WHY AMERICANS SHOULD CELEBRATE THE 5TH OF MAY: EXTRA EDITION: Feliz Cinco de Mayo!
May 6, 2025
I’M STARTING TO LIKE MALTA AS MUCH AS LAWDOG DOES: NGO Says Malta Blocking Access To Gaza-Bound Aid Ship Hit By Drones.
MONDAY IS ALL RIGHT FOR FIGHTING: All The Trouble In The World.
THIS IS NEWS? Damn, the left hates Jews and Israel.
May 5, 2025
OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.
THE GALACTIC EMPIRE: FIRM, BUT FAIR*. Andor v. Star Trek: How Star Wars gets government right. New video from Reason TV:
* QED: As Sonny Bunch noted in the Washington Post in 2015: The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified.
IT’S A GROWING FIELD: Army creates space career field for enlisted soldiers.
HEY, REMEMBER IN THE FALL OF 2024, WHEN THE KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGN SOUGHT TO REHABILITATE THE REPUTATIONS OF DICK CHENEY AND GEORGE W. BUSH? Dr. Jill says, hold my zinfandel!
The left absolutely vilified Mike Milken in the 1980s — he was pardoned by Trump in February of 2020 — now Jill is going to work for him; that’s just perfect. More details at the Daily Caller, in an article headlined: Former First Lady Jill Biden Finds A New Gig In The Swamp.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Will Gen Z Reverse the Baby Bust?
Might that be for this reason, noted by The Conversation at the bottom?
In Vucci’s photograph, we are given the illusion that this photograph captures “the moment” or “a shot”. Yet it doesn’t capture the moment of the shooting, but its immediate aftermath. The photograph captures Trump’s media acuity and swift, responsive performance to the attempted assassination, standing to rise with his fist in the air.
In a post-truth world, there has been a pervasive concern about knowing the truth. While that extends beyond photographic representation, photography and visual representation play a considerable part.
It made Trump look like the hero we know him to be, the decisive, swift-acting, self-sacrificing leader that voters had been looking for. The picture turned up on tshirts, coffee mugs, stickers and posters, signaling how much the public was moved by it. Of course he won the election.
Some must have blamed this photo for it. But it was hardly propaganda — it was the work of an experienced photographer able to act with split-second instincts in a dangerous situation with events still unfolding. What’s more Vucci was hardly buddies with Trump. In March, he testified against the White House exclusion of AP from the photo press pool over the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ being renamed the ‘Gulf of America.’
Given Vucci’s photos, it seems kind of counterintuitive for the White House to exclude Vucci over a dispute like that, but the Pulitzer board didn’t notice.
But not entirely unexpected:
Or to put it another way:
PROGRESSIVISM, WHERE TIME STANDS STILL: Benjamin Kerstein: We have met the pigs… In the 1960s and 1970s, a totalitarian movement almost destroyed the republic. Now it threatens to do so again.
Put simply, the professoriate regime is the 1960s New Left. That is, it is the New Left in its decadent and hopefully final form as an institutionalized totalitarian movement. It has now collapsed into the antisemitism that appears to be the endgame of almost all totalitarian movements. It has decimated its enemies within the institutions it controls and, as a result, has found a new and ultimate enemy. It has finally arrived where it was always going: the Elders of Zion.
Like all things, this is illustrated by the fact that none of this is new. Even a brief examination of an unbiased historical account of the late 1960s proves as much.
II.
One of the best of these histories is Theodore H. White’s extraordinary The Making of the President 1968, which chronicles the tumultuous presidential election that witnessed the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the escalating Vietnam War, the devastating Chicago New Left riots that shattered the Democratic party and the New Deal consensus, and ultimately, Richard Nixon’s victory.
White’s book is of immense value for two reasons: First, he was a brilliant writer with a gift for pithy insight and revelatory aphorism. Second, he wrote before the professoriate regime conquered and colonized academia and American intellectual life. As a result, he did not attempt to rewrite history in the New Left’s favor.
The professoriate regime that now controls the writing of that history has long since whitewashed and falsified the history of the New Left. However, it has yet to completely burn all the books that bear witness to what really happened. Consequently, White remains to tell us something like the truth.
In doing so, White provides conclusive proof that none of this is new. The monstrous crimes we witness on US campuses today were occurring decades ago, and the ideology that “justifies” them already existed in full. It was partially institutionalized at that time and is now completely institutionalized, yet it remains unchanged.
A single passage in White’s book provides conclusive proof of this. It details the rhetorical strategies and underlying ideology of the 1960s New Left students’ movement, which had already laid out and made public its stunningly successful plan to conquer and colonize the universities. Not all members of the student movement were totalitarians, but the totalitarians eventually emerged victorious in the struggle for leadership, with devastating consequences.
White is ruthless in his deconstruction of the movement. He does so in a lengthy excerpt that cannot be truncated without damaging its insights. I reproduce it in full below:
I don’t want to quote the whole passage by White for Fair Use reasons, but note this:
In this new rhetoric, normal contradictions of thought vanish. Thus, the old virtues of tolerance and free speech becomes repressive tolerance, a sinister effort by the establishment to smother the truth by indulgence; this, apparently, justifies the denial of free speech to those who disagree. To steal, seize or destroy offices or files becomes to liberate. The old Marxist adverbial phrase objectively speaking becomes, in the new rhetoric, a transitional phrase to any statement that cannot be factually proven; when a speaker begins a paragraph with objectively speaking, it means that any construct of the imagination he thinks should be true is indeed so. The word non-violence is turned inside out. If what can be won by the massing of bodies, the occupation of buildings, shoving, and the use of brawn is yielded immediately, it proves the validity of non-violence. (Stone-and-bottle-throwing can be classed, in this vocabulary, as non-violent.) If the non-violent aggressors are resisted, then those who resist are styled violent and brutal. Eric Sevareid [a prominent television news reporter] was recently reminded, in one of his broadcasts, of his European experience: “They [the student activists] have the same approach, ” he said, “as the early Nazis and early Communists. ‘We are right,’ they say, ‘we are progress. If you resist us, or defend yourself, you are the instigators of violence.’ ”
If this infamous Orwellian moment from CNN in August of 2020 took you by surprise, it shouldn’t have; it was totally predicted by the worldview of the ’60s New Left, which as Kerstein writes, has burrowed deeply into 21st century academia:
At American Greatness, Roger Kimball explores: The Politicized Mind: How the University Lost Its Way.
As Kerstein writes at the first link, it lost its way a long time ago indeed.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Scientists May Have Found a Natural Alternative to Ozempic.
KATY PERRRY CAN’T BELIEVE SHE WASN’T INVITED TO THE CEREMONY: Trump honors space exploration on National Astronaut Day.
THIS SHOULD LEAD TO NEW TREATMENTS FAIRLY QUICKLY: Heart Mystery Solved: Scientists Discover Unexpected Source of Cardiac Inflammation. “Researchers have discovered a surprising trigger for heart damage after a heart attack: surviving heart cells near the damaged area become inflamed due to mechanical stress, not immune cells as previously believed. These heart cells rupture and leak DNA, which sparks a damaging immune response. This breakthrough challenges long-held assumptions and offers fresh strategies for preventing heart failure by calming these stressed heart cells and blocking specific inflammatory signals.”
A UNIFIED THEORY OF TRUMP TROLLING:
Yesterday, in my Sunday Smiles essay, I mused about Trump’s “own the libs” style of trolling.
It drives the liberals nuts, which can be very entertaining to watch, but I think a lot of MAGA converts who were initially reluctant to support Trump for cultural reasons are made extremely uncomfortable by his constantly trolling liberals. . . .
What’s the point, they wonder. Is it presidential? Doesn’t Trump have more important things to do? Is it unnecessarily provocative?
Obviously, what set off my musings was the recent controversy about Trump’s tweet in which he put up an AI-generated image of himself in Papal garb. Liberals went insane. Again.
A year or two ago, these same people applauded when the FBI labeled traditional Catholics “domestic terrorists,” regularly call priests pedophiles (I could write essay after essay about the fact that government-employed public school teachers abuse more children in any given year than priests did in 70 years and liberals work assiduously to prevent kids escaping the public schools), and bash the Church due to its pro-natalism and anti-gender-ideology stances.
But whatever. . . . Trump’s greatest allies are his opposition, who overreact to everything he does and go to ridiculous extremes because he violates the norms they claim (and often do) hold so dear. Liberals will go to the mat to defend wife-beating, human-trafficking MS-13 members rather than agree with Trump on anything, and that reveals them to be insane. . . . Trolling the liberals keeps his base excited, not so much because they love the trolls–some do, some don’t–but we can all unify in defending Trump against the insane attacks. The hypocrisy of the left keeps getting exposed, and the trolling Trump does keep the liberals in a perpetual state of lighting their hair on fire.
Also, it’s funny. And it’s not just about firing up the base. The left has ruled through an unjustified sense of entitlements, and an unearned moral and intellectual deference. Treating them like Groucho treated Margaret Dumont is a very effective way of undermining those characteristics, and of demoralizing the left. He’s constantly hitting them with some variant of Cousin Vinnie’s “You was serious about that?” leavened with doses of “Everything that guy just said is bullshit.”
And you know, he’s loud, he’s uncouth, but everyone is always rooting for Cousin Vinnie.
BECAUSE THEY’RE LYING POLITICIZED HACKS? Mark Judge: Why NPR Refuses to Have Me on the Air.
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.
