For now, anyway.
Let me know if you encounter any problems getting to the blog.
The words “dictator” and “fascist” mean whatever the left says they mean …
… and the Humpty Dumpty left says they mean “Trump.”
And why do I call them the “Humpty Dumpty left”? This is why:
`And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
`I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”‘ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t– till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘
`But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”‘ Alice objected.
`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’
`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.’
`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master– that’s all.’
The question is who is to be master, and the left has been master of this for quite some time. It thought it would continue to be master, but at the moment it’s not. Let’s try to keep it that way:
I don't know how many more times I have to say this before leftists will get it through their oblong-shaped, smooth-brained heads, but I'm going to say it again now:
1. Rule by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who "resist" the Constitutional will of the electorate is NOT…
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) February 3, 2025
Alien criminals might now think twice about sneaking into the US
Do they want to end up in a prison in El Salvador? I doubt it:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio met today with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in San Salvador. It was a tremendously successful meeting that will make both countries stronger, safer, and more prosperous.
Multiple agreements were struck to fight the waves of illegal mass migration currently destabilizing the entire region. President Bukele agreed to take back all Salvadoran MS-13 gang members who are in the United States unlawfully. He also promised to accept and incarcerate violent illegal immigrants, including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, but also criminal illegal migrants from any country. And in an extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country, President Bukele offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.
I very much doubt that Bukele’s offer to take in US citizens would be allowed by the US courts, and I doubt the administration would even attempt it. But it was kind of Bukele to offer.
Also:
Secretary Rubio also raised strategies to counter the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the hemisphere to safeguard the sovereignty and interests of both nations and the region.
Bukele is very much a hardliner who cleaned up El Salvador; I’ve written about him here as well as here. I wouldn’t think a trip to one of his prisons would act as an incentive for a criminal to come to the US.
Another disincentive would be sending criminal illegal aliens to Guantanamo, which has already begun:
Trump last week signed a presidential memorandum last week to begin the process of making 30,000 beds available at Guantanamo to house migrants who pose a threat to the American public, adding that putting them there will ensure they do not come back.
“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” Trump said. “We’re going to send them to Guantanamo.”
He added, “It’s a tough place to get out of.”
Guantanamo will apparently be reserved for the really really bad guys, but I assume the left will assure us that it will be filled with innocent abuelas and their grandkids.
These policies are aimed at getting rid of the criminal alien presence in the US, but I think the larger message is, Don’t come here if you’re a criminal. The free ride is over – unless it’s a free ride to an El Salvadoran prison or Guantanamo that you’re after.
What’s up with USAID?
I remember first hearing about USAID – the United States Agency for International Development – back in the 1960s. But I have no recollection of the context or the specific topic. Now that the Trump administration has focused on the agency and its excesses, I wondered what I’d written about it here over the years.
The answer is: very little. Now, of course, it’s very much in the news. Here’s some of the general history, from Wiki. It was established during the Kennedy administration:
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the United States government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $50 billion, USAID is one of the largest official aid agencies in the world and accounts for more than half of all U.S. foreign assistance – the highest in the world in absolute dollar terms. USAID has missions in over 100 countries, primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
Big. But nevertheless, only a small percentage of the US budget. This AP article – which, surprisingly, doesn’t seem especially biased to me – explains some of the background to the current fight, and indicates what I recall, which is that the amount and nature of the US’s foreign aid has long been criticized:
In the decades since [the USAID’s founding in 1961], Republicans and Democrats have fought over the agency and its funding. …
Today, supporters of USAID argue that U.S. assistance in countries counters Russian and Chinese influence. …
Critics say the programs are wasteful and promote a liberal agenda.
On his first day in office Jan. 20, Trump implemented a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Four days later, Peter Marocco — a returning political appointee from Trump’s first term — drafted a tougher than expected interpretation of that order, a move that shut down thousands of programs around the world and forced furloughs and layoffs.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since moved to keep more kinds of strictly life-saving emergency programs going during the freeze. …
It’s part of a Trump administration crackdown that’s hitting across the federal government and its programs. But USAID and foreign aid are among those hit the hardest.
