RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/18/trump-needs-to-cut-the-51st-state-crap/

It started as a joke, or so it seemed. Canada should become the 51st state, said US president Donald Trump to then Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in late November. Trudeau laughed nervously, according to the Fox News report of the meeting. Two weeks later, Trump took to Truth Social to mock Trudeau as the ‘governor’ of the ‘Great State of Canada’.

Trudeau and his fellow Canadians are not laughing any more. And for good reasons. What began as a seemingly offhand quip, an idea so crazy it had to be a joke, has now caused a serious rift between the two countries.

Since Trump initiated his on-again, off-again tariffs in February, he has been constantly repeating his ‘51st state’ jibe, presenting it as a solution to his self-created trade war with Canada. This flared up again last week, when Ontario premier Doug Ford announced a 25 per cent export charge on electricity to the US. Trump responded by doubling his planned tariffs on Canadian exports of steel and aluminium to 50 per cent. Both sides then backed down.

Trump has continued to claim that Canada’s tariff problems would disappear if it became a US state. ‘As a state, it would be one of the great states’, he said. In what he must have thought was a kind gesture, Trump then added that Canada could retain its national anthem if it joined the US.

Imposing tariffs on Canadian goods is bad enough, but Trump’s demeaning ‘51st state’ talk only adds insult to injury. He has angered the Canadian people, united their political parties in patriotic opposition to him and further alienated America’s Western allies. Indeed, last week’s G7 meeting of foreign ministers was overshadowed by the question of how to respond to Trump’s threats to annex the meeting’s host, Canada.

After weeks of repeating his 51st-state ‘solution’, we must call it what it is – imperialistic bullying. Trump is behaving like a mafia boss, making an offer Canada can’t refuse: ‘Nice little country you have there – it would be a shame if someone crushed its economy.’ Trump is offering ‘protection’ to Canada – protection from the threat he created.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/artificial-intelligence-china-deepseek-nvidia-broadcom-openai

How secure is America’s lead in artificial intelligence? It wasn’t long ago that the conventional wisdom put China years behind the curve. This was partly because the United States introduced export controls in 2022 and 2023 that notionally embargoed Chinese companies from the most advanced AI chips.

Today, however, most experts I speak with believe China trails the U.S. on AI by at most six to nine months—if at all. Take the sudden rise of China’s DeepSeek, the impressive AI startup that began as a hedge-fund CEO’s side project. DeepSeek shocked the markets earlier this year by releasing R1, a “reasoning model” that replicated top AI firm OpenAI’s breakthrough o1 model only a month after the latter’s unveiling, and seemingly at a fraction of the cost

OpenAI’s latest models still top the leaderboards, but only because they have access to vastly more computing resources. What DeepSeek nonetheless demonstrated is just how few technical barriers stand in the way of competing at the AI frontier. As DeepSeek’s CEO Liang Wenfeng put it in an interview last year, “money has never been the problem for us; bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.”

In practice, though, U.S. chip export controls have been incredibly leaky. Chinese buyers have circumvented the controls on a mass scale by routing chips through third parties in nearby regions, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. In other words, East Asian allies and U.S. firms are enabling the transmission of chips to a geopolitical adversary. America’s economic and military advantage depends on government stepping up to stop the flow.

The evidence for mass export-control evasion was always right under our nose. When the chip controls were first introduced in 2022, Nvidia responded by releasing a new, slightly inferior chip tailor-made for China—the H800—within weeks

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-america-first-tariffs/

Tariffs have figured prominently in the news since President Trump returned to the White House. He says that ‘tariff’ is one of his favorite words and lauds the 25th U.S. president, William McKinley, for using tariffs to achieve his goal of protecting the American economy. President Trump has brandished the specter of tariffs as leverage in advancing his own economic and national security objectives. They include enhancing cross-border security with Canada and Mexico, reshoring manufacturing back to the United States, reducing trade deficits with U.S.’s trading partners through fairer trade agreements, protecting American workers’ jobs, and safeguarding America’s national security. But tariffs have become a rapidly moving, economically volatile issue with potentially unintended consequences and unpredictable outcomes. Tariffs can backfire badly and hurt American consumers and manufacturers if they are not carefully calibrated to ensure that their benefits clearly outweigh their costs.

On the other hand, if tariffs are used with precision against the right targets at the right time and their purpose is clearly communicated, tariffs can play a valuable role in protecting America’s economy and national security. Just the mere threat of tariffs provides great leverage in overcoming the resistance of other countries to key U.S. demands.

President Trump has scored early successes with his tariff policies. Colombia backed down and reversed its initial refusal to take back its citizens deported from the United States after the president threatened to impose steep tariffs. President Trump also threatened Canada and Mexico with 25 percent tariffs on their exports to the U.S. if they did not show considerably more progress in securing their borders with the U.S. and stopping the cross-border flow of fentanyl. The two countries immediately began to step up their efforts to do just that, in return for which President Trump agreed to delay the imposition of these tariffs for now except on aluminum and steel.

President Trump has other tariff policy objectives besides border security. Promoting fair trade between the U.S. and its trading partners is a key objective.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/can-we-sacrifice-for-the-common-good/\

Recently the portents of a weakening economy have continued. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “tech stocks and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply again on Monday,” and “Friday’s jobs report . . . showed employers added 151,000 jobs last month . . . half as many as in November and December.” We’re hearing more and more gloomy talk of a looming recession.

Many commentators, the Journal continued, are blaming “Mr. Trump’s willy-nilly tariffs” –– the latest on Canadian aluminum and steel––that “are weighing on business sentiment.” Trump’s measured admission that tariffs may cause “a little disturbance” and require a “period of transition” was not enough for many economists who see the more serious negative effects of raising tariffs as more important than the improvements that others say could follow correcting our negative balance-of-trade with China, Canada, and other countries.

Canada’s surplus, for example, alone was $64.26 billion in 2023. Our total trade deficit is $1trillion. Surely, eliminating such imbalances would be good for our fisc––especially those of our rich Nato partners, who until very recently have defied the 2014 obligation to spend a meager 2% of GDP on their militaries, while freeloading for decades on our military for their defense. And don’t forget Mexico’s $170 billion, and as Victor Hanson reminds us, “Mexico currently siphons off $63 billion in remittances from the U.S. economy, most of it from illegal aliens.”

So, which “experts” should we heed? First, we must acknowledge the problem with the dueling, credentialed economists who counsel government officials and inform us citizens––economics is not a science properly understood. Any discipline that involves individual, unique human beings–– with their unpredictable spontaneity, their “passions and interests,” and their power to serve both no matter how irrational, destructive, and selfish––cannot be the subject of a pure science.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/19/public-thinks-that-25-or-more-of-all-federal-spending-is-wasted-ii-tipp-poll/

Americans have shown a high-degree of support for the cuts being made to the federal bureaucracy and spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Why? A majority across the country believe the government wastes vast amounts of their tax money, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

For the March online national I&I/TIPP Poll, voters were asked the following question: “What percentage of your tax dollars do you believe is wasted by the federal government?” The possible responses included: “Less than 10%,” “10%-25%,” “26%-50%,” “51%-75%,” “More than 75%,” and “Not sure.”

It’s fair to say that Americans see a lot of their money being wasted. Among the 1,434 people who took the poll from Feb. 26-28, 52% responded that they felt more than 25% of their tax money was being wasted, with the breakdown showing 24% responding 26%-50%, 14% at 51%-75%, and another 14% guessing 76% or more.

By comparison, just 19% answered 10%-25% and only 10% agreed it was less than 10% waste. Meanwhile, “Not sure” notched 19% of the responses. (The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points).

https://www.thefp.com/p/jb-pritzker-dei-donald-trump-pritzker-family-foundation-website

Mentions of diversity and equity have vanished from the Pritzker Family Foundation’s website amid Trump’s attack on DEI.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Democratic Illinois governor JB Pritzker has emerged as a key figure in the Resistance 2.0. A longtime proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Pritzker has described Trump’s attack on DEI as an attempt to “tear down” civil rights. He also called Trump “unfit to lead” after the president suggested DEI played a role in a tragic aircraft collision in January in Washington, D.C.

But, according to a Free Press review of internet archive records, Pritzker’s own family nonprofit appears to have scrubbed a slew of DEI language from its website on March 11. The Pritzker Family Foundation eliminated the phrase justice and equity from its mission statement and jettisoned the word inequities to describe its focus on social justice. The group also removed the word equitable from the statement that said the group had a “deep desire to create more just and equitable outcomes.”

And the foundation removed an entire sentence from its website that read: “Learn more about our ongoing efforts to apply a lens of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) to our grantmaking here,” which linked to a downloadable foundation document detailing its “ongoing journey” to embrace DEI. This document can no longer be found on the foundation’s site, but was located by The Free Press on the internet archive.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/18/how-tariffs-will-lower-the-cost-of-living/

Critics of President Trump’s trade policy—tariffs, tariffs, and more tariffs—cry that tariffs will cause inflation and make Americans poor. This is false.

Although there will be a brief period where the market adjusts to the new normal, tariffs will not cause inflation. In fact, tariffs will lower the cost of living in the long run.

Perhaps the more interesting question to ask is: inflation of what? Consumer goods? Why are these critics not concerned about the inflation of assets like houses or investments that are caused by economic globalism and the trade deficit?  Why are the Democrats and Neoconsso preoccupied with keeping the cost of disposable products low, when people cannot afford their rent or mortgages?

Fiddling with the grasshoppers

Contrary to popular belief, tariffs did not raise the cost of goods during President Trump’s first term, and they are not likely to do so the second time around. There are a few reasons for this.

First, a tariff is a tax imposed on imports. For example, a 25% tariff on steel would increase the price of steel coming from Canada or South Korea. However, that same tariff would not apply to steel that was made in America. In this way, tariffs are a completely avoidable tax. If you do not want to pay tariffs, buy American. Simple.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/a_businessman_and_a_brilliant_strategist.html

Business schools and military schools borrow extensively from each other’s academic literature.  Although the workings of the boardroom and the battlefield might seem mismatched, there is considerable overlap.  Both require leaders capable of assessing assets and liabilities dispassionately, developing short-term strategies that complement long-term objectives, and comprehending an adversary’s point of view.  Both demand critical thinking.

Organizational theory, as a scholarly discipline, reflects the shared language of business people and military planners.  Business executives “go to war” against rivals and cordon off associates in “war rooms” when their firms’ interests are “under attack.”  Military commanders seek to maximize “opportunity” and “leverage” while minimizing “loss.”  Allocating resources efficiently and avoiding waste are crucial for both vocations.  Just as an accountant is essential for a healthy business, a quartermaster is essential for a healthy army.  In business and war, technical knowhow, tactical skill, and logistical expertise separate winners from losers, victors from the vanquished.

What is striking about President Trump’s return to the White House is how completely he embodies this business-military mindset.  If a plan of action (a government program) is ineffective in achieving its goals, then the Trump administration terminates it immediately.  If government bureaucrats within the Executive Branch’s ranks serve no purpose or fail in their day-to-day missions, then they are relieved of their duties.  Just as fat, incompetent armies devour supplies and lose battles, bloated, incompetent bureaucracies devour resources and sabotage nations.  Military commanders have no time to worry about an individual soldier’s feelings when operational success and lives are on the line.  The chief executive of the United States has no time to worry about an individual bureaucrat’s feelings when the nation’s success and all Americans’ lives are at stake.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-3-14-qw44bfyfus1omeo4ao4zf20hjpmiv1

Way back in the ancient year of 2012 — before this blog had even been started — Penn State climate “scientist” Michael Mann brought a lawsuit for defamation against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, as well as against two websites (National Review and CEI) that had hosted the blog posts of those two individuals. Mann asserted that his reputation had been damaged by the Steyn and Simberg posts, which had compared Mann to fellow Penn Stater Jerry Sandusky. The point of comparison was that Penn State had investigated and cleared both men around the same time over allegations of misconduct — scientific misconduct in the case of Mann, sexual misconduct in the case of Sandusky.

In the succeeding years, the case went through a truly unbelievable history of procedural twists and turns, including multiple motions to dismiss and appeals. There was even an effort in 2019 to seek Supreme Court review, which the Court denied at that time; but Justice Alito issued a detailed dissent as to why he thought review should have been granted. The case finally reached trial in January 2024, by which time the two corporate entities, National Review and CEI, had been dismissed from the case, leaving only the individuals Steyn and Simberg as defendants. The trial was available for public view over the internet, and I watched substantial parts of it, leading to five blog posts over the period January 27 to February 8, 2024. Links to those five posts are here, here, here, here and here. A February 9 update to the last of those posts reported on the jury verdict that was delivered on the 8th. Readers who are at all familiar with the case will recall that the jury awarded only $1 of compensatory damages against each defendant, but awarded punitive damages of $1000 against Simberg and $1 million against Steyn.