WHICH MOST OF AMERICA DIDN’T NOTICE. STOP TRYING TO SCARE US:  CDC Warns U.S. at Risk for Monkeypox Surge Even Worse Than the One in 2022.

Funny only once!

THIS IS AN IMPROVEMENT. IT’S OPEN:  Media Openly Collaborating With Team Biden.

Ten years ago if you said this was going on, they’d call you crazy. Yes, it’s uncomfortable and horrible, but at least we can see it. Everyone can. You can’t fight what you can’t see.

NONE OF THAT. IT’S THE FRAUD WE MUST BEAT:  The GOP Is No More, If It Can’t Beat Old Joe.

That’s not a job for a political party. It’s a job for Americans.

WELL, HE’S RIGHT: Actor Tim Robbins unloads on Democrats and media for abandoning free speech.

FITTING: Mass. Gov. Maura Healey’s Official Portrait is Literally an Empty Frame.

OPEN THREAD: Assemble, but don’t dissemble.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: WashPost Columnist Urges People To Harass Republicans At The Grocery Store, Church.

Republicans did not need Trump or Fox to tell them to be pro-life, pro-gun rights, or opposed to giving hormones to children. Still, [The Daily Show’s Desi Lydic] wondered, “Where do we go from here? Is there any solution?”

For [Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr.], the answer is harassment, “I think ultimately we have to, in the short term, shame them out of passing the most aggressive versions of these bills, criticize them enough to make sure that they are told when they go to church or when they go to the grocery store that ‘you passed a terrible bill and acted like a bigot.’”

It is safe to say that neither Bacon nor Lydic would appreciate it if you harassed them about their political views at the grocery store.

Yet, Lydic’s biggest problem with Bacon’s proposal was not the morality, but practical effects as she proceeded to make fun of Sen. Rand Paul being attacked, “Are you sure that shame would work with Kentucky Republicans? I mean, look at Rand Paul, if I got my ass kicked in my front yard by my neighbor, I would never leave my house again.”

Flashback: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules.

WE’VE HAD THIS FOR THE AIR FLEET FOR YEARS: DoD weighing options to create ‘commercial space reserve.’

The Defense Department is considering ways to partner with commercial space companies so their services can be accessed during national security emergencies, DoD space policy chief John Plumb told lawmakers April 26.

Plumb, who is assistant secretary of defense for space policy, testified at a House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee hearing on national security space issues.

He said there are ongoing conversations about an initiative led by the U.S. Space Force called “commercial augmentation space reserves.” This is a new project looking at whether it makes sense to create the space equivalent of the civil reserve air fleet, or CRAF, a program the Pentagon conceived 70 years ago to gain access to commercial airlift capacity in emergencies.

People have been talking about this for years, and now it’s about to happen.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What Puts Nazism on the Right?

This is a sincere question to which I’ve never had a satisfactory answer. I may have even asked it here before. We all know what Nazism is, but I think we need to define what we mean by “Right,” and specifically the American Right. I know some people prefer the quadrant model of political ideology to the linear one. Libertarian to authoritarian on one axis and communism to free markets on the other. But, where’s the overlap between Hitler’s Germany and American conservatism?

Do law-and-order righties fall on the far right of the axis in opposition to the chaos-and-destruction (2020 summer of love) lefties? I don’t think law and order is all that authoritarian, at least in America. If laws are just and equally applied (increasingly not the case), that would appear to be in a sweet spot near the political middle.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Andy Ellis, 1% Leadership. (Bumped).

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Unemployed Guy’s Basement Selfie Video Crushes Fox News In Primetime Ratings.

THAT’S WHAT XI SAID! ‘The China Way:’ Biden Campaign Co-Chair Lavished Praise on China in Interview with CCP Propaganda Outlet.

Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chairman for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, heaped praise on China in an interview with Chinese state television, saying “doors opened” for his movie studio in the communist regime after he learned “the China way.”

Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks, said in a 2017 interview with CGTN America, a subsidiary of the CCP’s propaganda department, that business in China had proved “extremely rewarding.” He praised China’s technological innovation as “way ahead” of other countries, and downplayed concerns about China’s reputation for censoring American movies.

Katzenberg’s friendly relationship with China could present a political liability for Biden, who has come under scrutiny for failing to stand up to Beijing and for his son Hunter’s dealings there. National security officials have warned that the Chinese government increasingly tries to influence American foreign policy through business leaders and other influencers outside government.

Flashback: Biden Sold Out America to China While Working for Hollywood:

“Some of you were there. Literally when by end of that lunch we had a handshake,” Biden boasted to the MPAA. “The next year the number of blockbuster foreign films showing in China has increased by over half and our share of the box office revenue has doubled — or your share of the box office revenue has doubled.”

