REGULATORS AT WORK: The long, frustrating wait for better sunscreens in America. “The Food and Drug Administration’s ability to approve the chemical filters in sunscreens that are sold in countries such as Japan, South Korea, and France is hamstrung by a 1938 U.S. law that requires sunscreens to be tested on animals and classified as drugs, rather than as cosmetics as they are in much of the world. So Americans are not likely to get those better sunscreens — which block the ultraviolet rays that can cause skin cancer and lead to wrinkles — in time for this summer, or even the next.”
May 6, 2024
COVERUPS AND CRIMES: Judge mulls sanctions over Google’s “shocking” destruction of internal chats.
FINALLY, A MARKER HAS BEEN LAID DOWN: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400+ Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years.
LIGHT RAIL IS USUALLY A VERY EXPENSIVE AND UNFUNNY JOKE: Is Austin’s Toy Train Finally Dead? “Austin’s liberal establishment has been trying to trick taxpayers into pouring billions into their light rail boondoggle for decades, finally winning an apparent victory when voters approved a scheme in 2020. But it turns out that the terms of the ballot language may have doomed the project.”
WAIT, FIBER WAS SUPPOSED TO BE GOOD FOR THAT: A common type of fiber may trigger bowel inflammation.
KAROL MARKOWICZ: Brainwashing campus activists starts long before college.
What we’re seeing on our campuses is the culmination of many years of leftist activists pushing kids to the forefront to spread their propaganda.
And it’s not remotely just board books like “A is for Activist” that introduce toddlers to the idea of protest before they even set foot in school.
Teachers push their agenda; whether climate change, gun control or the war in Gaza, they’re focused far less on teaching children how to think than what to think.
The goal is to turn kids into activists, and the sooner the better.
After all, children can be valuable for shutting down debate.
Their youth implies innocence and seems to confer moral authority: How could anyone argue with an innocent child?
Greta Thunberg famously quit school to campaign against climate change.
It was impossible to challenge a pig-tailed child, even if she demanded the world stop functioning.
Recall her tearful “how dare you!” in front of the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019?
It reverberated widely because of her age.
A grown-up making the same plea would be seen as unbalanced.
Yet the idea of Greta as a climate-warrior spokesperson was born when a grown-up activist saw how teen anti-gun crusaders, after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., viciously attacked ideological foes with minimal pushback.
No one could argue with a traumatized teen — and that was the point.
The concept has only spread since.
It’s nothing new for the left — Thomas Sowell was writing about “Mascots of the Anointed” back in 1995, and long before Greta, there were earlier enviro-youth programmed to inflict maximum guilt:
I just dug up this clip from 1992…
Severn Cullis-Suzuki's speech to the UN in 1992 on climate change sounds an awful lot like Greta Thunberg's in 2019.
I cut the two together to show just how similar the language is: pic.twitter.com/18ptTzX4M4
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) September 26, 2019
But as Iowahawk warns the rest of us:
If you are laboring under the belief that we need to heed the unsullied peak moral vision and judgment of 18-25 year olds, ask yourself why there isn't a rental car agency on Earth that would hand them keys
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 6, 2024
And as America’s Newspaper of Record noted in 2019 at the height of Green Nude Eel mania: Democrats Introduce Debate Strategy Of Holding Up Small Child Whenever Their Positions Are Challenged.
THE RATCHET EFFECT: Biden Races to Trump-Proof His Agenda. “The past few months have seen a frenzy of regulatory activity. In April, government agencies finalized nearly three dozen economically significant regulations, more than during any single month of Biden’s presidency, according to the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. New policy announcements from the White House are being rolled out multiple times each week on issues ranging from tighter environmental rules to new restrictions on noncompete agreements.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM:
4,200 Joshua trees are scheduled to be removed are replaced by solar panels for the Aratina Solar Project near Boron, CA in June of this year. They will not be salvaged but funds based on the size of the tree will be placed in a mitigation bank. pic.twitter.com/1BhA3uag4F
— Basin & Range Watch (@BasinRange) May 4, 2024
And now we know what happened to rest of the forests prior to the events in Silent Running:
WELL, PROGRESSIVES ARE KOOKS AND MORONS, SO. . . Progressive Attitudes Towards Sex Are Pretty Damn Incoherent Right Now. “It’s not just that the arguments for “no sex in movies” are unconvincing to me. It’s that I don’t even believe that the people making them are convinced by them. Instead I think that it’s pure visceral emotion being sold as actual argument – most of these people are simply scared of sex. They find it icky and frightening. The good news is that they are of course free to avoid sex in their own lives, to whatever degree they choose. The trouble is that they want to consume pop culture and, because sex is a big of life and narrative art must be free to depict all elements of human experience, they often find themselves confronted with the existence of sex in movies and TV. And it appears that, because they’ve been brought up in a social and political environment that has taught them that their momentary psychic comfort is the only thing that matters, they assume that all of the rest of us have to accept sexless and sanitized movies and television.”
Why we listen to the ravings of self-centered neurotics is a mystery. But as a culture, we unaccountably do. More mocking and shaming of self-centered neurotics would help.
Plus: “I just find it so bizarre, where we are as a culture when it comes to sex – there’s a lot of explicit “sex positivity” married to a society full of people who find sex scary, in a way that’s connected to a broader fear about human experience and its many risks. The result is a culture where a young woman starting an OnlyFans on her 18th birthday and immediately filming herself performing sex acts for cash is seen by many as a matter of feminist empowerment, but where there’s perpetual controversy about whether it’s OK to talk to a stranger on the street. (You know, the reason a lot of us exist, because our parents or grandparents struck up a conversation on the street.)”
THEY’RE ALREADY HERE OR ON THE WAY: Warren Buffet Warns You’re Going to Get a Tax Hike.
HONORING AMERICAN HEROES: Frat Boy Summer: Conservative Beer Brand Plans a Celebration.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Does Columbia Want to Elect Donald Trump?
Disorder is the Republican’s best friend.
Let’s finish what they did in 1968,” a Columbia protester said the other day.
In political terms, that would mean electing Donald Trump.
The disorder of 1968 — when LBJ declined to run again and Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace faced off — played right into the hands of Nixon, who rode his opposition to the riots and campus unrest into the White House.
As Luke Nichter writes in his book on the 1968 campaign, The Year That Broke Politics, “the great debate of the campaign, the issue that consistently struck the nation’s nerve, and where there were the greatest differences among the three candidates, was law and order.”
That’s not going to be true this year, when other issues loom much larger than do the student protests. But if “law and order” is broadly conceived to include the chaos at the border (as well as conflict abroad), it is a major theme of 2024 and has inarguably undermined Biden’s presidency. In sheer magnitude, the mayhem of 1968 was much larger and more consequential than anything that is happening today. After the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, as Nichter notes, more than 50,000 federal and National Guard troops were called out “in one of the largest peacetime deployments on American soil in history.” The rioting rumbled on for a week in Washington, and LBJ later wrote of his “sick feeling” as he watched smoke fill the D.C. sky.
Nixon also went out of his way to position himself as the statesmanlike centrist, which is never Trump’s impulse and rarely his tone.
Nichter explains that Humphrey sought to differentiate himself from Johnson to appeal to liberals, while Wallace ran to Nixon’s right. This ceded the center to Nixon. Pat Buchanan would recall that, while Nixon “was positioned as tough on law and order, he did not try to rival George Wallace.” (Ronald Reagan was actually harsher on the subject than Nixon.)
This allowed Nixon to own the issue, while, with his relatively moderate tone, he won strange new respect from the elites who had, heretofore, disdained him.
As with 1967 and ‘68, which saw far left protestors uncomfortably aligned against Great Society liberal LBJ, why not aim all of that anger at an actual Republican? As in 1968, why aim all your eco-doomsday fears at a fellow Democrat? Heighten the contradictions, to coin a phrase. From Trump’s perspective, it’s time to dust off Nixon’s 1968 “Law and order” ad and update it to reflect the past four years:
As this 2022 attempt highlights, you won’t be able to get the ad past Biden’s friends at Google of course, but the Streisand Effect might work to its advantage.
Exit question:
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX Gears Up for Starship Flight Test 4 with Unprecedented Upgrades and Preparations.
The technological advances and rigorous testing at Boca Chica are at the heart of SpaceX’s preparation for Starship Flight Test 4. This phase of development is not only about refining the spacecraft but also about validating a host of new technologies that will be crucial for the success of future missions. As Marcus House pointed out, “SpaceX is conducting the fastest tower arm tests ever seen, suggesting that the company is on the brink of mastering the booster catch mechanism, which could revolutionize rocket reusability.”
The tower arms, crucial for the innovative booster catch technique, are being tested under extreme conditions to ensure they can handle the dynamic stresses of catching a booster as it returns from space. If successful, this method will eliminate the need for traditional landing legs on the booster, reducing weight and complexity and potentially allowing for quicker turnaround times between launches. “These arms need to move with precision and speed, and the recent tests show that SpaceX is making significant strides towards achieving these goals,” House explained.
Would it be rude to ask, “Faster, please?”
JOHN LUCAS: An Immigrant’s View of Our Current Mess.
CRAZED CAMPUS GARBAGE BABIES DESTROYING LEFTIST INDOCTRINATION CENTERS: Columbia University Cancels Main Commencement Ceremony After Protests. “The ceremony, which was scheduled for May 15, has taken place outdoors on its New York City campus where students had set up a pro-Palestinian encampment that was taken down by police last week. The protests over the Israel-Hamas war that have swept campuses nationwide have prompted university administrators to rethink commencement plans with a goal of protecting students and guests from potentially ugly and violent political disputes.”
Crazy idea: Stop making “commitment to social justice” an admissions factor. Or, you know, just stick with the current approach. It’s changing the higher education world much faster than reformers like me ever could.
READER FAVORITE: Gildan Men’s Crew T-Shirts, Multipack. #CommissionEarned
HMM: Judge mulls sanctions over Google’s “shocking” destruction of internal chats. “According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ’s attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should ‘conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law.'”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: This year’s Harvard commencement speaker compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
Everyone’s a Nazi, except for the people actually calling for the eradication of Jews.
AMERICA’S RED GUARDS: George Washington Students Hold ‘People’s Tribunal,’ Call for Faculty’s Deaths.
CHAOS AT FORDHAM: Woman speaks out after protester rips Israeli flag from her hands, says it’s ‘Baffling.’
It’s only baffling if you close your eyes to the truth of what’s going on.
YOU’VE HEARD OF ATHEISM, AGNOSTICISM: But what about Apatheism? That’s when you just really don’t care one way or the other about the “God question.” Apologetics Professor Maryjo Sharp, a former Apatheist, explains on HillFaith this morning.
