REQUIEM FOR THE 'A' TEAM

 

REQUIEM FOR THE 'A' TEAM

 Don Jaffa...

Lieutenant Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith and the ‘A Team,’ after 45 minutes of chaotic improvisation, wild chases, improbable engineering feats, and non-lethal gunfire, the team’s seemingly scattered efforts would miraculously align to achieve their mission. At the moment of victory, often while lighting his iconic cigar, Hannibal would smile and utter those satisfied words:

“I love it when a plan comes together!”

President Trump ordered “Operation Absolute Resolve,” which was executed on 3 January 2026. Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured and flown to New York City to face their trial on Federal ‘narcoterrorism’ charges. At two hours and 28 minutes, it qualifies as one of the shortest wars in history. 

Back in 1976 and 2007 Venezuela nationalized Americal oil companies operating crude oil production: in 1976 Gulf Oil, and Texaco, and in 2007, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. “Operation Absolute Resolve” addressed this issue:

“Trump and his administration made clear that access to Venezuelan oil was a core reason for the action. The US Announced a 50-million-barrel oil supply deal with the remaining government in Venezuela, with the first $300 million already received on 20 January. On 29 January, a new law was passed by Rodriguez to give private companies control over the production and sale of oil.”^(Wikipedia)

The expropriation of assets by Latin American socialist and Marxist regimes was one of the issues that needed to be addressed.  To make the point, merely applying sanctions is insufficient, not merely in Latin America, but absolutely to Russia and Iran. Secretary of State Rubio on this:

“The funds from that (oil sales) will be deposited into an account that we will have oversight over,” Rubio said, adding that the U.S. Treasury would control the process. Venezuela, he said, “will spend that money for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.”

George Peppard, as Lieutenant Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, would here, light his cigar and announce ““I love it when a plan comes together!” President Trump, after January 29^th, no doubt (with or without the cigar) smiled, and announced  “I love it when a plan comes together!” 

“On June 10^th President Trump announced that the U.S. military had killed Hector Rutherford Guerrero Flores, the alleged leader of the Tren de Aragua gang, in a strike inside Venezuela.”^{(OPED LA Times 16 June 2026)}

This blew every gasket in the engine of ‘fake news.’ The title of that LA TIMES OPED was the following: “Military now enables Trump’s Lawlessness!” But here is the indictment:

“The military has become one of the mechanisms by which the President is ignoring constitutional limits.”

On May 2^nd 2011, “Operation Neptune Spear” was executed by Order of the President. Launched from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, two Blackhawk helicopters flew 24 Navy SEALS (SEAL TEAM SIX) into Abbottabad, Pakistan, to assassinate Osama bin Laden, retrieve the body for forensic examination, and his burial at sea.

President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton were sitting around the table in the White House Operations Center waiting on confirmation of the kill. I suspect that it was only Hilary Clinton who lit up her cigar to announce:

“I love it when a plan comes together!”

Of the three, only Hilary came equipped with ‘cojones.’ Obama could only bow and scrape in front of a real Muslim King (Saudi Arabia), and the best Biden could do is come up with a plan to derail the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court using a coke can with pubic hair on it. 

In a short but devastating operation against Iran, its theocratic leadership was decapitated, and the successor has not been seen in public, nor his whereabouts even hinted at. Iran has been segmented into military organizations, and its’ government, regional and Provincial, has also been decapitated. 

Iran’s financial well being is based on its’ on-going crude oil production, storage and transfer at Kharg Island onto oil tankers for sale. With the Naval Blockade and no loading of crude at Kharg Island, crude storage filled capacity. To that end, production would have to be shut down. 

Iranian officials are all theocratic fanatics. Reading their pronouncements during the 60 days demonstrated their willingness to babble theocratic nonsense the entire time. It was also evident that these theocrats were willing to execute any Iranian anti-government demonstrators in public. (Do you get the message?) 

Both Russia and Iran do not honor civil negotiations nor brokered agreements which they can refuse to honor when it suits them. During their war with Iraq they conscripted boys ages 9 through 14 for de-mining operations. 

“During the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian government recruited an estimated 550,000 children into a volunteer paramilitary militia known as the Basij. These boys—some as young as nine—were deployed in "human wave" infantry attacks against fortified Iraqi positions, serving as cannon fodder to overwhelm enemy lines.” ^{(Amesty International)}

Russia remains equally stalwart in its refusal to give value to human life. Some 228,000 Russian officers and soldiers have been identified by name, out of a possible 550,000 dead. Total casualties approximately 1,393,140.

“South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) reported that out of the estimated 11,000 to 15,000 North Korean troops deployed to Russia's western Kursk region, roughly 6,000 had been killed or wounded.” ^(BBC)

Putin’s Russia engaged in war with Ukraine, not over land, but over greed. During the Cold War the Soviet Union built a natural gas pipeline from Siberian gas fields, through Ukraine, to customers in the European Union. Natural gas sales in the EU have been paid in cash, some 40 billion Euros per annum. 

Under the original contract with the Ukrainian SSR, the pipeline was completed in 1984, and Ukraine received a tariff (transport fee) based on cubic meters through the pipeline. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine announced that at the Expiration of the Contract, 1 Jan 2025, the tariff would quadruple. But natural gas is still flowing as both sides need the cash.

