SEEN ON TWITTER:

Heh™ and Indeed™.

Our intelligence community certainly has some ‘splainin to do, but this is the least of it.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN MONOMANIA. Terms of Impeachment: Media Mention The I-Word 309 Times in One Day.

I BLOW THROUGH MY DATA CAPS EVEN WITHOUT THIS: Humans May Have Search Engine Tech in Our Brains ‘Within Decades.’

I DON’T DO A LOT OF REVOLVER DRILLS SINCE I ONLY OWN A SINGLE REVOLVER: Skills Check: ‘New York Reload’ Revolver Drill.

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DAVID SOLWAY: Life in the Biodome: Capitalism for All Its Shortcomings Has Found a Way to Work with Human Nature. “I could not help reflecting that the biodome was in a certain sense a metaphorical surrogate for Western civilization, evolving through a long history of trial and error into a comparative haven for its cultural and national species. It provided a favorable environment for human flourishing, bestowing a degree of shelter, sustenance, leisure and freedom never before seen for those who would otherwise have found themselves in a state of nature where life, as Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in Leviathan, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The Greeks gave us the idea of the sovereign human mind and the Judeo-Christian nexus bequeathed the idea of the infinitely precious human soul. These gifts were the materials from which the biodome of the West was gradually assembled.”

Interesting piece, well worth your time.

I’ve always thought of capitalism as the non-system system, where people have enough political and economic elbow room to set up their own little systems inside of it.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: People are pooping more than ever on the streets of San Francisco.

(Classical reference in headline.)

MARK LEVIN: Volume 2 of the Mueller report is a 200-page op-ed that should never have been written.

Video at the link.

SPACE: It’s official: Blue Origin will bring rocket engine tests back to Huntsville.

IF PUSHED, I BET SHE DOESN’T THINK MUCH OF FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTIONS, EITHER: Writer Thinks Our Rights Aren’t Good Reasons To Oppose Gun Laws.

TOLERANCE ON CAMPUS: Two pro-Kavanaugh females accused of supporting ‘rapist,’ not allowed to make statement at campus townhall.

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Orange County baby dies of whooping cough.

ON THE OTHER HAND, A SURVEY OF THE NEWS SUGGESTS THAT YOU CAN HARDLY BLAME THEM: Survey suggests middle-aged Americans drink too much.

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STEPHEN KRUISER: Yankees Drop Kate Smith’s Version of ‘God Bless America’ Because People Were Racist in the 1930’s.

WASN’T THERE A STAR TREK TOS EPISODE ABOUT THIS? Brain Stimulation Gives New Hope For Treating Psychiatric Disorders.

OUR POLITICAL CLASS IS COMPOSED OF IDIOTS (CONT’D): Associated Press: Tourist mecca Notre Dame also revered as place of worship.

OUR POLITICAL CLASS IS COMPOSED OF IDIOTS (CONT’D): WaPo worries: Is the success of Notre Dame fundraising “white privilege”?

STACY McCAIN: Orange Man Bad!

The nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump seem to be sticking with him — his job approval numbers have gained about 7 points in the Real Clear Politics poll average since December 2017 — and the Democrat field for 2020 is a clown car full of left-wing crazies. Despite what his enemies in the media might believe, the end of the Mueller probe is a clear victory for Trump, and if the economy keeps roaring along like it is now, the odds of him being re-elected are quite good.

None of these facts matter to the 3 million who watch CNN and MSNBC, the cable-TV echo chamber defined by the anti-Trump cult mentality of Maddow and Matthews, Joe Scarborough and Erin Burnett, Chris Hayes and Chris Cuomo. The good news is that this alternative universe appears to be shrinking. Maddow has lost nearly a third of her audience since last April, and CNN recently recorded its worst ratings week of the year. It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results, and this is exactly what Trump’s media enemies seem to be doing. The more often the president mocks them as “fake news,” the more determined they become to destroy him, and the more they limit their audience to the most fanatically deranged Trump-haters. However, it never seems to occur to them that they might be mistaken, no matter how often they find themselves humiliated in the ratings. They know only one thing, and they are completely committed to it: “Orange Man Bad!”

Heh. Read the whole thing.™

OUR POLITICAL CLASS IS COMPOSED OF IDIOTS:

“Chief Legal Analyst” for CNN.

UPDATE: From the comments: “This is not stupid, and it is dangerous to see it that way. This is the deliberate and coordinated big lie, the latest attempt to keep this coup together. All the left united in the latest lie. It is aimed at people so ignorant of their own nation’s affairs they don’t even realize that the Obama Administration actually spied on an opponent’s campaign and Nixon never did.”

Flashback: Was Obama administration illegal spying worse than Watergate?

In 1972, some employees of President Nixon’s re-election committee were caught when they broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant a bug. This led to Nixon’s resignation and probably would have led to his felony prosecution had he not been pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

But if a single bugging of the political opposition is enough to bring down a presidency — and maybe lead to an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president — then what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law?

Because that’s what was unveiled last week.

It’s now become much clearer what happened. And yes, it was much worse than Watergate, since it involved the perversion of existing government agencies into political spying and persecution.

Plus:

Will the Justice Department investigate and prosecute former Obama officials? It seems hard to imagine. But then, so did Nixon’s resignation, when the Watergate burglary was first discovered.

This debacle also raises serious questions about the viability of our existing “intelligence community.” In the post-World War II era, we gave massive power to the national security apparatus. In part, that power was granted in the belief that professionalism and patriotism would lead people in those agencies to refuse to let their work be used for partisan political purposes.

It now seems apparent that we overestimated the patriotism and professionalism of the people in these agencies, who allowed them to be politically weaponized by the Obama administration. That being true, if we value democracy, can we permit them to exist in their current form?

Answer: No.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED ALL THE BEES HAD DIED ALREADY: 180,000 bees were living on top of Notre Dame when the fire broke out – and they survived.

This is news? Can’t they just fly away?

YES, PLEASE: Michael Barone: Stopping the campus-fication of American life.

SUZANNE VENKER: Michelle Obama is hopelessly out of touch with the reality of divorced families. “Obama just over-generalized divorced dads as frivolous parents who put their own selfish desires above their children’s health. Not only is that a malicious lie, implicit in the statement is the assumption that mothers, not fathers, are the ‘real’ parents who meet children’s needs.”

Yes, we can’t let that bigotry go unremarked.