israel – Page 3 – Martin Simpson

Good News from Israel (posted 6/14/24)

I’m continuing to have a good visit with mom, taking her to a lot of pretty, small Tennessee towns, so today’s column will be a little shorter than usual. (You’re welcome, readers who say my columns are too long!)

Today’s theme is good news from Israel.

The IDF continues to impress, despite receiving constant, dishonest abuse from the EU’s and America’s biased MSM.

In some of the toughest urban warfare in decades – mostly due to Hamas’ continual violations of the Geneva Convention and basic morals, via hiding among civilians and storing war materiel in hospitals, schools, mosques and other civilian locations – the IDF has produced a nearly unbelievable low civilians-to-combatants-killed ratio of around 1.5 to 1.

Ratios of around 10 times that amount are pretty typical, and the Israelis have paid a high price in their own losses to fight with such restraint and precision. And yet their media coverage has continued to prove that we don’t hate the media nearly as much as we should.

Last Tuesday the IDF used a targeted missile strike to kill Taleb Sami Abdullah, a Hezbollah field commander, in southern Lebanon. On Wednesday, a bunch of Hezbollah big shots gave a bunch of threatening speeches about how they were going to kill lots of Jews, and they fired 200 rockets into Israel, which started some fires, but didn’t kill anyone.

Annnndddd…

Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in another strike in Lebanon on Thursday.

The bad guy in question was Hashim Safi Al Din, the Hezbollah number 2 man. (And never has the adjective “number 2” been more appropriate.) Al Din was with a dozen or more other terrorists in a two-story building in Lebanon.

I’m assuming that the IDF turned that into a zero-story building, because the end result was a baker’s dozen of dead terrorists, including Al Din.

So Al Din is Al Done (HA!), and one observer noted that, “The powerful elimination worries Hezbollah members.”

I’ll bet it does.

Meanwhile, in the same week, Israeli troops discovered an entrance to a Hamas tunnel inside a child’s bedroom in Rafah. They recovered a trove of weapons and explosives from the tunnel. The operation is the latest of what Israel calls its “precise, intelligence-based, targeted operations” inside Rafah.

A few days before that, an Israeli strike took out Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists hiding at a United Nations school for displaced Palestinians in central Gaza. Media reports from “local officials” and “UN sources” – both common euphemisms for “anti-semitic/pro-terrorist hacks” – report that the strike killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children. And probably soulful poets and Amish Muslims.

Israeli sources – who have not been consistently lying their arses off for 80 years straight – said that there was a Hamas compound inside the school containing 20 to 30 fighters. Many of those non-women, non-children, non-soulful poets were killed. And wise people everywhere said “good riddance to bad hummus.”

As is often the case, the great Babylon Bee summed up the leftist attitude toward Israel’s latest successes in two hilarious stories about the recent rescue of four of Hamas’s hostages:

“Gaza Health Ministry Confirms 8 Billion Dead in Israeli Hostage Rescue” and

“Ilhan Omar Calls for Day of Mourning Over Hostages Rescued.”

Hamas delenda est!

Biden Storms Normandy, Biden-flation Makes Fast Food a “Luxury,” WAPO Flounders & “Innocent Gazan Journalist” Holds Hostages (posted 6/10/24)

As a Christian, I feel like God communicates with me in many ways, such as through the Bible, and church services, and joyous moments with family and friends. Even through his creation, as I was reminded of as we drove through some of the beautiful landscape of Colorado last week.

But He’s never spoken to me in an audible voice.

However, this last weekend He seemed to come pretty darn close. And what did He say to me?

“Hey Martin, do you believe that I can ever give you more targets for mockery than you can handle?”

To which I replied, “Well, I’m just a mortal man over here, and—”

“And a hilarious one, and one of My personal favorites. And by the way, you’re welcome for the strength of 10 men, and the smoke-show of a wife, the two great daughters and the Wonder Dog, all of which I have graciously bestowed on you.”

What does one say to that? “For which I can’t thank you enough. And thanks also for the gift of mockery, which so far has seemed sufficient to keep up with the stream of mockable targets—”

But He interrupted again. “Hold my wine chalice, and watch this!”

And a thundering Voice said, “Joe Biden at Normandy, Hunter Biden on trial, WAPO implodes, creepy anti-Semite Brihana Joy Gray fired by The Hill, the MSM scrambles to cover for Hamas, the Nashville trans-shooter’s writings leak out, the two best politicians on earth are a weird-looking Argentinian and a French-Canadian. Should I go on?”

And I was humbled.

So buckle up for another three-column week, because I am just as God made me, and I’m mocking as fast as I can!

To start with, I cannot confidently say that the President of the United States did NOT poop his pants at Normandy. That’s where we are today, people.

Biden’s team sent him off to D-Day ceremonies hoping to get the kind of inspiring performance on the 80th anniversary that Reagan gave on the 40th. Unfortunately, Reagan is dead, and so is Joe Biden. So we got the usual shaky walking, and slurred talking, and lots of gaffes.

Sadly for the national Dems, they wanted the Gipper, and they got the Tripper. And his power-hungry wife looked even more like a dead-horse-whipper. (And Hunter got the stripper!)

I’m here all week, people. Try the veal.

As sad as it is to say, Biden’s rickety performance at Normandy at least temporarily distracted from some of his troubles at home. It’s easy to forget, for example, that he’s in a legal tug-of-war over incriminating audio tapes.

I’m old enough to remember when Nixon was forced to turn over tapes of WH conversations. (Well, not really. I was alive then, but not paying attention to such boring events.)

Now Biden is doing something similar – fighting to withhold the audio tapes of his interview with Ben Hur – though he’s got a compliant and complicit justice system backing him up, so he has no fear of impeachment, despite having done much shadier things than Nixon ever did.

In defense of Biden, the transcripts of his interview are already out there, as they weren’t in Nixon’s case. On the other hand, reading the words of a demented old man’s ramblings doesn’t have the same visceral impact as listening to them… which is why his taxidermists are fighting so hard to keep them from the public.

But it’s interesting how history repeats itself. Nixon was finally doomed by the famous 18-minute gap in his tapes. (Everyone assumed that he’d erased some damaging conversations.) But you know that if you added up all of Biden’s silences – as he stared off into space, made multiple tortured attempts to think of a word or remember a point, or just sat like a zombie, before muttering “anyway…” – you’d have a hell of a lot longer silence than 18 minutes!

In a sane world, a crack team of caregivers from Visiting Angels (sing it with me: “America’s choice in home care”) would have carted him away years ago, leaving Que Mala to step in and start sinking piers, alienating allies, destroying the budget, and generally blowing all opportunities for success like they were Willie Brown.