“Keep me in mind for Chris [Dodd’s] assistant later,” he joked.

Biden understandably lost track of the difference between “your share” and “our share” because Hollywood has been a reliable fundraising machine for Biden. What was good for Hollywood was also good for Biden. Katzenberg got Oriental Dream Works, a $330-million joint venture with the PRC, and eventually hosted Biden’s first Southern California fundraiser which brought in $700K.

2012 was a big year for the adulterous nuptials of Hollywood and the Chinese Communist Party.

A few months after the meeting between Biden and Xi, China’s Wanda Group bought AMC Theaters for $2.6 billion. The Wanda Group, run by a billionaire Communist oligarch with close ties to regime officials, is working on a Communist theme park, and its investors allegedly include Xi’s sister. Beyond just owning the theaters, Wanda owns the Legendary Group which has a hand in a long list of movies from Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansman, to Pokemon, along with the King Kong and Jurassic Park sequels.

The only reason Hollywood movies can play in China is because the Communist leadership directly profits from them and controls what goes into them, either directly through ownership, or by forcing the industry to submit scripts for the approval of its Communist censors. HUAC would be superfluous today. The big studios who make up the MPAA are all working for the Communists. And they’re proud of it.

As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.

HOW IT STARTED: Next mayor wants NYC to be even more of a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal immigrants.

Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”

* * * * * * * *

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”

And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.

“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.

The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.

—The New York Post, June 2nd, 2021.

How it’s going: Eric Adams wants FEMA to ban cities from busing migrants to NYC — as 1,300 arrive this week alone.

—The New York Post, today.

This isn’t who we are. Adams clearly needs to reread the words on the Statue of Liberty — and his own promise that New York is a sanctuary city.

Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

Why, it’s as if: Democrats Discover Only The Federal Government Can Solve The Border Crisis.

21ST CENTURY HEALTH PROBLEMS: Throat Cancer Is Becoming an Epidemic, And Our Sex Lives Could Be Behind It. “Those with six or more lifetime oral-sex partners are 8.5 times more likely to develop oropharyngeal cancer than those who do not practice oral sex. Behavioral trends studies show that oral sex is very prevalent in some countries. In a study that my colleagues and I conducted in almost 1,000 people having tonsillectomy for non-cancer reasons in the UK, 80 percent of adults reported practicing oral sex at some point in their lives. Yet, mercifully, only a small number of those people develop oropharyngeal cancer. Why that is, is not clear.”

I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE PEOPLE PITCHING THIS, BUT I’VE BEEN SAYING HOLLYWOOD SHOULD MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT ROBERT SMALLS FOR YEARS:

But he was a Republican. So I’m not suggesting you invest based on my recommendation.

OUT: “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”

IN: Baby, it’s still C-O-L-D outside. “Considering the weather outside lately, if we were expiring in any great numbers from Global Warming/Climate Change/anything AL Gore’s ever predicted, our bodies would be well preserved into early summer. Take the U.K.: ‘Balmy’ is not the word for springtime in England this year. . . . Our very own wild west is wooly, too, but that’s what they’re wearing, not a state of mind. Records have fallen over like frozen antelope. The snow and ice coverage extent measurements have only started since the advent of satellite monitoring in 2001, but when you approach doubling the average?”

HEALTHSPAN EXTENSION: The low-hanging fruit for longevity efforts?

Olshansky argues we should shift our attention to helping people live healthier lives, rather than simply focusing on overall lifespan. That’s a view shared by Juulia Jylhävä, a principal researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and a data scientist at MedEngine, a medical data science company based in Finland. “We should surely be more focused on healthspan and how to maintain not only health, but also functional abilities,” says Jylhävä.

Healthspan—years lived in good health—might be the unsexy cousin of longevity research, but figuring out ways for people to live healthier lives could have a much greater impact than extending lifespan by a few years. A big part of extending healthy lives is pinpointing when people start to decline in health, and what the early indicators of that decline might be. One way is by looking at frailty—a measure that usually takes into account factors like social isolation, mobility, and health conditions to produce an overall frailty score. In England, the National Health Service automatically calculates frailty scores for everyone aged 65 and over, with the aim to help people live independently for longer and avoid two major causes of hospital admissions for older people: falls and adverse responses to medication.

But Jylhävä’s research suggests that frailty indicators might be useful much earlier in life, too. She found that increased frailty scores were associated with higher mortality risks in old age, but that this association was particularly pronounced at age 50, where a jump in frailty score indicated a relatively large increase in mortality risk. Jylhävä says this is a sign that assessing frailty at age 65 is too late. Rather than looking to the ultra-old for the key to healthy aging, we should actually be looking at when and why younger people start the decline into ill health.

