BUT THEY ALL PRETENDED HE WAS COMPETENT UNTIL THEY COULDN’T ANYMORE: “Joe Biden drops ice cream and calls Ukraine ‘Iraq’ on secret Harvard visit. A talk by the former president at the university in Donald Trump’s crosshairs was ‘marked by gaffes,’ a student newspaper said.”

IT’S CALLED ANARCHO-TYRANNY: When Government Is Endlessly Intrusive and Omnipresent, and Also Not There At All.

See the alley between the Yoshinoya and the pharmacy? As I drove by on Wilshire, two extremely alert LAPD officers on motorcycles were sitting at the edge of that parking lot, postures tight and poised for action, urgently scanning the street. It was like watching a gunfighter movie, in the scene when the camera closes in on the gunfighter’s eyes, watching his opponent for the draw. These dudes were ready. If you did 38 in the 30 MPH zone, then brother, you were dead-ass done, nailed up in the trophy case.

Also, no more than thirty feet away from them, a little gaggle of filthy human zombies was passing a glass pipe around the circle, throwing up clouds of smoke, at the top end of an alley wall-to-wall full of open drug use and not terribly subtle drug dealing (and probably the prostitution that pays for the drugs, but I didn’t wander into the alley to look). But California made the possession and use of heroin, meth, and cocaine a misdemeanor, and the DA at the time was very proud that he wouldn’t allow his office to file most misdemeanor cases, because misdemeanors are lifestyle crimes that punish people for being poor, or for being “individuals experiencing homelessness.” So that alley full of people Hunter Bidening all day out in the open weren’t doing anything that could lead to prosecution, but your expired registration tags would bring down an immediate police response in you happened to roll by them.

The registration tag is a sign of submission. Those must be kept up to date.

ROGER SIMON: Online Attention Competition Distorts Reality: Not just the legacy media has lost their minds.

“RULE OF LAW:”

A number of judges have seemingly adopted a constitutional meta-principle: what a past President did, President Trump may not undo https://t.co/UlEWsVJxag

— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) April 18, 2025

The trick he’s playing here is to pretend that the left hasn’t already violated these norms and set these precedents

The left is well past the Rubicon but is gaslighting the right for even approaching it https://t.co/BalT782mxY

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) April 19, 2025

I mean, wouldn’t it at least be a bit embarrassing to have those “principles” turn on and off every four years?

— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) April 19, 2025

The problem is that our system has a crisis of legitimacy.

ex-President Applesauce illegally and deliberately imported somewhere between 10mm and 20mm illegal aliens into the USA and illegally provided them with tax dollars you and I earned on the sweat of our brows.

All of…

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) April 19, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Party on, dudes and dudettes.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Moon, Mars — China leads to both.

WELL, GOOD: Up to 13% of Dementia Cases May Actually Be a Misdiagnosed Treatable Condition.

Years ago, my doc told me that she had an old woman in whose family thought she was demented. She looked in the woman’s ears and they were jam-packed with wax. 45 minutes of wax removal later (“you wouldn’t believe that all that would fit in there!”) and she was perfectly lucid.

JUSTICE: A THREAD.

2/ Link: https://t.co/71Rglc1qlT Comments to follow.

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) April 19, 2025

ALIENS: Dark, Pitted, and Possibly Alien: The Skull Hill Rock That Has Scientists Stumped.

GRAFT, CENSORSHIP, AND OPPRESSION ALL IN ONE: The Numbers Behind The Government’s Anti-Misinformation Explosion: The Free Press finds that the Biden administration awarded more than 600 grants.

AS PREDICTED: VW Holding Prices Steady Despite Tariffs—For Now.

SPYING: Sen. Rand Paul Seeks Answers Regarding Secret ATF Surveillance Program.

LUCY: NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is speeding toward another close encounter with an asteroid.

IT DOES SEEM THAT WAY:

Remember, Democrats will always side with a wife beating gang member over you https://t.co/cslaML3DGv

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) April 18, 2025

NEXT WE’LL FIND OUT THEY ARE ACTUALLY A NATURAL PHENOMENON: Microplastics discovered in caddisfly casings from the 1970s suggest long-term contamination.

WELL, GOOD: Research identifies key enzyme target to fight deadly brain cancers.

SOON EVERYONE WILL BE SKINNY, AND BEING SKINNY WON’T BE NEARLY AS COOL: Eli Lilly finds its weight-loss pill works just as well as Ozempic — and investors are loving it. “The data showed that the once-daily pill reduced patients’ weight by an average of 16 pounds, or about 8% of their body weight, and lowered their A1C, a blood-sugar measure, by an average of 1.3% to 1.6%. The pill form is in line with injectable GLP-1 drugs, like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, a diabetes drug also used for weight loss.”

THERE SHOULD BE SHARP LIMITS ON INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ENROLLMENTS IN GENERAL: Feds warn Harvard may lose ability to enroll international students.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY: University of Austin’s ‘Merit-First Admissions’ automatically admits students based on test scores.

