The World is Making Less Sense (posted 4/7/23)

If this column reads a little discombobulated, it’s not you.  It’s me.

I like to think of myself as man with his share of common sense.   I’m old enough to know better, and I’ve been around the block a few times.  My eyes are not ones over which the wool can usually be easily pulled.

And yet the world is making less and less sense.  Let me give you a few examples.  

Two weeks ago, 92-year-old Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch and 66-year-old Ann Lesley Smith got engaged, but this week they canceled the engagement. 

If those crazy kids can’t make it, what chance do the rest of us have?

Chicago, having delivered itself from the scourge of Lightfoot, picked perhaps the only other far-left loon in Christendom who could be as bad as she was.   (At least his name – Brandon – will be easy to remember, during the chaos to come.)

On a different topic, I’ve always thought that I’ve understood how marketing works.  If you’ve got something to promote, you identify your target audience, learn everything you can about them, and create ads that appeal to their interests and beliefs.

For example, if you’re looking to draw eyeballs to the View, your target audience is going to be unemployable women with low-to-middling IQs and physical appearance, who will feel better about themselves as they watch women who look and sound even worse than they do.

If you’re pushing the Joy Reid show – may God have mercy on your soul – you’re looking for an audience of black folks and white liberals who share a deep-seated hatred of white folks, and America.  And logic. 

If you’re promoting the Stephen Colbert show, your target audience is… the family and both friends of Stephen Colbert. 

That’s all logical, and it’s how the world used to work.  But not any more.

In 2019, Gillette came out with a new ad campaign.  Common sense would say that a razor maker – which sells a large majority of its products to men – would try to appeal to, you know…men. 

Instead, Gillette found an ad director and agency with a reputation for hostile, feminist campaigns, and they produced a 90-second male-bashing meditation on “toxic masculinity.” It was a dog’s breakfast of every negative stereotype of males – bullies, homophobes, sexual harassers, mansplainers – and also included the shrill Ana Kasparian from Young Turks discussing sexual assault, followed by a split screen of a bunch of leftist MSM empty heads yowling on the topic.

It ended by transforming the previously well-known previous Gillette slogan (“The best a man can get”) into a scolding, sarcastic, “Is this the best a man can get?”

The ad was slickly made, but the message was clear to every male who watched it: “You’re all filthy, disgusting pigs, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.  Now buy our razors, jerks!”

Guess how that worked?

The giant parent corporation Proctor and Gamble owns Gillette, and P&G did very well that year; all of their brands went up in value. 

Except Gillette.  Which reportedly lost $8 billion dollars.  With a capital “B.”

So okay, that was colossally stupid, and everyone on Madison Avenue learned their lesson, and no one ever made such an idiotic, crap-on-your-customers ad again.  The end.

HA!  I kid. 

Because many other morons kept making the same blindingly obvious mistake.

The NFL is watched by males, and the women with the good taste to love those men, and football.  They are not racists, as you could infer from the fact that they watch a game played mostly by black Americans, and they hero-worship many of those black Americans. 

(As a case in point, when my wife and I were ready to have kids, I suggested that if we had a son, his name should be either “Antonin Scalia Simpson,” or “Walter Payton Simpson.”  My wife pointed out that we are not Italian, and little Antonin’s initials would spell “ass.”  So Walter Payton it was.  Until I had two daughters.  And when I suggested “Walterina,” my wife gave me a single look that caused part of my body that is normally on the outside to migrate to the inside.)

(Perhaps I’ve said too much.)

Anyway, the brain trust at the NFL knew that their target audience was mostly regular guys.  (Or as the MSM calls them, “predatory foot-soldiers of toxic masculinity and the patriarchy).”

So naturally, they started dressing the players partly in pink as part of an interminably long campaign to bring awareness to… wait for it… breast cancer!   (You know, the same way the LPGA has made all their lady golfers wear black arm bands and talk endlessly about testicular cancer.)

Then they promoted a number of black players’ ill-informed protests against racism (Michael Brown never said, “Hands up don’t shoot!” before he got shot, because he was too busy assaulting a cop and trying to take his gun.), and cops, and America, and the national anthem.

All of this was led by Colin Kapernick, a quarterback so skilled that he was benched in favor of the immortal Blaine Gabbert.  (For those of you who haven’t been to the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton, you’ve got to see the scale model of a football version of Mount Rushmore.  From left to right, the images carved there are as follows:  Marino, Montana, Brady and Gabbert.)  

Luckily for the NFL, the male devotion to football is so strong that they could only dent the ratings, rather than kill them.

Similarly, hockey is a game so filled with alpha males that many fans buy a ticket to a fight, and are pleasantly surprised when a hockey game breaks out.  So naturally, the geniuses at the NHL started having “Pride Nights” and making players wear warm-up jerseys with the gay rainbow, and reacted with shock when many players and teams resisted bringing sexual politics into hockey. 

(I don’t follow hockey, but I see a potential compromise: if woke totalitarians won’t make hockey players wear gay pride junk, hockey fans won’t make gay porn stars and drag queens wear hockey jerseys and blacked-out teeth while they work.)       

Speaking of drag queens, the Country Music Awards just featured a singer surrounded by a bunch of unattractive men in Liz Taylor’s old wardrobe.  This wasn’t the Tony awards, or the Emmys, or the Grammys.  It was the Country FREAKING Music Awards!  The world has gone mad!

Some of you might have guessed what I’ve been leading up to: Bud Light just signed a deal to have Dylan Mulvaney become their spokesman. 

If you don’t know who Mulvaney is, you’ve been spending your time more wisely than I have.   He was a little-known actor and singer in several Broadway shows, and he once went on a game show, where he put on the most over-the-top, drama queen, super effeminate gay routine ever.

But a little over a year ago, Mulvaney found a way to transform himself from an unknown flamingly gay guy to a celebrity spokes-they by jumping on the transgender bandwagon.  (Though that may be a circus wagon that just identifies as a bandwagon?)

He began a daily series of TikTok videos called “Days of Girlhood,” in which he documented each day that he’s been pretending to be a girl.    

I’m not sure which is the most nauseating thing about his new career, though there are several serious contenders:

The President of the United States (RIP) gave this weirdo a public platform by meeting with him to discuss women’s issues.

It would be insane enough if Mulvaney was just pretending to be a woman, but he’s not; he’s pretending to be a flighty airheaded girl in her early teens.  But the guy is 26! 

(Try calling the women in their mid-20s at your work place a bunch of “girls,” and see if you escape with your groin un-kicked.)   

I think the worst part is that the guy is doing a “woman-face” routine that is every bit as insulting to real women as the vaudeville black-face routines were to black people.  He offensively mimics the worst stereotypes about women.  

In his first video, “Day 1 of being a girl,” he said, “I’ve already cried three times, I wrote a scathing email that I did not send, I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then, when someone asked me how I was, I said, ‘I’m fine,’ when I wasn’t fine.  How’d I do, ladies?”

Well, you defined “femaleness” as being unstable and hysterical, unable to manage money, and emotionally stunted.  So… great job, fella!

What can Anheuser-Busch be thinking?  How many beer drinkers out there have been dying to drink Bud Light, if only it were pushed by a grown man with a fetish for acting like a teen girl? 

And what has the world come to when the most sane response to an offensive commercial comes from Kid Rock, who blasted a case of Bud Light with an automatic weapon and said, “F**k Bud Light?”

(And just like that, I’m a big rap music fan.) 

But rather than end on that down note, I’ll close with the undisputed Greatest Commercial Ever Made, which I guarantee you will love.

The story starts last March, when yet another razor company repeated the same mistake that Gillette made.  After advertising on the Daily Wire’s great conservative podcast network for several years, Harry’s Razors dropped their sponsorship after received a single complaint from a mope who got offended when one DW host pointed out that men and women are different.

But dropping their sponsorship wasn’t enough for the hateful dopes at Harry’s – they had to issue a virtue signaling smear at DW.  They “condemned” DW’s “hate speech,” and promised to “prevent any values misalignment” in the future.

So DW’s co-CEO and “god-king” Jeremy Boreing did what any fightin’ Appalachian-American like myself would do: he launched a feud! 

Within several days, he had started a razor-selling business called Jeremy’s Razors.  He cut the aforementioned greatest ever ad, started the website “ihateharrys.com,” and within 3 days in business, he’d sold 25,000 razor subscriptions, and had more Twitter followers (35K) than Harry’s had amassed in 10 years (32.5K). 

He also put up a giant series of ads directly across from Harry’s company headquarters.   

Seriously, you’ve got to watch the Jeremy’s Razors ad.  It’s got everything that makes an ad great: flamethrowers, a reference to the guys who shot Bin Laden, great tongue-in-cheek humor, and Jeremy on a huge throne, wearing a crown and a fur cape, flanked by two models on one side and a bald eagle on the other. 

And most importantly, a cigar-store Indian version of Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

So boycott Budweiser, watch that ad at least twice, think of me, and you’re welcome.  

Now I’ve got to post this column, and then begin preparing myself for our church’s Tenebrae service, which I’ve written about in previous posts. 

“Tenebrae” is Latin for “darkness.”  The service takes place on Good Friday, and features a somber reading of scripture about the crucifixion, while a series of candles are extinguished along the way.  It ends with a darkened church and a loud sound – “strepitus” – symbolizing the stone being rolled in place to seal Christ’s tomb.

Tonight’s service, coming halfway through the Biden administration and amidst our nation’s incipient unraveling, sadly fits my mood.  “Democracy dies in Tenebrae,” and all that.  

But tonight, I’m going to soak in some other, better words: “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Dylan “Woman-Face” Mulvaney, 2024!

Crime Stories & Foolishness (posted 4/3/23)

No, I’m not going to discuss the Trump indictment, for several reasons.  First, I’m no law-talking guy.  (“Do you mean ‘lawyer,’ Martin?”  Yeah.) (Obscure Simpson’s reference? Check.)  Second, I’m sick to death of hearing about it.

Third, it’s Palm Sunday, and I’m supposed to be looking forward and getting my mind right for Easter.  Instead, thinking about Alvin Bragg and the shameless Dems’ egregious behavior gets me in a vendetta kind of mood, which is not where I want to be. (Obscure Christopher Walken in “True Romance” reference?  Check.)  

So I’m going to write about a few stories that fall into happier categories for me: crime stories and laughable leftist foolishness.

First up on the crime beat we have the story of Ricky Jimenez, 23, a resident of Houston.  On March 28 he stopped at a food truck where a grandmother was cooking soul food.  Ricky asked about the food, and then stuck a gun in the window and pulled the trigger.

So cue the sad trombon—

No, wait.  Ricky’s gun jammed.  So grandma pulled out her licensed pistol (because: Texas!) and gave Ricky a little of the ol’ ballistic behavioral adjustment herself.  Then, according to the news story, Ricky “attempted to leave the parking lot.”

I’ll bet he did.

He made it around 50 feet before he took the asphalt challenge, still within smelling distance of grandma’s great soul food.  Not that he could smell it.  Because he was dead.

So I guess, cue the happy, New Orleans’ style jazz parade happy trombone!

A sadder story, also from Houston, involved two young thugs who followed a 44-year-old Asian mother after she’d withdrawn cash from a bank.  Zy’Nika Woods drove, and when the victim was out of her car, Joseph Harrell jumped her.  He grabbed her wallet and knocked her down, and then body-slammed her onto the concrete, leaving her paralyzed.

Which raises the obvious question: Does Texas law allow a scumbag thief who paralyzes someone to be sentenced to paralysis?  And if not, how soon can we get that on the books, and can it be applied retroactively to Woods and Harrell?

I think such a law would be a pretty effective deterrent to other would-be thieves out there.  Can you imagine the benefit of televising a judge reading out the sentence?

“Mr. Harrell, you are going to serve 5 years in prison, and pay a $1500 fine.  Oh, and you’ll be taken to a parking lot and repeatedly dropped on the cement until you’re paralyzed.  Bailiff?  Let’s get to paralyzin’!”

Utah has an even better idea.  After having to postpone a death row inmate’s execution several times because they’ve had a hard time getting lethal injection drugs, Utah’s governor just signed a bill to go “old school,” in the best possible way:

They’re bringing back firing squads!

If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a long draw of bourbon, and write an improvised, ideal Utah execution screenplay scene:

INT.  We open on an execution chamber, with a condemned serial rapist strapped to a wooden chair, with 5 riflemen standing and facing him, and a warden standing to one side, beside a telephone on the wall.

Warden:  “Okay, the warrant being read, we’ll proceed with the execution.  I’m going to count down from 5—”

Rapist: “Don’t I get a blindfold?”

Warden: “Do you want one?”

Rapist: “Yes.”

As the warden steps up to tie a blindfold around the condemned man’s eyes, the fourth rifleman in line, whose name is Brian, says, “Wussy.”

Rapist: “What?”

Brian: “You heard me.”  (As soon as the blindfold is in place, Brian raises a middle finger.)  “How many fingers am I holding up, wuss?”

Warden: “Knock it off, Brian.”

Brian (muttering): “Big strong rapist needs a blindfold.”

Warden: “Okay, I’m going to count—”

Rapist: “Are you sure the phone is working?  The governor might call.”

Warden: “Yes, we checked the phone an hour ago.  Now then, I’m going to count down from—”

The phone rings.  The rapist sits up straight and gasps, then laughs.  The warden picks up the phone, and listens for a few seconds.  Then he turns to the riflemen.  “Did somebody order a pizza?”

The rapist groans, and four of the riflemen turn toward Brian.

Brian (raising a hand): “Guilty.  Listen, tell the guard at the gate to pay for it, and I’ll get him back.  I got enough for everybody.  Well…not EVERYBODY.  Wuss!”

Rapist: “You son of a—”

Brian: “Stop whining.  Tell you what: you can have my piece, if we all miss.”

Warden: “All right, all right.  Now I’m going to count down from 5.  Riflemen, take your aim…”

All five riflemen raise their weapons.

Warden:  “Five…”

POW!

Warden: “Brian!”

Brian: “You said ‘Five’.”

1st Rifleman: “He’s counting DOWN from 5!”

2nd Rifleman (looking at the rapist): “You’re a terrible shot!  You’re supposed to aim for the heart, and you hit him in the groin.”

Brian: “Oops.”

Rapist (in great pain): “C’mon, let’s go!”

POW!

3rd Rifleman: “Brian!”

Brian: “He said ‘let’s go.”

Warden: “He’s not in charge here, I am!”

Brian: “Got it.  Sorry.”

5th Rifleman: “And you shot him in the groin again.”

Brian: “He rushed me.  I barely had time to aim.  Let’s not get all bogged down in who shot who early.”

Rapist (in greater pain): “YOU DID!”

Brian: “Agree to disagree.  Come on guys, pizza’s getting cold.”

Warden: “Okay, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.”  

POWPOWPOWPOWPOW!!

The rapist slumps forward, and all 5 riflemen lower their weapons.

2nd Rifleman (looking at Brian): “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.” (to the Warden) “Wasn’t Gary supposed to be up tonight?”

Brian: “I paid him $100 to let me take his place.”

Warden: “What?!”

Brian (nodding toward the dead guy): “My little sister was his third victim.”

The other riflemen look at each other.

Warden (clapping Brian on the shoulder): “Pizza’s on me!”

And, scene. 

On to two stories of lefty foolishness, on one of the topics about which the lefties are most predictably foolish: transgender stuff.

The first story comes from JFK airport, where a trans “woman” – i.e. a guy – complained about an aggressive frisking at the hands of a TSA agent. 

And because it’s 2023, this is an actual sentence in an actual news story: the “…woman was left in tears after she claimed a TSA agent punched her in the testicles.” 

Now in some of these stories, the “trans woman” is pretty obvious.  As in, when you’re about 50 yards away you think, “Hey, since when does Mike Ditka wear a frilly blouse and… Oh good lord!” 

But in the pics that accompany this story the mix-up isn’t so obvious.  So I imagine that the TSA agent was moving her hand into what she expected to be empty space, when… surprise!

As someone who was “assigned male at birth” as they say, and who also played a lot of contact sports with a lot of juvenile males, I am well acquainted with the temporarily debilitating sensation of the proverbial “sack tap.”

And I really do feel sorry for this person.  As I said in my column on Friday, it has to be terribly painful to live in such denial of reality. 

But this could end up being a healthy therapeutic experience for “her.”  Because there’s nothing like a good, hard whack on the juevos to serve as a wake-up call!

After the airport search, this poor guy ended up retreating to a women’s restroom and texting “her” story on social media, blaming the insensitive TSA agent and ending with the question, “Anyone know what I can do?”

Would it be rude to say, “Man up?”

If you’re wondering where this poor soul came up with her delusion, look no farther than NPR. 

In a March 26th story, the brain trust drawn from the elite of our J-schools, and spanning the political spectrum from far left to ultra far left, reacted with predictable outrage to the news that the World Athletics Council is barring “transwomen” (i.e. dudes) from elite female athletic competitions.

In their truthy and unbiased opinion, the elite “journalists” said that the WAC took action, “citing a priority for fairness over inclusion, despite limited scientific research” supporting the idea that males have a “physical advantage” over females in competitive sports.

How can one respond to that? 

In many ways, I guess.  Most of which should start with the venerable Sam Kinison filter™:

“LIMITED SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH?! NO PHYSICAL ADVANTAGE?!!  HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A SPORT?!  OH! OHHHH!!!!”  [end Kinison filter™]

Honestly.  NPR’s researchers could look at a few record books, where they would find that the elite male vs. elite female athletic performance gaps are huge.  A study out of Duke pegged the average difference at between 10-12%.  

For an idea of how that works out in the real world, researchers took the lifetime best speed of two female Olympic runners in the 100 and 400 meters respectively, and then totaled the number of men and boys (under 18) who beat the record-holding females’ times in the year 2017.  


In just that one year, 15,000 men and boys ran faster times – in each event – than each female record-holder’s lifetime best. 

Or, NPR “journalists” could have spent a half hour watching NBA and WNBA games, or men’s and women’s pro tennis matches, or golf matches, or weightlifting, or swimming, etc.

None of that is to put down female athletes, obviously.  But no one should be able to make the argument with a straight face that “male” and “female” are just malleable, easily transitioned social constructs.

Seriously NPR, do you WANT to get tragically confused males being whacked in the balls in our nation’s airports?

Because THIS is how you get tragically confused males being whacked in the balls in our nation’s airports!

Let me end on a more positive note:

As your humble Roving Correspondent, I want you to know that I am completely on board with the LGBTQ agenda!

If by “LGBTQ” you mean, “Let’s Get Biden To Quit!”                  

Have a good week, everybody!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Ricky “Food Truck Bandit” Jimenez, 2024!

Writing About a Painful Subject (posted 3/31/23)

Writing a column partially about the Nashville school shooting is going to be a bit like tightrope walking for me.  Partly because most people feel like we’ve heard enough about that story, but mostly because of how sad it is.  

My natural tendency is to mock and crack wise, and even though many of the political reactions to this story deserve mockery, and I do have some serious thoughts about transgenderism and how I think we should view it, I’d understand if many people aren’t in the mood for a discussion of this topic. 

If that’s you, you might want to skip this one.

For the rest of you, I’ll start with the obvious: the tragic, violent deaths of those at the school are heartbreaking, somehow even moreso because three of the victims were children.  Especially for those of us who don’t know those involved, offering thoughts and prayers really is the appropriate thing to do, even as hollow as that feels, and as often as that idea is mocked.  

But I do feel some dark schadenfreude from watching the self-owning, hypocritical leftist media tie themselves into knots as they have been trying to force the round peg of this story into the square a-hole of their ideology.

Sorry, that should have been “square hole.” 

Or should it?

Anyway, they are juggling so many internally contradictory ideas that they can’t help but beclown themselves in multiple ways.

For example, in their usual script, the gun itself is evil, and responsible for all gun deaths. 

UNLESS the gun is wielded by a right-winger, or a straight white guy of indeterminate politics, in which case the gun is incidental, and the gunman is evil, and responsible for all gun deaths.  (In this case, obviously, the gun is at fault.)

Also, all guns are assault weapons!  Even if they’re pistols, or tiny little derringers from an Old West poker game, or flintlock muskets that take 22 minutes to reload. 

But you put two AR-15s in the hands of a transgender shooting Christians at a Christian school, and leftist craniums are exploding and bouncing off ceilings from sea to shining sea.  (If by “sea to shining sea” you mean from each coast to about 10 miles inland, and then skipping over all the icky flyover states in between.)

You know that there is a certain kind of malevolent leftist – hopefully not a huge percentage of the left! – who can’t think of a more satisfying daydream than a transgender Rambo shooting up a bunch of people in a red-state Christian school.  

And yet they have to do their best to suppress the shooter’s “manifesto,” out of fear that it will likely express exactly that sort of Christophobic poison that they have been pushing for years.  

The poor MSM reporters stuttered and stammered as they tried to report at least some facts while also avoiding the obvious truth that is the transgender elephant in the non-binary room. 

Initial coverage made a big deal about how rare it was for a female to be a mass shooter like this.  Which is true.  Except that it can’t be true, because this shooter was “male,” like all the bad patriarchal shooters always are.  Because of their toxic masculinity. 

Which obviously arises from the ovaries “trans men” are born with, and is not the least bit affected by the functioning testicles that they absolutely never have, even if they do get genital mutilation/emulation surgery, in the worst metaphorical game of hide the pea under the shell ever known to mankind.

I mean, “personkind.”

And no, I’m not going to explain what is the metaphorical pea and which is the metaphorical shell in that horrific game.   Because I don’t know, and you don’t know, and Dylan Mulvaney doesn’t know.  Even though he’s been doing his best to hide the pea for quite some time now.

Or was it the shell?

Nevermind.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yeah.  My favorite med-idiot (I’m trying to create a neologism from “media” and “idiot,” but I know that it’s not there yet.  Maybe “meediot?” or “media-idiot?”  I’ll keep working on it.) was “science” writer Benjamin Ryan, who stumbled through a pronoun minefield.

First he said that the shooter was killed “after she gunned down” her victims.  Later, he called the shooter “he.”  Finally, he solemnly intoned about how the shooter had been “assigned female at birth.” 

That phrase is a ridiculous, moronic linguistic malformation; it easily belongs in my top 5 leftist-language pet peeves.  It both gets my goat AND gets my dander up, until I’m left to just sputter in anger, as I watch a dander-covered goat gamboling about, just out of my reach.

Nobody is “assigned” anything at birth!  The phrase suggests a doctor walking through a nursery full of newborns, trailed by a nurse who is writing down every infant’s assignment as the doc taps each crib and says, “Eenie, meenie, miney, Boy.  Eenie, meenie, miney, Girl.”

Or possibly, “Duck, duck, Vagina.”  Or “Black sheep, black sheep, have you any Penis?”  Or however such phantom “assignments” would be given out.

These people are idiots, and I feel like they’re shaving several IQ points off of me just in the process of writing this column.  (Re-read the last 250 words or so.  Do they not indicate someone who is slowly losing his faculties?  The whole family is worried about me, and Cassie the Wonder Dog is staring at me with her gorgeous dog head cocked at an extreme angle.) 

Again: none of this is about the shooting.  It’s about the way the ghoulish, bad-faith left is trying to make political hay out of it, which we should always push back on.  Yes, that gets us talking politics in the wake of a tragedy, which we’d all rather not do.

But we don’t have that luxury, because that’s not the way politics and culture work: if the other side is constantly aggressing, and we either passively cede ground — or worse, try to fight by one-hand-tied-behind-our-back, Marquess of Queensberry  rules – the aggressors are going to win. 

In this specific debate, we need to go back to the most basic fact from which all other arguments, responses and policies flow: authentic transgenderism is a mental disorder. 

I say that out of compassion for everyone it affects.  I’ve known people with various mental issues.  My mom has Alzheimer’s, as did her mother, and I struggled with a natural depression during the five months when my dad was dying.  I can only imagine how awful it would be to feel alienated from your own body and gender, and I seriously empathize with anyone experiencing that, and wish only the best for them.

But if a condition is wrongly diagnosed, the prescribed treatment is bound to go horribly wrong.   

A hallmark of nearly all mental disorders is that the patient mis-perceives reality.  In various psychoses, the patient thinks voices are talking to her – from the radio, or fillings in her teeth, or from the empty air around her – when there are no voices.  Or the patient thinks he’s Napoleon, or Christ.  (Spoiler alert: he’s not.  There has only ever been one of each.)

In the body dysmorphia subset of mental illnesses, the same holds true.  An anorexic looks at her emaciated frame in a mirror and sees an obese person.  Some rare illnesses have involved people who felt that they are alienated from one body part, that it is somehow not part of them; one such patient mangled his arm to force its amputation; another intentionally blinded himself.

Transgenderism seems logically related to that subset of mental illnesses, and in none of those other cases would we condone doctors or society indulging the sufferer’s delusion.   Many Americans think it’s compassionate to agree and go along with traumatic surgeries and health-threatening drug interventions for those with one body dysmorphia, when they would NEVER agree with an anorexic that she is disgustingly fat.  

There is clearly a strong element of social contagion with transgenderism, as the numbers have been exploding far beyond any biological or naturally occurring phenomena would.  And it coincidentally affects far-left parents in blue states disproportionately; many high-profile parents have “discovered” that several of their kids are trans or non-binary, which is statistically unlikely, to say the least!

The one bit of truth in the leftist script is that there have always been people who are gender stereotype non-conforming, as with more masculine or “tom-boy” girls, or more effeminate boys.  Those are so common as to be a familiar fixture in all cultures.  In that sense, if not in the sense that the radical LGBTQ activists claim, gender expression is very commonly on a spectrum, from hyper-masculine to hyper-feminine, and encompassing everything in between.

I think most people in this group would fall into one of three common-sense categories:

1. In many cases, these are characteristics or tendencies that don’t dominate personalities, and can be very well accommodated into lifelong, well-functioning relationships.  You all know couples in which the man is more stereotypically sensitive or “feminine” – eschewing sports, hunting, or activities more often associated with testosterone – and women who are the same in the opposite direction: hard-charging, aggressive, or confrontational in their careers and social relationships, etc.

Even though most women don’t go into traditionally male-dominated fields (engineering, construction, the military), some do.  Even though most men don’t go into traditionally female-dominated fields (elementary school teacher, caregiver, housekeeping), some do.  Even though most husbands don’t take a long paternity leave, and most mothers don’t willingly choose to go back to work a day or two after giving birth, some do.  

These aren’t people who should pursue radical means to try to change their gender; they are part of the diverse kaleidoscope of preferences and tendencies that make up varied human nature.

2. In at least as many other cases, some gender-non-conforming behavior in childhood is a transient phase that a young person goes through during the process of coming into one’s self that marks all passages into adulthood.  Every adult with a normally wide circle of acquaintances knows many, many women who went through a tomboy phase, before dating and settling into a satisfying traditional marriage, or becoming “earth-mother” types with many kids.    

3. In many, many other cases, gender-non-conforming kids just turn out to be gay.   

The comparatively tiny number of people who don’t fall into any of those groups and who are actually suffering from gender dysmorphia need therapy and treatment, not affirmation in their illness, and encouragement to pursue surgeries and drug regimens with life-long, severe consequences  

Today we look back with disdain on many fads that were considered to be at the forefront of “science,” endorsed by some of the most influential medical and cultural groups of their time.  

Some of these are tragic and dark – using lobotomies to treat mental illness, or eugenics to “compassionately” improve society – and some were ridiculous, as when phrenologists studied the shape of the skull to diagnose psychological attributes, or astrologers used horoscopes to make life decisions.

The current transgender mania is both ridiculous and darkly tragic, and history is not going to be kind to those pushing it now.    

In the meantime, we should show compassion to the mentally ill, and politically defeat those who – knowingly or not – are fighting for a bad cause, and doing life-changing damage to too many children.  

And thank the cops in Nashville, who bravely confronted a disturbed person, and used their guns to save many lives!

Most Things Make Sense… and One that Doesn’t (posted 3/27/23)

In Friday’s column I wrote about some of the best things in life, followed by some of the worst.  Today I’m starting with things that make sense, and will end with just one example that baffles me.

First up in the “that makes total sense” column: 

An article in the Washington Examiner, “The Collapse of Britain’s Health Service, the crown jewel of socialized Healthcare,” detailed the problems of – prepare yourself for a chain of sarcastic quotation marks — a “free,” “universal,” “healthcare” system.

Those problems include long wait times, excess deaths, and the government’s hiding of damaging data. 

After often waiting for literally hours – the average time Brits wait for an ambulance after having a heart attack is 90 minutes! – patients are commonly evaluated in waiting rooms or hallways.   Government figures show that “tens of thousands of people spend 12 hours or more on hospital gurneys after being admitted to the emergency department.”   

And leaked internal reports indicate that the government has been lying about wait times and excess deaths, because the real numbers are even worse.

So the government took control of something, and promised free and universal access to that thing, and then shortages developed and quality fell like Joey Gaffes mounting a mobile airplane staircase?

Makes sense. 

I refer you to the words of the late, great Milton Friedman (peace be upon him):  “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

In other totally predictable news, arrogantly woke Disney is having some serious financial trouble.

Starting at the end of this week, Disney will apparently make the first round of staff and cost cuts, following by a larger one in late April, which sources are now describing alternatively as “the big one” or a “bloodbath.”  (Both better movie titles than “Avatar: The Way of Water.”) The goal is to cut 7,000 staff and save $5.5 billion.     

Not that long ago, Disney was the California of corporations, holding an unassailable position at the top of the heap. 

Cali had amazing climate, topography, and natural resources, in addition to incredibly rich human resources in the forms of a premier university system, and the cultural and financial world-leaders of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Around 40 years ago, any sane observer, looking at all that California had going for it, would say, “This state is so blessed in so many ways that even the most delusional and destructive of all political philosophies could not bring it low!”

And the first in a long line of socialist morons said, “Hold my kale smoothie, and watch this.”

And then… yada yada yada… it’s all brain-drain flight, fires, floods, and sidewalks covered in human waste and dirty syringes.

Disney was similarly situated, and has followed the same path. 

Its brand was one of the strongest in the world, buoyed by almost a century of classic animation masterpieces beloved by successive generations of star-struck fans, and theme park destinations where American parents would gladly take their kids to spend the second mortgage they’d taken out on their homes.

Then, as if in a Biblical “pride goeth before the fall” parable, a bunch of leftist locusts began to eat away at a great company.  They decided to start forcing a “not so secret gay agenda” into every movie and cartoon in sight, and were dumb enough to be caught on video bragging about it. 

Leftist political and sexual agendas forced rewrites of cherished stories.  Suddenly the (Danish) Little Mermaid had to be black, and the Lion King had to be a vegetarian, and all of the villains had to be straight white guys.  Snow White (voiced by Ellen Degeneres) was awakened by a (French) kiss by Cinderella (voiced by Dylan Mulvaney).

The Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe still lived in a giant piece of footwear.  But now it was an enormous Birkenstock that had been converted into a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.

“Martin, were there trans storylines?” you are not asking, because you already know.

I’ll put it this way:  Jack and Jill went up the hill… put Jane and Jill came down. And that was NOT water in the pail on that return trip. 

Perhaps I’ve said too much.    

To top it all off, the corporation that had enjoyed a 60-year-long sweetheart tax deal for Disney World  decided to pick a political fight with Ron DeSantis and the parents of Florida.  Brilliant!  

(If that’s not the perfect political example of a “F*** around and find out” story, I don’t know what is!)

Perhaps the best individual story that summarized Disney’s woke idiocy is that of Victoria Alonso, the uber-powerful president of production, VFX and animation at Marvel, which Disney bought for $4 billion in 2009. 

Alonso proudly touted her own status as an openly gay woman of color — although judging from pictures, she’s about as “colorful” as Lizzie Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) – and received many MSM journalistic tongue-baths that noted her “fiery passion and outspokenness over diversity and inclusion.”  

You’ll not be surprised to know that she has a memoir coming out next month – at Disney book label Hyperion Avenue, naturally – about her corporate rise, with the clunky, non-sensical title “Possibility is Your Superpower.” 

As a one-time voracious reader of comic books, I cannot imagine a less enticing superpower than “possibility.”  I mean, if an armored suit, X-ray vision, the power of flight, and using webs to swing around NYC were all off the table, I STILL wouldn’t pick “possibility.” 

In fact, I’d quickly choose either “parallel parking on the first try” or “being able to come up with annoying running jokes in political columns” over “possibility” any day of the week!

Anyway, Alonso’s story ends in a hilariously satisfying way, and one that is likely to depress the sales of her idiotic autobiography.

She went to the unwatched Academy Awards ceremony a couple of weeks ago, and when she noticed that the two photographers on the red carpet were both female, she made a big, politically correct deal of it.  She insisted that the women put down their cameras and take a pic with her, gushing, “Look at this!  Two women!  We’ve worked so hard to get here and we’re not going anywhere.”

aaannnnnddd…

Eight days later she was fired.

To which there are only three acceptable responses:

1. Cue the sad trombone.

2. HA!  HAHA!!  HAHAHA!!!

3. That makes perfect sense.

Here’s a story that doesn’t appear to make sense, but only at first glance.

It’s the story of Tiffany Thomas, who won a professional women’s cycling race last week in NYC.   Although her teammates on the elite LA Sweat cycling team range in age from 24 – 32, Thomas is 46!    Several news reports stated that, “Tiffany only started cycling [at 40], yet she was immediately successful and has since dominated events.”

So is Thomas just one of those athletic anomalies who defies the normal strictures of aging to remain competitive long after most have retired?  Is she like Tom Brady?

Well, sort of.

Because like Brady, Tiffany Thomas is [cue Austin Powers voice] “a man, baby!”

And now it all makes sense.

Obviously, the headline, “Old, Inexperienced Woman Cyclist Dominates Elite Young Women Cyclists in Race,” is counter intuitive. 

But “Older Dude Kicks Female Butt in Women’s Cycling Race?”  Well that just rings true, doesn’t it?

Insulting. Aggravating. Obnoxious. 

But true. 

(Fun fact, proving that irony is dead:  When Thomas isn’t using the power of testosterone to crush his smaller, more estrogenical competitors, guess what his day job is.  That’s right: BIOLOGIST!  You can’t make this stuff up.)

So I guess there’s really only one thing that doesn’t make sense to me right now, and it is this: 

I’ve watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies, and found all of the hobbits in them to be quite charming. 

And yet I don’t care for Janet Yellen at all. 

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Victoria “Looking for Work” Alonso, 2024!

I Consider What a Piece of Work is a Man (posted 3/24/23)

Boy, is our world a dizzying mix of the amazingly good and the hideously bad!  

I usually take a few daily notes on things I’m thinking of writing about, but this week my notes were all over the map. 

I noticed a ton of things that are really, seriously great, as I went down internet rabbit holes on several different topics.

As I was re-listening to some great country/folk songs from Billy Strings and Colter Wall, I came across a handful of new-to-me singer/songwriters, including Tyler Childers and Benjamin Tod. They’re both blue-collar, no-frills singers – acoustic guitar, raspy voices, dead-on lyrics – from the parts of Kentucky that my dad’s family comes from, and I haven’t heard a bad song from either of them yet, though they’ve got a lot of sad ones.

I somehow went down another path leading me to dozens of videos about dogs.  Some featured K-9s putting the fear of God in some bad guys, or going through a retirement ceremony after years of faithful service, or – heartbreakingly – being given a sorrowful send off by a police department and citizens as they are escorted into a building to be put down, due to illness or injury. 

Some featured military dogs, which are like the K-9 ones, only even cooler.  Many focused on everyday pets – sometimes helping out owners with disabilities, sometimes going nuts greeting owners after they return from being away, sometimes merely acting goofy.

Just as I was reconfirming my belief that in general, humans don’t deserve dogs, I came across a series of people finding injured or sick strays, then nursing them back to health and finding families for them.  And if I weren’t as tough as a two-dollar steak, those would have made me cry. 

I also found some addictive videos showing grandparents and family members meeting newborns for the first time.  In several of them, a proud grandpa falls to pieces when he discovers that a grandson has been named after him. 

(Note to my married daughter, who should probably start having some babies soon: You can’t go wrong with “Martin” as a classic and timeless name for a grandson.)

I even found a bunch of videos about a guy named Devon Rodriguez, a talented artist who rides the subway in NYC, capturing other riders in super-realistic pencil drawings. 

I know, I was thinking the same thing: “…and then the stabbings began.” 

But no, he creates the drawings, and then surprises the subjects with them, giving them their portrait and complimenting something about them.

From there I somehow got to a bunch of videos showing kids or adults who were fitted with cochlear implants and were able to hear for the first time.  And then to videos showing color-blind people putting on special glasses that allow them to see color for the first time. 

Watching all of these inspiring and heartwarming videos reminded me of the best of people (and dogs).  Musicians who hone their talent and write raw and honest music, families celebrating new life, an artist seeing the beauty in strangers.  Inventors who help the nearly blind to see and the deaf to hear.

It brought to mind one of my favorite passages on the topic of human potential from Shakespeare:  “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!”

(Of course Hamlet is depressed when he speaks those words, and the following lines undercut that imagery.  But he had it right, all the same.) 

But then I watch some current events and political news, and my faith’s teaching on human nature was reinforced: created in God’s image… but fallen and depraved and ridiculous. 

Our political class, especially, is the worst.  

Everything in our country is going off the rails like a train full of toxic chemicals with Mayor Pete in the conductor’s chair, sitting on a huge phone book so that he can see out the window, and wearing an old-timey conductor hat and brand-new work boots that are even now creating blisters on his delicate little never-been-in-work-boots-in-their-lives feet.

Our numbskull-rich Congress held hearings in their eternal, logic-free attempts to ban all guns so that only criminals will be armed, and Sheila Jackson Lee ranted about how pistol-stabilizer braces turn firearms “into killing machines!”

For one brief moment I thought about a handgun turning into a robot Terminator the way Transformers turn into robots in toy commercials.

But then I remembered that Sheila Jackson Lee is a moron.

Since I’d never heard of a stabilizer brace, I did 30 seconds of research.  And found out that they don’t turn pistols into machine guns, or phasers, or sentient cyborgs of death.

They strap to your arm and help you aim your pistol.  Which remains a pistol, the whole time. 

And don’t tell Jackson Lee, but pistols are basically “killing machines” already, just like cars are killing machines, and banana peels are killing machines, and Simpson Slinger™ trebuchets are killing machines, in that they can all be used to make someone dead.

Ugh.  Jackson Lee also graced the hearing with a little history lesson, stating that the ATF has been “keeping us safe” since “as far back as 1886.”

Petty sticklers for detail might point out that the ATF was established in 2003, which was, technically, a lot LESS far back than 1886.   But they’re probably the same kind of dopes who think that a pistol-stabilizer brace stabilizes your pistol for you.  So what do they know?

But of course it’s not fair to just criticize political underlings – spokespeople who can’t speak intelligibly, flatulent congressmen who are too busy banging an Asian cutie to realize that she’s a Chicom spy, crotchety white ladies who think they’re Sitting Bull’s 4th grand-niece, twice removed (#wemustneverstopmockingher) —  without criticizing the Big Guy at the top.

And yes, it was quite a week for Joey Gaffes, who was inexplicably let out to speak at several PR events, and incomprehensibility ensued.

He tried to say a few words at a Women’s History event, and how hard can that be?  (“Women are better than men!  Yay women!  Goodnight folks!”)

