Althouse: Sunrise – 6:55, 7:13, 7:18.

March 12, 2025

Sunrise – 6:55, 7:13, 7:18.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

54 comments:

john mosby said...: So far in this term, I don't believe Trump has started any action on the Freedom Cities initiative, which he talked about during the campaign. I don't think he has said a single word about it since being sworn in.

Is he waiting until he gets some good near-fatal blows in at the regulatory state, to make it easier to stand up the cities? And/or maybe he wants to get a lot of invaders out, because they would be the first ones to flock to unregulated territory?

Or has he forgotten about it?

JSM; 3/12/25, 8:24 PM
rehajm said...: Want to soak the rich Bernie? Tax donations to college endowments…; 3/12/25, 8:36 PM
Lem Vibe Banditory said...: Nice pics.; 3/12/25, 8:49 PM
Eva Marie said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 3/12/25, 8:58 PM
Eva Marie said...: Grok knows moods.
I asked Grok to write a happy based on the theme "today is the first day of the rest of my life."

Happy Poem
Today’s the start, a golden gleam,
The first of days in a waking dream.
With every step, my heart takes flight,
The rest of life shines pure and bright.

Then I asked for a Sad Poem on the same theme:
Today begins, a heavy sigh,
The first of days I can’t deny.
A shadowed road, where hope feels thin,
The rest of life, I stumble in.

Sadder Poem, please:
Today creeps in, a muted cry,
The first of days I dread to try.
A hollow path, where shadows cling,
The rest of life, a broken wing.

Even Sadder Poem:
Today drags on, a whispered moan,
The first of days, I’m lost, alone.
A barren trail, where tears decay,
The rest of life, a grave’s delay.

I didn’t want to leave Grok in such a miserable state so I asked for a poem with a sense of contentment:
Today unfolds, a gentle start,
The first of days to ease my heart.
A steady road, with peace in view,
The rest of life, a calm anew.; 3/12/25, 9:01 PM
Big Mike said...: I see that some (currently unknown) lefty spray painted "F*** Trump Long Live Ukraine" on a Tesla charging station in North Charleston, SC, then tried to destroy a bank of charging stations using Molotov cocktails made from beer bottles. Except he screwed up and set himself on fire instead.

Perhaps he used Bud Lite bottles, which might explain what went wrong.; 3/12/25, 9:03 PM
Peachy said...: Leftist Judges - providing their own Constitutional Crisis.; 3/12/25, 9:08 PM
Peachy said...: Big Mike -9:03
American democratic terrorists - smell like Islamic terrorists.; 3/12/25, 9:09 PM
Peachy said...: Lab leak time-line for birdflu All under Crook Joe. I smell nasty sewer rats.; 3/12/25, 9:13 PM
Lem Vibe Banditory said...: During the president Biden's term, nobody worked harder than Biden's autopen.; 3/12/25, 9:16 PM
john burger said...: Cool Vapor Trails.

jvb; 3/12/25, 9:18 PM
Lem Vibe Banditory said...: Bubbling rumors is that the Obamas marriage is crumbling.; 3/12/25, 10:01 PM
rrsafety said...: Dylan’s version of Blue Moon from his Self Portrait album is outstanding. A nice surprise.; 3/12/25, 10:10 PM
DINKY DAU 45 said...: Shut it down , a favorite play of the trumpers and the king and his court already shutting it down.WHo gives a flying fuk who gets the blame.Shut the mother down. As the freedom caucus guys never vote for a CR. So shut it down...Let's just keep the excitement going g with a republican favorite move! BIG BALLS DO IT!; 3/12/25, 10:59 PM
HistoryDoc said...: One of the interesting things I've learned recently is that all the NGO's that I thought were funded by lefty billionaires, were actually funded by the government via USAID and other Departments.

Turns out that the billionaire donor class is actually kind of stingy, prefer to look like they are generous funders, but instead prefer to use tax-payer money to fund these NGOs, and not sustain them with their own bankroll.; 3/12/25, 11:12 PM
Original Mike said...: "Turns out that the billionaire donor class is actually kind of stingy, prefer to look like they are generous funders, but instead prefer to use tax-payer money to fund these NGOs, and not sustain them with their own bankroll."

Leverage. Spend a few million, get a few billion.

What's unfortunate is that even if Trump can shut down this gravy train, it'll just be back with the next democrat administration.; 3/12/25, 11:21 PM
Jupiter said...: Around 4:00 this morning, while somewhere between sleep and waking, I realized that Dirac's famous analyses of the effect of the four-potential on the wave function failed to distinguish between the effect on the basis functions and the effect on the wave packet. Mathematically, you can do it either way. But putting it on the basis functions contradicts the fundamental assumption of his transformation theory. And putting it on the packet requires a rather different analysis than the one he developed.
Dirac was the subtlest, and the most perplexing, and the most obtuse, thinker of the 20th century. Reading his papers is like watching a magician pull a skyscraper out of the back of a Volkswagen. When he starts, it is impossible to guess where he is headed. When he has finished, the mind recoils from his conclusions. Yet there is no point at which a cogent objection can be raised.
It astonishes me to realize that our lives overlapped by more than thirty years, yet by the time he died I had barely begun to engage his thought.; 3/12/25, 11:56 PM
wendybar said...: Barry J Collins
@BJCollins131
·
Follow
Replying to @WesternLensman
Democrats are always “progressive” until you disagree with them. Then they become “regressive” - regressing right back into the emotionally fueled irrational animals that they really are. You cannot have a rational conversation with a leftist.
10:42 PM · Mar 12, 2025; 3/13/25, 1:56 AM
Lem Vibe Banditory said...: If the democrats vote to shutdown the government, Trump’s OMB will be put in charge of the government to trim it down as much as Trump may please. If they vote not to shut it down, they will vote for a CR that funds DOGE and ICE as Trump has made it. They are dammed if they do and dammed if they don’t. It’s a beautiful thing.; 3/13/25, 2:00 AM
Original Mike said...: "Elections have consequences".; 3/13/25, 2:05 AM
Original Mike said...: "If the democrats vote to shutdown the government, Trump’s OMB will be put in charge of the government to trim it down as much as Trump may please."

If Congress isn't going to provide the funds, he has to trim spending, I guess. I don't understand what the democrats think they're doing.; 3/13/25, 2:50 AM
wendybar said...: John Stewart Leibowitz can't be this clueless. If he is, then there is something DEFINITELY wrong with the Progressive side of the aisle where they are blind and deaf....and you may as well add DUMB too....
Chief Trumpster

@ChiefTrumpster
·
Follow
Jon Stewart is thiiiiis close to getting it…😂
https://x.com/ChiefTrumpster/status/1899575113772929466; 3/13/25, 3:00 AM
Original Mike said...: "John Stewart Leibowitz can't be this clueless."

I didn't know what to make of that. Is he mocking the premise?; 3/13/25, 3:31 AM
wendybar said...: “Imagine telling someone who was born in a dictatorship that Donald Trump is a dictator…If anyone was born in a dictatorship, or gone through a dictatorship, hears what you’re saying or sees what you’re saying, I guarantee they are cracking up right now. …..the privileged Americans have no idea, they’re cosplaying oppression and they don’t even know the first thing about being oppressed.”

https://x.com/TheEXECUTlONER_/status/1899856494432334056; 3/13/25, 4:15 AM
wendybar said...: 50 Democrats send out the same exact tweet. It's almost like they are robots or something....

@amuse
@amuse

NARRATIVE: The Democrats keep proving they are being controlled by a small handful of powerful people that literally put words in their mouths. Here 50:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1900067308577702219; 3/13/25, 4:18 AM
Big Mike said...: “Imagine telling someone who was born in a dictatorship that Donald Trump is a dictator…”

@wendybar, you don’t have to imagine it. Just follow Sarah Hoyt’s blog; AccordingtoHoyt.; 3/13/25, 4:51 AM
Big Mike said...: Preliminary reports have been released for both the Philadelphia and Potomac River crashes. There s not much to say yet about Philadelphia. The cockpit voice recorder was recovered, buried deep underground, but apparently it has been broken for years and never repaired. The pilots had been in communication with a controller, but gave no distress call. The plane clipped a sign just before it crashed into the ground so investigators have been able to calculate how steep the angle of impact was.

The scary thing about the collusion of an Army helicopter and a passsenger jet over the Potomac River is that close calls and near misses between jets landing at Reagan National Airport and helicopters following the path over Washington called Route 4 have averaged one a month for years. And no one thought to rethink the routing of military helicopters flying southbound from the city in the grounds that sooner or later it wouldn’t just be a near miss but an actual collision??? It turns out that even if the Blackhawk had been below 200 feet, as required, it would have missed the CRJ trying to land on Runway 33 by just 75 feet. For the time being Route 4 will be closed to helicopters when certain runways are in use at the airport.

I was a road warrior for my employer for many years and I cannot tell you how many times business travel took me into and out of that airport. Scary.; 3/13/25, 5:17 AM
rehajm said...: In the case of a ‘government shutdown’ what does trim it down mean? Would the administration gain additional powers that allow them to make permanent changes to structure and agencies? That would be the only leverage…; 3/13/25, 6:08 AM
Dave Begley said...: Omaha metro is now over 1,000,000.; 3/13/25, 6:09 AM
gadfly said...: john mosby: Trump brought up the subject of Freedom Cities in 2023, likely because he considered that he could make money from converting closed military bases. Now he has found easier ways to steal.

As for new cities, Lowry AFB east of Denver is being bought up for development, but the building surge has cooled off along the Front Range, where 1400 housing units are being built in Sterling Ranch, 20 miles south of Denver.

Unfortunately, the foothills of the Front Range are characterized by highly expansive clay soils. The soils of the Front Range contain high levels of bentonite and other expansive minerals, which cause the soil to swell dramatically when wet and shrink when dry. So the rural community of unincorporated Sterling Ranch has few schools, medical facilities, and one small remote shopping area. At the same time, homeowners fight the shifting ground and excessive rules from their controlling property association. Unkept promises of mountain views and the threat of 600 apartments have the citizenry up in arms.; 3/13/25, 6:12 AM
rehajm said...: Connecticut woman held stepson captive for 20 years The crucifix is a nice touch…; 3/13/25, 6:12 AM
mezzrow said...: The most satisfying thing I have read in the past few weeks is the ruling against Michael Mann in the Steyn/Simberg libel trial. Remember when the guilty verdict supporting Mann dropped on this to our astonishment? Followed shortly by the verdict against Trump in the NY state lawfare scam?

How the worm has turned. As we suspected, they were cheating the whole time.; 3/13/25, 6:24 AM
Christopher B said...: @mezzrow, reading those reports is a thing of beauty. There must be some statutory limit to the reduction in the award because the opinion seems to indicate the court would have reduced it to the token $1 if they could have. At any rate Mann is on the hook for at least a half million more to NR than he received. I hope the court can claw back some of the money his lawyers got in the form of sanctions.; 3/13/25, 6:49 AM
Old and slow said...: Mann still put Steyn though many years of expensive and time consuming legal hell at no cost to himself. He won't be paying his own legal bills. You can be sure that the American taxpayer has been footing the bills via a network of NGOs. I think the left would largely count this whole process as a win. It worked didn't it?; 3/13/25, 6:50 AM
boatbuilder said...: Are those Black Swans?; 3/13/25, 7:57 AM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Logical. - https://canadafreepress.com/article/its-not-widely-known-but-over-half-of-columba-universitys-enrollment-is-now-foreign-students; 3/13/25, 8:15 AM
Jaq said...: I think Ukraine played Rubio and Trump in these latest negotiations. They added a demand that Putin "return" children who were "forced" to go to Russia during the war. You know, the Russian speaking children who lived in the Russian speaking part of The Ukraine who were orphaned by Ukrainian shelling and rocket attacks. You know the ones, the ones who Russia said they would happily return to relatives in Ukraine who came in person and provided proof of the relationship, the ones where the Russians would not accept on-line "proof" from potential child traffickers in order to send children back. A few such children were sent to Ukraine when proof of relationship was provided, which complies with international law. Well, under the heading of "no good deed goes unpunished" the Ukrainians took this humanitarian action by Russia and painted it as a "war crime" and got an ICC warrant against Putin over it, even though it plainly wasn't and even though the ICC had no jurisdiction. So planting that in the conditions of the "cease fire" was such a fuck you to Putin that it absolutely guaranteed that it would be rejected out of hand, and Ukraine got their weapons flow and intel flow back while pretending to have accepted a "cease fire" which they knew would never happen.

Zelensky is playing this the same way Tsar Alexander played Napoleon in War and Peace. The difference is that Napoleon's invasion of Russia was not an existential war for France, so Napoleon could simply walk away.; 3/13/25, 8:23 AM
Kakistocracy said...: "Musk’s hyperactive efficiency drive failed to prevent US federal spending rising to a record $603bn last month, new Treasury data has revealed, highlighting the Trump administration’s difficulty in drastically cutting the size of government." ~ FT

"hyperactive efficiency drive"
It’s an ideological purge. “Efficiency” is a smokescreen.

If the current majority would be forced to choose between the vow of upholding the constitution and the president, they would choose the president regardless of consequences.

Lying about the fiscal crisis is only one facet of that.
But having the buffoon on ketamine running around making a joke of American governance while adding these costs is surely summing it up for the rest of the world.

Never mistake action for results.; 3/13/25, 8:39 AM
Aggie said...: ""John Stewart Leibowitz can't be this clueless."
"

John Stewart is being deliberately obtuse to augment the irony of what he's pretending not to get. He's fully aware, as is the woman, whom you'll notice is refraining from saying anything, as she's enjoying the irony too. She's in on the shtick.

Stewart has commented before on the censorship and heavy-hand authoritarian stuff - he just can't use this kind of humor on his show, because too many people wouldn't get it- they're of the persuasion that endorses authoritarianism.; 3/13/25, 8:40 AM
planetgeo said...: One great thing about being right is that those on the left often emphasize how right you are whenever you disagree with them about anything that they say you are far right, or even extreme right. Thanks.; 3/13/25, 8:40 AM
Olson Johnson is right! said...: about whatever you like in the comments.; 3/13/25, 8:46 AM
mezzrow said...: "John Stewart Leibowitz can't be this clueless."

Maybe he's still coping with his Aunt Fawn's tragic death in a freak accident when in college in the '70s. It's as good an explanation as I can summon up right now.; 3/13/25, 8:59 AM
Peachy said...: The Left spent the past decade building a vast censorship enterprise. A shadowy network of NGOs, tech groups and governments working to censor the Left's enemies—not just in America, but across the West. Over the next four years, the GOP must expose + dismantle this system.; 3/13/25, 9:14 AM
Rocco said...: Kakistos the Kakiposter said...
"Musk’s hyperactive efficiency drive failed to prevent US federal spending rising to a record $603bn last month, new Treasury data has revealed”

Thanks for reminding us there’s plenty more to be done. GO ELON, GO!! (And every other department head, too).

"If the current majority would be forced to choose between the vow of upholding the constitution and the president…”

Fortunately in this case it is a BOTH AND situation.; 3/13/25, 9:22 AM
Peachy said...: Good news for Democrats:
"So a mediocre mayor of a small Indiana city who was elevated to Secretary of Transportation because he liked choo choo trains and also is gay has now announced he will not run for Senate from a place he never really lived so he can run for president. Dems are not in good shape."
-Ben Shapiro; 3/13/25, 9:26 AM
Peachy said...: In other news- The democrat Party is still a Sewer.; 3/13/25, 9:29 AM
Peachy said...: "Secretary Linda McMahon
@EDSecMcMahon
President Trump’s goal is not to take away education, it’s to take the bureaucracy out of education.

It’s time to focus on what matters: ensuring our students are learning what they need to be successful."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The soros-left demand our children be emotionalized, traumatized, sexualized, radicalized dummies - for our grim state-run antifa-thug censorship molotov cocktail future.; 3/13/25, 9:32 AM
Iman said...: Kak is spreading his kakamine.

When Kak teh vile shitbird gets here
Ain’t nobody gonna want a dose

h/t Bob Dylan; 3/13/25, 9:40 AM
Iman said...: 🔥 😂

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1900050551767003636; 3/13/25, 9:43 AM
Narr said...: Almost 10a.m. CDT and no post from the Prof. Weird.

I hope all is well at Meadhouse.; 3/13/25, 9:48 AM
Aggie said...: "The cockpit voice recorder was recovered, buried deep underground, but apparently it has been broken for years and never repaired...."

That doesn't sound right, to me (not an expert). To be certified for airworthiness is not like getting an inspection sticker - the checklists and functionality tests are pretty exhaustive for aircraft, and also pretty frequent. You need them to take passengers and to get insurance and so on. I'm very surprised that a primary safety system could be neglected in this way, and get away with it. But as I recall, this was a Mexico-flagged and crewed charter? Most countries in the West use the FAA as their authority.; 3/13/25, 9:52 AM
Peachy said...: Gadfly,
Bentonite and expansive clay soils are all over Colorado.
Nothing new at all.
The requirement for dealing with the bentonite is proper engineering and caissons.

I've seen homes built in the 1950's-1970's with cracked open/shifted basement slabs that look like an earthquake hit. All due to expansive clay/bentonite.
Building codes in Colorado have modernized and adjusted ever since, and soils testing is always required - for new permits.
None of that has anything to do with Trump.; 3/13/25, 10:10 AM
Jaq said...: I don't get why you bother reading his posts, Peachy. He just comes here and posts stuff that flies on BlueSky, where anybody who might push back has already been banned, or he repeats anti-Trump propaganda he seems to read in the UK press, which is why I used to call him the Daily Starmer, except I can't even bother with him that much anymore.; 3/13/25, 10:27 AM
Peachy said...: Jaq - well that one was an easy one to bat. I do usually skip past most of the hive.; 3/13/25, 10:47 AM