Andrew Yang Is Running For President On Universal Basic Income

Y'know...this guy is pretty interesting, and I'm not as skeptical of UBI as I used to be...because I'm not as ignorant about it as I was...like...a week ago...

Jussie Smollett Changes His Story Again

Kyle Smith at NRO
Not that there's any real doubt that it's a hoax...but still interesting to see how this unfolds. Will the police and/or the media just let it fade from memory? That's my guess. I mean, with the Covington kids / Nathan Phillips incident, we had video of almost every moment, and that didn't really matter. There was the eruption of crazyhate against the kids and MAGA hats etc....then frantic attempts to deflect the iron-clad proof that it had all been bullshit...and then, so far as the media goes, it might as well never have happened.
Though the Washington Post did publish this today...so that's something, anyway.

More On The Lurch To The Left

C'mon, blue team.
The center is your friend.
I still believe that you can be a liberal without being crazy.

Senate Intelligence Committee Has Found No Evidence Of Trump-Russia Collusion

And if the best the Dems have is "but he asked them to hack Hillary's emails!!!111"...well...that's just pathetic.
   It's really important to keep track of this stuff.
   For the last two years, the left has been insisting that collusion was obvious and there was no other explanation. And the red team has been poo-pooing it all. Barring some weird twist(s), the two sides are on record as having taken up clearly opposed positions on this. At least there may be evidence that the pubs didn't know about, and that could be an excuse. I don't realistically see anything analogous for the blue team--they (many of them, anyway) have bee insisting that it's obvious that Trump is guilty. If it turns out--as, IMO, it's always looked as if it would--that they're wrong...well...in this case, evidence of wrongness, I think, is basically evidence of nuttiness. There's nothing terribly wrong with thinking that Trump might have colluded...though that's almost never seemed plausible to me. But insisting that it was obvious that that was basically the only possibility...there's no excusing that.
   Anyway, as I've been saying: the blue team had better get ready to try to beat him in '20. Because that's very likely their only hope. And that's going to required two things, I assert: (1) the blue team needs to pick a centrist, and (2) their left wing has to vote for him. That means both of them are going to have to put their money where their mouth is about Trump being unfit for office. If he's genuinely a danger, then the progressive Make America Crazy campaign will have to go on hold for four years. If you think he really is so dangerous, then you should think that a 175% tax on millionaires and mandatory Drag Queen Story Hour at the DMV can wait another four years.

McConnell Will Force The Senate To Vote On AOC's "Green New Deal"

LOL now that's brilliant/hilarious.
I'm not what you'd call a big Mitch McConnell fan...but credit where credit's due.
Incidentally, have we reached local peak left yet? They can't really get that much crazier without losing significant support...can they? When you're making the Pubs look like the reasonable party, it's time to reassess.
(via Instapundit)

Thoughts on Blackface

I was in the gym this morning, and it suddenly hit me: blackface might be making fun of black people. That simply hadn't occurred to me. I've always just thought it was some weird-ass kind of theater, or some lame attempt at (non-malicious) humor...but somehow it didn't strike me as an attempt to poke fun. So that is a very different kettle of fish. I mean, I don't think that necessarily means that that's what people are intending it to be--Northam and Herring might easily have been as clueless as I was about it when they did it. Obviously something can still be racist even if not everyone who does it realizes that...but that's not the point. The point is that the trope could have an origin in bad intentions. I'm not even sure that the bad intentions are necessary. Actually, I suppose maybe the idea is that blackface is like a racist caricature.
   Anyway...maybe all that's obvious...but it wasn't....and isn't...obvious to me. It's the kind of thing it might be good for people to articulate better and more frequently in the public discussion.

Rob Lowe's Joke About Elizabeth Warren Isn't Racist Because She's Not Native American

link
Similarly, "fauxcahantas"
I'm not sure it'd be racist even if she were 1/1023 American Indian...

Carolina 61 - UVA 69

Eh, we let the solid lead slip away, Coby's 3 was a nanosecond late, then Guy hit the 3...6 point turn-around. UVa's a great team, but we just absolutely went to sleep in the last 5 minutes. Missed 12 of our last 14 shotes. Not the worst 5 minutes we've played all year, but close to it. Couldn't even put the ball in the hoop from point-blank range at the end of the game.
   IMO Virginia's the toughest team in the conference, so it's not a terrible loss...but kinda bad to get housed after you seem to have the game in hand. We've definitely got a lot of room for improvement. If we had any semblance of an inside game we might be a dangerous team.
   Injuries killed us, too...hope Nas is ok. Not to mention Leaky. Not to mention Sterling...

Robbed

Can you believe that the refs robbed us of that 3 by Coby?
Eh...looks like he was still touching the ball as the clock went to 0...as close as it could possibly have been.

"Fact"-Checking And The Left: AOC GND Edition

liars

Carolina 26 - UVa 36 At The Half

3s not falling...

The NA-335: The F-15 That Never Was

I had never heard of the North American 335. Cool.

"Free" Everything For All!: Free Day Care For All Edition

I do agree with Pollitt that it's a better idea than free college for all...for what that's worth.
And she doesn't actually say "free," she says "affordable." And may even mean it. But both mean: the rest of us pay for (at least some of) it.
   I'm not irrevocably against such ideas. In particular, I'm more inclined to be in favor of government programs that help kids get a good start in life, hence that level the playing field to some extent. But the progressives' Free Shit! sweepstakes not only gets old, it betrays a worrisome view of government. If I knew it might stop somewhere, I'd be more favorably-disposed toward individual suggestions. But it won't.
   But, anyway, it is a better idea than "free" college for all...so it's got that going for it...

