SUMMER RERUN SEASON BEGINS EARLY AT HARVARD:
Nobody is operating at the level of the Harvard PR team right now pic.twitter.com/7JP36RPX3t
— Sam Biederman (@Biedersam) April 17, 2025
Harvard’s PR team is simply recycling old jokes from the successor magazine to the Harvard Lampoon:
Related: Noem Opens Third Front in War On Haahvaahd: Student Visas.
BURGMENTUM, BABY: Burgum Takes the Wind Out of the Empire State’s Plans. “As much as I cracked on Doug Burgum as a presidential candidate, he is going gangbusters as Interior Secretary and is proving to be another of Trump’s inspired picks. All I can say is molto well done to him. As for the offshore waters South of Long Island, I hope the folks really enjoy them now. Things are always better savored when you realize what you almost lost.”
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: James May reviews a fully driverless car (video).
The video goes on quite a bit too long, but for longtime Top Gear viewers, the punchline is a hoot.
It does make me slightly less apprehensive about riding in a self-driving car though: Lyft plans to launch robotaxi service in Dallas in 2026. “The ride-sharing company Lyft said Monday it plans to roll out a full self-driving robotaxi service in Dallas next year. The announcement comes as rival Uber plans to launch its self-driving taxi service with Google’s Waymo cars in Austin, Texas, next month.”
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Don’t like a columnist’s opinion? Los Angeles Times offers an AI-generated opposing viewpoint.
MASK DROPPED: CNN and Taylor Lorenz Exposed Their Motivation.
Earier in her CNN interview, [Lorenz] justified her appreciation for [Luigi] Mangione:
It’s hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stand murderers of all sorts, and we give them Netflix shows. There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles of mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels. And you see that in moments like this.
Lorenz loves that Mangione allegedly murdered the United Healthcare CEO. She lit up with joy when discussing it. Her elation over it — and her statement that he was a “morally good man” exposes her motivation behind doxxing anonymous conservatives on social media — she wants certain people with opposing viewpoints dead.
It isn’t a stretch to connect the dots here — a national left-leaning journalist felt it necessary to expose the identity of an anonymous conservative video aggregator who was gaining traction by exposing the far-left’s insanity. That same journalist considers the alleged murderer of a healthcare CEO “revolutionary, famous, handsome, smart, and a morally good man.”
She was doing it all because she can justify murder and violence against those she disagrees with — she wouldn’t necessarily personally do it, but if she could expose the identities of people she doesn’t like and where they live — she’d be OK with, “a morally good man” taking it from there.
CNN not denouncing her actions or this interview implicates their motives as well. After all, it doesn’t seem like that long ago since the network sent reporters to ambush random elderly women at their homes for sharing pro-Trump memes.
Unlike CNN’s gushing Donie O’Sullivan, Fox News’ Sean Hannity tried a more aggressive approach to get Lorenz to put the breaks on her pro-assassination rhetoric, but not surprisingly, Lorenz is sticking to her guns:
HANNITY: "Do you condemn people that call for assassination?"
LORENZ: "Gosh, you're gonna ask me if I condemn Hamas next, this is crazy!" pic.twitter.com/DP8FsGowfV
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 17, 2025
No, I think we already know the answer to that based on her actions last year: “Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz on Monday pushed a false claim that a Los Angeles synagogue was auctioning off Palestinian land this week—a conspiracy theory that led to violent, anti-Semitic protests outside the Jewish house of worship on Sunday.”
Not to mention calling then-President Joe Biden a “War Criminal:”
And I think we all know the answer to this dilemma as well, based purely on aesthetics:
I'm trying as hard as I can, and I just can't figure out why Taylor Lorenz is so into Luigi Mangione but not Cody Balmer. If anything, Cody Balmer's motive is much more related to Taylor's own causes and passions.
Help me out here. pic.twitter.com/w9qvgYU57C
— Alan Cole (@AlanMCole) April 16, 2025
COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Coronavirus: San Clemente Fills Skatepark With 37 Tons Of Sand After Skaters Ignore ‘No Trespassing’ Signs.
