HEH:

OPEN THREAD: Make me proud.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Interest grows for human spaceflight in Europe.

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Driverless Cars Hit By ‘Coning’ Incidents As San Francisco Group Rebels.

A San Francisco group that stands for “car-free spaces, transit equity, and the end of car dominance” is behind a wave of “coning” driverless cars owned by Waymo and Cruise.

Members of the Safe Street Rebels, a group that states cars are “polluting, dangerous & murderous,” are coning driverless cars across the city, which disables the vehicle and forces it to stop.

Here is some of the footage of coning incidents:

"Coning" a driverless car forces some of them to have to be hard reset. It's done as a form of protest against the autonomous vehicles.

So now people are gonna start bullying robots? That’s how it all starts … 🤔 pic.twitter.com/BIbst8CbKO

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) July 9, 2023

Why is the 21st century left such a cesspit of Luddism?

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: Justice Ketanji Jackson’s faulty claim in affirmative action case takes another hit as lawyers ‘clarify’ brief.

It was my understanding that there would be no math.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Kidney stones are rising among children and teens, especially girls, research shows.

BOB MCMANUS: Ice Cream Sunday: Heart-attack pushers Ben & Jerry’s hippie ‘Indian land’ hypocrisy.

Way back in the Stone Age, shortly after the woolly mammoths disappeared, I was city editor of an Albany newspaper while Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were mixing up exotic ice cream on stolen land across the border in Vermont. . . .

By now, anybody who cares knows all about the obnoxious birthday greeting to America that popped out of the B&J Twitter account a week ago.

“The United States was founded on stolen indigenous land. This Fourth of July, let’s commit to returning it.”

God, it’s all so tiresome.

Land-grabbing humans have been cracking each other over the head since the species evolved. And this includes “indigenous” Americans — who in their day were among the most fearsome land-grabbing head-crackers ever to walk the planet.

And just why contemporary America is to be held exclusively to account for a project begun by the English, French, Spanish and Dutch more than 500 years ago is a mystery.

People should protest at stores that carry Ben & Jerry’s. “No Stolen Land ice cream!”

HMM: Ukraine deserves to be in NATO, Erdogan says; Biden calls discussions ‘premature’.

HMM: Mindfulness meditation could mitigate the adverse effects of fatigue on emotional processing. Maybe, though I have a suspicion that meditation, etc., are oversold right now.

YEP:

Now everyone is offended by everything because in retrospect the civility we once thoughtlessly enjoyed was based on a shared culture where disagreement was on the margins. Now our disagreements are fundamental.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) July 8, 2023

THE CRITICAL DRINKER RECOMMENDS: Sound of Freedom (Video).

Related: Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

ON BRAND: Khalid Kamau, Georgia’s first socialist mayor, arrested on burglary charge.

GERRYMANDERING, OCCUPATIONAL LICENSING, and economic liberty.

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: WSJ blames abysmal recruitment numbers on military veterans. “Yes, you read that right: military veterans are the problem.  Not the drag queens, not the anti-white rhetoric and policies of Lloyd Austin, not coerced participation in experimental drug trials, but those who enlisted and served.  It is appalling that our media blame low recruitment numbers on people who sacrificed and risked their lives for their country.”

OUT ON A LIMB: Many black Americans agree with Supreme Court’s anti-Affirmative Action ruling: new poll.

NARRATOR VOICE: No one actually thinks this.

https://twitter.com/KevinTober94/status/1678050367001579525

To be fair, it’s not surprising that Zakaria is inspired by Biden: Fareed Zakaria suspended by CNN, Time for plagiarism.

STANDARDS: The Great NACS Migration: Who Is Switching to Tesla’s Charging Port?

READER FAVORITE: Men’s Rogaine 5% Minoxidil Foam for Hair Loss and Hair Regrowth. #CommissionEarned

ROGER KIMBALL: Poetic Justice for the Biden ‘Ministry of Truth.’

The injunction is against the FBI, the DOJ, the CDC and five other federal agencies, as well as against such officials as the Surgeon General and various White House staffers. It prohibits them from “threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech.”

Everyone expects the Biden administration to appeal the judgment. After all, having been in the censorship business so long and so successfully, the administration will be loath to open the window on free expression and opinions critical of their performance.

We don’t yet know how this case will turn out. Perhaps Judge Doughty will be overturned and the censorship and suppression industry will go on its merry way making the world safe for Democrats. But I suspect that the genie has been let out of the bottle. The Deep state will howl. The forces of freedom will howl louder, and now they have the House and, most likely, the courts on their side.

Whatever happens, the Wall Street Journal’s Jacob Gershman is right: “The case is among the most potentially consequential First Amendment battles pending in the courts, testing the limits on government scrutiny of social-media content on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other major platforms. Never before has a federal judge set such sweeping limits on how the federal government may communicate with online platforms.”

Exit quote: “I wish I knew what Judge Doughty’s favorite tipple is. I’d like to buy him a case of it.”

FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS: “HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad, one study says/A pair of professors found that home renovation media leads homeowners to decorate for the masses, not for their own happiness.”

FASTER, PLEASE: The blueprint is set to end Joe Biden’s shaky reign in the White House.

NO ONE IS SAFE: A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too: For thousands of years, mathematicians have adapted to the latest advances in logic and reasoning. Are they ready for artificial intelligence?

MARK JUDGE: Mercy Street: When Rock and Roll made you read books.

This summer marks the 40th anniversary of Synchronicity, the great record by the rock band the Police. 2023 is also the year when the British rock band the Cure is touring to sold-out venues around the world. And David Bowie’s 1979 concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars is being reissued.

What do these things have in common? These are all rock and roll acts whose music is steeped in literature. The artists are from a time when pop music often led fans to books, and often not easy ones, to understand the music. Taylor Swift, arguably America’s biggest pop star, is praised for her “self-confessional” songs about boyfriends and fame. Swift is a clever lyricist, yet she lacks the literary depth of previous music stars.

In 1983, my senior year in high school, Sting inspired me to read the novel The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. The Sheltering Sky, about three American expatriates in the Sahara desert, is a dour and depressing read. I read it when I heard “Tea in the Sahara,” a song that Sting wrote that was based on Bowles’s novel. Further, Synchronicity the album was named after a concept explored by both Carl Jung and Arthur Koestler, whose anti-communist masterpiece Darkness at Noon I had also read in high school.

Yes, the lyrics to rock songs were much more informed and interesting back in the day. But Stanford apparently never got that message: Students expecting a ‘fight to the death’ to get a spot in Stanford’s new Taylor Swift class.

WHEN THEY’RE LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES? General Motors wants to predict when battery fires might happen.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY FROM PBS! How PBS Wrecked Independence Day: An ‘Ideological Tool’ of Right-Wing Extremists.