EXCUSES, EXCUSES: Illinois State Senator Says Flash Mob in Chicago Last Weekend Was a ‘Mass Protest’ and a ‘Political Act.’

WELL, YES: Why J.K. Rowling Isn’t As Controversial As You Think: The authors’ defenders include some prominent transgender people.

Also, as recent sales indicate, the critics are a small band of yammerers with a big media megaphone but little influence on actual fans.

AMY WAX ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM: “Penn is very powerful, rich, ruthless and unprincipled and will do everything they can to wear you down from my experience so far—I’m sorry to have to issue such a harsh judgment, but there it is.”

Make life as unpleasant as possible for the educrats going after you. Name names. If it were a public university, I’d hire an investigator to go through administrators’ travel expense records. There’s generally plenty of dirt there.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: One Dead in Parking Garage Collapse in Lower Manhattan. “Kazimir Vilenchik, New York City’s acting buildings commissioner, said at the news conference that the building had several open violations dating back to 2003, although he also indicated that plans had been filed to correct them in 2010.”

#METOO: What Are They Hiding About the Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto? Glenn Greenwald (and Others) Want To Know.

DEAL OF THE DAY: iRobot Roomba 671 Robot Vacuum with Wi-Fi Connectivity. #CommissionEarned

THE LEFT EATS ITS OWN, ALWAYS: Threats of Violence Erupt as Disney’s Live-Action Casting for ‘Lilo and Stitch’ Features Light-Skinned Actors.

Disney helped weaponize woke entertainment, and now they reap the whirlwind.

BIGOTRY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: UT Austin psychology quiz: ‘Wealthy white men’ most likely to ‘repeatedly violate rights of others.’

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

WAIT, WHAT? How Bad Is Portland’s Drug Problem? So Bad That It Closed a County Drug Center.

LEADERSHIP: ‘Bedrock of the university’: Cornell announces free expression commitment for next school year.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN: The United States of Queer.

From the perspective of Queer Theory, when Kelly claims to be “speaking the truth,” the very act she lays claim to is an affront to the Queer activist, who doesn’t believe in truth in any important way. What we may call “reality” is to the Theorist only a collection of discourses always in conflict. The meta-narratives — which are the dominant discourses that inform us culturally — are where the real power resides: they provide the frames of reference we live inside, and that we are socialized into accepting are the universal truths that determine our ways of knowing.

One of these phallogocentric — male-created and maintained, by way of male privilege and power — meta-narratives is, under the framework of western Enlightenment thinking, “Science,” which must itself be constantly “problematized.” It is science that informs us that humans exist within a sexual binary, with few and rare genetic anomalies. To the Queer theorist, though — and by extension, the Queer activist — this binary must be rejected entirely, because it is nothing more than a white male creation meant to maintain the subjugation of those who exist outside the binary’s demands. Thus, no one is “male” or “female,” just as no one is “gay” or “straight”, but rather on a spectrum, with gayness and straightness in all of us to varying degrees. We are each Schrödinger’s Faggot, perpetually and potentially both in and out of the closet.

Read the whole thing.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Utterly Useless UN Jumps Into the Pervert Pedophile Pool. “The same people who want all college boys convicted of rape without a trial for merely asking a girl out also want to force sexual awareness on kids who are still years away from no longer believing in Santa Claus. Thus far, we’ve been discussing American leftists. We can’t forget, however, that they’re working in unison with leftists around the globe in a bid for a Collectivist Kumbaya New World Order.”

JON GABRIEL: New Arizona law makes it easy for extremists to harass regular donors like you. “Proposition 211 was sold as mere transparency. Instead, it places donors’ identities on a government list for everyone to see.”

THIS WOULD MATTER IF BIDEN CARED WHAT VOTERS WANT: Biden country backs McCarthy spending cuts, debt plan.

SCHEDULED FOR 8:50 AM ET: SpaceX to launch 21 new Starlink satellites.

LINCOLN BROWN SPEAKS FOR US ALL: For the love of everything sacred, holy, honorable, and sensible, will you actors, singers, models and influencers just shut up, shut up, Shut Up, SHUT UP?

IS THIS AMERICA’S GREAT DIVORCE? Or the spreading of the Woke cancer? Issues & Insights provides the promised followup to last week’s analysis on net migration patterns showing blue states losing population as red states grow larger. Turns out 61 percent of the nation’s counties carried by President Joe Biden in 2020 have lost population in the years since. And yes, 65 percent of the Trump-supporting counties have since gained population.

