BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Jobless claims increase more than expected to their highest since October 2021.

WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT STUDIES? Study Shows COVID Lockdown Benefits Dwarfed by Social and Economic Costs.

RIP: Rev. Pat Robertson, Legendary Evangelist and 1988 Presidential Candidate, Dead at 93.

AND YET HE REMAINS CONTEMPTIBLE: House GOP drops plan to hold FBI director in contempt. “The contempt push was the closest House Republicans have come to direct action against an executive branch official as part of their vast array of probes into the Biden administration.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Success! NYC’s Drug Paraphernalia Machine Cleaned Out in One Night.

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? A ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid bigger than a skyscraper reaches Earth next week.

TAXPAYER-SUBSIDIZED PRIVILEGE AND EXCLUSION: New documentary exposes Ivy League privilege and the students it shuts out.

INTRODUCING THE 28TH AMENDMENT: Gavin Newsom Wants to Protect Your Gun Rights by Destroying Them. “All it requires is one teensy little amendment to the Constitution that would neither ‘leave the 2nd Amendment unchanged’ nor ‘respect America’s gun-owning tradition’ as Newsom claims because Newsom hates your rights and is also a known liar.”

PUSHBACK WORKS: UNC Med School disbands DEI task force after backlash. “The task force previously promoted discussions on ‘Understanding that America’s medical system is structurally racist’ and ‘Understanding and Responding to Microaggressions.'”

HMM: China May Be Headed for a Lost Decade.

The apparent failure of the Chinese economy to regain its past rapid economic growth path following the ending of the Covid restrictions should have come as no surprise to those who had been paying attention to the bursting of the Chinese housing and credit market bubbles. This is especially the case considering that those bubbles exceeded the size of those that preceded Japan’s lost economic decade in the 1990s and that preceded the U.S. recession of 2007-2009.

Chinese non-public-sector credit has increased by more than a staggering 100% of gross domestic product since 2008, according to the Bank of International Settlements, since 2008. Meanwhile, housing prices in relation to incomes in a number of major Chinese cities increased to levels exceeding those in London and New York, a study by Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff found.

Anyone doubting that the Chinese housing and credit market bubble has burst need only recall that last year Evergrande, along with 20 other Chinese property market developers, defaulted on its debt. They also might take note of the fact that Chinese housing prices have declined in each of the last 12 months and that a number of major local governments are now running into difficulties in repaying their debt as land sales have screeched to a halt.

This is all not to say that China is likely to experience a U.S.-style bust led by a housing and credit market collapse. Rather, it is to say that the Chinese government’s efforts to prop up the housing market and the ailing local governments will leave little credit available for the more productive sectors of its economy. That in turn threatens to usher in a lost Chinese economic decade a la Japan’s of the 1990s.

China can’t afford to lose a decade if they have any hope of beating the “grow old before they grow rich” prophecy.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: George Santos Is My Favorite Liar in Congress. “Look, almost everyone in the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives is a grifter whose familiarity with the truth is casual at best. Santos’s appeal to me is that he doesn’t shy away from his indifference to veracity. I don’t need legislators to be my life partner, I need them to sponsor and pass laws that will benefit the Republic.”

REMINDER/DISCLOSURE: I’M ON THE NCLA ADVISORY BOARD. NCLA Endorses Request for U.S. Supreme Court to Rule on ATF’s Unilateral Bump Stock Ban.

LOW-TRUST COMPUTING: Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my ‘Chrome’ search with a fake AI answer. “Let me put things a different way: Microsoft just gave itself a full-screen ad in search results by faking an AI interaction. This ‘search result’ is juicing Microsoft’s own product instead of respecting its users’ intent.”

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Former Biden Staffer Didn’t Get Cited Or Tested For Intoxication After Crash. “Police did not issue a traffic citation to Cedric Richmond, a former senior adviser to President Joe Biden and ex-U.S. congressman, or test him for intoxication despite the high-profile Democrat acting bewildered and slurring his speech after a car wreck in New Orleans, according to new details about the April 23 incident. A police report offered insight into a police officer’s investigation into what happened with Richmond, who left the White House last year to become an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, after his Mercedes convertible crashed into an oak tree at an intersection with his young son in the passenger seat of the vehicle.”

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Instagram Algorithm Makes Buying Kiddie Porn Easy.

STANDING UP AGAINST BIGOTRY AND HATRED: Kentucky Jewish Group Condemns Anti-Semitic Activists Working to Reelect Dem Governor: Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory’s anti-Semitic history is ‘deeply troubling,’ Kentucky Jewish Council says.

GREEN NUDE EEL: Biden admin is preparing to target Americans’ gas furnaces amid stove crackdown.

According to experts, the regulations — proposed in June 2022 by the Department of Energy (DOE) — would restrict consumer choice, drive prices higher and likely have a low impact on greenhouse gas emissions. The agency could finalize the rules targeting residential gas furnaces, which more than 50% of American households rely on for space heating, at any point over the upcoming weeks.

“This is a classic example of one size not fitting all,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “Every home is different, every homeowner is different and people are best off having a wide range of choices. They can work with their contractor to make the best decision for their home and their circumstances.”

“The efficiency standard would effectively outlaw non-condensing furnaces and condensing alternatives would be the only ones available,” Lieberman said. “Those are more efficient, but they cost more. And installation costs could be a big problem for some houses that are not compatible with condensing furnaces.”

Making everything more expensive and less convenient is the goal.

OVER AT SUBSTACK, I have an essay on all the stories about aliens that are coming out.

One explanation for alien visits and sightings, which I heard from (I think) Greg Benford at a party (it might have been Jerry Pournelle at a different party, it’s been a while), is the “graduate student hypothesis.” We’re being studied by alien scientists, but, like human scientists, all the grubby fieldwork tends to get left to grad students. Grad students are in their 20s (or whatever the alien equivalent is), get bored doing all the grubby work, and occasionally get drunk and set out to spook the locals just for fun. (The drunk part might explain all the crashes, too . . . )

But of course we can’t know. Even if we met and studied aliens it would probably take a lifetime or more to really understand them. Without any data there’s really not much we can say.

We maybe have some data, or at least inferences. Are they friendly? Unclear, but if they wanted us wiped out they probably could have just nudged an asteroid onto a path that that would have killed us all, or at least destroyed civilization, by now. Are they keeping us in an interstellar quarantine? If so, not very effectively given all those crashing spaceships.

I mentioned the crashed ships as a means of transferring technology. Perhaps they’re trying to protect our mental health. On Earth, at least, less advanced civilizations that encounter more-advanced ones tend to suffer a deeply destructive societal depression of sorts. So the idea is that we’re being allowed to retain our self-esteem by reverse-engineering their technology, making us feel proud of our achievements, rather than receiving handouts that would simply underscore our inferiority. Perhaps it’s also a way of making sure we only get technology that we more or less understand.

Read the whole thing, of course.

HOW THE MACHINE WORKS: Hunter’s Laptop All Over Again: The House Oversight Committee seeks an FBI document alleging Joe Biden took a bribe, and the effort to discredit the claim is already under way.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer subpoenaed a Federal Bureau of Investigation form he says outlines details of a $5 million bribe allegedly paid to Joe Biden while he was vice president. Until last week, the FBI wouldn’t even concede the document existed.

Nevertheless this Monday morning an FBI team dispatched by Director Christopher Wray made its way up to Capitol Hill in hopes that Rep. Comer would be satisfied with a look-see. He wasn’t. After the meeting, he said the FBI told him there is a continuing investigation but reiterated that he still plans to hold Mr. Wray in contempt unless he turns over the document.

The response is telling. Mr. Comer, a Kentucky Republican, has been painted as a partisan rube chasing conspiracies. Nobody seems to care that a sitting vice president was accused by a trusted FBI source of taking a bribe. For those who lived through the Hunter Biden laptop saga, it is, as Yogi Berra would say, déjà vu all over again.

But after Mr. Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley told Mr. Wray in a phone call last Wednesday that they’d already seen the document, pretending it doesn’t exist was no longer an option. Now that the FBI says there’s an investigation, there is a campaign to discredit the charges before the public can see them.

The first salvo came from CNN last Wednesday.

Well, CNN.

REPORT: Biden Admin to Indict Donald Trump Over Classified Docs Soon; Charges Revealed.

TOO FAKE TO TELL: US government stats aren’t reliable. More importantly, neither are US government bonds.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The Fed’s Inflation Fight Faces A New Challenge: A Dry Panama Canal.

Well, as swimmingly as you can go without water. “If Gatun Lake levels keep falling as forecast, the market reaction will be higher shipping rates and a scramble to find alternative routes from Asia to the US, logistics experts said. The drought also risks undermining the Fed’s battle to get the rate of inflation closer to its 2% target, said Jonathan Ostry, an economics professor at Georgetown University and a former International Monetary Fund official.”

2%? Haha.

IT’S SCARED:  YouTube Ramps Up Censorship of RFK Jr Campaign.

No, I’m not going to vote for him. I don’t vote for democrats. But of their bunch of horrors, he’s the one that is telling the truth, if only on a limited front. That’s enough to terrify them.

NOTHING SHADY ABOUT THAT AT ALL: IL Dems’ new law – citizens may ONLY file suit against the state from two counties.

FROM JONATHAN DE SOUZA:  Solist At Large: The Last Solist.

Adelaide Taylor is the newest Solist to have gained her powers. A magical warrior of the ancient and lost Dawn Empire, she moved from California to New Jersey in secret. Enrolled in a very Catholic high school, she has to find her Companions-five teenagers that will help her to defeat magical threats to the human race. But, in the process of becoming a Solist, Adelaide has to hide the truth of her past from everyone else. Including the five people that she needs to trust the most. And, there are secrets that Adelaide still has to discover about herself and the world she has become a part of… And, who she truly is.