Month: October 2017

This past week has been a mixed bag for me.

Personally, I’ve had the unutterably painful experience of watching two loved ones in their 70s receive diagnoses of late stage cancers that resulted in life expectancy of less than four months.  Both of them are responding with stoicism and grace, and my wife and I are going to have the privilege of bringing our relative home with us, where she’ll be surrounded by loved ones and supported by hospice during her final months.

I will respect their privacy and not discuss any other details here, except to say that hospice is great and deserves our support, and that smoking is every bit as bad as advertised.  Both of them began smoking in their teens, and that has played a key role in their respective diseases.

I know that at this late date, everyone knows what smoking does.  But if I can add my voice to the throng of nagging busybodies in your life, please try to quit again.  Use whatever gimmick or strategy you can – nicotine gum or patches, prayer, support groups, hypnotism, acupuncture, voodoo, loved ones willing to douse you with a bucket of water when you light up.

Whatever it takes.  If you’ll pay my airfare, I’ll personally fly to your house and read excerpts from one of Noam Chomsky’s terrible books when you light up, as a form of aversion therapy that probably violates the Geneva Convention.   But please quit!

Thus ends today’s sermon.

And now: things that don’t really matter all that much.  Like idiot politician, and the idiotic voters who elect them.

Before yesterday I’d never heard of Frederica Wilson, and my life was better for it.  She’s a Democrat African-American congressdope from Florida, and she’s been embroiled in the mini-scandal about what Trump said to the widow of a dead serviceman in a condolence phone call.  A call which Wilson listened in on, just in case you thought she might be a classy human with an ounce of decency.  Nope and nope.  (If you haven’t heard about it, Google it for the painful details.)

The story is a perfect Rorschach test, as many political stories are.  It’s a she said/he said tale, but to believe her take on it, you’d have to believe two things:  1. Wilson could tell the truth if her life depended on it.  And 2. Trump would call and intentionally insult the wife of a dead serviceman.

I don’t believe either, needless to say.  Trump says a lot of crude, insensitive and clumsy things.  But this smells like a political hack operating in bad faith to either manufacture or purposefully misinterpret a statement from Trump for her own grubby ends.

General John Kelly – and since Patton is dead, Kelly is neck-and-neck with Mad-Dog Mattis as my most admired general — gave a press conference excoriating Wilson, referring to her as following in the long tradition of “an empty barrel that makes the loudest noise.”

I hadn’t heard that one before, but now I’m going to try to use it every day.

As in, “By the way, did you notice that Hillary in a pantsuit bears an uncanny resemblance to an empty barrel, and she tends to make a lot of annoying noise?”

See?  Thank you, John Kelly.

Anyway, how would you guess that a brainiac like Frederica Wilson would respond to that shot across her empty bow?  As reported by CNN (I know, but still), “Wilson told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that Kelly’s “empty barrel” remark was racist, but didn’t explain why.”

Didn’t explain why, you say?  I guess I have to be the one to point out the obvious.  Barrels often contain oil.  And oil, as I’m sure Elijah Muhammad has explained at one time or another, is black.

So, res ipsa loquitur — Frederica Wilson would probably say, if she wasn’t a total dope and knew even one cool Latin phrase – racism.  Duh!

I’ve spent the last 15 minutes – which I will never get back – looking through the debris field of Wilson’s political record.  And from that I learned two things:  1. She is a far-left loon whose presence in Congress speaks very poorly of the constituents who elected her.  And 2. She apparently inherited an extensive hat collection from a wealthy cowboy pimp.

I’m guessing that her parents were really hoping for a boy who would one day drive cattle from Topeka to Dallas.  To assuage their disappointment when she was born, they nailed her with the name “Frederica,” stuck a ridiculous baby cowboy hat on her empty head, and foisted her upon the voters of Florida’s beleaguered 24^th District.

Seriously, look at her hat pictures.  In fact, pull up a split screen of a few lovely ladies in the reproductive organ headgear from January’s march, alongside one of Wilson’s garish hats.  If you could look up the phrase “opposite of a thinking cap” in the dictionary, those are the pictures you would see.

If there is no such cliché as “a two-pint brain in a 10-gallon hat,” I would like to invent that now, and apply it to Wilson.

But not satisfied with eavesdropping on a condolence call and then trying to score political points off of it, she steered into the stupid skid, releasing this tweet: “ I still stand by my account of the call b/t @realDonaldTrump and Myesha Johnson. That is her name, Mr. Trump. Not “the woman” or “the wife.”

Hilariously enough, the mother’s name is actually “Myeshia” Johnson.

I am not making that up.  In a snotty, three-sentence tweet meant to excoriate Trump for not using the grieving widow’s proper name, Hopalong Bonehead GOT THE GRIEVING WIDOW’S NAME WRONG.

Ugh.  To complete the empty barrel trifecta, Wilson gave an interview afterwards, an excerpt of which appeared on Bret Baier’s show.  Wilson said,  “Let me tell you what my mother told me when I was little.  She said, ‘The dog can bark at the moon all night long.  But it doesn’t become an issue until the moon barks back.’”

Cut back to Bret, wearing the same confused expression that my Aussie shepherd gets when I try to explain to her that Frederica Wilson is in congress.

By the way, I would bet my life that Cassie ‘the Wonder Dog’ Simpson would make a much better representative than Wilson.  She doesn’t have much foreign policy experience, but she is a strict constructionist on Supreme Court nominees, and she is very tough on crime, having protected our house from burglars for over three years now.

Plus she’s up to date on all of her shots – which, judging from that little barking moon story, I’m guessing that Frederica Wilson is not.

If it didn’t mean moving to the 24th district, I would create an exploratory committee tomorrow.   The first ad would feature my beautiful girl at attention – her one brown eye and one blue eye staring soulfully into the camera — behind a chewed-up, bedazzled cowboy hat, with the slogan, “Cassie Simpson – Who’s a good girl?  Not Frederica Wilson!”  Tagline: “My name is Cassie Simpson, and I approve this—WOOF!”

Before I dive into my second column in a month on the virtues of failure, I have to note the passing of Tom Petty.

Petty is on my Mount Rushmore of musicians.  I started following him in high school, and he’s the rare rock star who continued to put out quality music over many decades.  I chose my grad school in part because Petty had come from that town.  (I know – not the most mature way to choose a grad school.  But on the other hand, unknown to me, my future wife lived there, and God used Tom Petty to get me into close proximity to her.  From there, it was up to my charm and pig-headed persistence during the courtship process to wear her down.  Mission accomplished!  And to quote Petty, the waiting was the hardest part.)

Losing Petty is a doubly bitter blow because of the knowledge that singers with horrible music and worse politics like Cher (71) and Barbra Streisand (75) and Madonna (112) inexplicably live on.

In fact, in my darker moments, I have to keep from thinking about the unfairness of great creative people who are gone, versus horrible ones who seem impervious to death.  Off the top of my head, Vince Flynn, Robert B Parker, Elmore Leonard and Tom Clancy are all dead.  Flynn is an especially bitter loss, because he was so young.  But many of you might say that Parker, Leonard and Clancy were in their 70s or older, so their deaths aren’t a shock.

Okay.  But you know who else has lived into their 70s, and yet continue to torture us with terrible books?  Hillary Clinton (later this month) and Bill Ayers.  In fact, Bill Moyers is 83, Dan Rather is 85, and Noam Chomsky is 88!  And they’ve been living on nothing but bile and hatred of America for at least the last 30 years!  And that’s not to mention that Harry Reid and Maxine Waters are still alive in their late 100s, and Nancy Pelosi was a teenager in the Pleistocene Era, and is still fixing me with that glassy-eyed mummy stare through my television screen several times a week!

Ugh.  Got off on a tangent there, didn’t I?  Anyway, I’ll miss you, Tom Petty!

And now, on to failure.  (If I can steal Hillary’s original title for her book on 2016, before she wussed out and went with “Wha’ Happen?”)

Last month I wrote about how entertaining failure can be, whether it’s from a rapper who gets gunned down 10 minutes after crediting God with making him bullet proof, or environmental extremists who get trapped by ice on a sailing expedition to show how the oceans are boiling.  And I didn’t even mention Carlos Danger/Anthony Weiner, who would be the funniest failure of the last 10 years, if it weren’t for Clydesdale Ankles’ failure on November 9^th, and the fact that Weiner was perving on teenagers.

But today I’ve got a few examples of how failure can not only amuse us, but teach us.   And I’ll start – as one usually should – with a quote from Edmund Burke: “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.”

Burke knew a thing or two, and you won’t go far wrong in life if you find yourself repeating, “I’m going with Eddie Burke on this one” when you need to make a decision.

And he looks even wiser when you compare him to the intellectual heroes of the Left – Rousseau was a dope, Thoreau had a nice way with words but went home to stay with mom three nights a week when he was supposedly thinking deep thoughts in the isolation at Walden Pond, Marx is 0-47 in “I’m sure socialism will work THIS time” predictions since 1917, and Noam Chomsky has already lived about 87 years too long.

But I have to quibble with Burke just a bit; it’s not just examples, but examples of failure, that teach us.    Especially in a free or quasi-free market, failure sends crucial signals as to what works and what doesn’t.

Hollywood insults their audience, and the box office tanks.  Remember that spate of anti-US war movies when we were engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan?  I know, I didn’t either.

But I looked up a few titles: Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss, Body of Lies, Green Zone.  The cumulative box office returns for those was less than I received from a few exclusive showings of my family vacation films.   Sure, I had only back-end points, and took a bath.  But I didn’t have to pay Redford to direct, or sleep with Harvey Weinstein to get my masterpiece made, so I’ve got that going for me.

ESPN foists leftist tirades on their audience, and they’ve lost millions of subscribers, and are on a glide path toward implosion.   Leftist university administrations – the U of Missouri, Oberlin, etc. – cater to leftist crybullies and thugs in the student body and the faculty, and thereby lose students and financial support and the jobs of many employees who are no longer needed to teach students who aren’t there, and maintain buildings that aren’t necessary to house students who aren’t there.

The NYT puts out biased pap, and slowly bleeds readership and advertisers, and ends up shrinking print runs and laying off employees and renting out floors of their building in NYC (to late-night infomercial makers, if there’s any justice!).

Of course, failure in the political marketplace can also be instructive.

Blue states deploy leftist financial strategies: they levy confiscatory taxes on any citizens who are financially successful, and lavish benefits and promise generous pensions to government employees.  They throw up roadblocks to the formation of small businesses, and hire more government workers to inspect and harass and fine the hardy few who run that gauntlet.  Then they are shocked when businesses close or flee, and financially successful residents decide that they would rather live where they are not simultaneously resented and bled dry.

Baltimore and other large, Democrat-run cities treats their cops like crap, and lionize their thugs (Michael Brown was a gentle giant, etc.), and then they’re shocked when the “Ferguson effect” ensues.   Cops pull back from energetic, interventional policing, and the criminal element in those areas fills in the void, preying on the very poor people and minorities whom the Dems claim to represent.

People vote with their feet, and their eyes, and their time, and their dollars, and the results lays bare the failure of leftist policies.

Okay, so this column has been a little serious for my tastes.

So let me end with a best-of-both-worlds tale, in which failure is both entertaining and instructive.  Someone dies in this story, though, and that’s usually not funny.  But as we’ve seen with Yung “Bulletproof” Mazi and the guy who got killed (literally) losing a fight to an armless man, it can be.

 

In this story, we meet an idealistic young vegan named Dr. Maria Styrdom, 34, who along with her husband wanted to climb Mt. Everest.  But not “because it was there” – the idiotic reason that most mountain climbers usually give, and that I’ve never understood.  (You know one thing that Edmund Burke did NOT say?  “I’m sick of these gently rolling hills of England.  I think I’ll go give gravity and hypoxia a chance to kill me.”)

No.  Styrdom was sick of hearing questions about whether vegans “have iron or protein deficiencies,” so she decided to drag her husband up the mountain with her to prove something.  “It seems that people have this warped idea of being malnourished and weak,” she said. “By climbing the seven summits we want to prove that vegans can do anything and more.”

Not since Bob Titanic launched his ship with the boast, “She’s unsinkable, I tell’s ya!  Un-freaking-sinkable!” has someone come so quickly to regret their words.

You can guess the result.  She made it to the top of the mountain – because God is merciful, and He didn’t play the “iron deficiency” and “malnourishment” cards until she was on the way back down the mountain – and then she died.

This cautionary tale contains at least 4 great life lessons:

First, c’mon.  (Do I need to say this?)  Don’t be a vegan!  I mean, have you ever tried a steak?  Or a hamburger? Or a pork chop?  Not to mention a pork chop on top of a hamburger, served with a side of steak?

Second, if you must be a vegan, keep it to yourself.

Third, if you absolutely can’t keep it to yourself – and from my experience with vegans, they can never keep it to themselves – don’t announce that you are going to climb Mt. Everest to prove how a diet of soy milk-infused tofu served on a bed of hummus (I don’t know if that’s a thing, but from my experience with infuriatingly chatty vegans, it probably is) is fantastic fuel for a jaunt up a mountain.

Fourth, consider the case of me.  Although popular opinion — of the voices in my head, anyway — is that I’m aging quite well, my cholesterol is probably in the mid-300s, I can no longer cover a speedy wide receiver on crossing patterns over the middle, and I pretty much hang around at sea level, other than on an occasional trip to walk in the woods in the Appalachians.

But I’ll never bother you with details of my diet or talk down to you about yours, and my chances of dying with de-oxygenated blood under a tumbling Sherpa in the middle of an avalanche along the treacherous north face is pretty darn close to zero.

So take it from me – and sure, from Fast Eddie Burke, too:  have a burger and listen to some Tom Petty, and enjoy the instructive and entertaining cavalcade of failure that is the slow-motion implosion of the left.

We’re already 5 days into October, so it’s past time for a “Best of September” post.

Item 1.  Trump’s 9/17 speech to the UN.  The smart set MSM types all had their dresses over their heads about how outrageous his comments were, and how unpresidential, and how rude.  I found myself mostly agreeing with them, and yet coming to the exact opposite conclusion. Which is: he’s speaking to the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the UN – it’s metaphysically impossible to be rude enough to those people.

Here’s the part where I give my spiel on Trump: didn’t vote for him in the primary, half of what he says makes me slap my forehead, not a consistent ideological conservative, etc.

And yet.  We all know what a president is supposed to sound like at the UN.  Just like Obama sounded, according to the MSM.  And I’ll agree that he had a glib, superficially smooth delivery.  But what he said was either bland, multicultural boilerplate – the community of nations is just peachy, we must respect other country’s belief systems, only by working together can we be successful and just — or awful, leftist America-bashing: we’re deeply flawed, we have too often been arrogant, dismissive, even derisive, etc.

Compare that to Trump’s message: we’re paying way too much for the UN, we can’t allow the Iran nuke agreement to give cover for their jihadi leaders to get nuclear weapons, and we are celebrating the 230^th anniversary of our constitution, which is the best constitution ever, believe me.

Yes, yes, and hell yes.

And then he called Porky Nork “rocket man,” and warned him that we’ll destroy him if he gets froggy with his nukes.  (And by the way, thanks loads, Bill Clinton, for giving us the deal that ensured that the Norks wouldn’t get nukes… right until the minute that they got nukes.  Nice job, Handsy McGroperton!)

Admit it: you laughed when you first saw that “Rocket Man” line.  Rachel Maddow and Mika and the Mensa members on the View, on the other hand, were horrified!  How could he be so disrespectful to a foreign leader?!

Yeah.  The foreign leader who has his rivals executed in barbarous ways, and has starved and enslaved  millions of his countrymen, and has been firing missiles over and around his neighbors in recent months.  Plus his haircut is a crime against humanity, and he had Hans Blix killed by a shark in a giant aquarium.

I just love the image of dozens of translators sweating into their collars as they tried to decide how to translate “rocket man” into their various languages in a way that would make sense.

 

Item 2. On September 27^th, Michelle Obama addressed a conference in Boston, during which she helpfully lectured the millions of women who voted for Trump last November.  She said, “Any woman who voted against Hillary voted against their own voice.”

And that might be true, if you are a woman whose voice sounds like this:  “What difference, at this point, does it make?!!  CAW, CAW.  Why am I not 50 points ahead, you might ask!  CAW.  Hey, sweetheart, stop tricking my husband into exposing himself and sexually assaulting you!  CAW, CAW, CAW.”

I know that as you read those words, you heard her voice in your head, and for that I apologize.  Nobody deserves that.

But seriously, Michelle, please keep lecturing us about how we are too stupid to know what’s best for us, and how any gyno-American who voted against Hillary betrayed the sisterhood.  We get it.  You think we’re all Nazis, and sexists and deplorables and the rest.   I’m sure that that smug condescension is going to work just great for you in 2020.

In other great Michelle-related news, she said that she’s writing a book, which is about – and I’m not making this up — “being her authentic self.”

Ugh.  I’m going out on a limb here, and guess that it might also include some stirring passages about “speaking my truth,” or “building bridges instead of walls,” or having “the courage to speak truth to power?”

Let me suggest that if you were thinking about getting rid of your knitting needles — now that you’ve used them to gouge out your eyes after seeing those Antifa-member mugshots last week — hang on.  I’m sure Michelle’s book will be available in an audio version.

And those knitting needles can also be used to pierce your ear drums, too.  So, you’re welcome.

 

Item 3.  Speaking of fine literature, Melania Trump was asked to help celebrate National Reading Day by choosing some children’s books to donate to one school in each state.  She picked some Dr. Seuss books that she has enjoyed reading with her son.

When the books arrived at a school in Massachusetts, the leftist librarian said, “We really appreciate the generous gifts for our students.  Even though we have our differences with the White House, we’d really have to be petty, small-minded a-holes to politicize this totally inoffensive gesture.  Thank you, Mrs. Trump.  PS, love the stilettoes. I wish I could pull those off, but I’m frumpy and unattractive.  And yet, it hasn’t made me bitter, and I’m not at all tempted to transfer my rage at my own disappointments into confrontational, nasty political fight-picking.”

HA!  I tricked you!  That’s not what she said at all.

What she said was that Dr. Seuss books are full of racism, and that the American education system is broken, and most kids are poor, and it’s all Trump’s fault.  Now please shove these books up your infuriatingly attractive rear end, Melania.  (Those are not direct quotes, but they capture the stunning, ill-mannered gracelessness of her response.  Read it, and tell me I’m wrong – I dare you.)

Like you, my first instinct was to laugh at the absurdity of claiming that Dr. Seuss books are racist.  But, because I take my awesome responsibility of reporting to CO nation seriously, I decided to do my due diligence.  It’s been a long time since I read Dr. Seuss, and I have to admit that I had forgotten a lot of it. So I went to my local library.

I was shocked to find that she was right!  Consider these Dr. Seuss titles that I had not remembered:

The Cat in the Pointy White Hood

Green Eggs and Miscegenation

The Grinch Who Stole Kwanzaa

One fish, two fish, red fish, white supremacist

Horton Hears a Racist Dog Whistle

 

So good job, leftist librarian!  You keep fighting the good fight against reality, self-awareness and good manners.

 

Finally, Item 4. After a hurricane hit Puerto Rico, the creepy far-left mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin “Don’t Call me Ted” Cruz, took time out of her busy schedule of not improving the lives of her city’s citizens to criticize how Trump was to blame for the storm and the horrible response to it.

Having recently been threatened by a hurricane myself, I’m predisposed to sympathy for Puerto Ricans and the stress and hardship they are under.  But I also finding myself questioning why God couldn’t have found it in His heart to drop a palm tree (or maybe a live electrical wire) on this woman’s empty head.

First, she gave a speech to the press from a warehouse-like area, during which she thundered about how her people were dying, and she was mad as hell, and not enough was being done to help.

The best thing about that speech: she was standing in front of stack after stack of pallets of supplies that had been delivered by the United States government.  Press reports soon had to admit that the feds had flooded Puerto Rico with material and assistance, but the Puerto Rican infrastructure and human resources were initially unable to transport the supplies from the port to their citizens, creating a bottleneck.  Which was entirely Trump’s fault, because as the mayor of a major Puerto Rican city, it’s his job to—

Oh, wait.

That evening, the totally unbiased and fair Anderson Cooper interviewed the mayor.  She was wearing a shirt bearing the professionally printed words “Help Us We Are Dying.”  (By the way, that was the worst name for a Led Zeppelin tour ever.  The best ever?  Ted Nugent, “Intensities in Ten Cities.”  Take that, racist Dr. Seuss.)

Because the best use of your time and resources if you are trying to cope with a natural disaster is to mobilize your forces and have some politicized t-shirts printed up.  I mean, that’s Crisis Management 101.

Her interview was a smorgasbord of stupid.  Some highlights were when Anderson asked her if people really were dying, and she stuck to her guns.  Yes, people were going hungry and thirsty, and old people had to be evacuated from nursing homes, and they weren’t getting dialysis, and the power wasn’t back on yet.  I waited for Anderson to point out that she has been presiding over a quasi-3^rd world city where that has been happening every Wednesday and on alternative weekends before any storm hit.  But alas, I waited in vain.

She did mention that the US response to Haiti had been “so good, and we were all so proud,” and by comparison, the current response was much worse.  For some reason, Anderson didn’t point out that the Haitian hurricane in 2016 killed approximately 600 Haitians, while as the mayor was speaking, there had been 16 confirmed deaths in Puerto Rico.

In case you are not good at math, let me help.  A response that limits deaths to 600 when a Democrat is president is “so good,” and makes us “so proud.”  But a response that allows the Puerto Rican death count to balloon up to 16 when a Republican is president is disgraceful, and probably evidence of a Dr. Seussian amount of anti-Puerto Rican racism.

Got that?

 

Before getting to my topic today, I wanted to let everyone know that we got through the hurricane remarkably unscathed.  I spent several days putting plywood up, then several days taking plywood down and cutting up trees that fell everywhere but on our houses.  We missed about a week of work, and I’ve spent what feels like two weeks getting caught up on what I missed.

But we got very lucky, and my heart goes out to the folks in south Florida, and Puerto Rico, who didn’t.

And now, on to failure, which has two great virtues: it entertains us, and it educates us.

Admittedly, failure only entertains us when it is the failure of others.  None of us appreciate the entertainment value when the failure is our own, unless maybe we are looking back on it decades later.    But when others fail, it is sweet, sweet nectar.  I won’t beat a certain dead (and thick-ankled) horse about the hilarious hijinks of last November.  Instead, let me cite a few examples that I haven’t written about before:

Exhibit A.  An Atlanta rapper named Jibril Abdur-Rahman – who wisely took the stage name “Yung Mazi” – bragged that he had been shot 11 previous times.  After his most recent wounding in December of 2016, an interviewer asked him why he kept getting shot.  He cited such reasons as his skin tone, the amount of jewelry he wears, and the fact that he is a “real dude,” and “some people don’t like real dudes.”  (Before you dismiss that claim, consider how rare it is for imaginary dudes to get shot.  See, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.)

Anyway, Mazi proudly proclaimed that “God made me bulletproof.”

You know where this is going, right?  Yeah.  Yung Mazi is not going to get the chance to get to be Old Mazi.  Because in August of 2017 he was shot to death.

When reached for comment, God said, “Only the good die, Yung.”  Then He began snickering, and hung up.

 

Exhibit B.  Consider the case of a fight between Charles Keith Teer, 49, and William Russell Redfern, 44, who scuffled over a woman in 2007.  I’m not sure how the fight started, but I know how it did NOT start: with Redfern slapping Teer with a glove, to challenge him to a duel.  I also know that they did not settle their differences with an arm wrestling match.

How do I know that? Because Redfern had no arms.  He had been born with no right arm, and only a stump below his left shoulder.   So his fighting options were a little limited.  He tried a few kicks.  Which, more power to him – you fight with the limbs you have, not the limbs you wish you had.  (I think Mad Dog Mattis said that.)

But to no one’s surprise, that didn’t work.  So Redfern turned to his secret weapon: the head butt.

He head butted Teer in the chest.  And several hours later, Teer died.

A bunch of pointy-headed doctors said that Teer had had a history of heart disease and blockages, and that was what killed him.  But what do they know?

I’m pretty sure that he died of embarrassment.   I’d guess that as he was lying on the ground, what flashed through his mind was not his entire life, but the next several weeks, when he would have to face his family, and his buddies at work, and at the local bar, and explain how he’d lost a fight to a guy with no arms.

What could Teer say in his own defense?  That Redfern was 5 years younger than him?  That Redfern outweighed him?  That Teer had been a little drunk, or tired?  That Redfern had caught him by surprise, and “sucker butted” him.  (Thus inventing a new phrase.  But sadly, one that doesn’t carry the same weight of outrage as “sucker punched.”)

Teer knew what his friends would say to all of those points:  “Yeah. Okay.  But the guy HAD NO ARMS!”

I’m sure you’re all ahead of me re: the moral of the story:  “Don’t bring your fists to a skull fight.”

 

Exhibit C.   In July of 2016, a bunch of global warming alarmists – “adventurers, sailors, pilots and climate scientists” — went on what was supposed to be a two-month trip around the North Pole.  According to their website, their mission was to demonstrate, “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”

Cue the great South Park sketch:  “Aannnndddd, they’re stuck.”

An article in Real Climate Science summed up their situation in this quote, which I am not making up:  “They are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months.”

I know what you’re thinking.   If only they had had something other than shaky computer climate models and bong-hit-induced deep thoughts to guide them!  If only there had been some historical precedent from which they could have learned!

Which brings me to…

 

Exhibit D.  Two and a half year earlier, a group of scientists, their assistants and “adventure tourists” were sailing in the Antarctic, also intending to document the ravages wrought by our horrendous global warming crisis.

By the way, what’s with these “adventurers” and their choice of adventures?!  I was never a particularly adventurous young man.  But when I imagined going on an adventure, I thought of scenarios like, “So I’m in a Turkish bath in Monte Carlo, with two gorgeous Bosnian co-eds, the American ambassador to Greece, and Sean Connery, and we’re all kicking around the idea of knocking over a casino.”

Do you know what I was NOT thinking of?  “So I’m stranded on an ice-encrusted trawler near Murmansk, with my extremities blackened by frost bite while a blocky Women’s Studies prof explains how global warming often manifests itself by freezing people to death.”
But back to our story.   This adventuresome crew was sailing on a Russian-operated ship called the Mika Brezhinski.  (Just kidding.  It was actually called the Akademik Shokalskiy.  But when I think of things that are thick and sluggish and ineffectual, I can’t help but think of Mrs. Morning Joe.)

Anyway, our intrepid crew on the Mika had set sail from Australia at the end of November (i.e. summer in Australia), bound for Antarctica, where they expected to lounge about in beachwear, demonstrating how our SUVS are boiling our precious environment, or something.

Guess what happened to their ship?

If you guessed that the ocean got too hot and they were all scalded to death, you are not paying attention.

In fact, it got stuck in the ice that they were shocked to find.

But wait!  There’s more hilarity.

