June 2, 2025

YES.

Posted at 4:16 pm by Glenn Reynolds 68

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Andrew McCabe Can’t Understand Why Kash Patel Called Boulder Attack Terrorism.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth: “The Egyptian illegal immigrant who used a flamethrower and molotov cocktails to set a group of Jewish people on fire Sunday at a demonstration in Boulder, Colo. is now facing federal hate crime charges for attacking a group of demonstrators bringing attention to the hostages remaining in Hamas captivity.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 44

MAYBE IF THEY’D TRY NOT SUCKING SO MUCH: CNN’s Buried Lede: New Poll Shows Dems Still Cratering. “Bear in mind that CNN’s polls generally lean towards Democrats, too. These are terrible numbers for Democrats, and they aren’t the only indicators of political crisis either. Chalian and Raju go through the issue numbers, and Republicans are still dominating on the most important policy areas.”

Related: CNN’s Harry Enten Flabbergasted by Brutal New Numbers for Dems on Economy.

Posted at 4:07 pm by Glenn Reynolds 44

I LOVE A HAPPY STORY: ‘PROTECTED BY GOD AND A GUN’: 3 Thugs Motivated To Beat a Hasty Retreat in California Home Invasion. “A trio of masked thugs broke into a multi-million dollar home in the Hollywood Hills near Los Angeles Thursday evening. A sign on the property warned that, ‘This house is protected by God and a gun. Screw around and you’ll meet both,’ should have offered the young scholars a clue to pick another house. But to be fair, they probably couldn’t read. Anyway, the trio forced their way in around 10:30 and not fifteen seconds after making entry, they had poked the bear and the bear opened fire. All three of the felons fled in great haste.”

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 40

LAUGHING WOLF: Lightning Strike Conference Report.

The short version is that I wish I had been able to attend one of these Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors conferences very much sooner. As in not long after I was hit. The amount of information I got was almost like being hit with a firehose. Even better was talking with other survivors and finding out I’m not alone and not crazy (well, not in terms of the after effects of the strike anyway).

The longer version is that the life I had is gone, and it’s not coming back. In the words of the song, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. In fact, I feel more than fine. There is a part of me that is sad and other emotions at knowing that life is not ever going to come back. My mind and body are never going to work the way they did, and I will never be able to do some of the things I used to do. I’m still a pilot, though I will likely never fly again. If I can adjust to that, I can learn to deal with needing grab bars in the shower.

Fact is, on many levels I had already accepted that and begun moving forward. For parts of my old life, I was and am glad to see them gone. I prefer to see it as a chance to start over, to build a new life, and hopefully a better one, despite the difficulties. While I was never one who worked at Elon-speed/level, I did okay in certain areas. I can still work through certain types of problems, it just takes me longer to do the work. As I noted to Glenn at breakfast, what used to take me 30 minutes to write back then now takes me four hours (or more to be honest).

I can still look at data and spot patterns and trends, it just may take a bit longer. On the physical side, I’m doing a lot better than I was right after the strike and the conference gave me some ideas on how to work to step up my game mentally and physically. It would be nice to be able to do full prostrations, and get up again afterwards. One thing I realized during the conference is that I’ve been viewing, and gaming, my recovery as yet another experiment — one I’ve not bothered the human subjects committee about (think Les Geddes may have rubbed off on me more than I realized).

Which is probably a good thing, as I sure can’t count on the medical field to do much on a holistic level, much less within specialties

Fascinating and touching stuff — read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green 24

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 45

THEY WON’T LIKE A RADICALIZED AMERICA:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Stephen Green 81

THIS SEEMS TO BE AN INCREASINGLY POPULAR SENTIMENT:

Posted at 2:21 pm by Glenn Reynolds 60

‘DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS STAYS WOKE.’ Enjoy trying to figure out the description of the book “The Virgin Mary and the Neutrino.” No using ChatGPT!

Posted at 2:02 pm by Robert Shibley 18

GREAT MOMENTS IN HYPERBOLE: David Brooks Invokes Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin To Mark Musk’s Departure From DOGE.

New York Times columnist David Brooks did the not-so-clever trick of insisting he wasn’t saying what he was indeed saying on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour as he reflected back on Elon Musk’s time at DOGE by comparing him to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.

Host Amna Nawaz wondered, “David, how do you look at it? What’s his legacy, if we know that yet?”

Brooks declared that, “As a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven’t gotten over. And so there’s folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That’s true.”

He then claimed, “according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That’s just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that’s 300,000 dead, and we’re four months in.”

At this point, it should be noted that President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget keeps PEPFAR funding steady. With that in mind, Brooks reference to the trio of communist dictators comes across as even more absurd:

Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don’t have anybody on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that’s Elon Musk’s legacy. And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that.

MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas, borrowing Fonzie’s leather jacket and t-shirt, jumps the shark as well by taking the same talking points and compares Musk to LBJ: MSNBC panel stunned to silence over report on deaths linked to Elon Musk’s DOGE.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 147