CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS APPEAR TO BE A PARTY OF (AT BEST) EPHEBOPHILES, IF NOT ACTUAL PEDOPHILES:  California’s Child Trafficking Bill Sort of Advances, But….

THEY’RE CHICOM PUPPETS. THEY DON’T GET TO DICTATE TO THE WORLD:  Even if I had no other problems with the World Health Organization.

SO, WHEN DO WE GET TRIALS?  Ten years ago, microbiologist Ralph Baric told Tony Fauci and the world he would make coronaviruses more lethal. Then – with Fauci’s backing – he did.

ARE THEY INSANE?  Yes, I Am Proud Of Having Started A Tradition.

First, they’re aware the government takes all the money plus some and eats it or something, right? Second, what is this: You can’t rob me. I’ll give you money!

Seriously?

IS THIS JUST AN OLD SHORT STORY, OR IS FRANCIS TURNER A PROPHET? WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE. COMPARE AND CONTRAST:  How I Became An Official Zombie.  AND  Solicitors’ computer error leaves estranged couple officially DIVORCED – and High Court says there’s nothing they can do to fix it.

INDEED:  The value of Trump’s Abraham Accords once again proven.

IT’S BEEN EVIDENT FOR A GOOD LONG TIME:  Harvard Medical “Expert” Disqualified in Federal Court Case Due to “Overwhelming” and “Misleading” Plagiarism.

NOT SURPRISED:  Harvard Medical “Expert” Disqualified in Federal Court Case Due to “Overwhelming” and “Misleading” Plagiarism.

Fish, rotting from head. Tertiary education has a credibility problem.

WHAT? THEY THOUGHT IT WAS A SECRET?  Longtime NPR Editor Who Documented Their Liberal Bias Suspended Without Pay, Threatened With Termination.

STOMP, STOMP, PANIC ALREADY:  Researchers Warn of Mutant Monkeypox Strain with ‘Pandemic Potential’, Discovered in Congo Village.

OPEN THREAD: D-Dooh Yeah. When this video came out, Edie Brickell looked exactly like my sister, except that my sister has blue eyes. I haven’t seen Edie lately, so I don’t know if the resemblance still holds.

SPACE: Unforgiving Failures: the challenges of upper stages.

JUST ASK SOMEONE TO FEDEX IT BACK TO YOU FROM ELON CITY IN A FEW YEARS: NASA Announces It Needs a New Plan For Retrieving Its Martian Rock Samples.

BLACKMAN AND TILLMAN GET RESULTS: Special Counsel Jack Smith Responds to Blackman-Tillman: No matter how you slice it, Smith cannot exercise the powers he purports to exercise.

LOL, DAVID FRUM. “We’re not supposed to read Biden’s refusal to debate to mean that he lacks the mental capacity to debate. Frum and others will instruct us, repeatedly, in articles repeating the talking point.”

But we all know that’s why, and that dishonest flacks are making excuses for the mental incapacity of the President they foisted on us last time around.

CHANGE: Evolution in Action? Nitrogen-Fixing Organelles May Be Nature’s Next Big Leap.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Journalist At NPR Suspended, Leading To Shocking Discovery There Was A Journalist At NPR.

A journalist and senior editor at National Public Radio has been suspended, leading to the astounding revelation that there was a journalist working at NPR.

Uri Berliner, who has worked at the taxpayer-funded media organization for 25 years, was suspended after he recently wrote an essay exposing how NPR had lost all trust among the nation’s public.

“Wow, they had a real journalist at NPR? That’s news to me!” said one member of the astonished nation’s public. “I thought they were just mellow voices on the radio that told me in a matter-of-fact, upper-crust, college-educated manner what Leftist narrative I was supposed to believe about any given story.”

Indeed; as our leftist betters become more and more surreal and comical, the Babylon Bee is increasingly doing straight-up reportage.

MARK JUDGE: Kathleen Parker Has Balls.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Spot the Next Mania: Each new panic follows the same playbook. “Within the astonishingly short time frame of 10 years, I count four real-life collective crazes: transgenderism, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns (which spawned sub-crazes over masks and vaccines), and Black Lives Matter. I also worry we’re already in the grip of social mania number five.”

But I don’t believe that “both the priests and disciples of moral panics are driven by good intentions.” The useful idiots are, but not the promulgators. And even a lot of the useful idiots are drawn in by the opportunity to bully others and feel virtuous about it.

OZEMPIC, ETC. WILL MAKE THIS OBSOLETE. Why don’t rich people eat anymore? Extreme dieting is the latest way for the mega-rich to signal their wealth and status.

ALMOST ALWAYS A VERY HARD DECISION: Reflections of a Newsman.

I saw this article where country singer Ashley Judd talked about being on the “other side” of coverage of tragedies. It made me take pause and reflect.

As a former photojournalist turned newsroom lawyer, I’ve had to wrestle with this from time to time. My watch-words (especially in the Media Law and Ethics classes I teach) has always been “good taste and common sense win the day.”

