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I’ve had my suspicions….

You’ll notice that you never see her and Paul McCartney in the same place.

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Let’s be honest here, the way the Dems are going bat-excrement crazy right now is, I think, bearing this out. They’ll be up to 30 candidates before long, and each trying to out-Left and out-crazy and out-Communist the other. That sort of rage is frankly unsustainable, and really their entire platform is boiling down to “Not Trump.”

I want one.

Cass Sunstein, usually a dependable Voice of the Crust, suffers an attack of atavism.

Sunstein rightly points out that many vocal fans of socialism have no clue as to what it actually means. I’ll pace him by suggesting that many people who complain about ‘capitalism’ have no clue as to what that means, either, and just use ‘capitalism’ as a catch-all term for ‘not-socialism’ — which it isn’t. The problem is that we don’t have a clever one-word term for an economic system based on private property and free trade, so we’re forced to thrash around in a verbal swamp that helps nobody.

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My, what a surprise.

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Gotta love that Global Warming.

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Getting-off-fossil fuels would reverse much of the progress made over the last few centuries. Just a few of the thousands of products that we get from fossil fuels that would be eliminated from our society and lifestyles would be: Medications, Cosmetics, Plastics, Fertilizers, and Transportation fuels for planes, ships, trucks and automobiles.

Electricity alone, especially intermittent electricity from renewables, has not, and will not, run the economies of the world, as electricity alone is unable to support the energy demands of the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures. Getting off fossil fuels would virtually negatively impact the following industries and infrastructures that are driven by the energy density of oil, coal, and natural gas:

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Because they’re disgusting? That’s just a guess….

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The real threat to Optum may be Amazon, which has already made some forays into the pharmacy business and is willing to sacrifice profits as it builds market share. Optum is vulnerable because its customers — particularly employers — have little insight into its businesses, which range from health data services to pharmacy benefits, said Michael Turpin, a former UnitedHealth executive who is an executive vice president at USI, an insurance brokerage.

“It is truly the most opaque of all black boxes in health care,” Mr. Turpin said. He added, “Amazon is lying in the grass and will someday pop up and do something disruptive around pharmacy.”

Scott Adams is one of the handful of people actually looking forward to the SOTU speech tonight.

No accounting for taste….

The Other McCain is on the case.

You should read the entire complaint online, as McGinnes’s legal team go point-by-point in explaining how the SPLC’s “hate” label is being used to silence conservative voices. When McGinnes started Proud Boys, it was basically a social thing — meet-ups for fans of his podcasts — but then the media started paying attention, Trump got elected, and “Antifa” started harassing the Proud Boys. Last year, SPLC evidently decided to target McInnes for destruction, and this lawsuit is about his refusal to be destroyed. Keep in mind, SPLC is also being sued by Baltimore attorney Glen Keith Allen, and many other organizations are said to be contemplating their own lawsuits. Whatever the ultimate outcome of these suits, they are valuable in that (a) the SPLC is forced onto the defensive, and (b) if the lawsuits get to the discovery phase, we could learn a lot about the internal workings of their billion-dollar smear machine. The fact that SPLC was willing to pay $3.3 million to Nawaz shows how much they fear what might be revealed in discovery.

About time somebody did something about these sleaze bags.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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How about that GREAT government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in this country?

Feel the Bern….

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I’m the little portrait with diamonds.

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Tired of falafel? This recipe will bring new flavours to the vegan fave.

Or you could just go have a hamburger. Your choice.

(Look at the picture and decide whether you really want to put that in your mouth.)

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Three people who operated multimillion-dollar birth-tourism businesses in Southern California were arrested Thursday in the biggest federal criminal probe ever to target the thriving industry, in which pregnant women come to the United States to give birth so their children will become American citizens.

The businesses coached their clients to deceive United States immigration officials and pay indigent rates at hospitals to deliver their babies, even though many of the clients were wealthy, investigators said. Some Chinese couples were charged as much as $100,000 for a birth-tourism package that included housing, nannies and shopping excursions to Gucci.

Actually, I don’t have a problem with the children of rich Chinese tourists becoming automatic American citizens. My problem is with the children of poor Mexican criminals becoming automatic American citizens.

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Believe me, you don’t have to be Chris Christie in order to despise John Kasich.

Ace of Spades is having some fun.

Actually, it’s sadder than that.

Because BuzzFeed’s director of quizzes was laid off on Friday.

No, that’s not the sad part. The sad part is why.

Yes, it’s sad that Buzzfeed had a “director of quizzes” in the first place. But even sadder is this: all of BuzzFeed’s most popular quizzes were being created, for free, by an overly energetic 19-year-old college student.

See, they laid the director of quizzes off when some Green Eyeshade Genius realized, “Why are we paying a director of quizzes when all the good quizzes are given to us for free by a 19 year old co-ed?”

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At the very least, it will agitate all of the people who really really need agitation.

At the very least, that will be entertaining.

Steve Sailer looks at political speciation.

For example, Lake Shasta in far northern California is the largest reservoir of the vast California aqueduct system. As the population of California grows and droughts seem more common, the idea of expanding the lake’s capacity by raising the 602? tall dam’s height by an additional 20 feet has been considered since the last century.

The Trump Administration is pretty positive about the plan, which has led to one salamander species suddenly being redefined as three salamander species. That might seem strange, but actually this kind of thing is a common occurrence whenever anybody wants to do anything with a dam, going back to the invention of the snail darter species in the 1970s.

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“Weathered.” “Despite the severe disruptions.” Really? What disruptions were those? Did they consider that a brief respite from a small portion of government heavy-handedness may have been irrelevant to job growth, or even a positive factor? Evidently not.

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I hope they demanded asylum.

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I smell another Hate Hoax aborning.

UPDATE: I Didn’t See This One Coming

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President Donald Trump has often noted that America’s rich and powerful choose to live behind large walls for protection, much like the wall he is trying to build across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Nowhere has that thesis proven truer than in the posh neighborhoods of Los Angeles and Hollywood. The homes of the rich and famous, peppered throughout the area, are often gated and feature high walls that protect the homes from outsiders.

But what about the viscerally anti-Trump celebrities that reside in Hollywood and hate the idea of Trump’s border wall? Do these moguls, sports and film celebrities really live behind walls? The Daily Caller set out to find the truth in a series called “Walls Across America.”

UPDATE: Tucker Carlson Calls Out Celebrity Hypocrisy On Border Wall

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has infuriated colleagues by aligning with a progressive outside group that’s threatening to primary entrenched Democrats. Now some of those lawmakers are turning the tables on her and are discussing recruiting a primary challenger to run against the social media sensation.

At least one House Democrat has been privately urging members of the New York delegation to recruit a local politician from the Bronx or Queens to challenge Ocasio-Cortez.

From Congress to Saturday Night Live seems a very short step for some people….

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As it was meant to do. Bolton is a fast learner from Trump.

Aficionados of Terry Pratchett’s DiskWorld will recognize the velvet touch of Lord Vetinari.

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Uh, because that’s where the money is?

Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape. “Rise and Grind” is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a “Shark Tank” shark. New media upstarts like the Hustle, which produces a popular business newsletter and conference series, and One37pm, a content company created by the patron saint of hustling, Gary Vaynerchuk, glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.

Serve thee the Lord all of thy days … and nights….

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We have the technology. (Automation is coming….)

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Pass the popcorn.

UPDATE: Here’s how the world picks sides in the Venezuela crisis

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The author makes (at length) the strong point that there is no system of government that can be created that will absolutely ensure that it will work in the face of bad faith on the part of those acting within that system. The old Soviet Union Constitution was a marvel of democracy and human rights, and had no effect on the government because the men in government just ignored it, and the populace bore with it — until they didn’t, at which point it all came tumbling down. Thus it will be with our system. If people don’t push back at those who ignore the safeguards built into the system, then those safeguards might just as well not exist.

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I hope he goes for it.

The CEO in question makes much of the claim that Trump is ‘obviously’ unqualified to be President, without explaining what qualification that said CEO could claim that Trump could not also claim.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Personally, I am of opinion that, if you don’t want your food to stick together, avoiding a food named after ‘paste’ would seem an obvious first step. But that’s me.

Well, at least you’d always have Paris….

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The raid on Stone’s home clearly made for great television, but the Stone indictment hardly makes for a great collusion case. Let’s be honest. After more than a year of investigation, Mueller nailed a gadfly on false statements, witness tampering and obstruction rather than illegal collusion with Russia.

All ‘process crimes’, nothing of substance, and nothing involving Trump.

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In my opinion, if it doesn’t have watchtowers and machine guns, it’s not really a wall.

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After 11 years of hemorrhaging money, the Baltimore Sun on Friday announced that the Newseum, a 250,000 square foot temple dedicated to journalists by journalists, will close.

The Sun reported that the $500 million building will shut down at the end of 2019, finally ending the saga of a Washington D.C. museum that was always in debt and had five chief executives in the last nine years. In 2017, the Washington Post announced it was on “death watch” after a “stunning decline.”

Ain’t That a Shame.

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The style guides say: keep your sentences short. Write cleanly, cut as many words as you can, and don’t overburden your reader’s short-term memory by delaying the arrival of the full stop. But sometimes a sentence just needs to be long. The world resists our efforts to enclose it between a capital and a full stop. The sentence has to withhold its end because life is like that, refusing to fold itself neatly into subject, verb and object.

Long sentences are ideal for people who can keep up. Those of us who can keep up don’t have a lot of use for those who can’t.

For what it’s worth, I too love Frank Sinatra and Karen Carpenter.

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Was there ever a more perfect story for the DemLegHump Media?

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The old Dan Rather Rule. The BabylonBee is entertaining; Snopes, not so much.