DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS:  Texas Supreme Court Allows Arrest of Fleeing Democrats.

GOOD:  Teachers Unions Exposed To Anti-SLAPP Punitive Claim For Suing Mom Nicole Solas Over Critical Race Records.

IS IT ACTUALLY POSSIBLE THEY’RE EVIL BARBARIANS TRYING TO DRAG EVERYONE TO THEIR LEVEL? Eat Celebrity Meat.

Why do we have to explain to them that cannibalism is wrong?

NOW THEY’RE COMING FOR FREDO:

BOB MCMANUS: The rise and fall of Andrew Cuomo, New York’s glowering heavy.

OPEN THREAD: Come on baby.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Mask bullies don’t want to persuade you — but to humiliate and rule you.

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! ‘It Was Just Disbelief:’ Parent Files Complaint Against Atlanta Elementary School After Learning the Principal Segregated Students Based on Race.

To be fair, segregation is pretty on-point for Atlanta Democrats.

SPACE: Space Force developing “freight train to space” for smallsats.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Tall Were WW2 Leaders? (Video.)

#RESIST: Four States Will Be in Defiance Of Federal Court Order If They Comply With CDC’s Eviction Moratorium; Judge In Large Tennessee County Is Refusing To Enforce CDC’s Edict.

FINISHED KURT SCHLICHTER’S THE SPLIT LAST NIGHT. Another home run, and the Ben Sasse bit was amusing. Plus, in the afterword, the funniest yet most-disturbing part, where he writes: “I’m still struggling with the fact that the present is almost crazier than any future I can imagine. Our struggle to reimpose sanity is not going to end anytime soon.”

THIS SHOULD BE OBVIOUS: Fourth Amendment Forbids Handcuffing Driver Just Because He Has Gun + Gun Permit. “The court also held that the law was clear enough that the police officer didn’t have qualified immunity from the claim.”

I think that police who overstep in this manner should be subjected to corporal punishment. The loss of dignity attending a flogging seems appropriate in these circumstances. Indeed, it might be a bigger deterrent than money damages or jail time, and much less expensive for the state.

IT’S COME TO THIS: “Marijuana has never been more popular in the U.S. — and its carbon emissions have never posed a bigger threat to the climate.”

FEDERAL JUDGE SUGGESTS PROSECUTORS BEING TOO LENIENT ON CAPITOL RIOTERS.

15 DAYS TO FLATTEN THE CURVE: Oregon to resume statewide indoor mask mandate, Gov. Kate Brown says.

TO BE FAIR, IT WAS ALSO BETTER UNDER THE BARBARIANS AFTER ROME FELL:

The “Dark Ages” were dark for bureaucrats and scribes — who get to name things like that — but the average peasant farmer consumed significantly more calories after the Empire’s taxes disappeared. The Goths and Vandals and such looted, but they stole less from the people than their predecessors. For more on this see Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter’s thesis is that the collapse occurs when the bureaucratic/parasitic load on a society destroys its ability to adapt to new challenges. We may be approaching that point. The safest and easiest thing to do would be to cut off the bureaucrats and parasites, but they will resist that with the determination of all who don’t work for a living to protect their sinecures.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Our garbage establishment has ceased to fear any reaction to its overreaching. It needs to be returned to its place.

UPDATE:

Related: Obesity Is Contagious. “When an individual gains weight, it dramatically increases the chances that their friends, siblings, and spouses will likewise gain weight.”

You need to follow your diet, or mine won’t work.

QUORUM CALL: Texas Supreme Court Allows for Arrest of Democrats Who Don’t Show Up at Capitol.

Legislative rules generally empower the sergeant-at-arms to compel the attendance of absent members, and to employ law enforcement or other assistance. Back when Tennessee was about to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, opponents — Democrats, then, too! — absented themselves and had to be hunted down with help from private detectives, if I recall correctly Pinkertons. One history I read referred to “a wild chase across ridgetops on muleback by moonlight” or something like that (I’m going from memory). Anyway, enough were caught to allow a quorum and the Fourteenth Amendment passed.

The Democrats’ “Fleebagger” tradition goes back over 150 years!

DON’T GET COCKY: Rep. Ron Kind announces retirement in boon to GOP’s House hopes. “Rep. Ron Kind, a senior Democrat in one of the most competitive swing seats [in rural Wisconsin], will not seek reelection — a gutting blow to House Democrats in their uphill battle to hang onto their majority next November.”

It must have been painful for the three Politico authors attributed to the column to type the above lede.

ALEC BALDWIN RESPONDS TO CUOMO RESIGNATION: ‘This is a tragic day.’

Flashback: Anthony Weiner Is a Modern Human Being.

—Alec Baldwin, the Huffington Post, June 9th, 2011.

