Getting Real About Canada

First, all the YouTubers were sure Poilievre was going to win the Canadian election. Once that didn't happen, they're all now sure this means Alberta is gonna have a plebiscite and vote to become independent, or join the US, or maybe become a territory on the way to becoming a state, or somethong like that. And after all, once Saskatchewan and Manitoba join Alberta, there are lots of conservatives in BC, right? Of course, nobody even knows what kind of supermajority Ottawa will want to see in such a vote, and right now, polling suggests there's not all that much support, but hey, it's gonna happen!

A post by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse suggests the whole Alberta question is irrelevant and goes into the real origin of Trump's "51st state" proposal:

Following the 2024 presidential election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago and said if President Trump was to make the Canadian government face reciprocal tariffs, open the USMCA trade agreements to force reciprocity, and/or balance economic relations on non-tariff issues, then Canada would collapse upon itself economically and cease to exist. In essence, in addition to the NATO defense shortfall, Canada cannot survive as a free and independent north American nation, without receiving all the one-way benefits from the U.S. economy.

To wit, President Trump then said, if Canada cannot survive in a balanced rules environment, including putting together their own military and defenses and meeting their NATO obligations, then Canada should become the 51st U.S state. It was following this meeting that President Trump started emphasizing this point and shocking everyone in the process. However, in the emotional reaction to Trump’s statements, no-one looked at the core issues outlined by Trudeau that framed President Trump’s opinion.

Representing Canada, Justin Trudeau was not expressing an unwillingness to comply with fairness and reciprocity in trade with the USA, what Trudeau was expressing was an inability to comply. Quite simply, after decades of shifting priorities, Canada no longer has the internal economic capability to comply with a fair-trade agreement (FTA). Trudeau was not lying, and President Trump understood the argument; hence his 51st state remarks.

This means that on many issues, negotiating with Canada, even using the threat of prohibitive tariffs, will have no effect. For instance, at the link,

If the NATO member states contribute more to their own defense, the U.S. can pull back spending and save Americans money. However, Canada is currently 26th in NATO funding, spending only 1.37% of their GDP on defense.

Canada would have to spend at least another $15 billion/yr on their defense programs in order to reach 2.0%. Justin Trudeau told President Trump that was an impossible goal given the nature of the Canadian political system, and the current size of their economy ($2.25 trillion).

If Alberta leaves Canada, some of the YouTubers do raise worthwhile questions. Would Alberta vote to become independent, vote to join the US, or defer the question to some later time? Under most scenarios, the question of whether Alberta would have its own military would come up. A potential condition of independence from Ottawa might be for Alberta to contract with Ottawa for military protection -- but that would be de facto something other than independence.

And maybe Alberta might decide money spent contracting with Ottawa might be better spent contracting with the US for the same thing. But in most such scenarios, this would make Ottawa even less able to meet its NATO commitment than it is now, which is a problem that Alberta won't solve whatever direction it takes.

By the same token, even if Alberta becomes independent, or even if it eventually becomes a US state, this makes the problem of the porous northern US border worse. Alberta would need to create a border protection agency de novo for the short term even as it transitioned to becoming a state or territory -- just glancing at the map, it might have 2000 miles of border to protect with both Canada and the US. If it becomes a US state or territory, there would be almost as much additional US border with Canada to protect.

This would be a non-trivial problem involving drug smuggling, illegal migration, and human trafficking. But as a US state or territory, this would create a whole new salient on the US border that would also be problematic from both a military and border enforcement perspective. All of this suggests to me that making Alberta alone -- or even Alberta with one or more other provinces -- part of the US would create more problems than it would solve for the US and weaken Canada further, running the greater risk of making it a failed state on our long northern border.

From Trump's perspective, the message Trudeau brought him in December, that any material change to current tariff or defense arrangements would make Canada a failed state, is a real conundrum. As Sundance points out at the link,

Canada is a NATO partner, Mexico is not. As President Trump affirmed to Justin Trudeau during the meeting, it would be unfair of President Trump to discuss NATO funding with the European Union, while Canada is one of the worst offenders. Trump is leveraging favorable trade terms and tariff relief with the EU member states, as a carrot to get them into compliance with the 2.0 to 2.5% spending requirement for their military.

