Month: October 2026

When is An Execution Not an Execution? (posted 10/5/26)

I’ve been known to mock other nations – and many American states – when they prove themselves to be comically incompetent.  The USSR tried an economic system currently being proposed by dimwits in the DSA wing of the Democrat party…and they end up with mostly empty stores. 

“Welcome to State Shoe Store.  Would you like shoe?  Don’t bother to say size or color.  We have brown shoe, all size 13, and many pairs with only left shoe.”

Or they steal some nuke plant plans from us, then read them upside down, annnnnddddd… Chernobyl!

Or the Chicoms try to copy Amazon.   Annnnnnddddd…Temu!

Or Venezuela sits atop tons of oil, so their commies take over and nationalize it so that the Party can profit from it.  Annnnnddddddd…everything breaks, and no one knows how to fix it, because you ran off all the smart people.

It’s especially fun to mock our own home-grown incompetents. 

Hey, did you hear Mamdani is going to control rents and provide state-run grocery stores?  Annnnnnddddd… rents have gone through the roof, and each grocery store will cost $30 million.   And the closest thing they’ll have to fresh vegetables is brown shoes.   All size 13. 

Ooh, Gavin’s bringing magical high-speed rail to California!  Annnnnddddd…we’re $20 billion in, and the first rail of track is set to be laid when Gavin’s youngest grandchild graduates with a BA in Grievance Studies in the spring of 2045. 

But today is a sad day when I must mock the people in one of my favorite red states.  And you probably know what I’m going to say.

Tennessee, come on!  How hard is it to kill a sadistic, 50-year-old murderess?!

I mean, she’s not the armed, energetic 18-year-old she was when she slashed and stabbed and tortured her poor victim.  She’s 50, and she’s strapped to a table, and you’ve got her outnumbered.

Seriously!  You guys proved yourselves adept at killing Redcoats at Boyd’s Creek and King’s Mountain – and that was in the 1770s, and all you had was muskets!  And you were picking off Yankees from 200-300 yards… in the 1860s!  C’mon man.

Sure, maybe the problem was that we let a bunch of inexperienced female executioners do the job…A Sexist Would Say!  (And by the way, is there anything that DEI can not screw up?  Asking for a less p.c. friend.)

How did that work, exactly?  I’m guessing that women generally have the good sense not to volunteer to be executioners.  But then this murderer asked for an all-female death squad, so…what?  The prison officials looked around, realized that they have no female executioners, and then went to the local Job Corps office and asked if any women there wanted to give the chemicals a go? 

On the one hand, I’m not totally shocked they found a few takers.  If the women knew what this murderer did to end up on Death Row – lured a young girl into the woods with two creepy accomplices, and then spent a lot of time cutting and torturing her – I expect that some of them wouldn’t be opposed to a little sisterly justice.

On the other hand, are we really letting killers choose their own executioners now?   I’ve always thought letting them order their last meal was a weird ritual, but at least that seems to be a harmless, quasi-chivalrous gesture, like giving a condemned man a cigarette before putting the blindfold on him.  (Or giving him a blindfold, for that matter.)

But letting her pick her own executioner?  What did they expect?  She’s looking at Mike, the regular executioner – he’s a Marine with unit tattoos and a scar through one eyebrow, who did tours in Fallujah and Afghanistan, and has already done four previous executions (so this one will make him an ace!). 

Then she looks at near-sighted Janice from the cafeteria, Louise from HR, with carpal-tunnel and braces on both wrists, and Mildred, the short-timer with the trembling from Parkinson’s who’s about to retire from her supervisory job on disability at the end of the year.  So she rolls the dice, and comes up with a crew who couldn’t hit a vein if they had a basket full of needles in a room full of veins. 

The whole debacle reminds me of dark humor about the best kind of doctor to be: a coroner.  Because even if you completely screw up an autopsy, what’s the worst that can happen?  The guy comes back to life? 

Except in this case, the humor is even darker.  What’s the worst kind of botched execution?  The kind where the murderer survives…twice!     

This whole topic might make you feel queasy, and I wouldn’t blame you.  I can joke about it only because if I can’t laugh, I’d have to cry.  It’s obviously a morally fraught thing to execute someone, and I can respect some arguments on both sides.  But ultimately, the deciding factor for me is that giving our worst predators anything less than the death penalty undervalues the precious life they took. 

Add to that our society’s growing embrace of toxic empathy – wherein we care much more about the criminals than their victims, and are so lenient with criminals that they can eventually victimize more innocent people – and I think that capital punishment is a necessary response.

Unfortunately, the story of this botched execution is taking the attention away from the particularly gruesome and cruel murder that earned Christa Pike a date with the executioner.  (If you haven’t read the details and don’t have a strong stomach, don’t.)  And when marginalizing and even erasing her victim turns Pike into a sympathetic figure, it plays right into the hands of the left. 

They’ve already been making tons of bad-faith arguments against killing anyone – other than Trump, Charlie Kirk, Jews, or the unborn, of course – for the better part of a century.  They’ve objected to every method of capital punishment.  They said that hanging and firing squads were archaic and cruel, so we went to the new-fangled electric chair.  But a few of those went wrong – some knucklehead used the wrong kind of sponges, or didn’t make sure they were wet, or mixed up the black and white wires.  So we went to lethal injection – the killer goes gently to sleep, and then stops their bothersome breathing. 

Annnnddddd…Tennessee! 

You guys might have just given our opponents one more objection.  I’m afraid that the end result of this mess might be that we go back to our usual method of ushering our worst criminals to their eternal reward:

Death by old age.    

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Schadenfreude Friday (posted 10/2/26)

Today I’ve got three stories of schadenfreude, the great German word for “pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune.”  That can be a supremely creepy thing, if the person suffering is innocent.  But if the suffering arrives as the just consequences of that person’s bad actions – sometimes identified by the acronym FAFO – then the freude (joy) can be sweet indeed.

First up we have a TDS-riddled bonehead named Kirk Bangstad, who owns a bar called the Minocqua Brewing Co in Madison, Wisconsin.  Bangstad really dislikes Trump, as is his right.  If you ask me – and as a general rule, you really should – I think most of our politicians have earned some scorn, and I have no problem with anyone expressing disdain for any politician, regardless of whether I agree with them.

But one crosses a line when one wishes death on a political opponent.  And little Kirkie B. has done that.  Back in January, he started advertising on his bar’s webpage, “Free beer, all day long the day he dies.  Show us this post when it happens in a few months and we’ll make good on that promise.” 

Hilariously enough, Trump has now outlived Bangstad’s bar.  Because the state of Wisconsin has yanked his liquor license, and the reason is chef’s kiss perfect: Bangstad had been bringing in beer from Illinois without the required permits and tax payments. 

So when it comes to leftist hypocrisy, this story gives us a two-fer.  Not only is Bangstad the kind of compassionate, big-hearted liberal who wishes death on anyone who disagrees with his hateful politics, he’s also the kind of pro-government regulation and taxation liberal who was doing everything possible to avoid complying with regulations and paying his taxes. 

This guy should be on the Democrat ticket in 2028!

The moral of the story, as the wise old proverb says: “The dildo of consequences seldom comes lubed.” 

The second story is about a business quite a bit bigger than Bangstad’s.  Although the way this company is going, it might soon be every bit as successful as his shuttered bar.

I’m talking about Nike, a former sportswear company who decided to turn themselves into a producer of virtue signaling and America hatred.  Since then, to paraphrase Brad Pitt in that Nazi movie, business has not been a’ boomin’.

In 2021, Nike had been on the S&P 100 for 13 years, and its stock price was $161 per share.  But that year was nearing the peak of woke, and Nike had already picked third-string QB – but All-Pro Whitey-Hater – Colin Kapernick as their spokes-toxin. 

Sorry, that should have been “spokesperson.”  

Or should it?  

Anyway, they followed up that brilliant move with an ad campaign based on the US women’s soccer team’s complaints that they weren’t paid as well as the male soccer team.  (Never mind that they were wildly over-paid, based on how much less money they brought in than the men’s team.  And also never mind that their unpopular cause was fronted by repellent little guy Megan Rapinoe, a scowling misanthrope with a giant chip on her frail little shoulder.)

Next up was a campaign to lecture Americans about what racist scumbags they were, in the wake of recidivist junkie George Floyd’s death.  Then they dropped a Betsy Ross-themed sneaker because racist Colin Kapernick delusionally found it to be…racist.  (Unexpectedly!)  Then they launched ANOTHER campaign about how racist and sexist Americans are, this time featuring LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe (again!). 

If you’re keeping score at home, that means that Nike chose to associate themselves with 4 charter members of the Whiny Athletes Hall of Fame.  Plus George Floyd.

Annnnnnddddd… Nike’s value has cratered, losing over $200 billion in five years, and dropping off of the S&P 100.  Today it’s down to $35 per share.

Proving once again the cliché, “Go woke, go broke.” 

(And also that thing about the un-lubed marital aid of consequences.)

Next up is everyone’s favorite airport-travelers-botherer, with a market value somewhere between Kirk Bangstad’s defunct bar and the imploding Nike:  CNN.     

This story comes in the wake of CNN’s being temporarily thrown out of the WH press room, after which they got their gender-non-binary onesies over their heads because the administration dared accuse them of being a purveyor of propaganda and conspiracy theories.  They ululated in outrage at the very idea of trying to denigrate a news network that way.

And then – because God exists, and He loves us – somebody grabbed and posted a CNN story from five short years ago, featuring a semi-telegenic hack named Brianna Keilar.  Her story begins by saying that “Fox in the era of President Joe Biden is a carousel of conspiracy theories and fear mongering.” 

I know.  She’s doing exactly what CNN is now saying must never, EVER be done. 

But it gets better.  Because she cites 4 examples of those wretched “conspiracy theories” that Fox was pushing.  The first is the contention that “Biden is essentially senile.”  The next is what she calls “the evidence-free conclusion” that Biden is “a puppet of a deep state.”  Next is the idea that in recent years, human sperm counts have been falling.  Last is Fox’s ridiculous contention that the border is actually open, and there is a “border crisis.”   

Her conclusion? “Fox is not news, no matter what it calls itself.”   

Got that?  As evidence that Fox is not a legitimate source because it lies all the time, she cites four examples of those lies.  Except that all four examples were true, and she lied about all of them.

Biden WAS senile, as all PWFE (people with functioning eyes) knew.  I guess you could quibble with what constitutes “a deep state,” but “unelected people behind the scenes producing talking points, writing legislation and signing pardons for a senile president” sums it up pretty well, don’t you think?  And dozens of medical studies have documented falling sperm counts.

Also, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to detect that 15-20 million illegals streaming in –with commensurate levels of crime, red ink and social disorder – suggests that our border was completely open, thus constituting a crisis.

Sadly, though, I don’t know whether this last story has as much “freude” to it as it should.  Because while Kirk Bangstad’s malicious business has gone under, and Nike’s assault on our culture has cost it $200 billion and counting, CNN is still broadcasting, and Brianna Keilar still has a job there.

Because: “journalism!”

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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