Fun article, but the best part is Pinsker's one-liner description of the soyboy

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even changing into a disco suit doesn’t help

DNC Vice Chair Now OPPOSES Gender/Racial Quotas, and You’ll Never Guess Why

You’ll be gobsmacked to learn that the reason is because his election as DNC Vice-Chair (in charge of gambling and prostitution?) is being challenged by a female (chicken feather) Indian who lost the vote, but here’s the intro I like:

David Hogg is the Democratic Party’s version of Greta Thunberg, only skinnier and with less upper-body strength: a youthful, baby-faced answer to complex social problems.

Our Defense Secretary at the Army War College

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Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito has an excellent article in HotAir today reporting on her interview with Pete Hegseth and his visit to the Army War College. Very much worth reading in its entirety, first because Zito is one of the best reporters out there, and second because it’s encouraging; Hegseth gets it, and understands the massive overhaul our military needs desperately. Now if he can just pull it off.*

Here’s a small excerpt from Zito’s article:

Pete Hegseth's Hard Choices: Today's Decisions and Tomorrow's Military

 …. Since being announced as Trump's pick for defense secretary, Hegseth has faced resistance from the legacy press, Democrats and some Republicans, and his worst enemy of all: the very building he is set to reform.

        The Pentagon's culture is legendary for its rigid hierarchy. Its home base in Crystal City, Virginia, has the population of a small city, 27,000, and directly employs 3.4 million people worldwide. And that doesn't even begin to count the contractors who work for the Defense Department, which some estimate to be just under 980,000 men and women across the globe.

        It is a culture that does not like to be tinkered with.

        "If you're here for the right reasons and you're not compromised and you're willing to be courageous and bold and speak clearly, and then you'll back POTUS, 100% you're a threat," he said.

        "They knew that from the minute he chose me through my entire confirmation process, from the minute I walked into the building to the first initiatives we took, like DEI is dead at DOD," he said of the elimination of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies at the agency.

      ….

        Hegseth isn't the first outsider to stir the wrath of the institutional DOD. On Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a Pentagon speech that declared war not on an adversary in hot spots around the globe but one in the very building he was standing in.

        "This adversary is closer to home," Rumsfeld said. "It is the Pentagon bureaucracy -- not the people, but the processes; not the civilians, but the systems; not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action we impose upon them."

        He lambasted waste, duplicative duties, bloated bureaucracy and gridlock. He proposed streamlining finance and procurement systems and the consolidation or elimination of duplicate defense jobs.

        Less than 24 hours later, the 9/11 attacks began at the Twin Towers in New York and went on to include a farm field in Somerset County and the Pentagon itself. Rumsfeld would tell me years later in an interview that he went into the job to be a reformer, something the two wars during his tenure would never let him fulfill.

        Hegseth said the speech Rumsfeld gave, rattling DOD bureaucrats to their core, was very good. "In fact, it models a lot of things that we're going to do, and I commend him for that," Hegseth said. "I would argue that what we're doing is back to basics."

        "It's actually not that complicated. If you set high standards, you maintain discipline, you empower commanders, you make sure they're focused on training and readiness. You focus on lethality, and you get the troops what they need. Military education becomes a fairly straightforward exercise," he said.

        Hegseth argued that under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the military got confused and was running think tanks: "We're running basic training and we're running military academies, which are training privates, lieutenants, cadets, future leaders to the war college here. Your job is not to think about the grand social justice dynamics on another continent."

        Hegseth said the job of the military is to ask questions such as, "How do I maneuver an infantry battalion or an infantry brigade in the modern context where now drones are vehicle killers?"

        "That's what we study at the war colleges," Hegseth said. "That's what we study at West Point. That's what we should be studying: military history, engineering science."

        The 44-year-old said people can claim that DEI is just a buzzword. "It is the exact opposite," Hegseth said. "It's actually become an ethos of a place, and it infects the entire inter-dynamics of the relationships."

        His plan, from education to training, is to get back to basics: "It's what you are supposed to be able to do, navigate your ship, hit your target with artillery, and are you training for those things? And are you taking care of your people? And that's a big part of the tension also."

