RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Miami Mayor Francis Suarez Files Paperwork to Enter 2024 GOP Field.

OLD AND BUSTED: Redneck Nation.

The New Hotness? Vodkapundit Nation! People Are Boozing Like It’s 1860 As Americans Have Reached Civil War Levels Of Alcohol Consumption.

BRINGING NEW MEANING TO THE PHRASE, “THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:” Penn State professor Themis Matsoukas accused of performing sexual acts with his dog: ‘I do it to blow off steam.’

A longtime and award-winning Penn State professor allegedly performed sexual acts with his dog in sickening displays that were captured on a state forest trail camera.

Themis Matsoukas, 64, was charged Tuesday after he was allegedly caught earlier this year naked from the waist down — except for socks and shoes — committing the perverted sex acts with his collie near bathrooms at Rothrock State Forest in Pennsylvania, according to reports.

Matsoukas, who is on leave from the university, was identified through a North Face backpack he was carrying from an incident in April and also May, according to a criminal complaint cited by the Centre Daily Times.

He allegedly tried to record himself performing the lewd acts with an electronic tablet, according to the trail cam footage, Fox 43 reported.

After Matsoukas was identified as the possible suspect, rangers from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources searched his home earlier this month and he went into a panic, the complaint reportedly states.

Between this story, Jerry Sandusky, and the late Joe Paterno looking the other way, we need a complete and total shutdown of Penn State until we can figure out just what the hell is going on there.

A HANGOVER FROM 2020’s SUMMER OF LOVE: Judge rules that Seattle must not enforce law against graffiti.

UNEXPECTEDLY: China’s economy is way more screwed than anyone thought.

Entering 2023, the relentless drumbeat of Wall Street consensus was pounding out one consistent rhythm: China is back. After years of lockdowns and suppressed output, economists and investors cheered the end of Beijing’s zero-COVID policy and the economic boom that was sure to follow. The colossus-in-waiting that is the Chinese consumer was about to roam freely, analysts said. This was great news for the whole world — everyone would benefit from the globe’s second-largest economy getting healthy.

But six months into the year, Wall Street’s dreams for the country are turning into a nightmare.

Far from an economic explosion, China’s recovery from COVID has been weak. Industrial production has disappointed. Trade — both imports and exports — has slowed markedly. There is debt everywhere, especially in property development, which makes up 30% of the economy. Trading partners are upset for a litany of reasons, from human-rights abuses to concerns about the government’s increasing role in the country’s commerce. The private sector — which was expected to drive most of China’s bounceback — is running scared.

Flashback to November of 2019: How to Conduct Business with Chinese Companies That See a Dark Future.

And to December of 2021: China Is Becoming the Soviet Union.

GENTLEMEN, WE CAN’T REPORT NEWS HERE, THIS IS CNN! Media whiplash: CNN’s Tapper muzzles Trump-friendly footage a month after town hall.

SHELBY STEELE’S FILMMAKER SON BLASTS SAN FRANCISCO POLICE AFTER $30K IN CAMERA GEAR STOLEN IN CAR BREAK-IN:

Filmmaker Eli Steele first tweeted that he had lost around $15,000 worth of camera gear after his rental car windows were smashed at around 11 a.m. near the famous winding street.

Upon further inspection, he said $25,000 to $30,000 worth of filming equipment was taken in the theft. He told The Standard via text message that a total of $30,000 worth of equipment had been stolen.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Pond scum publicly angers algae advocate slinging speciesist seaweed slur.

The Expert™, English naturalist (he’s a natural something, I’ll give you that) Chris Packham, immediately fell into a state of triggered and offended Karenism, as he chided interviewer Amol Rajan to “mind his language.”

Over SEAWEED?! *blink* Indeed.

Extraordinary. And to Rajan’s eternal shame, he stopped everything and abjectly groveled in remorse for so egregious a faux-pas.

…A BBC anchor profusely apologized after an environmentalist corrected him on-air Friday for using the offensive term “seaweed” when referring to “marine algae.”

English naturalist Chris Packham asked Radio 4 “Today” host Amol Rajan to not use the common nickname when talking about the ocean plant that has recently swamped a beach on the southwestern coast of the UK.

“I’ll politely last ask you to mind your language. Can we call it marine algae rather than seaweed? The weed word puts it at an immediate disadvantage, doesn’t it?” Packham, who presents the BBC show “Springwatch,” said.

Rajan interrupted his guest to extend his apologies.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. And that’s important because I actually looked it up and I still got it wrong,” the host said.

Mr. Priss Packard was a guest on the program because “noisome” – which is a polite English way of saying “stinks to the high Heavens in a nauseating, gag-inducing manner,” or what any Yankees fan thinks of Boston, same-same – masses of the seaweed/algae had been washing up on English beaches, rendering them basically uninhabitable. The Expert™ was invited on for the segment ostensibly to enlighten people who’d had their sun and sand hopes dashed about what it was, why these things happen, and, I’d imagine, how long such events last. Simple informational fluff piece.

But, no.

He gave a priggish “suck it up, peasants” speech, followed by the climate version of what we used to call the “There are starving children in Biafra, so eat your damn oatmeal” pathos appeal.

At least for the next three weeks, you can hear the S-word exchange at the 2:32:45 mark of this BBC audio clip.

If we all last that long. Pity the poor environmentalist. The stress of knowing that the world only has a week to go before it’s all over must be enormous:

INSULTING YOUR CUSTOMERS RARELY WORKS OUT WELL: Bud Light’s Failure Was Not Anti-Transgenderism. It Was The Rejection Of Its User Base.

THE TRUTH ABOUT ACID CASUALTIES:

Bankruptcy is not the only thing that proceeds gradually, and then suddenly. While Syd Barrett may have appeared fine in an interview in May 1967, his teetering mental state would change drastically by the summer. Locking himself in his bedroom for days, the formerly placid frontman of Pink Floyd became crudely violent, on one occasion smashing a mandolin over a girlfriend’s head. “This angelic boy became this… moody, impossible to work with, violent man,” said his friend David Gale. Initially, Barrett’s antics were exoticised as the floridities of a ‘mad artist’. While testimonies vary, many blamed, at least in part, his excessive use of LSD.

Barrett is the main case study of the “acid casualty”: the archetypal subject who, after a few too many trips, is said to endure a mental collapse from which they may never return. His story is frequently shared as a parable in online forums such as Reddit, which is a recruitment pool for psychedelic studies. And while attitudes around psychedelics have softened in recent years, this meme still lurks subtly within the public consciousness. One doesn’t have to ask too many baby boomers before someone shares a story, perhaps of a friend from school or university, who got lost ashore on the other side.

The first recorded reference I could find was in 1974, from Changes magazine. A passage spurns the “unique contemporary type: that kind of burnt-out acid casualty who ends every sentence with ‘Man’”. Amid the Nixonian disappointments of the Seventies, the acid casualty was a way to culturally dismiss the psychedelic ruptures of the Sixties. No longer an agent for spiritual awakening or a wonder treatment, LSD was cast as a trigger for madness and a tool for mind control. Many casualties were reported in the press: Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators, Arthur Lee of Love, and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who suggests his LSD experiments “f*cked with his brain”.

Another near-acid casualty was John Lennon. As Ian MacDonald wrote in his 2005 book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties:

Leaving aside the desirability of a world peopled by passive adherents of ‘the cosmic giggle’ (and passing over the tenuous link between meaninglessness and peacefulness), there is, contrary to Leary’s assurances, no guarantee of predictable results from LSD, which is capable of inducing anything from suicidal self-negation to paranoid megalomania. All that is certain is that if you exhort people to sacrifice their sense of self to a drug, the chances of disaster are high. Accordingly, as the use of LSD spread under Leary’s influence, a trail of ‘acid casualties’ followed in its wake – individuals who had left their identity in some uncharted zone of inner space and were now incapable of functioning in the supposedly illusory real world. Among those thus permanently disabled over the next few years were some of the most sensitive and talented people in pop. John Lennon nearly became one of them.

* * * * * * * *

According to those who knew him around this time, his LSD intake was so enormous that he was almost permanently tripping.

* * * * * * * *

By late 1967 — the period of ‘Across the Universe’ — Lennon had come so close to erasing his identity with LSD that The Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor had to risk a powerful therapeutic ‘trip’ with him in which he went through the group’s songs pointing out to their dazed author which ones he’d written and how good they were. Yet, while Lennon’s love for Ono helped him escape the debilitating clutches of acid, it was a fragile détente and, within a year, wounded by hostile media coverage, the couple were experimenting not merely with artistic conventions but with heroin.

There were so many acid casualties by the time that I was a teenager, that it was obvious that was not a drug to be experimented with. Unfortunately, far too many people in the 1960s learned that the hard way, and many never recovered.

WHAT IS SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN: Nearly 10,000 Photos from Hunter Biden’s Laptop Published.

OKAY, GROOMERS: Disney Hired a Male Gay Pron Star as an Actor in The Little Mermaid.

“My Not-So-Secret Gay Agenda.”

Disney claims they didn’t know this guy was a gay porn actor. But they did put out a call for “really sexy male models” — for a children’s movie — and didn’t bother checking the CVs of the really sexy male models, like “Dante Ferrari,” that they were interested in.

Here’s a hint that “Dante Ferrari” might have been a gay porn star:

His name is “Dante Ferrari.”

Heh. Sadly, Vic Ferrari wasn’t available.

NOT-AT-ALL-OVERDRAMATIC TEEN* ACTIVIST: Act now or face a climate-change “death sentence.”

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg told the Bonn COP28 preparatory conference that humanity needed to act on the climate crisis now or face ‘the death sentence’ pic.twitter.com/XPiRGRMMDI

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 13, 2023

And Greta means now, considering that on June 21st 2018, she predicted:

* Greta’s actually 20. “Greta Thunberg, you know the name. She’s a young lady, a girl, really. And she is the face of the climate movement. Except the thing is, she’s not actually that young anymore. I mean, listen, I wish I was just 20 like she is, but she is 20. That’s not a teenager anymore. It’s certainly not a girl. Although meeting her in person today reminded me of how physically small she is. And I don’t know if it’s a medical condition or just a particularly unique look, but she truly looks like someone who is 12 or 13.”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE:

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump Gets the Beria Treatment.

The Trump indictments—note the plural—are they not like the blind encountering an elephant for the first time?

One touches the beast’s trunk and says it’s shaped like a snake.

Another touches its tusks and says, no, it’s hard and bone-like.

A third, hands on the elephant’s capacious side, says it’s more like a wall of flesh.

That old story was meant to remind us of how limited our individual perspectives can be.

How easy it is to mistake the part for the whole, to seize on one thing we’re familiar with and elevate it to a general explanatory principle.

Noting the wild differences among people in their assessments of the latest—but not the last—of the Trump indictments, I at first thought the differences of opinion might be due to the differences in the vantage points from which individuals survey the news about the indictments.

But the more I learn about the issue, the more I think that’s too generous a conclusion.

It assumes a modicum of good faith among those issuing the judgments.

Alas, I don’t think the motives of every party to this spectacle are pure.

Exit quote: “Donald Trump is being given the treatment that Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the secret police, advocated when he said, ‘Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’ At the end of the day, Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is.”

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: California mom claims LA school encouraged daughter to transition and is to blame for her suicide.

HE’S AN OBAMA RETREAD, SO VERY LIKELY YES: Is the Biden White House Secretly Reviving Its Assault on Concerned Parents?

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: When LGBT Activists Flood Target With Bomb Threats, Media Pretend Conservatives Did It.

HITACHI: THE EARLY YEARS. Archaeologists discover 6-inch stone penis used in Medieval times.

MARK JUDGE: Liberal Supreme Court journalists admit incompetence, prescribe propaganda and harassment of justices.

Liberal reporters who cover the Supreme Court don’t know what they are doing. To fix this, they need to be much more hostile toward conservative justices and even more propagandistic in their coverage.

This was the theme of a live symposium recently held in Washington, D.C. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate, Elie Mystal of the Nation, and Jay Willis of the leftist Balls and Strikes all admitted that their coverage of the Supreme Court over the years had been terrible — not because of its obvious leftist bias, but because it had failed to prevent conservative court opinions from being handed down. Calling the past few years “a wake-up call” and the result of “the sinking feeling that we’ve been doing it all wrong,” the speakers argued that they have been too deferential to the Supreme Court and its traditions.

Instead of passively “translating” for readers the often byzantine text of Supreme Court rulings, reporters now need to cover the court with the aggression that is usually used when reporters cover Congress or the White House. They need to trace cases long before they make it to the high court, the reporters claimed. They also need to do a lot of grisly stories about people who are “victims” of the court’s decisions, particularly women harmed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Also, when it comes to conservatives and Christians, the new journalistic model calls not for empathy and insightful coverage, but all-out antipathy.

