Patterico's Pontifications

6/5/2022

Sunday Open Thread

Filed under: General — Dana @ 12:00 pm



[guest post by Dana]

I’ve been out of town, so here’s a fresh albeit brief open thread. Just a few tidbits, but I’m sure you’ll find plenty to talk about!

First news item

It just never ends. Shootings/deaths this past week in Chatanooga, Philadelphia, Chicago .

Second news item

Responsible gun ownership is one thing, but gun idolatry is an entirely different – and ugly – animal altogether:

Go to the Rand Corporation’s state firearms law navigator, and you can track the extraordinary expansion of gun rights in the United States year-by-year. Combine state laws with Supreme Court precedent, and it’s hard to think of a time when Americans enjoyed a greater degree of personal liberty to own or carry firearms.

No, the threat to America’s gun culture comes from the gun rights movement itself. The threat is gun idolatry, a form of gun fetish that’s fundamentally aggressive, grotesquely irresponsible, and potentially destabilizing to American democracy…

What is a gun fetish? It’s a concept that’s tough to define, but easy to observe. When a leading candidate for Senate runs on a platform that’s “pro-God, pro-Gun, and pro-Trump,” then guns (and Trump) are elevated far above their proper place in American life. The same goes for popular t-shirts and signs that declare a person “pro-life, pro-God, and pro-gun.”

We see the gun fetish when a member of Congress appears on television with crossed AR-15s behind her head. Or when another member of Congress raffles off a .50 caliber sniper rifle…

The gun fetish rears its head when politicians pose with AR-15s in their campaign posters, or when a powerful senator makes “machine-gun bacon” to demonstrate just how much he loves the Second Amendment.

It’s certainly not the case every time a politician publicly shoots a gun that they’re exhibiting a gun fetish, but the sheer prevalence of the open display of firearms (and not just any firearm, but the AR-15 specifically) illustrates that something has changed.

Third news item

How about teachers just don’t discuss penises with five-year-olds in any context and let parents fulfill their responsibility to teach their children about such matters, and then teachers would have more time to fulfill their responsibility to teach kindergarteners about shapes, letters, spelling, numbers, counting, and basic social skills:

In his kindergarten classroom, one teacher in western Massachusetts using “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” introduces the idea of gender as part of an exploration of identity. He explains that people use all sorts of pronouns: he, she, they, ze. He introduces the terms transgender and gender queer but doesn’t fully define them because that is too much for kindergartners, said the teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his district did not authorize him to speak publicly.

He talks to students about anatomy but declines to classify various body parts as male or female. “We don’t say a penis belongs to a man,” he said. It belongs to a human, he explains.

And he makes clear that even if a doctor proclaims at birth, “It’s a boy!” that baby may not be a boy. “Someone who was born a boy may not feel they are a boy.”

Fourth news item

Seriously??:

In an interview published Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron said allowing Russia to save face could help bring a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. “We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means,” he said.

Facing a barrage of criticism for the comment, Macron was slammed by Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and President Zelensky as well:

“Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it. Because it is Russia that humiliates itself,” Kuleba tweeted Saturday.

“We all better focus on how to put Russia in its place. This will bring peace and save lives,” he added.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also appeared to reference Macron’s comment in an address Saturday night, saying: “The Russian army can stop burning churches. The Russian army can stop destroying cities. The Russian army can stop killing children. If the same person in Moscow just gives such an order. And the fact that there is still no such order is an obvious humiliation for the whole world.”

Fifth news item

Uvalde mom who rescued her kids claims she was told to keep her mouth shut by authorities:

Angeli Gomez, the Uvalde mom who ran into Robb Elementary School during a shooting to rescue her two sons, told CBS she was handcuffed and threatened by police officers for talking to the media.

“Right away as I parked, US Marshals started coming toward my car saying that I wasn’t allowed to be parked there. And he said, ‘Well, we’re gonna have to arrest you because you’re being very uncooperative,'” Gomez, whose two sons were not in the classroom where the shooting occurred, told CBS.

“I said, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to arrest me because I’m going in there.’ And I’m telling you right now, I don’t see none of y’all in there. Y’all are standing with snipers and y’all are far away. If y’all don’t go in there, I’m going in there.”

Gomez was handcuffed and eventually released by officers while the shooting happened. She made her way into the school by jumping a fence and pulled both of her sons from the school, saying she saw no officers inside as she walked through the halls.

The mother of two was also threatened with a probation violation, she told CBS, by a police official who told her that if she spoke to media about her experience she may be obstructing justice.

A judge later told Gomez she was brave during the incident and her probation would be shortened, despite the threats.

“If anything, they were being more aggressive on us parents that were willing to go in there and, like I told one of the officers: I don’t need you to protect me, get away from me. I don’t need your protection. If anything, I need you to go in there with me to go protect my kids,” Gomez told CBS.

Popehat opines:

If that’s true, she should get a lawyer and sue the cops under Section 1983 for violation of clearly established First Amendment rights. That’s a winnable case. I’d take it. Wouldn’t be easy, because the law is so unconscionably biased in favor of the fuckin’ cops, but plausible remedies for cop misconduct are so rare you should take them when they arise. Damages aren’t great but I think a jury would give punitives.

Sixth news item

This:

South Carolina’s Tom Rice was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Now, as Rice fights an uphill battle for his political life in the heart of Trump country, he is standing by that choice — calling it “the conservative vote” in an interview with ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl that aired Sunday on “This Week.”

“I did it then. And I would do it again tomorrow,” Rice said.

–Dana

199 Responses to “Sunday Open Thread”

  1. Hello.

    Dana (1225fc)

  2. Reposted from a previous thread:

    Voters Say They Want Gun Control. Their Votes Say Something Different.
    …….
    When voters in four Democratic-leaning states got the opportunity to enact expanded gun background checks into law, the overwhelming support suggested by national surveys was nowhere to be found. Instead, the initiative and referendum results in Maine, California, Washington and Nevada were nearly identical to those of the 2016 presidential election, all the way down to the result of individual counties.

    The usual theories for America’s conservative gun politics do not explain the poor showings. The supporters of the initiatives outspent the all-powerful gun lobby. All manner of voters, not just single-issue voters or politicians, got an equal say. The Senate was not to blame; indeed, the results suggested that a national referendum on background checks would have lost. And while the question on every ballot was different and each campaign fought differently as well, the final results were largely indistinguishable from one another.
    ……..
    The possibility that one of the most popular policies in polling could run behind Mrs. Clinton at the ballot box raises important questions about the utility of issue polling, which asks voters whether they support or oppose certain policies. While these questions probably tell us something about public opinion, it may tell us quite a bit less about the political landscape than many assume.
    ……..
    …….. The apparent progressive political majority in the polls might just be illusory. It simply may not exist for practical purposes. And the tendency for referendum results of all ideological colors to underperform the polls may betray an overlooked dimension of public opinion: a tendency to err toward the status quo.
    ……..
    “When we see that initiatives consistently underperform lopsided issue polling, then that suggests that there is a common pattern at work,” said John Sides, a professor at Vanderbilt who has researched public opinion polling in ballot initiatives. “When seemingly popular proposals are subjected to counterarguments in a competitive campaign and when voters have the responsibility of changing policy (as opposed to just answering survey questions), then the results differ.”
    ……..

    Rip Murdock (0f5551)

  3. Trump Endorses Kevin McCarthy, Pisses Off His Own Supporters
    ………. However, after posting the endorsement to his Truth Social platform, Trump’s followers expressed disappointment in the comment section. “What the heck,” one user whose bio states they will vote for Trump a “third time,” wrote. “The guy [McCarthy] talks behind your back..yuck,” another pro-Trump user wrote. In supporting McCarthy, Trump has crossed some of his loudest supporters. Trumpworld allies, including Fox News contributor Leo Terrell and Roger Stone, have been two of the many voices leading attacks on McCarthy over being a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only). “California RINO Kevin McCarthy is a disgrace to the Republican Party, and he needs to resign,” Stone wrote at the end of April. Around the same time, hardcore MAGA Rep. Matt Gaetz responded in kind to a tweet that supported the idea of a “takeover” of House “leadership from RINO Kevin McCarthy.”
    #########

    Rip Murdock (0f5551)

  4. Women Are Nearly Half of New Gun Buyers, Study Finds
    …….
    The preliminary results from the 2021 National Firearms Survey, designed by Deborah Azrael of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Matthew Miller of Northeastern University, show an estimated 3.5 million women became new gun owners from January 2019 through April (2021). About 4 million men became new gun owners over that period, they found.

    For decades, other surveys have found that around 10% to 20% of American gun owners were women.

    The number of federal background checks for gun purchases hit an all-time high in 2020 of 21 million, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group.

    Researchers and gun store owners attributed the jump to fears driven by the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests, sometimes accompanied by violence, that followed the police killing of George Floyd, as well as the divisive atmosphere around the 2020 presidential election.
    ……..
    In addition to its findings on gender, the survey found that new gun buyers were more racially diverse than existing owners who bought more. Among new gun buyers, 55% were white, 21% were Black and 19% were Hispanic. Among new women gun owners, 28% were Black. The 19.6 million existing gun owners who bought more firearms since 2019 were 71% male and 74% white.
    ……….

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  5. It never has ended. Just reported more now.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  6. #3

    McCarthy is the perfect Trumper. He has demonstrated, time after time, that he can bullied into towing the line. Why would Trump take a chance on a true believer? He might disagree with you someday and act on that disagreement. (See Brian Kemp and Governor DiSantis) People like that are threats. McCarthy just isn’t.

    Appalled (1a17de)

  7. “If anything, they were being more aggressive on us parents that were willing to go in there…”

    The parents weren’t armed. It will be very interesting to hear what orders the cops got and what their bosses thought they were doing.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  8. @2: So, when a presidential candidate rides around in a tank, he’s got a tank fetish? Or he thinks his voters would like him better if he did? [possibly true -ed.]

    I don’t think it’s a gun fetish, what I see is a “government get off my lawn!” fetish. The rise in gun ownership, the rise in firearm capability, and the rise in numbers of people carrying firearms routinely is directly relatable to the attempted reach of the federal government.

    These are people who refuse to live “The Life of Julia” and might kill you if you try to make them.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  9. Macron was slammed by Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and President Zelensky as well…

    Always a joy to watch Ukrainians biting at the hands that can feed them:

    France retains one of the most capable military forces in Europe. Unlike Britain, France retains a completely independent nuclear deterrent and an independent industrial base. It has its own indigenous ballistic missile submarines that carry French designed missiles armed with French warheads. It also maintains its own air and land-based nuclear deterrent using French designed Mirage 2000N bombers and the ASMP missile.

    France also retains a formidable conventional military force of 215,000 troops. The French army is well equipped with LeClerc main battle tanks and Tiger helicopters. Meanwhile, French special operations forces have acquitted themselves well in Afghanistan and Mali. The French Navy—which has its own nuclear-powered aircraft carrier—is larger and arguably more capable than its traditional British rival. The carrier operates a mix of Rafale fighters and Super Etendard strike aircraft. The French Navy also maintains six attack subs, three amphibious assault ships and 21 surface combatants. The French air force maintains a force of 220 combat aircraft including the Rafale and Mirage 2000 fighters. It also maintains a force of four AWACS aircraft and 14 tankers along with a tactical transport fleet.’ –
    https://nationalinterest.org/feature/europes-4-deadliest-military-powers-12214

    And then, there’s the business of business:

    https://tradingeconomics.com/france/imports-from-ukraine

    https://tradingeconomics.com/france/imports-from-ukraine

    OTOH: ‘France imports 16.8% of its natural gas from Russia (Source via @Fizz which in turn relies upon Eurostat). These imports account for about 3.7% of Russia’s natural gas exports, which can be compared to the roughly 74% of all Russian natural gas exports that are imported by OECD European nations.’ And, of course, Macron has just been re-elected, too.

    DCSCA (7ff1a6)

  10. Women Are Nearly Half of New Gun Buyers, Study Finds

    D’oh. Guess what group most needs an equalizer. People like LeBron James, not so much.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  11. “We see the gun fetish when a member of Congress appears on television with crossed AR-15s behind her head. Or when another member of Congress raffles off a .50 caliber sniper rifle…”

    There are lots of fetishes. The bothersome issue here is that guns are becoming more forefront in political protests. Open carry at times seems less about actual self defense and more about making a statement….and a bit about intimidating one’s opposition. It’s becoming more mainstream to believe that the heart of the second amendment lies in having the ability to oppose a tyrannical federal government. And the bar for what constitutes “tyranny” seems to be weirdly lowering during these increasingly hyper-partisan times. The stockpiling of weapons and ammo suggests that many are itching for a confrontation…..that we’ve exhausted dialogue and finding common ground, and that all that remains is violence and provocation.

    If a gun is truly a tool, who poses for pictures with their crescent wrench or channel lock pliers? Something is going on with respect to glamorizing guns that wasn’t the norm 50 years ago. The corresponding mixing in with Biblical quotations and religious orthodoxy is also eye popping. I think our disturbed and marginalized in our society sees this sensationalism…across the culture…and build it into their suicide/revenge fantasy. No one thinks that they will be the one that snaps….until they do. As usual, French is shrewd to call it out….

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  12. “We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means,” he said.

    Bless his heart.

    It’s not Russia that is being humiliated, it’s Putin. Once Russia has withdrawn from all of Ukraine, and Putin has met his reward, then the diplomacy can start about how fast to rebuild Ukraine and how much it will cost Russia. And Macron’s guys can have some of the contracts.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  13. There are lots of fetishes.

    Indeed. One of the worst is the legalistic fetish, where law and regulation control more and more of our lives. If only we can have enough law and regulation, everyone’s life will go swimmingly. Or some such.

    When people feel controlled (and the Covid thing just made this so much worse) they push back, often irrationally or inappropriately. The gun mania is a visceral reaction to too much government. It remains to be seen if government can read the signs and back off, or if it is going to push until something breaks.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  14. The gun mania is a visceral reaction to too much government.

    Or is it the visceral reaction to a lot of rhetoric and hyperbole that continually warns that the government is ready to come after you ANY SECOND NOW!?

    Dana (1225fc)

  15. There are lots of fetishes.

    Sure there are. But a shoe fetish typically doesn’t lead to mass murder.

    Dana (1225fc)

  16. “The gun mania is a visceral reaction to too much government.”

    Maybe this comes from the Covid restrictions…but otherwise, has there really been an explosion of regulations over this past decade? Obamacare was probably the next biggest intrusion but as someone who has always gotten his insurance from his employer, it didn’t exactly tilt me over the edge…especially with the tax enforcement repealed through our democratic process. The Covid rules were annoying at times, but enough to stockpile guns and ammo….as if law of the jungle will work better than a Republic? Hardly.

    We continue to have much less government than the rest of the world (a good thing), yet we have far more anxiety and senseless homicides. Maybe it’s because we have far more time to spin each other up over matters that used to not get federal traction. I’m no fan of CRT, but should I be ready to storm the local school board (who are not pushing CRT) because I’m angry about what they might do at some future point. People need to relax and get perspective. Government is how we solve collective action problems. Government is ugly right now because we hate each other. How about let’s stop doing that?

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  17. “But a shoe fetish typically doesn’t lead to mass murder.”

    Agreed…but I’m not sure if fetish is the best word. For one thing, when one hears fetish they do as Dana did, connote it to something sexual or perverse (at minimum, unhealthy), which is probably not the best way to encourage dialogue, especially for lifelong gun collectors who are exceedingly law abiding. How many guns make a fetish….and does it change if you actually use all of the guns (i.e. hunting different prey or doing different target shooting)? Maybe “fascination” would make for a better word…adding whatever adjective that might be appropriate out front. I mean I don’t want to think about what a fetishist might do with his gun….

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  18. Religious fetishists?

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dozens-dead-church-attack-nigeria-1.6478338

    The Nigerian government needs jump start their gun and explosives buyback program

    steveg (5c8a33)

  19. AJ_Liberty,

    I find the statement that gun mania is a visceral reaction to too much government a bit eye-rolling. Nice way to blame others. Blaming the government has become a too-frequent excuse for bad behavior on the right, IMO.

    Dana (1225fc)

  20. Dana – Glad to see you’re OK. I was beginning to worry about you, a little.

    On a lighter note, here’s a story for you about that scamp, Abe Lincoln:

    When Lincoln was a teenager, and his father and step-mother were away, he came up with this prank: He took two little boys to a nearby stream, got their feet all muddy, and then took them back to the cabin. He then held them upside down so they could “walk” on the ceiling, leaving muddy footprints.

    When his step-mother got back, she saw the footprints, laughed, and told Abe he deserved a whipping. (He didn’t get one but he did clean up the ceiling, without being asked to.)

    I can’t say I behaved perfectly at that age, but I can say I never thought of any prank that clever.

    (From Sandburg’s biography.)

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  21. How much worse do things need to get under Biden Administration actions and inactions before people start to miss Trump. I know that the die hard never Trump people here will not budge but seeing more and more comments from people getting hit with higher fuel/food costs, wondering.

    Mendocino
    https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/California-gas-nears-10-dollars-17218407.php

    Southern CA
    https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a40176313/gas-prices-us-summer-2022-russia-oil-ban/

    steveg (5c8a33)

  22. Dana On your third item: I think I preferred the days when you could, from time to time, see stories like this one: An elementary school class had a pet rabbit. One day the teacher asked the class how they could tell whether the rabbit was a boy or a girl. One student piped up: “By voting on it.”

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  23. If, like me, you have an unhealthy interest in the details of the fighting in Ukraine, you might want to look at the Institute for the Study of War site from time to time.

    Here’s a disclaimer they put on all of their posts:

    We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  24. “I find the statement that gun mania is a visceral reaction to too much government a bit eye-rolling. ”

    Kevin said it, not me. I commented against this notion @16

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  25. And the bar for what constitutes “tyranny” seems to be weirdly lowering during these increasingly hyper-partisan times.

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74) — 6/5/2022 @ 1:23 pm

    Yes, now that Biden is President.

    When Trump was President, the bar was rising. Trump’s “perfect call”, and stoking of the January 6th mob, were both forms of tyranny, but not to the cult members. Love is indeed blind.

    norcal (3f02c4)

  26. Or is it the visceral reaction to a lot of rhetoric and hyperbole that continually warns that the government is ready to come after you ANY SECOND NOW!?

    Dana (1225fc) — 6/5/2022 @ 1:35 pm

    You nailed it, Dana. This is Carlson’s whole shtick–“They are coming for you.”

    It’s a poisonous quasi-religion.

    norcal (3f02c4)

  27. AJ @ 24,

    Yes, I knew it was Kevin’s comment but wanted to respond to yours (which I agreed with).

    Dana (1225fc)

  28. Jim Miller,

    What a rascal Lincoln was (as a kid)!

    Dana (1225fc)

  29. The referenced “mass shooting” in Philadelphia was actually a gun battle between at least two gangs, that occurred in a busy party neighborhood around South and Third Streets.

    That area isn’t the (normal) combat zone or slum neighborhood, but party central not that far from hoity-toity Rittenhouse Square. It’s a fixed up area full of posh shops and bars. Two thugs accosted a third, a fist fight broke out, which then degenerated into one of the two guys pulling a gun and shooting their opponent. That part has been caught on tape. In the end, at least six shooters were blasting away.

    Three were killed, including one bad guy and one bystander. Ten out of 11 wounded but not killed were bystanders, while the bad guy wounded is in critical condition.

    The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (412927)

  30. How high are gas prices, nationally? About as high, adjusting for inflation, as they were in 2008.

    The blame for the high price now should be placed on Putin, and, to a much lesser extent, the Saudis. (The Biden administration has decided to appease the Saudis, and has already gotten them to promise to increase production. I agree with that Biden decision, despite the Saudi’s dismal human rights record.)

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  31. Also, regarding the gun mania being a visceral reaction to too much government: Republicans like alot of government as much as the next guy. P.S. Annual federal spending grew by $940 billion under Trump’s signature, even before the coronavirus.

    Dana (1225fc)

  32. Except the left has made it clear they are coming for you and your right to self-defense.

    If you don’t want a gun, don’t own one.

    I’ve heard similar remarks before.

    NJRob (5ac4ba)

  33. Jim,

    Stop carrying water for the Biden administration. It must be exhausting. The blame for high gas prices belongs squarely on Biden and the left. They want high prices to force people to enact their disasterous policies. They want people to suffer if they use fossil fuels. Period. End stop.

    NJRob (5ac4ba)

  34. Foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia has seen a 600% increase in gun permits and sales, as murders soared from 356 in 2019, to 499 in 2000, to 562 last year. Homicides this year are trending slightly lower than last year, but the math works out to 540 to 550 murders this year. You can see why the law-abiding citizens might think that they need more protection.

    Math geek that I can be, I downloaded the Philadelphia Shooting Victims database, and then ran the numbers.

    The database is awkward, any you need to manipulate it to be able to read it easily. While race, sex and age of the victims are in three columns together, the column indicating whether the victim is Latino is far to the right, and then, even further, is the column indicating whether the victims was killed. I saved it to a Microsoft Excel file, then moved the columns around, and hand-tallied the results.

    Black males were 148 (65.49%) of the 226 shooting victims, and 37 (77.08%) of the 48 fatal shooting victims. Black females were 27 (11.95%) of the shooting victims, and 2 (4.17%) of the fatal shooting victims. The population of the city are only 38.3% non-Hispanic black.

    The gang-bangers are rather poor shots, killing their victims ‘only’ 21.24% of the time.

    The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (412927)

  35. @20. Agree. The trends and pattern suggests ease of access by civilians- chiefly young males – mostly white, between ages 18-25– to technologically advanced weapons developed and confined to the military use- like the AR-15.

    When the military’s super secret, neat-o ultra-classified phaser-firing video-drones hit the civilian market in 2030, watch cats and kids get vaporized by the next crop of gamers. 😉

    DCSCA (c4ce5f)

  36. How high are gas prices, nationally? About as high, adjusting for inflation, as they were in 2008.

    Pfft. Gas now at station closest to home today: Regular: $6.76/gal.; Midgrade $6.96 gal.; Premium: $7.06 gal.; Diesel: $7.16/gal.

    DCSCA (c4ce5f)

  37. The blame for high gas prices belongs squarely on Biden and the left.

    Biden gets a lot of the blame but not all of it. It was Trump who cut a deal with the Saudis in spring 2020 to cut oil production, in order to raise oil prices for the benefit of domestic producers.

    Paul Montagu (5de684)

  38. #33 – NJRob – By your frequent use of “carry water” are you referring to the famous Zen saying?

    Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

    It seems to me that we should all chop wood and carry water — or do the modern equivalents, if we care about those around us, and our nation.

    If you have some other meaning, please be clearer.

    As for me, I don’t think in a democracy we should hate — or worship — our politicians*. If, after a confused start, Biden is doing things of which I approve, like releasing oil from the strategic reserve and striking bargains with the Saudis, I’ll say so.

    And if you have an argument for your claim that Biden wants us all to suffer with high gas prices, make it with numbers, and links. Or find some economists who don’t blame Putin for the price increase.

    (*Of course, it is entirely appropriate to hate politicians who try to destroy our democracy.)

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  39. (The Biden administration has decided to appease the Saudis, and has already gotten them to promise to increase production. I agree with that Biden decision, despite the Saudi’s dismal human rights record.)

    Agreeing w/a dolt who has been wrong on every major U.S. foreign policy decision in his career is nothing to boast about. Maybe they’ll ‘promise’ not to murder any more reporters, too.

    And BTW, lest you forget: ‘Of the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia… The Saudi government had broad immunity from September 11 tragedy lawsuits in the United States, until a United States District Court for the Southern District of New York judge allowed a suit against the Saudi government in March 2018.’ -source, wiki.twofaced.evildoers

    DCSCA (c4ce5f)

  40. Here’s a graph that illustrates both Kevin’s point and mine:

    You can follow the argument better if you set the time to five years. There was an incredible break in oil prices, right when Trump bullied the Saudis into cutting output, spring of 2020. Then by December 2021, prices rose to about where they had been in October 2019. They rose, as Putin’s war came closer and spiked at the beginning of March, this year, when Putin attacked Ukraine.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  41. #40 Sorry. Paul’s point, not Kevin’s.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  42. This David Ignatius column explains the administration decision.

    Two new factors proved decisive for the Biden White House: The first was the war in Ukraine, and Biden’s need for Saudi help in buffering the oil market; the second was Israel’s strong desire that Biden normalize relations with MBS and the kingdom as part of a broad realignment whose shorthand is the Abraham Accords.

    Ignatius approves the decision, for reasons of “realpolitik”. He isn’t happy about it, and neither am I, but we often need help from allies who do not have clean hands. We have even worked, in some limited ways, with Putin.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  43. Appeals court clears way for bid to disqualify Cawthorn as ‘insurrectionist’
    …….
    The three-judge panel’s ruling reverses a lower court’s determination that an 1872 federal law that granted amnesty to nearly all former members of the Confederacy had immunized Cawthorn from the lawsuit brought under the 14th Amendment.

    “We hold only that the 1872 Amnesty Act does not categorically exempt all future rebels and insurrectionists from the political disabilities that otherwise would be created by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Judge Toby Heytens, a Biden appointee, wrote for the panel of judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

    Although Cawthorn unofficially lost his primary bid last week, the court said the lawsuit was not moot since a primary winner has not yet been certified.
    ………
    The two other judges on the panel — James Wynn, an Obama appointee, and Julius Richardson, a Trump appointee — joined in the judgment, but each wrote separate concurring opinions.

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  44. How high are gas prices, nationally? About as high, adjusting for inflation, as they were in 2008.

    so inflation is as high as it was in 2008, adjusting for inflation

    brilliant

    and I’ll bet biden’s competence is as high as any other president’s, adjusting for dementia

    JF (e1e9c0)

  45. David Ignatius column explains the administration decision… Ignatius approves the decision, for reasons of “realpolitik”.

    Like that adds gravitas?? Who gives a damn—he’s a frigging opinion columnist carrying water for the Imbecile In Chief, not an elected official with any weight of responsibility involved.

    For God’s sake- one Ignatius’ very own Washington Post colleagues, Jamal Khashoggi, was literally hacked to death by the very same Saudis he’s advocating doing deals with. He’s an insulated Beltway ass. This is why populism is rooting deeper and deeper in the U.S. It wasn’t Putin’s minions who attacked the U.S. on September 11.

    DCSCA (a6210e)

  46. Will there be a new British Prime Minister soon? Quite possibly.

    Briefly, Boris Johnson is in trouble because he has lied about so many things, but especially about what the Brits are calling “partygate”. While the nation was supposed to be locked down, Boris had parties in his official residence, Number 10 Downing Street — and then didn’t tell the truth about them.

    There’s a good chance that the Conservatives MPs will hold a vote of “no confidence” soon. If he loses that, he will almost certainly resign, to be replaced by another Conservative MP. (And they are betting on which, right now.)

    (If you aren’t familiar with Johnson, here are three details that may amuse you. Since he was born in New York City, he had dual citizenship, but gave it up, when the IRS was able to stick him with a big bill for capital gains, in London. That hair is messed up deliberately, as sort of a trademark. But the hair is orderly compared to his personal life.)

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  47. Jim Miller,

    Do you at all buy into the prices for gas are being raised out of sheer greed and that the supply levels are good?

    Dana (1225fc)

  48. @45 like some here, Ignatius has long been a tool for the democrats

    he was a conduit for the leak of classified info that kicked off the russia collusion nonsense

    JF (e1e9c0)

  49. Russian media roundup:

    Julia Davis
    @JuliaDavisNews
    On Russian state TV, they discuss not only what it would take to destroy the United States, but also how many Ukrainians have to be massacred. One lawmaker came up with a figure: 2 million. No one in the studio blinked or objected—including the host, who is himself a Duma member.

    8:49 AM · May 30, 2022·Twitter Web App
    _____________________________________________

    Putin’s Puppets Can’t Stop B*tching About the Grueling Cost of His War
    …….
    When Russia’s own problems are being discussed, the mood in Kremlin-controlled TV studios is far from jolly—in part because state media mouthpieces were so wrong in their earlier predictions about how the war would impact Russia.
    ………
    On 60 Minutes, host (Evgeny) Popov shot down suggestions from pundits that Russia can quickly organize its own production of semiconductors. “One factory that produces semiconductors would cost us $20-30 billion… It’s quite clear that we can’t build them quickly. We have to look for them on foreign markets. It’s utopia for us to suggest we could be making them here,” Popov said.

    Vladimir Avatkov, from the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, delivered a sunny—albeit an Orwellian—outlook: “In the non-Western world, they’re looking at us with hopeful anticipation. They’re waiting for the time when Russia can actively involve and attract others into its new security architecture.” Even seasoned a propagandist like Popov seemed aghast at the delusional forecast and snidely asked: “They’re waiting to join us, even though we have no Visa, Mastercard, iPhone, or McDonald’s?”
    …….
    On Wednesday, news agency Interfax quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko, who responded to Western appeals for the Ukrainian ports to be unblocked by requesting the removal of sanctions against Russia’s financial sector and the country’s exports. While Ukraine’s grain is being blocked from reaching its recipients, the Kremlin’s state media mouthpieces frame the approaching crisis as a mere “market competition” which Russia intends to win. During last week’s broadcast of The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, Simonyan boasted that unlike India and the United States, Russia had no drought and would experience no shortage of food. She added that Moscow could choose to share or sell its extensive food stocks, but only with those who behave “nicely” towards Russia.

    In another state media venting session on Tuesday, senior member of the Communist Party Yuri Afonin delivered a grim forecast: “The West is ready to fight us until the end… How can we respond? Only with a sovereign economy, the rebuilding of our economy. Yes, there are some people—thankfully, there’s less and less of them—who keep hoping that everything will settle down, calm down and return to normal. They need to understand, that will never happen,” he said on Tuesday’s 60 Minutes.
    ………..
    _____________________________________________
    Russian lawmaker suggests kidnapping NATO defence minister in Ukraine
    ……….
    Oleg Morozov, first elected to the Russian parliament in 1993 and a member of the dominant United Russia party, said the supply of Western arms to Ukraine posed a direct threat to Russia and might require Moscow to review its military aims.

    “You know, perhaps it is a fantastical plot that I have brewing … that in the near future, at some stage, a war minister of some NATO country will go by train to Kyiv to talk with (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskiy,” Morozov told the “60 Minutes” talk show on Rossiya-1 state TV late on Monday.

    “But he would not get there. And would wake up somewhere in Moscow,” Morozov said.

    “You mean we abduct them?” TV host Olga Skabeyeva, one of the most pro-Kremlin journalists on television, asked with a smile.

    “Yes. And then we would sort out who gave which order for what, who is responsible for what exactly,” Morozov said. “It is not such a mythical picture … There are new rules in the world now. Let all those war ministers gathering in Kyiv think a little about what it would be like to wake up in Moscow.”
    …………

    Related:

    Captured Russian Weapons Are Packed With U.S. Microchips

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  50. 34/man Dana:

    Give the current occupant a good back slap and maybe this one will address what should be broken out as “closing time thug shootings”.

    urbanleftbehind (50f204)

  51. remember triumphant headlines like this?

    Biden’s Stock Market Is Crushing Trump’s

    and every time it dipped under trump there was so much self congratulation in the msm and media saturation

    nowadays, you won’t find biden’s name associated with the market, or inflation, or gas prices, or baby formula

    my search engine must be broken

    how about yours?

    JF (e1e9c0)

  52. https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/bidenflation-egg-prices-soar-161-as-shortages-loom/

    A chicken in every pot? Not under Biden. You’ll eat bugs and like it.

    Just imagine how much a turkey will cost this Thanksgiving… if you can find one.

    Thanks Biden voters!

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  53. Poll: 61% of Trump voters agree with idea behind ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory

    A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that more than 6 in 10 Donald Trump voters (61%) agree that “a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views” — a core tenet of the false conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.”

    Less than a quarter of Trump voters (22%) disagree with that statement.
    …….
    …….. 54% of Republicans and 53% Fox News viewers now also agree that “a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views,” according to the Yahoo News/YouGov poll. In both cases, just a third disagree. The rest are unsure.
    ……..
    Most Trump voters (73%) and Republicans (64%) also say that “discrimination against white people has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black people in the U.S.,” and roughly the same number — 69% and 66%, respectively — say they’re either very or somewhat concerned that “native-born Americans are losing economic, political, and cultural influence in this country to immigrants.”
    ………
    More than three-quarters (77%) of Biden voters, for instance, select racism as one of the issues that “played a role” in the Buffalo shooting. Only 42% of Trump voters say the same — roughly the same number (40%) who select “liberal media (such as MSNBC)” as a contributing factor.

    Asked to choose which of eight issues played the “biggest” role in the shooting, most Trump voters pick mental illness (56%), followed by racism (15%) and liberal media (14%). Just 2% say “too many guns.”

    In contrast, a plurality of Biden voters select racism (39%), followed by “conservative media (such as Fox News)” (27%), mental illness (14%) and too many guns (10%).
    ……….
    ……. Trump voters are roughly three times as likely as Biden voters to believe that “there is no way to stop mass shootings in the U.S.” (30% vs. 11%) or that “mass shootings in the U.S. can already be stopped by enforcing the current laws” (38% vs. 11%). In contrast, two-thirds of Biden voters (67%) believe “there is a way to stop mass shootings in the U.S., but it would require drastic change in laws.” Just 18% of Trump voters agree.
    ………..
    ……… In a March 2021 Yahoo News/YouGov poll, 50% of U.S. adults wanted handgun laws to be more strict, 13% wanted them to be less strict and 27% wanted no change. Today those numbers are statistically unchanged: 47%, 14% and 28%, respectively.
    ………

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  54. Dana – I am not an oil economist, but I don’t doubt that sometimes happens, humans being imperfect. What seems to have happened recently is that the increased demand, as the economic damage from COVID lessened, made supplies tight, and then the disruption of the Russian oil supply made them even tighter. The resulting price increases will draw more supplies — but not instantly. And, I think more slowly than usual, because of the transition away from fossil fuels. A prudent investor might decide not to finance oil exploration, in hopes of a net profit ten years from now.

    Two examples to show some of the complexities: The Saudis have been accused of stepping up production — in order to eliminate, or at least reduce, competition from fracking. Venezuela has the largest proved reserves in the world, but has trouble producing much, because of the corruption and incompetence of its government. (And their oil is “heavy” so it usually has to be mixed with lighter oil before it is refined.)

    Because of the volatility in the oil market, many economists prefer to study “core inflation”, when looking for long-term trends.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  55. Murphy rules out assault weapons ban, new background checks in Senate plan

    Sen. Chris Murphy, who is helping lead Senate talks on gun control, said lawmakers don’t plan to bring any bill to the floor that would ban assault weapons or include comprehensive background checks but are actively working on legislation that would include a range of other measures.

    “We’re not going to put a piece of legislation on the table that’s going to ban assault weapons, or we’re not going to pass comprehensive background checks,” Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But right now, people in this country want us to make progress. They just don’t want the status quo to continue for another 30 years.”

    Among the items currently on the table are investments in mental health care and school safety, red flag laws and changes to strengthen the background check system, said Murphy.
    ………

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  56. Dana (1225fc) — 6/5/2022 @ 2:11 pm

    It’s funny, I had a similar reaction to the gun fetish block in the post. It’s a fairly transparent ad hominem.

    frosty (79658c)

  57. How high are gas prices, nationally? About as high, adjusting for inflation, as they were in 2008.

    The blame for the high price now should be placed on Putin, and, to a much lesser extent, the Saudis. (The Biden administration has decided to appease the Saudis, and has already gotten them to promise to increase production. I agree with that Biden decision, despite the Saudi’s dismal human rights record.)

    Jim Miller (406a93) — 6/5/2022 @ 3:01 pm

    When you go from being a net exporter of oil to being a net importer of oil and you have a president who has continually said before the election that he wants us to go down to zero fossil fuel usage, the price of oil is going to go up. Oil is sold as a future and not really based on what the current value. It’s what they think it’s going to be sometime in the future.

    Here’s a chart showing the price of gas started going up when Biden was elected president in November 2020.

    Blaming Putin for the rise in gas prices is bologna.

    Tanny O'Haley (8a06bc)

  58. @51. He’s such a hypocritically brain-damaged wind-bag. The only bigger ass in America is stitched to the butt end of the King Kong exhibit at Universal Orlando.

    DCSCA (e57ae6)

  59. “nowadays, you won’t find biden’s name associated with the market, or inflation, or gas prices, or baby formula

    my search engine must be broken”

    That diagnosis appears to be correct. A quick search on Biden plus each of the terms yielded, in order, about 1.115 billion, 108 million, 49 million, and 29 million hits.

    Please pass that problem on to Google, since they will want to know how you were able to break their search engine.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  60. Or is it the visceral reaction to a lot of rhetoric and hyperbole that continually warns that the government is ready to come after you ANY SECOND NOW!?

    No, it’s the feeling that they have been for some time now. Covid didn’t help, but the government is in everyone’s face at all levels FAR more than it was in my childhood. It may be withing YOUR comfort zone (or you may be the beneficiary of the controlling), but that doesn’t mean that it’s OK for everyone.

    I ask you, when was the last time government’s answer to an issue was to back off? In almost every case it has been to press harder. Speed cameras. Cell phone tracking. Mind-numbing rules about water and toilets and lightbulbs and gardens. Add something to your house and there’s a new raft of must and must not.

    The issue is not that some people snap, it’s that so few do.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  61. https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/34043550/kevin-cash-says-pride-night-logo-opt-some-tampa-bay-rays-players-divide-team

    Kevin Cash says ‘Pride Night’ logo opt-out from some Tampa Bay Rays players won’t divide team

    This is how the left pushes their propaganda.

    If you don’t celebrate perversity, they want you to feel abnormal. Why is behavior worthy of celebration?

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  62. Obamacare was probably the next biggest intrusion but as someone who has always gotten his insurance from his employer, it didn’t exactly tilt me over the edge…

    You didn’t see your worst-case premium + OOP go from $5K to $25K, as a high-priced sh1tty plan replaced the one you had. Most people, like you, were insulated from Obamacare. SO you thought all those whiners were just whining.

    As now.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  63. It was Trump who cut a deal with the Saudis in spring 2020 to cut oil production, in order to raise oil prices for the benefit of domestic producers.

    Oil production moves on expectations. If you think oil cheaper than it will be next month, you produce less this month. If you think that drilling for oil doesn’t make sense when the states start passing phase-out laws, you stop drilling.

    Everything the Democrats have done has convinced oil producers their services are no longer welcome, so they are just going to go with their current output, or less, as long as possible. If that means America pays more for oil, well, maybe people should act like they want it produced.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  64. @60: The four steps:

    Tolerate
    Accept
    Normalize
    Celebrate

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  65. https://www.ajc.com/neighborhoods/dekalb/dekalb-commission-candidate-asks-elections-board-not-to-certify-results/XR4DQX5R5RD2RCEQO4MKF3LS6I/

    DeKalb County commission candidate Marshall Orson has asked the local elections board not to certify results as scheduled on Friday, citing “numerous issues” that have surfaced in his race since election day.

    In a letter sent to the board Thursday, he also asked for a formal recount and an “independent review” of the election.

    “There is no rational basis for believing that there are not continuing issues with the results,” Orson wrote, “and the results should not be certified with the continuing existence of multiple substantive issues and concerns. Doing so would pose a substantial risk not only to the confidence the public will have in the overall election results from this race but could extend to the entire primary as well as the general election.”

    Initial results posted shortly after the May 24 Democratic primary had Orson — a longtime school board member trying to transition to the county government — leading the three-candidate race for commission District 2, which covers parts of the Decatur, Brookhaven and Atlanta areas in northwestern DeKalb.

    Opponent Lauren Alexander was in second place and, with neither candidate eclipsing the 50% mark, seemingly poised for a runoff with Orson. Michelle Long Spears was in third place, on the outside looking in.

    Ho hum… nothing to see here.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  66. #40 Sorry. Paul’s point, not Kevin’s.

    I was wondering.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  67. nowadays, you won’t find biden’s name associated with the market, or inflation, or gas prices, or baby formula

    Well, you will, but the links go to things like “Biden and governors are trying to help Americans cope … – CNN”

    Biden is like the “friend” who steals your sh1t then helps you look for it.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  68. It is still amazing to me that the folks who hate Trump so much they voted for Biden still don’t understand why so many people voted for Trump. It’s not because they’re stupid, and if that’s what lets you sleep at night, well, sleep tight.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  69. When voters in four Democratic-leaning states got the opportunity to enact expanded gun background checks into law, the overwhelming support suggested by national surveys was nowhere to be found. Instead, the initiative and referendum results in Maine, California, Washington and Nevada were nearly identical to those of the 2016 presidential election, all the way down to the result of individual counties.

    That’s because the surveys are crafted to give credence to the left-wing ideological consensus, not to what the populace actually supports. A poll asks, “Do you support background checks,” then Democrat-voting “journalists” present an inference that the public support is there for universal background checks.

    The whole point is to shift the Overton window and manufacture a consensus behind left-wing political positions, not obtain an accurate gauge on what the public actually supports. Hence, the continued lamentations from the press whenever their side doesn’t get its way, including promoting the evergreen-stupid talking point that people are “voting against their own interests.”

    Factory Working Orphan (2775f0)

  70. Contagious, though from the Kempian wing if the GA GOP:

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/missed-ballots-found-cobb-must-092000417.html

    urbanleftbehind (2b999d)

  71. Anyone who thinks the War on Guns won’t end up playing out the same way that the War on Drugs did is relentlessly naive.

    Something is going on with respect to glamorizing guns that wasn’t the norm 50 years ago. The corresponding mixing in with Biblical quotations and religious orthodoxy is also eye popping. I think our disturbed and marginalized in our society sees this sensationalism…across the culture…and build it into their suicide/revenge fantasy. No one thinks that they will be the one that snaps….until they do. As usual, French is shrewd to call it out….

    No, it’s just a variation of the “video games are causing an increase in gun violence!” argument, only from the left-wing perspective. As usual, David “Mr. By-Ends” French laments a symptom and not the illness, this time by echoing the same talking point used for decades by people who, for some bizarre reason, seem to always think of a penis whenever they see a firearm or a pickup truck.

    I know the people commenting here are old enough to remember the 80s and 90s. Go look up gun violence and firearm homicide statistics from those decades, especially in the FBI reports, and how the rates evolved from then to now. Take a look at the weapon used in those incidents. What’s rather ironic is that Biden’s own crime bill was likely responsible for that drop in the mid-90s taking place and staying rather stable for a generation.

    Factory Working Orphan (2775f0)

  72. For those in the City of Los Angeles:

    Bass slightly ahead of Caruso in new poll, both appear headed for mayoral runoff

    Days before Los Angeles’ first open mayoral primary in nearly a decade, Rep. Karen Bass (D) and Rick Caruso (D), the billionaire developer, appear headed toward a November runoff, with Bass building a small edge as the campaign moves toward a close.
    ……..
    Bass has support of 38% of likely voters in the poll, which was conducted May 24-31. Caruso, who has bombarded Los Angeles’ airwaves with millions of dollars of advertising, has 32%.

    With 15% of likely voters saying they were still undecided, either of the two could still come out on top in the primary, but it’s unlikely either candidate would win the 50% they would need to avoid a November runoff.
    ……..
    Concern about rising crime has provided the driving force for Caruso’s campaign, which early on drew strong support from more conservative Angelenos, especially white voters. Over time, however, he has also won over a growing number of Latino and Black male voters, the poll found.
    ………
    ………Bass gained ground with the biggest segments of the city’s electorate — her fellow Democrats, liberals and women. She has also maintained a strong lead among Black women.

    White voters who identify as liberals make up nearly a third of the likely electorate for the primary, the poll found. In April, Bass was ahead of Caruso 40% to 15% with them, and 34% were undecided. Now just 13% of them remain undecided, and her lead with that group has swelled to 66%-8%.

    The race features a large gender gap which works to Bass’ advantage. She leads Caruso by 19 points among women, who make up slightly more than half of likely voters, the poll found. He leads by 8 points among men.

    ……… Caruso has been able to cut into her support by gaining ground among Black men.

    Black women favor Bass by a significant margin, but Caruso appears to be at least even and perhaps ahead among Black men. The poll can’t say for sure because margins of error get larger with small subgroups of voters.
    ……….
    Looking ahead at a head-to-head November runoff, Bass leads Caruso 37%-33% among all registered voters with 30% undecided.
    ……….

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  73. Of course, some government IS backing away, such as the DA who gave this driver 5-months probation for hitting a mother and stroller in a stolen car while loaded, then trying to flee. He also failed to show after his no-bail release. But still Father Duffy sent him to Boy’s Town, as there are no bad kids.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  74. Anyone who thinks the War on Guns won’t end up playing out the same way that the War on Drugs did is relentlessly naive.

    The difference is that there is a constitutional amendment protecting the individual possession of firearms, with a Supreme Court willing to enforce it. Not so for illegal narcotics.

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  75. @63. They preach ignorance- purposely so; the breadth, depth and reach of petroleum, petrochemicals and associated byproducts throughout the modern industrial world is staggering. Those dimwits want the suckers to believe it’s only about refining fossil fuels for gasoline. Biden’s people need a kick in the ass– or maybe a simnple “seminar” for few hours with some petroleum execs, derrick riggers, tanker drivers, pipeline engineers, geologists and some wildcatters … “behind the gymnasium.” Irish Catholic Joe will hold all staffers coats.

    DCSCA (e5b19c)

  76. Rip, I guarantee you that, while they won’t say so due to woke reactions, most people in LA are pretty done with the “homeless.” Advantage Caruso.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  77. The whole point is to shift the Overton window and manufacture a consensus behind left-wing political positions

    So, I was in a captive video setting where ABC was discussing the Democrat talking points from all angles, if you get what I mean.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  78. Advantage Caruso.

    We’ll see in November.

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  79. Kevin M @76-
    If Caruso can spend $40M and only reach 32%, that’s pretty pathetic.

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  80. Industry of Delaware

    ‘The only mining in Delaware is of gravel and sand. The major economic enterprise is manufacturing, especially chemicals. Wilmington boasts of being the chemical capital of the world because it is the administrative and research centre of several chemical companies: DuPont, Hercules, and AstraZeneca. Chief chemical products are pigments, nylon, petrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals. Delaware also has a petroleum refinery, a synthetic rubber plant, packaging plants, and textile mills. Dover is home to food-processing and other industries.’ -https://www.britannica.com/place/Delaware

    DCSCA (e5b19c)

  81. Kevin M @76-

    Both are Democrats. A pox on both of them.

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  82. Everything the Democrats have done has convinced oil producers their services are no longer welcome, so they are just going to go with their current output, or less, as long as possible.

    That’s why I said Biden gets a lot of the blame, Kevin, just not all the blame. Oil prices were already too high before Putin invaded. They were going up before he was elected, but he did damn little on supply in office.
    The ongoing problem with the guy is he still hasn’t articulated a plan.

    Paul Montagu (5de684)

  83. If Caruso can spend $40M and only reach 32%, that’s pretty pathetic.

    30% undecided between Caruso and Bass means that at least half of them are lying.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  84. Both are Democrats. A pox on both of them.

    Bass is a Democrat. Caruso is a Democrat this week.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  85. Oil prices were already too high before Putin invaded.

    Putin and the invasion has almost nothing to do with this.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  86. The ongoing problem with the guy is he still hasn’t articulated a plan.

    No, it’s that he has. He’s quite clear. The magic transformation of the world economy from fossil fuels to, well, something that isn’t fossil fuels, real soon now. Just as soon as the boffins get back to us on that.

    Why we aren’t all on board with that is a mystery.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  87. I don’t know if Patterico can comment on the light sentence of this hit-and-run driver, but something is serious wrong. The video of the mom getting struck was not easy to watch.

    A 16 y/o hit & run driver in a stolen car who ran over a mom & child in Venice was sentenced on Friday to 5-7 months in juvie camp. LA DA @GeorgeGascon office tells me this was an “appropriate resolution”, but I’ve learned he has a prior criminal history.

    Per multiple law enforcement sources, the juvie was on probation, & violating it, at the time of this hit & run, and he had been previously convicted of felony poisoning after he spiked a teen girl’s drink at Palmdale high school in 2019. She was hospitalized.

    Despite the juvie’s criminal history, sources in the LA DA’s office tell me that in accordance with his policies, Gascon’s admin didn’t charge the juvie w/ assault w/ a deadly weapon or attempted murder for the hit & run, which led to light juvie camp sentence.

    Gascon’s office told me @LASDHQ agreed with the lesser charges in the case. After @LACoSheriff pushed back & said LASD had no involvement in the case or the “lightweight sentencing”, Gascon’s office admitted LASD wasn’t involved & told me they will “correct” their statement

    NEW: Just spoke with the mother who was run over by this juvenile. She was unaware of his criminal history, or that he was on probation when the hit & run took place. She is furious about the light sentence, and the way this case was handled.
    Her new statement to @FoxNews

    “Someone with a criminal record tried to kill me and my son, and George Gascon thinks that five months of camp is a sufficient punishment. Gascon’s office took the time to falsely comment on my case, but has taken no time to ask how we are doing. That’s because he doesn’t care. Gascon and his staff are highlighting their incompetence and their complete disregard for victims.”

    Paul Montagu (5de684)

  88. Putin and the invasion has almost nothing to do with this.

    Kevin, prices only blew up further after Putin invaded. Miller’s chart shows it clear as day.

    Paul Montagu (5de684)

  89. Item 6 First rule in politics no good deed ever goes unpunished in politics. Thats why fear works so well in politics. Also this is why good government democrat party liberalism fails so often. When they go low we go high! High in the air like the woman hit by the white supremest’s car in charlottesville. Clinton/biden corporate establishment liberalism has been continuously discredited. AOC and the left have the answer hit back harder then they hit us. What has playing nice with the gun lobby gotten us? Lets try tit for tat.

    asset (a63ab0)

  90. This made up chuckle. FTR, I’ll probably vote for DeSantis in the primaries if it’ll help defeat Trump, and I may well vote for him in the general if nominated.

    Paul Montagu (5de684)

  91. Kevin, prices only blew up further after Putin invaded.

    They were going to blow up anyway. Oil is fungible and Putin is selling all he can pump. Not to us, maybe, but to someone who isn’t buying from someone else. Etc.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  92. Captured Russian Weapons Are Packed With U.S. Microchips

    You expected what? Tubes?

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  93. @88: If you look at the chart the price got noisy after Putin invaded, as things got unsettled and new deals had to be made, but the price slope really didn’t change much from late 2021. It would still be 105-110 in June.

    You know how to get oil prices down? Make it clear that Biden’s Green Dream is toast. That may happen in November.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  94. @87: Link to video @73.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  95. I wonder if the DA can be charged with depriving the citizenry of their civil rights. Willfully returning violent felons to the community seems like, hmm, what’s the word?

    Terrorism?

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  96. Kevin, prices only blew up further after Putin invaded. Miller’s chart shows it clear as day.

    Paul Montagu (5de684) — 6/5/2022 @ 11:46 pm

    That graph showed the rise of prices regardless of Putin – actually world oil demand fell and is falling, and production is increasing. Its the future green machine regulations is what’s driving oil.

    Oil prices will reach even higher, as long as Biden and EU progressives think they’re genius’s. Oil reacts badly to heavy handed unnecessary regulatory and political environments.

    Biden and Obama caused this with signing the Paris collectivization agreement. 20 .years ago in the house Pelosi dragged the big oil into public hearings and in a rare show of solidarity they all insisted in being group questioned.

    Big oils opening statement made this point clear: at some point they will stop producing oil, and stop all refining if congress doesn’t stop in the USA. That the biggest cause of movement in the price of oil was being manipulated – not by competition nor consumption but by needless regulation.

    so for 20 years, the dems had shut up, regulations stayed even, until now. But you guys keep on linking Dail Kos articles as sources – its entertaining to watch a handful of progressives try to act libertarian or conservative.

    EPWJ (ded958)

  97. See, what people are missing is not that the GOP is subservient to Trump (they are) but that what really has them by the nuts is that their base doesn’t want what they thought they wanted in 2015. That base is quite willing to follow someone who can make happen what Trump could only talk about — someone who knows how to govern, not just talk.

    So DeSantis. There will be others.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  98. Clinton lost the election in rust belt in 2016 because democrats talked about the economy was improving. For the elites and professional class not the working class. It was reagan’s old trickle down ecomomics. If the rich kept getting richer maybe a few crumbs would fall off of the table. The bottom 50% saw their real wages drop in the last 30 years with the top 5% owning 90% of the wealth in this country. How dare fly over country vote for a racist nazi or that commie bernie who we managed to prevent getting the nomination. Full employment under trump with plenty of jobs and increasing pay for the working class. Thanks wuhan bio lab for slowing trump’s economy down. Now we have inflation so time for fed to Volker the economy shaft the working class and all that lower class job growth down so only the elites and professional class enjoy the benefits of this great country. This is what you get when the establishment of the democrat party joins the corporate elites and turns in back on the working class. 2022 will be another 2016 with the DNC and democrat establishment spending the next two years preventing AOC from getting the nomination.

    asset (a63ab0)

  99. Captured Russian Weapons Are Packed With U.S. Microchips

    …and the Military Industrial Compledx smiled.

