Kevin O’Leary says tariffs on Chinese goods should be 400 percent. A grim picture of antisemitism at Harvard. Is Tyler Cowen wrong about the experts? And more.
Ah, good to know Trump is turning America's decline around by making a golf course deal with a Qatari firm. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I'm just glad he has his priorities straight--America first!!
Before succumbing to the alarmism about the recent GDP figure, it's important to discuss the fact that after calculating the actual domestic production, etc., the costs of imports must then be subtracted. The April 2 tariff announcement unsurprisingly triggered a sudden, massive spending splurge on imported goods and materials to fill up our stockrooms - like another nationwide toilet paper hoarding splurge - before the dreaded tariffs hit. That sudden jump in spending is what drove the GDP into a negative territory. It's wrong to use this number to make any claim that the economy is in a downward slide. Future analyses will have to put an asterisk beside this one-time statistic.
There’s a simple way to understand the misery of tariffs and DOGE: we’ve spent 40 years listening to that sucking sound that Ross Perot described. A consumer society assumes consumers have money to buy things — beyond their welfare checks.
Ever since the Sixties, our best colleges have been devoted to “oppression studies”—just like all the schools for the rich, from pre-school through Harvard or Wellesley. The “movements” for women, blacks, and gays have taught generations of students to be ever more “sensitive” to “oppression” in history and even in the “micro-aggressions” of daily life. In fact, sensitivity to “oppression” has been the badge of class superiority and even the secular religion replacing traditional faiths for upper-class American sophisticates. Such people have actively liked how the very expensive schools they chose for their kids were preaching the secular gospel of fighting “oppression,” from pre-school on. All the “movements” feeding the sensitivity training against “oppression,” by the way, from the founding of the NAACP a century ago to the Women’s and Gay Rights crusades spawned by the 60s, were spearheaded by liberal Jews. And the greatest warriors against “oppression” in academe and intellectual life were overwhelmingly Jewish, too. Do names like Zinn and Chomsky ring a bell?
What a shock for Jews on Oct. 8, 2023, when a century of Jewish led crusades against all forms of “oppression,” including the Holocaust and antisemitism generally, came for Israel! Actually, how could anything have been more inevitable for academics and students trained their whole lives to root out “oppression” from the “fair” distribution of laundry duties to all the grand struggles for social justice of the past sixty years NOT to have come for Israel?
Recently, two famous liberal Jews, Ezra Klein and David Remnick, had a talk in the Times, in which Klein reported that during his month-long reporting trip to the West Bank, the plight and living conditions of the Palestinians reminded him of the situation of poor blacks on Alabama in the Forties. I was born whitein Atlanta, as Jim Crow as Bama, in 1943, I saw the situation of blacks then up close and personal. Recently, I watched the excellent documentary, No Other Land, on the living conditions of Palestinians under Jewish domination on the West Bank right now. The film very much deserved its Oscars in America and England this year. Many, if not most, readers of The Free Press will angrily and disdainfully dismiss the film as “propaganda.” Academics and students who’ve been trained in “oppression studies” will not. The film realistically portrays Palestinians living in greater oppression than blacks in my native Georgia’s Jim Crow era ever did, In Georgia, the army did not bulldoze blacks’ homes on a daily basis, and a much higher number of Palestinians have been killed on the West Bank by the IDF and settlers than the 5,000 blacks lynched in the entire post-Civil War period in the South.
Professors and students at all our best colleges have been studying the West Bank for decades, just as they study studied the Jim Crow South, and from the same moral perspective, No wonder rich Jewish donors wisely reacted to Oct. 8 by committing themselves and their billions to stamping out “oppression studies” in general at our best schools. No wonder these donors have passionately backed Trump’s efforts for them and Israel to stamp out the justice for all ideals of D.E.I. across our society, as well as “oppression studies” in all our schools, libraries, and even Smithsonian museums. What a tragedy that the most powerful segment of the very people who have spearheaded the fight against American oppression in all its forms should now be backing American fascism and fighting the very “oppression studies” Jews themselves often proudly helped create.
400% tariff: Kevin O'Leary is correct.. The lesson in all this is the fallacy of 'free trade.' Fair trade is realistic. Free trade only works theoretically and in faculty lounges.
“The idea of ‘antisemitism’ has been expanded so much that anything that even remotely expresses concern about the calamity that’s facing Palestinians is prohibited at Harvard.”
- Your college expenses, student loans at work.
THE NEWS is still not attributed, but, the new, snark-free NEWS is welcome. Good job.
