HOW TO MAINTAIN YOUR GENERATOR.

BIG TALK FROM AN ADMINISTRATION THAT’S STILL FUNDING GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH: White House announces global partnership to prevent future pandemics.

DO TELL: Generally even if they say otherwise.

HEY, IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE:

Oops: Columbia University President Accidentally Gives Nazi Salute When Being Sworn In For Congressional Testimony https://t.co/Ipfeoua8js pic.twitter.com/nXrPBHZXRl

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

STANDING UP AGAINST TYRANNY: Court overrules attempted shutdown of Brussels conservative conference following legal challenge: A conference on National Conservatism is proceeding today in Brussels after a Belgian court ruled in the event’s favour against a police shutdown ordered by the local mayor, in what has been hailed as a “victory for free speech”.

THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE BUBBLE DEFLATES: Poll: Americans Are Less Interested in Buying an EV Than in 2023.

SPACE JUNK, BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA: Yes, a chunk of the space station crashed into a house in Florida: NASA confirmed the origins of the orbital junk that left a homeowner shaken ‘in disbelief.’

SIMULATION: NASA chooses 4 crew members for next Mars mission simulation.

MY BLOOD PRESSURE IS GOOD, AND I DON’T HAVE ANY UTERINE FIBROIDS. QED. Controlling blood pressure could prevent uterine fibroids.

OUCH:

Orwell didn't quite predict the UGGs, but he foresaw the rest of it: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy."

— Erich M. Schwarz (@ErichMSchwarz) April 17, 2024

I REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE WORKED TO KEEP THE WOLF FROM THE DOOR, NOT TO IMPORT HIM: Latest in European Farmers Protests: Swiss Ranchers Dumping Dead Sheep Challenging Protected Status of Wolves.

SO I FIGURE FOR THAT KIND OF MONEY I SHOULD GET A TEACHER WHO CAN USE AN APOSTROPHE CORRECTLY:

I DON’T THINK THEY HELP MUCH: Is It OK for Internists to Wear Masks Forever? “If you can’t believe we are still talking about this, that is sort of the point of the post.”

My internist managed to give me the flu while wearing an N95 mask. He looked awful, sat in the corner, and talked to me while a PA did the actual touching parts. I thought maybe he had cancer or something, but it turned out he had the flu. And a couple of days later so did I. Not a massive double-blind study, but it doesn’t inspire confidence. First time I got the actual full-blown flu in like a decade.

THE EMPEROR’S NAKEDNESS IS BECOMING MORE OBVIOUS: Politico: Let’s Face It, Biden Has No Strategy on Iran.

Flashback: Time for Consequences: The “Cabal” who bragged about rigging the 2020 election stuck us with an incapable president at a time of crisis. Examples need to be made.

DON SURBER: The Lynching of a President: Trump has them singing the Star-Spangled Banner in Harlem.

Related: Trump’s Perfect Jab in the Eye to Alvin Bragg During a Bodega Visit.

Trump went to Harlem to speak to Maad Ahmed and small business advocate Francisco Marte at the Sanaa Convenient Store, formerly known as the Blue Convenient Store. This is the bodega where a clerk, Jose Alba, stabbed an ex-con to death in self-defense two years ago. The case became national news because Alba was charged with murder.

It was D.A. Alvin Bragg who decided to charge Jose with murder though Austin Simon, a 35-year-old ex-con, was caught on camera cornering Alba, 61, in a fight over chips. Simon’s girlfriend, Tina Lee, stabbed Alba during the chaos.

Jose was charged with second-degree murder and spent about a week in jail before prosecutors in Alvin Bragg’s office agreed to lower his $250,000 bail. The charges were eventually dropped, thanks to the pressure from the public who were outraged. Jose was so traumatized by the whole experience that he returned to the Dominican Republic, where he remains today.

Ahmed and Marte are supporting Donald Trump for president. They have had enough, as other small business owners have. Local government in New York City is allowing crime to run rampant and bodegas are robbed regularly. His message to Trump, he said, was to be that the city is not safe. . . .

The visit to the bodega after spending all day in court was classic Trump on the campaign trail. Mingling with ordinary working people is his superpower. Joe Biden was campaigning in Scranton, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. He made a campaign speech before screened supporters and then went to a training facility of some sort and delivered some remarks.

Of course the city isn’t safe. The only people Bragg will prosecute are those who aren’t criminals.

BOYCOTT, DIVEST, SANCTION: This group keeps fighting for universities to divest from China.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: UCSD students hold ‘Vigil for Palestine’ to ‘Honor Our Martyrs.’

JOHN HINDERAKER: Iran, Israel, and Joe Biden.

I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THE “EXPERTS” TOLD US MISSILE DEFENSE WAS IMPOSSIBLE:

Then vs now.

1990: experts all agree missile defense will never work.

2024: why doesn't the Fleet defend every country on earth like it did Israel? Seems effortless.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) April 17, 2024

I checked Kosta Tsipis’ math back then and it obviously didn’t work, despite him being an MIT physicist.

Related: Why so many of us were wrong about missile defense. “I think the really interesting part of this story is that almost everything the Iranians threw at Israel was intercepted. Drones are slow-moving and easy to shoot down, but ballistic missiles are fast-moving and generally very hard to hit. Yet Israel’s Arrow system, jointly developed with the U.S., had little trouble knocking most of Iran’s ballistic missiles out of the sky — with some interceptions even occurring outside of Earth’s atmosphere. That’s pretty interesting, because for most of my adult life, I believed that ballistic missile defense was a hopeless, failed cause. From the 2000s all the way through the 2010s, I read lots of op-eds about how kinetic interceptors — ‘hitting a bullet with a bullet’ were just an unworkably difficult technology, and how the U.S. shouldn’t waste our time and money on developing this sort of system.”

They were saying this in the 1980s. Missile defense was obviously stupid and unworkable because that dunce, Reagan, had endorsed it. The experts knew better.

STONEWALLING: Nashville Police Say ‘Ongoing Investigation’ Prevents Release Of Covenant Shooter’s Manifesto.

DOES THIS COUNT AS MATERIAL SUPPORT TO TERRORISTS? Dark Money Group Funding Hamas Protests. Not that the Biden Justice Department would prosecute these people for that, or for anything else.

#JOURNALISM: Matt Taibbi: New York Times, NPR Bury the Lede in Defense of Katherine Maher. “It’s true Maher was not working in journalism when she posted the controversial messages. In fact, she’s never worked in journalism, which is very obviously the bigger problem when examining someone’s fitness to run a public news network with over 1000 member stations. Maher’s been a WEF global leader, board member at Signal, banking manager at HSBC, a member of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board (FAPB) at the State Department, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project — pretty much everything but a journalist. The closest thing to a journalism job Maher held was chief communications officer at Wikimedia. In newsrooms such people are called flacks.”

Related: NPR’s queen of the Karens.

It would be impossible to create a resume of a person more disconnected from Americans and more intertwined with the wealthy, urban, globalist elite who run the largest banks, media companies, and nonprofit groups in the United States. In other words, Maher has the perfect resume to run NPR.

And her tweets prove she is the perfect person for the job.

She’s a vegetarian. She hates cars. And white men flying on planes. She supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes “America is addicted to white supremacy.”

She doesn’t want to become a mother because “the planet is literally burning.” She uses phrases such as “CIS white mobility privilege” unironically. She admits to growing up “feeling superior … because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves.” I wonder what fuels her sense of superiority now.

As completely out of touch as Maher’s views are with the rest of America, the scary part is how willing she is to use her ample power to snuff out dissenting voices.

I’m surprised that red state legislators and governors allow their public universities to fund NPR by buying its hate-filled programming.

THAT’S WHAT ENDED THE ROMAN REPUBLIC, TOO: Roger Kimball: The Trump trial is a precursor to how a republic ends. Not with a bang, but a perversion of the law. “Since the trial is in New York, Judge Merchan will have a reliably anti-Trump jury pool to draw upon, and the circus of the trial is sure to feature lots of histrionics.”

Plus: “Admiral Yamamoto is said to have opined that America could never be successfully invaded because ‘behind every blade of grass’ there was a gun. A well-armed populace is indeed a bulwark against state tyranny. But Yamamoto neglected to consider the possibility that a weaponized one-party state could cow and intimidate the populace to such an extent that its tyranny became a matter of a carefully choreographed takeover of all the institutions of cultural legitimation. That would seem to be the real meaning of the experience we are even now undergoing.”

OPEN THREAD: D-Dooh Yeah. When this video came out, Edie Brickell looked exactly like my sister, except that my sister has blue eyes. I haven’t seen Edie lately, so I don’t know if the resemblance still holds.

SPACE: Unforgiving Failures: the challenges of upper stages.