April 6, 2026

April 5, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM:

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“We provided the stage, the sound, the lighting and contracted in all the generators and infrastructure and video towers and set them up for the No Kings three rally at the Capitol”

“We brought in, oh, about about a hundred speakers, which are kind of over here and all the electrical infrastructure — it had to have been 30 different trucks worth of stuff that came”

The company was Slamhammer Sound & Roadcase Co, they talk about the logistics and equipment used during the ‘No Kings’ protest in St Paul, Minnesota on March 28, 2026

It’s always paid and highly organized.

I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

Posted at 6:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU REALLY NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST:

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Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility.

The New York Times did not dismiss the possibility of powered flight at random. There was a very specific reason behind it. At the time, America’s most prominent scientific authority, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley, had been showered with large amounts of taxpayer funding to build an aircraft, the Langley Aerodrome. Despite all the money, institutional backing, and elite prestige, Langley and his team could not get it to fly, culminating in a series of very public failures, the last on December 8, 1903.

So when the New York Times declared that flight was millions of years away, what it was really saying was that if the most credentialed and well-funded “experts” cannot do it, then it cannot be done.

A mere nine days later, the elites’ proclamation of impossibility lay in ruins. Two totally unknown bicycle mechanics from Ohio achieved the first powered flight using improvised parts, a few hundred dollars of their own money, and sheer persistence.

The story of flight is, at its core, a story of the triumph of American individualism over elite credentialism. The fact that it was the New York Times that inadvertently delivered the proof is the most fitting conclusion imaginable.

At the link in the headline above, back in 2024, PJM alum Paula Bolyard wrote:

In an October 1903 article, the New York Times predicted it would take “one to ten million years” for man to develop a working “flying machine.”

We all know how that turned out. Sixty-nine days later, on Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic first successful flight in the heavier-than-air Wright Flyer in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

The New York Times was wrong then, and they continue to be wrong about many important things. One of the most dangerous in recent years was the Russia collusion story, for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize. For months before the 2016 election, the Times shouted Russia, Russia, Russia! from the rooftops, even after it became clear that the story was a psyops pushed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That was the real “election interference,” not the nonsense the Times was pushing.

There were also the myriad conspiracy theories: Hunter’s laptop was fake, Trump told people to inject bleach into their lungs and suggested they take horse pills, and conservatives (especially the scary Christian ones) are the biggest threat to democracy anyone has ever seen.

More recently, the Times, desperate to protect Joe Biden, claimed that videos showing him to be frail and confused are “cheap fakes.”

Having learned nothing from their mistake regarding terrestrial flight, in 1920, the Gray Lady mocked the idea of space flight: The Correction Heard ‘Round The World: When The New York Times Apologized to Robert Goddard.

And on January 13, 1920, the New York Times published an editorial insisting that a rocket couldn’t possibly work in space:

“That professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

Goddard pushed back against the wave of criticism in a Scientific American article later that year, but Newton’s Third Law doesn’t apply to public relations, and his response was mostly drowned out by the attacks. He retreated from the public eye, and from most interaction with other scientists, but continued his research.

Eventually, of course, Goddard would be vindicated by the 1944 launch of a German V-2 guided ballistic missile. But it took until July 17, 1969, the day after the launch of a crewed mission to the Moon, for the New York Times to take back its harsh words. The 1969 correction is almost comically dry and conspicuously doesn’t mention the Apollo mission.

“Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere,” the Times editors wrote. They added, “The Times regrets the error.”

On the flip side, don’t get the Timesmen started gushing over those nice young men from Austria and Georgia:

● In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus but he wasn’t buying it.

● The Times’ necrophiliac 1953 obit for one of the 20th century’s most brutal mass murderers was headlined: Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SUCKING IN THE ’70s:

Twenty years ago, when Mike Bloomberg was still its mayor and had carried over most of Rudy Guiliani’s broken windows police methods, Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote:

The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the ’70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.” Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the ’70s were considered “the dark ages” but “there was great music and everyone was broke.”

Let’s leave worshiping ’70s-era Fun City grime and crime to the left, huh?

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOD AND MAN AT YALE, AND FORT WORTH: My look at the Treasures of the Holy Sepulcher exhibition at Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, and the closing of the European mind, over at EdDriscoll.com.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

“IT’S A TESTAMENT TO THE U.S. MILITARY THAT NO AMOUNT OF EQUIPMENT IS MORE VALUABLE THAN A SINGLE AIRMAN’S LIFE:”

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Rather than charging aggressively and risking heavy infantry casualties, U.S. forces relied on overwhelming firepower—staying at a distance and expending vast quantities of artillery with little hesitation. Thanks to unmatched industrial production and logistics, fresh supplies were always available.

This approach allowed relatively smaller American units to wear down much larger and well-entrenched enemy forces.

In contrast, German and other European doctrines often emphasized aggressive maneuver and were sometimes more willing to accept high casualties to achieve objectives or preserve key equipment.

This material-heavy American style surprised many Germans, including Hitler, who had long dismissed U.S. soldiers as soft and lacking in fighting spirit. He believed soldiers were cheap and expendable; he discovered too late that Americans fought to conserve lives by expending machines and ammunition instead.

It was one of many reasons for Germany’s defeat—perhaps the hardest for some foreigners to fully understand.

Americans place a high value on the lives of our soldiers. Equipment and shells could always be replaced.

Why, it’s as if:

Sadly, the timing of the rescue probably ensures that there won’t be a Hollywood movie about it:

Oh, and speaking of timing:

Related:

UPDATE:

MORE:

Posted at 5:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THAT WAS THE WEEKEND THAT WAS:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES:

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green