Canada is expecting unique treatment as both a NATO member and as a trading partner via-a-vis both Europe and Mexico, but in Trumpian terms, they have nothong to offer in return. One thing we do know about Trump is that he prefers to negotiate with people who hve no alternatives. I suspect that he sees any independent move from Alberta to join the US as an unnecessary complication, and in fact a 51st state solution for all of Canada, or some variation on that, is most likely.

The Dark Ages Are Back!

I seem to be finding a lot of material at The Atlantic lately. Alan Lightman, who has been a professor at both Harvard and MIT and appears to be nothing if not a member of the academic establishment, has recently sounded the alarm: The Dark Ages Are Back.

Since April 22, more than 500 leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies have signed a statement protesting the unprecedented interference of the Trump administration into higher education, interference that included external oversight of admissions criteria, faculty hiring, accreditation, ideological capture, and, in some cases, curriculum. As the statement says, higher education in America is open to constructive reform. However, “we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

Especially targeted by the administration have been international students.

Here's where his argument starts to lose momentum. In this post, I looked at sources including the Chronicle of Higher Education to discover that universities love international students for the simple reason that 80 percent of them pay full freight -- no schoarships or other financial aid; if they borrow, they get the loans in their home countries,.

The percentage of foreign students at Harvard, as I pointed out in that post, is 27%. The percentage of international students at MIT, where Prof Lightman teaches, is even higher, at 29.1%. As I pointed out, these students tend to be the privileged scions of third-world ruling classes who attend elite US universities because the degrees are status symbols.

Harvard and MIT are happy to take their money, and it isn't a great leap to recognize that if those third-world rich kids want to harass Jews on campus in the name of supporting Palestine, neither Harvard nor MIT will get crosswise with them. And indeed, Prof Lightman will never intrude on the lives of those who learn, live, and work there, most espedcially the international students, without whom he and his colleagues would not have cushy paychecks.

The most recent interference from the Trump administration is Trump's threat to take away Harvard's tax exempt status:

pic.twitter.com/cjWgAaCP7v

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 2, 2025

It looks as if Trump actually has strong legal grounds for doing this:

It all goes back to 1983 and an 8-1 Supreme Court decision called Bob Jones University v. the United States. Back then, the Christian university didn’t allow interracial dating, which it considered a violation of biblical values. The IRS decided that since the United States was firmly opposed to racial discrimination as “public policy,” the school should lose its nonprofit status. The Supremes overwhelmingly agreed.

I've commented here that Harvard's undergraduate admissions policies are generally recognized to have originated as a way to limit Jews without having an explicit Jewish quota, and more recently, the same methodology has been used to limit Asians, while at the same time increasing the quotas for more favored groups. This practice was found unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 2023. Prof Lightman blithely ignores this background, instead quoting a letter from MIT President Sally Kornbluth:

“To live up to our great mission, MIT is driven to pursue the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence. That means we are, and must be, in the business of attracting and supporting exceptionally talented people, the kind of people with the drive, skill and daring to see, discover and invent things no one else can. To find those rare people, we open ourselves to talent from every corner of the United States and from around the globe.” In the past, MIT and the many other institutions of higher learning in America have been Bacon’s “merchants of light.”

Wait a moment. In the past, MIT, Harvard, and the many other institutions of higher learning have systematically discriminated against Jews and Asians, who indeed are also exceptionally talented people. In fact, I strongly suspect that in any future class action suit against any selective university, discovery will show that the century-old discriminatory policies have persisted with only slight cosmetic changes. As I pointed out in my post at the link, in a recent Harvard entering class, roughly 80% were in non-merit categories including foreign students, legacies, and preppies.

And we need to recognize that the Harvard admissions paradigm has been generally used by all selective unversities, certainly all the Ivies. If the whole process is discriminatory, all such institutions risk losing their non-profit status. This in turn suggests that the traditional college admissions process itself will need to be scrapped and reinvented -- and this leaves aside the whole question of faculty hiring.

And we have the whole additional problem of the faculty career path through graduate school, in which legions of graduate students are prepared, at least in theory, for a steadily shrinking market of tenure-track positions in a highly corrupt hiring, promotion, and tenure process, which is already collapsing of its own weight. A serious look into this aspect of academic culture would upend the univerity system as we know it. Prof Lightman undermines his own argument in this passage:

Of course, the intellectual and creative freedom in America has enabled great productivity far beyond the precincts of science and technology. Exemplars include William James in philosophy and psychology, Toni Morrison in literature, Noam Chomsky in linguistics and cognitive science, Hannah Arendt in political theory, Martha Nussbaum in law and ethics, Margaret Mead in anthropology, W. E. B. Du Bois in sociology, John Rawls in political philosophy, Susan Sontag in cultural criticism, John Dewey in philosophy and education, and many, many more.

William James is a philosophical dead end. Toni Morrison? And I've had to study Noam Chomsky in grad school myself -- linguistics as a field is based on his theory that language evolved as a series of computer program-like modules, something for which there is no empirical evidence. Margaret Mead's work has been acknowledged as fabricated for generations. John Dewey is a joke. And these examples are apparently the best Prof Lightman can think of. But Harvard has produced many lesser luminaries, including Ted Kaczinksy, the Unibomber, whose personality is alleged to have been shaped by a Harvard undergraduate experimental program, or for that matter Timothy Leary or B F Skinner.

If Trump's effect is to cause a rethinking of higher education that eliminates the Harvard-MIT model, so much the better.

"The Following Is Not A Political Message"

As many know, one of my hobbies is model trains, and every now and then, I'm amused when the hobby world intersects with real life. Real life, of course, always wins, but hobby types, being hobbyists, are usually surprised and disappointed when this happens. It's a little sad when people in the hobby supply business come out on the losing end as well, but this is almost always because they seem to forget that business involves real life, not a hobby.

As the New York Times put it hehind a paywall this week, "Want to Escape the Financial News? Don't Try a Hobby." Somewhat belatedly, the model railroad industry has woken up to the fact that they outsourced the vast majority of their production to a small number of factories in China. Very little is actually known about these factories -- including how many there actually are and who's behind them.

I suspect that they operate on much the same basis as larger enterprises that make products like cell phones. Rush Limbaugh spelled out the basic problem back in 2011:

There’s been this myth that we’ve shipped all of our jobs overseas. Yeah, certain kinds of jobs have been shipped overseas. And one of the misnomers with manufacturing jobs lost, take a look, for example, at the Apple iPhone. Now, the Apple iPhone is assembled in China, but all the guts are not made in China. There are parts made in America, parts made in Switzerland, parts made in parts of Europe. They’re just all shipped over to Shenzhen at the manufacturing plant and they’re assembled there, but the whole phone is not ChiCom. It’s just assembled there.

. . . We start tariffs on Chinese imports, that just never works. It just never works. The market is speaking. The market here is speaking. If we, given current labor rates and everything else, an iPhone totally put together and made in this country would cost about $1800. Well, people aren’t gonna pay $1800 for an iPhone, and Apple knows it. But with all the parts made elsewhere, shipped to China and assembled over there, you can get an iPhone for 200 bucks now with Verizon thrown in as a carrier, in addition to AT&T.

El Rushbo said this in 2011, before probably even he thought of Trump taking up politics as a retirement activity, and all of a sudden, Trump 2.0 is starting tariffs on Chinese imports, and my guess is that it's going to work. The problem is that US businesses will be affected in various ways.

President Trump said this week that there may be less dolls for children for this year’s holiday season amid his tariff war, but the hit to retail shelf inventory is likely to spread across many shopping categories if there is no quick de-escalation between the U.S. and China in the trade war.

As early as July 4, many holiday sales promotions may start to look different, as small businesses that supply big box retail stores review product inventories and discount plans based on tariff economics. Business owners and supply chain executives tell CNBC the next 30 days are critical for trade deals that lift tariffs on China for the manufacturing orders to be placed and prepared to ship to replenish shelves.

The hobby industry is affected as much as any other. The link here gives one example of how almost any industry can be caught up:

Lauren Greenwood, co-founder & president of YouCopia, which makes storage containers, had moved its U.S. manufacturing to China over the past 15 years to meet the demand from retail giant Bed Bath and Beyond. She recently posted on LinkedIn about the temporary shuttering of the factory outside Nanjing, China, which manufactures the majority of YouCopia products, and opened in January 2025.

. . . “Our manufacturing has been down for three weeks,” said Greenwood. “Come August, there will be some items no longer available, and shelves will be bare.”

Looking at this solely as a business problem, continuity planning is a well-defined field:

Business continuity is an organization's ability to maintain or quickly resume acceptable levels of product or service delivery following a short-term event that disrupts normal operations. Examples of disruptions range from natural disasters to power outages.

. . . Business resilience encompasses crisis management and business continuity. It requires a response to all types of risk that an organization may face. An organization that is business resilient is essentially in a constant state of "expecting the unexpected." It means continuously preparing to meet disruptions head-on, including events of extended duration that may affect more than one facility or region.

While auditors and business managers have focused for the past 30-plus years on IT disaster recovery, a sudden tariff war -- or for that matter, a shooting war -- is precisely the sort of thing that a business owner like Ms Greenwood should have had at the back of her mind. What if the container ship carrying her latest shipment sinks? What if there's an earthquake in Nanjing that takes out her factory? And she's almost certainly the one expert on what would have to be done.

But apparently she never quite got around to doing this, even though it would be the sort of exercise she could do in her head while driving to work. And this is the sort of exercise that the model train manufacturers also don't seem ever to have undertaken. They're just looking at a situation where they'll be short of inventory by August and throwing up their hands. After all, if Trump hadn't raised the tariff, something else would have happened, a new epidemic, a natural disaster, a war with Taiwan, whatever.

A "coalition" -- that's what they call themselves, like something out of Star Wars -- has put together a remarkably clumsy YouTube presentation on their dilemma, linked above. The lead presenter, and apparently the driving force behind the effort, is Stacey Walthers Naffah, CEO of William K Walthers, Inc, a major model train manufacturer and distributor founded by her great-grandfather in the early 1930s. Ms Naffah, who has clearly had plastic surgery, has been making the media rounds talking in glib CEO-speak about the "challenges" facing her "team" as they "figure out a plan", which seems yet to materialize.

Either they don't have a PR adviser, or they've hired Jeff Bezos's guy. The presentation begins with the stark statement, "The following is not a political message". And I suppose it isn't, insofar as it isn't much of a message at all. The rebel coalition is just announcing that the sky is falling, and if you don't want the sky to fall, then -- what? It sorta-kinda emerges that they want model trains exempted from the 145% tariff, but they don't seem to have a plan to accomplish this.

They might at least have said, "write your congressman", or"call the White House", or even "call Howard Lutnick", but they don't even propose that. Or they might have said, "Here's what we're doing. We're meeting with Secretary Rubio and Secretary Lutnick on Tuesday, but meanwhile, we're . . ." but they aren't saying anything like that, either.

Stacey Walthers Naffah has an MBA. I asked the web, "should an MBA know about business continuity planning?" and got this answer:

Business continuity management (BCM) is an important part of MBA programs. It teaches future business leaders how to keep a company running during tough times. In the business world, BCM helps companies stay open when big problems happen.

MBA students learn how to plan to deal with risks and keep businesses working. These plans cover all parts of a company, from how it works to its money and people. The main goal is to make businesses strong enough to handle unexpected problems.

She seems to be the leader of the model train rebel coalition, but it sounds as if the only class she took seriously in business school was how to talk glib CEO-speak.

Yet again, we see why "playing with trains" is a synonym for feckless activity, up there with "wanking". I do note that a number of well-known names in the hobby industry did not appear in the video, which restores to at least some degee my faith in humanity.

