DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:
Harvard’s fighting the Trump administration harder than it’s ever fought antisemitism https://t.co/Hf14YemuJW
— Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (@HarvardJews) April 15, 2025
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
April 15, 2025
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Shocking Katy Perry video resurfaces undermining all her claims about her Blue Origin trip.
Eco warrior Katy Perry is being slammed as a ‘hypocrite’ after it was revealed Monday’s Blue Origin space launch released tons of greenhouse gases.
Climate experts said the 11-minute trip was enough to ‘alter the atmosphere.’
Online, a resurfaced video of Perry lecturing people on climate change in 2015 has gained new attention.
‘Hi, I’m Katy Perry. Let’s take a journey to see how man-made* climate change is hurting children around the world,’ she said in the clip filmed for UNICEF.
Perry said carbon emissions were causing devastating tropical weather in the Philippines, destructive flooding in Bangladesh and deadly malaria in Africa, which hit around the time the video was released.
The clip was posted on X after Perry returned from her trip to space, sparking outcry because she said the mission was for the benefit of Earth.
‘Protecting the planet begins by refusing to produce hundreds of tons of CO2 for a ridiculous flight organized by one of the biggest polluters on this same planet,’ one user shared on X.
While Jeff Bezos‘ rocket releases water vapor as a byproduct, resulting in virtually no direct carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, scientists said it is still an ozone-depleting greenhouse gas.
C’mon — it’s 2025. When the left is burning Teslas and taking suborbital vanity flights on the eve of the 55th anniversary of the first “Earth Day,” we know all of the past eco-talk was just a phase that’s now been concluded.
* Man-made? Somebody’s going to get a stern talking to from an actual former astronaut turned language cop: See Bitter Scolding.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Detained Columbia protester Mohsen Mahdawi threatened and intimidated Jewish students, State Department says.
The Palestinian Columbia University student arrested by ICE agents in Vermont led disruptive anti-Israel protests on campus, and engaged in “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” against Jewish students, State Department sources tell The Post.
Mohsen Mahdawi, who hails from the West Bank, was at an interview to obtain his US citizenship on Monday when he was picked up by immigration authorities, his lawyer said.
“Mahdawi, through his leadership and involvement in disruptive protests at Columbia University, has engaged in antisemitic conduct through leading pro-Palestinian protests and calling for Israel’s destruction,” a senior State Department source said.
The peace sign flashed by a man who in most of the other photos (including an April 2024 60 Minutes interview) is wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh speaks volumes of his hypocrisy.
GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: Garrison Keillor: A few words from your elderly uncle.
I dropped my glasses in a café in New York and couldn’t find them and a young man got down on his knees and got them out from under a table. I thanked him, but it wasn’t enough. I said, “I really appreciate good manners more than I ever used to.” He said, “I know what you mean.”
There’s a lot of ugliness going around. I’ve never been called “scum” or “sleazebag” that I’m aware of though motorists do sometimes curse us slow pedestrians in rough tones but now that national leadership has embraced these particular terms I suppose the day is coming when TSA personnel will feel free (“Is that your briefcase, white trash?” “Hold your hands over your head, buttface, and stand very still.”) and give us a full-body patdown if we object. Security as an excuse for ugly manners, we’ve seen it before.
Some readers have called my writing “garbage,” but that’s literary criticism and I don’t take it personally. Same with “I used to like your writing back when you were funny”: each person is the judge of funny/unfunny. But “sleazebag” and “scum” deny a person’s humanity, and now that they’re accepted in high places, we are in for a rough ride.
Flashback:
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
—“We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore,” Garrison Keillor, August 26th, 2004.
LEFTISTS ALWAYS WANT TO AIRBRUSH THE PAST: Home Alone 2 Director Wants Trump’s Cameo Removed: ‘I Just Wish It Was Gone… if I Cut It, I’ll Probably Be Sent Out of the Country.’
“Home Alone” director Chris Columbus said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that he wishes he could remove Donald Trump‘s cameo from the 1992 sequel, “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.” The filmmaker said Trump’s seven-second appearance in the movie has “become this curse. It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”
“I can’t cut it,” Columbus added on a sarcastic note. “If I cut it, I’ll probably be sent out of the country. I’ll be considered sort of not fit to live in the United States, so I’ll have to go back to Italy or something.”
Evergreen:
23 PERCENT OF AMERICAN 17-YEAR-OLD BOYS HAVE AN ADHD DIAGNOSIS:
One of the greatest evils of my 90s childhood was the sedation and casual drugging of young boys for acting like boys in a school system built for little girls.
And it’s only now that we’re finally allowed to ask questions. Decades too late.
