Tag: book-reviews

Throw-Back Friday (posted 8/1/25)

I’m up in Illinois with the cousins now, and looking forward to the reunion on Saturday.  I was overwhelmed with the warmth and number of your responses to my bittersweet column on Wednesday.  Thank you, one and all!

When I checked my computer last night before hitting the sack, one of my old columns came up in my feed.  I don’t know how that works, but it felt like a sign, since it was as goofy and lighthearted as my Wednesday column was somber. 

So I thought I’d re-post it here, for those of you who might have missed it the first time around.  I posted it 5 years ago in May (as you might be able to tell from the fact that I was still half-accepting the “covid came from Chinese bats” cover story).

I don’t know if it’s a “Best of,” but I hope it will be a little palate cleanser for you as you start your weekend!

New Entry in the “Stupidest Article of the Year” competition (posted 5/1/20)

Bill Weir has a newborn son, born during the quarantine.  That’s a cause for celebration, maybe even more than usual, against the backdrop of this time of disruption and social isolation.  After spending part of the lockdown watching hours of You Tube videos of surprise pregnancy and twins and even triplets announcements – with all of the accompanying shouts and cheers and tears and joyful shock – I’m even more attuned than usual to appreciation of new life.

But there are some red flags for the newborn Weir boy.

First, his dad named him “River.”  And no, it’s not a “Boy Named Sue” situation, in which you stick a kid with a name guaranteed to toughen him up via all of the expected abuse he’ll suffer because of it.  He’s just the kind of dad who names his kid “River.”  Strike one.

Second, Bill Weir works as the Chief Climate Correspondent for CNN.  Strike two.

Third, he wrote a ridiculous letter to his son, and published it for all the world to see.  And it is long, and tiresome, and packs more wrong-headed leftist tropes into one column than I would have thought possible.  (And I’m known for packing lots of tiresome and wrong-headed political tropes into over-long columns myself!) (By people who are wrong about everything, I mean.)  Strike three.

I won’t put you through the whole thing, but I think it’s worth sharing a few lowlights.

The letter starts,  “My dearest River,  Against all odds you were conceived in a lighthouse, born during a pandemic and will taste just enough of Life as We Knew It to resent us when it’s gone.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry we broke your sea and your sky and shortened the wings of the nightingale.  I’m sorry that the Great Barrier Reef is no longer great, that we value Amazon™ more than the Amazon and that the waterfront neighborhood where you burble in my arms could be condemned by rising seas before you’re old enough for a mortgage.”

Yikes!  There’s so much wrong with that, I don’t know where to start.

No, wait a minute: I do know where to start.

Don’t tell your kids where and how they were conceived!  The letter starts and ends with references to a vacation that he and his wife took to Croatia, and the Dubrovnik lighthouse they stayed in.  Where – he wants River and the world to know – they “did it.”

Ugh.  First, I can’t think of anything more gross for this young kid to read as he gets older than the details of his parent’s love life. 

Second, what an erotic narcissist: “You plebes probably conceived your normally-named kids in a bland 3 bedroom tract house, in the missionary position.  Yuck.  Meanwhile, my lover and I (and you know this is the kind of gag-inducing male who calls his wife his “lover,” just to stick you with  a mental image that you do NOT want) hiked up a wind-swept cliff-face in a romantic foreign land during a thunderstorm to break into a century-old lighthouse, where we alarmed the livestock with our creative lovemaking and exotic outfits.”

As you regular readers know, one of the best life strategies you can follow is to ask WWMD (What Would Martacus Do?), and then act accordingly.  So what have I told my children about their conception, I know you are wondering.

Did I tell them, for instance, that their mother and I – having grown bored after romping our way through a series of sexual escapades that made the Kama Sutra look like a spring 1956 edition of the Saturday Evening Post – decided to try something different, when the Ringling Brother’s Circus came to town?  So we broke into the big tent at 2 in the morning, and after spending a half hour getting the hang of the trapeze, managed an aerial encounter involving several flips, hanging onto a bar upside down with just my knees, and finishing in a fall into a giant net, and 9 months later our oldest was born?

