IT SHOULD TICK EVERYBODY OFF:
This will tick the Arabs off. https://t.co/Khn3a5vNbG
— John The Main Guy (@JohnTheMainGuy1) May 18, 2026
May 18, 2026
HELD UP BY ALL THOSE VANISHED SHIPS? Forget the Bermuda Triangle — Bermuda itself is the mystery.
ROBERT SPENCER: A Cautionary Tale That No One Will Heed. “What would make someone switch sides and join America’s enemies? It’s easy to envision an America-hating leftist doing such a thing, but it’s much harder to understand when the defector in question was, to all outward appearances anyway, a patriot who was devoted to the service of her country.”
AMERICANS WILL DO ANYTHING TO AVOID USING THE METRIC SYSTEM: Watch an asteroid the size of a blue whale hurtle towards Earth live online May 18. Closest approach is 5:23 pm ET.
HEH: Spanberger’s Signing Statement Laid the Groundwork for Overturning Virginia’s ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban. “The governor’s acknowledgment that the law covers common hunting models will likely be cited in Second Amendment challenges. If the law is not amended, she could prove the main witness against her own signed legislation.”
IF YOU STARVE A COLD, YOU’RE FEEDING A FEVER: A New Study Backs Up 1 Old Theory About Getting Sick.. “The study, which was published in the journal Nature, discovered that your body’s T cells—considered the ‘soldiers’ of the immune system—respond better to a threat when you’ve eaten something.”
GEORGIA REVISITED:
Some people may not be "hip" to this because it was 6 years ago…
But in Georgia the Freedom Caucus people sued the state to recount and audit the ballots. The judge never threw out the case so the ballots were held in evidence for over 6 years, and just recently it was found… https://t.co/BDTyzbjqi3
— bumbadum (@bumbadum14) May 18, 2026
BOOK ON FATHERS ESTRANGED FROM ADULT CHILDREN: From John Norton, Love With Nowhere to Go. #CommissionEarned
WE’VE KNOWN ABOUT THE MUNCHIES FOR A LONG TIME: “Participants took a CBD capsule or a placebo, without knowing which. People ate about 193 calories more at lunch after taking CBD compared to placebo; roughly a 16% increase. This was statistically meaningful and unexpected, since the researchers had actually predicted CBD would reduce appetite based on its known biology.”
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: AOC’s Poor Understanding of America.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has little, if any, awareness of where money comes from—no knowledge of finance, of savings and investment, of creating a product or conceiving an invention that adds value to the economy. She operates in a stark and static universe without consequences and trade-offs, without growth or mobility. There are only victims and victimizers. And according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, she’s in fourth place in the 2028 Democratic primary.
Socialists have been getting economics wrong since at least 1848. There are several reasons. The link between individual effort and reward isn’t always clear. State action is visible; the operations of the market are not. Government takes dramatic steps, while the invisible hand—division of labor, specialization, comparative advantage, accrued interest, mankind’s natural tendency to truck and barter and innovate—improves our condition gradually. The unintended consequences of a policy, no matter how well-meaning, can be worse than the problem the policy is meant to solve.
Economics is counterintuitive. Few secondary schools teach it (they might want to start here). Most Americans learn the value of work, thrift and initiative—as well as the costs of taxation, regulation and inflation—through experience. That’s why Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a celebrity since she was elected to Congress at age 29, can’t distinguish between minimum-wage increases and overpriced croissants.
To be fair, she’s never had to.
2028 PREVIEW:
After @PeteButtigieg lies about modernizing Air Traffic systems and reducing highway fatalities he explains what he did with the $2 Trillion congress gave him:
“Magnificent” Baggage claim areas for airports nobody cares about, Wildlife tunnels (that still aren’t finished) across… pic.twitter.com/lLZfeiAhBP
— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) May 18, 2026
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Bill Maher Did What No Late Night Comic Dared.
“It’s everyone’s right in a free country to be Antisemitic, but enough with hiding behind Israel, or Zionism or Netanyahu,” Maher said. “[If you think] when it comes to human rights, Israel is the monster country of all time, you either don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy. Because there are so many worse places.”
“That’s how you know it’s antisemitism. It’s the inconsistency,” he added.
Maher brought up The New York Times getting cozy with Hasan Piker, a rabid progressive who has compared Zionists to neo-Nazis.
Yes, Maher both-sided the matter, but there is fault on both sides.
It’s hard to even quantify where Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens currently fall on the Left/Right divide*, but the anti-Israel fury isn’t confined to the new Left.
Maher brought some receipts there, too.
“The meathead manosphere and Code Pink people are on the same page,” he said. “They both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.”
Read the whole thing. With the exception of Maher, it’s increasingly looking like, as Karol Markowicz wrote on Thursday: Face it, Jewish liberals: You have no friends on the left.
* To be fair, Tucker’s newfound love from the New York Times is a clue.
IT ISN’T THE BIAS SO MUCH AS IT’S THE LACK OF LAUGHS: 91% of SNL’s political Weekend Update jokes this season targeted Trump, conservatives.
SOCIAL JUSTICE RUINS EVERYTHING, ARCHIVIST EDITION: “Archiving is about shaping memory, advancing justice, and ensuring access in a digital age. Our ARM students preserve the past and build ethical frameworks for the future…”
No, it’s not. Nobody wants this. The constituency of people who want archivists making decisions based on “shaping memory” (Orwell much?) or “advancing justice” is effectively 0% of the population. Not everything has to be politics. People are begging higher ed to stop being this way.
FOR A FEW YEARS IN THE ’90S, WILL SMITH DEFINED SUMMER BOX OFFICE:
Hollywood was full of enormous incandescent black Movie Stars right up until the moment activists decided the movie business was broken and racist and needed to be “fixed” and now we’re stuck hoping for Will Smith’s redemption because we aren’t making movie stars at all anymore https://t.co/zlMglBGPDR
— George MF Washington (@GMFWashington) May 18, 2026
IT’S WHAT THEY DO: The AP Goes Manic Panic Over Muskets?
READER FAVORITE: Carhartt Men’s Force Relaxed Fit Midweight Short-Sleeve Pocket T-Shirt. #CommissionEarned
SpaceX could file publicly for the IPO as early as Wednesday, with a roadshow kicking off on June 4, the report said. The prior timeline put the IPO near the end of June.
The company had already filed confidentially and is seeking to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. That would surpass the current record holder for the biggest IPO ever: Saudi Aramco, which $29 billion raised at a $1.7 trillion valuation in 2019.
Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has taken over the market. It claimed more than 80% of global rocket launches last year and has over 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, providing space-based internet connections to businesses and militaries.
SpaceX is a top launch provider for NASA and the Pentagon, which is also looking to the company to help develop President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile-defense shield.
“It’s a truly unique business with the deepest moat that exists today,” an investor told the Financial Times. “This company launches over 90% of Western payload into space each year. It’s like if you own the only undersea cable from the U.S. to Europe, it’s the only way you can get internet.”
Nobody has yet to beat Falcon 9 on price, and that’s before Starship undercuts Falcon 9.
ARRESTS AND EXPULSIONS ALL AROUND: Georgetown U. anti-Israel protesters disrupt senior convocation.
FANG FANG’S SISTER? Turns out, according to the Daily Caller, that California Treasurer/Candidate for Lt. Governor Fiona Ma has a history of meetings with Chinese intelligence
TAXES: Europe tried wealth taxes. Most gave up.
Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimate the Sanders proposal would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade. Competing estimates from the Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute project significantly lower totals of $3.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion, respectively.
Saez and Zucman’s estimate for Warren’s proposal has more than doubled since the legislation was first introduced in 2021, which the economists attribute largely to the rapid growth in billionaire wealth during that period.
Zucman has estimated that U.S. billionaires pay an effective tax rate of about 23%, though Magness disputed that figure, arguing broader accounting methods place the rate closer to 40%. A 2025 paper by IRS economist David Splinter estimated effective tax rates as high as 45% for top earners.
Wealth taxes have largely disappeared across Europe. Twelve European countries imposed wealth taxes in the 1990s, but only Spain, Norway and Switzerland still maintain them today.
“In practice, these measures have almost never delivered on their promised tax revenue,” Magness told The Center Square.
According to Magness, countries including Austria, France, Sweden, Finland and Denmark repealed their wealth taxes between 1994 and 2018 because of low revenue yields and concerns that high-net-worth residents would move assets or relocate abroad.
We’ll see if California voters figure this stuff out before or after they drive out even more wealthy taxpayers.
