OPEN THREAD: Light this candle.
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THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA awards studies for commercial Mars missions.
IT’S HOW THE MACHINE WORKS: Thoughts on Selective Law Enforcement. “You have a right to free speech, but that doesn’t give you a First Amendment right to camp out on my lawn with protest signs. That’s trespassing. But government officials sometimes allow trespassing when they sympathize with the trespasser’s viewpoint. Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC have refused to remove progressive anti-Israel protesters camping out at private universities — Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and George Washington University.”
This should give rise to civil rights lawsuits. Plus:
As a University of Pennsylvania alumnus notes, these illegal protests are only being allowed by progressive officials because of the viewpoint they are expressing. If the protesters were “white nationalists waving nazi flags and telling black people they should go back to Africa I’m sure [police] would be out there pretty quickly” to remove them. . . . This favoritism by progressive cities violates the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court, the government cannot favor certain kinds of protests over others.
But that’s how the left rolls: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies: The law.”
Plus: “From what I can gather, the problem in cities is usually not that the police department itself is unwilling to assist, but that they are under orders from the mayor, afraid of upsetting far left constituents, to stand down. This is going a bit beyond my expertise, but from what I understand the Justice Department could and should, but won’t under the Biden administration, investigate whether these police departments are violating the terms of their federal funding, and also denying equal protection of the law, by refusing to enforce the law for ideological and political reasons. An added factor is that this lack of enforcement is to the specific detriment of Jewish students who have disproportionately faced threats, intimidation, and violence from people at the encampments.”
SO IN PROSECUTING TRUMP FOR MISHANDLING CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, THE PROSECUTORS MISHANDLED THE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS: Prosecutors: Docs in boxes seized from Mar-a-Lago were inadvertently jumbled. “Special counsel Jack Smith’s team acknowledged Friday that some evidence in the prosecution of former President Donald Trump for hoarding classified documents at his Florida home may not be in the same sequence FBI agents found it when they swept into the Mar-a-Lago compound with a search warrant in August 2022. The concession from prosecutors in a court filing Friday afternoon came after attorneys for one of Trump’s co-defendants asked for a delay in the case because the defense lawyers were having trouble determining precisely where particular documents had come from in the 33 boxes the FBI seized almost two years ago. In their filing, prosecutors acknowledged the government had previously — and incorrectly — told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the boxes remained ‘in their original, intact form as seized,’ other than a decision to replace classified documents with placeholder sheets.”
YOU DON’T WANT TO BE STUCK WITH AN OBSOLETE PLATFORM: Experts Discuss The Dark Likelihood of ‘Abandoned’ Brain Implant Technology.
THIS SHOULD MAKE TERRAFORMING EASIER: NASA’s Curiosity Rover Uncovers Signs of an Earth-Like Environment on Ancient Mars.
IT’S LIKE JURASSIC PARK FOR BIRDS: What happened when scientists taught parrots to video chat?
GET IN SHAPE FOR SUMMER: Yes4All Kettlebell Vinyl Coated Cast Iron – Great for Dumbbell Weights Exercises. #CommissionEarned
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Woke God.
The writer James Lindsay said in a talk (here available on YouTube) before the European Parliament that ‘Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian’. Lindsay, described in Wikipedia as a promoter of right-wing conspiracy theories, goes on to describe how 20th-century Marxists, disheartened by the failure of the abolition of economic property to create wealth, expanded their evangelical model to include other types of properties. Race, civilization, and even sexual normalcy were all regarded as oppressive advantages that had to be mocked, abolished, and otherwise scattered for “equity” — the great leveling — to be achieved. This expanded their audience considerably and allowed them to expand beyond the traditional working class.
The James Lindsay talk explains why radical politics and Wokism in particular always involve God, or at least universals, whether Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, or in the negative sense of militant atheism. That is because it deals with the eternal issues, the nature of humanity, the origin of civilization, and the meaning of social relations. Hence Lindsay’s remark that “Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian.”
Indirect proof of this assertion can be seen in the traction of the Woke message in historical, parochial, or ethnic contexts where they were alien. Examples include anti-colonial movements in Ireland, which never had a colony; Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Europe and perhaps this most curious of imitations:
“Palestine wasn’t initially their thing, but now they are doing more than we are, and [we] felt ashamed and that we should do more,” Ali Tayyar, a student organizer at Lebanon’s American University of Beirut, said at a protest Tuesday. “We needed to at least show some support for our friends in the U.S.”
The message is nothing to do with the facts, just the feelings. Will it last? If Marx’s thesis, as Lindsay argues, was fundamentally erroneous in the domain of economics, the mistake cannot be fixed by expanding the flawed analysis to explain race, culture, sexuality and history after its original failure. Mistakes just get bigger by expanding their scope. Wokism as enlarged Marxist economics doesn’t get better, it gets worse.
Also from Lindsay: Marx was “a privileged white European male.”
Karl Marx Was a Conservative | @ConceptualJames pic.twitter.com/3Dn3aNpGrK
— New Discourses (@NewDiscourses) April 30, 2024
Flashback: Berkeley students angry that they have to read Marx, not because he was, well, a Marxist, but because he was yet another dead white European male: “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.”
As James Lileks wrote in response, “Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate. By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.”
GEORGE WASHINGTON STUDENTS HOLD ‘PEOPLE’S TRIBUNAL,’ CALL FOR FACULTY’S DEATHS.
I’m pretty sure that Christopher Nolan didn’t intend for the Dark Knight Rises to be a how-to guide:
THE ATF PERFORMING TO ITS USUAL STANDARDS: South Carolinian Faced 115 Years in Prison Until ATF Admitted They Got the Wrong Man.
STAY DRY: Repel Travel Umbrella: Windproof Travel Umbrella. #CommissionEarned
GET READY FOR SUMMER: Crocs Unisex-Adult Classic Clogs. #CommissionEarned
QUESTION ASKED: Are You More Annoyed Than You Were Four Years Ago?
What Biden’s government should do, more broadly, is resist the self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism*. Noah Rothman’s magazine piece last year on “the war on things that work” is a useful reference point, cataloguing the ways activists have been “waging a crusade against convenience.” This includes, especially at the state level, fulminating against gas stoves, fighting the scourge of gas-powered lawn equipment, and banning single-use packaging in grocery stores. On that New Jersey bag measure, Noah wrote that the environmental benefits are unclear given that reusable bags take more energy and resources to make (read this; it’s priceless) — and “the only observable effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and noticeably more annoying.”
Democrats, do you ever look at Trump’s Truth Social feed and feel like Jon Lovitz? Maybe stuff like this is why.
Speaking of: The administration’s persistent efforts to wipe away (transfer to taxpayers) college-student debt, especially while struggling to process present-day financial-aid applications, are yet another way to alienate voters. If the policy wasn’t invidious enough, one has to suspect more than a few (million) people saw the images this week of college students camping out, vandalizing property, occupying school facilities, and getting justifiably arrested and thought, perhaps while making their monthly car payment: So let me get this straight . . .
Reagan once asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The 2024 version might be: Are you more or less annoyed?
Google are doing their best to shield voters from the issues that frustrate them, and yet they all of all people should know about how the Streisand Effect works: Google Removes Trump PAC Ad Targeting Black Men and it is Very Suspicious.
Genuinely curious what policy this ad violates on Google. https://t.co/wBlm0KDQIO
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 3, 2024
* Well, “self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism” is a pretty good definition of the Luddite left these days: QED: Hillary Clinton group wired $500,000 to climate activists behind disruptive protests. “‘Anyone who cares about public safety and preventing vandalism should be deeply concerned that money connected to Hillary Clinton is propping up these radicalized eco activists,’ said Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of the Power the Future energy advocacy group.”
HE COULD DO A LOT WORSE, AND PROBABLY WILL: Is Winsome Sears on Trump’s Short List for a Running Mate? “She’s a rising star in Republican politics. Like Trump, she is known for delivering unfiltered opinions on controversial topics. At a time when college campuses are being disrupted by pro-Hamas demonstrations, the Trump campaign may be thinking about a strong show of support for law and order to contrast with Biden’s cowardice in addressing the problem. And, she is a black woman. Sears would provide a sharp contrast to Kamala Harris on a debate stage.” Well, yes, she can speak in coherent sentences and everything. Plus she has actual experience and substantive knowledge.
The born in Jamaica thing is an issue, though. You can’t be VP if you’re ineligible to be President. But the story just says her father is Jamaican. I don’t know if her mother is a U.S. citizen but if so she’s good no matter where she was born.
JACK DUNPHY: On the Violent Left, Eternal Recurrence.
Have we learned nothing from the past? It’s not as though we need to explore antiquity for lessons in how to confront today’s issues. While such an exploration would no doubt be helpful, any effort in that direction is beyond – far, far beyond – the stunted intellectual capacities of our current crop of ruling elites, certainly to include our degreed betters running our so-called institutions of higher learning.