The actual mindset of all sides, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza was defined by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the 24^th of September 2007, when he announced during a speech at Columbia University, “You are the Crazy Ones!” 

 

At the moment, both President Trump and Vice President Vance, are not lighting up cigars, not smiling, and are each grumbling “I hate it when a plan does not come together.” The threat of last resort should have been the mission of first resort: the destruction of all electrical production inside Iran. The second mission objective should have been the destruction of all refining capacity inside Iran. With no electrical power, and no logistics, the Iranian people and the Iranian military, starve. 

 

With little or no capacity to respond and fight, the destruction of Iran’s military assets would have been easier. Iran would have been forced, for its own survival, to cede to the United States, whatever was deemed necessary to end Iran’s posture as a state sponsor of terrorism: control of Kharg Island and the unrestricted export of Iranian Oil for sale, control of all Iranian oil sales, and all payments into a US Treasury account to purchase whatever was needed for the Iranian people. 

 

To begin the reconstruction of Iran, the theocrats will order Hezbollah and all Iranians in Lebanon and Syria to return home and become labor battalions. The allies, the United States and Israel, will provide an airlift to relocate the “Palestinians” to Iran to assist in the reconstruction of their new home.

 

“Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?” 

 

 

 

Keir Starmer’s Tyranny of Greyness

 

Good riddance to Keir Starmer’s tyranny of greyness

Starmer’s premiership was devoted to suffocating the popular will.

No wonder he was hated.

Brendan O'Neill, Spiked-Online

So he’s gone. Keir Starmer has resigned. The adults are out of the room. He waltzed into Downing St two years ago to the effusive gushing of the liberal commentariat, and now he’s slinking out. He and his slack-jawed media cheerleaders promised us an era of blissful if boring stability. What they gave us were riots, division, betrayal after betrayal, and an unprecedented assault on the ancient liberties of our nation. The lesson of the Starmer epoch? Never trust a technocrat.

Few tears will flow over the death of his insipid premiership. He’ll be remembered as the human-rights lawyer who took a cudgel to the sacred right of trial by jury. The self-styled worshipper of competence who was staggeringly incompetent. The man with the great work ethic who often switched off for the whole weekend, leaving ministers stumped and the nation leaderless. The ‘details man’ who didn’t even know Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting to become our ambassador to the US. Starmer was a mirage. A hologram of competence operated by an army of the inept.

It pays to look back on the media fawning that followed his electoral victory in July 2024. There was an explosion of onanistic glee in Britain’s moneyed quarters. ‘Keir Starmer has turbo-charged my arousal levels’, said Caitlin Moran of The Times. She claimed ‘every middle-aged woman’ she knew had felt ‘kind of fruity’ upon watching Sir Keir go into Downing St. Other sad centrists wanted less to be fucked by Sir Keir than sedated by him. They made a holy virtue of his dullness. They prayed he would Make Britain Boring Again. He ‘embodies the politics of boring’, said one giddy scribe, which is just what ‘mayhem-weary’ Britain needs. After the Brexit wars, the Boris years and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Liz Truss era, we’ve had enough of ‘fireworks and political circus’, declared the BBC – now is the time for ‘vague, even boring [politics]’.

So he’s gone. Keir Starmer has resigned. The adults are out of the room. He waltzed into Downing St two years ago to the effusive gushing of the liberal commentariat, and now he’s slinking out. He and his slack-jawed media cheerleaders promised us an era of blissful if boring stability. What they gave us were riots, division, betrayal after betrayal, and an unprecedented assault on the ancient liberties of our nation. The lesson of the Starmer epoch? Never trust a technocrat.

Few tears will flow over the death of his insipid premiership. He’ll be remembered as the human-rights lawyer who took a cudgel to the sacred right of trial by jury. The self-styled worshipper of competence who was staggeringly incompetent. The man with the great work ethic who often switched off for the whole weekend, leaving ministers stumped and the nation leaderless. The ‘details man’ who didn’t even know Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting to become our ambassador to the US. Starmer was a mirage. A hologram of competence operated by an army of the inept.

It pays to look back on the media fawning that followed his electoral victory in July 2024. There was an explosion of onanistic glee in Britain’s moneyed quarters. ‘Keir Starmer has turbo-charged my arousal levels’, said Caitlin Moran of The Times. She claimed ‘every middle-aged woman’ she knew had felt ‘kind of fruity’ upon watching Sir Keir go into Downing St. Other sad centrists wanted less to be fucked by Sir Keir than sedated by him. They made a holy virtue of his dullness. They prayed he would Make Britain Boring Again. He ‘embodies the politics of boring’, said one giddy scribe, which is just what ‘mayhem-weary’ Britain needs. After the Brexit wars, the Boris years and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Liz Truss era, we’ve had enough of ‘fireworks and political circus’, declared the BBC – now is the time for ‘vague, even boring [politics]’.

It was extraordinary the extent to which they sacralised Starmer’s blandless. His very lack of charisma was fetishised as a virtue. ‘Haven’t we had enough of charismatic leaders?’, asked one columnist. Surely what we need now is ‘someone who will manage the government in a cool and calm way’. Sir Keir’s ‘dull ordinariness’ is the best weapon we have against the ‘unchained forces of mayhem’ in British politics, said Politico. And there it was, the brutal truth about why they fell at the feet of this adenoidal personality void – they believed, they prayed, that his sheer greyness would smother the fires of dissent lit by Brexit and the broader populist thirst for a realigned, reimagined politics.

The Starmer project, at root, was a bloodless coup of bureaucratic vengeance. It was the institutionalisation of boredom as an antidote to the spirit of Brexit. The chattering classes swooned over Starmer’s lifeless, flavourless style because it was such sweet relief from the unpredictable passions of the little people. It was technocracy summed up: politics as fire extinguisher, designed less to represent the people than to tame them, less to heed our angry demands than to bury them under a slagheap of managerialism. The great hope of Starmer’s high-status backers was that he would ‘lower the temperature’.

It wasn’t long before this illiberal crusade to sanitise public life crashed against the shores of reality. The first problem was Starmer’s own shortcomings. Having won the General Election on just 33.7 per cent of the vote, he lacked moral authority. It was said by some that he won on the basis of four words: ‘I am not them.’ But that was the problem. Not being the Tories was not enough. His was a victory by default, driven more by public exhaustion after 14 years of Tory misrule than by public enthusiasm for this celebrated lacker of charisma. From Day 1, the favoured bore of the priestly class struggled to connect with your average unboring Brit.

Then there was the fact that Mr Competent was not so competent. He was rarely across his brief. He u-turned constantly. His administration lurched from scandal to scandal, from Angela Rayner’s tax idiocy to that whole installing of a pervert’s buddy as US ambassador. Starmer was a staggeringly incurious prime minister. His was a ‘passive premiership’, as that gobsmacking Sunday Times feature described it in March. People were often struck by the ‘unnatural, overwhelming silence’ in Downing St as the PM and his equally grey minions got on with things ‘wordlessly behind closed doors’. Let the fall of Starmer be a lesson to the Western elites: managerialism might be fine for a smalltown bank but it is death itself in a realm where argument, contestation, morality and noise ought to be the norm.

But the larger problem for limp, damp Starmerism was that it was so catastrophically at odds with public sentiment. You see, people didn’t want to be sedated. They didn’t want to be tranquilised into an infantile state by the halfwits and dullards of Westminster. They didn’t want to see the grey slaying of what media snobs called ‘the unchained forces of mayhem’ but which we called democracy.

But the larger problem for limp, damp Starmerism was that it was so catastrophically at odds with public sentiment. You see, people didn’t want to be sedated. They didn’t want to be tranquilised into an infantile state by the halfwits and dullards of Westminster. They didn’t want to see the grey slaying of what media snobs called ‘the unchained forces of mayhem’ but which we called democracy.

Everything Starmer did was about ‘lowering the temperature’ of the public. His rule laid bare the calculated authoritarianism of a ruling class that considers management of the masses to be the highest goal of public life. From his attack on trial by jury to his mad insistence on bringing in a new definition of ‘Islamophobia’ to his allergic reaction to the public fury over Henry Nowak, he was always driven by a patrician impulse to subdue the popular will. To neutralise political contestation itself in order that the mythical competence of his kind might enjoy free rein. All the civil unrest we’ve seen these past two years – some of it democratic, some of it violent and ugly – is best understood as a fuming reaction against the rule of the boring and its black dream of public disenfranchisement.

And now we have the prospect of prime minister Andy Burnham, the man who edged Starmer out of Downing St with his victory in the Makerfield by-election last week. The elites want Burnham to do what Starmer failed to: quell the ‘mayhem’ of Britain’s resurgent democratic spirit. Only where they thought Starmer’s dearth of charisma might achieve that, now they hope Burnham’s much-hyped charisma will. They’ve tried boring us into submission, now they’ll try Burnhaming us into submission. They’ve learned nothing. Ten years since Brexit and we’re still lumbered with an expert class that is breathtakingly dumb.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.

Neville Singham's network - Communist at work

 

Neville Singham's network - Communist at work

Notorious, China-Based American Mogul Is Running Shadowy Influence Campaign to Undermine U.S. AI Efforts, Give Communist China an Edge in Technology Arms Race

Sen. Tom Cotton is calling for a Justice Department investigation into foreign efforts to undermine artificial intelligence infrastructure, such as data centers

Eliana Johnson, Freebeacon

A Shanghai-based American expatriate who works hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party is using a network of American nonprofits to foment and amplify American opposition to artificial intelligence and the data centers that power it in a bid to propel China past the U.S. in the technological arms race.

A report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute reveals that, for the past five years, nonprofit organizations funded by the tech mogul Neville Roy Singham are churning out papers opposing export controls on advanced semiconductors to China, newsletters that quote CCP officials lambasting America’s approach to the technological arms race, and articles characterizing U.S. data centers as fronts in "the new Cold War on China."

Several lawmakers cited the report when calling on the administration to investigate, including Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who sent a letter to acting attorney general Todd Blanche in mid-June asking for an investigation into "foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure." House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Brett Guthrie asked the FBI and the chairmen of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology to provide information on the influence effort.

"Neville Singham has ties to the Chinese Communist Party so it's no surprise he's pushing anti-American policies through fake nonprofits," Cotton told the Washington Free Beacon. "The Department of Justice should launch a full investigation into this attempt to undermine America's prosperity."

A sprawling 2023 New York Times investigation identified Singham, who sold his technology consulting company, Thoughtworks, in 2017 for $785 million, as the source of a "global web of Chinese propaganda."

The anti-American, pro-China messages emanate from a vast network of nonprofits including Code Pink, led by Singham’s wife, Jodie Evans, the New York City event space The People’s Forum, which helped foment campus unrest in 2024, and a Massachusetts-based think-tank, Tricontinental, where Singham serves as chairman of the international advisory board and where his son, Nate Singham, once served a researcher.

Tricontinental’s executive director, Vijay Prashad, wrote on social media in 2021 that Singham’s money was the "original source" for Tricontinental’s endowment, describing Singham as "a Marxist with a massive software company!"

Devoted to Marxist-inspired social change, Tricontinental is now the hub of the Singham network’s opposition to America’s efforts to secure itself from Chinese technologies and to stay ahead of the CCP in the artificial intelligence race.

In November 2021, more than a year after President Donald Trump banned companies that use American technology from producing semiconductors for the Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE, but before President Joe Biden imposed stringent export controls on advanced chips, Tricontinental identified export controls as a flash point. The think tank published a paper, "Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle," which argued that while "China’s state capacity has allowed it to be the first country to implement a commercial 5G network on a large scale," its dependence on American processing chips and technologies is "the main choke-point for the US to delay or even block China’s progress."

The Biden administration enacted those export controls in October 2022. Tricontinental’s April 2023 newsletter opened by quoting Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Mao Ning charging that the U.S. was "abusing export control measures to wantonly block and hobble Chinese enterprises," behavior he predicted would backfire.

Earlier this year, in March 2026, Tricontinental pushed back against the notion that the U.S. and China are engaged in great power competition. Rather, the conflict is between "two fundamentally different logics of technological development." In the U.S., a logic "rooted in monopoly and rent extraction"; in China, a logic rooted in "production, scale, and diffusion."

Code Pink, a left-wing protest group that was once a vocal critic of China’s human rights violations but that now denies the Uygher genocide, warned in January that, as a result of data centers, "toxic chemicals are seeping into the lungs" of those who live near them, "causing asthma and long-term illness." Among the other potential maladies it blamed on data centers: hearing loss, anxiety, cardiovascular stress, toxic waste and "electronic pollution."

The Bitcoin Policy Institute report’s author, Sam Lyman, a former senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, said Congress should use its power to subpoena the leaders of the numerous Singham-backed nonprofits.

"It’s time that Congress consider using its subpoena power to get answers from these nonprofit executives," Lyman told the Free Beacon, and "time to subpoena Neville Singham himself," though Singham’s location in Shanghai would make it difficult to enforce.

The New York Times described China’s cultivation of its own propaganda outlets as well as foreigners like Singham to produce something that looks like "an organic bloom of far-left groups that echo Chinese government talking points, echo one another, and are echoed in turn by the Chinese state media."

The Free Beacon reported in April how Chinese propaganda outlets, including China Daily, China’s Global Times, and Beijing’s state broadcaster, China Global Television Network, are producing a thrum of content in the U.S. aimed at stoking opposition to AI and, in particular, driving the narrative that data centers are going to drive energy prices through the roof.

As Republicans on Capitol Hill are drawing attention to foreign meddling, particularly from China, in the domestic AI debate, a handful of mainstream media and events outlets have begun to assert that the CCP is being a "scapegoat" for grassroots domestic opposition. Semafor reported last month that China was "becoming a scapegoat for US data center backlash," arguing that "invoking Beijing isn’t a new phenomenon in Washington."

Prince George’s County, Md., has temporarily halted data center development after a campaign championed by the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Charlotte, N.C. approved a five-month moratorium on data center development on June 8 after the party organized a door-knocking campaign.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation, which says it "exists to carry out the struggle for socialism in the United States," does not disclose its funding but is deeply enmeshed with the Singham network. The party’s co-founder, Brian Becker, serves as a podcast host on Singham-funded BreakThroughNews, whose studios are located inside the Singham-funded People’s Forum. One of the party’s "central committee members," Becker’s son, Ben, is the editor in chief of BreakThroughNews and the editor of the PSL publication Liberation. Claudia de la Cruz, a co-founder of the People’s Forum, was the PSL’s presidential candidate.

Mike Rowe's Mission

 

Mike Rowe's Mission

'It's Only a Matter of National Security':

America's Workforce Academy's Mission to Fill the Workforce Gap

Salena Zito, Jewish World Review 

Mike Rowe has been on a lonely mission. For two decades, he has been raising the alarm.

Rowe has been warning anyone who would listen that our skills gap in the trades was widening to a chasm so large that the economic effect on U.S. manufacturing companies, in particular auto and steel industries but also defense, construction and energy sectors, was going to be nothing short of catastrophic.

Few listened. Rowe appeared before Congress. Twice. He sent an open letter to then-President Barack Obama. Crickets. Nonetheless, Rowe persisted. His alarm bells were not hyperbole. In fact, the gap has continued to widen. Last week, the Tech Times reported that the construction sector alone needs 349,000 net new workers just to keep pace with demand in 2026.

In April, the property services firm JLL issued a report showing that by 2030, 2.1 million skilled trades positions for electricians, HVAC technicians, plumbers, welders, pipe fitters and equipment operators were at a high risk of going unfilled. These are the key jobs needed to build homes, offices, buildings, energy infrastructure and artificial intelligence data power centers.

Some raw facts from the American Builders and Contractors Association are even more chilling: 39% of electricians in this country were 45 years old or older. Another disturbing stat: For every five plumbers leaving the workforce, only two apprentices are entering. As baby boomers age out, the industry faces an estimated shortage of up to 550,000 plumbers, according to the Merrow Report.

Same with auto mechanics. Currently, the United States is facing a shortage of 600,000 auto mechanics, according to that same report.

All these shortages are creating a downward and slippery slope for both consumers and builders alike, including higher costs and growing safety risks. And it creates wait times for services that extend beyond days into weeks, months and even years for larger projects.

Dina Powell McCormick, president of Meta, said that she first saw the impact of this escalating problem when she joined her husband, Sen. David McCormick, a Pittsburgh Republican, when he was running for office in 2022 and 2024.

Both listened to the growing concerns of small, medium and large business owners of manufacturing facilities and their worries over the expanding skills trade gap.

Last year, Rowe spoke at the Energy Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh, the first of its kind in bringing leaders and workers in the trades together with the intellectual capital at Carnegie Mellon University, along with the industries that need them both for energy and AI data power centers. Rowe bluntly addressed the problem in a panel. McCormick was listening, and it was then that she knew she wanted to help bridge that gap.

The problem, Rowe warned a somewhat stunned audience, wasn't just in traditional manufacturing. All the tech companies that were clamoring to build infrastructure for AI were running into the same challenge. They couldn't find "skilled workers to not just build the data power centers needed to power the future but also (to) keep them humming," Rowe said.

But it wasn't until she became president of Meta earlier this year that McCormick's ability to "do something" could finally be realized. Last week, McCormick and Rowe, as CEO of mikeroweWORKS Foundation, announced America's Workforce Academy. The new effort is a training initiative aimed at connecting workers with skilled trade careers tied to data center and infrastructure development.

In a dual interview with the Washington Examiner, McCormick said that it's an honor to partner with Rowe. "He is the greatest evangelist for the American worker, and he has been for 18 years," she said of his decadeslong efforts to inspire people to get into the trades. Rowe's foundation runs a scholarship program trying to fill the gap between the massive demand for plumbers, electricians, welders and fiber technicians, and the growing shortage.

"What Meta is launching today is America's Workforce Academy," she said, "a program that within five weeks gives you paid training, a credential that you have for life, and a guaranteed job on a Meta job site or anywhere else you want to take that credential."

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, among others, has a mission for America's Workforce Academy to fast-track the certification process to make job site-ready graduates, McCormick said.

"This is an opportunity for people like Uber drivers, waitresses, grocery store clerks and anyone out there who is living paycheck to paycheck," she said. "The challenge has always been, how do they take the time off unpaid to learn a trade? How do they pay for the expensive training and do all that without a guaranteed job? Well, that is what we are solving with America's Workforce."

Rowe said that the whole "supply-demand thing" has evolved in the past six years, since he first talked about micro- and macroeconomics. "The idea that whatever the solution will ultimately entail is going to involve government at the highest levels, private industry at the highest levels, small business at every level, and guidance counselors and parents at the most granular level," he said. "And then ultimately (it's) the worker, him or herself, who's going to have to decide for themselves what the definition of a good job really is."

Rowe has been in the space of reframing the conversation of work. Some of his work has centered on debunking stigmas and stereotypes. However, a lot of it has to do with just showing people the enormous totality of opportunities that actually exists in the trades.

"People just don't know, and the third leg of the stool — which Meta is addressing perfectly, I think — is to remove all the friction," Rowe said.

Rowe succinctly lays out the problem, calling it vocational training on steroids. "You don't have to pay for a flight. You don't have to pay for your transportation. You get a stipend, you get paid to learn over a five-week period, and when you come out the other end, you're certified, you're work ready, (and) you're guaranteed a job within the metaverse, and if you leave, your skills go with you."

Rowe said that he cannot find a chink in the armor. "It's a great way to grease the skids for those people who are grappling with that primary barrier, but there are other barriers too. This is maybe the most important way, I think, to get the supply freed up, but it doesn't mean (that) there's not a role for trade schools."

Applicants accepted into the program get tuition, lodging and airfare fully covered. The locations for the first wave of programs are in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Columbus, Ohio; Houston, Texas; and Indianapolis, Indiana.

Rowe said what Meta is doing is showing the broader scope of how this is being done, and that it's available to young people at trade schools all across the country.

McCormick explained that the people they are investing in are feeders for trade schools if they want to get more advanced training for specific roles. "This is a program, though, (that) because you get a certification from the National Council on Construction, Education and Research, that makes you job site ready," she pointed out.

The program empowers workers with safety credentials to get on a job site and be paid while they work. "Then you can go into electricity, you can go into fiber training, pipe fitting, welders, and you can even go on and get more training at trade schools," she said.

Rowe said that we need to look at workers in the trades throughout our history with clear eyes and see them as the American heroes that they are. Rowe pointed to their work during World War II, when workers, many of them women, came together to physically build the arsenal that defeated tyranny worldwide.

McCormick agrees. "Today, if we don't build the infrastructure that's going to fuel American AI leadership, then we're going to lose this race," she said. "And that means they're on a different kind of frontline in America today. And I think that we should show them the respect and dignity of what that work really means."

