THE NEW SPACE RACE: Rocket Lab hitting its stride with high cadence, new venture for Electron.

With a total of nine launches last year and as many as 15 planned for 2023, Rocket Lab now flies more boosters than any other company in the world not named SpaceX. In recent years, Rocket Lab’s cadence has surpassed United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and other major players.

This year, Rocket Lab may even launch as many boosters as Russia does, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

Clearly, Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle is much smaller than others in the established launch industry. Electron’s capacity maxes out at 300 kg to low-Earth orbit. But that has not stopped Beck from being inventive about use cases for the small rocket. Last year, his company launched a small satellite to the Moon, and Beck is working on a Venus mission.

And there is something to be said for providing a product that a lot of customers want to fly on—and then delivering that product.

To that end, Rocket Lab recently announced a new venture—using Electron to serve as a testbed for hypersonic technologies. The rocket will use essentially the same first and second stages, but it has a modified kick stage that will allow Electron to deploy payloads with a mass of up to 600 kg into hypersonic trajectories five times greater than the speed of sound.

That could certainly provide an earth-shattering kaboom.

DOG BITES MAN, SADLY: Grassley and Comer Say They’ve Found Evidence of Biden Getting PAID OFF for ‘Policy Decisions.’

BREAKING: Active Shooter Situation in Midtown Atlanta, One Dead, at Least Three Injured.

UPDATE (From Ed): Suspected gunman in deadly Atlanta hospital shooting captured after hours-long search.

(Updated and bumped.)

SAD! Now Bud Light Is Giving Away Free Beer to Make Amends After Dylan Mulvaney Debacle.

SO TAXPAYERS CAN BAIL THEM OUT A SECOND TIME? Nearly half of college dropouts would ‘very likely’ reenroll if given student debt relief.

HEH: Media Matters Tried To Destroy Tucker With Leaked Tapes, And It Blew Up Spectacularly. “Thank you for confirming that Tucker is a normal, down-to-earth, very funny person. Great work, as always, Media Matters, curating excellent conservative content.”

Related: Leaked Tucker Carlson Videos Are Truly Embarrassing — for the Leaker.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Fox News Is Officially Dying Without Tucker Carlson.

Plus:

• In the Navy?
• Everybody needs to talk about Oakland Fight Club.
• Vigilantism is going to be the new normal.

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: DOE Set To Award $200M Grant to Battery Maker Run by Chinese ‘Talent Program’ Recruit.

The founder of a lithium battery company poised to receive a $200 million grant from the Biden administration was once brought to China through a Chinese Communist Party program that the FBI warns is used for economic espionage.

The founder and chief executive officer of Microvast, Wu Yang, in 2000 was recruited to move back to China from the United States as part of a Chinese government-sponsored “talent program.” The grant to Microvast could conflict with the stated policy of the Department of Energy, which plans to boost the company with the massive green energy grant. A DOE official said in February that the department is “prohibited” from funding people who are involved in foreign talent programs.

Previously: The U.S. Government Should Register as a Foreign Agent.

COLORADO: When Is a Fee Not a Fee?

A month ago, I commented on Colorado Senate Bill 213, which would allow the state to give major cities housing targets that they would have to meet and require cities to rezone single-family neighborhoods to allow for more density. Some of the worst features of the bill have been deleted, but the bill is still bad.

The reason why the rezoning requirement was dropped from the bill was that the cities themselves opposed it — not because they opposed density but because they said they were already imposing density on their residents and didn’t need to be told to do so by the state. Many cities in the Denver metro area are landlocked, so the only way for them to meet state housing targets would be to densify anyway.

The bill also includes more funding for “affordable housing.” Some of that funding is supposed to come from a “fee” on new housing, thus making that housing (and all housing that competes with it) more expensive. But how is this a fee and not a tax?

Under Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), a constitutional amendment, the state can’t increase taxes without voter approval. But it can increase fees, so the legislature is redefining many taxes as fees so they can raise them without having to go to the voters.