But is 2020 so shrouded in the mists of history as to be inaccessible to the people who hold themselves out as arbiters of all that is good and just? Apparently so. Consider: it was a mere four years ago that every major city in America was convulsed in the paroxysms of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. We must, said these lettered sophisticates, allow the oppressed to vent their outrage at the death of one of their own at the hands of state oppressors. To deter them in any way would only deepen their pain. And never mind that our hero of the moment had lived a life of depredation and was found to have consumed a fatal dose of fentanyl. Such trivial details need not dim the luster of the man’s memory.
A result of the ensuing anti-police hysteria, one that was easily foreseeable in nature if not necessarily in its horrifying scale, was that the number of homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 5,000 from 2019 to 2020, and that nearly 3,400 of these added victims, 68 percent, were black. But there must be martyrs to the cause, after all, and who is to say how many of those 5,000 people wouldn’t willingly have sacrificed themselves in the name of a more just society? Eggs and omelets, right, comrades?
Still, one prays for more wisdom in those we’ve entrusted with authority. For the most part, we pray in vain. Witness the chaos this week on display on college campuses across the country, where we find that the protesters who brought so much death and disorder in 2020 have swapped their BLM T-shirts for kaffiyehs and adopted the Gazans as their Cause of the Season. Same clowns, different circus.
Not surprisingly, the AP isn’t willing to connect the dots:
There are some echos—for instance, at Kent State they were protesting in support of the mass murdering Khmer Rouge regime and today’s protests are in support of the mass murdering Hamas regime! https://t.co/tpQy5Ilo7k
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) May 4, 2024
Or as Jon Gabriel recently noted: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.
Because, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
DON’T GET COCKY:
Not sure I believe this, but a double-digit margin is impressive.
Useful to remember that Rasmussen was rather bullish on Trump in 2020. At one point during that campaign, Rasmussen estimated Trump led by 1 point.
Final Rasmussen #poll in 2020 had Biden up by 1; he won by 4.5… https://t.co/QggqWOx3TD— W. Joseph Campbell (@wjosephcampbell) May 4, 2024
HEALTH CARE COST CONTAINMENT HAS GOTTEN OUT OF HAND: Orangutan treats facial wound with medicinal plant.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT: Mark Hamill Makes Cringey Appearance at White House Press Briefing, Lame Jokes Fall Flat.
Hamill made an appearance at the White House on Friday but did not provide the powerful celebrity endorsement that Joe Biden may have hoped for.
Sporting a pair of aviator sunglasses, Hamill was introduced to the podium by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre but did not show the same stage presence as in his famous role as Luke Skywalker.
“How many of you had Mark Hamill will lead the press briefing on your bingo cards?” Hamill remarked. “I just got to meet the president and he gave me these aviator glasses.”
Some are questioning the timing:
No White House has ever read the room worse than this one.
There's chaos on American campuses, a poor jobs report, and Team Biden thought it was a great idea to trot out an actor whose was last hit film was 41 years ago to tell profoundly horrible jokes. https://t.co/qiKX0Ft32N
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) May 3, 2024
But, perhaps the time is right! Is Biden embracing the “Genocide Joe” sobriquet foisted upon him by (ironically enough) the bloodthirstiest members of his constituency? Why else would he bring in an actor who made his living playing Luke Skywalker and in the Batman cartoon series, the Joker, each of whom are mass-murdering terrorists — and in Skywalker’s case a communist-inspired slave-owning religious fanatic to boot.
Exit question: Did Hamill and Joe commiserate about the synchronicity of each being manipulated by their handlers into ill-advised homages to Leni Riefenstahl?
UPDATE: Treat May the Fourth as the holiday it deserves to be!
MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: This Video of Biden’s Chief Economic Adviser Is Making the Rounds (Yeah, It Explains a LOT).
Jared Bernstein is the chair of the Biden White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, where one of his chief duties is to put frosting on crappy news with regular somewhat laughable attempts to put a positive spin on what “Bidenomics” has brought.
* * * * * * * *
Bernstein often dials the gaslighting up to eleven to try and convince everybody to believe the White House instead of their own lying eyes and grocery/energy bills.
There’s a video featuring Bernstein making the rounds in which he tries to explain how things work, and it’ll just pump you full of confidence.
Wait, no it won’t:
Meet Jared Bernstein, Biden’s chief economic advisor:
✔️Art Degree, Manhattan School of Music
✔️ Mainstay on NYC jazz scene
✔️ Master of Social Work, Hunter College
✔️ Doctorate in Social Welfare from Columbia
✔️ Can’t answer a econ101 question 👇— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) May 3, 2024
Biden warned voters on the 2020 campaign trail that if he’s elected president, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” (Sadly, not that he ever was in America.) But nobody in the MSM-DNC deigned to ask who would be replacing him.
Related: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Anxiety is rising among Americans amid economic struggles, looming election.