It’s quite an argument. Acknowledging that they have no reporting skills, lefty writers have decided that repeating the propaganda that pushes their agenda, rather than more fairness and broader coverage, is the solution. They’re treating cancer by smoking cigarettes.

Read the whole thing.

THE GROWNUPS ARE BACK IN CHARGE! Is ‘No Nudity on the White House Lawn’ Really Too Much to Ask?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Kim Jong Un Attends Ivy League University To Learn New Brainwashing Techniques.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Paul McCartney says A.I. got John Lennon’s voice on ‘last Beatles record.’

Beatles singer-songwriter Paul McCartney told the BBC that artificial intelligence was used to “extricate” and clean up the vocals of former bandmate John Lennon from an old recording, allowing them to feature in an upcoming track.

“It’s a very interesting thing, you know. It’s something we’re all sort of tackling at the moment and trying to deal with,” McCartney told the BBC’s “Today” program when asked about AI.

McCartney said “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson — who in 2021 released an eight-hour documentary called “The Beatles: Get Back” featuring colorized, cleaned-up archive footage of the band — was able to “extricate” Lennon’s voice “from a ropey little bit of cassette.”

AI was used to identify Lennon’s vocals as distinct from instrumentals and background interference.

The demix technology that Peter Jackson’s team of boffins used to extract the individual instruments so that Giles Martin could remix Revolver last year is light years ahead in terms of quality of what’s commercially available in audio restoration software such as Izotope’s RX line. The latter produces loads of audio artifacts when it spits out multi-track stems. Hopefully Jackson’s technology will filter down to prosumer level software, and/or the commercial software will improve in quality over time.

FAILING UPWARD: Ousted Chicago Mayor Lightfoot to teach Harvard public health course.

Harvard University has granted a fellowship in public health to former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who recently became the first Chicago mayor to lose a re-election bid in 40 years after a controversy-ridden tenure as the Windy City’s top boss.

In her role as the Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow, Lightfoot “will teach a course in the fall at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health,” the Ivy League institution recently announced.

The June 1 announcement lists several of Lightfoot’s achievements as mayor, such as leading the citywide response to the pandemic and creating a “Racial Equity Rapid Response Team.”

It does not mention the spike in violent crime in Chicago during her term.

I’m sure Lightfoot will do as good a job of cleaning up Harvard as she did Chicago.

WHEN ROADWAYS COLLAPSE: A ‘Test’ for DeSantis, but Business as Usual for Buttigieg.

Buttigieg’s intervention [after Sunday’s I-95 collapse in Philadelphia] has not inspired any indication from the political press that Biden’s transportation secretary has something to prove, though he most certainly does. His tenure in this role has been one of the more eventful transportation administrations in recent memory, not because it was typified by the secretary’s unique competence or his agency’s fleet-footedness. Moreover, Buttigieg’s political aspirations transcend the office he presently occupies, and he is often cited in polls alongside prominent Democrats such as Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren as a potential future presidential candidate. The collapse of I-95 should be as much of a “test” of Buttigieg as the aftermath of Hurricane Ian and the damage it inflicted on Florida’s roadways was a “test” for Governor Ron DeSantis.

Nearly a week before Ian’s landfall, in late September of last year, political observers forecast the “challenge” the storm and its aftermath would pose to the governor. “To a national audience that knows him mostly as a provocateur,” a Wall Street Journal report observed, the storm would “test” DeSantis and challenge his characterizations of Florida’s relative livability. In particular, NPR observed that the speed with which “roads repaired and bridges reconnected” would either prove DeSantis’s mettle or showcase his shortcomings. In the storm’s aftermath, some even wondered if it was possible to rebuild in coastal areas of the country beset by “natural disasters intensified by the climate crisis.” Those who weren’t inclined to surrender the coasts to the ravages of nature were at least convinced that DeSantis could either concentrate on rebuilding Florida or run for the White House, but not both.

DeSantis passed this test, and it didn’t seem particularly strenuous. A severed link between Pine Island and Fort Myers was rebuilt in fewer than three days. The causeway over open water that couples Sanibel Island with the Florida mainland reopened within three weeks of Ian’s landfall — twelve days ahead of schedule. Florida voters registered their overwhelming satisfaction with DeSantis’s emergency response in polling, and they ratified his performance in November with a 20-point victory over his Democratic opponent.

Hopefully Buttigieg can quickly get back to his main job of posing for Time magazine covers and being feted with fawning Wired and Axios hagiography.

Evergreen: