OPEN THREAD: I’m just here for the party.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Virginia Parents Announce ‘Not a Domestic Terrorist’ March in Washington.

IT’S PROBABLY NOTHING: China Tested A Fractional Orbital Bombardment System That Uses A Hypersonic Glide Vehicle: Report.

REALITY GIVES TATER COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: Bari Weiss Confronts Brian Stelter Over CNN’s Covid Lab Leak Theory Coverage in Tense Debate.

Stelter picked up on Weiss’ argument that the media is not “allowed” to pursue these topics, so he asked her “Who are the people stopping the conversation?”

That’s when Weiss called out CNN on Stelter’s show:

“People that work at networks like, frankly, like the one I’m speaking on right now,” she answered, “who try and claim that it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory.”

“But who said that at CNN?” Stelter countered. “When you say ‘allowed,’ I think it’s provocative thing to say. You say we’re not ‘allowed’ to talk about these things, but they’re all over the internet. I can Google them, find them everywhere, I’ve heard about every story you mentioned. Of course people are allowed to cover whatever you want to cover.”

Weiss retorted that it is “delusional” for the media to not acknowledge “an increasing number of subjects that have been deemed third rail by the mainstream institutions.”

Not least of which, CNN: CNN’s Smerconish complains of COVID lab leak theory ‘politics,’ despite network dismissing it for months. CNN published report in March of virologist saying lab leak theory was out of a ‘comic book.’

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A SMALLER BLOG: The incredible, disappearing — incompetent — Team Biden.

Buttigieg was always going to be a lightweight transportation chief. He got the job as a reward for dropping out of the presidential race and throwing his support to Joe Biden — and also because he said he likes trains, having gotten engaged at a train station.

My 5-year-old likes trains, too. Yet just because he can say “Choo choo!” with enthusiasm doesn’t mean he can oversee the country’s transportation system. When the country is having supply-chain problems, the transportation secretary’s skills and experience, let alone availability, become rather, uh, indispensable.

Buttigieg can take a two-month paternity leave, but the guy who runs the pizza shop down the block can’t just disappear for two months without putting someone else in charge. Someone has to make the calzone.

The public didn’t even learn about Buttigieg’s break at the start, but only after transportation-related problems exploded around us. Who’s running the shop? Anyone?

This is all in keeping with the way a distracted, carefree, ideological Biden administration has operated the whole time. In September, the president took a weekend beach trip as the disaster on our southern border blew up and 14,000 Haitian migrants camped out under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. As the US pullout from Afghanistan turned into an unmitigated disaster, the president disappeared — surfacing later to claim it was an enormous “success.”

Now, as Americans start to worry about stocking their cupboards and buying Christmas presents, Biden goes more than a week refusing to take any questions. Sorry, but this is unacceptable, no matter who’s president.

It’s Karol Markowicz, so read the whole thing.

IT NEEDS REMAKING: A star Stanford professor leaves his lab for a startup out to remake psychiatry.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

NO: Does Covid Cause Significant Brain Harm? Maxim Lott takes a deep dive into research on “long Covid.” He concludes that it’s real but has been, as usual, badly exaggerated by the media, and notes that the long-term effects may not be much worse than the long-term effects from the ordinary flu.

STEVEN PINKER: Rationality Saves Lives. Reason’s Nick Gillespie interviews the unwoke Harvard professor.

VENICE-ZUELA: Squalor By the Seaside. Homelessness and RV fires have overrun Venice Beach, California.

UPDATE (From Ed): Link was incorrect; now fixed.

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY: Ciao, Alitalia. The previously untold (and hilarious) 500-year history of the “pope’s airline,” starting with Leonard da Vinci’s prototype of the Airbus A321. (Unfortunately for Pope Julius II — and for Alitalia’s on-time performance record — it was built of marble.)

PETE BUTTIGIEG’S HIGH-CLASS PROBLEMS:

Twenty years ago, American politicians sold globalization to their voters by promising that Brazil would become like us. Today, we are becoming like Brazil: a low-trust society with apparently insurmountable differences of class and race, in which the rich live in private spaces defended by a militarized police force, and politics has deteriorated into a theatrical.

At best.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: New York Times Faults Jeopardy Host Mayim Bialik for Pro-Israel Stance.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Instead Of Kryptonite, New LGBTQ+ Superman Will Be Crippled By Anyone Using Wrong Pronouns.

Fortunately though, Superman has Al Gore and Greta Thunberg on his side these days: Superman’s Next Big Fight Is Against Climate Change.

Wouldn’t it be easier for DC to stop printing comics and shut down its server farm instead? As Jim Treacher asks, “How many trees have died over the last 80 years to publish magazines about a guy in his underwear punching aliens and robots and bald guys?“

MATT TAIBBI: Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State.

On The Young Turks the other night, during a segment called — this is not a joke — “RebelHQ,” commentator Ben Carollo extolled the virtues of the CIA.

