Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

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Georgia’s new Governor, Brian Kemp, may want to send New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo a thank you note and a bushel basket of peaches.

That’s because another New York-based, firearms-related business has made the decision to expand its operations not in the Empire State with its highly restrictive gun control laws, but in this case in Georgia with its far friendlier business and political climate.

Check-Mate Industries, based in West Babylon, N.Y., makes handgun and rifle magazines, among other firearms-related equipment as well as life-saving devices for the medical industry. The company is an original equipment manufacturer for firearms makers and the U.S. military.

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I suppose they need one of each if the kid is ‘gender fluid’.

I am not making this up. I wish I were.

Steve Sailer says ‘told you so’.

The media’s latest Days of Rage, in which a white boy drove the national press into a frenzy by smiling at the leftist Person of Color banging a drum in his face, was like a greatest-hits collection of my old observations. So I’m going to take a victory lap to review how ideas I’ve been offering for years help explain much of the latest elite fury.

Kevin Williamson reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

David Klinghoffer scoffs at the notion of “passively allowing our views to be determined by others.” It has been a while, but, if memory serves, that is more or less how I learned algebra. Physics and chemistry, too.

Where we disagree is this: I do not believe that lawyers and novelists have anything of real value to contribute to our knowledge of evolution, and I have not seen any evidence that they do, however committed and well-intentioned these amateurs may be.

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So we’ve solved climate change and AlGore + dog will shut up about it, right?

Foolish mortal….

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There is no corner of life into which ‘vegans’ cannot intrude.

David Cole explores an interesting question.

The point is, there’s no shortage of writers who’ve envisioned a future in which sex, sexism, and other gender-related issues continue to exist.

But you know what’s conspicuously missing from the dystopia genre? Race. No one likes to write stories of a future world in which race is still a thing. Why? Why is it easy to believe that the battle of the sexes will continue after a nuclear war or a devastating plague, but racial tensions will somehow vanish? It’s the Lathe of Heavenprinciple, the belief that in the future we’ll still have every current social ill except racism (in The Lathe of Heaven, author Ursula Le Guin presents an ashy future in which all humans have become the color gray).

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Now, imagine what would have happened had this incident occurred in California or Florida.

The Other McCain comments: Advice to Criminals: Avoid Texas

I’m a big fan of flatness, myself.

Read it.

After one look at the author, I can see why.

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Community Thrift is a second-hand staple in San Francisco, a spot consistently mobbed with shoppers and donators alike, employees say. For the past week, though, the mob of people armed with donation bags has grown. By a lot.

Another weird thing has been happening, says Susan, who works the front desk: People have been thanking their objects before giving them away. She rolls her eyes.

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Let’s hear it for government shutdowns.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Leave bicycles to the young and stupid.

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Why? They don’t say. They just expect you to obey orders.

John Hinderaker at Powerline as a great idea.

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One would think that eventually you would get tired of the taste of vegans.

Ketchup can only do so much.

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he entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resigned Thursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work.

Today, the same team is launching a new fully open-access journal called Quantitative Science Studies. The journal will be for and by the academic community and will be owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). It will be published jointly with MIT Press.

The editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics said in a statement that they were unanimous in their decision to quit. They contend that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers, should be open access under fair principles, and publishers should make citation data freely available.

Eric S. Raymond is not happy.

The first thing to know is this: with only rare exceptions, any Western swordfighting you see in older movies is going to be seriously anachronistic. It’s almost all derived from French high-line fencing, which is also the basis for Olympic sport fencing. French high-line is a very late style, not actually fully developed until early 1800s, that is adapted for very light thrusting weapons. These are not at all typical of the swords in use over most of recorded history.

In particular, the real-life inspirations for the Three Musketeers, in the 1620s, didn’t fight anything like their movie versions. They used rapiers – thrusting swords – all right, but their weapons were quite a bit longer and heavier than a 19th-century smallsword. Correspondingly, the tempo of a fight had to be slower, with more pauses as the fighters watched for an opening (a weakness in stance or balance, or a momentary loss of concentration). Normal guard position was lower and covered more of center line, not the point-it-straight-at-you of high line. You find all this out pretty quickly if you actually train with these weapons.

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The imagery coming out of the White House has reached the media and Trump’s largest critics (I’m being redundant), who have harangued him for what they consider a pathetic display of congratulation, but I don’t know what could make the image more American. The context itself is even patently, on-brand American: College football players, anticipating dining with the president at the White House after they won a national championship during the longest government shutdown in American history; the billionaire-turned-president wearing his staple red power tie, paying for the fast food on his own dime.

McDonald’s is cheap, fast, and satisfying (even if the satisfaction is only emphemeral). The obsession with automation and convenience is an American one, and our food reflects this. When I have an intense food craving, it’s not duck confit or cassoulet that I want — it’s the addictive, guilt-inducing soul food that only an employee behind a drive-through window can give me. Big Macs and Whoppers are immediately accessible food for the working class, and Trump knows this — he could’ve easily afforded to purchase roasted russet potatoes and salmon, followed by other upscale-dinner norms of petite desserts with fancy coulis designs. He could’ve afforded a reception with rotating waiters holding glistening trays of hors d’oeuvres.

But he didn’t. He chose “great American food.”

At last, a writer at National Review who understands the dialectic. I suggest that Marlo will soon be looking for another job.

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline is not afraid to ask the obvious question.

en. Kirsten Gillibrand is expected to enter the presidential race today. Reportedly, she will make the announcement on Stephen Colbert’s program, and then head to Iowa to campaign.

When the Democratic field is set, Gillibrand will likely be its second phoniest member, trailing only Sen. Cory Booker. In itself, phoniness is not necessarily a drawback. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards both made the national ticket.

The real problem for Gillibrand is the presence of her female Senate colleagues, Elizabeth Warren and (presumably) Kamala Harris, in the 2020 field. What will be Gillibrand’s case for preferring her to them?

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I have no response to that.

You’d think that the reference to Kilimanjaro would make Kenya a more appropriate venue, but I guess not.

Ace of Spades does some color commentary.

Trump’s responses to Red Cortez’s “Racisss!!” taunt, and Sassy Jim Acosta’s buffoonish grandstanding, should be primers for all serious Republican politicians in the future.

Don’t dignify fundamentally undignified people. Treat them as what they actually are, not as what they pretend to be.

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Cronyism is alive and well in the Democrat Party.

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A California judge has ruled that American cops can’t force people to unlock a mobile phone with their face or finger. The ruling goes further to protect people’s private lives from government searches than any before and is being hailed as a potentially landmark decision.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Now THAT’S comedy.