JUST A DASH OF LSD. AND ANOTHER DASH OF LSD. BAM:  Salvador Dalí’s Eccentric Cookbook Is Being Reissued for the First Time in Over 40 Years.

YEAH. BECAUSE THE CURRENT ART WORLD IS A VEHICLE FOR MONEY LAUNDERING AND CORRUPTION. IT’S WHO THEY ARE, IT’S WHAT THEY DO. WELL THAT AND FUTILE, STUPID ATTEMPTS TO SHOCK THE SQUARES:  Disgraced Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s Art World Connections.

THIS IS DEDICATED TO SQUID-MEMBER (WHAT? YOU THOUGHT “SQUAD” WAS A THING? NO. THEY’RE A SQUID QUARTET. UNDER THE HUMAN SKIN THEY’RE ALL OLD-ONES. THIS IS WHY NONE OF THEM HAS ANY ACTUAL IDEA WHAT HUMANS FEEL OR THINK.) AYANNA PRESSLEY SHE WHO THINKS THOUGHTS AND MINDS HAVE “COLORS.”

FROM MY ENORMOUSLY TALENTED FRIEND, SYNOVA, WHO DOES CARTOONS:

LOOK, ONE OF THESE LIZARDS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER:  Between Lizards.

TOM FRIEDMAN REVIEWS RECENT EVENTS: ‘Trump’s Going to Get Re-elected, Isn’t He?’ “I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.”

So he’s a week or two behind.

Plus: “Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs.” The problem is, they don’t have any of those.

AT AMAZON, Happy Prime Day! For a few more hours.

HARSH, BUT FAIR: “Warren is a shrewish, nagging middle school principal; Sanders is a crazy dude who wandered in off the street and smells faintly of vomit and patchouli; Harris is a nasty and hectoring backstabber who rifles through the overcoats in the den looking for wallets; and Buttigieg looks like a cartoon character who wandered in from another dimension. And the rest of them? Even weirder and dumber.”

JEW-HATERS GOTTA STICK TOGETHER: Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke Heaps Praise On Rep. Ilhan Omar.

UPDATE: A friend on Facebook writes: “Four months ago, the House majority couldn’t pass an unqualified condemnation of anti-Semitism. Today, the same House majority condemns racism quite easily. Whatever could account for the change of heart? At the center of the delegitimization of the elites is not a popular conviction that they’re wrong. They may be right, and often are, and are often known to be. Their fatal flaw is what everyone intuitively understands: even when they are right, they don’t mean it.”

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

LINDSEY 2.0: HE’S NOT WRONG. Lindsey Graham Calls Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Freshmen Democrats ‘Communists’: ‘They Hate Our Country.’

Leftists hate two things: Patriotism, and having their patriotism questioned. . . .

FLASHBACK: RX-8, 6-YEAR REVIEW.

FRUITS OF THE DEMOCRATS’ VIOLENT EXTREMIST RHETORIC: Vashon Island man sent manifesto before he was killed at detention center. “More than a year ago, Van Spronsen was accused of attacking a police officer during an immigrants rally that turned violent outside the same detention center, some of it captured on cell phone video.”

WE’RE DOOMED:  Math teachers go off the deep end.  (With my usual coda.)

OPEN THREAD: Make it happen.

PHONY BETOMANIA HAS BITTEN THE DUST: Campaign Death Watch: Beto’s Fundraising Craters in Second Quarter.

RIP: Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens dies at 99.

“A Ford appointee, Stevens retired in 2010 as one of the Court’s most liberal members. He became increasingly outspoken after his retirement, calling for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment and abolishing the death penalty,” Jan Crawford of CBS tweets.

ARGUMENT: Low-Profile Tires Are Ruining Modern Cars. Our tire guy said something like that to the Insta-Wife recently.

HEH:

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Report: Planned Parenthood president ousted for refusing to use trans-inclusive language. “They kicked her out because [Dr. Leana Wen], a certified MD wouldn’t say trans can’t have abortions… holy god.”

NO. NEXT QUESTION: Does Ilhan Omar Speak The Words Of A Patriot Who Loves America? (Video.)

“WE LIVE IN AN AGE IN WHICH IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO BE FUNNY. THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE, NO MATTER HOW LUDICROUS, THAT WILL NOT PROMPTLY BE ENACTED BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES, PROBABLY BY SOMEONE WELL KNOWN,” Tom Wolfe wrote in 1989. He might have added, or by a very well known institution.

Here’s the popular “xkcd” Internet-themed cartoon series on YouTube commenters from 2007:

Here’s the New York Daily News’ Twitter feed today:

Meanwhile, WTOP, an ABC-affiliated DC-based FM news station gets the vapors over the problematic origins of manned space flight: “DC news outlet pulls feature crediting Nazi rocket scientist for Apollo 11 moon landing.”

Washington radio station WTOP apologized Tuesday after pulling a story that commended Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

The story removal and apology came after the news outlet described von Braun as a “brilliant German-American rocket scientist.”

“After careful consideration, WTOP has decided to remove the article from our website. This story did not meet WTOP’s standards and should not have appeared on any of our platforms,” WTOP wrote in a tweet to its more than 280,000 followers.

The historic origins of rocketry include some horrific elements which von Braun was in the center of, not least of which, using slave labor to build the V-1s and V-2s that he aimed at London. But after WWII, he was one of the chief architects of the American program to land men on the moon, an achievement near-universally praised in 1969, from figures as disparate as Walter Cronkite, who would come to believe in the importance of “one world government” in his dotage, to the mother of libertarianism herself, Ayn Rand.

Apparently, the bifurcated nature of von Braun’s life was too much for WTOP’s news people to handle. Both their meltdown today and that of the New York Daily News’ social media account may very well be attributable to a phenomenon described by Obama flack Ben Rhodes in his infamous 2016 interview: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

And it’s only going to get worse. As Joel Kotkin writes at Quillette, we live in an “Age of Amnesia:”

This trend was most marked in the British colonies of North America. Benjamin Franklin noted that high levels of literacy helped American traders and mechanics instigate the rebellion against the Crown and sustain it. But now, with access to information unimaginable in the past, our knowledge of history is fading. Information is increasingly separated from actual knowledge; blogs replace books, and tweets replace essays. Knowledge of even relatively recent events, like the Holocaust or D-Day, is become scanty. Four in 10 American millennials, and at least one in three Europeans, say they know “very little” about the Holocaust, and one in five young French respondents are not even aware it took place.

As we’re seeing today, Apollo 11, once a global event, is subject to the same “Great Forgetting,” to sadly invert the title of Tom Wolfe’s increasingly unlikely 1987 hopes for a better 21st century.

BAIT, TAKEN: Democrat-controlled House votes to condemn Trump ‘racist comments,’ with only four Republicans backing the measure.

Related: An accusation in search of an argument. “Today, Sullivan defends the practice in news stories of labeling President Trump’s utterances ‘racist.’ She calls this a ‘service to the truth’ (quotation from headline in paper edition). But one searches Sullivan’s column in vain for an argument in support of her claim that Trump’s comment about the four congressional rads (or anything else Trump has ever said) is racist. Arguments aren’t Sullivan’s thing. Name-calling is.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Adults Need To Help Students Stay Away From Colleges They Can’t Afford.

ROBERT GEORGE CALLS ON CONSERVATIVES TO BE MORE COURAGEOUS:  May I add that this is especially needed in the area of race-, ethnicity-, and sex-based identity politics?  You’ve never seen terror until you’ve asked a Member of Congress or Congressional staff member to do some tiny thing to help stem the tide of this destructive trend.  “Deer in headlights” doesn’t do justice to the look.

The current identity-obsessed state of the nation isn’t just a cultural change.  It is the result of law and policy.  The left has passed federal laws and instituted policies that beg people to think of themselves as members of victim groups.  Perfectly sound laws have been interpreted by courts and agencies to mean to opposite of what they say.  All the while conservative leaders ignore it, because they haven’t thought enough about it to recognize the long-term consequences or because they understand completely, but are afraid to speak up.  Until something is done to change significant parts of that body of law and policy, things will not get better.

(Here is an extremely minor example.  This bill should have been a no-brainer, but when opposition was voiced from an ill-informed civil rights advocate, who clearly didn’t understand the bill at all, it died.)

FLASHBACK: Sen. Hirono: Democrats Have a Hard Time “Connecting” With People Because Of “How Smart We Are.”