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Archive for 2019
May 13, 2019
WELL: AP source: Prosecutor to examine Russia probe origins.
Attorney General William Barr has appointed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign was “lawful and appropriate,” a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Monday.
Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to conduct the inquiry, the person said. The person could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Durham’s appointment comes about a month after Barr told members of Congress he believed “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign in 2016.
Stay tuned.
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DEMOGRAPHY IS CALIFORNIA’S DESTINY:
The decline in births and immigration and the aging of the baby boomers mean California, which has traditionally had a relatively young and vibrant population, is rapidly graying. We are becoming more like states in the East and the upper Midwest, while our neighboring states are more like California used to be.
The population boom of the 1980s pushed California from 24 million residents to 30 million, and after the 1990 census it was awarded seven additional congressional seats. Growth slowed in the 1990s, so we got just one new seat after the 2000 census, and none after the 2010 census.
Demographers say California will be lucky to break even in congressional seats after the 2020 census and could lose one seat—even if the count is not depressed by a very controversial citizenship question, as state officials fear.
Thus, one consequence of much slower population growth is relatively declining political influence, not only in congressional seats but in presidential electoral votes based on those seats.
Socialism: If you build it, they will leave.
OPEN THREAD: Freestyle it.
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YOU LEFT OUT PREDICTING FOOD RIOTS BY 1978, KURT, BUT HEY, YOU’RE NOT A SCIENTIST:
CRIMES IN CONCRETE: Theodore Dalrymple reviews James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism. Like Curl, it’s safe to say that the good Dr. Dalrymple is not a fan of modernist architecture:
The ideas of the modernists were generally expressed in the imperative mood and were frequently of a pseudo-mystical nature. Professor Curl’s description of some of the practices prevalent in the early Bauhaus make for hilarity; cranks are always a source of fun. In the early days, the modernists of the Bauhaus tended to a form of health mysticism involving vegetarianism, garlic paste, and regular enemas.Far more important, however, was their early and inherent attraction to totalitarianism. As the author points out, Gropius and Miës van der Rohe had no objection to Nazism other than that the Nazis failed to commission work from them. Gropius was an opportunistic anti-Semitic snob who espoused communism until it was no longer convenient for his career. Miës sucked up to the Nazis as much as he was able. The fact that both of them emigrated from Germany has done much to obscure their accommodation with the Nazis and even allowed the modernists to pose as anti-Nazi—though the most important proponent of modernism in America, Philip Johnson, had for some years been a rank Nazi in more than merely nominal terms. Moreover, as Professor Curl points out, the Nazi aesthetic, like the communist, had much in common with modernism.
The most startling instance of the modernists’ elective affinity with totalitarianism is of course Le Corbusier. To call him a fascist is not to hurl all-purpose abuse at him, but to state a literal truth. But, as Curl wryly remarks, you won’t hear any of this in a British architectural school—let alone a French one, despite the fact that in 1941, only a year after the Exode (the flight of eight million Frenchmen before the advancing Germans), Le Corbusier wrote a booklet, Destin de Paris, proposing to deport a large proportion of the population of Paris to the countryside, since in his elevated opinion they had no business living there in the first place.
It is possible however, to picture the twilight of those whom Tom Wolfe dubbed “the White Gods” in From Bauhaus to Our House, his classic 1981 demolition of modern architecture. Mies and Gropius died in 1969, just as the modern-day radical environmentalist movement was birthing itself. Last month, Green New Deal and SUV enthusiast Bill de Blasio uttered, “We are going to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers which are incredibly inefficient.” Yesterday, the Atlantic ran a column attacking another central tenet of modernism, the open plan, under the headline, “Open concept homes are for peasants.” Add to that books such as historian Jonathan Petropoulos’ Artists Under Hitler and French journalist Xavier de Jarcy’s Le Corbusier, un fascisme francais, both published in 2015, and the White Gods are looking increasingly tainted by the Maoist left that’s been awfully busy lately memory holing some of the 20th century’s most powerful cultural figures. Socialists devour their own, eventually.
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: The Dark Reason So Many Millenials Are Miserable And Broke.
DECISIONS BASED ON THE TEXT ARE SO OLD-FASHIONED. Hyatt, the Constitution, and the Common Law.
Today the Court decided FTB v. Hyatt, overruling Nevada v. Hall and declaring that states have sovereign immunity in other states’ courts. The majority opinion has gotten some rather pointed criticism—largely because it didn’t rely on any particular clause of the Constitution, but rather on general structural concerns.
Structure and relationship is fine, but I think they go too far in sovereign immunity cases. I wrote about this phenomenon some time ago in the Penn Law Review, in Penumbral Reasoning On The Right.
REALITY: Yes, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, The VA Is Badly Broken. Maybe we shouldn’t listen to health care policy talk from a woman who was recently amazed by a garbage disposal.
ISWYDT: Kurt Schlichter: Liberal Sex Strike Fails To Score.
Let’s review. Alyssa Milano is not going to have sex unless and until you allow her to kill babies. I am unclear on what our reaction is supposed to be. Does she expect us to pull a 180 on pre-birth infanticide in order to keep the Alyssa Option open?
Liberals are already thoroughly confused (at best – a lot of them know that liberalism is nonsense but embrace it as a vehicle for their personal power), yet when they get going on the abortion issue they get exponentially worse. It’s a pretty simple question – is it okay to kill a human being who has not yet been born? I say “No,” you say “No,” and they say it’s practically mandatory.
It’s not exactly clear why they draw their hardest ideological line on abortion, but they do. Maybe they love to freak out us squares. Maybe they hate the idea of traditional motherhood. Maybe liberalism is just a hideous death cult that has substituted Margaret Sanger for Moloch.
Probably some of all three.
But draw the line there they do, and it makes them stupid and crazy – well, stupider and crazier.
Which is an accomplishment.
Related, seen on Facebook:
ANALYSIS: TRUE. University Presses Shouldn’t Have To Make A Profit.
I BELIEVE IT: Demise Of A Close Friend Can Affect One’s Health For Years, Says Study. However, you can try to make the impact a positive one.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO… DO… THAT: ‘Snarling’ Burger King customer allegedly hid 7 syringes in vagina.
SNITCHES GET STITCHES: DC May Soon Allow Residents To Issue Parking Tickets.
“It would start small. Just 10 people per ward. They would be trained and made sure they would be ready to go. When they see a vehicle that is blocking a bike lane, blocking the crosswalk, blocking a fire hydrant, they would have the ability using an app on their phone to be able to take a picture and actually have a ticket that will be issued,” DC Councilmember Charles Allen, who introduced the bill, told Fox 5.
The photo taken by the authorized resident using the app would indicate when and where the photo was taken, and once submitted through the app, would carry the authority of a traffic injunction issued by a city employee.
Residents who applied for the program would be trained in “bicycle and pedestrian safety; the laws, regulations, policies, and best practices related to issuing notices of infraction for parking violations; proper use of the app; and conflict resolution techniques,” according to the bill.
There could be some legal issues involved in providing citizens such power.
They could call it the Standardized Ticketing and Safety Inducement program, or “STASI.”
WHERE YOU’LL PROBABLY NEVER TAKE IT: Here’s What the 2020 Mercedes-Benz GLS Can Do Off-Road.
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