    DCSCA (b6ed25)

  100. Breaking News- British PM Beau-Joe to face ‘vote of no confidence’ later today.

    DCSCA (b6ed25)

  101. If Caruso can spend $40M and only reach 32%, that’s pretty pathetic.

    30% undecided between Caruso and Bass means that at least half of them are lying.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9) — 6/5/2022 @ 11:35 pm

    There are 15% undecided for the primary on Tuesday, the 30% figure is for the general election in November.

    With 15% of likely voters saying they were still undecided……

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  102. Captured Russian Weapons Are Packed With U.S. Microchips

    You expected what? Tubes?

    Kevin M (eeb9e9) — 6/6/2022 @ 12:29 am

    Russian or Chinese microchips. The point, of course, is that microchips from American companies are ubiquitous, and that even the Russians recognize that they are dependent upon them, per the media discussion above in post 49:

    On 60 Minutes, host (Evgeny) Popov shot down suggestions from pundits that Russia can quickly organize its own production of semiconductors. “One factory that produces semiconductors would cost us $20-30 billion… It’s quite clear that we can’t build them quickly. We have to look for them on foreign markets. It’s utopia for us to suggest we could be making them here,” Popov said.

    Rip Murdock (512e74)

  103. Mr Murdock wrote:

    Anyone who thinks the War on Guns won’t end up playing out the same way that the War on Drugs did is relentlessly naive.

    The difference is that there is a constitutional amendment protecting the individual possession of firearms, with a Supreme Court willing to enforce it. Not so for illegal narcotics.

    Well, there is a Supreme Court that appears willing to enforce it now, but that may well be only because Donald Trump defeated the odious Hillary Clinton in 2016.

    What if Mitch McConnell’s bet hadn’t paid off, and Antonin Scalia was replaced not by Neil Gorsuch, but by Merrick Garland, or someone appointed by [shudder!] President Hillary Clinton? What if Ruth Ginsburg had been replaced by someone appointed by the wife of Bill Clinton?

    We already saw how the Supreme Court, before Justice Ginsberg went to her eternal reward, was willing to gut the free exercise of religion and freedom of assembly for the COVID restrictions, and it was only Mrs Ginsberg’s replacement by Amy Barrett that that was reversed. It only took a change of one member of the Court to change from gutting the First Amendment to supporting it.

    Even with Mrs Barrett on the Court, the Court let a contested case against Governor Andy Beshear slide until it had become moot rather than take a decision.

    If you believe in our Constitution and our rights, you had better pray every day that Justice Thomas survives until the next Republican President takes office!

    The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (8aab86)

  104. I wonder if the DA can be charged with depriving the citizenry of their civil rights. Willfully returning violent felons to the community seems like, hmm, what’s the word?

    Terrorism?

    Gascon was elected with the monetary support of that commie lich, George Soros, and similar situations are playing out across the country where his DAs are in place (just look to the north in that state with Chesa Boudin).

    Who’s going to charge Gascon? The Biden-run DoJ that’s in bed with the guy who put him in office to begin with?

    If this is terrorism, going after the DAs won’t make a dime’s worth of difference, because they’re part of a much larger, extremely well-financed network headed by a globalist megalomaniac with a God complex.

    Factory Working Orphan (2775f0)

  105. Democratic congressman David Cicilline told House Republicans they should “spare me the bullshit about Constitutional rights,” during a debate on gun control Thursday.

    Just a quick reminder that the current Dem candidate for governor of Texas displayed more enthusiasm when he declared “yes, we’re coming for your AR-15” during the 2020 Dem debates than he had for any other policy issue.

    Cicilline and Robert Francis O’Rourke aren’t outliers; they’re just expressing what Democrats actually want and some of their media allies have admitted in the last 10 years or so, but most of them are too weaselly to say out it loud.

    Factory Working Orphan (2775f0)

  106. Here’s a reminder about this day for all of us from Peanuts classic.

    And I think the comment below, by marilynnbyerly is rather sweet.

    (On the same subject, I’d like to mention the best book I’ve read on the Normandy invasion, John Keegan’s “Six Armies In Normandy”.)

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  107. Dana – Here’s a first look at the effects on the oil market of Putin’s invasion, from people who are economic experts, since they work for the Dallas Fed:

    In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, early estimates suggested that perhaps 3 million barrels a day (mb/d) of petroleum production—almost 3 percent of world production—had been effectively removed from the global oil market, constituting one of the largest supply shortfalls since the 1970s.

    And, I would imagine, pay more attention to oil markets than most economists.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  108. I wonder if the DA can be charged with depriving the citizenry of their civil rights. Willfully returning violent felons to the community seems like, hmm, what’s the word?

    Terrorism?

    No. The only remedy is a recall or election.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  109. Dr. Shapiro penned an eloquent “f–k you” to Georgetown Law and their left-wing anti-free speech culture.

    Paul Montagu (5de684)

  110. If you believe in our Constitution and our rights, you had better pray every day that Justice Thomas survives until the next Republican President takes office!

    Perhaps Thomas should have retired while Trump was in office. Hopefully he won’t become the right’s Ginsburg.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  111. Thomas and Alito should get out now, they owe the republicans in office nothing but a eff you. And I don’t want to hear about the voters. They elected the hack republicans.

    mg (8cbc69)

  112. I think J-CT’s pretty spry yet…for all the rancor Ginni causes in me, I must admit she’s not that decrepit, if that’s a useful barometer for Clarence.

    I think given the crazy we’ve seen in South Texas these past few weeks, it might be apt to open a Scalia death investigation.

    urbanleftbehind (6d3a6b)

  113. SCOTUS declines to hear appeal from McCloskeys, couple who pointed guns at protesters
    ……..
    The court declined to hear the McCloskeys’ appeal as they attempted to end a probationary period tied to a suspension of their law licenses instituted by the Missouri Supreme Court in February…….

    While the state’s chief disciplinary counsel had pushed for a suspension of their licenses, the state supreme court instead instituted a one-year probation, meaning they’re allowed to practice law but are required to “provide 100 hours of pro bono legal services” and report any other criminal charges or job changes. They must complete the probation to avoid having their law licenses suspended.

    The pair pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and harassment charges and turned in their guns in June 2021 after their defense attorney successfully pushed to remove a prosecutor seeking felonies for unlawful use of a weapon and evidence tampering. Shortly thereafter, they purchased a new assault rifle and were pardoned by Missouri Gov. Mike Parsons, a Republican.
    ………
    In their petition to the Supreme Court, the McCloskeys argued that their Second Amendment rights were being violated and noted the pardon and the fact their actions had been praised by Trump. The couple were denied cert — meaning that fewer than four justices wanted to hear the case —despite a six-to-three conservative majority on the court, which includes three justices appointed by Trump.

    ……..Mark McCloskey launched a bid for the Senate seat being left open by retiring GOP Sen. Roy Blunt, but has been polling a distant fourth. Mark McCloskey had attempted to take a pro bono position advising the right-wing media group Project Veritas to fulfill the 100-hour requirement of the probation, but the state supreme court denied the request, saying it was not an “approved legal assistance organization.”
    #########

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  114. The McCloskey’s Supreme Court petition.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  115. Sen. Rick Scott’s 11-point plan for when the GOP takes back the Senate

    https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017f-1cf5-d281-a7ff-3ffd5f4a0000

    It’s an interesting mix of items that is a good window into where we are at. Can any of it get bipartisan support, pass cloture, and not get killed by a veto? Or will it be political theater to set up 2024?

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  116. Sen. Rick Scott’s 11-point plan for when the GOP takes back the Senate….It’s an interesting mix of items that is a good window into where we are at. Can any of it get bipartisan support, pass cloture, and not get killed by a veto? Or will it be political theater to set up 2024?

    Mitch McConnell is not amused.

    “Let me tell you what will not be a part of our agenda: We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare after five years. That will not be part of the Republican Senate majority agenda,” McConnell said.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  117. @108: FIRE posts Ilya Shapiro’s full resignation letter, along with some comments about Georgetown Law.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  118. So in the communist utopia of Commiefornia, bees are now fish. Such is their transgender paradise.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  119. …This is what you get when the establishment of the democrat party joins the corporate elites and turns in back on the working class. 2022 will be another 2016 with the DNC and democrat establishment spending the next two years preventing AOC from getting the nomination.

    Most of asset’s comment is correct. I have some quibbles, but the Party System that was put in place by Reagan’s election and Mondale’s defeat (and cemented by Clinton’s New Democrat platform) had run out of gas. Perhaps Romney might have reinvigorated it if he had won in 2012, but he didn’t and in 2016 the Democrats put up the poster girl for Same Old Same Old, while the fractures in the GOP were sundered by Trump, who brought the message from the back benches to their deaf bosses.

    By the time Obama had been nominated, both parties had one goal: keeping the upper-middle-class happy, which meant keeping their investments happy. Screw that up (2000, 2001, 2008) and the other side might win. Globalization was the name of the game and those hicks in the hinterland whining about their jobs just had better suck it up.

    It wasn’t that Trump was a great speaker, or that he engendered trust. It was that he was the only one speaking truth to power for a lot of very distressed people. If there had been a believable attempt by other candidates to triangulate him, maybe they might have found traction, but instead they tried to argue for the status quo. Advantage Trump.

    On the Democrat side the insurgency was defeated, largely because it was led by a cantankerous old Marxist scold. They would have done better with less of an orthodox apparatchik from the nomenclatura, but Hillary was what they had. Now Biden, who is maybe more flexible, but he combines the worst of both party wings: a ward heeling radical.

    2024 will be interesting. I very much doubt that the Democrats will opt for AOC, as that will lead to a Goldwater-level rejection, but who knows (and Goldwater eventually won). What will be really fascinating is whether the GOP has Trump, or someone who can do more than just talk.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  120. I will point out to asset, as I do to some nephews and nieces, that the socialist nightmare they think will save them won’t. They will live in its crushing embrace for their entire working lives. Meanwhile I, who am living off Social Security and savings (not enough income to tax and not enough savings to steal), will do just fine. Probably better than now, with all these new ways to leech off the system. But they will pay for it, I won’t.

    They always seem to think I’m kidding.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  121. Hi Kevin:

    You wrote:

    “…it was led by a cantankerous old Marxist scold…”

    My students just adored the fellow. When I would ask why, things degenerated into platitudes, as most politics does. They didn’t know anything about his background or policy positions, really, other than a few bumper sticker memes. In this, they remind me of the New Right: all hat, no cattle.

    Anyway, it is an odd kind of Marxist who owns several mansions.

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders-summer-house

    Notice the “Modest lakefront house,” which makes me think of “jumbo shrimp” and George Carlin

    On the other hand, knowing the history of the Soviet Union as I do, maybe not.

    Perhaps they should just have called the lakefront home a dacha and been done with it.

    Simon Jester (b64578)

  122. (On the same subject, I’d like to mention the best book I’ve read on the Normandy invasion, John Keegan’s “Six Armies In Normandy”.)

    So, last night I watched “Saving Private Ryan” again. It had been a while. That opening scene shows what real heroism is all about. The “boys of Pointe du Hoc” indeed. I think I’ll try “The Longest Day” tonight. What’s surprising is how few movies are made about this event (“Patton” isn’t really). Any suggestions?

    (I’m recovering from Covid, so I have a lot of alone-time).

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  123. @120: paywall finally hit.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  124. Here are the statistics on the growing global demand for oil, along with projected increases.

    Why some commenters here think the demand has decreased since 2020 baffles me. Road traffic and air traffic are up sharply in the US since the worst of the COVID epidemic, something that should be obvious in most of the US. And there are similar trends in most of the developed world, for similar reasons.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  125. Kevin M (eeb9e9) — 6/6/2022 @ 10:57 am-

    Movies about D-Day-Google Search

    D-Day: American Experience Available on Amazon Prime

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  126. Free-speech group will spend millions to promote First Amendment cases
    …….
    The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is renaming itself the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and keeping the “FIRE” acronym as it launches a drive to promote greater acceptance of a diversity of views in the workplace, pop culture and elsewhere. Part of the push may challenge the American Civil Liberties Union’s primacy as a defender of free speech.

    …….

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  127. It’s an interesting mix of items that is a good window into where we are at. Can any of it get bipartisan support, pass cloture, and not get killed by a veto? Or will it be political theater to set up 2024?

    God only knows. In the political world this is still a rebuilding year. The last GOP president could have been Dick Gephardt in a Trump-mask. In a lot of ways the two parties are in agreement on things that are only stopped by partisan rancor. When both parties have an attitude that “if they suggest it, we oppose it” it rally doesn’t matter what the policies are.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  128. may challenge the American Civil Liberties Union’s primacy as a defender of free speech.

    That hasn’t been the case since William O Douglas died.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  129. Yeah, thanks Rip. Never would have thought of a Google search.

    The problem is that very few of the returned items are more than History Channel rehashes. “Overlord” is about secret Nazi super-soldiers for Gawdssake. It’s like June 6th doesn’t provide enough of interest and you have to add monsters.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  130. Murphy calls Florida gun law ‘the right one’ as senators negotiate federal legislation
    …….
    The Florida law, known as the red flag law, raised the age to buy long guns, including AR-15s, from 18 to 21, added a three-day waiting period, created a program to allow trained school staff to carry guns and invested $400 million in mental health and school security.

    “The template for Florida is the right one. Which is do some significant mental health investment, some school safety money and some modest, but impactful, changes in gun laws,” (Sen. Chris Murphy D-Conn.) said. “That’s the kind of package we’re putting together right now. That’s the kind of package I think can pass the Senate.”
    ……..
    “We’re having a conversation about that specific population, 18 to 21, and how to make sure that only the right people, law-abiding citizens, are getting their hands on weapons,” he said.
    ………

    Age restrictions on firearm possession are probably unconstitutional. Last year’s Fourth Circuit case was ruled moot because the plaintiff turned 21 during the appeal. And California’s ban on selling semi-automatic rifles to persons under 21 was recently declared unconstitutional.

    In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the 2nd Amendment “protects the right of young adults to keep and bear arms, which includes the right to purchase them.”

    The ruling reverses a lower court’s decision not to issue an injunction to block a 2019 state law that banned the sale of semiautomatic centerfire rifles to young adults, which the appeals court called a “legal error.”
    ……..
    Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who teaches about gun regulations, said the court’s ruling was consistent with the idea, common across much of U.S. law, that fundamental rights of adults in this country are generally conferred at 18, not 21.

    “People in America generally have their rights starting at the age 18, their full panoply of rights,” he said.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  131. Kevin M (eeb9e9) — 6/6/2022 @ 11:19 am-

    It’s hard to top The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  132. So, last night I watched “Saving Private Ryan” again. It had been a while.

    A depressing, fictional film expected to win top Oscars that year. Except it didn’t. Too long for the industry, too; couldn’t do more than 2 screenings/night in theatres. Beat out for top honors by a shorter, film capable of three screening/night- the light fictional comedy: Weinstein’s ‘Shakespeare In Love.’

    DCSCA (d4d23c)

  133. Raise the age of majority — and not just for buying guns
    ………
    For hundreds of years, the “age of majority” in the Anglo-American legal tradition was 21. The 26th Amendment led to the overturning of that tradition in U.S. law over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. In matters such as child custody, contracts and medical autonomy (though not alcohol consumption) states followed the amendment’s logic and lowered their thresholds for adulthood. Today, it’s 18 years at the federal level and in almost all states.
    ……..
    In upholding the federal government’s ban on most handgun sales to Americans younger than 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in 2012 cited the fact that “the line between childhood and adulthood was historically 21, not 18.” Congress passed the handgun law in question in 1968, and legislative materials from that time distinguished between “juveniles” (under 18) and “minors” (under 21).

    But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit last month took a different approach in invalidating a 2018 California state law that barred the sale of semiautomatic rifles to anyone under 21. The judges pointedly referred to the teens affected by the ban as “young adults” and cited the history of militia service by minors as young as 16.
    ………
    But what if the 26th Amendment — or at least the downstream legal changes it accelerated — was a mistake, and age 21 remains the better baseline? ……
    ……..
    The 26th Amendment is as secure as the Second Amendment — that is to say, it isn’t going anywhere. ……

    There could be other benefits (to returning the age of majority to 21). If young peoples’ parents or guardians had to co-sign their student loans, perhaps the volume of student debt, and wasted degrees, would be lower. If child-support payments had to continue beyond age 18, perhaps divorce would not have accelerated as quickly in the late 20th century. There are strong arguments for raising the legal age to 21 from 18 for appearing in pornography. In criminal law, the age of eligibility for the death penalty could also be increased and “youthful offender” programs expanded.
    ……….

    Enacting the 26th Amendment is demonstrating the law of unintended consequences.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  134. See also Adulthood in Law and Culture.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  135. @131. My two personal favorites: Twelve O’Clock High and Battle Of Britain. BoB holds a special place in memories- they were filming parts of it over London for a few days when we were living there and the tabloids ran stories reminding the old pensioners not to be concerned seeing the pair of German Heinkels low over the city being chased by Spitfires and Hurricanes as they were filmed from a B-25 camera plane. It was an extraordinary sight, albeit brief, as they passed over key city sites. But by far the strongest memory remains the distinctive sounds of the aircraft. One could imagine the skies full of the sights and sounds during the 1940 Blitz.

    DCSCA (d4d23c)

  136. Just for DCSCA:

    The Boys of Pointe du Hoc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTLVIp1AjAg) (text)

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  137. I miss the preview.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  138. Packin’ heat: Nude Hunter Biden cavorts with hooker, illegal gun in latest mess for president…

    … A naked Hunter casually waves around a handgun and even points it at the camera while partying with a prostitute in 2018, the video shows…

    … Hunter had lied to staff about where he purchased the handgun seen in the clip and also answered no when previously asked on a firearm transaction report if he was an “unlawful user” of drugs, according to Radar Online…

    … Two separate photos showed Hunter’s hand on the trigger of the gun as he cupped his genital area, while a third image showed what appeared to be crack cocaine and drug paraphernalia on paper plates, including a spoon…

    … Just weeks after Hunter illegally bought the weapon, Biden’s lover, Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau Biden, tossed the gun into a supermarket garbage can, setting off a Secret Service and FBI probe. No charges were ever filed.

    The place where the gun was dumped and went missing Janssen’s Market in Greenville, Del., where President Biden has a home in the upscale Wilmington suburb, is across the street from Alexis I. DuPont High School, which has roughly 800 students…

    https://nypost.com/2022/06/06/naked-hunter-biden-cavorts-with-hooker-and-illegal-gun-photos/

    Or:

    Joe Biden On His Son Hunter: “He Is The Smartest Man I Know”

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RdUfAIvaCz0

    Either way, decorum has been restored to the White House.

    BuDuh (340919)

  139. We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars. It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost.

    We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent. But we try always to be prepared for peace, prepared to deter aggression, prepared to negotiate the reduction of arms, and yes, prepared to reach out again in the spirit of reconciliation. In truth, there is no reconciliation we would welcome more than a reconciliation with the Soviet Union, so, together, we can lessen the risks of war, now and forever.

    –Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1984

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  140. #121 Kevin – I hope you recover soon — and completely.

    Jim Miller (406a93)

  141. More on the even-handed justice at the DoJ:

    We previously discussed the cases of attorneys Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, who were accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail into a police vehicle in New York. They were facing domestic terrorism charges and the possibility of 30 years in jail. This week, the Biden Administration agreed to a massive reduction of the charges in a plea agreement that will likely result only in a couple years of jail time. What is particularly bizarre is that the plea agreement reduces an earlier plea agreement for a more serious offense.

    I this then noted that this quite violent act is treated rather differently than those whose mere presence on Jan 6th is being treated.

    https://jonathanturley.org/2022/06/05/new-york-attorneys-accused-of-firebombing-police-car-given-generous-plea-deal/

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  142. I this then

    *It is then…

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  143. A depressing, fictional film expected to win top Oscars that year. Except it didn’t. Too long for the industry, too; couldn’t do more than 2 screenings/night in theatres.

    Yet Schindler’s List, a far more depressing film that was 26 minutes longer, won Best Picture and countless other awards. Same director, producer and production company.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  144. #121 Kevin – I hope you recover soon — and completely.

    If I seem a bit more pissy than usual, it’s probably this.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  145. Axon halts plans for Taser drone as 9 on ethics board resign
    ……..
    The board had voted 8-4 a few weeks ago to recommend Axon not proceed with a pilot of the Taser drone and had concerns about introducing weaponizing drones in over-policed communities of color.

    But after the mass shooting at an Uvalde, Texas elementary school, the company announced it was beginning development of the drone. (Axon’s founder and CEO Rick Smith) told The Associated Press last week he made the idea public in part because he was “catastrophically disappointed” in the response by police who didn’t move in to kill the suspect for more than an hour.

    The board issued a rare public rebuke of the project, saying it was a dangerous idea that went far beyond the initial proposal the board had reviewed for a Taser-equipped police drone. It said it had “pleaded with the company to pull back” before the announcement and that many of them believed it was “trading on the tragedy of the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings.”

    Smith had rejected that idea in an interview with the AP last week and said he was pressing ahead because he believed the Taser drone could be a viable solution to save lives. He contended the idea needed to be shared as part of the public conversation about school safety and effective ways for police to safely confront attackers.

    On Monday, nine members of the ethics board, a group of well-respected experts in technology, policing and privacy, announced resignations, saying they had “lost faith in Axon’s ability to be a responsible partner.”
    ………
    “What’s the emergency? School shootings are a crisis. I agree,” (one of the board’s members, Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor) said. “But Axon, on its own best timeline, isn’t going to come up with anything for a couple of years. Why was it necessary to jump ahead like this?”
    ……….

    A Taser firing drone? It would have been much cooler to use lasers.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  146. Just for Kevin:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCABnWlN8E

    Say it ain’t so, Joe; Biden is a lot like Reagan after all:

    Ronald Reagan’s wartime lies: The president had quite a Brian Williams problem

    Reagan spent WW II in Hollywood. He told the Israeli prime minister he was at the liberation of Nazi death camps

    ‘During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s November 1983 visit to the U.S., Reagan told Shamir that during his service in the U.S. Army film corps, he and fellow members of his unit personally shot footage of the Nazis’ concentration camps as they were liberated. Reagan would tell this story again to others, including Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. But Reagan was never present at the camps’ liberation. Instead, he spent the war in Culver City, California, where he processed footage from the liberation of the camps.’ – source, https://www.salon.com/2015/02/07/ronald_reagans_wartime_lies_the_president_had_quite_a_brian_williams_problem/

    DCSCA (29414b)

  147. @143. But unlike SVP, SL was based on a true story, K- survivors in the closing.

    DCSCA (29414b)

  148. ^ SVP=SPR

    DCSCA (29414b)

  149. UK PM Beau-Joe survives vote of confidence in ‘Parliament.’ ‘Smoke’em if you got’em.

    DCSCA (29414b)

  150. Elon Musk Threatens to End Twitter Deal Over Lack of Information on Spam Accounts
    ……
    In a letter to Twitter Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde that was disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday, Mr. Musk’s lawyer Mike Ringler said Mr. Musk is entitled to the requested data, in part so that he can facilitate the financing of the deal.
    …….
    “This is a clear material breach of Twitter’s obligations under the merger agreement and Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement,” he said.

    A Twitter spokesman said the company “will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.” He added: “We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”

    Shares of Twitter fell around 1.5% to $39.57 Monday; the all-cash deal is priced at $54.20 a share.
    ……..
    Mr. Musk’s latest letter is his clearest statement that he may try to abandon the deal, potentially spurring what could be a protracted legal battle between the two sides. As part of the deal, both sides agreed to pay each other a $1 billion breakup fee if they cause the deal not to happen for certain reasons. Twitter could also sue to force Mr. Musk to go through with the transaction.

    There are only specific scenarios under which Mr. Musk would be able to simply pay the termination fee to walk away from the transaction, including if regulators try to block the deal or the debt financing falls through. Twitter said last week that the window has closed for federal antitrust regulators to block the deal. And Mr. Musk has said he has financing lined up.
    ……..
    As part of the deal, Mr. Musk had waived detailed due diligence that buyers typically perform on targets. In a response to a tweet Monday, Mr. Musk suggested him waiving due diligence didn’t apply to any potential misstatements by Twitter.

    Legal experts offered different theories on what may be driving Mr. Musk and his legal team.

    “This sounds like they’re trying to shoehorn a due diligence termination right into an agreement that does not have one,” said David Hoppe, a mergers and acquisitions, tech and media attorney with Gamma Law in San Francisco.

    Mr. Musk would need to argue that something happened since the time he signed the deal that raised new doubts about the estimates that Twitter provided on the amount of spam and fake accounts on its platform, he said.

    “I’m sure Musk’s legal team wishes there was some change of circumstance that would raise doubts about the legitimacy of those numbers, but nothing’s really changed,” Mr. Hoppe said. “There’s no bombshell.”

    By linking the fake-account issue to Mr. Musk’s ability to secure financing for the deal, his legal team could be indicating the exit ramp they may try to pursue to extract their client from the transaction, said Ben Means, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. “Financing obviously is necessary to close the transaction,” he said.

    Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School, said that while Mr. Musk has the right to request information, Twitter may be unable to share it if doing so would breach another person’s legal rights or undermine the company’s competitive position.
    ……….
    ……….Around 70% of Mr. Musk’s followers on Twitter are spam, fake or inactive, versus 41% for all other accounts with between 65 million and 120 million followers, according to an estimate last month from SparkToro LLC, a maker of audience-research software.
    ##########

    Shocked that Musk would try to weasel out of the deal.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  151. @119 Scandanavia is hardly a socialist nightmare. What bernie calls democratic socialism is actually non exploitive capitalism. As for Venezuela that was brought on by the failure capitalism and failed right wing coups to protect their greed. By the way we are seeing shortages like Venezuela as capitalism for the poor fails here too. Real socialism, government taking over the means of production, is not being advocated by democratic socialists only regulating the excesses of crony capitalism and a more generous social welfare system. See real socialists complaining about democratic socialists not being real socialists. 5% of the population controlling 90% of the wealth and using that wealth buying political power has brought on populism in both parties. The corporate establishment of both parties are failing to control their parties. Is a deep state coup next?

    asset (4671f7)

  152. “Shocked that Musk would try to weasel out of the deal.”

    Musk has never faced any consequences, but in this case he’s messing with other rich people’s money.

    Davethulhu (054e7d)

  153. DOJ charges Proud Boys leaders with seditious conspiracy over Jan. 6 attack
    ……..
    The seditious conspiracy charges, announced in a grand jury indictment returned Monday, escalate the case against the Proud Boys and their leader Enrique Tarrio, who now face some of the most severe charges related to the attack on the Capitol. The Justice Department unveiled similar seditious conspiracy charges against an anti-government militia group, the Oath Keepers and their leader Stewart Rhodes, in January 2022.

    The new indictment also included a second charge against the group: conspiracy to prevent the police and Congress from discharging their official duties. The indictment underscores DOJ’s contention that the Proud Boys played a central role in stoking and amplifying the violence on Jan. 6. Prosecutors say the group “directed” and “mobilized” the crowd and helped move people toward the foot of the Capitol by removing barriers.
    ……..
    In a new piece of evidence included in the indictment, prosecutors described a text message exchange Tarrio had with an unnamed associate on the evening of Jan. 6, in which they were celebrating the breach of the Capitol. In one reply, Tarrio simply wrote “The Winter Palace.”

    That phrase, referring to a crucial event during the Russian Revolution in 1917, also appears in a document prosecutors contend Tarrio received a week before the storming of the Capitol. That document, titled “1776 Returns,” described a plan to occupy various federal buildings in Washington on Jan. 6, according to the Justice Department.

    In the same text exchange, Tarrio’s associate erroneously suggested that if the Jan. 6 session of Congress were delayed into the next day, it would render the process “invalid.” Despite the inaccuracy, prosecutors may see that as an indication of the group’s intent. When asked by his associate whether the Proud Boys had “just influence[d] history,” Tarrio replied “Let’s first see how this plays out.”

    Trump famously exhorted the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate in October 2020, a response to a question about his message to extremist groups. The Proud Boys interpreted that language as a call to action.
    ……….

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  154. “Shocked that Musk would try to weasel out of the deal.”

    What weaseling? They told him something fundamental (how many real users), based on a supposed dataset. He wants to check the dataset. They won’t let him. You’d have to be really stupid not to think your pocket was being picked.

    In the end they’ll relent, although that may not save the deal if the data shows that Twitter is filled with bots and spam instead of users.

    If the deal collapses, so does Twitter.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  155. A Taser firing drone? It would have been much cooler to use lasers.

    Paintballs might be fun. One SF story I read had drones firing sticky stuff that attached and immobilized, something like Spider-man’s webshooter.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  156. But unlike SVP, SL was based on a true story, K- survivors in the closing

    I think that D-Day and the general invasion that followed were real enough to call it “based on true events.”

    But that’s not why SL won. It won because there is a deep reservoir of good will toward films about the Holocaust.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  157. Scandanavia is hardly a socialist nightmare.

    1. We are not Scandinavia.
    2. Scandinavia is not Scandinavia anymore.
    3. AOL has no interest in a constitutional democracy.

    Her agenda is too important for that. Just as the Woke have no interest for other people’s speech, the Woke Party will have no use for other people, period, except for those that do as they’re told. I even see here someone who has no problem putting recalcitrant citizens up against the wall.

    I’d think that the Iranian guided democracy model is more the AOC style.

    As for Scandinavia, the Left has lost control, losing power in Sweden then regaining it only through wide centrist coalitions, such as the current fragile one with the Centre Party, giving them 175 out of 349 seats. The Russia thing will push them out at the next election. Again.

    In Norway the Left holds power in coalition with a protectionist populist nationalist Centre Party.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  158. I think that D-Day and the general invasion that followed were real enough to call it “based on true events.”

    Realism portrayed in a make-believe film production doesn’t make it a true story, K. But here’s a true story: President Biden has failed to acknowledge June 6. Again. But then, it’s only dusk in Washington and Delaware for the brain-damaged, imbecile. But it’s dark in Normandy now.

    “Day ain’t over yet.” – Curly [Jack Palance] ‘City Slickers’ 1991

    DCSCA (7ba1b2)

  159. “What weaseling? They told him something fundamental (how many real users), based on a supposed dataset. He wants to check the dataset. They won’t let him. ”

    He waived due diligence. Twitter also claims they’re cooperating.

    “You’d have to be really stupid not to think your pocket was being picked.”

    Waiving due diligence was really stupid.

    “If the deal collapses, so does Twitter.”

    Elon wants the deal to collapse.

    Davethulhu (054e7d)

  160. He waived due diligence, but not validating claims.

    M: “How many bot users do you have?”
    T: “5%, tops!”
    M: “How do you know?”
    T: “We have the data.”
    M: “Can I see the data?”
    T: “No.”
    M: “WTF?!”

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  161. Asa for the joys of socialism, it has been in about 100 countries now and they only point to Scandinavia (which is dismantling some of it) as an example of how benign it is.

    Never, say, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  162. “If the deal collapses, so does Twitter.”

    I’ll take that bet.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  163. If the deal collapses as a result of Musk pulling out, Twitter will be $1,000,000,000 richer.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  164. “He waived due diligence, but not validating claims.”

    There’s nothing in the contract about “validating claims”.

    Here’s the contract, musk is claiming a breach of section 6.4: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522120474/d310843ddefa14a.htm

    Twitter says “Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement. We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders.”

    Now my personal opinions:

    1. Twitter’s actual bot percentage is a red herring. One of the reasons Musk claimed he wanted to buy Twitter was to deal with the bot issue. So he already believes that there are a lot of bots. His claim that his offer is based on Twitter’s bot estimate is a lie.
    2. Twitter isn’t worth remotely close to $54.20 per share, but buyer’s remorse isn’t an excuse to get out of the contract. Twitter owners know that this is their best chance to cash in, so they are not going to quietly let this go. They also can’t accept a lower price because they’ll be sued by the smaller shareholders.

    Davethulhu (054e7d)

  165. Joe Biden is a bumbling, stupid, foolish, sophomoric, criminal, father of criminal, father of son who slept with dead brother’s wife, idiot who messed his pants at the Vatican & making the pope wait until staff brought a new pair of pants, passed gas loudly & bigly while conversing with Camilla and her friend, daily breaks promises, lies constantly, insults friendly nations while sucking up to enemy nations, made his own nation dependent on foreign nations again for oil, criminally sends military arms to Ukraine in an illegal proxy war with Russia, extended the disclosure of the JFK assassination so the public can not know the truth, became a multi-millionaire while on a senator salary, took illegal money from under the table deals with China with his criminal, drug addicted son, calls taxpaying citizens terrorists, insults taxpaying citizens daily, uses the DOJ against his enemies, disses our military by pushing trannies to the dismay of honored veterans and soldiers, violates his Oath of Office by not adhering to legal immigration laws, gives baby formula to illegal aliens while citizens cannot find any in stores because his fed purchased it for illegals, threatens to use F 15s against citizens who disagree with him, creeps normal people out by sniffing young girls hair and whispering in their ears, causes the highest prices for gasline in over 40 years, causes the highest inflation in over 40 years, sold oil from US reserves to China instead of allowing it to be used here, steals yachts and investments from wealthy Russians purportedly because they know Putin. Nations of Central and South America undoubtedly know that if the opposition party wins in November, this fool will certainly be impeached. His own former boss said: “do not underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to f things up.” His own colleague under Obama, Bob Gates said: “Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue the last 4 decades. Biden is much more than a mere Fraud. He is a creepy, corrupt criminal.

    mg (8cbc69)

  166. Asa for the joys of socialism, it has been in about 100 countries now and they only point to Scandinavia (which is dismantling some of it) as an example of how benign it is.

    Never, say, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9) — 6/6/2022 @ 3:32 pm

    Scandanavian socialism runs fairly well and functionally because it’s run by Scandanavian socialists, and even then the pretense is based on the existence of a high-trust, culturally hegemonic society. That’s why Denmark is making immigrants and refugees go through cultural assimilation before allowing them to become citizens, and putting the ones who won’t cooperate on an island or kicking them out entirely, so their recalcitrance won’t poison those who do want to fit in.

    Scandanavian socialism would fall apart in short order here, because there’s a whole industry of intersectional left-wing grifters dedicated to exploiting those programs for maximum gain, so they can bellyache and alienate when the ideal “equity” outcome doesn’t result from the government shoveling money down the poverty pit. In fact, that was the whole point of the Cloward-Piven strategy for bringing about the glorious communist utopia.

    Factory Working Orphan (2775f0)

  167. Joe Biden is a bumbling, stupid, foolish, sophomoric, criminal, father of criminal, father of son who slept with dead brother’s wife, idiot who messed his pants at the Vatican & making the pope wait until staff brought a new pair of pants, passed gas loudly & bigly while conversing with Camilla and her friend, daily breaks promises, lies constantly, insults friendly nations while sucking up to enemy nations, made his own nation dependent on foreign nations again for oil, criminally sends military arms to Ukraine in an illegal proxy war with Russia, extended the disclosure of the JFK assassination so the public can not know the truth, became a multi-millionaire while on a senator salary, took illegal money from under the table deals with China with his criminal, drug addicted son, calls taxpaying citizens terrorists, insults taxpaying citizens daily, uses the DOJ against his enemies, disses our military by pushing trannies to the dismay of honored veterans and soldiers, violates his Oath of Office by not adhering to legal immigration laws, gives baby formula to illegal aliens while citizens cannot find any in stores because his fed purchased it for illegals, threatens to use F 15s against citizens who disagree with him, creeps normal people out by sniffing young girls hair and whispering in their ears, causes the highest prices for gasline in over 40 years, causes the highest inflation in over 40 years, sold oil from US reserves to China instead of allowing it to be used here, steals yachts and investments from wealthy Russians purportedly because they know Putin. Nations of Central and South America undoubtedly know that if the opposition party wins in November, this fool will certainly be impeached. His own former boss said: “do not underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to f things up.” His own colleague under Obama, Bob Gates said: “Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue the last 4 decades. Biden is much more than a mere Fraud. He is a creepy, corrupt criminal.

    ROFLMAOPIP!

    “Don’t sugarcoat it like that, Kid. Tell her straight.” – Butch Cassidy [Paul Newman] ‘Butcj Cassidy and THe Siundance Kid’ 1969

    DCSCA (53e485)

  168. Scandanavian socialism runs fairly well and functionally because it’s run by Scandanavian socialists, and even then the pretense is based on the existence of a high-trust, culturally hegemonic society.

    Blonds have more fun. 😉

    DCSCA (53e485)

  169. #40
    Nice graph.
    Show that crude prices went into a holding pattern right around election day 2020 and rocketed immediately after Bidens victory

    steveg (adba86)

  170. I’ll take that bet.

    Just like the stockholders of Yahoo! did when they kicked Bill Gates’ money to the curb.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  171. Twitter isn’t worth remotely close to $54.20 per share

    That may be, but it is primarily because they have a business model that has very limited upside, and has no real controls over spam, bots and jerks other than whackamole.

    A service that was paid, with users traceable through said payment, might be worth a lot more assuming they can get people to pay. Pretty sure most avid Twitter users would pay a few tens of dollars a year, especially if it cleaned up the bots and riffraff. Spam can be handled because its a closed system and again, if you pay and sign the contract, you can be held accountable for any spam you send. You can’t just sideload it like you can with email.

    Buyer’s remorse? Maybe. They are refusing to share data they said they’d share, and Must has got to wonder why. But even if it’s overpriced, it isn’t THAT overpriced and Musk has turned worse into gold before.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  172. [ ] Debbie Does Dallas

    [ X ] Joey Does Jimmy

    [ ] Cher

    Choose and lose, Joey. Why would brain-dead Biden do sexist ex-‘Man Show’ host and current late night ABC TV caboose ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’?

    Ask the $15/lb., pork loin who keeps going to ABC as a media outlet and really pulling the POTUS train: President Susan Rice. Her hubby: Ian O. Cameron: a producer w/ ABC World News Tonight.

    DCSCA (53e485)

  173. “Buyer’s remorse? Maybe. They are refusing to share data they said they’d share, and Must has got to wonder why.”

    You keep saying this, but you only have noted liar Elon Musk’s word that it’s the case. What if he’s asking for personally identifiable information?

    Davethulhu (054e7d)

  174. Twitter isn’t worth remotely close to $54.20 per share

    Hmmm.

    Ask Jeeves. 😉

    DCSCA (53e485)

  175. From a new article I just found:

    Musk, as a non-lawyer, came up with a pretext that is like “Twitter told me something untrue about its bot problem, so I can walk away.” That sounds like it might work, but doesn’t work. But Musk’s lawyers have a better pretext. It’s something like “keep asking them for more information about their bot problem; eventually you’ll ask questions they won’t answer, and then you can walk away.”

    So they write:

    Under various terms of the merger agreement, Twitter is required to provide data and information that Mr. Musk requests in connection with the consummation of the transaction. … Mr. Musk is entitled to seek, and Twitter is obligated to provide, information and data for, inter alia, “any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction” (Section 6.4). Twitter must also provide reasonable cooperation in connection with Mr. Musk’s efforts to secure the debt financing necessary to consummate the transaction, including by providing information “reasonably requested” by Mr. Musk (Section 6.11). …

    As Twitter’s prospective owner, Mr. Musk is clearly entitled to the requested data to enable him to prepare for transitioning Twitter’s business to his ownership and to facilitate his transaction financing. To do both, he must have a complete and accurate understanding of the very core of Twitter’s business model—its active user base.

    And then they threaten that Musk will walk away if he doesn’t get the information he wants:

    Based on Twitter’s behavior to date, and the company’s latest correspondence in particular, Mr. Musk believes the company is actively resisting and thwarting his information rights (and the company’s corresponding obligations) under the merger agreement. This is a clear material breach of Twitter’s obligations under the merger agreement and Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement.

    The letter does not say what information Musk wants — it references previous letters, dated May 25 and May 31, asking for the information, but those have not been made public — but it makes it clear that Musk is not looking for information about how Twitter came to its conclusion that fewer than 5% of monetizable daily active users are bots. He is not looking to understand or test Twitter’s methodology. Instead, he wants to “conduct his own analysis,” which I would think would require raw data about Twitter’s users. Last month Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal tweeted a thread about how Twitter does this analysis, noting that Twitter “uses both public and private data (eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination.” Presumably if Musk wants to “conduct his own analysis,” he will want the same sorts of identifiable private data that Twitter uses.

    Again, I don’t know exactly what he’s asking for, but in general I can understand why Twitter would be nervous about sharing user data with Musk. For one thing, there are all sorts of regulatory and risk reasons to be nervous about sharing user data with someone who, for now at least, does not work at Twitter. For another thing, Musk has been publicly trolling Twitter about the bot problem, and about everything else, for weeks now, and there’s no reason to think he would be particularly responsible with this information. His lawyers write:

    Mr. Musk will of course comply with the restrictions provided under Section 6.4, including by ensuring that anyone reviewing the data is bound by a non-disclosure agreement, and Mr. Musk will not retain or otherwise use any competitively sensitive information if the transaction is not consummated.

    But this is not much comfort, because Musk has constantly ignored the restrictions of the merger agreement, including by tweeting disparaging things about Twitter. He himself has boasted publicly that he violated a non-disclosure agreement with Twitter by tweeting about Twitter’s bot methodology! 7 If you give him sensitive user data he is just absolutely going to tweet about it, and trusting his promises not to would be dumb. And if he does break his promises, what can Twitter do? Sue him to call off the deal? Twitter doesn’t want to call off the deal. Musk does!

    Still, this pretext is better than Musk’s pretext, for at least three reasons:

    As closing conditions for the merger, representations are qualified by MAE, but covenants by “in all material respects.” If Twitter does not comply with its covenants, Musk can walk away, so this makes for a good threat.
    The representations are limited to what the merger agreement actually says, but this covenant — the one about furnishing information — is limited only by (1) Musk’s (and his lawyers’) imagination and (2) the somewhat fuzzy standard of “any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transactions.” 8 So Musk can ask Twitter, like, “give me the cell phone numbers of every one of your monetizable daily active users so I can call them and see if they’re bots,” and Twitter will have to decide if that is reasonable, if it violates any laws, etc. If they say no, Musk can disagree, and it might end up in court, with Musk having the ability to walk away if he wins. If they say yes, Musk can just keep asking for more things. “Tell us what all of your users were thinking about last Thursday,” why not.
    Because Musk really has been talking about solving the bot problem, and because this request can be characterized as helping him do that, it doesn’t sound as much like a lie as his pretext does. “As Twitter’s prospective owner, Mr. Musk is clearly entitled to the requested data to enable him to prepare for transitioning Twitter’s business to his ownership,” says the letter: If he’s going to clean up the bots, he needs information about the bots, and he is allowed to ask for it now.

    I mean, to be clear, it isn’t a good pretext. It is, for instance, very hard to imagine that Musk’s banks are clamoring for detailed information about spam accounts to line up their financing; Twitter has raised debt financing in the past with its existing bot disclosure. Nor is it clear what Musk’s “reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transactions” is. And because it is so clearly part of Musk’s broader trolling operation, it is hard to imagine him winning if this ends up in court: If he refuses to close because Twitter won’t humor his bot-fishing expedition, it seems unlikely that a Delaware court will side with him. But it does raise the risk for Twitter, which gives him a bit more leverage to try to renegotiate the price. It is all going to get so much dumber.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-06/elon-has-a-new-bot-excuse

    Davethulhu (054e7d)

  176. “I think that D-Day and the general invasion that followed were real enough”

    And the story thematically based on the tragic loss of the Sullivan brothers

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_brothers

    The opening scene remains one of the most honest depictions of war, courage, and futility

    AJ_Liberty (411e90)

  177. Between Heard vs. Depp and Musk vs. Twitter, I find Heard vs. Depp more relevant to my life. I have enjoyed, to differing degrees but still enough to be worth my time, all of Depp’s movies. Neither Musk nor Twitter have anything I want or need, but I understand that others may feel the same way about Cry-Baby, so live and let live.

    To the extent that I waste any thought on Musk and Twitter, I’m still where I was when he started churning the stock: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

    nk (f80dc9)

  178. Mr Murdock wrote:

    Enacting the 26th Amendment is demonstrating the law of unintended consequences.

    As a Kentuckian, I already had the right to vote at 18, and was able to vote in one primary election, May of 1971, before the 26th Amendment was ratified.

    What else could I do at 18? I could enlist in the Army, and was required by federal law to register for the Selective Service within 30 days of my 18th birthday. I could be tried in adult court if I have been accused of a crime. I could marry without requiring the permission of my parents or a court. In some states, I could buy alcohol, though not in the Bluegrass State at the time.

    When my wife and I married, she was just 19. Given that we’ve been married for 43 years and 18 days, I’d say it wasn’t too bad a decision.

    The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (0295f5)

  179. The opening scene remains one of the most honest depictions of war, courage, and futility

    And profligate waste.

    But those guys were real heroes.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  180. Biden is much more than a mere Fraud. He is a creepy, corrupt criminal.

    Which is shy leaders around the world love him. He’s “One of Us”

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  181. *why

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  182. AJ: The SPR story is fiction. And it’s misleading to peddle it as based on actual events. [WB released a film on the Sullivans in the war years; loosely based on their family experience BTW.] Being historically accurate in detail doesn’t make a story true.

    Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan is loosely based on the Niland brothers story, not “The Sullivans.” It’s all here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_Private_Ryan

    The Niland brothers were four American brothers of Irish descent from Tonawanda, New York, who served in the military during World War II. They were sons of Mr and Mrs Michael C. Niland. Two survived the war, but for a time, only one, Frederick “Fritz” Niland, was believed to have survived. After the reported deaths of his three brothers, Fritz was sent back to the United States to complete his service, and only later learned that his brother Edward, missing and presumed dead, was actually captive in a Japanese POW camp in Burma.’

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niland_brothers

    Events in the 1963 film, ‘The Great Escape’ were based on a Brickhill’s POW book but the film characters were composites of several people: fictional. ‘Marooned’ was credited by some NASA managers as the genesis for the ASTP flight, but that doesn’t make Caidin’s space tale true. Whereas Apollo 13’s screenplay was based on Lovell’s experience; real people and actual events- even actual words spoken- but ut certainly wasn’t wholly accurate.

    ‘Twelve O’Clock High’ was a fictional screenplay adapted from a novel about the fictional 918th bomb group but: ‘the character Brigadier General Frank Savage was a composite of several group commanders, but the primary inspiration was Colonel Frank A. Armstrong, who commanded the 306th Bomb Group on which the 918th was modeled. The name “Savage” was supposedly inspired by Armstrong’s Cherokee heritage. While his work with the 306th, which lasted only six weeks, consisted primarily of rebuilding the chain of command within the group, Armstrong had earlier performed a similar task with the 97th Bomb Group. Many of the training and disciplinary scenes in Twelve O’Clock High derive from that experience.

    Towards the end of the film, the near-catatonic battle fatigue that General Savage suffered and the harrowing missions that led up to it were inspired by the experiences of Brigadier General Newton Longfellow. The symptoms of the breakdown were not based on any real-life event, but instead were intended to portray the effects of intense stress experienced by many airmen.

    Major General Pritchard was modeled on the VIII Bomber Command’s first commander, Major General Ira C. Eaker.

    Colonel Keith Davenport was based on the first commander of the 306th Bomb Group, Colonel Charles B. Overacker, nicknamed “Chip”. Of all the personalities portrayed in Twelve O’Clock High, that of Colonel Davenport most closely parallels his true-life counterpart.’ -source, wikiwingsflick.featherprop.org

    Even the late Dick Winters noted HBO’s hugely successful ‘Band of Brothers’ wasn’t wholly “authentic”: ‘ The series dramatized the history of “Easy” Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, of the 101st Airborne Division, from jump training in the United States through its participation in major actions in Europe, up until Japan’s capitulation and the end of World War II. The events are based on Stephen Ambrose’s book, his research and recorded interviews with Easy Company veterans. The series took some literary license, adapting history for dramatic effect and series structure. The characters portrayed are based on members of Easy Company.

    Shortly after the premiere of the series, Tom Hanks asked Major Winters what he thought of Band of Brothers. The major responded, “I wish that it would have been more authentic. I was hoping for an 80 percent solution.” Hanks responded, “Look, Major, this is Hollywood. At the end of the day we will be hailed as geniuses if we get this 12 percent right. We are going to shoot for 17 percent.” – source, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_of_Brothers_(miniseries)

    DCSCA (53e485)

  183. Next thing we’ll hear that the movie Battleship wasn’t loosely based on the sinking of the Bismarck

    AJ_Liberty (411e90)

  184. So, here’s an LA Times columnist surprised by the level of Black support for Rick Caruso over Karen Bass.

    She briefly plays with the idea that this might have something to do with a rejection of “police reform” issues and progressive law enforcement and finally lands on “the Ice Cube effect” — an ornery reaction to being taken for granted and just reaching out for the other guys, blindly.

    Uh, no. In a city where carrying a handgun is illegal and the police are treated like lepers by the press, politicians and DA, running someone who has stood firmly for “Police Reform” isn’t going to go over well with the lower-middle class who live in high(er) crime areas. And Blacks are a major component of this group.

    In about 43 states they are buying handguns and getting permits. Here they have to rely on the police and only Caruso favors them. To quote from the column:

    Caruso, for example, favors a return to some of the disastrous tough-on-crime strategies of the past, locking up more people and moving away from criminal justice reform. He wants to add 1,500 officers to the Los Angeles Police Department and has been endorsed by former LAPD Chief William J. Bratton — he of broken-windows policing infamy.

    It’s not hard to see where her blinders are.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  185. Next thing we’ll hear that the movie Battleship wasn’t loosely based on the sinking of the Bismarck

    Only if the Battleship was at A6.

    Kevin M (eeb9e9)

  186. Next thing we’ll hear that the movie Battleship wasn’t loosely based on the sinking of the Bismarck

    Bidenaurics.

    DCSCA (2f3067)

  187. The indomitable Cathy Young has one on the status of Putin’s War Against Ukraine and another on Glenn Greenwald and his long love affair with the Putin. The latter is a thorough and well-sourced takedown.

    Paul Montagu (5de684)

  188. https://theaspenbeat.com
    Many Thanks, Boys.

    mg (8cbc69)

  189. Here’s another photo of “tankman” in Tianenmen Square. He literally stopped a whole battalion in its tracks, until they murdered him of course.

    Paul Montagu (5de684)

  190. Here is an interesting list of school killings that goes back to the 1700’s. A good deal of the early shootings were teachers killed for being overenthusiastic with the corporal punishment.

    https://www.k12academics.com/school-shootings/history-school-shootings-united-states

    The largest of the mass killings where a gun was involved was this one:
    “May 18, 1927 Bath, Michigan School treasurer Andrew Kehoe, after killing his wife and destroying his house and farm, blew up the Bath Consolidated School by detonating dynamite in the basement of the school, killing 38 people, mostly children. He then pulled up to the school in his Ford car, then blew the car up, killing himself and four others. Only one shot was fired in order to detonate dynamite in the car. This was deadliest act of mass murder at a school in the United States.”

    I was more interested in school shootings that occurred in the AR15-AR47 era. The AR 15 was first sold in the USA in 1959 (Some say sooner)
    The first so called assault rifle use was in this one:
    “January 17, 1989 Cleveland School massacre of Stockton, California where 5 school children were killed and 29 wounded by a single gunman firing over 100 rounds into a schoolyard from an AK-47”

    steveg (83ef31)

  191. Side note. One of the shootings in 1977 was at CS Fullerton. I met a guy who had later been assigned one of the offices involved in the shooting. He said they had just sorta patched and painted (wrong shade). He quickly got himself another a job at a different school in the CA system

    steveg (83ef31)

  192. I believe there is a Potemkin village in Delaware where a Potemkin President spends about half his time.

    mg (8cbc69)

  193. I[vd picked up alot of facts.

    Did you know the Uvalde Indepedent School district police is all of 4 years old – school security used to part of the job of the Uvalde police department.

    In Feb 2020 the current chief became chief after jobs in the Webb county sheriff’s office and Laredo schools and Uvalde police dept. He had three men under him when he took officer – raised it to 5. Empire builder. All hat and no cattle.

    Sammy Finkelman (1d215a)

  194. I think the one thing they could improve is quicker lockdowns. Lock the door like a car door – not go fishing for a key.

    Sammy Finkelman (1d215a)

  195. Last Thursday or Friday, the lawyer for the woman who opened the door (she has a lawyer?) said that she opened the door of the school to get food from some other person — then she saw the person we now know to be Salvador Ramos Jr. running carrying a rifle, so she quickly went back in, slammed the door, called 911 and hid in an empty classroom.

    Incidentally, the original gunshot in the lower portion of te face of the grandmother also got a 911 call – two 911 calls – not so fast – at about 11:33 and 11:35 when he was already inside the school shooting )

    Sammy Finkelman (1d215a)

  196. The New York Times reportedly removed a reference to the fact that Salvador Ramos Jr had used marijuana from an article without making a correction which would mean it was probably true but they deemed irrelevant. Someone wrote somewhere not so – potent marijuana can cause hallucinations and damage an area associated with moral judgement, among other places.

    Sammy Finkelman (1d215a)

  197. How’d everyone like that Biden appearance on Kimmel?

    frosty (dcd693)


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