The Loony Left

It is now Friday, and Uber still hasn’t paid me. They claim the bank details are wrong. (These would be the same details that have worked before.) I have re-entered them and now Uber has another week’s excuse. A reminder: This is about $162.68, which unless their cash flow, already backwards to begin with, has gone totally off the deep end backwards, is a hell of a lot more money to me than it is to them.


There is yet another new blog post, entitled “Calls for impeachment are the latest displays of the naturalistic fallacy and system justification. When people speak of the “Loony Left,” this is it, in action, even if for very different reasons than they had imagined when they coined the phrase. The Left has really gone off the deep end.


When I look at the satellite photos trying to make sense of the weather here, there’s just no sense to be made of it. It’s madness. Complete chaos.

One of my passengers told me he thought the National Weather Service was right about 80 percent of the time. If true, it’s a miracle. The complexity here is off the charts compared with anything I saw out west. Weather seemingly appears from nowhere.

And so far, I’d have to say the Weather Service has not, in fact, been doing so well. Yesterday’s forecast was for just your basic hot and muggy. No mention of thunderstorms.

By afternoon, that had changed to warnings of severe thunderstorms (which mostly passed to my north), strong winds (which did indeed materialize), and the possibility of one-inch hail or quarter-size hail, depending on when you looked. Last night a thunderstorm rolled in with the craziest lightning I had ever seen.

And no, it’s not like I’ve never seen lightning before. I lived here for a couple years as a kid, spent a couple summers at camp in the Colorado Rockies, and lived for about three years in Reno, Nevada.

In general, the weather has been cooler than people expect. A common refrain: “When’s it gonna warm up?”


Currency

I can’t say it’s a lie though I think it is: To hear him tell it, Steven Mnuchin is focused on improving counterfeiting resistance on the $10 and $50 bills and simply deferring the $20 that Harriet Tubman had been selected for.[1]

I’ve handled a lot of cash over the years: At least in part due to the ubiquity of $20 bills dispensed by automated teller machines (ATMs), the $20 is far more commonly seen than $10’s or $50’s. So one could rationalize this by suggesting that it would be prudent to test new counterfeiting features on less commonly used bills. One might also note that the $10 and $50 bills aren’t being redesigned with a new honoree’s portrait.

One can as easily argue that if one is indeed concerned about counterfeiting, the $20 is much, much more urgent.

I don’t know how to resolve that particular question and, to be honest, am not that concerned about doing so. Because I doubt the veracity of the counterfeiting excuse in the first place.

James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: Trump administration’s spurning of Harriet Tubman opens a new front in the monument wars,” Washington Post, May 23, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/05/23/daily-202-trump-administration-s-spurning-of-harriet-tubman-opens-a-new-front-in-the-monument-wars/5ce5834a1ad2e52231e8e771/


Brexit

At long last, Theresa May is stepping down. If this “solves” anything, it will be that a hard Brexit is even more likely than before.[2]

Elizabeth Piper, William James, and Kylie MacLellan, “Tearful May resigns, paving way for Brexit confrontation with EU,” Reuters, May 24, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-may/tearful-may-resigns-paving-way-for-brexit-confrontation-with-eu-idUSKCN1SU0UF


Donald Trump

I had already awarded round 4 to Nancy Pelosi just on demeanor; Stephen Collinson articulates all that, but goes a step farther to explain how Pelosi is able to play Donald Trump’s narcissism to her advantage in fending off idiotic[3] calls for impeachment.[4] It has to be said: Pelosi is smart in how she’s handling Trump—and in pretty much the very ways I expected her to be.[5]

That score, again, is Pelosi with 3 won rounds, zero lost, one draw (3-0-1). Round five might be beginning with William Barr’s newly awarded power to selectively declassify information on the origins of the Robert Mueller probe[6] and many are already rushing to judgment. But there’s a time when one has to bow to experience, which Pelosi and many House Democrats have in abundance. The round isn’t over until it’s over. Let it play.

Aaron Blake, “Trump just gave William Barr carte blanche to declassify information. What could go wrong?” Washington Post, May 24, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/24/trump-just-gave-william-barr-carte-blanche-declassify-information-what-could-go-wrong/

Stephen Collinson, “Donald Trump falls for Nancy Pelosi’s trap,” CNN, May 24, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/24/politics/donald-trump-nancy-pelosi-democrats-republicans/index.html


  1. [1]James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: Trump administration’s spurning of Harriet Tubman opens a new front in the monument wars,” Washington Post, May 23, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/05/23/daily-202-trump-administration-s-spurning-of-harriet-tubman-opens-a-new-front-in-the-monument-wars/5ce5834a1ad2e52231e8e771/
  2. [2]Elizabeth Piper, William James, and Kylie MacLellan, “Tearful May resigns, paving way for Brexit confrontation with EU,” Reuters, May 24, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-may/tearful-may-resigns-paving-way-for-brexit-confrontation-with-eu-idUSKCN1SU0UF
  3. [3]David Benfell, “Why Nancy Pelosi is right about impeachment,” Not Housebroken, May 22, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/05/22/why-nancy-pelosi-is-right-about-impeachment/; David Benfell, “Calls for impeachment are the latest displays of the naturalistic fallacy and system justification,” Not Housebroken, May 23, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/05/23/calls-for-impeachment-are-the-latest-displays-of-the-naturalistic-fallacy-and-system-justification/
  4. [4]Stephen Collinson, “Donald Trump falls for Nancy Pelosi’s trap,” CNN, May 24, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/24/politics/donald-trump-nancy-pelosi-democrats-republicans/index.html
  5. [5]David Benfell, “It might actually be a good thing that Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House right now,” Not Housebroken, January 12, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/01/12/it-might-actually-be-a-good-thing-that-nancy-pelosi-is-speaker-of-the-house-right-now/
  6. [6]Aaron Blake, “Trump just gave William Barr carte blanche to declassify information. What could go wrong?” Washington Post, May 24, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/24/trump-just-gave-william-barr-carte-blanche-declassify-information-what-could-go-wrong/

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