Today’s News — 5/10/2019

Today’s Hot Headlines

NBC News: U.S. Seizes North Korean Ship Suspected of Violating U.N. Sanctions

New York Post: Inside the Online Posts of Colorado Shooting Suspect Maya McKinney

American Greatness: Only Five Democrats Have a Serious Shot at the Nomination

National Review: Victor Davis Hanson—Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape

Leon Wolf/Twitter: To Snopes—“I See You Have ‘Fact-Checked’ Another Obvious Satire at the Babylon Bee…”.  [bkgd]

The College Fix: TRENDING—Colleges Nationwide Removing Historical Artwork Deemed Offensive.  [bkgd]

Townhall.com: Trump White House Moves Ahead with Reining in Lower Court Judges

Hot Air: Gallup Poll—Less Than Half in U.S. Would Vote for a Socialist for President

Reason Magazine: Will Decriminalizing Psilocybin Hasten the End Of the War on Drugs?

NBC News: Legalized Marijuana Linked to a Sharp Rise in Car Crashes

RealityChek: Were Pre-Trump Trade Policies Really ‘America Last’ Policies?

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Things Fall Apart

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Take a minute to look at the opener here. We all know this is pretty much how things are nowadays. Everything chaotic, backwards and upside down, as if some law of nature had been violated. Which it has.  Early in this this century, wishful thinkers believed in a mirage called Hope and Change that turned out to be shallow, insincere, and small-minded. We survived that, sort of, but the ones who felt most betrayed, about 30 percent of the nation, believed they deserved more than the eight years of delusion which had been their sacrifice given in exchange for the real prize. In compensation, they wanted to elect a very bad woman to the Presidency of the United States. They were denied that wrongheaded but deeply felt desire. Since that bitter disappointment they have become obsessed with becoming as mean and hateful and ruthless as it took to wreak their revenge on the man who defeated them and the people who helped him do it. The bad woman led the legions of those smashing everythin...
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Why did it have to be snakes?

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  AI is independently objective? Not politically biased?  Not a powerful hidden censor? Guess again. This post isn’t about AI. But AI is now part of an increasingly ominous context in which the fate of western civilization is being played as both low comedy and high tragedy. I use an AI app as a satirical tool. It enables you to make still photos of faces say things from a long list of snappy quotes and music clips. A lot of the quotes are themselves satirical, with voices altered from the original speaker or singer, to make them funny in some other mouth. But they don’t like it when you use their little app to make certain sacred cows look stupid or dishonest. Any Every time the name Trump appears in a headline over a photo featuring one of his thousands of enemies, the Revive app is certain to flag your work in process as NSFW, as in not safe for work in the politically correct Progressive media environment. You’re not allowed. If you try to appease by moderating headlines o...
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The Rest of the Story About the Clancy Trial…?

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    I won’t kid you. I’m exactly where Nancy Mace is on this case. Even Cluck and Buck were better at providing an appropriate legal context for the farce just played out in Massachusetts than the rest of the media. Drug and alcohol intoxication are not legal defenses in murder trials. Combat veterans suffering from documented hallucinogenic episodes of PTSD have also been convicted of murder and given harsh punishments. The PTSD diagnosis does not suffice for an insanity defense. It is sometimes admitted after the verdict as a possible mitigating factor in sentencing. In legal terms sanity is knowing the difference between right and wrong. Lindsey Clancy has no basis for claiming that she forgot it is wrong to murder three helpless children in your care.  The cultural debate has been focused on the supposed uniqueness of female “feelings.” Which men cannot understand. Which is a crock. I understand the why’s wherefore’s of people wanting a Get Out of Jail Free card just ...
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Contradicting Nostradamus

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  Predicted the last three economic meltdowns, from each of which he made a  fortune. He’s been predicting the biggest one yet for a couple of months. There’s reason to take him seriously. He believes the President will invoke the Insurrection before the midterm elections. His argument is at the link. I advise you to watch his initial spiel, but not all of it until you’ve read I have to say. A delay recommended only because his video uses the ‘Infomercial’ tactic of going on and on and on until you’ve invested so much time it feels like commitment. I do not agree that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act before the midterms but after if and only if he loses his majorities in Congress. Trump is still determined to win despite the many attempts that will be made to steal votes across the nation. That’s who he is. Here’s Rickards’s   pitch . Here’s what I have to say, beginning from his Exhibit A on the Insurrection Act. That doesn’t mean it won’t be opposed tooth and cla...
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TEMU Mary’s in MAGA clothing

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Who’s in charge of building the American ‘woman’ of the future? Everyone knows what TEMU is, right? Even I know what TEMU is, and I don’t have anything to do with TikTok. How can that be? I don’t even associate with the CCP-friendly mass media. But I do know and I’ll explain why. For those a little bit farther behind the curve, this is TEMU: Companies like TEMU are the reason why Trump is taking a harder line against China than every other treacherous trading partner of the United States. The Wall Street media crowd is actively hoping for a recession to cool Trump’s jets on the tariff thing. They can’t afford to lose the enormous subsidy their publications receive from Chinese advertisers. Anything is preferable to losing those big big bucks in a period when the suckers are no longer willing to read libels against themselves by paying to see behind a pay wall. The crisis of the Trump tariff policy (that’s “Trade War” in NYTspeak) is hitting TEMU too.. Oh. Right. The crisis is higher pr...
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Bad Max as a challenging lesson

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  Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of  Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
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Concerning the 250th Anniversary of Our Nation

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Happy Independence Day No. 250!  I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial.  In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
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Don’t like Trump? Get over it.

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Another has-been life ruined beyond repair. Trump Curse writ large. Rosie O’Donnell still can’t get over the fact that Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by blowing off Megyn Kelly’s gotcha question about his mean tweets to women, using her as the completely understandable punchline.   Millions of men, and even some women, said to themselves, “I would do that too.” She’s a sad case. But this latest outburst got me to thinking. Maybe I’ve been unfair to The Donald myself over the years. With my wife and others, I’ve taken the position that I admire Trump as a President and would-be savior of the Republic. I’ve also said I wouldn’t have him in my house for dinner. Or, less pompously, that I have never had any desire to meet him in person. I have fought strenuously for his political life and fortunes. No one can deny that. But I also fought for George W and Mitt Romney (as I had done for McCain, whom I genuinely despised) when they were running. Didn’t want to meet them...
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GoFundPence 2.0

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  Make America Moral Again (Rockies caps are available super-cheap about now..) Epstein is the trigger. Mike Pence is the man to pull it. Time is of the essence here. Opportunities like this must be seized quickly or they go away just as quickly. The good news is I did some work on this back in the ‘24 Campaign, but there just wasn’t enough time to pull things together. Now I’m prepared to pass on the concepts and deliverables I developed before, spiff them up a bit for the new situation, and let all the brave new reformers use them to change the tide for the better. Yes, I’m talking about giving all you sudden moral stickler MAGA dropouts a head start on the ‘28 Campaign, which, believe me, the pollsters are already making serious money on. Still don’t get it? I’m giving you the basics for Mike Pence for President 2.0. I had already collected materials and some copy notes for a Kindle book called, simply enough, Pence for President. Here’s the cover I designed at the time. The co...
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A Big Missing Piece

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Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
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