FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: He’s McLovin’ the High-Speed Police Chase.

GOOD: SpaceX Countersues Hiring Discrimination Lawsuit By DOJ.

MEETING JOHN CLEESE WHILE NAKED

My interview with the comedic legend premieres Sunday night on GB News. Follow the link for the whole surreal tale (w/ pics!)

SO VIRAL HICKEYS ARE A THING? Virus observed sucking on another virus’ ‘neck’ for the first time.

DON’T GET COCKY: Shock Poll Shows That Even California Hates Biden and Newsom Running the State Into the Ground.

PROBABLY, EVERYTHING ELSE IS. Is the US reporting system for vaccine safety broken?

THIS ISN’T A GOOD TIME FOR EXPENSIVE ALTERNATIVES: Beyond Meat plans layoffs as US sales plummet. “The higher price of plant-based meat has also hurt U.S. sales at a time when consumers are stressed about inflation, he said. Brown said the company lowered some prices in the third quarter but didn’t necessarily bring new customers into the category.”

BUY LAND — THEY’RE NOT MAKING ANY MORE OF IT! OH YEAH? New island emerges near Japan after underwater volcanic explosions.

UNSURPRISING: Reducing work-life stress linked to improvements in heart health.

ENJOY THE MEMBERBERRIES: Hail Mary Sue: ‘Marvels’ Trailer Features Male Avengers to Save Female-Led Film. “They do pop up in the just-released trailer meant to reverse the bad buzz surrounding the project. It’s odd to see a trailer released the day before a film opens, but Team MCU is in trouble.”

THIS IS THE REAL MIKE JOHNSON: Wow, can you believe this – Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has in the past endorsed a proposal whereby the people of the United States — you know, THE sovereign power, aka “We the People” — would do in 2023 what we did way back in 1784.

That is, call a convention of delegates representing each of the states to consider amendments to the present Constitution and recommend any the majority of them think should be submitted to the states for possible ratification. I mean, the horror of such a thing, the ultimate illustration of republican democracy in action! OMG, they could repeal the EPA, stop the government from borrowing more trillions of dollars, even limit how long anybody can serve in Congress!

Clearly, Politico thinks Johnson should be thrown out, not just of the Speakership, but also out of the House of Representatives and indeed out of American public life because he is obviously a mortal threat to our existing — i.e. Progressive — order.

FACE, MEET PALM: Worst Winning EVER: House GOP Rewards Rogue FBI With $375 Million Housing Allowance.

WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM AND BIGOTRY? Tuition Waivers Open Only To Non-Whites at U. North Dakota and Its Law School Challenge by Equal Protection Project.

SUDDENLY WE’RE SEEING SOME ACCOUNTABILITY: U Chicago Arrests Student Protesters Engaging in Pro-Palestinian “Sit-in” in Admissions Office (+ Two Faculty Members).

WELL, ISRAEL HAS A TRADITION OF HUNTING DOWN WAR CRIMINALS: Israeli Minister: We Will Hunt Down *ALL* Participants in the 10/7 Atrocities, Including the Fake “Journalists” That Played PR Agent for Hamas.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Average credit card balances top $6,000, a 10-year high, as delinquencies rise. “Balances jumped 15% from a year ago, according to a separate quarterly credit industry insights report from TransUnion, while the average balance per consumer hit $6,088, the highest in 10 years.”

And we haven’t even hit the Christmas shopping season.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: How to Identify the Marxists 101: Biden’s New Pronoun Mandate Is a Dead Give-Away. “Language is a key tool to conquering people, and pronouns are the preferred cutlass of the Marxists.”

‘WHITE LOGIC’ AND ‘JEW PHYSICS.’ I was hoping they’d at least give us a cool cyberpunk-style dystopia, but the totalitarians just keep doing the same boring and predictable stuff over and over again. We deserve a better class of authoritarians stamping on our faces forever.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: If the next Starship makes it through staging, you can call that a win.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, said before the April 20 launch that a successful test flight would mean the rocket didn’t blow up on the launch pad. This time, SpaceX hopes to make it a little further. Ideally, the flight will go into space and reach full duration, a 90-minute trip around the world that will end with a reentry and splashdown of the Starship upper stage in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii.

Let’s call that a stretch goal. If that’s how the flight ends, you’ll probably hear the hollering all the way from South Texas. It would mean nearly everything worked on the humongous Starship rocket, including all or nearly all of the engines on the booster and upper stage, a daring new method of separating its booster from the upper stage, a brand-new steering system design, the Starship’s ceramic heat shield tiles to protect it during reentry, and complex guidance, navigation, and control algorithms.

It would unlock the next steps in SpaceX’s Starship program. Perhaps SpaceX could meet Musk’s goal of launching Starlink satellites on Starship toward the end of next year. Maybe SpaceX can start demonstrating refueling Starship in orbit, a major milestone for NASA’s Artemis program, which will rely on getting Starship to the Moon to serve as a landing craft for astronauts traveling to the lunar surface.

In June, Musk predicted that there’s a roughly 60 percent chance that Starship will make it to near orbital velocity on the second test flight. The rocket won’t quite attain the speed necessary to reach a stable orbit around Earth, so if it makes it that far, Starship will fall back into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean about 90 minutes after launch.

At the other end of the spectrum, let’s assume Starship blows up before clearing the launch pad. That would probably set back the privately run rocket program by at least six months. It took nearly that long for SpaceX to repair the extensive damage, but not destruction, at the launch pad following the April 20 test flight. It might even prompt more scrutiny from regulatory agencies, throwing another wrench into SpaceX’s schedule.

It seems to me that getting through the first three minutes of flight would be enough to show that SpaceX is on the right path with Starship.

Godspeed…

WHY IS YALE SUCH A CESSPIT OF HATE? Yale is a ‘campus without care’ after hosting ‘anti-Israel’ event, Jewish students say.

JUST RELEASE THE WHOLE THING: Nashville Police Put 7 on ‘Administration Assignment’ After Leak of Manifesto.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Board member resigns from Columbia over university’s ‘moral cowardice’: report. Henry Swieca accuses the Ivy League institution of being ‘significantly compromised by a moral cowardice that appears beyond repair.’

IT SAYS “SHOCK” IN THE HEADLINE BUT I AM NOT SHOCKED: SHOCK — One In Five Democrats Side With Hamas. “The political split was fairly wide, though all three major political groupings in the U.S. supported Israel by 50% or higher. The results include Democrats (54% Israel support, 20% Hamas support, 26% not sure), Republicans (71% Israel support, 7% Hamas support, 22% not sure), and independents (50% Israel support, 6% Hamas support, 44% not sure).”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump/Tucker 2024 Because YOLO and Why Not? “How much fun would it be to throw a true wildcard non-politician into the VP slot? This election is already going to be beyond weird, it might as well be the fun kind of weird.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: ‘B’ is for below grade level (and chronically absent). “Achievement is down and absenteeism is way up, yet report cards show the same grades — or higher — as before the pandemic, concludes False Signals, a new report by EdNavigator and Learning Heroes. No wonder ‘families believe that everything is back to normal or will be soon.’ No wonder demand is low for tutoring and summer school.”