This is funny. The day that Trump learned to tweet.
I still don’t think he knows how to thread, though.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Gun Control
A statistician changes her mind after actually looking at the data:
“A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible,” Libresco concludes. “We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.”
Libresco says she still does not endorse gun ownership, “but I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them.”
What a concept.
Reproduction On Mars
Nadia Drake has the latest. We continue to not have a gravity lab to study this.
[Update after reading the whole thing]
They seem to be proposing a gravity lab (still unfunded), but they want to put it in lunar orbit. I see no reason to do this, other than to give the Gateway something to do; LEO (and probably in the ISS orbit) makes a lot more sense to me.
The War On Princesses
Titania McGrath
Godfrey Elfwick (who was banned from Twitter) welcomes her back. (I suspect that the same person is behind both satire accounts.)
[Saturday update]
Reflections from Titania xirself:
Indeed, Twitter’s modus operandi appears to involve routinely silencing those who defend social justice and enabling those who spread hate. In my short time on the platform, I have regularly come across hate speech from the sort of unreconstructed bigots who believe that there are only two genders, or that Islam is not a race. It’s got to the point where if someone doesn’t have “anti-fascist” in their bio, it’s safest to assume that they’re a fascist.
The permanent suspension only lasted for a day, but the experience was traumatic and lasting. I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt. If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site.
She is a true martyr.
[Bumped]
ObamaCare
I disagree about pre-existing conditions, though. That requirement completely screws up the insurance markets. We need a different solution for that issue.
Stop The Personal Attacks And Answer The Climate Questions
Thoughts from Tim Ball on ad homimem and ad verecundiam.
Train Wreck
Will Gavin Newsom finally put an end to the not-so-high-speed madness?
The Weekly Standard
It’s shutting down, after twenty-three years. Probably a victim of its anti-Trump behavior.
Here are the three pieces that I wrote for it, the most recent being my obituary of Jerry Pournelle. When I read my criticism of SLS from 2011, it seems prescient.
There’s a lot of talent there, from Steve Hayes to Adam Keiper and Jonathan Last, and Haley Byrd. Hopefully they’ll land on their feet.
[Late-morning update]
Thoughts from Rod Dreher.
Constitutional Hardball
Yes. Asymmetric? Not so much.
And related: Why campaign finance violations won’t bring down Trump.
[Update later in the morning]
Looks like Mueller and Weismann may be up to some hanky panky: The case of the missing/altered 302s.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And Mueller destroyed the Strzok-Page texts before the IG could review them. How convenient.