At the start of the year, Denver imposed a statewide “fee” of 10 cents per shopping bag you didn’t bring yourself. That’s clearly a tax on shopping bags, and not a fee you’d pay in exchange for something like access to a state park. But at the rate Colorado is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years, Democrats were imposing “fees” on pretty much everything.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: You’ll Want to Hire These PJ Media VIP Supporters to Teach at Your Local High School. “I ask our VIP readers for a favor, and do you fine folks ever deliver.”

THE VIRTUAL DOCTOR IS IN: ChatGPT found to give better medical advice than real doctors in blind study.

First, the researchers asked them to judge the quality of the information in the message.

When assessing quality, there are multiple attributes to consider, Ayers said. “It could be accuracy, readability, comprehensiveness or responsiveness,” he told Fox News Digital.

Next, the researchers were asked to judge empathy.

“It’s not just what you say, but how you say it,” Ayers said. “Does the response have empathy and make patients feel that their voice is heard?”

“Doctors have resource constraints, so … they often zero in on the most probable response and move on.”

ChatGPT was three times more likely to give a response that was very good or good compared to physicians, he told Fox News Digital. The chatbot was 10 times more likely to give a response that was either empathetic or very empathetic compared to physicians.

It’s not that the doctors don’t have empathy for their patients, Ayers said — it’s that they’re overburdened with messages and don’t always have the time to communicate it.

Does fake empathy feel real when patients know it’s fake?

TALES FROM THE SWAMPLAND: New Emails Prove Hunter Biden Was Selling Access to His Father.

IT WAS A CON JOB FROM THE START: The Secrets of Reedy Creek.

This Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — EPCOT for short — is not the Epcot park we know today, though the amusement park shares the idealized planned city’s (now nostalgic) futurism. The EPCOT that was never built was meant to be a real town — and for that to become realized, the Walt Disney Company needed the authority to develop and run a town. So, Florida granted Disney the right to do everything it needed to make that happen, including controlling zoning and regulations and offering public services. Walt Disney’s death is cited as the reason the city never came to be, but the Disney Company’s hold on zoning, regulations, and public services remained.

That’s Disney’s story, anyway. Richard Foglesong, a former professor at Rollins College and author of Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando, says it’s a fabrication.

Disney’s self-governing district, with all its associated resorts and water parks and sports fields and shopping centers, eventually grew to an enormous size. And though it never developed any cities of the future, the area held on to its self-governing privileges.

While Foglesong was reporting his 2001 book, which traces Disney’s use of its government immunities and relationship with the surrounding area, he dug into Disney’s archives, poring over company documents and memos. Instead of evidence of serious plans for the development of an idealized city, he found a warning from a lawyer that such a development could threaten Disney’s control of the land. If there were real residents, they would be able to elect a local government and establish the external control that Disney feared.

Looking at that two-page memo about the development plans, Foglesong recalled in an interview, he saw that “someone had written NO in inch-high letters.”

“I took that memo to the archivist in the Disney Archives, and I asked whose comments these were,” Foglesong said. “The archivist said, ‘That’s Walt Disney’s comment.’ Every place in the memo where the attorney referred to the property of real residents, Walt Disney had written, between the lines, ‘temporary residents/tourists.’ So, in this planning memo, Walt is telling the attorney, ‘We’re not going to build a place with residents.’ ”

Plus: “Technically, the towns of Buena Vista and Bay Lake, both of which sit within Disney’s self-governing district, do have permanent residents—which allows for some small degree of self-governance within the district. Both towns have a city council and elect a mayor. But the residents aren’t just random people. They’re long-term, management-level employees of the company. Too senior to be eligible for labor unions and too personally invested in the company to do anything counter to business interests, these residents are essentially Disney stand-ins. Disney can count on them to not do anything the company doesn’t want.”

WEIRD HOW HE NEVER ADVOCATES CONFISCATING SECOND OR THIRD HOMES: Comrade Bernie Goes Full Commie, Wants Government to Steal ALL the Money You Make Over This Amount.

A BILLION HERE AND A BILLION THERE…: New York and California lost over $90 billion in income to low-tax states during Covid.

New data from the Internal Revenue Service shows that New York state lost $25 billion in adjusted gross income due to outmigration in 2021, on top of $20 billion lost in 2020. California reported a net loss of $29 billion in 2021, following a loss of $18 billion in 2020. Combined, the two states lost $92 billion across the two years.

