Free Republic

He suggests focusing on 2-3 Senate and 8-10 House seats? Somebody tell him that he needs 51 in the Senate (and 60 to break a filibuster) and 218 in the House.

But he doesn’t think he needs that. He thinks a splinter group can play kingmaker. So if the rest of the Republicans don’t fall into line, his faction is going to vote with the dems? No? Then what?

No matter. He’ll can ask Liz Murkowski or Rand Paul or a dozen more of the ritual purity types how this works.

He needs a majority. Throwing tantrums on X doesn’t make a majority.

Sleep with a lesbian with a penis. Thought you knew.

My family originated in Olduvai Gorge, so I am of African descent.

I am now too old to demand a tenured position at Harvard, but I still want to know where to sign up for reparations.

Nope.

Some Indian cultures were rising towards settled agriculture — the mound builder cultures of the midwest are a great example — but even these tribes were usually at war with each other and moved around. What we see in the archaeological record is a succession of cultures, with one group periodically displacing its predecessor. It is remarkable how modern woke land acknowledgments always overlook the long record of pre-Columbian war, massacre and displacement among the tribes. The woke academics simply endorse the claims of the people who were present when the white tribe arrived and started taking notes.

Since the North American Indians were pre-literate, they didn’t leave a written record, but the pottery styles, arrowheads, spear points, and other tools show the changes.

The question always arises: what happened to the losers in these tribal wars? Sometimes the losers were exterminated. Sometimes survivors might be absorbed into the conquering culture. Sometimes survivors drifted away to amalgamate with other tribes elsewhere, or they retreated to more inhospitable places to eke out a precarious existence in exile. This pattern has been played out virtually everywhere in the world as people passed through a comparable stage of development.

It’s interesting at any given Eastern Woodlands Indian site to examine how long it was continuously inhabited. Perhaps for decades, but over time, people still moved around. The Sioux are a great example. We associate them with the northern plains because that is where they made their final stand against the onrushing (white) culture of permanent settlement based on fixed land tenure and agriculture. But the Sioux’ own folk tales say that they had wandered onto the plains from regions far to the east, and probably in Canada, and around the Great Lakes region.

The Sioux were pushed onto the plains by other tribes. And had they lost a few more wars, they might have ended up in the deserts with the Apache, Utes, and others. The great boomerang of the Plains Indian cultures came when they acquired horses, which had been reintroduced to North America by the Spanish settlements. That revolutionized Plains hunting and warfare, and turned a bedraggled collection of loser tribes, long ago forced out of the richer lands to the east, into a formidable force. The flowering of the Plains Indian horse culture was itself a product of the European arrival. It took place with remarkable speed, and was over and done in less than 200 years. It is a remarkable anthropological case study.

7th and M is towards the north end of the Convention Center (which extends up to N). There is a metro stop there. That area is still sketchy, and it will remain so until some housing projects are torn down.

The neighborhood is Shaw, with Sirsum Corda just to the east. When I came to DC prior to the last ice age, Shaw and Sirsum Corda were strict no-go areas for middle class people of the white tribe, though some of the black middle class was still hanging on in Shaw (and good for them; I hope they all got house rich when the area started to turn). That is changing. Shaw is relatively large as DC neighborhoods go, so microhabitat is everything. The surrounding neighborhoods are what has now been rebranded the Atlas District (after the storied Atlas Theater), which is still a work in progress but which has come a long way; Eckington, also a work in progress but rapidly gentrifying; Le Droit Park, Columbia Heights, Dupont Circle, downtown and the Penn Quarter. Most of these areas are improving rapidly with residual problem spots here and there.

Shaw will continue to improve; it’s too close-in not to. Young people are flipping Shaw with each sale, and it’s a block by block story. As with anyplace in the city, situational awareness is essential.

The Government Finance Officers’ Association conference was wrapping up at the Convention Center yesterday. At the hour the shooting occurred, that should have cleared long before this incident. The Convention Center is big and boxy, and surrounding sidewalks can get pretty lonely when no events are in progress. The question becomes what was this young man doing there at that hour. It’s possible he had volunteered to help staff something at the conference and was still there late for the teardown. (Been there, done that, many times.) The metro center is right outside the building, so if that’s where he was, security cameras should have everything. If he had crossed the street, he had moved into much more dangerous territory. In any event, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught a stray bullet.

The first rule of thumb in assessing any location is to eyeball the distance to the nearest housing project. There are too many Great Society criminal ranches there for any sane person to be wandering around that late at night. Close the housing projects and that area would fully gentrify very rapidly. Shaw starts to look good if your alternative is Urbana, Haymarket, and Woodbridge, which is where the scared of the city young people flee to find affordable first homes, which they usually buy before they appreciate the full implications of the commute.

The moral of the story, obviously, is to stay away from large gatherings of government finance officers

The Indian tribes were constantly at war with each other, and most were nomadic or semi-nomadic. What the modern wokesters recognize as the original, aboriginal claims of first occupancy are actually derived from the travel journals of the first people of European descent who noted what Indian tribe was there when the first white explorers reached the area.

I.e., all such Native American land claims were assigned originally by White explorers and mappers. And many of the earliest stories we have of the tribes’ ancestral folk memories (which were themselves written down when white men arrived on the scene, so they are already selected and translated by outsiders) speak of the tribes’ long wanderings before they reached their current spot. As do, just for the record, the Jews’ origin story, which has Abraham coming out of Ur, but in that case, the Israelites at least wrote it down for themselves during the Babylonian captivity, when the oral tradition gave way to a written account.

In some parts of the world, Arab or Chinese explorers may have been the first literate recorders in a given region. But the principle is the same.

It wasn’t silent. I live less than a mile from RFK stadium; we used to walk to games, which was great. So in this instance, I was close enough to hear it, especially because it was very low. From my angle, however, it looked stationary as it spun for the turn. I don’t know what the turning radius of a B2 is at low speeds, but that’s how it appeared. Had it been higher and farther away, I might well not have heard it.

Lots of people have seen UNIDENTIFIED flying objects.

My closest brush with such things happened in the middle of the day, and the object was not very far away, so I had some visual clues. But had it been at night, and had the object had lights of any kind, I would have seen a very large, stationary object, shadowy in the night sky but with lights prompting the imagination, slowly spinning and then moving quite slowly in my direction, passing overhead without taking the slightest notice of the puny human staring at it from below.

Since it was daylight, late morning or early afternoon, and since I was up on my ladder painting my front porch, and since I was close enough to see the markings on the aircraft, I knew it was a B2 bomber. And knowing what was scheduled for the next day, I immediately knew that it was practicing for the big flyby that was part of the very impressive military parade that was held in DC after the first gulf war.

The plane was obviously turning over the Anacostia River and the RFK stadium property to get lined up for the flyby route, which ran down East Capitol Street to the Capitol Building and onwards from there. The uber ceremonial official parade route runs from the Capitol Building to the White House down Pennsylvania, but big parades have to stage somewhere. So they stage on and over Capitol Hill, often using the huge RFK Stadium parking lots. Back before the killjoys killed real circuses, we used to get the Barnum and Bailey parade every year, and we didn’t have to fight the crowds along the publicized route; everything staged on neighborhood streets, so we got the pre-parade procession to the starting point.

Anyhow, I was up on my ladder and the flyby rehearsal was beginning. For the next half hour, every type of plane involved in the first gulf war fly by, low and slow. But the B2 bomber was the first, and had it been at night, I would’ve seen a flying saucer.

I agree. Swapping out one of 16 venues as a World Cup site would be easy. And even if LA remains a site, we would be talking a few standalone games in a stadium with crowds in the 50-70,000 range — and much less if the top teams aren’t slotted into LA. Mexoco, Argentina or Brazil would draw a crowd, but are Mexicans in LA going to turn out for European or Asian teams? For the World Cup, LA is basically the fourth Mexican venue, with photo ops for Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom thrown in.

In any event, a single stadium can be cleaned up and the area secured. The Olympics are different, a massive presence over a much larger footprint.

Thanks. I’m interested here primarily in how the PixelVerse is being restructured as Big Tech turns what we used to consider Big Media and the big legacy movie studios into middling commodity items that get sliced, diced and traded faster than most of us can keep up.

Shari Redstone has been looking for a buyer and the right deal for years. Both of Larry Ellison’s children wanted to get into movie production. They each have their own companies and both seem to be seriously interested in making good movies. What David Ellison might do with Paramount could be interesting. So my guess, again, is that David picked up the phone and told Shari to get this mess settled, no matter how much the people at CBS might squawk.

Look at David Ellison’s filmography. His first film was Flyboys. His second was True Grit (2010), which is on my GOAT list. Even the most cynical, nuke Hollywood freepers will give him a nod for Top Gun: Maverick. Not every film is going to succeed, but he’s clearly trying to set the bar high. I’m a lot happier with him acquiring Paramount than Disney, Amazon, or Warner Bros Discovery grabbing it to plunder.

The 2026 World Cup will have 104 games played in 16 cities in three countries, with the U.S., Mexico and Canada having submitted a joint bid. The U.S. is the primary host, with Mexico having three sites and Canada just one (Toronto). The finals will be at MetLife Stadium in NJ.

LA is just one of the host cities and could be swapped out without missing a beat. Over 40 cities submitted bids. I personally don’t like FIFA’s final list for the U.S. sites, which suffers from BiCoastal Disease. Dallas, Houston, Kansas City and Atlanta were the non-coastal cities picked, but there is nothing in the Midwest, the Great Lakes region, or the west other than the coastal cities. Minneapolis, Chicago, Nashville and Minneapolis were among the cities cut. Add Denver, St Louis, Columbus and Cincinnati as cities that might be considered.

When one breaks this down across 16 venues, it’s not that big a lift to move any single site with this much lead time. FIFA has a 40,000 seat minimum on stadium size. That is a very low bar in the U.S. Beyond that, we’re talking a 40-70,000 size crowd, so it’s equivalent to a well attended D1 college or pro football game. Notre Dame, Michigan, Penn State or The Ohio State University could do this without batting an eye.

I think I’m more cynical than you are on this one. (I’m sure you beat me on that score often enough ....) Trump sued CBS for $20 billion and settled for $16 million? Right. That might conceivably cover his legal fees. CBS cut a “go away” check to settle something that could have dragged on for years. Big corporations and insurance companies pay off the bottom feeding trial lawyers like this all the time; it’s what keeps the shysters in business. Trump took the offer and will parade it as vindication.

That’s all fair enough, but my guess is still that David Ellison called up Shari Redstone and asked her why this mess was still stinking up the deal. David Ellison is the big money guy here. He’s cleaning house. He’s happy to throw the reputations of people at CBS News under the bus. That’s no skin off his back. When the merger is done, there’s a lot more trash he’ll probably send to the dump as well.

The U.S. news racket has become incredibly corrupt and needs its sails trimmed. I’m happy to see CBS take a hit for obviously sandbagging Trump in its coverage. But as to your comment that CBS News didn’t care about any of this and was happy to sabotage the merger ... that reinforces my point, which is that CBS News wasn’t making the decisions, and hadn’t been doing so for some time. The big bosses cracked the whip.

I can’t keep track of the players on this. Sharri Redstone and David Ellison have been trying for years now to finalize the Paramount-Skydance sale/merger. Getting that done requires taking out any trash left over from the legacy messes in any of the operating divisions. I imagine the order came down to the flunkies at CBS and Paramount Global to settle this case by hook or crook, just do it at a price that doesn’t scupper the sale.

I doubt that the merits of the case had much to do with the settlement. I imagine Trump has an opinion on the merger, since he has opinions on myriad things, including many that are none of his business but into which he inserts himself anyhow. If Trump was willing to settle for relative chump change, my guess is that he wants the merger to go through. He may just be happy to see CBS News, a small cog in a much larger machine, get taken over yet again and turned into an even smaller cog in a much bigger machine.

What David Ellison plans to do with it, I have no idea. My guess would be that he wants to spin off and dump poorly performing units; for all I know, he’ll sell CBS News to CNN, which Warner Bros Discovery is dumping over in another silo.

Huh? Doesn’t everybody buy a car to shout to the world that they’re mentally ill and sexually confused?

For a guy who is supposed to be smart, Elon can be pretty stupid at times. Splitting the vote and electing socialists/democrats is not a very good strategy.

Look at the left. For many decades, hard left and self-styled revolutionary parties formed and disappeared continuously on the left. They were all tiny, and they all expended 99 percent of their energy bickering amongst themselves over who would lead the revolution. They were ruthless about purging each other and accomplished nothing except controlling the editorial line of factional magazines with no readership. They were every bit as bad and self-defeating as the Libertarians.

At the same time, responsible people in the Democratic Party acted as gatekeepers to keep the communists out of positions of influence in the party. There was always some infiltration, and the battle between the communist and anti-communist left is one of the fascinating stories of the 1920’s-60’s period. That’s how Ronald Reagan, among many others, got red pilled.

Beginning in the 1960’s, the New Left — basically a fundamentalist revival group on the communist left — said, “Enough! We cannot progress if we have to take blood oaths to the Soviet Union, follow every twist and turn of the Moscow line, and lie endlessly about the crimes of Lenin and Stalin. What happened in Russia was a betrayal of communism, and we need to repudiate it and start over.” It was structurally similar to Martin Luther, John Calvin and the other early protestants repudiating a papacy and hierarchy that had grown corrupt.

From that point forward, the hard left moved decisively into the democratic party, which had itself gone Copperhead over Vietnam and had its guard down. It has now taken over the party. The anti-communist liberals largely became neoconservatives and joined the Reagan coalition, and huge numbers of traditional working class democrats started complaining that the party had left them. They started voting Republican. They are now a core part of the Trump base, but the movement started back in the 60’s.

The thing is, Elon needs to fight this battle in a way that unites, not divides, the right. Participate in primaries. Develop a branded wing within the Republican Party, or operate in a clearly fusionist way. The details will vary with state law, but the point is to reject Libertarian Disease, which is a defect of ego (Elon Musk, an ego problem? Donald Trump, an ego problem? ‘Nuff said.) Don’t split the vote and elect the maximum enemy.

Elon should run for the Senate, seeking to run on more than one line if he does form a third party. Let him stand up in town meetings and defend his tax plans and proposed entitlement reforms. Ronald Reagan did this. Newt Gingrich and the Contract With American Republicans did this. George W. Bush did this. They all understood the need to win elections. If he forms a third party, insist on an agreement with the Republican candidate(s) that they will support each other in the general election, uniting behind whoever has the most votes. As always, invite the Libertarians to join in, although we know most of the Libertarians won’t; they would rather prance about with their ritual purity dances, admire themselves in the mirror like good little Pharisees, and flip close elections to the dems because that makes them feel relevant.

And that’s the way Musk thinks. It’s the way Trump thinks as well. Unfortunately.

I think current Mexican thinking runs more along the lines of creating a dominant hispanic majority in the U.S. and then moving to create a North American union.

Where to locate the capitol is a very secondary question.

The culture would be hispanic. The language would be Spanish. The political system would be a corrupt one party state systematically looting the productive classes to support the political class and its clients.

Synthetic DNA will still not be alive. It will have to be inserted into a living cell. Life comes from life.

This is gene editing/splicing on steroids. I don’t know what the state of play is currently with regard to human zygotes, but the obvious first tier issue would be a parent (of either sex) who carries the gene for some serious genetic condition. What are the ethics of screening egg or sperm cells prior to fertilization to select one that doesn’t carry the problem gene(s)? Or editing a defective gene and using the “corrected” sperm or egg for fertilization? Are we really morally obligated to NOT correct for conditions like cystic fibrosis or Fanconi’s Anemia if we can edit them out PRIOR to fertilization?

We already have wide acceptance of genetic screening of embryos for multiple conditions, with abortion being the dominant choice in response to a variety of conditions (e.g. Downs Syndrome).

This is not the same thing as creating a highly artificial designer baby selected with multiple desirable traits engineered in. Nor is it the same thing as splicing in genetic coding from other people. It would be a matter of editing out a specific piece of defective coding using a person’s own genetic material. Nor is it the same thing as human cloning, although I would not be surprised if that isn’t being done in secret.

Of course, the next step would be ....

My prediction is that this kind of genetic editing will be embraced by the very same luddites who reject GMO corn, because a precisely controlled edit to make a corn plant toxic to common pests is somehow an offense against Gaia. But these very same people will clamor for the genetic editing of their own children in the hunt to produce perfect babies.

This kind of thing is why the Muslims are confident of winning.

Ditto. Per the”news” reports, each side wins this war at least three times in each news cycle.

Oh well.

Bottom line, Putin started this thinking Ukraine wouldn’t fight. Ot that, at worst, the great Russian army would roll over the Ukrainians in a couple of days.

Oopsie.

For the U.S., the one solid upside is that we are going to save a lot of money on tank production going forward.