        As for how the military has changed due to the electronic warfare and drone operations used during the war in Ukraine, he said there is a lot to learn.

        "We have to absolutely learn from Ukraine. Warfare has made, in many ways, a leap in just a few years, which is emblematic of how technology changes so fast these days," he said. "So from the internet and computing to quantum computing to AI, everything's multiplying rapidly. Exponentially. So are battlefield capabilities. So are hypersonics, long-range drones, cheap drones, sophisticated drones, electronic warfare, directed energy, space, cyber, you name it. All of those components are coming to bear under how we fight."

        The war in Ukraine also informs us of the viability of different platforms. "So, you pay for a lot," Hegseth said. "What if you're paying for lots of Humvees or lots of helicopters that in the next war are easily defeated by cheap drones? Then you're creating a situation where in previous wars, when dynamics change, it's when tactics didn't catch up with technology."

        He pointed to when the machine gun was first introduced in World War I, noting, "We were still sending waves of men across fields, and the machine gun changed everything."

        The 29th defense secretary said he believes we're at a point at which long-range drones, hypersonics and counter-air operations are all changing and contesting battle spaces differently from assumptions we had made in the past. "So places like the War College and elsewhere have to be learning from what's happening in Ukraine. And we are, we're learning a lot, and it's going to make our troops more lethal and survivable in the next conflict," he said.

        Hegseth said there are many hot spots that keep him up at night, but the budget process consumes more of his time and thoughts than he anticipated. He said that how and what we spend are crucial: "If we don't get that right and we don't actually rebuild the military, then I don't want to look back 10 years from now and say, 'You know what? I didn't fight hard enough to make sure we had everything we needed to rebuild the military so that my kids and grandkids had the strongest military in the world.'"

        "China's not messing around, and we either match and exceed them or we fall behind. My job is to match and exceed them, to deter them. And there are plenty of people with different priorities in this town. My job is to fight for the Defense Department for the president," he said.

        The questions preoccupying Hegseth are, "Have we delivered enough on this? Are we spending enough on this? Have we reprioritized this? Because that legacy lasts a long time too. So yes, I'm looking at the intel and realizing what we have up against us. But the long term is, am I doing right by the warfighters with what we're funding?"

        Hegseth said what the military looks like 10 years from now will be a direct result of what they do today.

        "So we need to make some hard choices right now. What is our forced posture in Europe? How do we ensure we don't get bogged down in Middle Eastern wars that keep wanting to pull us back so we have clear, limited objectives?" he continued. "How do we prioritize the defense of our own homeland? And you see that on the southern border and Iron Dome. How do we protect our own backyard in the Southern Hemisphere? And all of that is in service to saying, 'Communist China, we want to be friends with you.' We don't want war, but we're going to be the strongest nation on Earth to ensure that that never happens."

*“In the Blood” is a great book recounting one small triumph against the military bureaucracy. Fascinating, and a quick read. Highly recommended.    

So far as the DEI disinfecting is going, Twitchy has a post on a case of a West Point instructor who self-deported from the USMA earlier this week. Tres droll.

On Thursday, Graham Parsons, an associate professor in the English and philosophy department at the United States Military Academy, published a guest essay in the New York Times called "West Point Is Supposed to Educate, Not Indoctrinate." Public schools are supposed to educate and not indoctrinate, too, but we haven't seen the Times post that guest essay yet.

In any case, the DOD Rapid Response account responded rapidly:

Sadly, Professor Parson’s bio appears to have been removed from the West Point website, but this can still be found on the Internet; it’s perfect:

They removed Teddy Roosevelt's statue from the Natural History Museum and replaced it with this

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in the dead of night

Parents outraged by trans film for kids at Museum of Natural History: ‘Should be off-limits’

The Museum of Natural History shocked even liberal Upper West Side parents last week by showcasing an animated film featuring a drag-performing fox and a trans kid with an identity crisis – alongside an exhibit “about sea animals.” 

The eight-minute stop-motion animation short titled “Dragfox” – featuring a “charismatic” fox in drag voiced by Sir Ian McKellen — played last weekend on a loop inside the august Milstein Hall in the shadow of the famed 94-foot long blue whale.

