OPEN THREAD: Thank God it’s Sunday, only one more working day until Monday.

THERE WAS AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM:

imagine rolling a combined arms mechanized infantry attack with armor in support against a single outpost and some airman steps out like "no" and just deletes your entire force. unparalleled L. https://t.co/NRbQuGesQu

— matthew. (@iAmTheWarax) June 2, 2024

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China conducts three launches inside two days.

HMM: The Time You Take Blood Pressure Drugs May Lower Heart Attack Risk.

NOTHING IS SAFE: Hazards in Your Chocolate? New Study Reveals Potential Risks.

A.P. RUNS INTERFERENCE FOR BIDEN ON THE HUNTER GUN TRIAL: “The trial will lack details about his foreign business matters that Republicans have seized on to try to paint the Biden family as corrupt, but it is expected to feature deeply personal and embarrassing testimony about dark time in the younger Biden’s life. And it probably will provide new political impetus for Donald Trump’s allies, who are eager to distract from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s own legal problems after he was convicted of 34 felony counts in his hush money trial.”

Lol. “Try to paint the Biden family as corrupt.” Do you really have to try?

HMM: Mussels downstream of wastewater treatment plant contain radium, study reports.

Hmm. Radium 228, which is what most people think of when they think of radium, has a half-life of 6.7 years. I doubt that is coming out of the Marcellus Shale. Radium 226 has a half-life of 1600 years, and is less radioactive as a consequence.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: NIH scientists made $710 Million in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide. New revelations from OpenTheBooks.com.

THE BARD OF AMERICAN SELF-RULE: Painting the Revolution. John Turnbull, whose iconic paintings of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers hang in the Rotunda of the U.S.Capitol Rotunda and in a gallery at Yale, is the subject of Glorious Lessons, a new biography by Richard Brookhiser. From Paul Beston’s review:

In the mid-1970s, Richard Brookhiser, then a Yale undergraduate, came upon the Trumbull paintings. The story they told seized his imagination, seeming to instruct him: “This is important; pay attention. These men and women are dead, but they live here. You do not know them (you do not know them yet) but they had you in mind.” This directive could describe Brookhiser’s own mission. He has devoted much of his book-writing career to compact, eloquent lives of the American Founders, preferring, like Trumbull, the compressed frame to the vast canvas. His lean biographies, defined by insight, aim to draw readers’ eyes to the most important parts of the picture and answer a perennial question: Why should we care? . . .

These are obstacles enough to appreciating Trumbull’s art. The most formidable, though, is not aesthetic but political: the defilement of American memory beneath the march of a rejectionist history of the nation and its principles. “How many Americans today sympathize with the story Trumbull tells?” Brookhiser asks. He thinks the artist lucky not to have been a sculptor, given the fates of stone monuments in America’s demonic summer of 2020 (though vandals have not spared paintings elsewhere). The question echoes concerns voiced in his 2019 book, Give Me Liberty, where he called this “the most confused historical moment I have lived in,” lamenting how “America’s national essence is being ignored, trampled, or distorted.” It’s a glimpse of the quiet passion animating his work, which has yielded a canon of moral biographies that help Americans understand the Founders by trying first to see them—not so remote from us as they appear, and struggling, as we do, to make choices in a world full of bad ones.

Trumbull is a timely addition to Brookhiser’s gallery of portraits. Who more fitting to profile, in this age of screens, than the man whose images have “flashed like an ad on the nation’s retina”? Brookhiser calls him “the bard, in pictures not words, of American self-rule,” adding: “Those who enjoy self-rule as a matter of course forget how novel and fragile the concept was and is.” This is important. Pay attention.

Read the whole thing.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

Babylon Bee prophecy is almost complete pic.twitter.com/Cp36lRqJed

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 2, 2024

READER FAVORITE: Crocs Unisex-Adult Classic Clogs. #CommissionEarned

FASTER, PLEASE: Before Bugatti’s New 1,800-HP Hybrid Hypercar Arrives, It Built One Last (Very Special) Chiron.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Constitutional Carry: What You Still Need To Know.

THE SECOND CITY IS NUMBER ONE IN DEBT — AND IN FLEEING TAXPAYERS: How Debt Ate Chicago. The city already spends more than 40 percent of its budget on debt and pensions, and future looks much worse as the debts grow and the population shrinks. But are Chicago voters worried? Not the ones who chose a former member of the Chicago Teachers’ Union to be their mayor.

