MARK JUDGE: Ron DeSantis wants to teach young people about communism. He should use rock ‘n’ roll.

Rock ‘n’ roll is an exciting, popular art form geared toward young people. It also has a proud (and largely ignored) history of anti-communism.

In their book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, who both work for the libertarian outfit Reason, reveal the often hidden history of popular music as a weapon against totalitarianism. In the chapter “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” they detail how the music helped defeat communism.

As Welch and Gillespie note, Vaclav Havel and the leaders of the 1960s revolt against communism in Czechoslovakia were deeply influenced by American rock and roll, particularly the band the Velvet Underground. A group of young Czech hippies formed the group the Plastic People of the Universe, named after a Frank Zappa lyric, and were soon banned by the government. A fan of the Rolling Stones, Havel saw and heard in rock and roll “a temperament, a nonconformist state of the spirit, an anti-establishment orientation, an aversion to philistines, and an interest in the wretch and humiliated.”

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In The Declaration of Independents, Welch and Gillespie note an incredible irony. In October 1989, a month before the Berlin Wall was torn down, rock and roll and hippie icon Neil Young released the album “Freedom.” Young meant the title ironically; the title track was about how the world was collapsing with Reagan-inspired greed and violence.  But when the album was received in Central Europe, the newly free young masses took to it without irony.

It’s an exciting piece of history. DeSantis should add it to Florida’s new pro-freedom curriculum.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

Flashback: Welcome to the PMRC, Neil Young.

IT’S CALLED “SCREAMS BEFORE SILENCE” AND IT’S THE MOST POWERFUL DOCUMENTARY I’VE SEEN SINCE I DON’T KNOW WHEN: Watch This… If You Dare… If You Can…

THIS IS BAD: Vancomycin may be losing effectiveness against C. diff.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA still doesn’t understand root cause of Orion heat shield issue.

NASA officials previously said it is unlikely they will need to make changes to the heat shield already installed on the Orion spacecraft for Artemis II, but haven’t ruled it out. A redesign or modifications to the Orion heat shield on Artemis II would probably delay the mission by at least a year.

The charred material began flying off the heat shield in the first phase of the skip reentry. Engineers are looking at how the skip reentry profile affected the performance of the Orion heat shield. NASA wants to understand how the Orion heat shield would perform during each of the possible reentry trajectories for Artemis II.

“What we have the analysis teams off doing is saying, ‘OK, independent of what the constraints are going to be, what can we tolerate?” Kshatriya said.

Once officials understand the cause of the heat shield charring, engineers will determine what kind of trajectory Artemis II needs to fly on reentry to minimize risk to the crew. Then, managers will look at building what NASA calls flight rationale. Essentially, this is a process of convincing themselves the spacecraft is safe to fly.

“When we stitch it all together, we’ll either have flight rationale or we won’t,” Kshatriya said.

The heat shield worked during Artemis I reentry but didn’t burn off as expected. SLS is stacked and ready for Artemis II and Starship is coming along…

GOOD NEWS FROM POLITICO!

Congress is killing Biden's cancer moonshot https://t.co/IPfLzGg23u

— POLITICO (@politico) April 29, 2024

I mean, I think they intend it as good news from their perspective, given their interest in keeping the population down:

The far right is so obsessed with making babies, they just held a whole conference about it.

Behind the scenes at the first “NatalCon” ⬇️https://t.co/kLHHmetUNr

— POLITICO (@politico) April 28, 2024

Incidentally, could pundits try to update their language from beyond the Cold War ’50s and ’60s? It’s Sputnik moments and moonshots all the way down!

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: My husband and I quit our teaching jobs to start our own school – we’re challenging the lies our kids learn.

JIM TREACHER: Today’s College Kids Get an “A” for “Antisemitism.”

In the seven years since a bunch of neo-Nazis in polo shirts stomped around Charlottesville with tiki torches, chanting “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” and other caca del toro, somehow it has become acceptable for young people to publicly call for the extermination of the Jews.

As always, the left’s refrain is: “It’s different when we do it!”

