He will now be able to devote his remaining life to the things that are really important to him, like Satan worship.

Joking aside, there’s no denying his influence. Say what you want, but the man re-made journalism and made a fortune in the process. The only debate involves whether that was a good thing.

The AP reported: “A candidate in a high-stakes legislative contest in Virginia had sex with her husband in live videos posted on a pornographic website and asked viewers to pay them money in return for carrying out specific sex acts.”

“Radical left-wing feminists in Chile with “ponytails inserted in their butts and performing dances” in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the military coup against Salvador Allende.”

(In an event sometimes called “the other 9/11,” the USA backed the overthrow of Allende, a democratically elected Marxist, by a military coup. The Nixon administration wanted to prevent the spread of Communism during the Cold War.)

I don’t think the ponytails are actually in their butts, so the quote above kind of overhypes the protest. Nonetheless, the impact is approximately as promised – women in thongs or with bare butts, some waving strap-on ponytails. I assume they are anti-coup, but isn’t this counter-productive? After seeing the vid, I want to join the CIA and foment a military coup so more women will do this.

One year after the attacks, Dave Barry wrote a moving piece about the ground where flight 93 went down, and the courageous passengers who fought back against the terrorists. That author is the same Dave Barry who writes glib and humorous articles, but there is nothing trivial or funny in this piece.

“The passengers and crew on Flight 93, when they set out from Newark that morning, had no cause in common. They were people on a plane bound from Newark to San Francisco. Some were going home, some traveling on business, some on vacation. People on a plane. Which makes it all the more astonishing, what they did.”

I wrote in the Fun House on Sept 12, 2001:

The fun is absent from the fun house. Our thoughts are with the victims, and the families of the victims. And with the fragility of our own lives. The most frightening thing for everyone is that we can imagine ourselves in their places with only the slightest change in circumstances

As any history professor will tell you, people don’t much care for the minutiae of dates. Yesterday morning, most Americans could identify only three by heart.

  • July 4, 1776
  • December 7, 1941
  • November 22, 1963

Now there will be four.

The rapes took place in 2003, when he was still on That 70s Show.

A sideshow of the trial was the embarrassment for the Church of Scientology.

The women blamed the church for their hesitancy in going to police about Masterson. They testified that when they reported him to Scientology officials, they were told they were not raped, were put through ethics programs themselves, and were warned against going to law enforcement to report a member of such high standing.

The church said in a statement after the verdict that the “testimony and descriptions of Scientology beliefs” during the trial were “uniformly false.”

Masterson is the husband of Bijou Phillips.

You know, the more I hear about this Putin fellow, the more I’m beginning to suspect that he might not be strictly on the up-and-up.

I don’t know whether we’ll ever find out the truth about this incident, but I do know one thing: opposing Putin is not the recipe for a long and healthy life.

What is going on with the back of Mussolini’s head?

Former President Trump posted his mug shot on Twitter (now called X for some reason not really clear to me). It is the first time he has used his account since it was reinstated, making it his first tweet in two and a half years. Are they still called “tweets” or are they now “exes”? Twitter has changed the name of the button from “Tweet” to “Post.”

Who knew that the mug shot had an “inventor”? His name was Alphonse “Glaciale” Bertillon, which translates into English as Al “Frosty” Mug, who also founded the A&W Root Beer chain. Nah. Just fuckin’ witcha. But some mug named Alphonse Bertillon really is credited with creating the format.

“Mug” is an English slang term for “face,” dating from the 18th century, before the development of photography. According to my OED, when the term was first applied to photographs of criminals, it was a solo noun (without the “shot”), as in “He had his mug taken in fireman’s clothes.”

OED also lists these definitions of mug (as a noun):

1. “A stupid or incompetent person, a ‘muff’, ‘duffer’; a fool, simpleton; a card-sharper’s dupe.”
2. “A person, fellow, chap; spec. (a) a rough or ugly person; a criminal; (b) applied by criminals to someone who is not part of the underworld; (c) a policeman.”

It’s an interesting word, with many other meanings related to faces. As a verb, it means “to attack and rob,” as I’m sure you all know, but OED says it used to mean specifically to strike someone in the face, and the meaning morphed over time into a less specific form of attack. It can also mean “to make a face” in lowbrow comedy, as in “Milton Berle was always mugging for the camera.” It can also mean to put on facial make-up for the theater.

==========

As opposed to other, comparable underworld-type slang, “mug” is not size-restricted. Galoots and lugs are always “big” (there’s no Disney film about the littlest galoot), but “mugs” can be any size, as in “I ran into some nasty little mug outside of Flanagan’s”

There are also about 30 unindicted co-conspirators. “The Defendants, as well as others not named as defendants, unlawfully conspired and endeavored to conduct and participate in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere.”

Full indictment.

Among the national figures charged were Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark.

Sen. Lindsey Graham was not indicted.

—–

The Georgia indictments offer certain features that the federal ones can’t:

Total transparency. The trial may be, and almost certainly will be, televised.

Accountability. Neither the POTUS nor the Georgia governor has pardon power over Georgia convictions.

On the other hand, this case is incredibly complex, with 19 different defense lawyers filing motions and demanding discovery. Many defendants will file to remove the case to federal court, and some may file to sever their case from the mass trial. Trump and his co-defendants are expected to file multiple motions and to appeal motions denied by the judge. Trump’s tactics are always the same – delay, delay, delay. All sorts of things happen over time, all of them favorable to the defense. Evidence disappears. Witnesses die or forget key facts.

Jury selection alone could take months, as it has in another racketeering case currently being pursued by the same DA. Jury selection for that trial began in January and not a single juror has been selected. Since the trial itself may last many months, it is no simple matter to find unbiased jurors who can commit to an unlimited amount of time to participate in a trial. That problem is further exacerbated in any case involving Trump, where the jurors’ lives may be at risk.

Even the trial itself may take several months, with 19 defense attorneys constantly objecting and cross-examining.

I know that the DA wants to handle the case expeditiously, but that’s unlikely. I’ll be surprised if she can bring this case to trial before the 2024 election. If Trump wins that election, I for one will be surprised if Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani will live to hear the jury return its verdict in this case.

Ancient pathogens released from melting ice could wreak havoc on the world, new analysis reveals” — Didn’t John Carpenter already cover this?

“Estimates suggest we can expect four sextillion (4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) microorganisms to be released from ice melt each year. This is about the same as the estimated number of stars in the universe.”

In Tennessee, apparently. Tennessee had 34 deadly crashes per 100,000 people in 2021, compared to the national average of 12 per 100,000.

That state produced four of the twenty worst cities, including the very worst.

“The study by ConsumerAffairs reviewed crash data from the U.S. Department of Transportation and information included in the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The site then ranked cities based on four factors: crash fatalities per 100,000 people, the number of fatalities (per 100,000 people) due to bad driving, positive blood alcohol content, and speeding. “Bad driving” included driving the wrong way in one-way traffic; failing to yield; aggressive and careless driving; making an improper turn; following improperly; inexperience operating; passing where prohibited; and improper or erratic lane changing.”

Green Bay, Wisconsin represented America’s best drivers!

The state of California managed to get two cities in the bottom ten and two in the top ten!

In related news, New Hampshire was deemed to have the best roads in America, while California had the worst.

If they commit suicide, he’ll teach them a lesson!

Obviously one cannot punish somebody for having committed suicide, so Kim Jong Un has declared that he will punish any local authorities unable to reduce the suicide rates in their domains.

Kim Jong Un characterized suicide as an ‘act of treason against socialism‘ in the directive and emphasized that local government officials would be held responsible for failing to prevent such incidents within their jurisdictions.”

They have rejected Biden’s plan to forgive some student loan debt, saying that he exceeded his authority.

I have mixed feelings about this one.

I think Biden did exceed his authority. One man should not, with a stroke of the pen, be able to throw away hundreds of billions of dollars owed to the government of the USA. That should be the job of Congress. Biden’s claim to that authority was based on an overly broad interpretation of the HEROES Act.

Moreover, he made an end-run around the Constitution. Both houses of Congress voted to cancel Biden’s decision, but he had the power to veto their decision. Nevertheless, it is clear that Congress does not approve that forgiveness, and it should be their decision. Using this process, the President could declare any executive action he cared to, and no action of Congress could prevent him from doing so as long as he had enough votes in either house of Congress to avoid an override of his veto. This would mean that American policy would be made by a third of one house of Congress (plus one vote), since it takes 2/3 of both houses to override a veto. This is not the way laws should be made, and only the Supreme Court has the authority to settle that question, as they did.

To illustrate: If Trump regains power, he might declare an end to Obamacare by executive action. Congress would likely bristle at this blatant usurpation of their authority, and reinstate it, but Trump would veto, and would need only 146 members of the House on his side to win the day (the House needs a 290-145 vote to override a veto). That would hold true even if his veto were overridden 100-0 in the Senate. As we know from experience, it would not be difficult for Trump to find 146 blind loyalists in the House. The only remedy would be to take the case to court, where the Supremes would rule (I presume) that the president had usurped the authority of Congress, precisely the same ruling they made in this case.

I think the court took a sensible position on the merits of the case.

Standing, on the other hand, is a separate matter. It seems to me that the plantiffs in this case really had no valid standing to sue, which was the (rejected) position of the administration’s lawyers.

I am neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that both sides had a case for plenty of legal nit-picking.

What about the policy itself? As a taxpayer, I found it ridiculous that a family making $249,000 a year should get relief on $10,000 in debt. Those suckers should have that much in their checking accounts, especially since they have not had to make a debt payment on that loan for the last several years! Perhaps some degree of debt relief is necessary, but if so, this particular scheme didn’t seem to be the solution.

The WAPO featured this headline:

“State affirmative action bans helped White, Asian students, hurt others”

A quick look at the data indicates that the headline should read “State affirmative action bans helped White, Black, Asian students, hurt others.”

The headline does not say that, presumably because it is extremely inconvenient for the liberal narrative to admit that Black students do better in the states that ban affirmative action.

As you can see in WAPO’s own chart (below), the main beneficiaries of AA, by far, are Hispanics, who are brought from significant underrepresentation almost all the way to population parity by Affirmative Action.

image host

If you want to design a program that benefits Hispanics, there’s a much easier and totally constitutional way: just give admissions preference to any student who is totally fluent in more than one language. If, on the other hand, you want to extend a helping hand to Black students, the great brains at Harvard and elsewhere should be able to create a system that works better than the existing Affirmative Action models, which don’t seem to have worked at all for that purpose.

(Note: black students are still dramatically underrepresented in both groups, with or without AA, when measured as a percent of the population. In other words, even those who actively seek diversity should realize that it was probably time to shelve the existing Affirmative Action programs and replace them with some new schemes. The Supreme Court’s action will apparently have a negative impact on Hispanic students, but not so much for other minorities, who have apparently not been helped significantly by any of the existing admission models, with or without AA.)