Friday, January 13, 2023

It's A Confusing Life


After Putin choked off natural gas supplies to Europe, hoping Europeans would “freeze to death” and “turn on their elites,” the Biden Administration immediately committed to delivering an extra 15 billion cubic meters of U.S. LNG to make up for the shortfall. The U.S. ended up delivering nearly 40 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe (almost three times the previous record) and is en route to becoming the world’s largest LNG exporter. Europe is fully weaning itself off Russian energy, reducing its dependence on Russia from 46% to a minuscule 8%, with gas prices falling to lower than pre-war levels.

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John Carlson has not played in a game or skated with the Capitals since absorbing a Brenden Dillon slap shot to the side of the head on December 23. Apparently, his ear had to be reattached.

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Surveys show that only 1 in 3 Americans can pass a citizenship test, because most of them aren’t familiar with the foundational ideas outlined in our texts and documents.

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It's A Confusing Life

Apparently, there's a group of It’s a Wonderful Life haters and they meet at Kamala Harris's house.

During oral arguments in the case 303 Creative v. Elensis, which concerns whether a website designer who opposes same-sex marriage must be legally compelled to create a site for a same-sex wedding, Justice Jackson brought up Capra’s classic as part of a strange hypothetical:

"What I’m asking you is, [say] I have a public business, I’m a photographer. My belief is that — you know, I’m doing It’s a Wonderful Life scenes. That’s what I’m offering, okay? I want to do video depictions of It’s a Wonderful Life. And I — knowing that movie very well, I want to be authentic, and so only white children and families can be customers for that particular product. Everybody else can — I’ll give to everybody else, I’ll sell them anything they want, just not the It’s a Wonderful Life depictions.

I’m expressing something, right? For your purposes, that’s speech. What about — what’s the other step? It’s speech, and I can say anti-discrimination laws can’t make me sell the It’s a Wonderful Life package to non-white individuals. . . .

Everybody can come, but I have certain products that I’ll only sell to non — to — to white individuals because the speech that I’m trying to depict is the authentic depiction of that scene as I understand it and that I want to put out there in the world, and it has my signature on the bottom of it, so people are seeing my photos and I want my photos of It’s a Wonderful Life to be as authentic as possible, meaning no people of color."

This strange logic appeared in the Supreme Court in the argument over Creative v. Elensis. The Supreme Court.

 

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