Sonia Sotomayor has seen better days

Sotomayor has gained a lot of weight since her nomination in 2009 (right). She fell in her home in April (hmmm) and is scheduled for shoulder surgery tomorrow.

Blue Origin launched and returned successfully today in its eighth test flight

The rocket's capsule reached nearly 66 miles up and safely parachuted to a soft landing in the west Texas desert.

The rocket also safely returned to a landing pad. The rocket is not a heavy launch vehicle like Elon Musk's, but it returns to earth in similar fashion to be reused. Space tourism is just around the corner.

Excellent video of the whole thing, here.

The Weekly Standard's girly man way of calling Pat Buchanan a fascist without really calling him one

Here's the html:

https://www.weeklystandard.com/charles-j-sykes/patrick-buchanans-strange-new-respect-for-the-ayatollah

Here's the actual headline:

Patrick Buchanan’s Strange New Respect for the Ayatollah

Here's the index of articles the way the girly men only wish they could title it, but don't have the balls to:

Was the last North Korean nuclear weapon detonation yield at Mantapsan underestimated by over 100%?

According to a Wikipedia entry here, the following formula is used to calculate the radius of the crater created by an underground nuclear blast:

r = 55 * ${\displaystyle \sqrt[3]{y}}$

If y was 100 kilotons as widely reported, for example here, the radius r of the crater should have been in the neighborhood of 255ft. with the entire underground void thus having a diameter of something like 510ft.

Yet the researchers referenced in this article state that the diameter of the void left under Mantapsan was 656ft.

That presupposes an r-value of 328 and thus a y-value of 212 kilotons, not 100, meaning the North Koreans detonated a weapon with a yield 112% higher than widely reported.

Senator Jon Tester of Montana looks increasingly well fed in his government job

What economic boom? 1Q2018 real GDP at 2.3% disappoints again

Let's see: Kim Jong Fat Boy made his first foreign visit, a secret one, to China at the end of March, and one month later suddenly he's offering denuclearization to South Korea

Xi Jinping Pong read His Rotundity the riot act, that's all.

There's a contingent of fellow travelers in South Korea who want peace at any price, just as there are in the West. Xi instructed Kim to play them for the fools that they are, just as Xi is playing Trump and the US.

Do you hear the sound of that fiddle?

The communists of China and North Korea are in it for the long haul, a long, slow game toward victory in their shared mutual fight to achieve socialist ideals.

Just as Xi Jinping lied about not militarizing the reefs China has illegally occupied, they're lying about this too.

The real objective is to get the US out of South Korea, and ultimately out of the region, and Kim is the instrument for accomplishing part of this broader aim.

Actually, Obama should just give his to Trump

N. Korean Mantapsan collapsed after 5th underground nuke test turned the mountain into fragile fragments

From the story here:

The test turned the mountain into fragile fragments, the researchers found. ... The mountain’s surface had shown no visible damage after four underground nuclear tests before 2017. But the 100-kilotonne bomb that went off on September 3 vaporised surrounding rocks with unprecedented heat and opened a space that was up to 200 metres (656 feet) in diameter, according to a statement posted on the Wen team’s website on Monday. 

New study in Journal of Climate says future warming to be 30-45% lower than projected by IPCC models

Uh huh.

Reported here.

Mark Steyn wins in court in the matter of CRTV vs. Steyn

CRTV has to pay Steyn over $4 million, according to the court, a stunning rebuke.

Mark Levin's network's days look numbered.

Steyn's account of it all is here, and here:

They picked a fight with me - and two judges have now ruled that they lost, comprehensively.

The story of the dirty rotten DNC, the dirty rotten Hillary and the dirty rotten Federal Election Commission

Here.

Don't miss it.

IPCC puts global warming at +1.53 degrees F 1880-2012, over 3.8 times what it was in Grand Rapids, Michigan

The average temperature trend in Grand Rapids, Michigan shows warming of about only 0.4 degrees F over the 120-year record from 1898 through 2017, according to NOAA online weather data for the station. The relatively small increase combined with the recency of the highs for the data series, however, makes one wonder about possible interference from developing heat island effects at the station, which is located near the increasingly busy Ford International Airport.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figure of 1.53 degrees F is referenced here.

The data for Grand Rapids is shown below.

Gasoline prices are up about 30% since the Trump election

The SPLC Laugh of the Day

Liberalism is still trying to convince itself that Trump voters' economic anxieties were secondary

Here in "People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor" at The Atlantic.

The failure of jobs to recover under Obama to their trajectory before Obama means nothing to these people.

Mark Levin arrives at the truth: The US Senate has no purpose

He's saying so right now in the monologue, that since the 17th Amendment was passed the Senate has stopped functioning for the purpose for which the constitution had designed it.

It is indeed useless.

 

Popular election of senators made the US Senate a "Super House", which was a kind of a power grab away from the US House where popular power was distributed among many. 

 

Now popular power is concentrated among few.

 

The Senate still acts as a barrier to the House's energy, but it no longer reflects the direct will of the state legislatures which once appointed them.

R. Lee Ermey packs it in a little earlier than he had planned, I'm sure

Dang.

Find out how noisy is your address in the United States

The interactive map is here. Simply type in your complete street and city address and the tool will take you straight to your location. Government doing something useful for a change.

New York City's 311 gets 50,000 calls a day, the number one complaint being noise

From the story here in the Janesville WI GazetteXtra:

In a city whose cacophony can reach 95 decibels in midtown Manhattan — way above the federal government’s recommended average of no more than 70 decibels — the commotion over all that racket involves irate residents, anti-noise advocates, bars, helicopter sightseeing companies, landscapers and construction companies, as well as City Hall. The city’s 311 non-emergency call service gets 50,000 calls a day, and the No. 1 complaint is noise.

Pew study says $1.4 trillion in state pension promises currently can't be paid, a new record

From the story here:

The annual report from the Pew Charitable Trusts finds that public worker pension funds with heavy state government involvement owed retirees and current workers $4 trillion as of 2016. They had about $2.6 trillion in assets, creating a gap of about one-third, or a record $1.4 trillion.

White privilege, otherwise known as the 1990s phenomenon of everyone classifying Bill Clinton's misdeeds as peccadillos

Bill Clinton, America's first black president.

Reuters/Yahoo News can't bring itself to say China's Xi Jinping is a dictator who's enemy is freedom of speech

Tut tut, looks like enemy propaganda.

Here in "China's Xi says internet control key to stability":

Chinese regulators have been driving a sweeping crackdown on media content, which has been gaining force since last year, spreading a chill among content makers and distributors.

No shit, Sherlock.

Mark Levin is elated that the DNC has sued the Trump campaign

The DNC idiots have thereby unwittingly opened the door to discovery, "the compulsory disclosure, by a party to an action, of relevant documents referred to by the other party".

Laugh of the Day: A T.O.S. is similar to a P.O.S., only larger, smellier and potentially more dangerous to human health

Our Chinese enemy, lyin' Xi Jinping

Bill Gertz, here:

China has deployed electronic attack systems and other military facilities on disputed islands in the South China Sea and is now capable of controlling the strategic waterway, according to the admiral slated to be the next Pacific Command chief. ...

"In the South China Sea, the PLA has constructed a variety of radar, electronic attack, and defense capabilities on the disputed Spratly Islands, to include: Cuarteron Reef, Fiery Cross Reef, Gaven Reef, Hughes Reef, Johnson Reef, Mischief Reef and Subi Reef," Davidson said. ...

The militarization contradicts a promise from Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping not to militarize the South China Sea that is used as a waterway transit for an estimated $5.3 trillion in goods annually.

"These actions stand in direct contrast to the assertion that President Xi made in 2015 in the Rose Garden when he commented that Beijing had no intent to militarize the South China Sea," Davidson said.

"Today these forward operating bases appear complete. The only thing lacking are the deployed forces."

