From this guy (via Insty):
“There is Chief Justice Roberts, the institutionalist, who strategically guides the Supreme Court by not deciding more than is necessary to decide. Then there is Chief Justice Roberts, the institutionalist, who strategically guides the Supreme Court by deciding more than is necessary to decide. Which Roberts do we get in each case?”
Going by past decisions, we get the Roberts which is most likely to piss off conservatives in that particular case.
…or, Flock Off, Part 2:
A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in one week after Milwaukee Police Department staff failed to remove a vehicle alert from the Flock license plate camera system.
Fox 6 Milwaukee reports that on Thursday, police in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield, Wisconsin, conducted a high-risk traffic stop on Interstate 94 after a Flock camera flagged a vehicle in connection with a Milwaukee homicide investigation. Video footage from the incident shows multiple officers with weapons drawn and a passenger extending their hands out the car window in compliance with police commands.
The vehicle’s driver, Amber Newell, and her passengers were detained during the stop. However, when Brookfield Police contacted the Milwaukee Police Department to coordinate the arrest, MPD informed them they no longer needed the vehicle or its occupants. The officers immediately released Newell and the other individuals.
And if anyone in this party of “desperadoes” had been accidentally shot, it would have resulted in an “Oops, my bad” response from the cops, no doubt.
Remember: “If you’ve done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to worry about.”
Uh huh.
Grex delenda est.
Seen at Insty’s:
I wonder sometimes, from way back when men voted in favor of giving wimmyns the vote, whether they would have been so keen to check the “Yes” box after seeing this little chart.
But steering away from those shark-infested waters for a moment, I have a good idea as to why the chicks are becoming Maoist.
The problem is that most of them bought into the “You can have it all” tripe trope of Teh Feministicals, and went to college (as favored by the Smart Set) to become “educated” — except that being women, they picked the wrong stuff to learn, doing soft shit like “Gender Studies” and the like (which had been installed by feministical academics — male and female) rather than the difficult ones, like microbiology, applied mathematics or even accounting / finance.
Then, after graduating (with a boatload of tuition debt), they discovered that those soft degrees meant fuck-all in the workplace, and pretty much only qualified them for positions in HR (or back at college in a low-paying job like adjunct professor, if they could even find one).
Oh, and they can’t have kids because being a stay-at-home mom is impossible by the current economic situation (tuition debt) and anyway, Having A Career was part of the “Womyn’s Independence” schtick. So now they’re not having kids, suppressing within themselves that most intrinsic and fundamental instinct of women.
So, burning with outrage at the “unfairness”, of course they want to dismantle the “system” (the fault of the “patriarchy”) and when it comes to demolishing institutions, nothing works as well as Marxism.
And because they are young — and therefore stupid, as most youngins are — and have no real grasp of the history which proves only too well how disastrous Marxism actually is, they are pushing us all towards the pit.
Oh, and by the way, the boys that have become feminized during the whole process of primary, secondary and tertiary education, are just as likely to support Marxism as Teh Gurlz.
And of course, because Baby Boomers — who started the whole “Turn on, tune in and drop out” and “Burn it all down and start again!” bullshit in the 1960s and early 70s — are just as fucking stupid as their kids and grandkids, it’s no wonder that protest marches these days consist mostly of young blue-haired women and grey-haired old farts.
Morons, the whole lot of them.
As any fule kno, one of my frequent irritations is architecture that is foul and ugly (especially of the Bauhaus / Le Corbusier / Post-Modern ilk). Reader Alex S. sends me an interesting take on the whole “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) syndrome; and while it’s a long read, it’s definitely worth the time:
Western countries used to let landowners build almost anything anywhere. Now, strict rules freeze the character of most neighborhoods, banning change and densification. Why? One theory is that modern buildings tend to be ugly, leading residents to support rules that exclude them from their neighborhoods. If this is true, then designing beautiful buildings could lead to more development.
