I REMEMBER WHEN . . . OH, HELL, YOU KNOW THE REST: Existing high blood pressure drugs may prevent epilepsy, study finds.

THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: Fisker is out of cash, not making cars, and filing for bankruptcy.

WE’VE ONLY GOT A FEW MONTHS UNTIL THE ELECTION: Experts: Nation needs to prepare for next pandemic, even if it’s not bird flu.

WOEING: Paul Cassell: The Possible Penalties for Boeing’s Crime of Concealing 737 MAX Safety Issues. My letter to the Justice Department lays out the possibilities, including a possible fine of $24,780,000,000.

SCIENCE!

Happy 6 year anniversary to Greta Thunberg saying we'd all be dead in 5 years. pic.twitter.com/B9mPztL5qK

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) June 18, 2024

Well, it’s too late now. No point worrying anymore. Maybe that’s why Chuck Schumer broke out the gas grill?

ALL THE OLD MOVIES WARNED US: Edward Snowden Says OpenAI Just Performed a “Calculated Betrayal of the Rights of Every Person on Earth.”

Plus: “‘I do think that the biggest application of AI is going to be mass population surveillance,’ Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green tweeted, ‘so bringing the former head of the NSA into OpenAI has some solid logic behind it.'”

The governments of the West have, for some reason, been mobilizing for war against their own populations for a while. What do you think that reason is?

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: RFK Jr. is right — paper ballots will restore faith in our elections.

WEATHER HYPE: How a Heat Dome Creates Dangerous, Record-Breaking Temperatures. Basically, the story is about summer temperatures in the nineties:

A heat dome’s high temperatures are uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous to human health. A dome over the Pacific Northwest in 2021 caused an estimated 650 heat-related deaths in the U.S. and Canada. “There is a lot of heat stress on people, on animals, and a lot of potentially dangerous situations,” Oravec said.

Chicago broke its daily record temperature on Monday, hitting 97 degrees Fahrenheit, while forecasters said Pittsburgh is expected to hit three straight days of temperatures of 95 degrees beginning Wednesday. Hartford, Conn., is set to tie record temperatures of 95 Wednesday and 97 on Thursday, while Albany, N.Y., is expected to hit a record high of 97 degrees on Wednesday.

Although New York City isn’t expected to break any records this week, temperatures will be in the low- to mid-90s. The heat index, which is a combination of heat and humidity, could reach up to 105 degrees in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, according to the National Weather Service’s New York office.

Well, okay then, it’ll be hot. In the summer. Stop the presses.

“EDUCATORS” SPREADING HATE-FILLED LIES: Teachers union head: ‘Conservatives don’t even want black children to be able to read.’

DOMESTIC TERRORISM: TERROR?: Anonymous anti-Israel group ‘torched large portions’ of UC Berkeley construction site.

JEFFREY CARTER: Niall Ferguson Is Right. (So Is Mike Solana). “The problem isn’t Americans or America, it’s the elites that are running America.”

WHY IS THE NYT SO ANTI-SCIENCE? NYT Tries to Take Down Georgetown Prof Who Revealed Extent of Defensive Gun Uses.

YEAH, THEY’VE BEEN WORKING ON BUILDING UP THAT EXCUSE FOR A WHILE: Matt Taibbi: We Called It: Karine Jean-Pierre Blames AI “Deepfakes” for Joe Biden’s Real Infirmity. “Last week, Racket showed an intelligence-crafted game blaming AI for suggesting ‘one of the candidates may have dementia.’ Yesterday, Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre played that exact card”

Lol. One of the candidates. Like we don’t know which one.

BTW, Democrats are leaning hard on the “convicted felon” line about Trump, but the only reason there aren’t two of those in this race is that “one of the candidates” was determined to be mentally unsuitable to stand trial. That’s no deepfake.

PLAY STUPID GAMES, WIN STUPID PRIZES: Harvard’s ‘Abysmal’ Year Continues.

All of this might have been enough to convince the people who run Harvard that they needed to make some changes, and, in fairness, they have made a few small ones. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences did away with mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring but replaced them with a service statement that could easily be used to weed out candidates on the same grounds. And it partially adopted institutional neutrality, leaving out a key and currently essential part: that political divestment to get the university to take sides is off the table—National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood saw this coming.

But, despite these small steps, or even because of how small they were, it was reasonable to remain skeptical about whether Harvard had really understood the message. Professor and Dean of Social Science Lawrence D. Bobo has made it eminently clear that it did not get through to him.

Even a flatworm is smart enough to turn away from pain. Obviously Harvard hasn’t felt enough pain yet.

REMEMBER, THE POLICE DON’T PROTECT CITIZENS FROM CRIMINALS, THEY PROTECT CRIMINALS FROM CITIZENS: Good Samaritans beat, tied up Ecuadorean migrant busted in rape of 13-year-old girl at Kissena Park.