A popular skatepark in San Clemente was filled with sand to discourage skaters from using it during the coronavirus pandemic and to promote social distancing.
San Clemente had shut down all its parks and facilities on April 1 under the state’s stay-at-home orders, but skaters ignored signs warning against trespassing at the Ralphs Skate Court, 241 Avenida La Pata.
Since park facilities have been closed city officials say they routinely saw people visit the skatepark, even by some children accompanied with their parents, according to the San Clemente Times.
Later in April of 2020, Mark Judge explored: Skateboarding with Jordan Peterson—and Nietzsche.
“Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding.”
That is Rule 11 in Jordan Peterson’s bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson explores how skateboarding is a way for boys to test danger and learn to deal with risk and pain, and as such is a valuable source of socialization and psychic health. To Peterson, the buzzkills who clamp down on skateboard riders suffer from acute resentment; they are bitter at the freedom, bravery, and style of the riders: “Beneath the production of rules stopping the skateboarders from doing highly skilled, courageous and dangerous things, I see the operation of an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit.”
To drive the point home, Peterson offers this humdinger of a quote from Nietzsche:
For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms. The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. “What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge”—thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not”—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!” You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883)
I would adapt Peterson’s rule only slightly: “Do Not Bother Children or Adults When They Are Skateboarding.”
Along with jazz, movies, modern dance, and comic books, skateboarding is one of America’s great original art forms. A $5 billion industry with 16 million members in the United States, skateboarding fosters entrepreneurship, independence, physical grace and toughness, community, creativity, and freedom. The sport has been a friend to me for almost fifty years, reappearing at various times over the decades to thrill and re-enchant. When it was recently reported that a California skate park was filled with sand to prevent skating and promote social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, it felt to me like someone had spray-painted on the Lincoln Memorial.
No one knew in April of 2020 that defacing – and toppling — major cultural artifacts was right around the corner. In the meantime, there were endless quantities of what Roger Kimball dubbed “reverse gaslighting” last year to go around: “Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity. Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal:”
Imagine: practically the entire population quarantines itself because a couple of government bureaucrats tell them to. Everyone starts wearing little paper masks as patents of their capitulation and, secondarily, as badges of their virtue. Out in the world, they obediently stand six feet away from one another because the same bureaucrats tell them such behavior will “slow the spread” of a seasonal respiratory virus that is dangerous to a minuscule part of the population. This insanity is deemed normal.
So is the insanity of censoring, firing or even imprisoning people who question this insane orthodoxy. In a repellent effort to capitalize on the moral authority of the Holocaust, such dissenters are repudiated as “Covid deniers.” They are ostracized by polite society and subject to all manner of sanctions. All this was insane behavior, but our addiction to reverse gaslighting requires that we regard it, or at least say we regard it, as normal.
Suddenly, certain people are empowered to decide whose businesses are “essential” and whose are expendable. If you own a liquor store, congratulations! Your business is essential. Schools, churches, most restaurants, your aunt’s corner shop: sorry! They must be shuttered. This insanity is accepted, if grudgingly, as normal in the age of reverse gaslighting. You cannot visit your dying grandmother in her nursing home: that interdiction is said to be normal, not cruelly insane.
Thus just two days apart five years ago this week, headlines announcing “Exercise May Protect Against Deadly COVID-19 Complication, Research Suggests,” and news of skateboard parks filled with sand to prevent young people from doing just that. As Kimball wrote in the passage above, “This was insane behavior, but our addiction to reverse gaslighting requires that we regard it, or at least say we regard it, as normal.”
(Fortunately, those who use the San Clemente skatepark were immediately able to see through the charade: A California city filled its skate park with sand to deter skateboarders. Then the dirt bikes showed up.)
YES, I ALWAYS FEEL LIKE CHUCK YEAGER WHEN SITTING IN THE BACK OF A 737: Gayle King insists she was like Alan Shepard on her space ‘joyride.’
It’s becoming clear that long-popular “CBS Mornings” co-anchor Gayle King and her famous friends Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez have landed at the center of one of the most spectacular public backlashes against celebrity cluelessness and rich-people hubris in a long time.
The cluelessness, hubris and “audacious” display of power by “the billionaire class” came as these three wealthy celebrities made a big show about going on a “historic,” 11-minute, space-tourism ride Monday morning to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere — aboard a commercial Blue Origin space rocket owned by Sanchez’s billionaire fiancé Jeff Bezos.
On Tuesday, King continued to show cluelessness as she tried to defend herself and her friends from growing online ridicule and condemnation. One way she did so was by likening their trip to the truly historic 1961 flight taken by “Right Stuff” astronaut Alan Shepard. As a member of NASA’s original Mercury 7 astronauts in the early days of the Space Race, Shepard became the first American and second human in space.
That’s a particularly odd comparison, considering that CBS had Dr. Mae Jemison, a real former NASA astronaut (and the first black woman in space) covering the flight. And note that the above article is in the San Jose Mercury, not exactly a house organ of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, a reminder that the distaff suborbital flight is receiving well-deserved bipartisan mockery.
Also, quite unlike Shepard: Terrified Gayle King SOBS as she arrives for Blue Origin space flight.
VDH: China Would Lose a ‘Trade War’ With the US—’Gradually, then Suddenly.’
China has done everything possible to incur global distrust and fear.
Most of the world accepts that the COVID-19 epidemic that killed and maimed millions worldwide was birthed in a Wuhan virology lab under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army. The world also remembers that China and the Chinese-controlled WHO lied repeatedly about the origins and spread of the virus.
The global public may recall that China stopped all domestic flights out of Wuhan on the internal news of the lab leak of the virus, while for days greenlighting nonstop air travel to major European and American cities. The world now accepts that China will never explain exactly when the virus appeared, how it “escaped” from the lab, why it was created in the first place, why Beijing repeatedly lied about all such inquiries, and what happened to an array of whistleblowers who warned of the leak.
China’s so-called allies, such as Russia and India, have historical grievances and ongoing border disputes fueled by Chinese aggression.
NATO, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the US also are curious as to why China is using its vast foreign exchange not to lift about a quarter of its population out of third-world-level poverty. Instead, it is frantically building 3-4 nuclear bombs a month, a 700-ship navy, and 2,500 combat aircraft as it ratchets up pressure on Taiwan.
The complexities of trade and tariffs present all sorts of minefields. But the Trump administration is beginning to navigate them, and its trajectory is rather simple. In the next 90 days, it will likely conclude trade deals with our allies and third parties that bring either tariff parity or no tariffs at all that will reduce the U.S. trade deficit.
Of course, our allies and neutrals still use stealth tariffs to ensure advantage by money manipulation, VAT taxes, and pseudo-health and security impediments to free trade. And they deeply resent the Trump administration’s loud denunciations of their surpluses and asymmetrical tariffs. But those machinations can be addressed later in round two after tariff reciprocity or elimination is finalized.
For now, Trump should persuade our allies that if they were not so subject to Chinese mercantilism, they would have more flexibility to ensure fair trade with the U.S. And thus, they should not do something self-destructive and side with China but instead join the U.S. to force China to keep its long-broken promises and play by international rules. A reduced import footprint from China in the U.S. could make room for increased imports from the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—if they strike parity deals with the Trump administration. Barring that, they should simply get out of the way and not opportunistically cut reformist trade deals with China.
If China really does reduce most of its exports to the U.S., America will have to scramble for a year or so to establish new supply chains and some alternate importers of U.S. products. But after a year of gradual dislocation, China will begin to hemorrhage, and then quite suddenly, given the U.S. has almost all the advantages—if it chooses to use them.
Flashback to November of 2019: How to Conduct Business with Chinese Companies That See a Dark Future.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: We are still feeling the aftershocks of the Oklahoma City bombing.
On ABC News, the network’s national security correspondent, John McWethy, reported that “if you talk to intelligence sources and to law enforcement officials, they all say … that this particular bombing probably has roots in the Middle East.”
And in a commentary published shortly after the bombing, syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer asserted “the indisputable fact is that it has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East.”
Surprise was substantial when, two days after the attack, the Oklahoma City bomber was brought briefly before television cameras as he was taken into federal custody. The bomber was no foreigner. He was not from the Middle East. He was Timothy McVeigh, a lanky white American from upstate New York.
