April 2, 2026

IT’S AN EASY QUESTION:

Posted at 10:13 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Well, here we are.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

UNBURDENED BY WHAT HAS BEEN: White House Humorously Skewers Remarks Kamala Harris Decided to Put Out Before Trump’s Iran Speech.

She spoke in the video about the action against Iran, but she didn’t talk about how the Biden-Harris administration has helped to prop up the terrorist regime by relaxing enforcement on sanctions, and even released billions of dollars to Iran in frozen assets at the same time as a prisoner exchange.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly just flattened her, using Harris’ own comments about coconut trees to do her in.

“Kamala Harris oversaw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and ushered in an invasion of migrant criminals into our homeland. She should listen to the overwhelming majority of Americans who want her to crawl under a coconut tree and go away.”

Thirteen service members were killed directly because of the Biden-Harris failures.

This is what it looked like under Biden-Harris. We do well never to forget how out of control it was, from the border to the rampant high prices/inflation.

To be fair, I can understand why a cabinet member from Obama’s third term would be angry about how Trump is cleaning up Barry’s messes. It’s a far cry from giving the mullahs $400 million in cash, and the Taliban seven (cue the Dr. Evil voice) billion dollars worth of American weapons, vehicles, and aircraft:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

MY MONEY IS ON THE FORMER:

But in regards to Graham’s questions, while it’s obvious that as a fellow lefty Brinkley is a fan, his biography raised a number of questions about just how biased was Mr. “And that’s the way it is,” particularly in an era when his competition consisted of three other prime time anchors (two on commercial networks, eventually, one on PBS) with exactly the same Democrat Party talking points.

Still though, it could be fun for audiences to discover that Democrat Party operatives with a lavalier were smearing Republican presidential candidates as crypto-Nazis decades before Trump.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Unintential Plagiarist” Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse: ” I think the reason AI propagandists are so flustered by the fact that no real writer wants to use their idiotic tools is that they themselves don’t enjoy writing.”

As Phillip Magness asked at Reason in June 2022: Is Twitter-Famous Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse a Plagiarist?

His 2000 thesis on civil-rights-era Atlanta lifts passages from other people’s work.

Known for posting Twitter threads that call out both real and imagined errors of accuracy in conservative commentaries about America’s past, Kruse earned the moniker of “History’s Attack Dog” from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Kruse parlayed his half-million Twitter followers into a recurring opinion column on American political history at MSNBC, and he will soon be taking his Twitter threads to print in a co-edited book, which purports to catalog “distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media.”

But a discovery from Kruse’s past may now put Princeton’s Twitter warrior under a microscope of his own, raising the question of whether he holds himself to the same standards that he imposes on his internet adversaries. A key passage from Kruse’s doctoral dissertation on the history of race relations in Atlanta displays uncanny similarities to a 1996 book on the same subject by Ronald H. Bayor, a now-retired historian from Georgia Tech.

A few months later, “Princeton [dismissed] Kevin Kruse plagiarism allegations as ‘careless cutting and pasting.’”

Scraping data and repurposing it — it’s not just for LLMs anymore!

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM:

Posted at 7:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHAT MATTERS MOST: There are six things that matter most when pondering how to heal all that afflicts America, and long-time evangelical conservative insider operative Tim Goeglein documents each of them in his new book bearing that title. Actually, he wrote my book. Find out here what I mean.

Posted at 7:52 pm by Mark Tapscott

SQUEEZE HARDER: Dubai crackdown hits Iran’s economic lifeline, squeezes IRGC networks.

The arrest of dozens of IRGC-linked money changers in the United Arab Emirates is one of the most serious blows yet to Tehran’s sanctions-evasion network, laying bare how heavily the Islamic Republic has depended on Dubai as an economic lifeline.

Sources familiar with the matter told Iran International that UAE authorities detained dozens of money changers tied to financial entities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, shut down associated companies and closed their offices.

The crackdown follows days of mounting regional tensions and comes after other measures targeting Iranian nationals, including visa revocations and tighter travel restrictions through Dubai.

For years, Dubai has served as Iran’s main offshore financial artery, where oil proceeds, petrochemical revenues and rial conversions were turned into dollars, dirhams and euros beyond the reach of the country’s battered domestic banking system.

“This is going to be a real problem for Tehran because Dubai was an economic lung for the Iranian regime,” Jason Brodsky of United Against Nuclear Iran told Iran International.

