PROJECTION, BIDEN STYLE:

President Biden kicked off his first day of campaigning for re-election by making excuses for communist China — saying that President Xi Jinping never meant to fly a spy balloon over sensitive American military sites earlier this year.

“I don’t think the leadership knew where it was, and knew what was in it, and knew what was going on,” Biden told reporters Saturday as he headed to Philadelphia for his first campaign rally of the 2024 election. “I think it was more embarrassing than it was intentional.”

Biden does everything thing but thank the Chinese Communists for taking an interest in our military installations. What do they have on him? I should like to think that no one can be this stupid without motivation.

Who on earth could have seen this coming?

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Report: Biden Says So Many Weird, Incoherent Things That His Own Aides Are Perplexed.

You have to love the idea that randomly pleading for the queen as a US politician ending a speech is just an “old-timey expression.” I’ve got grandparents. I’ve never heard them say that, and you’d expect people from the South to be even more into folksy sayings. Why did Biden actually say what he said? No one knows, and that’s the point.

The [Axios] article in question then dropped this absolute gem of a paragraph. Truly, this might be one of the most amazing things I’ve seen written in the political press public.

Biden’s quirky aphorisms are sometimes weaponized by Republicans to insinuate the 80-year-old president is in mental decline. But Biden has been using unique phrases for years — but even some of his aides aren’t exactly sure what he means by them.

“Weaponized:”

PRIVILEGE: Men have lower life expectancy than women, less likely to seek preventive care.

IT’S NOT A CULT:

The San Francisco Chronicle tells its readers that “There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party,” which may be one reason why: San Francisco is the most childless major city in the U.S.

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH:

The legacy of a bitter, neurotic establishment with nothing to bequeath but cynicism and despair.https://t.co/9F63YEEWmd

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) June 16, 2023

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Uranus takes a pounding more frequently than thought.

JON GABRIEL: Ron DeSantis finally has Donald Trump on the defensive. Keep it up.

Trump mouthpiece Alex Bruesewitz tweeted, “No statement from DeSanctimonious today. Coward!”

Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk took to Twitter, as well. “Every ‘Republican’ running for President should suspend their campaign and go to Miami as a show of support …. show solidarty [sic] or we will mark you as part of the oppsition [sic].”

For his part, DeSantis criticized the “weaponization of federal law enforcement” and the “uneven application of the law.”

Needless to say, he didn’t suspend his campaign.

Still, even GOP Trump skeptics criticized DeSantis for only obliquely commenting on his legal troubles, insisting the governor stop “pulling his punches.”

But DeSantis has a very good reason not to focus all his energies on the Orange One. Being a former Naval officer, he understands something called the OODA Loop.

Read the whole thing.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Massive bear breaks into Colorado home, devours pork chops: video.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Automakers can’t quit manual transmissions so they’re cramming fake stuff into EVs.

There’s no question that the rise in electric vehicles represents a wholesale shift in the auto industry. But while most car companies appear ready to embrace the electric future, a lot of them are having trouble letting go of the past.

Take Toyota, for example. The biggest automaker in the world is reportedly working on an electric vehicle prototype that mimics the feel of driving a manual transmission, complete with a gear shift that’s not connected to anything and a floor-mounted speaker to pipe in fake engine noises. The car will even pretend to stall out if you fumble the controls — in order to deliver drivers the complete experience of driving a manual car.

Keep in mind this is an electric vehicle. There is no engine, no drive shaft, no gears to speak of. All of this is achieved using software and a bit of smoke and mirrors. Toyota says the goal is to preserve the driving experience for car enthusiasts, but it’s unclear whether people actually want this.

I’m not a car enthusiast, but I know people tend to hate fake shit. (Just look at the fake meat industry. It’s not doing so well.) It stands to reason that they will hate this.

Unfortunately, Toyota is not alone in its attempts to awkwardly merge the auto industry’s past with its future. Dodge has been working on a symphony of fake engine sounds it hopes to include in its upcoming lineup of electric muscle cars. The Charger Daytona SRT concept was the first to stress test this vision with a fake engine sound that sounded like a bobcat that was angry about being neutered.

Dodge isn’t the only car company using fake engine sounds. In his recent review of the sporty two-door Toyota GR86, Jeremy Clarkson mentioned that he “truly loved driving this car, and I loved the noise it made too, until I discovered it was an artificial sound coming at me through the speakers. Then I hated it.”

THE GAMES THE MARINE CORPS PLAYS:

The games were invaluable, but they were not crystal balls.

I teach a graduate class in red teaming and war-gaming at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. I stress several things to my students. First, war games do not validate anything. When done well, they can identify issues in a plan or concept that can help improve it. Sometimes, they kill a badly conceived concept in the cradle. Second, it is very rare for a war game or even a series of games to predict anything; they merely lessen the chance of total surprise.

Thus, I was surprised to learn that the Marine Corps claimed to have validated its Force Design (FD) 2030 concept based on a few war games and became alarmed about the fact that the current commandant of the Marine Corps has undertaken a radical restructuring of the service having used the games to justify his actions.