THAT’S WHO THEY ARE, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: The Failure of the Expert Class. . .Again.

The problem with the expert class isn’t so much that they override the will of the people, it’s that they face no consequences for being wrong.

Flashback: The Suicide of Expertise.

By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”

Then there’s the problem that, somehow, over the past half-century or so the educated classes that make up the “expert” demographic seem to have been doing pretty well, even as so many ordinary folks, in America and throughout the West, have seen their fortunes decaying. Is it any surprise that claims to authority in the form of “expertise” don’t carry the same weight that they once did?

Truer every day.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP:

Remember that time Barack Hussein Obama blamed the Benghazi embassy attacks on a random guy who made a YouTube video that nobody had ever seen and immediately threw him in jail and that was just fine? https://t.co/9ifadpa97p

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) April 18, 2025

PRESCIENT:

Every so often I revisit this tweet. No reason. No reason at all. Though I don't think you cudgel is what you do with shards. Oh, well. https://t.co/CZRAlyrbRQ

— Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) April 18, 2025

SO IT WOULD APPEAR: Is Canada Brain-Dead?

Though when a country seems stupid, it’s usually a sign of tight media control by the rulers.

MATT TAIBBI: The Harvard-Government Divorce is the Feel-Good Story of the Ages: When a couple that should never have been together finally breaks up, it’s a happy thing.

Less convincing were commenters like historian Joan Scott, who said Trump’s actions were “unheard of” and “even during the McCarthy period in the United States, this was not done.” Coverage consistently ignored the fact that Columbia has been a poster child for decades-long assault by most all universities on academic freedom, as well as a serial violator of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which requires that public funds not be spent “in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial [color or national origin] discrimination.”

It would be nice if the NYCLU acknowledged that Columbia’s record is replete with moronic civil liberties offenses. It’s deplatformed with gusto, allowed or encouraged “heckler’s veto” shutdowns of events, and institutionalized compelled-speech “diversity statements” as part of its admissions process (including instructions on what to write, like “When did your privilege result in different treatment than others?”). It has the same problems with the use of race in admissions that Harvard tried to defend and lost at the Supreme Court, and its DEI programs still infect the curriculum with iron race doctrine. The School of Social Work to this day proudly waving the banner of the “PROP or “Power, Race, Oppression, and Privilege” framework,” which makes the department’s “guiding principle” the idea that “anti-Black racism and white supremacy are endemic in our systems and institutions.”

Speech codes are issued in a variety of forms. A Barnard circular even missed the irony of a George Carlin routine, announcing “the following words cannot appear on any posted information at Barnard: shit, piss, suck, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, cocksucker and tits.” These practices and more led to Columbia in 2022 being named the worst campus in the country for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), getting the country’s sole “abysmal” rating. Ironically, Harvard would soon earn a worse review.

After October 7th, 2023, in a heated and difficult situation, the school made bad decisions. A lot of schools responded to this situation in ways less than ordeal (Cooper Union administrators won themselves a fat Title VI suit after a horrific “Jewish students locked in a library” ordeal), and Columbia seemed to admit to such issues in its early communications. Unfortunately, both parties want to blur lines: the Trump administration seems anxious to define some things that are clearly legal protests as antisemitism and/or discrimination, while schools like Columbia are content to acknowledge “legitimate concerns” without specifying where it crossed a line.

“Part of the problem is that it’s to everybody’s advantage, or they believe it’s to their advantage, to not be specific about problems they’re seeing, or to nix things that could actually be Title VI violations,” says FIRE attorney Robert Shipley.

The Trump administration would have been right to simply demand that Columbia cut the recent shit (and all the other shit). These things are usually resolved on the sly. As Shipley’s colleague Tyler Coward noted, “Historically no higher ed institution has ever lost all its federal funding, which is the consequence for violating Title VI.” But Trump is a different animal. He’s dragging these dramas in the open, making the Ivies dance for their federal crumbs in the most humiliating conceivable manner, like Joe Pesci shooting at the feet of Michael “No, I thought you said, ‘I’m alright Spider’” Imperioli in Goodfellas.

Read the whole thing.

DON SURBER: Did Katy Perry just kill feminism? “The 6 celebrities followed Freedom 7’s course? So what? You can retrace the route of the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria but that doesn’t make you Christopher Columbus.”

The Internet mockery has been extreme:

But efforts at stolen astronaut glamour notwithstanding, the real achievement is in fact that space travel has progressed to the point where you don’t have to be Alan Shepherd or John Glenn to fly in space: You can just be a passenger. Kind of like it’s a sign that air travel has advanced that you don’t have to be Charles Lindbergh to fly across the Atlantic.

These women flew in space because they’re famous. Alan Shepherd was famous because he flew in space. It’s not the same, but that’s okay.