SOCIALISM: “I doubt that anywhere in the world, except in Cuba, there exists a better health system than this one.”

Said President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, where “Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left. At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water. ‘It is like something from the 19th century,’ said Dr. Christian Pino, a surgeon at the hospital.”

Well, to be fair, socialism is a 19th century ideology.

UH OH: As Polls Tighten, Unease Grips Dowager Empress’s Chappaqua Throne Room.

GOOD FOR HIM: Obama Blasts Political Correctness, ‘Fragile’ Students in Rutgers Speech: “Don’t feel like you got to shut your ears because you’re too fragile and somebody might offend your sensibilities,” said Obama.

GLEEFUL-SOUNDING HEADLINES ANNOUNCING THE END OF WHITE AMERICA MAY PLAY A ROLE IN TRUMP’S RISE, TOO: Donald Trump and the Twilight of White America. “The grievances of middle-class white Americans are not make-believe, nor is their nostalgia misplaced. The 1950s was a remarkable decade for blue-collar male workers.”

‘AUDIT THE FED’ BILL MAKING PROGRESS IN CONGRESS: Federal Reserve officials may yet have to cough up a lot more information about their activities when auditors from the Government Accounting Agency come calling. A measure sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky, greatly expands GAO’s auditing authority over the Fed, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has scheduled a mark-up session on Massie’s proposal for Tuesday. Mark-up sessions are the among the last steps before proposals go to the House floor for final votes. A similar measure failed last year in the Senate but Sen. Rand Paul, another Kentucky Republican, introduced it again this year.

CALLING THE INSTA-FAITHFUL — BULLETS AND BOURBON 2016 NOW OPEN FOR REGISTRATION! We posted a bit about Bullets and Bourbon in 2015 and last year’s event turned out to be not only a huge success, but a gathering of the Insta-faithful. So I hope y’all (I’m a Texan now, I can say that) don’t mind if I take a moment to announce…. Bullets and Bourbon 2016 is open for registration.

The B&B “special sauce” has always been that you don’t just get to hear Glenn and our other speakers, but you get to really spend time over lunch, dinner, and going out and shooting stuff (or lounging around and solving the world’s problems) with them. And of course the venue, Rough Creek Lodge is amazing in and of itself. Please visit our revamped website at www.bullets-and-bourbon.com and our Instagram page, which will be gathering up a lot more photos from last year.

And saving the best for last, our current lineup for speakers this year is: Glenn Reynolds, Ed Morrissey, James Lileks, Roger L. Simon, Steve Green, Robert Farago, and Mark Rippetoe. Dr. Helen will also be there, as will I, to meet, greet, zip line, eat, drink, and generally join the festivities.

WHY AIRPORT SECURITY takes so long.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 2 Yellowstone visitors reportedly take bison calf for a ride in SUV.

Park rangers ticketed the pair, a man and his son who were visiting from another country, after they pulled up to a ranger station Monday with the animal in the vehicle, according to the news website. They apparently thought the calf was cold.

“They were demanding to speak with a ranger,” Karen Richardson told the news website. “They were seriously worried that the calf was freezing and dying.”

The calf and, remarkably enough, the tourists are all fine.

GAY PASTOR WHO CLAIMED AUSTIN WHOLE FOODS WROTE “LOVE WINS, FAG” ON CAKE DROPS LAWSUIT:

Whole Foods actually announced the lawsuit a month ago, claiming all along that Brown had tried to run a scam against the chain. They released the video just a day after Brown’s tearful press conference that showed that Brown had seen the cake before purchasing it. Oh, and one other thing … that bakery employee who decorated the cake turns out to be “a member of the LGBT community,” too. D’oh!

* * * * * * *

In retrospect, it seems odd that anyone would have bought this three-layer hoax at all. Whole Foods concentrates on the urban, upscale market that would be most turned off by the kind of derogatory slur that Brown accused their bakery of leaving on his cake. It seems beyond stupid to have tried a hoax like this in a well-capitalized chain that would have point-of-sale video systems. And finally, even the picture itself was a giveaway. The slur was clearly done separately from the rest of the decoration.

What was the point of this exercise, anyway? Perhaps Brown wanted to make himself the new leader for activists in the Austin community. Instead, he’s now the latest in a long line of hate-crime hoaxers, a trend that has gotten so bad that it might make for a bigger market for lawyers than actual hate crimes. Whole Foods will probably drop their lawsuit* now that Brown has publicly admitted his fraud, but they shouldn’t. And Brown should be banished into oblivion too, especially by his church and his allies, but that probably won’t happen either.

“What was the point of this exercise, anyway?” To respond to Ed Morrissey’s query, perhaps a detail reported last month at Austin-based NBC affiliate KXAN holds a possible clue: “KXAN obtained a copy of the lawsuit from the Travis County Clerk’s Office claiming Brown defaulted on a $27,000 student loan. The petition was filed March 11, 2016 by a student loan trust, and said Brown stopped paying on the student loan issued for the 2007-2008 school year at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania.”

*Which they did.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SUGAR.

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BURLINGTON COLLEGE FEELS THE BERN! BREAKING: Burlington College Closes Due To “Crushing Weight of Debt” Acquired By Jane Sanders. And note the confluence of players and events:

Burlington College announced today that it will close on May 27 after it found itself unable to recover from “the crushing weight of the debt” incurred under Jane O’Meara Sanders, the college’s former president and wife of Bernie Sanders.

At the end of 2010, Ms. Sanders took out $10 million in loans on behalf of Burlington College to purchase a 32-acre swathe of land from the Roman Catholic diocese, which put the land up for sale to help cover the costs of a $17 million sexual-abuse settlement.

Mark Steyn, Theodore Darlymple, Rod Dreher et al, your next columns just wrote themselves.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN TWEET THEIR BODKINS: NYT describes Anthony Weiner as ‘Almost Shakespearean.’

ARRIVE RESTED: SleepBus runs overnight between SF and LA for $48. “A new type of bus service is starting up to offer travelers a new way to get between two of California’s largest cities. It’s called the SleepBus, but the company doesn’t actually use a bus; it’s a Volvo truck with individual sleep pods on board. Each pod has an electric socket (so you can power and charge your devices while under way) and there’s on-board wifi, desks should you prefer to sit up and work, coffee and tea, and room for three bags and even a bicycle in the luggage compartment. The whole trim takes about seven hours, which is a bit longer than the typical hour-and-twenty-minute flight between LAX and SFO, even once you take into account extra time for check-in, clearing security, and transit. But the SleepBus travels overnight, so you leave one city at 11 pm and arrive at the other end by 6 am – plus they’ll even let you stay on board until 7:30 if you want to sleep in a little.”

CONGRESSMAN: CLASSIFIED DETAILS OF IRAN’S TREATMENT OF U.S. SAILORS WILL SHOCK NATION:

Rep. Randy Forbes (R., Va.) told the Free Beacon in an interview that the Obama administration is still keeping details of the maritime incident under wraps. It could be a year or longer before the American public receives a full accounting of the incident, in which several U.S. sailors were abducted at gunpoint by the Iranian military.

If the hard drive containing the data isn’t “accidentally” struck by a sledgehammer in the interim, that is.

I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Probiotics have no real effect on healthy adults, study finds.

SUPREME COURT TO PARTIES IN “LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR” — WORK IT OUT YOURSELVES.

“So this isn’t a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs as much as it is a signal that the road has run out for pushing nuns, priests, and ministers to pay for contraception, or to certify contraception coverage for those they employ. Given the non-issue that access to contraception is in the US, a rational decision on the lack of compelling interest by the Supreme Court would have been the best outcome. Considering the status of the court today, this may have been the best realistic outcome,” Ed Morrissey adds.

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COOL CLOCK, AHMED: Al-Qaeda in New ‘Inspire’ Issue: Clock Boy ‘Even Inspired Us in a Way.’

THE UNBELIEVABLE REALITY of the impossible hyperloop.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Hatsune Miku, the Animated Vocaloid Who Headlined Dallas, Should Run for President:

When the Fort Worth resident she says “it,” she doesn’t mean the avatar, she means Miku’s devoted fan base. The real show here is not the 3D anime vixen twirling on stage, but the solidarity of the fan base, which knows every beat, outfit, virtual sidekick and glow stick color change. A 3D animation brought these disparate people together to listen to music with lyrics in a language most can’t understand.

Enthusiasm, mass appeal, razor-sharp marketing and crowd manipulation — this Hatsune Miku is too good for pop entertainment.  She should run for president.

Like any epic talent, Miku came from humble beginnings. Her origin story is rooted in music industry software, not talent recruitment.

Yamaha developed the vocaloid concept in the early 2000s. The idea was simple: Instead of paying vocal artists to sing, what if researchers could make a synthesizer that could approximate a human voice? This “singer in a box” could open up new creative venues, especially in the world of synth-pop.

Here’s how it works, more or less. A voice actor provides samples of sounds for a digital library. Users type in the lyrics and melody, and the voice follows along. The reason this doesn’t sound like the computer from WarGames is because the software includes a Synthesis Engine that coverts pitch, manipulates timbre and adjusts timing. The software also adds stress to pronunciations and vibrato, but it can’t approximate a shout. (Grunge is safe from vocaloids. For now.)

Called it — right down to the use of Yamaha’s Vocaloid — back in 2004 at Tech Central Station, in an article titled: “The Making of a Pop Star, 2010.”

THIS IS WHY CHINESE MAKERS LIKE TO STAMP GERMAN TRADE NAMES ON THEIR PRODUCTS: German-Made Bearings Blow Away China’s in This Simple Test.

WHEN IN DOUBT, DROP THE COW: How to Make your RPG Players’ Lives Easier Without Them Knowing It.

DISPLACEMENT THEORY: NPR, NEW YORK TIMES PROMOTE ‘AMERICA’S FIRST CLIMATE CHANGE REFUGEES:.’

In The New York Times on May 3, reporters Coral Davenport and Campbell Robertson wrote an article headlined “Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees’”. They asserted these were the just the first of many, even as some resist the payoff:

In January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states to help communities adapt to climate change, by building stronger levees, dams and drainage systems.

“We’re going to lose all our heritage, all our culture,” lamented Chief Albert Naquin of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, the tribe to which most Isle de Jean Charles residents belong. “It’s all going to be history.”

The Times story acknowledged despite the headline that local flooding has been exacerbated by man-made actions that aren’t about the warming: “Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island, and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands’ sediments.”

But they quickly added “What little remains will eventually be inundated as burning fossil fuels melt polar ice sheets and drive up sea levels, projected the National Climate Assessment.”

To place this article into context, over the last year, we’ve seen endless and often quite terrifying headlines of Islamic refugees flooding Europe. Not coincidentally, we also know that Obama — and wide swatches of his operatives with bylines — believe that fighting Islamic terrorism is an unnecessary evil, that Americans can “absorb” the next terrorist attacks, that Iran should have a nuclear weapon, etc. The Times article quoted above at NewsBusters this past weekend reads like a textbook example of a different kind of displacement theory defined by columnist Julia Gorin in the Christian Science Monitor a decade ago:

It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

That’s why in 2004 we got “The Day After Tomorrow” – so we could worry about junk science that may or may not kill us in 1,000 years instead of the people who really are trying to kill us the day after tomorrow.

And once again we have language from the war on terror, and war in general, being adopted to push the greens’ crony socialism and concomitant war on energy.

Speaking of which, here’s your exit quote, via today’s Washington Examiner: “Navy secretary: Green energy saves Marines’ lives.”

What an enviro-hoss. He’s the Lee Ermey of global warming. But aren’t they all?

RELIGIOUS FATWA DECLARED AGAINST AUSTRALIAN INFIDEL COLUMNIST. DEATH THREATS ALREADY FLOWING FREELY ON INTERNET.

(H/T: Dave Burge.)