THE TRAIN WRECK THAT IS BUTTIGIEG: For those keeping score, the Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles has an important update.

INSIDE CHINA’S MILITARY BALLOON PROGRAM: This is essential reading for those seeking to understand what the devil is going on in near-space. The Epoch Times’ Eva Wu has the deep details.

WATCH: Climate Protester Rushes Stage, Josh Hawley Turns the Tables.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: High-paying trade jobs sit empty even as college degrees drop in value.

JOHN NOLTE: Disgraced Don Lemon Is Melting Down … and It Is Glorious.

The 56-year-old Lemon might not be terribly bright, but he’s also not dumb. He knows CNN This Morning is it. If this show doesn’t succeed, his next move is to HasbeenVille; is to Didn’t you used to be Don Lemon?; is to Twitter-ranting next to Keith Olbermann. And how is Lemon handling this pressure as he stares into the abyss of his career? Well, that’s the great part. He’s having a total meltdown right before our eyes, which is something I don’t want y’all to miss.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we learned that Lemon was screaming at his co-host, Nurse Ratched, for interrupting him or something.

And then on Thursday — lol — Don Lemon said women over 40 aren’t in their prime.

He said that on the air!

He said that in front of two women!

That is meltdown behavior. Lemon is freaking out over his imminent career demise, which has made him desperate. So he was almost certainly looking create a moment by 1) torpedoing 51-year-old Republican Nikki Haley’s attack on 187-year-old Democrat Joe Biden and 2) alpha male the discussion. And what did he do instead? The idiot torpedoed himself.

After publishing a mewling apology on Twitter Thusday afternoon, we learned on Friday that Don has the day off… Yes, Don did not appear on CNN This Morning this morning.

Why?

Because Don is melting down.

Meanwhile, Don Surber argues that — from a certain point of view — as Obi-Wan Kenobi might say, “Don Lemon was right when he said Nikki Haley is past prime:”

Oh, it is not her age. She is 5 years younger than the CNN presenter.

Her ideas are past prime. She remains a neocon who seeks to appease her tormentors in the press. She’s a politician who says more tax cuts will solve everything. (And the band played on.)

The world today is not what it was 8 years ago when Donald John Trump rode that golden escalator to the presidency.

And yet, the left appear frightened by Haley, and throwing both the ageism that Lemon strangely attempted paint Haley with, and plenty of racism as well: MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan’s racist take on Nikki Haley’s run ‘is about as vile a thing he’s ever said.’

WE WOULD BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT EDUCATION COLLEGES: National K-12 teacher shortage due to education colleges pushing ‘radical philosophy’, expert argues.

Related: Texas professor instructs elementary school teachers on how to ‘interrogate whiteness.’

HOW THE WORKING CLASSES ARE BEING SACRIFICED to elite virtue-signaling.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege.

In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a top executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, was the primary author of a scientific paper published in the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have found the potential cause for brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s patients. “Because of this research,” read Genentech’s annual letter to shareholders, “we are working to develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer’s from a novel entry point and help the millions of people who currently suffer from this devastating disease.”

But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech’s Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time; two were senior scientists and two were scientists who also served as executives. Three spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the allegations and non-disclosure agreements. The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review’s findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.

Tessier-Lavigne denies both allegations. Genentech said in a statement that “as part of our diligence related to these allegations, we reviewed the records from that November 2011 RRC meeting and saw no allegations of fraud or wrongdoing.” The company acknowledged that “given that these events happened many years ago … our current records may not be complete.”

After the review, which began in 2011, Genentech canceled research based on the paper’s findings. Till Maurer, a senior scientist at the company from 2009-2018 who said he was assigned to develop drugs based on the 2009 paper, told The Daily that his superior informed him that, in Maurer’s words, “the project is being canceled and it’s because they found falsified data.”

Read the whole thing.

FETTERMAN NATION INDEED: Navy drops physical fitness requirement, offers travel for abortions.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Judge Rules Woman Has No Parental Rights For Son She Raised With Ex-Wife, But Sperm Donor Does.

WHY IS JOE BIDEN SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? Biden refers to Maryland’s first Black governor as ‘boy’ in speech.

President Biden on Wednesday used the term “boy” while referring to Wes Moore, Maryland’s first Black governor, in a speech about the economy.

Speaking in Maryland, Mr. Biden gave a shout to the governor, recalling Mr. Moore’s days playing wide receiver on Johns Hopkins University’s football team.

“You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore. He’s the real deal and the boy looks like he can still play,” the 80-year-old Mr. Biden said. “He’s got some guns on him.”

Using the word “boy” to describe a Black man is often viewed a racial slur. That’s because, historically, racist Whites used the term to suggest Blacks weren’t on equal footing with them, both before and after slavery.

Flashback: Biden refers to his future boss as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

PERSONNEL IS POLICY: Top Biden Nat Sec Official Finds Time To Talk About His Top 40 Albums of 2022.

Well, it’s not like there’s much going on in the world right now. Seriously, I wouldn’t care about any of this stuff if people in this Administration — and especially its national security apparatus — were doing their jobs. But they’re not, and it shows.

JIM TREACHER: Nikki Haley Scandal: She Goes By Her Middle Name.

This week Nikki Haley announced she’s running for president. I don’t know if she has a shot, but the libs sure seem to think so. They’re already attacking her for… going by her middle name.

And:

If Gisele Fetterman wanted privacy, she wouldn’t have pushed her husband to run for the U.S. Senate when he was obviously unhealthy. She wouldn’t have called for “consequences” when Dasha Burns reported the truth about John’s mental incapacity. He couldn’t hold a conversation with Burns, and she didn’t pretend he could. Then all the libs blamed Burns, including her own colleagues. If Gisele had her way, Burns would’ve been fired for telling the truth.

Gisele wanted this life, and privacy isn’t part of it. She was willing to lie her way into this mess. Now she gets to deal with the consequences of her actions.

Read the whole thing.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: The Greatest Scandal In Gay Rights History? How journalists – yes, journalists – want to shut down reporting on child transition.

Five years ago when I wrote “We All Live On Campus Now,” I noted how illiberal practices that originated in elite colleges — bullying, ostracism, public condemnation, speech shutdowns, purges of dissenters — were becoming common in every sphere of life, super-charged by social media. From 2020 on, that dynamic has intensified, especially in journalism, with the media purges of 2020 lifted straight from the campus woke playbook.

And this week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud demo outside; alliance between insiders and outsider activists; public shaming of named journalists; accusations that the NYT is a “workplace made hostile by bias” (the now-familiar HR gambit); and non-negotiable demands for even more hiring solely on the basis of identity and ideology.

It’s an echo of Evergreen and Yale and Middlebury and Reed. The ploys are repeated because they work and there’s no downside. And almost all the university presidents caved. They held meetings and meetings; they apologized; they appeased; they conceded core liberal principles of free speech and dissent; they terminated dissident faculty; they equivocated and collaborated in the pursuit of “diversity” and then “equity.” In a word, they were pathetic.

Get the Dish free every Friday

And in the summer of 2020, when campus tactics invaded newsrooms, and writers and editors were purged for committing journalism that violated the orthodoxies of social justice, we saw a similar collapse of nerve.

But this time was different. Check this out, from the executive editor of the NYT. It’s the response we always needed from the leadership of besieged liberal institutions before and never got.

Plus:

The letter has no factual criticisms. It has three quibbles: that Grace Lidinsky-Smith was presented as “an individual person speaking about a personal choice to detransition, rather than the President of GCCAN, an activist organization that pushes junk science and partners with explicitly anti⁠-⁠trans hate groups.” Yes, Lidinsky-Smith became an activist after a traumatizing de-transitioning, but GCCAN is an organization designed for “gender-affirming care” patients.

Another NYT piece “failed to make clear that court cases brought by parents who want schools to out their trans children are part of a legal strategy pursued by anti-trans hate groups.” But the piece has several paragraphs highlighting the acute discomfort many liberal parents had when allying with conservative groups, which they otherwise opposed. The third complaint: that Bazelon used the term “Patient Zero” as a slur to describe the first minor patient to undergo the new affirmation-and-medicalization experiment in Holland. Please.

And that’s it. Seriously, it’s all they’ve got. The point of the letter is not that the pieces had errors, but that they were published at all. They shouldn’t have run because opposition to affirmation-only transition for gender dysphoric children is entirely illegitimate, and the task of journalists who already know this is to suppress rather than describe the argument. As the sign at the protest outside the NYT blared: “The Science Is Settled,” as if science is ever “settled,” and as if journalism is about ignoring and censoring controversy, not reporting and airing it.

Also:

One historical analogy does seem salient to me, though: the drugs they now give to gender-dysphoric teens are very closely related to the drugs they used to “cure” Alan Turing of his gayness. Every time I think of that I shudder.

And this attempt to suppress reporting on the subject comes at a very strange time. Next week, a new book will be published about the Tavistock Centre, the place responsible for the medical and psychological treatment of children with gender dysphoria in Britain. It’s written by a liberal female journalist, Hannah Barnes, of a flagship British documentary show, Newsnight.

Her book exposes a huge medical scandal, in which countless children were put on puberty blockers with almost no psychological evaluation, and with rates of autism and domestic abuse that were already through the roof. It shows what happened when the new affirmation-only puberty-blocker experiment, only begun in the late 1990s, was left to run its course, with no opposition and no dissent allowed. Check out an extract here. . . . More than a third of the kids pushed onto the trans track had autism, sometimes severe. Others were victims of domestic abuse: “[A natal girl] who’s being abused by a male, I think a question to ask is whether there’s some relationship between identifying as male and feeling safe,” one clinician at the center said. No questions about other aspects of a child’s mental health were considered if the kid was identifying as the opposite sex. And this took place in a socialized system, with constant oversight, and no massive financial incentives to treat children. Just imagine what could be happening in the US private system where trans patients are among the most lucrative to have in your care, and are under treatment their entire life.

Actually, don’t imagine — check out the affidavit of Jamie Reed, a lefty progressive whistleblower who worked at a similar clinic in the US.

Read the whole thing.

DON’T HAND OVER YOUR GOVERNMENT TO LOONY THUGS — A CAUTIONARY TALE: Vikings are RACIST: Life in the British police state.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Wallets for Men Slim Mens leather RFID Blocking. #CommissionEarned

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL.

DON SURBER: Fetterman Nation.

We have devolved into a big, dull, goofy, confused, barely functioning nation that given the choice between obvious and ridiculous chooses the ridiculous every single time.

Consider homelessness. Despite spending trillions of dollars on welfare, urban development and mental health over the last quarter-century — driving the national debt to $31 trillion — we now have homeless taking over cities.

Security.org reported on “Homelessness in America 2023: Statistics, Analysis, & Trends.”

It said, “In December of 2022, HUD calculated that 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States and its territories. That number represented an increase of nearly 2,000 individuals over the last complete accounting of 2020, yet remained steady at 0.18% of the nation’s population.”

If we can count to the last digit the number of people sleeping on the streets, we can get every one of them in a bed, even if it is in jail.

Instead, they sleep in pup tents in the street and do drugs unabated by law enforcement. Local and state governments even give junkies free needles and places to buy and use drugs. We call it humane, but this is the opposite.

Treating the homeless is a great racket that puts many an unemployable nephew of a politician on the government payroll.

Insider reported, “San Francisco has a ‘Poop Patrol’ to deal with its feces problem, and workers make more than $184,000 a year in salary and benefits.”

That is just one of the more glaring examples of exploitation. The number of social workers, advocates and programs rise but the problem grows.

Well yes. “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s,” SF Weekly noted a decade ago, stumbling into the Fox Butterfield effect.

AND THEY’RE MISINFORMED: Only 25% of Americans believe the news media.

THIS COULD BE AN INTERESTING COURSE, DONE RIGHT: Law school course praised for studying ‘Historical Origins of White Supremacy.’

