YEP: Kurt Schlichter: All GOP Senators Have to Do Is Not Be Dumb, So We’re in Trouble. Well, dumb and/or bought off.

“LEGITIMATELY EMBARRASSING:” Apparently Jane Pratt Doesn’t Actually Read Books; Does the Staff at New York Magazine? “This isn’t a case of some 19-year-old incompetently summarizing a book they were assigned to read but didn’t in college. It’s an adult woman, an editor and writer, voluntarily participating in this feature and plugging a book she clearly cannot have read. Why she would do that, I really can’t imagine; surely there’s a book that she actually finished that she could recommend? Why do this?”

These people like to think of themselves as smart and intellectual, but it’s basically a pose.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

IT’S A GROWING FIELD: Army creates space career field for enlisted soldiers.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Will Gen Z Reverse the Baby Bust?

MICROBIOME NEWS: Scientists May Have Found a Natural Alternative to Ozempic.

KATY PERRRY CAN’T BELIEVE SHE WASN’T INVITED TO THE CEREMONY: Trump honors space exploration on National Astronaut Day.

RIGGED: Judge Boasberg Keeps Getting Assigned Trump Cases. Lawmakers Want to Know Why.

THIS SHOULD LEAD TO NEW TREATMENTS FAIRLY QUICKLY: Heart Mystery Solved: Scientists Discover Unexpected Source of Cardiac Inflammation. “Researchers have discovered a surprising trigger for heart damage after a heart attack: surviving heart cells near the damaged area become inflamed due to mechanical stress, not immune cells as previously believed. These heart cells rupture and leak DNA, which sparks a damaging immune response. This breakthrough challenges long-held assumptions and offers fresh strategies for preventing heart failure by calming these stressed heart cells and blocking specific inflammatory signals.”

A UNIFIED THEORY OF TRUMP TROLLING:

Yesterday, in my Sunday Smiles essay, I mused about Trump’s “own the libs” style of trolling.

It drives the liberals nuts, which can be very entertaining to watch, but I think a lot of MAGA converts who were initially reluctant to support Trump for cultural reasons are made extremely uncomfortable by his constantly trolling liberals. . . .

What’s the point, they wonder. Is it presidential? Doesn’t Trump have more important things to do? Is it unnecessarily provocative?

Obviously, what set off my musings was the recent controversy about Trump’s tweet in which he put up an AI-generated image of himself in Papal garb. Liberals went insane. Again.

A year or two ago, these same people applauded when the FBI labeled traditional Catholics “domestic terrorists,” regularly call priests pedophiles (I could write essay after essay about the fact that government-employed public school teachers abuse more children in any given year than priests did in 70 years and liberals work assiduously to prevent kids escaping the public schools), and bash the Church due to its pro-natalism and anti-gender-ideology stances.

But whatever. . . . Trump’s greatest allies are his opposition, who overreact to everything he does and go to ridiculous extremes because he violates the norms they claim (and often do) hold so dear. Liberals will go to the mat to defend wife-beating, human-trafficking MS-13 members rather than agree with Trump on anything, and that reveals them to be insane. . . . Trolling the liberals keeps his base excited, not so much because they love the trolls–some do, some don’t–but we can all unify in defending Trump against the insane attacks. The hypocrisy of the left keeps getting exposed, and the trolling Trump does keep the liberals in a perpetual state of lighting their hair on fire.

Also, it’s funny. And it’s not just about firing up the base. The left has ruled through an unjustified sense of entitlements, and an unearned moral and intellectual deference. Treating them like Groucho treated Margaret Dumont is a very effective way of undermining those characteristics, and of demoralizing the left. He’s constantly hitting them with some variant of Cousin Vinnie’s “You was serious about that?” leavened with doses of “Everything that guy just said is bullshit.”

And you know, he’s loud, he’s uncouth, but everyone is always rooting for Cousin Vinnie.

BECAUSE THEY’RE LYING POLITICIZED HACKS? Mark Judge: Why NPR Refuses to Have Me on the Air.

BIG BULLETS: Ammo: 8.6 Blackout Review. “Unlike .300 BLK and 338 ARC ammunition, which are designed to work with a rifling-twist rate of 1:8-inch, the 8.6 BLK uses a rifling-twist rate of 1:3-inch. This is an incredibly fast twist rate, but what’s it for? Well, it helps better stabilize bullets that are about the size of your little finger, but it also significantly enhances terminal performance.”

SPACE: We finally know a little more about Amazon’s super-secret satellites: Amazon’s Kuiper satellites look nothing like SpaceX’s Starlink. “The employment history of Amazon’s head of Project Kuiper, Rajeev Badyal, makes it all the more compelling to compare the two companies’ designs. Badyal was SpaceX’s vice president of satellites until he was fired by Elon Musk in 2018, reportedly because Musk wanted to move faster with Starlink.” And it seems like Elon was right.

Also, SpaceX is radically transparent.

MY CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR TAUGHT US THIS IN COLLEGE: Study finds flourishing doesn’t always mean happiness.

ILYA SHAPIRO DEBATES Campus Deportations.

FIRST “MAN COLDS,” NOW THIS: High blood pressure, diabetes deadlier in men.

SPINES ARE STIFFENING THROUGHOUT HIGHER EDUCATION: NYU Demands Law Students Renounce Protests Or Be Barred From Final Exams.

A PRIVILEGED CLASS IN A PRIVILEGED SECTOR: You Won’t Believe the Tax Breaks for Professors. “Perhaps the sweetest perks Stanford and other elite universities provide are the multimillion-dollar tax-free housing and tuition stipends they lavish on faculty, staff and their children. They’re tax giveaways most Americans don’t get to enjoy, though they effectively cover the cost. It’s long past time to close these tax loopholes. The exact benefits universities provide to staff and their children vary but are consistently extravagant. Schools such as Columbia pay a significant portion of K-12 private school tuition for professors and senior administrators, often covering about 50% of tuition costs—which can run upward of $65,000 a year at New York’s top private schools. … The problem is that because these gifts are all exempt from income tax, taxpayers foot the bill.”

While the recipients attack “the rich” and private schooling — and tax cuts.

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH:

Speaker Mike Johnson and the House GOP should be embarrassed, there is a 20 year old kid named Big Balls working circles around them.

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) May 4, 2025

And I continue to be disappointed. https://t.co/j7jQ6OEJq3

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) May 5, 2025

HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO!

Happy Cinco de Mayo! pic.twitter.com/CGY5uJC8NI

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) May 5, 2025

THE “RADICAL THEORIES” THAT LITERALLY EVERYONE ON THE PLANET BELIEVED UNTIL FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO: Professor: TRUMP is the one who promotes radical theory regarding sex, gender.

ICYMI: MONEY LAUNDERING AND INFLUENCE PEDDLING: Qatar and China Are Pouring Billions Into Elite American Universities. American universities should be encouraged to be actual universities, by banning foreign funds and limiting the number of foreign students.

CHANGE: Trump Has Big Plans for Notorious Alcatraz Prison—’This Will Be a Huge Win!’

MY ADVICE: Don’t take advice on guns from the New York Times’ “Ethicist.”

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Some Personal Reflections on the Recent Litigation involving Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. “Looking back, this paper is not so much about Section 3 of Amendment XIV and recent ballot-access Trump-related litigation. Rather, it is more about the decline in civility and aspirational standards within the polity, the courts, and legal academia.”

From the conclusion: “It is said that at the negotiations at Appomattox Courthouse—Lee and Grant were both frank and civil during the course of discussing the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Afterwards, Grant sent food to Lee to feed his (and, then, their) nation’s former enemy soldiers. Celebrations for Grant’s soldiers came only later—not while Lee’s soldiers remained present. Again, in ending active hostilities, the first step towards national reconciliation was frank and civil discourse. I do not think our present and future is or will be as difficult as was Grant and Lee’s. But we too have to think about national reconciliation. It seems to me that the first steps in that direction involve frank and civil discussion, absent hyperbole, and absent name calling. If federal judges, state judges, and legal academics are not up to that task, then that is just another institutional and cultural problem crying out for reform and renewal. Likewise, our domestic law schools are supported by taxes, tuition, and donations. If universities and academics only further burden American society by casting aside our free speech traditions and actively engage in just another front in our culture wars, then wider society might very well choose to withhold support. Perhaps this process has already begun?”

I had some related thoughts on war and reconciliation here.

(First link had a typo, now fixed. — Charlie)