Rubio said the administration’s aim was a program-by-program review of which projects make “America safer, stronger or more prosperous.”
The decision to shut down U.S.-funded programs during the 90-day review meant the U.S. was “getting a lot more cooperation” from recipients of humanitarian, development and security assistance, Rubio said. …
Republicans typically push to give the State Department — which provides overall foreign policy guidance to USAID — more control of its policy and funds. Democrats typically promote USAID autonomy and authority. …
Musk alleges USAID funding been used to launch deadly programs and called it a “criminal organization.” …
Foreign assistance overall amounts to less than 1% of the U.S. budget.
“Less than 1% of the US budget” is still a ton of money. And the issue is not just saving money, but whether the money is being used for good or for ill. Some of the revelations don’t involve all that much money compared to the entire US budget, but are nevertheless shocking. Condoms for the Taliban? Transgender operas in Colombia? See this for some of the causes USAID has funded.
Here’s some of what Rubio has said:
RUBIO: … [M]y frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress. It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives of the State Department, and it refuses to do so.
The functions of USAID, there are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy. I said very clearly during my confirmation hearing that every dollar we spend and every program we fund that will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. And USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that and deciding that there’s somehow a global charity separate from the national interest. These are taxpayer dollars. …
… And we owe the American people the assurances that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest.
And so far, a lot of the people that work at USAID have just simply refused to cooperate.
Ace has written two lengthy and hard-hitting posts on the subject of USAID and what’s going on at this point: see this as well as this. It’s obviously a huge topic, and I assume I’ll revisit it as time goes on. But it’s become more and more obvious that the agency functions as an employer for an enormous number of leftists in leftist causes.
And here’s an interesting article I discovered in my researching the topic. It’s about aid through USAID to Haiti which, according to the author (who wrote a book on the subject last year), has “circumvented the democratic process, ended sovereignty, undermined local businesses and government, and served more as a benefit to US special interest groups than to the local population.” I’m going to assume that’s often the case all around the world.
Those “special interest groups” are now extremely upset. I assume we’ll be learning more as time goes on.
Open thread 2/4/2025
Check out the daughter’s reaction:
Canada and Mexico say let’s make a deal, for now
Well, well, well. I get busy for a day and evening with things that aren’t related to obsessively reading the news – and look what happens with Trump’s tariff brinksmanship.
From Justin Trudeau of Canada:
I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border.
In addition, Canada is making new commitments to appoint a Fentanyl Czar, we will list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering. I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million.
Proposed tariffs will be paused for at least 30 days while we work together.
Working together on some goals that should be obvious common goals – that’s what I like to see.
And from Sheinbaum in Mexico:
We had a good conversation with President Trump with great respect for our relationship and sovereignty; we reached a series of agreements:
1. Mexico will immediately reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, particularly fentanyl.
2. The United States is committed to working to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.
3. Our teams will begin working today on two fronts: security and trade.
4. They are pausing tariffs for one month from now.
Let’s hear it for Team North America. Well, not all of North America is on board, of course, but quite a bit. I also noticed, when I looked up the physical boundaries of North America, that Greenland is included. Hmmm.
The illegal alien criminals weren’t so hard to find after all
I knew that if Trump was elected president, he would attempt to deport illegal aliens who had committed criminal acts (in addition to the original criminal act of coming here illegally). That wasn’t rocket science on my part; it was merely what Trump had said he would do.
I also assumed, without thinking much about it, that locating these people would take time. I also knew that the Biden administration had made little to no effort to find them or to deport them, for the most part. What I didn’t realize was that the location of so many were well known.
