SAY IT WITH FLOWERS:

NIH Director @DrJBhattacharya says the agency stopped the beagle experiments on the NIH campus — and that @PETA even sent him flowers. pic.twitter.com/koFbZ9e9M9

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 5, 2025

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: JB Pritzker, the Shoney’s Big Boy of the Democratic Party, Is Here to Save the Day!

WITH LUCK, A NEW CANDIDATE FOR “FOUND OUT”: ER Doctor Calls Jews “Demonic”, Accuses Them of “Killing Babies”.

STAY COOL: FrSara Portable Handheld Fan Rechargeable. #CommissionEarned

TYLER O’NEIL: How Many Biden Appointees ‘Burrowed in’ to the Permanent Bureaucracy?

Left-leaning federal bureaucrats aim to oppose President Donald Trump from within the administrative state, and some Biden administration appointees have attempted to “burrow in” to the federal bureaucracy by switching from “political” to more permanent “career” positions.

While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in ostensibly nonpolitical, career positions.

“The biggest challenge that every single new Cabinet secretary and their subordinates will face is the entrenched bureaucrat,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.

“Some of it is overt, and we saw an example of that with the FBI employee trying to coerce his subordinates to ‘dig in’ against the administration,” he noted, referencing an email FBI agent James Dennehy wrote in January shortly before his retirement.

“What’s worse is the quiet insubordination,” Whitson warned. He said many bureaucrats will “slow policy,” simply ignoring the president’s orders.

Read the whole thing.

BIG BULLETS: Ammo: 8.6 Blackout Review. “Unlike .300 BLK and 338 ARC ammunition, which are designed to work with a rifling-twist rate of 1:8-inch, the 8.6 BLK uses a rifling-twist rate of 1:3-inch. This is an incredibly fast twist rate, but what’s it for? Well, it helps better stabilize bullets that are about the size of your little finger, but it also significantly enhances terminal performance.”

LET’S GO GET THEM: New source of gold, platinum, and uranium discovered in space.

A flash of intense radiation seen in space has upended long-held ideas about how some of our heaviest metals emerge. Scientists have found that such a flare can pump out vast amounts of heavy, rare atoms in mere seconds, revealing a surprising origin for valuables like gold and platinum.

Brian Metzger from the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City is one of the researchers behind this magnetar flare discovery.

Metzger and his colleagues worked to show how these unusually powerful neutron star outbursts can forge precious metals, called called r-process elements, at unimaginable scales.

Magnetars are the universe’s most intense magnets, and they’re not just strong – they’re wildly extreme. Born from the explosive death of massive stars, these neutron stars pack more mass than our sun into a ball just a dozen miles wide.

Their magnetic fields are a thousand times stronger than typical neutron stars, and trillions of times beyond anything found on Earth.

If you stood anywhere near one (which, thankfully, you can’t), it could scramble your atoms just by existing. That’s how intense these cosmic beasts are.

On second thought, maybe we aren’t quite ready to go get them.

PAYBACK: Not ‘One and Done,’ Israel and U.S. Strike Deep Into Yemen.

READER FAVORITE: Magnetic Fidget Pen – Stress Relief Toy & Multifunctional Writing Pen. #CommissionEarned

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…

"EDITED FOR CLARITY": NBC News cuts President Trump's mention of the emergence of damning evidence against Kilmar Abrego García from the Meet the Press broadcast.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: You see what happened just this morning. Tapes came out, horrible tapes from his wife. You don't… pic.twitter.com/ppr15BxLOa

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) May 4, 2025

…it isn’t enough.

WATCH: David Portnoy livid over bait-and-switch local ABC News interview. Language alert:

So @6abc begged me to do an interview about the incident at our bar. Since it was local I agreed. Then the reporter tried to say Barstool and I and white men were responsible for the incident. Austin started recording once it got contentious pic.twitter.com/ug8CX83HHp

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) May 5, 2025

Dave has definitely taken Glenn’s “Bring your own camera” advice to heart: “My terms were let me record interview so you can’t cut and edit. Same thing I offered to let Business Insider do. Weird how nobody but me will accept these terms.”

And if you missed it yesterday: Portnoy announces fitting punishment for bigots who launched vile anti-semitic attack on his Philly bar.

SPACE: We finally know a little more about Amazon’s super-secret satellites: Amazon’s Kuiper satellites look nothing like SpaceX’s Starlink. “The employment history of Amazon’s head of Project Kuiper, Rajeev Badyal, makes it all the more compelling to compare the two companies’ designs. Badyal was SpaceX’s vice president of satellites until he was fired by Elon Musk in 2018, reportedly because Musk wanted to move faster with Starlink.” And it seems like Elon was right.

Also, SpaceX is radically transparent.

JULIE BURCHILL: ‘Protect the Dolls’ is trans activism at its creepiest.

Reading a Guardian report on the new pro-trans ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt campaign, I reflected that there’s no tell like a self-tell.

When Tilda Swinton and a host of lesser-known fashion and showbiz faces (I had personally never heard of Pedro Pascal or Troye Sivan) put on one of these hilariously over-priced garments – £75! – and smiled self-servingly for the cameras, did they have no inkling of how the use of the word ‘dolls’ would play? Not after all the years when we gender realists declared so many times that women are born, not made? That ‘female’ is not a costume you can wear in the way that Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs wore the skins of his victims?

Even the tiny minority of autogynephiles who have had themselves turned inside out by surgeons who would give Dr Frankenstein a run for his money can never truly be refashioned as women. They can, at best, become an imitation of one.

So, in a way, transwomen are ‘dolls’. But not the kind they think of themselves as. Social media have fuelled the rise in images of men with body dysmorphia and / or a kink portraying themselves as fairies and little girls, even when they’re six-foot-four abattoir workers called Big Al. Whether these men are deluded or having a laugh is a matter of conjecture, but I’d say that either one indicates what the centrist dads call a ‘bad-faith actor’. The silly and the sinister often overlap on certain issues. ‘Palestine’ is one, trans is another.

