June 24, 2026

DEI IS MAKE-WORK EMPLOYMENT FOR OTHERWISE UNEMPLOYABLE NEUROTICS AND ANTI-SOCIAL TYPES:

To be fair, she won’t be evaluating any interns this summer.

Update:

If A players hire other A players, and B players hire C and D players, who hired her?

Posted at 5:11 pm by Stephen Green

CLIMATE ALARMISM AS A RELIGION, EXHIBIT #1,000,006:

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

ICYMI: How Government ‘Affordability’ Turns an $18 Antibiotic Into $2,500. “Nothing makes anything less affordable than a government promise to make something more affordable, and a Texas pharmacist revealed this week how an $18 generic antibiotic gets listed for $2,500. But from there, things get so seriously stupid that you just know there must be a government program involved.”

Posted at 4:21 pm by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: The Only Thing Better Than Pokemon is Pokemon With Guns. “Palworld” emerged seemingly out of nowhere on Friday, releasing on PC’s Steam shop and Xbox, and has now sold more than 5 million copies in three days. It immediately became the most played video game on the planet, with more than 1.5 million concurrent players on Steam as of Monday morning. It has amassed a larger concurrent audience than every Steam game besides “PUBG: Battlegrounds” and “Counter-Strike 2.” That’s larger than the biggest games of the last two years, “Elden Ring,” “Baldur’s Gate 3” and “Hogwarts Legacy.”

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: It’s impossible to fail in Philly: It’s too much paperwork. “On paper, Philadelphia students can fail courses, or be retained in a grade, so long as they are offered appropriate interventions and supports,” according to the Inquirer. “But many teachers said that they were discouraged or forbidden by their principals from flunking students, or that they have given out failing grades that were overridden.”

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE GOOD WAR? The Assault on American Myth:

To help answer this question, we turn again to Obama. In May 2016, almost exactly 10 years ago, he gave a little-remembered speech in Japan.

“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?” Obama posed this question to the world at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, seemingly conscious of making history as the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city—one of only two ever targeted by U.S. atomic bombs. Obama had already embarked on a much lambasted multiyear “apology tour” to foreign countries, including a 2009 talk before Turkey’s parliament in which he lamented America’s “darker periods” and the ongoing “legacies of slavery and segregation.”

His Hiroshima audience might have expected an address on nuclear nonproliferation, and Obama did deplore the “capacity for unmatched destruction” that nuclear weapons make possible. He also praised the hibakusha—survivors of the 1945 strike—citing a “woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself.” He offered no corresponding tribute to the American pilots who risked their lives for their country, nor any defense of the American decision to attack Japan; rather, he lamented the human tendency “to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” He enjoined his listeners “to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering.” He came to Hiroshima, he explained, to be reminded of the “ordinary people” who “do not want more war.” He never once sought to legitimate the cause in question or the notion that war is at times justified.

None of this is especially surprising given Obama’s famous insistence on “change.” Around midway through the speech, however, he offered something distinctive. After portraying World War II as having grown out of “the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes,” he sketched his view of Hiroshima’s significance:

There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war—memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species—our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will—those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

Here, Obama was engaging in a tentative attempt at mythmaking. The defining image of World War II, in this telling, was not that of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy or the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign above Auschwitz. No: It was an image that, in Obama’s words, represented a sinister “material advancement,” employed by America “to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.” American capitalism and American racism thus seem to undergird Obama’s understanding of World War II. He neatly placed the American decision to use the atomic bomb alongside the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany; all of it, he suggests, reminds us of mankind’s aptitude for evil. In this moment, he drew no moral distinctions in his condemnation of the horrors of war. In subtly conflating Nazi evils and the American response, Obama created a permission structure for his ideological partners to do the same thing.

Revisionists on the right, in part by taking refuge within Obama’s permission structure, have furthered this de-mythification project. Instead of castigating America for being racist, however, the right-revisionists rebuke their country as an antireligious tyranny, run by global elites. In this telling, American leadership became drawn into World War II by globalist interests while ignoring the plight of their own countrymen. Other, more extreme voices cast Hitler and Mussolini as heroic for wanting to strengthen their own nations and sense of national identity.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPACE: Could we actually terraform Mars? Scientists are trying to find out.

Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, detailed the plan here at a Space Resources Roundtable, which was held from June 2 to June 5 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines.

Kite’s talk showcased a mission concept prototype to validate aerosol dispersal to warm Mars’ atmosphere as a first step toward terraforming the Red Planet.

“Creating sustainable habitats and biospheres beyond Earth is an enormous scientific and technical challenge, but it’s one we’ll have to surmount if we’re going to extend life beyond Earth,” Kite told Space.com.

“We do not yet know enough to create a biosphere from scratch,” he added. “Applied astrobiology, like planetary science, requires contributions from many disciplines.”

Of course, the only way to know for sure is to try.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

JEFFREY CARTER: The Socialist Sweep: NYC is a warning sign. “Socialists are taking over cities. Last night in NYC, the Mamdani candidates won. They beat well-funded, more establishment Democrats. Those Democrats were NOT centrists. They were people of the left, too, just not communists.”

Posted at 12:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds