Month: April 2024

Some Annoying People, But Look: Flamethrower Robot Dog! (posted 4/26/24)

Hey, you know who’s a terrible person?

Whoa, whoa, don’t everybody talk at once.  All right, considering the news lately, that was a bad way to start a column.  (But yes, all of the people you named just now – either out loud or in your head – fit the description.) So let me try again.

Megan Rapinoe continues to prove that she’s a terrible person. 

You might not remember her from her soccer playing (because soccer is totally non-memorable), but you probably remember her whining about how Big Soccer is totally sexist for not paying female players the same as male players.

You also might remember that after she ended her career by tearing an Achilles while she was walking on soft grass with nobody within 10 yards of her, she drew a theologically stupid moral from that story (God does not exist), rather than the obviously correct one (God is hilarious!).

Now that she’s safely retired, she’s pushing the anti-woman idea that “trans-women” (i.e. mentally ill or creepy men) should be allowed to play women’s soccer.   

Think about that.  She couldn’t take a quiet walk on a nice lawn without shredding her Achilles, but she wants to shame other women into going toe-to-toe with hulking male power forwards or kick-strikers.  (Yes, life is too short for me to spend a single minute researching what actual positions exist in soccer.)

But in her defense, if she would come out of retirement to play one game against men and get her arse thoroughly kicked…I might watch that one soccer game.

Speaking of obnoxious, sexually confused weirdos, if you haven’t seen the video of a “transgender” dude trying to shame a large black employee in a Texas Dollar General store for “misgendering” him, you need to do so immediately.  

When the deranged customer starts recording the guy, he responds by rolling his eyes and pulling out his own phone and narrating the events, starting with, “This fella’s giving me a hard time because their card’s declined—” after which the cry-bully starts swearing and leaves, promising, “You’re going to lose your job, sir.”  

First, I don’t disparage anybody’s job, when they’re working a low-status but honest job, paying their taxes and contributing to society.  Especially when compared to life-long welfare recipients, college kids getting worthless degrees paid for by school loans they expect Biden to “forgive” later (in other words, as previously stated, “life-long welfare recipients”), or MSM talking heads pulling down multimillion dollar salaries as professional liars, anybody working at Dollar General is making a great contribution to society. 

But that being said, I don’t think “You’re going to lose your job!” to a guy at Dollar General is quite the terrifying threat that this narcissist cosplayer thinks it is.

Second, if we’re going to grade events that bring shame upon you, I’m not sure that “dude dressing like a woman and throwing a hissy fit” is any worse than “your credit card was turned down at Dollar General.”

One commenter won the day: “Bro put the ‘trans’ in ‘trans-action declined.’”

If you’re ever in this employee’s position, I have some fantastic advice for you.  (When I’m out not being called a hilarious genius, I’m often called a hilarious guru.)

If you are ever confronted by a sexually confused guy raving at you in public about how he’s really a woman, just do what I do.  Hold both of your arms out in front of you, palms up and facing the hysteric, and in a quiet and soothing voice, say, “Just calm down, sir.”

Works every time, and you’re welcome.     

The most aggravating story of this week has been the persistent campus pro-Hamas “protests” that blue-state officials and administrators have allowed to go on for way too long.  One highlight was Ilhan Omar’s daughter getting suspended, and then getting even more entertaining in her drama-queen over-reactions. 

She was given some time on MSNBC (because of course she was) to whine about the many ways in which she and her anti-Semitic genocide-enthusiasts are the real victims.  When she was suspended, for example (after only a half-million warnings), she was left without any food or a place to stay. 

She said that the pushback against her side’s threatening actions was “hypocritical” because “every single protest that we have, there’s a group of counter-protestors who bring all of their their items, their flags and things like that.”

Got that?  If her group brings their pro-terrorism flags and banners, and protests, that’s great.  But if people who disagree with her do the same, they’re hypocrites.  (Talk about the pot calling the kettle Somalian!)

She also repeatedly accused the evil Jewish counter-protestors of having used “chemical weapons” against the peaceful jihad-supporters.  Hilariously enough, it turns out that the “chemical weapons” in question was actually “fart spray.”  You’ll not be shocked to hear that no one was burned, hospitalized or killed from the malodorous crime against humanity.

(Rumors that Eric Swalwell was seen in the encampment at the time of the incident have not been confirmed.)   

Not content to be out-dumbed by the offspring of Omar’s allegedly incestuous relationship with her brother, AOC gave her a run for her money in a hysterical tweet about Columbia’s “horrific decision” to request NYPD help to deal with the lawbreakers.  She was especially juicy-bootie-hurt (her words, not mine) because “counter-terrorism units” were deployed with the cops.

Yes, it’s truly “horrific” to have the cops come when people are breaking dozens of laws, and why would anyone use counter-terrorism cops against unruly supporters of terrorism?  It’s a world gone mad!   

But even among the crowds of morons seemingly besetting our society on all sides, there is still an upbeat story in the newest “Celebration of Excellence” category, and this one is an exception to a rule for me.

I’m not usually one for tinkering with things that aren’t broken.  I wish I could still buy a car with a metal key and crank-up windows, because a metal key never has a dead battery and the crank isn’t broken.     

And I don’t understand attractive young people who say, “I’ve got this great body that God gave me, with amazing curves and pristine, unblemished skin.  So let me cover it all with tattoos, causing people to guess which biker gang I joined and where I did my time.

And as regular readers – and all those with discernment and good judgment – know, there are few creatures on earth that are less broken, and less in need of tinkering, than dogs.  And I’m not just saying that because I own Cassie the Wonder Dog, or because I’m personal friends with the amazing Aussie-Whisperer, COSE.  

But this might be the rare time when I could possibly be wrong.  Because I just read a story in the Daily Mail about the Thermonator, which is “the first ever flamethrowing robot dog!” 

It’s made by a company in Ohio (USA! USA!), weighs about 37-pounds, features a variety of sensors and cameras, and carries a flamethrower on its back capable of “shooting a jet of fire up to 30 feet.”

And it’s only $9420!

Right now I imagine that most female readers are rolling their eyes.  But all of my male readers are saying either, “Yes, please!” or “RO-BOT DOG! RO-BOT DOG!” and high-fiving each other.

The company has a video of the Thermonator in action (I give it 5 stars), along with their sales pitch, which claims that the mechanical beast can be used for “entertainment, wildfire control, agricultural management, and ice removal.” 

They had me at “entertainment.”  Because I’ve got a great idea for that. 

With fast enough shipping, I can receive my flamethrowing robot dog this weekend – I’m already in the process of explaining to my wife that we can’t afford NOT to buy a flamethrowing robot dog – and race for New England. 

The next thing you know, I’ll be parked on the edge of an Ivy League campus where the pro-Hamas loons have set up their Jew-hater tents, reading the manual (“Congratulations on your purchase of the Thermonator 3000…”) to figure out how to set the flamethrower on “roast.”  

Do you think any of the Hamas-niks double-majoring in grievance studies and America hatred would get the Shakespeare reference if I yelled, “Cry havoc, and let slip the flamethrowing robot dog of war!” before I released the Thermonator?

Or I could just stick to the old standard…

Hamas delenda est!

Tossing a Speaker (?) and Biden Warns Israel not to Hit… Israel? (posted 4/22/24)

Okay, I’m going to risk some of the goodwill I’ve hopefully got banked here at the CO site by discussing an issue that is toxic on our side right now, and that will likely make many of you mad.  But if you’ll hang with me through the first part of the column, I’ve got a few stories to celebrate, too.

(You’ve heard the old cliché “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”  Today’s column is going to be medicine first, and a little bit of sugar afterwards.)   

To the medicine: I think it would be politically suicidal to try to oust Mike Johnson from the Speakership right now.

No, he’s not conservative enough for me.  Neither is Kevin McCarthy, or roughly 97% of Republican office holders. Or Donald Trump, for that matter.

So I not only empathize with those amongst us who were dissatisfied with McCarthy, and now with Johnson – I am one of those!  But at the same time, many on our side don’t seem to recognize the most basic political reality: we have 51% of one house of congress, and the Dems have the White House and the Senate.

It’s especially aggravating to read conservatives on other sites blasting Johnson for not closing our border, or saying, “We need to secure our border before we do anything else!”

If we were living on a planet where Mike Johnson had the ability to close our border, and he sided with the Dems and refused to do it, I’d be with those conservatives: “He’s a traitor, and should be run out of town!”

But we do not live on that planet.  And Mike Johnson – or Kevin McCarthy, Donald Trump, or even the great and powerful CO – can do absolutely nothing to close our border right now.  If Johnson pushed a “close the border” bill through the House it would win by one vote.  Then the Senate would toss it aside the way they did with the Mayorkas impeachment. 

But hey, we’re optimists, right?  What if it turned out that Fetterman’s recent brain damage was caused by a virus, and half the Senate caught it, and their recovery was super-fast, so that half of them became marginally sane, and they passed the Johnson border bill?

Then the earthly remains of Joe Biden would veto it, and we would accomplish nothing.

Having said that, I’d still like Johnson to push and pass such a bill, purely to gain some justified political advantage.  In general, I think we should force the Dems to take every unpopular vote we can, and then bludgeon them with those votes in November. 

(Pass an “at least prohibit abortion in the last trimester” bill, and a “don’t allow warped Munchausen parents to sexually mutilate their sexually confused kids” bill, and a “don’t release serial murderers so they can immediately murder again” bill.  And force the Dems to vote for aborting babies half-way down the birth canal, castrating kids, and facilitating the murder of more Americans.)  

But let’s not pretend that Johnson is fumbling away a non-existent potential victory.   

The latest exaggerated Breitbart headline I saw said that by garnering Dem votes for the Ukraine bill (along with 185 GOP votes, which aren’t mentioned), Johnson “has allowed the Dems to seize congress.” (I’m not discussing the wisdom of the Ukraine bill here, which I think has only gray options, and is all Biden’s fault.)

Really?  If that’s true, then by that standard, Matt Gaetz and his small band collaborated with the Dems to oust McCarthy, despite nearly all Republican votes.  And if MTG and another tiny group decide to toss Johnson out, they’ll be siding with the Dems again. 

But forget all that emotional sturm und drang.  Just out of Machiavellian self-interest, it is incredibly stupid and self-destructive to overthrow your own speaker when you have no one better to take his place!

Not only will it cause a ballistic circle jerk of Republicans shooting at each other, it will also turn off the independents who are desperately looking for an alternative to the late Joe Biden, and will make a loss in November more likely.  (Then everybody who hated McCarthy and Johnson can happily settle in to the final six months before the election under Speaker Jeffries, and total Dem control of congress and the WH!)

So what should we do?  1. If any Republican is speaker when the dust clears, we must immediately get rid of the new rule that a tiny number of GOP pols can overthrow a speaker.  If you can’t get a majority of your party to agree that a speaker has to go, suck it up. 

The Dems would never cripple themselves with such a rule, which is part of the reason that – despite having the most idiotic and dysfunctional agenda since the Trojans tugged that big horse within their city walls – they’ve managed to push through their terrible legislation with very thin margins in the house, while the GOP’s much more rational legislation has languished.

Seriously.  At any given moment, at least several dozen House Dems are not just opposed to their party leadership’s agenda, they are certifiably bat guano crazy.  Hank Johnson thinks Guam is in danger of capsizing, Sheila Jackson Lee thinks that the moon is made of gas and the sun is “a very strong heat” on which human life would be difficult.  (Just think of how much sun screen you’d have to use every single day you were living on the sun, people!)  The squad is a bunch of mouth-breathing anti-Semites, and etc. and etc. 

And yet Imhotep Pelosi was able to either whip her stupidest colleagues into line, or else ignore and marginalize them.  Even though her brains were pulled out of her skull through her nose when she was first mummified several millenia ago, she would never have been stupid enough to give a group of 3-5 of her most volatile members the chance to scuttle her agenda any time they got their burkas in a bunch.

2. Win the WH and Senate in November!   

3. Win a large enough majority in the House so that you can let your camera-hogging marginal characters (I think MTG, Boebert and Gaetz – and sadly for me, Massie – are amongst those, but your mileage may vary) say and do what they want, without the power of the whip hand to paralyze all action in the House.

Okay, if any of you are still with me, and aren’t already typing your comments (“Dear Jackass, You are neither hilarious nor a genius!  Good day sir!”), let’s move on to other news.  (By the way, the last video I made – it’s called “Buckley and CS Lewis on this election” – touches on similar issues, i.e. a call for us to have grace with each other and our imperfect leaders as we head into this election season.  You can see it at my website – Martinsimpsonwriting.com – under “Videos.”)

One bit of very good news came on Friday, when the Trump campaign and the RNC unveiled a “massive election integrity program, involving more than 100,000 volunteers and attorneys working in each battleground state, and overseeing voting and ballot handling and counting. 

Yes!  Many people have been begging for this sort of effort (I mentioned it in my March 8th column), and if it is as robust as it sounds, it might go a long way toward making up for the inexplicable decision to support Ronna Romney for at least two election cycles and 4 years too many!  My gut tells me that the single biggest threat to a Trump victory is the left possibly rigging the election and 2020-style ballot shenanigans, so this new effort is just what Dr. Simpson ordered.   

(Now if we can just get Trump to stop telling his base to NOT vote early or by mail!)

There’s even a bit of good news involving Joey Gaffes this week. He was feeling a little down because five times he had said, “Don’t!” as a stern warning for Iran not to attack Israel. 

Annnndddd… they attacked Israel with 320 drones and missiles. 

But he said, “Don’t!” one more time, this time directed at Israel, along with this admonishment: “Don’t move on Haifa.”  And to their great credit – and Biden’s relief – Israel took his advice and did not attack Haifa.

Which is… a city in Israel.  

(I think he might have meant “Rafah,” which is a terrorist-infested city in Gaza.  And which, come to think of it, sounds like the kind of burg that Biden would like to protect, since his ululating base voters in Dearborn MI are quite fond of those gang-raping jihadists in Rafah… and much less fond of the peace-loving Israelis in Haifa.)  

But hey, Biden called on the IDF not to hit their own cities, and they didn’t, and that’s the closest thing to a win Biden has had for a while.

Ooh, except that while his favorite uncle was definitely shot out of the sky and then eaten by cannibals, Joe has been unmolested by cannibals for all 124 years he’s been on this planet.

Rumors that the cannibals took one look at him and said, “Too stringy.  Plus that brain thing he’s got might be catching, like Mad Cow Disease,” have not been confirmed.  

Hamas delenda est!

Enough of the Doom and Gloom – Here are Stories Worth Celebrating (posted 4/19/24)

I’ve got two quick bits of business to start with.  First, OJ Simpson continues to be dead, and rumors that he was related to me have been definitively disproven.  Just FYI.

Second is a language note that has been irritating me:  If you use the word “journey” around me, you’d better be Vasco da Gama, Magellan or Columbus.  Or possibly a fan of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

Otherwise, knock it off.  In just the last 24 hours I have either heard or read people talking about “my vegan journey,” “our crypto investment journey,” and “my gender awareness journey.”  (I’m guessing the last one took you around the Cape of Good Hope, and then way out past the Cape of Good Sense?) (Ending in the Cape of Good Lord! You Cut That Off?!)

And then I came across a story about an in-house Microsoft pro-DEI propaganda video called, “Work in Progress: Our Diversity and Inclusion Journey.” And that was too depressing for me to investigate any further. 

On the bright side, I am SO glad I don’t work at Microsoft. 

Okay, with those irritations out of the way, I’m going to focus on the sunny side today.  Because even with the many things going wrong in the country, good things are happening, too.   

For example, even the uber-woke Google has shown some backbone, and fired some insubordinate workers who were offended because the company was providing a cloud service called Nimbus to the Israeli government and military.

The workers had been protesting, interrupting meetings with shouts and inane chants for months, “demand[ing] that Google stop providing material support to genocide” by killing Nimbus.  On Wednesday, they took it up a notch, occupying company offices in NY and CA in a disruptive 10-hour sit-in.

My first instinct was that Google would likely “pull an NBC” and capitulate to the a-holes.  (Just as the intolerant MSM workers were able to force their putative bosses to fire Ronna Romney six minutes after they hired her.) 

But no!  Google warned the protestors to quit it, and when they didn’t, Google had a handful of them arrested for trespassing and then fired 28 of them.  It’s a Ramadan miracle!

The resulting social media tantrum thrown by the fired workers was a heart-warming laugh riot, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the employer-employee relationship in grown-up land.  Their statement began, “This evening, Google indiscriminately fired 28 workers.”  

Look up “indiscriminate,” you children, because this wasn’t that.  They have almost 200,000 employees, and they fired the 28 biggest a-holes among them.  That’s some fine-tuned discrimination right there!

The best part was when they whined that their “flagrant” firing was “a clear indication” that Google valued the $1.2 billion contract more than its malcontent workers.

Ya think?  Let’s see.  Hang on a second while I get my scales-of-justice decision-making tool out…

Okay.  On one side, put 28 entitled brats who are a constant source of dissension and stress in the office.  Now on the other side put $1.2 BILLION DOLLARS! …. Calculating… carry the 2… calculating…

Annnnndddddd…

You’re gone!  Don’t let the door hit you on the burka on your way out, and as they say in Gaza, Fa’aq Mabhouh!

And it’s not just Google, and Vanderbilt, and the Bakersfield city council that’s laying some smack-down on arrogant lefty dimwits.

Even the Ivy League is providing some good news, as when Columbia warned over 100 pro-Hamas anti-Semite student protestors who had set up tents on the school lawn that if they didn’t remove the tents and disperse, they’d be arrested.

Then, when the students didn’t do that… they were arrested! 

Unexpectedly! (But in a very good way.)

The NY cops rounded them up, cuffed them, loaded them onto corrections buses and took them downtown to be charged.  There’s also talk of suspension!  Tragically, no taser therapy was administered, but still: file this under “things I never thought I’d see.”

To provide a little sweet schadenfreude glaze (mmm, schadenfreude glaze!) on this delicious story, Ilhan Omar’s daughter was there, and was arrested too! 

I didn’t know Omar had a daughter.  Her name is Isra Hirsi, and my second thought about her was the hope that she’s not as obnoxious as her mom.  (My first thought? “Please God, don’t let her dad be her uncle!”) 

But she’s apparently cut from the same cloth as Jack Petocz, the Vanderbilt narcissist I wrote about last week.  Just as he whined about being expelled “for fighting for marginalized people” and “protesting the genocide (sic) in Palestine (sic),” Hirsi complained that she has been suspended “for standing in solidarity with Palestinians (sic) facing a genocide (sic).”

She has a Soviet hammer and sickle on her X account, too.  So she’s several different kinds of dumb.  She also has a biographical sketch that reads like self-aggrandizing self-parody:

“Isra Hirsi has been organizing for justice and equity since she was 14, bringing national attention to climate change before she graduated high school.”

Got that?  You may have thought that the non-stop yammering about climate change has been coming from every self-involved doom scroller in the country for the last 30 years, but it turns out it’s all the fault of this one insufferable teenager in Minnesota!

Isra, if you wanted to bring national attention to an issue that was being overlooked, why didn’t you raise our awareness of the prevalence of incest and immigration fraud in the Somali ingrate community?

Her bio goes on, and I bet you can guess where it ends up.  “Finding her voice (ugh!), embracing her purpose, and carrying years of experience as a leading Black (don’t forget the capital letter!) youth in the climate activism arena at such a young age has been…” wait for it, CO nation… “a difficult journey…”

Aagghhhh!  I’m out!  I hope she gets 5-7 in Rikers for aggravated virtue signaling.

But the cherry on top of this masterpiece of an optimistic column comes to us from another unlikely place:  Harvard University!  You may remember the school from that time when their President and their top DEI official both got caught plagiarizing their butts off, but now they’ve actually done something smart.

They’ve re-instituted the requirement for applicants to submit standardized test scores.  This requirement was dropped by many Ivy League schools in recent years, many of them blaming covid.  Which made no sense. 

But everyone on the left was blaming covid for everything.   

Joe Biden has lost the ability to walk, and speak coherently?  Covid!  Whoopi Goldberg is gaining weight and losing IQ? Covid!  Liz Warren’s DNA has mutated to mysteriously wipe out all trace of her Native American ancestry?  Covid! 

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But the real reason to get rid of standardized tests was that some minorities do great on tests (Asians, Indians from India) and others do badly (Hispanics and blacks).  So obviously the tests are racist and white supremacist, or Asian-supremacist, or Hindu-supremacist, or something. 

The dirty little secret in academia is that the tests pretty accurately reflect the level of student preparedness to succeed at a high-level university.  Which means that the tests accurately predicted that under-prepared minority students who did poorly on the tests would do poorly in college. 

Unexpectedly!

Which led in turn to the incredibly moronic – and un-sayable in public – premise behind dropping standardized tests in the first place: These tests reveal that many students will fail at Harvard.  So the tests must be killed, so that we can admit them, so they can then fail at Harvard.  (And then we’ll blame racism. Or patriarchy.  Or covid.)

This phenomenon also explains, IMHO, why MIT reversed itself and required tests again two years earlier than the Ivies did: when your focus is on rigorous STEM coursework – where everything has to work and be accurate – it’s much harder to hide very bad student performance than it is in Grievance Studies programs, where everything is stupid, dysfunctional, and false. 

So sure, higher education has a ton of flaws, and needs systemic reform.  [This is where, if my column had a soundtrack, you’d noticing the consistent rising volume of the strings asserting themselves…] But for today, I’m going to take this victory, and I’m going to celebrate it. 

Because I’m an Ameri-CAN, not an Ameri-can’t, and I’m a cautious optimist, dammit!  In fact, like many Martins before me, I’m a dreamer! [Now the brass has joined in, along with the woodwinds…]   

And I have a dream, today! 

I have a dream that our politicians – just like our college students and my two (relatively) little children – will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin or the juiciness of their booties (her words, not mine), but by their intellect, their work ethic, and the content of their character!   

Can I get an amen?

Now get out there and crush the weekend, CO nation!  Because you’re not on some simpering “journey” – you’ve already arrived!

And don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!

Law and Order, Part 2 (posted 4/17/24)

On Monday I discussed some typical crimes in big blue cities: Dexter Reed earning himself a 21-gun-salute by shooting at Chicago cops; St. Louis mayor Tishaura the Terrible (move over, Ivan!) blaming store owners for being robbed by thugs she allows to roam free; and San Fran’s brilliant plan to force bankrupt businesses to continue operating, because shoplifters need to exercise their constitutional right to loot.

Today I’d like to talk about a different kind of crime, one involving two of my favorite things: stupid high-status criminals, and sweet, sweet schadenfreude.  And I’ve got two great examples.

The first one comes from Scotland, sadly enough.  I hate to say it, but the Scots are now giving the Scandinavians some stiff competition in the race to see who can make their ancestors roll over in their graves the fastest.

Just a scant 1000 years ago – when Imhotep Pelosi was a dewy ingenue celebrating her 700th birthday – Norsemen were legendary warriors, and the Scots were the hillbillies of Europe (in the best possible way), having forced the Romans to give up their incursions and build Hadrian’s Wall.

Today, too many descendants of Vikings are beta males who embrace the EU and take orders from the Hague, and the once-proud Scots are castigating themselves for being too white (in Scotland!) and adopting insulting “hate crimes” speech codes into law.

They’ve somehow wound up with a goofball named Humza Yousaf as First Minister.  (Because apparently somebody challenged them to find a minister more hateful than Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, and they said, “Hold my haggis, and watch this!”)

Yousaf – yes, of Clan Yousaf, from the highlands – led the push to pass the “Hate Crime and Public Order Act,” which became law on April Fool’s Day, fittingly enough.  As with all such laws, it was passed on the promise that it would be used to stop hatred and bigotry, and never to quash free expression.

But as with all such laws everywhere, “hate speech” always boils down to “speech that those in power don’t like.”  As soon as I read about the law, I figured that it would likely be wielded as a weapon against whoever is the Scottish equivalent of people wearing MAGA hats.  (Maybe lads in William Wallace Windbreakers, or Don’t Tread on Me Kilts?)

(If those don’t exist yet, I’d like to copyright them right now.) 

And indeed, the law has gone terribly wrong, right out of the gate.  But what I didn’t anticipate – and what restores a little of my faith in the Scots – is in what schadenfreude-tastic ways it would go hilariously wrong!

In the first 48 hours after the law took effect, Scottish police were swamped with 4,000 official complaints!  Obviously, the cops have no time or resources to deal with this deluge of whining, as opposed to doing, you know, actual police work.  Instead, as a story in The Guardian put it (and that’s the last time you’ll see me citing that lefty rag with approval), “It has resulted in an almighty omnishambles.”

As a language nerd, I LOVE that phrase, and am determined to work it into future columns on a semi-regular basis.  (Ex: “The mob of Biden-voting looters began with some garden-variety tumultuous conduct, but then escalated to the point of creating an almighty omnishambles!”)

Many of the first 4000 complaints apparently dealt with J.K. Rowling (about which more in a minute), but another big chunk had to do with the malicious minister himself, Hamza Yousaf! 

Because it turns out that the Ham-ster went on a rant in 2020 about how racist Scotland is, citing as his evidence the vast majority of government positions that are held by whites. (In Scotland!) (Unexpectedly!)  

The culmination of his speech featured him spitting out “white” after each position’s title with visceral disgust.  (“The lord president, white!  The chief constable, white!  Every high court judge, white!”)

Since the hate crime law was passed to supposedly fight racial hatred, I love that the minute that the law took effect, many Scots trolled Hamza by aiming complaints at him for his own racial animus, hoisting him on his own petard.

I mentioned J.K. Rowling, who has now officially become a hero of mine.  She’s taken all sorts of abuse from the usual suspects for displaying the best kind of Scottish stubbornness on the issue of “transgender women” – who, as everyone knows, are dudes.

I hold her in similarly high regard as I hold my third-favorite African-American (after Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell): Elon Musk.  Both Musk and Rowling achieved great wealth, and could have continued to bask in public approval if they had just acquiesced to the elite censors and kept their mouths shut. 

We’ve all heard the cliché that someone is wealthy when she has “f**k you” money, but Adam Carolla has pointed out that REAL wealth is having “f**k me” money.  I.e. you can afford to lose $20 billion by overpaying for Twitter, just because you value free speech. 

Or you can afford to sacrifice the social capital represented by Harry Potter money by refusing to repeat the lie that men can be women.

When she heard about the new law, Rowling went before cameras and threw down the gauntlet, saying that she would never bend the knee and lie about gender, and daring Hamza and his army of woke bullies to charge her and jail her.

I’m not sure how many of the initial complaints filed about her were authentic whining from the leftist thought police, and how many of them were trolling from liberty-loving Scots, but either way, it worked out great.  Hamza’s government backpedaled furiously, putting out hapless spokes-weasels to insist that they would never apply the new law to people like Rowling or honest disagreements like hers.  (And all throughout the land, there were spit-takes of Scotch in every pub.)

I’m looking forward to watching the Scottish government squirm and suffer in the coming months, until they will hopefully be forced into an ignominious repeal of the law, just like Portlanders had to re-criminalize hard drugs, and Dem pols have had to scramble to re-fund the police.    

Speaking of spineless acquiescence to leftist bullies, it’s been maddening to watch one blue city after another allow pro-Hamas idiots to block major roads – the Golden Gate bridge, a major road leading to O’Hare in Chicago – while the cops are forced to stand by and let the madness go on.

That’s why counter-examples are so refreshing.  I probably don’t have to tell you that DeSantis sent in the cops and quickly dragged off and arrested a bunch of protestors in Florida last week.  (Man, I hope we can someday have that guy as our president!)

But you might not have heard of little Pomona college in CA, where a mob of pro-terror Hamas supporters were arrested after they took over a campus building on April 5th.  Nineteen of them were suspended and charged with crimes.  Sure, the charges are only misdemeanors, but for California, that’s a great start.    

As always with this kind of protest, their chants were pedestrian at best.  Along with the usual tired ones (“From the river to the sea…”), their only even half-decent one was, “Stop the killing, stop the slaughter, Gaza has no food or water.”  You’d think that such a large group of losers with no prospects for gainful employment and a lot of time on their hands could do better.

In fact, here’s one off the top of my head, just to challenge them: “We find Israel’s actions heinous, See? our thoughts come from our anus!” 

You’re welcome, keffiyeh-wearing morons! 

But the greatest recent example is the one you’ve probably already seen: Riddhi Patel, the toxic little firebrand who went on an epic rant aimed at the city council in Bakersfield.  After a slow start, she dialed it up to 11, and what she lacked in basic logic, she more than made up for in 180-proof bile.

By her second sentence, she had already achieved lift-off: “I don’t have faith that you will do this.  You guys are all horrible human beings, and Jesus probably would have killed you himself.”  

(Um.  I’m no Thomas Aquinas, but I think you may have missed a few of the subtleties of Jesus’ main idea there, Riddhi.)

Within a minute, she was up to, “I hope one day somebody brings a guillotine and kills all of you motherfrienders!”

For the toxic icing on her genocide cake, she expressed outrage that the council recently installed metal detectors and extra police.  “You guys want to criminalize us with metal detectors, we’ll see you at your house.  We’ll murder you!”

Got that?  “How dare you unfairly suggest that we might be dangerous in any way?  Just for that, we’re going to break into your houses and slaughter you!”

Well done! 

Miraculously, Riddhi was arrested right after her speech, and charged with 18 felony accounts involving threats to terrorize, and given a bail of $1 million!  When she appeared in court two days later, she was crying like a baby.

Three quick notes:  1. After watching her getting cuffed and hauled away, her fellow protestors “have since distanced themselves from Patel’s desire to kill.” I’ll bet they have!

2. Nearly all of her young fellow protestors were wearing covid masks. In April of 2024! (Virtue signaling has turned into “low IQ signaling.”)

3. The issue she was so outraged about was that the Bakersfield city council wouldn’t pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. 

As if the villains running Hamas would be sitting around a long table in their lair, planning their next mass murder, when a messenger enters with a note.  After reading it, the head terrorist would announce mournfully, “We were just about to gang rape more hippie chicks and burn more Jewish babies alive, but I’ve just learned that we’ve lost the Bakersfield city council!  That’s it, pack up the tents.  The jihad is over!”   

I see two kinds of protestors in these mobs.  First are the dead-eyed sociopaths who aren’t kidding around – they’d throw their “Queers for Palestine” co-losers off a rooftop in Gaza so fast it’d make your drag-queen tiara spin.  Thankfully, this type seems to be in the minority.

The majority are cosplaying narcissists like Riddhi.  And as we have seen in Bakersfield, Pomona, and Vanderbilt – and in most of the red states – they are cowards, and most fold and flee at the first sign of serious pushback.

If we had met her type with a little taser therapy, a set of cuffs and a night spent in a county jail starting with the first George Floyd riot, how much of the chaos and destruction of the last 4 years could have been avoided?

By the way, a California judge – citing among other things that Riddhi Patel doesn’t appear to own any firearms – has cut her bail in half.

D’oh!  This is why you can’t have nice things, California.  Hamas delenda est!

Law and Order Stories (posted 4/15/24)

Today I’m concentrating on stories involving crime and punishment.  So I’ll start in Chicago. 

Unexpectedly!  (For those of you scoring at home, that’s the earliest I’ve managed to work “unexpectedly!” into a column.)

I regularly watch videos channels featuring coverage of armed confrontations between criminals and cops/security guards/civilians, to pick up tips on situational awareness and to be entertained. (I find stupid criminals and stupid politicians to be continually battling for the top spot in a “human folly” competition.)

Among my favorite such channels are Donut Operator, Active Self Protection and Code Blue Cam.  Those sites shine a light on bad and incompetent cops – there seem to be a lot of obese cops on the job, and many who don’t appear to have won top grades for firearm safety, for example – but most of the encounters reveal the kind of dangerous idiots cops have to deal with every day.

After watching hundreds of those videos, I would say that the over/under on “number of police commands ignored and/or defied before getting shot by cops” has got to be around 85, at least.  If I had a dollar for every such command not complied with – “turn off the car, step out of the car, keep your hands where I can see them, drop the knife, drop the gun, don’t stab that K-9, put down the hooker, Hunter” – I’d be Elon Musk. 

Anyway, this first one is not just a stupid criminal story; it’s also a “you don’t hate the media enough” story.  Because here is the media’s account of the encounter between Dexter Reed (26) and Chicago police in late March: Reed – a budding entrepreneur who wanted to launch a clothing line – was a loving, funny and all-around great guy.  Look at these smiling pics of him at his graduation! 

The Washington Post story opened with him telling his mom that he was going for a ride, then says that he “was killed that same day” when cops fired at him “96 times within 41 seconds.” Virtually every MSM story says that the cops stopped him for not wearing a seatbelt, and the synopsis of those stories is a stark narrative: “racist cops execute angelic black guy in hail of gunfire because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.”

The reality of the situation, you will not be shocked to learn, was just a little bit different.  Fortunately, the officers involved had body cams on, which you would think would make the creepy MSM hacks slow their roll on the lying.  But… nope!

Reed came in on the “under” in terms of defied commands: the first cop to encounter him as he rolled his window down asked him what he was doing and he said, “Nothing.”  Then he rolled his window half-way up.  The cop told him “Roll the window down” three times (spoiler alert: he did not roll his window down), and then told him to unlock or open his door 8 times (spoiler alert: he did neither). 

The reason he ignored so few commands is that he opened fire on cops after only 11 ignored commands.  He hit one cop in the wrist, before multiple cops opened up on him in an impressive display of “tumultuous conduct.”  MSM reports first said he was shot “more than 100 times,” then said that the cops “fired 96 times,” though that number apparently counted the 11 shots that he fired at them in that total.

Oh, did the MSM not mention that he fired at cops first, wounding one of them?  Or that he had previous convictions that precluded him from legally carrying a gun, and that he was “out on pre-trial release” (bail, schmail!) involving earlier gun-related felonies?  Or that most of the cops who fired at him were black, as was the cop he shot and wounded?

No? Isn’t that strange?

To be fair, the WaPo DID report that he shot first.  <Kinison filter: IN PARAGRAPH 8!  OH! OHHHH!! >  (In other words, they literally “buried the lede!”)    

Of course, this is a political story as much as it is a crime story.  Our MSM desperately needs another George Floyd story to stoke hatred in the nation.  They are dying to be able to trumpet the case of decent, innocent black folk gunned down by the vile forces of white supremacy. 

And yet the demand for such stories so outstrips the supply that they are reduced to trying to make angels out of career criminals who are justifiably shot or killed in the act of committing violent crimes.  (Trayvon  Martin was bashing his victim’s head against concrete when he was shot.  Michael Brown was assaulting a cop and fighting to get his gun when he was shot.  Breonna Taylor was standing beside her drug-dealer boyfriend when he shot at cops who returned fire, killing Taylor.  George Floyd himself was a career criminal whom the coroner’s report proved died of an overdose. Etc.) 

Democrat voters in Chicago have elected one Dem mayor after another for over a century, and they’re getting what they voted for, good and hard.  Their last mayor – Lori Lightfoot — was the most racist and disastrously incompetent ever. 

But in 2023, when the voters had dumped Lightfoot in the primaries, they said, “Hold my malt liquor, and watch this,” and elected the truly egregious Brandon Johnson.  A recent scathing news story about Chicago’s continuing deterioration contains the most damning sentence ever: Johnson “has managed in just 11 months in office to make former Mayor Lori Lightfoot look competent.” 

Ouch!  That’s right up there with, “makes Sheila Jackson Lee look like an astrophysicist,” or, “makes AOC look like a valedictorian.”

By the way, the other candidate in last year’s Chicago run-off was another lefty Dem named Paul Vallas.  Vallas was running with a huge weakness – he’s white, in a city where the vast majority of Democrat voters are whitey-haters – and Johnson won pretty easily.  Vallas was also competent…in a city where that is frowned upon.

When the Dexter Reed story broke, Vallas posted, “DON’T SHOOT COPS.  When you shoot at cops, let alone wound one, they are going to shoot back and not count the bullets.” 

Words to live by. 

Or to die by, I guess.  Well done, Chicago voters!

But Chicago is facing stiff competition in its striving for the title of the most crime-ridden city.  Another contender is St. Louis, one of many Dem-run cities described as being in a “doom loop” of high crime, tax flight, business failures and empty buildings. One stark example is the former AT&T building, which at 44 stories is the third tallest building in town. 

It sold in 2006 for $205 million; it recently sold again, this time for $3.6 million.  D’oh!

“How could this have happened,” you are not asking, because you already know.  And yes, it turns out the last GOP mayor of St. Louis left office 75 years ago. 

Today, St. Louis’ mayor is a real peach named Tishaura Jones.  (If you read that name and thought, “white supremacist?” turn in your Cautious Optimism badge and ID, because you are officially suspended pending further investigation.)

Last month Jones joined a “coalition of black mayors against crime in the US.”  Because as one of those mayors put it, “Many of these leaders come from the communities most affected by crime, so they have a unique perspective on solving it.” 

Jones certainly has a unique solution for the owners of gas stations and convenience stores who have been plagued by crime in her lawless city.  And before you can ask:  No, I am not making the following quote up. 

Saith Tishaura, “How can we hold the business owners accountable?”    

That’s right.  She runs a city, and oversees a police department, whose job is to stop criminals from preying upon – among others – the owners and customers of gas stations and convenience stores.  Her city and her police department are failing miserably. 

So naturally, she’s blaming the business owners!  (Coming soon, the Tishaura Plan to Prevent Rape: We must hold women accountable for getting raped!  Her talking points will include, “Why are you putting on makeup, and dressing attractively?  And going outside of your house at night?  And also in broad daylight?  Not to mention at dusk, or dawn?”)

Before you declare that that might be the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, let me take you to San Francisco, where a Democrat brain trust has come up with another “unique solution” to businesses going broke in their city: make it illegal for stores to close! 

Got that?  They are proposing a law that “mandates that grocery stores will be required to give a six month notice before they close their doors permanently.” They will also be required to “find a replacement store so as to not disrupt access to essentials for residents.”

Good lord!  How do those morons think that this will work?

Store Owner (SO): “I’ve been bleeding cash for years, and I can’t do it anymore.  I’m closing my store.”

San Fran Dem (SFD): “You can’t do that.”

SO: “What?”

SFD: “It’s illegal to close your store.”

SO: “What?”

SFD: “Your customers need the goods you sell.”

SO: “Half of our customers are shoplifters, because you won’t arrest them.  Half of the other half are tired of long-jumping over banks of human feces because you won’t keep the streets clean, and the other half of that half are in the hospital with hep C or a flesh-eating disease they got from filthy needles they fell on as they were poop-jumping.  Because you won’t keep the streets clean.”

SFD: “You can’t close.”

SO: “How are you going to stop me?  I’m broke.

SFD: “We’ll fine you.”

SO: “What?!  (speaking very slowly) I… am… broke!”

SFD: “Okay.  We won’t fine you, if you find another store to take your place.”

SO: “What?  How am I supposed to do that?

SFD: “Persuade them.”

SO: “Oh yeah.  I’ll just tell them that the street we’re on looks like a zombie apocalypse, the store is crawling with meth heads and shoplifters, the cash flow is negative, the taxes are astronomical, and the labor pool is a bunch of pot-head grievance study majors who will sue you if you don’t use their made-up pronouns.” 

SFD: “That reminds us.  The new mandatory minimum wage is $75 an hour.”

And, scene. 

Okay, once again this will be a three-column week, because I’ve barely scratched the surface of crime-and-punishment stories. See you on Wednesday!

Hamas delenda est!

A Pistol-Packing Granny, Jim Clyburn Face-Plants in Real Time, and Sheila Jackson Lee is no Astrophysicist (posted 4/12/24)

Well, O.J. Simpson is finally dead.  And I’m sure that reminds us all of the old, well-known, cliched folk-saying: “Martin Simpson is NOT related to O.J. Simpson in any way.”

If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.  And yet it still rings true, doesn’t it?

So in honor of the day, I’ll start with a Stupid Criminal story, and I’ve got to warn you: it contains some tumultuous conduct!

This one takes place in Bingham County, Idaho.  Christine Jenneiahn (85) lives out in the boonies with her adult, disabled son, and at 2:00 a.m. on March 13th, Derek Condon (39, but no longer going on 40) broke into her house.  He was wearing a ski mask and carrying a 9mm handgun, and he hit Christine, handcuffed her to a wooden chair in her living room, and threatened to kill her if she didn’t give him her valuables.

She told him there were two safes in the basement.  When he went down to look, she dragged the chair she was handcuffed to into her bedroom, where she retrieved a pistol from under her pillow.  Because: Idaho!

She then dragged her chair back into the living room and hid the gun beside her, hoping she wouldn’t have to use it.  But when Condon discovered her disabled son, he got mad at her for not telling him the son was there.  He started threatening her again while he was rummaging around the house, so she pulled out the gun and shot him twice.

Condon emptied his gun at her, “hitting her multiple times in her abdomen, leg, arm and chest.”  She fell to the floor, and lay there for 10 hours until her son came into the room and gave her a phone to call 911.

Condon made it to the kitchen before he fell, as dead as O.J. Simpson.  (Who, I may not have mentioned, is not kin to me.)

There are several surprising parts to this story, including the fact that after being handcuffed, an 85-year-old woman could drag her chair into another room to get her gun, and also that she was shot multiple times, but survived. 

Granny’s got a little something I like to call “grit!”

But the most shocking part is her choice of firearm.  No little old-West-style derringer or dainty .22 for Miss Christine.  She’s got a .357 magnum!

Sure, that’s not a .44.  (Which, if I remember my Clint Eastwood films correctly – and I think that I do – is “the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off.”)

But it’s not nothin’.  And in this case, it has proved the truth of yet another hoary cliché – and one only slightly less well known than “Martin Simpson is no relation to O.J. Simpson” – “That iron get ya mind right!”

It certainly did so for the late and unlamented Derek Condon.  If he had survived, I’d tell him that he should be extra ashamed of himself for trying to victimize an old lady. Since he didn’t, I’ll just say RII (rest in ignominy). 

The only downside of the story is that if Idaho has the same kind of voter integrity safeguards in place as those in Chicago, NYC or Philly, he’ll be casting several votes for Biden in November.

Speaking of which, at 85, Granny Christine is 4 years OLDER than Joe Biden.  Does anybody in Christendom believe that in the same situation, Joey Gaffes would have been able to do anything she did in this story? 

He wouldn’t have been able to drag his own carcass into another room, let alone dragging a chair along with him.  And if he had somehow made it into the bedroom, he would have forgotten what he went in there for.  

And if, against all odds, he’d been able to find and hold the 357 up, the recoil from the first shot would have sent him tumbling backwards and probably broken multiple ribs, both arms and a hip.   

Changing topics, I’d like to introduce yet another new and hopefully recurring category in my columns:  Proof that God has a Sense of Humor.

The inaugural example comes from yesterday, when South Carolina Democrat Jim Clyburn appeared on a panel discussion on MSNBC (where Democracy Dies in a Smothering Fog of Imbecility™).  He was there to push the economic dumpster fire that is… Bidenomics!

He started by admitting that people are concerned with high inflation, but then tried to pivot.  “But what we’ve got to get them to see is that inflation today is about 40 percent of what it was when Joe Biden took office.  And so the inflation rates are down…”  Followed by another two minutes on the theme of “don’t believe your lyin’ eyes!”

I should note that he appeared on screen shot from the mid-chest up, so I could not say for certain that his pants ignited during the interview.  But if I had to guess…

So, Clyburn insists that inflation is dropping like a rock, and all will be well.  Because: Bidenomics!

And then, Mika cuts directly to breaking news: “The Consumer Price Index increased at a faster than unexpected pace last month, a signal that inflation remains stubbornly high.” 

She threw to Andrew Sorkin, who looked like someone had just urinated in his kale smoothie as he had to explain that, “We’ve been on this broadcast for months now about how the trendline was in Biden’s favor.  Today I imagine they’re throwing a party in Mar-a-Lago.”  

The entire segment was just more proof of what I’ve always said: God hates Jim Clyburn. 

Okay, I’ve never said that.  And – full disclosure – I can’t actually claim to know the mind of God.  But ever since Clyburn saved Biden’s campaign for the nomination in 2020 and foisted his horrific presidency on our beleaguered nation, I would guess that God is likely carrying a grudge. 

Anyway, for one rare moment, it was fun to watch MSNBC.  We’re all used to watching leftists’ promises and predictions proven to be laughably wrong (unexpectedly!), but we rarely get a chance to see them implode instantaneously, on live tv.

Coincidentally, when Mika cut back to the studio, Jim Clyburn was nowhere to be seen.  Rumors that he was rushed to the burn unit of a nearby hospital for treatment of “the results of a first-degree, trouser-related combustion incident” have not been confirmed.

Okay, there are more stories to get to, but I’ve only got room for one more, and I couldn’t let this one slide by without comment.  Even though I’m sure most of you have heard all about it.

I’m talking about congress-dunce Sheila Jackson Lee (of guess which party), formerly of the Science Committee, and the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, speaking to a bunch of school kids on the occasion of the eclipse.

Some of you have called me a hilarious genius, and I’ve been known to take creative flights of fancy when writing about loony lefties. 

But even if I had ingested the same mushrooms that guitar genius Billy Strings took before he tore through his epic “Dust in a Baggie” in that cell phone video in somebody’s rec room (if you haven’t seen that yet, c’mon man!), I could not have come up with the following quote, which I swear to you is directly from Lee’s mouth:

“[Unintelligible] provide unique light and energy so that you have the energy of the moon at night, and sometimes you’ve heard the word ‘full moon,’ sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gasses.”

“And that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans could live on the moon. Are the gasses such that we could do that? The sun is a mighty powerful heat, and it’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable.”

Un-freaking-quote.  And yes, she had us all at “unintelligible.”

As I mentioned in a previous column, my youngest daughter is near completion of two undergrad degrees, in planetary science and astrophysics, with an additional minor in regular old physics.  This summer she’ll be doing a 10-week undergrad research internship in astrophysics at UC Boulder, and will hopefully return there next year to start a PhD.   

(And not to brag, but I once did quite well in Algebra II.)

So I called her to fact-check Sheila Jackson Lee. 

I asked her if it is true that “the moon is made up mostly of gasses.”  The line was quiet, but just in case the call hadn’t dropped, I followed up by asking her if “the sun is a mighty powerful heat,” so much so that “it’s almost impossible to go near” it?

She hung up on me, but I swear I could hear her face palm all the way from her dorm on the space coast to my home library at Stately Simpson Manor.

To recap what we’ve learned here today:

Don’t get in a gunfight with a 357-magnum-packing octogenarian.

God hates Jim Clyburn.

Our elected leaders are morons.

And my amazing daughters – much like myself – have no genealogical connection to O.J. Simpson whatsoever. 

Hamas delenda est!

A Tale of Two Males (posted 4/12/24)

This first story happens in Indiana, a Midwestern state that is basically the Illinois I grew up in, before the Dems in Chicago and Springfield lost their minds and began committing a decades-long, first-degree wokicide on my much-loved home state. 

The scene was a Subway sandwich shop on March 22nd. 

The players: 

Daniel Saunders, 31, a bully and a crappy human (I’m judging by video of the incident). 

Un-named short, Hispanic-looking lady behind the counter. 

Gabriel Pitzulo, a twenty-something former wrestler with dreamy blue eyes.

(I’m just sayin’, ladies.  CO and I are taken, but if you’re single and looking for a good man, you might want to head to Indy and look up Gabriel P.)

As Gabriel came in to the shop, Saunders was screaming at the little Hispanic lady and throwing stuff at her from over the counter.  Then he turned and started to stalk out, with a cocky bounce to his step.  Because as everyone knows, the best proof that a guy is a real bad-arse is his ability to menace and intimidate a small Latina. 

Gabriel tackled Saunders, spinning his body to slam him onto the floor, and then pinning him and holding him until the cops arrived.  Saunders tried to fight back and free himself, but because Gabriel isn’t a diminutive lady and Saunders is a cowardly douche, that mostly meant whining and kicking his little feet. 

So if you’re scoring at home, Saunders was 1-0 against a tiny lady, and 0-1 against someone his own size and gender.    

Because this happened in Indiana – and not in NYC, CA, Chicago or any other Dem-run big city – Saunders was charged with some pretty nifty crimes, including battery, battery resulting in bodily injury, and a new favorite to me: “disorderly conduct-fighting/tumultuous conduct.”

I for one have not been able to work “tumultuous” into everyday conversations often enough, but from now on I’m going to try. 

The best part of this story is to read or listen to Gabriel’s account of the incident, and imagine a couple of leftists hearing it.  I picture soy lattes being dropped in horror, and man-buns spontaneously unraveling themselves in outrage.

In fact, allow me to present a dramatization of that scene, using Gabriel’s actual words:

Gabriel: “[When I came in, Saunders was] assaulting [the employee]… and throwing stuff.  I believe I saw him spit at her.  And how I was raised, man, you don’t do that stuff.  It was kind of ‘go time’ from there.”

Man-bun #1: “I know, right?  ‘Go time’ meaning ‘time to go to my safe space and call my therapist!’”

Gabriel: “She didn’t seem like she could defend herself.”

Man-bun #2: “What? Is he saying that a woman is different than a man?!”

Man-bun#1: “And how did he even know that she’s a woman?  What if she doesn’t identify as a woman?”   

Man-bun #2: “Yeah!  He could be guilty of mis-gendering they!”

Gabriel: “I did combat sports for a while, so I was completely controlling [him].”

Man-bun #1: “Eek! Toxic masculinity!” 

Man-bun #2 (with one hand over his eyes, peeking between his fingers in terror): “Hey, the other guy is a person of color!  This is a hate crime!”

Gabriel: “He was trying to bite me, and I didn’t want to punch him or anything.  I didn’t want to hurt him too bad.”

Man-bun #1: “’Too bad?!’  Why were you hurting him at all?”

Man-bun #2:  “He’s literally trying to keep a black man down!  Racist colonizer!”

Gabriel (after being called a hero by the store’s owner): “All glory to God, man.  He’s always protected me and put me in situations…that I can handle.”

Man-bun #1 (shocked silence):

Man-bun #2 (wide-eyed horror): “Did he…?”

Man-bun #1 (more shocked silence): 

Man-bun #2 (in a high-pitched squeal): “He’s a white Christian nationalist Christo-fascist!”

Man-bun #1 (vomiting on his Birkenstocks): “Blluuuu-ugh!”

And, scene.

From that story – and I must warn you that this transition may give you the bends – I take you to the tale of Jack Petocz, a gay narcissist who grew up in Florida and spent his high school years during Ron DeSantis’ first term as governor, and yet learned nothing from that enlightened time.

Jack was a young activist, starting when – at 15 – he was “irritated by a local school board member who was, in his opinion, ‘recklessly tweeting COVID misinformation.”  Because of course he was. 

(By the way, I’m betting that the offensive “misinformation” included wacky ideas like COVID starting in a Chicom lab, partially funded by Tony Fauxci, and that wearing masks and getting multiple pokes of a magic elixir would render you both immune and immortal.)

He started organizing protests for every bad cause he could find.  He held rallies protesting some schools’ attempts to keep child porn out of school libraries, and organized a state-wide school walk-out to protest RDS’ so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill (which, ironically, never mentioned the word “gay”).  

On the day of that protest, despite having been told by the school principal to not distribute 200 gay pride flags, little Jacky… distributed 200 gay pride flags.  And then was suspended from school.

Unexpectedly!

This bit of ass-hattery got him an interview on NBC news, where he said, “Waaahh!  Bigotry! Sniffle.  Homophobia!  My feelings are hurt! How dare you?  Waaahh!” (I’m paraphrasing slightly.)

He was also given some sort of virtue-signaling narcissism award from Teen Vogue, and parlayed that into a visit to DC, where he took selfies with Chuck Schumer and Imhotep Pelosi, and also one sandwiched in between Joe Biden and Que Mala Harris.

By the way, if you go to the Breitbart story on this, you’ll see those pictures.  And as you look at his self-satisfied smirk – he looks like a less masculine Greta Thunberg – you will be seeing a SFPI (Simpson Face Punchability Index) score of 98.  So you’ve been warned.  

Fast forward to late March, and Petocz is now a student at Vanderbilt.  (Because of course he is.) And he helped lead the pro-Hamas protest that involving a bunch of brats pushing their way into the chancellor’s office and conducting an obnoxious “sit-in.”  (Because of course he did.)

If you watched the entire video of that preening cosplay production, you’ve got a stronger gag reflex than I do.  But even watching a few minutes of it provided a perfect synopsis of everything that’s wrong with entitled adolescent social justice warriors.

A bunch of liberal white kids whose mommies and daddies are paying almost six figures per year for their “education” barge into a campus building, record themselves reading statements about how they are bravely standing up for the innocent Hamas freedom fighters.  They lecture a black security guard about how he doesn’t understand racism and oppression. They demand that Vanderbilt makes them all queens for a day, and that Hamas be given more ammunition and permanent access to all future Israeli music festivals.  (I’m paraphrasing slightly.) 

They also demand food and water, because they apparently had not considered how peckish you can get when you are saving the entire world through your courageous activism.  One female even demanded that one of her fellow protestors be allowed to leave and return after changing a tampon, which could otherwise cause toxic shock syndrome.

I am not making that up.  (Full disclosure though: Rumors that the fresh-tampon-deprived fellow protestor was Jack Petocz have not been confirmed.) 

Shockingly enough, Vanderbilt authorities actually terminated the protest by arresting 4 students (including Petocz!), and forcibly removing more than 20 others.  Two weeks later, Vandy announced the disciplinary consequences: they expelled 3 students (including Petocz!), suspended 1, and put 22 others on probation. 

And Jack’s wailing posts about this existential injustice were chef’s-kiss perfect!

“I’m Jack Petocz, a 19 y/o activist that’s been fighting for marginalized people for years.  Yesterday, I was expelled from Vanderbilt for peacefully protesting the genocide in Palestine.” 

He called himself a “passionate organizer.”  He bemoaned Vandy’s horrible oppression of “students rallying together in compassion and love for those outside Vanderbilt’s ivory towers.” 

He said, “I came to Vanderbilt with the dream of escaping the rampant bigotry and institutional repression I experienced in the Deep South.  That dream has soured.”

What can you say to that? 

Other than, “Come down off that cross, Jack, we can use the wood.”

Ugh.

There is only one greater gulf in our culture than the one between alpha-male Gabriel Pitzulo going all tumultuous on Daniel Saunders’ sorry arse and Jack Petocz pouting and whining like Ilhan Omar at a bar-mitzvah. 

And that’s the gulf between actual Native Americans and Liz Warren.  (Boom! Unexpected #wemustneverstopmockingher reference!)

Hamas delenda est!

I See Dumb People Everywhere, Including Judges and WH Officials (posted 4/8/24)

Once again I’ve got an embarrassment of riches in terms of stories about people who are too shameless or stupid – or both (a condition which I call “the Schumer gambit”) – to be embarrassed when they should be.  

Let’s start where we almost always could: in New York.  Where District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis (yes, his name can form two anagrams that somehow feel appropriate: “causal hiring oafs” and “fracas liaison ugh.”) is a notorious leftist in robes. 

Among his more prominent rulings were throwing out a non-racist firefighter exam because too many blacks and Hispanics failed it, and finding that DACA – a policy unilaterally created by hulking tough guy Janet Napolitano and later declared illegal by federal courts – is fine and dandy.

When I saw a headline about Garaufis saying, “Judge says FDNY firefighters booing Letitia James reveals systemic problem,” I was momentarily taken aback.  Could it be?  Could even a jerk like the oaf hirer admit that Letitia James’ biased and unprofessional performance as DA – which is more than deserving of lusty booing, if not thrown vegetables and a vigorous application of both tar and feathers – is evidence of a systemic problem?

Alas, no.  The systemic problem that Garaufis sees is that the firefighters booed a horrible boss that deserved to be booed… because…wait for it… racism! Of course.

We are facing a really serious dilemma in this country: what are we to do when a pathetically incompetent, biased, mean-spirited jackass gets into a powerful position and behaves terribly… and happens to be black?

Are we not allowed to point out that Kim Foxx has been a disaster in Chicago, or that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade are the most self-destructive couple since Thelma and Louise went off that cliff in the convertible?   Or that former Harvard president Claudine Gay is a plagiarizing, anti-Semitic mediocrity.  Or that Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Reid are racist nut jobs?

I mean, we can openly say that all red-heads are mortified that Jen “circle back” Psaki is one of them, and that all women with allegedly juicy booties are embarrassed to be associated in any way with AOC, and that Indian tribes from coast to coast are proud that Liz Warren is NOT one of them (#wemustneverstopmockingher)? 

But we can’t point out that Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t know what either a woman or the first amendment is? 

C’mon, man!  That’s a bunch of malarkey.  Not a joke.  Anyway…

But what can we expect of corrupt and dimwitted DAs and judges, when the best and brightest around the White House come up with the ideas reported last week in a Breitbart story titled, “Dem Strategists Gripe WH Not Pushing Back on Biden Frailty Concerns.” 

The story – which I cannot stress enough that I am not making up – featured various Dem apparatchiks expressing ire that Biden’s handlers aren’t doing enough to “counter the narrative” that Biden is too frail to be president for four more years.

Um, guys?  He’s too frail to be president for the LAST four years!

Brad Bannon says that Biden’s minions should do “everything they can” to dispute what everyone with functioning eyes sees every day.  An unnamed weasel agrees.  “If you have a president who is being portrayed as old and frail, why wouldn’t you punch back and show him active?”

Is that a serious rhetorical question?  He’s not “being portrayed” as old and frail – he IS super old and frighteningly frail!  And there aren’t enough CGI effects in all of Hollywood to “show him active.” 

The anonymous dope went on, and again, I swear I am not making this quote up: “Don’t just show a hyped-up Biden during the SOTU.  Show how active he is every f—ing day of the week.”

He wasn’t “hyped up” during the SOTU; he was doped up, you moron.  And do you remember how he laid face-down on the stage after he fell over a sandbag, and before a secret service guy picked him up?  THAT IS how active he is every f—king day of the week!

But the article got even worse.  Bannon suggested that the campaign should show Biden “lifting weights” and “on the treadmill.”  (Did I mention that I am not making this up?)

The guy couldn’t lift a paper clip at this point, let alone a weight.   And seriously.  You think his people should film him walking on a treadmill, a device which is slightly inclined, and moving!

Have you seen him try to walk across a perfectly level lawn, which is lying there perfectly still?  They’ve got him wearing those ridiculous waffle-soled shoes that are as big as a tennis-racket-style snowshoe, and he still manages to look like a Wallenda trying to make it across a thin tightrope stretched over the yawning mouth of an active volcano! 

My favorite quote is from a fitness expert “who has studied fitness through a social justice context.”  (Good lord! I’m not even going to ask what that means.)  This genius finds it “curious” that Biden has not shared more about his “exercise regimen” and his “workout routine.”

Words fail me.  Anybody who has watched Biden for five minutes knows that the only cardio he gets is when they put those paddles on him and shock his heart into re-starting, three to five times each week. 

One professor they quote manages to almost, just barely, tangentially get a glimpse of reality.  “It does occur to me that… [the Biden team] must take care not to produce a Dukakis-like image that people will poke fun at.”

Really?  That thought occurred to you, did it? 

You mean an image like Biden taking one step onto a moving treadmill and immediately being fired backwards into a wall, whereupon he’d explode in a crackling of dry bones and dust, with a fluttering cloud of hairplugs settling slowly onto the dessicated remains of his beef-jerky-looking carcass?   

After that story, this next one – the latest in my well-received “Stupid Criminals” series, doesn’t really seem that stupid.  Which tells you a lot about the quality of both our presidential advisers and our criminals.  (And that’s a Venn diagram that has more than a little overlap.)

Anyway, Jonathan Gagen (31) – proud owner of two pending aggravated battery charges – went to a stranger’s home in southern Illinois and tried to break in.  The homeowner met Gagen at the door, showing the criminal his gun and making “numerous requests for Gagen to leave.”

But Gagen – rumors that he “has studied B&E through a social justice context” have not yet been confirmed – ignored commands not to enter.  Instead, he told the homeowner that he would “have to shoot me,” and then opened the storm door.

Whereupon the homeowner shot him.

Unexpectedly!

Medical help arrived in time to confirm that Gagen had shuffled off this mortal coil. 

Rumors that his last words were, “Ouch! In retrospect, telling that guy with the gun that he was gonna have to shoot me wasn’t a good decision.  But at least it wasn’t as stupid as saying that Biden’s staff should try to set up a photo op with him on a treadmill,” have not been confirmed.

Okay, I’ll have another mid-week column on Wednesday, because a whiny kid got expelled from Vandy in the most hilarious way possible, and that’s too good to not celebrate.

In the meantime…

Hamas delenda est!

Reasons to be Optimistic, + DeSantis Dunks on MSM Smear Attempts. Again. (posted 4/5/24)

Hey kids, let’s start today with a quiz.  Here’s a description of the social decay in a prominent big city: 

“This is no longer a capital, it is a cesspit.  No one works; the streets are filthy; there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards. It hurts me to see how bad it has become. There is growing idleness and cowardice in the people and all of those base and criminal instincts…it seems are destroying [the country].”

Was that written about:

A. San Francisco

B. Chicago

C. New York City or

D. Washington D.C.

Many of you picked up on the reference to a capital, and might have chosen D.C.  Others may have noticed the slightly archaic language, and suspected a trick.

And despite the fact that I am usually the most reliable of narrators, the suspicious among you were right.  Even though the above quote could be aptly applied to any of our current sanctuary cesspits – er, cities – the passage was written by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, in 1917.

He was describing St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), not too long before Lenin’s Bolsheviks launched their murderous revolution.  In the previous months, attacks on the social order had been encouraged and carried out by the party’s foot soldiers, and the deterioration of everyday life was accelerating. 

It’s a sobering red flag (no pun intended) when you read a withering account of a doomed country’s downhill slide right before a historic tragedy and think, “Hey, I recognize that place!  Which one of our major cities is it?”

Fortunately for us, we’ve got a chance this November to avoid the damage that befell Russia.  The vocal, far-left fringe – then as now – represents a small minority, without as much widespread support as our egregious MSM would have us think. 

And as a cautious optimist, I see plenty of encouraging signs for the country, despite the Petrograd-esque decay in the Dem-run cities.   

For example, it was only a couple of years ago that a wave of “defund the police” measures were enacted all over the country.  Democrat pols at every level staked their reputations on removing cops, and trumpeted the dawning of a new day, in which economic justice would reign and cities would thrive. 

Annnnnddddd… Petrograd, 2024!  Crime skyrocketed, businesses closed, no one was working, and there were piles of stinking rubbish in every courtyard.

Unexpectedly!

Now those Democrats’ faces are as red as Liz Warren imagines hers to be (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and nearly all jurisdictions who cut cops are scrambling to reverse course. 

Similarly, the drive to decriminalize hard drugs has created growing pushback.  When a decriminalization law was passed in deep-blue Oregon and went into effect in 2021, supporters smugly pointed to parallels to getting rid of prohibition, and confidently predicted the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, man!

Annnnddddd… Meth Mania, 2021!

How disastrous was that plan?  It took America 13 years to reverse prohibition, but the results of this law were so horrific that even the imbecilic socialist dullards of Oregon managed to wise up and reverse it in only 3 years! 

I am not making that up.  A Democrat governor in Oregon – yes, she is female and gay (lucky guess on your part!) – signed a law criminalizing drugs last month. With the support of spineless Democrat Portland beta-mayor Ted Wheeler. And a headline the next day admitted, “Oregon Forced to Recriminalize Drugs After Disastrous Decriminalization Experiment.”

If I live to be as old as Joe Biden (RIP), I would never expect to read the sequence of words in my previous paragraph.  It’s a Transgender Day of Visibility miracle!

Even in areas where Dems are stubbornly persisting in their terrible policies, public resistance is building, increasing the chances of a Trump victory in November. 

The attempts to force Americans to buy EVs is looking more unrealistic and unpopular every day.  The open border is now a nationwide disaster that can’t be hidden, and national Dems are sweating like a meretrix in church.  The term “Bidenomics” became such a punchline that it has disappeared from the media. 

The ghoulish and outrageous mania to push transgender policies, including mutilating surgeries on kids and allowing dudes to beat the crap out of women in various sports, has gotten as ugly as “Admiral” “Rachel” Levine joining the gals of the View for a group photo.  Many states and some sporting organizations have passed rules recognizing biological reality, and the first of what should be a flood of lawsuits have been filed against doctors on behalf of kids whom they sexually mutilated or injured.       

And then there’s John Fetterman. 

Before his stroke, he was the worst mayor of the worst-run small town in PA.  During his campaign, he was less mentally agile than AOC, and less articulate than Joe Biden.  But as he’s recovered, he’s started saying sane, true things almost half the time.  Which gets him over the very low bar of “best Democrat senator in the country.”  

In fact, while I’m in a happy, post-Easter mood, let me send you into the weekend with a story that combines two of my column’s regular categories: “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough” and “Celebration of Excellence.”

The latest chapter of this story is happening in the polar opposite of 1917 Petrograd: Florida.

My state has its problems, as every place does.  Our summers are brutally hot and humid, recent hurricanes are playing havoc with insurance prices, and we’re facing the kinds of challenges caused by success (rising prices, more crowding).  

But we’ve got a great governor who has been under sustained attack by the MSM since the day he took office.  They smeared him over covid, they lost their Schiff when he sent illegals to Martha’s Vineyard, and they mocked him when it looked like Disney had put one over on him.

But then it turned out that he was right about covid, and right about illegals.  And then he beat Disney like Caitlin Clark beat LSU.  (That’s right, folks: my first and last ever reference to women’s basketball.  But that game last week was actually great.)

So last week NBC took another shot, in an article that explained why everybody who thinks Florida is succeeding is wrong.  In a state with 23 million people, they found a handful of gripers who fit their narrative, and let them gripe.  And after mentioning that “hundreds of thousands” of people have moved here, they ominously noted that 500,000 left in 2022.

Which doesn’t sound good, until you notice that in another paragraph they mention in passing that more than 700,000 people moved in in 2022.  And while I’m no mathmetologist, it seems like 700K is larger than 500K.

NBC was roundly mocked for that story – commenters noted that “NBC News apparently has no idea how net migration works,” and even lefty election analyst Nate Silver said, “Sorry, but Florida is popular. 

But then the Palm Beach Post told NBC to hold their beer, and ran a column with the headline, “DeSantis blames undocumented immigrants for health care costs.  His report costs taxpayers more.”

The story told about the “online dashboard” that DeSantis created to collect and publicize the data about how much illegals cost Florida taxpayers, then reported that while the state spent $566 million on uncompensated health care for illegals, DeSantis spent $577 million on the dashboard!

Ooh, they had him now!  It’s an outrage!  How the hell does anybody spend half a billion dollars on an online dashboard??

Except that when the story ran, it took about 30 seconds for hundreds of readers to fact check it.  And it turned out that the online dashboard had cost $5K to set up, and that the entire budget request for the data collection (which included another state agency as well) was $567,882. 

Not $577 million.  $567 thousand. 

Which is considerably less than the $566 MILLION that Florida has been stuck with because of Biden’s flood of illegals.

Of course, when the paper and the reporter discovered their error, they apologized profusely and ran a Page-1 correction of their laughable mistake.

HA! I kid. 

They actually “stealth edited” the column to remove the accusation, without acknowledging their mistake, or the change.  Which gave DeSantis the opportunity to spend a couple of minutes justifiably pummeling them for their unprofessional and dishonest behavior.

Man, I hope we someday have the chance to have that guy as our president!

Seriously though, I hope somebody from the Trump campaign has seen the story about Florida’s online dashboard, and is working on a national version.  Several columns ago, I called for something like that, only to find out now that it already exists.

I could see a national “dashboard” displaying updated and transparent totals of all of the costs of Biden’s illegally opened border.  One category could be “crime,” with breakdowns of the numbers of car accidents, thefts, assaults, rapes, murders, etc. 

Another could break down the enormous costs by type: medical costs, food assistance, housing assistance, education assistance, processing costs, costs to arrest, try and imprison, etc.

And then every time any Democrat complains about not having enough to spend on anything – infrastructure, social programs, increased pay for inert government workers, fresh burial wrappings for Imhotep Pelosi – we could call up the dashboard and say, “Well, if we hadn’t spent $65 billion on Biden’s illegals, maybe we could do some of that.  Oh wait, now it’s $66 billion.” 

If anybody knows any big shots in the GOP, please pass this along!

Hamas delenda est!

Men Attacking Women in NYC, Sanctions That Actually Work, & Billy Strings on Mushrooms (posted 4/3/24)

The latest crime story in NYC involves a spate of males (I can’t call them “men”) sucker punching women in “unprovoked, broad-daylight attacks.” At least 8 different women posted videos describing these attacks in just the week before Easter. 

Sorry, I meant “in just the week before the Holy Feast of Autogynephilic Weirdos.”

Many New Yorkers are rightly outraged by this.  The city council’s mostly leftist Women’s Caucus said they are “deeply disturbed and concerned,” and demanded that the NYPD do something about this. 

The council’s majority leader Amanda Farias asked, “Where are the men calling this out?”

Marine Daniel Penny – sitting at home with an ankle monitor on, awaiting trial in October for intervening to stop career violent criminal Jordan Neely from attacking innocent New Yorkers – saw Farias’ statement, and said, “Interesting. Good luck with that.”

Actually, I don’t know if he said that or not.  But I know what Sam Kinison would say, if Farias asked him why the stand-up men aren’t doing something to stop this: “Gee, I don’t know, Mandy.  Maybe because when they do step up and protect you from some thug, you try to PUT THEM IN PRISON FOR 15 YEARS!! OH! OHHHHHHH!!!” 

If you remember, in May of last year a bunch of NY Dems were outraged when Penny put Neely in a chokehold on the subway to stop him from menacing a car full of riders, only to get lambasted when Neely died. 

Mensa member AOC was “disgusted” when Penny wasn’t initially charged, saying, “Jordan Neely was murdered.  But b/c Jordan was houseless and crying for food… the murderer gets protected….”

For the record, Your Juicy Bootiness (your words, not mine), someone crying for food would say something like, “Please sir, may I have a few morsels of food?” whereas Neely was screaming – according to many witnesses on the subway – “I don’t care if I have to kill an F, I will!  I’ll go to jail, I’ll take a bullet!”

Do you see the subtle difference, Sandy from the block?  “Could I possibly trouble you for a sandwich?” vs. “I’ll murder all y’all mother frienders!!!”

But AOC wasn’t alone. Another influential female pol in NYC seconded Cortez’ indignation last May, posting, “I continue to be heartbroken and outraged by the death of Neely,” and went on to decry “the senseless violence” that cost him his life. 

That outraged gal was none other than…wait for it…Amanda Farias! 

Yep.  As a candidate she urged the city to “significantly divest from police precincts” and called for “the reduction of NYPD’s operating budget.”

And now, women all over NYC are getting assaulted by violent recidivists who remain on the street.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Changing topics to foreign policy, I’m going to answer the following question that I’m pretending that one of you have asked: “Hey Martin, how effective are international sanctions, anyway?”

I’m glad you asked that, imaginary person who respects my sagacity on all matters international.  The answer is that it depends on the nature of the sanction. 

Take one timely example.  Mohammad Reza Zahedi has been a top commander in Iran’s Qud’s Force, and the man in charge of getting Iranian weapons and intelligence to Syria, and to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, so that they can kill more Jews.  As is their wont.

In 2010, Obama hit Zahedi with financial sanctions.  (This was two years before Obama warned Assad that if he used chemical weapons, he would be crossing a “red line” that would have “enormous consequences.”  And three years before Assad used chemical weapons… and learned that Obama’s idea of “enormous consequences” was “a strongly worded email of disapproval.”)

The result of Obama’s soul-crushing sanctions?  No change in Zahedi’s behavior.  He managed to struggle through the last 14 years, living a pampered life of power and prestige, with an endless procession of the most alluring goats in the entire Middle East brought to his chambers each night.  (I’m guessing about that last part, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.)

Until this Monday, when he was sanctioned by Israel in an Iranian consulate building in Damascus.  But the Israelis had apparently ran out of strongly worded emails, because they opted for a SDS (supersonically delivered sanction) in the form of a missile strike.

The result of that sanction?   Quite noticeable changes in Zahedi’s behavior, including but not limited to cessation of pulmonary, cardiac and brain function; sudden cellular disassembly; and creating a mess for the “Allahu Akbar Syrian Janitorial Services, LLC.” (Not to mention a sudden and complete loss of interest in even the most fetching of Iranian goats.)

Experts calculate that the chances that he will facilitate any more terrorist acts and Jew murders in the future to be well less than 4%. 

Happily, Zahedi’s deputy and 5 other top-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guards terror chiefs were with him when Israel’s sanction whistled through the window, and they were all collaterally sanctioned as well.

Sources are calling this the largest loss to Iranian terrorists since Donald Trump ballistically sanctioned General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. 

(I’m assuming everyone remembers that one, but if not, you remember how in my last column I told you about how the violent thug who murdered NYPD cop Jonathan Diller had previously stuck a shiv up his own rectum?  Will this was kind of like that, only the “shiv” had a warhead on it.  And Soleimani didn’t insert it himself.)  

I’ll close with another of my “celebrations of excellence.”

Regular readers may remember that a year or two ago I wrote about the freakishly talented bluegrass/country guitar player and singer Billy Strings.  I had stumbled across a video of him when he looked to be about 15, playing a song he’d just written called, “Dust in a Baggie.” 

If you haven’t seen it, go find it now.  It’s the one recorded on a cell phone in a down-scale, paneled rec room like the ones in the houses I grew up in.  He mumbles around with his group of blue-collar (and stoner) friends for a minute… and then launches into a tornadic, three-minute virtuoso sprint through scorching, flat-picking guitar accompanied by pitch-perfect lyrics.

I find myself returning to that video every so often, and when I did again last night, I was reading some background info and found out something that made me appreciate his accomplishment even more: he was tripping on mushrooms during that performance!

Don’t get me wrong: don’t do drugs, kids. 

But to learn that he did THAT when he was on mushrooms?  It’s like finding out that Beethoven wrote Moonlight Sonata and six of his symphonies after he went deaf. 

It’s an amazing achievement either way, but holy moly!

If you haven’t seen it before, you’re in for a treat, and you’re welcome.

Hamas delenda est!