Read it.

Ka-ching!

Read it.

A federal judge has struck down a law banning handgun ads at gun shops as “unconstitutional on its face” and “highly paternalistic.”

California officials had argued that they intended the ban to prevent advertisements from prompting state residents with “impulsive personality traits” to buy more guns, and thereby reduce the risk of “handgun suicide and handgun crime.”

Read it.

Zanny Minton Beddoes herself could almost have been dreamed up by Bannon. She is his ideal foil. The Economist’s editor-in-chief is the epitome of a certain hectoring Davos type. From the moment she kicks off her interview she is as sharply rude as possible to her guest, making it clear to her audience from the get-go that her attitude towards Bannon is akin to that of someone who, having trodden in excrement, must perforce adopt some attitude towards its removal.

What makes this so grimly watchable is that Bannon merely has to phone it in. Zanny Minton Beddoes, on the other hand, appears to be fighting for her political, professional and social life. She won’t let Bannon get on a roll on anything. She won’t let him finish a sentence. She rebukes. She jabs. She hectors. It appears that to allow Bannon to make any point (let alone win it) would be to risk the total and utter death of Zanny Minton Beddoes. Henceforth she would be said to have given a platform to fascism. To have let it speak. And from there to have caused it. And look where that would lead us. While every last one of us was being herded onto cattle trucks, the one thing everyone would be in agreement on would be that the only reason the world had got into this mess was because of the unsatisfactory interviewing technique of Zanny Minton Beddoes.

I am reminded of those show-trial ‘debates’ that Christian inquisitors were fond of staging against Jews in the Middle Ages. Granted that the concept of Bannon in the Jew role is rather incongruous, the situation is pretty analogous. ‘We’re talking to you in order to show how superior to you we are and your job is to be beaten and, more importantly, to acknowledge that you are shit and we are gold.’ That about sums up any ‘interview’ between a Voice of the Crust and a Heretic/Sinner. They don’t even try to make any effort to appear fair, or objective. They’re playing to their bleachers, and it’s just one vast virtue-signaling ritual.

We see the same thing with the Kavanaugh hearings — ‘”I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,” said cunning old Fury; “I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.”‘

Read it.

What did they expect? Africans are Africans; they aren’t Europeans, and a brief period as a European colony doesn’t change  behavior that was developed over thousands of years.

Any European government that gives ‘aid’ to an African — or Middle Eastern, or Asian — government must expect a lot of it, if not all of it, to be stolen and profit the cronies of those in the government. That’s how they live.

Read it. And watch the video.

Even 80-year-old Irishmen aren’t to be messed with.

Read it.

The very thought is nauseating.

Read it.

Her first opponent will no doubt be Brett Kavanaugh.

Read it.

Cartoons suggest that rabbits can happily survive on a diet of carrots alone. But in the wild, rabbits don’t eat root vegetables—they’d much rather munch on greens like weeds, grasses, and clovers. That doesn’t mean you can’t give your pet some carrots as a snack from time to time, but don’t overdo it: Carrots are high in sugar and contribute to tooth decay in 11 percent of pet bunnies.

No wonder Bugs was so hyper.

All of my illusions, shattered.

Read it.

Some things don’t quite add up about hedge fund manager Seth Klarman’s interview with the New York Times in which he discloses that he will spend between $18 million and $20 million this election cycle on helping Democrats “because I think democracy is at stake.”

Democrats: Party of the Rich. You heard it here first.

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Women are running away from their support of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in droves — at least, that’s what a few misleading tweets that circulated on Monday would have you believe. But in reality, of the 65 women who signed a letter supporting his nomination, none have publicly withdrawn their support. Several, in contrast, have reaffirmed it.

Politico writer Daniel Lippman raised questions when he tweeted that of the 65 women who initially signed a letter in support of Kavanaugh, “only TWO said they still stood by him.” (That number was later updated to five.)

According to his article, however, that number only actually reflected the women who had responded positively to requests for comment.

Read it.

Left-wing groups funded by George Soros and other major Democratic donors hand out cash to protesters arrested for disrupting Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, the activists revealed Monday night.

A coalition of activist organizations including Women’s March, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and Housing Works have scheduled the near-constant disruptions at the Kavanaugh hearings as part of an organized effort to derail the confirmation process in a series of meetings since he was first nominated.

The cash from the donor-funded groups goes toward the protesters’ post-and-forfeit payments — a small cash sum paid to resolve low-level misdemeanor crimes and avoid jail time.

Those are just some of the details representatives from the three groups revealed in a Monday night conference call planning their next two anti-Kavanaugh protests, one on Thursday and one next Monday.

Read it.

But it’s still All The Fault of Da Joos, so they’ll be hating on Israel instead of the real perpetrators.

UPDATE: Syria Shot Down A Russian Reconnaissance Plane And The Kremlin Is Blaming Israel

Read it.

Whatever would we do without scientists to tell us these things?

Now that they are convinced that there actually are ‘personality types’, maybe they’ll discover that race is actually a thing.

Read it.

You know, as you do.

‘Trumpian Tactics’ — CNN’s Stelter Calls Out Avenatti For Daily Caller Criticism  Ooo, that’s low.

We Watch CNN’s Terrible Media Show So You Don’t Have To

The power of a named accuser: Kavanaugh’s future now hangs in the balance  At least, we hope it does….

President Trump ‘not going to survive’ testimony by Paul Manafort, former Obama ethics czar predicts  I wouldn’t bet on predictions from ‘Obama’s ethics czar’ if I were them.

We Know About Manafort What We Could Only Guess Before  Too bad it has nothing to do with Trump.

America Needs an Entirely New Foreign Policy for the Trump Age  Which Trump is in the process of crafting, but I suspect that’s not what they have in mind.

Supreme Court nominee accused of something sometime in distant past  Steve Sailer does the fisking.

Michael Moore: Trump’s An ‘Evil Genius’ Who’s All-But Guaranteed A Second Term  There you have it, from the walrus’s mouth.

Trump administration revokes visas of Palestinian mission ambassador’s family

On Jennifer Rubin’s Bizarre Critique of Brett Kavanaugh

Alyssa Milano Sends Open Letter To Trump: ‘We Won’t Let You Get Away With Threatening Our Families’  Which, of course, Trump has not done. Perhaps she needs to leave her fantasy world and join us in reality.

CNN’s “Legal Analyst:” Kavanaugh Hired a Lawyer to Defend Him Against These Accusations, So He Must be Guilty of Attempted Rape or Lying to Congress  Hiring a lawyer!  That’s conclusive proof of guilt!

Hillary Clinton claims American democracy is “in crisis” in searing critique of Donald Trump  Of course it is. She didn’t get elected; obviously democracy is at risk. (‘Searing’? ‘Whining’, perhaps….)

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

Easy for him to say. Professors are full of bright ideas that don’t work in the real world.

Let him start a company that pays people a competitive salary for a six-hour work day and make a success of it. Then perhaps people will pay attention.

Read it.

Actually, it was the increasing radicalism and irresponsibility of Democrats that led to Trump. Hillary spends too much time breathing her own exhaust.

More astonishing than the fact that Hillary keeps writing books is that publishers keep buying them. Well, that’s socialism for you — ideology trumps (no pun intended) profit every time.

Read it.

Jogging can kill you.

Read it.

And people say that the Senate can’t get anything done….

Read it.

Of course, it might make sense that governors, mayors and other elected officials might use fossil-fueled transport to get themselves and their security detail to the three-day summit, which kicked off Wednesday.

However, most people attending the conference don’t need bodyguards or a big entourage. They choose to have them, and with that, fly private jets and ride in SUVs.

Indeed, San Francisco International Airport spokesman Doug Yakel told the San Francisco Chronicle that “corporate jet traffic was up 30 percent over normal” during the time of the summit.

Read it.

I’m sorry, were you expecting her to say something different?

Check it out.

Surely a sign of the End Times.

John Hinderaker is not afraid to pull the trigger.

“Traitor” is normally considered a harsh word, but it is the only printable thing I have called “Republican” Senator Jeff Flake since he announced, a few hours ago, that he is “not comfortable voting yes” on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. His concern is the ridiculously stale allegation by Democrat professor Christine Ford that Kavanaugh groped her and tried to kiss her at a party when they were both high school students more than 30 years ago. You might reasonably think this is a joke. Unfortunately not.

…

Despite the feebleness of Ford’s complaint, it is easy to understand why the Democrats are clinging to it like a life raft. But what could possibly prompt Jeff Flake, who ran for office and was elected as a Republican, to join in their attempt to block one of the most superbly qualified jurists ever appointed to the Court? There is only one answer: his insane hatred for President Trump.

Read it.

Yet Another Corrupt Female Black Politician.

Seems as if we’ve seen this before….

SE Cupp: Why is it so hard for Republicans to say Trump is wrong?  I haven’t noticed any reluctance on the part of Republicans to say that Trump is wrong. Why is it so hard for Democrats to say that Trump is right?

Paul McCartney hits out at Donald Trump: ‘We’ve got a mad captain sailing this boat’  And yet we get where we want to go. I doubt that McCartney would do as well.

Donald Trump has ‘insecurity of a teenage girl’ says John Kerry in attack on president  Says the worst Secretary of State in U.S history except for Hillary Clinton. Evidence? None, of course. More psychoanalysis by someone with no qualifications.

Read it.

If Democrats take control of the House and impeach Trump, I can guarantee it.

Read it.

Persons of Color behaving badly — what are the odds?

Hey, hey, UK: Welcome to our world. Be careful not to step in the diversity; it’s Hell getting that stuff off of your shoes.

Joel Kotkin lays it out.

The big banks that caused the recession have increased their share of deposits by 50 percent since 2007. Not a single big banker went to jail for nearly collapsing the world economy.

More to the point, not one of the bureaucrats or elected officials who teed up this situation lost his (or her) job or went to jail. Your tax dollars at work.

“So far as this movement of agitation throughout the country takes the form of a fierce discontent with evil, of a firm determination to punish the authors of evil, whether in industry or politics, the feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a sign of healthy life.”

— Theodore Roosevelt, April 14, 1906

The rot started with Roosevelt. Don’t let anybody fool you by trying to tell you something different.

Read it.

We could have warned him.

Read it.

James Burnham was one of the greatest thinkers of modern times — seriously under-appreciated.

The similarities between Hitler and Stalin inspired Burnham’s first book, The Managerial Revolution (1941). Its subtitle, in oracular prose, promised an explanation of “what is happening in the world.” What was happening, Burnham said, was the displacement of both capitalism and socialism by an authoritarian system of technocratic managers.

…

The theme of The Machiavellians is the irrationality of ideologies and the pretense of democracy. Elites rule in every society and in every state, Burnham said, and “the primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions.”

…

It was George Orwell who became Burnham’s most famous interlocutor. “Burnham has real intellectual courage,” Orwell wrote in a review of The Struggle for the World, “and writes about real issues.” But Orwell could not embrace Burnham’s thought without qualification: The American, he wrote, was too deterministic, reductive, and catastrophic in his pronouncements. “The tendency of writers like Burnham, whose key concept is ‘realism,’ is to overrate the part played in human affairs by sheer force,” Orwell said. However, despite this objection and others, Burnham’s dark vision fascinated Orwell to such an extent that he incorporated it into Nineteen Eighty-Four.

…

Burnham also sought, over the objections of some of the other editors, to endow National Reviewwith a sense of maturity, ecumenism, and acceptance of American culture that he believed it on occasion lacked. He did not always succeed. However, so devoted was he to this new project that he produced just one major work in the 1950s: Congress and the American Tradition (1959), the result of four years of research into the relationship between Congress and the presidency.

What Burnham identified in this book was a dramatic modification of the way Americans understood democracy. The constitutional system designed by the Founders established Congress as the first branch of government, the mediating institution between the people and the state bureaucracy under the chief executive. Beginning in the 19th century, however, and accelerating under Wilson and FDR, the executive branch acted not with reference to the Constitution but in the name of “the people.” Congress lost its primacy, its powers, and its prestige. Government was no longer constitutionalist. It was Caesarist.

Sound familiar?

UPDATE: James Burnham’s Misplaced Optimism

Reporting the News Undermined in Era of Trump, Black Journalists Argue  A lot of it by black ‘journalists’.

MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Understands Why ‘Undocumented’ Immigrants Are ‘Scared’ Of Going To Hurricane Shelters  Perhaps they’ll be kidnapped and sent to slave labor camps in Venezuela.

Bill Maher: Anonymous Kavanaugh Allegation ‘Makes Us Look Bad’

Read it.

Sure, open the borders! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?

Read it.

In Britain, the LibDems (Liberal Democrats) are the mutant descendants of the former Liberal Party that shriveled away after the First World War when they were outbid for the Give Us Free Stuff vote by the Labour Party. They are periodically refreshed (and their name periodically changed) by defectors from the Labour Party who can’t persuade themselves that socialism actually works and by defectors from the Conservative Party who can’t bring themselves to risk getting social cooties from what used to be the upper classes.

Steve Sailer is fond of mentioning the odd American phenomenon that black people are always keen to get their kids into schools with a lot of white kids (and, necessarily, keen to keep their kids from schools that have a lot of black kids). He speculates that white kids have some sort of Magic Pixie Dust that, when added to black kids, make them more intelligent, harder working, and less behaviorally disruptive.

Apparently this Magic White Kid Pixie Dust belief has migrated across the pond to Britain.

Read it.

A Person of Color behaving badly — what are the odds?

Read it.

Yeah, I’m scratching my head over that one, too. I suppose it makes sense to somebody.

If you had given a cactus to one of the bullies in my high school his first impulse would have been to threaten to shove it up some nerd’s ass, so I’m not clear what’s going on here.

Read it.

Man bites dog?

I personally can’t think of any reason for someone who can speak English to buy from Taco Bell, but that’s me.

Read it.

Democrats are now replacing veteran Democratic legislators with avowed socialists in primary elections, choosing to nominate socialists precisely because of their socialist radicalism. Writing in the New York Times, Bari Weiss notes that Brooklyn Democratic voters overwhelmingly voted for avowed socialist Julia Salazar, despite her very public history of lying about basic things like her background, origins, and past political positions. As Weiss puts it, Julia Salazar is “the left’s post-truth politician.” This “socialist lied. And lied. And lied. Then she won handily in Brooklyn.”

This is the same transition that occurred in Britain after the First World War, when the Labour Party took over from the Liberal Party as the non-Conservative opposition in government. (The switch in parties rather than the zombification of an existing party was a reflection of the difference between British politics and American politics.) It was supported by intellectual trends in the Universities and co-0pted a lot of people from the existing upper classes whom one would think would naturally be of a Conservative bent, in much the same way as it is doing in the U.S., with the same bizarre features as trust-fund babies from old-money families spouting Marxist rhetoric and espousing policies that have failed every time they’ve been tried. AlGore and (pick any Kennedy) are good examples.

Unlike the Democrats, of course, the Labour Party is an explicitly socialist party and has been since its creation. Tony Blair managed to avoid the consequences of this with his New Labour clever-plastic-disguise, but that came apart rather quickly when it passed out of the hands of the only guy who could make it work. The New Labor scheme of importing a lot of non-British welfare cases from overseas to create a permanent Free Stuff Party majority almost worked, and is still trying to establish itself; the Conservative Party, which is composed of even worse cucks than the Republicans, may still manage to fumble their way into permanent minority status.

The key here is how the Republicans respond. Unlike Britain’s Conservatives, the Republican party’s semi-progressives are still a minority in the Republican political class, and the advent of Trump and his successful record has created an opportunity to beat back the RINOs for a while longer yet.

Read it.

The thing I like about this article is that when the author says ‘people who think X are wrong’ he tells you why in very easily understandable terms that make sense to someone not formally trained in economics. That doesn’t mean he’s right, of course, but it improves the odds.

One thing that I would object to is the headline, which I think is sufficiently imprecise as to be misleading.

What does ‘finance’ mean? When one says ‘I’m going to finance a purchase’, what is that sentence intended to convey?

‘Finance’ means ‘pay for’. And (typically) use of the term ‘finance’ for a transaction means that you are paying for what you’re buying by means of borrowing money from someone else.

The ‘financial system’ is the set of interrelated economic relationships composed of all of the people who are borrowing (and lending) money for the purpose of making purchases. In the case of a business, this can be for buying raw materials, machinery, land, trucks, new employees, bribes to government officials, whatever needs to be bought that you don’t have the cash on hand to buy. In the context of housing, it refers to people borrowing money in order to purchase living space, i.e. mortgages.

The fundamental flaw in the mortgage financial system that underlay the 2008 ‘crisis’ was the constant unrelenting pressure from government to lend mortgage money to people who don’t deserve it, i.e. were not good credit risks. The Politically Correct principle thus expressed is ‘being inclusive’ and ‘helping the underserved’. The assumption is that Fashionable Minorities are not getting the mortgages that they would get if they were Privileged Whites because of racism/sexism/bigotry/homophobia/women-and-minorities-hardest-hit CrimeThink. (That pressure still exists, by the way; when faced with a choice between reality and ideology, politicians will pick ideology pretty much every time if that’s the way to get votes.)

The financial institutions succumbing to this pressure were desperate to find some way of reducing the hideous economic risks that such lending brought to their businesses. They way they did it was basically a shell game, bundling these shit mortgages with good ones and fudging the numbers so that the result would smell like something other than shit, and selling this bow-tied shit to people who didn’t go to the effort of unwrapping it. So, in that sense, the ‘crisis’ arose because of financial shenanigans by people trying to make some money while actually satisfying Big Brother.

The problem with such a system, as with any Ponzi scheme, is that all it takes is one solid hit somewhere for the entire thing to collapse. As it did.

What the author is saying is, that the reason this became a ‘crisis’ was the ham-handed government intervention that attempted to keep all of the plates spinning and hope somehow that it would go away. So, in that sense, the headline is correct — if you boldface the word CRISIS. The situation was financial but the crisis was political; but that doesn’t come across through a casual reading of the headline.

Read it.

If you’re the sort of person who worry about ‘income inequality’, then this is the sort of OMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE clanger you’ll like.

On the other hand, if you’re the sort of person who worries about communists taking over the world, you’ll find this somewhat reassuring.

You will of course note that all of the places where the ‘super elite’ live are Blue areas. Make of that what you will.

Read it.

Tribalism is on the increase. Not a good thing.

Read it.

Heh.

Read it.

I’d buy one if I could.

Bitter Senate fight to confirm Kavanaugh plunges deeper into chaos over letter  What chaos? They got nothin’.

Jerry Brown Calls Trump A ‘Liar, Criminal, Fool’ On Climate Change

CBS’s Alex Wagner Admits To Using ‘Baseless Speculation’ To Push Trump Collusion Theory On Colbert

Woodward Found No Evidence Of Collusion, Even Though He ‘Looked For It Hard’

Seth Meyers Uses Hurricane Maria To Call Trump A Conspiracy Theory Fueled Narcissist With ‘Pumpkin Guts’ For Brains  Remind me who Seth Meyers is…?

Media Blame Hurricane Florence On Trump

Washington Post Owner Jeff Bezos Warns Against Trump’s Dangerous Demonization Of The Media  Especially the media that he owns, I suppose.

Letitia James: Woman on course to be New York’s first black state attorney general attacks Trump in victory speech  My, what a surprise.

The ‘adults’ in the White House trying to save America from Trump are just as dangerous as he is  Nothing less than installing Hillary will do.

Ace of Spades does what he does best: Cast aspersions.

It’s not often that the DemLegHump Media get caught with their pants down so blatantly, but the saddest thing is that most of them will use the Dan Rather Excuse ‘fake but accurate’.

Kevin Williamson looks at the FDA and government cronyism.

If we had an affordable, easy-to-use device that eliminated 90 percent of the health problems associated with HIV or cervical cancer in exchange for relatively minor risks and side effects, we would consider it monstrous to withhold that product from the market. If we take seriously the idea that cigarette addiction is a disease, one that should be combatted with public-health measures, then we should consider withholding effective assistance fundamentally unethical — even if it is not effective for everyone, and even if there are some undesirable associated effects.

As a public-health tradeoff, vaping is a good deal. It is an obviously good deal.

Ah, but a good deal for whom?