IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: We’re All Pandas Now.
Archive for 2025
May 1, 2025
READER FAVORITE: ROVE R2-4K DUAL Dash Cam Front and Rear. #CommissionEarned
BRING A GUN TO A KNIFE FIGHT? In the battle between a firearm and a knife, the gun always wins, right? Right? “The one and only time a gun is superior to a knife is when there is sufficient time and distance between combatants.”
I was always told you can rush a gun, but never rush a knife.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Amber Ruffin’s Trump Derangement Spikes in ‘View’ Tirade.
It must be comforting to get an invitation to “The View.”
The far-Left showcase spews nonsense on a daily basis. Facts are few and far between. Conspiracy theories run wild. And no one in the Legacy Media will hold you accountable.
It’s the fuel that keeps the long-running show afloat in 2025.
From that perspective, comic Amber Ruffin is a perfect “View” guest.
The former late-night host was slated to anchor last Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association gala, but the WHCA pulled her invitation at the last minute.
The official excuse? The evening was meant to be a healing, inclusive affair.
The real answer? The assembled reporters wanted to pretend that missing the story of the decade – President Joe Biden’s dementia-like condition – wasn’t their fault.
It was. Of course.
Having Ruffin torch President Donald Trump while ignoring Democrats would have made the event look even more partisan than it was.
Ruffin complained about the cancellation to “The View’s” hosts, but she placed the blame in the wrong spot. President Trump didn’t cancel her appearance. The WHCA did.
That’s not all she got wrong.
What’s most wrong is that there are enough viewers to justify the impressive salaries of angry, mal-informed “View” hosts and their guests.
THIS IS WHY WASHINGTON KEEPS TRYING TO FORCE HIM OUT: Hegseth Orders ‘Comprehensive Transformation’ of U.S. Army.
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned
ALLIES: US shares Chinese military’s space secrets with Britain.
The US has begun sharing some of its most sensitive intelligence on Chinese and Russian space operations with Britain and other Five Eyes nations in a move described as “momentous”.
Until this month, the activity of Space Delta 9, a unit focused on America’s orbital warfare, was largely deemed “US eyes only”, meant only for Americans with top-secret security clearance.
However, US military chiefs have taken the unprecedented step of allowing UK military leaders to observe their work at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado, in light of mounting concern about China’s militarisation of space.
Developing…
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
COVID FIVE YEARS AGO: On May 1st 2020, Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research reminded his readers: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic. “In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong* to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide:”
“In 1968/69,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”
And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.
I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?
Nothing was closed by force. Schools mostly stayed open. Businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.
* * * * * * * *
As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.
It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.
Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.
As I said above, Tucker’s column ran on May 1st, 2020. One month later, cue the dancing TikTok nurses and let loose the George Floyd riots!**
As even far left New York magazine admitted in late 2023: COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic.
In March of 2020, this sort of talk could get one de-platformed on social media and/or caught in the feedback loop of the MSM-DNC sending out the Batsignal to their readers on who to attack via social media: [Five] years ago American Thinker was the first to call out the fraud of Dr. Anthony Fauci and was viciously attacked by the WaPo, NYT other MSM outlets.
* In a scene included in 2021’s Get Back, Peter Jackson’s 2021 eight-hour miniseries reworking of the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, Paul McCartney even joked about the Hong Kong Flu, while he and John Lennon were hashing out song ideas:
January 23rd, 1969 (Apple Studios, London): While Robert Fraser drops in on the sessions, a good-humoured John and Paul stand up for a run-through of ‘Get Back’ that devolves into silly off-key takes on ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, ‘Help!’, and ‘Please Please Me’. (Note: The medium shot of Robert Fraser is the same as the one included here, so who knows where it really falls within the continuity.)
PAUL: Imagine I’m in love with you… I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.
JOHN: What?
PAUL: I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.
JOHN: Oh, are you? Take drugs.
[Let It Be Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg]: Are you really?
PAUL: No, not really. Not really.
And from Jeffrey Tucker’s article, the since-deleted tweets by fellow American Institute for Economic Research’s Phil Magness on Woodstock and other gigantic rock festivals that took place during that year’s pandemic:
** Jon Gabriel warned last year in the Arizona Republic: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “These mass demonstrations used to be more localized, such as Occupy Wall Street or the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. Today, they are global, and the new cause is released with the regularity of a new car model’s marketing campaign. This year, ‘global intifada’ is all the rage. I suppose activists are brainstorming a new cause to release in May 2025.”
