KEN DILANIAN: Kash Patel Has Fired a Completely Non-Partisan FBI Analyst For No Other Reason Than Disagreeing with Him About a “Shooter’s Motive” Ten Years Ago.

That’s the headline/digest this CIA operative and FusionGPS asset posted on Twitter to advertise his MSNOW article.

Based on that headline, would you care to guess who that shooter might have been, and what disagreement there might have been about his motive?

To help you out, the shooting he’s talking about happened in 2017, not quite ten years ago.

Do you have your answer?

Further hint: This analyst claimed the shooter wasn’t a domestic terrorist with any political motive, but was simply shooting rando targets in order to get police to kill him. That is, “suicide by cop.”

Yes, he’s talking about a Democrat operative who refused to acknowledge that the James Hodgkinson III, the man who shot up Republicans at a softball practice and hit Steve Scalise five times, wasn’t Aksually a Rachel Maddow fan and Bernie Sanders volunteer who hated Republicans, but just a man with no discernible motive other than seeking to end his own life in the most convoluted manner possible.

Read the whole thing.

QUESTION ASKED: How Will AOC Survive a Presidential Campaign?

It was only a month ago that Axios was telling us that while the AOC is a ubiquitous social media presence, she doesn’t like doing sit-down interviews, and when she does, “it’s usually with an ideologically sympathetic outlet or reporter.”

We saw this with Joe Biden, and we saw this with Kamala Harris. We are beset by overambitious, under-studied politicians who are absolutely convinced they’re ready to sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and order U.S. troops into combat when needed, but not ready to sit down for an hour with a major cable news host who’s going to ask them tougher-than-usual questions. If you want to be president of the United States, then you need to be able to sit down with someone who’s going to say some variation of, “your policies, ideas, and agenda stink, and you should not be trusted with power” and you need to be able to respond, “no, my policies, ideas, and agenda are the right answers, and here’s why” in a persuasive matter. This is Politics 101.

If you need to be wrapped in bubble wrap to get through a national tour, you are not going to get through the challenges of a presidential campaign.

Much like Kamala during her stillborn 2020 presidential bid, AOC’s 2019 Green Nude Eel obsessions created a treasure-trove of insane rhetoric. With the left having recently backed off on their apocalyptic eco rhetoric, her manic pixie “New Socialist ‘It Girl’” phase will be studied endlessly by operatives on the left during the primaries and on the right, if she’s the Dem’s nominee.

GOP IN DC FALL INTO TWO CAMPS: “Those who still value the institutions, and those who have been destroyed by the institutions.”

Read the whole thing.

 

BILL SCHER: Janet Mills Should Unsuspend Her U.S. Senate Campaign.

Polls aren’t votes. And on June 9, the day of Maine’s primary, Democratic voters deserve to have a say before rolling the dice on a candidate who has been a controversy magnet. It may be that Maine Democrats still want Platner as their nominee, but that should be a choice they make, not a fait accompli foisted upon them.

As Mills is still on the ballot, she can—and should—unsuspend her campaign and give Mainers a real choice.

That’s silly, you might understandably say. Platner’s checkered social media history and covered-up Nazi-themed tattoo have already attracted tons of media coverage. Yet he remains ahead of Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent U.S. senator, in general election polling. The obvious conclusion: Maine voters don’t care. Platner weathered the political storm and is in a strong position to deny Collins a sixth term. Why inject fresh intra-party division now?

That is a reasonable argument, and Maine Democrats should avoid any move that risks a permanent schism. Two weeks from now, Platner likely will be the official nominee, and the party will need to unify around him to maximize its chances of capturing not only Collins’s seat but control of the U.S. Senate.

That’s an awful lot of words to tell Democrats to vote for the Nazi in November.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Daily Show’ Host Justifies Violence Against Trump? “I think that there has been a co-opting of non-violence to the point of almost being a psyop. You can only take away so much from a person before they have no options left, other than to scream in the street — sort of riot or something like that … Or before they pinpoint certain individuals that they see as the perpetrators of all these crimes against making a way of life.”

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: NYC Gallery Sold an AI-Generated Ansel Adams Photo Without Permission.

The New York Danziger Gallery displayed for sale an AI-generated version of Ansel Adams’ photo “Moonrise Over Hernandez” without consulting the photographer’s trust, effectively stealing the legendary artist’s work and dramatically altering it with AI for the sake of profit.

The work, which can be seen above, is described as “A.I. Generated” from the prompt “Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams’ iconic ‘Moonrise Over Hernandez’.” It is further described as “Proofed, regenerated, & photoshopped from 11/25 – 4/26. Printed by master printer Esteban Mauchi Editions of 10 in 3 sizes – 20 x 24” , 24 x 30”, 30 x 40.’”

The image was part of The Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, which ran from April 22 through April 26, 2026. Images sold at this show in the past typically cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Ansel Adam’s trust published a public statement on Instagram over the weekend, confirming that despite its best efforts at communication, the Danziger Gallery used Adams’ name and his photo for commercial purposes without its permission.

The gallery responded: NYC Gallery Says it Has ‘Every Right’ to Create AI Version of Iconic Ansel Adams Photo.

But in a statement released last night, James Danziger says he has “every right to create a new and transformative work” since the Adams’ Moonrise photo, taken on November 1, 1941, has passed into the public domain.

“I had long believed the image was in the public domain but to confirm this beyond doubt, I hired one of the most respected copyright lawyers in the country to insure [sic] this was the case,” Danziger writes defiantly. “It was indeed confirmed to be in the public domain and I was free to create a transformative color rendition of the image and to exhibit and sell the resulting prints.”

Given the increasingly photo-realistic power of AI image creators such as Dall-E, stock image providers such as Shutterstock have got to be terrified of AI stealing their lunch.

 

CHINA IS ASSHOE: Analyst on China’s spent rocket stages: ‘Things only continue to get worse.’

In the early decades of spaceflight, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other spacefaring species paid little heed to these upper stages, also known as “rocket bodies.” They were ejected into all manner of orbits, there to remain for decades before ultimately succumbing to the slow pull of Earth’s gravity at higher altitudes.

But in the last 20 years or so, most countries (and the private companies operating within their borders) have taken a more responsible attitude toward disposing of these upper stages. This is because, as it turns out, having large, multi-ton blocks of metal spinning uncontrollably around low-Earth orbit becomes a problem over time.

The Soviet Union, and later Russia, is the biggest offender, with about 800 metric tons of rocket bodies in long-lived orbits between 600 km and 2,000 km above the Earth’s surface, according to data from the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office as well as Jonathan McDowell’s General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects. The United States, by comparison, has about 57 metric tons of spent upper stages in these orbits. However these numbers are more or less holding steady or, in the case of Russia, slowly declining as stages fall out of orbit.

By contrast there is striking growth in China’s rocket body mass. In the past five years, the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in long-lived orbits has risen from less than 100 metric tons to 252, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell.

“China… continues to abandon many rocket bodies in high low-Earth orbit,” Shell wrote on LinkedIn early Monday. “The total mass of orbital debris is a key variable influencing the long-term sustainment of space. There is broad agreement that abandoning rocket body upper stages in long-lived orbits is not a best practice. In fact, all the major space-faring nations have acknowledged this.”

That’s an awfully expensive junkyard Beijing is putting up there.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY:

Actually, based on photographic evidence, dinosaurs only fought in WWII:

And we didn’t go to war with Albania until we deployed the B-3 bomber against them in the mid-1990s. They even made a movie about it:

POTUS 47 KEEPS HAVING MORE FUN THAN THE LEFT CAN STAND: