Iran launched more than a dozen missiles at two Iraqi bases that hold US troops in what appears to be retaliation for the American airstrike that killed a top Iranian general last week, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
A US official told CNN that the attacks did not inflict any US casualties, but an assessment is underway. There are casualties among the Iraqis at Ain al-Asad airbase following the attack, an Iraqi security source tells CNN. The number of casualties and whether the individuals were killed or wounded was not immediately clear.
White House aides are making plans for a possible address to the nation by President Donald Trump, according to two officials.
The attack comes days after the US killed top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The administration has sought to cast that strike as an attempt to de-escalate tensions with Iran, but Tehran has vowed revenge for the killing, which it says was an “act of war” and “state terrorism.”
UPDATE: At one point, the media were reporting that President Trump would make a statement, but now it appears he will not do so. Why? Well, there were apparently no U.S. casualties, and the president may have decided that actions speak louder than words. So far — it’s about 9:30 p.m. ET — we have no reports of a U.S. counter-attack, but my guess is that such an attack has been ordered, and we won’t hear from the president until after that action has happened. We’ll see.
ABC News spent another morning sympathizing with our enemies on Monday’s Good Morning America. This time, it was correspondent Martha Raddatz’s turn to be awestruck by the anti-American protests in Iran over the U.S. drone strike-kill of terrorist General Qasem Soleimani, last week. Instead of praising the death of a man who has ordered the murder and torture of countless American soldiers, Raddatz sided with the Iranians, by touting the “mourning” over their “revered” military leader while worrying they would now seek “revenge” on the United States.
The ABC team set the stage, with co-anchors Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos warning of the “crisis growing in Iran” and the “fallout spreading” over the U.S. military strike that killed Soleimani.
Chief Global Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz then dove in with her over-the-top sympathy piece for people who hate our country. She marveled at the anti-American protests, calling them a “powerful combination of grief and anger,” while hyping the “mourners” “paying tribute” to a “revered” American-killer . . .
From the streets of Tehran, Raddatz spoke with protesters chanting ‘death to America’ and burning our flag, while taking shots at President Trump. Raddatz couldn’t find the words to be critical of their response; instead, she seemed to sympathize:
“Soleimani’s image everywhere. The impact of his death profound. The crowds are massive and emotional. There are many tears here,…” she gushed.
After warning about Iran’s threats of “revenge,” she continued hyping the “emotional” response to the terrorist’s death: “Inside the funeral service, the emotion just as powerful. The supreme leader of Iran weeping and praying over a coffin draped in the Iraqi flag. This is the largest funeral in Iran since the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989,” Raddatz stated.
Immediately following this, ABC continued trashing Trump in a report touting Democrats upset by the air strike against Soleimani. Anchor George Stephanopoulos complained Trump was “lashing out” at Democrats by “taunting” Congress with a “threat” against Iran if they retaliated.
Almost as if they are “the enemy of the people” or something . . .
TV news is full of scenes of out-of-control wildfires in Australia, where it’s been a dry, hot summer. Fortunately, the forecast this week in Sydney is for cooler, rainy weather, but we continue seeing televised scenes of people fleeing the catastrophic fires that have destroyed their homes. While environmentalists claim these fires prove the dangers of “climate change,” in fact criminals are making a significant contribution:
More than 180 alleged arsonists have been arrested since the start of the bushfire season, with 29 blazes deliberately lit in the Shoalhaven region of southeast [New South Wales] in just three months.
The Shoalhaven fires were lit between July and September last year, with Kempsey recording 27 deliberately lit fires, NSW Bureau of Crime and Statistics and Research data shows. Police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months. NSW police data shows 183 people have been charged or cautioned for bushfire-related offences since November 8, and 24 arrested for deliberately starting bushfires.
Queensland police say 101 people have been picked up for setting fires in the bush, 32 adults and 69 juveniles.
A 79-year-old South Australian man has been charged with intentionally lighting four grass and scrub fires in the state’s southeast in recent days.
Police will allege the man lit fires on December 30 and January 2, and then two on Saturday, all in the Kingston area.
He has been refused police bail and will appear in Mount Gambier Magistrates Court on Monday.
Almost 100 firebugs have deliberately started blazes across Queensland that have destroyed homes and consumed thousands of hectares of bushland. . . .
A 16-year-old boy found to have started a fire that razed 14 homes in central Queensland and dealt with under the state’s Youth Justice Act.
Two more teens, 14 and 15, were charged with endangering property by fire over a blaze that destroyed two homes and forced hundreds to flee.
NSW Police have charged two men with stealing firefighting equipment during [a Nov. 12] bushfire crisis, as they probe several “suspicious” blazes around the state.
In a separate incident, officers also charged a 19-year-old with impersonating a firefighter and stealing equipment in Sydney’s south.
It comes as police investigate seven “suspicious” fires across the state on Tuesday. . . .
Five people have also faced penalties over breaches of the statewide total fire ban for either using barbecues with an open flame or burning rubbish over the past 24 hours.
Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said it was hard to understand why people would take such risks in catastrophic conditions.
“Unfortunately we know there are some broken individuals out there who will maliciously light fires and we also have people out there who are just plain idiots and will try and light a barbeque on a day that it’s catastrophic,” he said. . . .
NSW Police and fire investigators made a public appeal for more information regarding fires that may have been deliberately lit.
“It’s awful. It angers every firefighter and angers everybody in the community,” RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said.
“Clearly we are looking at those as suspicious, particularly the one in Loftus were there were multiple ignition points in the Royal National Park there.”
Whoa — “multiple ignition points“? Clearly, this is evidence of deliberate criminal activity, and we know that dozens of people have been arrested since November for arson. What we don’t know is the identity of these “broken individuals,” or what their motives might have been. In the absence of such information, however, some Australians have begun to suspect that some of these arsonists may be environmentalists (“Greens”) trying to manufacture a crisis to dramatize their cause. We don’t have any proof that this is the case, so it is irresponsible to speculate, and Arthur Chrenkoff advises using common sense:
Most people (I hope) understand that trees tend not to spontaneously combust, no matter what the air temperature is; when we talk about bushfires starting naturally, we are talking about lightning strikes igniting tinder. The climate change argument posits that the more extreme weather conditions — higher temperatures, drought and so forth — make fires, however started, much more destructive and much more difficult to control and extinguish. These are debates to be had between climatologists, forestry experts and firefighters.What is painfully clear, however, that Australia has a firebug crisis. It will no doubt be up to future royal commissions and inquiries to calculate exactly what proportion of the current loss and destruction can be attributed to human action, but I suspect it will be a significant one. Mankind may be causing climate change, but man is most definitely making fires start.
Various leftists have declared that it is a “conspiracy theory” — a “coordinated misinformation campaign” spread by “climate denial traitors” using Twitter “bots” — to call attention to the role played by arsonists in the Australian brush fires. The facts are still the facts, however, and indisputable facts are never “misinformation.”
Because this is the Internet, where nobody remembers anything that happened before last Tuesday, it is probably necessary first for me to explain that Little Green Footballs (LGF) is a blog run by Charles Johnson (CJ). Until about 2007, LGF was one of the leading conservative blogs, but then CJ lost his mind (or was possessed by demons) and declared war on Pamela Geller, accusing her of being a Nazi despite the ((( obvious ))). CJ’s meltdown proceeded slowly at first, but then in September 2009, he declared that I was also a Nazi. By the crazy logic of CJ’s demon-possessed mind, anybody who didn’t shun and denounce me was a Nazi sympathizer. Because I’m obviously not a Nazi, however, everybody with an iota of common sense at that point realized CJ was crazy, which inspired the Charles Johnson, Race Detective parody.
That’s the short version of the LGF meltdown saga. A longer version would include some discussion of how CJ got captured by his commenters. That is to say, most of what went on at LGF was not about anything that CJ did, but rather about the wide-open comment fields, and the commenters who got promoted to being contributors and given “admin” status. Several of CJ’s admins had personal agendas that were in direct opposition to the conservative politics that originally made LGF successful, and their influence seems to have inspired wave after wave of purges among the site’s commenters, reminiscent of Stalin in the 1930s. Which brings us to the Something Awful meltdown . . .
If you’ve been following this is one of the worst instances I’ve ever seen of a community just getting wrecked from the inside out by over-zealous attempts to adhere to catty identity politics. I really don’t have anything against Trans people if people reading this think I do, it does not reflect on that community as a whole just because the Trans community on SA has become insanely controlling and intrusive, but it does say something about the crab bucket mentality that afflicts leftist communities all over the place, the seeming obsession over offence and oppression that results in ever more ugly and extreme behavior being tolerated and encouraged and driving away more and more people to chase some Sisyphean ideal.
What can we say about this? Why have accusations of “transphobia” become such a dye-marker of online neo-Stalinist repression?
My theory: A lot of people who inhabit “transgender” personas online (whether or not they are actually transgender in real life) are porn addicts, and porn addiction always produces insanity. These self-professed “social justice” activists are actually exhibiting a psychological defense mechanism, rooted in a twisted shame/guilt complex about their perverse sexuality. They present themselves as Arbiters of Righteousness, and lash out at scapegoats — “Nazis! Transphobia! ORANGE MAN BAD!” — as a way of shielding their damaged ego from the superego, to drown out the voice of their guilty conscience.
In a way they’re like Ted Haggard, the closet-case homosexual who preached constantly against homosexuality. That was one variation of the shame/guilt complex expressed as pharisaical hypocrisy, and endless bleating about “social justice” is just a different variation.
You should probably hit my tip jar for using the word “pharisaical” in a sentence, but in addition to having a formidable vocabulary, what I offer readers is a vast memory of historical trivia that most people never learned, or have forgotten if they ever knew it at all. Back in the 1990s, when the founder of SomethingAwful-dot-com was just a teenager, I was an assistant editor at a newspaper in Rome, Georgia, when we got our first Internet connection — one computer connected to the web via AOL dial-up. And my editor Pierre-Rene Noth said to me, “Stacy, find out what kind of Civil War stuff they have on there.” You see, that area had a lot of Civil War history and this was just a few years after the Ken Burns PBS documentary series, so appealing to the Confederate heritage interest among our readers was a good way of pursuing Pierre’s single-minded idea of local! local! local! news. But I digress . . .
The way I got smeared as a “white supremacist” originated in that 1995 assignment to research Confederate heritage on the Internet, which put me in contact with the League of the South, a so-called “neo-Confederate” organization that was later hate-listed by SPLC. Now, when I first contacted the League in 1995, there was nothing racist in their message, and I remember sitting with the League’s president Michael Hill, a history professor, having brandy and cigars on a friend’s back porch. But after I moved to Washington, D.C., and lost contact with my friends, they came under attack by the SPLC and after an organization is publicly branded “racist,” this becomes a certain kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Respectable people don’t want to be associated with racism, which means that once a group gets hate-listed by the SPLC, the kooks take over. A good barometer of the kook takeover is when you find people muttering about how international bankers (nudge, nudge) are advancing their secret plan (wink, wink) to destroy our Aryan Gentile purity.
What does this have to do with the SomethingAwful-dot-com meltdown? Well, transgender activists are kind of like Jew-haters in their paranoid obsession, and once you let trannies assume the role of Arbiters of Righteousness, a complete kook takeover is probably inevitable.
I’m obviously not a visionary, but I predicted that the internet would be sh–ty back in 1999. Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how sh–ty the internet could also be.
A long time ago, if somebody said they really wanted to f–k a pillow with anime on it, if they went out in public and said that, they would be laughed at. There would be some element of shame. They would keep that inside and say, ‘Well, I want to f–k a pillow with anime on it but I can’t tell anybody.’ But then the internet came along and they could get on a webring or whatever it was back in the day. Go to rec/all/f–kanimepillow or whatever. Then other people would say ‘I want to f–k anime pillows, too.’ You had this community of people who were very intent on f–king anime pillows. The typical person does not want to f–k a pillow with anime on it. This, of course, was back when f–king anime pillows was fresh and new.
I found it to be very interesting that these subcommunities would sprout up and their numbers would grow and pretty soon it’s Pillowf–kers United, Inc. And I found that whole process back then — it was even happening in the usegroup days — I found that whole process incredibly interesting, how the groupthink would manifest itself and increase exponentially over time. It was something that all the media outlets were ignoring at the time.
You may not have spotted the telltale clues there, but Kyanka’s subconscious was trying to tell us, “Hey, I’ve got some very bad habits, and I’ve been pursuing these habits online since I was about 17.”
According to . . . uh, what somebody wrote on the Internet, when Kyanka’s first wife divorced him, she cleaned him out for $140,000, and his second wife, an immigrant, fled the state with their young daughter. While it may be that Kyanka has a habit of marrying crazy bitches, perhaps we should consider the possibility that Kyanka himself is a dangerously crazy person who needs to be investigated by the FBI.
This is where the totalitarian impulse arises: Sadistic freaks in the grip of sexual insanity (or demonic possession) crave power and seek to silence others — ban them! purge them! — who dispute their authority. Some of these weirdos become Gender Studies professors, because this SJW regime is nowhere more powerful than on university campuses, but the same impulse is also manifested in the otherwise inexplicable desire of some people to play Internet Thought Police. Keep in mind that the Internet is crammed full of the most disgusting filth you can imagine and yet, we are told, “free speech”! You’re a right-wing theocratic anti-sex Nazi if you criticize porn or the perverted consumers thereof. The same people who adamantly defend pornography, however, insist that the Internet must be kept safe from “hate,” a term of elastic definition, so that you are guilty of “hate” (transphobia) if you are against allowing grown men in dresses to use the same public restroom as your daughter.
Is this contradiction not obvious? Whenever I see the Thought Police running around shrieking about racism, sexism or homophobia — “Somebody said something rude on the Internet!” — I automatically suspect them of extreme depravity, because no emotionally healthy adult would waste two minutes of their time worrying about that crap. Last year, when the SPLC’s toxic work environment became a scandal, I was not surprised. You think Mark Potok and Morris Dees are normal human beings? No, they are very sick individuals, because who else would volunteer for that kind of job? The fact that Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka has now surrendered his site to trannie SJWs tells you something about his fundamental problem and, yeah, it’s Something Awful.
Host Ricky Gervais used his opening remarks at the 77th annual Golden Globe Awards Sunday night to scold his celebrity audience for hypocritically promoting progressive ideas despite the skeletons in their own industry’s closet. “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything,” said Gervais. “You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.”
Gervais alluded to several of the various scandals that have rocked Hollywood in the past few years. He warned movie executives that Ronan Farrow “is coming for you,” and joked that Felicity Huffman—who served time for her role in the college admissions fraud—was busy making license plates.
Gervais also referenced Epstein’s suicide, which prompted some boos from the audience. But the comedian didn’t miss a beat. “Shut up,” said Gervais. “I know he’s your friend, but I don’t care.”
Speaking for the millions of people who would rather not be lectured about climate change by a bunch of movie stars and their private jets, Gervais concluded his remarks by warning the night’s award winners not to make any obnoxiously woke political statements. “Come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and f–k off,” he said.
Most Americans have stopped watching these award shows. The ratings are in the toilet because network TV is dying, the victim of Internet streaming. A “celebrity” is now any cute 19-year-old girl with a YouTube channel and an Instagram account. Every so often, Twitter erupts in a firestorm of messages declaring that some allegedly “famous” person (e.g., James Charles) has been “cancelled,” and the first thing I have to do is figure out who this “famous” person is. Excuse me if I descend into Boomer nostalgia here, but before the Internet, and before there were 220 cable TV channels, we had exactly three networks, and if you weren’t on NBC, ABC or CBS, you weren’t famous. Now?
Gregory Daniel Jackson, a/k/a “Onision,” is a YouTube personality with about 2 million subscribers who was originally famous for a silly performance called “I’m a Banana.” Now 33 years old, Onision has been called “YouTube’s most troubled star” because of his “bizarre and disturbing” content and his habit of provoking controversy. He is militant about veganism, for example, calling meat-eaters “murderers,” and despises Christianity, calling the Bible “a book of hate.”
Two million YouTube subscribers is a pretty big audience, but I never heard of this guy until he was accused of being a creep. Certainly, in the days of three networks, there were TV stars who were creeps, but now you’ve got random creeps becoming “famous” on the Internet — two million subscribers! — without any adult ever knowing who they are.
My point is . . . Well, I’m sure there must be a point in all this, but I don’t have time to think about it now because we might be at war with Iran by the time I could finish explaining why life was better when we only had three TV networks and no Internet. If you’re old enough to know what I mean, you’re probably eligible for a senior citizen discount — $7.59, drinks included! — at the Golden Corral buffet.
Well, apologies for not serving up a Rule 5 Sunday last week, but as you may recall, I was immured in the local VA hospital and had imprudently left my laptop in the trunk of my car. Well, time to make up for that with a super-sized double scoop post, featuring a classic Gil Elvgren pinup of a babe whose scoops seem to have gone astray, perhaps into her cleavage?
Needs a little work on the cone-handling technique.
Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery and the kind wishes for the new year! Next Rule 5 Sunday should come off on schedule a week from now, kayn aynhoreh.
