CENSORSHIP IN 2021: City Announces Cancellation of “America First” Rally at Private Venue, Claims Security Threats + “Values.” It’s Anaheim, California.

BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE: Michigan Senate Repeals Emergency Powers Law, Whitmer Unable to Veto.

INDUSTRIAL DISEASE: A Nation In Dire Straits Is Re-Living The 1970s.

THE LAWFARE CONTINUES: FAA warns SpaceX that massive Starship launch tower in Texas is unapproved.

KEN BURNS: This Is The Most Fraught Time In The History Of Our Republic.

Wait until Ken Burns discovers the Civil War…

OPEN THREAD: For who are as free as the sons of the blog?

TWO MORE TEXAS DEMOCRATS TEST POSITIVE FOR COVID AFTER FLEEING ELECTION VOTE. Five Texas Democrats have now tested positive on their DC visit.

SKYNET SMILES: Blue Origin launch will be the 1st fully automated flight with civilian astronauts: report. In truth, if the software is good, the machines can handle everything better than a human pilot. So let’s hope the software is good.

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Megaripples may be evidence of giant tsunami resulting from Chicxulub impact.

SAD: “On Nelson Mandela’s birthday, ruined South Africa mourns his vision.”

NOW #1 IN SOCIAL POLICY: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. (Bumped)

PEOPLE AREN’T SCARED OF COVID LIKE THEY WERE: How Vaccine Apathy – Not Hesitancy – May Be Driving Flattened Vaccination Rates. People who have had it don’t need the vaccine. People who haven’t had it, but know a lot of people who didn’t get very sick, aren’t in a rush. The increasingly shrill hectoring from media and government probably also makes some people more reluctant. Takeaway: “People aren’t buying it. The incentives don’t seem to be working – whether it’s a doughnut, a car, or a million dollars.”

ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION: The IRS Reads The Bible And Reveals Its Bias: A Bureaucrat Examined Our Religion And Declared It Republican.

OVER AT ED DRISCOLL.COM, I HAVE SOME THOUGHTS ON HOW FULL METAL JACKET WAS THE DARK DOPPELGANGER TO KUBRICK’S 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket: Standing in the Shadow of 2001.

(Bumped.)

THE DELTA VARIANT IS NO EXCUSE TO RETURN TO COVID-19 AUTHORITARIANISM.

AT HELEN’S PAGE: Don Smith’s new book Steinstuecken: A Little Pocket of Freedom.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Student Who Fled Venezuela Exposes Fidel Castro Quote at Penn State.

“The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing — that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world — is what I wish for all,” is the quote.

“The quote attributed to the dictator appears in the Paul Robeson Cultural Center,” where it seems perfectly appropriate, given Robeson’s absolute love of Castro prototype Joseph Stalin.

POST-PANDEMIC: Rethinking The Physical Campus After COVID-19: Akron Sheds One Million Square Feet Of Space; One University, Two Law Schools.

DEADLIER THAN COVID: The Panic Pandemic. The worst plague to hit America last year, I argue in City Journal, was the moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions — and the laptop class that prospered at the expense of the most vulnerable members of society.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession.

While the journalistic and scientific establishments panicked (et tu, Scientific American?), a few scientists and leaders kept calm. Instead of blindly following Anthony Fauci’s version of “the science,” Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, consulted with Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution and the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.

“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”

Yes, he has, but Fauci and his followers will never admit it. Now they’re  calling for even stricter social-media censorship of their critics — and threatening even greater power grabs in the future.

KAMALA HARRIS HAS DOCTOR’S VISIT AT WALTER REED DAYS AFTER MEETING WITH INFECTED TEXAS DEMOCRATS.

AT HELEN’S PAGE: Monticello Drug’s Throat Discs Throat Lozenges.

JOEL KOTKIN: Fully Oligarchic Luxury Californication.

This grossly unequal economy over the long run may undermine oligarchic socialism and could redound against the very oligarchs supporting it. At the heart of the challenge lies the old question: who pays? Right now, it’s likely to be the middle and working classes, through income, real estate, and sales taxes, rather than the wealthiest oligarchs themselves. Indeed as Pro Publica’s likely unethical and perhaps illegal revelations of personal tax information show, the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been brilliant at evading taxes.

The loss of factory, energy, and food related jobs does not much impact Palo Alto, Marin, or Malibu but could spark a rebellion in the less favored parts of the state. This conflict could become fraught once market cycles change and interest rates, as seems inevitable, rise again. The one percent—who pay roughly half of the state’s income taxes—won’t always have such great years, and with the middle and working class in decline, it’s hard to see where the money will come from to support the burgeoning welfare state.

Worse yet, the prospect of wealth taxes, with plans to force people to pay even if they leave the state, and calls to raise the state’s income tax, already the nation’s highest, could add to the hegira of high-profile billionaires like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison out of state. At the same time, tech employment has been shifting to other states, with firms like Apple doing their major expansions either abroad or in lower cost areas like Austin or Raleigh-Durham. Many leading tech firms now expect a large proportion of their workforce to work remotely after the pandemic, with workers now increasingly seeking out cheaper, more scenic, and less congested climes. It is also likely that some of the most powerful firms, even Google, could become sclerotic as they take on the bureaucratic sloth associated with monopolies.

Earlier: Visualizing all the Vacant Office Space in San Francisco.

YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF THE SILICON VALLEY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION: But you should know about it because it is one of the main tools of the Left in advancing its campaign to remake America in the socialist image. Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center (CRC) has all the details.

HMM: Study finds vaccine hesitancy lower in poorer countries. “New research published in Nature Medicine reveals willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine was considerably higher in developing countries (80% of respondents) than in the United States (65%) and Russia (30%).”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot: “The two most monumental events of the last year in the US were the election of Joe Biden to the presidency and the introduction of Covid-19 vaccines. Yet there are those who falsely believe Biden won only because of fraud or that they shouldn’t get a vaccine. Having either belief is dangerous — for either the health of society or the health of the republic. It turns out that about half the people in this country either have doubts about Biden’s legitimacy or have not gotten the vaccine. Take a look at the most recent Monmouth University poll, one of the few to ask about both people’s vaccine status and how they view the 2020 election result. Not having received a vaccine was a minority position, at 34%, at the time of the poll in mid-June. Thinking Biden won only because of fraud was a minority position at 32%.”

—“Half of the US believes a deadly conspiracy theory,” Harry Enton, CNN, today.

● Chaser: “The most recent Kaiser poll helps illustrate that the vaccine hesitant group doesn’t really lean Republican. Just 20% of the group called themselves Republican with an additional 19% being independents who leaned Republican. The clear majority (61%) were not Republicans (41% said they were Democrats or Democratic leaning independents and 20% were either pure independents or undesignated).”

—“Why politicians won’t reach the vaccine hesitant,” Harry Enton, CNN, May 9^th.

As Stephen Kruiser wrote on Thursday, Masks Are Back In L.A. County Because Libs Are Really Anti-Vaxxers, Too: “Unless millions of toothless Republican rubes from the icky flyover hinterlands moved to Los Angeles in the last month, it would appear that a whole bunch of libs aren’t getting their vaccines either.”