The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Ex-NFL Player: ‘Average White Guys’ Shouldn’t Be Talking About Football

Posted on | December 24, 2023 | Comments Off on Ex-NFL Player: ‘Average White Guys’ Shouldn’t Be Talking About Football

Rashard Mendenhall kicked a hornet’s nest this week, and even after getting ratio’d into oblivion, refused to apologize:

Let us stipulate that we don’t know what set him off. Something must have provoked him to say these offensive things, and his willingness to maintain his defense suggests that either (a) the provocation was great, or (b) Mendenhall has been getting tired of hearing “average white guys” for a long time. Because I don’t know what the background might be, I would not participate in a rush to jump on this particular dogpile. What is to be gained by joining an online lynch mob? Besides which, I dislike the tendency of some of my fellow conservatives to point the finger and say, “See? Black people are racist, too!” The far better approach to such issues, I contend, is to attack the fundamental premise of the syllogism, i.e., the liberal assumption that “racism” is the universal explanation of every problem afflicting black people. Call me a “racist,” and my response is likely to be, “So?” What does that have to do with anything? Even if it were true that I harbored some opinion which you might describe as “racist,” how is anyone — black, brown, whatever — actually harmed by my mere opinion? Spurious accusations of racism — “RAAAAACISM!” — are generally motivated by politics, representing an attempt to gain some advantage by discrediting one’s opponents, a character assassination that is logically invalid as argument and irrelevant in terms of explaining the problems of black America. But I have digressed far enough . . .

Rashard Mendenhall asserts that he is better than “ur goat,” G.O.A.T. being an acronym for Greatest of All Time, but this is self-evidently false. I’m guessing Mendenhall, as a former Pittsburgh Steeler, might be thinking of Rocky Bleier and I’m sorry, no, sir, you’re not better than him, at least in terms of pure courage. Whether or not Bleier was ever the “greatest” in terms of speed, the simple fact that he made it to the NFL — and won four Super Bowls with the Steelers — after being blasted by a hand grenade in Vietnam is ample testimony to his character.

So if Mendenhall was provoked by some old Pittsburgh fan’s nostalgic remembrance of Rocky Bleier as the G.O.A.T., maybe the best response would have been to bite his tongue. But I actually don’t think that’s what set him off. No, I think it more likely that Mendenhall’s resentment was provoked by the praise being heaped on San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey, a white guy who’s a lot better than “average.”

Since being acquired from the Carolina Panthers in a mid-season trade last year, McCaffrey has become the driving force of San Francisco’s offense, and is arguably the reason the 49ers are now 11-3, with the best record in the NFC and the odds-on favorite for the Super Bowl.

McCaffrey has rushed for nearly 1,300 yards and added more than 500 yards catching passes, with a total of 20 touchdowns, and these statistics don’t really do justice to the decisive nature of McCaffrey’s contributions. Whether it’s making crucial third-down conversions, or just enabling the Niners to play the kind of ball-control offense that helps keep their defense rested, it’s hard to imagine San Francisco being the conference leader without him. And yes, he’s white, in an era where it’s rather rare to see white players as running backs, let alone the kind of franchise star McCaffrey has become in San Francisco.

If there’s any secret to McCaffrey’s success, it’s good breeding. His father, Ed McCaffrey, spent 13 NFL seasons as a wide receiver, including three consecutive 1,000-yard-plus seasons (1998-2000) with the Denver Broncos. Athleticism comes from both sides of the family, however, as Christian McCaffrey’s mother was a soccer star at Stanford, and her father was an Olympic sprinter. Coming from a family with a tradition of athletic success, Christian McCaffrey’s NFL career is less surprising than it might otherwise appear in an era where it is not controversial to assume that only black players can be star running backs.

And, hate to break it to you, Rashard Mendenhall, but Christian McCaffrey is better than you ever were. In your best NFL season, you rushed for 1,273 yards and 13 TDs, which is less than McCaffrey’s got this year. So if you’re ranting about “average white guys” because you’re tired of hearing TV commentators praise McCaffrey’s ability, that’s too bad — he deserves the praise, and your complaints are unseemly.

By the way, permit me to suggest reading Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We’re Afraid To Talk About It by Jon Entine, a careful examination of the subject. The crucial point is that we’re talking about tail-end-of-the-bell-curve phenomena, which is less about average group differences than about what happens in competition between a comparative handful of elite athletes. It is unfortunate that a dogmatic commitment to intellectual abstractions about equality tends to make many people reluctant to acknowledge actual differences between racial or ethnic groups, as if such an acknowledgement would automatically lead to resurrecting Jim Crow or Nazi Germany.

There is no reason why all of us — including “average white guys” — can’t get along peacefully, without resorting to censorship and quotas and endless protests about “injustice.” Just get used to the idea that (a) everybody’s racist and (b) so what? The rest of it is then a lot easier.



 

Category: Football, Racism

Meth-Crazed Lesbian Dies in Proverbial Hail of Gunfire; No Charges for Cops

Posted on | December 23, 2023 | Comments Off on Meth-Crazed Lesbian Dies in Proverbial Hail of Gunfire; No Charges for Cops

Methamphetamine is a bad drug, and when the final report about the death of Whitney Leanne Fox, 36, was issued last month, probably the most important finding was the autopsy that showed “the amount of meth found in her blood was double the amount normally associated with irrational and violent behavior in meth abusers.” This is sufficient to explain why she led cops in Cocke County, Tennessee, on a high-speed pursuit that ended with her getting shot to death while apparently trying to run over officers who were attempting to get her out of the vehicle.

That happened in May this year, but authorities didn’t release body-camera footage of the incident until after a special investigation cleared the two county deputies of wrongdoing in the case: “Both deputies were placed in the position of being on foot in an open field with a driver who had no intention of surrendering and who was in command of a fully operational vehicle, which could reasonably be considered a deadly weapon.” And so last night I watched the YouTube video of the incident:

 

One of my pet peeves with local journalism these days is that there’s so little follow-up reporting on criminal activity. Surely, there must be a fascinating story of how Whitney Fox’s life ended this way, but apparently no reporter in East Tennessee considers the story worth pursuing.

Who was Whitney Fox? That question rooted itself in my mind, and when I started Googling for answers, among the things I noticed was that her obituary listed her as the mother of a daughter named Ryleigh, but made no mention of her being survived by a husband (or any other partner).

Then I found a Facebook page (which I won’t link) showing that, circa 2015-16, Whitney was in a relationship with a woman whose initials are T.A. Some time during the past decade, however, Whitney’s life seemed to descend in a downward spiral. About a year before her fatal confrontation with Cocke County sheriff’s deputies, there was this report from April 2022 in Newport, Tennessee:

On April 29, Patrolman Paul Weber initiated a traffic stop for a Buick with an expired temporary tag. The driver was identified as Whitney Fox, age 35. Fox was known to have an active arrest warrant out of Sevier County for Aggravated Kidnapping. Weber placed Fox under arrest and transported her to Sevier County, where she was released to the Sevier County Sheriff’s Department.

Whoa! Aggravated kidnapping? That is a serious felony, so why was Whitney Fox back out on the street barely a year later? What was involved in this Sevier County kidnapping case? Did the case go to trial? Was there a plea bargain? Or was Whitney Fox out on bail awaiting trial?

You see what I mean about the lack of follow-up by the local media? Other than the report that she was picked up on this warrant in April 2022, I could find no reporting about her Sevier County charges. My hunch — and it is only a hunch — is that she must have gotten out on bail and then failed to show up for a court hearing, because the reason cops tried to pull Fox over in what turned out to be the fatal May 2023 encounter was that she “reportedly had several outstanding warrants.”

It’s not just urban “blue” districts where the judicial system fails society by a turn-’em-loose approach to criminals. Even in rural East Tennessee (Cocke County voted 82% for Trump), somehow a meth addict with a criminal record was on the street. And this was not good for Whitney Leanne Fox. The cops fired 22 shots, hitting her 13 times.



 

Category: Crime

‘Oh, We’re Halfway There’

Posted on | December 23, 2023 | Comments Off on ‘Oh, We’re Halfway There’

Because I don’t watch much TV except news and sports, I know almost nothing about Millie Bobby Brown, one of the stars of a popular Netflix science-fiction series, Stranger Things. As for her fiancé, well, his dad used to be kinda popular in the 1980s, and maybe still is, if you count karaoke singalongs. When their engagement made headlines in April, there was a good deal of journalistic chatter: “Oh, they’re so young!”

Really? During the 1950s, the median age at first marriage for women in the United States was 20.3 years, which is to say that nearly half of weddings involved teenage brides. Such was life in the Golden Age of middle-class America, when Dwight Eisenhower was president. You would probably risk a United Nations human rights investigation if you advocated a return to the 1950s status quo ante, what with all the propaganda directed toward denouncing “child brides” (by which they mean any girl marrying before age 18). This is why Millie Bobby Brown’s engagement at 19 was “controversial,” as if she were a helpless child in a Third World village being bartered off by a tribal leader in some kind of primitive exchange where the father of the bride gets a herd of goats.

Question: Do any of these people who get themselves in a huff over youthful marriage actually remember what it was like being a teenager?

Boredom and restlessness, an impatient yearning to break free from the stifling prison of high school — that’s what I remember, mainly. Also, smoking weed and listening to Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. But there were also years of unrequited love, hopeless crushes that never got anywhere, and, yes, the hormone-induced Bible Belt affliction of sinful lust.

People seemed to grow up faster back in the Seventies. A ninth-grader could walk into the store and buy a pack of Marlboros, no questions asked. The legal drinking age was 18, although many of us started much earlier than that, and high-school girls were partying in downtown discos where nobody much cared whether their IDs were fake.

The main obstacle to adolescent hedonism back then, at least in the Deep South, was the prevalence of what we would now call fundamentalist Christianity, which defined the moral code that adults sought to inculcate in youth. We were all wretched sinners in need of salvation — this was the theme of every Sunday sermon at Lithia Springs First Baptist Church, and every sermon ended in an altar call, usually with the choir leading the congregation in “Softly and Tenderly.” Growing up with the consciousness of one’s inherently sinful nature — being lost, with only one hope of redemption — did not necessarily lead to good behavior, and I was rebellious by nature. Bad boys were (and probably still are) more numerous than bad girls, so there was a supply-and-demand imbalance in the sins-of-the-flesh market once adolescence arrived.

All this I recall by way of rebuking those soi-disant “reformers” who think that adolescence should be extended by effectively prohibiting teenagers from becoming adults. They don’t want kids to grow up and get jobs; instead, they want to send them off to college to accumulate a mountain of debt and get a worthless diploma, thus to make them even less capable of independent living than they would have been if they’d dropped out of school in 10th grade. Most of all, they don’t want young people to fall in love, marry their high-school sweethearts and have babies. Our 21st-century “reformers” are anti-marriage, anti-motherhood and, in the final analysis, anti-love. So when a Hollywood starlet like Millie Bobby Brown announces her engagement at age 19 — oh, how dare she do such a thing?

If Millie Bobby Brown had declared herself to be transgender, gotten injected with testosterone and underwent a double mastectomy, she would have been applauded for her (or “his”) courageous choices. But getting engaged? To marry a man? Well, this is not just unfashionable, it’s practically unthinkable, at least in the minds of the “reformers.”

What was once considered the right thing to do — “better to marry than to burn” (I Corinthians 7:9) — is now considered quite wrong in a culture that has abandoned biblical morality in favor of “progressive” beliefs.

In choosing the old-fashioned way, Millie and Jake are rebels against the prevailing cultural norms, and it’s weird that, even though Jake’s dad seems to be a Democrat in politics, he’s an old-fashioned conservative in his personal life, having spent more than 30 years married to his high-school sweetheart. Now, everybody sing along:

We got to hold on to what we got.
It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not.
We got each other, and that’s a lot.

Just make sure Millie’s dad gets that herd of goats, OK?



 

Category: Celebrities

In The Mailbox: 12.22.23

Posted on | December 23, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.22.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

Mash Kyrielight wishes you a Merry Christmas!

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: How’s That Bail Reform Working Out?
EBL:  Dostoyevsky Survives Firing Squad, also, Julie Christie
Twitchy: Author Claims Argentina Turning Fascist – Gets Slapped By People Who Know The Definition, Randi Weingarten Tries To Dunk On Prager U – Gets Buried Under Receipts, and Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud At U. Minnesota
Louder With Crowder: Below average high school male sprinter turns female, now SHE’S crushing records in college
Vox Popoli: The Shadow Mocks
According To Hoyt: Better Late Than Never Post, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry, and Blessed When The Masks Fell
Monster Hunter Nation:
Stoic Observations: Merry Christmas

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Avoiding a Junk-Filled Christmas
American Greatness: A Glaring Sign of Rot Within the CIA
American Thinker: 2020 Election Fraud and the Courts, also, One Doctor’s Fight for COVID Justice
Animal Magnetism: First Day of Winter, also, Rule Five Climate Cult Friday
Babalu Blog: A black Christmas in Cuba for the family members of political prisoners, Cuba’s fake president says drastic economic reforms ‘will make more Revolution and more Socialism’, and Nicaraguan dictatorship arrests bishop for saying he prays for imprisoned bishop
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For December 22
Behind The Black: Red Chinese astronauts do spacewalk to repair Tiangong-3 solar panel, Firefly successfully launches for the second time in 2023, and Curiosity takes a close-up of distant cliffs
Cafe Hayek: By Itself?
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: Worth Pondering
Da Tech Guy: My Suggestion to St. Mary’s Fire the Board, Fire the President
Don Surber: Merry Christmas, Matt Drudge
First Street Journal: St Greta of Thunberg must be appalled!
Gates Of Vienna: Striking Their Necks, also, We Have Ways of Making You Give Up Your Christmas Goodies!
The Geller Report: “Irishman” Who Stabbed Three Young Children With 14 Inch Knife Finally Identified as Muslim Migrant (Algerian National)
Hollywood In Toto: Why Godzilla Minus One Is Best Film in Decades-Old Franchise, Thanksgiving Slices Up a New Holiday Classic, and Toto’s Worst Movies of 2023
The Lid: Senator Rand Paul’s 2022 Report’ Uncovers a Startling $9 BILLION in Government Waste
Legal Insurrection: People Have Noticed the COVID Boosters Aren’t Very Effective, “If you had a 17-year-old son or daughter, would you send your kids to an Ivy League school today?”, Temple University Police Reportedly Threatened With Sanctions for Pushing Clothing Drive for the Needy, NYC Mayor Eric Adams Slams City Council for Pushing ‘Far-Left’ Agenda Over Progressive Policing and Crime Bills, and U California Tables Anti-Israel Proposed Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement After Pushback
Nebraska Energy Observer: Scattershot Friday
Outkick: Nick Saban Shares Ominous Warning For Future Of College Football, Florida State Files Lawsuit Against ACC In Fight To Leave Conference, Dodgers Have Built A Superteam, But Does It Matter In October? Patrick Mahomes Makes Taylor Swift Official Member Of Kansas City Chiefs: ‘She’s Part Of The Team’, Former Red Sox Pitcher Jonathan Papelbon Roasts Alex Verdugo After Manager Criticism, and Jets FB Nick Bawden’s Wife, Alexis, Gets The Internet’s Attention Via Yoga Pants Photo
Power Line: Interfering In Another Country’s Politics, also, Thoughts from the ammo line
Shark Tank: U.S. Sugar Makes Historic Donations This Holiday Season
Shot In The Dark: A Christmas Time Visit To The Ghost Of DFL Victory-Dancing Past, also, The Hallmark Movie I’d Like To See Over The Holidays
The Political Hat: 12 Post of Christmas, 2023 (Day 10)
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, Retired Airman attempts to gain base entry by claiming to be Captain America, and Army veteran struck by eight different vehicles
Victory Girls: Adulting Is Hard, And You Know What They Say About Karma
Volokh Conspiracy: Clarence Thomas: The Best and Most Incorruptible Supreme Court Justice in U.S. History
Watts Up With That: Authorities Raid Berlin-Based Radical Leftist Group “Zora”… Leader Tied To “Fridays For Future”, VOX: Winter Has Disappeared Thanks to Climate Change, and SCOTUS Will Hear Challenge to One of EPA’s Most Stringent Proposed Climate Regs
The Federalist: The Pregnancy Center That Saved My Life Years Ago Still Supports Me And My Sons, Washington Post Shedding Hundreds Of Staff From Payroll After Trump Presidency And Covid Is The Reason For The Season, Defunding Child Sexualizers Like The Kinsey Institute Should Be A No-Brainer For Republicans, With Help From DOJ, Lesley Wolf Dodged GOP Questions About Her Obstruction Of Biden Probe, By Trying To Keep Trump Off The Ballot, Democrats Are Staging A Coup In Broad Daylight, and Kate Cox’s Baby Deserved A Name
Mark Steyn: You Make Me Feel So Jung

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

‘TNFlyGirl’ as a Metaphor

Posted on | December 22, 2023 | Comments Off on ‘TNFlyGirl’ as a Metaphor

Tragedies can be instructive, if you pay attention, and the death of Jenny Blalock, a/k/a “TNFlyGirl,” could be a useful lesson in many ways. Blalock was a 44-year-old University of Tennessee graduate and successful businesswoman, founder of Luxe Homes and Design.

A couple of years ago, Blalock bought a Beechcraft Debonair airplane, which costs about $100,000 and carries four people, including the pilot, and took lessons to become a pilot. She had about 15,000 followers on her YouTube channel, which featured videos about her flying excursions. She wanted to have the plane fly on autopilot, so she had a Century 2000 autopilot system installed and, apparently, this was her fatal mistake, ultimately resulting in a crash that killed both her and her father, Buck.

After the December 7 crash, but before the National Transportation Board (NTSB) had issued its report on the incident, veteran pilot Juan Browne examined the available evidence on his YouTube channel.

 

Browne zeroed in on Blalock’s misunderstanding of how to use the autopilot as the likely cause of the crash. She simply did not know how it worked, but kept trying to figure it out, without the instruction of anyone competent to explain it to her. On her fatal flight, she was on a planned 500-mile flight to Bryant, Arkansas, where she planned to have work done on the plane. About 30 minutes into the flight, the plane began a series of “oscillating” climbs and descents, going up and down, its airspeed varying rather drastically. What was going on? The autopilot has “up” and “down” buttons, but it doesn’t have control of the throttle or trim, requiring the pilot to adjust those accordingly. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” Browne says at one point in his analysis of Blalock’s crash — which includes clips from her YouTube videos — and it’s clear that her misunderstanding of the autopilot function was related to the “oscillating” trajectory of her fatal flight. Blalock was still trying to figure out how to make the autopilot work, going up and down as a result, and ultimately ending in an uncontrolled dive straight into the ground.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and one doesn’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but the element of hubris involved here cannot be ignored. People who are intelligent, competent and successful — which is certainly an apt description of Jenny Blalock — are not immune to the temptation of thinking that, because they know what they’re doing in their regular daily life, they will automatically be competent in whatever new endeavor they may undertake. A successful businesswoman becoming a flight student in her 40s may have had difficulty accepting the fact that she didn’t know what she was doing. Her business expertise did not translate to automatic competence in the cockpit. She expects to succeed, and is frustrated by any failure, e.g., “Why isn’t this autopilot working?”

What Jenny Blalock needed — what she didn’t get from her instructors — was a “tough love” approach that would include warnings like, “Hey, you need to stop f–king around with that or you’ll get yourself killed.”

My brother Kirby was for many years a long-haul trucker whose job sometimes required him to act as a trainer for new drivers. He used to tell them to forgot about everything they “knew” about driving because most people’s driving “skills” are just a collection of bad habits that will get you killed if you drive like that in a semi rig. When I told him about “TNFlyGirl” and some of the videos she’d posted with her flight instructors, Kirby said, “They took her money, though, didn’t they?”

Ouch. Hit the nail on the head there. It probably wouldn’t have taken more than a few hours for a competent instructor to fully explain the autopilot to Jenny Blalock, and to take her up on a couple of training flights to make sure she was able to operate the autopilot system properly. But that instruction obviously didn’t happen, and at no point did anyone give her the advice that would have saved her life: “If you can’t figure it out, turn the damn thing off and just fly the plane!”

The NTSB has issued its preliminary report on the crash which did not find “any obvious cause,” which is to say, there was nothing wrong with the airplane. It wasn’t a mechanical malfunction, the weather wasn’t a problem. This was pilot error, pure and simple. And it strikes me that this is a metaphor for a lot of what’s wrong in America.

Consider my own profession of journalism. One of the basic problems in the news media is that reporters begin to think of themselves as possessing expertise about the topics they cover, so that you have the TV meteorologist presuming to lecture us about “climate change,” or the Pentagon reporter who imagines himself to be a military strategist. And don’t even get me started on sports writers — looking at you, Albert Breer — with their know-it-all attitudes about football. Two necessary traits for a journalist are curiosity and skepticism. A good reporter is driven by a need to know, a curiosity that keeps him asking questions until he’s satisfied that he’s gotten the right answers, and he is skeptical about everything: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

Curiosity and skepticism go hand-in-hand. A reporter must be able to question his own beliefs and opinions, to avoid jumping to conclusions based on whatever unexamined bias he may bring to the story. Yes, of course, you’ve got to be able to follow your gut hunches sometimes, but you’ve also got to be willing to realize when the facts contradict your gut-hunch first impressions. Be prepared to be proven wrong.

Now, think about politics, and think about Donald Trump. His basic problem, as I see it, was that he was used to being the boss, surrounded by people who got paid to do whatever he told them to do. His business success (or, at least, his reputation for success) was a validation of his methods, and he approached his presidential campaign with a similar attitude. But this caused problems. One of the criticisms heard from “sources” in the White House was simply that they couldn’t get Trump to read anything. His staff would supply him with written reports on various subjects, and this proved to be a complete waste of time. His basic attitude toward politics (and toward governance) was that of the guy sitting on his sofa watching TV news and yelling back at the TV.

Trump was (and still is) very popular with a lot of people because the things he yells at his TV are the same things we’d yell. But in terms of operating a presidential administration, this yelling-at-the-TV attitude is less than ideal, to put it mildly. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, though, and it appears that Trump won’t listen to any constructive criticism. People who would very much like to help Trump get elected, and then succeed as president, find themselves frozen out and accused of disloyalty for telling the boss what he doesn’t want to hear.

I voted for Trump and would vote for him again, but it’s frustrating to know that so many of his problems are self-inflicted wounds that could have been avoided, if he would have been amenable to good advice.

When your habit is to get rid of any advisor who’s not a sycophant — “You’re fired!” — your operations will falter due to the lack of dissenting opinions in your inner circle. Ronald Reagan’s advisors were not ideologically homogeneous; he had a bunch of neocons on his staff, but he also had Pat Buchanan as a counterweight to that neocon tendency. And it would help Trump if he had someone other than True Believers and yes-men in his circle of advisers. Even to point this out, however, is to incur the accusation of disloyalty, to be suspected as a faintheart or a sellout, so that no system-wide internal examination with the objective of reforming the Trump operation is possible. If the plane finally crashes (returning to the “TNFlyGirl” metaphor), the after-action report will identify these flaws, because hindsight is 20/20, but that will be of no consolation to those of us who wanted to see the flight land safely.

“You don’t know what you don’t know” — it would be tragic if this were to become the epitaph of the American republic.



 

Category: Politics

In The Mailbox: 12.21.23 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | December 22, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.21.23 (Evening Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I don’t know if I’m not getting out enough, or the news is being more depressing than usual, but politics is starting to make me feel the way celebrity news did back when this was Live at Five: like I need to take a really hot shower after linkmongling to get the slime off. So after tomorrow, I’m going to take a break from this until after New Year’s. There will still be Rule 5 and the FMJRA, but f*** politics. Maybe I’ll post about books or hamburgers or something. Maybe not.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

Merry Christmas from Shouko Komi (and some of her friends)!

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Last and First Men, also, Nordic Solstice
Twitchy: Conservatives Wishes Good Luck With “Their Civil War” When “We Have The Army”, George Takei Blames Anti-Trans Swimmer For Trans Teen Losing Volleyball Scholarship, and “Don’t You Have To Be Convicted Of The Crime First?”
Louder With Crowder: Popular Publisher Distributes Children’s Books For Drag Queen Story Time That Normalize Child Sex Changes, Teen Shot During Seattle’s CHAZ-BLM “Autonomous Zone” Is Now Suing The City, and Aaron Rodgers WRECKS Joe Biden with hilarious nickname inspired by classic 80s movie
Vox Popoli: They Know They Lost, Right? also, The World Has No Chance

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Mainstream Against Democracy
American Greatness: Will Partisan Lawfare Destroy Trump?
American Thinker: Blockbuster Poll Casts Doubt on Outcome of 2020 Election, The Globalist ‘Final Solution’, Do Not Apologize, and Fear Of Muslims Is Rational; “Islamophobia” Is A Myth
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Lardass News
Babalu Blog: Over 300 acts of repression in communist Cuba during the month of November, Cuban dictatorship does away with rationing and ration book in new economic ‘shock plan’, and That time of year when the pigs start hiding from the Cubans
BattleSwarm: Biggest Losers From Houthi Attacks? Not Israel And America, also, Biden’s Illegal Alien Flood Results in 7 Year Court Date Wait
Behind The Black: Starship prototype #28 completes full duration static fire test, Russia launches military satellite, ULA’s Vulcan rocket fully stacked for the first time, A movie of 14 years of gamma ray observations from space, A glacial lake on Mars? and White House issues “policy framework” to lobby for its space regulatory proposal
Cafe Hayek: The End Is Near! (Just Kidding)
CDR Salamander: Ukraine’s Summer Offensive – The Clear-Eyed POSTEX
Da Tech Guy: When it’s all Over I’d Put Israeli Arabs in Charge of Gaza, also, The war on the Holiday That Must Not Be Named has reached a truly ludicrous level this year
Don Surber: Hypocrisy alert
First Street Journal: Killadelphia: The City of Brotherly Love has been under one murder per day for the last three months, also, Journolism: The credentialed media don’t exactly lie, but they conceal politically incorrect facts
Gates Of Vienna: Silenced in Germany, Justice For Saman, and Cyprus Says: Send ’Em Back!
The Geller Report:  Delta, American Airlines, etc Flying Whole Planes Full of Migrants All Over United States
Hollywood In Toto: AG Ellison Slams Fall of Minneapolis (But There’s a Catch), also, Lady Ballers Jake Crain: ‘We Used to Be Able to Make Fun of Things’
The Lid: Radical Democrats Look Like Stone Cold Tyrants Right Now—And Normal Democrats Can See It, Too
Legal Insurrection: Congress Investigation Into Harvard to Include Plagiarism Allegations Against President Claudine Gay, Power Outages Force Maine to Delay Vote for Electric Vehicle Mandate, Study Finds Fewer Men Are Enrolling in College, Especially 4-Year Programs, Bay Bridge Anti-Israel Protesters’ Supporters Demonstrate Against San Francisco DA’s Decision to Charge Them, UPenn Faculty Warn of ‘Hostile Takeover’ as Trustees and Donors Take Action Over Anti-Semitism on Campus, and Biden Border Crisis: Agents Have Already Encountered Over 200,000 Migrants in December
Nebraska Energy Observer: Trying to walk a line
Outkick: Mike McDaniel With A Downright Incredible Speech, Minor League Pitcher Robbed At Gunpoint, Asks Cops For Ride To Throw Bullpen Session An Hour Later, Florida State Expected To Start Process Of Leaving ACC Imminently, Alabama Player Reportedly Arrested For Allegedly Spreading STD, Dodgers Spending Spree Continues With Yoshinobu Yamamoto; Japanese Star Signs 12-Year, $325 Million Deal, Jaromir Jagr, Confirmed Hockey Guy, Laces Up His Skates For 36th Professional Season At Age 51, and Paige Spiranac Wishes Everyone A Merry Christmas In Nothing But Wrapping Paper
Power Line: Americans Vote Red With Their Feet
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Asks E-Retailers To Provide Country Of Origin For Foreign Products
Shot In The Dark: Life Imitates Pulp Art, also, Mirthy
The Political Hat: 12 Posts of Christmas, 2023 (Day 9)
This Ain’t Hell: Red Sea updates, Navy Sailor brings large teddy bear to meet ’13-year-old’, Donald Trump removed from Colorado’s primary, and Extradited!
Transterrestrial Musings: The Democrats’ War On Elon Musk
Victory Girls: Groomers Latch Onto Little Free Library
Volokh Conspiracy: Jack Smith Lacks Standing to File in the Supreme Court Because He is Only a Private Citizen
Watts Up With That: Scottish battery factory goes bust in fresh blow to UK’s net zero industry, Emails Show Biden Admin Coordinating with Enviro Group That’s Suing Them, and Oregon’s Climate Program Overruled
The Federalist: Stopping Campus Antisemitism Requires Confronting The Marxism Behind It, 19 AGs File Brief Opposing Jack Smith’s ‘Partisan’ Bid To Fast-Track His Get-Trump Prosecution, ‘You Must Be 40’ To Be President, Whiffs California Lt. Gov. While Masquerading As Constitutional Expert, Here Are The Lessons The Obamas Don’t Want You Taking Away From ‘Leave The World Behind’, and Queens Resident Indicted For Submitting 118 Absentee Ballot Applications During New York’s 2022 Democrat Primaries
Mark Steyn: Digging the Demographics

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Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 12.21.23 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | December 21, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.21.23 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

Consort Yu wishes all you bloodbags a Merry Christmas.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Average Bubba: Wednesday Morning Liberal Love Edition
EBL: Epstein’s Associates List Dropping with New Year: Who is on it? Rocky Mountain MAGA Ballot Ban, and California Turning Sewage into Drinking Water 
Twitchy: “Let Me Tell You Something, Brother!”, Newsweek Spots Republicans Pouncing On Story Of Arrested Trans Activist/Alleged Pedophile, and David Frum Sounding The Alarm On A Second Trump Presidency Goes Oh So Wrong
Louder With Crowder: Democrats Introduce Bill DEMANDING Chick-fil-A Open On Sundays, Celebrity chef goes into explicit detail why he’ll NEVER open another business in crime-ridden California, and School District Socially Transitioned Autistic Child And Hid It From Parents, Now They’re Suing
Vox Popoli: Leaving the Cloud, The Empire Enters the Doom Loop, and Paperbacks Unlimited

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: This Machine Makes Companies Woke
American Greatness: Federal Judge to Unseal Over 180 Previously Redacted Names of Jeffrey Epstein’s Powerful Associates, Netflix and the Erasure of History, and Jim Jordan Subpoenas Merrick Garland Over Surveillance of Congressional Staff
American Thinker: Biden’s Party is Over… and the Hangover Has Begun, Claudine Gay isn’t the First, or Worst, Example of Black Plagiarism Privilege, and How Black Americans Were Tamed to Vote Democrat for 200 Years
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Reports from Cuba: ‘When I was at my peak, they gave me everything. Now what?’ says former Cuban boxer, Argentina’s President Milei will not appoint ambassadors to dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua, Cuba’s telecom monopoly rewards workers with bananas, Cuban dictatorship threatens to extradite, try, imprison, execute dissidents on their list of ‘diaspora terrorists’, and Argentina expecting Cuban ‘agitators’ sent to spark violence at left-wing anti-Milei march
BattleSwarm: Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw Files Bill To Ban DEI Statements At Universities
Behind The Black: Glacial layers in Mars’ glacier country, Launch of Intuitive Machines Nova-C lunar lander delayed until February, Ingenuity’s most recent flight, the 68th, a mystery, Congress passes short term extension of commercial space regulatory “learning period”, and The Biden war against Musk is a war against America
CDR Salamander: Deterrence Is In The Head As Much As The Spreadsheet
Da Tech Guy: Gee I Wonder What Binding Common Social Norm Might Have Been Abandoned over the Last 40 Years in Canada
Don Surber: Musk is winning
First Street Journal: What The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t tell us, tells us a lot
Gates Of Vienna: Giorgia Meloni: “There is a Process of Islamization of Europe”, also, The Windmills of Your Mind
The Geller Report: Migrants reject food served at NYC shelters: ‘Nothing healthy
Glenn Reynolds: Civilizational Jenga
Hollywood In Toto: The Best Movies of 2023, also, How the Sexual Revolution Killed the Rom-Com
The Lid: Christians Who Support Hamas Ignore Their Religious Canon
Legal Insurrection: Anti-Israel Protesters Seize Capitol Hill Rotunda, Including Linda Sarsour, Tennessee Suing BlackRock Over ‘Misleading’ ESG Strategy, Military Experts Blame Biden Admin’s DEI Agenda for Our Shrinking Armed Forces, Teacher Fired For Refusing to Use Male Pronouns For Female Student Can Sue School, VA High Court Rules, Teacher Union President Randi Weingarten: School Choice ‘is About Undermining Democracy’, and Biden’s Department of Interior Offers Most Restrictive Offshore Oil Drilling Plan in US history
Nebraska Energy Observer: Proportionality
Outkick: Eli Drinkwitiz Learned Something New 48 Hours Before Signing Day: Random Teams Will Offer ‘Crazy Numbers’ To Steal Recruit, MLB Player Blasts Relocation: ‘Nobody Wants The Las Vegas A’s’, Donovan McNabb Thinks Sean Payton Went Too Far By Chewing Out Russell Wilson: ‘I Wouldn’t Tolerate It’ , Coastal Carolina Deletes Photo Of Shirtless Coach With Bikini-Clad Dancers, But Screenshots Are Forever, Mack Brown Calls NC State’s Dave Doeren ‘Classless’ After Saying TarHeels Were ‘Pieces Of Sh-t’ Following November Rivalry Game, and Ben Verlander Says Shohei Ohtani Is Biggest Dodgers Signing, Ignores Jackie Robinson
Power Line: Colorado Bars Trump From the Ballot [Updated], Biden’s open borders, and Stop Moving the Goalposts!
Shark Tank: Florida Republicans Blast Biden’s Release Of Maduro Ally Alex Saab
Shot In The Dark: Massacre, Open Letter To Every GOP Candidate Everywhere, and Open Letter To The MNGOP
The Political Hat: 12 Posts of Christmas, 2023 (Day 8)
This Ain’t Hell: SECDEF Announces Operation Prosperity Guardian, Mexican military captures 10 IEDs at US-Mexico border, Two More Accounted For, USAF to court martial another general for sex assault, and Fake Waffle House Employee Steals Cash
Transterrestrial Musings: Keeping Discrimination Illegal In California, Saving “Our Democracy”, and AIAA SciTech
Victory Girls: Joe Biden Losing Ground Among…Democrats? also, Colorado Decision Against Trump: A Grotesque Use Of Lawfare
Volokh Conspiracy: Colorado Supreme Court Rules Trump is Ineligible for the Presidency Under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, also, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Appointment Is Unconstitutional
Watts Up With That: Time to Bring Nuclear Energy Into the 21st Century, Reason is Right, There is No ‘Climate Cliff’, and U.S. Climate 2023 Year in Review – In one word: NORMAL
The Federalist: All I Want For Christmas Is Something That Won’t Break Immediately, Rhode Island Parents Score Major Legal Win Against The State’s School Mask Mandates, Wisconsin Professor Pushes Antisemitic Petition Under The Guise Of Anti-Zionism, Lawsuit: Wisconsin State Bar’s ‘Diversity Clerkship Program’ Discriminates Based On Skin Color, and Queer Activists Are Putting Pornographic Books In Little Free Libraries
Mark Steyn: Live Around the Planet: Constitutional Crisis Edition

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Category: Linkagery

Do Bananas Grow in Colorado?

Posted on | December 20, 2023 | Comments Off on Do Bananas Grow in Colorado?

Is it a crime to vote Republican? Is it illegal to disagree with liberals? Will all opposition to the Biden regime be banned?

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a 4-3 opinion that the Constitution’s “Insurrection Clause” prohibits former President Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot for the presidency in 2024.
“The court found by clear and convincing evidence that President Trump engaged in insurrection as those terms are used in Section Three” of the Fourteenth Amendment, the ruling reads.
The provocative ruling partially reverses a prior ruling from Colorado District Court Judge Sarah Wallace, who ruled in November that Trump is not an officer of the United States as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment and that the Amendment therefore cannot be used to disqualify him from appearing on the Colorado primary ballot.
In his dissent, Chief Justice Boatright wrote, “Dismissal is particularly appropriate here because the Electors brought their challenge without a determination from a proceeding (e.g., a prosecution for an insurrection-related offense) with more rigorous procedures to ensure adequate due process.”
In partially reversing Wallace, the Court all but dared the U.S. Supreme Court to step in by January 4, 2024.
“If review is sought in the Supreme Court before the stay expires on January 4, 2024, then the stay shall remain in place, and the Secretary will continue to be required to include President Trump’s name on the 2024 presidential primary ballot, until the receipt of any order or mandate from the Supreme Court,” the ruling says.\
The Court disagreed with Trump’s claims that his actions were protected free speech.
“We consider and reject President Trump’s argument that his speech on January 6 was protected by the First Amendment,” the ruling reads, seemingly ignoring Trump’s calls that day for protesters to conduct themselves “peacefully and patriotically.”

ThoughtCrimes! WrongSpeak! Trump is Emmanuel Goldstein!



 

Category: Colorado, Constitution, Donald Trump
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