travel – Martin Simpson

The Tragi-Comic NYC Mayoral Race (posted 7/1/25)

Well thank God that’s over!

I’m referring to the least in-your-face Pride Month (or as I call it, “Haughty Spirit” month) in years. (“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”) In every other way, this June was one for the record books. Which is why I now continue what will be at least a four-column week.

In today’s edition of celebrating the Left’s self-be-clowning, I’m going to focus on last week’s NYC Democrat primary, which promises to be a boon to the GOP and one more self-inflicted Biblical plague on New York City.

And one that, just like in the original, is going to result in a Jewish exodus, with Mamdani playing the role of Temu Pharoah. And this time, nobody has to wait around, pleading, “Let my people go.” Because the Hebrews now have access to U-Haul, and unlike the Red Sea, I-95 South is wide open, baby!

(They said, “Hey Martin, bet you can’t work in half a dozen Old Testament references in the first three paragraphs.” And I said, “Hold my King James and watch this.”)

If I can be serious before mocking the hell out of the idiotic voters in NYC – and I know that the 90% gives the other 10% a bad name – this really is a sad story. Truly. A great nation should have great cities, and NYC used to be one of the greatest cities in the world. It’s tragic to see what has already happened to it, before we even get to what’s going to happen to it soon.

I know that some of my fellow conservatives say, “Don’t worry about it. Let NYC become a warning to the country and the world of what can happen when you elect terrible socialists to positions of power. It will provide a valuable FAFO lesson.”

That’s true. But it’s not like we need ANOTHER warning, or more FAFO lessons! We’ve got Chicago (RIP). And LA. And San Francisco. And Baltimore, and Detroit, and New Orleans. And the nations of Venezuela, and Cuba, and old East Germany, and current Haiti, and…

Ugh. As grateful as I am to not be living in a big blue city, watching Dem voters choose their own self-degradation makes me feel the same kind of pity and frustrated anger I get when I see a junkie – ravaged, scarred and dope-sick – shooting up one more time.

Then I remember that many of those voters would force that hellish descent on the rest of us if they had a chance, and I say – with another famous New Yorker, Jerry Seinfeld – “Yikes. Good luck with all that.”

And it’s not like New York City or state were doing great in recent years anyway. It’s been a one-party Democrat town for what seems like forever – with the brief interregnum of the Giuliani and Bloomberg years – and the old lions of the party were content to turn into hyenas, scavenging off the accomplishments left to them by previous generations, while letting the place slowly go to pot. Literally, lately.

(We Midwesterners call this process “eating your seed corn.”)

Many observers say that part of the reason so many lefties were open to a new, younger, fresh face is due to the dysfunctional hash the establishment Dems made of things. Hochul, and Cuomo before her, and David Patterson before him didn’t exactly blaze a trail of good governance. And the less said about DuhBlasio, the better.

But you’d think that there would have to be some quasi-competent Dems in New York who saw Mamdani coming, right? And yet the best candidate they could muster was Andrew “Grandma-killing Butt-grabber” Cuomo? Really?

If they needed an old-school name that dead-end Democrats would vote for just out of familiarity – e.g. Drunk Uncle Ted Kennedy, the second runner-up Kennedy after the first two were out of play – why not pick Chris Cuomo?

Sure, he’s not smart, despite how he tells it: “I can handle things, I’m smaht. Not like everybody says, not dumb. I’m smaht, and I want respect.”

(If you don’t get the Godfather reference, you’re dead to me. Dead!)

So yeah, Chris would be nobody’s first choice. Even Mario tapped Andy over the Block Head.

(Chris: Just because I’m younger, I shouldn’t have been stepped over.

Andrew: That’s the way pop wanted it.

Chris (yelling, while slumped in his armchair): Well that’s not how I wanted it!”)

(They said, “Hey Martin, bet you can’t follow an Old Testament main course with a Godfather-reference chaser.” And I said, “Hold my gun AND the cannoli, and watch this.”)

Anyway, since Chris got canned by the Tattaglias—sorry, I mean CNN – he’s got nothing else to do. He’s tanned, rested and ready, and at least he can brag that he never killed a bunch of senior citizens by tossing some contagious covid patients into their nursing home like a bunch of wrinkly biological weapons and bolting the door behind them.

