100% AWESOME: Fund a mariachi band to play next to Penn’s encampment 24/ 7

“Over the past week a merry batch of campers has struck fear into the heart of Israel by having a sleepover on Penn’s College Green. As Tel Aviv waits in horror to see their next move, I believe these protestors should be serenaded for their efforts, just as they have constantly serenaded my efforts to study for finals with a megaphone and drum set.”

THE “EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY” REPLACEMENT THEORY ISN’T WORKING OUT AS PLANNED: Survey: Texas Hispanics Support Abbott’s Border Crackdown, Jumping on the Trump Train.

MICHAEL WALSH: On Abortion, Take The Win and Move On. “Conservatives need to understand that handing the abortion club back to the Left is political suicide. They should instead be celebrating their Dobbs win, the partial restoration of the Tenth Amendment, and the option to put their morals where their mouths are and fight for their beliefs at the state level, as the Constitution intends — especially in a fraught national election year. To lose the White House over an issue that’s already been constitutionally decided is lunacy. So take the win and move on to the next battlefield. There’s no shortage of them.”

Related: On abortion, Trump gets what many conservatives don’t.

ENGINEERED TO FAIL: ‘Equity’ Grading Is the Latest Educational Fad Destined To Fail.

Always eager to embrace easy-button solutions rather than, say, ideas that promote competitiveness and excellence, our school bureaucracies are on to some “innovative” ideas that have a ballpark-zero chance of improving educational outcomes. The new ones are based around the concept of equity. As with every education reform fad, they sound OK in the elevator pitch. Who doesn’t support equity? But they will create a mess that further impedes student progress.

For instance, some Bay Area schools have approved “equity grading.” It’s strange to focus on grading rather than teaching, but the details are even stranger. The Mercury News reports that one district removed “the practice of awarding zero points for assignments as long as they were ‘reasonably attempted.'” It also eliminated extra credit for class participation. EG offers students “multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework’s impact on a student’s grade.” Now it will be almost impossible to get an A or an F.

It brings to mind Garrison Keilor’s Lake Wobegon, the fictional Minnesota town “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” Parents rightly worry that the new grading system will promote slacking. Why work extra hard when you won’t be able to get an A? Why try to improve when you won’t get worse than a C?

If you think of it as training for our glorious socialist future — “So long as they pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work” — it all makes sense.

THEY ASSUME ANGRY LEFTISTS COME FROM A POSITION OF MORALITY: Ben Sasse criticizes other universities for ‘bizarrely’ giving attention to ‘smallest, angriest group’ amid protests. They don’t come from a position of morality. They come from a position of greed for power.

IT’S SCHEDULED FOR TAKEOFF AT 10:34 AM ET. Watch: Boeing’s Starliner Capsule Blasts Off on First Crewed Mission to ISS Today. Good luck, guys.

HE’S FINE: Joe Biden Glitches During Medal of Freedom Ceremony.

DON SURBER: Where are the anti-Hamas protests? Why does the world accept the rape, torture and slaughter of Jews?

Because protests in the world are organized by leftists, and leftists are garbage people.

JEFFREY CARTER: By Any Means Necessary: Yesterday Climate, Today Hamas, Tomorrow?

The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. “You must participate. Hiding your head in the sand is exactly what the terrorists want. For an example, see voter turnout in Chicago. They have a Marxist for mayor. Let me try to help my liberal friends. Though it is very hard to understand, when someone says they want to kill you and they protest publicly, they really do want to kill you. We don’t think that way but they do.”

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: DOJ’s Kristen Clarke Testified She Was Never Arrested. Court Records and Text Messages Indicate She Was.

Before becoming one of the Justice Department’s top leaders, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke was allegedly involved in a violent domestic dispute, according to court documents, records, and text messages—an incident that ended in her arrest and was ultimately expunged. During her Senate confirmation, Clarke specifically denied ever having been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime. . . .

Clarke’s ex-husband, Reginald Avery, alleged to the American Accountability Foundation’s Tom Jones in 2021 that Clarke attacked him with a knife, deeply slicing his finger to the bone, on the night of July 4, 2006, while they were married and living in Maryland.