Lights went out in Europe because as it turns out gigantic flywheels being powered at thousands of RPMs carrying the inertia of freight trains due to hydrocarbon in pulses are not subject to momentary fluctuations in the grid. On the other hand wind and solar are as stable as feathers in hurricane and have a tendency to get blown around based on climactic conditions. Who knew?... Oh that's right everybody knew but in a race to get government handouts and giant grants and government largesse nobody put in the redundancies, the expensive redundancies that are needed for wind and solar to function on a modern grid. But I'm sure that's some conservatives fault or some person that hates the planet and wants everything to be polluted. It's so exhausting when you have to explain as if to a child simple physics because their head is so far shoved up there backside with ideology.
Those in the industry know... A power grid is a nonlinear system and balancing it is more of an art than a science... The stable grids are balanced with brute Force and resilience like doing brain surgery with battle axes... Renewables try to do this with inverters and the grid has a tendency to laugh at them...
All of these so called economic indicators are meaningless, elites trying to put some metric on the economy to say the. are doing a good job. The only piece of info that should matter is how are the citizens doing Lets put some real world metrics on this economy homelessness numbers, income inequality , crimes of dispair , disease of dispair ,addictions , how are we doing in what matters. This is not a communist country controlled by the government , this is supposed to be a bottom up system revovling around the needs of the people . As we stand right now we seemed to controlled by a government class who fail to have understood they are only the tail not the dog .
There are writers at TFP who have TDS and I’ve called them out on it in the past, but I don’t think Bari is one of them. She straddles the middle pretty well…
Re:Belichick interview - CBS has lost its way. First the Kamala debacle and now this. Editors need to be fired and the company owes Trump some money. ABCs interview with Trump on the 100 days review was despicable. After 3 minutes of constant interruptions by the interviewer, I had seen enough. Lamestream media is done. There is no journalistic integrity and the bias is revolting. Walter Cronkite is rolling over in his grave.
I think the term "inertia" in the context of the grid is not exactly or at least completely attributed to turbines or IC engines, etc. My understanding is that the generation coming from the "dispatchable" sources involves a generating machine that is, yes powered by a prime mover such as a turbine, but the generating machine, typically a synchronous electric generator not only generates "real power" but also "reactive power". The reactive part is malleable and basically looks like electrical current going through the electrical generating machine that is full of heavy copper windings, some that carry the rotating magnetic field and others, the current that goes out to the grid. The amount of this "reactive power" is referred to as power factor and is controlled (usually) centrally on the grid by grid operators requesting generating plants to modify the amount of reactive load they produce. In some cases, there are "reactor transformers" installed that are not nuclear reactors but more like electrical transformers that can be added or removed to help. Renewable sources (which it is little understood that nuclear power is actually part of the "renewable" aspect of that group), do not have this property of reactive power inertia because they rely on electronic inverters to change the DC power they create from their "machines" whether they be turbines or solar panels to AC. In this process, they must keep "guessing" the frequency variations on the grid as various loads and generating sources come on and off the gird. My understanding is this is a well-known problem in micro grids but can also manifest in large, diverse grids such as the one that experienced in the recent blackout. My understanding is that managing power and frequency on a large and diverse grid is a difficult problem that has been studied for a long time and even if "inertia" is present, instabilities are always a danger for blackouts. I believe another interesting large grid instability problem (not this one) is associated with corona mass ejections that the earth occasionally passes through.
Harvard’s response to antisemitic mobs? Release two reports — one on antisemitism, one on anti-Muslim bias on the same day — as if the victims and the perpetrators are equally to blame. That’s like watching a mugging and filing complaints against both the attacker and the guy who got punched. Pathetic.
On X 🚨 DDF BREAKING — U.S. STRIKES NEW TRADE DEAL, SPECULATION POINTS TO CHINA 🚨
At 15:00 Israel time, U.S. officials confirmed the signing of a major new international trade agreement — though the partner nation has yet to be officially named.
Early analysis strongly suggests the deal involves China, amid recent backchannel discussions on tariff reductions and supply chain coordination.
If confirmed, this would mark a significant shift in the U.S.-China economic cold war — possibly signaling a strategic recalibration by the Trump administration.
Details remain limited, but the timing and urgency suggest a fast-moving development with global implications.
What an excellent day and collection of “counterpoint.” I’m a free trader at heart, but the piece about China sure gave me pause.and made me reconsider.
Ah, good to know Trump is turning America's decline around by making a golf course deal with a Qatari firm. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I'm just glad he has his priorities straight--America first!!
Before succumbing to the alarmism about the recent GDP figure, it's important to discuss the fact that after calculating the actual domestic production, etc., the costs of imports must then be subtracted. The April 2 tariff announcement unsurprisingly triggered a sudden, massive spending splurge on imported goods and materials to fill up our stockrooms - like another nationwide toilet paper hoarding splurge - before the dreaded tariffs hit. That sudden jump in spending is what drove the GDP into a negative territory. It's wrong to use this number to make any claim that the economy is in a downward slide. Future analyses will have to put an asterisk beside this one-time statistic.
There’s a simple way to understand the misery of tariffs and DOGE: we’ve spent 40 years listening to that sucking sound that Ross Perot described. A consumer society assumes consumers have money to buy things — beyond their welfare checks.
Ever since the Sixties, our best colleges have been devoted to “oppression studies”—just like all the schools for the rich, from pre-school through Harvard or Wellesley. The “movements” for women, blacks, and gays have taught generations of students to be ever more “sensitive” to “oppression” in history and even in the “micro-aggressions” of daily life. In fact, sensitivity to “oppression” has been the badge of class superiority and even the secular religion replacing traditional faiths for upper-class American sophisticates. Such people have actively liked how the very expensive schools they chose for their kids were preaching the secular gospel of fighting “oppression,” from pre-school on. All the “movements” feeding the sensitivity training against “oppression,” by the way, from the founding of the NAACP a century ago to the Women’s and Gay Rights crusades spawned by the 60s, were spearheaded by liberal Jews. And the greatest warriors against “oppression” in academe and intellectual life were overwhelmingly Jewish, too. Do names like Zinn and Chomsky ring a bell?
What a shock for Jews on Oct. 8, 2023, when a century of Jewish led crusades against all forms of “oppression,” including the Holocaust and antisemitism generally, came for Israel! Actually, how could anything have been more inevitable for academics and students trained their whole lives to root out “oppression” from the “fair” distribution of laundry duties to all the grand struggles for social justice of the past sixty years NOT to have come for Israel?
Recently, two famous liberal Jews, Ezra Klein and David Remnick, had a talk in the Times, in which Klein reported that during his month-long reporting trip to the West Bank, the plight and living conditions of the Palestinians reminded him of the situation of poor blacks on Alabama in the Forties. I was born whitein Atlanta, as Jim Crow as Bama, in 1943, I saw the situation of blacks then up close and personal. Recently, I watched the excellent documentary, No Other Land, on the living conditions of Palestinians under Jewish domination on the West Bank right now. The film very much deserved its Oscars in America and England this year. Many, if not most, readers of The Free Press will angrily and disdainfully dismiss the film as “propaganda.” Academics and students who’ve been trained in “oppression studies” will not. The film realistically portrays Palestinians living in greater oppression than blacks in my native Georgia’s Jim Crow era ever did, In Georgia, the army did not bulldoze blacks’ homes on a daily basis, and a much higher number of Palestinians have been killed on the West Bank by the IDF and settlers than the 5,000 blacks lynched in the entire post-Civil War period in the South.
Professors and students at all our best colleges have been studying the West Bank for decades, just as they study studied the Jim Crow South, and from the same moral perspective, No wonder rich Jewish donors wisely reacted to Oct. 8 by committing themselves and their billions to stamping out “oppression studies” in general at our best schools. No wonder these donors have passionately backed Trump’s efforts for them and Israel to stamp out the justice for all ideals of D.E.I. across our society, as well as “oppression studies” in all our schools, libraries, and even Smithsonian museums. What a tragedy that the most powerful segment of the very people who have spearheaded the fight against American oppression in all its forms should now be backing American fascism and fighting the very “oppression studies” Jews themselves often proudly helped create.
At The Free Press it seems "Experts" has become "The smartest people we know". Maybe you should become The Elite Press.
400% tariff: Kevin O'Leary is correct.. The lesson in all this is the fallacy of 'free trade.' Fair trade is realistic. Free trade only works theoretically and in faculty lounges.
“The idea of ‘antisemitism’ has been expanded so much that anything that even remotely expresses concern about the calamity that’s facing Palestinians is prohibited at Harvard.”
- Your college expenses, student loans at work.
THE NEWS is still not attributed, but, the new, snark-free NEWS is welcome. Good job.
Lights went out in Europe because as it turns out gigantic flywheels being powered at thousands of RPMs carrying the inertia of freight trains due to hydrocarbon in pulses are not subject to momentary fluctuations in the grid. On the other hand wind and solar are as stable as feathers in hurricane and have a tendency to get blown around based on climactic conditions. Who knew?... Oh that's right everybody knew but in a race to get government handouts and giant grants and government largesse nobody put in the redundancies, the expensive redundancies that are needed for wind and solar to function on a modern grid. But I'm sure that's some conservatives fault or some person that hates the planet and wants everything to be polluted. It's so exhausting when you have to explain as if to a child simple physics because their head is so far shoved up there backside with ideology.
The article said the cause of the blackout has not been determined, Frank.
Those in the industry know... A power grid is a nonlinear system and balancing it is more of an art than a science... The stable grids are balanced with brute Force and resilience like doing brain surgery with battle axes... Renewables try to do this with inverters and the grid has a tendency to laugh at them...
You forgot about all the indulgences in heaven all those green energy projects are banking.
All of these so called economic indicators are meaningless, elites trying to put some metric on the economy to say the. are doing a good job. The only piece of info that should matter is how are the citizens doing Lets put some real world metrics on this economy homelessness numbers, income inequality , crimes of dispair , disease of dispair ,addictions , how are we doing in what matters. This is not a communist country controlled by the government , this is supposed to be a bottom up system revovling around the needs of the people . As we stand right now we seemed to controlled by a government class who fail to have understood they are only the tail not the dog .
Terrific! Watch Stephen Miller speaking to the press today. Starts at the 22 minute mark. https://www.youtube.com/live/H-TttT3Jt_g?si=ncw933nDQr3ikC6w
There are writers at TFP who have TDS and I’ve called them out on it in the past, but I don’t think Bari is one of them. She straddles the middle pretty well…
Re:Belichick interview - CBS has lost its way. First the Kamala debacle and now this. Editors need to be fired and the company owes Trump some money. ABCs interview with Trump on the 100 days review was despicable. After 3 minutes of constant interruptions by the interviewer, I had seen enough. Lamestream media is done. There is no journalistic integrity and the bias is revolting. Walter Cronkite is rolling over in his grave.
I do like the optimism, but the climate politicians rarely learn anything.
2900 acres is 5 sq miles, tiny fire
But I guess in a small country that is big.
Probably started by democrats or the climate/insane just like happens here
I think the term "inertia" in the context of the grid is not exactly or at least completely attributed to turbines or IC engines, etc. My understanding is that the generation coming from the "dispatchable" sources involves a generating machine that is, yes powered by a prime mover such as a turbine, but the generating machine, typically a synchronous electric generator not only generates "real power" but also "reactive power". The reactive part is malleable and basically looks like electrical current going through the electrical generating machine that is full of heavy copper windings, some that carry the rotating magnetic field and others, the current that goes out to the grid. The amount of this "reactive power" is referred to as power factor and is controlled (usually) centrally on the grid by grid operators requesting generating plants to modify the amount of reactive load they produce. In some cases, there are "reactor transformers" installed that are not nuclear reactors but more like electrical transformers that can be added or removed to help. Renewable sources (which it is little understood that nuclear power is actually part of the "renewable" aspect of that group), do not have this property of reactive power inertia because they rely on electronic inverters to change the DC power they create from their "machines" whether they be turbines or solar panels to AC. In this process, they must keep "guessing" the frequency variations on the grid as various loads and generating sources come on and off the gird. My understanding is this is a well-known problem in micro grids but can also manifest in large, diverse grids such as the one that experienced in the recent blackout. My understanding is that managing power and frequency on a large and diverse grid is a difficult problem that has been studied for a long time and even if "inertia" is present, instabilities are always a danger for blackouts. I believe another interesting large grid instability problem (not this one) is associated with corona mass ejections that the earth occasionally passes through.
Harvard’s response to antisemitic mobs? Release two reports — one on antisemitism, one on anti-Muslim bias on the same day — as if the victims and the perpetrators are equally to blame. That’s like watching a mugging and filing complaints against both the attacker and the guy who got punched. Pathetic.
Possible Chiba deal?
On X 🚨 DDF BREAKING — U.S. STRIKES NEW TRADE DEAL, SPECULATION POINTS TO CHINA 🚨
At 15:00 Israel time, U.S. officials confirmed the signing of a major new international trade agreement — though the partner nation has yet to be officially named.
Early analysis strongly suggests the deal involves China, amid recent backchannel discussions on tariff reductions and supply chain coordination.
If confirmed, this would mark a significant shift in the U.S.-China economic cold war — possibly signaling a strategic recalibration by the Trump administration.
Details remain limited, but the timing and urgency suggest a fast-moving development with global implications.
What an excellent day and collection of “counterpoint.” I’m a free trader at heart, but the piece about China sure gave me pause.and made me reconsider.