Daily review 18/04/2025

Written By: - Date published: 4:27 pm, April 18th, 2025 - 20 comments
Categories: Daily review - Tags:

Daily review is also your post.

This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.

The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).

Don’t forget to be kind to each other …

20 comments on “Daily review 18/04/2025 ”

  1. weka 1
    18 April 2025 at 4:28 pm

    sorry, only just realised that Open Mike didn't go up today. I've pushed Daily Review out early to make up.

    Reply
  2. weka 2
    18 April 2025 at 4:31 pm

    anyhoo, I was about to ask if there is good NZ side analysis of the fall out from the US shitshow.

    Things like this popping up in my twitter feed, but I haven't had the time to go look for anything more in depth,

    Many truckers I've spoken with don't realize how quickly container volumes have collapsed. Starting in May, port freight out of California will be almost eliminated. Its going to be a bloodbath in dray, followed by intermodal, and then a collapse in I-20 & I-40 trucking.

    https://x.com/FreightAlley/status/1913035787634901263

    And this thread with more detail, and observation that most people (in the US) don't know what is about to happen.

    https://x.com/TajSean/status/1913033422978625988

    In what ways will NZ be affected?

    Reply
    • Graeme 2.1
      18 April 2025 at 7:56 pm

      Border clearance for small parcels, online shopping etc, has totally collapsed at most US ports of entry. It started in February when Trump tried to remove de minimus, and has compounded this month with the tariffs. Everyone in US has leapt online and bought up large to try and beat the tariffs and removal of de minimus.

      https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/27/economy/trumps-tariffs-delivery-delays/index.html

      We've got a consignment of carvings a customer bought last month that's been sitting on the US border at JFK since 5/4, normally it would have been cleared the same day and on it's way to the customer with delivery a day or so later. USPS is normally very efficient. Our NZ Post account manager is tearing her hair out, everything is held up.

      We're just a small business that sends a few consignments a month to US, and loosing that ability will hurt because they are generally good ones, but that's also a few sales a month that our artists miss out on as well.

      There will be a backlash when American consumers realise that it's actually them that pay the tariff, and it starts at $0.01 How Trump is going to recover from the bare faced lie that US consumers won't pay the tariffs I don't know, but his supporters don't seem to care.

      Reply
      • Bearded Git 2.1.1
        18 April 2025 at 8:26 pm

        That is really interesting to hear somebody suffering at the coal face Graeme. I hadn't thought about this.

        There must be hundreds of thousands of small businesses around the world in a similar bind. The kind of people one would have thought the Republicans relied on for votes.

        Reply
        • Graeme 2.1.1.1
          18 April 2025 at 9:15 pm

          Well the hundreds of thousands of small business around the world can't vote in the US elections and the MAGAs don't give a shit about them, destroying those businesses is the objective. They want to move that business to the US.

          The US consumer is going to be a different story. When they can't go onto AliExpress and get the gizmo they want for a fraction of the price in the store down the road there might be a bit of hissing. I saw something that it's something like 80 777 freighters a day coming into US from Asia, that a lot of parcels, and a lot of pissed off consumers when it all goes to poo.

          Reply
      • weka 2.1.2
        18 April 2025 at 10:47 pm

        How do you see a backlash happening? At the midterms?

        Reply
  3. joe90 3
    18 April 2025 at 7:01 pm

    When Nazis have iPhones.

    //

    A row of Latino men with shaved heads and stoic expressions wearing identical white boxer shorts stand behind thick metal bars. In the back fellow prisoners sit cross-legged on large shelves that look like they’re meant for boxed furniture at IKEA, but are instead being used for humans. Outside the bars, free, is a white man in a blazer and collared shirt, his arm stretched out to hold the camera being used to take the photo of him and the men. The image is grotesque. And now it is history.

    If you’re not familiar with the names Riley Moore and Jason Smith, don’t worry; I wasn’t either until yesterday. They’re Republican Congressmen from West Virginia and Missouri, respectively, who took a trip to El Salvador on Tuesday where they were given a tour of Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a two-year old maximum security prison. Each posted photos to their social media pages after the visit, gloating about their access.

    […]

    (Left: Spc. Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib. Right: Rep. Moore at CECOT.)

    Once the congressmen’s photos from CECOT went viral, many drew comparisons to the prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib and subsequent photos released during the Bush administration’s War on Terror. For those who don’t recall, the images first published by CBS News in 2004 show US military police posing and smiling in front of Iraqi prisoners who they’d been abusing and humiliating. In one photo, a GI makes a thumbs up while pointing at naked prisoners with bags over their heads; Rep. Moore’s thumbs up at CECOT had disturbing echoes.

    But to the eye of Wesley Morgan, a freelance journalist who covered the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and author of The Hardest Place, there are fundamental differences between the situations that make the comparison not entirely apt.

    “When US soldiers posed with prisoners at Abu Ghraib, they did so with the expectation that no one outside their unit would ever see those photos—they knew they were committing a crime for which they would likely be held accountable if the photos got out,” Morgan told me Wednesday. “It was not intended for public consumption.” Whereas the photos posted by the Congressmen are “being posted straight to social media, unabashedly.”

    https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/selfies-cecot-el-salvador-abu-ghraib

    Reply
  5. tWig 5
    18 April 2025 at 7:58 pm

    This Guardian Long Read (I read thevtranscript), gives a backgrounder to Kahane, a US Jew born in the 1930s, who developed the zero-sum game that Israel is playing out in the Middle East today. He started off in NY as virulently anti-Black, moved further into ultra-Zionism, including involvement in a jewish group that planted bombs in the US to encourage Soviet USSR to allow Jews to migrate to Israel. Chased by the FBI, he then migrated to Israel, where he tried politics to spread his views.

    'From the moment he arrived in Israel in 1971, Kahane preached a shocking mixture of violent, exterminationist ethnonationalism and apocalyptic religious fundamentalism. Kahane agitated for the expulsion of Palestinians from all the territories under Israel’s control; the party he founded, Kach, was Israel’s first to make the idea its central policy demand. He envisioned “a state of Jewish totality” in which all matters would be decided according to his idiosyncratic interpretation of Jewish law. During his brief tenure as a legislator, he called for banning marriage between Jews and Arabs and criminalising sex between Jews and gentiles. He proposed that insulting Judaism be made illegal and Sabbath observance be made compulsory. He demanded the ethno-religious segregation of the country’s institutions, even its public beaches.'

    His ideas were considered toxic 40 years ago, but became popular as part of a class divide, and have been taken up by Israel since 2010, pushed by Netanyahu's coalition with far-right parties.

    Reply
  6. joe90 6
    18 April 2025 at 8:30 pm

    So the richest people in the world who own a network of global surveillance satellites want to build and own another network of satellites equipped with lasers and missiles that they will rent to the US military.

    What could possibly go wrong.

    /

    Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part of Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, six people familiar with the matter said.

    Musk’s rocket and satellite company is partnering with the software maker Palantir and the drone builder Anduril on a bid to build key parts of Golden Dome, the sources said, which has drawn significant interest from the technology sector’s burgeoning base of defense startups.

    […]

    SpaceX and Musk have declined to comment on whether Musk is involved in any of the discussions or negotiations involving federal contracts with his businesses.
    The Pentagon did not respond to detailed questions from Reuters, only saying it will deliver “options to the president for his decision in line with the executive order and in alignment with White House guidance and timelines”.

    The White House, SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril also did not respond to questions.

    In an unusual twist, SpaceX has proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a “subscription service” in which the government would pay for access to the technology, rather than own the system outright.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/17/spacex-golden-dome-musk-trump

    Reply
  7. Bearded Git 7
    18 April 2025 at 8:45 pm

    The Graun is reporting a Trump state visit for the UK in September.

    That should put half a million on the streets at least.

    Reply
    • alwyn 7.1
      19 April 2025 at 1:13 pm

      I'm sure that it will be more than that. The largest crowd ever in Britain is supposed to have been 600,000 at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. As Trump claimed in 1917 that the crowd at his inaugural was the largest ever I'm sure he will tell us that the crowd at his appearance will be the largest in British history so he will tell us that it was more than 600,000.

      He won't notice that they are all booing rather than cheering his appearance of course.

      Reply
      • alwyn 7.1.1
        19 April 2025 at 2:56 pm

        Repeat 100 times …

        2017 not 1917. 2017 not 1917. 2017 not 1917 ……

        Reply
        • Bearded Git 7.1.1.1
          21 April 2025 at 9:20 am

          I didn't think Bob Dylan (or my brother I think) was that old.

          Weren't the anti-Iraq war crowds more than 600K? You know, the ones that Bliar ignored.

          Reply
          • alwyn 7.1.1.1.1
            21 April 2025 at 9:53 am

            You are apparently correct. The Police say 750,000, the BBC 1,000,000 and the Guardian 1,500,000.

            My research was very cursory. I just googled largest crowd in UK history and it told me the Isle of Wight.

            Reply
  8. SPC 8
    18 April 2025 at 10:46 pm

    China explained.

    And why this is increasingly relevant – Trump will lose a trade war with China.

    https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/360659303/trump-has-already-lost-his-trade-war-against-china

    Thus the era of the 1945 order, aka America leadership, is coming to an end.

    The GOP as a Trump dependency has abdicated. It has not just enabled the fall of the March 4 1789 republic to build their Christian dominionism new world order it has accepted oligarchy as its preferred order of government.

    It allies to Russia against the EU, because Putin has made the Orthodox Church a state church, all so Valdimor of the Kremlin can reign in Kiev as leader of Eastern Christendom. Vance explains it all, as a requirement of the EU to submit to the new Christian hegemony.

    A classic protection racket scenario.

    American protection from the Russian threat, but only if they adopt the right wing strong man order of rule.

    Tyrant and church – the pre democratic order.

    The American war against the left wing threat (Cold War era) now extends to a war against secular (social) democracy itself.

    This is the nature of fascism.

    Reply

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