According to messages and documents reviewed by The Daily Signal, police arrested Clarke that night. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

She’ll get a pass due to race, skin color, and — particularly — political affiliation.

COVID FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics.

The conspiratorial left, convinced the world is run by secret cabals of bankers and cigar-chomping media moguls, thinks the Neil Ferguson story is a ‘dead cat’. In other words, they think the Daily Telegraph – Evil Tory Rag – revealed that Ferguson carried on bonking his mistress in defiance of a lockdown that he himself bears much responsibility for in order to distract attention from Britain overtaking Italy with the highest Covid death toll in Europe. A ‘dead cat’ strategy is when a sensationalist story is introduced to the mix to divert attention from a far more serious political crisis. Ferguson’s sexual antics are the Tory regime’s dead cat to Britain’s corona death toll, apparently.

This sums up the political infantilism of the left. It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism.

It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. It was a combination of disarray among the political class and the wild clamouring of the media elite for the severest lockdown possible that led to the working people of Britain being decommissioned and almost the entire population being put under an unprecedented form of house arrest. But Ferguson’s figures, his graphs and models, his worst-case scenarios, were the godly pronouncements upon which this historic disruption of society was based. And Ferguson fully backed the lockdown that sprung from his work.

As the BBC reported the same day, Ferguson “quit as a government adviser on coronavirus after admitting an ‘error of judgement’.”

Mistakes were made! But the biggest was made by the man who hired him: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.

When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.

This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.

Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.

Well, to be fair, Airstrip One become an even bigger police state — and most of the authorities there needed little prompting to scale up their efforts.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: 2.5×4 American Flags for Outside | American Flag Made in USA. #CommissionEarned

WHERE’S THE SURPRISE? Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.

The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Gates, Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Two of the organizers behind protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and it in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change. (Gates did not return a request for comment, and Soros declined to comment.)

Another notable Democratic donor whose philanthropy has helped fund the protest movement is David Rockefeller Jr., who sits on the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In 2022, the fund gave $300,000 to the Tides Foundation; according to nonprofit tax forms, Tides has given nearly $500,000 over the past five years to Jewish Voice for Peace, which explicitly describes itself as anti-Zionist.

Several other groups involved in pro-Palestinian protests are backed by a foundation funded by Susan and Nick Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel empire — and supporters of Biden and numerous Democratic campaigns, including $6,600 to the Biden Victory Fund a few months ago and more than $300,000 during the 2020 campaign.

The trail of donations shows a series of blurred lines when it comes to liberal causes and Democratic politics.

They look perfectly clear to me.

IF THEY’RE HIDING SOMETHING, IT’S BECAUSE THEY HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE:

For the 3rd consecutive year ⁦⁦the City of Pittsburgh run by Ed Gainey did not turn over its annual numbers to the FBI including homicides & assaults making it impossible for police & citizens get a true picture of crime in the nation from the FBI https://t.co/4rgQ58O2CE

— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) May 5, 2024

A BLOW FOR CIVILIZATION: MIT becomes first elite university to ban diversity statements.

JIM MEIGS: Unscientific American: Science journalism surrenders to progressive ideology.

Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

It is hard to put a single name on this sprawling ideology. It has its roots both in radical 1960s critiques of capitalism and in the late-twentieth-century postmodern movement that sought to “problematize” notions of objective truth. Critical race theory, which sees structural racism as the grand organizing principle of our society, is one branch. Queer studies, which seeks to “deconstruct” traditional norms of family, sex, and gender, is another. Critics of this worldview sometimes call it “identity politics”; supporters prefer the term “intersectionality.” In managerial settings, the doctrine lives under the label of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI: a set of policies that sound anodyne—but in practice, are anything but.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

The DEI worldview took over our institutions slowly, then all at once. Many on the left, especially journalists, saw Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as an existential threat that necessitated dropping the guardrails of balance and objectivity. Then, in early 2020, Covid lockdowns put American society under unbearable pressure. Finally, in May 2020, George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer provided the spark. Protesters exploded onto the streets. Every institution, from coffeehouses to Fortune 500 companies, felt compelled to demonstrate its commitment to the new “antiracist” ethos. In an already polarized environment, most media outlets lunged further left. Centrists—including New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and science writer Donald G. McNeil, Jr.—were forced out, while radical progressive voices were elevated.

