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Whiny Hunger Strikers, & Hillary’s Play Bombs (posted 5/13/24)

By the time you read this, I will be flying to Massachusetts with my wife and youngest daughter, to spend the better part of a week sightseeing with my oldest and her husband, culminating in watching her receive her Masters in nursing at Amherst. This will likely mean a cold and Simpson-less Friday (i.e. no column that day), but I trust that you all will soldier on.

In the meantime, there are too many things for me to talk about, so I’ll do the best I can.

First, I love me a good hunger strike. In fact, I have been known to participate in a few of my own. When I was ages three through about six, for example, I regularly conducted hunger strikes.

Most often on meatloaf night.

I would begin by advancing my argument, which ran something like this: “C’mon, meatloaf again? This has to violate the Geneva Conventions! You can’t even tell me what kind of ‘meat’ this is. It’s literally a loaf of undifferentiated meat!” (I had a precocious vocabulary at age 3.)

My dad would respond with tales about being born in the depression, and being offered rock soup with a dandelion salad, and all of it sprinkled with coal dust from the mines where grandpa worked 18 hours a day. And all 8 Simpson kids were glad to have it, and would sometimes even fight over who could have a second bowl of rock soup.

I would propose a compromise wherein I would give the dog my meatloaf, and I would have a bowl of Captain Crunch.

Eventually, dad would arrive at his final offer. “There are two choices for supper tonight: take it, or leave it.”

Check and mate.

Fast forward to now, and students at Princeton are less mature than I was at 3. Thus the young hunger-striking woman who is now being roundly mocked for her dramatic reading – from text on her phone – of her complaint:

“This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving.” [Sweetheart, it’s a HUNGER strike. Are you really complaining about being hungry during your self-imposed hunger strike?!] “We are physically exhausted, I am quite literally shaking right now, as you can see.”

Have you ever seen video of the police interrogating a sociopath after a horrific crime? The sociopath will often pretend to cry, looking down, covering her eyes, asking for a tissue, and using it to wipe away non-existent tears?

This was like that. And you know how I also know that her supposed shaking wasn’t genuine?

Because SHE READ IT OFF A PRE-WRITTEN SCRIPT ON HER PHONE! OH! OHHHHHH! (That’s right, I slipped a little Sam Kinison in on you.)

The only way her bad acting could have been more transparent would be if she were to “pull a Biden,” i.e. inadvertently read her stage directions aloud: “I’m literally shaking, as you can see. Shake now. Pause. Continue reading.”

Next, she actually said these lines: “We are both cold and hot at the same time. We are all immuno-compromised.”

Yes, if by “immuno-compromised” you mean “riddled with STDs and a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder.”

And “hot and cold at the same time?” That’s not a thing. I mean, if you’re kicking heroin cold turkey, you might have alternating chills and fever. But not at the same time. And not because you skipped a few meals.

By the way, did you see those “hunger strikers?” Some of them would tip the scale in the gray area between Whoopi Goldberg and Lizzo, so I don’t think going on a diet of water and (I’m guessing) surreptitiously gobbled protein bars is going to be life-threatening for them.

The moral of the story? When I was three, stomping off to bed without eating meatloaf never forced my parents to bring a big bag of Fritos and a bowl of chocolate ice cream to my room.

And a bunch of crybully Ivy League brats pretending to dab at fake tears with their keffiyehs ($29.99 at Amazon, made in China) and faux-fainting is not going to result in the murder of all the Jews in Israel. Sorry kids.

Hilarious hunger striking aside, the weekend was full of widespread interruptions of graduations. Some ceremonies were cancelled entirely; others were disrupted by stupid chanting and walk-outs. Jerry Seinfeld was the graduation speaker at Duke, and that event was interrupted by a bunch of selfish jerks getting up and chanting and waving a “Palestinian” flag as they marched out.

Because I’m a cautious optimist, I can see two very silver linings on this pro-terrorist cloud:

1. The shenanigans are mostly affecting leftist colleges with leftist administrations in leftist-run towns, which means that the majority of the inconvenience and disruption is being suffered by those who tolerate and even support it. So they can suck it, Trebek.

2. The antics of these morons – wrapping a George Washington statue in terrorist headgear, blocking traffic, burning American flags, violating various vandalism, harassment and trespassing laws – are infuriating to normal people. They’re making more people hate them every day, and they’re creating a widening rift within the Democrat party.

So keep it up, numbskulls! If we can’t have you dispersed, chased and charred by a pack of flamethrower robot dogs – and tragically, we apparently cannot – the second-best outcome is for you to identify yourselves to the rest of us, and build a huge backlash against your political goals.

(By the way, I was hoping to put my new flamethrower in a checked bag for the trip to MA, but my killjoy wife nixed the idea. So if some Hamas-lovers disrupt my daughter’s graduation and are allowed to escape burn-free, she’s going to hear a lot of, “I told you so” next weekend!)

In other news, Hillary Clinton has produced a Broadway play called, “Suffs.” It is nearly three hours long, and tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement a century ago. It also features an “entirely female and non-binary cast,” including a gal who plays President Woodrow Wilson.

And it is bombing.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

The show’s promotional material notes that “Suffs boldly explores the victories and failures of a struggle for equality that’s far from over.”

Um, the suffrage movement was about getting women the right to vote. They won that in 1920, which my abacus tells me is more than a century ago. So no, the “struggle” is not “far from over.”

Judging by the box office, neither is Suffs. In fact, I’d guess that it’s very close to over.

By the way, as I was about to post this column, I saw an update on the Princeton hunger strike, which I swear I am not making up.

The day after the “literally shaking” gal gave her brave speech from the edge of the grave, the original 13 hunger strikers ended their strike. Because they were very hungry. Unexpectedly!

But never fear, because as their nightmarish bout of peckishness ended (just in time!) seven new strikers took up the cause. Or, as their press statement describes it, “In the tradition of rotary hunger strikes, 7 new strikers are indefinitely fasting for a free Palestine.”

Is that not brilliant? A “rotary hunger strike!” It’s like hunger striking, but then when your stomach starts growling, you pass the baton to another Jew hater who is willing to skip brunch.

Only instead of a baton, it’s a footlong sub sandwich. Which you then mow through like a woodchipper, because you haven’t eaten in several hours.

Which gives me an idea. I propose that all of us in CO nation begin a rotary hunger strike, and we keep it up until all of our demands are met. Or at least our first three demands:

1. All student pro-Hamas protestors be arrested and expelled.

2. All non-student pro-Hamas protestors be arrested and deported to Gaza, even if they are American citizens.

3. The $80 billion appropriated to hire more IRS agents be redirected to the manufacture and purchase of a giant army of flamethrower robot dogs, half of which are to be immediately sent to American college campuses, and the other half to the southern border.

If we all sign up to skip just one meal, we can keep this rotary hunger strike going on definitely! Who’s with me?

I’ll go first. I hereby volunteer to skip supper on Meatloaf Mondays.

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 Local Stories: How to Handle Protestors, & Foolish Criminals (posted 5/1/24)

Today I’ve got two quick stories for you, both from my hometown. The first offers a case study in how to respond to law-breaking campus protestors, and the second one fits in two of my regular column categories: “Stupid Criminals” stories, and “You Don’t Hate the Media Enough” stories.

One of the many reasons that it’s great to be a Florida Gator is that our governing officials don’t suffer from CCRIS (Congenital Cranial-Rectal Inversion Syndrome), a condition tragically affecting many university administrations across the country.

(For your generous gift of only $10 per month, our team of dedicated, caring surgeons can give Claudine Gay and other Ivy League college administrators the desperately needed operations to remove their heads from their arses, before it’s too late. Won’t you please think of the children? The gullible, low-IQ, Jew-hating children? Our operators are standing by.)

In recent weeks, as many universities spiraled into paroxysms of pro-Hamas idiocy, UF issued clear guidelines delineating free speech on the one hand, and various forms of unacceptable and illegal a-holery on the other.

Among the latter, they identified “protests inside buildings… blocking egress, camping, building structures,” and they warned that student violators would face “a 3-year trespass and suspension,” and that non-compliant employees “will be trespassed and separated from employment.”

When 9 knuckleheads tested those rules a few days ago, they were all quickly arrested. You can see pictures of them online, and they are exactly what you’d expect. The breakdown: 3 males and 6 females; 5 are UF students; 2 have multiple hair colors not found in nature, and all 9 are absolutely un-“friend”-able, if you get my meaning.

All are charged with multiple misdemeanors, and one – Allen Frasheri – got an additional battery-on-an-officer charge for spitting on a cop. (Rumors that he has been tested for rabies so that the officer doesn’t have to go through a preventative series of painful shots have not been confirmed.) And surprise! He was the president of a student chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America in 2022.

So I’d advise that officer to take the shots, just to be on the safe side.

My favorite part of the info about the protestors is that the UF students are listed as “expecting to graduate” in 2025 or 2026. But given the three-year suspension mentioned above, I wouldn’t count on that now, kiddos!

After the arrests, UF spokesman Steve Orlando put out a statement that should be carved into a stone tablet and placed in front of the statues of the three UF Heisman trophy winners (Spurrier, Wuerffel and Tebow), so that parents who care about the important things in life can bring their children there, and train them well.

The statement began, “This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”

Sweetness and light!

Unlike at USC and many other schools, UF’s graduation is going to go on this Saturday, as scheduled. NOT unexpectedly!

My second local story is very different. It involves the death of four black males between the ages of 14 and 16 in a terrible car crash two days ago.

Most media reports had headlines that varied only slightly from this one: “Four Teenage Boys Dead after High-Speed Chase with Florida Highway Patrol, Who Performed Pit Maneuver to Stop Them.”

Most of the stories concentrated on how young the boys were, and the fact that one was a football star at a local high school, before providing a few details. A cop had initially pulled them over, but then they sped away, reaching speeds of over 100 mph, before a trooper intervened. It’s not clear how fast they were going when he pitted them (i.e. bumped the rear of their car to one side, in order to make it spin out). But the car ran into a cement pole, killing everyone inside.

If I were one to trust MSM crime stories, I would have been intrigued. At first I might think that maybe they were speeding because they were late for Bible Study. (I hate it when you get in there late, and you missed the first prayer and the reading of the Gospel text!) But a few paragraphs in, the story mentioned that the SUV they were in had been reported stolen.

So okay, they weren’t making great choices. But still, I’m sure that at the tender age of 16, these were just dumb kids, out for a harmless joyride.

Because who amongst us hasn’t driven a little too fast, and possibly slid our dad’s 1972 Gran Torino (white with a blue stripe, and that super-cool hood scoop on it) into a ditch off of a gravel road about half a mile north of El Paso, Illinois?

I mean, just speaking hypothetically, and not at all from personal experience.

Anyway, I’m sure these high-spirited rascals were just—

What’s that? Two of the four of them were wearing ankle monitors? And at least some of them were wearing ski masks? In Florida, on a 72-degree night, as one does?

Well, maybe they’ve got one of those really strict youth pastors, who makes you wear an ankle monitor if you’ve showed up late to at least two Bible Study sessions in the past. Those guys can get pretty Old Testament with—

What? Three of the four of them had active warrants? C’mon, man!

What do you have to do to have active warrants and an ankle monitor when you’re 14 or 16 years old?! And if someone in law enforcement is actually monitoring the ankle monitors, did they not find it strange that two of their ankle monitors were flying through east Gainesville at 110 miles per hour?

It’s obviously a tragic story, if only because the kids were so young, and may have had the chance to overcome their CCRIS if they’d survived their stupidity for a little longer.

And even though I’ve never had a warrant – active or otherwise – and never needed an ankle monitor, I do know that a 1972 Torino’s speedometer goes up to 120 mph, and what it feels like to bury the needle on a two-lane Illinois country road.

Nothing but the grace of God can explain why most of us males are still here at all.

And I wish those boys would have had fathers who put the fear of God in them before they ever got to the ankle-monitor and fleeing-in-a-stolen-car stage.

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Win the WH and Senate in November!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annnndddd… they attacked Israel with 320 drones and missiles.

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

Which is… a city in Israel.

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annnnndddddd…

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly! (But in a very good way.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But everyone on the left was blaming covid for everything.

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

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

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

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

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

And I have a dream, today!

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

Can I get an amen?

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

And don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To recap what we’ve learned here today:

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

God hates Jim Clyburn.

Our elected leaders are morons.

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

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really? That thought occurred to you, did it?

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

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

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

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

Whereupon the homeowner shot him.

Unexpectedly!

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

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

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

In the meantime…

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

Was that written about:

A. San Francisco

B. Chicago

C. New York City or

D. Washington D.C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unexpectedly!

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

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

Annnnddddd… Meth Mania, 2021!

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there’s John Fetterman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not $577 million. $567 thousand.

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

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

HA! I kid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNEXPECTEDLY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

A Little Schadenfreude, 3 “Unexpectedly” Stories, DeSantis Whips Disney Again, & Bragging on My Daughter (posted 3/29/24)

After introducing several different categories to write about in recent columns, today I’ve got one schadenfreude story, and three “Unexpectedly” stories.

Today’s Schadenfreude Corner tale arises when two axiomatic lefty principles come into unresolvable conflict.

I remember an example of this from a campus debate years ago: Many cultures (most of them in Africa and the Middle East) practice female genital mutilation (FGM), a bloody ritual of removing part of the female anatomy associated with sexual pleasure. Feminists of all political stripes strongly object.

But multiculturalists – another trendy leftist constituency – reflexively see indigenous and non-Western cultures as superior to Western (Euro-centric, Judeo-Christian, free-market) culture. (American Indians, for example, were environmentalist pacifists living in Eden, until evil white guys showed up and taught them how to fight and scalp, or something.)

So African and Middle Eastern cultures are morally superior to the West. Except when they violate women’s rights by practicing FGM…which is a part of their culture…which is morally unassailable…but evil, if it is misogynist. But who are WE to impose our Western anti-FGM standards on the noble, indigenous…misogynists?

You could see blue hair and nose-rings being blown off of heads all over campus during that debate.

(Conversely, conservatives had a much simpler take on that topic: “What are you, nuts? FGM is barbaric. Stop it immediately.” End of debate.)

Well, progressives in Chicago now have a similar dilemma. Because last month a “trans-woman” was standing on a street corner at 4:30 a.m. – as one does, in a super-safe city like Chicago – when a car pulled up. An armed guy in the car said, “bad gay,” and fired three times, hitting the poor guy twice in the legs and once in the groin.

Sidebar: One way you know that being a trans-woman isn’t a thing is that getting shot in the groin hurts more and in very different way if you’re a “trans-woman” and not an actual woman.

“But Martin, Illinois has very strict laws that stop people from owning and carrying guns, so how could that guy possibly use a gun to shoot the confused dude?” none of you are asking, because you have an IQ much higher than AOC’s. Bless her heart, and her juicy booty. (Her words, not mine.)

Anyway, the lefties in Chicago immediately sprang into action and began making signs condemning transphobia and preparing for mass protests. Until some learned that the shooter had actually said, “bad gay” in Spanish.

Okay, they said. Not great. We were hoping for a white guy. But Hispanics – sorry, Latinx-es – shouldn’t be transphobic either, so we can still condemn him—

Then it turns out that the shooter was a Venezuelan. Here illegally. With criminal ties to drug cartels.

D’oh! Three strikes! What to do?

Anyone who attacks a trans guy is evil…except if he’s a brown newcomer…or undocumented citizen? Or is it now non-papered American? Anyway, no human is illegal!

Except maybe when he points at a guy in a dress and yells, “That’s a MAN, baby!” in Spanish, like a Guatemalan Austin Powers?

We feel your pain, Chicago Democrats. If by “feel your pain” you mean “laugh at your self-inflicted stupidity.”

Now on to a trifecta of “Unexpectedly” stories. (For newcomers to the column, these are tales in which leftist policies are put in place and produce predictably terrible consequences, to the shock of those who pushed those policies.)

First up is a story from the lefty rag The Guardian (UK), about a great labor “victory” in the leftist sanctuary city of Minneapolis. Dissatisfied Uber and Lyft drivers there persuaded the city council to pass a minimum pay ordinance which would force the companies to give them what they called a substantial raise.

When the lefty mayor vetoed the ordinance (which is shocking in and of itself!), the council over-rode the veto. Of course I like to see workers get paid as much as they can earn in a free market, and I trust that market – drivers, customers and ride services – to hash out what a fair wage is, rather than having that dictated by a bunch of bureaucrats.

The Guardian’s headline is hilarious in its cluelessness. The first half reads, “Minneapolis drivers protested wages – and won.” But then, the second half of the headline tells the rest of the story, “Lyft and Uber are choosing to leave the city rather than pay up.”

UNEXPECTEDLY!

“Yay!” say the drivers, “Victory is ours!”

Annnndddd… the drivers are out of work, and more citizens are stranded without rides.

Spoiler alert, people: the real minimum wage – always and everywhere – is zero. And you’ll be earning exactly that!

Speaking of minimum wages and dopes who haven’t learned their lesson, how about that California? Next week a new law goes into effect that raises fast food workers’ pay in Cali from $16 an hour to $20.

Yay! Power to the people! It’s about time that pimply-faced teenagers at McDonalds are able to afford a cliff-top mansion next to Babs Streisand in Santa Barbara!

Annnnndddd…

Well, you know. McDonalds and Chipotle have already said menu price hikes are coming. Pollo Loco will be automating salsa-making, and Jack in the Box is testing fryer robots. Pizza Hut is laying off all in-house delivery drivers, and a smaller chain is cutting 73 driver positions by mid-April.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Thousands of fast-food workers who were starving at $16 an hour will now be thriving at $0 an hour. Congratulations everybody! Well done, Gavin!

Meanwhile, 6600 households in New York City – which should be known as “California East” or “Minneapolis South” – were recently polled about how satisfied they are with the way things have been going in their city.

Since 76% of them voted for Biden in 2020 and 66% of them voted for Eric Adams for mayor in 2021, and they have voted heavily for the one-party Democrat control that they now have, they all reported that everything is both hunky dory and tickety-boo in the Big Apple. The end.

HA! I kid, because I love.

Actually, a sizable majority of New Yorkers have recognized that their city has gone to shite in ways various and sundry, and half of them say they are planning to leave.

The numbers are grim. “Only 37 percent are happy with the level of public safety in their neighborhood, and only 34 percent are satisfied with their neighborhood’s cleanliness.” When asked to rate the quality of life in NYC overall, only 29.8% said “excellent” or “good.”

And that’s down from 51.2% in 2017!

Breitbart sums it up well: “The same Democrats complaining about this voted for this. They voted to end stop-and-frisk. They voted for politicians who declared New York a sanctuary for illegal aliens. They voted to release violent criminals. And now they are all, ‘Oh no, our city sucks. How could this have happened?’”

We can tell them how…

UNEXPECTEDLY!

And now, for a quick little “celebration of excellence” from right here at home…

Ron DeSantis just whipped the Mau’s House again! Disney finally gave up their big, year-long lawsuit, with the only condition being that Florida drops their counter-suit.

Which is the equivalent of a trash-talking boxer preening and mouthing off before a fight, and then, five rounds later, begging the other fighter, “Please stop hitting me. No mas. Let me crawl around the canvas and try to find my mouthpiece, which I’m hoping has at least some of my teeth in it!”

The DeSantis team took a victory lap online, re-posting some of the MSM headlines from when Disney first filed their self-humiliating lawsuit, which came after DeSantis challenged their last-minute, dirty-trick appointment of an all-new board to the Reedy Creek Development District.

At the time, lefty outlets crowed, “RDS’ Board Rages Against Disney after Legal Humiliation!” and “Out-negotiated by Mickey Mouse: How Disney just Beat Ron DeSantis!”

And now, after having their first “free-speech” lawsuit against RDS tossed in January, they’ve lost the final round to him.

Man I hope we can someday have that guy as our president!

One final note: we’ve enjoyed having our youngest – or as I like to call her, my tech support – at home with us during her spring break this week. She was able to fix a problem I’ve had with my website.

Regular readers know that whenever I post a new column on the CO site, I post my previous one on my page (Martinsimpsonwriting.com). I’ve also recorded a couple of videos of my rambling on various topics, but I’ve had to house them on Youtube. My last one – titled “CS Lewis & William F. Buckley on our Current Election” – had a glitch that kept people from seeing it.

My daughter spent two minutes doing some kind of sorcery over the keyboard, and my three videos can now all be found on my site, under “Videos” on the main page, and I’ll be recording and posting another one shortly. If you’re interested, and don’t mind watching a guy with a face made for radio, please check them out.

Also, if I wasn’t so proud of her I wouldn’t mention this, but my youngest just accepted a 10-week, paid research fellowship in astro-physics this summer at UC-Boulder. If that’s a good experience, she wants to apply to start a PhD there next fall. Which would mean that both of my daughters would be living within about 40 miles of each other, in a gorgeous place that we love to visit!

I know. I’m a simple hillbilly English major, and all I know about planets is that Men are from mars, women are from Venus, and all other made-up genders are pulled from Uranus. (Dad joke!) And my daughter is double-majoring in astro-physics and planetary science!

Honestly, I sometimes feel like I’m being pranked. I’ve got a smoke-show wife with a heart of gold, two amazing daughters, a paragon of canine excellence in Cassie the Wonder Dog, and the amazing CO nation to rant to instead of paying for therapy!

And Easter is coming!

Have a great weekend everybody, and don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!