UNEXPECTEDLY: WNBA Players Going Out of Their Way to Prove Charles Barkley Right About Their Petty BS.

I have never seen a group of people so determined to give up chartered jets to fly Spirit Airlines again https://t.co/fD9tbNMz18

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 1, 2024

In accordance with the prophecy:

Caitlin Clark To Retire From Spotlight And Enter WNBA https://t.co/2gdferskmM pic.twitter.com/imbZlzKb6U

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 8, 2024

WHEN YOU GET SPAM FROM BIDEN/HARRIS: Have fun with it.

There, I fixed it.

HMM: FDA’s review of MDMA for PTSD highlights study bias and safety concerns.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Frank Miniter, The Year of the Dragon.

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Atlantic writer who warned of Georgia’s human sacrifice by reopening says New York’s 8 p.m. curfew is ‘absolutely insane.’

HEALTH: Antibody discovery promises new hope in influenza B battle, paves way for universal vaccine.

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES SEINFELD: LA Lifeguard Says He Was Punished for Not Flying Pride Flag.

You don’t want to wear the ribbon? You have to wear the ribbon!

WOEING: NASA to decide when to reschedule Starliner crewed launch.

RICH LOWRY: EV fail exposes Pete Buttigieg as the little cabinet secretary who couldn’t.

Rarely has a cabinet secretary done so little with such vast resources.

On the CBS show “Face the Nation,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had to defend the Biden administration’s woeful record of building new electric vehicle charging stations that are key to unlocking its hoped-for EV nirvana.

Host Margaret Brennan asked how it could be that, with $7.5 billion allocated for this purpose two years ago, the administration has managed to build eight.

Not 8,000, or even 80. Eight.

Buttigieg said President Biden plans on building 500,000 chargers by the end of the decade, and — implying this is some sort of accomplishment — “the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built.”

It’s true that eight is better than zero, and the administration is now only 492,000 chargers away from its goal rather than 500,000 away.

At this rate, though, the Emperor Hadrian wouldn’t have finished his wall prior to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and we’d still be constructing the Hoover Dam* to this day.

Evergreen:

* Well, they can’t build those, either: As Joel Kotkin wrote in 2010, “When FDR commissioned projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, he literally brought light to darkened regions. The loyalty created by FDR and Truman built a base of support for liberalism that lasted for nearly a half-century. Today’s liberals don’t show enthusiasm for airports or dams — or anything that may kick up some dirt. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Deanna Archuleta, for example, promised a Las Vegas audience: ‘You will never see another federal dam.’”

AIR CONDITIONING? HHS announces new tool to help residents deal with extreme heat.

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Shocking new footage emerges of huge wooden ‘shantytown’ built in Democrat-run city whose name is byword for crime and urban decay:

Shocking footage has emerged showing a gigantic ‘shantytown’ that has sprung up in Oakland, as the California city’s slide into crime-ravaged squalor continues.

Michael Oxford, the host of CaliBased, posted a video on May 31 of massive temporary houses built along service roads that open up into main roads in Hooverville, Oakland.

The footage showed trash strewn around scores of houses that were built of wood, tarp and other discarded materials.

Particularly shocking was just how large the ‘shantytown’ is, with a lengthy stretch of road in the Bay Area city covered with the makeshift dwellings.

Oxford could be heard calling the area a ‘shantytown’ that is ‘absolutely mindboggling,’ as he remarked how ‘insane it is that [city officials] allow this.’

He captioned the video, ‘Parts of Oakland are worse than a third world country. They just allow people to live in absolute squalor, wherever they choose.

‘This looks like Hooverville during the great depression. Welcome to Oakland’s very own Gavinville.’

Tom Wolf, a former homeless man who is a recovering heroin and fentanyl addict from San Francisco, also re-shared the same video and said, ‘Worse than any shanty in the third world. You know how we got here? Drugs.’

Oakland’s descent into a dystopian hellhole comes despite its enviable location in the San Francisco Bay area – one of the most naturally-beautiful locales in the United States.

And while both Oakland and neighboring San Francisco are home to huge numbers of wealthy people thanks to the tech boom of nearby Silicon Valley, both cities have become associated with filth and crime increasingly blamed on progressive policy.

“Gavinville?” Time to update an oldie but a goodie Photoshop:

Oakland’s last Republican mayor left office in 1977.