While the global warming alarmists were spending Christmas day stuck in the ice, mourning the death of Gaia instead of celebrating the birth of Christ, they had high hopes.  Because the cavalry was on the way, in the form of a Chinese ice-breaking ship called the “Snow Dragon.”

Until the Snow Dragon got stuck.  In the ice.  The ice that it was designed to break.

But never fear, because a second Chinese ice breaker named the Aurora Australis was on its way.  (And by the way, if that’s not a good stripper name, I don’t know what is.  “Gentlemen, welcome to the main stage… Aurora Australis!  She’s from Down Under, and she just wants to break… your… ice.  Make it rain, make it snow, it’s all the same to Aurorrrrrrra.”)  This ship was bigger and more powerful than the Snow Dragon, so it would make short work of the–

Annnnnddddd, it’s stuck.

Actually it didn’t get stuck.  But the captain had to turn back from rescue attempts, because his ship was on the verge of getting icebound, too.

Oh, Chinese icebreaker boats.  You had one job…

Anyway, the global alarmist knuckleheads were eventually – tragically – rescued.

And two and a half years later, the next group sailed for sunny Murmansk, undeterred.

 

Finally, Exhibit E is as timely as today.  Because it was reported today, under the delightful headline:  “Four Arrested after Fight in Empathy Tent.”

Ah, Empathy Tent.  The most hilariously mis-named creation since the Chinese ice-breaking ship.

You can Google “empathy tent” to read the story, but do you need to?  I bet you can guess the salient details:

Who set up the empathy tent?  A. Rock-ribbed conservatives   B.  Navy Seals    C. Leftist “studies” majors

On which campus was the empathy tent located?  A. Hillsdale College   B. West Point   C. Berkeley

Guess who started the fight in the empathy tent?  A. Milton Friedman devotees  B. Ben Shapiro fans  C. Bernie Sanders acolytes

What do the virtuous leftist arrestees’ mug shots remind you of?   A.  Brad Pitt.    B. Margot Robbie   C. My eyes!  My eyes!  I can never un-see that!  Make it stop!  Where are my knitting needles?!

If you guessed anything other than “C” on any of those questions, please ask CO to ban you from this site immediately.

What is it with leftists and their inability to recognize or describe reality?  Fascist thugs are “anti-fascists.”  Bruce Jenner with a little makeup and a Mary Tyler Moore hairstyle is a woman.  Blue-eyed blonde Elizabeth Warren is an Apache.  Blue-eyed blonde Rachel Dolezal is black.

And now the Empathy Tent is a place where you can get the crap kicked out of you.

What’s next?  For the best wifi, try the Amish hut?  For the best hummus, go to the Mormon lean-to?   For sound financial planning help, check out the Occupy Wall Street dumpster?

Okay, so failure can be hilarious.  But it can be instructive too, which I’ll write about next time…

 

 

I’m not going to lie to you, CO nation: there’s a lot to be depressed about in the news.

Sure, there’s some fun stuff too.  Hillary Clinton’s book is out, and it is exactly the dog’s breakfast of schadenfreude and projection and delusion and leftist intramural fight-picking that we had all hoped it would be.  I mean, once we found out that she was writing a book, and then that a publisher was actually going to publish it.   And then after we checked that the source for those facts was not an Onion story, or a bit of snarky leg-pulling by CO or by me.

Anyway, that book is out, and it’s chock-full of laughs on every page.  But in a sane world, we would not turn our thoughts back to last year to beat this (thick-ankled) dead horse.

Unfortunately, we live in this world, where there’s enough depressing stuff going on that we might naturally want to reminisce about how Hillary was beaten by a conspiracy of young socialists following a very old socialist, Macedonian hackers, misogynists, the Bilderberg group, and I think Freemasons.  (Or was it Morgan Freeman?)

Depressing stuff like what, you ask?  I’ll mention three things.

1.Sports is supposed to be a pleasant escape from the mundane frustrations of everyday life, like insensitive bosses and oblivious drivers and financial worries and Ashley Judd.   Humans came up with sports eons ago, but for a long time, games involved nothing but rocks and sticks and the occasional enemy’s detached head.  Slowly, new sports were born.  Sports like “swim across the Red Sea before the Egyptians catch us and make us build more pyramids,” “footrace against the Mongol who is bearing down on you on horseback,” and “duck, duck, plague victim.”

Finally, when humanity was sufficiently advanced to appreciate the greatest of all sports, a loving God bestowed football upon us.  Now some of God’s earlier work was pretty impressive, too.  Creating a universe ex nihilo was a nice opening act.  Turning some guy’s wife into a pillar of salt can be appreciated by anyone who’s ever been married.  And the New Testament is the best sequel ever, and I’m including Godfather II and Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugaloo in there.

But have you ever seen film of Gayle Sayers running with the ball, or Dick Butkus or Gary Fencik disassembling offensive players into their constituent molecular parts , or Walter Payton dancing through several players before lowering his shoulder and plowing through several more?  Or any other, non-Bears players making other good plays, I guess?

Football is an amazing game, is my point.

So naturally a bunch of malcontent lefties are trying to ruin it by injecting their horrible politics into it.  Colin Kapernick probably has half a point, when he argues that his controversial views have made it harder for a team to employ him as a quarterback.  But considering that his views are boilerplate America-hatred and wildly exaggerating the racism in a country that millions of minorities from around the world are desperately trying to get into, you can’t blame team owners from shying away.

Consider the anti-Kapernick: Tim Tebow.  His views — fair play, the American way, and Christianity — were also said to be controversial, even though the vast majority of football fans don’t find them offensive.  But Tebow – when he wasn’t building orphanages, doing CPR to save kittens who had fallen out of trees, and healing the sick who touched the hem of his jersey – had a throwing motion that looked like he was being tasered just before it was time to release the ball.  So he didn’t get to play pro ball for very long.

Similarly, Colin Kapernick can’t read a defense or hit a receiver on a crossing pattern.  So even though he really hates America, he doesn’t get to play professional football.  But he was able to inspire a legion of other imbeciles all over the league, who are now calling attention to themselves by sitting through the national anthem and expounding on how my country sucks.

You people are ruining autumn!

2. Trump is morphing into the mushy center-leftist that many of us feared he was or would become, while the “professional” GOP – who are supposed to know better – apparently don’t know better. The low point came this week, when Trump inexplicably made an indefensible deal on the debt ceiling with – and here I am simultaneously choking on my own bile and throwing up in my mouth, which is every bit as pleasant as it sounds – Nancy Pelosi and Chuck-you Schumer.

The old cliché says, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  Of course, clichés become clichés because there is a lot of truth in them.  99 times out of 100, Joseph Stalin has got to be your enemy, if you are a decent, freedom loving country.   But when Stalin is fighting Hitler, Stalin is the enemy of your enemy, so… here’s a hearty handshake, Uncle Joe.

But if you should ever find yourself thinking that Pelosi and Schumer are your friends, you have to seriously re-assess your situation, and ask yourself how you could possible come to think that some other enemy – especially non-entities like Paul freaking Ryan or Chinless Cartoon Turtle McConnell – could be worse than those two!

Let me give you a hint, in the form of my own subtle revision of the aforementioned cliché:  “Pelosi and Schumer are your enemies, you imbecile!”

I’m still enormously grateful that Trump beat Hillary in November, and I appreciate some of the steps he’s taken (cutting regulations, Gorsuch, reforming taxes if he can get that done).  But the trajectory of his recent moves is not encouraging, to say the least!

3. In a true-life circumstance that puts the two complaints above in their proper, i.e. trivial perspective, hurricane Irma is barreling toward my family’s home.

We live in North Central Florida, but we’ve never experienced a hurricane before, since we’re far enough north that they usually become tropical storms before they reach us.  My only experience with 80 mph winds has been when I’ve ridden a motorcycle 80 miles an hour.  And that wind seemed like it might be unsettling, if you were feeling it when you were just standing in your yard, leaning into it.

We’ve spent the several days preparing.  My world-champion wife has been gathering supplies and stocking and preparing the homestead, while I’ve been out putting up what seems like 10,000 square feet of plywood on our handful of rental houses.  Our store shelves are empty, our gas stations are out, and the only books left on our library shelves were “An Inconvenient Truth” and Hillary’s new book.

So I’m going to be sitting with my family on our bathroom floor, using a flashlight to read the Owner’s Manuals for every tool and appliance I own.

If the current predictions are right, we will start feeling the effects of the storm on Sunday afternoon.  We will likely lose power Sunday evening, and if we’re lucky we’ll all come through safely, with our house intact, and we’ll only be without power for a day or two.

Before that happens, though, I’m posting this column at my dead drop for CO.   I’ll be back online as soon after the storm passes as possible.

In the meantime, if the worst should happen, no one is going to know what my last words were, which is really irritating.

I’m going to try to think of something really stirring.   But if I come up empty, I’m going back to a past classic.

After a tree has fallen through our ceiling, pinning me beneath it, I hope that I am able to gasp to my daughter, “You know who I blame this on?”

And she will respond, “The Democrats!”

I’ll wink at her lovingly.  And then the next face I expect to see will be Christ’s.   And he’ll fist bump me, in silent celebration of my awesome parenting skills.