There are without doubt ‘transwomen’ who have simply got carried away with the thrill they get from dressing up like Widow Twankey when their wives are at book club. But there are some who are downright creepy, and their embrace of the ‘dolls’ motif only draws attention to this, however unwittingly.

Why is yet another Disney actor with a zillion dollar movie scheduled for release in a couple of months issuing politicized statements that will alienate potential moviegoers? Flashback to two weeks ago: Another Day, Another Disney Celebrity Tanking Their Franchise:

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Shifting Morality of Gambling Isn’t Making Us Better.

MY CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR TAUGHT US THIS IN COLLEGE: Study finds flourishing doesn’t always mean happiness.

GLORIOUS AC: Austin Mandates AC. “If you’re be reading this blog any length of time, you know I’m not a fan of Austin’s oppressive regulatory regime. So it may surprise you to learn that Austin recently passed a housing regulation I actually approve of. So get those cries of ‘sellout!’ ready as I disturb the shade of Ayn Rand* and approve of government intervening in the free market.”

THIS IS CNN: Wow — CNN Officially Crosses A Line In Their Trump Hate With Disturbing Interview of Drug Cartel (Watch).

Well, well, well, there it is. Just when we think the fake news, lamestream media can’t get any lower, they once again prove us wrong. Ok, to be fair, we expect this sort of garbage from MSNBC because after all, they kept Joy Reid around for years even after they knew she was a racist, hateful bigot. And while we know CNN is pretty bad, we’ve always sort of seen them as a bit saner than MSNBC, which of course, isn’t saying much.

But this? CNN just gave MSNBC a run for their ‘hot mess of putrid media’ money.

Imagine hating Trump so much you feel sorry for the drug cartels being called ‘terrorists’.

Watch this:

Remember when angel mom Patty Morin emotionally described to the White House press how an illegal immigrant brutally raped and murdered her daughter?

CNN cut away from Patty to air segments about Gavin Newsom and the NBA. https://t.co/pzAsOG0qZa

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) May 5, 2025

Flashback: ‘Shameful:’ White House Blasts CNN, MSNBC For Refusing to Air Angel Mom’s Speech.

In April, White House aide Stephen Miller tweeted, “CNN’s and MSNBC’s contempt for the victims of migrant crime is reprehensible.” CNN is really leaning into the brand, apparently.

ILYA SHAPIRO DEBATES Campus Deportations.

RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Life at the top, and the bottom of New York. The New Yorker has a photo spread of “Power Houses: Inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers,” including Alex Soros and Huma Abedin, AOC, Al Sharpton, and “Ella Emhoff, textile designer,” in their wealthy digs, all very far removed from (but approving of): Tren de Aragua Tykes Rain Mayhem Down on Times Square, Mock NYPD.

Just to be on the safe side: Kamala Harris takes 25 taxpayer-funded bodyguards to the Polo Bar after trashing Trump over economy.

Republican NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Silwa said it was ‘an outrage’ the incumbent Eric Adams gave Harris a police escort.

‘Secret Service is fine; NYPD, no. NYPD needs to protect the people, we don’t have enough of them,’ he told DailyMail.com.

‘She’s going to a bar to enjoy herself, and she’s got like an army of security paid for by us, not her.

‘We should get a rebate from her so we can actually use these cops to protect citizens on the subways and streets.’

Tom Wolfe may have passed away in 2018, but the version of the Matrix he programmed is still working absolutely fine:

(Classical reference in headline.)

ANOTHER HANGOVER FROM THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, AND ALSO LARGELY POINTLESS: These Are the People You Can ‘Thank’ for Real ID.

FIRST “MAN COLDS,” NOW THIS: High blood pressure, diabetes deadlier in men.

SPINES ARE STIFFENING THROUGHOUT HIGHER EDUCATION: NYU Demands Law Students Renounce Protests Or Be Barred From Final Exams.

IT ISN’T ANTI-RACIST; IT’S PRO-DEPENDENCY: How ‘anti-racist’ ideology hurt the students it was supposed to help.

In 2019, students at Ascend’s 15 charter schools — nearly all of them living in poverty — were “reading Shakespeare in the middle grades, studying the Dutch masters, and outperforming city and statewide averages on standardized tests,” writes Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. Then, founder Steven F. Wilson came out for high expectations in a an essay titled The Promise of Intellectual Joy, and was fired for “white supremacist rhetoric.”

Wilson is back in the fray with a book titled The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. He tells Bellafante that anti-racist education failed students. At one school that went anti-racist, “the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards on the math section of the SAT plummeted from 41 percent in 2017 to 4 percent in 2024,” he says.

Anti-racist programming failed, says Wilson, because “indoctrination is boring.”

It also isn’t educating — and isn’t meant to be.

A PRIVILEGED CLASS IN A PRIVILEGED SECTOR: You Won’t Believe the Tax Breaks for Professors. “Perhaps the sweetest perks Stanford and other elite universities provide are the multimillion-dollar tax-free housing and tuition stipends they lavish on faculty, staff and their children. They’re tax giveaways most Americans don’t get to enjoy, though they effectively cover the cost. It’s long past time to close these tax loopholes. The exact benefits universities provide to staff and their children vary but are consistently extravagant. Schools such as Columbia pay a significant portion of K-12 private school tuition for professors and senior administrators, often covering about 50% of tuition costs—which can run upward of $65,000 a year at New York’s top private schools. … The problem is that because these gifts are all exempt from income tax, taxpayers foot the bill.”

While the recipients attack “the rich” and private schooling — and tax cuts.