Too soon? Okay. Withdrawn.

Speaking of corrupt politics, prosecutors just spent a week proving that in addition to being a dirtbag par excellence, Hunter Biden is undeniably guilty of some perjury and gun violations that carry penalties of more than a decade in prison.

So he’ll likely get the key to the city in DC, and have his child support debt to the ex-stripper further reduced. It’s a good thing for him that Lady Justice has a blindfold on, because now she can’t even ID him in a lineup as the one who’s been groping and assaulting her.

From the “Unexpectedly” files comes this story from the late, great Golden State: after only two months of Ken-Doll Newsom’s $20 an hour minimum wage law, CA’s fast-food restaurants have already cut 10,000 jobs! For just one example, McDonalds has cut hours, raised prices and moved to more automation.

Say it with me, people: UNEXPECTEDLY!

Perhaps the most depressingly revealing fact is that in a recent survey, “78% of consumers say that fast food is now a ‘luxury’ purchase.”

Great job, leftist micro-managers! You’ve turned your cities into third-world hellscapes, you’ve transformed one of our great actors into a hateful, raving old coot (I’m looking at you, DeNiro. Yes, I’m looking at you. Who else would I be looking at?), and you’ve taken the God-gifted natural paradise of California and made it Tijuana north.

And now you’ve managed to reduce the most prosperous population in the history of the world into a bunch of Dickensian orphans who can’t even afford a mediocre junk-food meal. Well done!

Let’s close on a few happier notes, starting in Schadenfreude Corner:

You may remember recent stories about how the Washington Post has been in a shallow doom spiral lately, and now the doom curve is getting even steeper, and the crisis even more entertaining.

New management came in last week and fired the Executive Editor Sally Buzbee. The new CEO then had a meeting with the woke staffers to announce that he was bringing in three experienced guys (one of them from the Wall Street Journal) to try to turn things around.

Then he went through the paper’s dire situation, which most of them had to already be aware of, at least in general terms: revenues have cratered, web traffic is down by half in the last several years, and the paper lost $77 million last year alone.

So naturally, the staffers recognized the crisis facing them, recommitted themselves to doing honest journalism, and vowed to do everything they could to return the paper to viability.

HA! I kid because I love.

What they actually did … wait for it… was whine about diversity at the paper!

Unexpectedly!

They pointed out that Sally Buzbee had female genitalia, while there wasn’t even a single vagina amongst the four toxically male new big hires! And also that many of the staffers who have been laid off as the paper began sinking beneath the waves were non-white, non-straight, sexually eccentric people of color!

So obviously they all need to be re-hired and given raises, to be paid for out of the obscene profits the paper is absolutely not producing, because the whole rotten racket is going down like Que Mala at a promotion meeting with Willie Brown.

Before the opposition can move to strike, I withdraw that hilarious yet inappropriate analogy.

But I’d be hard-pressed to make up a more damning indictment of the MSM than the scene of a CEO warning that the WAPO needs drastic, immediate changes to save it, and a bunch of coddled J-school malcontents threatening to call HR because they’re being triggered by the insufficient attention being paid to their DEI concerns.

Finally, we got some much-needed good news out of Israel this weekend, when the IDF’s brilliant raid freed four hostages from the clutches of Hamas.

And of course we also got the very telling reactions from our national Dems and their co-religionist pro-Hamas protestors. Everyone’s mad about the dozens – or hundreds, or no no, wait, THOUSANDS – of innocent Gazans killed during their rescue.

Even numbskull Que Mala, after a muted, rote expression of happiness for the hostages, quickly assured the world that “we mourn all of the innocent lives that have been lost in Gaza, including those tragically killed today.”

Of course, they don’t mention that Hamas is responsible for kidnapping and holding the hostages in the first place. Instead they focus on the damage to the Gazans among whom the hostages were hidden.

“They were unarmed civilians in their homes!” wail our MSM and leftist leadership.

To which I say, doing my fantastic Clint Eastwood impression from Unforgiven, “They should have armed themselves, if they were going to hold innocent hostages in their houses.”

Even more infuriating is that an evil Al-Jazeera “journalist” named Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad was holding three of the Israeli hostages in his own house! (Actually, his name is Abdallah Aljamal. But you say “Abdallah,” I say “Hamas.” Let’s call the whole thing off.)

This story reminds us that we need to view all claims about the vast majority of “innocent civilians” in Gaza with a very wary eye. Because reliable polling suggests that over 70% of residents support Hamas and celebrated October 7^th.

And now we find that a “legitimate” “civilian” “journalist” – I’m about to run out of scare quotes – turns out to be a Hamas-supporting collaborator. He used his home to hold innocent hostages, thus exposing his whole family and neighborhood to justified military action from the IDF.

And it turns out that several members of his family were reportedly killed, either because they were there in that legitimate military target of a home, or because they tried to prevent the rescue of the hostages. Either way, they reaped what Hamas has sown.

And as to all of the Hamas terrorists and their sympathizers who died in the rescue raid, good! Wrap their bodies in pigskin and bury them in a garbage dump where IDF K-9 dogs – beautiful dogs! kosher dogs! – go during training to relieve themselves.

Annnnndddd… I haven’t even gotten to half of the stories on my list. So I’ll talk with you again on Wednesday.

Hamas delenda est!

The National Dems Have the Reverse Midas Touch (posted 6/7/24)

You don’t have to look very hard to find a story that illustrates how everything our national Democrats touch metaphorically falls apart, and in a way so obvious that if it were written in a novel, it would seem too ham-handed to be believable.

In fact, a few minutes of surfing around the net brought 3 such stories to my attention in the last week.

First there was the pier was the Biden administration’s brilliant solution to address the need for food in Gaza. Never mind that the best way to help the Gazan civilians who aren’t terrorists (however many that is) would be to support Israel fully and encourage them to destroy Hamas ASAP.

And never mind that Israelis were already letting tons of food into the Strip each day, and that Hamas was promptly stealing it all and then selling it to the starving citizens that they obviously don’t care about.

Because as is always the case with those terrorist thugs, Hamas has gotta Hamas.

I think Disraeli said that. Or maybe it was Metternich, or Von Clausewitz, or CO. I know it was one of those smart guys.

Anyway, Biden spent a third of a billion dollars to build the pier, and after a few delays it was put into place, and was used to deliver food for several days. Rumors that that food was promptly commandeered by Hamas thugs go without saying. (See Disraeli/CO above.)

Annnnndddddd… high winds and heavy seas damaged the pier and partially sunk it, along with driving aground four US vessels operating there. Three of our service members were injured, one critically, and the Israeli navy had to help us retrieve our beached vessels, and the pier was taken to an Israeli port to be repaired.

Isn’t that the Biden administration story in a nutshell?

“But what about on the domestic front?” nobody is asking. Because everybody knows.

Let’s look at one move that almost always works for the Dems: giving taxpayer money to their pet interest groups to buy their votes. In this case, it’s the student loan “forgiveness” program, which is actually the “stick working people with the bill for other people’s bad educational choices” program.

But that name doesn’t poll as well.

In an effort to boost Joey Gaffe’s image, one prominent Democrat posted a heartfelt “thank you” on X last week, in the form of a screen shot of his college debt balance now being reduced to zero.

Annnnddddd… the stunt crashed and burned like a rickety Iranian helicopter falling onto Solyndra headquarters in the middle of a Sam Bankman-Fried speech.

Because the Dem in question was St. Paul, MN mayor Melvin Carter, who makes between $130-$170K per year. Normal Americans immediately ratioed him into next week, pointing out that his employees and fast-food workers are now paying off his student loans. One wise guy commented, “So much for the rich paying their fair share.”

On top of all that, the story also reminded people of Biden’s boast that when SCOTUS blocked him from “canceling” student debt, he did it anyway. (Because nothing is more important to him than the rule of law!)

And it reinforced the old truism of Leftist economic policy: Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll say, “No thanks, just keep giving me a fish every day.”

But if an immediately sinking pier and a rich guy getting money from the poor aren’t sufficiently clear metaphors for the Biden administration, I’ve got a New Jersey story for you that should do the trick.

It’s the tale of Congressional Black Caucus member Donald Payne Jr., who had a brush with death in April, suffering a heart attack and complications from diabetes that put him into a coma for two weeks.

Well, it wasn’t so much a “brush” with death as it was a “high-speed, head-on collision” with death. Because he died on April 24^th at the age of 65.

Annnndddd…

…last Tuesday he eked out a narrow victory in the Democrat primary, scraping by with 99.9% of the vote.

I’m not making that up. The Democrats had already elected a brain-dead congressman from NYC (representing Juicy-Booty Americans everywhere), and a mostly dead president, and now a completely dead congressman from Jersey.

At least now we can look forward to Biden making a campaign stop in New Jersey this fall, during which he will say, “And I want to thank Congressman Donald Payne Jr. for his support. I couldn’t win without the help of great Americans like Donald, no joke! Where are you Donald? Stand up and let us give you a round of applause!”

And at the end of that speech, will the Cadaver-in-Chief reach out and shake Donald Payne Jr.’s hand?

You’re damn right he will.

Hamas delenda est!

Biden Depresses College Grads, Germany isn’t Fond of Jews (again!), and Media Matters Fires “Journalists” (posted 5/24/24)

I just got home from our trip to New England last week, and now we’re flying out to Colorado tomorrow.

As I mentioned in a past column, my youngest daughter is going to Boulder for a 10-week research program in astrophysics. (She’s focusing on planet formation and other things I don’t understand, and if this summer goes well, she might be applying to CU for a PhD starting next August.) So my wife and I are using our little brainiac’s summer gig as an excuse to take her out and move her into her summer apartment, and then spend 5 days seeing various beautiful parts of God’s creation.

The two cousins with whom I take regular road-trips are going to meet us in Boulder, and the three of us will be temporarily civilized by the presence of my better half. (Our adventures in the old Caddy convertible on Route 66 in 2021, circumnavigating Lake Michigan in 2022, and last year’s re-tracing the route our families took 90 years ago to migrate from Kentucky to Illinois can all be found on Martinsimpsonwriting.com.)

I’m going to try to post from the road, but I can’t promise anything. As usual, too much is going on, so I’ll hit a few things that crossed my radar this week.

I’ve been simultaneously depressed and encouraged by the dumpster fire that Trump’s NYC prosecution has devolved into. Depressed because the existence of these cases shows how corrupt our justice system has become, and because there are at least some low-info voters out there who vaguely believe that he must be guilty of some bad stuff if he’s facing so many charges and trials.

But it has been amazing to watch just how badly the trial has gone for Bragg’s bozos. I can’t think of two worse prosecution witnesses than a porn star who can’t keep her mouth shut (but not in a good way), and an oily conman like Michael Cohen.

Stormy could offer no relevant testimony to the case at hand, and her appearance in the trial made plain the corruption of the wildly biased judge. He should obviously have recused himself, if for no other reason than that his daughter runs a lefty consulting firm that has raised millions for Democrats, and her resume includes being “Director of Digital Persuasion” for Que Mala’s 2020 presidential campaign. I swear I am not making that up.

Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds A LOT sleazier than Stormy’s resume, which boils down to “banging strangers on camera for cash.” In fact, I think Stormy and the judge’s daughter have a lot in common.

The daughter handled “digital persuasion” for a dingbat who slept her way into a career, and Stormy, though I have never seen any of her greatest hits, has a filmography that I’m willing to bet is replete with more than a few digits and a hell of a lot of persuasion. (Not to mention a long line of Willie Brown types, even though they might be credited only as “Pizza Delivery Man 1” and “Horny Boss.”)

And then Michael Cohen slithered into court, and he made Stormy Daniels look like Mother Theresa’s more pious sister. The climax (you’ll pardon the expression) of his testimony was admitting that in addition to his other convictions for perjury, tax evasion and campaign finance violations, he also stole $60K from Trump!

That’s larceny, and it is several standard deviations more serious than the (bogus) bookkeeping infractions that Trump is being prosecuted for.

Good job, NY judicial system. You’ve all covered yourselves in glory!

Speaking of stomach-turning corruption and incompetence, who is the genius who invited our Cadaver in Chief to give a graduation speech at Morehouse?

Even if the typical graduation address now begins with a morose land acknowledgment (“You should all feel guilty for throwing four years of frat parties on the sacred burial grounds once owned by the Ojibwas and the Indigenous Warrens…”) (#wemustneverstopmockingher), they usually quickly turn to a bunch of banal happy-talk.

“You graduates are the future. Your education has prepared you to go out and blaze new trails. The world is truly your oyster!”

But not the late Joe Biden. He hollered his way through a Jeremiad that must have had half the graduates contemplating whether they could fashion their tassels into nooses and put themselves out of their misery.

“What is democracy, when black men are hunted for sport every day by MAGA-hat wearing gun nuts? White people hate you, and America blows, and you’re all victims. Now get out there and suffer, until things get so bad that you gladly accept the sweet release of death, probably at the hands of a lynch mob.”

I’m paraphrasing. But only slightly.

Seriously, what kind of decision-process leads to inviting Joe Biden to inspire your graduates? Were all the less-depressing speakers unavailable? (“Well, the Unabomber and Dr. Jack Kevorkian are both dead, Paul Ehrlich is in his 90s and doesn’t travel, and Greta Thunberg wants too much money. So I guess it’s Joe.”)

But lest you think our country has the stupidity market cornered, consider the Germans’ latest masterstroke.

One of the most corrupt parts of the thoroughly corrupt UN – the competition is tough, what with terrorist and communist countries on various “human rights” commissions, and UNRWA funding and supporting Hamas – is the “International Criminal Court.” (Insert your own “You misspelled ‘kangaroo’ jokes here.)

This sleazy convocation of hypocrites – we are thankfully not a member nation of the ICC, though I’m shocked Joey Gaffes didn’t sign an executive order making us join – pretend to adjudicate disputes and war crimes claims. Yet they somehow don’t issue arrest warrants for the most evil dictators or terrorists in the world.

But now they are on the verge of issuing such warrants for Bibi Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, for the “crime” of fighting the terrorists who slaughtered their civilians and now hide behind civilians. The ICC is set to issue the same kind of warrant for the Hamas top terrorist Yahoo Serious, too, which is obviously just a fig leaf to allow them to try to arrest the Israelis.

(If they had wanted to issue an arrest warrant for the chief Hamashole, October 8^th might have been a good time to do so.)

So a German spokesman for Chancellor Olaf “Sergeant” Scholz (“I know NO-THING!”) has warned that his government will arrest Bibi if he enters Germany. Every EU country has submitted themselves to the ICC, so they would presumably all arrest Israeli leaders. (Which is reason enough for us to cut off all formal ties to the EU and the UN immediately, IMHO.)

It’s galling enough that the other European nations would agree to this. (Though they do have a history of cooperating with the Germans, especially when it comes to identifying and turning over the Juden.) But Germany? Where it has only recently become legal again to own a copy of Mein Kampf ?

Way to steer into that reputational skid, Germany! (Please tell me that this press release came out of Nuremberg!)

But let’s not end on a down note. Because some good things are happening, too.

For example, even in Portland – where AOC would be close to the median IQ – the numbskull voters might finally have hit rock bottom, and made the first baby step toward digging out.

For four years, they’ve had a Soros-funded (i.e. pro-crime) DA called Mike Schmidt, who was elected with 77% of the vote. Once in office, he resolutely declined to prosecute BLM and Antifa thugs as they rioted and destroyed the quality of life in that town.

Unexpectedly!

But on Tuesday, the voters fired Schmidt, giving Nathan Vasquez a 17% margin of victory over him. Vasquez is still a Dem (of course), but he’s promised to get tough on crime, and if he does, we should celebrate. Soros poured a bunch of cash into Schmidt’s re-election campaign, and he lost big.

In a similar karmic beat-down, a bunch of angry leftist hacks at MMFA – “Media Matters For America,” though that “F” should really stand for something else – no longer work at Media Matters, having been laid off yesterday.

When Elon bought Twitter/X, MM went on a slander campaign targeting his advertisers, falsely charging that he was posting racist material that would hurt their companies. Elon is suing MM and is likely to win, and as their fortunes decline, they’re starting to cut employees.

Ironically, you can read their whining and wailing on… wait for it… X! (HA!)

For example, one fired guy says, “Unfortunately, I have been impacted by the MM lay-offs… and am now open to any research/analyst roles, specifically regarding RWM narratives [I’m guessing that stands for “Rotten White Males?”] on DEI [ooh, I know this one: “Didn’t Earn It”], education, and LGBTQ+ issues.”

Another one, a guy named Alex who gives his pronouns under a picture of himself in some kind of pink feather boa, says, “I got laid off from MMFA today, proud of the 5 years of intense work I put into fighting right-wing hatred.”

Oh, you brave boy or girl, fighting the good fight against those nasty right-wing meanies!

If I weren’t such a classy, high-brow gentleman, I’d quote someone named “OneFineJay,” who posted a response to the list of whining ex-MM employees.

Oh, who am I kidding? Let’s give OneFineJay the last word:

“MMFA layoffs? #schadenboner”

Hamas delenda est!

Schadenfreude, Painted Protestors & Sterile Mosquitoes (posted 5/10/24)

Let’s visit Schadenfreude Corner today.

First up we’ve got Andrew Dudum, the CEO of something called “Hims and Hers Health Inc.” Last week, after watching pro-Hamas idiots defiling our campuses, Andrew thought he’d do a little virtue signaling online.

So he released a public message saying, “If you’re currently protesting against the genocide (sic) of the Palestinian (sic) people & for your university’s divestment from Israel, keep going. It’s working. There are plenty of companies and CEOs eager to hire you, regardless of university discipline.” He included a link to apply for a job with his company.

Annnnddddd… his stock dropped 8% and he reportedly lost $210 million.

Unexpectedly!

The next day another entrepreneur reported that when he logged on to Hims and Hers to cancel his order, the customer service queue was deluged with people doing the same.

So the brave CEO did what smart leaders always do: posted a long, meandering non-apology apology. I’ll just quote the first three sentences, because they establish the tone:

“The last few days have been a disheartening reflection of just how divisive a time we live in.”

Ah yes, those damned divisive times! Breaking into your social media account and posting stupid comments encouraging anti-Semitic boneheads to keep protesting a genocide that doesn’t exist, on behalf of those who are quite philo-genocidal. What havoc will those divisive times cause next?

“I’d like to clarify a few things because my words have been misconstrued by some.” Translation: I’d like to obfuscate the clear meaning of my earlier words, which have been accurately construed by people who know how to read.

“I in no way condone nor support acts or threats of violence, antisemitism, or intimidation …[blah blah blah].”

Got that? He doesn’t condone or support all the bad stuff the Hamasniks have been doing on campus.

But he’ll gladly hire you if YOU do.

This is a great reminder that we should all be pulling our support from companies who hate us and are working against our interests. Bud Light was the best example, but we should also take advantage of the information these colleges are giving us.

Now all of us know that we should never send our kids to any of the schools who have allowed these protests to drag on, negotiated with the protesters, and then gave them no consequences once they did arrest them.

If you’re hiring people, do extra vetting of anyone who graduated from any of these schools. If you are donating to any of these schools, stop it. If you are an alumni, contact them and let them know that you’ll never give them another dime, and that you’ll be bad mouthing them to anyone even considering donating or sending their kids there.

Along those lines, I was glad to see a story in the Free Beacon about a letter that 13 federal judges have sent to Columbia, announcing that none of them will be hiring any more Columbia law grads as law clerks, unless and until the school takes concrete steps to increase penalties on anti-Semitic faculty and students who illegally discriminate, and to support viewpoint diversity in the faculty and administration.

