[Late-morning update]
The strange case of white supremacy.
Yes, America is such a horrible racist place that millions of people of all races are clamoring and even risking their lives to get here.
And say, did you know that being pro-life is a white-supremacist position?
Yes, that’s right. Those evil white supremacists are trying to prevent the murder of millions of black babies in the womb.
…in troubled waters:
Mueller’s professed lack of knowledge during recent congressional testimony regarding Fusion GPS was inexplicable since, as former deputy assistant attorney general Bruce Ohr’s closed-door testimony before Congress shows, Weissmann had full knowledge of the fake nature of the Steele dossier that was a major predicate of the Russian witch-hunt that became the Mueller probe. Weissmann knew there was collusion with the Russians, and that it was between the DNC, the Clinton campaign, British agent Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the DoJ, the FBI and, yes, Russian sources interested in upending the Trump presidency.
Bruce Ohr, the number four official at the Justice Department as U.S. Deputy Associate Attorney General and the highest-ranking nonappointee, with an office a couple of doors down from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, kept Weissmann “in the loop” about the fake dossier and its journeys through the deep-state swamp, along with a myriad of other co-conspirators in a web of conspiracy and deceit so vast that Watergate trivia question Carl Bernstein may be right in a way he did not intend when he suggested this whole matter may be bigger than Watergate. It seems only the DoJ janitor was not involved.
If Horowitz finally releases his report next month, it may be a very interesting month.
…and gun-shooting statistics:
For a variety of reasons having to do with social and economic factors the firearms murder rate went down. What the current debate really seems to be about is whether rapid-fire guns increase the frequency of a special kind of crime called mass shootings. However, this is a somewhat artificial category. Mass shootings are a subset of the larger phenomenon of mass killings, sometimes referred to as rampage killings. “A rampage involves the (attempted) killing of multiple persons at least partly in public space by a single physically present perpetrator using (potentially) deadly weapons in a single event without any cooling-off period.”
It is one killer, one place, one time, many victims in a setting outside of war. The data collected on this type of even notes the type of weapon used, which is not always a firearm. It is mass killings that one would want to reduce, not just mass shootings.
The brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing didn’t use guns. As with the “War on Terror,” this is the insanity of going after inanimate objects, instead of the would-be murderers.
[Monday-morning update]
Six ways Bill Clinton lies about the “assault weapons” ban.
To be fair, though, Bill Clinton lies about a lot of things.
First Juaquin Castro outs one of his own supporters as a Trump supporter, forcing him to take protective action for his family, then Liz Warren defames Darren Wilson about what happened in Ferguson.
Neither is a public figure, and in the case of Wilson, even if he is, this was provably reckless disregard for the truth, which makes it actionable. Both of them should sue, to get the attention of the other vicious liars. I’d think they’d get plenty of donations for the legal funds.
Well, this isn’t good news for them. Sounds like maybe Cantrell had been financially mismanaging things?
[Saturday-morning update]
Here’s an update from Jeff Foust. I wonder why Sequoia pulled out?
Are they psychology tall tales?
How many heads will roll over it next month?
Not enough, judging by history, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
…will leave libertarians better armed than most.
Sounds good to me.
Jeff Manber says that space companies need to talk to each other more.
We came to the conclusion in our study … [that] there is no one company that can do commercial. One company does not make a market. … You need an ecosystem. You need compares that are doing things and other companies that use that and begin to put it into their business plan.
You also need advances in communications, like getting data down [to Earth] using advanced technology. You need orbital tugs to move hardware between [free flying commercial space stations] and the International Space Station. You need reentry vehicles, and a cost effective way to bring biopharma products and products made in microgravity like fiber optics back to Earth. What we laid out in our plan was a road map that has the government as one of many customers and a private sector that knows what each other is doing and can plan accordingly.
I’m in discussion with him, and others.
Joe Biden continues to double down on it.
And he continues to be a gaffe machine.
Politifact(!) calls out Biden on more of his lies about Trump.
Did they have a problem when he said that Romney would put blacks “back in chains”?