Free Republic

I had a visitor from the East Coast, a few weeks ago, and I drove her around the San Fernando Valley to show her what a dismal ----hole it is. But I kept missing all the encampment sites and pirate RV villages, which move around, so we ended up driving around the Encino hills, where my plan to show a visitor how disgusting Los Angeles has become led to the visitor saying that oh my goodness, this is such a pretty neighborhood. I apologized for the absence of squalor. There’s a lot of that going around. A bunch of recent...

Wrong, wrong, wrong. And psychologically interesting, as an examination of ideological priors. But mostly wrong. The New York Times has an answer to the question raised by the fires in Los Angeles, and, uh. So here’s how they frame the problem: The city of Los Angeles, with a population of 3.8 million, is one of 88 different cities that make up the county of Los Angeles. That county, with a population of 9.6 million spread across 4,751 square miles stretching inland from the Pacific Ocean, is controlled by a five-person board of supervisors, each one representing 1.9 million people. Each...

They can’t fight back, because they don’t know what happened, they don’t know what’s happening, and they don’t know what will happen. One mildly interesting counterexample at the end, but wait for it. Watching anti-Trumper reactions to the election, I can only refer again to the “bag of sand” scene in The 40 Year-Old Virgin, where the weird new guy’s co-workers figure out he’s never been with a woman because he flails around helplessly while trying to describe the experience. Tom Nichols at poker night: Oh, yeah, man, America’s so hot, it’s like a…bag of sand. There’s an entire industry...

First, the President of the United States left California on Sunday after a week of vacation time near Santa Barbara, and returned to… yes, his beach house in Delaware, where the NOTAMs suggest that he plans to spend nine days. His last trip to the beach house in Delaware? Two weeks ago. Taking bets on how many days Joe Biden sleeps in the White House between now and January 20. “The President of the United States.” Second, here’s a headline in a British newspaper that makes a disturbingly plausible argument: Read this well-written opinion piece, which carefully lays out the...

This book is an alarm. It’s a sign that danger is close, and that it’s serious. That’s not how the author meant it. Mark Pomerantz published People vs. Donald Trump last year to describe his role as a special assistant district attorney in Manhattan, trying to prosecute the former president, and to complain about an initial decision in the DA’s office not to file charges. I didn’t notice it until I saw Pomerantz taking the fifth over and over again in response to recent questions about his behavior during the investigation, but I bought a copy this week — a...