SAY IT WITH FLOWERS:
NIH Director @DrJBhattacharya says the agency stopped the beagle experiments on the NIH campus — and that @PETA even sent him flowers. pic.twitter.com/koFbZ9e9M9
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 5, 2025
Author Archive: Stephen Green
May 5, 2025
HEADLINE OF THE DAY: JB Pritzker, the Shoney’s Big Boy of the Democratic Party, Is Here to Save the Day!
LET’S GO GET THEM: New source of gold, platinum, and uranium discovered in space.
A flash of intense radiation seen in space has upended long-held ideas about how some of our heaviest metals emerge. Scientists have found that such a flare can pump out vast amounts of heavy, rare atoms in mere seconds, revealing a surprising origin for valuables like gold and platinum.
Brian Metzger from the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City is one of the researchers behind this magnetar flare discovery.
Metzger and his colleagues worked to show how these unusually powerful neutron star outbursts can forge precious metals, called called r-process elements, at unimaginable scales.
Magnetars are the universe’s most intense magnets, and they’re not just strong – they’re wildly extreme. Born from the explosive death of massive stars, these neutron stars pack more mass than our sun into a ball just a dozen miles wide.
Their magnetic fields are a thousand times stronger than typical neutron stars, and trillions of times beyond anything found on Earth.
If you stood anywhere near one (which, thankfully, you can’t), it could scramble your atoms just by existing. That’s how intense these cosmic beasts are.
On second thought, maybe we aren’t quite ready to go get them.
NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…
"EDITED FOR CLARITY": NBC News cuts President Trump's mention of the emergence of damning evidence against Kilmar Abrego García from the Meet the Press broadcast.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: You see what happened just this morning. Tapes came out, horrible tapes from his wife. You don't… pic.twitter.com/ppr15BxLOa
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) May 4, 2025
…it isn’t enough.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Shifting Morality of Gambling Isn’t Making Us Better.
GLORIOUS AC: Austin Mandates AC. “If you’re be reading this blog any length of time, you know I’m not a fan of Austin’s oppressive regulatory regime. So it may surprise you to learn that Austin recently passed a housing regulation I actually approve of. So get those cries of ‘sellout!’ ready as I disturb the shade of Ayn Rand* and approve of government intervening in the free market.”
ANOTHER HANGOVER FROM THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, AND ALSO LARGELY POINTLESS: These Are the People You Can ‘Thank’ for Real ID.
IT ISN’T ANTI-RACIST; IT’S PRO-DEPENDENCY: How ‘anti-racist’ ideology hurt the students it was supposed to help.
In 2019, students at Ascend’s 15 charter schools — nearly all of them living in poverty — were “reading Shakespeare in the middle grades, studying the Dutch masters, and outperforming city and statewide averages on standardized tests,” writes Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. Then, founder Steven F. Wilson came out for high expectations in a an essay titled The Promise of Intellectual Joy, and was fired for “white supremacist rhetoric.”
Wilson is back in the fray with a book titled The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. He tells Bellafante that anti-racist education failed students. At one school that went anti-racist, “the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards on the math section of the SAT plummeted from 41 percent in 2017 to 4 percent in 2024,” he says.
Anti-racist programming failed, says Wilson, because “indoctrination is boring.”
It also isn’t educating — and isn’t meant to be.
…AND IT’S ILLEGALS: Beaten to Death in His Own Home — After ICE Was Ignored.
WELL, IT IS PROGRAMMED BY HUMANS: AI is just as overconfident and biased as humans can be, study shows.
GPT-4 outperformed GPT-3.5 when answering problems with clear mathematical solutions, showing fewer mistakes in probability and logic-based scenarios. But in subjective simulations, such as whether to choose a risky option to realize a gain, the chatbot often mirrored the irrational preferences humans tend to show.
“GPT-4 shows a stronger preference for certainty than even humans do,” the researchers wrote in the paper, referring to the tendency for AI to tend towards safer and more predictable outcomes when given ambiguous tasks.
What happens when AI decides humans are too unpredictable?
YES:
US Merchant Marine was completely and utterly ignored by @PeteButtigieg for four years as China built thousands of ships.
To say this is a refreshing change is an understatement. https://t.co/04MdJBbCIJ
— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) May 5, 2025
Related:
This should be the opening briefing slide anytime the Joint Staff is being briefed on anything in the Pacific. https://t.co/u3JTlv2xmK
— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) May 5, 2025
If, God forbid, there’s a U.S.-China War, that’s where it will be fought. And the neglect of our civilian and military naval power these last three decades is criminal.
THAT’S THE SECOND LIGHT TANK THE ARMY HAS CANCELED SINCE THE END OF THE COLD WAR: The Army cancels the M10 Booker, a ‘light tank’ that was too heavy.
Another issue that irked both Army officials and lawmakers stuck with the bill for the Booker was the so-called Right-to-Repair terms in its maintenance plans. The contract under which the Booker was purchased required that the Army use the Booker’s builder, General Dynamics, to address a wide range of parts and maintenance issues that Army mechanics could have addressed on their own.
“If you look at kind of comparable industries for the civilian sector, I think tractors went through this five, eight years ago,” said Driscoll. “You had farmers who were having a hard time repairing their equipment. The exact same thing is true for soldiers. We have many instances where, for two dollars to twenty dollars, we can 3D-print a part. We know how to 3D print a part. We have the 3D printer, but we have signed away the right to do that on our own accord, and that is a sinful activity for the leadership of the Army to do to harm our soldiers. And so that is the type of thing that we are no longer going to be willing to concede to the private industry.”
Well, good.
Related: Hegseth wants ‘right to repair’ provisions in all Army contracts.
ASKING THE EVERGREEN QUESTIONS: What the Hell Is Going on in Iran This Time? “Israeli action? Typical authoritarian regime attention to maintenance issues? God just doesn’t like the Mullahs’ Regime? Who knows.”
MINUS 90% OF THE MEDIA ATTENTION THAT ACCOMPANIED ITS LOSSES: How the stock market made back all its losses after Trump escalated the trade war.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dear Democrats, We the People Have Had Enough of Your Illegal Immigrants’ Violence. “I can’t imagine being so weak and easily controlled that I’d ever side with animals sent here to rape, murder, and conquer us.”
WHY? Trump says he would extend TikTok deadline if no deal reached by June 19.
U.S. President Donald Trump said he would extend the June 19 deadline for China-based ByteDance to divest the U.S. assets of TikTok, the short video app used by 170 million Americans, if no deal had been reached by then.
”I would … I’d like to see it done,” Trump told the NBC News program “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker” in an interview taped on Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, that is airing across the United States on Sunday.
Trump said he had a “sweet spot” for the app after it helped him win over young voters in the 2024 presidential election, adding, “TikTok is – it’s very interesting, but it will be protected.”
Trump has already twice granted a reprieve from enforcement of a congressionally mandated ban on TikTok that was initially due to take effect in January.
Trump is out of legal extensions and he needs to enforce the law.
TRYING TO MAKE POLITICS UPSTREAM FROM THE CULTURE: What Is the Government Doing Funding ‘Art’ in the First Place?
SPOILER: IT WAS A COVER-UP AND PSAKI KNEW. Psaki pushes back on idea there was a Biden mental ‘cover-up.’
Psaki, who served as Biden’s press secretary from 2021 to 2022 and is now a host on MSNBC, recently joined Semafor’s “Mixed Signals” podcast, where Ben Smith asked if the White House or media “covered this up,” in reference to Biden’s mental abilities.
“I think cover-up is such a loaded phrase. But … I left in May of 2022, just for the facts here, and I have seen Biden once since then, when I took my daughter to the holiday party this last December, after he had lost, and so I hadn’t seen him in person during that period of time,” Psaki said.
“I never saw that person, not a single time — and I was in the Oval Office every day — that was on that debate stage,” she continued, referring to Biden’s disastrous debate with President Trump in June. “I’m not a doctor. Aging happens quite quickly.”
Smith pressed Psaki, asking if she ever heard from former colleagues about whether they in fact covered up his mental state or if they were in a sense of denial about Biden’s mental fitness.
Psaki again said she believes the term “cover-up” is loaded.
She dodged whether or not it’s true.
May 2, 2025
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College students don’t spend much time studying.
They’re not more likely to have paying jobs than earlier generations, research shows. In 2024, the average first-year student reported spending 5.3 hours per week in campus activities and clubs, 9.3 hours working for pay and 11.9 hours relaxing and socializing.
Yet most think they’re working hard. “Sixty-four percent of four-year college students say that they put ‘a lot’ of effort into schoolwork, yet only 6 percent report spending more than 20 hours per week studying and doing homework,” Hess and Fournier write. As a result of the low-expectations culture, “students are not getting the opportunity to master the work habits, knowledge, or skills that a college education is supposed to provide.”
Professors complain that students complain about what used to be a normal reading load and normal writing assignments. Everything’s too hard, they say. But used to inflated grades in high school in college, they expect to get A’s.
Replacing “gentleman’s C’s” with “warm-body A’s” was not an improvement.
ONE OF A KIND: Farewell to a Great American Funny Lady.
THE POST RUNS THIS HEADLINE YET REFERS TO HIM AS “HER” AND “SHE” THROUGHOUT THE STORY: Transgender swimmer Ana Caldas wins 5 races at national championship event: ‘Real-life South Park episode.’
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: ‘This Is the Symbol of America, Man.’ “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we learn why Disney World is the most magical place on Earth, how to rescue a bald eagle, and what not to do with a corpse on a New York City subway car.”