One could only hope. Let me clear on this: I’m absolutely not against redevelopment, especially in urban locations. The more the merrier, say I, as long as the new buildings don’t look like factories, warehouses and concrete/glass building blocks. In cities, by definition, where people are squashed together, there needs to be some kind of harmonious architecture — and not just for aesthetic reasons, either. It’s actually jarring to find, in an area that has a certain architectural feel or style to it, a new construction that belongs to the Fuck You School.
I’m less concerned with suburban architecture, by the way, especially if the houses are not standing cheek-by-jowl with each other. When it comes to personal property, I’m kinda-libertarian about the whole thing. While I may cluck my tongue and (occasionally) shake my fist at some modern concrete block house standing on the same street as some gracious older homes (and there’s a lot of that in Dallas), the way I see it is that if someone’s just dropped a couple mil on a piece of land, he should be allowed to build whatever he likes on it.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Along the occasionally-posh Inwood Road in north Dallas, one generally sees what I refer to as the “Dallas Mansion” style:
But on that very same road, one occasionally runs into an ugly Modernist edifice:
…and while I think that the above is a piece of shit and doesn’t fit into the overall tone of the neighborhood, I just shrug and say “No accounting for taste, is there?” and continue on my way to the DFW Gun Range.
My tolerance, however, stops very short when I see something like this:
…when it’s perched in a neighborhood that looks like this:
At that point, I start calling for the C4, and an investigation of the bank accounts of the people sitting on the local planning commission.
Never mind “not in my back yard”: it should be “not in anyone’s back yard”.
So we have this situation: some asshole — who is on parole for an earlier shooting incident — decides to turn his shooty proclivity into industrial-strength mayhem.
Sounds good, dunnit? Except for this:
[Our shootist] is seen on the sidewalk while firing several shots. He then darts behind and around a white car before running back on the sidewalk.
His frantic escape is then suddenly cut short by the courageous cop, who fires at one shot into the perp’s back.
Wait… the dickhead lets off a whole bunch of shots into a crowd, and the “courageous cop” only shoots him in the back once?
Whatever happened to “double-tap” or “I emptied my magazine into the asshole”?
Oh never mind, I just realized the problem. It was a cop involved, and every cop (even in Tulsa, I bet) runs the risk of being charged with “using excessive force” (as if any force used against a mass shooter can be excessive) when trying to end a deadly situation.
Bah. So the scrote was shot, but survived (I bet it was a police-issue 9mm bullet and not a manly .357 Mag or .45 ACP). Now he’s going to have his hand smacked by our pussified legal system and sent home for tea with his mum.
Charming.
So DJT lost his Birthright Citizenship case at the Supremes.
I for one am neither surprised nor even that upset about it. Here’s why.
I agree that the whole idea is fatally flawed: that the principle of just being born on U.S. soil makes one an automatic citizen is without equal in just about every other country in the world, where the nationality of one or both parents (if one, usually that of the mother) is the sole determinant of the baby’s citizenship.
And yes, I also know that the 14th Amendment had an entirely different purpose when it was originally passed, and has no proper justification today. But it’s still a Constitutional Amendment, and said document gives very explicit terms under which an Amendment can be altered or abolished; and that process has nothing to do with the sitting President. It remains, quite rightly, the proper preserve of the Congress and of the states, with those pesky two-thirds majorities required at every step of the way.
As such, I’m not comfortable with any POTUS trying to abolish parts of the Constitution by fiat or executive order, for obvious reasons, and that’s why I’m not upset about the Supremes’ decision. We have enough trouble with tinpot politicians deciding that the Constitution — or the part(s) they don’t agree with, anyway (hello, Second Amendment) — can be bypassed with some local law or regulation, and I’m of the firm belief that these people and/or governments need to have their pee-pees whacked, and hard, every time they try to do that.
If we want to end birthright citizenship, we need to do it the difficult way, the way the Founders intended it. That may make it impossible — I hope not — but sometimes the principle is just more important than the action.