The New York Times article screen-capped above notes that:
For some children, a different school, or a different kind of school, might produce the same profound shift that the M.T.A. subjects experienced when they enrolled in film school or began studying hair styling. For others, a prescription for Ritalin or Adderall might help make school feel like a better fit. But for them and their parents, the experience of taking medication might feel quite different if it was presented to them not as a medicine to fix their defective brain but as a tool to make an inhospitable environment more tolerable.
As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in 1995, when ADD was the pop culture disease of the decade:
I have children in school, and I am intrigued by the faith parents now invest–the craze began about 1990–in psychologists who diagnose their children as suffering from a defect known as attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this “disorder” is an actual, physical, neurological condition or not, but neither does anybody else in this early stage of neuroscience. The symptoms of this supposed malady are always the same. The child, or, rather, the boy–forty-nine out of fifty cases are boys–fidgets around in school, slides off his chair, doesn’t pay attention, distracts his classmates during class, and performs poorly. In an earlier era he would have been pressured to pay attention, work harder, show some self-discipline. To parents caught up in the new intellectual climate of the 1990s, that approach seems cruel, because my little boy’s problem is… he’s wired wrong! The poor little tyke –the fix has been in since birth! Invariably the parents complain, “All he wants to do is sit in front of the television set and watch cartoons and play Sega Genesis.” For how long? “How long? For hours at a time.” Hours at a time; as even any young neuroscientist will tell you, that boy may have a problem, but it is not an attention deficit.
Nevertheless, all across America we have the spectacle of an entire generation of little boys, by the tens of thousands, being dosed up on ADD’s magic bullet of choice, Ritalin, the CIBA-Geneva Corporation’s brand name for the stimulant methylphenidate. I first encountered Ritalin in 1966 when I was in San Francisco doing research for a book on the psychedelic or hippie movement. A certain species of the genus hippie was known as the Speed Freak, and a certain strain of Speed Freak was known as the Ritalin Head. The Ritalin Heads loved Ritalin. You’d see them in the throes of absolute Ritalin raptures…Not a wiggle, not a peep…They would sit engrossed in anything at all…a manhole cover, their own palm wrinkles…indefinitely…through shoulda-been mealtime after mealtime…through raging insomnias…Pure methyl-phenidate nirvana…From 1990 to 1995, CIBA-Geneva’s sales of Ritalin rose 600 percent; and not because of the appetites of subsets of the species Speed Freak in San Francisco, either. It was because an entire generation of American boys, from the best private schools of the Northeast to the worst sludge-trap public schools of Los Angeles and San Diego, was now strung out on methylphenidate, diligently doled out to them every day by their connection, the school nurse. America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! It never lets you down!
If anything, the diagnoses of ADHD are even more out of control in England, Brendan O’Neill wrote in Spiked at the beginning of the year: You don’t have ADHD – you’re just annoying.
ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some vogue ailment to boast about? There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. The Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – yikes – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18 per cent hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man that’s a lot of annoying people.
The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder’. Its reasoning was solid: much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ is just ‘ordinary human traits’, it said. It’s so true. Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganised, agitated? We’re not sick, we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from the pathologisation of life’s ups and downs. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific American said back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. One wonders if Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.
The ADHD epidemic, like all faux disorders, started in the US. They’ve been drugging kids there for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one sceptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘[suppress] all spontaneous behavior in normal children’, he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.
Yes. Jonah Goldberg concluded his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism, thusly:
The twentieth century gave us two visions of a dystopian future, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. For many years it was assumed that 1984 was the more prophetic tale. But no more. The totalitarianism of 1984 was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World was a dystopia based on an American future, where Henry Ford is remembered as a messiah (it’s set in the year “632 A.F.,” after Ford) and the cult of youth that Huxley so despised defines society. Everything is easy under the World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, what’s wrong with it?
Perhaps now, at last, we’re prepared to answer that question.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! The Husk of Joe Biden Will Attempt to Speak About DOGE Reform of Social Security.
Biden’s speech risks being more about political posturing than solutions. His approval rating, a dismal 39 percent in a January Gallup poll, reflects public disillusionment after a term marked by economic struggles and a chaotic debate performance that ended his reelection hopes. Some argue Biden’s return is an attempt to rally Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms, leveraging Social Security as an emotional wedge issue rather than confronting its structural flaws.
Conservatives agree Social Security must be protected but insist on reforms—like raising the payroll tax cap, adjusting benefits for high earners, or incentivizing private savings—to prevent insolvency. Biden’s critique of Trump’s agenda may resonate with his base, but without addressing these realities, it’s little more than a nostalgic defense of a broken system. As he speaks in Chicago, the question remains: Will Biden offer a path forward, or simply yell at us and then whisper old talking points to score points against his successor?
I hope that ol’ Teleprompter XD-235 is up to the task — he’s facing his ultimate opponent today.
I have heard from some anti-Trump officers that it is acceptable for them to challenge Trump and be “disloyal” to him on political matters because while the enlisted oath of office includes the phrase “that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States,” no such words regarding the president appear in the officer oath of office. This idea is highly disturbing.
It suggests that officers are not bound to follow the lawful orders of the president if they disagree politically. Not only is this contrary to the sacred officer tradition of being apolitical, but it is also contrary to the part of the officers’ oath that requires officers to “support and defend the Constitution” (after all, the president’s military role arises in the Constitution). Finally, it is contrary to the actual commission of all U.S. military officers, which states in part: “And this officer is to observe and follow such orders and directions from time to time as may be given by the President of the United States of America.”
The trends we are seeing feel dangerously close to an embrace of 1970s South American-style military juntas. Think about Gen. Mark Milley telling China he would warn them about U.S. military activity. Think about Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman using his position on the National Security Council as a springboard for impeaching a president because he did not like the way that president was lawfully discharging his duties. These are not the marks of healthy civilian control of the military. They are instead marks of a military approaching the rationalization of a coup.
I have heard numerous theories as to how we got here, ranging from “Obama purged all the good generals” to “Gen Z are too narcissistic for selfless sacrifice,” but I attribute the breakdown quite directly to DEI policies and practices. I do not mean that the advancement of officers for DEI reasons is the cause. Rather, the inculcation of DEI policies as a core ethos of military service has been monstrously destructive. Our military has always been driven by core values, such as, “Don’t give up the ship,” “Duty, Honor, Country,” and “Always Faithful.” Traditionally, those values have been apolitical and solely revolved around the military’s fundamental mission of defeating America’s battlefield enemies.
As Kurt Schlichter wrote yesterday, The Pentagon Must Go on the Offensive to Defeat Politicized Officers. “If you aren’t loyal to the commander-in-chief, who are you loyal to? Your own personal conception of right and wrong? Well, Soldier, you are in the wrong career field. There are a wide range of jobs you can do where you can freely share your thoughts about our political leadership and its policies, but being a military leader is not one of them.”
April 14, 2025
BEN, I WANT TO SAY ONE WORD TO YOU. JUST ONE WORD: PLASTICS. What happens to Botox, fillers and implants in space? Experts weigh in.
RIP, SIR: World’s oldest Pearl Harbor survivor dies at 106: ‘Lived with integrity every single day.’
Vaughn P. Drake Jr. from Kentucky was 23 years old at the time of the Japanese attack on the US Pacific naval base in Hawaii, according to a press release.
He was working as an Army engineer at Kaneohe Naval Air Station on Oahu on the day of the shocking attack on December 7, 1941, which precipitated America’s entry into World War II.
“We were getting ready to go to breakfast, and we heard all these planes flying over and making a lot of noise,” Drake told the Lexington Herald Leader in 2016.
“We just figured it was the Army Air Corps carrying out maneuvers for practice, like they did a lot. We didn’t pay much attention to it.
“Finally we left to go to the chow line to get our breakfast, and we noticed these planes flying over the naval air station, diving and everything. And we thought, ‘Boy, they’re really putting on a good show.’ Even though we saw the red spots on the wing — which was the Japanese symbol — we still couldn’t believe it,” he went on.
Drake also witnessed the Battle of Saipan in the Mariana Islands, a turning point for the US in the conflict.
“Only 15 survivors of the attack — which killed 2,403 Americans — are still alive today.”
LABOUR WILL BURY BRITISH STEEL, NOT SAVE IT:
In a rare Saturday sitting of parliament, MPs voted this weekend to allow the UK government to assume operational control of British Steel. The emergency legislation will be used to block the firm’s Chinese owner, Jingye, from closing down its two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. Full nationalisation is likely on the way.
There is no doubt that government intervention was necessary to prevent the plant’s closure. Jingye, which claims it was losing £700,000 per day from the Scunthorpe steelworks, was clearly determined to cut its losses and run. Negotiations over a support package broke down last week when Jingye rejected the government’s offer to cover the costs of the iron and coal needed to keep the furnaces running. It also rejected what business secretary Jonathan Reynolds described as ‘one of the largest government grants in British history’. It then became clear that Jingye was selling off its stockpiles and refusing to pay for past orders of raw materials, and thus had hoped to starve the furnaces and render them inoperable (without coal keeping the temperature high, furnaces can sustain permanent damage). Restarting the furnaces would not have been impossible in this event, but it would have been a costly and complex process.
The loss of British Steel’s blast furnaces would have been devastating for the plant’s 2,700 employees and for Scunthorpe, which has been a steelmaking town since the 19th century. But it also would have been devastating for the UK. The nation that invented modern steelmaking would become the only G7 nation incapable of producing ‘primary’ or ‘virgin’ steel. This is essential for carmaking, infrastructure, the defence industry and many other critical manufacturing sectors.
* * * * * * * * *
Labour’s intervention has brought British Steel some time. It may well have prevented the disorderly shutdown of Britain’s last blast furnaces, which would have had devastating consequences for the economy as a whole. Yet far from ‘saving’ British steelmaking, Labour continues to bury it. It’s hard to see heavy industry surviving another four years of eco-vandalism.
But at that point, who will be making plans for Nigel?
THE PEOPLE WHO CAME FOR YOUR PLASTIC BAG AND STRAW NOW WANT YOUR DOG:
From the people who turned your Mustang into a Prius and made it so your dishwasher does not actually wash dishes comes a new villain, not quite straight from central casting, in the imaginary war on the planet: dogs.
“We are all too aware of the negative effects of cats,” Australian academics Bill Bateman and Lauren Gilson write at The Conversation, “both owned and feral, on wildlife…. Our pet dogs seem to get a free pass.”
With all the charm of Almira Gulch and the subtlety of Michael Vick, Bateman and Gilson argue that man’s best friend really sits, and rolls over, as mankind’s great enemy.
The authors argue, “Our beloved pet dogs have a far greater, more insidious and more concerning effect on wildlife and the environment than we would like to be the case.”
How so?
“The medications we use to rid our pet dogs of fleas or ticks can last weeks on fur, and wash off when they plunge into a creek or river,” they write. “But some of these medications have ingredients highly toxic to aquatic invertebrates, meaning a quick dip can be devastating.”
They point out, “Dogs largely eat meat, meaning millions of cows and chickens are raised just to feed our pets.”
Sod off, swampy.
STEVE GREEN AT THE PJ MOTHERSHIP: Ford Has a ‘Chief Learning Officer,’ and He’s Exactly What You’d Expect.
In the case of Ford’s CLO, Barrett Evans, his function seems to be harassing an elderly guy in a wheelchair for watching Fox News and then bragging about it on social media. Here’s the first part of his post, which I believe (but not 100% sure) is from Facebook:
Elderly passenger on my flight from San Diego yesterday enjoyed Fox ‘News’ for the entire ride. Deplaning and I notice he and his wife getting into their airport wheelchairs to be pushed to next gate. My filter was malfunctioning…
‘Love to see you supporting DEI.’
‘Not me!’ ‘Yes – you. That wheelchair, and the human pushing it, are provided at no direct cost to you – rather by a subsidized cost attributed to every passenger in this airport. Provided to level the playing field – for you.
I won’t recount all the details and humorous responses here because my Twitchy colleague Sam J. already crushed it, and I’m not about to bust into her wheelhouse.
For what it’s worth, wheelchair accommodations are legally mandated by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Even before then, airlines generally seemed happy to accommodate almost any paying passenger. The point here is that Ford’s CLO doesn’t seem to understand that the D in DEI doesn’t stand for Disability. You’d think a guy with a seat in the C-suite would at least know the fundamentals.
The story also has one of those telling details that I almost missed the first time around. Evans’s social media account — posed in front of a Pride decoration — uses the handle “chivalryandchampagne.” My advice? Skip the bubbly, Barrett, and rediscover the chivalry.
The automobile company that published the Dearborn Independent in its salad days doesn’t seem to have made much progress when it comes to executives harassing innocent people and then boasting about it in the media.
THE DIVINE SECRETS OF THE SUBORBITAL YA-YA SISTERHOOD: Blue Origin’s all-female space flight was a step backwards for feminism.
Far be it from me to spoil the party, but this is not space exploration. Sanchez is a former TV presenter, about to get married to one of the world’s richest men who just happens to own the space rocket.
Katy Perry has also been drinking from the same fountain of delusional self-indulgence: ‘I’m really excited…We are all made of stardust and it’ll be exciting to see them twinkle from that site and have such an appreciation for Mother Earth when we see it that way’. She went on to suggest the trip would encourage young girls to go into space in the future with ‘no limitations’. Really? Previous passenger trips with Blue Origin have cost more than $1 million (£760,000) a seat. Only for rich girls, then.
It has been reported that the crew trained for all of two days ahead of the trip. Rather depressingly, much of the coverage of their journey into space featured talk of flared jump suits and other fashion accessories. The female crew appeared more than happy with this agenda, saying that lipstick, eyelash extensions and hair styles matter. The bible of female empowerment, according to Katy Perry, goes like this: ‘Space is finally going to be glam…We are going to put the “ass” in “astronaut”’.
Is it churlish to point out that she is not an astronaut, or certainly not in any conventional sense of the word?
No, it’s accurate. In December of 2021, NBC-DFW 5 reported: No More Commercial Astronaut Wings, Too Many Launching: FAA. Just as sitting in a seat on a 737 doesn’t make you a pilot; sitting in a seat on a fully automated suborbital flight similarly counts as passenger status. Or as former MTV VJ Kennedy writes:
These chicks aren’t astronauts. They’re leg-humping fabulists who ingratiated themselves with a billionaire for a little publicity. They’re space tourists, and their dumb stunt does nothing for humanity or space exploration, regardless of their gametes.
Sorry, sisters, but you’re no Valentina Tereshkova — the first woman in space, who flew on a solo mission in a flimsy Russian craft in 1963 during the Cold War.
That took some real asteroids. And no make-up.
University of Birmingham space scientist Dr Garrett Dorian said it best: ‘Let’s call it what it is and not tell ourselves that this is contributing meaningfully to science or space exploration. I am afraid I do still think these flights are essentially just joyrides for the super-rich.’
Hear hear! Or should I say, Her Her?
Heh, indeed.
SEE BITTER SCOLDING: Woke. In. Space! CBS Host Apologizes for Saying ‘Mankind:’ ‘I’m Sorry. I’m Sorry.’
In space, no one can hear you scream; but the aliens can apparently pick up your virtue signals on their scanners. CBS Mornings co-host Vlad Duthiers was sending out distress calls during Monday’s show after he was scolded by Dr. Mae Jemison (the first black woman in space) because he used the highly offensive term “mankind” to refer to the entire human species.
* * * * * * * * *
Duthiers immediately stepped in it again with his comments about space travel being a benefit to “mankind.” Again, he drew a swift scolding from Jemison:
DUTHIERS: So, explain to our audience why even a trip like this one, all the trips that we take into space, benefit mankind.
JEMISON: Um, so, it benefits humankind.
“Humankind, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Duthiers pleaded.
She then proclaimed that she was, “going to keep correcting the mankind and the man-made, and the man-missions because this is exactly what this mission is about, is expanding the perspective of who does space.”
Jemison’s high horse had legs that stretched up past the Karman line (international line that denotes where outer space begins).
As Thomas Sowell wrote 30 years ago in The Vision of the Anointed, on the left’s sustained attack on “The Generic ‘He:’”
Trivial as such crusades may seem, they have been very successful in changing the way people talk in the media, in academia, and in government. Not only is the generic “he” taboo in many quarters, the speech controllers have pressed on to new conquests, attacking such words as “layman,” “craftsman,” “actress,” or “matron,” which violate their unisex view of the world, and also proscribe such phrases as “to master a language” because it uses a sex-specific word. These examples are from an official guidebook put out by the Australian government, which shows how far such crusades have spread. An American guidebook, distributed internationally, declares that there is “a perfectly scientific, completely foolproof, and highly theoretical model for avoiding sexism on the job.” As so often happens, pretensions of “science” are the last refuge of those who offer neither the evidence nor the logic that are integral to science.
The net effect of all this is that young women, especially in educational institutions where they are bombarded with radical feminist propaganda, are led to believe that every use of the generic “he” in books of the past is proof of disdain or hostility toward women, when in fact such usage simply avoided cluttering up the language or forcing writers into strained constructions and awkward phrases. In short, the anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.
At the conclusion of her 10-minute suborbital jaunt, CBS’s Gayle King gushed, “You look down at the planet and you think that’s where we came from? To me it’s such a reminder about how we need to do better, be better.”
Indeed — excellent advice for Jemison to take to heart.
EUROPE IS THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE THESE DAYS:
EU energy policy is the biggest reason why Europe cannot unite against Russia in the long term.
Germany is hooked on Russian oil & natural gas like a drug addict is on crystal meth.🤢🤮 https://t.co/otXlo5fc78
— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) April 14, 2025
EVERGREEN: German Tanks Fail on Russian Front: German tanks are failing in Ukraine for the same reasons they lost World War II.
KURT SCHLICHTER: The Pentagon Must Go on the Offensive to Defeat Politicized Officers.
Your politics don’t matter when you are a military leader. At all. Politics have no place in the military. None. I was becoming more and more prominent politically and in the media as a civilian while I was becoming a senior field grade officer as a reservist, but I was actively apolitical around the troops. I never talked about politics on duty. I never asked about it or told anyone about it. You know the command sergeant major I mentioned? I have no idea who he voted for. None. That’s because he was a consummate professional, and I tried to be the same. When we put on the uniform, we did our job whether the President was named Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, or Obama.
But apparently, some officers these days think there is a Trump Exception to their duty as officers to be apolitical, just as there appears to be a Trump Exception to every other rule, regulation, norm, and standard in our society and government. They are wrong, and their utterly bass ackwards conception of their duties as leaders is poisonous to the organization. If you aren’t loyal to the commander-in-chief, who are you loyal to? Your own personal conception of right and wrong? Well, Soldier, you are in the wrong career field. There are a wide range of jobs you can do where you can freely share your thoughts about our political leadership and its policies, but being a military leader is not one of them.
What’s stunning is the sheer cheesiness of their tiresome acts of resistance. The commander of Fort Igloo decided to throw away her career by mass emailing a cloying letter that emphasized how she didn’t support the political leadership’s initiatives re: Greenland. What was she thinking? Another officer at NATO headquarters refused to post pictures of the new commander-in-chief and vice-president, as is a rule on military installations. That’s almost too petty to believe (I initially did not believe it – too insane – but my sources tell me it’s true).
Read the whole thing.
NVIDIA STOCK LEAPS AFTER MASSIVE U.S. INVESTMENT SURPRISE:
Nvidia unveiled plans for a massive investment in its U.S.-based manufacturing Monday as the ripple effects of President Donald Trump’s tariff gambit, as well as China’s retaliation toward the tech sector, continue to reverberate.
Nvidia said it planned to produce an American-made supercomputer from a U.S. platform, and planned to produce as much as $500 billion in artificial-intelligence infrastructure over the next four years as part of a partnership with Foxconn and Taiwan Semiconductor.
The plants are expected to be built in Arizona, to test Nvidia Blackwell chips, and in Texas, to test AI supercomputers.
“The engines of the world’s AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time,” said CEO Jensen Huang. “Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency.”
Meanwhile, in recent Apple news:
IT’S COME TO THIS: As Concert Ticket Prices Soar, More Than Half of Coachella GA Attendees Are Buying Tickets Through Payment Plans.
Tens of thousands of music fans will descend on the California desert this weekend for the first of two iterations of the Coachella Music and Arts festival outside of Palm Springs, Calif.
Approximately 80,000 to 100,000 fans each weekend will have coughed up the $599 ticket price to see headliners Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day and Post Malone. But ticket price is often just the cost of entry — many of those fans will spend more than a $1,000 per weekend on lodging and cough up hundreds of dollars more for food, drinks and merchandise. It’s a substantial spend for any of the 20-somethings in Coachella’s target demographic. But festival organizers have increasingly helped finance their purchase through payment plan programs.
Approximately 60 percent of general admission ticket buyers at this year’s festival opted to use Coachella’s payment plan system, which requires as little as $49.99 up front for tickets to the annual concert. The desert festival isn’t alone — Lollapalooza, Electric Daisy Carnival and Rolling Loud all sell the majority of their tickets using some kind of payment plan system.
Representatives at Goldenvoice, which puts on Coachella, declined to comment for this story. One source, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, told Billboard that payment plans have fundamentally changed how festivals are marketed to the public.
“Festivals are now marketing a cheap down payment as their main call to action,” the source says. “The messaging is $20 down gets you in the door, or $50 down gets you started. It’s no longer about the artists, or the festival lifestyle — the message is, ‘You can afford this if you act today.’”
Yes, but it’s not just Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, Green Day and Post Malone. There was also this brilliant veteran rap star spitting bars, and dropping some dope verses, straight fire: Bernie Sanders urges Coachella crowd to stand up against ‘US oligarchy.’
Senator Bernie Sanders held celebrity-backed rallies across the US as he emerges as one of the most vocal opponents to Donald Trump’s presidency.
Appearing for his war on extreme wealth tour – called Fighting Oligarchy – at the exclusive Coachella festival this weekend, he said: “This country faces some very difficult challenges and the future of what happens to America depends on your generation.”
Taking to the stage after a performance by the British pop singer Charli XCX he told the 36,000-strong crowd: “We need you to stand up.”
“You can turn away and ignore what goes on but you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up to fight for justice.”
“Fighting Oligarchy” is definitely Bernie’s greatest hits package, crafted from years of extensive jamming on the road, and presumably went down well with the young potentially violent socialists in the crowd:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025
Related: Festival guests report stolen belongings from hotel rooms during Coachella.
Multiple Coachella festivalgoers contacted News Channel 3, saying their belongings were stolen from their hotel rooms while they were away at the festival.
Ellie Brownridge said she’s attended Coachella for years with her best friend, Zoe Grober.
Grober said they’ve stayed at La Quinta Resort & Club before.
“We always love this property,” Grober said. “It’s just so disappointing that something like this happened and it’s totally tainted the experience.”
Brownridge and Grober, staying with their husbands, said they returned Saturday morning after the first day of Coachella to find personal items missing — including vintage bags, jewelry, family heirlooms and sunglasses.
They told News Channel 3 they called hotel management and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department — and quickly learned they weren’t alone.
“We met two other groups. In total, I think it’s like 15 people that we know of that this has happened to,” Brownridge said. “I think we’re looking at over $100,000 worth of stuff that’s gone.”
I was told in 2020 by Bernie’s supporters — including the New York Times and NPR — that this sort of five-fingered wealth distribution was perfectly acceptable. I’m glad to see that’s apparently no longer the case.
UPDATE: California punk rockers call for an ‘army of Luigis’ during brash Coachella set.
