YOUR SCIENTISTS WERE SO PREOCCUPIED WITH WHETHER OR NOT THEY COULD, THEY DIDN’T STOP TO THINK IF THEY SHOULD: Arby’s has flipped the vegan ‘meat’ trend on its head with the ‘megetable,’ a carrot made out of turkey that looks and tastes almost exactly like the vegetable.
Archive for 2019
June 28, 2019
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, THIS WILL END WELL. Democrat Candidates Agree: Taxpayers Will Cover Health Care For All Who Break Into The United States.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EARLY DAYS OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: Justin Raimondo, RIP.
Justin Raimondo died yesterday at age 67 after struggling with cancer. His obituary is a must read just for the eye-popping detail about his boyhood confrontation with a Communist psychotherapist. Raimondo was a young radical libertarian, a gay-liberation activist, and an indefatigable support of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns. Yes, you read that right. His two great passions were preserving the memory of the pre-WWII American right, and his activist news portal, Antiwar.com, which has opposed every U.S. war and military intervention since its founding in 1995.
Read the whole thing, and then click over to read that “eye-popping detail about his boyhood confrontation with a Communist psychotherapist” — and even Ayn Rand. But then, as Jerome Tuccille’s 1971 book correctly noted, “It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.”
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Critics Weaponize ‘Loudest Voice’ Against Fox News. “The Showtime miniseries lets critics savage the only media outlet that gives conservatives a fair shake.”
OBVIOUSLY, WE MUST FORCE WOMEN ATTENDEES TO ASK MORE QUESTIONS: Men ask most of the questions at scientific conferences; we can choose to change that. As I tell law students, if you think other people are talking too much, it probably means you aren’t talking enough.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE MEMORY HOLE AND THE STRUGGLE SESSIONS: Woke Fascism.
THE DEEP STATE HAS WANTED THIS AT LEAST SINCE THE CLINTON-ERA “CLIPPER CHIP” FIASCO: “Senior Trump administration officials met on Wednesday to discuss whether to seek legislation prohibiting tech companies from using forms of encryption that law enforcement can’t break.” It’s an awful idea, it’s probably unconstitutional, and why would Trump want to give the Deep State more tools to use against Americans?
REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA v. BAKKE: On this day in 1978, aspiring physician Allan Bakke won his case in the Supreme Court and hence his right to attend UC Davis Medical School. Yet those who believed Bakke’s victory would spell the end of race-based admissions policies were disappointed. Four justices came down hard against preferential treatment; a different four were happy to tolerate such treatment. Justice Lewis Powell, a Nixon appointee, attempted to come down somewhere in between. Powell’s swing opinion worked for Bakke, but colleges and universities were able to drive a truck through the narrow “diversity” exception Powell thought he was drawing.
Ever since then, “diversity” (which had barely been argued as a justification for race-based admissions by the Regents) has been the watchword on campus.
The consequences of the Bakke decision have not at all been what Powell was hoping for.
DEREGULATION MATTERS: The Council of Economic Advisers has just released a new report summarizing and quantifying the effects of the President’s deregulatory agenda. It
…estimates that after 5 to 10 years, this new approach to Federal regulation will have raised real incomes by $3,100 per household per year. Twenty notable Federal deregulatory actions alone will be saving American consumers and businesses about $220 billion per year after they go into full effect. They will increase real (after-inflation) incomes by about 1.3 percent.
As the report also notes, “The ongoing introduction of costly regulations had previously been subtracting an additional 0.2 percent per year from real incomes, thereby giving the false impression that the American economy was fundamentally incapable of anything better than slow growth. Now, new regulations are budgeted and kept to a minimum.”
Turns out the new normal…wan’t.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: It Isn’t Friday Unless It’s Florida Man Friday.
The 21st century is not working as I had hoped, to coin an Instaphrase.
GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD WE USE FOR THE THINGS WE DO TOGETHER: Valley growers sue over high-speed rail disruptions.
California’s high-speed rail route cuts a four-mile long gash in Tim Raven’s 2,500 acres of almond, and grape orchards near Selma.
He has already sold the authority the land and has been paid, but Raven says he has not been compensated for the disruption of dividing his property.
“On one property, a year and a half ago, they cut through an almond orchard, took out a 100-acre almond orchard, took our pump out, I spent $500,000 on two pumps and redoing the drip system, and I haven’t got a dime yet.”
That is just one example of disruption.
Attorney Mark Wasser is representing Raven and a total of 70 farmers with similar claims, totaling millions of dollars against the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
But don’t worry — the consultants all got paid.
FREE TUITION, after a drug test.
MORE THAN GOTCHA: Kamala’s Busing Blunder.
As I write this, the consensus opinion among GOP analysts (Jonah Goldberg being the only demurrer I’ve seen) is that Harris poleaxed Biden when she said, “There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me.”
Clearly, her team had planned this carefully, up to and including using an altered image that makes her look like a black child of poverty.
But more to the point, why wasn’t every GOP analyst and every conservative reporter up in her face about it?
Harris lied, for one thing.
Read the whole thing.
PROTECTING F-35 TECHNOLOGY: Voters in Istanbul do their job on Erdogan as the Pentagon begins to “unwind” the Ego-Sultan’s participation in the F-35 program.
PHOTO CATCH-UP FROM MAY: Marines fire a FIM-92 Stinger surface to air missile from a North Carolina beach. The Marine Stinger teams are assigned to the 2nd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion. Photo taken May 21.
COMMAND AND CONTROL IN THE BALTIC SEA: USS Mount Whitney participates in BALTOPS 2019. Good photo of the special purpose ship and its “domes and nests” (antennas) of electronic communication and surveillance equipment.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.
THE ANSWER PRETTY MUCH HAS TO BE RACISM AND BIGOTRY, RIGHT? Working-class Mexicans don’t want Central American immigrants, either. Here’s why.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Debate Night 2 Electric Boogaloo, the Woke-Off Beat Goes On. “There was no Spanish but mucho loco. During the first debate, the candidates were just trying to get some attention because many of them were unknown. On night two, the candidates attacked the president more explicitly and attacked one another because they are jockeying for a bump in the polls. G-d help us.”