May 1, 2025
CATHERINE SALGADO: Economic News Good, Bad, and Optimistic.
BAN FOREIGN INFLUENCE-BUYING: Harvard accepted over $1.4B from foreign sources, Campus Reform audit finds.
IT’S ALMOST LIKE TRUMP SETS THESE THINGS UP AS TRAPS: Abrego Garcia Case Keeps Getting Worse for Dems.
SLUSH FUNDS: Environmental ideologues enjoying the Colorado taxpayer dime.
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) describes itself as “…an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit that transforms global energy systems through market-driven solutions to secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future for all.”
Anyone that is familiar with their work would not dispute their claim to working towards a zero-carbon future, but as someone who’s looked into what they are doing in Colorado, I can tell you that the “market-driven” and “nonpartisan” claims are a real stretch to say the least.
I say that because RMI sure seems to have a cozy relationship with Governor Polis, and the things they are all working on are decidedly more government mandate than free market. In fact, of the approximately $718,000 tax dollars the state has paid RMI, the vast majority ($706K) has flowed to them just since Polis was elected. Further, the money has mostly funneled through the Colorado Energy Office (CEO), a division within the governor’s office.
A CORA request to see the contracts with RMI since Polis took office returned 15 files, and reading through them provides an intriguing look at how Gov. Polis is putting this supposedly free market, nonpartisan group to work.
Much more at the link.
I’d just add that Polis sure seems to enjoy those public-private “partnerships” an awful lot for a so-called libertarian Democrat.
HAHA:
Never gets old. This year and every year… https://t.co/I1MAraCbTf
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) May 1, 2025
Note, however, that the commies did not just give up and go away.
FISH, BARREL, DO THE MATH: Jesse Watters Humiliates Jessica Tarlov in Heated Debate Over MS-13 Gangmember.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Tim Walz Still Believes MSM’s ¿Quién Es Más Macho? Shtick About Him. “Part of creating the Kamala Harris fiction out of whole cloth involved turning her running mate Tim Walz into a believable human being. They pitched him as some sort of testosterone-laden man’s man who disenfranchised males would flock to. It was a story so patently absurd that only one person in America bought it — Tim Walz.”
MAN, DID I EVER VOTE FOR THIS: EPA canceling nearly 800 environmental justice grants.
In a filing that was entered last week but first reported by The Washington Post Tuesday, a high-ranking EPA employee states that the agency has already told 377 grantees that their awards were canceled.
The agency plans to send cancellation notifications to an additional 404 — meaning a total of 781 grants are being canceled, said the filing, a declaration from Daniel Coogan, the EPA’s Deputy Assistant Administrator for Infrastructure and Extramural Resources.
The grants are primarily related to programs that deal with environmental justice — that is, dealing with pollution in communities that face disproportionate impacts and have limited resources. This includes low-income and minority communities.
The Trump administration has targeted environmental justice programs — firing 280 staffers and reassigning another 175 who worked on the issue, saying it’s part of a broader effort against diversity initiatives.
It’s all just slush funds and payouts for progressive groups.
CONFRONTING FICTION BECAUSE THE FACTS ARE TOO HARD TO FACE: UK Parliament Hosts Incredibly Embarrassing Hearing Over Netflix Show ‘Adolescence.’
When African immigrants murder people, we must crack down on adolescent white Britons.
META IS GARBAGE: Robby Starbuck Sues Meta Over False Claims Its AI Made About Him. “Large language models like Meta’s AI can hallucinate false answers about a topic, but he wondered if these specific claims may have absorbed from some “source” when Meta’s AI was scraping the internet for training material. However, Starbuck’s research team couldn’t find anyone making these specific claims about him anywhere else online. Also, other AI companies did not make the same errors. . . . This is the first time I’ve heard of a company being sued for defamation over what its AI said about someone, but it turns out this is not the first such case. There was a similar case in Georgia last year involving Open AI’s ChatGPT. That case also involved a conservative.”
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE MONEY: Email Exposes How Boss Of NIH-Funded Alzheimer’s ‘Amyloid Mafia’ Shakes Down Critics. “77,655 Alzheimer’s papers cite the hundreds of papers compromised by manipulated evidence, according to a February book by Science reporter Charles Piller. Forty-six Alzheimer’s researchers, including major contributors to the amyloid hypothesis, have authored papers with evidence of manipulated data.”
How many lives were lost, and are still being lost, because of this self-interested wrong turn?
TO BE FAIR, THEIR PRESENT SOCIETY IS 100% ORGANIZED AROUND AVOIDING THE TRUTH: Europe’s Problem With Trump Is That He Tells Them the Truth.
MARK JUDGE: David Horowitz: American Hero.
NEWS YOU WON’T FIND IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: Potential deportee and Columbia grad student Mohsen Mahdawi won a habeas hearing yesterday. That perhaps temporary victory should not obscure the truly blockbuster revelation in the judge’s opinion, that Mahdawi was reported to the authorities and investigated by the FBI in 2015 after he told a gun store owner that he was involved in murdering Jews in Israel, and telling another individual that he liked to kill Jews, all why eyeing various firearms. The judge, seemingly intent on teaching the Trump administration a lesson did not take these statements very seriously, but (a) Mahdawi should have been referred to ICE for deportation in 2015; and (b) if he can’t be deported now, something is very wrong with our immigration system. Meanwhile, I won’t bother linking to the Times’ story on the habeas ruling but, no surprise, no mention of Mahdawi’s love of Jew-killing.
“AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION IS A MESS.” [VIP]: Refactoring American Public Education.
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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Scathing Harvard Report Details Pervasive Anti-Semitism Driven By ‘Politicized Instruction.’
COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: On May 1st 2020, Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research reminded his readers: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic. “In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong* to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide:”
“In 1968/69,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”
And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.
I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?
Nothing was closed by force. Schools mostly stayed open. Businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.
* * * * * * * *
As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.
It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.
Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.
As I said above, Tucker’s column ran on May 1st, 2020. One month later, cue the dancing TikTok nurses and let loose the George Floyd riots!**
As even far left New York magazine admitted in late 2023: COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic. In March of 2020, this sort of talk could get one de-platformed on social media and/or caught in the feedback loop of the MSM-DNC sending out the Batsignal to their readers on social media: [Four] years ago American Thinker was the first to call out the fraud of Dr. Anthony Fauci and was viciously attacked by the WaPo, NYT other MSM outlets.
* In a scene included in 2021’s Get Back, Peter Jackson’s 2021 eight-hour miniseries reworking of the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, Paul McCartney even joked about the Hong Kong Flu, while he and John Lennon were hashing out song ideas:
January 23rd, 1969 (Apple Studios, London): While Robert Fraser drops in on the sessions, a good-humoured John and Paul stand up for a run-through of ‘Get Back’ that devolves into silly off-key takes on ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, ‘Help!’, and ‘Please Please Me’. (Note: The medium shot of Robert Fraser is the same as the one included here, so who knows where it really falls within the continuity.)
PAUL: Imagine I’m in love with you… I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.
JOHN: What?
PAUL: I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.
JOHN: Oh, are you? Take drugs.
[Let It Be Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg]: Are you really?
PAUL: No, not really. Not really.
And from Tucker’s article, the since-deleted tweets by fellow American Institute for Economic Research’s Phil Magness on Woodstock and other gigantic rock festivals that took place during that year’s pandemic:
** Jon Gabriel warned last year in the Arizona Republic: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “These mass demonstrations used to be more localized, such as Occupy Wall Street or the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. Today, they are global, and the new cause is released with the regularity of a new car model’s marketing campaign. This year, ‘global intifada’ is all the rage. I suppose activists are brainstorming a new cause to release in May 2025.”
DECOUPLING: China exports drop amid tariff fight with U.S.
The country’s official purchasing managers’ index for the manufacturing sector, which gauges Chinese factory activity, was at 49 points this month, down from 50.5 last month. A reading of 50 points or higher means factory activity is expanding, while a reading below 50 means it is contracting. This month’s reading was the weakest since December 2023.
New export orders dropped sharply to 44.7 points this month, which is the lowest reading since December 2022, indicating that trade is slowing between China and the U.S. as American importers cancel or delay orders amid tariffs.
President Trump has placed 145% tariffs on Chinese imports. China then placed more than 100% tariffs on U.S. imports and has targeted U.S. companies that operate in China while also restricting exports of minerals used in batteries and other high-tech applications.
In a social media post on Tuesday, the Chinese government said it will “never kneel down” before the U.S.
Tuesday was a long time ago: China caves on 125% tariff for major US export after White House predicts Beijing can’t keep up.
LIGHTNING DEAL: FLEXTAILGEAR Tiny Pump Portable Air Pump. #CommissionEarned
ARE THE CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION LAWYERS WHO ARE LEAVING THE CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION APOLITICAL TECHNOCRATS?: WaPo implies that the 100 or so lawyers who are leaving the Civil Rights Division en masse are somehow apolitical technocrats who are outraged that the Trump Administration is politicizing their division. But as Alison Somin writes on X, that’s ridiculous. The Civil Rights Division has been home to hyper-partisan wokesters for quite some time. If that’s who’s leaving (and it almost certain to be), there is no good reason to miss them.
More than a decade ago, I got a taste of the Civil Rights Division’s special brand of leftism when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigated of the Civil Rights Division’s handling of the New Black Panther Party case. The dominant view there was that civil rights laws do not protect white males. If anything, it’s gotten worse since then.
Changing the culture there will be a labor on par with cleaning the Augean stables. But Harmeet Dhillon might turn out to be just the right person to do it. Godspeed to her.
NEW YORK TIMES CLAIM: Trump Invented the Surveillance State. “Donald Trump is fast becoming an Orwellian repository for America’s past sins, helping erase long histories of abuses.”
UGH: Your Nest Thermostat May Be About to Become a Decoration. “Google announced that it was becoming a pain in the posterior to update the outdated hardware on some Nest Learning Thermostats, specifically the 2011 first generation, the 2012 second generation, and the European version of the 2014 second generation. Updates on those devices will grind to a screeching halt on October 25.”
The thermostats will still work but without any smart or cloud functionality.