Apparently pretty hard, judging from this quote, which I am not making up: “This is a time for celebrating extraordinary women… like Jill, the First Lady, the first full-time lady, the First Lady who works full-time in addition to being the First Lady.”

Okay.  Moving on…

…to his attempt to point out how the Violence Against Women Act – which he called “the Violence zmm mm zuh Act” – has been a great boon to women of many colors (“Did he mention white women?” you are not asking, because you already know the answer.), before ending the list with “LGBTQ survivors.” 

Um. Well, considering the gross incompetence of KJP, “Admiral” “Rachel” Levine, and Mayor Pete, aren’t we all really “LGBTQ survivors” after the last two years, if you think about it?

Biden also made an impassioned promise to “keep guns out of the hands of domestic political advisors,” before some minion at the WH changed the transcript to what he had been supposed to say, which was “convicted domestic abusers.”

(Although, judging from the quality of Biden’s domestic political advisors, who’s to say which would be worse?)

But that wasn’t all.  On St. Patrick’s Day Biden claimed that the Irish are mostly low IQ, drunken jailbirds (I’m not making that up), before he headed over to a celebration of the Persian new year. 

And we all braced ourselves. 

I don’t know about you, but on my “Joe Biden Talks to Some Persians” Bingo card, I scored with, “Claims that his paternal grandpa was Persian,” “Claims to have marched against the Shah in Tehran in 1979,” “Remembers that when he was a young man, after going to the local synagogue and before going to the local black Baptist church, he’d pop into the Persian mosque everyday after school,” and “In middle school he sat at the feet of the Scranton Imam and learned to weave Persian rugs.” 

Sadly for me, I didn’t have “Claims to be a student, but not a practitioner, of Persian culture,” so I didn’t get my Bingo.  (That was really a thing he said.)   

And that was not counting his mangled attempt to read about 6 lines of poetry, multiple times.

But I love the written word too much – and there’s not enough bourbon in my house – to recount that atrocity here. 

To summarize today’s column:

First half – “Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”

Second half – “Jesus wept.”

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Sheila “Killing Machine” Jackson Lee, 2024!

Two Anniversaries, Plus Criminals are Stupid (posted 3/20/23)

Today’s theme – as it is so tragically often – is Cavalcade of Stupid. 

But before I get to that, I need to mention two important anniversaries that happened this past week. 

Saturday was the 34th anniversary of the greatest feat of a groom metaphorically outkicking his coverage and landing an out-of-his league bride in the history of nuptial achievement.  On March 18th, 1989, Norwegian-American goddess Karen Ludwigsen became my wife. 

Thus giving hope to average-looking, average-earning hilarious geniuses everywhere.  You’re welcome.

Did I tell the same groan-worthy running joke that I’ve been using every anniversary for years?  Damn straight.

To wit: “Today we celebrate 25 happy years together.  And we’ve only been married for 34, so that’s pretty good.”  Boom!

Less happily, last Wednesday was March 15th, the infamous Ides of March.  And it marked another anniversary, one which went about as well for our country as the previous Ides of March went for Caesar. 

Because on 3/15/20, President Trump was misled into announcing, “15 Days to Slow the Spread” of covid.  Three years later, Fauci is still pushing the merits of masks, boosters, and preventative lockdowns.  Which is a good transition to the Cavalcade of Stupid.

First up we have Stupid Cities, specifically Chicago and Portland (the bad one in Oregon, not the good one in Maine). 

It seems that WalMarts are leaving both towns, and for similar reasons: badly run and hostile political environments, and rampant crime.  Regardless of your feelings about WalMart – and there are plenty of pros and cons – it’s a red flag when stores that serve your middle- and lower-income citizens flee, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

In February and March, 3 Chicago-area Wal-Marts closed, citing “underperformance.”  In Portland, the last two Wal-Marts in town will shut down this month.  In a PR statement, WalMart cited generic issues of financial performance, customer needs, location, and blah blah blah.

But other people got to the real causes.  Journalist (and national treasure) Andy Ngo noted that “WalMart has long been harshly criticized by the city’s left-wing politicians & residents, but this shutdown follows the consequences of the 2020 BLM-Antifa riots that normalized urban criminality.” 

One customer complained that nearby options were “three times the price,” and stated the obvious: “We gotta resolve the shoplifting one way or another, because that is simply the problem. It’s gotta stop.”

 The moral to the story, as always, is that you get what you vote for, and what you tolerate.  And, unfortunately for them, the citizens of Chicago and Portland are getting both, good and hard.

On the “Thank God Most Criminals Are Idiots” front, I have two stories.

The first one happened in Chicago in January, but I just now came across it.  The appropriately named 19-year-old Thomas Battle (he fought the law, and the law won), was already on parole for carjacking and robbery.  But that didn’t stop him from either driving or riding in another stolen car, which crashed. 

(Criminals: not good at crime.  Also not good at driving.)

Battle and the others involved ran from the cops on foot, and he ultimately chose a dumpster for his hiding place.  Luckily for him, even though Chicago is a Dem-run dumpster-fire of a city, the dumpster he jumped into was not on fire at the time.

Unluckily for him, the dumpster was behind a building full of Chicago police dispatchers, who promptly called the cops with whom they are in constant contact and said, “The moron you’re looking for is right here, in a dumpster.”

Unbelievably enough, Battle was illegally carrying a pistol.  Which should have been impossible, since Chicago is practically a gun-free zone, where carrying illegal pistols illegally is illegal. 

Why, it’s almost like depending on a raft of gun-control laws that no criminal ever follows is not a bright idea!

The second story is a tale not just of a specific crime, but of an entire crime wave.  It involves the recently invented crime of stealing catalytic converters from underneath cars. 

The incentive is to get at the precious metals – platinum, palladium, and rhodium – in the converters.  (I’ve heard of platinum.  But I think “palladium” is a place where I saw Tom Petty in 1989, and I’m pretty sure that “rhodium” is the made-up thing the bad military guys were looking for in Avatar.)  The National Insurance Crime Bureau reports that the theft of this one part has increased by over 1000% between 2018-2022.

(To provide a useful comparison, that is nearly as much as grocery costs have increased since the plague of the Biden administration befell our country.)

But every dark cloud has a silver lining.  In this case, the skyrocketing theft rate has been accompanied by a skyrocketing dead thief rate, arising from a lethal combination – in the felon-American community – of a high level of laziness with a low IQ. 

A few of the cases have happened when car owners returned to their vehicle and unknowingly ran over a Biden voter who was beneath their car trying to rob them.  I’d like to think that at least a few more were from owners firing warning shots into the thoraxes of thieves whom they caught in the act. 

(In which case the thieves came for a few troy ounces of rhodium, but left with a few troy ounces of lead. In their chest cavities.)

But the vast majority of the time, the cause of death is that the vehicle falls on the hapless thief, resulting in a fatal case of SOOCS.  (Sudden-Onset Organ Compression Syndrome. Duh!)

(Criminals: bad at life choices. Also bad at jack deployment.)

Sometimes these dullard-squishings happen in driveways or on the street, and sometimes they occur at car dealerships or mechanics’ shops. 

Unfortunately, many people, when faced with a choice between 1. finding a job and putting in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, or 2. grabbing a wobbly jack and risking contracting a nasty case of SOOCS under some taxpayer’s car, make a wrong and fatal decision.

So let’s all have a respectful moment of silence…

…for the hundreds of innocent catalytic converters that have been dented or otherwise damaged from falling on the thick skulls of many low-down dirty thieves.

From the, “These Open Borders are Working out Great!” files comes the story of two Hondurans who illegally came into our country (Thanks, Brandon!) and made their way up to Nebraska, where they killed a bald eagle.  They planned to cook and eat the bird, and sell its talons and other parts “as ornaments.” 

If you were making this up for a screenplay or a short story, no editor would accept it. “Who is going to believe such a thing?” he would say, if he’s been in a coma or under a magic spell for several years, and just woke up last Friday. 

But it’s true.  Two Hondurans showed such disdain for our country and our laws that they illegally crossed our border – amidst literally millions of others – and then made a beeline for Nebraska, where they killed our national symbol.   

Rumors that their next plans were to steal an American flag to use as toilet paper, wrap packets of deadly fentanyl in torn-up copies of our constitution and sell them to kindergartners, and then hitchhike to Philly and pee on the Liberty Bell have not yet been confirmed.

I have two modest proposals.  First, we build a series of gigantic trebuchets in south Texas, and fire these two Hondurans back across the Rio Grande as our first test of what I hope will be called, “the Simpson Slinger™.”

Second, since the illegal community apparently has created a market for black market bald eagle parts, I move that we pass a law requiring that any illegal alien caught wearing eagle-beak earrings, or hanging bedazzled eagle talons from the rear-view mirrors of their non-registered and uninsured cars be immediately deported.  (Preferably via the aforementioned Simpson Slinger™.)

Or at least be given $10 and a defective jack and told to crawl under the closest heavy SUV and don’t come back without a catalytic converter.    

Finally, I did another appearance on the “Mitch Wonders” podcast, this time discussing the pros and cons of the rapid advancement of technology, and especially the internet, in recent years.  If you’re interested, the segment is called, “The Gutenberg Parenthesis,” and you can listen to it at   https://www.buzzsprout.com/2041434

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Thomas “Dumpster Boy” Battle, 2024!

The Lighter Side of the Banking Crisis, and Newark, NJ (posted 3/17/23)

Figuring out the bank closures this week is above my pay grade.  Fortunately, we’ve got financial big brains here like CO and the Silber Surfer to explain the details, and I’d recommend that all CO nation follows their analysis on this topic.

For me, just hearing that the Silicon Valley Bank managed to find $73 million to donate to various BLM- and social justice-related causes is a red flag that they were bound to fail.  Ditto the news that Barney Frank was on the board of Signature Bank, which also went down last week.

Speaking of going down, remember that time when Barney Frank’s live-in gay hooker boyfriend ran a gay prostitution service out of Barney’s DC apartment?  I’m not making that up.  That is a thing that really happened. 

