“STUDENTS DEMAND.” Harvard students demand environmental law prof cut ties with oil giant ConocoPhillips.
What gives them the right to demand anything of anyone?
Archive for 2023
April 9, 2023
JON GABRIEL: Hecklers at Trump’s arraignment have a lesson for us all.
Back in the real world, things aren’t going well.
Inflation continues and recession is likely. We’re $31 trillion in debt. Military threats are rising from China, Russia and other hostile powers.
Only 19% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going. At least we can still yell at strangers about politicians who don’t even know we exist.
Let’s face it: few leaders in D.C. want to put in the work to fix our problems.
No one wants to calm the waters. The political class is content with ratcheting up the divisions until it all breaks apart. This isn’t some grand conspiracy; modern politicians are too incompetent to launch one.
Instead, they’re hyperfocused on winning today’s news cycle and the next election. A few bold visionaries look all the way to the election after that, but little thought is given to the long-term implications for the country.
They want us to keep yelling at each other. It’s a luxury we can’t afford.
Exit quote: “It’s more obvious than ever that no one is coming to save you. No candidate, no party, no movement. You need to save yourself.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: World Turns To China In Moves To Escape Dollar Dominance.
KURT SCHLICHTER: The Only Way to Restore the Norms Is to Finish Them Off.
For a long time, we had a norm about trying not to prosecute political opponents even when we could. You beat them at the ballot box. But then they got more brazen, and there was no ambiguity about their crimes. They were actual crimes, and they rubbed them in our face. The Felonia Milhouse von Pantsuit toilet server stuff struck a nerve because so many of us knew what a big deal treating classified materials like her husband treated interns is (or was) – if we had done that, we’d be charged and in some fed pen converting large rocks to tiny ones. But she did not get charged. That looming doofus James Comey invented a new legal requirement for the statute that never existed before and never would exist if it was us. And there’s the First Crackhead buying a gun when he’s a drug addict – again, you know that if we lied on a Form 4473 the AFT would be SWATing us in our cribs. They took the sensible norm of reluctance and mocked us with it.
So, let’s not do that anymore. Let’s not bend over backwards to avoid charging our political enemies with their crimes. And if we have to be creative about the crimes and create novel new theories to ensnare our opponents, so be it. Alvin Bragg was creative. That’s the New Rule. Let’s see how they like being served up a dose of that kind of legal suppository.
“BUT THE RULE OF LAW!!!!”
Yeah, what rule of law is that?
Read the whole thing.
THE WOKIES CAN’T CREATE ANYTHING NEW, THEY CAN ONLY PRODUCED RUINED VERSIONS OF THINGS CREATED BY THEIR BETTERS: Grease goes woke: New TV reboot of 70s classic features multicultural, all-female quartet and will explore ‘sexual orientation, gender expression and racial identity’… as characters sing a song about white supremacy.
It’s a mockery, much as Sauron created Orcs in mockery of the elves.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California’s Attacks on Big Oil Will Only Drive More People Out of the State.
California does indeed have the highest gasoline prices in the nation. Those prices have fallen quite a bit in recent months to $4.82 a gallon. That’s still $1.38 a gallon higher than the national average—and $1.70 a gallon higher than in Texas. Oil companies are national operations, so a normal person might wonder why those companies are so much greedier in California than they are elsewhere.
The answer isn’t hard to find. For starters, California has the highest gas taxes in the nation. (We also get the least bang for our buck given the state of our freeways, but that’s a separate issue.) Those higher taxes instantly make our gasoline 48 cents a gallon higher than in Texas. There’s still a pricing gap, but despite officials’ blathering about a “mystery gas surcharge” here in California, it’s not a mystery at all.
“California’s tough environmental rules mandate that gasoline sold within the state be produced according to strict formulas that reduce pollution,” per a Los Angeles Times analysis. “But the gas is more expensive and difficult to produce than dirtier fuel sold elsewhere. Few refineries outside the state are equipped to produce it.” The report adds the number of California refineries is plummeting and our state has no interstate pipelines, thus forcing us to rely on costlier forms of transportation.
In January of 2022, Snopes ran the headline: Yes, U-Haul Ran Out of Trucks for People Moving Out of California.
I’d expect to see a repeat, but where will they get the gas to power them?
LIGHTNING DEAL: Men’s Long Sleeve Fire Retardant Henley Shirts. #CommissionEarned
BUT REMEMBER, IT’S TRUMP WHO’S SHATTERED OUR NORMS AND INSTITUTIONS: Biden, Schumer Aren’t Happy About a Texas Judge Blocking the Abortion Pill.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled in favor of pro-life medical groups challenging the FDA’s approval of the drug. He ruled that “both the initial approval of the pills in 2000 as well as more recent FDA decisions allowing them to be prescribed via telemedicine, sent by mail and dispensed at retail pharmacies, are unlawful,” according to the report.
In another interesting development, a federal judge in Washington State handed down a contradictory order on Friday preventing the FDA from prohibiting access to the drug in the “dozen blue states that brought the lawsuit,” Politico reported.
Democratic politicians railed against the Texas judge’s decision, and some intimated that it is part of the Republican Party’s effort to outlaw abortion nationwide. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said as much during a press call on Saturday, in which he referred to the ruling as “awful, extreme and unprecedented.”
“Let’s be clear — this is about the Republicans’ goal of a nationwide abortion ban,” he said, according to The Hill.
President Joe Biden also chimed in, saying that “the lawsuit, and this ruling, is another unprecedented step in taking away basic freedoms from women and putting their health at risk.”
“It is the next big step toward the national ban on abortion that Republican elected officials have vowed to make law in America,” Biden added, echoing Schumer’s claims.
Happy Easter from the man whom NBC describes as “America’s most prominent Catholic!”
Related: ‘No president is above the law’ Dems urge Biden to ignore judge’s abortion pill ruling. “Sen. Ron Wyden is asking President Biden to ignore the judge’s ruling:”
Past performance is no guarantee of future results:
Why is Wyden suggesting that the president should threaten the foundations of our republic?
More: AOC channels Andrew Jackson on abortion pill: ‘Ignore this ruling.’
“I believe that the Biden Administration should ignore this ruling,” AOC told an incredulous Anderson Cooper on CNN late Friday,
“The interesting thing, when it comes to a ruling, is that it relies on enforcement,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“It is up to the Biden administration to enforce, to choose, whether or not to enforce such a ruling,” she added — echoing President Andrew Jackson, another defiant Democrat.
Jackson’s notorious refusal to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1832 recognition of the Cherokee Nation’s independence led to the horrors of the Trail of Tears when 15,000 Cherokee were forcibly driven from their ancestral homeland in Georgia.
“The justices themselves … are undermining their own enforcement,” the Queens congresswoman charged, by issuing decisions that leftists like herself disdain.
On Friday, District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee from Texas, ordered the FDA to halt its 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, a widely used abortion medication. The order was stayed pending an appeal.
AOC has also done a 180 on this topic as well, of course:
MORE ON STANFORD: More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge’s Speech At Stanford Law School. “Asserting that Stanford’s very small and very moderate right-of-center contingent is ‘far-right’ is precisely the kind of irrational intolerance that erodes the fabric of our discourse.”
I BLAME SOCIAL MEDIA: Jonathan Haidt: The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere. “It is now widely accepted that an epidemic of mental illness began among American teens in the early 2010s. What caused it? Many commentators point to events in the USA around that time, such as a particularly horrific school shooting in 2012. But if the epidemic started in many nations at the same time, then such country-specific theories would not work. We’d need to find a global event or trend, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis doesn’t match the timing at all, as Jean Twenge and I have shown.”
Plus: “At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time: the rapid global movement from flip phones (where you can’t do social media) to smartphones and the phone-based childhood. The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010, just as teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones in large numbers. (Few teens owned an iPhone in its first few years). Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, which gave the platform a huge boost in publicity and users. So 2012 was the first year that very large numbers of girls in the developed world were spending hours each day posting photos of themselves and scrolling through hundreds of carefully edited photos of other girls.”
April 8, 2023
OPEN THREAD: Have fun, kids.
SO MUCH FOR THAT JOB AT HOME DEPOT: Ancient Hair Reveals Traces of Hallucinogenic Drugs Taken 3,600 Years Ago.
SO I’VE FELT SLIGHTLY BAD NOWADAYS ABOUT HAVING SHUT DOWN MY OLD TWITTER ACCOUNT. When I deleted it, it had something like 180,000 followers. (After I deleted it, someone encouraged me to start one back up under the same handle so no one could do it and pretend to be me, so there’s a basically dormant account now with a few hundred followers.) But it would be handy to publicize my Substack posts.
Or it would have been. Matt Taibbi reports that Twitter is now blocking Substack links in response to Substack Notes, a somewhat Twitter-like function that Substack is supposed to roll out next week. That seems cheesy on Twitter’s part, but does make me feel better about not having an active account there.
I guess I’ll try out Substack Notes, but to be honest, the more it’s like Twitter the less I’ll like it. I hated the partisan censorship on Twitter, but even leaving that aside it was the worst of the social media platforms in pretty much every way. Yeah, it’s good for a pithy zinger, but because of that the quality of discussion is pretty bad. And it’s designed to be addictive and serves as a huge time waster. Maybe Notes will be better, but what I like about Substack now is that it’s basically the polar opposite of Twitter.
UPDATE: Background:
1. Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false.
2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
3. Turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 8, 2023
ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “As of right now I was able to like, retweet and follow a substack link without any warnings or hindrance. So whatever restrictions there were there appear to have been resolved, at least for me.”
THEY HAD PREVIOUSLY TOLD US THAT FOMITE TRANSMISSION WAS NEGLIGIBLE: Virus on hands, surfaces contributes to household spread of COVID-19.
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation). #CommissionEarned
T.C. LYNCH: In my transplant life. “March 26, 2023 marked 29 years since I performed my last peritoneal dialysis treatment, and the first day with my newly transplanted kidney. Peritoneal dialysis involves surgically inserting a tube into the peritoneal cavity. The peritoneal cavity is then filled with a solution that helps draw poisons from the blood vessels in the lining of your abdomen into the solution. The solution remains in the cavity for 4 to 6 hours, then is drained and replaced with new solution. This is done 4 times a day.”
NOT BAD, BUT HOW’S THE SOUND SYSTEM? This Rad Overland Toyota Land Cruiser 76 Is Also Literally Bulletproof.
EXPECTATIONS MATTER: Study suggests short-term memory can be impacted by expectations.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Carhartt Men’s Loose Fit Heavyweight Short-Sleeve Pocket T-shirt. #CommissionEarned