But no. The Dems went with Raggedy Andy, despite the sexual harassment claims that allegedly did him in. Though I think we all know that that was more of a “straw that broke the horndog’s back” kind of thing.

Because this is the Democrat party we’re talking about. If you could go to the congressional offices of any 10 randomly chosen male Dem officeholders and dust the rumps of their 20-something secretaries for prints, you’d come up with 8 positives for groping.

And that’s only if your 10 chosen Democrats included Mayor Pete and Spartacus.

Okay, I’ve got to interrupt myself to say that I believe that God is just feeding stuff straight into my brain. Because I just free-styled the last 8 paragraphs or so, and that Buttigieg and Booker reference even caught me by surprise. And I know that it’s immodest to admit it, but I just laughed at my own joke.

In fact, when I’m done with this column, I’m going to pour a second glass of Knob Creek 9, clink the two glasses together, and congratulate myself. Because it’s the middle of the night, and my wife is sleeping, and she would be furious if I woke her up right now to read her this column.

Not that Cassie the Wonder Dog is not smiling at me as I look at her right now. But that’s because she’s one of God’s greatest creatures, not because she appreciates my skewering of hypocritical Democrat politicians as they dictate self-righteous “we’re shocked by Trump’s sexism” press releases while chasing their secretaries around the desk like so many Benny Hills with plum committee assignments.

Ooh, I just thought of one more thing: I can’t wait to see what AI-generated graphic CO comes up with to accompany this column! Keep it PG-13, CO!

Where was I?

Oh yeah. To quote some wit on the internet, “Defeated Cuomo left groping for answers.”

So that brings us to Zohran Mamdani…

…and that’s where I’m going to leave it for today, because I’m over 1100 words in, and this bourbon isn’t going to sip itself. Also, I’ve got over a thousand words drafted about Mamdani already, so I won’t test your patience with a 2000+ word column now.

So think of this as a tease, or a cliffhanger, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

In the meantime…

Hamas, Hezbollah and Mamdani delenda est!

The Cousins’ Trip, Part 1 – Shenandoah, Harper’s Ferry, Antietam, Gettysburg (posted 5/26/25)

After 10 days of traveling, I’m glad to be back home. I had intended to write a few columns during this cousins’ trip as I had in the past, but I was only able to take some notes along the way. So this column is about the first part of our trip, which fits the occasion of Memorial Day, and I’ll post a column tomorrow about the rest of the trip.

I was glad to be able to visit with my mom, sister and brother-in-law in Tennessee at the beginning and end of the cousins’ trip. Mom is hanging in there, and my sister is doing a great job of watching over her. Mom’s spirits are still good, and the whole family has gotten some much appreciated help from a woman who has been coming in to help two days a week.

I was also able to spend a day in Illinois having meals and visits with an aunt and uncle, as well as a few cousins who weren’t going to be traveling with the three of us.

Our trip this time was for five days, and the weather forecast changed our plans a bit. We had three sunny, cool days to start, and two rainy days at the end, so we opted to take my cousin’s relatively new Ford Explorer, rather than the ’76 Caddy convertible that we’d taken on our previous trips.

Regular readers may remember that that beautiful old car is less than completely water-proof, and its wipers less than efficient. Shakespeare was right when he said that “Conscience makes cowards of us all.” But if he were taking a long road trip in the rain in May of 2025, he might have had a few things to say about comfort and convenience, as well as conscience.

Anyway, we looked at the forecast, and then at the Caddy, and then at the forecast again. And then “our native hue of resolution was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” So the Explorer it was.

The rain also changed the order of our trip. We’d originally planned to head east first, and then south to the Shenandoah National Park and Harper’s Ferry area. But the promise of some sunny days for our outdoor activities meant that we headed southeast and drove longer than planned on our first day.

Fittingly for this trip shortly before Memorial Day, we went to four battlefields. Tippecanoe (in Indiana) was first, the site of a much smaller battle in a war with Indians associated with Tecumseh. Though that battle was much more important to Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher), the three Civil War sites to follow dwarfed it, in scale and casualties.

We made it down to Clarksburg, WV late that night, and the next morning we visited the Shenandoah National Park, which was as beautiful as advertised. From there we made our way to Staunton, VA, a small town surrounded by wooded hills that punches above its weight, with a charming downtown and blocks of well-preserved old buildings. After lunch we went to the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. That’s a modest place with pretty grounds, and a garage exhibit featuring a sweet Pierce-Arrow limousine billed as “The Chariot of the President.”

We didn’t tour the museum and house, partly because of time, but mostly because Wilson was a racist leftist president whose bossy wife was the defacto president when he was debilitated during his last year in office.

And I’ve already had my fill of that, and don’t want to support it any more!

That evening we made it to Harper’s Ferry, which made a strong, if strange impression on me. The site is lovely, with the old town occupying three or floor blocks along a hillside where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet. There is a train station on the low ground closest to the Potomac, and a few inns and restaurants, but most of the old town is a national historic park, and basically shuts down at night.

Of course the town is best known for John Brown’s famous raid in 1859. Meant to start a slave rebellion, the raid failed, and most of the raiders were killed during the skirmish or executed afterwards. Because of its proximity to DC and strategic location on two rivers and a major railroad line, the town was fought over throughout the Civil War.

We stayed in an 1840 inn, and took the opportunity to wander around the town and watch the last commuter train of the day arrive from DC, before we ate a late supper. The next morning we were up early, before many people were out, and walked the mostly empty streets. The morning air was cool and refreshing, and smelled like honeysuckle. We made our way up to Jefferson Rock, an outcropping on which the great man sat in October of 1783, and pronounced the view one of the most beautiful he’d ever seen.

After coffee and breakfast, we crossed a pedestrian walkway attached to a railroad bridge over the Potomac, and climbed on a forested path, up a steep hillside to where a battery of guns had been stationed during the war. As we climbed, we were treated to intermittent views out over the valley and the town below, which confirmed Jefferson’s opinion of the scenery. The timber was full of birds, and the honeysuckle scent was even stronger there. On our way back downhill we began to see more people, but that morning felt like a tranquil break from normal life.

On the other hand, I kept thinking about something that was never far from my mind as we visited two more battlefields over the next 24 hours: What must it have been like to fight the battles that happened in those places? After a half hour of walking on a cleared, wide pathway up to where the gun emplacement had been, I couldn’t imagine hauling cannon up that hill, when there was no path and tons of obstacles, and only manpower and horsepower to accomplish the feat.

From Harper’s Ferry we drove the 18 miles or so to Antietam, site of the bloodiest one-day battle of the war. The visitor’s center had some interesting exhibits, and we watched a film recounting the course of the battle, before walking the nearest portion of the battlefield, and then taking a guided driving tour around a series of spots that followed the various stages of the battle.

I’d read a lot about the Civil War years ago, and watched Ken Burns’ excellent 10-part documentary on the war, so most of the key positions were familiar to me: Burnside’s bridge over Antietam creek, the Dunker Church, the Cornfield, etc. But it’s a different thing to see the actual site, with the monuments identifying which units were at which spots, and the gently rolling land on which so many men died.

I remembered reading about the Sunken Road (soon to be known as Bloody Lane) from which confederates were first able to ambush federal troops who marched right up to it without knowing it was there. But even as we drove into the small parking lot that the audio tour identified as the Sunken Road, we still didn’t see it until we’d left the car and were right on top of it. And then we could instantly understand how it turned into a death trap, once the union troops knew it was there, and could fire down into it.

The beauty and peacefulness of the day when we visited Antietam contrasted with the horrific battle that had taken place there.

But that was not the case when we arrived at Gettysburg, in a cold rain, the next morning.

The museum there was excellent, with many exhibits of weapons and uniforms, and a moving film that proved an old adage: you can’t go wrong with Morgan Freeman narrating. After watching the film, we went upstairs into the Gettysburg Cyclorama, a large round room, with a raised, rounded platform in the middle, surrounded by a gigantic, 360-degree oil painting of the battle. Between the platform and the walls, there is a hillside – complete with artifacts (cannon, wagons, rifles) and vegetation – that slopes away from the platform, and blends into the painting beyond.

After that we went out into a chilly, foggy rain, and took another driving and audio tour of the large battlefield. The low skies and grim weather seemed to perfectly match the somber events of the three-day battle, and once again I was surrounded by famous places I’d read about since childhood: Little Round Top, the Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, Cemetery Hill.

