ED MORRISSEY ON Trump’s Special Prosecutor Promise.

THE GROWNUPS ARE BACK IN CHARGE! Is ‘No Nudity on the White House Lawn’ Really Too Much to Ask?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Kim Jong Un Attends Ivy League University To Learn New Brainwashing Techniques.

ASKING (AND ANSWERING) THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Since When Is Donald Trump Not the Big Story? “The news isn’t the news when it makes the newsies look bad — and Donald Trump made ABC’s Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace look awful after his arraignment on Tuesday.”

GUT FEELINGS: New Insights Into Human Gut-Brain Connection Revealed in Pioneering Research.

LIGHTNING DEAL: ZENOTTIC Square Polarized Sunglasses for Men. #CommissionEarned

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Congress: Making the Problem Bigger.

BTW, if you like these essays, consider signing up for a paid subscription. I appreciate it when you do.

FACE IT, MEN ARE BETTER AT EVERYTHING, EVEN BEING WOMEN:

Man wins Miss San Franciscohttps://t.co/IyU71SFF5u

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) June 14, 2023

I mean that’s basically the message of the trans movement, right? Erase women, replace them with a newer model.

COMMUNISM: China targets ‘unity in thought’ with campaign on Xi’s philosophy.

But there are also signs that the campaign on Xi Jinping Thought is more than just routine.

Before he left Russia after a three-day visit in March, Xi told President Vladimir Putin in Moscow that “right now there are changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years.”

According to Andy Mok, a senior research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization in Beijing, the education campaign is meant to prepare the party members for the challenges Beijing expects lie ahead as China rises on the world stage.

“The people have to be prepared to sacrifice,” he told Al Jazeera.

It always comes down to the people having to sacrifice their own wants, needs, and rights for the vision of the big guy.

BIDENOMICS IS WORKING AS PLANNED: Real Average Weekly Earnings Drop for 26th Straight Month.

TUITION DISCOUNT RATES ARE RISING. Mid-tier private colleges likely hardest hit, which makes sense. It’s one thing to pay Yale all of your money to indoctrinate your kids to hate you. It’s another to pay, say, DePaul for the same dubious privilege.

LOW EARTH ORBIT IS A MESS: Japan’s Astroscale has a new robot tug to clean up space junk. Here’s how it works.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Paul McCartney says A.I. got John Lennon’s voice on ‘last Beatles record.’

Beatles singer-songwriter Paul McCartney told the BBC that artificial intelligence was used to “extricate” and clean up the vocals of former bandmate John Lennon from an old recording, allowing them to feature in an upcoming track.

“It’s a very interesting thing, you know. It’s something we’re all sort of tackling at the moment and trying to deal with,” McCartney told the BBC’s “Today” program when asked about AI.

McCartney said “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson — who in 2021 released an eight-hour documentary called “The Beatles: Get Back” featuring colorized, cleaned-up archive footage of the band — was able to “extricate” Lennon’s voice “from a ropey little bit of cassette.”

AI was used to identify Lennon’s vocals as distinct from instrumentals and background interference.

The demix technology that Peter Jackson’s team of boffins used to extract the individual instruments so that Giles Martin could remix Revolver last year is light years ahead in terms of quality of what’s commercially available in audio restoration software such as Izotope’s RX line. The latter produces loads of audio artifacts when it spits out multi-track stems. Hopefully Jackson’s technology will filter down to prosumer level software, and/or the commercial software will improve in quality over time.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH! Ohio legislators propose campus ‘intellectual diversity’ centers.

CLARKE AND KUBRICK TRIED TO WARN US: ‘Open the Pod Bay Doors, Hal.’ Amazon Locks a Man Out of His Smart Home Over Racism Allegations.

THE TRANS CAMPAIGN TO ERASE WOMEN: Backlash against Johns Hopkins after university erases ‘women’ from definition of ‘lesbian.’ “The office made no such change to the term ‘gay man.'”

FOOTLOOSE, THE SEQUEL: Princeton issues guidelines for ‘Consent on the Dance Floor.’

HMM: Why Putin Will Never Agree to De-escalate.

Putin himself has little to gain from stopping the war any time soon, especially if the Ukrainian counteroffensive proves successful. Sure, ending the war would save thousands of lives, significantly relieve the pressure on the Russian economy and society, allow Russia to stabilize its international position, and so on. But for Putin personally, putting a stop to the conflict would be a disaster for his position in Russian domestic politics and history.

No matter how repressive the Russian regime has become, ending the war would inevitably prompt public reflection. There would be many questions about the invasion’s purposes, its high cost, and whether the result justified that cost. Moreover, Putin would have to face those questions in a situation where it would no longer be possible to justify harsher repression by citing the exceptional circumstances of war.

Regardless of how worn-out Russians may be, therefore, Putin will stick to his selective perception of reality, looking for reasons for and ways to further escalate his addictive crusade against the current world order. Putin has not even made any bones about his intentions: His key decisions over the past months—from tightening the military draft system to massively investing in weapons production—clearly indicate that he is bracing his country for a long war. It is hard to see how the upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive could affect these calculations, regardless of how successful it turns out to be.

I’ve written time and again that Ukraine’s biggest weakness is the West’s short attention span — and more than a year later, it’s clear Putin is willing to put that to the test.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump’s Enduring Appeal—He Never Does What Dems Want. “Democrats would have loved to see him show up to the courthouse with a look of panic in his eyes. Instead, he arrived to mini rally and had social plans for the rest of the day.”

EVERYTHING IS RUN BY THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST:

What could go wrong?https://t.co/LkN6YXyAjw

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) June 14, 2023

#JOURNALISM: Networks devote 291 minutes to Trump scandals and zero seconds to Biden’s.

GOOD ADVICE: Keep Posting. Keep Sharing. It’s Doing More Good Than You Know. Why else would they be so desperate to shut it down?

ROGER KIMBALL: There’s malarkey aplenty in the Bidens’ shell game: An FBI whistleblower revealed the existence of a bribery scheme that purportedly funneled millions of dollars to the Bidens.

IT’S THE SPENDING, STUPID: How Biden’s debt deal paved the way for the next financial mess.

Fitch Ratings, one of three major credit agencies, has already put the U.S. on notice that its top-tier rating could be dented even after President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a deal to suspend the debt limit until 2025.

Now, Fitch says it isn’t convinced that policymakers can set the nation’s finances on a sustainable path because of the polarization roiling U.S. politics, suggesting that a downgrade on Treasury securities could be on the way — the second in U.S. history.
“It’s not just the debt limit,” James McCormack, Fitch Ratings’ managing director and global head of sovereign and supranational ratings, said in an interview. “What we’ve seen in the United States is a steady deterioration in governance.”

Washington has an infinite appetite for spending, no real restraint thanks to the Fed happily monetizing each trillion-dollar-fad-of-the-moment, and near-endless obligations already on the books.

The rot runs so deep that my guess is that each side just hopes not to be the ones behind the wheel when we finally go off the cliff.

“PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIANS” ARE UNRELIABLE NARRATORS: Woodrow the Terrible, Warren the Good: The Upside-down Sensibilities of Presidential Historians. “There are many reasons to disparage what passes for expertise and judgment among presidential historians, but there is none better than their longstanding tendency to rate Woodrow Wilson as a near-great president and Warren Harding as among the worst. By any sensible estimation, Wilson was the ultimate bottom-feeder of American presidents, while Harding swam peaceably, albeit somewhat confusedly, around the middle depths of the pond. But historians tend to favor leaders with expansive agendas during dramatic times over those with modest goals in calmer times. In recent years, Wilson’s off-the-charts racism has begun to take him down a notch or two in public estimation, and there have been occasional suggestions that Harding be upgraded a bit. But there’s a long way to go to right the record on these two.”