Horribilis candidatus

/

Working girl — not.

/

"Don't blame me, i was never there"

Two days ago, serious doubts were raised about Kampallawalla’s claim to have worked behind a McDonald’s counter: in short, she never did. A silly issue, perhaps, but her handlers made it relevant at the DNC by highlighting her “experience” under the golden arches as part of their creation of an artificial “origin story” for their girl, some kind of evidence that she was just a poor working girl, raised in poverty in Oakland (both her parents are PhDs, and she grew up in Berkeley and Toronto); in short, having adopted Trump’s issues as her own, she has now tried to appropriate JD Vance’s authentic life story for her own use. That attempt has not gone well.

Somehow, I don't trust my liberty to this man and his friends (UPDATED)

/

Berkeley Law School Dean Tells MSNBC It’s Time To Scrap Constitution

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, called for a new constitution Friday, claiming that failing to make changes would cause the U.S. to “drift toward authoritarianism.”

Chemerinsky appeared on “Morning Joe” to discuss “increasingly problematic” constitutional provisions that he believed were “undermining democracy.” Chemerinsky cited the equal representation of states in the U.S. Senate and lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices as provisions that could bring about secession during the interview that promoted his new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”

“Choices that were made in adapting the Constitution have come to haunt us,” Chemerinsky told “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist. “The Electoral College increasingly is choosing the president who lost the popular vote. Two senators per state is undermining democracy. In the last session of Congress, there were 50 Democratic senators and 50 Republican senators, but the 50 Democratic senators represented 42 million people.”

… “Isn’t it absurd that we’re governed in 2024 by a Constitution written in 1787 for a small agrarian, slave-owning society? …. I do think it’s time to begin thinking of a constitution for the 21st century rather than be governed by the one from the 18th century.”

Madison and Hamilton and the other men at the constitutional convention were not some ragtag collection of slave-owning, farmers; the leaders, at least, knew and drew on 2,400 years of history; they were conversant with philosophers from Plato to Hume to Locke to Adam Smith, and also knew, because they’d studied them, the histories of dozens — hundreds — of governments of various forms, and used that knowledge to frame a constitution for the new country they were forming.

One small example is the electoral college, and the bicameral structure of our legislative branch that Dean Wormser so despises: that division was the product of a deliberate compromise between the smaller and the larger, more populous states: proportional representation in the House of Representatives, equal representation of the states in the Senate. Today’s liberals hate it, because it deprives the coastal blue states of total power. Some would see that as a feature, not a bug.

The real point here is that this dean and his fellow conventioneers will have no history of civilization to rely on when planning their new utopia because they’ve rejected and erased it. They want a new start, a building of a new society, one that no doubt will be based on Marxist ideas. And because they’ve rejected any concept of learning from the past, they won’t be troubled by any lessons that could otherwise be drawn from knowing how every one of those Marxist governments turned out.

Annie get your gun. ]

UPDATE: I just ran across this picture — funny.

Well, it's worked like a charm in the US with gun control, so why not knives?

/

Ed Driscoll:

THIS WILL END WELL: Germany Vows ‘Knife Control’ After ISIS Refugee Slashes Throats at Diversity Festival.

  • After laying a white rose at the site of the Diversity Festival slashing that left three dead and eight wounded, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised rapid action would be taken against knives.

  • Right now, people in Germany can carry knives up to 4.7 inches long. The law will be modified so that they can only carry knives up to 2.4 inches long. No one appears to have considered the possibility that Muslim terrorists on the way to killing as many infidels as possible might violate the law and carry a concealed knife of 4 inches or longer. Such thoughts are unthinkable.*

  • There were 13,844 “knife crime” incidents in Germany in 2023, which the authorities are blaming on the existence of knives and not the perpetrators, who are reportedly mostly young Muslim men.

  • But locating the source of the problem is probably “not a very helpful insight,” In the UK, people sharing such insights are being locked up even as Islamic terrorists are being freed.

“Knife control” headlines were rampant in the UK circa 2018. The policy worked about as well you’d expect: Britain’s Knife Control Is A Bad, Real-Life Parody Of Gun Control.

* A tacit reminder that integration of Muslim immigrants in German society may not be going very well:

FWIW: A fact that America’s gun control zealots and the flying monkeys of the press rarely mention is the race of these murderers: black gangbangers. It’s pretty safe bet that almost all of them have criminal records that would bar them, under both state and federal laws, from even possessing a gun, let alone shooting it at someone. Many states have mandatory-minimum sentences for illegal possession of a firearm — none of them enforce it, because that would be racist.

The anti-gun organization Everytown has some interesting statistics on gun violence and the people and the places where it flourishes:

(Unrelated, sort of, but here’s another of their statistics: notice the percentage of deaths attributed to the police.)

One step forward, two steps back (well, four, eventually)

/

1 Stepping Stone Lane, $2,587,500 on $2.650 million asked. There’s a curious price history here, because the house was initially listed at $2.650 last April 1st, reported under contract three days later on the 3rd, then reappeared as active on April 17th, marked up to $2.8, with three price reductions thereafter, before this final price was agreed to.

I haven’t confirmed this with listing agent Sally Maloney, but I’d guess that what happened was that the house received multiple offers when it was first listed, the highest — probably $2.8 or $2.7ish — was accepted, and when that fell though, the perfectly logical assumption was made that the high interest justified a higher asking price. But it didn’t work out that way, which sometimes happens.

Again, Sally didn’t tell me this, and my speculations may be entirely unfounded, but I’ve seen this happen before; it’s a curious phenomenon.

In any event, it’s now sold, and at a pretty good price, just not the one hoped for.

San Diego law enforcement: puddles of urine, piles of poop, and used needles on the sidewalk, or soap bubbles in the park: guess who gets ticketed for littering?

/

Aww, you peeked!

California officials ticket the 'Bubble Pirate,’ an artist and Navy veteran, for 'fluid littering'

A Navy veteran in California has been entertaining the local community with his creative bubble performances for over 10 years.

But Sandy Snakenberg, known as the "Bubble Pirate," was donning his pirate costume and performing his usual bubble show at La Jolla Cove in San Diego last week when he was issued a ticket by park officials, he told Fox News Digital. 

The ticket alleges that Snakenberg, 63, violated San Diego’s municipal code against littering due to the fluid from his bubbles.

Snakenberg said in a phone interview that he asked the park ranger to note that the liquid was from bubbles, but the officer did not do so, he said.

The ticket mandates that Snakenberg appear in court in October.