which has been a steelmaking town since the 19th century. But it also would have been devastating for the UK. The nation that invented modern steelmaking would become the only G7 nation incapable of producing ‘primary’ or ‘virgin’ steel. This is essential for carmaking, infrastructure, the defence industry and many other critical manufacturing sectors.

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Labour’s intervention has brought British Steel some time. It may well have prevented the disorderly shutdown of Britain’s last blast furnaces, which would have had devastating consequences for the economy as a whole. Yet far from ‘saving’ British steelmaking, Labour continues to bury it. It’s hard to see heavy industry surviving another four years of eco-vandalism.

But at that point, who will be making plans for Nigel?

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: How Democrats used NGOs to end-run voters: A ‘parallel government.’

THE PEOPLE WHO CAME FOR YOUR PLASTIC BAG AND STRAW NOW WANT YOUR DOG:

From the people who turned your Mustang into a Prius and made it so your dishwasher does not actually wash dishes comes a new villain, not quite straight from central casting, in the imaginary war on the planet: dogs.

“We are all too aware of the negative effects of cats,” Australian academics Bill Bateman and Lauren Gilson write at The Conversation, “both owned and feral, on wildlife…. Our pet dogs seem to get a free pass.”

With all the charm of Almira Gulch and the subtlety of Michael Vick, Bateman and Gilson argue that man’s best friend really sits, and rolls over, as mankind’s great enemy.

The authors argue, “Our beloved pet dogs have a far greater, more insidious and more concerning effect on wildlife and the environment than we would like to be the case.”

How so?

“The medications we use to rid our pet dogs of fleas or ticks can last weeks on fur, and wash off when they plunge into a creek or river,” they write. “But some of these medications have ingredients highly toxic to aquatic invertebrates, meaning a quick dip can be devastating.”

They point out, “Dogs largely eat meat, meaning millions of cows and chickens are raised just to feed our pets.”

Sod off, swampy.

STEVE GREEN AT THE PJ MOTHERSHIP: Ford Has a ‘Chief Learning Officer,’ and He’s Exactly What You’d Expect.

In the case of Ford’s CLO, Barrett Evans, his function seems to be harassing an elderly guy in a wheelchair for watching Fox News and then bragging about it on social media. Here’s the first part of his post, which I believe (but not 100% sure) is from Facebook:

Elderly passenger on my flight from San Diego yesterday enjoyed Fox ‘News’ for the entire ride. Deplaning and I notice he and his wife getting into their airport wheelchairs to be pushed to next gate. My filter was malfunctioning…

‘Love to see you supporting DEI.’

‘Not me!’ ‘Yes – you. That wheelchair, and the human pushing it, are provided at no direct cost to you – rather by a subsidized cost attributed to every passenger in this airport. Provided to level the playing field – for you.

I won’t recount all the details and humorous responses here because my Twitchy colleague Sam J. already crushed it, and I’m not about to bust into her wheelhouse.

For what it’s worth, wheelchair accommodations are legally mandated by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Even before then, airlines generally seemed happy to accommodate almost any paying passenger. The point here is that Ford’s CLO doesn’t seem to understand that the D in DEI doesn’t stand for Disability. You’d think a guy with a seat in the C-suite would at least know the fundamentals.

The story also has one of those telling details that I almost missed the first time around.  Evans’s social media account — posed in front of a Pride decoration — uses the handle “chivalryandchampagne.” My advice? Skip the bubbly, Barrett, and rediscover the chivalry.

The automobile company that published the Dearborn Independent in its salad days doesn’t seem to have made much progress when it comes to executives harassing innocent people and then boasting about it in the media.

AND YOU THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Researchers Identify New Blood Group After 50 Year Mystery.

IN BOATS? New Research Reveals How Bronze Age Scandinavians Could Have Crossed the Sea. Hard to get really lost in the Baltic, I would think.

THE DIVINE SECRETS OF THE SUBORBITAL YA-YA SISTERHOOD: Blue Origin’s all-female space flight was a step backwards for feminism.

Far be it from me to spoil the party, but this is not space exploration. Sanchez is a former TV presenter, about to get married to one of the world’s richest men who just happens to own the space rocket.

Katy Perry has also been drinking from the same fountain of delusional self-indulgence: ‘I’m really excited…We are all made of stardust and it’ll be exciting to see them twinkle from that site and have such an appreciation for Mother Earth when we see it that way’. She went on to suggest the trip would encourage young girls to go into space in the future with ‘no limitations’. Really? Previous passenger trips with Blue Origin have cost more than $1 million (£760,000) a seat. Only for rich girls, then.

It has been reported that the crew trained for all of two days ahead of the trip. Rather depressingly, much of the coverage of their journey into space featured talk of flared jump suits and other fashion accessories. The female crew appeared more than happy with this agenda, saying that lipstick, eyelash extensions and hair styles matter. The bible of female empowerment, according to Katy Perry, goes like this: ‘Space is finally going to be glam…We are going to put the “ass” in “astronaut”’.

Is it churlish to point out that she is not an astronaut, or certainly not in any conventional sense of the word?

No, it’s accurate. In December of 2021, NBC-DFW 5 reported: No More Commercial Astronaut Wings, Too Many Launching: FAA. Just as sitting in a seat on a 737 doesn’t make you a pilot; sitting in a seat on a fully automated suborbital flight similarly counts as passenger status. Or as former MTV VJ Kennedy writes:

These chicks aren’t astronauts. They’re leg-humping fabulists who ingratiated themselves with a billionaire for a little publicity. They’re space tourists, and their dumb stunt does nothing for humanity or space exploration, regardless of their gametes.

Sorry, sisters, but you’re no Valentina Tereshkova — the first woman in space, who flew on a solo mission in a flimsy Russian craft in 1963 during the Cold War.

That took some real asteroids. And no make-up.

University of Birmingham space scientist Dr Garrett Dorian said it best: ‘Let’s call it what it is and not tell ourselves that this is contributing meaningfully to science or space exploration. I am afraid I do still think these flights are essentially just joyrides for the super-rich.’

Hear hear! Or should I say, Her Her?

Heh, indeed.

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TODAY IS WORLD QUANTUM DAY. Depending on how you look at it.

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

SpaceX completed its 400th mission using a flight-proven booster, nearly eight years after the company’s first successful reflight pic.twitter.com/Hau0uZjDSt

— Dima Zeniuk (@DimaZeniuk) April 13, 2025

Reflights of rockets not built by SpaceX still stand at 0.

CORRECTION: Orbital reflights. Thanks to Ranten N. Raven for the heads up.

SEE BITTER SCOLDING: Woke. In. Space! CBS Host Apologizes for Saying ‘Mankind:’ ‘I’m Sorry. I’m Sorry.’

In space, no one can hear you scream; but the aliens can apparently pick up your virtue signals on their scanners. CBS Mornings co-host Vlad Duthiers was sending out distress calls during Monday’s show after he was scolded by Dr. Mae Jemison (the first black woman in space) because he used the highly offensive term “mankind” to refer to the entire human species.

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Duthiers immediately stepped in it again with his comments about space travel being a benefit to “mankind.” Again, he drew a swift scolding from Jemison:

DUTHIERS: So, explain to our audience why even a trip like this one, all the trips that we take into space, benefit mankind.

JEMISON: Um, so, it benefits humankind.

“Humankind, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Duthiers pleaded.

She then proclaimed that she was, “going to keep correcting the mankind and the man-made, and the man-missions because this is exactly what this mission is about, is expanding the perspective of who does space.”

Jemison’s high horse had legs that stretched up past the Karman line (international line that denotes where outer space begins).

As Thomas Sowell wrote 30 years ago in The Vision of the Anointed, on the left’s sustained attack on “The Generic ‘He:’”

Trivial as such crusades may seem, they have been very successful in changing the way people talk in the media, in academia, and in government. Not only is the generic “he” taboo in many quarters, the speech controllers have pressed on to new conquests, attacking such words as “layman,” “craftsman,” “actress,” or “matron,” which violate their unisex view of the world, and also proscribe such phrases as “to master a language” because it uses a sex-specific word. These examples are from an official guidebook put out by the Australian government, which shows how far such crusades have spread. An American guidebook, distributed internationally, declares that there is “a perfectly scientific, completely foolproof, and highly theoretical model for avoiding sexism on the job.” As so often happens, pretensions of “science” are the last refuge of those who offer neither the evidence nor the logic that are integral to science.

The net effect of all this is that young women, especially in educational institutions where they are bombarded with radical feminist propaganda, are led to believe that every use of the generic “he” in books of the past is proof of disdain or hostility toward women, when in fact such usage simply avoided cluttering up the language or forcing writers into strained constructions and awkward phrases. In short, the anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.

At the conclusion of her 10-minute suborbital jaunt, CBS’s Gayle King gushed, “You look down at the planet and you think that’s where we came from? To me it’s such a reminder about how we need to do better, be better.”

Indeed — excellent advice for Jemison to take to heart.

AMERICA NEEDS A CHEAP TRUCK: Could a Bezos-Backed Startup Bring a $25,000 Truck to Market?

BE CAREFUL OUT THERE: FDA warns about fake Ozempic in U.S. supply chain. “Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and the weight loss drug Wegovy, told the FDA on April 3 that counterfeit 1-milligram injections were being distributed outside its authorized supply chain in the U.S., the agency said in a news release. That means it likely entered the market through unofficial means, like unauthorized distributors or resellers.”

EUROPE IS THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE THESE DAYS:

EU energy policy is the biggest reason why Europe cannot unite against Russia in the long term.

Germany is hooked on Russian oil & natural gas like a drug addict is on crystal meth.🤢🤮 https://t.co/otXlo5fc78

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) April 14, 2025

ENJOY YOUR STAY: Trump Meets with Nayib Bukele, Destroys Fake News.

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EVERGREEN: German Tanks Fail on Russian Front: German tanks are failing in Ukraine for the same reasons they lost World War II.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Training: You are the Operating System for Whatever Firearm You Choose to Use.

THE PROBLEM, AS OUTLINED BY DATA REPUBLICAN:

The Left is structured as a network of NGOs: ruthlessly efficient and ready to act the moment power changes hands.

The Right has no equivalent infrastructure. If I sit down and ask myself, “How would I start an NGO to implement a conservative agenda in D.C.?” … I draw a blank. Because the dominant instinct on the Right isn’t to build, it’s to dismantle. Most conservative goals center on shrinking or limiting the federal government.

That creates a fundamental asymmetry. NGOs on the Left are designed to expand state power through policy scaffolding, and once federal funding flows in, it’s nearly impossible to tear down. It would take an act of Congress to defund these mechanisms, and Congress rarely votes to shrink its own power.

So, we can’t fight fire with fire.

As I see it, there are only three paths forward (not mutually exclusive):

1. Keep scaling the existing DOGE efforts.
2. Replace the majority of Congress with people willing to shut the spigot.
3. Trigger a Convention of States and rewrite the rules from outside the system.

Each path demands broad public support, which, again, NGOs don’t need. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous. They just have to win the influence of a few.

What Musk is doing with DOGE is great. But the next step needs to be building out a conservative informational infrastructure. That isn’t a new idea but if the best time to build it was 20 years ago, the second-best time is right now.

A HUNDRED MILLION HERE AND A HUNDRED MILLION THERE…: ‘Mississippi Musk’ Finds $400 Million in State Government Waste.

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BECAUSE THE NYT ISN’T ON AMERICA’S SIDE. NEXT QUESTION?

I'm trying to understand NYT economics. How can what's good for the US be an obvious disaster for Europe? pic.twitter.com/JR8nDvbF3k

— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) April 14, 2025

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Pentagon Must Go on the Offensive to Defeat Politicized Officers.

Your politics don’t matter when you are a military leader. At all. Politics have no place in the military. None. I was becoming more and more prominent politically and in the media as a civilian while I was becoming a senior field grade officer as a reservist, but I was actively apolitical around the troops. I never talked about politics on duty. I never asked about it or told anyone about it. You know the command sergeant major I mentioned? I have no idea who he voted for. None. That’s because he was a consummate professional, and I tried to be the same. When we put on the uniform, we did our job whether the President was named Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, or Obama.

But apparently, some officers these days think there is a Trump Exception to their duty as officers to be apolitical, just as there appears to be a Trump Exception to every other rule, regulation, norm, and standard in our society and government. They are wrong, and their utterly bass ackwards conception of their duties as leaders is poisonous to the organization. If you aren’t loyal to the commander-in-chief, who are you loyal to? Your own personal conception of right and wrong? Well, Soldier, you are in the wrong career field. There are a wide range of jobs you can do where you can freely share your thoughts about our political leadership and its policies, but being a military leader is not one of them.

What’s stunning is the sheer cheesiness of their tiresome acts of resistance. The commander of Fort Igloo decided to throw away her career by mass emailing a cloying letter that emphasized how she didn’t support the political leadership’s initiatives re: Greenland. What was she thinking? Another officer at NATO headquarters refused to post pictures of the new commander-in-chief and vice-president, as is a rule on military installations. That’s almost too petty to believe (I initially did not believe it – too insane – but my sources tell me it’s true).

Read the whole thing.

I FIND THIS BELIEVABLE: Yoga is as effective as strengthening exercises for knee osteoarthritis pain relief, study finds.

NVIDIA STOCK LEAPS AFTER MASSIVE U.S. INVESTMENT SURPRISE:

Nvidia unveiled plans for a massive investment in its U.S.-based manufacturing Monday as the ripple effects of President Donald Trump’s tariff gambit, as well as China’s retaliation toward the tech sector, continue to reverberate.

Nvidia said it planned to produce an American-made supercomputer from a U.S. platform, and planned to produce as much as $500 billion in artificial-intelligence infrastructure over the next four years as part of a partnership with Foxconn  and Taiwan Semiconductor.

The plants are expected to be built in Arizona, to test Nvidia Blackwell chips, and in Texas, to test AI supercomputers.

“The engines of the world’s AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time,” said CEO Jensen Huang. “Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency.”

Meanwhile, in recent Apple news: