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Sometimes we all need a good laugh to keep the spirits high :-). This short video is just slapstick - but kind of funny. Is this chap a modern day Charlie Chaplin? With thanks to:- https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_tT2ldpZHek?feature=share

Colleges around the country are reporting some of their international students’ visas are being revoked unexpectedly, expressing alarm over what appears to be a new level of government scrutiny. Visas can be canceled for a number of reasons, but college leaders say the government has been quietly terminating students’ legal residency status with little notice to students or schools. That marks a shift from past practice and leaves students vulnerable to detention and deportation. The...

The Harvard International Office announced Sunday that three students and two recent graduates from the university have had their student visas revoked amid the Trump administration’s crackdown. The office did not release the students’ names and said it has referred them to legal counsel. The reasoning for the revocation is unknown, but the office said it was made during a routine records review.  “Harvard deeply values the international students and scholars who travel ...

The Trump administration has begun a new wave of visa revocations for international students studying at American universities. Universities across America said over the weekend that the visas of several international students were revoked. It's unclear if the visa revocations are associated with anti-Israel actions by the affected international students. The most recent wave of visa revocations impacted international students at Harvard University, University of Michigan,...

This column isn’t what you probably expect it to be. I’m sure you read that headline and expected we’re going to be decrying the legacy corporate propaganda press and its ubiquitous fearmongering over the economic effects of the tariffs which went into place last week as President Trump seeks to rebalance the relationships between the United States and the rest of the world on trade. I could do multiple columns on that subject. Instead, I’ll just throw in this X conversation… I think the market reax and most every mainstream economist left, right and center is pretty clear ! — Jonathan Martin (@jmart) April 5, 2025 That’s Politico’s Jonathan Martin, who responded to one of the on-again, off-again expressions of perspective by investor Bill Ackman by noting two days of market trades as a final judgment on the tariffs. Two days! It’s insane. Reminded me of Walter Cronkite declaring that the Vietnam War was lost in the midst of the Tet Offensive, which was one of the most lopsided military disasters in the history of warfare. Cronkite was categorically wrong in his judgment, and near-treasonous in his abuse of his position to spread defeatism when it wasn’t warranted. This isn’t a column about media malpractice, however. Because where the tariffs are concerned, the liars who matter are people like this woman… Europe is ready to negotiate with the US. We have offered zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods. Because we’re always ready for a good deal. But we’re also prepared to respond with countermeasures. And protect ourselves against indirect effects through trade diversion. pic.twitter.com/hpZ77TXH4B — Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) April 7, 2025 Ace of Spades quite reasonably called Ursula von der Leyen “the unelected dictator of Europe,” and also noted that she’s limiting this zero-for-zero tariff offer to industrial goods, because the EU’s objective remains to freeze American agricultural products out of Europe. Here’s another example of this, from the UK… Britain doesn’t want to lower food standards. Doing a trade deal with Trump means allowing a tsunami of substandard foods which decimate public health and food security. USA deal also causes huge problems for Northern Ireland. Say NO to being Trumped! Write to your MP… pic.twitter.com/R4bE3N95E3 — Liz Webster (@LizWebsterSBF) April 6, 2025 Imagine hearing lectures about food quality from the culinary wasteland that is Great Britain. And what underlies this, with emphasis on the “lies,” is that the Euros and the rest of the people now performatively scrambling to make a zero-for-zero deal with us on tariffs aren’t really offering a surrender at all. Food safety regulations, VAT taxes the revenues of which are rolled into producer subsidies, “net-zero” environmental red tape, and other things, are the real trade barriers being used to abuse American producers in this country. It isn’t just tariffs that make a Chevy Tahoe cost $175,000 in Norway. Peter Navarro was on CNBC on Monday talking about another malefactor along these lines, Vietnam. You may have seen that the Vietnamese are offering a zero-for-zero trade on tariffs, and Navarro noted how dishonest those offers are… Peter Navarro: President Trump will negotiate with countries offering to drop their tariffs to zero but they must also remove non-tariff trade barriers against American products. “Let’s take Vietnam. When they come to us and say we’ll go to zero tariffs, that means nothing to us… pic.twitter.com/NYD51Mp6CP — Paul Furlong (@MDMPaul) April 7, 2025 The transcript of Navarro’s appearance, via RealClearPolitics, shows just how insidious all this is… PETER NAVARRO: So when you ask if we’re willing to negotiate, the president will always listen. But let’s understand what the problem is. When you have a country like Vietnam — let’s take Vietnam — when they come to us and say, “We’ll go to zero tariffs,” that means nothing to us because it’s the non-tariff cheating that matters. Let’s do Vietnam. They sell us $15 for every $1 we sell them. About $5 of that $15 is China trans-shipping to Vietnam to evade their tariffs. What does Vietnam do? They dump into our markets, killing our shrimpers, our people who make metal brackets, kitchen cabinets, agricultural products. They engage in intellectual property theft. They have the biggest number of cases — aside from China — at the Department of Commerce on dumping. So the point is, anybody who wants to come talk to us, talk to us about lowering your non-tariff barriers. Vietnam has a 10 percent VAT. Europe has a 19 percent VAT. We can’t compete against that. We have tried. Let me just make this point. We have tried at the World Trade Organization since the 1970s to get VAT tax relief, and they’ve told us no. Every single time. We’ve won case after case at the World Trade Organization on things like our agricultural products — pork, beef, and corn — and they think… CNBC HOST: What we’re all trying to understand is: if there are going to be negotiations, and you’re saying zero is not enough, what is enough? PETER NAVARRO: Zero is a small first start. CNBC HOST: Okay, okay, then what is enough? PETER NAVARRO: Let me answer that question. Let’s take them one at a time. We’ve got plenty of time. So what is enough? Okay, you take any given country — they’re like fingerprints. They all cheat us in a different way. So here are the things they cheat us on. Some of them engage in currency manipulation. Some of them have a hefty VAT tax. All of them dump into our markets. All of them engage in heavy export subsidies and government subsidies. All of them put up these phony technical and phytosanitary barriers to our Ag products, our autos, and everything in between. Many of them steal our intellectual property. A lot of them run sweatshop labor, including forced child labor. They have pollution havens. So when you say to me, “What do we want from them?” We want fairness. We don’t want them to kill American workers by inundating us with this non-tariff cheating. And it would be really refreshing to have the media talk more about that. This zero-tariff thing — it’s a misdirection. It’s the non-tariff barriers. We could certainly attack these people in kind with a host of onerous regulations, predatory subsidies, and other non-tariff trade barriers. That isn’t what Trump is doing. He’s taking a far more straightforward approach. The Trump administration built a schedule based on the U.S. trade deficit with each of the countries in question and imposed tariffs based on the structural disadvantage they impose on our producers. (RELATED: The Dismal Science and the Trumpian Tariff Hullabaloo) Which generates, back to the original set of liars mentioned on this page, coverage like this… Trump Trade Adviser Moves Goalposts on Tariffs Despite Warnings https://t.co/hQtnSz1t60 — The New Republic (@newrepublic) April 7, 2025 Navarro never moved the goalposts. The administration has been clear from the beginning that trade barriers of multiple kinds were in the crosshairs, and not just monetary tariffs. Objectively, it would be stupid and ineffective to simply match our trade partners’ tariff for tariff. In fact, that would simply encourage even more cheating by way of regulations and other measures that wouldn’t be defined as tariffs. But the lies keep mounting. Interestingly, though, while the markets are roiling (something which most Americans aren’t overly concerned with, either because they aren’t in the markets or because they take a longterm investment strategy and recognize what a fantastic buy-the-dip opportunity the current turmoil offers), there isn’t such a major hue and cry among the public at present over Trump’s tariffs. We had protests across the country, which appeared to have been driven in no small part by a pay-for-play guarantee from left-wing non-profit groups (and how much funding from China fueled those activities? Inquiring minds wish to know…), but for an economic and political crash we hear so much about how things seem awfully calm. Maybe wait and see. And maybe don’t make Cronkite’s mistake and declare the trade war lost or that Trump is the bad guy when the opening zero-for-zero gambit is so transparently dishonest. Nice try, you liars. You aren’t up against idiots. You’ll have to deal with America on a much more even keel than that. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: A Tariffic Week Coddled Princesses and Stupid-Party Simps Is Not How We Make an American Revival Europe Is No Longer Worth Defending The post The Liars Are Out in Force Thanks to the ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Is Larry Fink high? It’s a fair question to ask. The BlackRock CEO recently suggested that Bitcoin — the notoriously volatile, slow, and inefficient digital asset — could replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. He wasn’t joking. As America’s national debt continues to rise, global confidence in the dollar may eventually diminish, allowing a decentralized alternative like Bitcoin to take its place. At least, that’s what Fink’s suggestion implies. Such a statement is, at best, a wild fantasy. Moreover, it comes from a man whose company, BlackRock, has established itself as a central player in the very ecosystem it is now attempting to reframe as the antidote to global financial decay. (RELATED: BlackRock and American Airlines: Is Larry Fink the New Sam Bankman-Fried?) In other words, Fink isn’t a neutral observer. BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF — approved in January 2024 — is now the largest in the U.S., managing over $47 billion in assets. An ETF (exchange-traded fund) is a way for investors to buy into an asset like Bitcoin without ever having to deal with the asset itself. There are no wallets, passwords, or understanding of how it works. Just one click, and you’re in. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority recently gave BlackRock the green light to expand into European crypto markets. If Bitcoin were to become the world’s reserve currency, BlackRock wouldn’t just benefit. It would, in many ways, own the infrastructure. Fink’s shrewd, somewhat shameless salesmanship demands some scrutiny. Let’s remove our tinfoil hats and imagine, for a moment, a world where Bitcoin becomes the reserve currency. What, one wonders, would that look like? It certainly wouldn’t be a world of greater transparency or decentralization. It would be a world dominated by a handful of uber-wealthy whales and institutional players — BlackRock among them — who already control vast portions of the supply. Bitcoin’s fixed cap of 21 million coins doesn’t democratize value. It ossifies it. It rewards those who got in early, punishes latecomers, and centralizes power under the guise of decentralization. In other words, it’s a game designed for, and largely controlled by, the elite of elites. Bitcoin’s Institutional Capture Risk Earlier this month, Jack Dorsey, one of Bitcoin’s earliest and most vocal champions, warned that Bitcoin is in serious danger of institutional capture. What was supposed to be a revolution by the people, for the people, is now being swallowed up by Wall Street and its allies. Dorsey’s warning wasn’t hypothetical; it’s already happening. And BlackRock is leading the charge. But leading the charge to where, exactly? Bitcoin has existed since 2009. Yet, even today, trying to purchase something as simple as a cup of coffee with it is often clunky, expensive, or entirely impractical. Most businesses don’t accept it. Most people don’t use it. In real life, Bitcoin remains closer to a speculative asset than a functional currency. The idea that it’s ready to take over global commerce is rather absurd. Bitcoin is slow. Its transaction capacity is only a fraction of what’s necessary to support global trade. Settling one block takes about ten minutes, while Visa can process tens of thousands of transactions per second. Although Bitcoin’s layer-two solutions, like the Lightning Network, have enhanced speeds, they remain largely untested at scale — and still depend on trust mechanisms that undermine the very decentralization they promise. There’s also the issue of volcanic-like volatility. Reserve currencies must be stable. Predictable. They must be anchors, not rollercoasters. Bitcoin, however, can drop 15 percent in a single day if Elon Musk or another influential figure tweets something ambiguous. The idea that nations would align their energy, food supplies, or defense systems with such an erratic asset is completely naive. And yet, here we are, living in a world where the man who runs the largest asset manager on the planet is earnestly entertaining the idea — not because it’s plausible, but because it’s profitable. Fink is many things, but he’s certainly not stupid. He knows Bitcoin won’t replace the dollar. However, the narrative of Bitcoin as a counterweight to fiscal irresponsibility is good for business. It stokes FOMO. It signals to institutional investors that they, too, can get in on the “anti-establishment” gold rush, without ever leaving the comfort of regulation or Wall Street. It’s marketing masquerading as monetary theory. And it’s working. Fink’s very public musings about Bitcoin becoming the world’s reserve currency aren’t about genuine belief in the death of the dollar. They’re about selling scarcity with a story, creating the illusion of inevitability so the cash keeps flowing into his product. The man managing more money than most countries isn’t betting on Bitcoin replacing the dollar — he’s betting on you believing it might. That belief powers the ETF. That ETF rakes in fees. And those fees don’t go to Bitcoin maximalists. They go to BlackRock. The danger here isn’t that Fink is wrong. It’s that people might believe he’s right. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: Christianity, Inc.: The Rise of Silicon Valley’s False Prophets The Guardian’s Shameless Attempt to Rewrite Flannery O’Connor’s Legacy Elon Musk Does Have a Few Conflicts The post Is Larry Fink High? BlackRock CEO Sells Bitcoin Fantasy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Trump’s tariff hammer has caught global markets off guard and plunged them into severe turbulence. It’s hard to find bearings in the fog of volatility and panic. Yet, a trend is slowly taking shape: The U.S. is targeting China’s trade dominance with its harsh policy. First, the good news: The tariff shock initiated by the U.S. government is, for now, driving down living costs — at least where states aren’t using a crowbar to enforce green ideology and eliminate energy capacities, as Germany has with its nuclear power. Prices are dropping across the board — oil, for instance, by about 15 percent since the start of the year, heralding deflationary days. (RELATED: Lights Out in Germany) While stock markets suffered a dramatic collapse, with the S&P 500 tumbling over 10 percent since the tariffs were announced, oil, gasoline, and agricultural commodity prices also went into free fall, offering initial relief to the battered household budgets of the private sector. Is Trump playing the “Main Street over Wall Street” card by sidelining the markets? It’s entirely possible that the White House is prioritizing the mood in “Blue Collar America” to clinch the midterm congressional elections and shore up political power. (RELATED: Why ‘Liberation Day’ Frightened Democrats) You cannot claim that the Trump administration is giving shareholder wealth special treatment, given the bloodbath on the exchanges. It’s clearly willing to stomach heavy corrections to pursue its domestic and geopolitical goals simultaneously: wiping out the twin deficits of trade and fiscal imbalances while staging a comeback for domestic industry. (RELATED: The Dismal Science and the Trumpian Tariff Hullabaloo) Trump’s Strategy: Pressure as Leverage? Countries with negative trade balances with the U.S. — like the U.K., France, and Spain — face a problem: Trump’s tariffs further restrict their access to dollars needed to refinance their dollar-denominated debts. With the end of USD LIBOR in September 2024, euro-based collateral will continue to lose its credit standing — the era of conjuring dollars out of thin air is nearing its close. It’s increasingly clear that Trump is exerting maximum pressure on America’s trading partners. How far potential escalations might go remains uncertain, but the Trump camp seems dead-set on continuing the trade war it’s ignited. Is this an attempt to force countries with hefty trade surpluses into bilateral negotiations to shrink the U.S. deficit? Or is the White House truly going all-in, aiming to collapse the foreign credit machine — the Eurodollar market — by abruptly cutting off dollar liquidity, thus forcing its two major geopolitical rivals, the European Union and China, onto the defensive? China’s Export Engine China these days gives off the vibe of a faltering giant. Sure, the real estate crisis and the country’s demographic collapse have vanished from media coverage. But the Communist Party in Beijing can barely mask its own economic weakness and credit woes. Time and again, fiscal packages and liquidity injections — like the 200 billion yuan pumped in October 2024 — are deployed to buy breathing room for a banking sector buckling under deflationary pressure and a persistent wave of bankruptcies (a policy we know from the last financial crisis and one neither the U.S. nor Europe has fully overcome). China’s export sector remains the regime’s political ace. It has nurtured this seemingly unbreakable economic engine with export subsidies and an artificially undervalued yuan to keep its labor market stable and nip domestic unrest in the bud. Just a reminder: China’s trade surplus in 2024 nearly breached the stratospheric mark of one trillion U.S. dollars. That figure looks even more staggering when set against global economic output, pegged at around 110 trillion U.S. dollars. (RELATED: False Justifications for Trump’s Tariff Policy) Nearly every hundredth unit of currency circulating worldwide flows through the ever-widening bottleneck of China’s trade surplus — a state of affairs causing extreme mercantile distortions globally, as the Chinese central bank consistently undermines the hinge function of a free currency market and systematically devalues the yuan. Trump’s tariffs zero in on this politically orchestrated surplus. Yet China fights back with its trade policy toolkit: Since March 10, 2025, it’s slapped 15 percent tariffs on U.S. goods like soybeans, with 34 percent counter-tariffs on all U.S. imports starting April 10, 2025. The yuan was cautiously devalued Monday morning European time — a chess move against the falling dollar and an effort to defend its trade stance. The Party leadership is signaling loud and clear that it’d rather engage in monetary brinkmanship than cave on trade. No Relief in Sight This tug-of-war is taking on sweeping dimensions. Trump’s tariffs also target China’s trade satellites, Vietnam and Thailand, to plug export loopholes — a lesson from his first term when third-country workarounds diluted the tariff impact. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flatly rejects tariff relief, while advisor Kevin Hassett talks of negotiations with over 50 countries. Markets remain unsettled amid these contradictory signals, though bond markets show no signs of stress yet — a deceptive calm? That could shift if stock losses spiral into a fiscal crisis, especially for nations like the U.K., France, and Spain. Without LIBOR, they face a dollar-financing dilemma: Their debts, running into hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars, could turn into a fiscal anchor dragging down the Eurozone as access to cheap dollar credit dries up. READ MORE from Thomas Kolb: Reshaping the Credit Market and the Global Economy ‘Liberation Day’ and the Double Standard of EU Policy The post US Tariffs: China in the Crosshairs appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

And, no surprise, this latest anti-Trump protest has things exactly backwards. The New York Post headlines: “Anti-Trump protesters descend on DC to rally against Musk’s DOGE cuts, new tariffs: ‘Let’s keep them afraid!’” These stories were all over the media. The NY Post version reports: Tens of thousands of protesters descended on D.C. Saturday as part of nationwide “Hands Off!” rallies against spending cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and President Trump’s new “Liberation Day” tariffs — with one speaker calling on the crowd to make the two men “afraid.” The huge crowd assembled with homemade — and in many cases vulgar — anti-Republican signs near the Washington Monument while similar events unfolded in New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. “Trump and Musk, who want to be dictators and want to be kings and lords, they are afraid of the power of love and truth and justice!” declared activist minister William Barber II, who was one of the first speakers at the D.C. event. “They are afraid of your unity and diversity. Well, let’s keep them afraid until they change,” he roared. “This is an outright battle for civilization! We are not going to bow to power drunk neofascist extremists.” Unsurprisingly, the “Hands Off” groups have it exactly backwards. (And they were here in my area of Harrisburg, Penn., on the steps of the State Capitol.) Now, as has been true throughout a good bit of American history, it is the Left that is in reality “power drunk neofascist extremists.” The “activist minister” quoted in that Post is a longtime Leftist, William Barber II. Protest, of course, is an all-American and decidedly cherished First Amendment value. So no problem there. But to protest means that the subject of the protest should be examined, and examined closely. And in this case, the “Hands Off” crowd has it exactly backwards. Here’s a fact. A hard fact. Over there at the decidedly liberal AARP (the American Association of Retired Persons) is this headline: “How much longer will Social Security be around?” The AARP story reports as follows, bold print for emphasis supplied: According to the 2024 annual report of the Social Security Board of Trustees, the surplus in the trust funds that disburse retirement, disability and other Social Security benefits will be depleted by 2035. That’s one year earlier than the trustees projected in their 2023 report. That does not mean Social Security will no longer be around; it means the system will exhaust its cash reserves and will be able to pay out only what it takes in year-to-year in Social Security taxes. If this comes to pass, Social Security would be able to pay about 83 percent of the benefits to which recipients are entitled. Translation? If the “Hands Off!” Crowd got their way and Social Security were not touched, in a mere ten years Social Security recipients will be getting only 83 percent of the “benefits to which recipients are entitled.” This being the case, what these “Hands Off!” Protestors are really doing by fighting President Trump and Elon Musk (and their efforts to save Social Security and more) are making sure that when the next 10 years run out, senior Americans will lose a full 17 percent of their Social Security benefits. (RELATED: DOGE Confirms That Social Security Is a Fine Mess.) And why? All because these Democrat protestors are utterly ignorant that, were they to get their way, they would be doing real damage to Social Security and its recipients. So who, exactly, are these protestors who are, in reality, trying to wreck Social Security? Again from the New York Post. They are: A coalition of Democratic and left-wing groups organized the event, which is one of the first large D.C. rallies against Trump since he reentered the White House in January. Simultaneous protests unfolded at over 1,000 locations across the country, including the Big Apple, at Columbia University and Bryant Park. In response, the Trump White House issued a statement that correctly said as follows: President Trump’s position is clear: he will always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ stance is giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens, which will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors. Say again, if these “Hands Off!” Democrats and the Left get their way, which includes not merely ignoring the decrease in Social Security benefits 10 years down the road but “giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens,” they “will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors.” “These programs,” specifically meaning “Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.” (RELATED: Entitlement Fraud Is Now a Stated Aim of the Democrat Party) So. Here sits the American people, most doubtless blissfully unaware that were Democrats and the larger American Left to get their way in opposing President Trump and Elon Musk, their Social Security benefits would, in fact, be in trouble down the road. And the response from the “Hands Off!” crowd? Silence. Complete and total silence. Shocking. Not. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Newsmax Scores on the Stock Exchange A Trump 3rd Term? Rep. Jasmine Crockett: The New GOP Asset The post The ‘Hands Off’ Ignorance appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.