In addition, Issues & Insights notes that:

• Two Biden-voting counties that lost the most from net migration were Los Angeles County, which was down 363,760, and Cook County, Illinois, down 200,718. While many of the blue counties that lost population were urbanized, the exodus was widespread and nationwide, including many far more sparsely populated liberal areas.
• In contrast, the biggest loss in any red county was Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, down just 18,470, followed by Worcester County, Maryland, which is in the southern part of the state, down only 17,545.

And even in the 13 states that lost population post-2020, the red counties within those jurisdictions gained new residents from elsewhere within the state borders. And so the question remains, as Issues & Insights explains, with examples of red counties within Arizona and Texas that were turned blue by the migration:

“Will this mass migration lead to an even more divided country, with people increasingly relocating to be with their ideological brethren? Will it mean that, as in those Arizona and Texas counties, Democrats take over more areas that had been traditionally conservative as they ditch the disasters their own policies produced? Or will this migration out of leftist enclaves lead to a weakening of the undue influence a few elitist urban areas have on national politics?”

KATHERINE KERSTEN:  “Legislature is planning an ‘antiracist’ revolution in Minnesota schools.”

HOW CAN WE MAKE OUR TAXBASE SHRINK FASTER? SAY, I’VE GOT AN IDEA! Energy ‘Equity’: California Electricity Companies Propose Billing Based on Income.

ERIC BERGER: Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket is turning into a space policy disaster.

Member nations of Europe make financial allocations to the European Space Agency and expect roughly that amount of money in return in terms of space projects. So the development and production of Ariane 6 was spread across a number of nations under management of a large conglomerate, France-based ArianeGroup.

This approach combined the worst of the parochial politics that guide NASA funding in the United States with the sluggish activity of a traditional aerospace company accustomed to guaranteed contracts. Naturally, therefore, development of the project has lagged and gone over budget. As of this writing, the public date for the debut launch of Ariane 6 remains “late 2023,” but the rocket’s first flight will certainly slip into 2024. And its development budget has nearly doubled, to $4.4 billion.

That is a lot of time—nearly a decade—and money for Europe to develop what is essentially a poorer version of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. In the nine years since Europe began development of the Ariane 6 to compete with SpaceX, the Falcon 9 rocket has nearly doubled its payload capacity and become partially reusable, so it is now more capable and costs far less. It has also launched more than 215 times, which is nearly as many rockets as the Ariane program has launched since 1979. Because of this, the Falcon 9 is now extremely reliable and capable of launching on schedule.

So why is Europe developing a rocket that costs more than a Falcon 9 and is a decade late to the party?

Everybody — ULA, Boeing, Ariane, Roscosmos, I mean everybody — should have thrown out all their existing plans once SpaceX proved that reusable rockets were both reliable and profitable.

IT’S WHATEVER THEY HAPPEN TO WANT IT TO BE AT THE MOMENT, DUH. Biden’s ATF Director Was Asked to Define ‘Assault Weapon’ and It Didn’t Go Well.

CALIFORNIA IS RUN BY DEMOCRATS, DUH: Why Homelessness Is Worse in California Than in Texas: Today, the Lone Star state counts 90 homeless people per every 100,000 residents. In California, the problem is almost five times as bad.

CHRIS QUEEN: Disney May Soon Wish It Hadn’t Messed With Florida. “Florida continues to put Disney on notice that the state will not bow to the far left and its corporate allies. In other words, this fight is far from over.”

STANDING UP TO THE SCOLDS: Fun strikes back: 2023 ASSU preliminary election results announced. “Running on a platform of “Fun Strikes Back,” Sophia Danielpour ’24 and Kyle Haslett ’25 were elected by a wide margin. . . . over second-place slate Christian Sanchez ’24 and Gurmen Bahia ’25.”

Bottom line, with a big increase in turnout, parties and candidates who stressed fun and traditions beat out “social justice” candidates by a lot.

FROM J. L. CURTIS, CONTAINING FICTION BY CEDAR SANDERSON, MONALISA FOSTER, TOM ROGNEBY AND MORE:  Twisted Tropes.

Things are never what they seem, and on the other side of this cover, what you know isn’t so!

Plunge into eight tales of that will feel familiar, only to careen through more twists than a country road at night, and stranger turns: From noir private eyes, to Fae battles, to the cookies of the dark side, you’ll find a surprise in every story!