The occupied islands will permit China to extend its influence thousands of miles southward and project power deep into the Oceania.

"The PLA will be able to use these bases to challenge U.S. presence in the region, and any forces deployed to the islands would easily overwhelm the military forces of any other South China Sea-claimants," Davidson said. "In short, China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States."

Don't piss gasoline down my back and tell me it's rainin', Senator

What labor shortage? We have 1 million more people 20 to 24 years old than we did in 1979, but 400,000 fewer counted in the labor force and 20,000 fewer actually working

What labor shortage? We have 800,000 more people 25 to 54 years old than we did 10 years ago, 830,000 fewer counted in the labor force, and 45,000 fewer actually working

What labor shortage? We have MORE teens in 2018 than in 1978, but 3.5 million fewer are counted in the labor force and 2.7 million fewer WORK

Well, at least the Minneapolis Fed President doubts the labor shortage narrative

Too bad he doesn't have a vote right now.

25th anniversary of FBI crimes at WACO

Story here.

Total unemployment looks headed for a new cyclical low in 2018 similar to the year 2000

The year 2000 was also noteworthy for peak S&P 500, in August on a monthly average basis. The same may obtain for 2018. The market's average level in January already may have established the top for this cycle.

Maybe gasoline wouldn't cost as much if we didn't export 8% of our consumption

In 2017 our consumption of gasoline came to 3.40 billion barrels, but that year we exported 0.273 billion barrels, or 8% of that consumption, a new record. Consumption actually fell in 2017 from 2016 when consumption hit 3.41 billion barrels.

The news today says prices are climbing because of increased demand and tighter supplies. But as prices have risen in the last year, miles-traveled are down sharply year over year in January. Growth of miles-traveled had barely caught up with pre-recession levels in 2016 and 2017 and is now on the verge of recession-like conditions to start 2018.

We'll see if any of this continues, but one thing's for sure. Paying $3.00+/gallon this summer isn't what we voted for when we voted for Donald Trump.

Hogg jumps shark, now calls for boycott of Blackrock and Vanguard over guns

Story here (photo here).

Rotza ruck with that, kid.

TrimTabs: 1Q2018 pace of corporate stock buybacks and deals outstrips pace of wage increases by 85%

For the five years previous to the Trump corporate tax cuts, buybacks and deals outstripped wage increases $4.9 trillion to $2.3 trillion. The pace increased in the first quarter to a projected five-year level of $6.1 trillion to $2.6 trillion, meaning the pace of stock buybacks and deals is up 24% but only 13% for wage increases. The difference between those two rates of increase is nearly 85%.

The CNBC story, "Tax cut riches have gone to execs and investors over workers by nearly 3-to-1 margin", is here. The headline exaggerates the 1Q2018 ratio of buybacks of $305 billion to wage increases of $131 billion, which is actually 2.3:1.

Liberal math, but still. The Trump tax cuts are going to top managers and stockholders overwhelmingly compared with the masses of ordinary wage earners.

This explains the resilience of the stock market indices near their record highs. The tax cut cash is flowing into stocks, boosting and supporting prices.

Piers Morgan: James Comey's a snivelling, egotistical worm, an incompetent, inept, self-aggrandising gossip-mongering drama queen, not to mention a treacherous, useless, money-grabbing weasel

Here.

Gee Piers, why don't you tell us how you really feel?

Congress may end up getting rid of Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein if Trump won't

The window for that, however, closes if Republicans lose the House in November. Reps. Jordan and Nunes ought to consider that the Department of Justice will continue to slow-walk this just enough to get them there.

From the story here:

Although the DOJ cooperated with the lawmakers Wednesday, the department has still failed to fully comply with congressional subpoenas for thousands of documents. Thus, Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed U.S. Attorney John Lausch of the Northern District of Illinois to speed up efforts to deliver documents lawmakers have been seeking for months. But if the process drags out too much longer, [Rep.] Jordan said there would be severe consequences for Rosenstein, Wray and Sessions.

"My attitude is just like [Nunes']. If things don't change dramatically — and I'm talking days, not weeks or months — if they don't change dramatically, then impeachment and contempt and resignations should all be on the table," Jordan warned. "Because we're tired of it, and more importantly the American people are tired of it."

Two US guided-missile destroyers never fired a shot, Syria attacked instead from three other directions

Bloomberg reports here in "Warship Ruse and New Stealth Missiles: How the U.S. and Allies Attacked Syria":

While both vessels carry as many as 90 Tomahawk missiles -- the main weapon used in the Friday evening strike on Syria -- neither ship in the end fired a shot. Instead, according to a person familiar with White House war planning, they were part of a plan to distract Russia and its Syrian ally from an assault Assad’s government could do little to defend itself against.

The Laugh of the Day: Trump 2013 says Obama must get Congressional approval b4 attacking Syria

Miloš Forman has passed away at 86

The Czech director of Amadeus (1984, won 8 Academy Awards) and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975, won 5 Academy Awards) had made his American home in Connecticut. 

The LA Times has the obit, here.

SECDEF Mattis has called the joint missile strike on Syria a "single shot", not an opening salvo in a war

Reported here:

Mattis said the strike was a “single shot” aimed to deter the Syrian regime from using chemical weapons. Whether the United States and its allies will pursue further action in Syria would “depend on Mr. Assad should he decided to use more chemical weapons in the future," the secretary said. 

Critics will no doubt say the April 2017 missile attack was a one-off, too. How many one-offs does it take before we're at war?

US, France and Great Britain attack Syrian chemical facilities after 6th Russian veto at the UN on Tuesday

From the veto story here:

Washington (CNN) -- Russia vetoed a US draft resolution at the UN Security Council Tuesday that would have established an independent investigation into the suspected use of chemical weapons in Syria. ... In November, Russia blocked the renewal of the independent panel investigating chemical weapons in Syria, and British Ambassador Karen Pierce reminded the council that Tuesday's vote marked Russia's sixth veto related to chemical weapons in Syria. Seven nations -- including the US -- voted against a Russian resolution that would have set up an investigation overseen by the Security Council. According to Haley, that draft was designed to give Russia a chance to approve the investigators who were chosen for the task and allow the Security Council to assess the findings of the investigation before any report was released. A second Russian resolution that only supported the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons fact-finding mission in Syria also failed to pass. The organization is made up of an international team of investigators but it cannot on its own determine who was responsible for the attack.

If we really had full employment in America, we wouldn't be missing 7.6 million working

The difference between 63.2% working before 2009 and 60.2% working in March 2018 is 7.6 million.

China has 350,000 students in the US, many of them spying and reporting to 100 "Confucius Institutes" at US universities

Bill Gertz reports here.

Former British Ambassador to Syria says first responders to gas attacks on which the West relies are themselves Islamic fanatics who beheaded their enemies

Watch here.

He says the video evidence is unverified and probably staged and that the West should get inspectors in there.

It's April 12th but snow remains in the forecast for Grand Rapids, Michigan

John Boehner joins board of marijuana company

These people don't care about anything except cashin' in.

Here.

Dershowitz meets with Trump, accuses Mueller of laundering info he's not allowed to pursue to SDNY

Reported here.

150 big spending House Republicans gave away the store in December 2015 in exchange for lifting the oil export ban

The Roll Call vote is here.

Since the vote on Dec. 18, 2015 what we got in return is US debt to the penny increasing by $2.33 trillion through 4/9/18, or 12%, and the price of a gallon of gasoline climbing by 65-cents, or 33%.

Way to go, Brownie!

Hungary completes second border fence with Serbia in less than two months for 120m Euros

The second fence was begun in late February, according to Politico here.

The 3-meter high 155km barbed barrier is already finished, according to Reuters here.

That's 96 miles in two months for the equivalent of $149 million.

That would come to $3.1 billion for the equivalent of 2,000 miles of US barbed barrier with Mexico. To match the Hungarian pace the US would need to finish the 2,000 miles in 3.5 years.

