INCITEMENT & INSURRECTION: As Maxine Waters Calls for Riots in the Streets to Continue, Minnesota National Guardsmen Shot At.

CHANGE: “Consensual incest” should be decriminalized, advocates say.

IT’S ONLY AN “INSURRECTION” IF THE NARRATIVE REQUIRES IT TO BE:

OPEN THREAD: History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.

REST IN PEACE, COUSIN ITT: Actor Felix Silla, famously known for his role as Cousin Itt on ‘The Addams Family,’ dies at 84.

SPACE: NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity is ready to make its first flight attempt Monday.

NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: The Death of Hope. I’m partway into it, and as always he never fails to entertain.

I WASN’T EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Hidden magma pools pose eruption risks that we can’t yet detect.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP:

Plus, heh:

SHOCKING ADVICE FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Heart patients advised to move more to avoid heart attacks and strokes.

THREE DEAD IN AUSTIN ‘ACTIVE SHOOTER’ INCIDENT.

Related: Austin ‘gunman’ an ex-detective accused of molesting teen.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Georgetown’s Cultural Revolution.

The silence to my mind is telling. It speaks of the lack of resources within progressive thinking that could be drawn upon to resist the trend that has bedeviled American academia over the past few years. The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before. Terror and dread fill academic workers, professors, and staff alike, and it is everywhere. Neither the call for distinguishing between unconscious bias and structural racism; nor for dismantling “merit” so that “minorities” succeed, seem able to do the work the authors of these emails want them to do. They fail to deliver responses of the kind, “Let’s just talk about this. Maybe the problem is overdetermined and is not reducible to ‘unconscious bias.’” What they beget instead is a combination of dread and virtuous self-congratulation. These two sentiments, dread married to virtue, constitute to my mind the affective embodiment of progressive ideology prevalent among white liberals as developed in its most privileged space: academia. They are typical. They are two faces of the same coin: flip and you see dread, flip again and you see virtue.

This is what dead or dying institutions look like. In this context, “woke” politics is the bear shirt cult, the ghost dance movement, of academia. It’s what anthropologists call a “revitalization movement,” the last convulsions of a dying culture. The chief characteristic of revitalization movements is that they always fail. Which doesn’t mean that they aren’t dangerous on the way down: Nazism was a revitalization movement, too.

MORE STATES SHOULD DO THIS: Joshua Silverstein, Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock is an old pal from my law school class of NYU ’96, and might be the best example of a truly “classical” liberal, at the heart of which shares many values with genuine conservatism and thoughtful libertarianism. At the heart of his opinion piece in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is simply that government is not a supreme power answerable to no-one. The foundation for ending sovereign immunity begins with this simple proposition:

“Sovereign immunity is a holdover from the era when most countries were monarchies. The legal basis for sovereign immunity was as follows: Because the monarch created the courts, the monarch is superior to the courts. And thus the monarch is not subject to the jurisdiction of the courts.”

This makes complete sense to me as a person who believes in smaller and less intrusive government. Silverstein continues:

“There is a fundamental principle of American law that provides that no person should be a judge in his or her own case. But that is exactly what happens when a person sues the state of Arkansas for money under current law: The Legislature itself ultimately decides if the injured person is entitled to monetary relief from the state.

That is inconsistent with the notion of due process that underlies our justice system. Sovereign immunity thus makes it far harder for citizens to enforce their fundamental legal rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.”

This is pretty hard to argue against.

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH? HELL, YOU CAN’T EVEN UNDERSTAND THE TRUTH: Media Should Tell the Truth About Herd Immunity.

This is a VIP piece because frankly Facebook and Twitter are suppressing any real discussions of herd immunity. If you haven’t already. you can get a small discount with the promo code CHARLIE.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. John Ratcliffe: America’s Adversaries are Testing, Taking Advantage of Biden’s Wrong Decisions.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Child vaccination rates declined during COVID-19 pandemic.

HOW CAN YOU LEAVE A “MESS” ON SOMETHING THAT’S BASICALLY A PILE OF DIRTY GRAVEL? NASA spacecraft leaves mess after grabbing asteroid samples. Anyway, the photos don’t live up to the headline.

RIP: Mike Mitchell, a founding member of the Kingsmen, who recorded ‘Louie Louie,’ has died, age 77.

POINTS AND FIGURES: Dispatches from the Covid Frontlines.

On Wednesday, April 7 I went to Red Rock Casino here in Las Vegas and got a free Johnson and Johnson Covid 19 vaccine. It was nice of the casino to do that. The process was orderly and organized. My wife found out about it on Twitter and because my doctor at Mayo recommended I get the vaccine, I went.

Of course days after I got the shot a few people around the country were getting blood clots and they have stopped giving people the JnJ vaccine. When I looked at the numbers, it was so small given the entire sample size I wasn’t worried. Also, almost all of the people getting clots were women and I have identified as a male since the day I was born. I guess I could be a “cis-lesbian-female” if I understand the new terminology correctly. The Dead Sea Scrolls are easier to decipher but I digress.

I checked out of the hospital today.

On April 14, I started running high fevers up to 105. I could get them down with Tylenol, Advil, and cold baths. Because of what happened to me in January, I take a drug that is an immune suppressant. My genetics have kept my white blood cell count low all of my life but now it is exceptionally low. We were sorting through some old papers from the 90s and my WBC count was low then. My counts are so low they are in that “four standard deviations away from the mean range”-or outside the “normal distribution” for those that truly understand statistics.

I was poked and prodded in the hospital. I was fed a constant stream of antibiotics. I was tested for Covid 19 again and was negative. My eighth victory against Covid. They drew lots of blood and tested it. So far, I have no other bacterial or viral infections percolating in my bloodstream. I was CT Scanned and Lung X-Rayed, “Hey, your lungs look great!”. I was Ultrasounded to check for clots. No clots.

The only conclusion is that my body had a very adverse reaction to the vaccine.

Read the whole thing.