3-3-25

 

Bullet Points:

** Big Media should hire a few people to report the political news objectively instead of relying on Democrat talking points to fill their airwaves. Now is the time to do so, because the re-election of Trump as president provided a cornucopia of great news stories. And so you get AP reporting, “Trump’s firing of 1,000 national park workers raises concerns about maintenance and operating hours.” That’s a lot of staff—except, it isn’t. AP said the National Park Service operates 428 parks, historic sites and other attractions. That works out to two or three per site, although it is likely many of the layoffs are back office DEI staff and the like. The National Park Service has a staff of 20,000 employees. This is a 5% layoff.

** Why do you go to the artsy food outlets?

** Center for Security and Emerging Technology: “Based on current enrollment patterns, we project that by 2025 Chinese universities will produce more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates per year compared to approximately 40,000 in the United States. If international students are excluded from the U.S. count, Chinese STEM PhD graduates would outnumber their U.S. counterparts more than three-to-one.”

** “The U.S. Navy is at crossroads, with extended deployments, inadequate maintenance, huge cost overruns, delayed shipbuilding, failed audits, subpar housing, and, sadly, record-high suicide rates,” businessman John Phelan told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing for the top civilian Navy post. President Trump had two words for the new SECNAV – “Build ships.” The US must also invest in drydocks and shipyards and refurbish what we have.

** Radio Free Europe reported, “U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and said Washington will not renew funding for the UN agency helping Palestinian (terrorists).”

** Proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada and a tariff increase on Chinese goods will go into effect tomorrow. Following uncertainty about whether the White House would impose the tariffs after last month’s pause, Trump noted on Truth Social that his concerns about drug trafficking across both the northern and southern borders had not been assuaged. “Drugs are still pouring into our Country from Mexico and Canada at very high and unacceptable levels,” he wrote, adding that the planned 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico would go through, along with a 10 percent tariff hike on Chinese imports, bringing that rate to 20 percent.

** Collin Campbell reported, “Pentagon Officials Caught Using Taxpayer-Funded Credit Cards at Casinos, Bars, and Nightclubs Totaling $1.3 Billion.” What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—unless it comes to the bill. That goes to the taxpayers.

 

 

More on Red China Blues

(Newsweek) Because Xi Jinping is determined to steer the country in an unsustainable direction, China is entering a “doom loop,” as some call it. “China’s economy is confronting a crisis unlike any it has experienced since it opened its economy to the world more than four decades ago,” the New York Times reported in September.

In 2008, China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao decided they would not allow the economy to suffer, so they embarked on perhaps the most significant stimulus program in history. The result was historic overbuilding, and the country now has too much of almost everything.

For instance, in 2023, He Keng, a former senior statistics official, publicly revealed that China had enough vacant apartments to house the population of 1.4 billion people. He noted that some believed that empty homes could hold three billion. To deal with the severe imbalance, some Chinese localities are demolishing newly completed but vacant apartment buildings. Destroyed buildings cannot produce revenue to pay for their construction and demolition.

“Without paying for the bad investments—largely real estate—the economy can’t grow,” says Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research, author of Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy.

“And it definitely can’t pay for the bad investments. At least within the next decade.” The crisis will almost certainly last a long time. “China has grown almost entirely through capital investment,” notes Stevenson-Yang.

“Because there isn’t enough to invest in, much good money chases bad, and they have reached a limit. The Chinese economy is having a heart seizure.”

*** *** ***

University Palestinians

(NY Post) To reinstate their crybaby comrades and the “abolition of the corrupt Barnard disciplinary process and complete transparency for current, past, and future disciplinary proceedings.”

But make no mistake, this was just a pack of privileged rich kids getting their kicks by creating mayhem — covered by the delusion that it was social justice.

On Wednesday night, dozens of anti-Israeli invaders pushed their way into Barnard College’s Milbank Hall, banging drums and chanting “resistance is justified when people are occupied” and other genocidal slogans from the “The Idiot’s Guide to Intifada.”

On the walls, the masked up thugs organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, reportedly scribbled “f—k Barnard” and “free Palestine.”

Since Hamas’ barbaric terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, rabid pro-Palestinian protesters have terrorized elite college campuses, taking over buildings, swathes of campuses and harassing Jewish students. Few colleges had the backbone to dish out any meaningful discipline.

But this latest march of the resistance LARPers, in which they “physically assaulted” one employee who was sent to the hospital, was sparked after the school expelled two students, very deserving of such treatment.

 

The White House Press Corps

It’s just the latest in a long list of freakouts by the liberal inside-the-Beltway establishment about the way the Trump 2.0 administration is shaking up Washington. However, the decision to change the composition of the White House press pool seems to have really hurt the D.C. elites.

For several decades, the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) has jealously guarded its privilege to determine which outlets get the right to work in the executive mansion, sit in the briefing room when press conferences are held, and be recognized to ask questions.

So, it’s hardly surprising that this group—whose complaints are amplified by the hysterical coverage of the issue in the corporate mainstream publications and websites where its members work—is treating this measure as if it is the end of the free press, if not the world.

That it is nothing of the kind is only partly why this story says a lot more about the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the establishment press than it does about the foibles and willingness of President Donald Trump and his team to get even with their antagonists.

What is going on here is not just a battle between a new administration spoiling for a fight with a liberal press that is hopelessly biased against Trump and will do anything it can to discredit him. It is also an inflection point in which legacy outlets whose hegemonic dominance of journalism ended long ago are being forced to recognize just that.

They are notified that their control of the news flow at places like the White House will no longer be indulged. Moreover, their glaringly obvious tilt to the left, which has grown more significant yearly, especially since Trump began discomfiting the D.C. uniparty, is also a factor here.

It has caused them not only to be challenged by those who disagree with their prejudicial coverage but also rendered them essentially irrelevant to a 2024 presidential election, whose discourse was conducted mainly via podcasts and niche publications, not the daily newspapers, broadcast, and cable-TV news channels.”

***

The Ukrainian Delegation

Zelenskyy says he’s ready to sign the minerals agreement now, but he said this twice before arriving in DC. He could have signed in Munich, but didn’t. The EU doesn’t like the minerals deal with the US because it wants them for itself.

Go figure.

Most negotiations are not televised because negotiations are UGLY, and one rarely opens the kimono on the first date.

 

 

Identify the Armor

1

The pak42 was a game changer

I met a guy in England circa 1975 who crewed one of these beasts in Hungary’s failed war for freedom against the USSR—back when the US turned its back on them (23 October – 4 November 1956). He loved the tank, but it was knocked out in city fighting. Somebody hauled him out of it and found an airlift to the UK. He woke up in a hospital in Bristol.

 

2

You can do it!

 

Identify the Aircraft

3

 

Identify the SMG – that the Italian is showing off. It’s the same model as the other one has on a sling.

4

 

End