NOT SATIRE: Book Industry Apologizes For Not Burning Book Saying Boys And Girls Are Different Before People Could Read It.

I HAD JUST BEEN ASSURED YESTERDAY THAT NOT A SINGLE DEMOCRAT EVER DID THIS: Texas Democrat James Talarico Opposes Voter ID.

WE OBEY GOD RATHER THAN MEN: The liberty saga in Loudoun County, Virginia, continues. My latest PJMedia column.

CAN WE TEST THEM ON OUR PRESIDENT’S SPEECHES? Machine-learning algorithms used to detect Alzheimer’s during phone conversations.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Two-thirds of romantic couples started as friends, study finds.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: MLB All-Star Game bombs in ratings again. Here’s why. “For the Ohtani factor alone, the numbers should have landed at least above the 10 million-viewer threshold, but didn’t. And if you’re looking for a big reason outside of cord-cutting, look no further than the backlash baseball is receiving for moving the All-Star Game out of Georgia to Colorado due to the former’s new voting laws.”

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: White House quietly signals inflationary run could last years.

OR MAYBE SOMETHING IN BETWEEN, WHO KNOWS? Farm robots could bring utopia or disaster, scientist warns.

MATT TAIBBI: Spying and Smearing is “Un-American,” not Tucker Carlson.

After Obama left office, illegal leaks of classified intercepts became commonplace. Many, including the famed January, 2017 leak of conversations between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, were key elements of major, news-cycle-dominating bombshells. Others, like “Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin,” or news that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials in foreign intercepts, were openly violative of the prohibition against disclosing the existence of such surveillance, let alone the contents.

These leaks tended to go to the same small coterie of reporters at outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN, and not one prompted blowback. This was a major forgotten element of the Reality Winner story. Winner, a relatively low-level contractor acting on her own, was caught, charged, and jailed with extraordinary speed after leaking an NSA document about Russian interference to the Intercept. But these dozens of similar violations by senior intelligence officials, mainly in leaks about Trump, went not just unpunished but un-investigated. As Winner’s lawyer, Titus Nichols, told me years ago, his client’s case was “about low-hanging fruit.”

The key issue in those cases was not even so much that someone in government might have been improperly accessing foreign surveillance intercepts — revelations to that effect have been a regular occurrence since the Bush years, with the FBI a serial violator — but that such intercepts were being leaked for public effect, with the enthusiastic cooperation of reporters, often in stories involving American citizens. They got away with it in the Trump years, because it was Trump, but the arrogance to think they can keep getting away with it by power-smearing everyone who objects is mind-blowing.

During Trump’s first run for president, I nearly lost my mind trying to explain to fellow reporters that he was succeeding in part because of us, that the prestige media’s ham-handed, hysterical, anti-intellectual approach to covering the Trump phenomenon was itself massively fueling it, making a case for establishment corruption and incompetence more eloquently than he could.

Something similar now is happening with the collapse of traditional media and the rise of Carlson, the current #1 voice on cable, who is rapidly stealing the audience MSNBC somehow believed it could corral with spokesgoons like Wallace. It seems impossible that Carlson’s haters don’t realize how easy they’ve made it for him, turning themselves into such caricatures of illiberalism that they’re practically handing him the top spot.

Read the whole thing.

I’M BEGINNING TO SUSPECT A COORDINATED EFFORT AGAINST SPACEX: FAA threatens shutdown of SpaceX’s Starship program at Boca Chica. Giving the Chinese a chance to catch up, I guess.

HE FIGHTS AND SELLS: New Ron DeSantis Campaign Merch Is Absolutely Epic.

WHILE OUR TOP MILITARY OFFICERS INVOLVE THEMSELVES IN DOMESTIC POLITICS, THE MILITARY THEY OVERSEE IS CRUMBLING: The U.S. Navy’s Leadership Crisis.

What needs to be done: “Get politics and media out of the wardroom. Renew the Navy’s noble tradition of remaining out of politics. Limit social media accounts and activities by Navy officials, discourage use of toxic platforms by sailors, remove all political and sociological topics from Professional Military Education and replace them with essential warfighting courseware. Modernize public affairs training.”

BUT OF COURSE:

So long as “shark advocates” call it an “interaction” when I kill and eat sharks, I’m okay with that. So far I’ve eaten more sharks than will ever eat me. Apex predator, baby.

Related: Loving Monsters.

MOSTLY DUE TO LONG-TERM LOCKDOWNS AND MEDIA HYSTERIA: Drug overdose deaths up nearly 30% in U.S. during pandemic-scarred 2020.

AT HELEN’S PAGE: Richard G. Tuttle’s Wyoming.

MALTHUS IS UP THERE WITH MARX FOR DAMAGE DONE: Malthusian Myth Busting: Easter Island Edition. “While it is true that the Easter Islanders deforested their island, forensic historians have now determined that by converting the forest to farmland and innovatively adapting to prolonged Little Ice Age droughts, they avoided collapse.”

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Basketball player uses nationally televised CBS interview to show off his “Free the Uyghurs” T-shirt, and the mainstream media won’t show it so come see it here.

EVERGREEN QUESTION: What the Hell Happened to Bill Kristol?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I think that Hayward is too charitable to Kristol here. Maybe he’s right, but a more parsimonious explanation is that Kristol was always a grifter, and he’s just found a new grift. It’s like why famous actors and athletes wind up hawking reverse mortgages and medicare supplements at the end of their careers — whatever they did before, that’s the thing they can do at this stage that makes the most money.

BLM FINALLY DISCOVERS COPS THEY RESPECT: Black Lives Matter: Actually, Cuban Police Brutality and Abuse Is Fine.

WIN ANY WARS LATELY? Joint Chiefs Chairman Compared Trump to Hitler, MAGA to Nazi ‘Brownshirts.’

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: The Reverse Cuban Boatlift, Real Americans Doing What Biden Won’t.

Plus:

• Meet the world’s shortest, baldest, oldest, least-talented, and most-desperate Solid Gold dancer
• Everybody in Florida is going to die of smart policy
• Donald Trump takes a scam car insurance call

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

WAS IT OVER WHEN THE MAGA HATS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR? Gen. Mark Milley Compared Trump Supporters To Nazis: ‘These Are The Same People We Fought In World War II.’

It’s a Comcast-approved smear: MSNBC’s Joy Reid Claims Republicans Are Neo-Nazis.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Why does Gen. Mark Milley want to start a Civil War? Because that’s where talk like this, from America’s highest ranking military officer, tends to lead. If he’s as well-read as he claims, he must know this.

Milley has demonstrated that he is unfit to serve, and must resign. He will not of course, because he’s a symptom of institutional decay.

ONE HEARTBEAT AWAY: Traumatized Ex-Harris Staffers Terrified at Thought of Her Becoming President. “Some people have defended the vice president against the charges of staff abuse, including Anita Dunn, a senior White House aide who served as a ‘damage control’ adviser to disgraced Hollywood pervert Harvey Weinstein. According to Dunn, the situation in the VP’s office was ‘not anywhere near what you are describing,’ though she declined to elaborate as to whether it was better or worse than the situation being described.”

WELL, THEY DO BETTER WHEN AVERAGE AMERICANS DO WORSE:

And they know it. But they hope voters won’t figure it out, or that by the time voters do they’ll have jiggered the voting system enough that it won’t matter what voters want.

EQUALITY IN MISERY AND OPPRESSION: Communism Solved Racism in Cuba, 1619 Project Founder Claimed. “Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere. I mean the Caribbean — most of the Caribbean — it’s hard to count because the white population in a lot of those countries is very, very small, they’re countries run by black folks, but in places that are truly at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality, and that’s largely due to socialism, which I’m sure no one wants to hear.”