In The Mailbox: 07.06.23

Posted on | July 6, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.06.23

I have three subscriptions to Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom Reborn Substack thingy to give away. First three members of the commentariat who ask for one get them.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Barbenheimer. It’s real.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Copium – A Rare Drug Used By Hollywood To Deal With Failure
EBL: Who brought the cocaine to the White House?, Bikini Day, and Musk and Zuck: Trial By Combat
Twitchy: On July 4 Ben & Jerry’s Calls For The Return Of Stolen Land – Doesn’t Return Any Themselves, PuffHo “Reporter” Says Justice Brown Was Factually Wrong But Morally Right, and Nation Proclaims Asian Conservatives Have Become “Key Allies Of White Supremacy”
Louder With Crowder: Police need your help in finding a Bud Light thief because I guess paying for it was too embarrassing, also, Bride bans conservative uncle from her wedding, demands $1000 gift anyway
Vox Popoli: St Breivik, Pray for France, The Idiotic End of Indiana Jones, Surrender Monkeys Urge Surrender, America Has Lost its Appeal, Troon Magick, and Netflix’s Next Target: Narnia
Gab News: Facebook’s Twitter Alternative Is Already Censoring

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: What if Russia Is Winning America’s Proxy War in Ukraine?
American Greatness: CocaineGate Update: Coke Stash Was Found in Secure Place ‘Near the Situation Room’ Not Accessible to ‘Average People’, also, ‘Another 9/11:’ Law Enforcement Warns of Terrorists Coming into America Among Illegal Aliens
American Thinker: Transgenders: The Real Numbers, also, Do Americans Still Trust Our Elections?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Biden(‘s Handlers) News
Babalu Blog: Lack of fuel and parts sidelines two-thirds of public buses in Havana, Cuba, Another plague hits Cuba: 300 exploding electric motorcycles within past 6 months, and Luxury 5-star apartheid hotel opens in Cuba’s Old Havana, surrounded by collapsing buildings
Baldilocks: Just Deserts, also, A Conservatarian’s Take On Freedom
BattleSwarm: Bodycam Footage of Cop Taking Down Active Shooter, also, The Battle of Juba: When China Got Its Ass Kicked
Behind The Black: Curiosity’s most damaged wheel appears to be surviving the rough terrain on Mount Sharp, Europe’s Ariane-5 rocket completes its last launch, Scientists claim discovery of most distant supermassive black hole yet, July 6, 2023 Quick space links, Pushback: Federal judge confirms and shuts down censorship campaign of Biden administration, and Pushback: Non-profit legal firm warns 200 law schools they will be sued if they defy the Supreme Court’s decision ending all racial quotas
Cafe Hayek: Oh That No One Would Ever Have Embarked Upon ‘Balance of Trade’ Accounting, What “Social Dislocation”?, On Adam Smith, and Who’d a-Thunk It?
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Chicago Boyz: The White Queen’s Boast
Da Tech Guy: Well That Establishes Motive for the Dems in 2024, Lower the boom on fireworks, Declaring Independence from Responsibility of Fatherhood, In Philly DaTechGuy’s 3rd Law of Media Outrage is About to Kick In, and Psalms 1-10 as I understand them
Dana Loesch: The White House Changes Its Story AGAIN On Hunter’s Booger Sugar
Don Surber: Politico’s War With Reality & The Donald
First Street Journal: Today’s left really, really, really hate Freedom of Speech, and normality, Out-of-control ‘wilding’ teens run Wawa out of Center City, so Josh Kruger blames not the brats, but Wawa, and The journolism of The Washington Post
