June 4, 2025

HARSH BUT FAIR:

Posted at 7:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds

I AGREE:

Posted at 7:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds

FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists Discover Promising New Alzheimer’s Treatment. “In these mouse models treated with the drug, the BBB remained completely undamaged. The brains didn’t undergo neurodegeneration and, most importantly, cognition and memory capacity were completely preserved.”

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CNN HOST CLAIMS SHE PREPARED FOR US VISIT ‘AS IF I WAS GOING TO NORTH KOREA:’

CNN/PBS anchor and self-styled journalist Christiane Amanpour recently gave a wild, anti-Trump commencement speech at Harvard where she invoked everything from 1984 to Benito Mussolini, but that may not have been the wildest part of her recent trip to America. On her Tuesday podcast installment of The Ex Files—so named because she co-hosts it with her ex-husband, Jamie Rubin—Amanpour declared she prepared for the visit by getting a burner phone because Trump’s America forced her to treat her trip “as if I was going to North Korea.”

Amanpour recalled her horror story, “I have to tell you when I went to Harvard to give this speech, and it was just a few days ago, last week. I must say I was afraid. I’m a foreigner, I don’t have a green card, I’m not an American citizen, I’m fairly prominent, and I literally prepared to go to America as if I was going to North Korea. I took a burner phone, Jamie. Imagine that. I didn’t take a single—not my mobile phone, not my iPad, nothing, and I had nothing on the burner phone except a few numbers, and I could text with my sister, I had your number, I had our son’s number, I had our lawyer’s number, you know, the CNN lawyer, and I was really afraid.”

Wait, is this meant to be derogatory, comparing America to North Korea? Because past CNN coverage of North Korea has often passed the Juche on the lefthand side!

 

Posted at 6:32 pm by Ed Driscoll

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER…

More to come, I’m sure.

Posted at 6:14 pm by Stephen Green

CONSEQUENCES:

Posted at 5:13 pm by Stephen Green

THE JUDICIARY IS LOSING RESPECT:

Posted at 4:53 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONE: Calif. cannabis market posts biggest sales drop in legalization history.

Taxable sales at California’s legal cannabis stores amounted to $1.088 billion in the first quarter of 2025, the lowest figure in five years and an 11% drop in sales compared to the same quarter a year earlier, according to an SFGATE analysis of tax data. That’s the largest such drop in the history of legal cannabis sales in California.

Tamma Adamek, a spokesperson for the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, did not dispute SFGATE’s analysis of the drop. However, she said comparing the latest figures to earlier reported taxable sales is like comparing “apples to oranges” because the tax figures are constantly being updated as more cannabis stores file their tax reports.

“We know that the gap will shrink,” Adamek said, without providing an estimate for how much the agency expects the reported sales to change.
Experts have been warning for years that California’s legal market is in dire straits, as legal operators face extraordinarily high regulatory fees, taxes and competition from the unlicensed market.

“Unlicensed,” heh.

Sacramento forgot that, long before legalization, California had a robust “unlicensed” infrastructure in place for the production, distribution, and sale of pot. Were they stupid enough to think they could tax and regulate licensed producers and sellers to the point where their product was more expensive than the “unlicensed” stuff — and still collect their precious taxes?

I suppose they were that stupid.

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green