THAT’S NOT CREEPY AT ALL: Dead birds get new life: New Mexico researchers develop taxidermy bird drones.

Scientists in New Mexico are giving dead birds a new life with an unconventional approach to wildlife research.

A team at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro is taking birds that have been preserved through taxidermy and converting them into drones in order to study flight.

Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian, a mechanical engineering professor who is leading the project, had found that artificial, mechanical birds had not given the results he was looking for.

“We came up with this idea that we can use … dead birds and make them (into) a drone,” he said. “Everything is there … we do reverse engineering.”

Taxidermy bird drones — currently being tested in a purpose-built cage at the university — can be used to understand better the formation and flight patterns of flocks.

Not surprisingly, the “Birds Aren’t Real” guys are having a field day on Twitter in response:

you all called us crazy and we will never forget https://t.co/UoMIpddHNd

— Birds Aren't Real (@birdsarentreal) April 15, 2023

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: ‘Why Don’t More People Use Public Transit?’ Asks Naked Hobo On Subway.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Budweiser Replaces Clydesdales With Cows Dressed As Horses.

LECHAIM TO KILL! Israeli actor Chaim Topol lived a double life as a Mossad agent using his VIP status to gain entry to sensitive sites on daring missions around the world, his family reveals after his death aged 87.

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Just Perfect: For 2024, Dems Pick a Dying Chicago to Showcase a Lost Joe Biden.

JULIE BURCHILL: The privileged ignorance of Daniel Radcliffe.

THE NFL JUST CAN’T ESCAPE WOKENESS: Shocker: NFL Draft Will Be Sponsored By Bud Light.

RIP: Dame Mary Quant, fashion designer, dies aged 93.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why the US Kept Trying to Land Oversized Cargo Planes on Aircraft Carriers at Sea (Video).

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Light Bud > Bud Light.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: ‘A Voice of Truth:’ Kamala Harris Praises Unrepentant Anti-Semite Al Sharpton.

What happened? Vice President Kamala Harris praised one of America’s most prominent anti-Semites during a speech in New York on Friday.

It was Al Sharpton, wasn’t it? Correct. Al Sharpton, the notorious race hustler best known for instigating the Crown Heights riots—one of the worst outbursts of anti-Semitic violence in American history that inspired slogans such as “Let’s get the Jew!” and “Hitler didn’t finish the job.”

What’d she say? “Rev, I love you [maniacal laughter],” Harris said at the National Action Network convention in Manhattan. “No matter where you are, you are always a voice of truth speaking about the importance of justice for all people. You are part of the conscience of our country.”

Why’d she say it? Sharpton has successfully reinvented himself as a “respectable” “mainstream” race hustler—who hosts his own show on MSNBC—and is one of the most influential figures within the Democratic Party and media establishment.

Nice Axios parody by the Washington Free Beacon, by the way.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Ex-Biden Energy Department official Sam Brinton gets no jail time in luggage theft plea deal.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE, AND WEIMAR AMERICA: California Bill Would Teach 7th Graders How to Have an Abortion.

DEM MEGADONOR SECRETLY FUNDS RAPE LAWSUIT AGAINST DONALD TRUMP: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has secretly paid E. Jean Carroll’s legal bills since 2020. “Carroll’s lawsuit could also be clouded by Hoffman’s affiliation with [Jeffrey] Epstein, whom he hosted in 2015 at a fundraising dinner for MIT Media Lab. The tech titan later apologized for ‘helping to repair’ Epstein’s image.”

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Downtown SF Whole Foods Made Weekly Emergency Calls Ahead of Closure.

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND: Inverse Jim Cramer Curse Strikes Again: This Time It’s Boeing.

APOLOGY LIGHT: Anheuser-Busch CEO offers flat apology following Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney backlash.

Anheuser-Busch’s top executive on Friday offered an apology flatter than a day-old Bud Light as the beer giant reels from the backlash over its sponsorship deal with controversial transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Brendan Whitworth said in press release titled “Our Responsibility To America.”

“We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

Whitworth finally broke his silence over the brewing controversy but made no mention of the sponsorship deal with Mulvaney — which has led to calls for a boycott of the nation’s largest beer company.

He also didn’t address reports that senior executives were kept in the dark about the Mulvaney rollout.

Instead, Whitworth said he was “focused on building and protecting our remarkable history and heritage.”

“Moving forward, I will continue to work tirelessly to bring great beers to consumers across our nation,” said Whitworth, a Harvard Business School graduate who served in the Marines and was a CIA officer.

The $132 billion beer company has seen its market value plummet by some $5 billion since the campaign was launched April 1.

As Matt Walsh tweeted in response to Whitworth’s non-apology apology:

The statement won’t satisfy their conservative customers because there is no apology or acknowledgment of wrong. And it won’t satisfy the Left because it doesn’t affirm transgenderism and admits at least (without using the word) that the trans issue “divides people.” They had a few options in dealing with this PR crisis. Out of all the options, they chose the one with the biggest downside and no upside. Geniuses.

The result was a spectacular ratio on Twitter last night: Bud Light resumes tweeting but gets majorly ratioed as Twitter users dunk on the woke beer brand.

GLENN GREENWALD: The Same Establishment Playbook is Used to Malign the Character of Leakers and Distract Attention From the Substance of the Revelations.

On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post‘s long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State laundered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks — which result in the disclosure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws — that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now — in a new and genuinely shocking escalation — it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI’s work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest.

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves.

I’m so old, I can remember when whistleblowers and leakers were the stuff of legend in the media:

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Mike Pompeo Announces He’s Not Running for President in 2024, ‘Personal Decision.’

ROGER SIMON: Digital Money Plus Electric Cars Equals Fascist America.

The administrative state is moving faster to cement its totalitarian rule over the United States of America than we can to keep pace.

They are doing this because they realize the majority of our people oppose their wishes, but if they are able to impose them by fiat before that opposition forms and reacts, most people will eventually go along. Unfortunately, it’s human nature for many.

This Passover, I had a telling reminder when I learned for the first time that only an estimated 20 percent of the Jews left Egypt during the Exodus. The other 80 percent chose to remain in the comfort of what they knew—slavery. (These figures come from the medieval French rabbi Rashi, one of the most revered Talmudic scholars.)

Our slavery comes in an electric form. Only a few days ago, the following was announced in The New York Times (which we today learned has become a reality):

“The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

Currently, the same article reports, they are around 5.8 percent.

Joe Lancaster of Reason adds: The EPA’s Ban of Gasoline-Powered Cars Will Actually Slow Development of Electric Cars. “The Biden administration should let the market decide. Clearly, there is a demand for electric vehicles. But by insisting on the rate at which the industry needs to make the transition, the administration’s incentives could be undermining progress. Axios noted this week that ‘battery technology is still evolving…meaning the U.S. may be at risk of building mines and factories to produce batteries that wind up being obsolete in a decade.’ As Reason‘s Ronald Bailey wrote in the March 2023 issue, electrochemists are already devising new methods of powering electric cars that don’t use scarce materials. By imposing such a breakneck timeline, the EPA is forcing automakers to choose production over innovation.”

THE BBC’S LIBERAL BUBBLE HAS FINALLY BURST:

Challenged by Clayton over Twitter no longer flagging up so-called Covid “misinformation” (aka, things posted by lockdown sceptics like me which usually turned out to be true), Elon inquired mischievously: “Does the BBC hold itself at all responsible for misinformation regarding masking and side-effects of vaccinations and not reporting on that at all?” You could cut the silence with a knife.

“And what about the fact that the BBC was put under pressure by the British government to change the editorial policy, are you aware of that?” Musk taunted.
“This is not an interview about the BBC,” spluttered Clayton.

Oh, dear deluded reporter, it was about the BBC, and how. Huge thanks to Musk for exposing the corporation’s groupthink with such forensic, dancing wit. Elon, I could not love you more.

Should Clayton ever secure another encounter with the Twitter titan, may I suggest he ditches the affronted liberal assumptions and tries arming himself with some facts. It’s called journalism.

Flashback: ‘A Powerfully Corrosive Internal Culture.’

Related: Musk Calls Out NPR as Government Mouthpiece.

LAUGHABLE: Equality Florida warns that Florida is “unsafe.”

This is how the Left works. Everything is a campaign, and while I haven’t looked into the funding sources for these groups I would be willing to be quite a lot that if you followed the money it would all lead to the same group of Leftist Democrat donors who have decided that destroying Ron DeSantis is job #1.

They are terrified of him, and they have reason to be. Because, despite what the “Florida Immigrant Coalition” claims, people of color in Florida like Governor DeSantis just fine. It turns out that being an excellent governor pays political dividends.

The coordinated campaign goes far beyond these “grasstops” groups that exist to do the bidding of the Left. Expect news stories to be generated by these fake warnings, and think pieces to follow about how DeSantis is scaring gays and Hispanics by sending brownshirts after them. This is just the Leftist propaganda network doing its job.

It’s all lies.

No it’s not — heed their advice!

OUR COSPLAY WORLD:

The man who recently leaked world-shaking classified government documents is reportedly a gun-happy bigot who was trying to impress his teenage gaming buddies in a Discord clubhouse. The Washington Post broke the news in a terrific story incorporating conversations with one of the man’s pre-adult acolytes. It seems the leaker, known by fans as “OG,” pilfered the documents from the military base where he worked. And you can bet he’s a nobody. As the Post notes: “Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared.” But that didn’t stop him from becoming, first, king of the digital Lilliputians and, then, a threat to national security. OG “appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne.”

And that’s how we arrived at our latest geopolitical crisis: cosplay gone wrong. A nonentity in the real world pulls a bunch of gamer kids into his fantasy life and rocks diplomatic relationships around the globe.

Read the whole thing.

DAN SNYDER REACHES DEAL TO SELL THE WASHINGTON COMMANDERS FOR BILLIONS: Report. “Dan Snyder’s tenure with the Washington Commanders appears to be over after nearly 30 years. Snyder agreed to sell the Commanders to a group led by Josh Harris, the co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils for $6 billion, Sportico reported Thursday. Snyder and Harris are reportedly hoping to execute a contract in a few days. The Harris group also included billionaire Mitchell Rales and NBA legend Magic Johnson.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: National Public Radio Denies Being National Or Public.