Yes! More please.

I had never heard of Andrew Dudum’s company, so I didn’t think I had ever bought any of his stuff. But I looked it up, and found that he ships all kinds of medications that you can order online. Their info specifically mentions ED meds.

Which makes sense. And I now have greater respect for Dudum as a businessman.

Because if he’s trying to market to the low-T crowd whose idea of a mating ritual involves draping a terrorist tablecloth over your shoulders and screaming horrific Jew-hating poetry while surrounded by a herd of blocky gender-studies majors who believe in neither deodorant nor personal grooming, he has nailed his target demographic!

Plus it’s a win-win for him, because even if his customers’ downstairs plumbing worked well under normal conditions, a quad full of their female comrades would go a long way toward creating an erection-free zone, even for the healthiest among us.

If I had to put myself in their Birkenstocks (and please don’t make me do that), I’d guess that I’d need a set of beer telescopes (beer goggles would not be strong enough) and a supply of little blue pills to buzz-saw my way through like Michael Moore with a comically over-sized bowl of M&Ms if I were to have any chance of surviving an encounter with any of those scowling harpies.

But we should also be doing the inverse of boycotting, i.e. buying stuff from companies who side with us. Since all of the Hamasholes are pushing to have their schools divest from Israel, we should look for products made in Israel.

Since I’m not Jewish, that’s a little tough for me. I don’t wear a yarmulke, and never had a dreidel, but this is almost enough to get me to buy the latter. (And those cynics among you can just save your warnings about how Big Dreidel has been colluding with Big Torah to control the market in all kinds of Judaica. I’m not buying it!)

But I’m a fan of the second amendment, so perhaps I will check out a future Uzi or a Desert Eagle purchase. Because Christmas (and Hanukkah) is coming. And come to think of it, I would LOVE to have a mini Iron Dome over my house.

Man, I’ve already got a flamethrower, so if I pick up an Uzi and an Iron Dome, I will be ready for the future invasion of Florida by the zombified Biden voters who I assume will be heading here when their disastrous politics cause the final collapse of Chicago, NYC, Baltimore, Philly et al.

My favorite campus protestor story of the last several days comes to us from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. A bunch of mouth-breathers there had painted pro-terror graffiti on a wall, and the school hired some painters to come in and paint over it.

Apparently the protestors heard about this, and a small group of them stood in front of the wall to prevent their hateful messages from being painted over. It was a classic, “blue-collar vs worthless-d-bag” standoff.

Of course the best response would have been the timeless classic: deploy the flamethrower robot dogs!

But because no university administrators have the guts to implement some strategic thermal discipline, we had to settle for the second-best outcome: the blue-collar guys spray-painted right over the protestors!

Unfortunately, some accomplices gave the others plastic face shields just in time, so nobody ended up with a dramatic, culturally-appropriating white-face. But they all received a nice coat of paint from head to toe. I can only hope that the painters were using an epoxy, or at least an oil-based paint.

I’ll close with yet another story of the great things happening at the University of Florida, where researchers have helped develop an innovative strategy for fighting mosquitos, which was recently pilot-tested in Los Angeles. The strategy involves irradiating lab-raised mosquitos, and releasing tens of thousands of them into a targeted area.

According to the story, “These mosquitoes are all male and have been sterilized by the radiation, so the hope is that they will find wild female mates and impregnate them with dead-end sperm, rendering the resulting eggs worthless.”

And today’s column comes full circle, by applying the lessons we’ve learned from the pro-Hamas campus protests to the world of insects. Because we are looking at the same basic story as that of the protestors and young leftists generally: lots of aggressive (and aggressively unpleasant) females, and lots of sterile males.

Even before I read this story, when I watched video of the non-peaceful protestors disrupting schools and ruining graduations, I swear that the phrases “dead-end sperm” and “worthless eggs” spontaneously ran through my mind.

Though to be fair to the sterile, irradiated male mosquitoes, they are probably not stupid enough to think that they can become female mosquitoes. Or that Liz Warren is anything but a very, very white lady. (#wemustneverstopmockingher) (also, #sterilemalemosquitoforMAsenator.)

So at least the sterile male mosquitoes have that going for them.

Hamas delenda est!

Two Emblematic Pro-Hamas Protestors: Rich Kid & Slutsky (posted 5/6/24)

I’m sure everyone has just about had it up to here with the campus protest stories, and I feel your pain on that point. But I caught a few details over the weekend that I’d missed, and I think they’re worth some comment.

First, I think it’s hilarious that the one moment of unity between the hateful pro-Hamas side and the pro-Israel/the West/America side came at the University of Alabama, when both sides came together to chant, “F**k Joe Biden!” It was the kind of bipartisan reaching across the aisle that for a moment gave me hope that we all might get along.

Annnddd… it turns out that the Hamasholes are mad at Joe Biden because they think he’s not being submissive ENOUGH to the Jew-hating genocide enthusiasts in Gaza.

So I guess this is an example of that old folk saying, “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.” Or, in the Arabic version from Gaza, “even a blind sheik finds a gay guy to toss off a roof once in a while.”

It loses a little in translation though, doesn’t it?

Second, over the weekend I learned more about two of the protestors whom I think are emblematic of the problem we’re facing.

I was probably one of the last to learn that one of the violent Columbia protestors arrested after breaking into a campus building was James “Cody” Carlson, 40, a wealthy heir to an advertising fortune. This guy is straight out of central casting, if you’re casting someone to play a leftist d-bag in a forthcoming straight-to-video Rob Reiner agitprop bomb.

In his late 20s, he got his first criminal charge (that we know of), when as part of a group of self-styled “anarchists” he was involved in a violent “protest.” Though he was charged with a raft of felonies, including battering a cop and aggravated assault on a cop with a deadly weapon, those charges were dropped two years later. (I’m guessing that daddy’s money had something to do with that.)

He’s also got two kids, one with a “baby mama” who is a model. I’m assuming that his ability to impregnate a model also had something to do with daddy’s money, an assumption backed up by what I think is dispositive evidence:

In his mug shot, he doesn’t look like a fella who normally has to fight off supermodels with both hands. In fact, he’s got a SFPI (Simpson Face Punchability Index) of 86 out of 100.

For comparison purposes, when I was in my mid 20s, with discernable abs and a firm jawline, I had an impressive SFPI of only 7, and yet surprisingly few models ever engineered elaborate schemes to trick me into impregnating them. On the rare occasions when that did happen – and I always managed to outwit the wily vixens – my friends never taunted me that the women were only after me because of my dad’s gas-company-heavy-equipment-operator’s money.

Anyway, Carlson is also the kind of 40-year-old who has enough time on his hands to spend many weeks agitating at a college he has no connection to, and leading a bunch of gullible morons in various criminal acts. In fact, his accomplishments so far in 2024 demonstrate his emotional maturity.

In January he was one of the Jew-hating idiots who caused chaos in NYC by blocking traffic on several bridges. Because he wasn’t run over by some heroic driver, he was still around in April, when he was at another protest, and this time grabbed an Israeli flag from a 22-year-old and hit him in the face with a rock, and then set the flag on fire.

He should have ended up in an intensive care burn unit, in terrible pain and wrapped up like Imhotep Pelosi, but due to the inexplicable absence of NYPD flamethrower robot dogs, he was still roaming free when he broke into Hamilton Hall at Columbia.

The guy apparently got a law degree years ago, but his only connection to the law seems to be in finding various ways to break it. As a Blaze story put it, “sources have stated that Carlson is a menace and an attorney by profession.”

A menace AND an attorney, you say? Don’t tell Que Mala, but that makes for a Venn diagram with a hell of a lot of overlap in it!

His own family aren’t big fans, either. When a NY Post reporter called his sister’s house, the woman who answered said, “We don’t talk to him. Leave us alone. He is out of our lives for so many years.”

I like the cut of her jib.

After his arrest at Hamilton Hall, Carlson got five charges: burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy, and criminal trespassing. When he was put in a holding cell at the jail, he destroyed a camera there, and got another criminal mischief charge. He was also later charged with a hate crime, assault and petit larceny for the April Israeli flag incident.

All of which could be big trouble for him. Except that he’s still got some of his daddy’s money left, and he’s in NYC, where only orange guys are pursued by “law enforcement,” such as it is. Still, he is a rich white guy, so maybe his super-punchable face will earn some karmic attention.

I heard about the next protestor when she was being roundly mocked for demanding that the school provide food and water for the protestors. The keffiyeh-wearing Columbia grad student in question ridiculously warned that if the school doesn’t give in to their demands, the protestors might be facing “[dying] of dehydration and starvation.”

Her name is Johanna King-Slutzky, and she’s writing a dissertation for an English PhD (d’oh!) focused on interpreting poetry from 1760-1860 “through a Marxian lens.” Which answers the age-old question, “How do I communicate that I’m totally unemployable without saying the words, ‘I’m totally unemployable’?”

Also, it’s probably just the lingering effect of the raunchy sex comedies of my youth – this was several years before I was fending off models drawn by the allure of my pop’s gas company cash – but when I hear that there’s a poetry professor named “Slutzky,” certain expectations are created.

Expectations that were completely dashed when Ms. King-Slutzky stepped before the cameras to warn about the impending starvation of the brave Groucho Marxians cosplaying their way through the Ivy league. (Let’s just say that Van Halen would not make a “Hot For Teacher” video about this specific academic.)

But the most incomprehensible part of her story is a detail that I haven’t heard anybody comment on. Everybody got some cheap laughs from her last name. But that last name is hyphenated, which means that she could have just stuck with “King,” and made her husband/wife/your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine drop the “Slutzky.”

But no. She steered into the Slutzky skid.

And then she wrapped herself in a terrorist tablecloth and marched out to face the cameras, and earn herself a spot in the annals of self-satirizing woke imbeciles.

Well done, Columbia!

Hamas delenda est!

I Get a Personal Flamethrower, & Disney and Newsom Continue to Blunder (posted 4/29/24

Everyone here knows that I am not one to brag.

Sure, I may have mentioned in passing that my oldest daughter is busy saving the lives of children in a pediatric hospital, or that my youngest daughter is a budding astrophysicist whose mentoring professor just submitted an article with her on which she’s going to be first author.

And yes, if you held a gun to my head, I’d confess that when Sheila Jackson Lee once saw my wife, she said, “I thought that the sun was a powerful heat, but THIS woman is HOT!” And that my Aussie shepherd Cassie (“the Wonder Dog” is an honorific, but I can’t really type her name without it) is the apotheosis of canine cool.

But yesterday I was able to check off another bucket list item. Because I am now the proud owner of a… wait for it…flamethrower!

No, tragically, it is not a flamethrowing robot dog. (My wife somehow doesn’t agree that that would be the best $10,000 [with shipping] that we ever spent. Because she’s apparently not the financial visionary that I am.) (See my Friday column at Martinsimpsonwriting.com for background.)

This is a small, personal flamethrower to be used for burning weeds or grass, among other things. And by “other things,” I don’t mean pro-Hamas protestors’ tents, because in Florida, we don’t have any of those on our campuses. Because we are not governed by terrorist sympathizers or sniveling cowards.

But I do already have a few other “flame-thrower-target” ideas. I’m going to see what happens if I turn her on the first “Co-exist” bumper sticker I see, and there’s a house a few blocks over with one of those, “In this house we believe… chromosomes don’t exist, etc.” yard signs that intrigue me…

If you have any suggestions about other possible uses for Sparky (yes, I’ve already given her a name, and yes, it’s a name that works for a personal flamethrower OR the electric chair that we used on Ted Bundy) (Because: Florida!), please leave them in the comments.

And yes, Sparky’s pronouns are she/her. Because guys always think of their favorite physical possessions as female. I refer you to sailors always calling their ships “her,” and to every Beach Boys song about a beloved car. (“She’s real fine, my 409.” “She’s my little deuce coupe, you don’t know what I got.” Etc.)

Not to mention the fact that when the Japanese fooled around with us at Pearl Harbor, they “found out” on the receiving end of a big ol’ fissile middle finger dropped from a plane that was named after the pilot’s mom, the Enola Gay.

And if by some freak coincidence, I should pass away in a flame-thrower-related accident this week (my wife is not totally discounting the possibility), I am asking here and now that the great and powerful CO will give my eulogy, at a service to which I trust you will all travel to attend.

And the only requests I have are that “I’ll Fly Away” be played, that the flag at the CO Compound be flown at half-mast for a respectful interval, and that CO’s first sentence be, “The world without Martin Simpson is now a dark and dismal place, but we can all be comforted knowing that he died doing what he loved: throwing flames.”

Yes, I have been hitting the celebratory bourbon this evening, thanks for asking. Because did I mention that today I received my own personal FLAMETHROWER!?

Now where was I?

Oh yeah, Disney is still reeling after having been beaten like a rented mule by Ron DeSantis; campus protestors are continuing to illustrate their own idiocy AND the difference between how blue states and red states react to said idiocy; and Gavin Newsom continues to step on rakes.

