SCIENCE: Texas Attorney General launches investigation into companies illegally marketing toothpaste. “The investigation was launched amid a growing body of scientific evidence demonstrating that excessive fluoride exposure is not safe for children. For example, in August 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Toxicology Program released a meta-analysis that found a statistically significant association between fluoride exposure and lower IQ scores in children. The CDC states that parents should only put a rice-sized “smear” of toothpaste on the brush until the child turns three years old. . . .However, despite both these and additional guidelines, toothpaste manufacturers continue to flavor their products and deceptively market them in ways that encourage kids to ingest fluoride toothpaste and mislead their parents to use far more than the safe and recommended amount of fluoride toothpaste.”
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
May 2, 2025
100 DAYS AND TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE GLOATING: Michael Walsh writes: “Stock market up big, inflation down, jobs good, NPR defunded, Poison Ivy rackets soon to be stripped of their tax exemptions, China reeling from tariffs. What’s not to like?”
I bet CNN hated reporting this. https://t.co/BPCJc22x9A
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) May 2, 2025
Lots more work to do, though. But good news. Still, beware:
If societal calamities which cam be exploited for political gamesmanship do not materialize organically, the progressive cult and the social apparatus it controls will manufacture calamities, and the nation will suffer for it.
Never underestimate their ambition.
— Thymirus (@thymirus) May 2, 2025
I RECOMMEND A CAN OPENER, TOO:
Experts name five things to survive a grid collapse
1. Cash;
2. AM radio
3. Canned food
4. Candles
5. Spare batteriesThe farmer in Leyte is in many respects better prepared than the advanced Westhttps://t.co/wwVMvrt2Si
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) May 1, 2025
Also guns and ammo.
FIGHT THE POWER: Minnesota Gun Owners Take Aim At Taxpayer-Funded Anti-Gun Activism.
NOW OUT FROM KURT SCHLICHTER & IRINA MOISES: Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip. A departure from Kurt’s earlier work, though there are still guns. With silver bullets. Kinda more Larry Correia-ish and that’s a compliment. I enjoyed it, and it’s a real page-turner.
DELICIOUS: Eating Harvard’s Lunch.
“DEMOCRACY:” German Intelligence Officially Designates AfD an ‘Extremist Organization’ That Threatens Democracy. In Germany and elsewhere, the grifters in charge are pulling out all the stops to retain power.
Europe needs some revolutions. Hopefully not bloody, but revolutions one way or another.
FINALLY: Trump makes first judicial nomination since returning to White House. “The nomination was the first of what is expected to be more than 100 nominations Trump could make over the next four years to the federal courts, helping further put his conservative stamp on a judiciary that to his frustration has stymied key parts of his immigration and cost-cutting agenda.”
Congress needs to increase the size of the judiciary, and the Supreme Court, as soon as possible. It’s a nonpartisan project with bipartisan support!
The National Judicial Council just recommended adding 66 District Judges and two Court of Appeals judges to remedy the “crisis of undermanned federal courts.” Republicans should do at least that, though I would add at least two new Court of Appeals judges to each circuit. And I might increase the number of district judges appointed to the District for the District of Columbia, and perhaps the Southern District of New York, beyond the Council’s recommendations on the ground that those districts seem to be getting busier.
This wouldn’t be court-packing, since it’s simply following the recommendations of a non-partisan commission. (And in truth, it’s been widely agreed for many years that the federal courts are understaffed).
Now for the Supreme Court. Again, no partisan court-packing. Instead, in a spirit of bipartisanship, the GOP should enact the Democrats’ bill from 2021, which would have expanded the Supreme Court from 9 to 13. Although perhaps, in a spirit of generosity, they might increase the number to 15.
Yes. We must be generous.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE:
Second Amendment issues are civil rights issues. https://t.co/SQixK0ZO6S
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@HarmeetKDhillon) May 2, 2025
LIKE DRUDGE IF HE WERE STILL RELEVANT: White House introduces White House Wire.
TRUE. WE NEED MORE ACTION FROM CONGRESS, THOUGH: Trump and His Team Win When They Lead From the Front.
PEAK WASHED-UP HIPPIE CRINGE SO FAR. Neil Young Slammed For New Anti-Tesla Song: ‘Peak Washed-Up Hippie Cringe.’
PEOPLE SAY THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WORK, BUT IT WORKS FINE AS A MONEY LAUNDRY FOR THE CONNECTED: Elon Musk and the DOGE Team Do Group Interview – What Big Balls Has Uncovered Will Infuriate You.
An accountant friend comments on Facebook: “If you’ve not yet watched yesterday’s FoxNews DOGE bros interview, it’s really a must. DOGE has unconvered just ASTOUNDING levels of incompetence in our federal government. In fact, incompetence doesn’t even begin to reach it. Rather it seems very much to be a system that was intentionally set up without, or more likely robbed of, even basic internal controls so that TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS of money could be spent in ways that are completely unaubitable and therefore unaccountable.”
This isn’t by accident. It’s by design, to facilitate stealing.
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS NOT HAPPY, BUT I’M OKAY WITH IT: The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive. “I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture — an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo.” It’s awfully long, and there’s a lot of blather, but there are some interesting nuggets.
Including this on college: “The thing I’ve thought long and hard about — and what I saw when I was a lecturer at UCI — there’s been this severing of a continuity between the past and the present, and I think it’s an intentional severing. These kids, they’re not well read. They don’t really know anything. I spent half of my classes just teaching Wikipedia-tier history just so we can have enough context to have the conversation about the actual stuff we’re talking about.”
WELL, HE HOLDS ALL THE CARDS, AND THE MONEY: Trump Is Likely to Win His Fight with Universities. “Critics of higher education over recent decades will not have much sympathy for Harvard and similarly situated universities in this contest. Beginning in the 1970s, liberal activists discovered that they could use the threat of withdrawn federal funds to induce colleges to reform their faculties by hiring feminists, blacks, environmental activists, and others associated with progressive causes—all for the purpose of promoting “diversity” on campus. Trump has now turned the tables by using these same tactics against them in a campaign to reform the universities from a different direction. As to Trump’s wish to lift Harvard’s tax exemption, he is merely citing a Supreme Court precedent (Bob Jones University v. United States, 1983) created by civil rights activists when they sought to withdraw that school’s tax status because of its racially discriminatory policies. Large research universities are vulnerable to these threats because they are highly dependent on federal funding to sustain their complex scientific and medical establishments. All told, the federal government sent more than $60 billion to colleges and universities in 2023 for research and development alone, most of it in grants and contracts from the National Institutes for Health, the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Health and Human Services.”
May 1, 2025
OPEN THREAD: Make me proud.