Dramatic video and photos obtained by The Post shows the shirtless creep – later identified by police as Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi – cowering on the sidewalk early Tuesday as the angry mob pounds him and calls him out as “a rapist.”

“Where are you going? Where are you going?” a woman is heard screaming in Spanish while clutching his hair. “He’s a rapist. He don’t care.”

Of course, they’re safe from prosecution by Alvin Bragg because they’re non-whites.

LOL, THE CDC: The CDC Admits its Latest Anti-Gun Report is Misleading and Full of Holes.

When they can address infectious diseases in a way that’s not criminally awful, maybe I’ll listen to them on other topics. Maybe.

JIM MEIGS: The Fauci Covid Conspiracy. “We told you so. There’s probably a more polite way to say that, but who cares? We are long past the time for politeness regarding the derelictions of our leadership class when it came to Covid-19. The American public has every reason to be angry. And the small, maligned group of scientists, journalists, and political figures who challenged the wisdom of America’s designated Covid experts deserves an apology. . . . In the absence of hard data, a little overreach on the part of experts might have been forgivable, at least at first. As the pandemic ground on, however, scientists started learning more about the disease, including insights that could help slow transmission and that undermined the case for rigid lockdowns. But the Covid gatekeepers mostly ignored any data that challenged their initial recommendations. They never admitted a mistake and rarely changed course on policy. And when it came to the mystery of Covid’s origin, the scientific community instantly closed ranks. The idea that a bat-related coronavirus might have emerged from a Wuhan China lab devoted to studying bat-related coronaviruses was deemed a far-out right-wing fantasy. In other words, our public health officials, abetted by a politicized media, manufactured an airtight consensus on both Covid science and policy. This consensus was largely immune to scientific evidence or concerns about the real-world impacts of draconian policies.”

Plus: “It takes a lot to shock me, but, after following the lab-leak debate for four years, I continue to be stunned by the duplicity of Anthony Fauci and other leading health officials on this issue. I’ve written column after column about how Fauci and his nominal boss, National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins, joined several key virus researchers in scrambling to distract Congress, the press, and the public from questions about their long-standing links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Indeed, long before most American conservatives had even heard the term ‘lab leak,’ Fauci was denouncing the idea as a nutty conspiracy theory. Today we know there was a conspiracy. But it had nothing to do with a few dissident scientists and journalists asking questions about the origin of the virus. The conspiracy was orchestrated by Fauci and his closest aides. Thanks to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other reporting, we can now see how Fauci strong-armed his fellow scientists to embrace a false consensus on the lab leak. (According to emails later released, even some of the scientists whom Fauci pushed to write the famous 2020 ‘Proximal Origin’ article—which claimed to disprove the lab-leak hypothesis—had doubts about their own paper’s conclusions.) Fauci and his team went on to conceal public records, bamboozle reporters, mislead Congress, and lean on social-media outlets to suppress inconvenient stories—all to cover up their possible complicity in the creation of Covid.”

And none of them has been prosecuted, or even tarred and feathered.

IT’S SATIRE, BUT IS IT?

White House Claims Terrible Economy Is Just A Deepfake https://t.co/uvSmNqWPtc pic.twitter.com/QVhTRSvgFD

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 17, 2024

TRYING TO CORRAL THE PRESS: “”The Biden campaign seems to believe that journalists should stop reporting on polls, rallies, and other tentpoles of traditional presidential races and instead devote their resources to telling Americans that Trump wants to be a dictator, over and over again. If that means ignoring Biden’s missteps and weaknesses, well, the Biden campaign can accept that.”

I’ll bet they can.

Plus: “Hendrickson’s unexamined belief in Biden’s belief in the Constitution makes me want to reverse engineer that sentence I boldfaced: Biden’s failure to support a free and independent press means he does not believe in the Constitution.”

Ya think?

OPEN THREAD: Waiter bring me some more Bacardi’s.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA moon orbiter spots Chinese lander on lunar far side (photo).

IN THE SENSE THAT WE’RE LETTING THEM, YES. Are the Houthis Winning in the Red Sea?

Reminder: We were supporting the Saudis’ war against the Houthis. The usual left wing apparathiks and media people — but I repeat myself — made a lot of noise about that being a human rights violation. (All such concerns about human rights in the Houthi territory were, and are, largely absent.) After the Saudis killed Jamal Khashoggi, who for some reason was friends with a lot of Washington bureaucrats and journalists, the clamor increase. When Biden came in, he called the Saudis a “pariah nation” and now we’re raiding our oil reserves in pre-election desperation and seeing shipping through the Suez Canal cut roughly in half.

JUST UNTIL THE ELECTION: Should We Be Worried About News of New Viruses? Here’s What to Consider.

Damn I’ve gotten cynical. But not without reason.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: RFK Jr. is right — paper ballots will restore faith in our elections.

THE DISCUSSION LOST ME AT “NUTRITIONAL AND HEALTH EQUITY.” Are You Eating Like the Rest of America? How U.S. Diets Have Changed Over 20 Years.