The thumbnail version of that is that we don't have the shipbuilding capacity we need, and we don't have the skilled tradesmen we need to build ships. You can see from the Senator's comments that Austal is literally going through all of the local community, even, as Senator Tuberville puts it, "through fast food joints" looking for tradesmen or anyone who could be trained. This is another aspect of something I've been saying and writing for years: our education system is not placing enough focus on the trades. When I was in high school in the '70s, even my small-town eastern Iowa school had a full auto shop, a full wood shop, and a full metal shop. A friend of mine graduated high school and, because of his classes in machining, was hired in a tool & die firm within days of graduating.

Building ships requires tradesmen: welders, pipefitters, electricians, and more. We don't have enough of those. //

This hearing illustrates very plainly why this rebirth of our shipbuilding capacity isn't going to happen overnight. And we don't have the luxury of time and distance we had in 1941. //

OrneryCoot
9 hours ago
High school teacher here. Did my master's thesis on something relevant to this. What would benefit our country greatly (as well as our youth) is an investment in career academies. Basic model is you do a normal K-8 education, and then spend your high school years learning a trade. Welding, construction related fields, tech related work, medical training and the like. After 4 years of real, hands on training in the field, get certified as a welder, electrician, plumber, etc. Having work studies with nearby industries is also a must. Also learn functional math that deals with how to handle finances at home and work, English for practical communication needs via email, resumes, work related correspondence, and a civics course to learn about how our nation functions and to install civic pride. Not everyone needs 4 years of Shakespeare, and that is coming from a teacher certified to teach English and history classes. An education like this provides something that is lacking for many students: a valuable, tangible benefit from their education. Not everyone wants or needs college, but they DO need to make a living. Career academies provide that. I'm sure companies like Austal in Mobile would love to see a school like that in their county, and would provide work studies galore for students

Yes, that's right. We're paying for a group of "consultants" whose funding depends on their spreading climate panic. I'd love for anyone to show me in the Constitution where this is an enumerated power of any portion of the federal government. Hint: It isn't, but that's never stopped the left and big-government advocates (but I repeat myself) from spending more and more of our money. //

This group, mind you, has a defined budget nearing $2 billion, and, as I wrote in March, takes money from a variety of government sources:

There are reports that funding from our federal government to ICF runs as high as $7.4 billion. //

There does not, as of this writing, appear to be any indication that the DOGE or the Trump administration has their eyes on this waste. That needs to change; after all, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. //

anon-7lqi
9 hours ago
It starts as a movement, evolves into a business then degenerates into a racket. //

Froge
8 hours ago
That is the research racket for everything though. If I wanted to study the Western Sparrow, just to find out it range and nesting habits etc, and came to the conclusion, it is an interesting bird and is doing just fine - I will never receive another grant to study my bird. So even if things are going well, I will have to write pages and pages of what could go wrong, and it is easy to glom onto Global Warming as the problem. Government grants are predisposed to award people who discover problems, if it isn't a hard science. And if the problem is really big, the government loves it because they get to set up a department to help fix the problem.

So that is the racket with everything. Environmental studies, nutrition studies (though with nutrition, "we don't know but it could cause cancer heart disease and even death" is more likely than GW) medical studies, the works. And the studies don't even have to be true, as we learned with the Alzheimer's plaque studies which were bogus but led to years of fake research accusing aluminum from frying pans and other things that "cause the plaque."

The report you're about to read would normally be unbelievable.

A U.S. president's administration holding private talks with Communist Chinese officials about the administration's concerns over the potential impact on this country's relationship with China if the origin of a Chinese spy balloon and its intent were disclosed to the American public — all of which occurred before the public was notified about the spy balloon. //

U.S. officials identified the spy balloon infiltrating U.S. airspace on Jan. 28, 2023, and an Air Force fighter jet shot down the Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina Feb. 4, 2023, two days after the Pentagon issued a statement on the matter.

Biden officials held discussions with Beijing Feb. 1, 2023, about the balloon, and discussed the impact disclosing the balloon to the public could have on the relationship with China, internal State Department documents show, two Trump administration officials told Fox News Digital. //

Cowboysurfpunk
5 hours ago
I don't think they were going to tell us,.. until that woman in Montana took a video of it and put on the internet...then they had to...

Trans-identifying male Redmond Sullivan is out on the women’s team after female fencer Stephanie Turner refused to compete against him and was given a black card in response, removing her from the competition.

“We are in full compliance with NCAA and NEC rules and regulations. The fencer is not a member of our fencing team,” Wagner College Spokesperson Jim Chiavelli said in a statement to silive.com about Sullivan.

At the time of this publication, it is unclear if Sullivan was removed from the team or voluntarily stepped down.

Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday rolling back a federal regulation he has blamed for poor water pressure. His order would eliminate restrictions the Obama administration placed on how much water can flow from shower heads, an effort to conserve resources. Trump relaxed those standards during his first term, but President Joe Biden put them back in place.

“No longer will shower heads be weak and worthless,” said a draft of Trump’s order, adding that it intended to “make America’s showers great again.”

Trump has for years lamented the effect of low water pressure on his “gorgeous” and “perfect” hair.

Governments should just get out of the way of free trade among consumers and businesses. //

If we want trade reciprocity, the government should get out of the way and let businesses and consumers engage in voluntary exchanges with each other and overseas partners as they please. ///

So it's okay for Vietnam to charge 90% on imports from USA to protect their economy and industry, but it's not okay for USA to charge a tariff on imports from Vietnam to protect ours? How is that reciprocal?

Decades of efficiency mandates have made dishwashers weaker, A.C. units feebler, and appliances more expensive. A new rollback offers a rare win for function over dogma.

Like with the Japanese internment during World War II, the current move to deport alleged alien criminals is driven by hysteria.

Sean Parnell @SeanParnellATSD
·
Secretary Hegseth has removed U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield from her position as U.S. representative to NATO’s military committee due to a loss of confidence in her ability to lead. The Defense Department is grateful for her many years of military service.
10:24 AM · Apr 8, 2025

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett @RepJasmine
·
They fired Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield—not because she couldn’t do the job, but because she wouldn’t hang up pictures of Trump and Hegseth. This ain’t about merit—it’s about ego.

Sean Parnell @SeanParnellUSA
·
Congresswoman, I realize this may be a foreign concept to you but here at the DoD if you disrespect the chain of command & don’t do your job, you will be replaced.

Period.

“I consider Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to be the leader of the Democratic Party," Kennedy declared.

He then just killed the room and sent them all off into gales of laughter, “She's entitled to her opinion. I'm entitled to mine. As I've said before, I think she’s the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle. Our plan for dealing with her is Operation Let Her Speak.”. //

anon-ia42
31 minutes ago
She also the reason for the warning on hair dryers.......do not use this appliance.....in the shower.

“104 percent tariffs in China are not enough. I’m advocating 400 percent,” he said.

“I do business in China. They don’t play by the rules,” continued O’Leary, who is also the chairman of O’Shares Investment and private-equity firm O’Leary Ventures. “They’ve been in the World Trade Organization for decades. They have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades. They cheat, they steal, they steal [intellectual property]. I can’t litigate in their courts. They take product technology, they steal it, they manufacture it and sell it back here,” he said.

O'Leary explained this wasn't about tariffs anymore but about how no one has taken on China for decades while they behaved badly — no one, until Trump.

"As someone who actually does business there, I've had enough," O'Leary said, saying he spoke for "millions of Americans." He said finally, with Trump there was an administration who was saying "enough."

O'Leary said we had all the cards and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader should be on a plane here to work it out because "Xi can only stay the Supreme Leader if people are employed." He didn't hold back, "It's time to squeeze Chinese heads into the wall."

China may end up getting there themselves. The latest from China is that they are going to raise their 34 percent tariffs to 84 percent on Thursday. But at the same time, they were calling for "dialogue" with the U.S.

In the first few months of the new administration, we have witnessed an unprecedented dismantlingopens in a new tab or window of the national scientific and research enterprise. While certain shifts were anticipated in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, the speed and scope of these changes have been alarming. The consequences are rippling across every domain of science and medicine, leaving the academic community grappling with how to move forwardopens in a new tab or window in a rapidly shifting landscape. While debate is integral to the advancement of science, division across partisan lines harms the advancement of science and our collective health.

At a time when many individuals and organizations are unsure of how to respond, one thing is abundantly clear: silence will not protect science. As health equity researchers, our fields of science -- reproductive health, workforce diversity, and cancer disparities -- are once again at the center of conflict. One commonly observed response has been to obscure or rebrand "controversial" areas like diversityopens in a new tab or window or sexualityopens in a new tab or window in an attempt to avoid scrutiny. For example, researchers are considering and being asked to make changes to language in grants and manuscriptsopens in a new tab or window.

This strategy is both ethically and strategically flawed. Obfuscation erodes public trust and weakens the integrity of scientific inquiry. The recent threat of NIH indirect cost cutsopens in a new tab or window and canceling of grantsopens in a new tab or window and public health programsopens in a new tab or window serves as a stark warning: when we permit vulnerabilities in one area of research, the resulting fracture inevitably undermines the entire scientific infrastructure. //

George_Avery_PhD
2 days ago
We needed people to speak up when leaders at NIH tried to suppress the Lab Leak hypothesis in order to cover up the fact that the agency may well have paid to create the COVID virus. We needed people to speak up when Washington was trying to suppress those who held true to the fundamental virtue of science, which is skepticism - not just on COVID, but other areas of science. We needed to speak up when the Climategate e-mails revealed a conspiracy to suppress dissenting research. We needed to speak up for years as nutritional research clung to the ideas of Ancel Keyes, even when it was revealed that he suppressed his own results when they did not fit his ideas. We needed to speak up over the crisis in peer review. We need to speak up about health economists who neglect to consider that government intervention is itself a market failure. We needed to speak up about the misrepresented and exaggerated risks of nuclear power, and the false idea that solar and wind generation can meet growing baseline needs.

Wall Street Apes
@WallStreetApes
Every single time you see Democrats screaming into news cameras, remember this clip:

Elon Musk “I'll tell you a lesson I learned at PayPal. You know who complained the loudest, the quickest and the loudest and with the most amount of righteous indignation? The fraudsters. That's who complained first, loudest, and they would generally have this immense overreaction. That's how we knew they were the fraudsters. That's how we knew. That's the tell.”

12:13 AM · Apr 3, 2025

FischerKing
@FischerKing64
Remember that free trade with China, allowing it into the World Trade Organization, was in pursuit of a foreign policy agenda. The thinking was China would move toward democracy, become a stakeholder in the international order.

That didn’t happen. It was a failed experiment. So all those jobs lost with the goal of liberalizing China were for nought. So if we’re still dealing with an authoritarian regime engaged in a mercantilist policy, complete with currency manipulation - it’s time for the USA to try something else.
2:52 PM · Apr 7, 2025
·

James Lindsay, anti-Communist
@ConceptualJames
VIDEO: Historian Frank Dikötter reveals the secret of how the CCP took advantage of Bill Clinton to get into the WTO and force the West to destroy our manufacturing capabilities and hand it over to the CCP and its People's Republic. Absolutely mind-blowing video.

2:29 PM · Apr 5, 2025
·

DataRepublican (small r)
@DataRepublican
I've had a change of heart on federal income tax. On the surface, it's just a way for the government to generate revenue—it has to get its funding from somewhere. But I now see that the method of taxation itself fundamentally alters the relationship between the government and its people.

When the government relies on taxing individual income, it shifts from serving its citizens to exploiting them as a revenue source. This dynamic creates an inherent friction, where the government no longer answers to the people but to the system that extracts from them. And if you look around, it's clear—whatever our tax dollars are funding, it’s not serving us.

This is what modern economists fail to grasp when they dismiss tariffs, sales taxes, or luxury taxes as harmful. The structure of taxation matters, not just the amount collected. The income tax distorts governance itself—and it needs to go.

Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
The thing about an income tax is that it literally just makes it a pain to succeed.

A consumption tax makes it a pain to consume things you don't need. BIG difference.

In a consumption tax-heavy environment, when people are tight on money, they can simply do what any rational person does: buy less "wants," buy only necessities.

In an INCOME tax-heavy environment, it doesn't matter. You lose a flat 15-30% of your income. It doesn't matter how smart or purposeful you are with your money. The government just swipes it away. Then, it essentially throws it into a black hole.

And the REAL problem, and why the elites DON'T want a system based on tariffs and domestic consumption taxes?

They encourage self sufficiency. You don't pay taxes on potatoes and peppers growing in your garden. You can take steps to eliminate purchases, or the prices of the things you do buy by shopping smartly, thus lowering your taxes, while having more money. Consumption based taxes, taken to their logical end, would mean a government that physically cannot be as bloated as it is now while still remaining even somewhat solvent.

Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
That's why the structure matters. "Punishing" people for buying a bunch of stuff seems much more "fair" than punishing people for... trying to make a living.

And the people who want to min-max their finances can simply spend time and effort minimizing the costs of their purchases, and minimize the quantity of their purchases.

But that would require the presumption Americans have the capability of being smart, rational and self sufficient - not something the elites are interested in entertaining.

Robert Sterling
@RobertMSterling
THREAD: Here's what a dive bar in Memphis taught me about tariffs, global trade, and domestic manufacturing.

(Yes, I'm being serious.)

Let's talk about why it's so hard to produce things in America, what it means for our country, and what we can do about it 🧵👇 //

If you build a steel mill in America, your billion-dollar asset is going to have hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment from companies like SMS (Germany) or Danieli (Italy). Like it or not, most of your critical infrastructure is coming over on boats from Europe.

You see, when we imported all that equipment from Germany, we didn't just have to import machinery. We also had to import the engineers to install it, configure it, and get it all working. By the hundreds.

America simply doesn't have the engineering know-how to do this anymore.

That's the salt in the wound of deindustrialization. You don't just lose the supply chains and the production footprints and the middle-class jobs and the local tax revenue.

You also lose the knowledge. You lose the skilled labor.

And it's almost impossible to get it back.

Robert Sterling
@RobertMSterling
·
Apr 3
Over the past 35 years, China went from a smaller steel industry than the US to producing more steel than the rest of the world combined.

We still make steel in America, and we make really good steel.

It would be nice if we could once again make the things that make the steel.

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Small "r" Rebellion

lI_MACHINE_Il
[Female Voice] [Rap] [Hip-Hop] [Energetic] [Bold]
March 6, 2025 at 8:14 PM
v3.5
Lyrics
Comments
(Pre-Chorus)
Numbers don’t lie, but the suits, they do,
Uniparty schemes, I’m seein’ right through!
Musk got my back, DOGE in the fight,
Droppin’ truth bombs, left and right!

(Chorus)
Small R rebellion, I’m breakin’ the chains,
Data’s my weapon, corruption’s my BANE!
From the screen to the streets, I’m rewritin’ the game,
Small R's Rebellion BITCHES remember the name!

(Verse 1)
Yo, I’m DataRepublican, the code’s my ammunition,
Diggin’ through the grants, exposin’ politicians’ mission,
Small "r" in my soul, I don’t bow to the throne,
Utah to the core, cuttin’ fat from the bone.
Deaf since the jump, but my vision’s loud,
Hands still speak, though my signs may sway,
USAID on blast, half a bil in the stash,
NGOs in my scope, turnin’ lies into ash.

DataRepublican (small r)
@DataRepublican
Anecdotal: my kids have been homeschooled for a month now.

One child is a diagnosed ASD2 who had a full time aide in class.

The other child is a normal, thriving straight-A student.

Guess which child benefited from homeschooling to the extent he’s already doing math two grades ahead.

Jeremy Keeshin
@jkeesh
In 1945, six women pulled off a computing miracle.

They programmed the world’s first computer—with no manuals, no training.

Then, a SINGLE assumption erased them from tech history for decades.

The story of how ONE photo nearly deleted computing’s female founders: 🧵

Kathy Kleiman, a young programmer, found old photos of women standing beside ENIAC—the first general-purpose computer.

When she asked who they were, curators said: “Probably just models”...

But Kleiman had a feeling they were something more:

Program ENIAC—a machine the world had never seen.

It was 8 feet tall, 80 feet long, and weighed over 60,000 pounds.

The engineers built the hardware...

But someone had to figure out how to make it do anything:

They were the world’s first programmers.

First, they were hired as “human computers” to calculate missile trajectories during WWII.

Then chosen for a top-secret project unlike anything before:

Security restrictions kept them out of the ENIAC lab.

They had to write programs using only blueprints and logic diagrams.

No manuals. No programming languages...

So how do you code something no one’s ever coded before?

By inventing the process from scratch.

They built algorithms, flowcharts, and step-by-step routines—on paper.

Then, once granted access, they programmed ENIAC by physically rewiring it...

And that’s where things got even harder:

There was no keyboard.

Programming meant plugging thousands of cables into the right configuration—by hand.

It was almost impossible to program.

But they pulled it off anyway: