Utopia, you are standing in it!

Quick thoughts on PBS’s Churchill’s Secret:

It’s June 23, 1953 and 78-year-old British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was entertaining Italian guests at Downing Street at an event for Italy’s Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi when he had a stroke. After passing out, Churchill’s son-in-law, Christopher Soames, the MP for Bedford finds that the left side of the PM’s mouth was left drooping. They made excuses and rushed the Italians out of the residence.

Eventually, his condition worsened and he lost sensation on one half of his body and his speech was nearly unintelligible. His successor-in-waiting, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, was also in grave health. He was in the United States, having surgery to correct a botched operation — his bile duct damaged during a gall-stone operation. Churchill was preparing to go to Bermuda to meet President Dwight Eisenhower for a summit before he was hit by this tragedy. Churchill’s Secret is the story about his remarkable fight to…

On the evening of June 16^th three Palestinian terrorists from a village near Ramallah carried out a combined attack in Jerusalem. Border Police officer Hadas Malka was critically wounded while responding to the incident and doctors were unable to save her life. In addition, four more people were wounded. While ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, Hamas rejected that claim:

“Early on Saturday morning, Hamas rejected IS’s claim of responsibility, saying the three belonged to Palestinian terrorist organizations.

“The claim by the Islamic State group is an attempt to muddy the waters,” said Sami Abou Zouhri, spokesman for the terrorist group which runs the Gaza strip.

The attack was carried out by “two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a third from Hamas,” he said.”

The BBC’s report on the attack currently appears on the BBC News website under the headline “Israeli policewoman…

Matthew Cobb assiduously scans Twitter, and of course he sends me the cat ones. Here’s the rescue of a kitten stuck in a Tesla bumper, tweeted by Elon Musk. When the kitten emerges, unhurt, you won’t believe how small an animal can make that much noise!

And from our Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll, who with his wife Jennifer Oullette recently adopted two kittens. Reading it you’d think he’s almost embarrassed to be a Big Softy about cats. It’s OKAY, Sean!

If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to a four hour video of Wednesday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on “the ideology behind violent extremism and potential tools the U.S. can use to counter it.”

Here are those involved, starting with the four who testified, including five Democratic Senators and two Republicans.

As an article in the Washington Postpointed out, and I’ve verified by watching much of the testimony, the women Democratic Senators largely ignored Hirsi Ali and Nomani in favor of the males, particularly Leiter.  The article gives tw**ts from some social media-ites who also noticed this. Here are a couple:

https://twitter.com/MohammadShouman/status/875056582236811268

I don’t think the behavior of those Democrats has anything to do with deference to men; rather, the they…

Whenever I debate my left-wing friends on tax policy, they routinely assert that taxes don’t matter.

• They argue that we don’t have to worry about the Laffer Curve because high tax rates don’t discourage taxable income.
• They argue that we don’t have to worry about double taxation because high tax rates don’t discourage saving and investment.
• They argue that we don’t need fundamental tax reform because tax burdens don’t have much impact on economic performance.
• They argue that we don’t have to worry about punitive marginal tax rates because such policies don’t discourage work.

It’s unclear, though, whether they really believe their own rhetoric.

After all, if taxes don’t affect economic behavior, then why are folks on the left so terrified of tax havens? Why are they so opposed to tax competition?

And why are they so anxious to defend loopholes such as the deduction for state and local…