“That is economic pressure and diplomatic isolation in a way that the UAE is able to employ against the Iranian regime, and it will have a very considerable impact.”

This is no time to go wobbly.

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Nike Shares Now Slide to 11-Year Low.

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File.

Nike’s stock has slumped to its lowest level in more than a decade after the sportswear giant warned sales will keep falling through 2026.

Shares hit an 11-year low on April 1, capping a brutal stretch that has seen the company lose around 75 percent of its value since shares peaked in 2021.

It is now worth under $68 billion – a third of the value of TJ Maxx.

The latest sell-off was triggered by a bleak outlook, with Nike forecasting sales will slump 4 percent this quarter – a staggering $500 million fall in the value of shoes, tracksuits, and t-shirts.

The brand is being hit by a triple whammy: backlash to its more ‘woke’ image shift, a failed retreat from major retail partners in favor of direct-to-consumer selling, and a deepening slump in China.

* * * * * * * *

Nike’s recent ad campaigns have apparently featured not only Colin Kaepernick, who whines about being “oppressed” while enjoying fame and fortune, but also the woke Megan Rapinoe and a “non-binary esports player” – whatever that is – named Dominique McLean. That’s not very likely to draw a wide audience of loyal American buyers.

Why can’t these companies just advertise the virtues of their products? Why not just make the case to the buying public that Nike athletic shoes and so forth are better quality, longer-lasting, more comfortable, and explain why? Traditionally, advertising has promoted the virtues of a product. The company is looking to entice buyers to a free trade in which their buyers perceive a gain in value; that the shoes, or sportswear, or whatever, will return value to them greater than the cost of the product.

Promoting anti-American woke nutbars does nothing to that end. Nike seems to be learning that; they are learning, as other companies have before them, what it means to “get woke, go broke.”

How woke did Nike get before the plummet began? This woke:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

NASA VERSUS SPACEX:

Tweet continues:

SpaceX on the other hand can rapidly develop their rockets because most of it is built by them. If they make changes it doesn’t result in months of back and forth they can pretty much do it on the fly. And then test them on full rockets. This ultimately saves time and money but faces more public scrutiny, especially from those who are ignorant or are simply against the company/elon and are looking for any reason to be critical.

A perfect example of this was on the last couple of flights where various heat tiles and even no tiles were all tested to see what real world effects they would have.

To boldly go where Virginia Postrel has gone before. In 1997, she explored “Resilience vs. Anticipation:”

Boston’s winter is a natural disaster, but its predictability changes everything.3 As Hutchinson suggests, New Englanders know winter is coming. Bad weather is annoying but easy to plan for: You build snow days into the school year, buy a car with four-wheel drive, get used to scraping ice and shoveling snow. You make sure you have a coat, hat, and gloves. Snow, says Hutchinson, is no big deal: “You just put on boots.” Life has a regular rhythm.

Good weather plus earthquakes creates an utterly different environment. On a day-to-day basis, you can concentrate on your goals, with no need for contingency plans. Your softball game, your picnic, your wedding won’t be rained out. But everything could change in an instant. You can’t anticipate earthquakes, can’t plan for them, can’t even predict when and where they’ll strike. Instead of providing the certainty of seasons, nature promises a future of random shocks. All you can do is develop general coping skills and resources. There is nothing familiar about the aftermath of an earthquake, and no one survives it alone.

In his 1988 book, SEARCHING FOR SAFETY, the late UC-Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky laid out two alternatives for dealing with risk: anticipation, the static planning that aspires to perfect foresight, and resilience, the dynamic response that relies on having many margins of adjustment:

Anticipation is a mode of control by a central mind; efforts are made to predict and prevent potential dangers before damage is done. Forbidding the sale of certain medical drugs is an anticipatory measure. Resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back. An innovative biomedical industry that creates new drugs for new diseases is a resilient device. . . . Anticipation seeks to preserve stability: the less fluctuation, the better. Resilience accommodates variability; one may not do so well in good times but learn to persist in the bad.

Here, then, is the basic difference between the Valley and the Hub: Viewing the world as predictable and itself as the center of the universe, Boston has encouraged strategies of anticipation. People try to imagine everything that might go wrong and fix it in advance. But in Silicon Valley, there are no certainties. The future is open and subject to upheaval. Resilience is the strategy of choice. People do the best they can at the moment, deal with problems as they arise, and develop networks to help them out.

I wonder how much of Musk’s experiences in Silicon Valley impact how his team builds and tests rockets?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll