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On Monday the Supreme Court takes up the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases in what is the Super Bowl of civil rights litigation—arguably the biggest moment for the Court since Brown v. Board of Education. Naturally that is the focus of this episode, though we do briefly review a couple of the key news stories of the week, such as Fetterman’s collapse, the early spin on the deeply strange Paul Pelosi story, the growing confirmation of the COVID lab leak hypothesis, and the left’s angst over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
But the key story of the week is the bad news for John Yoo—McDonald’s announcement of a “farewell tour” for his beloved McRibb, after which McDonald’s stock soared by more than 10 percent, indicating that Wall Street does not think much of John’s culinary choices.
We then preview a couple of the key issues we hope are confronted directly in the oral argument, including the proper understanding of the 14th Amendment, the flaws in the “diversity” rationale in the dubious Bakke case from 1978, as well as some observations about the way this case has been shaping up in the pre-game period.
We are hoping to be back with a special mid-week episode with observations about how the oral argument went.
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You go straight from the story about a crazy man assaulting a semi-public figure into taunting John Yoo that they’re shutting off the McRib tap forever. Do you expect us not to realize you’re suggesting a certain course of action?
Of course. The course of action is: go out and buy a McRib.
Which I did immediately after listening to this podcast.
Masks, ugh. I can’t for the life of me figure out whom any mask is supposed/expected to protect.
I have for the better part of the past three weeks been traveling aboard a cruise ship, from Trieste, Italy, ultimately to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The crew is required to wear masks. Probably 10%-15% of the passengers wear masks, including
* one woman who wears her mask while on the treadmill in the fitness center as well as between courses in the dining room; and
* another woman who put her mask back on after having her face painted for the “Neptune Party” celebrating the crossing of the equator (my first crossing).
How far is the belief that masks do anything to prevent spread of COVID from the belief that a man can get pregnant?
Masks don’t do anything at the aggregate level. There isn’t one chart anywhere that shows this.
If you are around a vulnerable person and follow a bunch of other protocols, theoretically paper masks do something.
Regarding the protocols, before omicron, they knew that spending more than 15 minutes around somebody jacked up the risk considerably. Now it’s just instant. I got that from Mark Siegel, the Fox News Dr.
I eat spam for breakfast. Get a spam slicer. Cook it in one of those small microwave grill things, with cheese. It’s an easy way to eat dead burnt up animals for breakfast, but canned meat is far from ideal nutrition for a bunch of reasons.
This is my amateur observation about reparations or whatever. You chain these people up by force and stomp on their human capital and financial capital over decades. Then you free them and you don’t compensate them in any way.
Since there wasn’t an income tax, anything you would do out of any government treasury would amount to regressive taxation on everybody else.
They should have given them title to land somewhere or something.
Call it the Triumph of John Wilkes Booth.
He replaced Abraham Lincoln with a President who was a pro-slavery Union Democrat from the South.
This is why the Republicans tried to remove Andrew Johnson from office. Unfortunately one Republican Senator was successfully bribed to vote with the Democrats. (I forget his name, but it was something like Ritt Momney.)
I suspect that Senator’s chapter in Profiles in Courage is no longer taught in high school.
It makes me insane generally, and it makes me insane that we don’t specifically get this in the heads of every citizen. We kicked them, then we kick them again, and then they did really well considering that until LBJ went crazy. It’s just awful.
According to travel writer Paul Theroux, in Hawaii (which gave such a warm welcome to Captain Cook) spam is popular because it’s the closest they can get to long pig.