It's Confirmed

A week ago Monday, I noted that Owen McIntire of Kansas City, MO had been arrested on charges of firebombing a Tesla dealership. This was in the context of the remarkably high proportion of Tesla arsonists who are trans males, and I wondered, as did others on social media, whether, given his feminine appearance in photos, he was trans as well, although legacy reports carefully avoided any reference.

This morning, it was confirmed:

The college student accused of firebombing a Tesla dealership has been released from federal custody to continue gender affirming medical care, according to a report.

. . . The University of Massachusetts physics student was granted release by US Magistrate Judge Jessica Hedges due to “serious and ongoing” medical needs — which include gender-affirming medical care that requires daily medication as well as mental health support, according to KMBC.

Fox News Kansas City quoted McIntire's defense attorney:

“What the courts don’t want to do is put too much burden on the jail staff to extend unique care or specialized care if they don’t have to.”

This is correct. The last thing jailers want to do is have to assure the safety of a trans 19-year-old. But the link adds another tidbit:

The defense filing says McIntire is undergoing treatment for depression, and is receiving gender affirming care that began in March of this year — and that care would likely be interrupted or terminated in federal custody.

So McIntire is facing charges for a firebombing that took place on March 17, within days or weeks of when he started taking drugs for gender-affirming care? Somehow, starting this treatment got him started on the road to arson. But there's more at the first link:

The University of Massachusetts physics student was granted release by US Magistrate Judge Jessica Hedges due to “serious and ongoing” medical needs — which include gender-affirming medical care that requires daily medication as well as mental health support, according to KMBC.

McIntire is also on the autism spectrum and was diagnosed with both ADHD and depression, all of which require medications and treatments that excuse him from remaining in prison, his lawyers successfully argued.

“By moving back home with his parents, he will have access to the care providers who are familiar with him and his specific needs,” the court documents read, according to KSHB.

With all this going on, why was he in college in Boston? It almost sounds as if the firebombing was a cry for help. But this brings me to a recent Commentary piece by Hannah Meyers:

Nationwide, headlines describe a spectrum of transgendered, nonbinary, and other “gender non-conforming” variations of criminal offenders. . . . In January, transgender repeat knife offender Jaia Cruz fatally stabbed a postal worker after jockeying over places in the sandwich line at a Manhattan deli. A few weeks later, transgender Nicol Suarez, who was being pursued by ICE for previous crimes, stalked and then raped a 14-year-old boy in a bodega bathroom in East Harlem. In February, 18-year-old transgender Trinity Shockley was arrested as she planned a mass Valentine’s Day school shooting. She failed where Tennessee transgender teen Audrey Hale succeeded; Hale gunned down six kids and adults at The Covenant School.

All of these cases raise a very obvious question: Do transgender Americans commit crime at higher rates or of different types than “cis-gender” Americans?

The answer is: We have no idea.

I suspect the article was written before the wave of trans arsons on Tesla dealerships, and the cases she cites indicate that the problem of trans crime existed before these and is much more widespread. She continues,

A Swedish study conducted in 2011 found that “transsexual individuals were at increased risk of being convicted for any crime or violent crime after sex reassignment.” More specifically, transwomen had a significantly increased risk for committing crime and violent crime compared with biological women—but not compared to cis-men. Indeed, transwomen retain “a male pattern regarding criminality.”

Transmen, on the other hand, had higher crime and violent crime rates than women—about the same rates as biological men. In other words, women who “transition” commit crime at rates similar to men—who, in the general population, commit most of the lawbreaking and violence.

An earlier Swedish study, from 1992, also suggests that higher rates of criminality exist within the transgender population. This research found that 9.7 percent of male-to-female and 6.1 percent of female-to-male sex change applicants had been prosecuted for a crime—higher than rates in the general population.

All anyone can say is that Owen McIntire's case is highly suggestive in this context -- he begins gender-affirming treatment, and within days or weeks, he's throwing Molotov cocktails. Meyers concludes,

Unless America recenters our debates about criminal offending in reality, and ballasts them with evidence, we will help neither crime victims nor offenders. And we will certainly harm transgender Americans, who are so often both.

Is Bezos Overrated And Out Of Control?