In one scene 11-year-old Sam twirls around with his sister’s pink dress, eventually wearing it. The flamboyant fox, “Ginger Snap,” snatches it and breaks into a drag musical number as the duo embark on a “magical journey” in the attic. 

The “family friendly” series, part of the annual Margaret Mead Film Festival, was innocuously called “Our Friends, The Animals” and described a collection of five “imaginative” shorts that explore “the deep and often mysterious connections between humans and animals” told through “myth, magic and quiet moments of discovery.”

“What on Earth is this doing playing in the Natural History Museum? No connection whatsoever to space, the ocean, anything,” blasted one stunned museum-member mom in an online parents group.

The answer to her question lies in looking beyond the museum itself and seeing the grand mosaic of what’s happening, in all aspects of current society. Like this small fragment, for instance:

It Is Our Job to Destroy the United States,’ Says...

The figures at the top of this campus movement have been repeatedly exposed as profoundly hateful and openly supportive of violence.  Almost without exception, they loathe not only Israel, but the West and Western values -- very much including the United States of America.  When they tell us their objective is the complete destruction of Western Civilization, and when they join forces with the explicitly anti-American dirtbag Left, believe them.  Understand what they're really about.  This is not just about Jews or the state of Israel.  It never has been.  Here's yet another piece of evidence, for the record: 

Opening the borders; blocking the removal of the illegal aliens who subsequently flooded in; the 1619 Project in our schools; rejecting all western thought and culture of the past 3,000 years as the product of “dead white men”; it’s all one effort, all leading to the ultimate goal, even if that goal is a fuzzy as the brains who are embracing it.

Where's the beef? Our betters’ prescription for the Little People’s diet will offer no real solution to the MAGA problem, because there’s a bug

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crickets

Vanity Fair Torched for Ridiculously Blaming MAGA for Americans Wanting a Protein-Fueled Diet

The article was titled “Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein? Blame MAGA” by author Keziah Weir. In it, Weir calls out those in the “manosphere” led by President Donald Trump and supported by “influential podcast bros” like podcaster Joe Rogan and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement.

By 2015, psychologists were finding that the overconsumption of protein among men could constitute an eating disorder. Was it correlation, coincidence, or some lean-meat canary in the proverbial coal mine that it was into this proteinous landscape that Donald Trump—burger loving, locker room talking, and all—announced his bid for the presidency?

And now, amid a shrinking economy, following strides and setbacks for women’s rights via #MeToo and its backlash (including the overturning of Roe v. Wade), as well as marriage equality, visibility, and media representation for queer and trans people with a similar subsequent “anti-woke” recoil—we have a second Trump term, MAHA, and what menswear commentator Derek Guy calls the “slim-fit revolution” of the manfluencer sphere.

Weir concludes her piece with the bizarre statement that reads, “Whether our current protein path leads to an accidental brush with transcendence, or face down on the pavement as gunshots ricochet nearby, remains to be seen.”

But here’s the bad news: Bugs can have more protein than meat.

[T]he protein content of edible insects ranges from 35 to 60 percent dry weight (after being processed) or 10 to 25 percent fresh weight, which is higher than plant protein sources like cereals, soybeans, and lentils and can sometimes be greater than meat and eggs, says Antonette Hardie, a registered dietitian nutritionist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. Their fat content ranges widely, from 10 to 60 percent, and it’s mostly healthy, unsaturated fats, she adds.

Ultimately, however, converting the serfs’ diet to grub worms and locusts is both a bug and a feature, despite the impending disappointment of Vanity Fair’s readers, because the real goal of the people who wish to rule is to return the mass of surplus humans to the poverty-stricken conditions of the pre-industrialized world, and a diet of insects, distributed sparing and grudgingly, will accomplish that neatly, protein or no.

ClimateNews 5 February 2018: [Bolding added]

Developing world cannot sustainably achieve same living standards as West

Wealthy nations must 'dramatically reduce resource use' as planet does not have sufficient resources to maintain highest quality of life for everyone, say researchers

High standards of living for all the world’s inhabitants would require up to six times as many resources as the planet can sustainably provide, a new global study has found.

Basic needs such as adequate food to eat, access to electricity and sanitation could likely be met for the entire world population, researchers at the University of Leeds discovered .[“discovered” Uh huh — Ed]

“However, achieving the high standards of living of the type enjoyed by people in many Western countries is not feasible.”

“It’s also not really possible for the developed world to continue having their standards of living,” said Dr Daniel O'Neill, a sustainability researcher at the University of Leeds who led the study.

“So really we need to reduce resource use substantially in wealthy nations and at the same time we need to increase resource use in developing countries," Dr Daniel O'Neill said.

The results suggested that some of the United Nations’ “sustainable development goals” – designed in 2015 to “end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all” – could undermine each other, the study said.

“Pursuing the highest levels of wellbeing for all, for example, could negatively impact efforts to combat climate change.”

“We need to take the lead in wealthy countries like the US and the UK, and dramatically begin to reduce our resource use,” he said.

While problems undoubtedly still exist in developed nations, he said they are unlikely to be solved with more resource use. Instead, other measures such as better distribution of income would help those countries.

“Achieving life goals that go beyond basic needs for everyone, such as universally high levels of life satisfaction, would require between two and six times the sustainable level of resource use.”

The research took into consideration several “planetary boundaries” which, if exceeded, could lead to catastrophic damage.

Previously, earth system scientists have described these boundaries as essential for maintaining the relatively stable conditions the planet has experienced for the past 10,000 years. They define a “safe operating space” in which the Earth can exist.

[The earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old — only in the past 10,000 years has it enjoyed climate conditions in which it can exist? — Ed]

By comparing these boundaries to national resource consumption, the scientists established how sustainable the resource use of each of the 151 countries they studied was. They also considered how well met the social needs of those countries’ citizens were.

“The results revealed that no country was able to both meet its citizens’ needs and maintain a sustainable level of resource use.”

“In general, the more social thresholds a country achieves, the more planetary boundaries it exceeds, and vice versa,” said Dr William Lamb, one of the study’s co-authors from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change.

"Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet,” said Dr Julia Steinberger, another of the study’s co-authors. “These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality.”

Deindustrialization

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Decline and Fall

John Hinderaker, PowerLine:

In the London Times, Diana Furchtgott-Roth traces the economic suicide of Western Europe:

At the Munich Leaders’ Meeting in Washington DC this week, vice-president JD Vance put his finger on a major cause of Europe’s recent decline. “One of the things that the Germans were very good about,” he declared, “is that they had kept the industrial strength of their economy consistent with the first world standard of living. But now what we see in Europe is a lot of our European friends are de-industrialising.” Hard power, he continued, requires strong industry.

It’s tough to be a naval power, for example, if you don’t make any steel and don’t build any ships.

[Europe’s] industrial base is getting whittled away by net zero policies, with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to preserve the environment placed ahead of almost everything else, including economic growth. Worse, China is ramping up coal-fired power at the same time. The net effect is not likely to be net zero but economic suicide for the West.

The European Union is trying to reduce CO2 emissions by 90% by 2040. That can’t be done, and won’t be. Nor would it have any discernible impact on climate, even if you believe the warmists’ own formulas:

[A]ccording to the Heritage Institute’s Climate Calculator, based on government economic and climate models, reducing Europe’s entire CO2 emissions to zero would have a net temperature mitigation of only about 0.12 degrees Celsius by 2100, assuming the highest climate sensitivity to carbon.

What “net zero” will do, however, is destroy Europe’s industrial base, and thereby impoverish its people and render Europe irrelevant in world politics:

Due to higher prices for electricity in the West, energy-intensive manufacturing has been shipped to countries like China, which do not so slavishly follow net zero nostrums. Europe’s progressive policies are effectively contributing to China’s industrial might.

England once rode coal to its status as the premier world power. Not it is China’s turn:

[C]oal-powered generation [in China] rose from under 1,000 TWh in 2000 to 5,864 TWh in 2024, highlighting the ongoing expansion of coal power in China.

With the election of Donald Trump, I think the U.S. has turned back from the brink of “green” destruction in the nick of time. If Europe continues to de-industrialize in service of environmental folly, it can only be regarded as deliberately suicidal.

(FWIW) I’ll add this: Britain has closed all but one of its blast furnaces, and that one isn’t long for the (western) world. 2019 Steel Production figures were: UK: 7 million tons; China: 996 tons. Will the disappearance of that last remaining 7 million tons save the world? Of course not: there’s a different goal being pursued here. PJ Media’s Stephen Green explains.

The industrial town of Scunthorpe is home to Britain's last operating steel mill. While the corporate sign in front might say "British Steel," the company's owner since 2020 is a Chinese industrial giant, Jingye, operating out of Beijing. Jingye claims to lose about £700,000 (about $925,000) each day keeping Scunthorpe's furnaces running. The company says that's due to high energy costs, environmental expenses, and competition from lower-cost producers around the world.

All big companies must deal with global market pressures, but Jingye's other two loss-driving expenses are due to London's insistence that Britain moves to a "net-zero" economy. Scotland's largest oil refinery at Grangemouth closed earlier this year "after struggling to cope with soaring energy costs, carbon taxes and Labour’s ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences."

Jingye threatened to shutter "British" Steel at the cost of 2,700 jobs, so Parliament stepped in to take control during an emergency session on Saturday. The emergency was because once a blast furnace is turned off, it can't be switched back on like a light switch. Think millions of dollars and weeks of downtime. 

While British Steel dangled from a government lifeline, Labour's Minister of State for Industry, Sarah Jones, was on Times Radio yesterday saying that British Steel would eventually transition to zero-emission "hydrogen to make direct reduced iron," a technology that doesn't yet exist and won't come cheap. In the meantime, I suppose Britons will have to absorb British Steel's million-dollar-a-day losses until DRI is available to generate even bigger losses.

There's been enough finger-pointing from both sides to conduct all nine of Beethoven's symphonies during a Hulu commercial break. So let's not even get into all that. The issue is that British Steel is — once again — effectively nationalized. Anyone who knows anything about post-war/pre-Thatcher Britain understands how badly that went the first time around.

Or for a more recent example, look at Chavismo Venezuela. 

You'd have to be a fool to put money into British heavy industry so long as both Labour and the Tories remain committed to legislatively mandated deindustrialization via Net Zero. Now that Parliament is the effective owner of British Steel, they're likely stuck with it. So if — when? — the mill at Scunthorpe goes dark, Britain will have achieved an ignoble first: they'll be the only G7 nation with zero domestic steel production. 

Britain without steel is like Britain without bangers and mash.

I've written some about the ongoing deindustrialization of Germany, Europe's (former?) economic powerhouse. But the process might be even further along in Britain.

An increasingly Venezuelan economy with an increasingly Islamic culture and an atrophied military is not the future I envisioned as a budding Anglophile teen — back when Margaret Thatcher and pre-Woke Doctor Who exemplified modern Britain in my eyes. 

On reflection, deindustrialization might not be the correct word for that country's accelerating move toward economic, military, and cultural irrelevance. Perhaps the correct word is de-westernization. 

Welcome to Gran Bretaña, comrades. Or is that al-Biritaniya? 

"There will always be an England," Britons sang when their island nation stood alone against the conquering Nazis.

Will there?

All salute our new President

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San Francisco judge puts temporary pause on Trump's mass layoffs at government agencies

A federal judge on Friday issued a temporary pause on the Trump administration’s plans to restructure various government agencies and cut tens of thousands of federal workers because the government overhaul was not authorized by Congress.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston put a 14-day pause on the mass layoffs, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments after they filed a lawsuit on April 28.

Illston said Trump may broadly restructure federal agencies, but only in "lawful ways" with approval from Congress.

"The President has the authority to seek changes to executive branch agencies, but he must do so in lawful ways and, in the case of large-scale reorganizations, with the cooperation of the legislative branch," Illston said. "Many presidents have sought this cooperation before; many iterations of Congress have provided it."