McCormick said it is important to note that America's Workforce Academy is bigger than Meta. "This is a problem that's way bigger than any one company. We hope that we will build a national coalition to invest even more," she said.

Rowe said that it's too early to take a victory lap. "But I'll tell you that the thesis that informed 'Dirty Jobs' 23 years ago and kept it on the air to this day is the exact thesis that's informed this endeavor," he said of his iconic show, which has him working in just about every job imaginable, from garbage man to being 10 feet underground in a sewer.

"It starts with appreciation and gratitude," he said. "It's being fueled today by a level of practicality that wasn't necessarily in the works 20 years ago, but it is now. So this is an effort for our times."

Rowe said he was thrilled to be part of this. "It's only a matter of global hegemony, but it also trickles all the way down to anyone who has ever pledged allegiance to our flag and thought about pursuing something that looks like happiness and wanted to do it in a way that made sense to their brain and to their talent."

If it weren't for "Dirty Jobs," Rowe may not be part of this today. In fact, today may not have even happened. "I'm really grateful that there are enough macros out there in the world right now paying attention to get this thing elevated to where it ought to be," he said, adding, "It is only a matter of national security."

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between.

Stop destroying civilization!

 

Stop destroying civilization!

In the #MeToo years, the Left's signature slogan was "Believe all women!"

 Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review

That directive was used to bolster Christine Blasey Ford's preposterous and easily refuted 2018 allegations that some 35 years earlier she had been sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, when both were teenagers.

Two years later, the Left quietly junked that "Believe women!" credo when Tara Reade came forward and lodged a far more credible charge that 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had sexually assaulted her when she was a Biden senatorial staffer.

Seven other women alleged that Biden acted toward them in sexually inappropriate ways. The Left more or less ignored these serial charges, and in Reade's case, demonized her. Suddenly, the new mantra was "Believe women only if they prove useful to the Left."

Since then, the grotesque sexual misconduct involving Democratic politicians --from New York governor Andrew Cuomo to California Congressman Eric Swalwell -- has finally put #MeToo to rest. We were reminded of its demise when it was revealed that Maine senatorial candidate and socialist heartthrob Graham Platner had been discovered to possess a long social media history of crude and pornographic put-downs of women.

Indeed, an entire gaggle of former girlfriends has attested to his Nazi fascinations, his contempt for women, and his occasional physical violence against them.

So what?

Or as feminist icon and former #MeToo-er Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, speaking at a Platner campaign rally in Portland, Maine, "I'm here because Washington needs fighters, and Graham Platner is the fighter we need."

But a fighter for what cause -- and on whose behalf?

The demise of Black Lives Matter (BLM) offers another example of a recurring left-wing phenomenon: movements that begin as moral crusades and end as self-parodies. Almost every BLM cause celebre has proved fraudulent, following a long tradition that stretches from Al Sharpton's Tawana Brawley myth to the Duke lacrosse scandal.

The ginned-up BLM riots that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were all based on an abject lie. Brown never said, "Hands up, don't shoot." In fact, he attacked a police officer repeatedly and was lethally shot as he charged toward the officer.

Failing actor Jussie Smollett was never attacked by white MAGA thugs in the wee hours of a cold Chicago night. Instead, the faker Smollett hired two Nigerian-Americans, decked out in MAGA hats, to stage a mock attack. Only by staging such an attack could Smollett claim victim status, attract national sympathy as a target of white hatred, and attempt to revive his fading career.

Yet, for a while, the con worked. At the time, soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris, who would go on to praise the often-violent mass George Floyd demonstrations of 2020, raged that the attack by anonymous white "racists" was an "attempted modern-day lynching." Right -- and she never apologized for spreading that lie.

The aftermath of the death of George Floyd did lasting damage to the country that still reverberates. Floyd was a career criminal. He had been imprisoned for participating in a home invasion where he pressed a gun into the stomach of a terrified young woman, who was beaten by one of his fellow criminals.

At the time of his arrest, Floyd was in poor condition both physically and legally -- attempting to pass counterfeit currency, high on drugs, recovering from COVID, and resisting arrest.

He died after a police officer restrained him using an authorized but controversial protocol that involved placing a knee on the prostrate suspect's neck -- and did not heed in time Floyd's call that he could not breathe.

What followed was the high-water mark of BLM, involving four months of nightly riots led to some 35 deaths; 1,500 injured law enforcement officers; $2 billion in property damage; 14,000 arrests; and the torching of a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C., church. The current leftist habit of urban intersection takeovers, statue-toppling, name-changing, and violent demonstrations is a legacy of that summer of lawlessness.

So we still live with the toxic ripples from the aftermath and the canonization of Floyd.

Thousands of police officers nationwide were laid off in "defund the police" madness. Faddish "critical race" and "critical legal" theories led to no cash bail and the near-immediate release of hundreds of thousands of arrested violent criminals.

Our supposedly best universities, in Pavlovian fashion, dropped the SAT admission requirement and upped race-based admissions.

Racially segregated graduation ceremonies, dorms, and "safe spaces" proliferated -- along with newly introduced remedial math courses at our top campuses. Indeed, professors began handing out As to 80 percent of the student body, as Ivy League schools now inflated grades far more than did community colleges.

Administrators and bureaucrats soon created thousands of DEI positions across universities and corporations. This craze led to McCarthyite "diversity statements," an epidemic of alleged victimhood, untold billions of dollars squandered, and workplace productivity diminished. And the result was certainly not better race relations.

We were just reminded again of the absurdity of the immediate post-Floyd years, after learning that the inverse of Floyd's death had recently transpired in the United Kingdom.

Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak, a white male student, was fatally stabbed by a Sikh immigrant with his "ceremonial" sword. In truth, the weapon was an eight-inch knife mysteriously exempted from Britain's otherwise tough laws against possession of knives.

According to reports, Vickrum Digwa called police and falsely claimed that the dying Nowak had initiated the confrontation with racial slurs, while family members attempted to conceal the weapon. (Would a Scottish highlander claim that he too had the right to carry an eight-inch broadsword as integral to his race, religion, and indigenous traditions?)

No matter -- the police arrived hungry to deal with a sensational case of George Floyd-style, white-on-non-white racial violence.

Instead, they reportedly treated Digwa as the victim and handcuffed the mortally wounded and bleeding Nowak as he pleaded -- nine times in total -- that he could not breathe and was dying. They therefore almost certainly ensured his death. The national reaction?

No British politician went into full George Floyd take-a-knee mode -- as they had in 2020, even across the Atlantic, for the felon Floyd. The ensuing unrest, so far, seems mainly to have been limited to Southampton; there has been no mass destruction of property; there have been no mass assaults. Nowak was on the wrong side of the left-wing race-based binary of victim/victimizer and thus offered no fuel for virtue-signaling by hollow politicians. Such racial reductionism always trumps matters of class, evidence -- and the truth.

As for the fate of the BLM architects? The founders never accounted for how their $90 million in donations was actually spent, but they did disappear into their newly purchased multi-million-dollar homes and have hardly been heard from since.

The episodes of existential psychodramas that come and go -- after doing enormous damage to the nation -- are nearly endless.

A number of American and international agencies and "experts" have now, mostly quietly, sighed that global warming was never really the existential danger that the Left swore would put "Earth in the balance" in a mere decade.

Nonetheless, once again, the toll has been enormous. Germany wrecked its economy to seek mythical "net zero" carbon emissions -- by dismantling natural gas, oil, and nuclear power plants and turning to costly, inefficient, and unreliable solar and wind power.

This green mania swept the Western world -- as China built two to three coal-fired power plants a month.

The left-wing, postmodern, globalist notion of a borderless utopian world that would fuel endless "diversity" has done so much damage to Western nations that even the European Left now fears its own political suicide from the vast influxes of often hostile illegal aliens.

Millions of unlawful and unvetted entrants crashed the borders, with no desire to integrate, assimilate, or acculturate to their Western hosts. They have spiked crime, fueled antisemitism, and ensured unsustainable social welfare costs.

The transgender frenzy was to be the Left's next civil rights crusade, as it constructed a new victimized class with reparatory claims against the guilty traditionalist majority.

It mattered little that gender dysphoria was an ancient phenomenon, documented even in classical literature as a rare and aberrant syndrome where physical sex was at odds with psychological sexual identification. That malady had also been well known to modern sexologists since the 19th century, who had documented it as rare, involving far less than 0.01 percent of the population.

Nevertheless, the Left invented the unnecessary Orwellian term "transphobe," and suddenly we were off to the races with transgender biological men nude in gym showers with teen girls and transgender "women" with male musculoskeletal bodies dominating female sports.

Soon, an epidemic of teens began wondering whether they were in fact "trans" and pondering whether to undergo a battery of dangerous hormonal and chemical drug regimens -- or calling themselves nonbinary, to the point where the new third sex sometimes seemed almost as numerous as the old two genders.

What accounts for these bouts of periodic, collective, and suicidal madness?

First, the craziness is almost always birthed in the contemporary, affluent, and leisured West, which alone has the capital and resources to afford such freakish sideshows.

Second, the frenzies are usually the creation of the Left, predictably birthed in universities, the media, and the bureaucracies. They appear with familiar symptoms. The irredeemable, deplorable, and "garbage" hoi polloi are supposedly too dense to be properly schooled and thus must be frightened to death in order to adopt agendas that otherwise appear to them as utterly insane.

Junk your natural-gas dryer and grill, or face massive floods on your coasts. Drop the SAT and defund the police or face endless race riots.

Hire thousands of race and gender commissars or be forever tagged as racists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes. Open the border and let illegal aliens enter by the millions, and thus pay partial penance for "whiteness" as the nation "checks its privilege."

The Left is correct that few Western voters will openly embrace the unpopular elite agenda of racial fixations, globalism, laxity on crime, and degrowth environmentalism.

So, their long-term solutions have four predictable aspects:

1. Open the borders to create a more diverse, impoverished, and needy constituency.

2. Create fake "working-class" pseudo-populist candidates like the pampered Graham Platner, the G od-is-nonbinary "new Christian" James Talarico, and, of course, the waxen effigy of 'good ol' Joe Biden from Scranton.

3. Destroy time-tested systems by seeking to demolish the Electoral College, the 50-state union, the Senate filibuster, and the nine-justice Supreme Court.

4. Gin up these end-of-days, pseudo-existential crises whose solutions require massive new taxes, bigger government, and more dictatorial elite managers.

