GET HIM BACK ON THE PROMPTER, STAT: Too Much Ice Cream: Biden Tells Irish to ‘Lick the World.’

MY LITTLE TOWN: Monument pushes back against Polis’ plan for more affordable housing.

The plan was introduced in the State Senate two weeks ago and allows the state to control more zoning laws and holds local governments to a statewide land-use standard.

Governor Polis thinks that more density and availability is the way to fix the affordable housing issue in Colorado, but not everybody agrees.

In Monument, the mayor says this is a ‘one size fits all’ plan that doesn’t fit his town.

Monument Mayor Mitch LaKind and the six members of the town council are not on board with the high-density zoning plan laid out by Governor Polis.

“The increased density that would be allowed if this were to pass would be catastrophic to Monument’s culture,” LaKind said.

LaKind and Mayor pro-tem Steve King believe Monument’s current infrastructure can’t handle more people. They say that there are not enough roads, water, parking, or schools to accommodate an increase in population.

“There is no affordability mechanism in this bill,” King adds.

That’s because takeovers like this one aren’t about affordability. They’re about the left’s war on suburban and exurban life in general, and single-family dwellings in particular.

HMM: White House Insider Says He Can Prove ‘Conspiracy’ Between Joe, Hunter, and Ukraine.

OH, FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: FAA Blows Out Candle On Historic Launch Of Giant SpaceX Starship.

Enthusiasm waned among fans of space flight and Elon Musk Thursday as the Federal Aviation Administration shot down plans by Musk’s SpaceX for the maiden flight of its giant two-stage rocket called Starship.

On Twitter, Musk indicated the space vehicle might launch this week. However, it ended up being the fourth time the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation blew out the launch plan.

The agency still has yet to complete an environmental review, which began in November 2020. It now plans to release the assessment on May 31.

Maybe Musk should let it be quietly known that SpaceX might develop delays in military, intelligence, or ISS supply launches if the administration doesn’t stop dragging its feet.

UPDATE: Charlie Martin tells me IBD has retracted their story. Stay tuned…

ANOTHER UPDATE: This NOTAM (hat tip, Marcus House) indicates a Starship test flight set for April 17.

Fingers crossed.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden’s Public Warmup for Campaign ’24 Is a Pathetic Trainwreck. “Barring a manufactured health crisis for Biden, he’s going to have to get out and campaign this time around. That is, of course, unless he starts World War III just to have an excuse to stay home.”

SUSTAINABILITY: Deficit Tops $1 Trillion in First Six Months of FY2023.

The federal deficit topped $1 trillion in the first six months of fiscal 2023 (October through March), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

This was despite the fact that federal tax revenues in the first six months of this fiscal year were $2,048,196,000,000, which was the second-highest in the nation’s history (when compared to the inflation-adjusted numbers for the tax revenues collected in the first six months of previous fiscal years).

Left unsaid: Not even near-record tax collections can cover Washington’s insatiable appetite for spending.

EXCUSE ME? Losing His Head: ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Co-Creator On ‘Mission’ to Take the Show to Iran.

HARDBALL: Republicans want to make it difficult for Senate to replace Feinstein on key panel.

In response to some Democrats calling on her to resign, Feinstein, 89, asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to find a substitute for her on the powerful committee until she can come back.

With Feinstein’s absence, the committee, split 11-10, has delayed advancing more than a dozen of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees for full Senate confirmation.

Replacing Feinstein on the panel, even on a short-term basis, would require approval from the full Senate. Schumer could ask for unanimous consent on a resolution to make that happen, but any one Republican member could object and block it.

In that case, Democrats would have to go through a lengthy process to garner the 60 votes required to break a filibuster — meaning 10 Republicans would have to join the other 50 Democratic members to allow Feinstein’s replacement.

This would be a more exciting story if there was some indication that the GOP had any inclination to really make the Democrats bleed to get their committee change.

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN BIDEN WAS GOING TO BRING STRENGTH BACK TO OUR HISTORICAL ALLIANCES: Is Biden’s Hatred of the English Showing on His Ireland Trip?

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Megyn Kelly on MeToo’s Collapse: ‘We’re Back to Where We Started.’ “The MeToo movement has been exploded and women really have nowhere to turn. You can leave the set in tears after being screamed at by [Lemon], who I bet has a long HR personnel file, and they just say, ‘re-educating training, bye.’ Not good enough.”

#MeToo was a political convenience that got dropped as soon as it was no longer convenient.

THIS IS HOW SCIENTISTS GET A REPUTATION AS SPOILSPORTS: Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it.

Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition.

Earlier, the department chair, Frank Hu, had instructed Ardisson Korat to do some further digging: Could his research have been led astray by an artifact of chance, or a hidden source of bias, or a computational error? As Ardisson Korat spelled out on the day of his defense, his debunking efforts had been largely futile. The ice-cream signal was robust.

I say, why take chances and also pass the chocolate-chocolate chip.

“URBAN STRUGGLES”: Walmart Closing Half its Chicago Locations. “I’m more interested in WaPo reporter Jaclyn Peiser’s skewed take than I am in any problems Walmart has in one of the nation’s most violent cities.”

BREAKING: Mitch McConnell’s Retirement Is Reportedly Imminent.

