AXIOS: U.S. put a hold on an ammunition shipment to Israel.

The Biden administration last week put a hold on a shipment of U.S.-made ammunition to Israel, two Israeli officials told Axios.

Why it matters: It is the first time since the Oct. 7 attack that the U.S. has stopped a weapons shipment intended for the Israeli military.

• The incident raised serious concerns inside the Israeli government and sent officials scrambling to understand why the shipment was held, Israeli officials said.
• President Biden is facing sharp criticism among Americans who oppose his support of Israel. The administration in February asked Israel to provide assurances that U.S.-made weapons were being used by Israel Defense Forces in Gaza in accordance with international law. Israel provided a signed letter of assurances in March.

State of play: The Israeli officials said the ammunition shipment to Israel was stopped last week.

• The White House declined to comment.

• The Pentagon, the State Department and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office didn’t immediately respond to questions.

Flashback to CNBC in January of 2020: Trump administration broke law in withholding Ukraine aid, watchdog says as Senate prepares for impeachment trial.

ROGER KIMBALL: From Idealism to Irresponsibility: Comparing College Protests Then and Now.

One apparently striking difference is the strong current of anti-Semitism. It is ubiquitous now; it was not a factor in the protests of the 1960s and 1970s.

But that difference distracts us from a deeper similarity between the two.  Fueling the anti-Semitism is a profound anti-American and anti-Western animus. Although shot through with radical Islamic verbiage, the overarching ideology is essentially Marxist in aim and origin.  The assaults on campus are not so much political as a snarling repudiation of the political in favor of something more atavistic. As Jean-François Revel noted in The Totalitarian Temptation (1977), such an upsurge is “not simply a new political orientation. It works through the depths of society. It writes the play in which political leaders will act much later.”

Providing a full anatomy of this phenomenon would take a book, or several books.  But as we ponder the emergence of “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” on the quads of our most exclusive universities, it may be useful to note a few things that today’s protestors have in common with their predecessors.

One of the most conspicuous, and conspicuously jejune, features of America’s cultural revolution has been the union of hedonism with a species of radical (or radical-chic) politics. This union fostered a situation in which, as the famous slogan put it, “the personal is the political.” The politics in question was seldom more than a congery of radical clichés, serious only in that it helped to disrupt society and blight a good many lives. In that sense, to be sure, it proved to be very serious indeed.

Our new revolutionaries, like the college revolutionaries of yore, exhibit that most common of bourgeois passions, anti-bourgeois animus—expressed, as always, safely within the swaddling clothes of bourgeois security.  Typical was the spectacle of that Columbia Ph.D. candidate who, having helped smash into and occupy a major college classroom building, stood before microphones, keffiyeh in place, to demand that the university feed the occupiers.  As Allan Bloom remarked in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), the cultural revolution proved to be so successful on college campuses partly because of “the bourgeois’ need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have dangerous experiments with the unlimited. . . .Anti-bourgeois ire is the opiate of the Last Man.”  It almost goes without saying that, like all narcotics, the opiate of anti-bourgeois ire was both addictive and debilitating.

Like Falstaff’s dishonesty, the adolescent quality of these developments was “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” Looking at the pampered multitudes agitating on campus, one is reminded that now, as in the 1960s, the actions of the protestors were at bottom an attack on maturity; more, they was a glorification of immaturity. As the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin put it, “We’re permanent adolescents.”

And the song remains the same: ‘Violent’ leader of Columbia University’s anti-Israel protest is unmasked as 4o-year old son of millionaire ad execs who is married to a model and lives in $3.4M Brooklyn brownstone.

THE POLITICO VISITS RICK’S CAFÉ, IS SHOCKED TO DISCOVER GAMBLING GOING ON THERE: Pro-Palestianian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.

President Joe Biden has been dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him “Genocide Joe” — but some of the groups behind the demonstrations receive financial backing from philanthropists pushing hard for his reelection.

The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Gates, Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Two of the main organizers behind protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and it in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change. (Gates did not return a request for comment, and Soros declined to comment.)

