———————————————————
Bezos’s rocket explodes on launch pad; the Bidens exploded on the Sunday shows; and a 1960s NIH vaccine trial that killed two babies in D.C. exploded into court. Three “anomalies.” One pattern.
MAY 29READ IN APP
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your roundup includes: how Jill’s stroke memoir, Hunter’s Candace Owens cameo, and the DNC’s year-late autopsy collided into a polycrisis the Democrats can’t talk their way out of and can’t stop talking about; how Bezos’s Blue Origin turned its only New Glenn launch pad into an anomaly visible from Cocoa Beach, while SpaceX quietly filed for the biggest IPO in human history; and how a New York Times story about race in a 1960s NIH vaccine trial accidentally exposed the much uglier disease infecting our public-health agencies — a Cold-War utilitarianism that treats babies as line items and informed consent as an inconvenience.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
🔥🔥🔥
Yesterday I reported, as a curious aside, Jill Biden’s Sunday show stroke excuse for her husband’s political suicide qua debate performance. It was a popular topic in yesterday’s comments, with most folks skeptical since Jill wheeled Biden around on a post-debate Waffle House victory tour instead of taking him to the hospital.
Little did we know that, while the Biden story tickled Republicans, it did not amuse the Donkey party. We did not yet realize that this is another polycrisis story. Politico reported, “‘Why are we talking about this?’: Democrats are furious that the Bidens won’t go away.” Check out the picture Politico picked to head the story, which makes Jill look about 106:
“Democrats want to move on from 2024,” the article soberly informed readers, but “The Bidens won’t let them.” Sad!
The reason the Bidens graced the Times’s front page with two stories yesterday is because Joe just sued the DOJ to block the release of his audio interviews, and Jill is on the Sunday shows because she has a new book coming out —just in time for midterms— which apparently includes what Politico called a “stunning admission that she thought her embattled husband was having a stroke on the debate stage in June 2024.”
The Times could have made it a trifecta. But maybe we should be surprised that it left out Hunter’s interview this week, since it has a well-developed habit of ignoring the antics of the laptop-losing First Crackhead. Last week, Candace Owens interviewed Hunter Biden. Heeeeeee’s back! And back with a (fringe?) conservative podcaster.
This, apparently, caused Democrats a great deal of distress.
CLIP: Candace Owens interviews Hunter Biden and they discuss mutual conspiracy theories (1:50).
The pair compared conspiracy theories. Among many other remarkable assertions (and a somewhat unorthodox grasp of scripture), Hunter made a stunning claim, equally as controversial as Jill’s stroke claim. He accused national Democrats of taking out Joe, and better, called them the “Epstein class.” Hunter said, “The DC elite of the left? They crushed my dad.” He added, “Because he was never part of that club. He was never part of the Epstein class.”
The Washington Post, last week:
🔥 Politico explained that this sudden surge of unwanted Bidens (they’re practically everywhere you look, dammit), “ripped open barely healed wounds from Democrats’ disastrous effort to hold the White House.” Mixing several metaphors worse than AOC trying to make an Old Fashioned, Politico said the reopened wounds “set off a fresh round of backward-looking fingerpointing less than a week after the party’s botched autopsy of the 2024 presidential election.”
The “botched autopsy” was a political post-mortem that the DNC released a year late, diagnosing the reasons Democrats lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate in 2024. The report itself was so terrible that they even put bright red disclaimers at the top of every page saying the DNC did not necessarily agree with its diagnosis. Political commentators either mocked or deplored it. Glaringly absent was anything about Biden’s dementia and the decision to run him again.
It went over like a lead Autopen. Politico, last week:
At a DNC meeting at the nation’s capital yesterday, New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) told reporters, “We don’t need to be distracted by what the DNC says about the autopsy. I don’t need to be distracted about anyone’s book.” Aggravated by follow-up questions, she exclaimed, “I don’t think the average Democratic voter, honestly, particularly in New Mexico, gives a damn about that book or the debate anymore.”
Meghan Hays, political consultant and former special assistant to Joe Biden in the White House, told Politico that “Jill’s memoir risks dealing Democrats a setback.” She expanded on the theme. “We have a lot of momentum in our favor,” Meghan explained, “and when we get pulled back into conversations about age and the election in ‘24, it’s never gonna be a good place for Democrats. I think it’s a tough place to be.”
Former Representative Susan Wild (D-Pa.), who was washed out of her seat in 2024 as Trump carried the state, is uncomfortable over the autopsy. “I am a bit unhappy about the DNC’s delayed release,” Wild said. “We don’t need those reminders in writing, and we certainly don’t need to give the Republicans any more oppo to remind voters of everything we did wrong in 2024.”
“Some Democrats,” Politico reported, “are simply ready to sweep the Bidens into the dustbin of history so their party can move forward.” The trouble is, they aren’t ready to be quietly swept into the dustbin of history. It’s the Biden revenge tour.
🔥 Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked on Obama’s campaigns, was exasperated. “Nobody wants to relitigate the worst debate performance since the Greek Republic,” he complained. “Why are we still talking about this? Why are we talking about Hunter Biden? Why is Hunter Biden talking about Hunter Biden?”
“Your time has passed, move on,” Giangreco exhorted. “The Republicans and all their super PACs are going to outspend us three-to-one, four-to-one — that’s what we need to be focused on.”
The mood at the DNC meeting last week was sour. “Frustration is building among DNC members,” Politico reported, with many members complaining their party “is descending into a circular firing squad when the party needs to be casting Republicans as the ones in disarray.”
To be honest, I assumed that when Biden and his crime family shambolically exited the national stage, I’d be happiest never to see them again. But I’ll admit to a scrap of guilty pleasure watching the Democrats’ polycrisis multiplied from the most unexpected place of all. They can’t attack Joe, Jill, or Hunter outright, not after supporting and promoting them for years. They just have to grit their teeth and take it, good, hard, and repeatedly.
🚀🚀🚀
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is part of the special billionaire club whose dues are paid in private space companies. Yesterday, Bezos’ Blue Origin burned up several hundred million dollars doing the meme. Reuters reported, “Blue Origin rocket explodes on launchpad in a setback for bid to catch Musk’s SpaceX.” It literallyblew up on the launch pad. And pretty dramatically, too.
CLIP: One of the most flammable Amazon package-delivery failures in history (0:29).
The 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket —named, with maximum irony, after the first American to orbit Earth— was conducting what Blue Origin called a “hotfire test” at Cape Canaveral when it experienced what the company, deploying the aerospace industry’s most heavily-abused euphemism, described as “an anomaly.”
In non-euphemistic English, we call it a fireball visible from Cocoa Beach to Daytona.
Residents across the Space Coast dialed 911 to report the explosion, which destroyed the rocket and severely damaged Blue Origin’s only New Glenn launch pad. Bezos has a workforce of three hundred thousand, a fortune of two hundred billion, and a launch infrastructure of one New Glenn pad— which was just deleted.
No one, fortunately, was injured. Pad repairs will take months and cause costly, very public delays.
The rocket was supposed to soon launch forty-eight Amazon broadband satellites into orbit— part of Bezos’ Project Kuiper, his long-running and increasingly delayed attempt to compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink. Bezos posted on X that yesterday was a “very rough day,” which is a bit like saying the Hindenburg had a soft landing.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Artemis moon program —which depends on multiple Blue Origin launches to get a lander to the lunar surface— just watched its timeline burst into a very expensive confetti of debris and spent optimism.
Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal said SpaceX enjoys a “rocket monopoly,” which sort of reduces Blue Origin to a scratched-at-the-post nonstarter. Folks pointed out that SpaceX has successfully landed boosters over 600 times and recently caught one in mid-air with giant mechanical chopstick arms. That’s not a completely fair comparison; SpaceX has suffered its own share of misfires and enjoys a significant head start.
But Musk’s rocket company undoubtedly leads the pack, by a considerable margin, as do Tesla’s cars, Musk’s underground-digging machines, and, arguably, his robot company. Sometimes I wonder whether Elon’s real invention was a time machine, and he’s now busily importing future tech. But I digress.
The world’s richest man graciously expressed his sympathy.
Anyway. Despite creating an anomalousperiod of difficulty for Blue Origin, which just suffered a billion-dollar setback, this astonishing era of private space travel has probably been advanced overall through what it can learn from this negative example.
But the good news is that, since the rockets are now flown by remote control, nobody got hurt. (Except, presumably, a certain number of box tortoises, alligators, and other random reptiles too dumb to depart the vicinity of all that noise.)
SpaceX has filed for an IPO and plans to go public this summer, as early as June. (Portlanders: That means it will sell shares of stock to the public on the stock exchange.) Opinions vary, but most analysts are already predicting a historic, unprecedented, wildly over-the-top initial public offering. CNBC, last week:
It was only 2010 when the first private space provider (also SpaceX) completed its initial successful launch into orbit. Now, just 16 years later, that space company is expected to be the biggest IPO in history. Analysts predict a corporate valuation for SpaceX at around $2 trillion dollars, and an initial public offering that will raise around $75 billion— which is easily 2-3x the next largest IPO (Saudi Aramco in 2019, about $25 billion).
For a historical comparison, the Wright Brothers launched private air travel at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The first publicly traded commercial air carrier, Pan Am, debuted 36 years later in 1937, with American Airlines just behind in 1939.
Unlike SpaceX, Pan Am’s and American Airlines’ IPOs were commercially unremarkable, tiny by comparison, even in inflation-adjusted dollars.
That parallel history highlights the prodigious fact that not only is private space progressing 2-3x as fast as private air did, but it is also much more valuable, even though there’s currently nowhere for commercial passengers to go. (Unless you count the International Space Station, which, by all accounts, does not sound like a particularly inviting travel destination. Two stars.)
It is an extraordinary time to be alive.
💉💉💉
Yesterday, the New York Times quietly reported, “Suit Says Black Infants Were Subjected to Experimental Vaccine Without Consent.” The details of this horrifying story will not surprise anyone who’s been paying attention for the last five years.
The Times must have felt some not insignificant internal conflict over running this story at all. On the one hand, the scandal offers an irresistible race angle. On the other hand, it makes the public health agencies and vaccines look even more horrible, if that’s possible.
On May 22nd, two families sued the federal government over vaccines given to their children in 1966. At the time, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a program to develop a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). They sent experimental vaccine prototypes—the now-infamous “Lot 100”— to local government health clinics, where doctors enthusiastically and unquestioningly administered them to infants and newborns.
Healthy infants Ross Otto Hambrick and Victor Marcellus King were just a few months old when they got the experimental jabs at a children’s clinic in Washington, DC. When RSV season came around in January, 1967, Ross was 14 months old and Victor 16 months old— the boys caught the virus, and within hours of being hospitalized, both died.
There were 31 kids in the Lot 100 trial. The NIH took lung samples from Ross and Victor, which were studied and later used to develop modern RSV vaccines. The families’ lawsuit claims they never consented to this, or got any credit or compensation.
The article reported that the clinics kept on giving three doses “even as hospitalizations continued to rise from the trial,” and did not halt until the hospital director, very late in the day, warned that Lot 100 “could be causing some children to become violently ill.”
The effect now has a name. It is called RSV vaccine‑associated enhanced respiratory disease (RSV‑VAERD or ERD). Somehow, the vaccine programs young children’s bodies to overreact upon later infection. When this side-effect arises, vaccinated kids who’d never had RSV get sicker from a subsequent natural RSV infection.
It took 58 years to solve the ERD problem. The FDA finally approved the first RSV vaccine only three years ago, in 2023. Modern RSV vaccines are designed with multiple layers intended to frustrate RSV-VAERD, such as the use of special adjuvants.
🔥 Government researchers enrolled extremely vulnerable infants in an experimental RSV trial, did not obtain informed consent, continued dosing even as severe cases emerged, and two children died. Nobody was prosecuted or even fired. This is serious iatrogenic harm (injury caused by medical treatment) and a research‑ethics failure on its face, full stop.
The Times did its absolute best to cloak that very disturbing and all-too-familiar story in race. The two boys were black. “Most, if not all,” of the 31 kids in the trial group were black. Thus, the Times concluded: racism.What the Times didn’t say was that by the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Washington, D.C. had become a majority‑black city; black residents were the single largest racial group, and by 1970 had peaked at about 71% of the entire population.
That’s one problem for the Times’ unfounded racial hypothesis. Second, the NIH’s RSV trial was deployed through government-run or funded clinics. Both because blacks were in the majority in DC, and because of basic economics, most patients at these public clinics were also black. So we needn’t dream up some conspiratorial racial animus to explain the trial’s demographics.
Black folks were just unlucky enough to be living in DC in large numbers at the time. That’s it.
So, once again, the NYT’s dumb, woke narrative collapses with the most trivial inspection. But more interesting is why the Times leaned so hard into the race angle, despite having not a scrap of evidence. It’s because the last thing the big health agencies need right now is more scandals.
This is exactly the institutional reform RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya were hired to deliver.
🔥 At some point during the Cold War, our big health agencies contracted a deadly disease. They are infected with a mind-virus called utilitarianism. The scandal here is not that the NIH gave experimental RSV shots to black infants without informing their blackparents. The real scandal is that the NIH believes you can’t make a public health omelet without breaking a few babies.
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the “Father” of Modern Utilitarianism and progressive saint. His preserved head, anyway.
In other words, the NIH’s secret trials of experimental vaccines would not have been more acceptable if the babies had been white, orange, or green.
Classic ethical philosophy based on Judeo-Christian principles says: “You may not use people purely as a means, not even for a huge benefit to others.” Utilitarianism rudely inverts that: if the benefit is big enough, and the expected risk is small enough, almost any use of human bodies as means can be rationalized.
At some point in the recent past, our public health agencies quietly slid from “we are here to protect people” to “we are managing a herd, sorry, a population,” and those are not the same posture. In other words, instead of thinking of themselves as healers, they think they are ranchers.
The Lot 100 episode illustrates this problem perfectly. Severe harms and even deaths of infants were tolerated by elite managers because the perceived collective value of “staying the course” was so high. Even fudging the numbers to hide the harms was considered virtuous.
Stalin’s stats were great too, until they weren’t.
In classic public‑health utilitarian fashion, the stated good was enormous —preventing a leading cause of infant mortality worldwide— so the “cost” of experimenting on a few dozen vulnerable infants in D.C. could be rationalized as small in comparison.
The reason progressives and public health types (but I repeat myself) stick like limpets to utilitarianism is that it is technocratic. The philosophy —which is a necessary foundation for communism— presumes it is possible to quantify, in hard numbers, the numeric value of human lives and flourishing. That makes it possible to compare political policies: which ones produce on balance the most human flourishing?
It is both sensationally attractive and completely perverted.
The main problem is that human flourishing is not easily quantified. Altruism makes some people happy; others prefer selfishness. Some people are fulfilled by regular exercise; others prefer alcohol or sex addictions. Utilitarianism ranks a genetically disabled child below a genetically clean child, even if the disabled child might later become Stephen Hawking.
In the Lot 100 case, we find scientists who explicitly or implicitly calculated that infants were less valuable than adults, and that poor folks were less valuable than more economically privileged ones. After all, the NIH investigators recruited from publicchildren’s clinics, not from the private practices their own children or colleagues might have used.
Put even more simply and uglier: the NIH bureaucrats didn’t experiment on their ownkids.
🔥 I will say it: utilitarianism is an evil, reprehensible ideology that all good people should root out and shun.
Utilitarianism isn’t a neutral “science of compassion.” It’s a license for elites to convert other people’s lives into numbers and then quietly decide which ones are expendable. Once you agree that it’s acceptable to harm a few innocents to buy hypothetical benefits for the many, you haven’t elevated morality— you’ve simply replaced “thou shalt not” with “let’s run the model and see who dies.”
Lot 100 was not a tragic mistake; it was utilitarianism doing exactly what it promises: sacrificing powerless babies in a D.C. clinic for the supposed good of a population they never got to join.
In its rush to tell a boring morality tale about race, the Times wound up unintentionally documenting something much darker about our health bureaucracy. The Lot 100 disaster was not a story about cartoon racists targeting Black babies; it was a story about taxpayer-funded institutions that have grown comfortable loading a revolver with experimental medicine, spinning the cylinder, and aiming it at whichever powerless families happen to be sitting in the public clinic that day.
The victims in this case were poor and black because that’s who used those government clinics, but the engine of the horror was not identity politics. It was the cold arithmetic of utilitarianism.
If there is a lesson here for CDC, FDA, and NIH —and I hope our allies there are reading this— it isn’t another round of “implicit bias” training. It is that all the ugly residue of utilitarian thinking must be permanently purged from ‘public health.’
There must be no more sacrificing the few uninformed patients for the hypothetical benefits to an abstract “herd” or “population,” no more treating informed consent and individual rights as inconvenient obstacles to be managed instead of hard limits binding even the noblest intentions.
As they say, the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, anomalies, and disclaimed Democrat autopsy reports. Let’s take the next exit.
Have a terrific Friday! Then drive back over here tomorrow morning, for a full service of essential news and a carafe of caffeinated commentary.
———————————————————
Rose Rambles... 