It’s happening all over the Ivy League. Our best and brightest, or so we’re told. Now they’re openly parroting antisemitic filth, and the dumber it is, the angrier they get.

Well, I’m getting pretty ticked off too.

It’s obvious that a lot of young people are living in their own little fantasy world. Some grownups are blaming TikTok for this antisemitic garbage spreading so fast, which sounds plausible. If the Chinese Communist Party is evil enough to unleash a deadly virus on the world, why would they balk at spreading the mind-virus known as antisemitism?

I don’t know what can be done to stop it, if the colleges and the local police aren’t willing to do anything. Some of them are finally starting to step up, so maybe that’ll stem the tide.

In the meantime, all I know how to do is make fun of these little idiots. So I think I’ll do that.

* * * * * * * *

Here’s another large child saying something silly:

In accordance with the prophecy:

VICTORIA TAFT: Media Reports Shocking Trump NYC Witness Intimidation—And Then We Busted Them. “MSNBC and Joy Reid, hang your head. Deadline, where’s the correction? And this prosecutor-pushed and media-amplified deception could land former President Trump in Rikers.”

PROBABLY: Is the legend of Gavin Newsom’s baseball career a tall tale?

For their 2004 home opener, the San Francisco Giants invited a special guest to throw the ceremonial first pitch: Gavin Newsom, then just a few months into his first term as mayor of San Francisco.

As Newsom took the pitcher’s mound, wearing dress shoes and a button-down shirt underneath his custom Giants jersey, the announcer informed the crowd that “he played first base for the University of Santa Clara and was drafted by the Texas Rangers.”

The introduction was quickly overshadowed by Newsom nearly hitting a photographer with the ball. But it left a lasting impact on a few attendees that day—a group of former Santa Clara University baseball players who were struck by the glowing treatment of Newsom’s resume.

“It’s kind of the standing joke that Newsom played on the team,” said Vince Machi, who arrived at Santa Clara in 1985, the same year as Newsom, and played baseball for three years. “There’s always been kind of a joke between the guys who stay in touch.” . . .

But former coaches and teammates said that biography, repeated again and again through interviews and glossy magazine profiles and coverage of his 2021 baseball-themed children’s book on overcoming dyslexia, has inflated Newsom’s baseball credentials, giving the impression that he was a more accomplished player than he was.

Most notably, Newsom never played an official game for Santa Clara University; he was a junior varsity recruit who played only during the fall tryouts his freshman and sophomore years, then left the baseball program before the regular season began. He does not appear on the Broncos’ all-time roster or in media guides published by the athletic department to preview the upcoming season.

A deeper look at his recruitment also reveals that Newsom’s admission to Santa Clara University—like so many of his formative opportunities—was substantially boosted by friends and acquaintances of his father, William Newsom, a San Francisco judge and financial adviser to the Gettys, the wealthy oil family. One associate connected Newsom to the baseball program when he was in high school, while his father’s best friend, then a member of the university’s board of regents, wrote him a letter of recommendation.

Mike Cummins, the assistant coach at Santa Clara while Newsom was there, said the governor has “embellished his baseball career a little bit at times.”

“He never played in a varsity game. He may have played in some scrimmages,” said Cummins, who is now the head baseball coach at California State University East Bay.

I’m shocked.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Jerry Seinfeld Blames ‘Extreme Left, ‘PC Crap’ for Comedy Decline.

Seinfeld, the director, star and co-writer of the new Netflix comedy “Unfrosted,” shared his complicated thoughts on humor for much of the conversation.

When host David Remnick asked him about mixing serious themes with comedy he couldn’t hold back.

“People always need [comedy] … they need it so badly and they don’t get it,” Seinfeld began. “It used to be you’d go home at the end of the day, ‘oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘M*A*S*H*’ is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. ‘All in the Family’ is on.’ You just expected there will be some funny stuff on TV you can watch tonight.

“But guess what? Where is it? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme Left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

Reminder: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”

GOT WOKE, WENT…: Scotland’s Humza Yousaf resigns after conflicts over climate change, gender identity weakened government.

