One of the anime that got me seriously interested in the medium was Gunsmith Cats, an anime about a pair of fun-loving gals who run a gun shop in Chicago. The protagonist, Rally Vincent, was not only a hot babe who could shoot, but she could drive like a bat out of hell. What better gal to look for, if you need a girl with a gun and a job? Too bad they didn’t make a full series out of it. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
So the Bravos came to town and utterly wrecked our shit. Jim Kaat held them to two runs in the opener, but Steve Renko and Pat Dobson got beaten like red-headed stepchildren; game 2 was a 15-10 slugfest, but it really wasn’t that close. Fortunately, the Twins were next up, and we took two out of three from them to end he week 2-4, 23-31 for the season, just one game behind the Brewers. Next up are the 36-18 Daytraders, followed by the Brewers on Boxing Day. Notable casualties are Juan Marichal, who’s out for the season. Told him to stop pulling his groin. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Perhaps you’re not on X (formerly known as Twitter) and therefore have been spared the quarrel over “Heritage Americans.” Don’t know who coined that term or in what context it originated, but it seems to be a critique of the “proposition nation” ideology that George Will did so much to promote. Far be it from me to embrace or endorse a crypto-Nazi “blood and soil” ideology — the polar opposite of “proposition nation” — but the problem is that we are (or should be) talking about public policy.
In the long-running battle between neocons and paleocons, my sympathies are decidedly paleo (cf., “First They Came for Mel Bradford”). However, the really important battle is to keep Democrats from getting back in power and ruining everything while we are quarreling amongst ourselves, hurling insults back and forth. The whole intramural donnybrook between Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, et al., pains me for this reason. We are less than a year away from a crucial midterm election, with the historical odds against us, and should be united, not divided.
As I have said, it is public policy we should be discussing, especially in regard to immigration. President Trump has done a remarkable job in halting and even reversing the flood of illegal invaders that Joe Biden and the Democrats unleashed, and our task now is to ensure that this policy is continued, which cannot happen if Democrats win the next midterms. These thoughts are related to what I have to say in my latest American Spectator column:
About 20 years ago, I received an email from a young man congratulating me on my good fortune in being hate-listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is not pleasant to think back to what was then a rather dark moment in my life. At the time, the SPLC had not yet completely discredited itself by its wild accusations of “extremism” against just about anyone to the right of Chuck Schumer, and surviving their attack was not quite as easy for me as some might nowadays suppose.
My great sin — the Thought Crime for which the SPLC arraigned me — was to be a Southerner who was not ashamed of my ancestors, and to dare speak in defense of my beloved homeland. When I attended Jacksonville (Alabama) State University, I learned that the highway which bisects the campus was named for the most famous native of that region. Pelham Road memorializes Confederate artillery officer John Pelham, who gained fame as commander of J.E.B. Stuart’s “horse artillery.” During the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862, Stuart, with two guns, held up the advance of an entire Union division for more than an hour, a feat witnessed by Gen. Robert E. Lee, who praised Pelham’s “unflinching courage.” Three months later, when the young major was killed in the Battle of Kelly’s Ford, Lee mourned the loss of “the gallant Pelham.” He was posthumously promoted to lieutenant colonel and buried in the city cemetery in Jacksonville, a site I have visited, contemplating the life of that young hero who died at age 24. . . .
Earlier this month, Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified but were nonetheless still included in the final results of that election.
The admission came during a Dec. 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) stemming from a challenge filed by David Cross, a local election integrity activist. Cross filed a challenge with the SEB in March 2022. Cross alleged that Fulton County violated Georgia statute in the handling of advanced voting ahead of the November 2020 election, counting hundreds of thousands of votes even though polling workers failed to sign off on the vote tabulation “tapes” critical to the certification process.
And Fulton County admitted to it.
Ann Brumbaugh, attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, told the SEB in the hearing that while she has “not seen the tapes” herself, the county does “not dispute that the tapes were not signed.” Brumbaugh continued, “It was a violation of the rule. We, since 2020, again, we have new leadership and a new building and a new board and a new standard operating procedures. And since then the training has been enhanced. … But … we don’t dispute the allegation from the 2020 election.”
Georgia’s Secretary of State Office investigated the alleged failure to sign tabluation tapes and “substantiated” the findings that Fulton County “violated Official Election Record Document Processes when it was discovered that thirty-six (36) out of thirty-seven (37) Advanced Voting Precincts in Fulton County, Georgia failed to sign the Tabulation Tapes as required [by statute],” according to a 2024 investigation summary. In addition to probing the unsigned tabulation tapes, the investigation also found that officials at 32 polling sites failed to verify their zero tapes.
Georgia law requires that election officials have each ballot scanner print three closing tapes at the end of each voting day. Poll workers must sign these tapes or include a documented reason for refusal. Voting laws also require poll workers to begin each day of voting by printing and signing a “zero tape” showing that voting machines are starting at zero votes.
Read the whole thing. Five years after the election — when it is too late to rectify the crime, and never mind all the injury inflicted on those branded “election deniers” for protesting this fraud — we learn the truth.
Elections are, and must be, governed by law. Rules and procedures are established to ensure not only that votes are accurately counted, but also that the accuracy can be verified after the fact, in the case of disputed outcomes. Failure to follow the established procedures undermines public confidence in election integrity. Given what we now know about what went on in Fulton County, Georgia, in the 2020 election, the accusation of spreading “misinformation” should be made not against those who claim Democrats stole the election, but rather against those who claim there is “no evidence” of such fraud. Here you have more than 300,000 ballots illegally included in the tally, which is nearly 30 times more than Biden’s margin of (alleged) victory in Georgia.
Why would any honest person vote for Democrats? What ridiculous frauds they are, presenting themselves as defenders of “Our Democracy,” as they call it, when there’s nothing democratic about what they do?
Claudio Neves-Valente, seen on surveillance camera
It was a wild and sudden finish to a mysterious case Thursday night. A press conference had been scheduled in Providence, Rhode Island, after it was reported that police had finally identified a “person of interest” wanted in connection with last Saturday’s deadly shooting at Brown University. However, the press conference was then cancelled, as new developments in the case unfolded. Eventually, police descended on a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, where they found 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It turns out that Neves-Valente, a native of Portugal, had formerly been a Ph.D. physics student at Brown, but withdrew in 2003 before completing his doctorate. Also, not coincidentally, Neves-Valente had previously attended the same physics program at a university Portugal as MIT physics Professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro, who was shot to death Monday at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Neves-Valente had apparently planned these crimes for a while. He had been living in Miami, Florida, but arrived in Providence about two weeks ago and had been “casing” the campus. The motive of the Brown shooting is unclear, but he killed two students and wounded nine others on Saturday, before escaping to the Boston area, where police say he murdered Loureiro.
Somewhere along the way, Neves-Valente left behind an unfired bullet, and police got a DNA sample from that bullet that they were able to match to the gunman. Also, on the day of the Brown shooting, Neves-Valente had been encountered by a man who saw him behaving suspiciously and was able to give police a description of the vehicle with Florida plates that he was driving. Neves-Valente then apparently parked that vehicle at the storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, which is just over the state line from Massachusetts, about 35 miles north of Boston. Meanwhile, after police had focused on Neves-Valente as a suspect, they showed his photo to one of the surviving victims of the Brown shooting, who “quickly froze, physically pushed back, and became emotional . . . tearing up and shaking.” Then information from Flock license plate reader cameras was able to lead them to the Salem storage facility, where Neves-Valente was found. And thus the mystery is solved.
Whatever the motive turns out to be, it apparently had nothing to do with radicalism on the Brown University campus, which means that apologies are owed to the chubby Palestinian student whom many Internet sleuths had suspected as the gunman. Jew-hating douchebag? Yes. Killer? No.
After six days of double-talk and obfuscation, at last authorities in Rhode Island claim to have gotten a clue about the killer:
Law enforcement is investigating possible connections between the mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday afternoon and the targeted killing of an MIT professor two days later, sources tell CBS News.
Prior, multiple sources familiar with the investigation at Brown University told CBS News on Thursday that a person of interest has been identified in the deadly mass shooting.
Law enforcement has identified a person, and a search for that individual is underway, the sources said.
Two students were killed and nine more were wounded when the gunman opened fire Saturday afternoon inside a classroom on the Ivy League university’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island, authorities said. The shooting occurred in the school’s Barus & Holley engineering building during final exams.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, police said a male suspect had managed to escape from the building. In the hours and days that followed, police and the FBI released images and videos of the man they described as a person of interest walking around a nearby neighborhood several hours before the first 911 calls reporting the shooting came in.
Of course, the suspect isn’t identified, so we’re going on ‘trust us, bro’ from the police.
“I don’t know” was often said, along with word salad, and, at times, anger that some questions, like why a student assistant at Brown was being scrubbed from the websites during this probe, were being asked. . . .
[G]iven this week, prepare for the circus to continue, as no one in Rhode Island seems to know what they’re doing.
We have a university president, Christina Paxson, who’s a deer in the headlights, being incapable of providing direct and clear answers on various lines of inquiry, specifically and camera system and the use of the school’s alert system, a police chief who couldn’t seem to find any leads, and a state attorney general, Peter Neronha, who was equally useless. The mayor, Brett Smiley, whined about being tired. It’s a mess.
There’s supposed to be a press conference soon, and I may come back to update if this involves actual news. Big “if” there.
