YOU WENT FULL WEIMAR, GERMANY. NEVER GO FULL WEIMAR: Germany recognizes 71-year-old, trans, Muslim, male as having been ‘born a woman.’

ANALYSIS: TRUE. ‘With a Strat you can rule the world!’ Nile Rodgers, Bonnie Raitt and John Squire on the electric guitar that changed everything.

Celebrating its 70th birthday this spring, the Strat – or Fender Stratocaster – may now be the most recognisable musical instrument of all time. It is almost certainly the bestselling guitar, loved by legions of riffing stars. “The Strat is as sturdy and strong as a mule,” Keith Richards once said, “yet it has the elegance of a racehorse. It’s got everything you need, and that’s rare to find in anything.”

Bonnie Raitt got her first one in 1969, buying it on the street at 3am after a gig. She has played it at every one of her shows since, and it was pivotal to her 13 Grammy wins. “There’s just a tone that doesn’t happen with other guitars,” she says. “It’s all about that middle pickup – you just can’t beat it.”

Radio repair man turned inventor Leo Fender could not possibly have known what he was starting when he began designing the Strat in the early 1950s. Perhaps because he wasn’t a guitarist, he approached the design differently, with an eye on not just manufacture but also repairability. Hence the bolt-on, rather than glued-in, neck. He had hit the mark a few years earlier with the Broadcaster, later renamed the Telecaster due to a legal wrangle with rival manufacturer Gretsch. He also designed the Fender Precision bass. Both were instant successes, popular with western swing bands, but the Telecaster was and remains a slab-like, utilitarian workhorse – two pickups, no nonsense. And as much as musicians loved its sound, they often complained that its square edges dug into their ribs and banged their hip bones.

Exit quote: “So what does a Strat sound like? Anything you want.”

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Blue City Only Issues Seven New Housing Permits In Two Months Despite Housing Crisis: Report.

The city of San Francisco has only issued seven new housing permits in the first two months of 2024, The San Francisco Standard reported Monday.

San Francisco committed to building 82,000 housing units by 2031 in a plan adopted in 2023, according to the outlet.

(RELATED: California Building Fewer Homes As Residents Continue Getting Smacked With Astronomically High Rent)

The number of approved new housing does not count a number of scenarios such as refurbishment and conversion projects, The San Francisco Standard reported. The city reportedly claimed it had permitted 341 new housing units in three months since the start of 2024. The outlet observed that under the current rate of approvals, it would take the city decades build 82,000 new housing units.

As Thomas Sowell has written, it’s “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.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: After Being Completely Exposed By Its Own Editor, NPR Responds in the Worst Possible Fashion.

The NPR article responding to Berliner goes on to miss the point yet again by bragging about how four out of 10 staffers are “people of color.”

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR’s leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

It’s like talking to a wall. They just can’t grasp how stocking the newsroom with DEI hires instead of hires based on actual viewpoint diversity could possibly lead to the outcome Berliner exposed in his piece.

Former NPR CEO John Lansing, who resigned a month prior to this writing, defended his tenure this way.

“The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?” Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner’s piece. “I’d welcome the argument against that.”

Sure, I’ll provide the argument against that. DEI does not “make sure it sounds like all of America” because left-wing ideologies are naturally self-selective. In practice, diversity quotas as produced by organizations like NPR create bubbles where only those who agree with DEI in the first place have their opinions heard and published. Thus, you get the insane bias and censorship demonstrated by NPR.

Naturally, no lessons will be learned and Berliner, who is himself a left-wing Democrat, will be cast into the abyss for speaking the truth. Meanwhile, NPR’s ratings will continue to flatline all while looking to the federal government for hand-outs. The cycle repeats.

As Don Surber adds, responding to Berliner’s article at Bari Weiss’ Free Press: DEI opens a liberal’s eyes.

The goal is not to diversify views because the MGIPOC and the LGBTQIA selected are all socialists. The goal is to convert the rest of the MGIPOC and LGBTQIA.

The biggest selling point to the MGIPOC and LGBTQIA is that white people caused all their problems, particularly the straight men. He pointed out that the union contract with NPR is a tool for DEI.

Berliner said, “In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.”

Well, well, well, what do we have here? A white boy is complaining about paying union dues to make it harder for a white boy to make it at NPR.

They say a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. We will see how true that is because DEI just mugged Uri Berliner.

Berliner claims that “It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.” Fair enough on that last point — “scolding” would require dropping the famously tepid NPR announcer voice, if only temporarily. But the rest of those boasts seem ridiculous to anyone who hadn’t already drunk the leftist Kool-Aid pre-Trump. At Power Line, Steve Hayward links to a hilarious 1993 article by Glenn Garvin. The references are of their time, but the point is made nonetheless: How Do I Hate NPR? Let Me Count the Ways.

UPDATE: ‘Amazing!’ Here’s Who Was Picked to Defend NPR’s ‘Journalism’ Integrity.

How can we ever forget NPR's courageous stance to ignore a major, relevant story on the eve of a presidential election.

True journalistic heroism. pic.twitter.com/bC5dSAK2wB

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) April 10, 2024

SPACE CADET: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee tells schoolkids that moon is a ‘planet’ and ‘made up mostly of gases.’

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) stunned attendees at a high school solar eclipse event Monday by claiming the rock-solid moon is a “planet” that is “made up mostly of gases” — before adding she still wants to be “first in line” to learn how to live there.

The former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee badly botched elementary lunar facts while speaking during the gathering at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston.

“You’ve heard the word ‘full moon.’ Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases,” Jackson Lee, 74, told teenage pupils who gathered on a sports field ahead of the rare celestial event.

* * * * * * * *

In a statement to The Post on Tuesday, she admitted she was wrong to describe the moon, which has virtually no atmosphere, as being composed mostly of gas to the schoolkids.

“Obviously I misspoke and meant to say the sun, but as usual, Republicans are focused on stupid things instead of stuff that really matters. What can I say, though, foolish thinkers lust for stupidity!” she said of GOPers who swiftly criticized her glaring gaffes.

This isn’t the first time that the final frontier has vexed Jackson Lee:

During a 1997 visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, Jackson Lee, who was then serving on the House Science Committee and on the Subcommittee that oversees U.S. space policy, asked a guide whether the Mars Pathfinder would be able to show an image of “the flag the astronauts planted there before.” When it was subsequently pointed out that the flag to which she was referring was in fact the one that Neil Armstrong had planted on the Moon—not Mars—in 1969, Jackson Lee complained that she was being mocked by bigots. “You thought you could have fun with a black woman member of the Science Committee,” her then-chief-of-staff wrote angrily in a letter to the editor.

How bad have Jackson Lee’s gaffes been over the years? Even her fellow leftists at the Daily Beast has goofed on her worst moments: The Constitution Is 400 Years Old and More Pearls From Sheila Jackson Lee.

UPDATE: Citing Jackson Lee, America’s Newspaper of Record reports: American Transition To Idiocracy Running Ahead Of Schedule.

DEVELOPING: Several people shot near end of Ramadan event in Philadelphia: report.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Inflation unexpectedly rises to 3.5% — plunging Dow Jones down 450 points and all but ruling out a summer cut to interest rates.

The ghost of Milton Friedman smiles.

HOLY SHIT!!!🤣🤣🤣

Shopping during Bidenomics!!!

Whoever made THIS👇🏼 FREAKING ROCKS!!!😆😂 pic.twitter.com/g6TB3K29nM

— SaltyGoat (@SaltyGoat17) November 13, 2023

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: US Navy warship commander mocked for holding rifle with scope mounted backward.

“Several people also pointed out that Yaste’s shooting stance and technique were not exactly on the level of, say, a US Marine. One user fired off the first salvo on X, where he wrote: ‘US Navy just killing it on Instagram,’ alongside laughing and cringing emojis. ‘Man. The scope is annoying, but that grip placement is downright WILD,’ another responded.”

BEN SHAPIRO: America Is Now in the Business of Losing Wars.

Blinken stated, “If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.” He then added, “Right now, there is no higher priority in Gaza than protecting civilians, surging humanitarian assistance, and ensuring the security of those who provide it.”

Of course, there is a higher priority for Israel: victory.

But America is no longer interested in victory.

The pattern of every American war since the end of World War II has been simple: we jump to involve ourselves in military conflicts when we feel a surge of moral outrage at the evils of our enemies; we then begin to question ourselves when we see hideous pictures on our televisions; we then surrender or cut an ugly deal. That is the pattern in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Sometimes, we simply abandon our allies without any sort of serious opposition, as with the Kurds or the people of Hong Kong.

Obviously, America ought not involve itself in foreign conflicts in which we are unwilling to stay the course. American interests dictate pragmatism. But we’ve gone far beyond that. Now we’re telling our allies that they can’t win victories in conflicts in which they are willing to stay the course and in which they can win.

We will actively step in to prevent victory.

And so our enemies grow stronger. They have no such Hamlet-like moral qualms. They push where there is mush. Should Israel accede to America’s request to leave Hamas in place in Rafah, Hezbollah will challenge Israel in the north; Iranian proxies will challenge Israel in the West Bank; Iran will up the ante in Yemen and the Red Sea. Israel and Saudi Arabia will be forced to search for new allies and new weapons. The world will significantly become more dangerous.

In his March 2001 review of Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, Orrin Judd wrote:

Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks.  They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam.  When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi.  For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North.  For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table.  Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that :

In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area,
you had won the war.  It was over.

At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War.  Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way.  Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.

So what happened?

Over to you, Watergate Congress!

Flash-forward to the 21st century. As Bill McGurn noted in the Wall Street Journal on the day of Obama’s inauguration in 2009, “Bush’s Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq.” To the point where shortly thereafter, Obama and Biden were bragging about what a success Iraq was, before, as Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker noted, Obama unilaterally withdrew all American troops for a reelection talking point, thus throwing it all away and giving rise to ISIS.

And with Obama allegedly back in the White House, 2021 was the perfect time for a repeat. That it took place during the 20th anniversary of 9/11 no doubt added an extra frisson of pleasure for Barry: Biden commemorates 9/11 anniversary with surrender to Taliban.

It’s easy to write off Biden’s “Vietnam” gaffe today as yet another moment of Trunalimunumaprzure. But as David Strom writes at Hot Air, “It is pretty normal for dementia patients to relive their past–visiting their golden age from their golden years–and the Vietnam war dominated the news during Biden’s rise to power. Drifting back from the reality of 2024 to the 1970s should, I suppose, not be unexpected.”

In September of last year, Steve linked to Joe Klein at his Substack: Hidin’ Biden.

For those of us who spent time in Afghanistan, the endgame came as no surprise. I made several visits to a once-crucial town called Sanjaray in Zhari District where a series of American Army Captains learned these truths: that the local leaders were thoroughly compromised by the Taliban, that the local people couldn’t distinguish us from the last invaders, the Russians; that the Afghan civilians were happy—grateful, really—for any help we could give them; and everyone, especially the Talibs, knew we would eventually leave. A mixed message to be sure. But no surprise when the Afghan “army,” which we’d spent billions funding, evaporated in the face of the Taliban offensive. It turned out that almost everybody in the Afghan establishment had made the same calculation as the local warlord in Sanjaray—his name was Hajji Lala: they all had secret deals with the Taliban.

How could Biden not know this? How could he not plan for it? Why did he abandon Bagram, the massive American airbase that might have been a less chaotic staging area for our evacuation than the commercial airport in Kabul?

As the flashback link to Business Insider Steve added noted: Biden in 2010 reportedly told a US diplomat ‘f— that’ when asked if the US should stay in Afghanistan to prevent a humanitarian crisis.

Robert Altman’s cartoonish 1980s parody of Richard Nixon couldn’t have said it any better:

Except of course in the early 1970s, the real life Nixon still held on to the quaint FDR-era notion that America should actually win its wars.

Exit quote:

"Elect me. I'm in the 20th Century." – Joe Biden

If this was your elderly parent or grandparent, you would pull them off the stage.

Not allow them to run for reelection of the most powerful country on Earth.

pic.twitter.com/3wtaasEmWh

— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) April 10, 2024

IT’S 1965 ALL OVER AGAIN:

Both the Vietnam anti-war movement and today’s growing anti-Israel war movement started on college campuses. They were galvanized by narratives of oppression. In 1965 it was the South Vietnamese who were allegedly oppressed by rich landlords and corrupt generals. Now in the Holy Land it is the alleged one-sided, unilateral oppression of one religious community by another.

In both wars, the issue to be decided by blood and iron is sovereignty: who will rule the land? Vietnamese Communists or Vietnamese Nationalists? Palestinians or Jews?

But what may start on campus can spread to embroil the body politic. In 1972 the movement against the war in Vietnam took over the Democratic Party under the leadership of George McGovern. Now it seems the anti-Israel movement is similarly gaining strength in the very same Party, causing President Joe Biden to backtrack on his previous support for Israel.

Following the dissemination modality of the anti-Vietnam War movement, consider the current article by Jon Hoffman of the Cato Institute titled: “Israel Is a Strategic Liability for the United States.” The anti-Vietnam War movement precursor was the March 25, 1964 speech (expanded later into a book) by Senator William Fulbright with the title “Old Myths and New Realities”.

In a similar vein, Hoffman suggests that we turn away from “old myths” to seriously consider “new realities” in our relationship with Israel asking: “What exactly the United States gets in return for this unidirectional relationship remains unclear.”

He seeks to weaken the hold on us of the “old” narrative: “Proponents claim that unfaltering support is critical for the advancement of U.S. interests in the Middle East. Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example, once referred to Israel as the “eyes and ears of America” in the region. While intelligence-sharing may have some strategic value, the past five months of war in Gaza have made clear the numerous negative effects of the relationship, namely how Washington’s emphatic embrace of Israel has undermined its strategic position in the Middle East while damaging its global image.”

Today, the toxic “from the River to the Sea” narrative is collecting adherents thanks to a powerful ancient prejudice – antisemitism. That pernicious narrative about Jews proposes that they are always outsiders, on their own, not deserving of our sympathy, or “ally-ship.”

What conflates the two antiwar narratives of 1965 and 2024 is a mythos about the compelling morality of liberation coupled with a false narrative about who is oppressed. Those who are said to be oppressed need liberation and so to support them is righteous. End of analysis.

During Biden’s disastrous bugout of Afghanistan, some pointed out how Biden was obsessed with replaying how the Vietnam War ended for America:

During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.

According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.

But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.

Found via Fred Bauer, who notes, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us to 2021:

In 2024, what’s left of Joe’s brain is still back there in Full Metal Jacket land:

BIDEN: "I hope the legacy is that I kept my word that I said the reason I was running was to … reduce the prospect of war because of Vietnam" 😬 pic.twitter.com/sJgIiodtN2

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 10, 2024

SPENGLER: Horror and Humiliation in Gaza.

Like the Nazis, Islamist terrorism weaponized horror to demoralize the West. Christianity has a soft underbelly: It struggles to reconcile belief in a God who so loved the world that He sacrificed Himself for its salvation with the suffering of innocents. That was the nub of Voltaire’s attack on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake killed 12,000 in 1755, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s protest that “if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”

The post-Christian world, which eschews the mystery of Divine Providence in favor of a squeamish urge for earthly salvation, is all the more vulnerable to the theater of horror. The post-Christian West has become paralyzed by the fear that the world is beset by forces hostile to humankind, which J.R.R. Tolkien called “the black breath.”

All too well have the Western-educated, multilingual leaders of Hamas gauged the spiritual state of the West, and invented an atrocious way of conducting war in order to psychically paralyze it. Hamas cannot win a war against Israel, but it has sufficient power to force Israel to fight a war that cost many civilian lives. Whether the civilian death toll is the 32,000 that Hamas claims or the 18,000 estimated by pro-Israeli analysts is of minor importance.

During the U.S. Marines’ siege of Fallujah 20 years ago, I wrote that the battle for that city brought into focus the vulnerabilities of both the Americans and the Sunni resistance. Horror—the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end—is lethal to the West, which cannot endure without faith in a loving Heavenly Father. For the Islamic world, meanwhile, humiliation—the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it—is beyond its capacity to endure.

The Muslim world said nothing when between 9,000 and 40,000 civilians died in the 2016-17 campaign against ISIS in Mosul. That involved Muslims (the Iraqi Army with American support) killing Muslims. But Gaza is not merely a slaughter but also a humiliation, the reduction of Hamas, and the displacement of most of the Gaza population. Muslims can accept Muslims killing Muslims, but they can’t abide Jews humiliating Muslims.

This toxic combination of horror and humiliation poisons world opinion against Israel. There is no near-term remedy. Horror elicits irrational responses. Never mind that Hamas forced an urban war upon Israel through unspeakable acts of brutality against Israeli civilians, and that it embeds terrorists in hospitals, schools, and other civilian installations to maximize casualties among its own civilians. Never mind that Israel’s response has occasioned fewer civilian casualties in urban combat than any other fighting force on record.

Read the whole thing.

COVID FOUR YEARS AGO: On April 4th 2020, less than three weeks into the Fauci, Birx, and Trump-approved lockdown, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote: From 9/11 to COVID-19. The last time New York was the center of a catastrophe, America rallied behind it. The nation’s reaction to its coronavirus outbreak is a different story.

It was always a fairy tale, but it was surely a nice one. Columbine’s tragedy was America’s tragedy. Las Vegas happened to all of us. Parkland, Florida, was everyone’s worst national nightmare. Regional differences were downplayed so we could grieve together. But Donald Trump came along to remind us that Puerto Rico is not really America, and Detroit is not really America, and California is definitively not America. It was an easy myth to puncture, and he has deftly and rapidly ensured that no city or state will ever be America’s battered sweetheart again. We are all on our own.

