Contra Richard Spencer, it's not a question of the efficacy of the constitution but of the efficacy of its heirs

The constitution's heirs clearly aren't worthy of it. To slaves it is meaningless, a trifle to be dispensed with. Only already free people could write it, and only still free people can love it.

Like all liberals, Beto O'Rourke is mistaken about human nature

Beto O'Rourke's immigration plan: No wall but no specifics:

"I trust the wisdom of people. And I'm confident - especially after having traveled Texas for two years - people are good, fundamentally, and if given the choice to do the right thing, they will. To do the good thing, they will," he said, referring to his unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign while giving a walking tour of El Paso and its Mexican sister city, Juarez.

People are not fundamentally good. Nor are they basically evil. Human nature is irreducibly mixed. If people were fundamentally good we wouldn't need laws or government at all, or lawyers, judges, courts and prisons. If they were basically evil the possibility that is America never would have presented itself to history, and monarchy would still be called for. America is the gift of English dissenting Protestantism.

All our political problems remain spiritual ones. There is no freedom without self-control.

Already there, Senator

Said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., “The shutdown will eventually take us to a place where the average American is angry at and sick of all of us.”

 

 

Oswald Spengler to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio: Left is, finally and above all, lack of respect for property

 

De Blasio pitches plan to seize private property of problem landlords, opponents cry ‘communism’:

[W]e will seize their buildings and we will put them in the hands of a community nonprofit that will treat tenants with the respect they deserve.

British Prime Minister Theresa May's soft Brexit, agreed to by EU, defeated in Parliament 432-202

UK leader Theresa May suffers resounding defeat on her Brexit divorce deal: 

May’s proposed “Withdrawal Agreement” was agreed with EU leaders in November last year. ... It’s reportedly the largest defeat for a sitting government in U.K. political history. Despite the result, and expressing a defiant tone, May told lawmakers that she wanted to show those who voted leave the EU that it was her “duty to deliver” on Brexit. ... On June 23, 2016, voters in the U.K. favored leaving the EU by 51.9 percent. The U.K. is legally set to leave the political and trading bloc on March 29.

In 1930 each Congressman decided the fates of 283,000 Americans . . .

. . . and now in 2019 754,000.

Don't talk to me about growing executive power, Justin Amash. If you really cared about the original constitution, you'd give the president more cats to herd.

Says Justin Amash, whose party stopped the growth of Congressional representation in the 1920s, consolidating legislative power in ever fewer hands (his)

The president is term-limited, you are not.

Nicholas Bakalar for The New York Times can't figure out that 69.4 inches is 5' 9.4"

 The Times is also absolutely certain that Steve King is a white supremacist.

You’re Not Getting Much Taller, America. But You Are Getting Bigger.:

Among all men, age-adjusted mean height increased to 69.4 inches (about 5 feet 8 inches) in 2005 from 69.2 inches in 1999, and then decreased to 69.1 inches by 2016.

Glenn Greenwald thinks the FBI is overreaching and abusing its power

The FBI’s Investigation of Trump as a “National Security Threat” is Itself a Serious Danger. But J. Edgar Hoover Pioneered the Tactic:

If Trump’s foreign policy is misguided or “threatening,” that’s a matter for the Congress and/or the American public, not the FBI. However “threatening” one regards Trump’s foreign policy relating to Russia, the FBI’s abuse of its powers to investigate an elected official due to disagreement with his ideology or foreign policy views is at least as dangerous, it not more so, and the fact that those policy disagreements are characterized as “national security threats” does not make those actions any less threatening or abusive – whether for Trump, Henry Wallace or George McGovern.

It’s certainly possible, as the always-smart Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith wrote at Lawfare, that the FBI had far more grounds that is currently known for opening this investigation. But based on what we do know, Goldsmith adeptly argues, there is a potentially disturbing incident of serious overreach of the FBI’s role and grave abuse of its vast investigative powers. While Goldsmith is clear that he is not yet adopting this view – in part because some facts are unknown and in part because the Constitutional issues are murky – he lays out what the potential dangers are . . ..

Teen use of marijuana just once or twice interferes with normal sculpting of the brain

But our foolish politics is making marijuana use more likely, not less.