LAUGHING WOLF: Yet Another Intelligence Disaster.

Okay, to be fair, U.S. intelligence operations have been a disaster for a while now. Frankly, we never have been that good at it. Yes, we’ve had a few individuals over the years who were outstanding at the job, going back to the Civil War. Organized and large scale intelligence operations not so much. I don’t know if it’s the ghost of Stimson and the curse of the Black Chamber or something else. The OSS was a good wartime operation, but when it came time to start the metamorphasis to what eventually became the CIA, well, let’s say there have been ups and downs.

Personally, I view the current FUBAR as starting under Carter, who should have been awarded the Order of Stimson for his incompetence with intelligence, intelligence operations, and (much needed) intelligence reforms. His cavalier revelation of our ability to monitor car phones in Moscow blew that source and the much needed intelligence it provided right out the airlock.

Which brings us to the current fuckup. While I wonder if it was more than one person, someone rather clearly went shopping in a SCIF and despite all preventative measures walked out with documents that were never intended to leave the SCIF. Unlike television, getting into and out of a SCIF can be and should be a major PITA. Because if not you get the current situation. Like David, I suspect they know or have a good idea of the person or persons involved as the access list for documents like this is rather small.

Read the whole, damning thing.

DECOUPLING: Apple Triples iPhone Production In India As Split With China Accelerates.

THE DEMAND FOR RACISM STILL VASTLY EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY: Fraudulent Studies Withdrawn as Professor Is Caught Faking the Racism Narrative.

A HEARTWARMING STORY FROM BATTLESWARM BLOG: Social Justice Karens are worst Karens.

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: ‘Dementia Joe’ Needs Hunter to Help Him Answer a Question from… a Child?

EVERYBODY IS SICK OF JOE: Biden 2024? Most Voters Want Democratic Primary Challengers. “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 39% of Likely U.S. voters believe Biden should run for reelection as president in 2024, while 48% think Biden shouldn’t run again. Another 13% are not sure. In February, only 32% said Biden should seek reelection in 2024.”

“SAFE, LEGAL, AND RARE” IS SEVERAL POLITICAL LIFETIMES AGO: Sick CNN Is Sad About 32,000 Fewer Abortions Post Dobbs.

CHANGE: Mass Layoffs and Absentee Bosses Create a Morale Crisis at Meta.

“I’m already fired,” added a former Meta employee who worked in the company’s business division for nearly four years before most of his team was laid off this year. “But who can keep track?”

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has declared that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency” at his company. So far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He has conducted two rounds of cuts over the past six months, with two more to come; these will eliminate more than 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also closing 5,000 open positions, which amounts to 30 percent of his company’s work force.

At the same time, some of Meta’s top executives have moved away and are managing large parts of the Silicon Valley company from their new homes in places like London and Tel Aviv.

The layoffs and absentee leadership, along with concerns that Mr. Zuckerberg is making a bad bet on the future, have devastated employee morale at Meta, according to nine current and former employees, as well as messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Before Facebook went public, Zuckerberg rigged the share structure so that he couldn’t be ousted like Steve Jobs was from Apple 40 years ago. So no matter how deep a hole he digs at Meta, there’s no one who can tell him to stop digging.

MEGAN FOX: American Library Association Mobilizes to Intimidate Parents Into Silence. “In the clip below, you can hear an excerpt from one of the books pushed by the groomers who want to destroy children’s innocence and separate them from their families. I warn you, it’s so explicit that I had to set an age restriction on YouTube, and at the age of 46, I had never heard some of this stuff before (and wish I hadn’t).”

HMM: Tennessee Dem expelled for storming state Capitol reinstated. “On Wednesday, Justin Pearson, one of the two Tennessee state representatives expelled from the House for leading a gun control protest on the House floor late last month, was reinstated to the state House.”

Wait… which Justin Pearson?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: ‘Pay No Attention to That Jihadi at the Mexican Border…’ “It’s yet another case where the Democrats’ reality denial is putting American lives at risk and building a body count.”

NIALL FERGUSON: The aliens have landed, and we created them.

It is not every day that I read a prediction of doom as arresting as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s in Time magazine last week. “The most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances,” he wrote, “is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’ … If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.”

Do I have your attention now?

Yudkowsky is not some random Cassandra. He leads the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, California, and has already written extensively on the question of artificial intelligence. I still remember vividly, when I was researching my book Doom, his warning that someone might unwittingly create an AI that turns against us — “for example,” I suggested, “because we tell it to halt climate change and it concludes that annihilating Homo sapiens is the optimal solution.” It was Yudkowsky who some years ago proposed a modified Moore’s law: Every 18 months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.

Now Yudkowsky has gone further. He believes we are fast approaching a fatal conjuncture, in which we create an AI more intelligent than us, which “does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. … The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss.”

He is suggesting that such an AI could easily escape from the internet “to build artificial life forms,” in effect waging biological warfare on us. His recommendation is clear. We need a complete, global moratorium on the development of AI.

There are a lot of very smart, knowledgeable people with deadly serious concerns about AI.

Off topic, but I’m re-reading Ferguson’s The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I and it’s as good as ever and probably more relevant than ever.