Pete Buttigieg has a splitting maul.

Instapundit reports on what's in The Atlantic.

And then there's this:

Rugged Lumberjack Pete sits at authentic rustic diner awaiting a heaping breakfast plate of carburetors, while Annie Leibovitz captures him in a moment of deep reflection https://t.co/52OgDhd5we pic.twitter.com/Unz6GxyyQQ

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 3, 2026

I know what a splitting headache is, but what's a splitting maul?

"I thought the audiobook was the move, but hearing this in her own voice is so much worse than reading it. I couldn’t even make it through the intro."

Said Instapundit's friend, who bought the Olivia Nuzzi book.

Ha ha. I was going to listen to the audiobook (commission earned), but I clicked the "Audible sample" button and as soon as Nuzzi's voice began, I clicked it off and exclaimed "Oh, no!"

She was able to get out exactly 6 words: "For the women who have mothered me...."

I was reacting to the voice alone, but the meaning lingered — For the women who have mothered me.... No no no no! I don't know who she's talking about or what they did that constituted "mothering" in her world view and I don't want to know. 

CORRECTION: 7 words.

"I checked in on BlueSky to see how people there are reacting to the release of the Israeli hostages, and it’s the eeriest thing."

"It’s not trending. There’s no mention of it on the 'Explore' tab. I started scrolling the feed and went through hundreds of posts without seeing a single one that mentioned it. Instead, it’s all posts about Mamdani, John Oliver’s new episode criticizing Bari Weiss and Jamie Reed, the “No Kings” protest apparently happening this weekend, Taylor Swift, the Epstein Files, complaints about anti-vaxxers, and snarky takes insisting that Antifa doesn’t exist. That's it. It’s honestly blowing my mind...."

Writes Colin Wright, at X — via Instapundit.

I signed up for BlueSky so I could do a search over there. My search word, "hostages." This was the main thing that came up:

 

I also saw things like "Now release the Epstein file hostages" and "How about the US releasing all the hostages that ICE has recently taken?"

"It looked more like a repurposed Pride rally than an anti-Trump rally, really, and that’s because it was."

"Boston’s Pride parade got repurposed into the 'No Kings but Drag Kings' parade. This was smart in terms of boosting the crowd size — there were a lot more people present than attended the rather pallid anti-Elon protest I attended in Boston a few months ago, which drew numbers in the dozens. This event definitely drew thousands. But while there was plenty of anti-Trump stuff, I’m not sure there was any more than a regular Pride parade would have featured...."

Glenn Reynolds reports — with photos — from the Boston "No Kings" event.

Makes me kind of wish I'd walked downtown to get some pictures of the Madison march. I was wary of violence. You never know.

But here's David Blaska covering the Madison event, with photos. Text: "'No Kings,' like many a partisan demonstration, was a BYO punch bowl of Leftist causes: End the War on Drugs. No Public Land Sales. Trans rights. My Body, My Choice. And, unforgivably 'Free Gaza.' No outward support for the Ayatollah, at least. Our favorite placard: 'Local Unpaid Agitator.' Note this well: at least nine of 10 signs were home made. My fellow Republicans will dismiss this as the work of George Soros and his checkbook at their peril...."

"Think I'm going to be sitting on a waiting line, at United, waiting...?

Bernie Sanders: "You think I should wait on line at United? No apologies for my private jets."

Socialists are beyond parody pic.twitter.com/MF6dDHOiyE

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 8, 2025

I know. He sounds entitled. I see that being mocked at Instapundit — "FIGHTING THE OLIGARCHY LOOKS A LITTLE… OLIGARCHIC" — but I just want to join the pile on so I can comment on the language: "sitting on a waiting line, at United, waiting."

1. There's no sitting. One stands in line.

2. A line's a line.

"In a bid to polish up Biden’s rusted image, The Washington Post on Sunday reported on the president’s private complaints that Garland should have been faster to prosecute Trump..."

"... so that he could have staged a 'politically damaging trial before the election.' Funny, as I recall Trump had a lot of trials before the election — and they all seemed to drive his approval levels up, not down. In any case, this seems like an admission, as law professor Ann Althouse observed, that 'Biden intended to use the Justice Department to destroy his political adversary!' Indeed. That now seems to have been Garland’s role throughout this administration, which — in the name of 'protecting democracy' and our institutions — has only undermined our democracy and corrupted our institutions. That’s Biden’s sorry legacy. And Merrick Garland’s, too."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, in "Merrick Garland corrupted the Justice Department with political persecutions" (NY Post).

Here's my blog post about the WaPo article.

"If, as virtually everyone agreed after the June presidential debate, it was obvious that Biden wasn’t up to running for president, it should have also been obvious that he wasn’t up to being president."

So why hasn't Biden resigned or been ousted using the 25th Amendment?

Asks Glenn Reynolds in "Harris would be as much a figurehead as Biden — and we’d be ruled by the swamp" (NY Post).

Maybe Democratic Party insiders think Harris would make such a hash of even a temporary presidency that she would destroy her chances of winning the election in November.... Or maybe it’s just that those currently running the government like this president-less setup. They have power without responsibility and without meaningful accountability.... That most of our political class doesn’t care about this at all tells us how little it thinks of both democracy and legitimacy.... The coming election offers a stark choice between a chief executive who will govern as an executive, and one more likely to serve as a colorless tool of special interests. The special interests would prefer the tool....

You, the commenters, talked a lot yesterday about that A.G. Sulzberger column blaming Trump for efforts around the world to censor the press.

I gave you a gift link to read the whole thing in what was my first post of the day: "A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, has an opinion piece in The Washington Post: 'How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America.'"

It was a long piece, and I really did have a lot to say about it myself, but I didn't want to get dragged down dissecting what was so infuriatingly wrong about it. So I appreciated the active comments section.

The #1 thing I didn't say but wanted to say was that contrary to Sulzberger's perverted argument, criticizing the press is not censorship. Criticizing the press is more speech. Trump has been criticizing the press. It is Trump's antagonists who have pursued censorship, for many reasons, including his criticism of the press.

I'm prompted to revisit yesterday's post because I see that Glenn Reynolds is linking to it this morning. He says:

"When will the press tell us that Democrats 'assert, without evidence,' that Biden has withdrawn?"

Glenn Reynolds quips darkly, linking to something I wrote earlier this morning.

ADDED: Speaking of evidence, Kamala Harris is a first hand witness:

"I am first hand witness that everyday, our president, Joe Biden, fights for the American people, and we are deeply, deeply grateful for his service to the nation."

She is quoted in "Harris: ‘We are deeply grateful’ for Biden’s service/Harris spoke on the South Lawn of the White House for a celebration of NCAA championship teams, filling in for Biden as he recovers from Covid" (Politico).

So she's filling in for him and simultaneously attesting to his daily work, his "fight" for us. The last time we saw him, he was fighting to keep his place as the nominee. KH is a "first hand witness," that is, we're stuck with hearsay.

I have a tag for the word "deeply," and she just said it twice in a row. She must really mean it.

AND: Here's the original post where "deeply" became a tag: "Deeply... it's such a poser word." That's from 2014. There, I made a list of earlier examples of the use of "deeply" in the blog archive. And look what's #1 on the list!

1. "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded," wrote Garace Franke-Ruta, explaining "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."

Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' was, of course, Kamala Harris. 

"Good Lord. I do not want any of this to be the case. I'd far rather have the whole thing have been simple incompetence."

Wrote Jamie, in the comments to my post "Biden’s Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump’s Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt."

The post title is a quote from a Sean Davis article in The Federalist. Instapundit pulled out Jamie's quote for his post on the Sean Davis article.

Also quoted at Instapundit is a comment from Achilles: "At first glance every trained person in the world said one thing: Bullshit."

So how are you feeling — more like Jamie or more like Achilles? The Jamie position, if I may rephrase it, is: I hope the Secret Service is as bad as it would need to be for this to have all been mere negligence. The Achilles position is: The negligence theory is beyond belief.

I'm not one for jumping into conspiracy theories, but here, the idea that it happened through multiple levels of Secret Service failures feels more like a conspiracy theory. You have to strain and get creative to explain it. If you begin in the Jamie position and desperately hope there was no intent to allow a killer access, you have to struggle to explain how that could be.

Apologies to Achilles and Jamie if I've misstated their thinking or if they don't like their names being used in this way. I'll rename the "positions" if they object. 

"I now assume that any prosecution or regulatory attack on a business not overtly aligned with the Democrats is undertaken for partisan political reasons."

  A Glenn Reynolds rule of thumb.

"Fetterman’s health has improved more and faster than expected, and in what may not be a coincidence..."

"... the more his brain damage recedes, the less he agrees with lefty activists and the Democratic Party’s functionaries. Speaking at Yeshiva University’s commencement, Fetterman dramatically stripped off his Harvard hood and announced he was 'profoundly disappointed' at his alma mater’s refusal to address the antisemitism rampant on its campus, a discontent he extended to the entire antisemitism-enabling Ivy League. Quoth Fetterman: 'As an alum of Harvard — look, I graduated 25 years ago, and of course, it was always a little pinko. But now, I don’t recognize it....' When pro-Palestinian protesters showed up at the senator’s house (no dogpiling in his defense from lefty activists over this) and told him he had 'nowhere to hide,' Fetterman defiantly got on his roof with an Israeli flag....."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, in "Mea culpa, Fetterman: I was wrong about the senator and his illness" (NY Post).

"Many people with obesity... have fat deposits in the tongue and in the back of the throat. The neck gets larger with fat that narrows the airway..."

"... and the tongue gets larger in all directions, 'like blowing up a balloon'... During sleep, the tongue obstructs the flow of oxygen, repeatedly waking the person repeatedly.”

Writes Gina Kolata, in "Sleep Apnea Reduced in People Who Took Weight-Loss Drug, Eli Lilly Reports/The company reported results of clinical trials involving Zepbound, an obesity drug in the same class as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy" (NYT).

That's good news, and I hope this drug helps with sleep apnea, which must be a terrible problem, but I'm blogging this because I was cheered up by the phrase "repeatedly waking the person repeatedly."

"It's totalitarian indoctrination, of course, and it's meant to be."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, about the mandatory DEI training for first-year law students at University of Wisconsin Law School (where I was a lawprof from 1984 to 2017).

Reynolds observes: "This sort of thing also creates a pervasively hostile educational environment on account of race, as courts are starting to notice."

He links to TaxProf Blog, which copies the text of Alan Rozenshtein at Volokh Conspiracy: "Mandatory DEI Trainings and Academic Freedom":

“ The goal is to portray Trump as deviant, even when he’s doing the same thing as everyone else.”

 Glenn Reynolds answers my question.

"It’s not too late for the adults, like [Berkeley Law School Dean] Chemerinsky, to take control."

"But for too long they’ve given the extremists a pass, and an entirely undeserved moral legitimacy. If they want to save higher education, they’ll have to anger a lot of people they’ve never been willing to anger before."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, in "Welcome To The Party, Pal!/Erwin Chemerinsky discovers that higher education is a hotbed of antisemitism" (Substack).

I see Instapundit is linking to "The ‘Lazy-Girl Job’ Is In Right Now. Here’s Why."

That's in the Wall Street Journal. Subheadline: "Rather than lean in, young workers say they want jobs that can be done from home, come with a cool boss and end at 5 p.m. sharp."

Here's the Instapundit link. Quips: "Career goal of the moment" and "it’s unfair if women get paid less than men."

I was thinking about blogging that "Lazy-Girl Job" story yesterday. Quip: I was too lazy.

"The surest proof the knives are out is a Ronan Farrow 'exposé' in The New Yorker: 'Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule: How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.'"

"Exactly what business it is of the United States government to 'rein in' a figure remains unclear, but the establishment doesn’t trust any power center it cannot control. This is the instinct of authoritarians everywhere and with good reason — Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution arguably started with rock and roll. It’s why college administrators are hostile to fraternities and why communist regimes control the churches...."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, in The New York Post.

"During a live audio event on the social media platform, Musk’s team of all-male math, AI and engineering experts spoke about how they wanted to create an AI..."

"... that was smarter than humans with the goal of benefiting society. Musk said the fundamental goal of the company is to understand 'what the hell is really going on.' The event showcased how Musk seems to initially be more focused on answering deep scientific questions, rather than competing head to head with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to create consumer AI products. Musk did say he saw his venture as an alternative to bigger AI companies but said xAI was still 'embryonic,' and that it would take time for it to catch up with OpenAI and Google...."

I'm reading "Musk’s new AI company, xAI, will aim to solve scientific mysteries The billionaire and his team of artificial intelligence researchers gave details of the company’s goals during a live Twitter event Friday" (WaPo).

If it's true that xAI is really about answering deep scientific questions — AKA understanding what the hell is going on — then this is a nice contrast to Mark Zuckerberg's Threads, which was created (it seems) to compete head to head with Twitter.

I went into the comments over there, mainly to see if they were saying what I expected them to say — essentially: We hate Musk. And, yes, there it is, right on top of the "most liked" pile of comments: "Just what we need, AI that is explicitly fascist and white supremacist."

IN THE COMMENTS: Leland writes:  

WaPo commenters are why ChatGPT does so well. Their comments seem like coherent sentences, but the words used don't create a coherent thought. What is explicitly fascist? Was Musk proposing having his AI collude with the government to control the population? That's fascism, and while it exists quite a bit these days; I don't think that is what Musk is proposing. Musk is proposing quite the opposite.

Instapundit quotes that comment in full and adds: "Nowadays anti-fascism is called 'fascism,' just as explicit racism is called 'anti-racism.'"

Let's read this morning's Instapundit post about feminism and happiness.

Glenn Reynolds writes:

PYRRHIC VICTORY:  Joel Kotkin: Women have won the ‘war between the sexes,’ but at what cost?

Even Vox is wondering why women have gotten everything they said they wanted, but are still unhappy. Their explanation, of course, is that men still aren’t doing enough to make women happy. But it’s interesting that they’ve noticed the problem.

My hypothesis: What we’ve been told that “women” want is in fact what a relatively small percentage of women — 20% at most — who tend to be neurotic and anxious, and largely incapable of sustained happiness anyway, say they want. But even to the extent that’s true, their needs aren’t really those of most women whose interests fall closer to the norms.

Related:  “Actually, it’s very much an open question as to whether feminist interpretations of life make women happier. . . . Certainly, polls such as the General Social Survey suggest that women have become steadily less happy every year since 1972.”

Also:  The Female Happiness Paradox. 

Lots of parts there, so let's take this one piece at a time.