OPEN THREAD: That’s right, today was a twofer.

HMM: Senate bills seek to reform commercial space regulations.

HUMAN BEINGS ARE MADE FOR SPACE: Astronauts Have an Unexpected Ability That Helps Them ‘Fly’ Through Space. “Based on our findings it seems as though humans are surprisingly able to compensate adequately for the lack of an Earth-normal environment using vision.” Well, human beings are surprisingly adaptable, anyway.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: In which I go under the knife. Well, sort of.

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FASTER, PLEASE: Science’s Latest Marvel: Electronic Material That Grows Tougher on Impact.

OF COURSE THEY DID, THEIR PROTESTS ARE ESTABLISHMENT-APPROVED: Yes, Hamas Supporters Felt Perfectly Entitled to Interrupt Easter Services at St Patrick’s Cathedral.

But it’s not true, as claimed, that nothing is sacred. Do the same thing at a mosque — or an LGBT rally — and you’ll swiftly learn what’s held sacred by our establishment today.

FASTER, PLEASE: After Concorde, a long road back to supersonic air travel.

MORE GOVERNMENT-SPREAD MISINFORMATION: This FBI Tweet Just Got Nuked by Community Notes.

Plus: “Do we need reminding that the FBI is staffed with bad people, the worst in committing acts of government overreach? Agents visit people’s homes because they posted anti-Biden material on social media. Illegal FISA warrants are atrocious, but now they’re targeting Americans exercising free speech rights. Why? Are they compiling an enemies list? Would you be shocked? Not me.”

UPDATE (From Ed): FBI Agent Says He Hassles People ‘Every Day, All Day Long’ Over Facebook Posts. “It’s just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will,” he claimed.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: The moment a Met Police officer tells Jewish woman that swastikas ‘need to be taken into context’ — after she complained about the Nazi symbol being used in pro-Palestine march banners in London.

Here is a context from 2022 that certainly got the British police’s attention: Moment army veteran is arrested ‘for causing anxiety’ after retweeting meme of swastika made out of Pride flags as force is condemned by its own crime commissioner for the ‘proportionality and necessity’ of its response.

In 2018, when British cops were threatening social media critics after the NHS banished 23-month-old Alfie Evans to the Spartan hillside, British ex-pat Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted, “Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out to me that police in the U.K. spend all their time on Twitter threatening people with jail time for frivolous things, and now I can’t stop seeing it.”

PROVOCATION: Heinz to put ketchup dispenser stations outside Chicago hot dog restaurants.

I ALWAYS KIND OF WANTED ONE OF THESE: Farewell to the Audi R8, the Supercar That Pretended to Be a Sports Car. Not enough to, you know, buy one. Helen doesn’t like to ride in low-slung sports cars, and there’s not much point in having one if you’re not going to have a hot chick riding with you at least some of the time.

READER FAVORITE: Survival Gear and Equipment 12 in 1. #CommissionEarned

HMM: Universal brain-computer interface lets people play games with just their thoughts.

ARE WE IN AN AI BUBBLE?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Biden Condemns Jesus For Rising Again On Trans Day Of Visibility.

AND NOBODY CARES: Prostate cancer is the second-leading cancer among men.

ED MORRISSEY: A Happy and Blessed Easter to All Our Readers!

SPACE: SpaceX sends Eutelsat telecom satellite into orbit.

READER FAVORITE: Solar Eclipse Glasses Approved 2024. #CommissionEarned

STEVE HAYWARD: What Presidential Rankings Get Wrong.

When Ronald Reagan put Calvin Coolidge’s portrait up in the White House Cabinet Room, taking down a painting of Thomas Jefferson, the outrage in the media was ­deafening.

Historians typically treated Coolidge with disdain as well. When I was in college, as my contemporary history professor went through the run-up to the Great Depression, the only thing he said of Coolidge was, “If you took the Washington Monument and dug a commensurate hole in the ground, that would be a fitting monument for Calvin Coolidge’s contributions to America.” That was it. No argument, no specifics, nothing to substantiate this view.

In the years since, historians have revisited Coolidge. Thomas B. Silver made an important contribution in the early 1980s with his book Coolidge and the Historians. Paul Johnson got a lot of the story right in Modern Times and A History of the American People. The restoration culminated in Amity Shlaes’s spectacular biography, Coolidge.

Of course, Coolidge still achieves middling marks in most presidential rankings. He has that reputation as Silent Cal. This is a superficial take. Coolidge was not silent at all. He gave more press conferences than any other president and used the radio well. But his taciturn nature remains legendary. It makes for fun ­reading.

Still, I have always thought historians who disliked Coolidge had a secondary purpose to attaching the Silent Cal label to him: they hoped you would ignore what he said—because if you read it, you might be persuaded by it.

Take the 1922 speech Vice President Coolidge gave before the American Bar Association. Coolidge wrote his own speeches, and that address is a brilliant and prescient analysis of what today we call the administrative state and why it can’t give us effective government. When you read it, you realize he is contesting all the premises of Woodrow Wilson and the early administrative state before that term came into use.

When you look at how Coolidge fares in presidential rankings and at some of the presidents who rate highly, you realize we need a new standard for assessing our chief executives.

When asked in a press conference near the end of his time in office what his administration’s most important accomplishment was, Coolidge was quoted as replying, “I think it would have to be, minding our own business.”

That’s very useful advice for every administration, and would have come in handy right around this time four years ago.

ROGER KIMBALL: Easter Reflections: George Washington’s Farewell Address in Today’s America.

We modern sophisticates tend to blush when the subject of religion is broached. We mewl about “the separation of church and state” and wait for the moment we can utter the word “fundamentalist” to dismiss our opponents.

George Washington, however, was not a member of that anti-Christian church. Indeed, in one of the most famous passages of the Farewell Address, he stipulates that “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” In case we didn’t get it the first time, he proceeds to drive the point home. “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”

Okay, he says we ought to have regard for morality. For such an Enlightenment figure as George Washington, morality surely does not encompass or stand upon religion.

But it does. “Let us with caution,” he writes, “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Well, that was then. We’ve made such progress since 1796. We have embraced our hatred and antipathies with uncommon zeal, to the point where the words “secession” and “national divorce” are once again circulating in earnest. A snarling partisan spirit is alive and rancorous. We have in all essentials transformed ourselves from a republic into an oligarchy, trampling on such quaint guardrails as the separation and disbursement of powers. We have loaded ourselves—or, rather, we have been loaded—with eye-watering, incomprehensible mountains of debt. And we have loudly rejected the claims of traditional morality and religion as so many otiose and unprogressive holdovers from a discredited past.

Like those crosses outlined in light on the Manhattan skyline at night, George Washington’s exhortations and admonitions are residues of a lost and probably unrecoverable past. What that means for us now and in the future is sobering to contemplate. But this is Easter, a holiday commemorating a miracle. That is good, because we are going to need one.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Speaking of those “crosses outlined in light on the Manhattan skyline at night:”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Massachusetts teachers union offers anti-Israel webinar.

DANA LOESCH: Happy “Jesus Visibility Day!”

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: In which I go under the knife. Well, sort of.

And if you enjoy these essays, please subscribe.

IT’S NOT LIKE BEING A REPUBLICAN: Columbia University groups host event with Israeli-designated terror org: ‘There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas.’