You’d think that Disney would be busily engaged in trying to win back their audience and staunch the flow of red ink they’ve been experiencing lately. But nope!

Their latest blunder happened last month, when a family of four were staying at a Disney Resort at Disney World, and during a meal, paid an extra fee for a visit from a character, the Evil Queen from Snow White and the 7 Dwarves (currently Snow Brown, One Dwarf and Six Normally Proportioned People).

And they did get an “evil queen,” sort of. It was a dude in a costume and make-up!

“This is some Bibbidi Bobbidi Bullschiff right here!” said the dad.

Well, I don’t know if he said that. But he should have. He did say that his whole family have been huge Disney fans before this. He also said that he spent $8000 on his current trip.

Obviously the family were bait-and-switched. It would be like paying to meet a living president at the Hall of Presidents, and getting the mortal remains of the late Joe Biden. Or paying to meet Geronimo or Sitting Bull, and getting Grandma Squanto (#wemustneverstopmockingher). Or paying to meet Universal Studio’s classic movie monster the Mummy, and getting Imhotep Pelosi.

Okay, that last one would be getting exactly what you paid for. But I think the other examples make my point.

I can’t believe Disney is still pulling stuff like this, and I feel this guy’s pain. But if this guy was going to drop $8K on entertainment, he could have just come up with another $2 large and got himself a FRD instead! (“Flamethrowing Robot Dog,” of course).

And then, if he’s ever confronted with a hulking dude in a robe and tiara, it’s Evil Queen versus Flamethrowing Robot Dog! And that has pay-per-view written ALL over it! C’mon, man.

Meanwhile, pro-Hamas asshats continue to illustrate why you should never send your kid to a college run by leftist wokesters. On one campus after another, they continued to set up squatter camps and then virtue signal and “negotiate” with feckless administrators.

But I see several silver linings coming out of this mortifying debacle:

1.The GOP should be cutting ads of these idiots to run – interspersed with border chaos scenes – 24/7 in October and early November. (Though I’ve got a feeling that we’ll already have plenty of great footage from the Dem convention in Chicago in August. I’m going to have a 50-gallon drum of popcorn delivered to my house for that!)

2. The contrast we’re seeing between red state campuses and blue state ones are both educational and edifying. Texas troopers immediately arresting lawbreakers on their campuses are just one example.

At Florida State, 5 minutes after protestors started setting up tents on the quad, campus officials made them pack it up. When protestors’ chants got boisterous, a number of university grounds people suddenly appeared on loud riding mowers to keep the campus tidy. Then sprinklers mysteriously went off, dampening the brave freedom fighters.

One beta male protestor accused the school of intentionally trying to discourage them, saying, “Waah! How am I going to impress my mouth-breathing simpleton friends, and maybe even get a chance at the most dispiriting, low-quality hippie-chick tail ever, with all of this lawn mowing and lawn watering going on?” (I’m paraphrasing, slightly.)

An unnamed university spokesman (and as of this moment, a hero of mine) said – and I swear I am not making this up – “Work on our grounds happens throughout the day.”

I’m not crying. I’m just allergic to newly mown grass and moist Marxists.

My favorite visual of the week came from Emory U in Atlanta, where a bunch of Hamas-loving, cop-hating protestors set up an illegal encampment on campus. After too many warnings, some Georgia state troopers descended on them with the wrath of an angry Old Testament God.

Or at least with the enthusiasm of a well-coached outside linebacker trying to make the first string at an SEC school! You probably saw the video. One particular moron tried to run away, a checkered terrorist tablecloth on his head. (You say “keffiyeh,” I say “terrorist version of a MAGA hat.”) (Hat-tip to CO for that one!)

The dope was run down from behind by a trooper in full gear, including what I first thought was a looped length of rope on his belt, but later realized were just plastic zip ties. (Man, if that had been rope, and the cop had dropped the perp and quickly hog-tied his legs with a rope, that would have been the most awesome trifecta of toxic masculinity – cop, football player and rodeo roper – ever!)

The cop demonstrated perfect form: knees bent, weight going forward, then the lowered shoulder and exploding through the tackle. He even put his head to one side of the target right before impact, to avoid the 15-yard penalty for spearing!

I tell ya, those protestors were dropping like Moanin’ Megan Rapinoe walking into a particularly tall blade of grass!

More, please.

Finally, Gavin Newsom is back in the news, and for a hilarious reason.

(By the way, I realize that today’s column would make a good round on Family Feud: “Name three people or groups that Ron DeSantis has totally owned in the last year! Survey says: Disney, pro-Hamas campus protestors, and Gavin Newsom.”)

Newsom got the brilliant idea of commissioning a $1 coin to honor innovation in the late great Golden state, and tweeted out a call for suggestions of what should appear on the coin. And the people of the internet unleashed a torrent of swift kicks to the smooth, featureless groin of the Ken Doll.

Dozens of proposed designs featured some variation on the tent city: a single filthy tent surrounded by garbage; a few dozen tents with whacked-out meth heads lounging around; an endless vista of tents in the foreground, with the LA skyline in the background.

One suggestion featured a gas-station sign with innovatively high $6+ gas prices. One proposed a wagon train of U-hauls heading east, while another contemplated how to indicate in an image the turning a budget surplus into a $73 billion dollar deficit in two years.

But the leader in the clubhouse seems to be a glowing, golden image of the Golden Gate Bridge, one of its iconic towers partially obscured by a ginormous poop emoji.

It’s a perfect image for California currency under Democrat rule: not a bitcoin, but a sh*tcoin.

Well done, Gavin! Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annnnndddddd…

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly! (But in a very good way.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But everyone on the left was blaming covid for everything.

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

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

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

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

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

And I have a dream, today!

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

Can I get an amen?

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

And don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNEXPECTEDLY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

Stephanopoulos Shames Himself, A Criminal Brings a Hammer to a Gunfight, and Bibi Tells Biden to Stick It (posted 3/25/24)

The ridiculous stories are coming at us so fast that I might have to make this another three-column week. No promises, but I’ll do my best.

We Don’t Hate the Media Enough

This story is already two weeks old, but I have to mention it: George Stephanopoulos put on a truly shameless display when he interviewed Nancy Mace on his sleazy Sunday morning show.

He opened with a clip of Mace talking about her rape when she was a teenager, and then attacked her for supporting Trump, whom GS dishonestly said – 10 times! – had been found “liable of rape” against the crackpot E. Jean Carroll.

Mace fought back and repeatedly played the victim card – rare as it may be, she was actually justified in this case for doing so! But I wish she had really attacked GS directly, because he certainly deserves it. I wanted to hear her say something like this:

“George, are you telling me that I shouldn’t support a candidate just because he’s been accused of rape?” (Wait for him to give a smug, self-righteous reply.) “Well didn’t you coordinate the vicious attacks on Bill Clinton’s numerous sex assault victims, including Juanita Broaddrick, who credibly accused him of raping her? And didn’t you call those victims “nuts and sluts?” And didn’t you refer to their true accusations as “bimbo eruptions?”

“And by the way George, you know very well that Tara Reade has credibly accused Joe Biden of doing to her exactly what Jean Carroll said Trump did to her, except that Reade knows the year it happened, as well as the day and the place and the details. Since her charge is so much more credible than Carroll’s, will you agree to denounce Joe Biden right now, and urge your dozens of viewers to refuse to vote for him, since you strongly disapprove of rapists?”

Ugh. If our MSM weren’t thoroughly corrupt, they’d never hire someone like GS, and if he had a conscience and even a scintilla of self-awareness, he’d never be able to attack a rape victim on air, after he’s spent decades pimping for Clinton and Biden.

To follow that story up with a little schadenfreude chaser: Trump has filed suit against ABC News and GS for defamation. Those suits don’t usually succeed, but Trump’s might have a chance, since GS repeatedly said that a jury found Trump “liable for rape.”

Unfortunately for him and ABC News, and even though the Carroll jury were biased hacks who bent over backwards to pretend to believe her, even THEY couldn’t go as far as GS claimed.

They answered 10 charging questions in their verdict. The first one read, “Did Ms. Carroll prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll.”

Their answer, and I quote, was “No.”

So here’s hoping that Trump beats George like he’s going to beat Fani’s fanny.

Stupid Criminals

Today’s Stupid Criminals story has a little mystery to it, because I found two media stories about it, but one says that it happened in Trenton NJ, and the other in Muskegon County, MI. So let’s just look at what the stories agree on:

At 2:00 a.m., Citizen-of-the-Year candidate Andray Ingram, 34, used a hammer to break into an apartment and assaulted the resident there. Then he tried to enter the main home that apartment was attached to. He broke the ring camera with the hammer and made it inside, before the owner greeted him with a pistol.

Shortly after that, cops arrived to find Andray with a brand new hole in his chest. He was taken to a local hospital, where he joined the choir invisible.

The moral may at first seem obvious: Moron Brings Hammer to Gunfight, Goes Down Swinging.

But I think the lesson is more complicated:

Hammer vs. Unarmed resident; Hammer Wins.

Hammer vs. Ring Camera: Hammer Wins. But…

Hammer vs. Pistol; Armed Homeowner Wins.

In other good news, the Israelis ignored Tony Blinken, Que Mala and the Biden administration’s strongly worded letters telling them to leave Hamas alone now that they are trapped and one the edge of defeat in Northern Gaza. (You know, like the allies left Hitler alone once we had him trapped in Berlin, or the way we left the Japanese alone once they had pulled back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

Instead, the IDF raided the al-Shifa hospital over the weekend, killing 170 terrorists and capturing 480 more. They also “located weapons and terrorist infrastructure in the hospital.” (You know, the way your local hospital will also be a staging place for jihadi lunatics, RPGs and AK-47s.)

Israel also said that it killed Fa’aq Mabhouh – a guy whose name sounds like a verb followed by a direct object – whom it identified as Hamas’ “head of internal security.”

According to NPR, though, “The Government Media Office in Gaza said Mabhouh was in charge of the coordination between tribes and UNRWA to bring humanitarian aid into northern Gaza.”

They say “tomato,” I say “tomahto.” And by now, I think we all know what Hamas calls “humanitarian aid,” don’t we?

Anyway, I’ll always remember Fa’aq as the guy whose name I will NOT spell out phonetically, because I’m a gentleman. If I weren’t so gentlemanly, I’d be tempted to speak for all of us when I say to the “Government Media Office in Gaza” (which, oddly enough, is Arabic for “NPR”), “Fa’aq Mabhouh, and the horse you rode in on!”

But I am a gentleman, and I know that hearing about the deaths of so many terrorists can hurt the tender feelings of many of our leftist brethren and cistern, let me rephrase what happened in a way that will ease their minds:

“Women’s health care in Gaza was defended by IDF medical personnel who surgically removed 170 tissue masses at the al-Shifa hospital. These “parts of a woman’s body” ranged in age from 57 to 165 trimesters. You are now free to shout these abortions.”

Sorry. My crack staff tells me that “cistern” was the wrong word to use in the last sentence, and that I should have used “sistren.” I apologize for the mistake, and will happily amend my last paragraph to replace “cistern” with “septic tank.” Mea culpa.

Celebration of Excellence

Finally, I highly recommend to you the Daily Wire’s new 8-part video series by Bill Whittle on the history of the Soviet Union, called “An Empire of Terror.” I’ve only watched the first episode and the first five minutes of the second, and it is stellar. The production values are high, and it provides a great re-cap for people who already know the outlines of the story.

It really brings alive the heartbreaking cruelty and malice at the heart of all top-down central control schemes (99% of them leftist), and the shocking extent to which those evil forces worked in Russia. And for those who have only learned about the story in public school – i.e. those who have barely heard of it – it will be a gut-wrenching revelation.

Whittle knows how to tell a story by starting with some intriguing details, and then providing a Paul Harvey-esque “the rest of the story” payoff.

For example, the second episode begins with the story of a train carrying a devastating biological secret weapon that left Switzerland for Germany and then on to Russia in November of 1917. Whittle reveals that Lenin was on that train, then cites a haunting 1929 quote from Churchill: “The Germans turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus…”

Whittle hammers home the point: “Lenin was not carrying the weapon. Lenin WAS the weapon.”

The comparison of communist ideology to a plague bacillus is chilling, but it might even be understating its destructiveness! In the 14^th century, the Black Plague killed no more than 30 million people at the most, while communism killed 100 million people in just the last 87 years of the 20^th century. (And the actual plague never imprisoned, tortured and immiserated tens of millions more, the way the commies did!)

You need to subscribe to the Daily Wire to see the entire series now, but I think most conservatives would benefit from supporting the Daily Wire. They have some great writers/speakers (Andrew Klavan, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro among them), and they make docs (What is a Woman?) and comedies (Lady Ballers) that Hollywood wouldn’t touch.

They are even making wholesome cartoons for kids to counter the agenda-driven, grooming weirdos at Disney and elsewhere.

So check out “An Empire of Terror,” if for no other reason than to say, “Fa’aq Mabhouh!” to Disney and the MSM.

Hamas delenda est!