Overall, Harper’s Ferry was too quaint and the landscape too charming to feel like a battlefield to me, and Antietam was too bucolic and the day too pretty. But experiencing Gettysburg under slate-gray skies and a cold rain was appropriately somber, and felt fitting, considering the bloody struggle that unfolded over three terrible days there.

On this Memorial Day, I’m in a Gettysburg state of mind, and I feel the kind of gratitude that it took the pen of Lincoln to express, when he wrote about our military men who “gave the last full measure of devotion” in the service of our country.

God bless them, and their memory.

Hamas delenda est!

Tesla Vandalizers Are Exactly Who You’d Expect Them to Be (posted 3/21/25)

Yesterday was the two-month anniversary of Trump’s swearing in. Can you believe it? Only two months! I’ve got column ideas piling up like productive citizens caught in a traffic jam fleeing New York, California or Illinois, and I don’t know how I’ll get to most of them.

Columns about crime. Columns about schadenfreude. Columns on evergreen political topics, leavened with a dusting of humorous observations about Liz Warren being whiter than Edgar Winter singing A Whiter Shade of Pale in an igloo during the winter solstice.

#wemustneverstopmockingher

But I can no sooner get a few sentences out before something funnier or more satisfying happens. I’m just trying to keep my head above water over here!

Joy Reid gets fired, but before I can make a joke about her sitting on the street with a cardboard sign saying, “Will hate whitey for food,” some MSNBC host is asking why Trump has been in office for 12 minutes and egg prices are still so high?

I start brainstorming some sort of a “you didn’t mind a president whose brains were scrambled, but…” thing that’s not working, before Bret Baier notes that egg prices just dropped 10%.

HA! How ironic that—What’s that? Margaret Brennan just said that the Nazis only took power in Germany because they loved free speech so much?

Okay wait, I’ve got something for that. Yes, the Nazis were world-renowned for their passion for the free exchange of ideas. “Ein volk, ein reich, ein free-wheeling debate,” that was their–

Annddd…egg prices are down 25%.

And Tampon Tim Walz was just celebrating that Tesla stock is way down…until someone pointed out that Minnesota government workers’ pensions have a bunch of Tesla stock in them. D’oh!

I give up. It’s too much winning. I’ve got to start somewhere, so I’m sticking with Tesla for this one.

You’ve probably heard about all of the leftists who are very angry with Elon now. They don’t like his fetish for free speech at Twitter/X; they don’t like his exposing and cutting leftist waste and corruption in government; they don’t like him rescuing astronauts, for some reason.

So they’re taking to various public fora (“archaic Latin plurals for 500, Alex”) with logically coherent, rhetorically persuasive critiques to change public perception through rigorous, democratic debate.

HA! I kid.

Actually, they’re threatening Tesla drivers, vandalizing dealerships and setting charging stations and cars on fire.

A few of these criminal masterminds have already been caught, and you’ll never guess what they’re like. If by “you’ll never guess” I mean “you absolutely know.”

Which I do.

Consider Contestant #1, Justin Thomas Nelson, who allegedly vandalized and threw Molotov cocktails at a Colorado Tesla dealership several times, before getting arrested on a return trip there several weeks ago.

In keeping with my policy of giving you trigger warnings before you look these people up – remember “the bowling ball with eyes” illegal immigrant from Wednesday’s column? – I’ll paint you a picture, and you can proceed at your own risk.

Justin looks like what would happen if Penn (from Penn and Teller) and Herman Munster somehow had a baby, and that baby grew up and got breast implants.

You heard me. Justin has got a Stage-4 case of gender dysmorphia, and I don’t think he’s been taking his meds. He goes by the name “Lucy Grace Nelson,” and one look at his picture will bring out the Ricky Ricardo in you. (“Luuuccy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!”) (“Timely comic references from 1952 for 100, Alex.”)

Nelson was listed on “her” driver’s license as “female,” which doesn’t fill one with confidence in the DMV. I’m guessing that if I moved to Colorado and listed my gender as “marmoset,” some beaten-down Loveland cop would listlessly play along the next time I got caught speeding.

“I see here that you’re a 6-foot-tall marmoset with green eyes and brown hair. You still live on 5^th Avenue?”

Anyway, Nelson’s booking sheet also lists him as female. Because of course it does. Aggravatingly, even the nominally conservative NY Post uses female pronouns to refer to Nelson in its story, and many media stories never mention that this “woman” ain’t one.

At least Nelson’s dad – Claiborne “Jerry” Nelson – seems to understand that he’s got a son.

By the way, I’m not sure that Claiborne understands how nicknames work. I get calling a Joseph “Joe,” or a Thomas “Tommy,” or even a Martin “Martacus.” But how do you get “Jerry” out of “Claiborne?”

Though in his defense, it’s a lot shorter jump from “Claiborne” to “Jerry” than from “Justin” to freaking “Lucy!”

Where was I? Oh yeah.

Claiborne/Jerry describes Justin/Lucy in what I think may be the first-ever instance of a “5-implied- unexpectedly” paragraph. To wit:

“He changed his name to Lucy a few years ago. [unexpectedly] He’s in his early 40s, but has been living with this mother who has been taking care of him. [unexpectedly] He has emotional problems [unexpectedly] He hasn’t been able to keep a job. [unexpectedly!] Our entire family support[s] the Democrat party. [UNEXPECTEDLY!]”

There are pics in Justin’s social media labeled “baby gets her first bra” and “baby gets her first dress,” and you don’t want to see them. But spoiler alert: they will NOT remind you of Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing.

Because sometimes somebody DOES need to put baby in the corner.

…of a room with bars on the door and windows.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Contestant #2 – Daniel Clarke-Pounder, 24 – also had the brilliant idea to attack a Tesla dealership with Molotov cocktails. Ironically, he apparently throws more like a girl than Justin/Lucy does, or else he is easily fatigued. Because he managed to set himself on fire with his fifth Molotov cocktail.

Sadly, all he lost was a burned shirt, and what little dignity he had.

While his mug shot doesn’t have the “She’s a MAN, baby!” shock value of the Justin/Lucy pic, he does give off a bit of a Buddy Repperton vibe. (“I’ll take 1980s Stephen King movie references for $200, Alex.”)

Unfortunately for him, he looks a little softer in his social media photos. He’s facing charges that could result in 20 years in prison, and if those old “Scared Straight” shows are accurate, Daniel might find that “Clarke-Pounder” is not only his last name, but his new cell-mate’s eventual nickname.

Can you imagine how it must feel to be a Democrat today? Their political leaders are Ken-Doll Newsom, Jasmine “Fake-Lashes” Crockett, and Juicy Booty. Their men are women, and their women are crazy. They were just swept in the swing states, DOGE is derailing their gravy train, their bag of dirty tricks is as old and ineffective as Imhotep Pelosi, and their approval ratings are in the toilet.

And it’s only been TWO MONTHS!

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!

A New Category for my Columns: Jerk of the Month (posted 3/20/24)

First, let me thank everyone for the congratulations on our anniversary; you all are too kind.

As I mentioned on Monday, I’ve got a new category that will be featured in many future columns. I’m calling it “Jerk of the Month.”

I was going to call it “Jackass of the Month,” but upon reflection, the jackass is a useful animal, and one that has been put through enough degradation already, having been hijacked by Democrats as their party mascot.

I pictured some poor jackass in a barnyard, being harassed by the other animals:

Cow: Hey Jerry, is it true that Anthony Weiner, AOC and Adam Schiff are all your guys?

Jerry (the jackass, shaking his head wearily): I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not one of them. They just picked me as their mascot.

Pig (oink-chuckling): Sure they did.

Jerry (to the pig): Hey Randy, aren’t Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg two of yours?

Pig (looking offended): That’s just mean!

Jerry: Meaner than associating me with Imhotep Pelosi, or Adam Schiff?

Clydesdale horse: Take it easy, Jerry.

Jerry: And what about you? Hillary Clinton is one of yours, right?

Clydesdale: Whoa, whoa. Just because she’s got our ankles doesn’t make her a Clydesdale!

Jerry (to a nearby chicken): What are you looking at, General Tso? Eric Swalwell is one of yours!

Chicken: Fang Fang is one of mine. We’ve got nothing to do with Swalwell. That guy smells worse than Randy.

Pig: Hey!

Jerry: See how that feels? (noticing a white Jeep Cherokee parked in front of the barn) And what about you? Would you like it if I insinuated that you’re related to Elizabeth Warren?

Jeep Cherokee: That’s not funny! You can see that I’m white, Jerry.

Jerry (narrowing his eyes): Exactly. #wemustneverstopmockingher

And, scene.

Where was I?

Oh yes. My first nominee for Jerk of the Month is a Palestinian Canadian – I picture a guy screaming, “Death to the infidel, eh?” – named Ahmed Kouta.

He got a nursing degree in Gaza, and he made his latest trip there from Canada not long before the Hamas attack on Israel; now he’s apparently stuck there. He’s got around 250K followers on Instagram, where he calls himself “Prince Kouta.”

He’s not a strong candidate for Jerk of the Month because he calls himself a prince – though if there were a competition for “douche of the month,” calling yourself “prince” would likely get you on the medal stand – but because of a video he put out on March 17^th. While the video is only 2 minutes long, it contains a weapons-grade blend of arrogance, bad faith and whining.

Elsewhere in his social media Ahmed has been wailing about how the innocent, sainted “Palestinians” are starving to death, all because of the evil Jooooosss.

But this video is basically an unboxing video of a MRE – “meal ready to eat” – that the USA has been air dropping for the citizens of Gaza. He shows his audience the contents of the MRE, one at a time.

“Martin, does he get excited, and express his thanks to the American people for giving his people this life-sustaining aid?” you are not asking, because you know that he wouldn’t be a candidate for jerk of the month if he did that.

He starts by saying that the MREs have been airdropped to Gazans courtesy of the American defense department. “This is the airdrop they drop on us… and then all the airstrikes that they also hit us with.”

Already I wish the MRE had hit him on the head.

He pulls out one packet and shows it to the camera; it’s crackers. Then a packet of applesauce. Then gum. Then something that he looks at, and tosses aside, saying, “I don’t know. We don’t see this here.” (That bag was actually a heater; the user adds water, which creates a chemical reaction to produce heat.) Next is an energy bar, and “French vanilla,” (?) then cashews, then peanut butter.

Then the video cuts to a little later, after he’s opened and tried each of the packets in the MRE. And he says, “Overall, it’s one of the worst meals I’ve ever had. I literally ate a piece of everything, because… imagine I’m fasting all day, hungry, haven’t eaten anything, and then I came to eat this… nothing. Only the peanut butter tastes like our Canadian peanut butter.”

“Everything else? This whole meal is like a 2 out of 10. Not even a 1 out of 10, actually. This is torturing us more than it’s being ate.”

My first thought was that someone should treat him to a little waterboarding, followed by hooking up part of his anatomy to a car battery, followed by playing Dylan Mulvaney’s music video for him on a loop. (Don’t look it up, CO nation!)

And then he could be asked to complete a survey asking him to rate those tortures, as compared to the “torture” of being given free food.

Ugh. MREs are routinely given to our soldiers in the field. (By the way, the life of any one of them is worth more than the collective lives of every malicious anti-Semite in your entire social network, Princess!) They are designed to not spoil or rot, and to provide life-sustaining nutrition in challenging environments.

I’ll grant that a MRE doesn’t sound like a gourmet meal to me, and I probably wouldn’t choose to eat it, if I had a lot of other options.

On the other hand, I do have a lot of other options. Because I’m not a hateful little b*tch who supported a bunch of terrorist scum who gang-raped and slaughtered a lot of defenseless civilians, bringing down a righteous drum of karmic whup-ass on me and my vile co-religionists, which means that I’ll never have to rely on my innocent victims to feed my sorry, unrepentant arse.

So I’ve got that going for me.

As one commenter on the video said, “If you’re rating humanitarian aid on a scale of 1 to 10, you don’t need humanitarian aid.”

Yep.

Another commenter pointed out that Kouta only showed the snacks that come with the MRE that he held up; the main course was “vegetable crumbles with pasta in taco style sauce.”

Which means that in addition to being an obnoxious ingrate, Kouta is also either a liar, or else someone stole the main course out of his MRE before it got to him. Now who could have done that, I wonder?

Well, Kouta accidentally gave us a clue in the middle of his moan-fest. When he first displayed the MRE, he said, “It comes for free, but in the end we still have to buy it.”

That’s right. The American taxpayers provide you with free food, and then the noble jihadis in Hamas steal that food, and extort you into paying them for it. But the Americans and the Jews are the bad guys?

Got it.

On behalf of the American people, I apologize, Ahmed. We’re going to get our best chefs right on the task of providing you with the kind of delicacies that your sophisticated palate demands.

In the meantime, might I suggest that there is an alternative source of protein in Gaza for you right now? We call it “terrorist crumbles with diced shrapnel in taco style sauce.” Don’t think of it as cannibalizing the corpses of Hamas fighters, think of it as “consuming a Canadian-peanut-butter-esque substance.”

And if some of the servings you can scrounge might have gone bad after a little too much time in the sun, don’t worry, because the IDF is preparing some more for you right now.

Bon appetit, Ahmed, and congratulations on your nomination for Jerk of the Month!

Hamas delenda est!

I’m Sick, so Here’s a Throwback Column! (posted 12/27/23)

I hope you all had a great Christmas! I had a great trip to Denver, but then my whole family got covid for Christmas! The wife and daughter got it first, and it caught up to me on Christmas eve. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t in church on Christmas eve.

So since I’m not yet back on my feet and capable of providing you the top-shelf snarkery to which you’ve become accustomed, I thought I’d declare this to be “Throw-Back Wednesday,” and re-post two stories I enjoyed writing about last January:

From 1/27/23:

In my recurring “Find A Mirror!” series, this week’s entry comes to us via a would-be Olympic athlete named Sha’Carri Richardson. Her trouble is totally unrelated to the silly apostrophe in her name, even though it does violate one of the well-known rules found in wisdom literature the world over.

(Don’t get into a land war in Asia. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Don’t invest with a leftist weirdo like Sam Bankman-Fried. Never use an apostrophe in your first name. Etc.)

The last time we saw Sha’Carri, she was getting tossed off the US Olympic team for smoking weed shortly before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Rather than, you know, preparing for the Olympics WITHOUT smoking weed. Which sounds just crazy enough to work!

Full disclosure: I can’t say that I ever saw her in any Olympic stories or coverage, because football is not in the Olympics, while many goofy sports are.

(Although there is that one cool sport where people ski around with rifles on their backs, and then stop and shoot things, and then ski some more. Ever since the Finns cleaned up in that event in the 1930s, and then punched above their weight against the Russians in the Winter War, I’ve got a soft spot for that event.)

(Okay, I just looked it up, and it’s called the “biathlon.” Which is what I’ve been mistakenly calling Bruce Jenner for the last several years. Boy, is my face red!)

Where was I? Oh yeah.

If you search Richardson’s name online you’ll find a lot of pictures of her during various races and workouts (between bouts of weed smoking, presumably), and you may notice that her hair was often either orange or yellow.

I only mention this because I am deeply offended by cultural appropriation, and unless there is a Skaarsgard or Hrothgarsdottir in her family tree, she should be ashamed of herself. (Yes, I’ll say it: she’s the Lizzie Warren of pot-smoking, non-Scandinavian sprinters.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But Richardson’s latest problem has nothing to do with her vestigial apostrophe, or her racially offensive hair color. It all stems from her advanced case of NUSS (Narcissistic Un-self-aware Snowflake Syndrome), which went from dormant to active on an American Airlines flight on Saturday.

I know what you’re thinking, and let me stop you right there: Obviously, I normally wouldn’t be able to diagnose a stage-four NUSS case without spending some in-person clinical time with the patient.

But in this case, Richardson recorded herself throughout the incident, in the delusional belief that she was 100% correct, and that everyone who viewed her video would naturally side with her. (That belief is actually one of the 7 recognized symptoms of NUSS that you’ll find in the DSM 5. You can look it up.)

Anyway, our video opens with Richardson making a selfie video on the plane, as the recorded message saying,“turn off personal electronics” is playing. (Classic NUSS-ster move!) A passing male flight attendant reminds her to turn off her phone in preparation for take-off, and she immediately NUSSes out on him: “I’m recording me, but you jumped in my video, so I caught you because you jumped in my video. You’re harassing me at this point, so I think you should stop.”