Here’s how I’d structure it if I were teaching it, each item indicating a phase of the course:

I. Pre-modern times: Basically no real concept of race. People from southern latitudes were considered to be burned black by the sun, but not thought inferior because of that. (Before Isabella, Ferdinand’s family negotiated to marry him to an Ethiopian princess, since Ethiopia was a rich and powerful Christian kingdom. Nobody cared about race, though there might have been religious issues (I think she was Coptic), but those could be dealt with, apparently.)

II. Early trade with Africa: Portugese explorers, etc.: Hey, these people are a lot like us. They have cities, kings, taxes, armies, etc. We can’t beat them militarily but they’re happy to trade. They’ll sell us slaves for gold, and for firearms and manufactured goods! We can use those in our sugar colonies, etc. [Africans: These Europeans will buy slaves for gold, and better yet firearms and manufactured goods! That will help us finance our wars, where we will capture more slaves to sell!]

III. Europeans: Now that we’re buying a lot of slaves, we’ve decided that they must be inferior, which justifies the slavery, about which we feel a tiny bit uncomfortable. [Africans: This trade is great! Keep it up!]

IV. White people rule! “White supremacy” is just taken for granted almost everywhere. New scientific community gives a scientific sheen to theories of superiority. “Progressives” push segregation, discriminatory government policies, eugenics.

V. General theories of equality make this less and less appealing, then Nazi racial ideology suddenly makes race-supremacy theories unacceptable basically everywhere post-war.

VI. Move toward equality, we’re all the same under the skin, etc. Peaking in early to mid 1970s.

VII. Progressives rediscover theories of race, repackage white supremacy and segregation as woke politics. Return of racial identity politics, institutional segregation, etc. Denial of common humanity as more important than racial character. Brings us to today.

You can teach almost anything and make it interesting and educational. The course syllabus linked in the story isn’t all bad, but the heavy reliance on the likes of Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project seems dubious.

Related: A Syllabus for the Occupy Movement.

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: How Biden and Fetterman Crushed My Faith in Doctors.

IF WHITE SUPREMACY IS REAL, WHY ARE PEOPLE CONSTANTLY PRETENDING TO BE MINORITIES? Arab-Latina activist working as chief equity officer for progressive group is actually a white woman.

The obvious question raised by this incident is how Rachel was able to get away with it. The Intercept notes that the DEI has become a big business very quickly and, as a result, the qualifications and backgrounds of people claiming jobs are sometimes not looked at as carefully as they should be. Sana Saeed, an Al Jazeera media critic, told the Intercept the hiring of Raquel/Rachel was “a damning indictment of how superficial and detrimental, to safe and inclusive workplaces, DEI can often be.”

I see something besides sloppiness at work here. Oskar Pierre Castro, who led the search committee to fill the DEI position, described how Raquel/Rachel seemed like an ideal candidate.

“It really touched all the points,” said Castro…

Castro added, “In my mind it was, ‘Great, a person of color, a queer person of color, who happens to be a Muslim, it’s a woman, all these things, and someone who seemed to get it. I definitely feel conned. … I feel deceived.”

He feels conned because he was conned.

Raquel/Rachel presented exactly what he was looking for in a candidate. Saying she “touched all the points” is a nicer way of saying she checked all the boxes. Queer – check. Person of color – check. Muslim – check. Woman – check. If you think of intersectionality as a kind of progressive credit score, Raquel Evita Saraswati would have scored near the top thanks to her fake identity. If she’d just been a Muslim white woman, that wouldn’t have been quite as impressive. Maybe then they’d have taken a little more time thinking about her actual qualifications in that case. But as it was, she was simply too perfect to pass up.

Like I said, if there’s so much bigotry out there, why all the fakery? Back when white supremacy was actually a thing, black people tried to pass as white, not the other way around.

A WHITE HOUSE OF HATE: Biden: White people love watching lynchings, even now.

HEH: Ilhan Omar Withdraws Support For East Palestine After Learning It’s In America.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Head of German intelligence unit was a Russian double agent.

I don’t have a lot of confidence in our intelligence agencies ither.