THE NEW SPACE RACE: Musk outlines plans to increase Starship launch rate and performance.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
April 7, 2024
USING IMMIGRATION TO HOLD WAGES DOWN:
That chart was a good chart. Biden's immigration surge is making sure it doesn't happen again, though. And our lowest-wage workers had a lot more catching up to do … https://t.co/vhaQKCnEnt
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) April 6, 2024
VITAMIN D UPDATE: Scientists Shed New Light on the Anti-Aging Effect of Vitamin D.
SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: We were very wrong about birds.
PRINTING “YUMMY!” ON THE TIDE PODS WAS A BIT MUCH: Procter & Gamble recalls 8.2 million laundry products for defective packaging.
SHE’S NOT WRONG: ‘Truth doesn’t matter’ at Penn, Amy Wax says.
Notice the difference in the way her criticism of affirmative action has been treated, as compared to others’ expression in support of genocide against Jews.
LOL, “OUTRAGE FROM LEFTISTS.” WHAT ELSE DO THEY HAVE TO OFFER? Kyle Rittenhouse appearance at Western Kentucky University triggers outrage from leftists.
Bottom line is that the left is terrified that the normals might respond to its violence with violence.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW:
As seen from Arizona pic.twitter.com/0kAbSvsvgj
— Rich_Rantz2 (@Rich_Rantz2) April 7, 2024
THAT’S WHO THEY ARE, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: Legacy Media Tries to Suppress Damaging Information. “Rather than dealing with the underlying issue of non-citizens registering to vote, the AP goes on at length about the number of people on social media platforms, primarily Twitter (or ‘X’ if you insist) who use pseudonyms rather than their real names. They heavily imply that this is largely a right-wing phenomenon, despite the fact that there are plenty of anonymous lefties out there posting as well. . . . Keep your eyes open for more of this. It’s part of a much larger pattern. After endlessly accusing Donald Trump and his supporters of trying to steal the 2020 election, the leftist legacy media is laying the groundwork for muddying the waters of the 2024 election in the event that the polls prove to be accurate and Joe Biden manages to lose. The closer we get to November, the more of this you are likely to see.”
The legacy media has declined from trying to persuade people who disagree, to trying to intimidate people who disagree, to simply trying to give their own people some excuse to stay on the plantation.
ROGER KIMBALL: Navigating the Vibe Shift of a Cultural Reckoning.
LOL, NOT LIKELY: VP Kamala Harris: Biden Administration Will Lower Your Energy Bill, “You’re Welcome.”
Related: Kamala Harris is all cutesy coyness as she purports to enlighten us and is so wrong it’s hard even to figure out what she thought she was trying to say. “I’d say the problem is that Harris was given a talking point that she didn’t understand. She didn’t even understand her lack of understanding well enough to realize she needed to memorize the precise talking point and not reword it with embellishments. Getting basketball wrong is embarrassing but harmless, but this display of the Vice Presidents mental capacity and self-awareness is a warning that extends beyond basketball.”
SUICIDE MISSION: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane.
WHEN YOU’RE ON THE CCP PAYROLL, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SUPPORT ITS INTERNAL OPPOSITION: The Biden Administration Turns Its Back on Hong Kong.
FAFO, VANDERBILT PROTEST EDITION. “A university spokeswoman said Vanderbilt couldn’t share how many students are facing expulsion or suspension related to the incident at Kirkland Hall, where students pushed past a community service officer to enter the administration building as part of a sit-in protest. But in an update to students and staff on Friday, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs C. Cybele Raver said after a thorough review of the incident, including examination of evidence and interviews with students, administrators issued a range of findings and sanctions, including disciplinary probation as well as suspension and expulsion.”
Related: “WSMV reports that there were three expulsions and one suspension when the protest turned violent.
Busted by Community Notes:
I'm Jack Petocz, a 19 y/o activist that's been fighting for marginalized people for years.
Yesterday, I was expelled from Vanderbilt University for peacefully protesting the genocide in Palestine.
Vanderbilt will let sexual assaulters walk free, but expel passionate organizers.
— Jack Petocz (@Jack_Petocz) April 6, 2024
Flashback: Father Hesburgh and Notre Dame in 1968.
CHRISTINE ROSEN: The Elite War On The American Middle Class: And How To End It.
Consider the recent cultural and political shifts experienced by the typical middle-class American, shifts dramatic enough to be experienced as whiplash by many of its members. During the Covid pandemic, for example, the majority in the middle was told to listen to elite experts and follow the dictates of the institutions those elites controlled. Most did. But as those same elites mandated harmful business and school closures (while conveniently ignoring such restrictions on their own behavior by dining at the French Laundry, as Governor Gavin Newsom did, or sending their children to private schools that remained open), middle-class Americans watched their children’s educational and emotional well-being suffer as the public schools they attended remained shuttered.
The arbiters of culture increasingly ignore the middle to focus instead on minority groups of every stripe (the smaller and more bizarre the better), or on the tribulations of the luxury consumer. When given attention at all, the middle is treated as a bunch of exotic weirdos, despite still being the majority. Cultural products consumed by the middle—their favorite comedians, music, and television shows—often get only grudging or glancing attention from elite media. Increasingly, television shows depict the very wealthy (Succession, The White Lotus) or the poor or working-class (Dopesick, Maid) more than they do the lives of people in the middle. . . .
Rather than be catered to by the elites who seek to make their living off their tastes and wants, the middle class is more likely to hear the elite talk about it as a problem: Middle-class Americans are racist, they complain too much about how expensive everything has become, and they won’t get on board either with the left’s social-engineering schemes or the populist right’s rage-driven apocalypticism.
They are told that “no human is illegal” and that their concerns about an open border are evidence of their own bigotry. They see the poor and other designated “oppressed” receive sympathetic elite attention and government subsidies and programs, and services aimed at helping them. The elite champion the rights of criminals, illegal immigrants, and destructive Black Lives Matter activists who want to dismantle the police. They tell the rest of the country that they must call the homeless the “unhoused” and ignore any quality-of-life effects from that population’s drug use or instability. When the middle class complains, the elite often chide it for having fallen prey to “misinformation” or excessive “right-wing” media consumption.
The middle class is also frequently reminded that shoplifting is a victimless crime even as they see prices rise and goods placed behind locked cabinets—or, in many cases, entire stores shuttered after being scavenged for too long by thieves who go unpunished. In January, after coordinated groups of pro-Palestinian protesters shut down traffic to tunnels and bridges in Manhattan, disrupting the lives of millions of New Yorkers, the New York Post noted how many of the protesters were students at elite colleges such as Yale and Brown, whose activities were being lavishly funded by “the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation” as well as “a Rockefeller family foundation.”
On the rare occasions when such protesters are arrested, they are immediately released and often valorized for their law-breaking, as Black Lives Matter protesters were in the summer of 2020 by soon-to-be–Vice President Kamala Harris. She urged the public to donate to the pro-decarceration Minnesota Bail Fund to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” many of whom had committed arson, property crimes, and assault; the same fund later secured the release of a man who then murdered someone. As Matthew Crawford observed of these young radicals, many the children of privilege, who have become full-time protesters: “At bottom, we see a refusal of the ruling class to take responsibility for its rule, preferring to [role-play] at the barricades.”
Read the whole thing.
April 6, 2024
I THINK WE ALL KNOW: Why is DOJ Slow-Walking the Case Against a Would-Be Trans Assassin? “It’s not hard to imagine the Biden Justice Department being reluctant to bang the gavel and lay a harsh sentence on someone identifying as transgender in the middle of an election. That’s particularly true if the offender was objecting to Roe being overturned while Biden is running on an ‘abortion rights’ platform.”
OPEN THREAD: Party on, dudes and dudettes.