Another notable Democratic donor whose philanthropy has helped fund the protest movement is David Rockefeller Jr., who sits on the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In 2022, the fund gave $300,000 to the Tides Foundation; according to nonprofit tax forms, Tides has given nearly $500,000 over the past five years to Jewish Voice for Peace, which explicitly describes itself as anti-Zionist.

Several other groups involved in pro-Palestinian protests are backed by a foundation funded by Susan and Nick Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel empire — and supporters of Biden and numerous Democratic campaigns, including $6,600 to the Biden Victory Fund a few months ago and more than $300,000 during the 2020 campaign.

Why is the establishment left such a cesspit of antisemitism?

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.”

Related: Karl Marx Calls Mexicans Lazy. Will Social Justice Warriors Demand Noted Racist Karl Marx Be Banned From Study on Campus?

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:

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.”

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

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 👇

pic.twitter.com/T54LLiKyXe

— 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.

CHRONOLOGICAL SNOBBERY STRIKES AGAIN AT THE BBC: Acclaimed BBC series Civilisation is given a warning over outdated attitudes.

Lord [Kenneth] Clark’s 1969 television series Civilisation has been given a warning note by the BBC for reflecting the “standards and attitudes” of its time.

The art historian’s groundbreaking series is being broadcast by the BBC for the first time in more than a decade.

The broadcaster has said that it may be forced to edit such programmes to align with its current editorial standards but it has not done so for Civilisation.

However, as well as adding the note, the corporation has released a video in which Dame Mary Beard critiques the principally “European story” told in Civilisation. The historian has previously criticised the series in print for its omission of female historical figures.

Beard really seems to have it in for Clark’s landmark series, which was created in 1969 to highlight the BBC then-recent switch to color broadcasts. In 2018, Andrew Ferguson recorded “The End of ‘Civilisation’” for the late, lamented Weekly Standard. Note this passage:

In the closing moments of the final episode of Civilisation, Clark intended to strike a note of optimism. “When I look at the world about me in the light of these programs, I don’t at all feel as though we are entering on a new period of barbarism,” he said. He shows us the campus of the then-new University of East Anglia. Apple-cheeked college students pop in and out of classrooms, labor over books—the baby boomers as Clark hoped they were in 1969. “These inheritors of all our catastrophes look cheerful enough. . . . In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious, and as critical as the young are today.”

Watching at home, we can assume, was the 14-year-old Mary Beard, all a-tingle and raring to go to college herself, where she could use her curiosity and reading and bright-mindedness to prove the great man and his theory wrong.

Back in 2013, I described watching Kenneth Clark’s seminal program as akin to reading “Notes from Atlantis” – the postwar British culture that made it simply no longer exists. Its successor culture continually demonstrates what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” which is particularly alive and well at the Beeb:

It is defined as the belief that ‘the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.’ If we add, ‘and therefore wrong and also racist’ to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs. Historian Larry Taunton defines it as ‘imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.’

As Ferguson wrote, from the title onward, the BBC’s sequel, Civilisations (note the title was of course, switched to plural), “pokes us in the ribs” repeatedly with its successor intellectual culture – a queasy mélange of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Exit quote from Beard, one of the hosts of who attempted a would-be successor series:

‘We’ know that ‘we’ are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised. . . . The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called ‘barbarians’ may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person’s barbarity is another person’s civilisation.

No. (Nice paraphrase of the motto at Reuters that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” though.) As Saul Bellow famously said in the early 1990s, eternally angering the left, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Campus Cannibals Edition.

REMAKE ALL THE MOVIES! Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer To Star In Robin Hood Reimagining ‘The Death Of Robin Hood’ For ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Director Michael Sarnoski — Cannes Market Hot Project.

Here’s a buzzy one. Oscar nominee Hugh Jackman (Les Misérables) and Emmy winner Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) are attached to star in new movie The Death Of Robin Hood, we can reveal.

Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One director Michael Sarnoski is writer-director on the project, which will be among the hot titles on sale at this month’s Cannes market via WME Independent. Arrival and The Prestige producer Aaron Ryder is among the producing team.

