“VINDICTIVE SORE LOSER BUREAUCRATS HAVE ENDANGERED PEOPLE’S LIVES AND INVITED CONFLICT BY ILLEGALLY RELEASING CONFIDENTIAL PRIVATE INFORMATION:” Massive Trove of Gun Owners’ Private Information Leaked by California Attorney General.
Archive for 2022
June 28, 2022
OPEN THREAD: Don’t run out of space.
FASTER, PLEASE: Venus Aerospace unveils its new dart-like Mach 9 hypersonic plane design. The subhed claims it will circle the earth in an hour, but it’ll have to go faster than 7,000 mph to do that.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: ‘The Jewish Factor, It’s Money:’ Biden Ambassador Pick Under Fire for Anti-Semitic Tirade.
It’s two Trumps in one!
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): That didn’t last long:
As usual, the salacious stories about Trump turn out to be made up.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): From the comments: “Will someone in D.C. please dress up as a steering wheel and hold a dramatic press conference? ‘Ohhhh, he tried to grab me! And Mark Judge saw the whole thing!'”
Plus, this, via the open thread:
Also, from tonight’s Open Thread: “If the Ds are doing so awesome with the abortion issue, why did they change the news cycle with the bogus Trump steering wheel stupidity?”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Ghislaine Maxwell Sentenced To Prison In Spite Of Years Of Faithful Service To Nation’s Leaders.
I COULD USE AN ATTACK CAT: Cat chases bear away from owner’s driveway in British Columbia.
BEGUN, THE STATE ABORTION WARS HAVE: Abortion-rights groups sue to stop ‘trigger’ bans in several states.
GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY REFUSES TO CANCEL CLARENCE THOMAS: A friend forwards this email from the Provost and Law Dean:
Dear Members of the George Washington University Community,
Since the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, we have heard from members of our community who have expressed feelings of deep disagreement with this decision.
We also have received requests from some members of the university and external communities that the university terminate its employment of Adjunct Professor and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and cancel the Constitutional Law Seminar that he teaches at the Law School. Many of the requests cite Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which he called the substantive due process doctrine a “legal fiction.” Justice Thomas has been a consistent critic of the Court’s legal philosophy on substantive due process for many years. Because we steadfastly support the robust exchange of ideas and deliberation, and because debate is an essential part of our university’s academic and educational mission to train future leaders who are prepared to address the world’s most urgent problems, the university will neither terminate Justice Thomas’ employment nor cancel his class in response to his legal opinions.
Justice Thomas’ views do not represent the views of either the George Washington University or its Law School. Additionally, like all faculty members at our university, Justice Thomas has academic freedom and freedom of expression and inquiry. Our university’s academic freedom guidelines state: “The ideas of different faculty members and of various other members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals within or outside the University from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”
Just as we affirm our commitment to academic freedom, we affirm the right of all members of our community to voice their opinions and contribute to the critical discussions that are foundational to our academic mission.
Too generous to the critics, but it comes out the right way.
BUT OF COURSE: Voicemail indicates Joe Biden knew of Hunter deals with ‘spy chief of China.’ Most corrupt administration ever.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Justice Nominee Promises She’ll Divest Her Stake in Avantor.
President Joe Biden’s nominee for a top post at the Justice Department intends to sell her remaining $14.5 million stake in a company her father chairs, amid questioning about a report the company sold chemicals diverted by Mexican drug cartels to make heroin.
Vanita Gupta made the pledge in written responses to questions from Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, as part of the nomination process. Grassley cited a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation that found a chemical Avantor Inc. makes, acetic anhydride, was easily tapped by narcotics gangs.
I guess that did the trick, as Gupta was confirmed in April.
THE FDA’S DEADLY PROHIBITIONISTS: Warning: This Agency is Hazardous to Your Health. The dramatic decline in smoking among teenagers and adults during the vaping era has been a great public-health success story, but it threatens the activists, academics and bureaucrats who have built careers in the anti-smoking movement. To keep their jobs — and their cut of the $800 million in tobacco user fees that the FDA collects — they need a new enemy, so they’ve declared war on nicotine, which in itself is safe and provides genuine benefits to tens of millions of Americans.
The nicotine prohibitionists want to ban Juul vaping sticks, the most effective technology ever developed for inducing smokers to quit, and mandate lower levels of nicotine in cigarettes. This pointless and hopeless war is a boon for activists and bureaucrats — the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products has more than doubled its staff — but a disaster for public health.
PHIL MAGNESS IS MANFULLY FIGHTING LEFTIST DISINFORMATION ON LIBERTARIANS: Setting the Record Straight on “Setting the Record Straight on the Libertarian South African Economist W.H. Hutt and James M. Buchanan.”
Nancy MacLean’s 2017 book Democracy in Chains has become a quintessential example of this literature. The book’s primary villain – described in MacLean’s words as an “evil genius” – is 1986 Nobel laureate economist James M. Buchanan, who she places at the center of an elaborate academic conspiracy to “enchain democracy” at the behest of a plutocratic elite. Race naturally plays a central part in MacLean’s argument as she places Buchanan in league with the segregationist “Massive Resistance” movement of 1950s Virginia as part of an intellectual project to allegedly rehabilitate the pro-slavery constitutional theories of John C. Calhoun.
In a paper published in 2019, we subjected MacLean’s thesis to careful scrutiny, including retracing her steps through the archival materials she claimed to have used and adding other sources that she missed. The results were not pretty for MacLean’s thesis. We found that she had failed to substantiate her central allegation of Buchanan’s complicity with the segregationists, while also ignoring extensive evidence that worked against this claim. Her archival work produced a long list of misrepresented sources, misread documents, mistaken citations, faulty inferences, historical anachronisms, and outright factual errors. They nonetheless allowed her to construct a narrative about Buchanan that many on the political left accepted for its “truthiness.” Quite simply, MacLean had told a tale that seemed “true” to others who wanted to believe it. Her evidence did not support that story.
One of the main areas where MacLean’s segregationist narrative falters is the case of South African economist W.H. Hutt. In 1965, Buchanan recruited Hutt for a year-long visiting professorship at the University of Virginia. Shortly before he arrived, Hutt published The Economics of the Colour Bar – a withering economic broadside against the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa. The book built on decades of Hutt’s anti-Apartheid work, which had previously induced the South African government to suspend his passport in an effort to silence him. After arriving at UVA, Hutt continued his attacks on Apartheid and gave a string of public lectures pointing out its similarities to the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow South. Clearly, something did not add up in MacLean’s book. If Buchanan’s project at UVA existed to give an academic cover to the segregationist “Massive Resistance” movement, as MacLean maintains, why would Buchanan personally invite an economist who was widely known as an outspoken critic of Apartheid?
Because MacLean’s politics needed him to be racist.
YOU’LL OWN NOTHING, AND YOU’LL LIKE IT! Buyout Begone: Ford Says You Can Never Own Leased EVs.
MADE IN THE USA: The Classic Leather Everyday Belt. #CommissionEarned
WELL, BYE: Netflix cancels another show after just one season. “Q-Force is an adult animated comedy that focuses on a group of LGBTQ+ superspies, known as Queer Force, who are looking to prove themselves to the American Intelligence Agency (AIA) that undervalues them.”
LET ME JUST GET OUT AHEAD OF THE STORY AND SAY THAT GHISLAINE MAXWELL DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE: Ghislaine Maxwell Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison for Sex Trafficking Crimes.
Maxwell was sentenced on Tuesday to 20 years in prison in her New York sex-trafficking case for procuring teen girls for Jeffrey Epstein for him to abuse. Maxwell, 60, has maintained her innocence.
Epstein, a convicted sex offender and financier whose elite associates once included Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, was captured by federal authorities in July 2019, on sex-trafficking counts. He killed himself in a New York City federal jail just over one month after his arrest.
Maxwell’s attorneys had pushed for leniency in sentencing, saying that she should receive “well below” the 20 years recommended by federal probation officials. Prosecutors pushed for a sentence of 30 to 55 years in prison.
Maxwell, a former British socialite, was convicted on 29 December of five of the six charges she faced.
Related: “Maxwell looked at her victims, saying, ‘I am sorry for the pain that you experienced.’ ‘I hope my conviction and harsh incarceration brings you pleasure.’”
CORPORATE AMERICA TAKES SIDES: Google tells U.S. workers they can move to states where abortion is legal. They wouldn’t do this for gun rights. . . .
But if it staunches the flow of lefties to red states, I’m for it.
UPDATE: From a friend:
FASTER, PLEASE: Tissue model reveals key players in liver regeneration.
Obligatory Stephen Green reference goes here.
PARTY OF RERUNS: The whispers of Hillary Clinton 2024 have started. “Clinton is exactly the right person to put steel in the Democrats’ spine and bring attention to the reality that ‘ultra-MAGA’ Republicans, as President Biden calls them, are tearing apart the nation.”