Somebody tell Trump the election is 2.5 years away.

Fine, Mueller's had bupkis all along, but unscrupulously rummaging through information privileged between client and attorney might lead elsewhere

That's why someone has to stop Mueller.

Law and order costs money, which implies taxation and government

And that's this morning's reason why I'm a conservative, not a libertarian.

We wouldn't need to increase law and order if men were increasingly demonstrating that they were angels, but because they are not, we do. Simple as that.

Now, on to my coffee.

Violence on the right: Takimag author floods the zone with the bilge of his own irrationality

He's no different than Antifa. Giving up on reason is never the answer.

Here:

Anyone who, like me, has spent a lot of time in discussion and argument with other people can easily see how little the rational avails. ... And that is precisely why we need a civil war. ... There are so many bad ideas, and such moral rot, that only war can rid us of the many pathologies that obviate culture and democracy alike. Only war can bring us to a state of affairs in which people, having serious problems to face, will have a more reasonable perspective and stop griping about safe spaces, white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and all the tiresome rest. Only war will send our politicians the message that Americans will not abide their cynical manipulations and refusal to do what is best for us.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, But down in the bilge, and with just one foot, Pumping away was Chris DeGroot, says Johnny.

Levin calls for Sessions to step down as AG in wake of FBI raid on Trump's personal attorney

Says Trump "can put Dershowitz in there for all I care."

Dershowitz for his part called the raid dangerous for the future of attorney-client privilege.

The whole thing makes us want to puke. The affair is completely out of control, and there's no one in the amusement park to turn off the ride.

Don't be fooled: Our communist enemy Xi Jinping Pong is still after our high-tech

Quoted in the story here:

"We hope developed countries will stop imposing restrictions on normal and reasonable trade of high-tech products and relax export controls on such trade with China."

Disqus' Jewel Box and Channel Z don't believe in freedom of speech anymore than Takimag does

Hillary's pal in California Party of Censorship introduces bill requiring fact-checking before posting

Publius Decius Mus exits the Trump Administration

Michael Anton.

Story here.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Holocaust survivor born in 1938 or 1939 warns America under Trump feels like 1929 Berlin

Here in "Holocaust survivor: America under Trump feels like 1929 Berlin".

The story references Newsweek as the source, here:

At 79 years old he is among the youngest of the Holocaust survivors still alive. But Jacobs can remember life in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald; what the Nazis did to him, his family, his friends. ...

“It feels like 1929 or 1930 Berlin,” Jacobs says, ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day 2018 on Thursday.

Laugh of the Day: What happens to your ad copy when it's proofread by the Chinese

New lightweight cookware "provides price control of the cooking process".

Precisely. Price control is always at the top of my list when I'm trying not to overcook the scrambled eggs.

So-called Alt-right Takimag commits suicide, drops popular Disqus Comments after three month slide in Alexa traffic rankings

And that's after the big decline from the summer of 2017 after the loss of the popular Gavin McInnes. Replacement with a dark, combative author in his place hasn't helped, either.

The celebrated comments section, a veritable maelstrom of unparalleled wit, wisdom and waywardness, was unceremoniously ended over the Easter weekend, scattering its loyal denizens like ants.

They have been welcomed by Disqus' Jewel Box and Channel Z, but will be m o d e r a t e d.

Rotza ruck.

The dumbest headline of the day comes from The New York Post

Headline:

GOP’s tax cut isn’t a gift to the rich, analysis finds

Paragraph six of the story:

The biggest beneficiaries of the new tax structure are those earning between $300,000 to $733,000, according to the analysis. They’ll see an average tax cut of about 3.4 percent, taking home an extra $11,200 this year on average.

I guess the Post doesn't know that 90% of individual wage earners make less than $100,000 per year.

Loretta's been having lunch again, a lot of it

Immigration raid sends shockwaves through packing industry happy to hire people from shit-hole countries

Neil Munro reports for Breitbart, here:

The raid is sending shock-waves through the meatpacking industry which is being caught between marketplace pressure to keep costs low and the federal laws barring the employment of cheap foreign migrants.... For many years, the industry has relied on a mix of immigrants, illegal migrants and legal refugees from Syria, Somalia, and other unfortunate countries. The resulting marketplace pressure is pressuring reluctant meatpackers to raise their salaries. ...

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Fake jobs boom: Just 23,000 full-time jobs were added in March 2018

We're still missing about 6.2 million full-time jobs . . .

. . . and the pace of additions has slowed to recession-like levels.

YouTube shooter was Iranian refugee, follower of Baha'i faith

The LA Times reports here:

Aghdam entered the country as a refugee roughly two decades ago, a family member said. In one of her videos, she said she was born in Urmia, Iran — where she and other members of her Baha'i faith face discrimination — and that her family had spent a year and a half in Turkey.

Trump plays hardball with China, latest threatened tariffs impossible to match

Bloomberg reports here:

President urges levies on $100 billion more of Chinese goods . . . Were China to want to match Trump’s latest threat, it wouldn’t have enough American goods imports to target. It could take other measures like curbing package tours or student transfers to the U.S., or hamper American companies operating in China.

And just like that The Atlantic fires Kevin Williamson

Reportedly, here, after learning that Williamson advocates that women who abort their babies should be hung for homicide.

Sounds more like a convenient "discovery" after The Atlantic realized it had made a mistake hiring him in the first place. One almost gets the feeling that Williamson was set up.

Meanwhile The Atlantic tolerates women who actually kill their unborn children, but not someone who merely thinks that's a capital offense.

John Gray identifies the apocalyptic faith animating Antifa

Here, in The Times Literary Supplement:

The hyper-liberal demand that public spaces be purged of symbols of past oppression continues a post-Cold War fantasy of the end of history.

Adam Winkler: The British colonies in America were created and governed by corporations

Discussed here at TNR as if this were news to them:

Winkler’s approach is different from the outset. He does not see corporate behemoths as a deviation from the ideal of a land of small entrepreneurs. Nor does he see the corporate form—the structure that allows a business entity to have a degree of independence from those individuals who found it—as inherently menacing. The British colonies, he points out, were settled by private organizations such as the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company, entities that had stockholders and were governed by charters—essentially, by corporations. “Democracy and constitutionalism,” as he puts it, “were intimately tied up with the corporation from the very beginning.”

Kevin Williamson laments the passing of classical liberalism, the soil in which libertarians got rich

Well, at least we finally know whose side Kevin is really on. His own. 

Here:

[L]ibertarianism has benefited from the fact that American elites are notably more libertarian in their views than is the median American voter. That dynamic was explored by the economist Bryan Caplan under a typically bold title (“Why Is Democracy Tolerable?”) with a typically needling conclusion: “Democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich … Democracy as we know it is bad enough. Democracy that really listened to all the people would be an authoritarian nightmare.” ...

[T]he United States is for the moment left with two authoritarian populist parties and no political home for classical liberalism at all.

Coulter after The Oval: I don't think we're getting The Wall

Here:

COULTER: . . . I said you're not doing what you promised to do.

Where's the end of NAFTA? Where's the wall? Where are the deportations? What are you doing talking about the DREAMers?

CARR: To which he responded? 

COULTER: [Does Trump impersonation] I appointed Gorsuch.

That's all we're getting.

Winnie Mandela, vicious animal, meets her maker at 81

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for March 2018

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for March 2018

Max temp 56, Mean Max temp 66

Min temp 17, Mean Min temp 7

Av temp 34.3, Mean Av temp 34

Precip 1.16, Mean precip 2.45

Snowfall 4.9, Mean snowfall 9.1, Snowfall season to date 71.7, Mean Snowfall season to date 63.6

Heating Degree Days 943, Mean HDD 955, HDD Season to date 5599, HDD Mean Season to date 5850

Using HDD, the cool season to date has been 4.29% warmer than the mean.