* * * * * * * *

Carollo looks like he’s about six, and I say that fully conceding jealousy over his full head of hair. It’s relevant only because he’s representative of a generation of young, left-leaning intellectuals who grew up in the Trump years believing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other such agencies to be trusted, straight-and-narrow defenders of democratic “norms.” These credulous kids with piercings and chin-beards who think the secret services are on their side are the fruits of one of the great P.R. campaigns of our time.

Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.

As Obama’s Middle East “advisor” Ben Rhodes famously said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

More Taibbi:

When Trump arrived, it almost immediately became obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started saying they believed in it.

QED:

FASTER, PLEASE: Ex-SpaceX Engineers Are Building a Cheap, Portable Nuclear Reactor.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● Shot: Why is Pete Buttigieg still the Secretary of Transportation?

—Karen Townsend, Hot Air, yesterday.

● Chaser: The Buck Stops With No One After Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle.

—Matt Lewis, the Daily Beast, August 19th.

● Hangover: Kamala Harris’ team tries to distance her from fraught situation at the border.

—CNN, June 1st.

● The D.T.s: Who knew that governing was so ‘complicated?’

What does America have to show for having this elite braintrust in the White House? For one, gas prices, inflation and illegal immigration are all sky-high. Plus we have a supply chain crisis on both coasts. Last week, when discussing the gridlock at the ports, President Biden spoke for under six minutes before wandering off the stage as reporters shouted questions at the back of his head, a gesture which has come to characterize his presidency to date.

The truth is that even if Joe were allowed to take questions, he would not have any answers for us. And his team isn’t any better.

—Grace Curley, Spectator World, today.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Rat-borne disease of ‘high risk’ to homeless identified in Boston.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Blue-check investigative journo says if Sen. Joe Manchin isn’t stopped, climate destruction is ensured:

By the late 1960s, as Fred Siegel wrote in “Progressives Against Progress” at City Journal a few years ago, “Crankery, in short, became respectable:”

In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Back in the early 1970s, it was overpopulation that was about to destroy the Earth. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, who has been involved in all three waves, warned that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” on our crowded planet. He predicted mass starvation and called for compulsory sterilization to curb population growth, even comparing unplanned births with cancer: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.” An advocate of abortion on demand, Ehrlich wanted to ban photos of large, happy families from newspapers and magazines, and he called for new, heavy taxes on baby carriages and the like. He proposed a federal Department of Population and Environment that would regulate both procreation and the economy. But the population bomb, fear of which peaked during Richard Nixon’s presidency, never detonated. Population in much of the world actually declined in the 1970s, and the green revolution, based on biologically modified foods, produced a sharp increase in crop productivity.

“Progressivism” — where time stands still:

(Classical reference in headline.)

I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DOWN: Deaths from tuberculosis rose in 2020, for the first time in a decade, the W.H.O. says.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Where Did the Phrase “Hubba Hubba” Come From?

DISPATCHES FROM THE IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT PARTY: Eco-Nazis Storm Federal Building And The Left Isn’t Crying This Time.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: A herd of ‘cocaine hippos’ from Pablo Escobar’s private zoo are being sterilized.

A group of rampant hippopotamuses, introduced by the late Colombia drug lord Pablo Escobar to his private zoo, are being sterilized by the country’s wildlife services, after mounting concern that the 80-strong herd presented a potential environmental disaster as an invasive species.

The so-called “cocaine hippos”, whose number has more than doubled since 2012, were sterilized after worries have mounted over their environmental impact, including a threat to human safety.

The decision to neutralize the herd’s breeding potential comes after a study earlier this year concluded that the animals had become a hazard. The hippos, which were originally introduced to Escobar’s Hacienda Napoles estate, are one of the most enduring legacies of the notorious cocaine trafficker, who was killed by police in 1993.

I’m looking forward to a reboot of Miami Vice, where Elvis the Alligator gets to meet Escobar’s Cocaine Hippos.

I’M SURE IT’S PROBABLY NOTHING: China tests new space capability with hypersonic missile.

China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise.

Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.

The missile missed its target by about two-dozen miles, according to three people briefed on the intelligence. But two said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realised.

The test has raised new questions about why the US often underestimated China’s military modernisation.

“We have no idea how they did this,” said a fourth person.

The US, Russia and China are all developing hypersonic weapons, including glide vehicles that are launched into space on a rocket but orbit the earth under their own momentum. They fly at five times the speed of sound, slower than a ballistic missile. But they do not follow the fixed parabolic trajectory of a ballistic missile and are manoeuvrable, making them harder to track.

Taylor Fravel, an expert on Chinese nuclear weapons policy who was unaware of the test, said a hypersonic glide vehicle armed with a nuclear warhead could help China “negate” US missile defence systems which are designed to destroy incoming ballistic missiles.

Fortunately though, the Pentagon is laser-focused on stopping this:

ANOTHER USEFUL BOOK: The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual. #CommissionEarned