Flashbacks:

● Scotland Just Banned a Surgical Anesthetic Because of Climate Change.

● SNP frontrunner Humza Yousaf says transgender double rapist Isla Bryson is ‘not a genuine trans woman’ and ‘is trying to play the system’ – after outcry over initially sending sex predator to all-women’s prison.

● UN says Scotland’s proposal for gender self-ID poses risk to women and girls.

● Women in Scotland outraged as country’s first ever Period Poverty tsar is announced as a MAN.

● Scotland hate crime bill seeks to criminalize ‘dinner table’ conversations.

Exit Quote: Humza Yousaf is everything that’s wrong with modern politics. “Many of us find ourselves wondering what will happen to the West when the woe-is-us bourgeois youths of the 21st-century campus enter politics, bringing with them their hyper-fragility, blacklisting lunacy and BS about ‘structural racism’. Wonder no more. Yousaf’s Scotland is what will happen. This first minister with his innate wariness of his fellow citizens and his seemingly boundless capacity for self-pity is woke made flesh.”

LIMITED TIME DEAL: SodaStream Terra Sparkling Water Maker. #CommissionEarned

RABBI MICHAEL BARCLAY: How to End the Craziness on College Campuses. “Let’s be clear: I am not recommending that the JDL be reborn, or saying that violence is the answer. But we need to consider the situation we are all seeing today: College graduations being canceled, Jews being threatened and even killed (may Paul Kessler rest in peace), temples being vandalized, and a hatred of Jews that rivals anything the world has seen since Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The terrorism that ended up being the practice of the JDL by the 1980s is not the answer, but what is?”

GASLIGHTING: It’s Not Me, It’s You: Blaming the Public’s “Perception of the Economy.”

MICHAEL WALSH: Mephisto’s Revenge.

And so the War of the Baby Boomers has now come full circle, and for those of us who were in college at the end of the Sixties it’s déjà vu all over again. The urgent need of the postwar generation to protest something, anything, is now — like them — in its dotage but still lashing out at the thing it’s always hated: the United States of America. Only this time, they’re on the receiving end of the nasty activism of which they were the first modern practitioners.

And it’s happening precisely at Ground Zero of the anti-American revolution: Columbia University, the American home of the Frankfurt School. The tragic irony is that an “intellectual” movement of largely German-Jewish Marxists, refugees from National Socialist Germany, has now been weaponized against the Jews themselves, with anti-Semitic outbreaks on campuses and elsewhere across the country — this time with the Jews cast in the role of the Nazis. (The current moment is not, it should be noted, the first time Columbia’s had a Jewish problem.)

Read the whole thing.

FASTER, PLEASE: SpaceX making progress on Starship in-space refueling technologies.

Speaking to the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee April 26, Amit Kshatriya, NASA deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Program, said SpaceX achieved one step towards refueling of Starship with a demonstration on the latest Starship test flight March 14.

During that flight, SpaceX performed an in-flight propellant transfer demonstration under a NASA Tipping Point contract awarded in 2020. SpaceX planned to transfer at least 10 metric tons of liquid oxygen from a header tank to the main tank within the Starship upper stage while in space.

While SpaceX said the day of the flight that it performed the demonstration, neither the company nor NASA provided any updates since then. At the advisory committee meeting, though, Kshatriya said the test appeared to go well.

“On Flight 3, they did an intertank transfer of cryogens, which was successful by all accounts,” he said, adding that analysis of the test is ongoing.

The next major milestone is a demonstration planned for 2025 where two Starships will dock in orbit, with one transferring propellants to the other.

Artemis depends on SpaceX perfecting orbital refueling and, more broadly, getting to the Moon (and Mars) with enough stuff to stay there depends on it, too.

BRYAN S. JUNG: Establishment Corruption in Big Art. “Art is the only unregulated business that I know of in the world outside of the illicit drug business since the public had to be protected from criminal abuses in the stock and real estate markets over a hundred years ago.”