New York almost makes it too easy. The city has long been associated with unbounded greed and wealth, cultural elitism, and ethnic diversity. That encompasses Ted Cruz’s sneering dog whistle about “New York values” in 2016, and Trump’s newfound loathing of the city he called home for his entire life—a city he was maligning long before the coronavirus came along. Despite the country’s love affair with New York in the wake of 9/11 or even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it’s also always been the case that the city coexists uncomfortably with the fantasy of rugged cowboys, wide-open spaces, and manly white men dominating nature, an American story Trump and his acolytes seem to love above all things.

Nobody can blame the coronavirus itself on this president, though we must keep track of how his failure to take action will cost untold American lives. But even as we sit here, waiting, it is worth remembering that Trump has led a three-year project in which leadership consists of laying blame, constantly and relentlessly, on everyone and anyone, and the more inchoate that group is, the better. Victims are to be further victimized, always. We have been so carefully trained in this response that even without Trump’s insistence that the media, Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and thieving New York doctors are to blame for the rampant spread of the virus, we could fall easily into the habit of doing it ourselves. We haven’t had to do that; the president has still happily led the charge. The strangest thing is simply that New York is the same greedy, insomniac, starving, pushy, wisecracking, bighearted place it was in the days after 9/11. Americans need to hate her today because everyone needs to hate everything and everyone now. Just when we needed to rally together in a fight against death, we are realizing we’ve been primed to fight one another to the death instead. Even if the myriad historical acts of pulling together after national tragedies were planted in fantasy more than fact, the alternative—a vicious and slashing vilification of the other—will not keep any of us safe or free.

As I wrote four years ago, that last sentence is a classic case of projection. Isn’t Lithwick aware that the rest of the nation is also dealing with the same pandemic? And is a massively diverse group of people who don’t think in lockstep? I could be mistaken, but I don’t believe that Saul Steinberg drew his classic “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover as a how-to guide to life for insular Manhattanites.

Flash-forward to today. Having been demonized by NYC’s “Defund the Police” “Progressives” since 2020, one GOP congresswoman has what must be an enticing offer for some at the NYPD: Rep. Beth Van Duyne Takes Out a Full Page Ad for NY Police: Come to North Texas Now.

Rep. Beth Van Duyne, who represents the Irving, Texas area of North Texas, is running an ad in the New York Post. The full-page ad encourages New York City police to come to North Texas.

The headline reads, “Ladies and Gentlemen of Law Enforcement It’s Time to Escape New York and Move To Texas!.” There is a list of 15 North Texas law enforcement agencies where New York officers can apply.

“Your lives don’t have to be endangered by violent career criminals who are never locked away,” the ad states. “You don’t have to be beaten on the streets by gangs of illegal immigrant criminals. And you don’t have to be endlessly insulted by budget cuts by Defund the Police politicians.”

“It’s time for you to leave these loathsome and destructive fools behind,” the ad continues. “Escape from New York.”

No word yet if Lithwick approves of Duyne’s suggestion.

DON’T GET COCKY: Vanity Fair Is Freaking Out About Trump’s ‘Terrifyingly Competent’ Campaign.

MARGARET SANGER, LE CORBUSIER, AND PHILIP JOHNSON SMILE: Swastikas Are Progressive Now.

After Hamas supporters vandalized a synagogue with a swastika, leftist cheered this prototypical Nazi act as a progressive commitment to human rights.

“A swastika clearly has a deep and painful history for the people in our community, it’s a symbol of hatred and death,” Rabbi Ethan Witkovsky of Temple Beth El said.

However Malcolm Harris, a former Occupy Wall Street activist and author of ‘Palo Alto’ and other books published through Hachette, explained that swastikas were progressive now.

“Israel’s genocide has literally reversed the meaning of a swastika on a synagogue from a Nazi threat to a condemnation of genocide,” Harris, who also writes for The Nation and Wired, argued.

Harris claims that he viewed vandalizing a synagogue with a swastika as “an anti-zionist condemnation of Israeli genocide.” And if vandalizing synagogues with swastikas, the ultimate symbol of Nazi behavior is only “anti-Zionist”, not antisemitic, then there really is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and between leftist anti-Zionists and Nazi antisemites.

David Austin Walsh, a postdoc at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, who has a book on the “far-right” coming out from Yale University Press, chimed in, “I’ll stipulate for the sake of argument that tagging a synagogue with a swastika has an ambiguous or multivariate meaning. How are we to determine which is the intended meaning?”

Marshall Steinbaum, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a Senior Fellow at the Jain Family Institute, whined that, “I wish we lived in a world where spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue still meant Nazis”.

In the UK, where the London Met Police had previously arrested and threatened anti-Jihad protesters for flying the St. George’s flag, an officer explained to a Jewish woman complaining about swastikas at a pro-Hamas hate rally that the swastikas needed to be viewed in context.

In certain contexts, such as Neo-Nazi rallies, swastikas might be bad, but when leftists and their Islamist allies aim swastikas at Jews, these Neo-Neo-Nazis were actually progressive.

While the debate about whether vandalizing synagogues with swastikas and waving swastikas at Jews was antisemitic, the progressive swastika was making its way around the world.

Exit question: “I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: ‘Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?’”

DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Sunny Hostin Blames Climate Change For Solar Eclipse.

The View cohost Sunny Hostin believes that Monday’s solar eclipse, which has been known for decades when the exact date and time it would take place, only happened because of climate change.

Oh, did I say decades?

Sorry – I meant THOUSANDS of years in advance thanks to what is known as the Saros Series. A three-second Google search taught me that, but let’s not let facts get in the way of her spewing her cup of BS.

Hostin With Her Most Insane Rant Yet

“We’ve got a solar eclipse, we’ve got an earthquake… also, I learned that cicadas are coming!” Hostin said, as she didn’t have the time to do a quick Google pronunciation lookup of how to actually pronounce cicadas since she butchered that as well.

“Si-CAH-Dahs ar coming!” Hostin said again, prompting Whoopi Goldberg to correct her as “Si-CAY-Duhs” and the TV control room executive producer probably throwing their hands up in the air.

It didn’t stop there though. “For the first time in a hundred years or so [the cicadas are coming], for the first time in many, many years actually” before Whoopi then had to cut Hostin off again. “No, no. Every 17 years this happens,” Goldberg cut in as if she was back filming Sister Act and scolding a student.

“That’s not what I read,”noting before then brilliantly… and I mean brilliantly, saying the solar eclipse, earthquake and cicadas “would lead [people] to believe that climate change is happening.”

… I’m sorry, what?

After Rosie’s fire doesn’t melt steel line, Joy Behar exclaiming that Antifa doesn’t exist, and Whoopi’s belief that apparently Stanley Kubrick filmed the moon landings, America’s Newspaper of Record is left with little choice: NASA Sends Rover To Search For Intelligent Life On ‘The View.’

To paraphrase Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song,” pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space, ‘Cause there’s bugger all down here at ABC.

UNEXPECTEDLY: San Francisco’s Train System is Still Running on Floppy Disks.

In 1998, San Francisco installed the latest cutting-edge technology to run the train network: floppy disks. A quarter of a century later and the city’s transportation agency is still using the same system.

People under the age of 30 might not know what a floppy disk is; an archaic way of storing data (think USB stick). But the workers at San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) sure do as they are still using obsolete tech to automate the movement of light rail vehicles.

“We were the first agency in the U.S. to adopt this particular technology but it was from an era when computers didn’t have a hard drive so you have to load the software from floppy disks onto the computer,” Mariana Maguire, SFMTA Train Control Project, tells ABC 7.

“It’s like if you lose your memory overnight, and every morning, somebody has to tell you hey ‘this is who you are and what your purpose is what you have to do today,’” adds Maguire.

The SMFTA uses five-inch floppy disks to automatically control trains inside the subway. “With each increasing year risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure,” says SMFTA director Jeffrey Tumlin.

Flashback: “Shades of the New Yorker cover from 2013, which showed Obama with Gordon Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone and Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers while Jay Carney nervously inserted a five-inch floppy disk into the TRS-80-era Obamacare server. Not to mention the speeches that Newt Gingrich was giving during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, when he would hold up in one hand a vacuum tube, and in the other a microchip. As he explained, vacuum tubes were still in use in some FAA-regulated Air Traffic Control towers in America.” As I wrote back in 2019 responding to a Bloomberg News article that exclaimed:

San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology, but that’s what’s running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S.

“Now who’s being naive, Kay? When I lived in Silicon Valley, the numerous power outages were a reminder that the businesses trying to bring you the 21st century were reliant upon a power grid that, thanks to the NIMBY nature of Bay Area leftists, hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s heyday of Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad.

HOW IT STARTED: Community groups pressure City Council members to defund Oakland police.

—ABC7 News, June 15th, 2020.

How it’s going: Oakland Crime Wave: Burglaries Nearly Doubled over Last Three Years as Arrests Cut in Half.

The city of Oakland has experienced a dramatic crime surge since 2020 as arrests plunge and the police department struggles to fill vacancies.

From 2020 to 2023 burglaries increased by 99 percent, motor-vehicle theft surged by 72 percent, robberies jumped by 53 percent and homicides went up 16 percent, according to a supplemental police report on the Oakland public safety committee’s April 9 agenda. Arrests plummeted by 50 percent over the same period.

The newly released data, first reported by the Center Square, demonstrates that the public-safety situation in Oakland has not significantly improved since the Oakland police department released a city-wide crime report at the end of 2023 showing that robberies in the city had spiked by 38 percent, burglaries went up 23 percent and motor-vehicle theft surged by 44 percent compared to the same period the previous year. An analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle found roughly one out of every 30 city residents was the victim of car theft last year.

Staffing levels at the Oakland police department have gone down from 749 in 2019 to 696 over the past year, according to the newly released data. Police are projecting approximately 91 retirees in 2024. Only 9.5 percent of Oakland police officers live within city limits and many come from nearby cities and counties. The Oakland police department staff is roughly a quarter black, white, and latino, reflecting the city’s population.

As crime surges and staffing levels fall, Oakland is facing a decline in arrests: Arrests dropped from 12,911 in 2016 to 5,576 last year, according to a report by the city’s finance department. The city went without a police chief for over a year, until mayor Sheng Thao (D) announced the appointment of Floyd Mitchell as the city’s police chief in late March. Mitchell will begin his duties in late April or early May after previously serving as the police chief of Lubbock, Texas.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco:

Traffic citations issued by SFPD are down 97% (!!) since 2014. This is alarming and it's part of why our streets are dangerous and reckless driving is tolerated.

We must enforce the law – this must change to save lives. Supervisors need to demand better. pic.twitter.com/pzcSH4mrb5

— Danny Sauter 李爾德 For Supervisor (@DannySauter) April 9, 2024

Gooder and harder, Bay Area.

NORFOLK SOUTHERN REACHES $600 MILLION SETTLEMENT IN EAST PALESTINE TRAIN-DERAILMENT SUIT:

Norfolk Southern announced Tuesday it reached a $600 million settlement agreement to resolve all class-action lawsuits within a 20-mile radius of the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment last year.

The settlement, if approved by a court, would result in compensation to individuals and small businesses impacted by the train derailment, and it would resolve personal-injury claims from within 10 miles of the incident. Norfolk Southern is not admitting guilt as part of the settlement.

“The agreement is designed to provide finality and flexibility for settlement class members.  Individuals and businesses will be able to use compensation from the settlement in any manner they see fit to address potential adverse impacts from the derailment,” Norfolk Southern said in a statement.

Norfolk Southern has provided over $100 million in community assistance to East Palestine and the surrounding areas to help residents recover from the train derailment. The plaintiffs of the class-action lawsuit said in a court filing Tuesday they will be filing a motion to have the judge approve the settlement within ten days, CNN reported.

Exit quote: “Former president Donald Trump and his supporters pointed to the accident and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s delayed visit to the area as another example of Democrats neglecting middle America. President Joe Biden only visited East Palestine earlier this year more than a year after the train derailment took place.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Vatican Reluctantly Sides With God On Gender Theory.

ED MORRISSEY: All (Approved) Things Considered: How We Lost Our Way at NPR.

“If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way,” NPR veteran Uri Berliner writes. “But it hasn’t.” Perhaps not, but it’s been that way for longer than Berliner wants to admit, too.

And it’s not just NPR that Berliner dresses down in this detailed and damning mea culpa from inside the house, so to speak, at The Free Press. What Berliner writes about his own media organization pretty much applies to all American mainstream media outlets, and just as much as at NPR, if not more.

Berliner puts the beginning of the corruption at the election of Donald Trump, when NPR went all-in on Adam Schiff’s McCarthyism — and failed to call it out when it collapsed:

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

In 2010, NPR attacked the Tea Party, a group of fiscally responsible grownups whose protests against government waste often ended with their cleaning up their protest sites, not destroying them:  Taxpayer-Funded Immaturity: NPR Teaches Readers ‘To Speak Tea Bag.’

As Glenn noted in October of 2016, “I’m increasingly concerned that the neutralization of the Tea Party movement — an effort by both major parties — may have convinced a lot of people that civics-book style polite political participation is for chumps.”

As did the DNC-MSM’s coverage of Mitt Romney. In 2012, when Romney faced off against Obama, NPR attacked him with racial dog whistles that only Cokie Roberts could hear.

And then the network wondered why the Republican rank and file united behind Trump in 2016:

Oh you guys want to Portray Mitt Romney as an extreme and abusive sociopath? Okay, well here's the real thing then.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 22, 2024

Flashback: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Our Ruling Class Monoculture.

WOEING: Terrifying video shows engine of Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 ripping apart during takeoff.