The speed with which it’s happened has made it clear that it was just a matter of rounding them up rather than finding them:
As the leftists whine about invading schools (not happening) and mamacitas being terrorized by Tom Homan chasing them with cattle prods (not happening), the real story is that ICE and law enforcement knew all along where so many of these bad hombres were. …
Mayorkas, NGOs and churches, and local government officials were actively protecting the worst of the worst just because they preferred helping illegal aliens to protecting Americans. …
Local, state, and the federal government knew where these people were and left them on the streets to terrorize people. We paid for their food, housing, and medical care in many cases, and in sanctuary jurisdictions, they rushed them out the back doors to prevent ICE from picking them up.
They were indeed being protected, but why? Yes, I know that the more illegal aliens, the theory was it meant the more Democrat voters later on. And sanctuary cities were virtue signaling pure and simple. But what else was going on? For years, the word was getting out that there were criminal illegal aliens here committing heinous crimes, and the general population was not the least bit happy about it. Even Hispanic voters, considered a Democrat mainstay, were defecting, in part because they bore the brunt as victims of this criminality.
Did the Democrats not think this would all come back to bite them? Because it did. Did they think they could continue to “rig” elections and continue to win them indefinitely? Because they didn’t.
Why would a mayor of even a very blue city want dangerous criminal aliens to remain at large? Is virtue signaling more important than anything else? Is there some other payoff of which I’m not aware?
Roundup
Time for another roundup.
(1) Caroline Glick has announced she won’t be doing podcasts for a while but has a new job:
Prominent Israeli-American columnist and JNS senior contributing editor Caroline B. Glick is returning to the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem to serve as International Affairs Adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Glick, who worked with Netanyahu over a quarter century ago before becoming a widely-read columnist, took up her new position on Sunday, almost three years after the first episode of her record-breaking “The Caroline Glick Show” premiered on JNS TV in 2022.
I already miss her podcasts; she’s very very good. But I wish her the best in this new role.
(2) Blue states have more to lose from a federal funding pause:
Democratic states and their economies depend much more on Washington largesse than Republican states do. This year, New York received roughly $4,900 per capita from the feds and California $4,300—two to three times as much as Florida ($1,700) and Texas ($1,500). That’s because Democratic states provide more generous social welfare, which is increasingly funded by Washington thanks to regulatory changes by the Biden administration. …
States have less incentive to help lift people out of poverty since they receive more federal dollars if people stay poor. When you’re spending someone else’s cash, there’s hardly an incentive to spend it prudently. Medicaid, states’ biggest source of federal dollars, encourages inefficient spending.
(3) Trump praised Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas, among others, in honor of Black History month:
President Trump on Friday said he is “honored” to recognize February as Black History Month and that “black Americans have been among our country’s most consequential leaders.”
“American heroes such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Thomas Sowell, Justice Clarence Thomas, and countless others represent what is best in America and her citizens,” Trump said in a statement.
When I did a search for the quote, up popped a bunch of articles with headlines pairing the story with the observation that Trump’s been attacking DEI, as though attacking DEI and lauding the contributions of black Americans are contradictory. They are not.
(4) There’s been a report that Jordan may be willing to extradite the Sbarro bombing mastermind to the US to stand trial. This would be wonderful news, if true. Ahlam Tamimi is wanted in the US for the 2001 terrorist attack in a pizza parlor, that killed 16 – seven of whom were children and one of whom was a pregnant woman (and a US citizen). The reason a trial in the US would be necessary is that she was already tried in Israel and sentenced, but was released in the infamous 2011 Shalit prisoner exchange. She’s been living in Jordan, quite comfortably, ever since she left prison.
Interesting:
The report emerged just as the White House announced it would host Jordan’s King Abdullah II for talks with US President Donald Trump on February 11. Amman is thought to be seeking ways to remain in good standing with Trump despite, like Egypt, declining to fall in with his proposal to relocate Gazans there.
To give you an idea of how awful this woman is, read this:
[The suicide bomber] was escorted to the restaurant by Ahlam Tamimi, a 20-year-old female university student and part-time journalist, who had disguised herself as a Jewish tourist for the occasion. She later commented that she was not sorry for what she had done and does not recognize Israel’s existence. “Despite the fact that I’m sentenced to 16 life sentences I know that we will become free from Israeli occupation and then I will also be free from the prison,” she said. When she first learned from a journalist who was interviewing her in jail that she had murdered eight children, not just three as she had initially believed, she just smiled broadly and continued with the interview.
