Althouse

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• "It was a rowdy, frequently lawless brotherhood bound, in no particular order, by machismo, tattoos, winged death-head insignia, booze, dope, rides to nowhere..."
• "I once knew a man who saw what little had been achieved since independence in a land filled with people with the greatest potential for achievement, and yet they were poor."
• "It is very John Roberts to hold his last two opinions for the final day, one of which hands a win to the Biden administration and the other of which hands a big loss to the Biden administration."
• "The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants..."
• "I was interested to see that Hillary called Clarence Thomas a 'person of grievance.' That sounds like a phrase, whether newly minted or not, that Ann might be interested in discussing."
• There's already enough paranoia about bugging out and hunkering down — must we add prions?!
• I'm just noticing that the game The Floor Is Lava is indoor parkour.
• "The federal prosecutors working on the case watched [Cassidy Hutchinson's] appearance before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and were just as astonished..."

"It was a rowdy, frequently lawless brotherhood bound, in no particular order, by machismo, tattoos, winged death-head insignia, booze, dope, rides to nowhere..." Posted: 30 Jun 2022 09:14 AM PDT "... on thundering Harley-Davidson hogs and a lust for the unfettered freedom found on the open road. 'Discover your limits by exceeding them,' Mr. Barger urged. Woven into the Hells Angels history was a tradition of crime and violence — much of it involving Mr. Barger, a fact he boastfully acknowledged. He once referred to himself as belonging to a band of 'card-carrying felons.'... Mr. Barger's rough and anarchic manner belied a disciplined entrepreneurial streak. He promoted his renegade brand, carefully marketing Hells Angels-themed T-shirts, yo-yos, sunglasses and California wines. He registered trademarks on club logos and designs, and retained an intellectual property rights lawyer to sue poachers, a frequent occurrence.... In 1998, he moved from Oakland to suburban Phoenix.... He ran a motorcycle repair shop and mellowed in suburban life, doing yoga and continuing to lift weights... He kept riding the open road, thousands of miles a year.... What did his nonconformist life teach him? 'To become a real man.... you need to join the army first and then do some time in jail.'"  From "Sonny Barger, biker outlaw and founder of Hells Angels, dies at 83/For decades, he was the public face of a nationwide counterculture tribe of bearded, denim-clad road warriors memorialized in literature and film" (WaPo).

"I once knew a man who saw what little had been achieved since independence in a land filled with people with the greatest potential for achievement, and yet they were poor." Posted: 30 Jun 2022 08:53 AM PDT "But he got it done. Sometimes, with the needed support. Sometimes, without. So, will it be with his son. You will get no excuses from me." Said Ferdinand Marcos Jr., in his inaugural address, referring to his father. And... there to witness it all, Imelda Marcos, still alive and kicking — I say "kicking" to call attention to her feet, famously possessed of a multitude of shoes — at 92.  Marcos Jr. — AKA Bongbong — is quoted in "Imelda Marcos watches son 'Bongbong' sworn in as president of the Philippines/Ceremony marks return to power of Asia's most notorious political families" (London Times).  [I]t is unclear what a second Marcos government will mean in concrete terms. The prospect horrifies many of those who remember his father's reign, first as elected president, then as a ruthless dictator, from 1965 to 1986. Marcos Jr went into exile in Hawaii with his family. His father died in 1991 after being exposed as a kleptocrat who had plundered the state coffers of as much as $10 billion.

"It is very John Roberts to hold his last two opinions for the final day, one of which hands a win to the Biden administration and the other of which hands a big loss to the Biden administration." Posted: 30 Jun 2022 07:56 AM PDT  Writes James Romoser at SCOTUSblog. The Biden loss, discussed in the previous post, is West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.  The Biden win is Biden v. Texas. Here's the NYT write-up, by Adam Liptak: The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the Biden administration's efforts to end a Trump-era immigration program that forces asylum seekers arriving at the southwestern border to await approval in Mexico. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the court's three liberal members. Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with much of the chief justice's analysis. The challenged program, known commonly as Remain in Mexico and formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols, applies to people who left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the U.S. border....  Soon after he took office, President Biden sought to end the program. Texas and Missouri sued, and lower courts reinstated it, ruling that federal immigration laws require returning immigrants who arrive by land and who cannot be detained while their cases are heard. Since the Biden administration restarted the program in December, far fewer migrants have been enrolled than during the Trump era....

"The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants..." Posted: 30 Jun 2022 07:47 AM PDT "... dealing a blow to the Biden administration's efforts to address climate change. The vote was 6 to 3, with the court's three liberal justices in dissent, saying that the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of 'the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.'...  The implications of the ruling could extend well beyond environmental policy and further signal that the court's newly expanded conservative majority is deeply skeptical of the power of administrative agencies to address major issues facing the nation and the planet." Writes Adam Liptak in the NYT. The question before the justices in the new case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 20-1530, was whether the Clean Air Act allowed the E.P.A. to issue sweeping regulations across the power sector. More broadly, the court was asked to address whether Congress must "speak with particular clarity when it authorizes executive agencies to address major political and economic questions.["] The court has called this inquiry the "major questions doctrine."  From the majority opinion, written by the Chief Justice (citations omitted): The dissent criticizes us for "announc[ing] the arrival" of this major questions doctrine, and argues that [the cited precedents] simply followed our "ordinary method" of "normal statutory interpretation." But in what the dissent calls the "key case" in this area, Brown & Williamson, the Court could not have been clearer: "In extraordinary cases . . . there may be reason to hesitate" before accepting a reading of a statute that would, under more "ordinary" circumstances, be upheld. Or, as we put it more recently, we "typically greet" assertions of "extravagant statutory power over the national economy" with "skepticism." The dissent attempts to fit the analysis in these cases within routine statutory interpretation, but the bottom line—a requirement of "clear congressional authorization" —confirms that the approach under the major questions doctrine is distinct.  As for the major questions doctrine "label[]," it took hold because it refers to an identifiable body of law that has developed over a series of significant cases all addressing a particular and recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted. Scholars and jurists have recognized the common threads between those decisions. So have we.  Under our precedents, this is a major questions case....

"I was interested to see that Hillary called Clarence Thomas a 'person of grievance.' That sounds like a phrase, whether newly minted or not, that Ann might be interested in discussing." Posted: 30 Jun 2022 07:26 AM PDT Wrote Norpois, in a comment in last night's open thread. Is a "person of grievance" someone who overdoes their grievancing? as I think Hillary meant? More generally, aren't virtually ALL Hillary supporters "person of [some sort of] grievance"? I don't necessarily mean that in a condemnatory way. You could say, in a democracy, all political views are expressions of grievance. Is this a new phrase I've missed? Here's the video clip of Hillary: "I went to law school with him. He's been a person of grievance for as long as I've known him. Resentment, grievance, anger." I agree with Norpois that "person of grievance" sounds like a deliberate phrasing. The similarity to "person of color" seems non-accidental. She doesn't call him an "angry person of grievance" — though The Hill gives us that "quote" in its title for the video — but she says "anger" right after calling him a "person of grievance," so that feels as though it's wafting the stereotype "angry black man." Now, is Justice Thomas more of a "person of grievance" than the sort of person of color that Democrats expect to vote for Democrats? Perhaps what's bothering Hillary Clinton is that Thomas stands back from the ministrations that Democrats offer to aggrieved persons.  It makes me think of what Justice Thomas wrote at the beginning of his dissenting opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which found that a subtle enough approach to affirmative action does not violate Equal Protection: Frederick Douglass, speaking to a group of abolitionists almost 140 years ago, delivered a message lost on today's majority: "[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us… . I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! … And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury." What the Black Man Wants: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 26 January 1865, reprinted in 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 59, 68 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds. 1991) (emphasis in original).  Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators. We all have grievances. But what do we do with them? Do we center our life on grievance? Do we align with a political party that offers to help us — perhaps in election after election — and then wait and see what form that help takes and whether it actually helps? Or do we become skeptical — like Douglass — and say "Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!" Thomas has made his position clear. It's the argument for going right-wing. Is that grievance or a withdrawal from a life full of grievance? Hillary Clinton — a Democratic Party politician — wants to impugn him: A "person of grievance" seems like someone quite unpleasant. If you knew him as a schoolmate, you'd do that schoolkid shunning. And as an adult — an elderly adult! — you still want that old mean-girl action.

There's already enough paranoia about bugging out and hunkering down — must we add prions?! Posted: 30 Jun 2022 05:47 AM PDT I'm reading this advice about "go bags" and "stay bins" in The New York Times: No matter where you live, every home should have a "go bag" and a "stay bin." The go bag is what you grab when you have to leave the house in a hurry, whether to get to the emergency room or to evacuate because of a fire or a hurricane. The stay bin is a two-week stash of essentials to be used in case you have to hunker down at home without power, water or heat. In the event that you need to stay put instead of flee, keep a stay bin in your home. Use a large plastic bin or a similar container to set aside the essential items for a two-week prion.... Prion?! Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein.... It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold, but the abnormal three-dimensional structure is suspected of conferring infectious properties, collapsing nearby protein molecules into the same shape.... The hypothesized role of a protein as an infectious agent stands in contrast to all other known infectious agents such as viroids, viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites, all of which contain nucleic acids (DNA, RNA, or both). Prion isoforms of the prion protein (PrP), whose specific function is uncertain, are hypothesized as the cause of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs),[7] including scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle (commonly known as "mad cow disease") and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. All known prion diseases in mammals affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue; all are progressive, have no known effective treatment, and are always fatal. That's horrifying. I don't know what kind of "two-week prion" the NYT author has in mind, but I can't imagine anything I could put in a bin that would help. I'd mellowed out from the anxiety of the summer of 2020, when thoughts of bugging out or hunkering down loomed large, and I could have calmly contemplated go bags and stay bins, but then I confront a word that's been disturbing me lately: PRION. What did she mean to write? Prison? Anyway, prions have been disturbing me lately, ever since someone on our neighborhood email list said he had 25 pounds of venison that had tested positive for chronic wasting disease. He didn't want to eat it, but he thought someone might want it to feed to their dog. Is that a good idea?

I'm just noticing that the game The Floor Is Lava is indoor parkour. Posted: 30 Jun 2022 05:16 AM PDT I'd linked to a TikTok I called "A grown man plays the floor is lava." And tim maguire said: I'd like to see #4 on a Parkour course, whereas I hate to see him putting all his weight on things that were not designed to hold his weight. Left Bank is probably right--he's a renter. Yeah, I thought, The Floor Is Lava is indoor parkour. But that can't be a new insight. Googling, I found this: That made me think about something I just noticed on Instapundit: MAYBE — JUST MAYBE — MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT AND DON'T ALWAYS SHARE THE SAME DESIRES AND GOALS: Women are still less likely to aspire to leadership in business, despite decades of gender initiatives – we need to find out why. 25 Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green

"The federal prosecutors working on the case watched [Cassidy Hutchinson's] appearance before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and were just as astonished..." Posted: 30 Jun 2022 04:51 AM PDT ".. by her account of former President Donald J. Trump's increasingly desperate bid to hold on to power as other viewers. The panel did not provide them with videos or transcripts of her taped interviews with committee members beforehand, according to several officials, leaving them feeling blindsided. The testimony from the aide... came at a critical moment in parallel investigations that will soon converge, and possibly collide, as the committee wraps up a public inquiry geared for maximum political effect and the department intensifies a high-stakes investigation aimed at securing airtight convictions. Committee members have repeatedly suggested that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has not moved fast enough to follow up their investigative leads. But for reasons that are not entirely clear... members have resisted turning over hundreds of transcripts until they are done with their work...." From "Hutchinson Testimony Exposes Tensions Between Parallel Jan. 6 Inquiries/That the House panel did not provide the Justice Department with transcripts of Cassidy Hutchinson's interviews speaks to the panel's reluctance to turn over evidence." (NYT). Something doesn't fit together! The NYT says the reasons "are not entirely clear." That's putting it mildly!  I did put an ellipsis after that phrase, and I don't want to seem as though I'm withholding something insightful the reporters —  Glenn Thrush, Luke Broadwater and Michael S. Schmidt — might have said.  Here's their sketching out of the possibly reasons that may be lurking inside the unclarity: 1. "classic Washington bureaucratic territorialism," 2. "the department's unwillingness to share information," and 3. "the desire to stage-manage a successful public forum." Something's amiss. Let's brainstorm some less mushy reasons. I invite you to speculate about the motives and to put it as clearly as you can or as brutally as you wish.

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