One good sign of growing antidotes is that increasingly Americans, and indeed all Westerners, are saying no to green haranguers, no to the gender and sex demagogues, no to the race-baiting industry, no to the open-borders conglomerate, and no to ungrateful immigrants.

Their pushback might be summed up as follows: "We are no longer going to allow you to destroy ancient traditions that ensured our prosperity, security, and liberty, and which were handed down to us by generations far better than your own."

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

Islamic Extremism in California

 

Islamic extremism’s rise in California

...and what to do about it

By Joel Kotkin, California Post

Much has been written about the “Islamization” of Europe and the UK. Is it now California’s turn?

Two major books — “Londonistan” by Melanie Phillips, and “Submission,” a novel from France’s Michel Houellebecq — have pictured an old continent that is increasingly at the mercy of often violent Islamists.

Although the Muslim population in Europe is much larger as a percentage of residents, the Muslim population of the US is booming, due to high birth rates and immigration. It is expected to pass the Jewish contingent by 2040, and pass 8 million by 2050.

But we don’t have to wait until then to see the contours of the Islamization of America. 

New York City, where Muslims may be as numerous as Jews, Italians or Irish, has already elected a staunchly anti-Israel, Third Worldist Mayor in Zohran Kwame Mamdani.

Increasingly, we see Democratic Party candidates critical of Israel, including Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, as well as three potential anti-Israel congressional candidates in New York, the largest Jewish city in the diaspora.

These conditions can also be found here in California, once described by an observer in the late 19th century as “the Jews’ earthly paradise” for its economic and social promise.

Jews have shaped much of California’s progress, from Levi Strauss and the founders of the entertainment industry to numerous other leaders in culture, science, real estate and finance.

But California is increasingly in the Islamists’ sights. In LA, the Jewish diaspora’s second largest city, mayoral candidate Nithya Raman continues to criticize Israel during the campaign. 

Even some Jewish politicians cannot take the heat. State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat and former member of the Legislature’s Jewish caucus, tried to fend off left-wing rivals by embracing the toxic notion of Israeli “genocide,” after long distancing himself from such assertions.

Even the judiciary is getting in the act. We have seen the remarkable case of a prosecutor of Jewish descent, Jeff Rosen, forbidden to prosecute antisemitic vandals because of his heritage. 

This is akin to forbidding a black prosecutor from adjudicating a case against the Ku Klux Klan. 

Antisemitism, much of it linked to Islamist activists, has made some California campuses particularly toxic for Jews. Erwin Chemerinsky, UC Berkeley’s law school dean and a well-known progressive, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism” rife at Berkeley and other campuses.    

Even Hollywood is following suit. Today, leading figures in entertainment, like Maha Dakhil, a top manager at Creative Artists Agency, accuse Israel of “genocide.” Others also refuse to work with Israel film companies. Two thousand actors signed a statement outlining Israel’s “war crimes” with no mention of Hamas’ atrocities.

Pressure to denounce Israel is even evident at the local level. I have seen this firsthand in Santa Ana, where my synagogue is located. A coalition of political radicals and Islamists sought to pass an anti-Israel resolution, but were closely defeated. All this in a largely poor city with its own share of more immediate problems.

Similar measures have passed in California cities like Oakland, which called for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza war without mentioning Hamas’ atrocities, and Richmond, whose city council accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” Oakland demonstrators even suggested that Israel murdered its own people as a pretext to attack Gaza.

Even worse, California’s youth are subjected to potentially anti-Israel curricula, setting up a whole new generation of antisemitism and in the meantime putting Jewish teachers at risk. San Francisco has experienced anti-Israel walkouts in 10 high schools, organized by an advocacy group with access to student addresses.  

As in Europe and Canada, casual antisemitism in California is a natural outcome of the alliance between Islamist militants and our own local far left.

What is the answer? Knee-jerk responses like “Muslim bans” or demagogic legislation banning sharia law in family matters are crude and discriminatory. We cannot blame all Muslims for the extremism of a few.  

The recent shooting of Muslims at a San Diego mosque, allegedly perpetrated by deranged youngsters with Nazi sympathies, is as horrendous as the killing of any innocents.

What is needed: moderate Muslims who openly embrace America and denounce antisemitism, even if they disagree on aspects of US policy. Waving the flags of terrorist groups and the repressive Iranian theocracy is no way to integrate into the US mainstream. 

One key advantage: Unlike in Europe, where Muslims are increasingly an underclass, American Muslim immigrants are better educated than average Americans. Some, like Persians, outperform the norms in both income and education.   

Ultimately, the left-Islamic alliance may founder on its own massive contradictions. Many Muslims are fundamentally conservative, entrepreneurial and hold traditional cultural views at odds with many Democratic positions. American Muslims are far more likely to support legalizing polygamy, while outlawing gay marriage and homosexuality altogether, than the general population.

These views, to say the least, do not jibe well with the “progressive” social values of Raman’s and Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America. 

Islamist influence in California and elsewhere defies political category, but the basic agenda is often the same.  

The archreactionary Tucker Carlson, the leading fount of antisemitic thought in America, is the proud owner of a home in Doha, Qatar. He has much in common with such online pro-Hamas leftists as Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, figures embraced by progressive Democrats. 

The Islamization of London, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin may not be reversible. But that outcome is not yet here. 

Still, it is no longer something happening far away. It could happen in California as well. 

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute of the University of Texas at Austin.