(5) The new head of the DNC is Democrat Ken Martin from Minnesota who once called for Trump to be tried for treason over a report of Trump’s wrongdoing that turned out to be unsubstantiated. The second in command is David Hogg. Sounds as though the far left stance of the party will continue.
Trump’s tariffs: good or bad?
[I’ve published this UPDATE.]
Of all the things Trump has done since his inauguration, the large tariffs on Canada and Mexico are the ones that bother me the most. I’ve read many articles both pro and con – it’s much easier to find those that are con – and I’m left feeling very uneasy. I don’t really have strong trust in any prognostications I read about them, and economics is not my strong suit. But it seems to me that Trump should have taken it more slowly and done more talking to both Canada and Mexico first.
The smaller tariffs on China don’t trouble me as much.
I’ve read that the tariffs will be offset by tax cuts. I’ve read that Canada and Mexico need our goods more than we need theirs. But somehow I just don’t see Canada and Mexico caving on this issue. Even Pierre Poilievre, the Canadian Conservative Party leader, is angry, saying “there is no justification for these tariffs or this treatment.” However, he also said:
“These tariffs are a wakeup call that it is time for us to meet our potential,” he said. “It is time for us to be a country that can trade for itself, that builds homes quickly for its youth, that allows entrepreneurs to succeed quickly and profitably so that success is once again rewarded.”
That sounds like “make Canada great again” (or for the first time), which doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
I make no predictions on this, except that the whole thing makes me nervous.
Here are some quantitative predictions made by an organization called The Tax Foundation, which describes itself as non-partisan, for what that’s worth.
Even Trump himself has said that it probably won’t be all unicorns and rainbows:
Trump argued if companies made their products in the United States, there would be no tariffs.
“This will be the Golden Age of America!” Trump continued. “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!). But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid. We are a country that is now being run with common sense — and the results will be spectacular!!!”
Isn’t one of the reasons we buy products from Mexico that they are cheaper? Products made in the US don’t have tariffs, to be sure, but aren’t they inherently more expensive for the same product?
Anyway, I’ll let you iron it out in the comments.
Open thread 2/3/2025
Attack of the bots
That problem with the bot attacks got significantly worse today, and I’ve been working on trying to protect against it. I already had a plug-in that’s supposed to protect against them, but it’s obviously no longer very effective. So I did a bunch of research, decided on a different plugin, managed to get into the files of the blog – not an easy task when under attack – and installed the new one.
It’s improved the situation for now, so I’m hopeful. We’ll see if the improvement continues.
Apologies for any delays you may have experienced. Bots get smarter and smarter as time goes on, but perhaps plugin developers can stay ahead of them.
Titanic artifacts exhibit: from the bottom of the ocean
Last weekend I went to this exhibit in Boston that featured many items taken from the wreck of the Titanic. Most were very ordinary: some green cufflinks, a bow tie, paper money, a toilet, men’s wool slacks and a vest. But they were so strange to see, knowing their history. And many were in surprisingly good shape, having been somewhat protected in suitcases and then restored.
There were also life-size replicas of a first-class stateroom and a third-class stateroom, as well as of the famous grand staircase – again, the same size as the original. It all had a strange, disturbing, poignant, and fascinating quality.
I took quite a few photos, and here are two that I think capture something of the essence of the experience. First we have a set of au gratin dishes as they were displayed in an exhibit case. They seem perfectly preserved and unbroken, and there were so many of them:
I wondered how there came to be so many, and in such good condition, and when I read the explanation and then looked up, I saw this photo. It’s what they looked like when they were found at the ocean’s bottom. Apparently there were hundreds of them, originally in a large wooden cabinet which fell undisturbed and settled on the bottom. Over the approximately seventy years they lay there, the wooden cabinet disintegrated and left the dishes in these neat rows:
