It’s Monday, March 18th, 2019…but before we begin, consider this photo taken at Union Station early Friday morning by our youngest son Travis:

A woman had evidently become lost, so lost she ended up on the tracks, despite there being no roadways remotely close to her final destination.  (We asked Travis whether it might have been AOC, to which he responded, “C’mon, Dad, you know she doesn’t take trains!”.  Truly his father’s son!)

While contemplating this incredible instance of idiocy (after all, wherever you THOUGHT you were going, wouldn’t the presence of a passenger platform and 3′ drop to the tracks give you a hint this wasn’t the way?!?), we came across this item from FOX News:

US Navy vet fighting cancer gets 10-year prison sentence in Iran

“A cancer-stricken U.S. Navy veteran from California who was first detained in Iran while visiting a girlfriend has been sentenced to 10 years in prison there on charges of insulting the country’s supreme leader and posting a photo on social media, his lawyer said Friday.

…[Michael] White’s family told the paper he had traveled to Iran to visit a woman he had met online…”

He travelled to Iran…to meet a woman he met online: Seriously?!?  Sorry, but it’s NOT the job nor duty of the U.S. government to rescue its citizens from the consequences of their acts of sheer stupidity (see, “Warmbier, Otto“).  So man-up, Michael White: ‘cuz…

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as this report from FOX News‘ Amy Lieu confirms, the divisive wind of disrespect, disregard and distrust for law enforcement sown by The Left and The Great Divider continues to reap the whirlwind:

Youth basketball game becomes riot, as 9 teens arrested after crowd ‘closes in’ on deputies

“…Deputies from 33 law enforcement units eventually responded to the scene after a report of a disturbance at Gaiser Middle School in Vancouver, Wash., around 5:40 p.m., according to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.

“Three deputies arrived on scene and were immediately met with verbal hostilities from the large group of teenagers, to include racial slurs (Which serves to solidify the ethnicity of the perps!), cursing and threats of assault,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

As the deputies attempted to address a specific individual, about 60 to 70 teenagers began to “close in” on the deputies, the statement said. “It was just like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone. It was really crazy really quickly,” Sgt. Chad Rothenberger with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office told KGW8.

The teens continued to curse at the deputies and threaten violence against them, including making death threats, FOX 12 Oregon reported…”

Think about it: (1) this was a middle school basketball tournament; and it’s going to get worse…a lot worse…before it gets better.  (2) If Barry Soetoro had sons…50, 60 or 70 of them all together…THIS is EXACTLY what they’d have looked like…and acted!  Because craven cowards take strength only in overwhelming numbers.

Next, in a follow-up to our earlier coverage of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, here are the thoughts of an old friend and Naval Academy classmate who, in the two years immediately prior to his retirement, flew the Boeing 737 MAX 8 (his email has been unedited, though any emphasis is ours):

“I flew the Max 8 for two years before I left [U.S. carrier] and had no issues! Loved the plane..The Max has big engines and at a full power t/o if you forgot to reset your trim to something close to 5 degrees up as opposed to 10-12 up for landing, you might think the plane might try and do a loop on you after t/o? Nose will pitch up, but very easy to control with down trim and Auto Pilot OFF! Fly the plane!!  Can’t just sit there and watch it?? Not sure that’s what happened but I think we need to look into the pilots proficiency!!

If the nose pitches up after t/o and you just sit there and don’t intervene, then I think the flight controls (only on Max) would push the plane over to prevent stall! But, you just can’t sit there and watch it?? Btw, I never saw or tested that part of the flt controls. At [U.S. carrier], we all adhered to one “motto”, if it isn’t doing what you commanded it to do, turn it off and FLY the jet!“

Pending the results of the official NTSB investigations into both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, whatever the stories floating around the web, we’re withholding judgement…which is more than we can say for China and certain European nations (who want to use perceived problems with the 737 MAX series to promote their competing models of transport aircraft), not to mention Indonesia and Ethiopia (who are keen for the flying public to forget the lack of hands-on stick and rudder experience of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flight crews).

By the way, this includes the opinion of  an “expert” who, in an incredible display of cover-all-the-bases commentary, managed to blame both Boeing AND the lack of aircrew experience and training for the accident:

“We do not yet know what caused the tragic crash of Ethiopian 302 that sadly claimed the lives of all passengers and crew, though there are many similarities between this flight and Lion Air 610, in which the design of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 is a factor. It has been obvious since the Lion Air crash that a redesign of the 737 MAX 8 has been urgently needed, yet has still not been done, and the announced proposed fixes do not go far enough.“

“Sullenberger said he believed the Ethiopian Airlines crew did everything they could to prevent the accident. The retired pilot pointed out that the first officer on the doomed flight had insufficient hours of flight experience.“

Holy “Irreconcilable Inconsistencies”, BatSully!

Since we’re on the subject of irreconcilable inconsistencies, courtesy of NRO, Jay Nordlinger exposes another Socialist sh*thole the existence of which the likes of Bernie and AOC would have you remain ignorant:

“To the extent that eyes are on Latin America, they are on Venezuela — which is understandable. Venezuela has come to a boil. But Nicaragua is boiling too — and we should spare a glance in its direction. The dictator, Daniel Ortega, has executed a terrifying crackdown on the country.

Felix Maradiaga borrows an old line: “Nicaragua produces more history than we can consume.” He is a Nicaraguan political scientist, entrepreneur, and human-rights activist who has been forced into exile. The regime made him a bogeyman. Then a gang of the regime’s supporters beat him to a pulp, knocking his teeth out in the process.

Ortega first took power in 1979, as the face of the Sandinista revolution. In 1990, thanks to U.S. and U.N. pressure, Nicaragua held a free election — and voters chose Violeta Chamorro as president. Hers was the first democratic government in the country’s history. It was the beginning of a 16-year democratic interval, which included two other presidencies.

In 2006, Daniel Ortega contrived to return to power. He did so via a rather ingenious coalition of left-wingers and entrenched conservative interests. He soon enjoyed the patronage of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. “The Ortega regime can be understood only in intimate connection with the Venezuelan regime,” says Maradiaga. Ortega has stayed afloat on a sea of petro-dollars.

What is he, by the way? At various times, Ortega has presented himself as a Communist, a socialist, a populist, a conservative, a man of God. Maradiaga has a blunt and almost funny answer: “The Ortega of today is basically a criminal.” If he has any ideology, it’s what is known in Nicaragua as “orteguismo,” i.e., Orteg-ism…”

Funny, sounds like the same ideology espoused by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, the Kims of North Korea, Chavez and Maduro…as well as Obama, Bernie, AOC and every other supposed Socialist savior!

Then there’s this, also courtesy of NRO, from Kevin Williamson, who relates the truth behind…

“…So, in sum: Remington’s private-equity owners acquired Bushmaster and formed a new company. That company sold a rifle to a distributor, which in turn sold it to a federally licensed gun dealership, which in turn sold it — legally — to Adam Lanza’s mother. She was murdered, and her rifle was used in a horrifying massacre…and…if you squint…this somehow leads back to the marketing department at Remington, which advertised the Bushmaster rifle as a cousin to the standard-issue U.S. military rifle, which it is.

The lawsuit against Remington is bogus. It has little to do with Connecticut commercial law and everything to do with a substantive gun-control agenda and the opportunistic inclination to wring money from institutions that have a great deal of it. From the opinion of the state supreme court:

The gravamen of the plaintiffs’ complaint was that the defendants negligently entrusted to civilian consumers an assault rifle that is suitable for use only by military and law enforcement personnel and violated the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA) (§ 42–110a et seq.) through the sale or wrongful marketing of the rifle. The plaintiffs’ first theory of liability was that the rifle is a military grade weapon that is grossly ill-suited for legitimate civilian purposes such as self-defense or recreation, that the rifle and other similar semiautomatic weapons have become the weapon of choice for mass shootings and, therefore, that the risks associated with selling the rifle to the civilian market far outweigh any potential benefits, that the defendants continued to sell the rifle despite their knowledge of these facts, and that it therefore was negligent and an unfair trade practice under CUTPA for the defendants to sell the weapon, knowing that it eventually would be purchased by a civilian customer who might share it with other civilian users.