When the news got out, Barney insisted that he had no idea what had been going on.  But I don’t know which is worse: enabling your hooker boyfriend to run a gay brothel in your apartment, or being so clueless that your hooker boyfriend can do that while you remain clueless.

But either way, let’s definitely put a guy with that kind of judgment in charge of a bank!  What could possibly go wrong? 

My favorite part of the bank scandal story came from hacky Jen Psaki, whom I once thought had secured the title of the worst presidential spokesperson ever.  Until along came KJP, whose mindless word-for-word readings of stale and disingenuous talking points have vacillated between infuriating and soporific.

But she loves the girls as much as Barney Frank loves the boys, so your criticisms are invalid.

Anyway, after a jittery weekend, Biden’s handlers re-animated him with a huge jolt of electricity — if you’ve seen the classic movie Frankenstein, it was just like that, except that instead of a lightning strike, they used a diesel generator, and instead of taking place in a Gothic castle, it happened in the White House basement – and he staggered out to make a brief statement in front of the cameras on Monday morning.

The gist of it: Nothing to see here folks.  That’s no joke.  Our banking system is as solid as my economic agenda and our immigration system.  

He closed with a flourish: “Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe.” 

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that it would be easier to rest assured if Biden would just rest in peace, instead of being jolted back to life to come out and scare the children (along with the men, the women, and the markets) every time a chicken comes home to roost in the Rose Garden from one of his earlier terrible decisions.  

Once Biden was safely back in his crypt, the Ginger Prevaricator appeared on an MSNBC panel, to reassure their high-school-gymnasium-sized audience that the Biden White House is obviously on the case.  But the evidence she cited had to be the least reassuring message since Biden told the residents of East Palestine, OH that Mayor Pete was taking the reins on that train derailment situation.

Psaith Psaki: “What [Biden] needs to project to the public is, ‘We’ve got this, we have a plan….’ It’s important to know that President Biden does nothing at 9:00 a.m., he is a night owl.   The fact he is doing this at 9 a.m. anyway speaks to how vital the White House recognizes this is to have his voice out there, conveying it to the American public.”

I guess we’re just supposed to forget that for the last several years it was widely reported – if anything on CNN can be considered “widely reported” – that Joe Biden has an “early-to-bed” schedule. 

And really, isn’t that idea a lot easier to believe than a diligent Joe Biden burning the midnight oil?  If that codger isn’t tucked in for the night no later than 10 minutes after Matlock is over, I’ll eat my pointy purple magician’s hat.

Good lord, how much has our leadership bar been lowered?!  In the past, presidents would show that they were fully engaged in a crisis by demanding an emergency meeting with the Joint Chiefs, or calling their cabinet together on short notice, or sending a carrier group into the Persian Gulf.

But Joe Biden got out of bed to squint at – and mumble his way through – some boilerplate text in giant print on the teleprompter by the time most working people had already been on the job for an hour!  Hoorah!   

Psaki should be ashamed of herself for even psaying those words.  If Peter Doocy is reading this, I’m begging him to ask this question to KJP at the next WH presser:  “If the President’s getting up by 9:00 a.m. is supposed to be an indicator of how seriously he takes this crisis, can you give us a list of other wake-up times that would indicate the seriousness of other potential crises the WH may face in the future?”

My guesses:

Putin uses a tactical nuke against Ukraine?  Joe rolls out of bed by 7:00.

A Girl Scout troop with freshly washed, highly sniffable hair arrives for a photo op?  7:05

A single border agent on horseback in Del Rio uses his reins to speed up his horse?  7:15

Another video surfaces of Hunter snorting coke off of a hooker’s behind?  8:15.

Corn Pop shows up on the WH lawn with brass knuckles?  11:30.

A million MS-13 thugs breach our southern border, gas hits $9 a gallon, our national debt hits $38 trillion, and a Chinese spy balloon crashes into a train carrying deadly chemicals, setting off an explosion that kills every citizen in a Midwestern red state?

Joe hits the snooze button.

On a lighter note, I’m always on the lookout for funny stories, even if the political ones are sometimes tinged with tragedy, because they involve our leaders and how bone-deep stupid they can be.  But the harmless stories are even more enjoyable.

An example of such a recent one is a 2022 incident involving Whoopi Goldberg.  When she’s not being flatulent and oblivious on the unwatchable The View, she still occasionally acts in movies.  After a recent performance, one reviewer questioned why she had worn such a distracting fat suit in the film.

And then Whoopi had to come out and admit that… wait for it… she hadn’t been wearing a fat suit.

Ouch!  (Also, HA!) It’s almost enough to make one feel sorry for her.  I mean, if she weren’t constantly spewing misinformed hatred and slander at all even quasi-conservative Americans.

So in the spirit of punching up rather than down – since Whoopi is rich and famous and I’m just an obscure hilarious genius – here is an appropriate joke at her expense:

I never fat-shame people, because you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.  On the other hand, if a book is really, really thick, no one is ever going to read it.     

(By the way, if Whoopi’s future biographer chooses “Flatulent and Oblivious: the Whoopi Goldberg Story” as a title, I expect royalties.  Because that is the perfect title, and I hereby copyright it, right now.)  

What prompted this is another very funny story you may have heard about: last week, Newark, New Jersey had a televised ceremony in which they became a sister city to the Hindu nation of Kailasa.

The ceremony featured the usual accoutrements of such an occasion: a joint signing at City Hall of a cultural trade agreement, along with an exchange of trophy-like gifts and a series of hand-shake photos.  

Usually, the worst criticism of such a harmless event is that it is a time waster.  As you may know, Newark is a Democrat-run city, which unfortunately (but necessarily) means that it is badly run. 

Therefore, it would probably be a better use of city employees’ time and resources to tackle the usual serious problems: potholes unfilled, criminals un-caught and un-jailed, taxes higher than a Biden-era grocery bill, city officials running gay brothels out of their homes. 

You know, the usual.

But if Newarkians want to take a little escapist break from the misery of the grifters and incompetents they’ve voted to saddle themselves with, what is the harm in extending the hand of friendship to the Kailasans?

Only one thing: Kailasa doesn’t exist. 

It’s a made-up Hindu nation, the invention of a notorious scam artist named Swami Nithyananda.  And because the city officials went to Dem-run public schools, and don’t have access to either maps or Google – not to mention Google Maps – they fell for it.

Of course, not that long ago Newark elected Cory “Spartacus” Booker as its mayor.  So this is hardly the most laughable fraud they’ve been duped by.

Their first clue should have been that sister city programs traditionally involve two cities – as the name “sister cities” implies – rather one city and one nation.

Their second clue?  That a nation anywhere on earth would want to be voluntarily associated with Newark, NJ. 

This situation gives me a great idea, though.  I say we reach out to Swami’s people, and get them to approach Biden and Que Mala, and propose an executive branch exchange with Kailasa.  They get our current leadership, and we get whoever they can round up to pose as their leaders.  

(To paraphrase the late, great William F. Buckley, “I’d rather be governed by the first 300 people in the Kailasa phone book than by the entire Biden administration.”)

We could even throw a few senators into the deal.  I know at least one who would jump at the chance to claim that she is an India Indian, since the American Indian thing didn’t pan out.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Have a great weekend, everybody!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Grandma Squanto Nithyananda, 2024!

Thoughts on Studies Showing that Liberals are More Depressed Than Conservatives (posted 3/13/23)

I saw a couple of stories last week that only require a short response, followed by an article that requires more attention.

Stories first:

Biden had what is being called a “cancerous lesion” surgically removed last week.  Yet oddly enough, “Dr.” Jill Biden, Que Mala Harris and Mayor Pete have all been seen with Joey Gaffes in the week since the surgery.

So speculation on who exactly was the cancerous lesion on the presidency continues…

Here is a PJ Media headline from last Tuesday: “They’re on to Him: a Shockingly Low Percentage of Americans Think Old Joe Biden Is Really Running Things.” 

I like PJ Media, and I would generally be loath to correct them, but in this case I feel like I must.  The article points to a survey finding that only 30% of likely US voters are “very confident” that Biden is physically and mentally up to the job of POTUS. 

“Only” 30%?  ONLY?  That number is far from “shockingly low.”

In fact, after watching Joey Gaffes’ performance for the last two years, any number higher than zero is shockingly high!

Then again, I guess if John Fetterman can sponsor 6 bills despite being incommunicado in a hospital being treated for what sounds like multiple strokes and depression, I guess our Cadaver in Chief can lead the free world from the comfort of his metal tray in the White House Morgue.

(Also, while I’m not a physician – although my PhD makes me more of a doctor than “Dr.” Jill is — I think that if you could excise the cancerous lesion that is his wife, Fetterman’s condition would markedly improve.) 

But the most interesting thing I’ve read this past week is a piece by Matthew Yglesias on why young liberals are more depressed than young conservatives.

Yglesias is a lefty, but a mostly reasonable one.  He co-founded Vox, but he left several years ago to go to Substack – along with some other smart lefties, including Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald – to write and think independently, outside of a uniformly leftist bubble.

The article that Yglesias reacted to was called, “The Politics of depression,” and it found higher rates of depression in young females than young males, which made sense to leftist commentators, since they generally think that males are evil little want-to-be patriarchs, who naturally make females miserable.

But the far larger depression gap didn’t involve gender, but politics: while liberal females were considerably more depressed than liberal males, and conservative females were slightly more depressed than conservative males, it turns out that conservatives of both genders (spoiler alert to lefty readers: there are only two genders) are way less depressed than liberals of both genders.

In fact, liberal males are considerably more depressed than conservative females.  Which has to be especially galling to a certain type of feminist, since female leftists like themselves are the saddest, and the conservative males they hate are the least depressed. 

Cue the sad violin.  (Because to this type of feminist, the sad trombone is probably too disturbingly phallic, what with that slide protruding farther and farther as the note becomes sadder.)  

If you are an irreverent roving correspondent with a fondness for cheap jokes, you could easily make a few snarky comments at this point.

So I will.