Exercise and a good diet will help. They’re not magic, but they’re what we have.

DON SURBER: “The devil won’t win, but he has been on a hot streak since World War II.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Will the US be weaker in 2050 than today?

STAR TREK: PICARD SEASON 3 REVIEW: Bad Fan Fiction With Noble Conviction.

I will say that season three of Picard is easily the best of the bunch, and certainly better than anything Star Trek-related that has come from [Alex] Kurtzman and company over the last fourteen-or-so years.

However, the man brought the bar down so low that even a fractional increase in quality feels like a galactic paradigm shift. At the end of the day, Picard is still a badly-written show. It’s just less badly-written than before.

Should you watch it? That’s a very hard question to answer. There were many moments in season three that I lauded and enjoyed, and just as many that caused me to double-facepalm like Picard in the classic TNG episode “Offspring.” It’s not a fantastic show, but it’s not a total train wreck, either. In comparison to season two, which I rightfully dubbed “unfathomable garbage,” season three can best be summed up as “bad fan fiction with noble conviction.” There’s a love for TNG here, to be sure, but it’s mired with incompetence and a remarkable lack of faith in its own fan base.

It’s always great to see Patrick Stewart on screen as Picard. If only he was served with much better writing than the three seasons of Star Trek: Picard.

DESANTIS NUKES REPORTER OVER ‘TOTALLY BS’ CLAIM: ‘Focus On The Facts And Stop Worrying About Narrative.’

DeSantis forcefully rejected the claims made by former detainee Mansoor Adayfi, who claims that he saw a picture of DeSantis on Twitter and remembered his face from nearly two decades ago.

“No. No. Not at all,” DeSantis said when asked if he witnessed any instances where Al Qaeda terrorists were allegedly force fed. “That’s BS. Totally BS.”

When the reporter mentioned that the former detainee claimed that DeSantis was present at force-feedings, DeSantis quickly fired back at the reporter.

“Who said that? How would they know me?” DeSantis responded. “Okay, think about that. Do you honestly believe that’s credible? So this is 2006, I’m a junior officer, do you honestly think that they would have remembered me from that? Of course not.”

“They’re just trying to get into the news because they know people like you will consume it because it fits your pre-ordained narrative that you’re trying to spin,” DeSantis continued. “Focus on the facts and stop worrying about narrative.”

This is the way.

KEEP ROCKIN’! Biden’s pre-written questions present a crisis of confidence.

So how does a question from a White House reporter make it to the president of the United States’ hands before she even asks it? One would think the White House itself, most likely the comms shop that works directly with them, has to be involved making preselection demands of reporters. Then reporters would have to be willing to go along with this, which violates all sorts of long-standing ethics about speaking “truth to power.” Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted, “No WH reporter would ever tell me what question they intended to ask POTUS. It would be unethical — not to mention soft — to do so.”

This should be a legitimate scandal for this White House, as they try to push an eighty-year-old president onto the country for a second term while it appears he cannot answer questions without a cue card. Subramanian should explain who at the White House she’s coordinating with, and her bosses at the LA Times should say something, too. Yet so far, no explanation has been offered. Subramanian herself is refusing to answer inquiries and the LA Times has simply gone silent on the matter. The White House isn’t accountable, either, because they are clearly in cahoots with the people who should be holding them accountable.

“Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines” has been an Insta-phrase for years. But it was nice of the L.A. Times and the White House comms shop to make it official yesterday.

(Classical reference in headline.)

WELL, THAT’S DISTURBING: Hackers Are Breaking Into ATT Email Accounts to Steal Cryptocurrency.

#JOURNALISM: Reuters Uses Lies to Defend Their Photographer Over Disputed NRA Show Child Photo.

Flashback: “So, basically, my butt refuted The New York Times.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Comedy Under Attack: Stand-Up in the Age of Woke Mobs.

How many security guards does it take to stage a comedy show?

That’s not a joke, and it’s certainly not funny. Comedians increasingly risk their lives for trying to make us laugh.

The Slap heard ’round the world was only the beginning.

Yes, Will Smith’s assault on Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars gala got plenty of attention. The media also pounced when a member of the audience jumped on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last year and attacked Dave Chappelle, a knife in his pocket.

Other, more ominous threats of violence routinely fly under the media radar.

Right-leaning comedian Kvon, whose stage show is both traditional and mostly bipartisan, shared an Instagram post this week sharing the security measures behind his recent show.

Read the whole thing.