Over the next ten minutes she escalates, getting louder and more profane as other passengers make it clear that they don’t agree that she’s the fixed point around which the entire solar system revolves.

She also gestures dramatically with her boxcutter-length fake fingernails (NUSS Symptom 4), and compulsively flutters her small-badger-sized false eyelashes (Symptom 5).

When the captain finally gets involved and orders her off the flight, her first question is, “Is [the flight attendant] going to be removed off the plane as well?” Then she asks if the captain can come to her seat so that she can make him “understand the situation.” (Symptom 2) She also insists that the flight attendant is at fault because he “invaded [her] privacy” by intruding on her video. (Symptom 3)

Also, she informs one of her fellow passengers that, “I’m still a superstar, and you’re a regular person.” (Symptom 1: NUSS Symptom Bingo!)

As she finally leaves the plane, many passengers applaud.

Now generally, receiving applause creates one of life’s most enjoyable moments.

For example, during my career as a professor, I would often receive rounds of applause, and not just because my funny and thought-provoking lectures weren’t forcing anyone to miss a connecting flight to Dallas. And even when my students would hoist me on their shoulders and carry me out of the classroom chanting, “Simp-son, Simp-son!” they weren’t applauding the fact that I was leaving the building.

Sure, maybe those tales are slightly exaggerated, or maybe in some cases – technically speaking – “imaginary.”

And maybe some of the polite applause I often received had something to do with the fact that I had total power over my students’ grades, so they were like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

(And that’s how you score in the category of “Puritan Sermon References” on Jeopardy, people.)

Still, it is a major red flag when you meet several hundred people for the first time, and 11 minutes later they are cheering as you are forcibly driven from among them.

Therefore, Sha’Carri Richardson, you need to…

Find a Mirror!

From 1/23/23

The British Museum has tragically succumbed to advanced wokeness, having recently decided to stop using the word “mummy.” To spare the feelings of easily triggered 3000-year-old cadavers, I guess?

“So what do I call a mummy?” you’re not asking, because you’ve got a life to lead and you’re not an imbecile.

The proper term now is either “mummified person” or “mummified remains.”

Ugh. Are we going to going to have to discuss mummy pronouns next?

Even the National Museum of Scotland has joined in the insanity. One of their spokeswomen said that they either use a mummy’s individual name (if known), or else “mummified, man, woman, boy, girl or person.”

Which opens a whole ‘nother can of worms. (Sorry: a whole ‘nother can of “soft-bodied invertebrates belonging to the phylum Annelida.”) (See? You learned something here today, didn’t you?) (Also, when you read “soft-bodied invertebrates,” how many of you instinctively thought of Jerry Nadler?)

Anyway, all phyla aside (Boom! Irregular Latin plurals for $1000!), why don’t the insensitive clods in Scottish and British museums consider that saying “mummified man or woman” could be mis-gendering them?

And you cannot say, “I judged based on the mummified phallus on that mummy.” Because if academics have taught us anything lately – and the jury may still be out on that – it’s that women can have phalluses too. (Yes, I could have also said “phalli.” Don’t get pedantic with me when I’m on a roll.)

Now where was I? Oh yeah.

When you read “mummified phallus,” how many of you instinctively thought of either Bill Clinton, Dick “nobody calls him ‘Richard’” Durbin, or Richard “everyone secretly calls him ‘Dick’” Blumenthal?

Okay, this first item has gone totally off the rails.

But only because extending the woke lunacy to the point of trying to protect the feelings of people who have been dead since before Bernie Sanders got out of middle school is so ridiculous.

Even if you accepted the premise, though, here is a short list of things that mummies would be more worried about – if they could worry about anything – than being called “mummies”:

a. Being associated in any way with Imhotep Pelosi.

b. Whether these burial wrappings make their butts look too big.

c. Having had their brains scrambled and removed with iron hooks, leaving them with the cognitive function of AOC.

In related news, I will be calling a press conference tomorrow announcing that we should no longer call dullard politicians, “idiots.” Instead, I decree the favored alternatives to be either, “Idiotic Person,” or “Person Stricken with Idiocy.”

Or, in the case of Joe Biden, “Idiotic Remains.”

Okay, I’ll be back on my feet and writing new stuff again shortly. But in the meantime, don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!