McVeigh nursed numerous grievances about the federal government. He was outraged by the deadly assault by federal agents in 1993 to end a weeks-long siege near Waco, Texas, at the compound of the Branch Davidian cult. McVeigh timed his attack on the nine-story Murrah building to coincide with the second anniversary of the fiery end to the standoff in Waco, in which 76 Branch Davidians were killed.
According to his biographers, McVeigh was neither a leader nor a member of an extremist hate group or of a self-styled paramilitary militia. Contrary to a New York Times report four days after the Oklahoma City attack, there was no “broader plot behind the bombing” nor was there “a conspiracy hatched by several self-styled militiamen who oppose gun laws, income taxes and other forms of government control.”
And then there was Bill Clinton’s shameful exploitation of the bombing, as Byron York wrote 15 years ago this month: How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain.
Later, under the heading “How to use extremism as issue against Republicans,” [Dick] Morris told Clinton that “direct accusations” of extremism wouldn’t work because the Republicans were not, in fact, extremists. Rather, Morris recommended what he called the “ricochet theory.” Clinton would “stimulate national concern over extremism and terror,” and then, “when issue is at top of national agenda, suspicion naturally gravitates to Republicans.” As that happened, Morris recommended, Clinton would use his executive authority to impose “intrusive” measures against so-called extremist groups. Clinton would explain that such intrusive measures were necessary to prevent future violence, knowing that his actions would, Morris wrote, “provoke outrage by extremist groups who will write their local Republican congressmen.” Then, if members of Congress complained, that would “link right-wing of the party to extremist groups.” The net effect, Morris concluded, would be “self-inflicted linkage between [GOP] and extremists.”
Clinton’s proposals — for example, new limits on firearms and some explosives that were opposed by the National Rifle Association — had “an underlying political purpose,” Morris wrote in 2004 in another book about Clinton, Because He Could. That purpose was “to lead voters to identify the Oklahoma City bombing with the right wing. By making proposals we knew the Republicans would reject…we could label them as soft on terror an imply a connection with the extremism of the fanatics who bombed the Murrah Federal Building.”
It was a political strategy crafted while rescue and recovery efforts were still underway in Oklahoma City. And it worked better than Clinton or Morris could have predicted.
Democrats would repeat that playbook in 2011 after an apolitical lunatic shot Gabrielle Giffords, and the entire DNC-MSM nexus immediately blamed Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
UPDATE: Sarah Palin Gets Another Crack at Making the New York Times Pay for Reckless Article.
MORE: John Nolte: Oklahoma City Bombing Review: Compelling Netflix Doc Takes Us Back to a Dreadful Day.
MICHAEL WALSH: Which Is to Be Master?
To justify their very expensive parasitical role in the conduct of policy, no doubt they can all quote Robert Bolt’s speech for St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons by heart:
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
Spoiler alert: More wound up separated from his head shortly thereafter, first placed on a pike on London Bridge and later in a casket, which his daughter Margaret and her family kept for many years as the ultimate memento mori. It’s a pretty speech but are the sentiments expressed in it correct? As former Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote in 1963: “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” In this, he echoed Justice Robert Jackson’s opinion in a 1949 case that “there is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” Jackson knew whereof he spoke, having been one of the lead prosecutors of National Socialist German Workers Party war criminals at Nuremberg.
Read the whole thing.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Harvard Warns Loss Of Federal Funding Will Cripple Their Ability To Find A Final Solution To The Jewish Problem.
SCOUNDRELS REACH LAST REFUGE: Roll Tape! Supercut of Cnn Hosts and Guests Hating America Proves Dana Bash is a Liar.
CNN: "We do NOT hate America 😡"
Also CNN: pic.twitter.com/UkgtyWS42g
— Bill D'Agostino (@Banned_Bill) April 14, 2025
Meanwhile, NPR is begging not to be defunded:
Related: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. Attempting to Jettison State-Run Media is Fascism. Jon Stewart says Defunding PBS Is Authoritarian.
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
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.”
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.”
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