Gates Of Vienna: A Follow-Up on Marinus van der Lubbe, Unplugging the Electric VW, Vehicular Jihad Against the Mayor of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, What’s That? A Teapot, Germany Needs to be More Like France!, and French Mayor Lodges a Complaint — That’ll Fix It
The Geller Report: ISLAMIC RULE: Biden’s Taliban Outlaws Female Beauty Salons in Afghanistan, also, Biden Regime Files Suit To Crush Free Speech
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, I’m Not Making This Up, You Know, Things Might Go More Smoothly, Massive Resistance, and NGC 2356
Hollywood In Toto: Dear Hollywood: Listen to Your Critics … or Else, Sound of Freedom Eyes Stunning $20 Million Debut, Bud Light and Country Music: It’s Complicated, and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One – Hold on Tight!
The Lid: Is Ben & Jerry’s The Next Bud Light?
Legal Insurrection: Florida Restricts Influence of Chinese Communist Party on Campuses of Public Colleges, Pennsylvania Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro Caves to His Party on School Choice Program He Backed, Students for Life Claims Christian University is Stalling the Approval of the Group’s Chapter Application, Teacher Union Recommends Including Pornographic ‘Gender Queer’ on Summer Reading Lists, Report: Philadelphia Shooting Suspect a BLM Supporter, Wears Women’s Clothing, and CDC Says Transgenders Can ‘Chestfeed,’ But Doesn’t Mention Possible Health Risks to Babies
Nebraska Energy Observer: Uffda, also, St. John 11:35, part two
Outkick: Carmen Electra & Jenny McCarthy Team Up For Bikini Car Wash Ad, NBA Is The Original Bud Light, And No One In Mainstream Sports Media Will Tell You That, Isiah Thomas Claps Back At Dennis Rodman Over His Controversial Larry Bird Take, Anthony Edwards Won’t Share One Penny Of New Contract With Random Women, Paige Spiranac Says She Wasn’t Invited Back To Celebrity Golf Event Because She’s Not Famous Enough, and Deadspin Hilariously Claims That Bomani Jones’ HBO Show ‘Game Theory’ Failed Because Jones Is Too Smart
Power Line: Crack this case, also, The Folly of Wind
Shark Tank: Rep. Mast Alleges Fauci Funded Lab That Produced Corona-chan
Shot In The Dark: Open Letter To The Mostly Peaceful Fireworks Kids Of Minneapolis, also, Autopilot
STUMP: Sunday Sumo: July 2023 Height/Weight Scatterplot and Welcome Makuuchi Newbies!, also, Drowning Deaths: Sex and Race/Ethnicity, U.S., 1999-2022 (provisional)
The Political Hat: Trans-Species Ideology In The Classroom, also, Race In Academia: Mandatory Course On Anti-Black Racism; Segregated Medical School; BIPOC Bonus
This Ain’t Hell: Student Loans: A Modest Proposal, Iran tried to take a couple of commercial ships, the U.S. Navy stopped them, and Team Biden to appeal injunction preventing government officials from colluding with social media companies
Transterrestrial Musings: Slapping Down The Censors, The Supposed Benefits Of “Diversity”, “Politicized Science”, and AI Follies
Victory Girls: Rainbow Flags vs Sucking Chest Wound
Volokh Conspiracy: 9th Circuit Invalidates Oregon’s Ban on Surreptitious Recordings of Conversations
Watts Up With That: “Islands of expertise surrounded by oceans of incoherence” – today’s energy policies in a nutshell, China Seeks Military Dominance Through Fossil Fuels, and Wind Turbine Power and Land Cover Effects on Bat Deaths
The Federalist: The Decline Of American Manufacturing Inevitably Means An Empty Wartime Arsenal, The White House That Tracked Down Grannies After Capitol Riot Wants You To Believe Cocaine Caper Has Them Stumped, Here’s What You Need To Know About France’s ‘Summer Of Love’ Riots, Oregon Democrats Are One Step Closer To Rigging Elections With Ranked-Choice Voting, and Missouri v. Biden Proves Corporate Media Lied About Big Tech’s Censorship Crusade Against Conservatives
Mark Steyn: Those Rube Rednecks Are So Fiendishly Clever!, also, Death By Socialism

