YOU ASSUME THEY HAVE DATA!  Vaccines For Infants And Toddlers Based On Faulty Data?

ON THEIR KNEES, ATTEMPTING TO SELL NATIONAL HONOR:  Biden Administration Still Hoping Iran Wants A Deal.

WELL, PHILOSOPHY MIGHT KEEP THEM OFF THE STREETS:  House To Investigate “Life, The Universe And Everything” .

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Case for Donald Trump 2024.

The fact is that Donald Trump 2024 has a reasonable chance to beat anyone the Democrats launch at him – hell, in ’16 he defied the conventional wisdom to crush Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, the Smartest Woman Ever Was, and there are a lot of reasons why he might well pummel whatever pea-brained nimrod the Dems deploy against him in 2024.

Let’s look where all smart tacticians will look first – at logistics. Trump has money, oodles of it, and his supporters now have two campaigns worth of experience instead of the none they had in 2016. He also has his own social media outlet, as well as friendly conservative media, and Twitter may even be under free speech advocate Elon Musk by then. They can’t shut him up again.

Then there is the opposition. He faces a clown for an opponent – Grandpa Badfinger is the only guy dumb enough to forget how to ride a bike – and some polls already show Trump beating Biden in a head-to-(empty)-head race two-plus years out.

I’d enjoy seeing Trump pull a Grover Cleveland. But I’d rather have 8 years of DeSantis than 4 years of Trump. Ideally it would be 4 years of Trump followed by 8 years of DeSantis, of course, but that’s a stretch. And I don’t think 4 years is enough to beat the bureaucracy.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: American Airlines Ends Service In Three Cities Due To Pilot Shortage.

Maybe firing pilots over the vax thing was a mistake. Just spitballing here . . .

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Ride the decline: Existing home sales drop 3.4% in May — and that’s just a start.

OPEN THREAD: Give me a reason to feel what I think.

TURNING JAPANESE; I THINK WE’RE TURNING JAPANESE — I REALLY THINK SO: New York state officials are giving companion robots to more than 800 senior citizens to help combat loneliness.

Classical allusion in headline: Aging Japan: Robots may have role in future of elder care.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Gets Snippy with Reporter Asking a Not-So-Tough Question—Non-Comedy Ensues.

TRANSCRIPT:

REPORTER: “Economists are saying recession is more likely than ever.”

BIDEN: (Interrupts): “Not — the majority are not saying that. Come on, don’t make things up, OK? Now you sound like a Republican politician. I’m joking. That was a joke. That was a joke. But all kidding aside, no I don’t think it is.”

He’s got jokes, ladies and gentlemen.

On a side note, I wonder if the reporter was more offended by the president accusing her of making things up or sounding like a Republican? This we will never know.

On the plus side, Jimmy Carter and Obama are thrilled that their reputations are suddenly getting propped up in comparison with Biden’s disastrous performance.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: South Korean rocket puts satellites in orbit for the first time in second flight.

JOEL KOTKIN AND MARSHALL TOPLANSKY: Engineered California.

“Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.”

—Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi,” 1970

Nothing so illustrates the mindset of green politics, particularly in California, as the word “natural,” which is taken to mean unspoiled, pure, and better than the workings of man. Yet few places are as fundamentally artificial, if measured by its dependency on human intervention, as California.

So why do California’s progressives, and so many others, yearn for what the historian Leo Marx dubbed the “pastoral ideal”? Much has to do with the state’s rapid population growth from 1.5 million in 1900 to nearly 40 million today, which resulted in a regime of environmental rapine that many still living experienced.

California would not exist in anything like its modern form without massive engineering. Largely dominated by desert, flammable, dry chaparral and high mountains, California depends on human-created technology to bring water to its bone-dry coast. It taps distant dams for the bulk of its electricity and food and would have never grown its population without this manufactured transformation of its natural environment. “Science,” as the University of California’s second president, Daniel Coit Gilman, put it, “is the mother of California.”

* * * * * * * *

Equally missing is a clear appreciation of the economic effects of the state’s green policies. Historically, California’s public works—the freeways, aqueduct, power stations—were designed to grow the opportunity horizon for the majority by boosting the economy, creating opportunities for new production, and forging new communities. The current policy agenda, in contrast, has proven catastrophic for many middle and working class families.

Attorney Jennifer Hernandez has demonstrated in a recent report for the Breakthrough Institute what she calls “the green Jim Crow.“ Pushed by overwhelmingly white billionaires, these policies have escalated housing and energy prices, driving jobs and people out of the state. This has hurt minorities in particular, she claims, “deepening the state’s shameful legacy of racial injustice.”

Read the whole thing.

Found via Hugh Hewitt’s co-blogger John Schroeder, who writes, “The modern environmental movement is built on false philosophical premises – that mankind is apart from nature, that nature is static, and many others. What I find most fascinating about all this, is the adoption of such false philosophical premises is rooted in a presumption of god-like status for mankind. For Christians, seeking such a status is the very root and beginning of the concept of sin.”

NEVER LET THE CRISIS YOU’RE PLANNING GO TO WASTE: Biden says U.S. needs more funding for next pandemic.

BREAKING: The Gun Bill Just Dropped. It’s the GOP’s First Step to Blowing Slam-Dunk Midterms.

NO OUT-OF-SEASON FOODS FOR YOU, PEASANTS: It’s Worse Than We Thought: Food Miles Account For a Sickening Amount of Emissions.

Naturally however, comrades, the nomenklatura will still need asparagus in winter, to offset the stress of their work on behalf of the people.

LIVE RESULTS: Primaries in Virginia, D.C.; Runoffs in Alabama, Georgia.

I DON’T LIKE THIS: Senators unveil text of bipartisan deal on gun violence, setting up speedy vote.

Meanwhile: Texas official: Uvalde shooter driven by social media fame, ‘abhorrent behavior’ went unchecked for months.

Things the bill does nothing about. Also police incompetence — or worse — which the bill also does nothing about.

UPDATE: Stephen Kruiser: The Gun Bill Just Dropped. It’s the GOP’s First Step to Blowing Slam-Dunk Midterms. Yep.

LEFTIST DREAMS: The Golden Age of travel is over: All our lives, we’ve taken it for granted. But now with airports in chaos, £100 to fill up your car and trains on strike, social historian DOMINIC SANDBROOK says the future is bleak for getaway-lovers.

Or, you know, you could punish the people who stand in your way. Environmentalists, woke CEOs, officious bureaucrats — none of them would be missed.

YOU DON’T NEED A GUN, THE POLICE WILL PROTECT YOU: ‘Abject failure’ | Uvalde school massacre could have been stopped in 3 minutes, DPS says.

READER FAVORITE: Sun Joe Electric High Pressure Washer. #CommissionEarned

BUILT LIKE A TANK: “You could bludgeon a dude to death with one of these and then take pictures of the crime scene with it.”

THE ATLANTIC MORPHED INTO THE BABYLON BEE SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: In Defense of Naked Joe Biden.

HEH, INDEED:

OF COURSE: Police Report Proves Undercover Cops Were Embedded With J6 Protestors.

OUT ON A LIMB: WHO chief ‘believes Covid DID leak from Wuhan lab’ after a ‘catastrophic accident’ in 2019 despite publicly maintaining ‘all hypotheses remain on the table.’

I USED TO HANG AROUND WITH A BUNCH OF EXTROPIANS BACK IN THE NINETIES: HOW THE EXTROPIAN QUEST FOR DIGITAL CASH SECURED OUR TRIPS TO THE STARS.

The future looked brighter in those days, though I haven’t given up on it yet.