THE SAM BANKMAN-FRIED, ALVY SINGER CONNECTION REVEALED! Lawyer’s Argument: SBF Suffers From Anhedonia:

• His mother’s letter: Barbara Fried flagged her son’s social awkwardness, which she framed as putting his life at risk, per Business Insider. “I genuinely fear for Sam’s life in the typical prison environment. Sam’s outward presentation, his inability to read or respond appropriately to many social cues, and his touching but naive belief in the power of facts and reason to resolve disputes, put him in extreme danger.”
• His father echoed that: Joseph Bankman wrote the prison setting “would put Sam in an environment where his responses to social cues will sometimes be seen as odd, inappropriate, and disrespectful; when that happens, he will be in significant physical danger. Nothing can justify putting him at that risk.”
• His lawyers’ argument: They say a lesser sentence is appropriate because FTX’s customers will end up getting their money back during bankruptcy proceedings (in part because of savvy investments Bankman-Fried made in the AI company Anthropic). “That recommendation is grotesque,” they wrote, noting “victims are poised to recover—were always poised to recover—a hundred cents on the dollar.”

• His lawyers’ argument II: The Wall Street Journal notes they also bristled at the prosecution’s depiction of Bankman-Fried as a high-roller with a “lavish penthouse lifestyle in the Bahamas.” They said his goals were altruistic, not self-serving, and that material possessions don’t motivate him. “Those who know Sam are sensitive to the tragic fact that nothing in life brings him real happiness. Sam suffers from anhedonia, a severe condition characterized by a near-complete absence of enjoyment, motivation, and interest. He has been that way since childhood.”

Yes, I get SBF and the earlier, funnier Woody Allen confused all the time, myself:

Until it was finished, ”Annie Hall” was hush-hush. Nobody knew where the shooting was going on in New York or even what the name of the movie was. Mr. Allen didn’t know the name either. He and Mr. Brickman considered 100 possibilities. Right up until the end, the favored title was ”Anhedonia.” But hardly anyone knew what the word meant, so it was jettisoned.

”Anhedonia is a psychological state where nothing gives a person pleasure,” he explained. “The word hedonism is in it. We diagnosed that as Alvy’s problem; nothing gives him any pleasure.”

SBF may or may not be impacted by anhedonia, but does he suffer from the crippling effects of anatidaephobia?

(H/T: The Ricochet “Glop” podcast.)

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: San Francisco Bill Would Let People Sue Grocery Stores for Closing Too Quickly.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a remarkable policy that would allow people to sue grocery stores that close too quickly.

Earlier this week, Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would require grocery stores to provide six months’ written notice to the city before closing down.

Supermarket operators would also have to make “good faith” efforts to ensure the continued availability of groceries at their shuttered location, either through finding a successor store, helping residents form a grocery co-op, or any other plan they might work out by meeting with city and neighborhood residents.

Lest one thinks this is some heavy-handed City Hall intervention, the ordinance makes clear that owners still retain the ultimate power to close their store. It also creates a number of exemptions to the six-month notice requirement. If a store is closing because of a natural disaster or business circumstances that aren’t “reasonably foreseeable,” it doesn’t have to provide the full six months’ notice.

Still, should stores close without providing the proper notice, persons affected by the closure would be entitled to sue the closed store for damages.

San Francisco’s city government apparently can’t stop their city’s doom spiral, so why not extort those supermarkets closing up as a result of it? I’m sure that won’t accelerate the city’s descent at all.

GOODER AND HARDER, CA: Why gas prices in California ‘have gone ballistic.’

Gas prices have been on the rise nationwide, but for California drivers, they’ve skyrocketed in a short amount of time.

The Golden State’s average at the pump surged by $0.23 to $5.27 per gallon on Friday from a week ago, according to AAA data. Meanwhile, the nationwide average sat at $3.54 per gallon on Friday, up $0.04 during the same period.

Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at OPIS, points to refinery challenges as the main culprit for California’s surging prices, including an important Phillips 66 refiner in the Bay Area halting gasoline production in favor of renewable diesel.

“Throw in regularly scheduled maintenance that will occur at two critical refineries in May and the normal penchant for speculative buying in global markets in the second quarter, and you have wholesale prices that have gone ballistic,” he said.

Kloza calculates gasoline in San Francisco, less taxes and other costs, is at a premium of almost $60 per barrel more than current crude levels. 

On Friday West Texas Intermediate (CL=F) futures topped $86 per barrel while Brent (BZ=F), the international benchmark price, settled above $91 per barrel.

Flashback: Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?

It’s as if “Elitist environmentalists hate the working class” or something.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Of Course the New York Earthquake Was Due to Climate Change. What Else Could It Be?