The film is a darker reimagining of the classic Robin Hood tale. Set of its time, the film will see the title character grappling with his past after a life of crime and murder, a battleworn loner who finds himself gravely injured and in the hands of a mysterious woman who offers him a chance at salvation. Production is due to begin in February 2025.

Lyrical Media (Elevation) is fully financing. Ryder and Andrew Swett will produce under their Ryder Picture Company banner alongside Alexander Black for Lyrical Media. Lyrical’s Jon Rosenberg and Natalie Sellers will executive-produce with Rama Gottumukkala, Sarnoski, and Jackman.

“It has been an incredible opportunity to reinvent and freshly innovate the story we all know of Robin Hood,” reflected Sarnoski. “Securing the perfect cast to transform the script to screen was essential. I could not be more thrilled and trusting in Hugh and Jodie to bring this story to life in a powerful and meaningful way.”

“This is not the story of Robin Hood we’ve all come to know,” said Aaron Ryder and Andrew Swett of RPC. “Instead, Michael has crafted something far more grounded and visceral. Thanks to Alexander Black and our friends at Lyrical along with Rama and Michael, the world is going to love seeing Hugh and Jodie together in this epic.”

I understand that Hollywood is all about reworking existing public domain or otherwise dormant intellectual properties, but didn’t Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, directed by Richard Lester, do a “darker reimagining of the classic Robin Hood tale” way back in 1976?

Found via Christian Toto, who tweets, “How many more ‘reimagining’ projects can we take???“

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH DON LEMON IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

Don Lemon calls out Taylor Lorenz for falsely equating the 'lack of freedoms' between people in Texas / Florida and Gaza:
DL: "Taylor, how do you reconcile the way marginalized groups fighting for what's happening in Gaza, yet in Gaza, they would not have any freedom."
TL: "They… pic.twitter.com/4pJQhAbTAo

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) May 3, 2024

Flashback: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?

COVID FOUR YEARS AGO: On May 1^st 2020, Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research reminded his readers: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic. “In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong* to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide:”

“In 1968/69,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”

And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.

I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?

Nothing was closed by force. Schools mostly stayed open. Businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.

* * * * * * * *

As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”

The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.

It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.

Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.

As I said above, Tucker’s column ran on May 1^st, 2020. One month later, cue the dancing TikTok nurses and let loose the George Floyd riots!**

As even far left New York magazine admitted in late 2023: COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic. In March of 2020, this sort of talk could get one de-platformed on social media and/or caught in the feedback loop of the MSM-DNC sending out the Batsignal to their readers on social media: [Four] years ago American Thinker was the first to call out the fraud of Dr. Anthony Fauci and was viciously attacked by the WaPo, NYT other MSM outlets.

* In a scene included in 2021’s Get Back, Peter Jackson’s 2021 eight-hour miniseries reworking of the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, Paul McCartney even joked about the Hong Kong Flu, while he and John Lennon were hashing out song ideas:

January 23rd, 1969 (Apple Studios, London): While Robert Fraser drops in on the sessions, a good-humoured John and Paul stand up for a run-through of ‘Get Back’ that devolves into silly off-key takes on ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, ‘Help!’, and ‘Please Please Me’. (Note: The medium shot of Robert Fraser is the same as the one included here, so who knows where it really falls within the continuity.)

PAUL: Imagine I’m in love with you… I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.

JOHN: What?

PAUL: I think I’m getting Hong Kong flu.

JOHN: Oh, are you? Take drugs.

[Let It Be Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg]: Are you really?

PAUL: No, not really. Not really.

And from Tucker’s article, the since-deleted tweets by fellow American Institute for Economic Research’s Phil Magness on Woodstock and other gigantic rock festivals that took place during that year’s pandemic:

** Jon Gabriel warned last month in the Arizona Republic: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “These mass demonstrations used to be more localized, such as Occupy Wall Street or the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. Today, they are global, and the new cause is released with the regularity of a new car model’s marketing campaign. This year, ‘global intifada’ is all the rage. I suppose activists are brainstorming a new cause to release in May 2025.”