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 07.05.23

Posted on | July 6, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.05.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links in June. Very much appreciated!
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Because the Barbie movie is coming soon…

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Even Financial Analysts Can Recognize Reality When It Hits Them In The Face
EBL: Alan Arkin, RIP, Happy Belated Canada Day , and Cocaine
Twitchy: Sussex Police Report Teenage Boy Molested By Two “Women”, A Preview Of Media’s “Actually Doing Coke In The White house Isn’t A Big Deal” Defense, and NYT Asks If “Adversity Scores” Could Replace Affirmative Action
Louder With Crowder: Sound of Freedom – Possibly the Most Important Movie This Year, Federal judge blocks Biden Admin from coordinating with Big Tech to suppress content in huge win for free speech, and ‘Jesus ain’t f***ing God’: Atheist bullies neighbor over cross decoration, gets dropped after eating fists
Vox Popoli: Authority vs Democracy, On to Plan D, The War on Vermin, Boosting Morale, and We Have a Deal
Gab News: A Major Win For Free Speech

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Invalidity piled up upon invalidity
American Conservative: The Divine Right of Joe Biden
American Greatness: Democrats Baseless Lies Are Responsible For Today’s Divisiveness, The Bidens’ Existential Threats to the American Rule of Law, and What the Fourth of July Was Not

American Power: Cocaine Found in White House Library: The Big Mystery!
American Thinker: Trump’s Greatest Triumph: A Court That Follows the Constitution, A Line of Defense Against Mail-in Ballot Fraud, and Michelle Obama’s Affirmative Action Adventure at Princeton
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday, Happy Independence Day!, and Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Wagner Group’s mutiny speeds up deployment of Cuban troops in Ukraine, Cuba to send 3,225 slave doctors to Brazil, 300 to Portugal, and Is Russia about to install nuclear power plants in Cuba?
Baldilocks: Musings On Bad Things Happening, also, Anger & Disagreement
BattleSwarm: Supreme Court Strikes Down Biden Unilaterally Forgiving Loans, Ukrainian Soldiers Love Bradleys, Why Does Will Hurd Think He’s Running For President?, and Happy Independence Day!
Behind The Black: SpaceX and FAA seek dismissal of lawsuit against Starship at Boca Chica, Another flying car gets FAA approval for flight testing, SpaceX launches Europe’s Euclid space telescope, South Korea: North Korean spy satellite of “no military utility”, and The first week in July’s fund-raising campaign, celebrating Behind the Black’s thirteenth anniversary
Cafe Hayek: Wise Reflections on China, Sigh, and Repeal the Jones Act
CDR Salamander: Mom, We Really Didn’t Want To Leave, also, The PRC’s Legacy Bond Bomb
Chicago Boyz: Society, Social Media, and Human Nature, Trent Telenko’s Twitter Threads, and Interesting Discussions
Da Tech Guy: Stop adding queer to The Witcher, Quick Bits of Advice Under the Fedora, A Reminder of Who is in Charge From Jan 18th 2021 and 25 years after my last visit, Latvia is a nation transformed
Don Surber: The Day John Adams Predicted, Judge Orders Biden To Stop Censoring Real Americans,
First Street Journal: Special Snowflake™ melts down, The ‘Wise Latina’ says the quiet part out loud, and A great Mexican family
Gates Of Vienna: Kill the Kuffar!, Jihad Attack Against Pride Parade Foiled in Vienna, The “French Model” for Germany, Éric Zemmour: “It’s an Ethnic War, a Racial War”, and Marine Le Pen: “These Terrifying Events Are Dragging Our Leaders Back Into Reality”
The Geller Report: BLM Trans-Terrorist Arrested in Philadelphia Mass Shooting That Killed FIVE People, Injuring 2 Children, FRANCE IS BURNING: The Leftist-Islamic Alliance Makes Its Move In France, WATCH LIVE: TENS OF THOUSANDS DESCEND ON SOUTH CAROLINA FOR TRUMP RALLY, and HUGE: Judge Delivers Major Blow to Biden Admin in MASSIVE Ruling for Freedom of Speech on the Fourth of July
Hogewash: Math Is Hard, A Big Brother for the Milky Way, Highly Irregular, Potential Earth-Shattering Kabooms, and Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
Hollywood In Toto: Brazen Media Deny Real Reasons for Dial of Destiny Failure, 15 Astonishing Shows You Might Have Missed (U.S. and European), 15 Astonishing Shows You Might Have Missed (U.S. and European), Eddie Murphy Has Big Shoes to Fill in ‘Pink Panther’ Franchise, and Ice Cube: Woke Word Police ‘Keep Us Bickering’
The Lid: Today July 2nd Is Independence Day NOT July 4th, State Secrets and a Commander-in-Chief With Mental Issues, and When The Entire World Learned Freedom Is Worth Fighting For
Legal Insurrection: France Burns With BLM-Style Riots In Major Cities, Considers State of Emergency, CNN ‘Invents Sailboats’ In Climate Alarmism Article, Hilarity Ensues, U. Cincinnati Prof Reprimanded for Failing Student for Using Term ‘Biological Women’, Federal Court Enjoins Biden-Big Tech Collusive “far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign” against Conservatives, and ALITO and THOMAS: Government resorting “to racial or ethnic classifications to ration medical treatment … would be a very strong case for prompt review by this Court”
Nebraska Energy Observer: Saturday – just for you, Well Finally!!, and St. John 11:35
Outkick: For The Love Of God Can We Stop Talking About Bobby Bonilla Day, David Pollack Shares Emotional Video After Surprising ESPN Layoff, Golf Influencer Karin Hart Gets The Fourth Of July Festivities Started Early With A Patriotic Bikini, Rocket Mortgage Classic: Fowler Beats Morikawa, Hadwin In Playoff, But PGA Tour Broadcast Rules Meant Virtually No One Saw It, WNBA Player Natasha Cloud Unrepentant For Calling America ‘Trash’, and Enes Kanter Freedom Destroys WNBA Player Who Called America ‘Trash,’ Encourages Her To Leave The Country
Power Line: There Is No Transition, She Can’t Do Arithmetic, Either, It’s Cocaine, and Will the Supreme Court Dismantle the Administrative State?
Shark Tank: DeSantis Announces List Of Invalid Pro-Illegals Out Of State Drivers’ Licenses
Shot In The Dark: Mediocrity, Frozen, Streak, and For The Record
STUMP: Drowning Deaths: U.S. Geographic Differences 1999-2022 (provisional), Podcast: What is the Value of a Promise?, and Happy Bobby Bonilla(‘s Agent) Day 2023!
The Political Hat: North Dakota vs. Diversity Training, also, When in the Course of Human Events
This Ain’t Hell: Mostly Peaceful Protests Rock France for Fifth Day, The anniversary we missed (that no one was missing at all), Sad day. Freedom ain’t free, Wednesday Shorts: Soros, Supremes, Cards, and California Reparations Task Force: The police should not have to enforce urination bans
Transterrestrial Musings: Joe Biden’s Brain, AI, Our New Space Race, and Due Process On Campus
Victory Girls: NEA Admits – Yes, We ARE Coming For Your Children, also, Conservative Uncle Barred From Wedding But Bridezilla Will Accept His Cash
Volokh Conspiracy: What the Declaration of Independence Said and Meant, also, July 4 Injunction Bars Various Federal Departments from Encouraging Social Media Platforms to Delete Content
Watts Up With That: World Now Wasting $1 Trillion Or More Per Year Investing in Useless “Renewables”, Volkswagen Notes “Strong Customer Reluctance” in the Electric Vehicle Sector, No, WaPo, Climate Change is NOT Fueling More Devastating Rains and Flooding, and The Myth Of Replacing Fossil Fuels
The Federalist: Celebrating July Fourth Rings Hollow Without Fidelity To America’s Founding Ideals, Here’s How America’s ‘Rainbow’ Military Commemorated This 4th Of July Weekend, Petty Woman: Meghan Markle Waves Goodbye To Her Rom-Com Dreams, Judge Bars Biden Press Secretary From Flagging Posts For Big Tech To Censor, Two Years After Admin Bragged About It, Honoring Frederick Douglass On The Fourth Of July Just Makes Sense, and Leftist Push To Disenfranchise Parents In Ohio Riddled With Deception
Mark Steyn: Peace at a Price: Ealing Studios, Postwar Britain and Passport to Pimlico, Ofcom Comes Back for More, Tal Bachman: Cancelled by Popular Demand: My Final Rugby Installment, and O Canada

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Anonymous Official: We May Never Know Who Had Cocaine at the White House

Posted on | July 5, 2023 | 1 Comment

‘Round up the usual suspects’

Politico gets the “inside” source:

Law enforcement officials confirmed on Wednesday that cocaine was found at the White House over the weekend.
But one official familiar with the investigation . . .

(Who may be Merrick Garland, or maybe not. Who knows?)

. . . cautioned that the source of the drug was unlikely to be determined given that it was discovered in a highly trafficked area of the West Wing.

(When a Democrat’s in the White House, everybody’s on dope.)

The small amount of cocaine was found in a cubby area for storing electronics within the West Exec basement entryway into the West Wing, where many people have authorized access, including staff or visitors coming in for West Wing tours.

(Oh, great — let’s blame the tourists!)

Asked what the chances were of finding the culprit, the official said that “it’s gonna be very difficult for us to do that because of where it was.”

(Notice the use of “us” here, indicating that this official is part of the investigation. And by “investigation,” of course I mean cover-up.)

“Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around, it may not have been caught” by the cameras, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity given that it’s an ongoing investigation. “It’s a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time.”

As to whether Hunter Biden ever used this entrance, well, for some reason that Politico reporter didn’t think of asking the “official familiar with the investigation” about The World’s Most Famous Cocaine Addict.

These people aren’t doing any actual journalism. It’s all just stenography for the Democratic National Committee.

Category: Media Bias

An Alaska Fourth of July Tradition

Posted on | July 4, 2023 | 1 Comment

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON
“What do you mean, no fireworks?”

It was then explained to me that, because it never gets fully dark in Alaska during the Midnight Sun season, a fireworks display is impractical. What do Alaskans do for the Fourth of July?

They go to Glacier View — about 100 miles northeast of Anchorage, up the Matanuska River valley — for the annual Car Launch.

Old vehicles are rolled down a hill and off a cliff for the entertainment of a crowd of thousands. They’ve been doing this since 2005, and it’s become like race day at Talladega, an all-day redneck festival — Alabama in Alaska, essentially. Looks like fun. We’re going.

Category: Alaska

In The Mailbox: 07.03.23

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.03.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Well, it’ll be a lot shorter, because Feedly is acting up. To fill the time that you otherwise would have spent on those blogs, go read The Killer Angels, This Hallowed Ground, Stephen Sears’ Gettysburg, or Forstchen & Gingrich’s alt-history Gettysburg, the first part of a trilogy that shows how Lee could have won the battle – and lost the war a lot sooner.
Silicon Valley delenda est.
OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: How Movies Make Money, Or Don’t, As The Case May Be
Twitchy: The National Speech & Debate Association Has Gone Woke – Tolerates Open Discrimination, Mehdi Hasan Doesn’t Understand – The Children Yearn For The Mines, and The Homeless Are Flushed Out Of Public Toilets In Gov. Hairgel’s California
Stoic Observations: Welcome To My Worldview
Gab News: Twitter’s Extreme Position Destroys The Open Web
CDR Salamander: Have Yourself A Very Nimitz July 4th
Don Surber: The Bioweapon That Elected Biden

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Democrats Kill Each Other in Baltimore; Mayor Blames … Texas, Florida, Alabama?