The data shows that the income flight from high-tax states to low-tax states, which has been happening for years, picked up steam during Covid. The income losses for California and New York in 2021 were more than three-times their combined losses in 2019, before the pandemic took hold in the U.S.

Experts say that while the income migration from states likely slowed in 2022 and 2023 from the pandemic highs, higher-tax states will continue to see outflows of high earners, thanks in part to remote work and white-collar job growth in the sun belt.

“When we get the data for 2021-22 and 2023, the outflow is certain to have slowed to some extent,” said E.J. McMahon, founding senior fellow at the Empire Center, “which does not in my view, mean migration will have ceased to be a problem.”

People actually like freedom and low taxes but you’d never know it from the way around half or more of us vote.

SKYNET FROWNS: Steve Wozniak, ‘AI Godfather’ and Apple Cofounder, Quits Google to Expose AI Dangers.

Correction: “An earlier version of this article identified Steve Wozniak as the “Godfather of AI” who left recently Google; in fact, it was Geoffrey Hinton. We regret the error.”

HAVE A COKE, A SMILE, AND NOTHING ELSE: Learning from Bud Light? Coca-Cola Shareholders Shoot Down 3 Attempts to Turn the Company Fully Woke.

While Coca-Cola is hardly a paragon of conservative positions, the votes could well mean that even liberal-leaning corporations are seeing the costs to their bottom lines.

The vote generating most of the headlines nationally dealt with a proposal to study how individual states’ pro-life laws affect the company’s business — and potentially make decisions about “closure or expansion of operations” based on access to abortion.

It was defeated by nearly 87 percent of controlling shares, according to the proxy vote.

(Company votes aren’t based on a “one-person, one vote” as in an election, but on the percentage of shares that are owned by the voter.)

Another proposal, which demanded Coca-Cola audit itself to determine how its “corporate policies, practices, products, and services” affect non-whites, went down by a vote of just over 83 percent of controlling shares.

More like this, please.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Forget Biden, AI Might Kill Us First. “While we’re all worrying about Biden and WW III, AI is advancing at a pace that could make the war conundrum go away forever. Because the human factor would go away forever. If we’re not needed for labor, what good would we be?”

GOODER AND HARDER, PORTLAND: Furious Portland residents say Democrat-backed bill would allow homeless camps to terrorize communities.

NEVER WENT WOKE, FAR FROM BROKE: $100 Million Offer Made to Tucker Carlson for New Broadcast Role.

SUMMERS WAS ONE OF THE FEW WASHINGTON TYPES TO CORRECTLY PREDICT BIDENFLATION: The odds of a recession in the next year are 70% and the US has a stagflation problem brewing, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says.

NO. Recent Developments Spark Michelle Obama ’24 Rumors.

BECAUSE NOW THAT HE’S IN THE SENATE HE’S AN EMBARRASSMENT RATHER THAN A SOB STORY: The Media Seems to Have Lost Interest in John Fetterman. I Wonder Why.

STICKER SHOCK: There are only 3 new cars priced under $20,000 now.

The average price paid for a new vehicle was $48,008 in March, according to Kelley Blue Book, a drop of $550 from the prior month.

“We’ve been anticipating transaction price declines, as inventory has been steadily improving and choice has expanded. More vehicles on dealer lots — and on their competitors’ lots — means dealers simply don’t have the pricing power they did six months ago,” said Rebecca Rydzewski, Cox Automotive research manager of economic and industry insights.

Prices are expected to continue their downward trend, but are unlikely to reach the $37,736 average they were at in March 2020 anytime soon, if ever again.

Last month: Biden Administration Announces Ambitious Final CAFE Standards.

Today, the Biden-Harris Administration announced final Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which will improve gas mileage for new passenger vehicles sold in the United States between now and 2026.

The new standards require a 49 mpg fleetwide average by 2026, a 33% increase over model year 2021 standards.

We’ll soon look back fondly at $48,008.

HE FIGHTS: Biden Caves to McCarthy, Agrees to Meet the Speaker About Raising the Debt Limit.