INSURRECTION!

🚨 BREAKING: Leftists storm the Tennessee Capitol demanding more gun control measures.

h/t: @TheTNHoller pic.twitter.com/d2K0Kb5t1c

— MRCTV (@mrctv) March 30, 2023

Will they get six months in solitary for this attempt at political intimidation? Notice that the state troopers are not escorting them in.

GOOD: Lab-made antibodies offer potential cure for yellow fever.

COLD WAR II: Russian Court Orders Wall Street Journal Reporter to Be Held in Custody.

Russia’s main security agency said Thursday it had detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich for what it described as espionage.

Mr. Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen and member of the Journal’s Moscow bureau, was detained in the city of Yekaterinburg on Wednesday while on a reporting trip.

The Federal Security Bureau said Mr. Gershkovich, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.” Mr. Gershkovich is accredited to work as a journalist in Russia by the country’s foreign ministry.

Authorities took Mr. Gershkovich to Moscow, where he appeared in court with a state-appointed defense attorney and was ordered held in custody until May 29, said the press service of the court according to TASS.

In Russia, espionage trials are often conducted in secret and it is rare for a court to acquit a defendant. Trials can take months to unfold.

Developing…

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Veteran NASA engineer to lead lunar space station project.

I THOUGHT THAT THE INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMIC UNION HAD SETTLED ON “WOMBAT” AS THE STANDARD UNIT OF MEASURE FOR ASTEROID LENGTH: Asteroid the size of 33 armadillos to pass Earth Sunday – NASA. “Asteroid 2023 FL2 is 35 meters, which is as much as almost 33 nine-banded armadillos lined up tail-to-snout.”

I must have missed the armadillo memo. I mean, I try to follow this stuff but I’m busy and it’s so hard to keep up.

FIT TO SERVE? We Now Know When John Fetterman Will (Allegedly) Return to the Senate.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: James O’Keefe Uncovers Possible Lucrative Money-Laundering Scheme for Dems.

ONLY THE BEGINNING: QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley is released 14 months early from prison after Jan. 6 footage showed him being ‘ESCORTED’ by cops inside the Capitol. “The Bureau of Prisons gave no explanation for the decision, but it is impossible not to think that it is related to the release of a video that showed Chansley being escorted peacefully and helpfully by Capitol Police, suggesting that the prosecutors misled the jury on the circumstances of his arrest. That video was not available to Chansley and his lawyers when constructing his defense, violating Chansley’s constitutional rights. As you recall from earlier posts, the prosecutors failed to make a ‘Brady disclosure’ of exculpatory evidence.”

Plus: “The January 6th prosecutions have been a farce. It’s not that the rioters deserve no consequences for their actions. They do. But the response has been utterly disproportionate to the cause. The fiction that this was an insurrection, not a riot, is absurd on its face. Putting rioters in solitary confinement for months to pressure them into guilty pleas? Unforgivable.”

People need to be held accountable. And in time they will be.

SOMEBODY TELL MODERNA AND THE CDC: WHO says healthy kids, teens may not need more COVID shots.

WELL, AT LEAST WITH A CERTAIN VOCAL AND INFLUENTIAL COHORT, SHE’S RIGHT: New generation too woke for classic comedy, according to Jennifer Aniston.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Sen. Manchin Proves Once Again He’s a Dupe for His Own Party. “You know what the difference is between West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin dealing with his fellow Democrats and Charlie Brown hoping to finally kick the football Lucy held for him?”

LIGHTNING DEAL: UABRLA Tire Inflator Portable Air Compressor. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)

JEFF GOLDSTEIN: “For so-called ‘red flag laws’ to have prevented the Covenant shooting, we’d have to concede, as a society, that body dysmorphia is a mental illness — which it was, up until about a minute ago.”

PUNCH BACK… ER, LIFT UP?… TWICE AS HARD: Male powerlifter ridicules Canada’s gender self-ID laws by declaring himself a woman, entering female contest and smashing bench press record held by trans woman.

21ST CENTURY DATING: ‘COVID Safe Cuties’: The Insular #ZeroCOVID Dating Network. “One Twitter user, @rach_fornow, posted a selfie and invited Zero COVID people to ‘come flirt.’ Unfortunately for Rach, she is unmasked indoors (a cardinal sin), she doesn’t have neon hair, she doesn’t have a BLM or transgender icon in her bio, and she is conventionally attractive. So she’s probably not going to find a lot of love on the COVID Safe Cuties platform.”

READER FAVORITE: Levi’s Men’s 550 Relaxed Fit Jeans. #CommissionEarned

JUDGE DUNCAN: What We Must Expect of Our Law Schools.

Let’s say the quiet part out loud: The mob came to target me because they hate my work and my ideas. They hate the clients I represented in court. They hate the arguments I made. They evidently hate my judicial opinions, although the protesters were evidently familiar with only one of the hundreds I’ve written — an opinion where I refused to enlist the federal judiciary in the project of controlling what pronouns people use. So, the protesters did not come to respond to my talk or engage in counter-speech. They just wanted to vent their rage against me. None of this spectacle — this obviously staged public shaming — had the slightest thing to do with “free speech.” It had everything to do with intimidation. And to be clear, not intimidating me, but the protesters’ fellow students. The message could not have been clearer: Woe to you if you represent the kind of clients that Judge Duncan represented, or take the same views that he has.

Yes, this was a conspiracy to deny others their civil rights, and should be treated as such. Plus:

So, next, let’s talk about legal education. We shouldn’t forget that this incident did not occur in a campus bar at 12:45 a.m. after the USC game. It occurred in a law school — indeed, one of our nation’s elite law schools. Dean Martínez’s letter eloquently explained why this makes the incident doubly shameful. … Dean Martínez is correct when she writes, “I believe we cannot function as a law school from the premise that appears to have animated the disruption of Judge Duncan’s remarks.” And what was that premise? That “speakers, texts, or ideas believed by some to be harmful inflict a new impermissible harm justifying a heckler’s veto simply because they are present on this campus.” I’ve heard someone comment recently that to be a lawyer means, by definition, to have to occupy the same room with people you seriously disagree with — and yet to have to engage in reasoned, indeed persuasive, argument with them. If that is true — and it is — then the primitive impulse to shout someone down is not a trait we should want to encourage in law schools. Just the opposite. It is a trait we should strive to help students unlearn. …

Indeed.

CHANGE: China and Brazil have reached a deal to trade in their own currencies, ditching the US dollar as an intermediary. “Today, as well, Saudi Arabia has joined a China-led security bloc and trade alliance with China, Russia, India, Pakistan and others, per CNBC.”

CRIMINAL MASTERMINDS HARD AT WORK: Watch Teens Attempt to Carjack Maryland Man, But Can’t Drive Manual Transmission to Get Away.

Two teens who carjacked a man at a gas station in Germantown, Maryland were unable to drive away because they didn’t know how to operate the car’s manual transmission, police say.

A 16-year-old from Rockville and a 17-year-old from Washington, D.C. were arrested after the carjacking on Saturday at the Sunoco gas station on Frederick Road, Montgomery County police said.

A man had just finished pumping gas and was getting into his car when he saw the two teens running toward him, police said. The teens then forced his door open, grabbed him and demanded his keys, which he handed over to them.

When the teens got into the car, they didn’t know how to operate the car’s manual transmission, police said, so they got out of the car and ran off.

Congrats fellas — you’re living the meme!

HOW’S THAT UN-POLICING WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Plagued by campus crime, Temple president resigns.

THINGS ARE SO BAD IN SEATTLE: That public transportation system officials have had to install Fentanyl detectors because the fumes are getting to drivers. Washington Free Beacon’s Susannah Luthi reports at least 50 bus drivers became so sick from the fumes that they had to stop and seek emergency medical treatment.

“The city is installing the detectors as part of a University of Washington study whose researchers hope to ‘better understand drugs that are being smoked on the buses and trains.’ Symptoms of fentanyl exposure include dizziness and breathing difficulties,” Luthi writes. Which makes one wonder, what else is there to understand – the fumes are evidence of illegal drug use and passengers doing so should be arrested and punished.

PLAY BALL! Those are the two happiest words in the vocabulary for The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz. It’s time for Jeff’s opening day tribute to the world’s finest sport. He’s a practicing Jew and I’m a born-again Christian, but we both love baseball because we know God created the game. Otherwise, why would the first verse of Genesis begin with “In the big inning …”?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Michigan State warns against using bigoted phrases like ‘Christmas trees,’ ‘terrorist’ or ‘overweight:’ Language referring to Christian holidays or the United States was listed under ‘terms to avoid.’

I remember when funding for higher education was justified on the grounds that it would facilitate higher reasoning.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Berkeley Unified considers reparations for Black students. “Smith acknowledged that Berkeley schools could do better to provide equitable outcomes for current students. He said the big question is how to fund reparations.”

I’d suggest reparations in the form of unearned, worthless diplomas but that’s been going on for a while now.

THIS IS OUR PRESS TODAY:

Related thoughts from Andy Ngo.

UPDATE: ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ Set for Washington Days After Nashville School Shooting.

Trans people seem generally fine to me. Trans activists seem to be a particularly odious group of hysterics and bullies.