I’m no scientist, but I can give you two quick reasons why leftist young people might be depressed:

1. The females are mopey because their males are all betas who weren’t raised to be chivalrous men, and couldn’t open a door for you if they wanted to because of their lack of upper body strength due to the hormone blockers they are on while they’re trying to decide if their authentic self is more of an effeminate male or a masculine female.

2. The males are depressed because of the above, and because the only females they have any chance with are their political co-religionists, and news flash: scowls, genitalia-simulating hats and psychotic daddy issues and hatred of testosterone are not the turn-ons that they are cracked up to be.

Seriously.  Look at the women on Fox News, and then at the women on CNN, or MSNBC, or the View.  They are the visual equivalent of the antidote to Viagra.  And unfortunately for them, they’re as pretty on the inside as they are on the outside.

So… yikes!

But childish mockery aside, I think there is more at play than just physical attractiveness.  Those of us on the right aren’t all paragons of physical beauty (CO Nation excepted, of course), and I’m sure that there are some attractive lefties out there somewhere.

But leftism carries its own unhappiness with it, for several reasons.

Leftists replace God or any legitimate higher purpose with hack politicians who have recruited them into the service of a poisonous, immiserating ideology cobbled together from the envy and mean-spirited bile of Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, Michael Moore and Satan.

That’s no recipe for contentment.

Peer pressure is also a big source of unhappiness, a situation exacerbated when your peers come pre-depressed. Because as the old saying goes, “Democrats love company.”

Sorry.  That’s not it.  Oh yeah: “Feminists love company.”

Shoot.  It’s on the tip of my tongue.

Ooh, I’ve got it: “Misery loves company.”

Honest mistake. 

Another contributor to depression is losing all the time.  Believe me, the rib-kicks of the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022, have still got me wincing.  

But while they’ve been winning way more elections than they should, have you noticed that most lefties aren’t real happy about that? I think part of that arises from the fact that they’re not content with partial power.

The main point of being a little totalitarian is that you want total control.  So as long as there are red states out there – with their infuriating successes that are drawing productive citizens to flee there from your power-hungry blue states – you can’t really be happy.

To add salt to their wounds, wherever the left has gotten real power, the results have been disastrous.     

As I’ve written before, the socialist agenda has been implemented in at least 50 countries, starting with the Russkies in 1917, and it’s produced nothing but gulags, misery, environmental devastation and democide. 

Seriously, their record is 0-50-2, if you count a couple Scandinavian countries with short-lived, quasi-socialist experiments as draws.  How can you help but be depressed with a record like that? 

And who would your all-stars be?  Stalin?  (He’s got the silver medal in terms of body count.)  Mao? (Gold!)  Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, any of the blocky, glowering Russian mass-killers between Stalin and Gorbachev? Ortega in Nicaragua, Ceausescu in Romania, 98% of the liberal arts faculties in the Ivy League? 

That’s a weaker lineup than the Mumblers’ Row that the Dems put up in their 2020 primary! (And how terrible were they?  Joe Biden whipped them all!)

So what’s to be happy about on the left?  Your women look like Bruce Jenner, your men look like Caitlyn Jenner, you’ve got the win-loss record of the 1976 Tampa Bay Bucs, and even when you win, you’ve got to immediately put up a Berlin/blue-state Wall to keep people from running away from you.

But perhaps the biggest cause of depression among lefties is that they’re the opposite of we few, we happy few, we band of cautious optimists: they look at every half-full glass and see it as half-full of hemlock.

They live in the greatest nation in history, where opportunity abounds, and the universal scourges of human life – war, disease, racism, sexism, soccer – are less oppressive than they are anywhere else.  And still they see problems everywhere. 

Their view is best summed up by creepy leftist cry-bully Taylor Lorenz, who reacted to the depressed liberals study with this quote, re-defining depressed young lefties as realists: “we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.”

Every word of that is wrong!   Our economy’s problems are mostly caused by her ideology, and pale in comparison to those in the rest of the world; covid was way less serious than the flu for otherwise healthy young people.

Our wealth inequality arises from everyone getting wealthier, but some faster than others.  We have more safety net than ever before, to the point that it’s become an atrophy-causing hammock for millions.  And 2 degrees of warming over a century couldn’t cook a scrambled egg, let alone a planet.

All of which reminds me of one more reason for us to be happy: we don’t have to trade places with lefties! 

Before I go, I wanted to mention that I was on another audio podcast that just posted today.  This time the topic was, “When Does Humor Cross a Line?”  My cousin’s take was that most people are way too easily offended, and my take was that I enjoy jokes even when they should conceivably offend me.

As part of the discussion, I told several borderline-tasteless jokes as examples.  So if you enjoy my foolishness here, please download and/or listen to the podcast at this link, and let me know what you think: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2041434/12423113

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Taylor “Waah!” Lorenz, 2024!

A Public Service Announcement to Improve Your Life(posted 3/10/23)

Hello All,  

This is your humble Roving Correspondent, speaking to you on behalf of the whole brain-trust team here at Cautious Optimism: the Big Man himself (CO), the COW, COSE, the Silber Surfer, the Correspondent for Thinly Researched Conspiracy Theories, etc. (I mean, I haven’t actually cleared this with any of them, or even discussed it with them, but I’m sure they’re with me on this.) 

Gather around, and I’m going to give you some valuable advice that you’ll want to return to again and again throughout your life:

You know who you should trust for accurate news of the world, and solid reporting on and interpretation of the same? 

Us.  Especially me. 

You know who you should NOT trust as far as you can throw them, even if you have a trebuchet in your back yard that can toss a stupid human several blocks away? 

(By the way, if you do have such a trebuchet and are planning to launch a stupid person several blocks away, please be mindful that their empty-headed body may do damage to whatever it lands on.  So check out the surrounding area and see if anybody has one of those obnoxious signs in their yard which starts out, “In this house we… welcome migrants, believe in the glorious socialist future, don’t believe in X and Y chromosomes or sex-differentiated genitalia…”  Then adjust your trebuchet’s aim accordingly, and let ‘er rip!)

(Hat tip to Woo Hah and Yee Hah, ancient Chinese inventors of the trebuchet.)

(Also, coincidentally, “Woo hah!” and “Yee hah!” are the sounds you make when your trebuchet launches a Biden voter violently up into the sky, followed by his diminishing cry of, “I deserve this because of my white privilege…” as he disappears from sight.)

(Before a distant, yet satisfying crunch as the virtue signaling dullard lands on a Volvo with a “Coexist” bumper sticker on it in the driveway of the yard with the “Black Lives Matter” sign in it two blocks away.)  

Wow.  A four-level-deep parenthetical diversion.  Now I’m a little light-headed.

Where was I? 

Oh yeah: who should you NOT trust for news about the world or politics?

Entertainers! 

For example, even though Jane Fonda was quite fetching 55 years ago in Barbarella, she also thought it was a great idea to pose for a photo-op with some commie murderers on an anti-aircraft gun.

And even though Bryan Cranston was amazing in Breaking Bad, he recently explained that,“Make America Great Again” is a racist slogan.

And even though Ken Burns made the great documentary series The Civil War, he went on CNN this week, and in front of literally dozens of viewers compared DeSantis’s attempt to keep hateful, anti-American whitey-hating pseudo-history out of Florida schools to a Hitlerian “rewriting of history.”   

And now comes yet another example.

This time it’s Cyndi Lauper, the moderately talented singer of a few inconsequential 1980’s pop songs with the desperate-cry-for-attention hair color.

By the way, if you remember my most recent column on the unfairness of life re: so many irritating people outliving great ones, here are a few more data points:  

Walter Payton and Sam Kinison were both born in 1953, and they’ve both been dead for more than 20 years.  Norm MacDonald was born in 1959, and died in 2021.

But Cyndi Lauper — also born in 1953 – is still with us.  And she’s got opinions.

And man ‘o Manischewitz, are they are stupid! 

For example, you’ve probably heard about laws being enacted by voters to keep some docs and hospitals from making huge profits operating on gender-confused children and teens, followed by a stream of lucrative life-long income from providing those poor kids with hormones, therapy and more surgeries to try to keep them from killing themselves once they’ve realized the monstrously wrong and irreversible effects of those creepy surgeries and hormonal abuse.   

You might think that those laws sound like a great idea. 

But that’s because you’ve never covered yourself with too much makeup and too many bracelets and sold a million records 40 years ago.  So stay in your lane, and listen to Cyndi.

She has looked at legislation requiring that people use the correct bathrooms and wait to have genital-mutilating surgery until they are adults, and drew the obvious conclusion, in this quote which I swear I am not making up: “This is how Hitler started, just weeding everybody out.”

Yes.  Exactly!  I think we all remember the early, grainy footage of Hitler bursting into a clinic to stop a bunch of strapping Hitler Youth boys from being turned into members of the League of German Girls.  (Look it up.) 

Because THAT’s the one thing Hitler was best known for: his deep and abiding respect for the gender we are assigned at birth!

Mein gott!  

Cyndi, there were indeed many cruel and barbaric surgeries on people in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, surgeries in which people were used as human guinea pigs, with no moral weight or respect given to their bodily integrity. 

Do you know who did those surgeries, Sweet Pea?  [cue Sam Kinison voice] “THE NAZIS! THEY DID THAT!!  OH! OHHHHH!”

And you know who stopped those atrocities?  The good guys.  We shut down the medical “clinics” by way of B-17 bombing raids, brave Allied troops, and lots and lots of tough fighting.  And we chased those creepy surgeons down, some of them even all the way to South America.

Read a book, Cyndi.  But be prepared to have your mind blown when you find out that in your own analogy, you are actually supporting the Nazis and their modern-day Mengele-esque doctors.

By the way, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” is a catchy, harmless pop tune, and I can see why you had a hit with it. 

You know what song would NOT have made the pop charts?  (What’s that?  The ghost of Sam Kinison is back?  Ok…)   “GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE THEIR HEALTHY BREASTS CUT OFF!! OH!  OHHHHHH!” 

And yes, Cyndi, we do see your true colors, shining through.

And those colors are a black swastika, in a white circle, on a blood-red banner.  Knock it off!

On a happier note, I am very glad the GOP has a majority in the House, because otherwise we would not have seen Tucker Carlson’s great exposure of what actually happened on January 6th.  And we also would not have seen the MSM, the Dems, and too many “Republicans” losing their Schiff over it. 

One after another, they’ve denounced Carlson for the way he’s “depicting… his version of events.” 

It’s not “his version” of anything, you idiots!  He’s literally just showing actual video of the actual events.

Now I could see one reasonable counter-argument: if Tucker selectively shows some video excerpts and not others, he might be skewing the totality of what happened. 

For example, it could be that 95% of the protestors that day were violent thugs (they weren’t), the right-wing version of antifa or BLM, and only 5% were peaceful, non-violent protestors (they weren’t).  And maybe Tucker is ONLY showing those 5%, and thus giving a biased picture of the totality of what happened on J6. (He isn’t.)

But if you agree that that might be true (it’s not), don’t you realize the logically necessary corollary to that?  By showing only a very tiny slice of the thousands of hours of J6 video footage, and vigorously fighting the release of all other footage, the dishonest leftist hacks on the J6 committee – I’m looking at you too, Crybaby Kinzinger and Lyin’ Liz Cheney – did exactly that!

And I don’t remember Cocaine Mitch, Willard Romney and the rest of the RINOs screaming about the unfairness of that.  (Because they didn’t.) 

Oh, if only there were a way that we could get to the truth!  If only—

Wait a minute.  An idea occurs to me, and it might be just crazy enough to work!  

What if someone made ALL of the J6 video publicly available?  Sure, that would require some determination, in the hands of someone with the political power to make it happen.  But that would answer all of our—

What’s that?  The Democrat star chamber running the multi-year Potemkin J6 show-trial had total control over all that video and could have released everything 2 years ago, thus revealing the unvarnished, un-spun truth to the American public? 

And yet they didn’t do that?

And now they’ve got their gender non-binary footie-pajamas pulled up over their heads and they’re shrieking that Tucker is Hitler – or Tucker hit her, or tacky hiccup, or something?

(You can’t really hear them clearly, because their howling is muffled by the fact that they’re yelling through what is supposed to be the butt-flap in their footie pjs, but is now over their faces. Because they’ve pulled them up over their heads, as I think I mentioned earlier.)   

Huh.  Why, it’s almost like they’re a bunch of colossal hypocrites, speaking with forked tongue, as Liz Warren’s tribespeople used to say.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Whew!  I’m a little out of breath after that.  Let me just take one more sip of Knob Creek 9 and review my original goals for this column: 

Provide useful and timely trebuchet knowledge to the general public?  Check.

Rhetorically Hillary-slap dopey old Cyndi Lauper?  Check.

Lambaste MSM, Dems and RINOS for their J6 perfidy?  Check.

Last-minute insertion of the hilarious, never-gets-old hashtag about never stop mocking pale Lizzie Warren?  

Check and mate!

Thus ends yet another valuable public service announcement.  As pretty much everything here at Cautious Optimism is.

You’re welcome.

Thanks to Alan Greenleaf and Ivy Shafer for hitting my tip jar, and have a great weekend, everybody!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Woo “The Trebuchet King” Hah, 2024!

One Goodbye, & a Choice Between 2 Rationalizations (posted 3/6/23)

The actor Tom Sizemore, who died this week at 61, was great in four movies I really liked:  Saving Private Ryan, True Romance, Blackhawk Down and Heat. 

Usually it’s a mistake to learn too much about actors’ or musicians’ lives, because they too often turn out to be dimwits, jerks or leftists.   (Not to get Que Mala too excited, but if you make a Venn diagram of those three groups, you’ll get a lot of overlap.) 

There are exceptions, of course.  Denzel Washington seems like as good of a person as he is an actor, and I admire what I know of the life and work of Nick Searcy and Neal McDonough.

I don’t know much about Sizemore as a person, but I understand that he had some addictions that likely hastened his death.  But even so, the unfairness of the world always weighs on me at times like these. Tom Petty is dead, as is John Prine, Vince Flynn, Rush, and Andrew Breitbart. 

Yet some of the worst people are in their late hundreds – Noam Chomsky, Paul Ehrlich, Bernie Sanders, Imhotep Pelosi, Joe Biden (sort of) – and are all still alive and kicking.  Or at least falling up airplane mobile staircases, in Brandon’s case.

Doesn’t seem right.  RIP, Tom Sizemore

I heard two of the lamest rationalizations of bad behavior this week.  The first involves the lunatic male teacher who has been going to work in a blonde wig and enormous fake breasts for the last year or more.  (I’m glad he’s in Canada, because lately I’d started to think that we’d cornered the market on nutjobs here in the US.)  

If you didn’t catch the story, he finally got in real trouble this past week, when a reporter staked him out and got some pictures of him without his ridiculous drag-teacher costume, and looking like a regular, schlumpy middle-aged guy.

So now the school board in Ontario has removed him from the classroom, and it sounds as if he might actually get fired.  Which makes perfect sense, and is obviously way overdue.

The insane part is that as long as this guy was parading in front of his students as a grotesquely disproportionate female impersonator, this uber-woke school board didn’t think that they would be justified in intervening.  Because he identifies as a woman who apparently caught a chest-full of whatever radiation it was that caused the titular actress (HA!) in “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” to get her most famous leading role, I guess?

But now, after it turns out that he only intermittently identifies as a gender-confused circus freak, the school board is galvanized to take action! 

In other words, the Ontario school board decided that whenever this guy had a posture-threatening pair of patently fake breasts strapped onto his idiotic carcass, he was teacher of the year material.

But when he took them OFF, he had to be fired immediately.

Brilliant!

If you haven’t been a reader here for long, you may be tempted to challenge me.  “Martin,” you might say, “it is impossible to top the sheer idiocy of that reasoning!”

My response is to say, “Hold my bourbon” — which I am medicinally forced to drink whenever my high calling as your Roving Correspondent requires me to see or even think of that Canadian mammarian monstrosity (try to type THAT when you’re two bourbons in to a column!) – “and watch this!”

Attorney General Merrick Garland was questioned by several GOP senators this week on various topics,  and it is beyond my humble powers of description to communicate to you how badly it went for him.

If it were a fight, they would’ve stopped it. 

The senators beat him like a rented mule.

It was more lopsided than the infamous Rumble on the Runway, when Joey Gaffes squared off against a mobile airplane staircase, and was TKO’ed after three falls on the first 12 steps.    

Senator Mike Lee asked Garland about why the DOJ has gone after a lot of non-violent pro-life people for protesting at abortion clinics, and only a very few pro-abortion vandals for violent and expensive property damage to pregnancy support clinics and churches.

The numbers are pretty damning: since the start of 2022, the DOJ has pursued charges against 34 individuals for blocking access or damaging abortion clinics.  On the other hand, since the leak of the Dobbs decision, there were over 81 attacks (vandalism, break-ins, firebombings) on pregnancy centers and 130 on Catholic churches, and Garland’s Guerrillas have only been able to bring charges against 2 suspects.

Garland stuttered through a transparently foolish lie — “We apply the law equally” – before admitting the obvious: there are many more prosecutions of actions against abortion clinics than those against crisis pregnancy clinics or churches.   

But he had an explanation: it’s because the actions against abortion clinics happen in the daytime, when “seeing the person who did it is quite easy.”  On the other hand, the criminal geniuses who are attacking Catholic churches and pregnancy centers are – and I am not making this quote up – “doing this at night.  In the dark.” 

Got it?   The dastardly pro-aborts have been waiting for nighttime! 

What do you expect Merrick Garland to do? It’s not like DOJ workers have superhero-like powers to see in the dark!   They don’t employ Doctor X, the man with X-ray vision, or any other Marvel or DC character with similar abilities whom I can’t name right now because I’m a grown-ass man and don’t read comic books any more.

If only someone could invent some sort of power source or device that would allow us to illuminate our surroundings, even after the otherwise impenetrable “cover of darkness” (I just now invented that phrase – thank you, noble Kentuckians who invented Knob Creek 9!) descends at sunset to protect evildoers from detection. 

Can you imagine that? 

I mean sure, if such a thing ever became a reality, we’d first use it to put up what I suggest we should call “lights” at Wrigley Field so that the Cubs could start playing some night games.  And next we should probably use some of them in Las Vegas, because gamblers keep bonking into one dark casino after another, resulting in many minor injuries and spilled drinks.

But right after that, we could give that awesome power of illumination to Merrick Garland, and in no time he’d be blinding hundreds of red-handed pro-abortionists like they were Paul on the road to Damascus!

I mean, if Paul had been on his way to Damascus to firebomb Catholic churches.  (I mean, if Catholic churches had been invented when Paul was heading to Damascus.)    

Garland looked commensurately worse when asked why he has done nothing to arrest the packs of leftist thugs who have been staking out and screaming at SCOTUS judges’ houses, in clear violation of the law. Inconveniently for Marvelous Merrick, those creeps have been out in full daylight for months.

And it’s not like they couldn’t be tracked down just on eyewitness descriptions alone: 

Look for males who are malodorous, effeminate, unkempt, and look like they live in their parents’ basements. 

Look for unwell females – either morbidly obese or frighteningly spindly – with a general demeanor that just screams, “I hate you, dad!” and who elicit in all who see them a phrase that ends in, “…not with a ten-foot pole.”

For both genders, watch for hairstyles involving colors not found in nature, and/or erratically shaven heads.  In terms of facial piercings, think “fell head-first into a huge tackle box.”    

So let me leave this poll question up to CO Nation: what reasoning is more idiotic?

Canadian educrats saying that they were fine with a perv teacher wearing obscenely ginormous fake boobs, but not with him taking them off,

Or

Merrick Garland saying that the United States Department of Justice will vigorously pursue all crime… as long as it happens when the sun’s out.

I know one thing: we should thank our loving Creator every day that Merrick Garland is not on the Supreme Court!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Merrick “Sherlock” Garland, 2024!