Sir Francis Drake c. 1540 – 28 January 1596.

Drake’s Drum by Henry Newbolt

DRAKE he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand mile away,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’
He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.

Drake he was a Devon man, an’ ruled the Devon seas,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Rovin’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe,
“Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.”

Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’,
They shall find him, ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago.

————————————

Drake’s Drum, now in Buckland Abbey, Devon.

Yale’s next residential college should be named for Pawel Morozov, the Soviet Young Pioneer, who reported his father to the Party for hiding food. The father was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp, and ultimately executed. 13-year-old Pavel was killed by his relatives for betraying his father, and then his whole family was executed by firing squad.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that Yale has successfully adopted the Neighborly Surveillance and Reporting System that proved previously so successful in East Germany and Castro’s Cuba.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Yale University has required all students to mask indoors in public spaces. But it was 9:30 p.m on a Saturday night, and the library was deserted. With no one within at least 150 feet of him, a Yale senior decided to relax with a movie—and without a mask.

It got him reported to the school’s COVID hotline.

According to the Yale senior, another student walked into the library and demanded he mask up. Since he didn’t have one on him, the senior said he would leave. As he was gathering his belongings, the other student pulled out her phone and began filming him. When the senior asked for her name, the student raised her middle finger and stormed off.

Two days later, he received a notice from the Yale administration that he had been reported for violating the school’s “Community Compact,” a set of rules put in place to “promote the health and safety of all community members.” The student was given 24 hours to provide the “Compact Review Committee” with “any relevant information” he would like it to consider during the official “evaluation” of his conduct. He was ultimately found guilty of a violation and threatened with a “public health withdrawal.”

“The [committee] has determined that your conduct posed a risk to the health and safety of yourself or other community members,” the university wrote the student two weeks later. “Should you continue to engage in behavior that violates the Yale Community Compact, you will be placed on Public Health Warning and may face more serious outcomes, including the removal of permission to be on campus.”

According to university documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the incident in the library took place on December 4, 2021—the same night 1,000 maskless students gathered for Yale’s annual holiday dinner. A ritzy Yale tradition that had been canceled in 2020, the dinner featured lobster-laden ice sculptures and a parade of mostly masked dining hall workers, who marched the decadent culinary spread through a packed crowd of students, according to a video posted of the evening’s festivities.

The episode offers a window into the intrusive and often inconsistent enforcement of Yale’s COVID rules, which, as one student put it, “made campus feel like a surveillance state.” The rules were put in place before the existence of vaccines but have persisted long after, relaxing or tightening as case counts fluctuate and new variants erupt.

You successful hedge fund tycoons, be sure to give Peter Salovey another $100 million, since he’s doing such a fine job.

RTWT

1956: For a bet whilst drunk, former Marine Thomas Fitzpatrick stole a small plane from New Jersey and then landed it perfectly on a narrow Manhattan street in front of the bar he had been drinking at. He had made a bet with a fellow drinker that he could leave the bar, go to New Jersey, and then get back in 15 minutes.

He did nearly the exact same thing two years later, after a bar patron refused to believe he had done the first one.

Above the Law Founding Editor David Lat handicaps Joe Biden’s “Black Female” potential SCOTUS picks.

Who will President Biden pick to replace Justice Breyer? I offered some off-the-cuff reactions in a lengthy Twitter thread, and now I’ll provide more detailed analysis.

Here’s one thing we do know: the Biden Administration’s SCOTUS nominee will be a Black woman. In February 2020, back when he was a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. And yesterday, after news of Justice Breyer’s retirement broke, White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated that pledge.

Indeed, President Biden appears to have anticipated this very moment, by placing a record number of Black women on the federal appeals courts (where every current member of SCOTUS has come from, save Justice Elena Kagan). He has nominated eight Black women to the circuit courts, and five have been confirmed—doubling the number of Black women on the federal appellate bench.

Without further ado, here are five women I view as leading contenders to replace Justice Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court, along with my rough odds on how likely it is that each will be nominated. Odds are, of course, subject to change (and I have already changed them from the odds I put out yesterday, in fact).

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: 3-to-2 odds (40 percent)
Age: 51 (born September 14, 1970)
Current role: Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (since June 17, 2021)
Education: Harvard University (A.B.), Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Clerkship(s): Judge Patti Saris (D. Mass), Judge Bruce Selya (1st Cir.), Justice Stephen Breyer
Senate vote history: 53-44
ABA rating: Well Qualified

Judge Jackson is widely viewed as the frontrunner—and one can see why. First, she has the credentials and experience we look for in SCOTUS nominees (for better or worse): two Ivy League degrees; multiple clerkships, including a Supreme Court clerkship; and judicial experience, including service on the prestigious D.C. Circuit and eight years as a district judge before that. Second, she enjoys strong support in liberal and progressive circles, thanks to her background as a former public defender and rulings against Donald Trump and his administration in several high-profile cases—including the Don McGahn subpoena litigation, when she declared that “presidents are not kings.”

Third, she went through the Senate confirmation process just last year, winning support from all 50 Democrats, including Senators Joe Manchin (W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), and three Republicans—Senators Susan Collins (R-Me.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Yes, a senator who previously supported her could argue “SCOTUS is different”—but the prestigious and powerful D.C. Circuit ain’t chopped liver, and any senator who voted for her last year did so with the knowledge that she was a potential high-court contender. And because Judge Jackson hasn’t done anything crazy while on the D.C. Circuit—indeed, critics might complain that she hasn’t done anything, period—it’s hard to see why any of these senators would have a change of heart.

So my guess is that Judge Jackson will get the nomination—unless there are some lucky breaks in favor of Justice Kruger, to whom we now turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Kurt Schlichter is reveling in Schadenfreude as the Biden Administration keeps racking up the points in the Worst-Ever-Presidential-Administration Olympics and the microscopic-majority democrat Congress keeps trying for revolutionary change and falling flat on its face.

There’s no sense in pretending that we don’t take pleasure in the total failure of our Marxist-curious party of the left. Through a combination of outright fraud, procedural irregularities, plus the total support of the garbage establishment and its failed institutions, the Democrats took power by the thinnest of margins and have proceeded to fail on a level comparable to Heaven’s Gate, New Coke, and the Weekly Standard. There’s no shame in enjoying their total rejection by all decent Americans. In fact, you should enjoy it without hesitation or mercy, especially since it means more than just us cons getting our jollies.

The Democrats’ “Biden is FDR and not just a desiccated, pervy old weirdo” dreams have died. Their dreams of five trillion in handouts to bums and donors have died. Their dreams of enshrining their ability to cheat in elections have died. The Democrats can’t even shatter norms, like the filibuster, competently.

So much fail in so little time. The Latinx community – which the Dems put all their faith in as part of an unstoppable future majority, is rejecting them, in large part because Democrats are the kind of people who use the word “Latinx” unironically. Some foreigners, seeing the Democrats’ weakness and stupidity – it’s not just Commander-in-Chief Crusty who is the problem – are chomping at the bit to chomp off pieces of other countries because they know that the Dems put the “feck” in “feckless.” The rest are invading our country through what used to be a border. Inflation is up, the market is down, and November 2022 is approaching just over the horizon like a Tongan tsunami.

Noted dead white guy Samuel Johnson, who believed that there are only two genders, once observed, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It’s an apt analogy here, both because it evokes the fact that the Democrats have gone all-in on the side of the criminals as the crime rate rockets up, and also because it demonstrates just how intractably stupid the Democrats are. They ride in the little cart heading toward their November 8th date with the electoral noose, but their minds are not concentrated on that. Instead they are concentrated on fake insurrections and telling us how CRT is not taught in schools yet must absolutely continue to be taught in schools.

RTWT

A rather moving original color photograph of a British family inspecting dead sea birds along a beach near the Margate Cliffs in Kent. The birds were killed by first war-time use of poison gas by the Germans in the Second Battle of Ypres, 22 April — 25 May, 1915. There were roughly 60,000 British casualties. German casualties were around 35,000. The Germans gained three miles of ground.

@homecoming.diary What do u do after work?🤳#foryou #fyp #home #cooking #roomtour ♬ original sound – love dream

She has little space, but a helluva lot of gadgets.

HT: Vanderleun.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

Don’t Look Up is the least subtle allegory of modern times. It is a mallet of a metaphor. It is the bluntest of parables, smashing through TV and tablet screens across the globe and screaming at viewers: ‘This is a film about a comet but REALLY IT IS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE.’ They really do scream, especially Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the clever, sexy scientist Dr Randall Mindy, who, unlike the dentally challenged rednecks he has the misfortune to call his fellow citizens, knows that the comet is real and that it really will hit the Earth. Poor Mindy is in a constant state of apoplexy at fickle, dim mankind, on one occasion bellowing: ‘YOU ARE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE.’ Leo, being a green nut himself, really hams it up, revelling in this mad, morally infantile script that gives free rein to his fire-and-brimstone eco-beliefs. Next time you see The Revenant, you’ll root for the bear.

It is hard to describe just how preposterous Don’t Look Up is. Adam McKay’s 145-minute lecture disguised as a movie is on Netflix. (Where else?) It tells the story of two low-level astronomers – Mindy and his punkish PhD student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) – who spot a comet that is hurtling towards our big, dumb planet. They try to warn humankind, but to little avail. The president of the United States – Meryl Streep as a female Trump – is too busy thinking about the Midterms and the media’s discovery of the fact that she once sent a photo of her vagina to her nominee for the Supreme Court to worry about something as trifling as the extinction of all life on Earth. Let’s sit on it, she says. Businessmen wonder if the arrival of the comet might be a good thing. Think of all the minerals it will contain! Think of how many mobile phones we could make! Evil, money-grubbing capitalists? Original. As for the plebs: they’re far more concerned with celebrity tittle-tattle and earning a living – so vulgar! – than they are with the heat death of humankind.

It really is this unsubtle. It’s like someone reached into the head of a freshly politicised 16-year-old TikToker and turned the contents into a film. It falls to an Expert (Mindy) and a Cool Person (Dibiasky) to try to prise open the eyes of the ignorant throng. These are the heroes of our age in the eyes of the Netflix elites – people with postgraduate degrees and funny-coloured hair. Lawrence as Dibiasky sports a severe, red-dyed fringe – to distinguish her from the billions of normies who don’t care about the comet that’s about to vaporise them – and she goes on TV to weep and wail about the destruction of the planet, like George Monbiot recently did. One good line is when Streep’s president says they should use Dibiasky for media work more often, because she’ll connect with ‘disaffected youth and the mentally ill’. Every time DiCaprio and Lawrence’s characters were on screen, I felt myself turning a bit Betjeman. ‘Come, friendly comet…’ It is sweet relief when they die. (Come on, that doesn’t count as a spoiler – you knew this crap wasn’t going to have a happy ending.)

RTWT

HT: The Anonymous Professor.

The gutless, brainless nincompoop eunuchs who have by some unaccountable disaster been placed in charge of the Museum of Natural History in New York, in characteristically cowardly fashion, arranged to have the noble equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt removed from in front of the Museum in the middle of the night. (WSJ)

A statue of Theodore Roosevelt that stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for decades was removed, the result of years of debate over a monument that critics said glorified colonialism.

A crane lifted the bronze portion of the statue up from the museum’s Central Park West entrance overnight Wednesday, according to the museum and images and videos of the removal process.

The statue, by James Earle Fraser, shows the 26th U.S. president on horseback flanked by a Native American man and African man on foot. Named the “Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt,” it was commissioned in 1925 and unveiled in 1940 at the museum, which his father had helped found.

The museum requested the statue be removed in June 2020 as the movement for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis prompted many institutions to re-examine monuments. Owned by New York City, the statue sat on public parkland. The New York City Public Design Commission approved its removal unanimously in June 2021.
The statue, by James Earle Fraser, shows the 26th U.S. president on horseback flanked by a Native American man and African man on foot.

The statue was designed to celebrate Mr. Roosevelt as a devoted naturalist, according to the museum. “At the same time, the statue itself communicates a racial hierarchy that the Museum and members of the public have long found disturbing,” the museum says on its website.

The ironies are almost limitless. Theodore Roosevelt was a war-time hero, a Naturalist and Explorer personally intimately involved in the building of the Natural History Museum’s collections, and one of the most popular presidents in American history. On top of which, Teddy (gifted, as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, with “a first-class temperament and a second-class intellect) went all Bolshie part-way through his presidency and became a Progressive (!). Teddy qualifies as a hero and role-model to both political sides, but even that does not save his memory from the demented fanaticism and racial obsessions of the radical Left, to whom our elite Establishment misses no opportunity to grovel.

The statue is actually not in the least uncomplimentary to President Roosevelt’s native guides who are depicted, just as idealized and heroic, striding beside him into the Wilderness. Its cancellation and exile to North Dakota is simply an insane expression of the neurotic racial hypersensitivities and treasonous oikophobia of the demoniacs and crackpots making up the revolutionary Left.

How can it be, one exclaims in frustration, that today’s world is run by utter nincompoops so cowardly that they will not, and cannot, simply reject out of hand the insolent, obnoxious, and just plain stupid complaints and demands of crazy people who are addled and deranged by perverse and contemptible ideas?

The icing on the cake in all of this is the recorded and widely publicized endorsement of the statue’s removal and exile by none other than the great man’s namesake and descendant Theodore Roosevelt V.

Somewhere in Valhalla, Teddy is throwing up in the street as he contemplates what’s become of the American Aristocracy and his own bloodline.

Theodore Roosevelt V.

January 23, 1855 — November 26, 1926.

Greatest Firearm Inventor of all time.

BEST GOVERNOR EVER!!! LOVING THE NEW AD!!! pic.twitter.com/6EuyN06urc

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) January 21, 2022