Twelve years in prison seems excessive for a tourist with bullets in his luggage. Not even a weapon. Just bullets. Maybe a modest fine would be warranted.
That said, I’m skeptical that the bullets wound up in his luggage “accidentally.” Although I admit I can’t think of any reason for packing bullets on a family vacation, I can tell you that on any vacation or trip that I’ve ever taken, every item in my luggage was there for one reason only and that’s because I put it there.
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
A longstanding argument against affirmative action is that if you’re a member of an affirmative action-eligible group, it’s difficult — it’s not impossible, but it’s difficult — for anyone to figure out whether your achievements are the result of merit or whether they were gifted to you.
If someone wants to assume the worst, the numbers back them up. For decades, affirmative action candidates have been admitted to colleges and professional schools with much lower academic qualifications than other candidates.
DEI is the new affirmative action. (It seems illegal to me since Title VII doesn’t differentiate between “good” discrimination and “bad” discrimination.) Companies and organizations have been promoting themselves as supporters of DEI, creating the problem that DEI-eligible employees are often seen as less qualified, and calling someone a “DEI hire” has become an insult.
The solution is to get rid of DEI. I don’t know if that’s going to happen but anyone willing to accept the benefits of being a DEI hire has to equally willing to accept the scorn. You’ve done it to yourself.
During the time my son was at UC Berkeley, they had a fair number of campus protests. Usually the protests were about tuition hikes or something race-related.
As a parent paying tuition, I was against tuition hikes, but I was also against my kid participating in protests when he should be studying.
Whenever I heard about a Berkeley protest in progress, I’d check in with the boy to make sure he wasn’t participating, which he wasn’t. I got the impression from the way he talked about it that not only was he not participating, none of his friends were participating and no one with any sense was participating.
I was at the Berkeley campus myself during one of the protests. There were 100 people, maybe less, blocking Sather Gate to protest a microaggression or something, but it was easy enough to just walk around them.
When I watched the news that night, I saw close-in camera footage of the 100 people, as though that was the totality of what was happening at the school that day.
If you weren’t there, you might watch and think “Wow, the whole campus is in an uproar!” but what you didn’t see was 25,000 other people ignoring the 100 protestors, going to class and trying to get on with their day.
If you weren’t there, what you see is not really what was happening.
I don’t know if that’s the case with these “Kill the Jews” protests but I hope it is.
Ken Holtzman was a left-handed starting pitcher for the Chicago Cubs beginning in 1965. Holtzman pitched two no-hitters with the Cubs, and later played on the Oakland Athletics’ teams that won three consecutive World Series championships between 1972 and 1974. Holtzman won 20 games for the A’s in 1973.
Joe Biden is not a serious person. He wants more gun laws but doesn’t enforce the gun laws we already have, like the ATF Form 4473, a federal form required to buy a gun in the United States.
Among other things, the form is intended to prevent crack addicts from buying guns. Lying on the 4473 — for example, saying you’re not a crack addict when you are, like your son Hunter did — carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years, but Hunter won’t be going to prison because he got a plea deal.
And the Democratic Party is not a serious party. I haven’t heard a single Democrat say the plea deal is a joke and Hunter should go to prison.
Yes I know the president doesn’t want his son to go to prison, even though he boasts about sending other people’s kids to prison for lying on a 4473. But if you’re going to continually advocate for more and more gun laws, which is what Democrats do, then you should goddamn well be enforcing the ones we already have.
Here’s Kamala Harris, the vice president, also not a serious person, also calling for more gun laws.
Doug and I send our prayers to the city of Baltimore. Two lives were lost and 28 others were injured, including children, during another mass shooting – this time at a block party.
Every person in our nation should have the right to go to a party or walk down the street without…
Baltimore, like every other city with a lot of gun violence — Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC and others — is all Democrats. They have not elected a Republican to any political office probably in my lifetime.
Same in Los Angeles, where I live. The mayor is a Democrat, as is every member of the city council.
Democrats in these cities can pass any laws they want to with no Republican opposition. Baltimore already has “commonsense” gun laws, which don’t work.
If all you’ve got regarding gun violence is “More gun laws,” then you have no idea how to address gun violence.
SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. – Dickey Betts, a driving force behind the Allman Brothers Band that launched Southern rock and influenced the jam band scene, died Thursday at his Florida home
Betts was best known for his legendary guitar skills, but he also wrote the Allman Brothers Band’s only Top 10 hit, “Ramblin’ Man.”
During Bob Dylan’s Sept. 30, 1995, concert at the USF Sun Dome in Tampa. Florida, Betts joined Dylan on stage for several numbers including “Ramblin’ Man.” Betts told the story of how it came to be while seated at his Sarasota County home in 2014.
Dylan says, “Let’s do ‘Ramblin’ Man.’”
“All right, let me write the words down,” Betts tells him.
“I know the words,” Dylan says. “I should have wrote that song.”
Betts unleashed one of his warm, charming laughs.
“I said, ‘Bob, just sing whatever you want to.’ I didn’t think he knew the words. I figured he’d just make up some stuff,” Betts recalled. “He knew the song word for word. Man, it was such an honor. He sang it and I told him later that those words have never had so much feeling. The way he sings, he makes every word punchy. It really was beautiful. It really was.”
When they were shooting Casablanca. . . someone comes to [Humphrey Bogart] and says, “they want to play the ‘Marseillaise,’ what should we do? — the Nazis are here and we shouldn’t be playing the ‘Marseillaise.'” Humphrey Bogart just nods to the band, we cut to the band, and they start playing “bah-bah-bah-bah.”
Someone asked what he did to make that beautiful scene work. He says, “they called me in one day, Michael Curtiz, the director, said, ‘stand on that balcony over there, and when I say “action” take a beat and nod,'” which he did. That’s great acting. Why? What more could he possibly have done? He was required to nod, he nodded. There you have it. The audience is terribly moved by his simple restraint in an emotional situation — and this is the essence of good theater: good theater is people doing extraordinarily moving tasks as simply as possible. Contemporary playwriting, filmmaking, and acting tend to offer us the reverse — people performing mundane and predictable actions in an overblown way. The good actor performs his tasks as simple and as unemotionally as possible.
He’s exploring that? It’s a little late in the day to be exploring closing the border.
The first thing he did on taking office was to undo all of Trump’s executive orders related to closing the border. If he has the power to open the border, he has the power to close the border.
Or just close it. Assume you have the power and see if the courts say you don’t.
I don’t think the jobs report was good. I don’t think the economy is good.
I just read a series of comments on the story linked above and commenters were euphoric. Why do we see one sunny report after another on jobs, unemployment and the economy while Forbes reports that 40% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and 29% are doing even worse, i.e., their income doesn’t cover their expenses? Why has the sentiment on LinkedIn been so dismal?
The jobs numbers are illusory. The jobs are all part time. Last month’s jobs were all part time. Full-time employment actually went down. We’ve added 6.2 million jobs since May 2022 and full-time employment has gone up by only 263,000. Number of jobs “created” has gone up much faster than number of people employed, I suspect because a single person working multiple jobs counts as multiple jobs.
The unemployment numbers are illusory. If you work 1 hour in a week, you are not unemployed. If you are marginally attached to the labor force, you are not unemployed. If you work part time for economic reasons, you are not unemployed. Look up the U-6 unemployment rate for what I’d say is a more realistic number.
I read a post today on LinkedIn that started out like this:
“Your salary increase will be 2%,” I told her. It was one of my worst moments as a people leader.
She was my star performer, my right hand person.
1000% business critical to our team. Yet 2% was the best our company would give her.
It was far beneath her value, and we both knew it, and I couldn’t do better for her.
The author goes on to say that he advised her to look for a new job that would pay what she’s worth, which she did. And the moral of the story is that you can’t complain when employees leave if you don’t give them reasons to stay.
Surprisingly to me, the poster got a lot of recognition and praise for his handling of this tale of woe.
I don’t like the story myself.
As I understand it, he offered his most valuable team member a 2% raise, knowing it was far below her value, placed the blame on “our company,” and advised her to find another job. I’m going to assume since he didn’t leave that he got more than 2%. It sounds like he got his raise and offered her 2%.
And he didn’t, as a people leader, say to whoever these things are said to, “If you make me offer my most valuable team member a 2% raise, I’m going back to my desk and start typing my resignation letter.”
If you see a problem, you own it. If you ignore a problem, you’ll see more of it.
What we saw last night was the president’s ‘let them eat cake’ moment. Millions of Americans are suffering because of the mismanagement of this economy. I say this frequently. We’re seeing record numbers of foreclosures, people are having their cars repossessed, we are seeing a silent job loss because the reports are now showing that the actual growth in employment is in part-time jobs, not in full-time jobs. It is totally and completely unseemly, in this economic environment, for our president to say that we’re going to try to set the record for the amount raised. No money to help people buy eggs and bacon. No money to make sure that people can afford gasoline.
Kahneman was a genius not only at formulating original insights into human behavior but at explaining them in a way that’s interesting and understandable to the non-expert.
I can’t recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow highly enough. It’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.
What Justice Jackson said to raise eyebrows was “Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods.”
Correct! One clear goal of the First Amendment is to hamstring the federal government from doing what it would like to do: control our speech. I would have expected a Supreme Court justice to have learned this in law school, not in on-the-job training.
Justice Jackson went on to say, “The government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country . . . by encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” she said.
There’s always a euphemism handy for “information the government doesn’t want you to know,” e.g., “misinformation” “disinformation,” “harmful information,” etc. We can’t have freedom of speech! It’s too dangerous!
As a thought experiment, if you had to select one person to decide what you can or can’t read, who would that person be? They also get to decide, regarding information transmitted audibly, what you can or can’t hear. Any information this person deems to be inaccurate or harmful or dangerous will be inaccessible to you.
Do you trust anyone that much? I don’t.
That’s what the First Amendment says (among other things), that the federal government is not to be trusted to censor information or control the speech of the citizens.
This movie probably doesn’t deserve the whole five stars but I have a real affinity for characters like Emily (played by Aubrey Plaza), who, like the Mark Baum and Vinny characters in The Big Short, are people with a code of honor, a sense of awareness, not looking for trouble, but not willing to put up with insolence or nonsense.
To give you a sense of what I mean — and this may need a very minor spoiler alert — a group of criminals has stolen a significant amount from Emily’s boyfriend (also a criminal but less physical than the other criminals) and she’s making a case that they should go and get it back because, among other reasons, the boyfriend owes her a cut of what was stolen.
The boyfriend is against the idea. “These are very serious people,” he says.
Emily replies, “No, no, we’re serious people. Ok? Motherfuckers will just keep taking from you and taking from you until you make the goddamn rules yourself. That’s what this is about. Am I wrong? Am I wrong?”
I say no.
John Patton Ford, in a first-time writer-director effort, keeps things moving. And I like the L.A. locations for a sense of authenticity.
Rating:
Emily the Criminal
Down on her luck and saddled with debt, Emily gets involved in a credit card scam that pulls her into the criminal underworld of Los Angeles, ultimately leading to deadly consequences.
Director: John Patton Ford Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Bernardo Badillo
‘This Is Shocking’: Some Democrats Demand CNN Apologize, Denounce Alleged ‘Islamaphobia’ Made Against Ilhan Omar https://t.co/PkDdBuwt6f via @dailycaller
It is shocking! I haven’t been as shocked since Claude Rains discovered gambling at Rick’s Cafe.
I think Democrats really do believe that the role of corporate media in general and CNN in particular is to serve as a public relations arm of the Democratic party. A journalist taking an adversarial position vis-a-vis a Democratic representative should not be allowed to have a job.
What CNN commentator Scott Jennings said is that Ilhan Omar is a “public relations agent for Hamas living in the United States Congress.”
To me, that’s a pretty good one-liner, no better or worse than political barbs I read every day. All the people that I see complaining about the remark are people who’ve called Donald Trump Hitler, Satan, a fascist, a racist, a white supremacist, a dictator, etc., for the last eight years. If you want to dish it out, you’ve got to be able to take it.
You could make what I think is an excellent case that Jennings’ remark was not based on “Islamophobia” but on things that Rep. Omar has said, including that she is “Somali first, Muslim second” (where does “American” rank?) and that she is “here to protect the interests of Somalia from inside the U.S. system.”
She also falsely pushed Hamas propaganda by claiming Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. The U.S. intelligence assessment was that the hospital was hit by a Hamas rocket. While she didn’t retract her original remarks, she did subsequently say that it’s important to ensure that information comes from credible sources.
I’m glad that neither Ilhan Omar, nor any of the people defending her, is my congressional representative. What a bunch of crybabies. I want a freedom fighter.
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