Shortly after ending a blistering rendition of “Coup D’Etat” during their Coachella set, Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris made a clarification to the moshing crowd. Although that last song ended with the words “kill all,” he made a point to say that the band does not condone what it describes, including kidnapping government leaders for ransom and leading a coup. “That song, that last line, ends with ‘kill all.’ That’s a pretty f—king ugly statement,” Morris said. “In ugly times. Do not think that we encourage that.”
Then, Morris went in a different direction. “What we do encourage — what would be totally f—king happening — would be an army of Luigis,” he said, in reference to Luigi Mangione, who is currently facing both federal and New York state charges for the alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson late last year.
Tay-Tay and Donie smile.
UNEXPECTEDLY: California has the highest impact fees for homebuilding in the country.
When property owners apply to the government for building permits, they’re often required to pay impact fees: fees meant to cover the strain additional buildings have on public resources like roads, sewers, schools, and parks.
There’s nothing wrong with properly set impact fees. But some local governments set impact fees that are excessively high or that aren’t related to the actual impact of construction projects. In addition to violating property rights, these improperly set exactions increase the cost of construction during today’s housing crisis, as a new Pacific Legal Foundation report reveals.
While this is a problem across the United States, California’s impact fees are much higher than anywhere else. Our report found that the average total impact fees for a typical U.S. home grew from almost $5,000 in 2004 to more than $9,000 in 2019. However, California’s average impact fee in 2019 was more than triple the national average, at almost $30,000. And it was much higher than the next-two-highest states: Maryland and Oregon charged the third- and second-highest exactions on average in 2019—nearly $13,000 and $17,000, respectively.
When breaking this down by locality, the situation paints an even starker picture of how much higher impact fees were in California. The five cities with the largest average total impact fees in 2019 were all in California, and all exceeded $50,000. Ironically, the smallest exactions were found in California’s next-door neighbor, Nevada. Las Vegas and Mesquite had average total impact fees of $165 and $43, respectively.
Somewhat relatedly, Thomas Sowell has written about “The Housing Price of Liberalism.”
In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.
Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.
Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.
What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.
As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.” San Francisco is a crumbling, endlessly multifaceted example of precisely that.
And as we linked to earlier today, Adam Carolla knows who California’s local governments will invariably roll first:
KYLE SMITH: Eve of Destruction.
Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World is an exhaustive look at the enduring appeal of works about how civilization might end, from the Book of Revelation to 12 Monkeys, The Matrix, I Am Legend, and whatever extinction-level event Hollywood next brings to screens. (“Extinction-level event,” by the way, is a phrase popularized by the 1998 blockbuster Deep Impact, starring Robert Duvall and Téa Leoni, about what happens as Earth prepares to receive an asteroid the size of Texas.)
A writer and podcaster whose previous books include 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), Lynskey seems to have pored over hundreds of books, many of them obscure, and watched nearly as many movies and TV shows to shape this definitive account. “There is always enough misery and mayhem in the world to support a claim that it is the end of days,” he writes. The seismologist Charles Francis Richter noted that when the Gospel records that “there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places” (Luke 21:11), Jesus wasn’t exactly going out on a limb: “Assuredly, no safer forecast was ever made.”
* * * * * * * * *
The most celebrated of this supposedly brilliant crew was the spectacularly erroneous neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich (“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” he promised in 1970), who boldly accepted a bet in 1980 by the techno-optimist economist Julian Simon about the future price of any five precious metals chosen by Ehrlich, which under his catastrophic-scarcity theory would necessarily become more expensive. Prices instead fell across the board. Lynskey sniffs, “Simon was lucky because commodity prices were unusually high in 1980 and Ehrlich had a weak grasp of economics.”
The most sophisticated of the sophisticated see climate change and overpopulation working in tandem to hasten our mass demise. For Lynskey, the 1973 Charlton Heston flick Soylent Green, which pictured a 2022 New York City (population 40,000,000) as a “smoggy, sweltering, desperate shanty town” is “a remarkably far-sighted movie about climate change.” Yet any long-time resident of New York City will tell you that the place is considerably cleaner and more pleasant than it was in 1973.
To Lynskey, no climate-change prophecy is ever wrong, merely premature; he occasionally sounds like a Millerite re-calculating the future arrival date of Armageddon. Why, after mocking so many doomsayers, does he include only two glancing mentions of the leading alarmist of our age, Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) won an Oscar for its sci-fi speculation, warning that the planet would be doomed in ten years unless a “drastic” reversal of course were taken? Lynskey seems entirely to have forgotten that Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, was taken far more seriously than nearly all of the dozens of (other) nuts and cranks whose wrong predictions get detailed, multi-page summaries. Reaching the end, one feels a bit worn out by the endless zombie-march of unearthed factoids. A greater effort to make sense of it all would have been welcome. But then again, it’s always a good time to panic.
