Boo-Yah

Amidst all the excellent news items I’ve read (so far) this week — fedgov departments closed, useless people fired, lawbreakers under investigation etc. — I think this one gave me the greatest pleasure:

The U.S. Army recently announced it shattered previous recruiting records, with December 2024 being the most productive December in 15 years.

The branch reported it enlisted nearly 350 soldiers every day that month, Army officials announced Tuesday on social media.

In January 2025, the Army hit its best recruiting number in 15 YEARS.

Putting that into perspective:

During the last fiscal year (2024), the Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 active-duty soldiers. That makes 25% of its target. This shortfall forced the Army to cut its planned active-duty end strength from 476,000 to 466,000. Army officials project that active end strength could shrink by as much as 20,000 soldiers by September, down to 445,000.

It just shows you that under the right leadership, Americans want to serve their country.

Girls & Boys

…just like they used to be.  From the Department of Common Sense (Title IX Division) comes this news:

Trump’s Dept of Education released a “dear colleague” letter to every school in the country, stating that the social experiment of “trans inclusive” facilities, sports, bathrooms, & scholarships is done. “Sex” under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is back to being interpreted as male & female, as it always was.

The Department relies on a recent federal court ruling vacating the rule & indicating that the rewrite violated civil rights, administrative, & constitutional law.

My favorite part:

Any school, recipient, college that doesn’t comply with the directive could lose federal funding.

Keep rolling back the Leftist lunacy, folks;  we ain’t tired of it yet.

And when you’re done undoing, close the whole fucking department down.

More Like This, Please

We need a great deal more of this:

Entering 2025, community colleges are expanding apprenticeships and other experienced-based learning programs to address America’s labor shortage crisis and meet a growing demand for alternative forms of higher education.

“Community colleges are going beyond their traditional role of instruction, helping to organize, register, and assist companies in running their apprenticeship programs,” John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America, told The College Fix.

“By expanding these services, they reduce barriers for employers to offer apprenticeships,” he said in a phone interview earlier this month.

A recent report by Colborn’s organization shows the number of community colleges with active apprenticeships has grown from just 30 to over 200 between 2016 and 2023.

I’d be happier if it was two thousand community colleges, but I’ll take what I can get.

Seriously:  considering how colleges’ traditional educational courses have been debased into (essentially) Marxist wokism, there is a profound rationale for colleges, especially community colleges, to start turning some of their classrooms into workshops.

And I don’t even want to hear that government (of any kind) needs to get involved in this initiative, for any reason.  No;  this belongs entirely in the purview of businesses who would benefit from having a ready pool of trained workers in their trades, as opposed to the usual escapees from the grease pit at JiffyLube, no-hoper high school “graduates” or illegal immigrants.

There are not many instances where I’d want to copy the Germans, on anything;  but I’ve always been a huge fan of their clinical observation — that not everyone should go to college, but an awful lot of the people left over would benefit greatly from trade schools — and it deserves comprehensive implementation on this side of The Pond.

Honestly, nobody loses in this operation;  not the workers, nor the companies and especially not the colleges who participate.

Having said that:  so beneficial an opportunity is bound to fail, because OMG every child is special and shouldn’t have to get their precious little hands soiled by working at Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs (or Victor Davis Hanson’s “Muscular Jobs”, if you prefer).

Fach.

Bad-Mannered Guests

Speaking as one who was once and “admitted alien” myself, let me say that until I became a U.S. citizen I was very aware that I was a guest in this country, and you’d better believe that I was on my very best behavior.

“What’s this ‘admitted alien’ thing, Kim?”

Glad you asked.  Here’s POTUS on the topic:

The new executive order from President Trump specifies that the United States “must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”

You know what?  Even though there’s a First Amendment covering this stuff, I never thought it applied to me as a non-citizen.  Ditto the Second, by the way:  only after the swearing-in ceremony did I visit a local Merchant Of Death (only to be confronted by the hated Illinois Firearm Owner’s Card — FOID — restriction, which meant I had to wait until the People’s Revolutionary Council had okayed me to own a gun aaaaargh).

Anyway, I was always conscious that as a non-citizen, I was in essence a guest in this lovely country — a guest, by the way, who was already paying an obscene amount of taxes despite having no citizen’s rights, but I just considered it a fair payment in return for being able to live here.

And as a guest, I had to mind my Ps and Qs, because if I didn’t, there was always a chance (I feared) that America would decide that I wasn’t worth the trouble, and kick my ass back across the Atlantic.

Which is what POTUS apparently plans to do, an action which I support wholeheartedly.  If these foreigners can’t behave themselves, send them back to Shitholia without hesitation.

Righting Wrongs, So To Speak

The hits just keep on coming:

President Trump will sign an executive order to reinstate thousands of troops kicked out of the military by Joe Biden for refusing the Covid vaccine.

Trump vowed to reinstate the troops “unjustly expelled from our military for objecting to the Covid vaccine mandate” during his inauguration speech last week.

Approximately 8,000 troops were discharged because of Biden’s Covid vaccine mandate. Some troops sued over the mandate and faced backlash.

The troops will be reinstated with full back pay and benefits.

Welcome back, boys and girls.

The 80:20 Beginning

Many conservatives have queried the pace of illegal immigrant deportation recently, saying that the few hundred or so deportations made so far are not going to make a dent in the massive illegal immigrant population.

That’s true, but we need to be mindful of the “80:20” approximate rule of thumb:  that 20% of the population, in any given activity, account for 80% of that activity.  (We all know that in the supermarket business, for example, the “top” 20% of a store’s customers — in spending terms — account for about 78% of total sales;  less well-known is that those 20% also generate about 93% of a store’s total gross profit.  They are the people who keep the store’s doors open.)

And it’s pretty much the same with criminal behavior.  When NYfC mayor Rudi Giuliani first went after crime in that benighted city, his “Broken Windows” strategy –arresting petty criminals as fast as they could be arrested — was at first a source of derision.  That derision ceased when it became apparent that crime fell precipitously because those “petty” criminals accounted for a disproportionate percentage of total crime.

And here’s a pointer from the very first round of ICE arrests:

Fox News witnessed ICE Boston make eight arrests, including multiple MS-13, Interpol Red Notices, murder and rape suspects, and a volatile Haitian gang member with 18 convictions in recent years who told our cameras that he “ain’t going back to Haiti” and “f— Trump, Biden forever!”

Note:  just one fucking mope had been convicted eighteen times over a couple of years.  (Exactly why this asshole wasn’t still in jail for Crime #1, #2 or #3 is a topic for another time. #3StrikesRule)  If ever there was a candidate for the Pinochet Example, this would be one.

And I doubt that too many people in his home country would shed a tear at his disappearance either.

In any event, going after the most egregious offenders is not going to affect the total illegal immigrant number — but it sure as hell is going to improve public safety.

And by the way, the article makes it plain that in going after the worst first, there will be “collateral” arrests and deportations as well.  Of course it will;  criminals tend to band together (e.g. MS-13), so by all means toss their asses onto the one-way C-135 flights as well.

More to the point is that foreign criminals are soon going to become aware that the U.S. is not going to be the soft target that it used to be, and they may be deterred from coming here to set up, for example, burglary gangs.

Keep it going, guys.  Gooder and harder, to quote Insty.