Or that four years later, we came up with the idea for an assignation on the back of a 2-year old Palomino that incorporated the kind of horsemanship worthy of a young Crazy Horse at the height of his powers, in a little trick I like to call the ol’ “canter-canter-trot-TROT-GALLOP!”  And that 9 months later, our youngest was born?

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

The point is that of course I haven’t told them that!  All they know is that when a man and woman love each other very much, the man carries the woman through a bedroom doorway that is in black and white for some reason, and then the door shuts and the credits roll (“Gregory Peck as Martacus,” “Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Simpson.” “Nancy Pelosi as the Mummy,” “Elizabeth Warren as the Cigar Store Indian.”) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  And nine months later, one of them is born.

And nobody is named “River.”

Weir moves from erotic narcissism to climate narcissism: “I’m so sorry that we broke your sea and your sky?”  I’m pretty sure that the sea is still there, and I was just looking at the sky this afternoon. Doesn’t seem broken.

And because he’s apparently learned all his science from Al Gore and Captain Planet, he thinks that his house is going to be underwater in 20 years or so.  And just like with my old lefty buddies who were sure that the oceans would be dead by now, and acid rain would have wiped out half of our population, and a new global ice age would have wiped out the other half, I’d like to call Weir and remind him of his hysteria and laugh at him, as he sits in his un-condemned and totally dry house.

Weir goes on:  “See, for decades, scientists told us that if we weren’t careful, humans would unleash an invisible enemy out of the jungle and into our lungs. But that was a story few wanted to believe.  So we kept cutting down jungles — and prairies and mangroves and the last few the places where the wild things are — to pave and plow, develop and devour everything inside.”

Does this guy think that the Flu Manchu came from humans cutting down jungles?  Has nobody told him about the Chinese boneheads eating the bats, or the Chicom boneheads and their fifth-rate lab safety procedures, or the progressive slave-state bureaucrats in Beijing who lied about everything (as commies are wont to do) until it was too late to stop a pandemic?  Apparently not.

“As you get older, this will be hard to understand. But we were under the spell of Genesis 1:28: to take dominion over every living thing.”

Good lord!  I love when non-Christians who wouldn’t know Saint Paul from Minneapolis-St.Paul expound on how the evil Bible teaches that we should destroy the environment.  “And God said, go forth and cut down the jungles, and pile up the wood and make a great fire, upon which thou must roasteth the bat, notwithstanding that it is the least delicious of all the fowl that flieth through the air. Then shalt thou cough on thy neighbors, who must thenceforth flee to the airports and disperse throughout the globe, spreading the pestilence while your vile and indolent government lieth about it all, and keepeth on with the intellectual property theft and the exporting of lead-based toys and contaminated drywall.”

I’m no theologian, but you don’t have to be Aquinas to understand that the Biblical mandate is for humanity to be stewards of the environment, not destroyers of it.

Weir isn’t done:  “We had the strange urge to carve straight lines out of nature’s curves and were under the spell of a uniquely human force called “profit motive.”

You mean like the profit motive that has allowed you to get a six-figure job writing terrible “journalism,” and allowed you to afford a house to take River home to?

The article goes on and on, but it’s too painful to spend any more time on.  I just find myself feeling sorry for his son, because he’s less than a month old and his dad is already filling his mind with alarmist doom and gloom.  “We’ve killed the planet, we’re all cursed, you’ll never know how things used to be so great, but now they’re terrible, and getting worse every day.  Sorry about that.  By the way, did I ever tell you the story about the time I absolutely wrecked your mother doing downward-facing dog on a faux bearskin rug on the flagstone floors of a Dubrovnik lighthouse?”

Not since the Cuyahoga was so filled with chemicals that it caught fire has any River been so badly treated.

To get the bad taste of this article out of my mouth, I’ve written a letter to my oldest daughter, to cosmically balance Weir’s toxic letter:

Dear Katie,

First, aren’t you glad to have a great name like “Katherine,” which is classic, timeless and versatile, and not something ridiculous like “Conifer” or “Aquifer” or “Saguaro Cactus Simpson?”  You’re welcome.

Second, never mind how your mom and I made you.  You’re here now, and you’ve been nurtured and educated and equipped to make your own way in the best nation ever.  You’re welcome again.

Third, we used to be much worse stewards of the environment that God has given us responsibility for, but because we have free markets, we have gotten wealthier, and our wealth has allowed us to innovate and improve our treatment of nature.  We’ve found ways to grow more food on less land, and our modes of building and transportation are becoming cleaner and less destructive with each passing year.  If we can just not watch CNN, elect less leftists, and get the Chicoms to stop eating the freaking bats, your future is going to be brighter than for any other generation in history.

Now get out there and be an Ameri-CAN!”

Avenatti/River Weir 2020!

Thinking about Ayn Rand, and Ungrateful Beggars (posted 3/28/25)

I’m working on a column about immigration for Monday, which has involved doing a little research on various immigration acts that the US passed starting in the 1870s, in a period of transition between our early nationhood and the 20th century world power that we became. 

But as I was looking into that topic, an idea kept niggling at me: the explosion of resentful, entitled people who are reacting so hysterically to every aspect of the Trumpkrieg™ that is now two months old.

As soon as I noticed this idea cropping up in many different contexts, I thought of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which is a terrible great book.  Or possibly a great terrible book, depending on how you look at it. 

It’s terribleness comes from three primary flaws.  Rand was a curmudgeon, and her grimly doctrinaire atheism makes large swaths of the book an irritating slog.  Her moral worldview is cartoonishly black-and-white, which often makes her characters cardboard stand-ins for intellectual tropes.  And the book is wildly overwritten; my copy comes in at 1168 pages, and it could easily be a tight, fast-moving 250-pager.

But its greatness lies in two strengths. Rand despised totalitarian leftism the way we all should: utterly and passionately.  And the central conceit of the book was an answer to the fascinating question, “What would happen to a corrupt leftist society if its most productive citizens began purposefully disappearing?”    

Written in the mid-1950s, it presciently (if exaggeratedly) predicts the flight of productive citizens from blue to red states that’s been going on over the last 30 years or more.  As CA, NY, and IL get more greedy and socialist, talented people shrug, and vote with their feet, and take their skills and net worth to TN, TX and FL.

The most direct echoes from the book involve the kind of virtue-signaling social justice warriors who simultaneously look down on and criticize the successful people and inventors they depend on.  The book is full of Bernie Sanders-es railing about how the rich don’t pay their fair share, and Musk-hating Tesla-vandalizer types – and the villains totally agree with so many in the “resistance” now.  They’re all convinced that beggars have the absolute moral right to be choosers.    

I’m seeing this phenomenon on many foreign policy fronts, now that we’re learning how much foreign aid we’ve been indiscriminatingly showering on the rest of the world.  Apparently we’ve had a non-stop convoy of C-130 flights going 24-7, shoving giant pallets of cash out the rear cargo hold at 15-minute intervals, all over the world.

And yet the Europeans want to lecture us that we’re not paying enough for the UN, and NATO, and the “March of AK-47s” program to provide Russian small arms to jihadi toddlers in Gaza.  (It’s like the March of Dimes, except that instead of collecting dimes, we’re disbursing rifles.) 

Then, when Trump suggested that we might be shutting down the money flow to Ukraine, many Europeans lost it.  In an earlier column, I referred to the six- or seven-nation poll showing that around 70% of Europeans want Zelensky to get a lot more support… but only around 20% of them want to give him any of that themselves.

Strange.  Putin is an ocean away from us, but right on their doorstep, and they are very adamant that WE do whatever it takes to keep him within his own borders.   

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Australian universities are freaking out after the Trump administration sent them a questionnaire asking whether they’ve got ties to commie or socialist parties, receive funding from China, or recognize genders other than the two real ones.  The wrong answers could potentially jeopardize $386 million US dollars (over a third of what Australia spends on research each year) in research grants.

The Aussie profs have their lab coats over their heads, demanding an “emergency meeting” with their Prime Minister about this.  One of them was “astounded” at the questions, saying that, “if this was any other country, it verges on foreign interference.”

Good lord!  Am I going to have to break out my Sam Kinison filter to explain to that dolt how she could avoid such pesky “foreign interference?”  (“Hey sweetie, you know what you might think about doing?  PAYING FOR YOUR OWN FREAKING RESEARCH! OH!! OHHHHH!!!!!”)

Seriously, why are we paying for Aussie scientists to do research?  Australia is a first-world, Anglophone nation.  They’re not some struggling sub-Saharan country desperately battling a snake-borne diptheria strain (which Fauci probably paid to create in a crumbling lab in Mombasa) that is the leading cause of death among their citizens!

Also, are American scientists broken?  If not, and if expensive research is worth doing, why don’t we do that here at home? 

And it’s not just foreigners who are stamping their feet in their clunky foreign shoes, and cussing us out in their comically non-English languages.  Lots of Americans are also threatening to hold their breath and give us the silent treatment if we don’t pony up the dough they’re used to getting.

Some of them are government workers in the crucial fields of grievance mongering, racial and gender bean-counting, and maintaining a minimal pulse rate while “working” from home.  And some of them are actually doing legitimate work that we can’t afford anymore, now that we’re the brokest nation in the history of nations.  

Woke universities are similarly out of sorts.  They’ve been happily demonizing and excluding conservatives from their programs and campuses, and rhetorically (and for all I know, literally) fellating terrorist supporters and their cosplaying allies, while gorging themselves on grant money provided by the (despised) conservative majority in the country. 

But when Trump said that the federal money flow will stop if they don’t change their ways, they became outraged, and then terrified.  Just like the sanctuary state and city governors and mayors, when they found out that they’re going to have to face the natural consequences of their arrogant defiance of our immigration laws.   

The purest distillation of this attitude appeared in the story of Trump’s proposed changes to the SNAP (i.e. food stamps) program.  The GOP is proposing a bill to ban the use of SNAP benefits to buy junk food and sodas, and the people who rely on you and me to buy their food are not happy about it. 

In a sane world, this wouldn’t require any debate.  We know that the leading health problems among poor Americans – and many non-poor Americans! – are caused by unhealthy diet and obesity, and that taxpayers are already paying exorbitant costs for welfare recipients’ health care.   So who could possibly argue that we need to buy junk food for the poor?

Big junk food companies, beggars who are surprisingly picky eaters, and the Democrats who need the sick-and-fat vote, that’s who! 

A couple of their arguments are transparent dodges.  They say it will be very hard to alter how the SNAP program works in this way.  They also say that nobody can really define “junk food,” because hey man, one person’s junk food is another person’s healthy snack, isn’t it?

Nope. This argument is even easier to debunk than its older counterpart, “How do you define pornography?”  Because you know both when you see them. 

Show any reasonably intelligent adult Stormy Daniels in a g-string, washing down a plate of chocolate chip cookies with a Mountain Dew, and he’ll point and say, “Why is that porn star gorging herself on that junk food?”

But their other arguments are even worse.  They say that the proposed bill limits personal choice, and infringes on the freedom to eat whatever you want.  Which would be true, if you were paying for the food yourself.   

But since you’re not paying for the food yourself, you should get the same offer my dad gave me when I was a kid and looking at a plate of meatloaf (again!) that he bought with his Northern Illinois Gas Company salary:  “You’ve got two choices: take it, or leave it.”

They’re also worried that, and I quote, “The bill could stigmatize SNAP recipients, making them feel judged or shamed for their food choices.” 

Hey kids, you know what else will make you feel shamed and stigmatized?  Walking around looking like J.B. Pritzker, (D)irigible – IL, unable to feel your feet (which you also can’t see), and wondering if that means that the diabetes is almost to the point where the amputations will need to start.

So get yourself off the Mountain Dew, AND the government teat.

You’ll feel better.  And we will too.  

Hamas delenda est!

From Corrupt Agencies to Illegals to Murderers, the Left Can’t Choose the Right Side (posted 3/19/25)

This is my third column of the week, and I’ll have one more on Friday, and attentive readers may notice that there has been one through-line in many of my recent ramblings: the left’s perplexing inability to choose the morally or even politically correct side in any conflict.

If there’s a clash between law breakers and law abiders, they’ll back the former.  Give them an illegal immigrant over a legal one, a gang-banger over a choir-boy, and creepy dude in a dress over a schoolgirl trying to shower unmolested every time.

I don’t get it, but bless their hearts, they may never win another election if they keep this up.  And wouldn’t that be grand?

Three quick examples from the last week:

1. Even a political neophyte knows that the Department of Education has made itself toxic.  The lion’s share of all education decisions are made and money is spent on the state level, which is as it should be.  The Ed Dept is crammed full of well-paid and insular educrats in DC, where the rotten 98% give the other 2% a bad reputation.

Since its founding in 1977, $1.4 trillion (!) has been spent on the Ed feds, and the proof of the pudding is in the gagging.  As our education has become more expensive, student test scores have plummeted.  Our students can somehow count all 57 of the 2 genders, but nothing else.  They read few classics, and most of the history they “know” just isn’t so.

As the great Dennis Miller once noted, the fact that only one of the “Three Rs” actually starts with the letter “R” tells you everything you need to know. 

Enter Grandma Squanto Warren, being asked for her reaction to Trump’s much needed culling of the Ed Department last Friday.  A smart politician would have said something like, “I welcome any efforts to scrutinize the department, because it can definitely do a better job than it’s been doing.  But Trump is taking the wrong approach blah blah blah.”

So what did Warren say?   Watch the 45 second video of her quasi-teary, content-less mush of glittering generalities that never comes within a mile of the reality of the grift-apalooza that is the DC education establishment.

I haven’t seen a fake Indian that sad since the Italian-American actor with the stage name “Iron Eyes Cody” (his real name was something like Rocco Vincenzo Corleone) made those commercials crying over littering in the 1970s. 

But what else would we expect from the empty headdress from Massachusetts?  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

My only disappointment was that she didn’t take the time to emote about her fond memories of the one-room school-tepee where she learned her ABCs (A- always, B- be, C- Cherokee) back on the wide-open prairies of Martha’s Vineyard.  (#neverstop) 

2. The latest example of the MSM ineptly trying to elicit sympathy for an illegal comes from Philly, where Virginia-Basora Gonzalez, 36, sobbed as ICE agents re-arrested her.  If you google her name, I’ve got to give you a trigger warning on opening that picture without preparing yourself.

Because, yikes! 

Some say that she looks like a bowling ball with eyes.  She got picked up wearing sweats and a large shirt that… how can I put this?

You’re going to need a bigger bowling bag. 

Okay, I apologize.  I just did a thing that lefty “journalists” always do, and that drives me crazy, when I said that “some say” she looks like a bowling ball with eyes.

It’s me.  I’m the one who says that.   Because you look at her, and tell me that she’s not a Brunswick 16-pounder with an insanely long stretch between the thumb and finger-holes when you’re looking for a smooth-rolling 12-pounder on league night and you forgot your ball at home. 

Before you can say anything, I know: I shouldn’t criticize anyone’s appearance, especially when I look like this.  Sure, I’m not as bad as I was a week ago, when I was more poison ivy than man.  But I’m still not the matinee idol that you’ve come to know and love over here, either.

Anyway, forget all that.  I mock her only because she’s been criminally playing our system, in very familiar ways:  first arrested in PA for 40 grams or more of fentanyl and aiding and abetting in June of 2019.  (I don’t know what she was aiding and abetting, unless it was helping somebody bowl three perfect games in one night.) 

After serving out part of a short sentence, she was deported back to the DR, only to illegally re-enter and get caught again last week.  And yes, I know that my lefty pals will say that lots of Americans deal drugs too.

Yeah.  We know.  We’ve got plenty of our own drug dealers, which is just one reason why we don’t need to import more of them.  Especially ones that, when you drop them in your backswing, they’re going to take out several people sitting behind the ball return. 