Essentially, the Corps had walked away from its traditional role as the nation’s worldwide “911” force to concentrate on an anti-ship role in the South China Sea. In doing so, it got rid of all its tanks, its heavy engineering assets, much of its conventional artillery, and about one-third of its aviation capabilities. All this was done to buy anti-ship missiles designed to deny the Chinese naval dominance of the South China Sea by occupying small islets in the area with small units firing those missiles at Chinese ships.

I am not inspired to confidence.

TATOOINE’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Jabba The Hutt Complains Of Discrimination After Airline Charges Him For Multiple Seats.

RULES ARE FOR THE NON-WOKE: UNC med school continues to use DEI metrics despite systemwide ban.

ROGER AILES LEFT THE BUILDING LONG AGO: Fox News Encourages Employees To Read ‘Gay Erotica’, Support Pro-Child Castration Groups, In Leaked Docs.

Tucker Carlson to the white courtesy (video) phone, please!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Texas Christian University students will create own drag personas, perform in ‘Queer Art of Drag’ course: The course will be taught by Dr. Nino Testa, also known by his drag persona, ‘Maria von Clapp.’

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!

FAIRY TALE INDEED: NYT fairy tale: Biden DoJ is independent.

LIGHTNING DEAL: Pipishell TV Wall Mount Full Motion for Most 37-75 Inch LED LCD TVs. #CommissionEarned

TYLER O’NEIL: Tim Scott Eviscerates Attack on Moms Who Want Education to Focus on ‘ABCs, Not CRT.’

IT’S OKAY, HE IDENTIFIES AS A ROTTWEILER: Liz Warren Donor Arrested for Dog Sex.

NEO: The trans proliferation: Part I (intro and grooming).

As part of the effort to understand more deeply what’s been going on, I’ve read many articles and also watched a host of YouTube video interviews of transitioners and detransitioners, especially youthful ones. I’ve been impressed at the eloquence and insight of so many of the latter, who despite their exceptional intelligence got sucked into this terrible mess and often made irreversible decisions because the adults in charge failed them in major ways. These stories are heartbreaking, fascinating, and enraging.

Read the whole thing.

HEY, HE’S AS MENTALLY SHARP AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! WATCH: John Fetterman Swings at Softball Question—and Misses and Misses and Misses.

GUY GOES VIRAL FOR ACCURATELY ANALYZING THE HORDES OF LIBERAL WOMEN WHO MOVE TO THE CITY TO GET AWAY FROM THEIR “BACKWARDS” FAMILIES AND END UP HATING EVERYTHING:

Once upon a time there was a tweet from a Columbia professor.

Educated Hillbilly sure can, and he has thoughts on the hordes of urban women who move to the big city to find meaning in a career – especially those who make a job out of trashing their own families.

Apparently a lot of people liked (or hated) his thoughts because as of the time of this writing, he had 771,000 views on that tweet.

I’ll put the rest of his thread in a text box:

I’ve seen enough to get a fix on this gal and I’ve seen her type a million times. And they’re a dime a dozen in the writing world. They almost always go into the arts… never the sciences. Because your intelligence can be measured in the sciences. Writing is subjective.

Molly here grew up poor, TN I believe she said, but she mentions “poor” & “the south” about a million times. She’s making a point here. That she has the authority to speak on these topics & tell the liberal NY writing society that they’re correct to hate rural white poors.

She absolutely hates her parents, hates having to grow up in & around all that poor, all that filth, all their ignorance. Imagine knowing you’re better than everyone else & having to share a school bus with them. A lunch table. A class room. The rage builds for 18 years.

As the late Charles Krauthammer wrote in in 2002, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” But there’s a problem, Christopher Caldwell wrote a couple of years later: “For these people, liberalism is not a belief at all. No, it’s something more important: a badge of certain social aspirations. That is why the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation. As if those who voice them are fighting off the nagging thought: If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.”

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Workers, shoppers in San Francisco fed up with products kept in locked cabinets.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Obama suggests ‘digital fingerprints’ to counter misinformation ‘so we know what’s true and what’s not true.’

The former president added that the deepfakes — digitally manipulated images, audio or video that appear legitimate — started with a version of him dancing, “saying dirty limericks” and similar kinds of activity.

“That technology’s here now,” continued Obama, who warned about the issue getting worse moving forward. “So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”

He then suggested “digital fingerprints” to discern truth from misinformation.

“And the need for us, for the general public, I think to be more discriminating consumers of news and information, the need for us to over time develop technologies to create watermarks or digital fingerprints so we know what is true and what is not true,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of work that’s going to have to be done there, but in the short term, it’s really going to be up to the American people to kind of say.”

Hey, remember when Obama’s comms shop tried to pretend he was the anti-1984 guy? Good times, good times.

FIGHT THE POWER: Citizen mutiny across Europe has NetZero looking shaky.