THE PUBLIC SEEMS TO BE GETTING TIRED OF THIS NONSENSE:  “King’s College London Rejects Research on Trans Athletes for Calling Men ‘Males.’“

DOING THE WORK THE SUN WON’T DO:  Scientists create first solar flares inside a laboratory.

NO REAL MATH WAS HARMED BY THIS BS:  Modern bigotry in Canada: Simon Fraser University declares math “racist”.

People, OTOH….

CORRECT. DON’T DEMONIZE THEM. LOCK THEM UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY*:  Chicago’s mayor-elect warns against ‘demonizing’ rampaging teens after unrest.

*Revisit the parable of training the dog in Starship Troopers. It’s not fair, no, but when teens are already weaponized to destroy society, it might be too late to integrate them into anything useful.

Alternately ship them somewhere in the world where they’ll have to work for survival.

IT’S TOO LATE TO WAVE THE FLAG AFTER YOU’VE USED IT TO WIPE YOUR CORPORATE BEHIND:  Budweiser releases new pro-America ad with iconic mascot in wake of Anheuser-Busch Mulvaney controversy.

MOST FAIRY TALES WERE CAUTIONARY HORROR:  Disney’s financial fairy tale in Florida is coming to an end thanks to Ron DeSantis.

NO DOUBT THEY DO … SHAME THEY HAD SO LITTLE CONCERN ABOUT UNLEASHING THAT DISEASE ON THE WORLD:  Chinese Embassy Expresses ‘Grave Concern’ Over Upcoming Hearing on COVID-19 Origins.

THIS IS INSANITY:  ‘My Rosa Parks Moment’: Target Customer Demanded Reparations After She Couldn’t Pay $1,000 Bill.

THOSE WHO WANT YOU BANNED ARE NOT AND WERE NOT EVER FOR FREE SPEECH:  The lost promise of Substack?

WHEN TREASON PROSPERS:  The former Director of National Intelligence agrees with the former CDC Director that Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Congress under oath about funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

OH, POLIO, IS IT? WHAT ABOUT A HOST OF MEDIEVAL DISEASES THAT WE DON’T EVEN HAVE NAMES FOR?  NYC’s Top Doctor Warns that Half of Migrants Heading to City Are Not Vaxxed for Polio.

There are reasons nations have borders, and it’s not to avoid the great international communist paradise.  Or it is, if you understand the reality of that “paradise.”

SHE GOT A NON-SANCTIONED RESULT. HOW DARE SHE?  University ‘blocks’ academic from her own gender wars research over ‘dangerous’ data.

BEHOLD, MY SHOCKED FACE:  Elon Musk Claims the Govt had ‘Full Access’ to Twitter, Including Direct Messages.

THEIR GOAL IS TO RENDER HUMANITY EXTINCT:  Climate Change Activists Now Going After Rice – A Staple That Feeds Billions.

IT’S BEEN THERE FOR A WHILE. NOW IT’S JUST OBVIOUS:  Critical race theory has arrived at medical schools. What could go wrong?

THOUGHTS ON THE AI RACE, from Leslie Eastman.

GOOD: Ninth Circuit Rules Berkeley Gas Hookup Ban Is Preempted: A local California ordinance prohibiting natural gas hookups in new construction conflicts with federal law according to a federal appellate court. “By its plain text and structure, EPCA’s preemption provision encompasses building codes that regulate natural gas use by covered products. And by preventing such appliances from using natural gas, the new Berkeley building code does exactly that. We thus conclude that EPCA preempts Berkeley’s building code’s effect against covered products and reverse.”

OPEN THREAD: Happy pre-hump-day!

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Bud Light: from Spuds MacKenzie to Dylan Mulvaney.

[Anheuser-Busch’s Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid:] “It’s like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. What does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity,” she opined. “It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different. And appeals to women and to men. And representation, isn’t it the heart of evolution?”

She went on: “We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”

This corporate jabber and diversity talk might wow the sisters and woke crowd. It makes many of her actual beer drinkers want to barf.

Born into a high-powered lawyer family with connections extending from Texas to Southern California and the East, she attended Groton, Harvard and then Wharton. Alissa is the ultimate brand manager and Prep-Woke Girlboss.

Alissa talks in fluent psychobabble: the trendy drivel of her finding emotional safe spaces to process her feelings, the listening and empathy, the journey and trials. In this self-scripted narrative, she overcomes uncertainty, hardship and suffering to be the best in her field, catnip for aspiring female managers. She professes to be a beacon, “bringing women along with me and inspiring the next generation of female leaders to keep moving forward and pursue careers in male-dominated industries.”

But does Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president for marketing Bud Light, by far the nation’s biggest beer brand, know her product or her customers? Does she even like them? At least she could pretend.

Alissa seems like she’d be very comfortable kicking back a Deschutes microbrew at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club; not so much in some godforsaken tavern off I-90 with one beer on tap, take it or leave it. Bottoms up, honeybunch!

Heinerscheid has a done a brilliant job shifting the brand’s customers overnight. I’m sure it will do fine:

And already, people are finding important alternate uses for the product!

Whoever put "for rectal use only" stickers on Bud Light…. wins the internet today. 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/WaoeGiIFNX

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) April 17, 2023

READER BOOK PLUG: From William Stroock, The New American Order: 1977-1981. The latest installment in his series chronicling the aftermath of the Great Nuclear War of 1975.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA releases architecture for human exploration of the moon and Mars.

YET MORE AMERICAN INDIANS ARE CANCELLED: NY schools banned from calling teams Warriors, Chiefs, Braves, using Native American mascots.

New York follows 20 other states which have moved to restrict Indigenous-related monikers at the high school level.

Upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik blasted the ban on tribal nicknames as wokeness run amok.

In her district, this ruling would impact Native American symbols at Cambridge Central School District, Fonda-Fultonville Central School District, and Glens Falls City School.

“Upstate New York and the North Country take pride in our history and forcing them to replace these historical mascots is prioritizing the Far Left mob at the expense of our students’ education,” Stefanik said.

Flashback: Scott Ott of Scrappleface: ACLU: Effort to Marginalize Indians Succeeding.

THE DALAI LAMA SMILES: ‘So gross!’ Children yell in disgust when middle school staff partakes in a ‘licking contest’ with students.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA:

● Great moments in bureaucracy: Man in charge of Title IX enforcement refuses to define “woman.”

● ATF director admits he’s no firearms expert and can’t define ‘assault weapon.’

● Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg Says Traffic Fatalities Are Caused By ‘Discrimination’ (Video).

● Biden’s non-binary ex-nuclear waste chief Sam Brinton will undergo mental health evaluation as part of diversion program after stealing luggage from Minneapolis airport — as he also avoids jail time for theft in Las Vegas.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: The Return of Paganism.

When a 28-year-old person identifying as transgender shot up a Tennessee school in March, killing three children and three adults, the usual grim afterlife of tragedy was underlined by an odd note: One by one, media outlets rushed to apologize for “misgendering” the shooter, who, they explained, had been born female but had recently begun identifying as male.

How to make sense of such a statement? And what to do when a newspaper headline tells you about a “trans woman left sobbing in JFK Airport after TSA agent hit her testicles”? Appealing to reason hardly helps, as J.K. Rowling and others learned the hard way when trying to ask simple questions such as how one might define sex if not according to the chromosomes rooted in literally every cell of our bodies. Instead, anyone wishing to find his way through the thicket of American public discourse these days should start by embracing one simple and terrifying idea: The barbarians are at the gates.

I mean this almost literally. Everywhere you turn these days, pagans are afoot, busily hacking away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of American life and replacing them with a cosmology that would have been absolutely coherent to followers of, say, Voltumna, the Etruscan earth god, or to those who worshipped the Celt tribal protector Toutatis.

If you think the above paragraph is a little bit overblown, consider the numbers. In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions. So fast-growing, in fact, that my colleague Maggie Phillips recently reported in Tablet magazine about the thriving, and officially recognized, pagan faith groups within the U.S. Army. “What’s important now,” one of its leaders, Sergeant Drake Sholar, told Phillips, “is showing religious respect and understanding across the board as Norse Pagans, or Heathens, return to a distinguishable religious practice.”

Amen, selah. But as we respect and understand those who profess paganism outright and sincerely, we should worry about those—many more of them—who go by other names and profess different affinities yet whose worldview is consistently, coherently, and crushingly pagan. There are millions more heathens who would shudder to be called such, yet who offer a vision of a perfectly pagan American future. It behooves us, then, to reckon with the paganism in our midst.

As G.K. Chesterton never actually wrote, “When a man ceases to believe in God, it’s not that he believes in nothing, it’s that he’ll believe in anything.