It really is: On climate change scare tactics.
1971: New ice age coming by 2020 or 2023!
1972: New ice age by 2070! Oil depleted in 20 years!
1974: Space satellites show new ice age coming fast! And another ice age just around the bend! Ozone depletion a ‘great peril’ to life!
1976: Scientific consensus planet cooling; famines imminent!
1977: Department of Energy says oil will peak in ’90s!
1978: No end in sight to 30-year cooling trend!
1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes! Peak oil in 2000!
1988: Regional droughts (that never happened) in 1990s! Temperatures in DC will hit record highs! Maldive islands will be underwater by 2018!
1989: Rising sea levels will obliterate nations if nothing done by 2000! New York City’s west side highway will be underwater by 2019!
1996: Peak oil in 2020!
2000: Children won’t know what snow is!
All this doomsday talk gives me a serious case of nostalgia. The apocalypses haven’t been nearly as much fun ever since Orson Welles wasn’t available to pick up a quick paycheck narrating them:
POLICE: Arson Suspect Admitted ‘Harboring Hatred’ Toward Gov. Shapiro.
[Cody] Balmer faces numerous charges including:
- Criminal Attempt – Criminal Homicide
- Aggravated Arson – Person Present Inside Property
- Terrorism – Affect the Conduct of a Government
6ABC reported that the police “have not ruled out Shapiro’s Jewish faith” as a possible motive.”
What little is known about Balmer, the suspected Jew-hating arsonist, paints the picture that he isn’t a resident of either side of the political aisle. He seems to be A) a nut, and B) an anarchist, which if you look up the definition of an anarchist, it’ll say see A). He once proclaimed on social media that he was a socialist, but there’s not much other evidence out there to back up that claim. What is there is that he hated everybody on both sides.
I hope that Kash Patel at FBI gets to the bottom quickly of what made this person snap, and I hope that Attorney General Pam Bondi, if he did it out of religious bigotry, throws the book at him, despite whatever political affiliation, if any, he currently espouses.
I am grateful that Governor Shapiro and his family are safe. As for the Governor’s ‘both sidesism’, we all have eyes and ears, and functioning brainstems. It’s not hard to see where the bulk of the outbreaks of anti-Semitism are falling on the ideological spectrum recently. It’s not on the right. It’s on the left. Using moral equivalence to downplay the explosion of hate against Jews on the Democratic side isn’t going to make the problem go away. Putting political expediency over morality reduces the spotlight on the true offenders of evil instead of shining the light brightly on these cockroaches wherever they surface.
I want to help dig a giant pit and assist the rest of the country in dropping every anti-Semite into it, regardless of whom they voted for in the last few cycles. If this latest fire outbreak of hate is happening mostly on the left, however, perhaps that’s the direction where we should be applying the most water.
The day after Balmer’s arson attack on the PA governor, CNN was in a festive mood regarding political violence in general: CNN blasted for segment calling Luigi Mangione a ‘morally good man. “’CNN is a bad joke of a new org and Lorenz is a nut job. She said Mangione is a ‘morally good man’ which is absurd, as he killed a man in cold blood,’ another said. ‘The more I think about the Donie O’Sullivan interview with Taylor Lorenz the more astonished I am that they were laughing when talking about a guy who shot a man in the back in cold blood,’ a third person fumed.”
NAKED LUNCH: San Francisco Humiliates Itself Further, Erects 45-Foot Tall Statue of Woman—but Leaves Out Key Feature.
San Francisco was once a shining example of a great American city, but now it is mostly a punchline. The metropolis that gave us epic Mark Twain quotes, Levi’s, an iconic music scene, the Golden Gate Bridge, and so much more is now known more for excrement on the street, crime, mass drug addiction, and homeless people sprawled across the sidewalks. Given that, you’d think they’d figure out what to prioritize to improve the lives of their citizens.
Their answer, though, will make your head spin. They’ve decided to erect a 45-foot statue of a woman in Embarcadero Plaza to “jazz up” downtown. They might certainly achieve their goal, because the sculptor decided that the woman didn’t need something most of us would want when standing in the center of a city square: clothes.
That’s right, this lady is buck nekkid.
“Quick, darling, pack the bags—let’s take the kids to San Francisco!”*
I’ve decided not to put a photo of this atrocity here because you get the idea, but if you’d like to take a look, here’s the link.
* I’d say “Or raise them there,” but “unexpectedly” that hasn’t been happening very much in SF for decades: In 2013, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Frisco had the lowest percentage of children of any major American city. In 2005, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal spotted an AP article that noted, “‘San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city,’ the Associated Press reports. ‘Just 14.5 percent of the city’s population is 18 and under.’”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Best comment: “I mean- the biggest shock of all of this is that SF has acknowledged what a woman biologically should look like, and erected it into a 45-foot statue to celebrate.”