Somehow, I don't trust my liberty to this man and his friends (UPDATED)

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Berkeley Law School Dean Tells MSNBC It’s Time To Scrap Constitution

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, called for a new constitution Friday, claiming that failing to make changes would cause the U.S. to “drift toward authoritarianism.”

Chemerinsky appeared on “Morning Joe” to discuss “increasingly problematic” constitutional provisions that he believed were “undermining democracy.” Chemerinsky cited the equal representation of states in the U.S. Senate and lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices as provisions that could bring about secession during the interview that promoted his new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”

“Choices that were made in adapting the Constitution have come to haunt us,” Chemerinsky told “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist. “The Electoral College increasingly is choosing the president who lost the popular vote. Two senators per state is undermining democracy. In the last session of Congress, there were 50 Democratic senators and 50 Republican senators, but the 50 Democratic senators represented 42 million people.”

… “Isn’t it absurd that we’re governed in 2024 by a Constitution written in 1787 for a small agrarian, slave-owning society? …. I do think it’s time to begin thinking of a constitution for the 21st century rather than be governed by the one from the 18th century.”

Madison and Hamilton and the other men at the constitutional convention were not some ragtag collection of slave-owning, farmers; the leaders, at least, knew and drew on 2,400 years of history; they were conversant with philosophers from Plato to Hume to Locke to Adam Smith, and also knew, because they’d studied them, the histories of dozens — hundreds — of governments of various forms, and used that knowledge to frame a constitution for the new country they were forming.

One small example is the electoral college, and the bicameral structure of our legislative branch that Dean Wormser so despises: that division was the product of a deliberate compromise between the smaller and the larger, more populous states: proportional representation in the House of Representatives, equal representation of the states in the Senate. Today’s liberals hate it, because it deprives the coastal blue states of total power. Some would see that as a feature, not a bug.

The real point here is that this dean and his fellow conventioneers will have no history of civilization to rely on when planning their new utopia because they’ve rejected and erased it. They want a new start, a building of a new society, one that no doubt will be based on Marxist ideas. And because they’ve rejected any concept of learning from the past, they won’t be troubled by any lessons that could otherwise be drawn from knowing how every one of those Marxist governments turned out.

Annie get your gun. ]

UPDATE: I just ran across this picture — funny.

Well, it's worked like a charm in the US with gun control, so why not knives?

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Ed Driscoll:

THIS WILL END WELL: Germany Vows ‘Knife Control’ After ISIS Refugee Slashes Throats at Diversity Festival.

  • After laying a white rose at the site of the Diversity Festival slashing that left three dead and eight wounded, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised rapid action would be taken against knives.

  • Right now, people in Germany can carry knives up to 4.7 inches long. The law will be modified so that they can only carry knives up to 2.4 inches long. No one appears to have considered the possibility that Muslim terrorists on the way to killing as many infidels as possible might violate the law and carry a concealed knife of 4 inches or longer. Such thoughts are unthinkable.*

  • There were 13,844 “knife crime” incidents in Germany in 2023, which the authorities are blaming on the existence of knives and not the perpetrators, who are reportedly mostly young Muslim men.

  • But locating the source of the problem is probably “not a very helpful insight,” In the UK, people sharing such insights are being locked up even as Islamic terrorists are being freed.

“Knife control” headlines were rampant in the UK circa 2018. The policy worked about as well you’d expect: Britain’s Knife Control Is A Bad, Real-Life Parody Of Gun Control.

* A tacit reminder that integration of Muslim immigrants in German society may not be going very well:

FWIW: A fact that America’s gun control zealots and the flying monkeys of the press rarely mention is the race of these murderers: black gangbangers. It’s pretty safe bet that almost all of them have criminal records that would bar them, under both state and federal laws, from even possessing a gun, let alone shooting it at someone. Many states have mandatory-minimum sentences for illegal possession of a firearm — none of them enforce it, because that would be racist.

The anti-gun organization Everytown has some interesting statistics on gun violence and the people and the places where it flourishes:

(Unrelated, sort of, but here’s another of their statistics: notice the percentage of deaths attributed to the police.)

One step forward, two steps back (well, four, eventually)

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1 Stepping Stone Lane, $2,587,500 on $2.650 million asked. There’s a curious price history here, because the house was initially listed at $2.650 last April 1st, reported under contract three days later on the 3rd, then reappeared as active on April 17th, marked up to $2.8, with three price reductions thereafter, before this final price was agreed to.

I haven’t confirmed this with listing agent Sally Maloney, but I’d guess that what happened was that the house received multiple offers when it was first listed, the highest — probably $2.8 or $2.7ish — was accepted, and when that fell though, the perfectly logical assumption was made that the high interest justified a higher asking price. But it didn’t work out that way, which sometimes happens.

Again, Sally didn’t tell me this, and my speculations may be entirely unfounded, but I’ve seen this happen before; it’s a curious phenomenon.

In any event, it’s now sold, and at a pretty good price, just not the one hoped for.

San Diego law enforcement: puddles of urine, piles of poop, and used needles on the sidewalk, or soap bubbles in the park: guess who gets ticketed for littering?

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Aww, you peeked!

California officials ticket the 'Bubble Pirate,’ an artist and Navy veteran, for 'fluid littering'

A Navy veteran in California has been entertaining the local community with his creative bubble performances for over 10 years.

But Sandy Snakenberg, known as the "Bubble Pirate," was donning his pirate costume and performing his usual bubble show at La Jolla Cove in San Diego last week when he was issued a ticket by park officials, he told Fox News Digital. 

The ticket alleges that Snakenberg, 63, violated San Diego’s municipal code against littering due to the fluid from his bubbles.

Snakenberg said in a phone interview that he asked the park ranger to note that the liquid was from bubbles, but the officer did not do so, he said.

The ticket mandates that Snakenberg appear in court in October.

No-Go Zones bring a touch of Paris and Malmo to the U.S.

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The Washington Examiner provides background:

What is Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang running amok in Colorado?

Venezuela‘s largest criminal gang, Tren de Aragua, is wreaking havoc in Colorado, driving national attention.

The group revolutionized crime in Venezuela and across Latin America, in the words of author Ronna Risquez, running the country from prisons and extending its reach across the Western Hemisphere. In several areas, the gang has taken complete control, usurping government authority.

One unique feature of the group is its origins as a prison gang — the entire gang was run out of the Tocoron prison, which, prior to its storming by the Venezuelan army in 2023, had been turned into a luxury palace replete with swimming pools, a baseball field, and a zoo. Before the raids, more than half of the country’s prisons were controlled by gangs, the New York Times reported.

The leader of Tren de Aragua, Héctor “El Niño” Guerrero Flores, escaped the prison before the storming and is still on the loose. The Department of State and the Department of Justice are offering up to $5 million for information regarding his whereabouts. He is believed to reside somewhere in Colombia.

While in prison, Guerrero Flores extended the gang’s reach across the continent, recently expanding into North America and the United States.

The New York Post reported that the gang has been linked to more than 100 crimes across the U.S. Among the litany of crimes the group is known for are human trafficking, sex trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, drug dealing, murder, money laundering, contract killings, smuggling, and other types of theft.

One of the group’s tentacles extended to Aurora, Colorado, where the gang is making its presence known.

You'll be glad to know that she assured her CNN advocate today that her "values haven't changed", so we can expect to get still more of this, good and hard.

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Mr.Trump, tear down this wall!

“Last year, US taxpayers shelled out some $150 billion in government services and support to help the 20 million illegal migrants in the country, according to a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

“And most of the cost is being borne by state and local governments.”

(NYC alone has spent $5 billion on its “newcomers”, and expects that number to hit $10 billion by June 30 2025.)

And note this:

In an August 2020 article USA Today defended Kampalla against conservative posters who were charging her with hypocrisy by claiming that she had once supported a border. She absolutely did not! the paper insisted.

Our ruling: False

Sen. Kamala Harris has been a vocal critic of border wall funding, seeing the move as misguided. There is no evidence the 2011 photo's backdrop was meant to emphasize the border fencing, but rather the law enforcement personnel who appeared alongside Harris. We rate this claim FALSE, because it is not supported by our research.

Harris was one of the three senators who opposed a deal which would have granted Trump border wall funding as part of a legislative deal that also included a path to citizenship for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

“I’m not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances,” Harris said during a 2019 CNN Town Hall where she called the president’s wall proposal a “medieval vanity project.”

Harris again called the idea of an expanded border wall a “vanity project” while on a tour for her book “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.” Harris called the budgetary fight over funding for the wall a “distraction from the fact that you’ve got Mueller investigating.”

Harris also called the war on drugs “ineffective” and criticized the country’s cash bail system as “not reflective of a system of justice” because of its disproportionate cost and damage inflicted on poor Americans.

Harris later repeated the line during the May 2019 kickoff rally for her presidential campaign.

"Folks, on the subject of transnational gangs, let's be perfectly clear: The president's medieval vanity project is not going to stop them,” the senator said.

Elegant, without being overly ostentatious

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15 Thornhill Road, Riverside NoPo, has sold for its full asking price of $1.250 million. By the way, if there is any sort of hill on Thornhill, it’s as modest as the houses that grace it; I’ve never seen it, personally. But the road did have one notable feature in the past: there were at least three, maybe four cops living on this short cross road between Riverside Lane and Sheep Hill and it was, a life-long resident once told me, the safest street in town and completely vandal-free.

Howard Lane

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64 Howard Lane has sold for $2.890 million. Once owned by the late broadcaster Michelle Marsh who, before she hit the big time in NYC, was a stunning young woman who brightened up Bangor, Maine’s evening news back in the day. Imagine my surprise to discover that she’d followed me south.

Marsh paid $2.775 for the house in 2004, and sold it to these owners in 2013 for $2.250 million; such are the vagaries of real estate.