"They Called Them Spitfires..."

A fantastic homage to the greatest and most beautiful fighter plane of all time...not a dry eye in the house here at the Institute after watching this...God bless the Brits, and God bless the Spit.

Carolina 88 - Miami 85 in OT

Wow, good game Miami, good game Heels!
That was a fun one.

Science Proves Conservatives Are Irrational, Episode MCXXIII: Conservativism Is All About B.O.

Behold, the leventy-millionth scientific proof that conservatives are irrational and primitive.

The Red New Deal

Total crap.
My favorite bit was the adjunct proposal to "provide economic security for all who are...unwilling to work."
   I'm not even really a "denialist"...I just don't believe the hysteria. Largely because Progressives don't believe the hysteria. If they did--as I've argued before--they'd be bargaining away everything else to get carbon emission reductions. They'd drop their objection to nuclear and argue for building every damn nuclear plant we could possibly fuel. They certainly wouldn't cram irrelevant socialist pipe-dream nonsense into a bill like this. If an asteroid were on a trajectory to destroy the Earth, and only an all-out effort would stop it, and party P1 actually believed that, and party P2 didn't, P1would drop every other goal, bargaining them all away to get whatever it was going to take to stop Armageddon. Instead, you see what the Dems are doing--pursuing socialism and other whackery at the expense of policies that--according to them--are our only hope for survival.
   They don't even believe their own bullshit; why should we?
   Me, I'm all for reducing carbon emissions. I'm extremely pro-environment. But I'm anti-bullshit.

Is Abortion In Danger?

Maybe not.

Rauch and Wehner: Republicans Got Us Into This Mess And They Have To Get Us Out Of It

I think I agree with most of this, including especially:

The most troubling — and from our point of view the most disappointing — development of the Trump era is not the president’s own election and subsequent behavior; it is the institutional corruption, weakness and self-betrayal of the Republican Party. The party has abandoned its core commitments to constitutional norms, to conservative principles and even to basic decency. It has allowed itself to be hijacked by a reality television star who is a pathological liar, emotionally unsteady and accountable only to himself. And it has embraced presidential conduct that, if engaged in by a Democrat, it would have been denounced as corrupt, incompetent and even treasonous.

In the long wake of Gingrich, the Pubs have shown themselves willing to play hardball to the point of warping the system and violating the norms necessary for its proper functioning. To my mind, this is the most destructive part of Gingrich's legacy, and I still believe that it could ultimately be the end of us, or contribute significantly thereto.
Read more »

"The Ten Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal"

Again, this shows that the progressive left doesn't really believe that climate change is an emergency; it's largely just using it as a stalking-horse to achieve ends it wants for other reasons.

Chicago PD: Smollett Will Be "Held Accountable" If He Made A False Report

"If"

The Real Story Of the Covington Kids / Nick Sandman / Nathan Phillip Encounter On The Mall

If this video is an accurate representation, then what happened really is exactly the opposite of what the left / media claimed. I expect that it's accurate, because any error or omission will be seized upon by the usual suspects...if they even ever mention it again...which I doubt that they will. Their M.O. is: smear and advance. Refutation of their tale was already on the table within a day; they didn't care. By the time that their lies were undeniable, they'd already moved on to the Jussie Smollett hoax. That's already fading away.
   The only thing I can clearly identify as having been left out is the Seven Nation Army chant, which I think a reasonable person might construe as provocative. But it doesn't matter. This is such a black-and-white, open-and-shut case that even if it's off by about a third, nothing much changes:

The progressive left has lost its mind.

OD Dems In Disarray

I don't have any idea what to say about this mess.

   I mean, the accusation against Fairfax is unsubstantiated, but sounds plausible. It is, obviously, by far the most serious charge. The other two have admitted that they did the deed in question at some time or other...though I'd say that deed is a venial transgression...but I guess I must be an outlier on that. I mean...uh...I think racism is a Very Bad Thing. I've thought that my entire life, so far as I can remember. This hasn't been a casual belief, but, rather, something pretty close to the core of my moral outlook. But over the course of the past few decades, the public posture of the left (hence of Polite And Consequential Society) has changed in such a way as to widen the scope of what counts as racism, and increase the moral severity of each transgression. So that now, apparently, someone even mentioning (and not even using) what we now refer to coyly as "the 'n' word" is apparently an unforgivable, mortal act of racism. Even as its appearance in popular culture has become far, far more common than ever. A pretty strange stage of affairs.

   Anyway, as I've babbled before, offensiveness is a weird thing. It's one of those categories that may not have any reality beyond however much reality is constituted or conferred by considered judgments. And I think the judgments that are most salient here are those of the average reasonable black person in the street. Somebody oughtta take a poll. Because I'm fairly sure that a lot of what's getting passed off as the consensus of minority groups is actually the opinions of leftist activists and academicians (but I repeat myself...). I doubt, for example, that illegal/undocumented aliens/immigrants/migrants care much about the terms 'illegal alien' and 'undocumented migrant'... 

   Anyway. Jeez...how common was it in the '80s to walk around in blackface anyway? Was just everybody doing it? This is kinda the weirdest thing about all this to me.