But it’s always a tough call. My dear friend, the late Hal Buell was the long-time Photo Chief for the Associated Press. A truly decent guy in every way. When the legendary Nick Ut made the iconic news picture below, Hal told me years later that they debated for several hours about whether they should move the file on the wire.

(Credit: Nick Ut/AP under Creative Commons license)

They decided that despite its somewhat gruesome and certainly invasive nature, it depicted a moment too important to keep from the public. IIRC, some newspaper members simply chose not to run it.

Flash forward a few years to the wild and wooly ’80’s. The standard became “if it bleeds, it leads.” Little thought was given to the sensitivities of the victim’s families, let alone the readers. Photographs like this were common:

(Credit: Paul DeMaria/NYDN via Wikimedia Commons)

As a shooter myself, I was guilty of making pictures that today might be “insensitive.” I made the photo below after hearing a police call of a shooting outside an elementary school:

(Credit: Charles Glasser/Miami Beach Sun)

Apparently this fellow was a Marielito who owed about $50 to another drug dealer. Without warning, the murderer (never caught) simply walked up behind this guy and pumped a few .38 rounds into the back of his head. (FYI: Years later, Facebook blocked this photo from view for violating “community standards.”)

Did I consider anyone’s “privacy”? Hell, it was on a public sidewalk (in front of a school, no less) and the guy wasn’t a “somebody.” No relatives to complain, no objections from readers, I even won a Florida Press Club in Spot News award for it.

Let’s flash forward to my being a newsroom lawyer a decade or so later. I’m the Global Media Counsel for Bloomberg News. In the early days of the Enron collapse, one of the top executives — a real Boy Scout — committed suicide. An outstanding reporter named Loren Steffy, got a hold of his suicide note from the Sugarland PD. What to do?

The family’s lawyer begged us not to publish it. The note itself revealed nothing personal, and didn’t name names about Enron. I had a long, deep discussion with the Editor-in-Chief. If we didn’t publish, I argued, the family would be subjected to endless conspiracy theories. By publishing, we could put the matter of his suicide to rest. He knew bad things were done, as an honest guy he couldn’t deal with it, and it was going to get worse: He wanted to apologize to his family.

We ran the note. Thoughts?

UPDATE (From Ed): 50 years on: Revisiting the myths of the ‘Napalm Girl,’ a photo ‘that doesn’t rest.’

The napalm attack was carried out by propeller-driven Skyraider aircraft of the South Vietnamese Air Force trying to roust communist forces dug in near the village – as news accounts at the time made clear.

The headline over the New York Times report from Trang Bang said: “South Vietnamese Drop Napalm on Own Troops.”

The Chicago Tribune front page of June 9, 1972, stated the “napalm [was] dropped by a Vietnamese air force Skyraider diving onto the wrong target.”

Christopher Wain, a veteran British journalist, wrote in a dispatch for United Press International: “These were South Vietnamese planes dropping napalm on South Vietnamese peasants and troops.”

The myth of American culpability at Trang Bang began taking hold during the 1972 presidential campaign, when Democratic candidate George McGovern referred to the photograph in a televised speech. The napalm that badly burned Kim Phuc, he declared, had been “dropped in the name of America.”

McGovern’s metaphoric claim anticipated similar assertions, including Susan Sontag’s statement in her 1973 book “On Photography,” that Kim Phuc had been “sprayed by American napalm.”

(The Associated Press, in an article posted online yesterday, erroneously described the aerial attack at Trang Bang as “an American napalm strike on a Vietnamese hamlet.” See screenshot nearby. The news agency later in the day corrected the error after it was noted on Twitter.)

Read the whole thing.

THE E.V. BUBBLE DEFLATES: 2025 Mercedes-Benz eSprinter First Drive: Run Silent, Run … Slow?

SCIENCE IS NEVER SETTLED: Top Astronomers Gather to Confront Possibility They Were Very Wrong About the Universe.

“We have great data, but the theoretical basis is past its sell-by date,” he added. “More and more people are saying the same thing and these are respected astronomers.”

A number of researchers have found evidence that the universe may be expanding more quickly in some areas compared to others, raising the tantalizing possibility that megastructures could be influencing the universe’s growth in significant ways.

Sarkar and his colleagues, for instance, are suggesting that the universe is “lopsided” after studying over a million quasars, which are the active nuclei of galaxies where gas and dust are being gobbled up by a supermassive black hole.

The team found that one hemisphere actually hosted slightly more of these quasars, suggesting one area of the night sky was more massive than the other, undermining our conception of dark energy, a hypothetical form of energy used to explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate.

“It would mean that two-thirds of the universe has just disappeared,” Sarkar told The Guardian.

Other researchers have suggested that the cosmological constant, which has been used for decades as a way to denote the rate of the universe’s expansion, actually varies across space, which would contradict the standard model of physics.

“We have great data” is a great thing to have to start with.

RIP: Legendary St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog dead at 92.

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: ¿Qué? Why Do Flyers in Mexico Encourage Illegals to Vote for Biden?