WHY TOLERATE THIS? Rutgers University President Escorted Out of Town Hall by Police as Student Protesters Take Over: Jewish Rutgers students told to ‘go back home’ by anti-Israel protesters.

TODAY’S NAVY: “From FITREPs to the Shipyard, a culture of untruth bears fruit.” “Eventually the music will stop. We are now on the second generation of leaders who have been happy to ignore this systemic failure of performance as if it is a force of nature to endure, and not a creation of man that can be changed. If you are waiting for the uniformed leadership to speak clearly on this, you simply have not been paying attention. If you think the Executive Branch leadership will address this, you have not been awake the last 26-months. The only solution to this wholesale institutional failure will be in Congress.”

BACK AND TO THE LEFT, BACK AND TO THE LEFT: If You Want to Gauge the Democrats’ Lurch Toward the Left, Read This Thread About Bill Clinton.

‘William Jefferson Clinton was a moderate Republican’ isn’t a new criticism of the former president—Michael Moore lobbed it in his book “Stupid White Men” years ago. Still, some pollsters and data crunchers have used it to analyze the former president, as his 1996 landslide was far from a foregone conclusion after the 1994 Republican Revolution. People thought this Slick Willy was dead in the water, and he might have been if it weren’t for Dick Morris’ triangulation overhaul concerning policy. In short, it eschewed far-left tendencies and gravitated toward the middle, attacking policies with healthy consensuses.

We’re a right-of-center country; no matter how much progressives deny that fact, it’s true and channeling that saved Clinton’s presidency. Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights decided to construct a lengthy Twitter thread about Clinton’s 1996 comeback, how his presidency stole some GOP initiatives, and how some issues that Clinton championed still resonate today, like being tough on crime and curbing illegal immigration.

Wait until the left discovers JFK’s policies. As Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge and Ricochet said when he interviewed James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution in 2008, “Let me point out that John F. Kennedy ran to the right of Richard Nixon on defense, and not long after he was elected, he set to work on and enacted before his death a massive income tax cut.” Piereson replied, “You know, a lot of conservatives look back on Kennedy and say his views in 1960 are not all that far from their views today.”

SAVED BY THE NERD: Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? A Microsoft engineer noticed something was off on a piece of software he worked on. He soon discovered someone was probably trying to gain access to computers all over the world.

Related: What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world.

DISPATCHES FROM THE ICE FLOE: Dem Senator Richard Blumenthal Turns Up the Heat On Justice Sotomayor to Retire: ‘Graveyards Are Full of Indispensable People.’

Speaking with NBC’s Sahil Kapur for a story published Wednesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) made a veiled reference to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who ignored calls to step down for years during former President Barack Obama’s tenure. She passed away in 2020, with former President Donald Trump choosing her successor.

“I’m very respectful of Justice Sotomayor,” Blumenthal told NBC. “I have great admiration for her. But I think she really has to weigh the competing factors. We should learn a lesson. And it’s not like there’s any mystery here about what the lesson should be. The old saying — graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included.”

The idea of the 69-year-old Sotomayor stepping down has gained momentum in recent days. Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan made the argument for the justice to retire in a recent column for The Guardian.

CTRL-F, Blumenthal’s age on the Mediaite article brings back zero results. Or as Jim Geraghty writes: Really Old Senator Tries to Convince Less Old Justice That She’s Too Old to Stay at Work.

Oh, Blumenthal thinks Sotomayor is too old to remain as a Supreme Court justice, huh?

Blumenthal turned 78 in February. Sotomayor is 69 years old. And while Sotomayor has diabetes and travels with a medic, her mother lived to be 94.

Look, I’m as appalled as anybody else at what Blumenthal is saying, but we should probably cut him some slack, as old men tend to ramble and get confused. Or maybe he’s just having a traumatic flashback from Vietnam.

Flashback: The Democratic Party’s Ice Floe Politics.

FREDDIE DE BOER: The Deepest Bias in Media? Fear of Looking Old. “Social media opened the door for people in the industry to directly express and enforce a set of values, and a core value was lionizing the young – the young were left and the left was young, at least in the progressive imagination, and anyway, no one wants to feel old.”

The left valorizes youth because young people are ignorant, gullible, and easily manipulated. Old ideas seem new to them, because they haven’t seen them fail before.

Related: “Why is the ‘Party of Youth’ Run By Old People?”

Plus:

Leftist politics, as noted above, is something that the manipulative old sell to the gullible young. Hence leftists’ nonstop efforts to produce more gullible young people.

Young people are susceptible to socialism for a number of reasons. One is that families, by and large, actually do operate along more or less socialist lines. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is a fair description of how most families work. Parents have jobs, earn, pay bills, care for their young, provide clothes, education, medical care and more, without the children being expected to pay their way or, nowadays, even contribute. (That last was quite different a few generations ago, when teenagers provided, on average, about a third of the household income.)

Since this works at home – certainly for the children who are the recipients of their parents’ largesse – it seems natural to expand it to society as a whole. People who have been looked after for their entire lives are likely to be comfortable with the idea of being looked after in the future.

Of course, it works at home because the parents feel an attachment to their children, and a loyalty to them, that people don’t feel for strangers. . . .

But to retain the support of the younger people, they must be insulated from the objections of the middle-aged. This is done by cultivating youth culture. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” is a famous example. The reason you’re not supposed to trust them is that they are likely to tell you that the exciting new socialist ideas you’re being fed have in fact been tried over and over again for more than a century, generally with disastrous results.

The divide was further strengthened by the invention of “cool.” As Roger Simon has written, at one time being cool was the obsession of a generation – really of several. And being cool meant, among other things, being estranged from what the squares were doing, and the squares were, by definition, the older, stable, more experienced people.

