IF YOU’RE IN A FAIR FIGHT, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Grandfather Of Teen Killed During Burglary Says AR-15 Made Fight ‘Unfair.’
And burglers deserve to be shot. They don’t deserve a fair fight.
Archive for 2024
December 15, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
JOHN HINDERAKER: How Much Voter Fraud In 2020?
FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOMS:
In 1981, Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, preventing the world's worst weapons from being used by Saddam Hussein.
Today, Israel is destroying chemical and strategic weapons in Syria, preventing the world's worst weapons from being used by jihadist rebels.… pic.twitter.com/lC8SdFbYoG
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) December 15, 2024
UPDATE: I mean, I did say earth-shattering kabooms.
WATCH⚡️
An absolutely monstrous explosion in Northwestern Syria near Tartus on a munitions depot. This explosion was so large that it registered as 3.0 earthquake on seismic sensors in the area. Brought to you by the Israeli Air Force.
Via @inside_IL_intel pic.twitter.com/CnV8qGR66L
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) December 15, 2024
LEFTIES: TWITTER SUCKS BECAUSE THERE’S NO MODERATION CONTROLLING VIOLENT NUTS. WE’RE GOING TO BLUESKY!
LEFTIES ON BLUESKY:
There's a culture of just total impunity over there when it comes to violence. On Twitter, as far as I can tell, it's rare for people to post violent threats or musings under names identified with their IRL identities. Over there, they know they can do so without any risk. pic.twitter.com/3xRWdAo3Kl
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 15, 2024
SOME PARTS OF THE 21ST CENTURY ARE TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED:
It’s ~120m tall today. Probably grows another ~20m over time. https://t.co/wYEHq26gOE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 15, 2024
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
WATCH: Jill Biden Got Humiliated by a Bunch of Kids, And It Was Awesome.
One could argue that the 2024 election sent the message that Americans have had enough of woke, politically correct nonsense.
This was on full display recently when Jill Biden, during her appearance at the White House’s annual Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots campaign, faced an unexpected rebuke from the most unlikely critics: children.
As the lame duck first lady addressed the audience, she offered the typical leftist-friendly, seasonally generic and “inclusive” greeting of “Happy Holidays.”
But the kids in the crowd weren’t having it. Several shouted back, “Happy Christmas!” and “Merry Christmas,” making it clear they weren’t about to let the holiday’s traditional greeting be swept under the rug.
Forced to respond, Biden corrected herself, saying, “Happy Christmas, yes.”
A child just corrected Jill Biden 🤣
Jill Biden: "Happy Holidays!"
Kid: "Happy CHRISTMAS!"
pic.twitter.com/O7cM3KWqoD— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 13, 2024
For someone used to carefully scripted events, it must have been a humbling moment. Being publicly corrected is awkward enough, but when it comes from children—and on something as simple and traditional as saying “Merry Christmas”—it’s hard not to see it as a real blow to your pride. The kids’ reaction wasn’t rude or disrespectful; it was honest, and it reflected the kind of unapologetic pride in tradition that so many Americans feel.
While it’s easy to be full of schadenfreude watching the above clip, I do have a bit of sadness seeing any Trump 2024 voter being humiliated, especially during the holidays Christmas season.
DAVID MARCUS: Drone debacle perfect end to Biden’s ‘You don’t need to know’ presidency.
Up in the air. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the Biden administration’s final bit of credibility on fire in the form of giant mysterious drones over New Jersey.
As President Joe Biden limps away from one of the worst presidencies in American history, these unidentified flying objects, whatever they are, serve as a reminder that the general attitude of this White House towards the American people has been, “you don’t need to know that.”
We didn’t need to know that the president of the United States was suffering severe mental decline, we didn’t need to know that he was actually open to pardoning his son Hunter while swearing he never would.
Even back in 2021, when breakthrough COVID cases among the vaccinated that weren’t supposed to exist were popping up all over Washington DC, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked then Press Secretary Jen Psaki how many had been detected at the White House.
“Why do you need that information?” was her incredible reply.
In other words, you don’t need to know.
For four years now, it has been the Biden administration and the Biden administration alone that has deigned to decide what Americans do and do not need to know, and even in the case of the former, half the time these people just seem to be lying.
Setting aside Sundown Joe’s role as John Gill, the Chinese spy balloon debacle absolutely destroyed any credibility his staffers might have had when it comes to playing it straight with the nation over our enemies spying on us. As Steve wrote last year: Confirmed: That Chinese Spy Balloon Made Fools of the Biden Administration.
SO MUCH HATE AND BIGOTRY ON THE LEFT:
Understand how much they hate you https://t.co/EiGHFxohLl
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) December 15, 2024
Related:
It's interesting that we continue to see the mental breakdown of the radical American left on a daily basis on our @X timelines and nobody in the establishment media has done a report on a need to do something about the surge in left-wing "hate speech."
Despite the uptick in… https://t.co/Ugv4jNSdRz
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 15, 2024
THE SAD THING IS, IT’S 90% DRIVEN BY A DESIRE NOT TO BE LIKE THE UNITED STATES: The Only Thing Canada and NZ Can Learn From Each Other on Guns is Failure.
I ESPECIALLY CREDIT J.K. ROWLING: Gender Ideology Has Been Comprehensively Beaten: Three Cheers for Terfs.
JEFF DUNETZ: The Partition Vote: When The UN Acted As An Agent Of G-D.
Seventy-seven years ago, on the 16th of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar (annually November 29 on the secular). By a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, the United Nations passed Resolution 181, approving the partitioning of British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states (back then, Jews living in the Holy Land were called Palestinians).
It was the Zionist dream. After 1,900 years of prayer, the Jewish nation, the indigenous people of the Holy Land, could again have a sovereign state in its eternal homeland.
Despite what you might have heard, there was never an Arab state called Palestine. The Arabic tradition grew with the establishment of Islam in the early 7th century, approximately 500 years after the Jewish State of Judea was destroyed.
Read the whole thing.
RADICAL CHIC — THE BOY BAND ERA: The deranged lusting after the ‘hot assassin.’
The widespread fawning over Luigi Mangione, the man charged with the murder of US healthcare boss Brian Thompson, is as bizarre as it is nauseating. You would have thought that we were beyond victim-blaming by now. But no, a consensus has emerged from ‘progressives’ that Thompson ‘had it coming’, and that his alleged killer can be excused for his apparently good motives. Worse still, he can even be indulged on account of his good looks.
The latter response has been the most deranged aspect of this episode. Just when you thought our society couldn’t become more superficial, witness how this ‘hot assassin’ has been lusted over by legions of pervy half-wits. In other circumstances, the actions of a lone nut armed with a gun and violent fantasies would have had progressive Americans in paroxysms of moral panic, usually about gun laws or the threat posed by the far right. But no. It’s different this time, it seems. This killer meant well, we’re told. And aren’t his looks just to die for, too?
Some have sought to dress up their fawning as politically motivated. The former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz seemingly spoke for many when she said her initial reaction to Thompson’s death was one of ‘joy’. Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian spoke of Thompson as ‘the face of an unfair system.’
* * * * * * * *
In recent days, it has emerged that Mangione is no left-wing radical, but instead seems to be enamoured of America’s lunatic fringe and its icons. ‘He was a violent individual’, he once wrote of the Unabomber, a terrorist who murdered three people and injured 23 others with nail bombs. ‘While these actions tend to be characterised as those of a crazy Luddite, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary’, Mangione added.
Speaking of the Unabomber, perhaps to calm its more bloodthirsty leftist readers, the New York Times has an opinion column titled: The Unabomber’s Influence Is Deeper and More Dangerous Than We Know.
Plenty of young people are alienated from both sides of the political spectrum, and trying to create their own patchwork philosophies. They’ve seen little meaningful reform from either political party in their lifetime, get their information from a wide range of sources of varying reliability and take pride in forming their own opinions.
So what do you say to a young person who has come to admire Mr. Kaczynski? I share many of the same frustrations over the state of the world as those of the college students I teach — how we are bound up in and complicit in horrors across the globe without a viable political alternative to chart a new way forward. How do we maintain our humanity in an inhumane system, where people die unnecessarily every hour on the streets of the richest country in the world?
I did give an answer to the teacher’s question, the best one I could. I told him to tell his students that Mr. Kaczynski was cruel, that he tortured dogs and took pleasure in imagining the suffering of others; to read not only his manifesto, which he polished for public consumption, but also his diaries. There they would see what kind of man he was. I told him that the Unabomber’s philosophy was taken from thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who never killed anyone, and urged him to teach his students about their work.
I hope my words reached them. And I hope they understood that what Mr. Kaczynski represents is not a new way forward or an answer to the injustices of the modern world, but another turn of the wheel of violence that brought us here.
Finally, Justine Bateman spots the dog that didn’t bark in the wake of Mangione’s coldblooded assassination of an insurance CEO:
“FLY WITH ME, LESBIAN SEAGULL!” A Very Merry Tom Wolfe Christmas. In the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Wolfe writes:
My younger self would be appalled by the person I’ve become around the holidays. Gone are the tasteful decorations of my youth—the popcorn garlands, homemade ornaments on Popsicle sticks and a stitched Mark Twain doll in place of a Christmas star at the top of the tree.
Now my house is filled with fluorescent red and green bulbs, Paw Patrol-themed sirens and foot-long candy canes covered in tinsel.
My embrace of Christmas maximalism is fairly recent, but I now see that the seeds of this aesthetic were first planted in 1996, when my father saw the classic holiday film “Beavis & Butt-Head Do America.” My dad, Tom Wolfe, an otherwise polite Richmond gentleman, spent the next six months singing at the top of his lungs, “Fly with me, lesbian seagull!” At 16 I was only just noticing my father’s taste for the absurd.
Although my dad was always proper and impeccably dressed, I grew to see how much he enjoyed the occasional silly flourish. Every July 4 since I was a toddler, he’d attend our town’s parade in his usual summer outfit of a white linen Oxford shirt, white linen suit and white boat shoes, but with a red, white and blue tie—an ensemble that already turned heads. Then, as we stood among the crowds waiting for the procession to begin, he’d press a button that made his tie loudly sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The shock on everyone’s faces sent him into paroxysms of laughter.
Our holiday decorations may have been elegant, but dad always injected some quirkiness. On Christmas mornings, he’d come downstairs in beige slacks and a sweater, then pull up his pant leg to reveal bright green socks with red Christmas trees. After a breakfast of pancakes and bacon—the one day a year he allowed himself this indulgence—he’d cackle at the stocking-stuffer toys that screamed at the press of a button, “Shut up!” or “Whaddaya think you’re doing?!” An unexpected connoisseur of singing pop-up greeting cards, he may have laughed harder at their robotic lyrics than at anything else all year.
After he died in 2018, Christmas got quieter. Gone were the sounds of his wrapping gifts until 4 a.m., his feet shuffling up and down the steps from the tree to his study, where he wrote our names on cards in colorful calligraphy. Gone was his Christmas greeting, “Good morning, Breakfast Clubbers!” He was so hard to shop for that I couldn’t help buying that first year something that I knew he would’ve liked: a set of salt and pepper shakers shaped like white shoes.
Despite his penchant for white suits and faux-spats and the humor throughout his writing, it’s tough to picture Wolfe acting so goofy in person, based on the courtly southern gentleman persona he developed when speaking and doing interviews. Certainly, this side of him doesn’t really come across in the otherwise must-see recent Netflix documentary, Radical Wolfe, and would have been a welcome addition.
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NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: Drug Lords, Ponzi Schemers, and Corrupt Officials: Meet Joe Biden’s Clemency Recipients.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: Looking Versus Seeing.
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IS TRUMP MAKING SNL GREAT AGAIN?! Probably not — salvaging America is one thing, but bringing Saturday Night Live back to life is a nigh-impossible task at this late date. Still, credit where credit is due: Watch: Chris Rock Sends Libs Searching for a Safe Space With ‘SNL’ Monologue Slamming Biden, Democrats.
“Trump had a good year, man,” Rock said. “Trump survived an assassination attempt. Won the presidency again by winning the popular vote. Was just named Time ‘Man of the Year.’ You know?”
“It could happen to a nicer guy.”
That may have been the worst of it, as Rock immediately ripped anti-Trump liberals for saying the president-elect’s return to the White House would shatter norms and etiquette.
“A lot of people are scared. Like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to be so undignified,'” he mocked. “When I say a lot of people, I’m talking about the nine New Yorkers that didn’t vote for him, okay?”
He then eviscerated Clinton.
“Come on, man, this is not the most dignified job in the world,” Rock said of the presidency. “We’ve had presidents show up to the inauguration with pregnant slaves, okay? And I’m just talking about Bill Clinton.”
Rock continued with some jokes about the Menendez brothers getting out of prison just in time to get deported by the 47th President and teaming up with the world’s “richest African-American,” Elon Musk.
“Trump is not playing. He’s got Elon. They’re going to put them in a rocket ship — call it SpaceMex,” he quipped.
At one point, the former SNL regular addressed Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden, joking that the president might not have all of his mental faculties, but he can still stick it to people.
“I gotta hand it to Joe. He don’t move as fast as he used to, he don’t talk as fast as he used to,” Rock laughed. “But that middle finger still works.”
The comment elicited some good laughs. Not laughing, however, were leftists on X who suggested Rock needed to be slapped by Will Smith again for daring to make jokes across the political aisle.
“Normalizing the felon will never be funny,” one BlueSky woman wrote. “Love Chris Rock but oof.”
The Ayatollah was famously quoted as saying, “An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.” And even he’d probably be wondering today why doctrinaire leftists are such humorless scolds.
A NEW TWIST ON ‘I’M LEAVING THE COUNTRY:’
Anytime a Republican wins a presidential election, we hear about celebrities who threaten to leave the country. Few of them ever follow through, and we’ve learned that the most recent examples moved before the election and are using Donald Trump’s victory as an excuse to virtue signal.
We rarely hear about someone in the entertainment industry moving out of a left-wing country and seeking somewhere more conservative, but Irish-born British comedy writer Graham Linehan announced that he is moving to the U.S. because the UK is too restrictive on free speech.
In a broadcast on X, Linehan told his followers that he is moving to Arizona to form a production company with Rob Schneider, Andrew Doyle (the genius behind Titania McGrath), and Martin Gourlay of GB News. He announced:
I am happy to announce that I’ve written three episodes of a new sitcom which we’ll be hoping to shoot in the next year. And to that end, I’m going to be leaving the UK and we’ll be moving to Arizona where I will be setting up a production company with Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay and Rob Schneider. We have an idea for a sitcom that I think is pretty damn good.
The premise is strong. It’s not anti-woke comedy, which I think many people would be expecting, because I think that’s going to be as dead an end as the woke movement itself is because all of this nonsense is going to seem out of date in a couple of years.
Linehan is the mind behind one of my favorite British shows of all time, “The IT Crowd.”
And he’s not the only “controversial” figure departing the Commonwealth for the Colonies: Jordan Peterson moves to US over bill that could turn Canada into ‘totalitarian hellhole.’
ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES: DC server fired over refusing service to Trump officials.
“I personally would refuse to serve any person in office who I know of as being a sex trafficker or trying to deport millions of people,” Suzannah Van Rooy, a server at Beuchert’s Saloon on Capitol Hill, told the Washingtonian this week. “It’s not, ‘Oh, we hate Republicans.’ It’s that this person has moral convictions that are strongly opposed to mine, and I don’t feel comfortable serving them.”
Her remarks were part of a report about whether there would be local “resistance” to certain Trump figures when they were in public settings again after several high-profile incidents during his first term. They included then-aide Sarah Huckabee Sanders being ejected from a restaurant in Lexington, Va., and protesters swarming then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a D.C. Mexican establishment.
“People were a lot more motivated the first time around to do those kinds of shows of passion. This time around, there is kind of a sense of defeat and acceptance,” Van Rooy said, according to the Washingtonian. “But I hope that people still do stand up to this administration and tell them their thoughts on their misbehavior.”
According to a review of her LinkedIn page on Friday, which has since been taken down, Van Rooy listed her duties as doing daily operations, messaging strategies for the restaurant, developing relationships with influencers, and managing in-house events for political figures and VIPs.
Her page also said she worked as an organizer for Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s failed run for governor in 2022.
Beuchert’s Saloon told Fox News Digital that Van Rooy’s remarks were “reprehensible” and she had been fired for violating their “zero-tolerance policy on discrimination.”
We’ve come a long way from the heyday of the now departed Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan, when Julian Niccolini, the restaurant’s maître d’ and eventual co-owner was quoted by food and wine journalist John Mariani in his 1994 history of the restaurant:
Nicolini became known for his ability to joke with even the most powerful of his clientele; it was reported that he once told the hawkish Henry Kissinger and the more dovish Cyrus Vance, “We have a lovely breast of pheasant today. Will that be the right one for you, Dr. Kissinger, and the left one for you, Mr. Vance?”
But then, “safetyism” wasn’t a known word in the 1970s and ‘80s.