GREEN AUTHOR MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Why I Am Not A Progressive.

But progressives are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Yesterday I debated a British climate scientist named Richard Betts on television. After I pointed out that he and his colleagues had contributed to one out of four British children having nightmares about climate change he insisted that he was all for optimism and that he agreed with me about nuclear power. But just hours earlier he had told the Guardian that we were “hopelessly unprepared” for extreme weather events, even though deaths from natural disasters are at an all time low and that, objectively speaking, humankind has never been more prepared than we are today.

And on the drug deaths crisis, the consensus view among Democrats in Sacramento is that “the problem is fundamentally unsolvable,” according to one of the Capitol’s leading lobbyists. Facing a recall that is growing in popularity, Governor Gavin Newsom yesterday tried to demonstrate that he believes he can solve the problem. He came to Berkeley California and cleaned up garbage created by an open air drug scene (“homeless encampment”) underneath a freeway underpass. A reporter for Politico posted a picture of Newsom who he said was “looking tired, sweaty and dirty.” But a commenter noted that the video was shot at 12:12 pm and by 12:25 pm Newsom was holding a press conference. The governor hadn’t even bothered changing out of his Hush Puppies into work boots. People close to the governor say that it is Newsom himself who believes homelessness is a problem that cannot be solved.

The reason progressives believe that “No one is safe,” when it comes to climate change, and that the drug death “homelessness” crisis is unsolvable, is because they are in the grip of a victim ideology characterized by safetyism, learned helplessness, and disempowerment. This isn’t really that new. Since the 1960s, the New Left has argued that we can’t solve any of our major problems until we overthrow our racist, sexist, and capitalistic system. But for most of my life, up through the election of Obama, there was still a New Deal, “Yes we can!,” and “We can do it!” optimism that sat side-by-side with the New Left’s fundamentally disempowering critique of the system.

That’s all gone. On climate change, drug deaths, and cultural issues like racism, the message from progressives is that we are doomed unless we dismantle the institutions responsible for our oppressive, racist system. Those of us in Generation X who were raised to believe that racism was something we could overcome have been told in no uncertain terms that we were wrong. Racism is baked into our cultural DNA. Even apparently positive progressive proposals are aimed at fundamentally dismantling institutions. The Democrats’ $1 trillion infrastructure bill, supported by many Republicans, and their $3.5 trillion budget proposal, contain measures that would finance the continuing degradation of our electrical grids by increasing reliance on unreliable, weather-dependent renewables, and establish racial incentives for industries including trucking, where there is already a shortage of drivers in large measure because not enough of them can pass drug tests. And does anyone really believe that, if those bills pass, progressives will abandon their dark vision of the future and return to Rosie the Riveter?

Meanwhile, at the state and local level, progressive governments faced with worsening racial disparities in education and crime, are attempting to “solve” the problem by eliminating academic standards altogether, and advocating selective enforcement of laws based on who is committing them. Such measures are profoundly cynical. Progressives are effectively giving up on addressing racial disparities by ignoring them. But such is the logical outcome of victim ideology, which holds that we can divide the world into victims and oppressors, that victims are morally superior and even spiritual, and no change is possible until the system that produces victims and oppressors is overthrown.

To some extent none of this is new.

Nope: Welcome Back My Friends, to the Malaise that Never Ends.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Nation Agrees To Get Vaccinated In Exchange For TikTok Influencers Being Launched Into The Sun.

QED: The White House apparently hired this TikTok influencer to promote the vaccine and I can’t tell if it’s a parody or if this is actually serious.

As Muggeridge’s Law states, there is no way any satirist can improve upon real life for its pure absurdity. Especially with Joe Biden in the White House, he might have added.

RADICAL CHIC, THE GERITOL YEARS: Minneapolis Democrat Party chair writes that setting a police precinct on fire was ‘an act of pure righteousness.’

Related exit question: How Crazy Are Liberals?

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Cuomo did ‘hell of a job’ as governor, Biden says in shock remark after resignation over sex harass claims:

Biden lauded Cuomo, who leaves office in 14 days, despite the fact that Cuomo is under investigation by at least four New York district attorneys for assault and the fact that he’s under federal investigation for an admitted coverup of COVID-19 death data at New York nursing homes.

“Well, he’s done a hell of a job. He’s done a hell of a job. And I mean, both on — everything from access to voting to infrastructure to a whole range of things. That’s why it’s so sad,” Biden said.

The president did not express sympathy for Cuomo’s victims, but said that “I respect the decision he made” to resign.

Flashbacks:

● NY Times: Cuomo aides hid nursing home deaths for months.

—The New York Times, April 28th, 2021.

● Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now.

—The New York Times, March 16^th, 2020.

● “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”

—Cuomo on January 29th.