Two weeks ago, Jeff Bezos stepped into one of the biggest PR disasters you could imagine. Aaron Cohen, a PR and brand executive. wrote:

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin may have made history on Monday for sending an all-woman crew into sub-orbit on its New Shepard rocket ship for all the wrong reasons.

From a pure PR perspective, this was a Jupiter-sized faceplant.

. . . It reeks of poorly performed virtue signaling. Showing extremely privileged women taking a magical vacation into space as passengers while leaving common folk grinding away at their hamster wheel does not a good deed make.

. . . It is difficult to imagine any PR team approving this launch without waving flaming red flags.

But just yesterday, Amazon and Bezos stepped in it yet again:

Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday that, according to a source familiar with the matter, the e-commerce giant will start showing the figure added to the value because of the duties right alongside a product’s total price.

The move is reportedly an effort by Amazon to inform customers cost rises have nothing to do with it and everything to do with the Trump White House.

Stephen Green at PJ Media wrote,

Mere hours after a blistering Briefing Room performance from PressSec Karoline Leavitt — who slammed Amazon as a “China-aligned” online retailer — the company backpedaled faster than a skinny-dipper who mistakenly waded into a piranha pool. Leavitt was responding to questions involving a Punchbowl News report that Amazon would break out the "Trump tariff" on the price of imported goods.

Elsewhere, Green linked to this post on X:

This will backfire.

Amazon buys Chinese trash for $0.70 cents. Pays $0.50 tariff. Sells to you for $18 plus $0.50. Customer realizes they’re buying Chinese trash. https://t.co/cowWJ0T0x5

— Rob Schmitt (@SchmittNYC) April 29, 2025

Green continued,

Nick Sortor reported that "minutes after President Trump called Jeff Bezos this morning, Amazon CAVED and backtracked on their plans." Bezos isn't CEO any longer, but he can still jerk some chains.

Whatever the truth is, what a shame Amazon isn't sticking to its guns. As I wrote earlier today, breaking out taxes and letting consumers know up-front where their merchandise is coming from would be a big win. Even that, however, wouldn't be enough to fix what's wrong with the Amazon-China Connection.

The chart below is from last year, before the tariff controversy:

But there are apparently other problems with Anazon's business model:

UPS will cut 20,000 jobs this year, about 4% of its global workforce, the company said Tuesday. But UPS added the decision is unrelated to tariffs and is instead due to increased use of technology and a previously announced plan to trim its Amazon business.

UPS in January announced a “glide down” plan to cut its business with Amazon, its largest customer, in half by the middle of 2026. UPS CEO Carol Tome said Tuesday that most of the Amazon business that it is giving up is “not profitable for us, nor a healthy fit for our network.”

The UPS package volume from Amazon was already down 16% in the just-completed quarter, which was a bigger drop than UPS had forecast for the period. UPS said it will close 73 US buildings by the end of June as the next part of that “glide down” plan.

So UPS is losing money on its business with Amazon. On the other hand, Amazon has its own delivery service, Prime -- so why was Amazon taking business away from itself and giving it to UPS? I've got to assume UPS was cheaper than Prime for Amazon to use it instead. But now UPS is forcing Amazon to use its own higher-cost shipping, because Amazon was ripping it off. These were factors in play before Trump's tariffs. But the tariffs are also just an outcome, not a cause:

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has quietly canceled a number of orders from suppliers in China and Southeast Asia, according to Bloomberg. The move appears aimed at avoiding the rising costs tied to U.S. tariffs but it's left some vendors with goods they can't sell.

. . . A consultant familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Amazon canceled several direct import orders without warning. Because Amazon usually acts as the importer of record, it normally pays any tariffs once the goods arrive in the U.S. But when an order is canceled after shipping, that responsibility shifts to the vendor leaving them on the hook.

In its 2023 annual report, Amazon flagged risks tied to its China-heavy supply chain, warning that global events, security issues, or policy changes could affect results. Around 40% of items sold through Amazon come from these types of vendor relationships showing just how wide the impact could be.

In other words, Amazon was fully aware as early as 2023 of the risks in its supply chain, but it seems to have persisted in that risky business model for as long as it could.

“How'd That Work Out?”

Trump has bveen asking this question in various contexts lately, most recently over Taylor Swift. Of the Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl win, he observed at the White House yesterday,

“It was incredible. A little surprising,” the president said of the blowout win.

“I was there along with Taylor Swift,” Trump added before asking rhetorically: “How did that one work out?”

The “You Belong With Me” singer, who is in a high-profile relationship with star Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, was loudly booed — to her apparent surprise — when she was shown on the big screen during the game.

Moments earlier, Trump was greeted with applause and cheers when he was shown during the pregame performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

I've been wondering when Trump will address this question to J B Pritzker:

Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, scorched Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday night, calling for “mass protests” and declaring that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” during a fiery speech in New Hampshire that immediately sparked presidential speculation.

“It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” Pritzker said to a ballroom filled with Democratic activists, officials and donors. “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.”

But the story goes on with the inevitable setting of context:

The billionaire heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune addressed more than 800 people. . .

There's nothing incongruous about a billionaire rentier shouting "to the barricades!" at a group of wealthy activists, officials, and donors. No, nothing at all. On a web search I also learned that Gov Pritzker most definitely does not wear a toupee.

In an unrelated story,

On Sunday, during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) did not rule out impeaching President Donald Trump if Democrats take control of Congress.

. . . Schumer said, “Well, look, right now, President Trump is violating rule of law in every way and we’re fighting him every single day in every way. And our goal is to show the American people over and over again, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s Russia and overseas and whether it’s rule of law, how bad he is.

So two prominent Democrats are arguing for basically dusting off and replaying the 2020 strategy -- BLM riots, impeach Trump (twice), Trump is Hitler. How'd that work out? But there's also a confused echo of the 2024 campaign, and that's the odd juxtaposition of white upper-class style and faux revolutionary rhetoric:

A bizarre quote by Vice President Kamala Harris—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”—is going viral once again as she mounts her presidential campaign after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race following his rough debate performance, with supporters and even other politicians adopting coconut emojis and memes inspired by the quote on social media to demonstrate support for Harris.

Harris’ quote: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” which she said at a White House event last year, has become an ironic slogan in support of the vice president as she campaigns for the presidency.

I've frequently noted here Harris's affectation of white upper-class minimalist hair style, wardrobe, and accessories while clumsily mimicking ghetto street argot. Now Gov Pritzker's call for unrest in the streets contrasts again with his own wealthy lifestyle:

Before Pritzker — a venture capitalist billionaire — became governor of the Prairie State, the now-governor and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, allegedly removed the toilets from their second Chicago mansion they bought in 2007 for $3.7 million to write it off as "uninhabitable" on a property tax appeal.

Cook County only taxes vacant properties at 10 percent of their market value. The property was reported by the Chicago Sun-Times as being uninhabited and allowed to fall into disrepair.

A 2018 report from Cook County Inspector General Patrick Blanchard shed some light on the Pritzkers’ porcelain problem: in 2015, the couple hired contracting company Bulley & Andrews to remove five of the toilets from their second mansion, allegedly to take advantage of the county’s low tax rate for uninhabitable properties.

As a result of the mansion’s lavatories being lightened before the inspection, the Cook County assessor’s office "lowered the 6,378-square-foot mansion's assessed value from $6.3 million to about $1.1 million."

Following the assessment, Bulley & Andrews was hired again to reinstall a single toilet in the now-governor’s "hangout/meeting area."

I think what we're looking at is the bitter end of trhe Fabian socialist strategy advanced by the UK upper class in the late 19th century -- to forestall the proletarian revolution, gradually appease the workers with faux referms that are funded by sources other than plutocratic wealth, to wit, taxes, debt, and inflation. Thus we still have some of the wealthiest families in the country, the Pritzkers, Bill Gates and his estranged wife and children, Steve Jobs's widow, and others, clinging to this old strategy, with the Pritzkers in particular claiming now to be the revolutionary vanguard. J B's sister Penny is running her side of the revolution as Lead Fellow of the Harvard Corporation.

Somehow I don't think this will work out.

Not Much Actually New Here

The @nytimes story on the January DC plane crash hides its takeaway until the last sentences: the lady helicopter pilot ignored multiple warnings from her right seat about altitude (and his directly telling her to turn away) and flew straight into a passenger jet.

The end. Ugh. pic.twitter.com/7emtYkZTwQ

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 27, 2025

There's a new fuss over what seems to be a previously unreported excerpt from the cockpit recording of the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into an American Airlines jet at Reagan National Airport on January 29.

Three months on, new details published by The New York Times revealed that the pilot made more than one mistake leading to one of the worst catastrophes in aviation history.

Not only was Lobach flying her Black Hawk too high, but in the final moments before the impact, she failed to take advice and instruction from her co-pilot to switch course.

. . . Just 15 seconds before colliding with the commercial airplane, air traffic control told Lobach and Eaves to turn left, but she did not do so.

Seconds before impact, co-pilot Eaves then turned to Lobach in the cockpit and told her that air traffic control wanted her to turn left. She still did not do so.

The one bit of new information appears to be the exchange with air traffic control when Lobach was directly instructed to turn left, and the instructor pilot repeated the same instruction. The rest of the recording has been released for more than two months. Without the new exchange reported over the weekend, this was the surmise I had as of February 15:

[NTSB] Chairman Homendy makes the point that the maximum altitude for the helicopter when passing over the Memorial Bridge should have been 200 feet. However, at 8:45:30, the instructor pilot told Cpt Lobach that they were at 300 feet altitude at that location. But at 8:44:27 [of a February 1 news conference], the instructor pilot had already noted to Cpt Lobach that the helicopter was at 300 feet and needed to descend to 200. For some reason, this descent never took place, even though the instructor pilot clearly expressed the need for it.

. . . this gives a two-minute span between the Key Bridge and the Memorial Bridge where at least the instructor pilot understood they were at 300 feet, should have been at 200, but there was no discussion about this. If anything, if Cpt Lobach thought they were at 400 feet, she should have seen even more urgency to descend.

. . . The fact that the collision occurred indicates that the helo's altimiters were close enough, and the pilots were fully aware this was too high, whatever the exact numbers may have been. This would also be irrespective of whether the helo crew had parts of the ATC transmissions blocked when they were keying the mic.

The big question as of the February 1 news conference was whether the helicopter crew heard air traffic control's instruction to "go behind" the jet:

The transmission from the tower that instructed the helicopter to go behind the plane may not have been heard by the crew because the pilot may have keyed her radio at the same second and stepped on the transmission from ATC, the NTSB added.

The whole issue at the time was obscured by the possibility that the crew didn't hear this transmission. But now we learn there was a whole 'nother, even more specific, transmission from air traffic control telling the helo to turn left. This must have been available to the NTSB at the same time as they were able to scan the earlier transmission, but it appears that they left it ot of the February 1 news conference, and it's only been leaked now.

But even without that specific transmission in the record, as of February 15, I still came up with what I think is the only reasonable conclusion:

This was a check ride that Cpt Lobach had to pass. During the ride, more than four minutes before the collision, the instructor pilot doing the check noted that the pilot flying was too high, and indeed, although she had four minutes to get down to 200 feet altitude, she never did this. At the same time, the instructor pilot inexplicably told the ATC twice that he had the jet in sight and was maintaining visual separation, which he clearly was not.

Was Cpt Lobach already failing her check ride even before she ran into the jet? If she wasn't, was the instructor pilot complicit in conducting a silly charade that was going to pass her no matter what?

This, of course, doesn't appear to be anything like a full transcript of the helo's CVR from the whole flight. My surmise, during the two-week period before the NTSB would release even a redacted portion of the CVR, was that its contents would prove deeply embarrassing to the Army and the memory of Cpt Lobach. For now, I think I was right, and I would bet there's still more to come.

Looks like I was in fact right. More pressure needs to be put on Chairman Homendy to explain why this transmission was left out of the February 1 news conference.