Even a little marijuana may change teen brain, study finds:

“At the age at which we studied these kids (age 14), cortical regions are going through a process of thinning," he said, suggesting that this is a “sculpting” process that makes the brain and its connections more efficient. "So, one possibility is that the cannabis use has disrupted this pruning process, resulting in larger volumes (i.e., a disruption of typical maturation) in the cannabis users. Another possibility is that the cannabis use has led to a growth in neurons and in the connections between them."

It's not the first research to find that cannabis use may cause changes to the teen brain.

A recent study found that teen brains are more vulnerable to the effects of marijuana than alcohol. And in June, University of Pennsylvania scientists discovered that young people who used marijuana frequently were more likely than nonusers to have slightly lower scores on tests of memory, learning new information, and higher-level problem solving and information processing.

House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings Plans To Hit The Ground "Flying"

House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings: We've Got To Hit The Ground "Flying"

 

 

 

 

 

Works for me.

Much smaller than first thought to be, the gig economy lies prostrate before the great wall of state capitalism

"The Gig Economy Increasingly Defines Late-Stage Capitalism

Annie Lowrey, Atlantic" is how Real Clear Markets links to:

The Truth About the Gig Economy

Uber and similar companies aren’t driving huge changes in the way that Americans make a living.

Real Clear Markets' libertarian headline writer completely missed the point of the article, which is that the gig economy is as much as 80% smaller than we first thought. A capitalism disintegrating into a chaos of millions of small holders in risky circumstances, careening into the ditch, is a complete myth. The leftists who still long for this resemble no one so much as the Christian millenarians.

Clearly Marxism-light thoroughly infects economic thinking at the popular level in more places than just The Atlantic, blinding us to where we really are, which is in the golden age of fascism. Here tax reform for the individual is an afterthought, a necessary piece of propaganda in the big scheme of things having to do with state capitalism and its myriad forms of corporate welfare. What really matters is the relationship between government and business, protecting their mutual interests.

The West's version is little different from China's. China exercises top down control through the corrupt Communist Party, but we increasingly have the same thing from the bottom up through the unjust hand of Political Correctness, populated through the right schools and the revolving door of Washington where the regulators become the richly rewarded regulated.

The extension and consolidation of control by this globalist fascist system since the Reagan Revolution is responsible for all the failure lately attributed to capitalism by the coddled generations of children of the post-war Baby Boom. It couldn't be otherwise in a world where everything has been organized to feed the corporation through the glorification of the job. You must go to school, you must get good grades, you must get a college degree in order to get hired, you'll need loans to make this happen, and for the car to get to work, and good credit, and . . .. And then they've got you. It's called preying on human nature.

The declarations of independence of our former youth often used to take the form of getting out of Dodge as soon as they turned eighteen. Now those declarations are a mere shadow of their former selves, taking the form of tattoos on that creature that still lives in your basement in his twenties . . . or thirties.

The risk-taking of capitalism has been expunged, and the consequences of rebelling against the new rigidity have been amplified. Stenosis has set in, and if the barbarians finally do overtake us they will find that the bones break easily.     

Future ICE agent: 11-year old uses Full Metal Jackets on intruder, makes him cry like a little baby

Next time use hollow points, boy.

Here. Here.

Flashback Helen Thomas: Jews should get the hell out of Palestine, go back to Poland, Germany, America

Here in 2010.

Helen Thomas lives: Democrat Rashida Tlaib (MI-13) brings the Intifada to the US House, welcomes Abbas Hamideh who wants Israeli Jews to go back to Poland

Jim Acosta has gone to The Wall, now visits The Aquarium

While the government is shutdown Democrat Senator Bob Menendez is hard at work in Puerto Rico inspecting the local fauna

Walls don't work, except in Israel, the Vatican, at Pelosi's house, Obama's, Paul Ryan's, and . . . prisons

"Russian collusion" has always been about Democrats' attempts to criminalize Trump's politics

If you can't beat 'em at the ballot box, get judges to overturn the will of the voters (the default position of Democrats since FDR). When that's no longer enough to satisfy your lust for power, weaponize government and drum-up law enforcement to investigate your political enemies for "crimes". The better educated public of the past wouldn't have put up with this sorry spectacle.

Screw the shutdown, screw the emergency, just build the wall already