This is another way of saying that Remington’s owners are being sued for failing to concur with the substantive political views of gun-control advocates, i.e. that the weapon in question is “ill-suited for legitimate civilian purposes such as self-defense or recreation,” a claim that, it is worth noting, is false on its face inasmuch as semiautomatic rifles are proven instruments of self-defense and by far the most popular recreational firearms in the United States…”

This opinion has all the legal grounds and gravitas of Roe v. Wade, though hopefully the SCOTUS will resign it to the dustbin of history it deserves.  Stay tuned.

And in the Environmental Moment, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins…rhetorically…asks what inquiring minds already know:

Is There a Green Rational Deal?

Congressional Democrats propose a fantastically expensive plan to fix precisely nothing.

“Put me down as doubting the Green New Deal means we’re now about to have a serious policy debate about climate. If we did, how would Democrats stop taxpayers from discovering the following: For a minuscule fraction of the cost of the Green New Deal, we could fix the biggest piece of the climate problem by injecting particles into the air sufficient to block 1% of sunlight hitting earth.

No, this would not cure every risk (or end every theorized benefit) associated with higher atmospheric CO2. But it would neutralize the biggest putative risk, namely a warming of the planet. Gernot Wagner, a Harvard economist specializing in climate, is the latest to run the numbers. He estimates that such a program would cost around $2 billion a year. His findings are in line with estimates made by other reputable researchers.

This non-eye-popping sum represents about 0.1% of the estimated world-wide annual cost of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 by midcentury (which ain’t happening). Using words precisely, it would be infinitely more cost-effective than the Green New Deal, which addresses only U.S. emissions and therefore would solve nothing.

A 2008 paper by the liberal scholar Cass Sunstein offers an insight that should have informed our thinking all along. Donald Trump is right: China and India might be happy to hold our coat but they won’t be joining us in the climate fight. And without their full participation, the climate fight cannot successfully achieve any goal.

So let’s have a debate. To be remotely useful, the press would have to rediscover a concept it has religiously avoided in the discussion so far: cost and benefit…”

The answer to Holman’s question is simple: not “no”, but “HELL NO!!!”  Primarily because there are no rational Green New Dealers.

In a related item, John Stossel provides as comprehensive an exposé of the anthropogenic climate scam as we’ve ever viewed:

Which brings us to The Lighter Side:

And finally, we’ll call it a day with a story we frankly find so hard to believe we have to present it as News of the REALLY Bizarre!

Plane turns around after mom realizes she left baby at airport

“A Malaysia-bound plane made a U-turn for a frantic passenger who realized that she forgot her baby back at the airport in Saudi Arabia, according to reports. The pilot of Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight SV832 made the rare request to air traffic controllers shortly after takeoff, when the passenger told crew members that she had left her child at the terminal in Jeddah, Gulf News reported.

“May God be with us. Can we come back [to King Abdulaziz International Airport]?” the pilot can be heard asking air traffic controllers, according to an online video, the news outlet reported. “This flight is requesting to come back,” the pilot then tells a colleague. “A passenger forgot her baby in the waiting area, the poor thing.”

The flight ultimately was permitted to return to the airport. “OK, head back to the gate,” one of the air traffic controllers said during the exchange. “This is totally a new one for us.”“

Sorry, but like Michael White’s trip to Iran to rendezvous with a “woman he met online” (featured near the top of the page), we’re not buyin’ this one.  People’s Exhibit “A”: we could find no confirmation the woman was ever reunited with her forgotten infant.  People’s Exhibit “B”: though TLJ admitted to having once forgotten her groceries following a shopping trip, she at least remembered to bring home our boys who’d accompanied her to the store. 

Magoo