Not a new topic, but a new take on it. You wouldn’t get me on one of those things.
The Real State Of The Economy
If you’re feeling financially pinched, it’s because you are.
Steve Scalise
It’s early, but he’s got the tweet of the year so far.
[Afternoon update]
More examples of bad behavior of the Brooklyn Bolshevik’s disciples.
AB5
A letter from a California Democrat to California Democrats: What were you thinking?
She’s being overgenerous in her assumption that there was actually anything resembling thought involved.
[Thursday-morning update]
The bill is so bad that the legislature may dump it next week.
[Bumped]
[Friday-morning update]
Now the legislature is going to require strippers and webcammers to get an occupational license.
I volunteer to help with providing the necessary training.
[Bumped]
A Mission To Mars
How to optimize your headspace for it.
This is why I think that the notion of missions to Mars under the Apollo paradigm are fanciful. There’s a reason (well, OK, more than one) that Elon is building Starship so large. He wants to make it like a cruise, not solitary confinement.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of which, SN1 is entering final assembly for its 20-kilometer flight.
After Brexit
Britain somehow carries on:
Ever since David Cameron announced a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in February 2016, the British people have been issued the direst imaginable warnings. Before the referendum, the then–chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, among others, predicted an immediate recession in the U.K. if the voters were unwise enough to disregard his instructions and vote to leave the EU. But we did disregard his instructions, as we did those of the prime minister and the heads of all the other major parties. We disregarded everybody, in fact, who warned us that our future would be darker, poorer, more ignorant, and more insular. In June 2016 we voted to leave the EU.
For a variety of reasons that arose after that decision (not least the ineptitude of Theresa May’s government and her minority rule after the 2017 election), the scare stories stepped up. The warned-of recession was claimed to have merely been deferred. And the financial threats were the least of it. The media and politicians on the Remain side upped the volume on all their dire warnings. Disappointment and rage about losing the referendum were transferred into a number of vitriolic behaviors, but most prominent amongst them was the claim of increased insularity.
Media, including a new, strange propaganda paper called the New European, offered the British public “farewell tours” to the Continent. Such publications strongly suggested that once Britain left the EU, we Brits would be unable to visit again. We would return to where we were before we entered the Common Market in 1975. And as centuries of literature and history attest, until 1975 nobody from Britain ever went to the Continent. In fact, prior to 1975 we had been a strange, hobbit-like people, famously incurious about abroad and choosing never to visit the place.
RTWT
The Democrats And 2016
They still haven’t come to terms with it.
They probably never will.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Democrat groans in response to Bloomberg’s defense of capitalism should terrify all of us.
[Update a while later]
First link is fixed, sorry.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The debate was a glorious Wrestlemania.
Bill Barr
…and his critics’ derangement syndrome.
Anti-Barr polemics dwell on the parade of horribles that might come from his tenure at Justice, without pausing to consider that a norm-busting violation of the rules targeting a politically inconvenient individual already occurred — it was the abusive FISA surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page.
The supposed institutionalists and civil libertarians who are piling on Barr are more outraged that the attorney general wants to get to the bottom of this abuse — and related 2016 investigatory overreach — than by the abuse itself.
It’s no wonder that Barr has a poorly disguised contempt for his critics, many of whom are so inflamed by their opposition to Trump that they’ve lost any sense of standards. In a peppery speech to a Federalist Society conference last year that is now one of the counts against him, Barr rightly warned that “it is the Left that is engaged in a systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.”
As has always been the case.
Bloomberg
God made one.
[Update a few minutes later]
Just as Hillary made every West Virginian a coal miner, Bloomberg has made every American a farmer.
And Bloomberg may regret making it to the debate stage.
The Flynn Case
From Sydney Powell’s latest filing:
The government’s conduct in this case has been so outrageous—and evidence of it suppressed—that FBI Director Wray immediately adopted new policies to foreclose it. No one had anticipated the leadership of the FBI and DOJ would “spy” on a presidential campaign and breach the trust of a presidential nominee and purposefully circumvent DOJ and White House protocols to interview the new administration’s National Security Advisor without counsel.
Moreover, it seems impossible for Special Assistant United States Attorney Van Grack to view these issues with even a hint of objectivity. The defense’s motions and the IG Report evince Mr. Van Grack’s plain suppression of evidence that is undeniably exculpatory to Mr. Flynn under any objective standard and a series of his retaliatory actions against Mr. Flynn. ECF No. 133. Mr.Van Grack has suppressed evidence from the formation of the “Special Counsel Investigation” and likely even prior to it—for the very purpose of putting Mr. Flynn in the unjust position he now occupies while protecting the prosecutors, his team, and the cadre of malfeasant FBI agents from the discovery of their negligence, crimes, and wrongs. There is a veritable litany of government misconduct here that is “outrageous” or “grossly shocking” and mandates dismissal of this prosecution.
Good luck with that.