Rodrigo Moynihan, “Friedrich August von Hayek.”

“The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.”

HT: The Man in the Green Shirt.

A sign for The Lamb and Flag is seen as the Grade-II listed pub is forced to close, after more than 400 years of business, following outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in central Oxford, Britain, January 25, 2021. REUTERS/Eddie Keogh – RC21FL975VBS

Not the famous pub where the Inklings, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and others, regularly met back during the 1930s and 1940s. That was the Eagle and Child. But still a 450-Year-Old Oxford institution, owned by St. John College abd much frequented by Tolkien, Lewis, Thomas Hardy, and many other famous Oxonians, it has been announced is another casualty of COVID-19 lockdowns.

Yahoo

The stock market saw an example of the classic short squeeze last Friday organized by GameStop enthusiasts on the Internet to massacre short sellers. Business Insider:

Mark-to-market losses for GameStop shorts on a year-to-date basis reached $3.3 billion when trading closed on Friday, according to data from the financial-analytics firm S3 Partners. Losses totaled nearly $1.6 billion on Friday alone as shares rocketed 51% higher into the close.

GameStop stock has continued to climb as Reddit users and day traders have extended the unusual momentum trade into its third week. The company’s shares initially leaped on January 11 after it agreed with an activist investor to add three new directors to its board. The day’s gains drew in swaths of retail traders, including members of the popular WallStreetBets subreddit.

Online posts urging other investors to join the trade have since driven outsize bullish momentum for GameStop. The stock traded 115% higher as of 10:40 a.m. ET on Monday and is up more than 500% year-to-date.

As old Daniel Drew once remarked: “He who sells what isn’t his’n must buy it back or go to prison.”

RTWT

New Statesman story (behind paywall), thus linked via Outline.

If you could fly two billion miles in the direction of the Pegasus constellation, and knew where to look, you would find a thin, flat object, about the size of a football field and up to ten times more reflective than the average comet. If you watched it for a while, you would notice that it is tumbling as it moves away from the sun, turning end over end roughly every seven hours.

This object passed the Earth in October 2017. As it began its return to interstellar space, the Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk identified it among the images from what was then the world’s most powerful camera, a telescope in Hawaii called Pan-STARRS1. The astronomers in Hawaii called it ‘Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word meaning “first scout from a distant place”. Read the rest of this entry »

Millennials are strange. They cover their bodies with tattoos; pierce their noses, ears, eyebrows, and places you don’t want to know. Despite their spectacular sissiness, they affect beards, dress like lumberjacks, and have adopted as a generational icon the plebian Pabst Beer.

Their latest weird thing is an obsession with Sea Chantys, a phenomenon apparently inspired by the video below which was uploaded to TikTok and which rapidly went viral.

See the NY Slimes article or this one at Inverse.

@nathanevanss

The Wellerman. #seashanty #sea #shanty #viral #singing #acoustic #pirate #new #original #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #singer #scottishsinger #scottish

♬ original sound – N A T H A N E V A N S S

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It’s not hard to find a better one than that one. How about?

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Conservatism’s all-time top blogger, Glenn Reynolds, makes a practice of identifying repetitive memes with a particularly apt and cutting catch-phrase. His associate bloggers, especially Ed Driscoll, have gotten very good at using the same technique.

“JOE BIDEN, THE JOB-KILLING PRESIDENT: 70,000 JOBS KILLED ON DAY ONE, MORE SINCE.

Good and hard:

https://t.co/bMdThimB42 pic.twitter.com/3grahmtn24

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 23, 2021

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Lot 19

Estimate: €6,000-9,000 ($7,302.79-$10,954.18)
9 February, Paris

I just visited the solders who have been abandoned & insulted by our leaders. I brought them pizza and told them that they can sleep in my office.

No soldier will ever, ever sleep on a garage floor in the US Capitol while I work in Congress

Our Troops deserve better. pic.twitter.com/4attFqhRRJ

— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) January 22, 2021

And it was a Democrat from Taxachusetts who got them forced out of the Capitol building. The Wiz:

National Guard troops protecting the Capitol were forced to sleep in a freezing parking garage because of complaints by Democrat Rep. Bill Keating (MA), according to Breitbart.

Rep. Keating told Capitol building authorities earlier in the day that a National Guardsman was seen in a Dunkin’ Donuts without a mask on.

After Keating said he commented out loud that masks were required to be worn at all times in a federal building, and a National Guard member responded, “I appreciate my freedom,” according to a source.

Rep. Madison Cawthorne (R-NC) tweeted that he brought pizza to the abandoned National Guard members and offered his office for them to sleep in.

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And President Trump did even better than pizzas. OANN:

President Trump gave thousands of National Guard troops permission to stay at his Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. after Capitol Police kicked them out of the Capitol Building.

On Thursday, 5,000 guardsmen and women brought in to protect Joe Biden’s inauguration were forced to take shelter in an underground parking garage after they were told to vacate the building.

The move garnered intense backlash after it was revealed the soldiers were forced to sleep on the ground in freezing temperatures and had just one bathroom as well as one power outlet to share.

On Friday, an advisor told OAN that President Trump stepped in by informing the troops they could stay at his luxury hotel near the capitol.

Upon seeing the situation, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle demanded the unit be brought back inside.