In other words, journalism went from a sometimes-propaganda enterprise to a full-time propaganda enterprise.

VICTORIA TAFT: We’re Now in Full Goat Rodeo Mode in the NYC Trump Trial. “How do you go on offense against this ever-changing target? Get out the Gatling gun and pray and spray in hopes of hitting the moving target. This is what’s happening on cross-examination by the defense.”

IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT THERE WOULD BE NO CONSEQUENCES: ASU Senior Is Triggered After Learning Her Arrest During Pro-Hamas Protests Has Consequences. “Notice how she repeats “the cause” several times, without sharing much detail on this oh-so-important movement that she’s willing to throw away her future for. This attitude reminds me of a recent piece by RedState’s Brandon Morse; he pointed out that based on the naive answers these student revolutionary wannabes gave, so many of them just glommed onto the protests out of a desire for community, while not truly understanding what they’re truly supporting.”

FROM RACONTEUR PRESS, WITH STORIES BY LAW DOG, LEE ALLRED AND OTHERS:  Space Cowboys 5: Cattle Drive.

#CommissionEarned

When every inch of our planet has been explored, from the depths of the sea to the top of every mountain, Space and her untamed frontiers will still be beckoning us, calling us to go beyond the farthest star and see what there is to see.

Old Sam Clemens once said that History don’t repeat itself, but it do rhyme. In Space, we got a vast, unexplored, mysterious, and dangerous frontier. We’ll have herds of some kind to watch over and to drive to market. Most times we’ll be far and beyond the reach of “civilization,” with their myriad of laws, lawyers, and politicians. Those tough enough to carve out a living will need the independent, rugged spirit of the cowboy to survive. There will be leeches and villains, for sure, heroes and anti-heroes, and some folks just trying to eke out a living. If we choose to tell their tales draped in the lingo and trappings of the cowboy, that’s just another rhyme, with form following the function.

If you’re new to the Space Cowboy series, you’re in for a treat. These ten stories, from ten different authors, are where you’ll find Explorers charting new frontiers in space, Trailhands and Drovers watching over their cattle on alien plains, and Lawdogs of every stripe meting out frontier justice, and doing their best to make sure scallywags with evil intent don’t win in the end. These cowboys and cowgirls don’t back down from a challenge. It’s not in their nature.
(From the Introduction written by Rick Cutler)

IF YOU BELIEVE THAT, I HAVE SOME SWAMP LAND IN FLORIDA I SELL CHEEEEP:  Top House Intel Dem defends ‘very strong vetting process’ as Biden admin considers admitting Gazan refugees to US.

HOW ABOUT WE FIRE THE TEACHERS AND DISBAND THE UNION? IT ISN’T AS IF KIDS LEARN MUCH:  Chicago Teachers Union’s $50B demands include pay hikes, abortions, and migrant accommodations — at $2K per migrant.

THE FIRST ITEM UNDER THIS, NOTE THE COLUMNIST IS A GOSSIP COLUMNIST AND SHE DOESN’T SAY THIS IS PROVEN… OR DISPROVEN:  Antisemitic college protesters can go ahead and move if they don’t like it here.

Me? I’ve looked at pictures of Castro and Trudeau at the same ages, and I’m going to take old Justin’s mom’s word for it. There’s a reason I call the little b*stard Castreau.

OKAY, SO THERE WERE THREE THIS YEAR? REALLY? THAT AND TWO PEOPLE SETTING THEMSELVES ON FIRE SO FAR THIS YEAR? WHERE IS THIS STUFF COMING FROM:  Motorist Killed After Crashing Into White House Gates.

IT’S BEEN LIKE THAT FOR AT LEAST FORTY YEARS:  One-way speech on college campuses.

NOEM’S CAREER IS AS DEAD AS HER DOG: Another whopper found.