One of the reasons the “coolness” strategy worked was that young people care a lot about their reputations, and age separation in our education system (more on that in a bit) means that the people whose reputations they care about are mostly other young people.

You can see why leftist education is always bad.

THIS IS KIND OF A JOKE. IT’S NOT LIKE THE IRANIANS WEREN’T DOING THEIR BEST BEFORE. Biden officials worry Iran may hit targets inside Israel as revenge for killing general.

UPDATE:

Biden Demands Israel Fight Rest Of War Using Nerf Guns https://t.co/CYmUUj1YG4 pic.twitter.com/hhT3hLgoQB

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 5, 2024

OF COURSE IT DOES: The Book ‘White Rural Rage’ Gets the Research Wrong. “The book White Rural Rage was co-authored by political scientist Tom Schaller and commentator Paul Waldman. As the title suggests, the gist is that white rural voters are a threat to democracy. . . . But political scientist Nicholas Jacobs from Colby College says the authors of the book have gotten some of the research underlying their claims wrong. He has a personal stake in the argument because some of the research cited in the book is his own. Jacobs is clearly not a fan of the book, in part because he thinks it is wrong-headed in its approach but also because he finds that it is simply wrong in many cases.”

To be fair, anything that’s a threat to the power of Democrats counts as a “threat to democracy” in the eyes of the Democrats and their clients.

Plus: “Shockingly, people in rural areas don’t like being told they should be grateful for every effort big city progressives make to micro-manage their lives for them (always for the greater good of course). For daring to disagree, they get smeared with books like White Rural Rage.”

GOOD QUESTION: Update on Little Rock airport exec killed in ATF raid: Where are the media on this story? “We’re not talking about beat cops here — who I’m sure are as sickened as we are by this totally unnecessary deadly raid. These field agents are subject to the orders given them by enormously powerful federal agencies that have in the past few years made it routine to conduct not law enforcement, but LAWLESS enforcement. Some of the agents are likely sickened, too, even as they go through the motions of their jobs, hoping the culture at these agencies will get better. Well, it’s going to have to.”

Is it? Only if we force it to.

OPEN THREAD: Happy Friday.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Thailand joins China-led ILRS moon base initiative.

AS USUAL, THEY’RE BEYOND PARODY:

Holy crap I was just joking about people blaming climate change and then this genius pops up. A Senate candidate no less! https://t.co/HZujDQ7alP

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) April 5, 2024

COUPLES THAT DRINK TOGETHER, LIVE LONGER? “Couples who share similar drinking habits tend to live longer than those who don’t, according to a study of more than 9,000 people. This might sound like a suggestion to drink more with your partner, but the researchers from the University of Michigan warn against taking it too literally.”

HE’S RIGHT TO QUESTION THOSE: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. questions prosecutions for Jan. 6 attack, says he wants to hear ‘every side.’

WOEING: “Thanks to a string of unforced errors and botched responses, Boeing, like other corporate giants from the 20th century, has devolved from the epitome of world-beating quality to a symbol of managerial fecklessness, focused on short-term profits at the expense of the company’s long-term sustainability. Boeing cut corners in production, pushed out experienced workers to save money, and poured money into boosting the stock price instead of investing in its products.”

WELL, THAT’S DISAPPOINTING: OneTaste isn’t an ‘orgasm’ sex cult — but a ‘wellness’ company like SoulCycle, Crossfit, attorney claims.

And kind of oversells SoulCycle and Crossfit, to be honest.

SPRING CLEAN: Lefant M210 Pro Robot Vacuum Cleaner. #CommissionEarned

WELL, GOOD: Existing medicine may slow rare disease that can lead to amputation.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: What the ‘3 Body Problem’ teaches about stagnation: A simple plan for slowing human progress.

CHANGE: Marines Ditch 100-Year-Old Marksmanship Standards.

DEAN REUTER EMAILS:

Just now, the Federalist Society is prepared to hand out some money to budding AI scholars. We’ve issued a call for papers, described below. Would you be able to feature it on Instapundit?

Feel free to mention that 8 or so (depending on submissions) papers in different categories will win $7,500 first prizes, and others can win $2,500 second place prizes.

Here’s the symposium announcement.

INDEED: Honest Question for Trump-Averse Republicans: How Bad Do Things Have to Get?

#METOO: Space experts foresee an “operational need” for nuclear power on the Moon.

Each day and night on the Moon lasts two weeks. When the Sun sets, a solar-powered lunar lander like Odysseus is starved of energy. Temperatures during the lunar night plummet, bottoming out at around minus 280° Fahrenheit (minus 173° Celsius).

Over the course of two weeks, these cold temperatures can damage sensitive spacecraft equipment, killing a lander even if it could start generating power again at lunar sunrise. Surviving the night requires heat and electricity, and NASA officials say nuclear power is one of the most attractive solutions to this problem.

“We do anticipate having to deploy nuclear systems on the lunar surface,” said Jay Jenkins, program executive for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

“Honestly, it’s not unrealistic that we’ll want to do be able to do this within five years or less. We are starting to buy payloads that are meant for investigations that go beyond one lunar day,” Jenkins said during a Nuclear Regulatory Commission conference earlier this month.

I like the idea of small, rugged, transportable reactors for down here, too.

A LITTLE-REMEMBERED STORY OF HEROISM: Even old weapons crewed by older men can save a nation.

The lightning strike where you seize the government in one fell swoop seems to be less successful than hoped, most of the time.

FASTER, PLEASE — A LOT FASTER: Helicity Space Fusion Propulsion Funded by Lockheed Martin.