She pulled this one out from under the robe she was sitting on: the Executive can impose changes in the Executive Branch only with the permission of the Legislative and Judicial branches? Uh huh. And many iterations of Congress have granted that permission?

Not to worry, we have a Supreme Court to review the decisions of judges who believe they, not the president, have the power and duty to run the country, and rule accordingly. We can relax, knowing that wise Latinos are waiting to preserve and protect the Constitution. Like this:

GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVITY:

"We have met the enemy, and it is us" Adrian Mardell, Jaguar CEO.

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Okay, he didn’t actually admit that — not publicly, at least — but he should.

Jaguar looks for new ad agency after disastrous woke rebrand

It's almost like the middle-aged male bank managers who buy mid-range luxury cars want power and speed...

Not pretty boys peddling hot air and mascara. Better to focus on transmissions, instead of transvestites? Just a suggestion.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s Jaguar’s decision to go all-EV that’s more responsible for its collapse, and not solely its rebranding its cars as Wokemobiles: maybe, just maybe, the EV has been presented to the public, and the public has declined the opportunity to stop the oceans from rising

As Tesla Sales Decline, Ford’s EV Sales…Fall Off a Cliff

With the EV-loving media having recently refocused its venom on Elon Musk because of his alliance with President Trump, Tesla has become a target for the left. The media has gleefully been reporting any bad news about Musk’s electric car company, celebrating not only falling sales and financial repercussions, but also legitimizing vandalism against Tesla vehicles because of Musk’s politics.

The media has also been desperate to report that competitors are benefiting from Tesla’s woes. If you have the stomach for it, this nasty piece of journalistic bias from the AP dated 4/02/2025 hit all those marks, including the blaming of Musk himself for vandalism against Teslas: ”Tesla sales tumble 13% as Musk backlash, competition and aging lineup turn off buyers”

But something funny is happening. As Tesla sales decline, competing electric vehicle brands are not capturing the lost sales. It’s just the opposite, in fact. Legacy automakers who tried to make a big splash in the EV market are seeing their already nominal EV sales decline precipitously as the electric vehicle fad wanes. Ford had anticipated that by 2025 its electric lineup would be a major component of its product lineup, but now its EV sales are barely an asterisk, with sales plummeting from any already low peak.

“Ford’s EV sales fell by 40% in April and now it’s adjusting plans for another major project” [Elektrek – 5/01/2025]

Despite higher sales of internal combustion (ICE) and hybrid vehicles, Ford sold significantly fewer electric vehicles last month. Ford sold 4,859 fully electric vehicles in April, which is nearly 40% less than the 8,019 sold in April 2024.

(Ace of Spades): ‘Despite'? Is that the correct word to use here? It reminds me of the infamous Fox Butterfield stories from the NY Times, which had comically obtuse headlines along the lines of, “Despite record incarceration, crime rates are down.

Ford’s 4,859 EV sales amounted to just 2.3% of the company’s total sales in April. Yet CEO Jim Farley and nepot destructor Bill Ford remain committed to perpetuating the failed Model E-dsel efforts, despite multi-billion dollar EV losses continuing, with no end in sight.

Aside from its existing – and underutilized - EV manufacturing plants, Ford built a massive new plant (“Blue Oval City”) near Memphis to assemble 500,000 electric pickup trucks per year. The plant was supposed to be open by now, but it has been mothballed until at least 2027. There is little prospect for it ever opening, as Ford’s April electric pickup sales annualize to less than 21,000 units per year, and the sales trajectory is downward from here.

Or perhaps there is no problem at all, and it’s just a matter of perspective.

On the Waterfront

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61 Byram Shore Road has sold for $10.130 million. On and off the market since 2018, it’s pretty special, and true deep-water docks are rare in Greenwich. Reader Hankster commented in an earlier post on this house that he believed it was originally built by one of the Steins, of the Steinway Piano family, which is rather neat. Also neat would be if the listing agent really meant it when she suggested that the house would convey with “a well-stocked wine cellar”; an unusual lagniappe, certainly, but sure to be appreciated by the new owner.

Purchased for $7.240 million ($11,632,217 in current dollars) in 2005.