I’M GLAD HE’S DEAD: Here’s How (and How Not) to Celebrate the Death of the Butcher of Tehran. “Iranian strongman Ebrahim Raisi — aka ‘the butcher of Tehran’ — is dead in a Sunday helicopter crash that his countrymen and women are celebrating, so now would be the perfect time for the New York Times to avoid interviewing the Iranian dissident he tried to have assassinated. Wait, what?”

WOEING: Boeing Blasted for Prioritizing Racial Quotas Over Performance and Safety. “By tethering itself to DEI benchmarks instead of prioritizing performance and safety, Boeing not only risks the lives of those who fly its aircraft, but also subjects the company and its executives to liability.”

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: How the West Was Woke, to the Point of Near Extinction.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Demonized as contributing to climate change, cattle may actually decrease emissions, research shows.

Dr. Vaughn Holder, research project manager for beef nutrition at Alltech, and Dr. Betsey Boughton, director of agroecology at Archbold, studied the impacts that cattle production has on the ecosystem on a wetlands pasture at Buck Island Ranch, about 150 miles northwest of Miami, Florida. The researchers found that 19%-30% of methane emissions were from the cattle, but the rest was from the wetland soils. If the cows are removed, their research shows, it actually increases the amount of methane the wetland ecosystems give off.

Methane, which is more potent in terms of greenhouse warming than carbon dioxide, lasts only about 12 years. So reducing methane can have a more immediate impact on warming than reducing carbon dioxide.

Cattle emissions, Holder told Just the News, are often thought of like fossil fuel emissions. When we burn fossil fuels, the emissions go into the air. So eliminating a coal-fired power plant, for example, removes an emissions source, which produces a drop in emissions.

Grill burgers tonight in celebration.

BIDENOMICS: Family Wealth Soared Under Trump, Stagnated Under Biden. “We’ve struggled mightily these last three years, and the best most of us have done is tread water.”

WIND AND SOLAR DON’T CUT IT: Texas Is Heading Towards An Avoidable Blackout… Again.

The author of the piece lays all the blame on Texas having a separate grid, but the state has made itself overreliant on unreliable energy sources.

HMM: Trump Voters Are Defecting to Robert Kennedy Over the Vaccine Issue.

SKYNET SMILES: OpenAI dissolves team focused on long-term AI risks, less than one year after announcing it.

Sutskever and Leike on Tuesday announced their departures on social media platform X, hours apart, but on Friday, Leike shared more details about why he left the startup.

“I joined because I thought OpenAI would be the best place in the world to do this research,” Leike wrote on X. “However, I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.”

Leike wrote that he believes much more of the company’s bandwidth should be focused on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety and societal impact.

“These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there,” he wrote. “Over the past few months my team has been sailing against the wind. Sometimes we were struggling for [computing resources] and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done.”

Leike added that OpenAI must become a “safety-first AGI company.”

If they weren’t going to become one when they had a safety team, it seems less likely without one.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: On Cue, Biden Is Lying About Republicans and Elections. “The Democrats are the most backwards-looking ‘progressive’ political movement on Earth. FDR still drives their economic policy, and race relations in America haven’t improved since the late 1950s in their telling of the story. As Rick points out in his post, this kind of garbage still resonates with older Black voters.”

EXPANSION: Elon Musk launches Starlink satellite internet service in Indonesia, world’s largest archipelago. “Launching the service at a health clinic aligns with Starlink’s broader mission of providing affordable access to high-speed internet services, particularly in underserved and remote regions, said Coordinating Minister of Maritime and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan.”

VICTORIA TAFT: The Trump Trial Could Be Over Sooner Than You Think — Unless He Testifies.

BIDENOMICS IS WORKING: Consumers are so demoralized by inflation and high rates that they’ve given up on saving for the American Dream and are spending money instead, economist says.

Joanne Hsu, who is the director of the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey, told CNBC on Friday that she thinks Americans have abandoned plans to save money as they see their financial goals look less attainable and are spending money instead.

“This positive spending is not a reflection of some sort of internalized secret sense of confidence that consumers have,” he explained. “And instead my interpretation is that consumers see that a lot of aspirational goals that we talk about as part of the American Dream—homeownership, paying for college, paying for college for your kids, having a comfortable retirement—with high prices and high interest rates right now, those aspirational goals just feel increasingly out of reach.”

And as a result, consumers have “given up” on saving for those goals, Hsu added, noting that the still-strong labor market allows them to spend now.

The unintended (and ironic) consequence is that the front-loaded aggregate demand is inflationary.

IT’S PERFECTLY SANE IF THE INTENTION IS TO BRING HARM TO THE HOST COUNTRY: Biden’s Plan to Resettle Thousands of Gaza Refugees Is Insane, Warns Expert.

CHRIS QUEEN: Brave Cops Target That Criminal Mastermind Scottie Scheffler. “Scottie Scheffler is the number-one golfer on the PGA tour. He’s the reigning Masters champion and the favorite to win this weekend’s PGA Championship. He’s a devout Christian, a devoted husband, and a new father. And thanks to the intrepid work of the Louisville, Ky., Police Department, whose officers totally didn’t overreact, he now faces four charges, including one felony.”

THAT WAS TUESDAY — 51 IS SET FOR TONIGHT: SpaceX launches 50th Falcon 9 rocket of 2024 on Starlink mission.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Was Found Guilty of Grand Theft… Houses? “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week we have the curious case of the man who stole houses, instant karma for a Pokemon shoplifter, and Utah Man’s failed attempt at playing possum.”

THIS IS NOT INDICATIVE OF A BOOMING ECONOMY: Walmart gains high-income shoppers as elevated prices persist.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST CNN…: Even CNN Thinks That Michael Cohen’s Testimony Was a Gift for Trump.

THIS IS WAS CNN:

Per TV Newser when compared to one year ago:

During primetime, Fox News was up by +40% in total viewers and +33% in the A25-54 demo.

In primetime, CNN was down -27% in total viewers and -39% in the demo.

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) May 16, 2024

Something that can’t go on forever will stop.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE HAS BEEN TAKEN TO AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: More Shady Biden Accounts Have Been Discovered.

NIFTY: West Point team’s computerized rifle scope adjusts itself in combat. “The cadets, David Caddigan, Aiden Looney, Ashton Gaines, Heyward Hutson, dubbed the project ‘a smart sight for the average soldier.'”

IT’S BEEN YEARS SINCE I MISSED THE NFL: Time for the Bud Light Treatment: NFL Denounces Player for Advocating Traditional Values.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Another #Bidenomics Update: CA Wines Could Be at a ‘Breaking Point.’

An extinction-level event has not come to pass — yet. But regardless of the winery survival rate, it’s become clear in 2024 that the nature of the California wine industry has fundamentally changed. After decades of unfettered growth beginning in the 1990s, wine consumption started to flatten around 2018. Now, following what appeared to be a spike during the pandemic, it’s in dramatic decline.
…
The elephant in the room is #Bidenomics – the hideous state of the economy thanks to inflationary policies. For many people, the extra funds available to indulge in life’s nicer things are no longer available, having been eaten by the cost of living and the plunging value of the dollar.

There’s the cost of CA wines compared to what’s coming out of Europe. CA produces a lot less volume than its European counterparts, for one thing, and as you can imagine, the overhead in Socialist Central is enormous.

California wines, overall, used to enjoy a value proposition over the imports but that’s changing, too.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Want Spies With That? Chinese and Iranian Moles Are Posing As DoorDash Drivers. “Chinese nationals tried to squeeze onto military bases in the U.S. roughly 100 times just in 2023, roughly once every three or four days. They sometimes pose as DoorDash drivers who have ‘wandered off course’ and ‘accidentally’ showed up at a secret nuclear site.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The Kurt Schlichter scenario is looking more plausible all the time.

#RESIST: Texas Sues Biden Administration Over EV Trucking Mandates. “Better to get this law thrown out now than to wait until food become unaffordable because there aren’t enough reliable trucks to deliver it.”