OPEN THREAD: Enjoy!

IT’S NOT REALLY SPACE TOURISM, BUT IT’S COOL: Visit the edge of space in style with new luxury balloon tourism startup.

CHANGE: A Chance Event 1 Million Years Ago Changed Human Brains Forever. “Like treasured recipes passed down from generation to generation, there are just some regions of DNA that evolution doesn’t dare tweak. Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years. Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long preserved by our ancient ancestors were suddenly ‘spiced up’ within a short evolutionary period of time. Because we’re the only species in which these regions have been rewritten so rapidly, they are called ‘human accelerated regions’ (or HARs). What’s more, scientists think at least some HARs could be behind many of the qualities that set humans apart from their close relatives, like chimpanzees and bonobos.”

WELL, YES:

Plus: “At Twitter, you’ll find video and the completion of that last sentence: ‘The Administrative state more effectively controls its puppets when they are hollowed-out husks of themselves.'”

Also the reason for welfare policy.

ROGER KIMBALL: An American’s View of the Coronation: If the pageantry surrounding Charles III seemed quaintly anachronistic, it was also moving in an irreducibly pertinent way.

GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: Voices Politicizing NYC Subway Death Opposed Mayor’s Plan for Severe Mentally Ill.

I ONLY SAW A COUPLE OF MINUTES, BUT HONESTLY I THOUGHT HE LOOKED TERRIBLE: King Charles’s swollen fingers trend on coronation day: What do we know about his health?

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Parents protest Texas school after first graders allegedly force girl to perform sex act, record it on iPad.

BUZZED ON COFFEE AND DOUBLE STANDARDS:

Anyway, let’s talk about caffeine, or to be more accurate let’s use caffeine as a way to set up my segue. Esquire has a buzzy article about the dangers of getting too buzzed on coffee. It’s a weird piece on the merits because it focuses on people, literal addicts, who drink a lot of coffee. It opens with a story about a guy who drank the equivalent of 10 cups a day. There’s a scary chart that explains that four cups is the recommended limit for “non-pregnant adults.” Ten cups: “negative symptoms can arise.” And 10-14 cups? We’re told that’s a “fatal dose” next to a picture of a human skull!

The author, John McDermott, writes:

So ubiquitous is caffeine in our culture that it doesn’t even register to people as a drug. Step out of the office for a midafternoon cigarette and people might look at you askance. Get caught doing a bump of coke in the office bathroom as a midday pick-me-up and it’s grounds for immediate termination. But slam a Monster or a quad-shot Americano at work and people will think you’re a go-getter.

To which I say, “Um, duh.”

Now, I’ll skip through most of my other complaints about the article and instead provide just a little perspective. First of all, according to McDermott, 80 percent of Americans consume caffeine. That’s about 265 million people. Meanwhile, a 2018 study found that 92 people died from caffeine overdoses in a given year. Let’s round that up to 100. That means about 0.000037736 percent of Americans die every year from overdoses of this horrible drug hiding in plain sight. Meanwhile, in 2016, 951 people died from contact with a power lawn mower. More than 1,100 people died from falls related to ice skates, skateboards, etc. More than 2,100 died from … constipation. More than 10,000 accidentally died from suffocation or strangulation in bed (and we’re not talking about the David Carradine-style deaths). But be careful fleeing your potentially literal deathbed! Because more than 10,000 people die every year falling out of bed.

And yes, yes, I understand that caffeine abuse surely plays a much more lethal role as a contributing factor to other problems. I mean spaghetti carbonara isn’t lethal, but overdoing it can make other problems worse. But you get the point.

I’m so old, I can remember when Esquire ran articles by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Michael Herr. I’d like to think the editors of that era of the magazine would be rolling their eyes at the thought of running an article on the dangers of…caffeine.

SO MUCH FOR “THE PARTY OF SCIENCE:” RFK Jr.’s Popularity Reminds Us That Democrats Endorse Conspiracies.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY FOR THE NARRATIVE:

Now it is easier to discredit the legacy corporate media when they try to push a fake news narrative. Many accounts on Twitter version 2.0 are much larger than the obsolete news media.

Without the censorship of Twitter version 1.0, the media doesn't have the same protection. https://t.co/mxmPd194OU

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) May 7, 2023

HEY, THAT NARRATIVE DOESN’T ADVANCE ITSELF, YOU KNOW: “The Texas mall mass shooter has been named as 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia.  Garcia, 33, killed eight people – including children — before he was shot dead himself at Allen Premium Outlets on May 6. Investigators now believe he may have been a white supremacist or neo-Nazi who followed extremists ideologies.”

UPDATE: Texas Mall Shooter Identified…and the Liberal Media Peddled a Cringy Narrative in Response.

JEFF DUNETZ: Watch Out Pres. Biden, Sen. Manchin Furious At Your Betrayal.

READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods (2nd Generation). #CommissionEarned

FASTER, PLEASE: Watching the Trans Bubble Burst.

And the numbers reveal a much saner country than you might infer from observing media and politicians. Not only do majorities in every age category believe that one’s sex is locked in at birth, but most Americans are opposed to trans females competing against biological females at every level of athletics—from youth sports (62 percent) to the pros (65 percent). Sixty-eight percent of respondents are against access to puberty blockers for children aged 10 to 14 and 58 percent oppose hormonal treatments for trans teens aged 15 to 17. Large majorities believe it’s “inappropriate for teachers to discuss trans identity in elementary schools.” For kindergarten through third grade, 77 percent are against it; for fourth and fifth grades, 70 percent are against. A slim majority (52 percent) support such discussion in middle schools and a full 64 support it in high schools.

How did this happen? In 2012, the country flipped in favor of same-sex marriage virtually overnight. This left vast activist networks suddenly without purpose. Money, contacts, lobbying know-how—all of it rendered useless. Well, that can’t happen. In the manner of MoveOn—which was founded to defend Bill Clinton from impeachment and then transformed into an anti-Bush group once Clinton was out of office—the gay-marriage movement was repurposed. But its new cause has proved too much for too many. And it has replaced disenchanted former allies with a new generation of unhinged radicals. These extremists overplayed their hand, wallpapering the world with anti-scientific, face-value lunacy and insisting that if you didn’t believe it, you were a monster. The more that Americans were exposed to this stuff, the more they rejected it. Numbers bear that out, too. The Post reports: “The Pew Research Center found 60 percent last year saying one’s gender is determined by the sex assigned at birth, up from 54 percent in 2017.” This is what happens when you embrace a self-discrediting cause.

Earlier: The Return of Paganism.

I KINDA FEEL LIKE OUR POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IS HUFFING NITROUS, BUT WITHOUT THE HORSEPOWER BOOST: Honda Civic with 2.2-Liter Swap and a Huff of Nitrous Nets 250-HP Boost.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Biden Unable To Participate In Democratic Debates Due To Looming Screenwriters Strike.

OUT ON A LIMB: AI should never be able to launch nukes, US legislators say.

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: The Wealthy Residents Who’ve Left San Francisco Have Taken Billions in Income With Them.

There’s an exodus going on in the Bay Area, and it’s not just Twitter employees fleeing the company.

An analysis of tax return data suggests that wealthy San Francisco residents moved out of the city during the early years of the pandemic, taking billions in income with them, according to according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 2020, 32,000 more people left San Francisco than moved into the city, and the income of those who cut out was nearly $8 billion more than those who came. That only compounded a problem the city was already experiencing. The year prior, San Francisco saw 39,000 more people depart than arrive, representing a net loss of $6.9 billion in salary. That means the city saw $15 billion dollars of income leave in a two year span.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Oakland:

Oakland voters felt law enforcement was too strict and so last fall elected a progressive D.A. who has stopped enforcing many laws. The result is lawlessness, “sideshows,” and assaults carried out with impunity. pic.twitter.com/xf6xWc6EPD

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) May 6, 2023

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Confusion Sets In As Meta Content Moderators Go Without Pay.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Neighbors Solve Mysterious NJ Pasta Dump Case.

Neighbors said that the oodles of noodles came from a nearby home that is up for sale. A military veteran moving out of his mother’s home after her death seemingly found a stockpile of old food that she had kept in the house.

“I mean, I really feel like he was just trying to clear out his parents’ house and they were probably stocked up from COVID,” said neighbor Keith Rost, saying it’s a generational thing. “My grandparents always had a cupboard full of cans and pasta, just to be safe.”

No matter the facts of the matter, the pictures still went viral, with captions saying things like the lead suspect is a man by the name of Al Dente (get it?). Or, don’t forget his partner in crime, Lin Guini (hah). Others wondered if whoever did dump the food will be sent to penne-tentiary (OK, that one was pretty good). And it wasn’t known if what was left there was pasta expiration date (last one, we swear).

As a character said in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, “In New Jersey anything can happen.”

HMM: How interleukin-6 helps prevent allergic asthma and atopy by suppressing interleukin-2 signaling.

IN A WORLD GONE MAD, THE JORDAN NEELYS RULE: “Who governs when justice becomes transactional and a mob determines right from wrong, what’s legal or illegal? Democratic politicians in New York are running scared instead of standing up for justice and for the citizens who have been terrorized by Neely and many other people who should either be institutionalized or in jail.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Czech Republic latest nation to sign on to NASA’s moon-focused Artemis Accords.

RIP: Vida Blue, Oakland A’s MVP and three-time champion, dead at 73.