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | 1 Comment

In 2020, Brandon Scott was elected mayor of Baltimore with more than 70% of the vote in a city whose per-capita violent crime rate (2,027 per 100,000 residents) is nearly twice as high as Chicago (1,099). There’s no sign that this carnage will abate anytime soon:

Investigators in Baltimore are searching for multiple suspects in a mass shooting that turned a beloved annual neighborhood block party into chaos early Sunday, killing two people and injuring 28 others, most of whom were teens, officials said.
The search for the shooters – investigators believe at least two were involved in the incident – is ongoing, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN Monday, vowing, “We will not rest until we find those who cowardly decided to shoot up this block party and carry out acts of violence which we know will be illegal guns.” . . .
The gunfire erupted early Sunday in the south Baltimore neighborhood of Brooklyn, where community members were enjoying a yearly celebration dubbed Brooklyn Day.
Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18 . . . and Kylis Fagbemi, 20, were fatally shot, the Baltimore Police Department announced.
The dozens of surviving victims all sustained gunshot wounds, according to acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley. Five of those injured were adults aged 20 or older and the remaining 23 were teenagers ranging in age from 13 to 19, police said.
Seven of the wounded remain in hospitals, with four in critical condition and three in stable condition, the mayor noted.
Investigators are scouring the sprawling crime scene – which spans several blocks – for evidence and are poring over hours of surveillance footage, the police commissioner said. Officials have also urged community members to come forward with any relevant information or video footage that may assist in the investigation.
A reward for information leading to the capture of the suspects has been raised to $28,000, Worley said at a news conference Monday.

While police have provided no description of the shooters, my hunch is that they’re probably not Trump supporters, IYKWIMAITYD. But this didn’t stop the mayor from trying to shift the blame:

“Mayor Scott, you said this year alone Baltimore PD confiscated 1,300 illegal weapons. Do you have a sense of where guns are coming from, the sort of illegal supply of guns are coming from into the city?” CNN anchor Audie Cornish asked.
“These guns come into Maryland – I want to be very clear about this – because Maryland has gun laws that actually have an impact. We have a ghost gun ban, which is why you see those numbers coming down. But these weapons come from Virginia. They come from Texas. They come from Florida. They come from Alabama. They come from everywhere in this country,” the mayor replied, blaming guns and not thugs for the carnage.
“Here we are dozens of years later, decades later at this point and we’re still dealing with mass shootings because of the inaction to deal with this issue on a national level. This can no longer be an issue that falls to the feet of local police, local elected officials or state governments,” Scott continued, seeming to suggest a larger crackdown on firearms on a national level is needed.

It’s not the people of Baltimore — the ones who elected Brandon Scott as their mayor — who are to blame, it’s those out-of-state guns! See, the citizens of Baltimore are all innocent angels, and their city would be a peaceful utopia, were it not for those bad people in other states — Virginia, Texas, Florida, Alabama — who refuse to “deal with this issue on a national level.” The CNN audience actually believes this absurd excuse, because their entire worldview would collapse if they ever stopped to think that perhaps the kind of people who vote for Democrats are anything other than virtuous. No CNN viewer would ever consider the possibility that the citizens of Baltimore are less virtuous than the people of Florida, who reelected Gov. Ron DeSantis in a landslide.

Category: Crime, Democrats, Maryland

The Consequences of Demonic Influence

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | Comments Off on The Consequences of Demonic Influence

The Huffington Post unloaded an 8,000-word feature about a transgender person calling herself/“himself” Renton Sinclair. Perhaps your first reaction to this is to ask, “The Huffington Post still exists?” Yeah, I was surprised, too. In 2011, Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL for $315 million. In 2015, Verizon paid $4.4 billion for AOL. then in 2021, Verizon sold HuffPo to BuzzFeed in a stock swap whose value could most likely be described as “pennies on the dollar” of what Huffington sold it for 10 years earlier. BuzzFeed immediately started cutting HuffPo staff.

So much for the story of the dwindling footprint of HuffPo. As for this exhaustingly long feature about Renton Sinclair, why? What was the journalistic objective of HuffPo senior reporter Christopher Mathias in spending so much time telling Renton’s story? The idea seems to be to present this person as the sympathetic “poster boy” victimized by a “right-wing culture war,” as Mathias describes the backlash against the Transgender Cult. Sinclair is the daughter of Tania Joy Gibson, who has become an outspoken opponent of transgenderism, and Mathias portrays Gibson as a “Crazy Church Lady” type, associated with “a coalition of Christian dominionists determined to reshape America according to a far-right, fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.”

A major “hook” for this story — the selling point of the narrative — is that Gibson is a former beauty pageant winner, who competed as Miss Illinois in the 1996 Miss America contest. And one could imagine how, perhaps, being the daughter of a former beauty queen might present difficulties, pressure to follow in mommy’s footsteps, to live up to a certain ideal or whatever. So this information may be relevant as an explanatory factor in Renton Sinclair’s gender identity issues. However, the more obvious and mundane explanations are impossible to overlook:

Renton was 8 when his parents divorced, and he struggled with depression thereafter. His mom sent him to therapy and put him on meds, but nothing seemed to help ease a profound despair and anxiety that had grown inside him, feelings he could never quite identify the origins of and which intensified with puberty. “A lot of it was just internally like feeling terrible about myself and just not really knowing why,” he recalls.
He didn’t have much of a frame of reference for being queer — save for a couple of gay men he saw serving on pageant boards with his mom — but he suspected he probably was. “What’s worse is my whole sexuality issue,” he wrote in his journal once. “I can’t decide if I’m homo or bi.”
Then, when he was about 12, one of Renton’s favorite YouTubers, an anime cosplayer named twinfools, posted a video announcing that he was transgender. . . .
Renton found refuge in an online network of queer youth on sites like Tumblr and DeviantArt. He started going by the name Axel with this online coterie — a name adapted from a male character in the video game “Kingdom Hearts” — and eventually set up a secret Facebook account where he could try on this new identity.
He and his new friends confided in each other and talked about being queer. At one point, Renton felt comfortable enough offline to come out to some friends at a Bible camp in Wisconsin. “I told two friends about my LGBT stuff,” he wrote in his journal.
But the depression only deepened. On Dec. 22, 2011, Renton tried to kill himself by overdosing on Tylenol.

This tale — family problems, mental health issues, social-media influence — is so familiar as to be stereotypical of transgender teens in the 21st century. A depressed girl with divorced parents and sexuality issues, addicted to YouTube and Tumblr, creating a fake male online persona named for a character in a video game and pretending to be a boy on Facebook? It’s a cliché. Remember all those crazy SJW Tumblrina feminists I used to make fun of? Practically all of them were “queer” in one way or another, and universally they listed their mental illnesses — bipolar, PTSD, whatever — in their Tumblr profiles.

Adolescence is always an emotionally turbulent time, and everybody has to find some way of coping with the stresses involved. Smoking dope and listening to Led Zeppelin were among the most popular coping mechanisms when I was a teenager. Nowadays, getting lost in online media — video games, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. — seems to have replaced nodding off to “Kashmir” in a haze of marijuana fumes as the popular teenage habit, and I’m far from certain it’s an improvement.

But what about the influence of . . . Satan?

In the HuffPo article, Mathias makes a point of treating Tania Joy Gibson’s religious beliefs and practices as self-evidently absurd, e.g., when she puts her daughter into psychiatric treatment:

Renton says his mom and stepdad had discovered he’d been cutting himself. Moreover, his stepdad had gone on Renton’s computer and found the “Axel” Facebook account. He and Tania read through his messages about being queer.
“They freaked the fuck out,” Renton recalls. . . .
One day they told Renton they needed to stop by the hospital so Tania could get a blood test. But while waiting in the lobby, it became clear to Renton that it was a ruse: “I saw a sign saying ‘adolescent inpatient psychiatric’ or some shit, and I was just like, ‘God damn it, here we fucking go.’”
Renton says they kept him there for a week. Sometimes Tania visited with a pastor, the pair loudly praying over Renton in the visitor’s room and speaking in tongues — the practice, popular in certain charismatic evangelical churches, of harnessing a supernatural ability to speak in an unknown, divine language. (To nonbelievers, however, it can sound like gibberish.)
Tania would also bring Christian counselors for therapy sessions, Renton says, during which they’d sit in a room reading Bible verses and telling Renton that being queer was wrong. It was only years later that he realized this was conversion therapy.
“I don’t think the goal was necessarily to make people straight or whatever as much as it was just to, like, repress you to the point where you either just die or you just stop arguing with it,” Renton remembers.
Renton eventually was allowed to spend nights at home, but he claims he spent daytime hours when he should have been at school at the psychiatric facility. He was still forbidden from seeing friends, even the kids next door. Renton remembers his grandmother, Tania’s mom, telling him over and over that there was a war over his soul between angels and demons.

Consider this possibility: GRANDMA WAS RIGHT!

The phenomenon of “cutting” (self-harm) immediately calls to mind the Gadarene demoniac who spent his time “in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.” When Jesus confronted the “unclean spirit” that had possessed the man and asked the demon’s name, the reply was: “My name is Legion: for we are many.” And then Jesus sent the demonic spirit (or spirits) into a herd of pigs, “and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea” (Mark 5:1-20).

Maybe you don’t believe that, but for those of us who do, there are several lessons that can be learned from studying this Bible passage, including the fact that Satan’s influence is destructive, which is why the victim of demonic possession engages in self-destructive behavior.

That Renton’s grandma would see her behavior as evidence of spiritual warfare is only controversial to non-believers. Most Christians aren’t into that charismatic speaking-in-tongues kind of thing, but anyone who views the Bible as the Word of God must acknowledge that demonic possession is a real thing. You can see evidence of it lots of places, if you know what you’re looking for (e.g., “‘Feminist Witchcraft,’ Mental Illness and the Demonic Dangers of the Occult,” Feb. 21, 2017). Some years ago, I read An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels by Father Gabriele Amorth, who was often called the Vatican’s chief exorcist, and offers this explanation (pp. 72-73):

Diabolical obsessions are disturbances or extremely strong hallucinations that the demon imposes, often invincibly, on the mind of the victim. In these cases, the person is no longer a master of his own thoughts. . . . The objects of these hallucinations can be manifested as visions, as voices . . . as monstrous figures, horrifying animals, or devils. In other cases it can be an impulse to commit suicide or to do evil to others and, particularly in the young, it can lead to confusion about one’s gender.

See, it’s not just me pointing out this connection. However, in an age of spiritual ignorance, most people are not cognizant of the dangers of demonic influences, and tend to ridicule anyone who takes such dangers seriously when discussing, for example, Ellen “Elliot” Page.

“Symptomatic evidence of demonic possession,” I called it, and I suppose most readers took this as merely more of my habitual sarcasm, but was I really just joking? When people engage in self-destructive behavior and claim to be hearing voices, whose voice are they hearing?

So HuffPo spent 8,000 words celebrating Renton Sinclair as a victim of “right-wing” Christianity, when I think it far more likely that she/“he” is a victim of Satanic forces which are everywhere in this dark age.

Category: The Transgender Cult

Rule 5 Sunday: Elisabeth Giolito

Posted on | July 2, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Instagram model Elisabeth (Lis) Giolito was born on May 26 1996, (which would make her 27) and also does professional modeling through Tricia Brink Management.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.