Ann Bridges

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

How long have we been ignoring China's threat? Link to in-depth interview on what I observed on the ground in Silicon Valley inspiring me to write Rare Mettle, and catapulting me into the world of critical minerals and how capitalism can beat communism.
https://t.co/g2naVwAUUm

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

Spot on! Thanks, @CaliforniaGlobe @katygrimes
Newsom’s Deep Financial Ties to Pentagon-Blacklisted Chinese Military Company https://t.co/50ZbtyoeMm

[Gordon G. Chang @GordonGChang]

We should move to Taiwan’s system: 100% paper ballots counted in public. Add in voter ID and you have clean elections.

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

@PhilWMagness The ability to avoid the draft via student deferment in the 60s led to advanced degree holders that then qualified for professorship and then tenure. Predictable

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

@oldstatemark One of the changes across the country is centralizing everything related to voting. Counties are the administrator, but often systems dictated by state. In CA, for example, state DMV registers voter, but County is responsible for clean rolls. There are probably other issues, too.

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

@KobeissiLetter This is the real reason. They need to raise capital to fund the IPOs. Also all this new supply releases some of the existing pressure of demand of lesser tech stocks by these ETFs & other funds.

[John Carney @carney]

Trump Boom: America Created 172,000 Jobs In May, Nearly Twice As Many as Expected https://t.co/HiyoY8Driw via @BreitbartNews

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

Great article, worth the read and the deep thought involved.

[Russell Winter @MFG_SMB]

Manufacturing X People - If you want to see more manufacturing on your feed or connect with others who are doing manufacturing things, check out the list I’ve been building for a year.

The May update to Manufacturing X - Roll Call is out.

Comment on Roll Call posts with what you do in 5 words or less to get added to this Directory + this list ->

RT appreciated!

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

Excellent summary, and risk/reward setting we've lived through before. Thanks @carney
Breitbart Business Digest: Is the AI Boom Becoming Too Much of a Good Thing? https://t.co/KSVk7qavQ4 via @BreitbartNews

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

@Bob_916 @SteveHiltonx It is. Now take a step back and realize how much power is given to that one elected official--corporate filings and business registrations, voters and elections, lobbying oversight--any wonder those 3 are intertwined with a lot of corruption?

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

@JohnLeePettim13 @Silentbutstron1 How are your apple trees handling your passing year(s)? Enjoy the celebration, and hoping you have many more!

[Tony Seruga @TonySeruga]

🏭 The Garden Grove Crisis: Overview

The GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove, California, has been a toxic catastrophe in slow motion. This plant has been processing aerospace components with known hazardous materials — hexavalent chromium, cadmium, and other heavy metals — for decades. The core allegation is that systematic neglect of environmental safety protocols has exposed workers and the surrounding community to dangerous levels of carcinogenic compounds.

Hexavalent chromium (the Erin Brockovich chemical) is no joke. It’s a known carcinogen that damages DNA, causes lung cancer, and leaches into groundwater with devastating persistence.

The facility’s crisis came to a head with reports of:

- Improper waste disposal practices spanning years
- Workers reporting chronic health issues consistent with heavy metal exposure
- Regulatory inspections found significant violations
- Community groundwater contamination concerns
- Gavin Newsom’s government turned a blind eye. Was it an appeasement to Xi Jinping and China?

🇬🇧 The Melrose Industries Connection
This is where it starts to get ugly from a national security and accountability standpoint.

Melrose Industries — a British private equity-style turnaround firm — acquired GKN in a bitterly contested $10 billion hostile takeover in 2018. This was the original GKN, a company founded in 1759 that literally supplied cannons to the British military during the Napoleonic Wars and built Spitfires in WWII. A cornerstone of British industrial heritage, gutted by financial engineers.

Melrose’s business model is well-documented and brutally simple:

1. Acquire undervalued industrial companies (often with hostile bids)

2. Slash costs aggressively — R&D, maintenance, environmental compliance, workforce

3. Extract maximum cash flow

4. Sell the stripped-down entity for a profit within 3-5 years

They did this with previous acquisitions like Elster Group and Nortek. GKN was just their biggest target.

The Garden Grove situation is a textbook case of what happens when a short-term-profit-maximizing financial owner takes over a complex industrial operation with serious legacy environmental liabilities. Environmental compliance, worker safety, and long-term remediation planning are cost centers — exactly the line items that get hollowed out under the Melrose model.

🇨🇳 The China Angle

This is where the national security dimension gets genuinely alarming.

GKN Aerospace is not some peripheral parts supplier. They manufacture critical components for:

- F-35 Lightning II (Lockheed Martin)
- F/A-18 Super Hornet (Boeing)
- CH-53K King Stallion (Sikorsky)
- Multiple commercial aircraft platforms (Airbus A350, Boeing 787)
- Engine components for Rolls-Royce, GE, and Pratt & Whitney

Now consider the ownership and supply chain structure:

Melrose Industries itself is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, but the deeper concern is about where GKN Aerospace's supply chains, joint ventures, and customer relationships extend. GKN Aerospace has:

- A significant joint venture in China — GKN Aerospace has partnered with Chinese state-owned and state-linked aerospace entities for years, including work on the COMAC C919 (China's homegrown narrow-body competitor to the 737/A320)

- Technology transfer agreements that involve sharing manufacturing processes, material science, and quality control methodologies with Chinese partners

- Supply chain integration where Chinese-sourced materials and components flow into GKN's global operations — including potentially into US military supply chains

The F-35 connection makes this especially sensitive. GKN produces the F-35’s canopy, among other components. The idea that a British holding company — itself under pressure to maximize returns — might be cutting corners on environmental compliance at a facility that feeds into the most advanced fighter program on the planet, while simultaneously maintaining deep joint venture relationships with Chinese aerospace entities, is the kind of multi-layered security concern that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

How the f*ck is this allowed?

🔥 The Larger Pattern

This isn’t just about one facility.

The GKN/Melrose situation exemplifies a broader rot in Western defense industrial policy:

- Hostile foreign ownership of critical defense suppliers with minimal CFIUS-style scrutiny (because the UK is an "ally")

- Financial engineering that prioritizes short-term extraction over long-term capability and safety

- Environmental externalization, where cleanup costs get dumped on taxpayers while profits go to London and the Caymans

- Technology leakage risks through joint ventures with adversary nations that get treated as routine “commercial” arrangements

The Garden Grove toxic crisis is the physical manifestation of this financialization. When you strip out maintenance budgets, defer environmental remediation, and cut compliance staffing to hit quarterly EBITDA targets, you get hexavalent chromium in the groundwater and sick workers.

The fact that this is happening at a facility tied to the F-35 supply chain while the parent company’s broader network extends deep into China’s aerospace sector should be setting off every alarm bell in Washington!

Instead, Melrose just announced they’re planning to spin off or sell GKN Aerospace in 2025-2026 — the classic “strip, flip, and walk away” endgame, leaving the environmental liabilities for someone else to clean up.

It’s a case study in why treating defense industrial base assets as financial instruments rather than strategic capabilities is a slow-motion national security disaster.

Now, Newsom and the California Uniparty legislature’s cozy relationship with the CCP should make more sense.

🌐 The China Dimension — Why This Goes Beyond Environmental Crime

The joint venture structure is the sleeper issue here:

- GKN Aerospace + SAMC (COMAC subsidiary) — Joint venture to manufacture composite horizontal tail planes for the C919, China's direct competitor to the 737 and A320
- GKN Aerospace + AVIC + COMAC — 2020 aerostructures joint venture
- 12 manufacturing locations across China, 5,000 employees — Deep integration into China's aerospace ecosystem

The concern isn’t just that a British holding company owns a defense supplier. It’s that the same corporate entity simultaneously:

- Produces F-35 canopies for the US military

- Partners with Chinese state-owned aerospace companies on advanced composite manufacturing

- Is apparently cutting corners on maintenance to the point of near-catastrophic failure

The intelligence community should be asking: was the deferred maintenance just standard Melrose cost-stripping, or was there any external factor at play?

A facility producing military aircraft components that suffers a catastrophic failure — whether accidental or otherwise — is a national security event.

@realDonaldTrump @POTUS @VP @JDVance
@USTreasury @SecScottBessent @DCSAgov @SecWar @PeteHegseth @DeptofWar @OASWIBP
@EPAregion9 @EPA @OSHA_DOL @FBI @HASCRepublicans @HASCDemocrats @GOPoversight
@OversightDems @SECGov @TheJusticeDept @DAGToddBlanche @CIADirector @CIA

[Daniel Rau @drauwsy]

I’m afraid Silicon Valley is going to have learn that all of Bell Labs’ innovations were only made possible because domestic gallium, germanium, hafnium, zirconium, niobium, indium, and rare earth mining + processing

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

@drauwsy Yep, been saying this for years. An entire generation+ only learned software, simply assumed hardware existed for them to build upon, without learning the underlying basics.

[Blume Industries CEO Balding 大老板 @BaldingsWorld]

This is away from the headlines and most people won't notice but this and projects linked to it are absolutely vital to decouple us from China. Boring. No headlines. Absolutely vital

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

@HurricaneAddict We have very little understanding or coverage of volcanic activity under the Pacific Ocean in the Ring of Fire. We feel earthquakes, but the Tonga explosion was a wake up call, largely ignored. The earth is moving under the fish, not just our feet.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.

Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.

Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.

Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.

Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.

Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.

C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.

Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.

Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.

Alors pardon. Et au travail.

[Breitbart News @BreitbartNews]

.@SecretaryBurgum tells @mboyle1: We'll graduate 36,000 lawyers in America this year. We'll graduate about 300 mining and metallurgical candidates. If you know anybody that wants to have a sure-fire, long-term career where everybody that's in that field is retiring because they're all Baby Boomers, go into that.

[Ann Bridges @ABridgesAuthor]

Exposing The Great Green Grift - https://t.co/7HN3Fg3ruj

[Joel Pollak @joelpollak]

The @ScottAdamsSays School announces the sad news that Scott’s ex-wife and caretaker, Shelly Adams, passed away recently. The news was withheld until now at the family’s request. She was an extraordinary person. https://t.co/sDLTII1mJp