We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.
OR MAYBE YOU WILL: You Won’t Believe What Rubio Found In Biden’s State Department Files.
THIS HAS TAKEN ENTIRELY TOO LONG: U.S. Senate Commerce Committee advances Isaacman’s nomination for NASA administrator to full Senate. “On Wednesday, by a vote of 19-9, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee chose to advance the nomination of Jared Isaacman to the full Senate. That vote will come at a later date, which has not yet been scheduled.”
PROF. JACOBSON IS NOT WRONG:
The campus "protests" are organized terror campaigns, and should be treated as such. https://t.co/p7V2qb9zXp
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) April 30, 2025
Neither is Prof. Bernstein:
The fact that Harvard permitted this is a pretty clear Title VI violation. https://t.co/zIN4FbuZk8
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) April 30, 2025
MUST FLEE TV: ‘I’m Black—You’re Not’: CNN Panel Explodes Into Ragefest As The View’s Ana Navarro Loses Her Mind.
HOLY MOLY: Ana Navarro’s complete meltdown on CNN just caused Abby Phillip to cut to commercial.
@MrShermichael: “If you come to this country illegally, you are going HOME!”
Ana Navarro: “There’s a hell of a lot of people who other than the black people who were brought here as slaves, who came to this country illegally.”
WHAT?!
@MrShermichael: “They are NOT the same as black people who were brought here against our will!”
This is when she started choking up — almost as if she was about to cry.
Ana Navarro: “That’s exactly what I just said!”
@MrShermichael: “Last time I checked, I’m black. You’re not.”
Ana Navarro: “I’m Latino and my people are being racially profiled!”
“Last time I checked, I’m black. You’re not.” Hoo boy, it’s getting hot in there. My favorite part about the whole exchange is watching anchor Abby Phillip’s face as she is forced to cut to commercial. It reminds me of those terrific Southwest Airlines commercials of yore: “Want to get away?”
So how are CNN’s nightly Thunderdome segments playing out? They’ve made Scott Jennings into a YouTube star, but that likely doesn’t buy the tiny public access cable network much advertising revenue: Fox News Prime Time Attracts 5X More Viewers than CNN-LOL in April.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s Shenzhou-19 astronauts back on Earth after six months in space.
AND YET THEY STILL RESIST CHANGE: Harvard Reluctantly Admits that Woke Politics Have Destroyed the School.
THOSE SIDE EFFECTS ARE BAD: Side effect fears prevent many depression, anxiety sufferers from taking meds, survey shows.
HOW COULD IT? The Democrats’ Abrego Garcia Problem Got a Whole Lot Worse.
ARE THE CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION LAWYERS WHO ARE LEAVING THE CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION APOLITICAL TECHNOCRATS?: WaPo implies that the 100 or so lawyers who are leaving the Civil Rights Division en masse are somehow apolitical technocrats who are outraged that the Trump Administration is politicizing their division. But as Alison Somin writes on X, that’s ridiculous. The Civil Rights Division has been home to hyper-partisan wokesters for quite some time. If that’s who’s leaving (and it almost certain to be), there is no good reason to miss them.
More than a decade ago, I got a taste of the Civil Rights Division’s special brand of leftism when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigated of the Civil Rights Division’s handling of the New Black Panther Party case. The dominant view there was that civil rights laws do not protect white males. If anything, it’s gotten worse since then.
Changing the culture there will be a labor on par with cleaning the Augean stables. But Harmeet Dhillon might turn out to be just the right person to do it. Godspeed to her.
NO-BRAINER, INDEED:
Worse than I thought it would be. If Bob Jones U deserved to lose its tax-exempt status, doing the same to Harvard—and every other school that so baldly fails to uphold its civil-rights obligations—is a no-brainer. https://t.co/3v3gpBzt9W
— Ilya Shapiro (@ishapiro) April 30, 2025
CLEAN YOUR HOME: Solareye Electric Air Duster – 300000RPM Compressed Air Duster. #Commissionearned
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP TRACK OF ALL THE NEW TRENDS KIDS GET INTO THESE DAYS: The Intrepid New York Times Tries to Get to the Bottom of Why People Wear Crosses.