3. To hear him tell it, Jessie Hoffman Jr. 46, is a peaceful man, deeply devoted to his Buddhist breathing and meditation rituals, and put upon by SCOTUS’ unwillingness to respect his religious beliefs. 

But to hear me tell it, Hoffman is a worthless POS who – if Buddha were here right now, and not too rotund and apathetic to dish out a righteous beating – would dish out a righteous beating to Jessie Hoffman Jr. 

(What is the sound of one hand clapping?  I don’t know.  But I do know that the sound of two hands in a blur of quick jabs using Jessie Hoffman’s stupid head like a speed bag is the sound of justice.)

What’s my beef with Jessie Hoffman, Jr., you might be asking?  Just that in 1996, he kidnapped 28-year-old Mary Elliott, a young wife who had just gotten off work, forced her to withdraw $200 from an ATM, then drove her to a lonely spot in the country, terrorized her, raped her, and shot her in the head. 

Last night, 29 years later – i.e. one year longer than Mary Elliott’s entire time on earth – the state of Louisiana finally executed Hoffman.  It made the news because they used the novel method of administering nitrogen gas through a respirator mask until Hoffman died of nitrogen hypoxia.

On one hand, I’m all for the kind of federalism that means that all 50 states are free to experiment with various and sundry ways to kill the many vicious murderers and rapists who desperately need killing in these United States.  So I appreciate this kind of outside-the-coffin thinking.

I might also note that we’re only trying new methods because an endless stream of morally disordered bleeding hearts have been kvetching over every existing execution method like a sociopathic Woody Allen.  (I mean, a Woody Allen way more sociopathic than the actual Woody Allen.)

“Gas can make people choke, and nooses are really scratchy.  Some gunshots are so loud they could give you a heart attack.  And don’t get me started on electrocution!  I once walked across some carpet in my stocking feet and touched a lamp, and I thought I’d die!”

State authorities chose nitrogen because it’s supposedly painless and humane.  The murderer-sympathizers aren’t satisfied though, worrying that if the respirator mask isn’t fitted tightly enough around the vicious animal’s face, enough oxygen might seep in to prolong his death, or make him nauseous, or even cause him to choke on his own vomit. 

I’m serious.  That’s what keeps them up at night.  The murdering rapist might die with a tummy ache, or go out like Jimi Hendrix, John Bonham and Bon Scott.  (And those guys ROCKED!) 

Too soon?  Perhaps I’ve said too much.

Anyway, I cannot imagine caring if Jessie Hoffman was a little uncomfortable right before he died, only 29 years too late.  In fact, if you told me that inhaling nitrogen caused the sensation of being kidnapped at gunpoint, driven to a lonely spot, stripped, raped and shot in the head execution style, the only other question I’d have is whether we could tweak the nitrogen mixture so that those same sensations would intensify, and last longer.

“So Martin, what was that Buddhist angle you mentioned earlier?” you might be asking.  In which case I’d thank you, because I’d forgotten about that part.

One of cowardly rapist Jessie Hoffman Jr.’s reasons for appealing his death sentence was that the nitrogen would violate his religious freedom because – and I swear I’m not making this up – “nitrogen hypoxia would interfere with [his] Buddhist breathing and meditation during his final moments alive.”

Hey Jessie, you know what else interferes with breathing and meditation?  [begin Kinison filter] BEING DRAGGED OUT INTO THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE AND SHOT IN THE HEAD BY A HEARTLESS, 0RECIDIVIST PIECE OF CRAP!  OH! OOOHH!!! [end Kinison filter]

Tragically, Hoffman appears to have died painlessly. 

But still, let’s all synchronize our watches, in anticipation of Melting Face Maxine Waters stepping up to a microphone to announce a protest to honor civil rights martyr Jessie Hoffman Jr., who was killed by the most white-supremacist of all elemental gases: Nitrogen.

In 3… 2… 1…

Hamas delenda est!   

A Tale of Two Males (posted 4/12/24)

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

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

The players: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man-bun #1 (shocked silence):

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

Man-bun #1 (more shocked silence): 

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

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

And, scene.

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can you say to that? 

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

Ugh.

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

Lawfare Is Looking Shaky, & Some Military Bad-Arsery (posted 2/23/24)

I know that the worst of the elite left is cheering that the corrupt NY judge and evil Letitia DeVille have run their banana republic lawsuit scam on Trump, and he’s now on the hook for almost half a billion dollars to get it eventually overturned. 

I’m so outraged and disgusted by that sham trial – and the other three! – that I can’t think straight, and I can’t add anything to the story that others here have not already said.

Except that I hope that the huge middle of the electorate – the independents, the casual and semi-apathetic voters, the RINOs and the mushy centrists – is paying enough attention and is sane enough to recognize the blatant corruption of the Dems, and punish them for it in November.

In the meantime, I wish that I had Trump’s ear, so that I could encourage him to stay focused on the important stuff.  He’s already got us in the conservative base with him, and he’s got a slight lead in the polls.  He just needs to remember the old political cliché: “When your opponent is decomposing before our eyes, stay out of the way.”

(I’ve paraphrased that slightly.)

For example, when the Hur report came out last week and Biden decided to stumble out and prove that he is tickety boo, mental-function-wise, he made things infinitely worse.  He yelled at the clouds, insisted that of course he knows what year his son what’s-his-name died, and bragged about how he got the president of Mexico to open the Panama Canal so the Gazanians could go see the pyramids. 

For the next 24 hours, the lefty establishment went to Defcon 4, insisting that the Hur report didn’t say what it said, and you didn’t see what you just saw.  

A flop-sweating lineup of MSM empty heads and Democrat hacks mumbled that sure, when he’s on camera Biden’s got the gait and demeanor of Bela Lugosi on horse tranquilizers, and he speaks like Ozzy Osbourne after a Fetterman-esque stroke.   

But behind closed doors, the guy cavorts around the Oval like Fred Astaire at the height of his powers!  When he talks foreign policy, it’s like Benjamin Disraeli and Metternich had a baby.  And his enunciation!  You remember when Professor Henry Higgins was trying to teach diction to Eliza Doolittle?

It’s like that!  Biden is at the top of his game, we tells ya!  He stands astride the world like a modern colossus!   

Trump should have pulled a giant, gilded throne up next to that media dumpster fire and roasted marshmallows over it, wearing a big Cheshire cat grin and saying nothing.

Instead, he got in front of a camera and said that he told our NATO allies that if they didn’t pay for their own defense, he’d tell Putin to do whatever he wanted to them.  Then he insinuated that Nikki Haley’s husband may have left her, saying, “Where’s her husband?  Where is he?”

Why?!

It doesn’t matter that he’s right about NATO’s recent under-funding of their own defense.  Many dumb and uninformed people think Trump is too friendly with Putin.  Of course, they’re wrong!  But is it helpful to say that?

And spoiler alert: Haley’s husband is in the Army National Guard, and is deployed overseas.  Which is irrelevant anyway, because you’re beating her by 30 points in her home state, and she’ll soon be out of the race.  There is no reason you should even say her name again.

Especially since Biden is out there throwing up on his shoes three times a week, and the media is dying to cover ANY story other than that!   

Please, Mr. President.  Don’t give them any other stories.  We all know that they hate your guts. Don’t make their job easier!      

Now onto happier news.  And there really is some.

We seem to be turning the corner on the recent trans madness, with more and more pushback against the groomers and narcissistic activists.  The first of what will surely be a tidal wave of lawsuits have been filed against docs and hospitals that have done mutilating and sterilizing surgeries on kids who later realize what was done to them.

And if common sense and the Hippocratic oath hasn’t stopped the butchers yet, gigantic financial judgments against them will likely do the trick.

Even though our borders are still disastrously open, the decisions by Abbott and DeSantis to send the illegals to big blue cities and states is causing just the opening battles of blue-on-blue warfare that is going to be schadenfreude-tastic to watch.  And if we can get Trump back in the White House, he’ll have a lot of support to reverse course immediately.

In fact, when it comes to fighting illegal immigration, City Journal (which I recommend to everyone) had a recent article proving how laughably wrong the leftist Cassandras were when they attacked DeSantis’ tougher immigration law SB 1718, which took effect last July. 

The law invalidated driver’s licenses given to illegals by blue states, required hospitals to quantify uncompensated care given to illegals, and forced employers to use E-verify to check new hires’ legal status. 

Of course the lefties tore their garments and gnashed their teeth, predicting that Florida’s workforce would plummet by at least 10%, and the economy would crater.  The state Dem party chair warned that, “Ron’s ‘woke’ war will cause prices to increase on all goods and services,” and other hysterics wailed about the inflation that was sure to follow. 

Annnnddddd… the opposite happened.  Unexpectedly!

Florida’s economy grew by 6 % in the third quarter, the population growth since then was 2nd in the nation, and food shortages and inflation never materialized.

I mean, other than the commonplace nationwide inflation caused by…Bidenomics!

You might think that birthday boy CO and I, as two of the state’s most influential citizens, spend a lot of time conferring on such economic issues, perhaps over expensive cigars and Kentucky’s finest bourbon. 

But you’d be wrong.  Because CO sent me a text last week, and it was about something far, far cooler: the recent hellfire missile strike that our military used to take out a smelly terrorist chieftain in Iraq earlier this month. 

Did I mention that the missile in question was one that used six gigantic flying blades rather than the usual explosives, and that it is called “the flying ginsu”?!  (I know: how can a country capable of that kind of awesomeness be losing a shipping war to a ragtag bunch of Houthi pirates?)

(You know the reason: Bidenomics!)

So the Iran-backed leader of Kataib Hezbollah, Abu Baqr as-Saadi, was riding in a car when a missile dropped onto his car, with the aforementioned flying blades being released right before impact.  Thus turning his car into a convertible, right before turning as-Saadi into “a-Salad”.

Yes!  The Flying Ginsu!  It slices, it dices, it circumsizes and it beheads!

More please.

Finally, you probably haven’t heard about this, but a great American died at the age of 74 on February 12th.

His name was Chuck Mawhinney, and he was the deadliest Marine sniper in Corps history, with 103 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills during his 16 months in Vietnam.  

His biggest single day was, ironically enough, Valentine’s Day of 1969.  He took up a position along a river that a platoon of Viet Cong wanted to cross, and he picked off 16 of them, persuading the rest to retreat.

Nine days later, he turned 20!    

According to news stories, after the war he lived quietly, working for the forest service and fathering three sons, and not even telling his wife about his sniper service. It wasn’t until a fellow Marine sniper wrote a book mentioning him in 1991 that he got his first public attention.

His obituary contains many indications of what a great man he was, starting with the fact that, “His friends, neighbors and co-workers had no idea that the soft-spoken man had killed at least 103 enemy combatants.” 

(Just like the mild-mannered Kiwi I met in Europe who had urinated in Hitler’s bathtub in the Eagle’s Nest, Mawhinney was no braggart.  As opposed to, say, I would be, if I had done anything anywhere near that cool.  “Hey, I know you’re just doing an oil change for me.  But have I mentioned that I killed several hundred commies in Vietnam?  And that I pissed in Ho Chi Minh’s bathtub?”)

In what turned out to be the last year of his life, Mawhinney was approached by a writer named Jim Lindsay, who got him to agree to let Lindsay write a book about him.  That book came out recently, and it’s called, “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time.”  

And it is the next book that I will be reading.   

“He listened to other people tell their stories,” said Lindsay. “He never told his story. Nobody knew he’d been in the war or what he’d done.  He was a good man.  He was a good father, a good husband and an asset to the community. He was a pretty cool cat.”

Indeed.  We should all be so lucky to have an obituary like that.  Plus, he killed between 103 and 319 Communist soldiers!

RIP,  Charles “Chuck” Mawhinney.  Semper Fi.

Also, a very happy birthday to the Founder of the Feast, our very own CO!

Also, as ever…

Hamas delenda est!