VDH: Can the Universities Be Saved?

Most feel that if the old general education curriculum has been destroyed at weaponized universities, then there is no great loss in skipping the traditional BA degree. A far better selection of demanding and well-taught classes can be found online at a lower cost.

The result is a disaster for both higher education and a wake-up call for the country at large.

Entire generations are now suffering from prolonged adolescence as they drag out college to consume their early and mid-twenties. The unfortunate result for the country is a radical delay in marriage, childbearing, and home ownership–all the time-honored catalysts for adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it.

Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite colleges. A degree from Columbia no longer guarantees either maturity or preeminent knowledge but is just as likely a warning to employers of a noisy, poorly educated graduate more eager to complain to Human Resources than to enhance a company’s productivity.Yet it may not be all that unfortunate that much of higher education is going the way of malls, movie theaters, and CDs. The country needs far more skilled physical labor and less prolonged adolescence and debt.

STEM courses, professional schools, and traditional campuses are better insulated from mediocrity and should survive. Otherwise, millions more starting adulthood at 18 debt-free and fewer encumbered, ignorant, and entitled at 25 is not a bad thing for the country.

As Glenn recently asked in his Substack: Education Apocalypse Now? “People are learning, and though Ivy League institutions are big, established, and rich, the past half-century has seen many big, established, and rich institutions humbled. If it happens to them too, it will be largely of their own doing. Meanwhile, some advice from a famous Internet philosopher:”

HARVARD COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER PUBLISHED EDITORIAL LIKENING ISRAEL TO HITLER:

[Maria Ressa], the CEO of the Philippines-based news site Rappler and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, will give the university’s commencement address on May 23, at a time when Harvard faces a congressional investigation for what House Republicans have called a “failure to protect Jewish students” and as anti-Semitism has surged on college campuses across the country.

* * * * * * * *

In a November editorial, Rappler called for a ceasefire and compared Israel’s actions to those by Adolf Hitler, according to a translation.

“What Israel is doing is clearly a disproportionate response and its intention is not simply to retaliate, but to launch an all-out war,” the editorial said. “In the intensity of Israel’s godlike technology, its paleolithic instincts can be seen in the lack of effort to differentiate between civilians and its enemy Hamas.”

The editorial said Israel’s actions were “about to reach genocide.”

“It is a great irony that the [Jewish] race that suffered centuries of oppression, even genocide at the hands of Adolf Hitler, is now [denying] the same aspirations [for] the Palestinians,” said the column.

“We like to think that our world is more modern, more aware, and more compassionate, compared for example to the time of Adolf Hitler, or the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,” the editorial went on.

In its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, Rappler has also referred to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as “militant” groups rather than terrorist organizations.

Ressa did not respond to a request for comment. Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.

Why are Democrat-monopoly Ivy League schools such cesspits of Antisemitism?

JIM GERAGHTY: Biden-Harris a Profile in Cowardice on Campus Disorder.

On the menu today: More than a day late and a dollar short, President Biden says that breaking the law on college campuses is wrong. But he’s still ahead of his vice president, the former prosecutor, who for weeks has had absolutely nothing to say about the lawlessness that took over college campuses. If the objective for the protesters was to make some noise and postpone finals, maybe they accomplished what they set out to do. But if their objective was to influence or change U.S. public opinion, they failed miserably. Read on.

* * * * * * * *

Still, at least Biden eventually was roused to address the issue. As far as I can tell, Vice President Kamala Harris has not made any public remarks about the campus protests. The New York Times noted, “Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning on Monday in Wisconsin, again took sharp swipes at former President Donald J. Trump for his actions on abortion, a hot topic across the country. But she stayed silent on the war in Gaza, another issue erupting elsewhere among the critical bloc of young voters she has been courting.” While speaking in Atlanta, “Harris did not address recent protests on Georgia college campuses tied to the White House’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.”

