Via Fox News.

Former President Trump on Monday said that his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida is “under siege” by a “large group” of FBI agents.

Susan Quinn expressed surprise and despondency at the degree of the sheer incompetence of the COVID management team in the White House, especially Dr. Deborah Birx.  I had a similar reaction to Scott Atlas’s book.

We could review the litany of bad policy decisions (masks and lockdowns misused as general suppression strategies, absurd claims for the effects of vaccination, closing schools), and of course, we could revisit the changing saga of the actual origins of the virus.

We have all bemoaned the current crop of Republican candidates who seem to have no interest in campaigning for a unified “Contract for America” kind of platform. I would cheerfully settle for a smaller “Contract” centered around select modules. Here’s one: Energy

Republicans should be campaigning for energy supply to go way up, and done simply enough. Here’s the proposed platform:

NYC Mayor/democrat politicians:  “Open borders! Open borders! This must be our policy.”

Texas Governor Abbott:  “The southern states are bearing the full burden of your idiotic policy. This is horrific.”

NYC Mayor/democrat politicians: “Shut up you racist bigot!”

If you have walked through a corporate office anytime in the past 20 years, you might have noticed that women are over-represented in the cubicle world.  The breakdown may vary from department to department, but there are more women than men working office jobs. Sure, most large corporations will still have some sort of women’s empowerment group where the ladies can get together, pretend it is still 1960, and pat themselves on the back because they are true professionals and not just secretaries. Despite the numbers, we are still supposed to believe this is a big deal.

I don’t watch TV.  I’m bothered by the fast montages, flashing images, and intrusive sounds.  I can’t concentrate on a movie unless I really like it – my mind jumps around too much.  TV news shows insult me – they all sound like they’re selling something, instead of telling me what happened.  I can’t get interested in reality TV – I can’t bring myself to care what color tile some lady chooses for her backsplash.  And so on and so on.  My wife enjoys TV.  It relaxes her.  But I’ve tried, and I just can’t.

For the first time in over 15 years, I actually have time to breathe.  So I joined a gym (Planet Fitness), because I feel horrible all the time, and I need to get in shape.  When I’m on the treadmill, there is a bank of televisions 50 feet across.  All tuned to different stations, to distract us from our boring exercise.  Help pass the time.  But for me, it makes it so much worse.  I can’t even watch one program at home, because my mind jumps around too much.  Imagine me watching several programs at once, while surrounded by other stimulation like various people exercising and interacting – imagine what all that does to my restless mind.

Allow me to share with you a rough approximation of 15 minutes of my morning today, while I was on the treadmill:

On Wikipedia, go to List of United States Cities by Population.  It features an interactive table of all the US cities (over 100,000 population), so you can click on the column headers to sort, up or down, by that value.

So this is what you see when you sort by the change in population in %, from 2020 (census) to 2021 (estimate):

In the early days of the Covid Panic, Peter Hitchens was one of the few people pointing out the utter foolishness of the lockdown policies. I took some comfort there was at least one public person pointing out the obvious.  Here he is below.

I warned clearly in March 2020 that the out-of-proportion reaction to Covid would lead to this crisis.

There has been rampant speculation as to why some of the world’s richest guys are suddenly buying huge tracts of farmland.  Bill Gates is now acquiring a big chunk of North Dakota in addition to other holdings. Jeff Bezos already has hundreds of thousands of acres of land.

Is there some insidious conspiracy to control the world’s food supplies? An investment in agribusinesses likely to boom when the Davos braintrust creates global food shortages that will make Sri Lanka and Holland look like practice runs? Or do they have so much cash there is nothing left to buy other than the planet’s surface?

One would think growing up in the shadows of memories that never belonged to them might grow up to feel jaded. I remember watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the family room of my parent’s house as a kid (reruns — I was a Reagan baby). The opening sequence of Mary Richards driving into Minneapolis, the Sonny Curtis lyrics backed with a simple, optimistic tune that matched Mary’s anticipation as she embarked on a new city, a new job, and a new life — still stirs the same hope that a young lady with as much eagerness as naivete could have, and I wish still had.

I didn’t have any remarkable childhood; I just loved it. I grew up watching John Wayne storm the beaches and round-up outlaws. I spent most summers working, swimming, and biking to Dairy Queen. Our family had a local pizza place that showed Looney Tunes cartoons I know by heart and served malts with the extra tin cup. It was simple. It was more Leave It to Beaver than Rebel Without A Cause.

I grew up thinking the world was probably like Happy Days but without the jukebox, which was funny because I ended up working at a sandwich shop that had one (Roger Miller’s King of the Road was in regular rotation). But I looked forward to an adult world in which America was still the stuff of dreams. Merit was as good as one’s reputation to unlock the door of opportunity. Men knew what chivalry was and women didn’t scoff at it. There were Little Black Dresses and kitten heels, tailored trench coats, and rubber overshoes. Picture windows were dressed in thick heavy floral drapes and kids in OshKosh B’gosh. Married couples slept in separate beds and Joe Friday was always serious.

This is my latest Thoughts on Therapy interview. Check it out!

The fundamental notion of a “rule of law” (in contrast to a “rule of the powerful”) is that the same law will be applied to everyone and that differential outcomes in the main are due to differing facts, not the preferences of powerful men/women. And so it is antithetical to a rule of law that the law, on the same facts, is open for interpretation. And yet, here we are: Differential outcomes on the same or extremely similar facts — from rioting, to border control, to health rules, and so on and so forth.

The latest outrage (and only just the latest), in my view, is the hubris of the Florida state attorney that Governor Ron DeSantis has suspended for failure to enforce a law that that attorney disfavors. Andrew Warren’s beef is, first, with the Florida law regarding abortion and child sex-change operations and, second, with Governor DeSantis taking Warren at his word that he would not enforce laws he thought “unconstitutional” which triggered Warren’s suspension for “neglect of duty.”

The year is 1964. The pop revolution is underway, and groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones own the British charts and are besieged by thousands of screaming girls throwing flowers (and much else) at them wherever they go.

Out of nowhere, that May, a quartet of young Australians who’d worked their passage from Down Under to the UK as the entertainment on a cruise liner, and who were expecting to stay for just ten weeks for a few small nightclub gigs, erupted onto the nation’s television sets and quickly won its heart.

They were clean-cut, frumpy even; not shaggy or swivel-hipped. The men (two guitarists and a bassist) wore suits and ties. The girl singer, Judith Durham, a former secretary who’d joined the group some eighteen months earlier, often wore modest dresses she’d made herself.