OPEN THREAD: Party on, dudes and dudettes.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX fires up huge Super Heavy booster ahead of 4th Starship test flight (photos, video).

ON THE UPSIDE, A LOT OF THIS IS BECAUSE MEN ARE LIVING LONGER: Scientists Predict Prostate Cancer Cases to Double Within 20 Years.

Be thankful for small mercies: The article talks about “men” and not “people with prostates.”

JOHN HINDERAKER: Rutgers, Rampant Anti-Semitism, and the Democrats. “‘Globalize the intifada’ means that no Jew should ever be able to live in safety, anywhere in the world.”

Plus: “Many liberals try to distance themselves from these pro-Hamas thugs, some of whom are Middle Easterners who never should have been let into the country. But the fact is that the anti-Semitic violence we are now seeing is of a piece with what liberals often do, when they can get away with it. The Democratic Party has been a party of violence for a long time, as this video reminds us. The current anti-Semitic variation is right at home in today’s Democratic Party.”

I HAD MISSED THIS: Anti-Israel ‘Squad’ Rep. Jamaal Bowman trails rival George Latimer by 17 points.

DON’T GET COCKY: HUGE: Democrats Warned Not To Register Young Voters, ‘They’re Going to Vote for Trump.’

FASTER, PLEASE: Clinical trial: First cardiac bioimplants for treatment of myocardial infarction using umbilical cord stem cells.

JOSH BLACKMAN: With the Lemon Test Dead, Can The Establishment Clause Be Unincorporated?

SAFETY: Tennessee Moves Closer to Empowering Teachers with the Right to Carry Firearms for School Defense.

GOOD QUESTION: Which Companies Will License FSD When Tesla FSD is Level 4 Autonomous Driving?

SMALL INJECTIONS OF CAPITAL CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE: Giving eyeglasses to workers in developing countries boosts income.

SCIENCE: NASA to send unmanned drone 2 miles high to study radiation during eclipse.

SPACE: Varda raises $90 million to fuel space manufacturing efforts.

WET FIRECRACKER: No black athletes have taken up NAACP Florida boycott: analysis.

WHY DOES THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA TOLERATE THIS? Student protesters disrupt conservative congressman’s campus speech: ‘You are a criminal’: Protesters at the University of Georgia disrupted a College Republicans and Turning Point USA event featuring Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA).

Best take: “‘They’re just mentally ill people,’ Winkler said of the protesters.”

IT WAS A MOVEMENT IN SEARCH OF FOLLOWERS: Jeffrey Carter: No Labels Fails. “No Labels also failed to understand the underlying currents in American politics. If there is a commonality behind the early Bernie Sanders supporters, the Ron Paul supporters, and the Tea Party movement it is to get big government and big corporate out of their lives. No Labels was for big government. Hence, it didn’t have what we call in the startup community, ‘product-market fit.'”

FIGHT THE POWER: Tim Scott leads black Republicans to court support for Trump amid VP speculation.

Related: No Endorsement: Biden Has Lost Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. “In 2020, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket in the presidential race. During an exclusive interview on Fox and Friends Friday morning, Johnson told host Will Cain that he sees himself as an independent voter. The endorsement of Biden was the first he ever made of a political candidate. Cain asked Johnson if he was happy about that endorsement now and with the current state of culture in America. He said no.”

UPDATE: Internet is Annoyed With Charlamagne Tha God’s Candace-Owens-Sounding Anti-DEI Rant.

IS YALE LAW SUDDENLY GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT ITS MISSION? Does Yale’s Hiring Of Garrett West Signal That Incentives On Campuses Are Changing For The Better? “After being demoted to the 6th best law school in the country last year by USNEWS.COM, things seem to be changing! Jokes aside, Mr. West is very talented, but what’s remarkable is that YLS hired him: a smart, articulate lawyer who knows a ton of law, and (I am told) is “conservative” (whatever that means).”

Plus: “West’s arrival in New Haven is a start, but Yale Law School has a long way to go. There are other signs, however, that the incentives on campus are changing for the better.”

Pushback works. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but this is progress for sure.

WHY TOLERATE THIS? Rutgers University President Escorted Out of Town Hall by Police as Student Protesters Take Over: Jewish Rutgers students told to ‘go back home’ by anti-Israel protesters.

TODAY’S NAVY: “From FITREPs to the Shipyard, a culture of untruth bears fruit.” “Eventually the music will stop. We are now on the second generation of leaders who have been happy to ignore this systemic failure of performance as if it is a force of nature to endure, and not a creation of man that can be changed. If you are waiting for the uniformed leadership to speak clearly on this, you simply have not been paying attention. If you think the Executive Branch leadership will address this, you have not been awake the last 26-months. The only solution to this wholesale institutional failure will be in Congress.”

SAVED BY THE NERD: Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? A Microsoft engineer noticed something was off on a piece of software he worked on. He soon discovered someone was probably trying to gain access to computers all over the world.

Related: What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world.

FREDDIE DE BOER: The Deepest Bias in Media? Fear of Looking Old. “Social media opened the door for people in the industry to directly express and enforce a set of values, and a core value was lionizing the young – the young were left and the left was young, at least in the progressive imagination, and anyway, no one wants to feel old.”

The left valorizes youth because young people are ignorant, gullible, and easily manipulated. Old ideas seem new to them, because they haven’t seen them fail before.

Related: “Why is the ‘Party of Youth’ Run By Old People?”

Plus:

Leftist politics, as noted above, is something that the manipulative old sell to the gullible young. Hence leftists’ nonstop efforts to produce more gullible young people.

Young people are susceptible to socialism for a number of reasons. One is that families, by and large, actually do operate along more or less socialist lines. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is a fair description of how most families work. Parents have jobs, earn, pay bills, care for their young, provide clothes, education, medical care and more, without the children being expected to pay their way or, nowadays, even contribute. (That last was quite different a few generations ago, when teenagers provided, on average, about a third of the household income.)

Since this works at home – certainly for the children who are the recipients of their parents’ largesse – it seems natural to expand it to society as a whole. People who have been looked after for their entire lives are likely to be comfortable with the idea of being looked after in the future.

Of course, it works at home because the parents feel an attachment to their children, and a loyalty to them, that people don’t feel for strangers. . . .

But to retain the support of the younger people, they must be insulated from the objections of the middle-aged. This is done by cultivating youth culture. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” is a famous example. The reason you’re not supposed to trust them is that they are likely to tell you that the exciting new socialist ideas you’re being fed have in fact been tried over and over again for more than a century, generally with disastrous results.

The divide was further strengthened by the invention of “cool.” As Roger Simon has written, at one time being cool was the obsession of a generation – really of several. And being cool meant, among other things, being estranged from what the squares were doing, and the squares were, by definition, the older, stable, more experienced people.

One of the reasons the “coolness” strategy worked was that young people care a lot about their reputations, and age separation in our education system (more on that in a bit) means that the people whose reputations they care about are mostly other young people.

You can see why leftist education is always bad.

THIS IS KIND OF A JOKE. IT’S NOT LIKE THE IRANIANS WEREN’T DOING THEIR BEST BEFORE. Biden officials worry Iran may hit targets inside Israel as revenge for killing general.

UPDATE:

Biden Demands Israel Fight Rest Of War Using Nerf Guns https://t.co/CYmUUj1YG4 pic.twitter.com/hhT3hLgoQB

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 5, 2024

OF COURSE IT DOES: The Book ‘White Rural Rage’ Gets the Research Wrong. “The book White Rural Rage was co-authored by political scientist Tom Schaller and commentator Paul Waldman. As the title suggests, the gist is that white rural voters are a threat to democracy. . . . But political scientist Nicholas Jacobs from Colby College says the authors of the book have gotten some of the research underlying their claims wrong. He has a personal stake in the argument because some of the research cited in the book is his own. Jacobs is clearly not a fan of the book, in part because he thinks it is wrong-headed in its approach but also because he finds that it is simply wrong in many cases.”

To be fair, anything that’s a threat to the power of Democrats counts as a “threat to democracy” in the eyes of the Democrats and their clients.

Plus: “Shockingly, people in rural areas don’t like being told they should be grateful for every effort big city progressives make to micro-manage their lives for them (always for the greater good of course). For daring to disagree, they get smeared with books like White Rural Rage.”

GOOD QUESTION: Update on Little Rock airport exec killed in ATF raid: Where are the media on this story? “We’re not talking about beat cops here — who I’m sure are as sickened as we are by this totally unnecessary deadly raid. These field agents are subject to the orders given them by enormously powerful federal agencies that have in the past few years made it routine to conduct not law enforcement, but LAWLESS enforcement. Some of the agents are likely sickened, too, even as they go through the motions of their jobs, hoping the culture at these agencies will get better. Well, it’s going to have to.”

Is it? Only if we force it to.