The vice president is a former prosecutor. She doesn’t have any thoughts on lawbreaking and whether the police should be called in on campus? For much of the reelection campaign, she’s been on a college tour!

Harris expressed her thoughts in 2020: Kamala Harris Lies, Claiming That She Never Promoted the Bail Fund That Bailed Out BLM Rioters As Well As Murderers and R4pists; But the Tweet In Which She Promoted that Bail Fund Is Still Up!

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE JOHN FACENDA AGAIN! In the meantime, this mini-Facenda (I don’t know if it’s a real person or AI simulation) will have to do:

College campus protestors get the NFL Films treatment
(original video by @JHolmsted ) pic.twitter.com/JHCVaMm9Wb

— Heavens! (@HeavensFX) May 2, 2024

And for those who prefer their backing scores slightly less orchestral:

The Benny Hill edit. Well done, @mamaswati

Original video from @JHolmsted pic.twitter.com/QBa5VlEPyo

— Tony Katz (@tonykatz) May 2, 2024

BIDEN’S LATEST BIG GOVERNMENT INTRUSION TARGETS THE INTERNET:

In the roughly six years since Trump repealed net neutrality, we haven’t seen internet service providers throttle speeds or charge us for every tweet. In fact, internet speeds have only increased, as has investment into broadband access. Yet, for some reason, the Biden administration is nonetheless bringing back net neutrality regulations.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to reinstate the rules along party lines.

“I think in a modern digital economy, we should have a national net neutrality policy and make clear the nation’s expert on communications has the ability to act when it comes to broadband,” Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Biden appointee, said. “This is good for consumers, good for public safety and good for national security.”

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican appointee, voted against the reinstatement and blasted it as a “power grab.”

In September, Steve wrote, “Net neutrality was Barack Obama’s gift to Netflix, who then gave him a sweetheart production deal a short time after he left office. I wonder what Joe Biden expects to get.”

¡NO PASARÁN!: In Spain in 1937 and 1938, many thousands of Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons (one who escaped was George Orwell).

On this day, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM DAY (spasiba to Tovarich Glenn Reynolds), and in view of Ed Driscoll’s thorough post over at Instapundit on George Orwell and his Spanish War period, I would like to take the opportunity to add to the discussion by quoting from Paul Johnson‘s history of the 20th century, from which there is much to learn, not least the appalling truth about the “Republican” camp during the Spanish Civil War.

Tom Wolfe is quoted as saying that, with the publication of the Venona transcripts, “it turns out that “the Loyalists secretly called in the Soviets at the very outset of hostilities—and if they’d won, Spain would have been the first Soviet puppet state!”

True enough. But according to Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s), Paul Johnson points out that while the war lasted, this was already the case: the Kremlin’s Soviet NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), not the Spanish, were in fact already in charge of the country (or of that part held by the so-called Loyalists).

Behind [Prime Minister Juan] Negrin’s complaisant ignorance, the Communists — that is, Stalin’s secret police — took over Republican Spain.  The result was one of the major political tragedies of the century

Read the whole thing.

2024: A LYNDON LAROUCHE ODYSSEY! RFK Jr. potluck complicated by staffers’ fear of microwave radiation among other unusual campaign details: Report.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign and its staffers want to be taken seriously in the middle of two party heavyweights in President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

They’re also reportedly afraid of microwave ovens, a detail that was included among various tidbits about the campaign dropped into a Wall Street Journal article Thursday.

An excerpt in the article on Kennedy’s campaign hit on the claim while discussing some oddities of the campaign.

“Several staffers fear the electromagnetic radiation from microwave ovens, complicating a volunteer potluck,” the story reads. “(People were advised to bring crockpots.)

Can’t say it’s surprising that RFK Jr.’s staffers share many of their boss’s, err, idiosyncrasies.

(Classical allusion in headline.)

“BOTTOMLESS MIMOSA INTIFADA:” Somehow, this isn’t satire. The comments are the funniest thing I’ve read all week.

More fun with the United Keffiyehs of Benetton crowd here: Hollaria Briden Takes Pro-Hamas Protester Hayley Becker to the WOODSHED With Hilarious Thread.

WOEING: Second Boeing whistleblower dies suddenly after claiming safety flaws ignored.

A whistleblower who accused Boeing of ignoring safety flaws in the 737 MAX airplanes has died.

Joshua Dean, a former Spirit AeroSystems quality auditor, claimed he was fired for flagging concerns about lax standards at the company’s manufacturing plant in Wichita, Kansas.

His sudden death at the age of 45 on Tuesday came after suffering from a fast-spreading infection, according to his family and lawyer.

Dean’s lawyer Brian Knowles said it is a ‘loss to the aviation community and the flying public’.

Knowles told Al Jazeera: ‘He possessed tremendous courage to stand up for what he felt was true and right and raised quality and safety issues.

‘Aviation companies should encourage and incentivise those that do raise these concerns.

‘Otherwise, safety and quality are truly not these companies’ top priorities.’

They certainly don’t seem to be these days, Joan Sammon writes at the Pipeline: Boeing: From Aviation Excellence to ESG Disaster.

The disastrous list of failures offers a prescient example of how influences from outside a company and even from outside an industry can distract a board and C-suite from its core business and cause irreparable damage. The accounts reveal how the decisions of three decades ago have intersected with the decisions of three years ago, leaving in their wake the death of innocent people, the stench of mediocrity, and a litany of leadership lessons from which other corporate leaders can learn.

In the days following the January door plug blow out, a post appeared on an aviation blog written by an anonymous, purported current employee. The author flatly asserted that four bolts that were supposed to hold the door plug in place were “…not installed when Boeing delivered the plane [to Alaska Airlines], our own records reflect this.” The whistleblower further described the Renton, Washington-based 737 production system as a “…rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen” — even asserting specific details about the exact plane that lost the door plug mid-air.

This check job [of the door plug] was completed on 31 August 2023, and did turn up discrepancies, but on the RH [right hand] side door, not the LH [left hand] that actually failed. …it was inevitable something would slip through- and on the incident aircraft something did.

While the account is stunning on its face, it aligns with similar details revealed in a whistleblower lawsuit brought by former Boeing employee John Barnett about the 787 program in South Carolina. Details of that complaint describe a similar fundamental shift away from the two factors that had made the Boeing brand an industry leader — precision engineering and quality manufacturing. The suit describes a contentious work environment that fostered speed over quality. It describes how managers worked to force out senior employees who remembered the higher standards and Boeing’s brand promise of decades ago.

Barnett ended up dying from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, after day two of what was supposed to be three days of testimony about what he allegedly knew about the Boeing failures, and what he had done to try to correct or effect the defective manufacturing processes. Barnett’s curiously timed death is considered by family, friends and his attorneys to be suspicious.

America’s Newspaper of Record adds: Boeing Sadly Announces Whistleblower Shot Self In Back While Falling Off Skyscraper Directly Into Wood Chipper While Wearing Cement Shoes.

‘MORNING JOE’ MIKA HAS A MELTDOWN WHEN AL SHARPTON COMPARES CAMPUS RIOTS TO JAN. 6:

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” got both sides of the aisle going this morning.

Joe Scarborough said that Democrats needed to call out the campus chaos more than they have been doing. Not only hasn’t there been a loud outcry by Joe Biden or many Democrats, but some Democrats, like the members of the Squad, have even expressed support for the radicals. He claimed they had to push for a ceasefire.

Al Sharpton stepped on the narrative big time, comparing the campus riots/violence to Jan. 6.

“How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side, say January 6 was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on, on college campuses, you can lose the moral high ground? Sharpton asked.

That’s when Mika Brzezinski had a meltdown. “Good Lord, don’t make a parallel to January 6th!” co-host Mika Brzezinski said in response. “For some reason, that’s not allowed.” Whoops, she just said the quiet part out loud — you aren’t supposed to be saying that, Al!

To coin a popular Insta-phrase, we’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Al Sharpton is a voice of sanity.