MAKE OUR MILITARY GREAT AGAIN: Here’s the Message Trump Gave to Pete Hegseth When He Nominated Him for Secretary of Defense.
Archive for 2024
December 24, 2024
IT’S HARD TO SIT WELL WHEN YOU ARE ALL BUTT HURT: Fetterman’s Comments About Trump Aren’t Sitting Well With Progressives.
DEFINITELY WORTH TRYING: Trump Puts Purchase of Greenland on Task List for His New Ambassador to Denmark.
OF COURSE THEY DIDN’T: Now, Did CBS News Really Think This Segment on Gun Control Through?
FARAGE, WE’RE HOLDING OUR THUMBS FOR YOU: How Reform plans to takeover No 10.
THE RUSH TO USE A NEW TECHNOLOGY ALWAYS RUNS AFOUL OF BUGS. WISH BIG CORPS GOT THAT: Ding-dong.
SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Post COVID data in the UK: Those who got the jab substantially increased their chances of death.
AND JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS: “Murder Hornets” are Officially Eradicated in the United States.
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: The Daily Chart: Demographics and Red Futures.
THERE’S AN ARGUMENT THAT WE NEED TO REFORM THE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY IN GUISE OF A LEGAL PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION, AND ITS IMPACT IN IMPROPERLY DELAYING EXECUTIONS: BREAKING: Biden Commutes Federal Death Row Sentences.
HE’S RIGHT, AND YOU SHOULD READ THIS: The Toxification Gambit is where Leftists use propaganda techniques to influence public opinion against one of their enemies. They present snippets of info, out of context, in complete disregard for exculpatory information. Their intent is to ruin someone without any Due Process.
AND HERE: If you don’t have twittex.
December 23, 2024
MY NEW YORK POST CHRISTMAS COLUMN: In a Christmas season of renewal, Trump’s boldness is bringing hopeful change.
And this bit probably isn’t entirely within the Christmas spirit, but then again naughty boys are supposed to get a lump of coal. “The hysteria led to two assassination attempts — and after a brief pause, lasting about 15 minutes, they started calling him Hitler again. A lesser man would have folded under the pressure. Just imagine how fast Mitt Romney would have tucked his tail between his legs, apologized for existing and Stockholm-Syndromed himself into being a Democratic Party tool. (Well, OK, you don’t really have to imagine that.)”
Plus thoughts on Millei and Bukele.
IF, AS SOME ARE URGING, HE BLANKET-PARDONS ALL ILLEGALS YOU CAN EXPECT THE MENTAL COMPETENCY ISSUE TO BE SERIOUSLY RAISED:
.@POTUS was deemed unfit to be charged in the classified documents case, but is now mentally sound enough to issue pardons and commute sentences? When and where do we draw the line that we don't let them cross?
— Rep. Tim Burchett (@RepTimBurchett) December 23, 2024
Contracts, wills, and other legal actions are null and void if a party is mentally incompetent, as Joe Biden obviously is. The Congress and the Trump Department of Justice should investigate whether these pardons for depraved murderers are binding.
Who is making these decisions…
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) December 23, 2024
I should note that when Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton’s term was coming to an end, and he was under investigation for pardon-selling, they swore in his successor, Lamar Alexander, three days early to limit the damage and to prevent Blanton from pardoning himself. The Lieutenant Governor, John Wilder, referred to that as “impeachment, Tennessee style.” Ned McWherter, who was Speaker of the state House at the time, and later Governor, told me that they weren’t sure it was constitutional under the state constitution, but that if they were fighting it out in court later, Blanton wouldn’t be able to pardon anyone regardless. I don’t think Blanton every contested his replacement. But that was a bipartisan affair — Wilder and McWherter and Blanton were all Democrats, and Alexander was a Republican — and swearing in Trump early wouldn’t get the same kind of support from Democrats.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: In Range v. US, a win for gun rights. After the case was GVR’d back to the Third Circuit (they Granted certiorari, Vacated the judgment below, and Remanded for further consideration) after Rahimi, the Third Circuit has stuck by its, er, guns, and held that the nonviolent crime of making a false statement on a food stamp application isn’t enough for a lifelong loss of gun rights. Full opinion is here. I’ve only skimmed it briefly (all 165 pages) but I’ll probably have more later, though probably after Christmas. Interestingly, only two judges from the 15 judge en banc panel dissented.
OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.
LET ME JUST GET OUT AHEAD OF THE STORY AND SAY THAT BILL CLINTON DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE: Bill Clinton admitted to hospital for ‘testing and observation’ after falling ill.
Great minds think alike:
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Liechtenstein signs the Artemis Accords. “Liechtenstein is the 52nd country to sign the Artemis Accords and the 19th to do so this year. The country, which is neither a member of the European Union nor European Space Agency, has a modest presence in space, and is perhaps best known as the country that Rivada Space Networks has used for spectrum filings for its proposed broadband constellation. It follows Thailand, which signed Dec. 16, and Panama and Austria, which signed in separate ceremonies Dec. 11.”
“So what Homan is doing is thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, who is the Admiral Byng of all of these 600 jurisdictions that I have to encourage you? I know the most obnoxious, the most crazy, the most nullification advocate in one of the second or third largest cities is Chicago, that crazy Mayor Johnson,’” Hanson continued. “‘So we’re going to tell him first, you try to stop the federal government and you think you’re South Carolina 1832 or you think you’re firing on Fort Sumner. You’re going to regret it because you were breaking federal law and we have a lot more federal laws that you would want us to follow in your interest than you do federal laws to break.’”
“That’s going to be interesting because what Homan is basically doing is talking over the mayor’s head to the black constituencies of Chicago and saying, don’t worry, your mayor doesn’t, he’s going to break the law, but I’m going to follow it and I’ll put him in jail for your benefit so that you don’t have to worry about Venezuelans and Colombians shooting you or taking over your social services,” Hanson added.
Glad to see a new sheriff in town, finally.
UPDATE: ICE: Wrong-way driver in crash that killed Las Vegas officer was ordered to leave US.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Jeff Dunetz on The Differences Between Christmas And Hanukkah: The 2024 Snarky Edition.
#2 The Jews also celebrate December 25th. Why not? We have a paid day off, too. The Jewish tradition of Christmas Day starts with going to the movies. On the 25th, there are no lines at the theater box office for the theaters playing the hot winter blockbusters because the Christians can’t go because they are with family celebrating Christmas.
After the movie theater, we make our annual Christmas pilgrimage to get Chinese food, the traditional Jewish cuisine.
It’s 2024 in the secular calendar, 4722 in the Chinese calendar, and 5785 In the Jewish calendar. Archeologists and other scientists still haven’t figured out what the Jews ordered for Chinese take-out for the first 1063 years of our existence.
In the book of Genesis, we learn that the patriarch Abraham always kept his tent flaps open. Theologians will tell you that he kept them open because he wanted to welcome people, but that’s not true. He kept the flaps open so the Chinese food delivery guy saw that he was home.
Exit quote:
IT’S THE DEMOGRAPHY, STUPID: Europe Is Canceling Christmas.
The gradual cancellation of Christmas in countries such as France, Spain, the United Kingdom or Germany is perhaps the most worrying symptom of the West’s renunciation of its Judeo-Christian cultural identity. It is happening at all levels: from governments and city councils to schools and associations. As ever, it’s the secularists of the socialist left, behind the facade of “inclusivity,” who are the most determined to cancel Christmas, which for centuries has been celebrated in style throughout the continent. Indeed, it has been celebrated as a festivity of the union, not segregation, between different peoples. What Ronald Reagan explained simply and in his own unique way, that “Christmas is a holiday that we celebrate not as individuals nor as a nation, but as a human family,” now appears entirely incomprehensible.
Let’s look at some examples of what is happening in Europe. In November, the head teacher of Wherwell Primary School, in Andover, England, informed parents that there would be no reference to Christmas in the school’s traditional festive pantomime, in order to be “inclusive.” Since “Christmas songs were included in the performance,” and some parents usually prevent their children from attending on religious grounds, the head teacher wrote, “We have requested that the show contain no reference to Christmas.” According to the 2021 census, 62.4% of Andover’s then-50,887 residents identified as Christian, compared with 0.6% who are Muslim.
The trend of canceling Christmas in European schools didn’t start this year, it simply spreads from one December to the next like an oil slick at sea. The first major controversy occurred in 2011, when kindergartens and schools in Denmark canceled their traditional Christmas celebrations so as not to offend Muslims, who are already the second-largest religion in the country, and who are densely concentrated in ghettos in large cities.
France, the European country with the most immigrants of Arab origin, has also been de-Christianizing Christmas for years. After the jihadist attack against a Christmas market in Strasbourg in 2018, far from redoubling the defense of freedom and pride in their Christian traditions, political leaders intensified the secularist drift, and this year there are already a majority of French cities whose authorities have decided to eliminate Christian referencing in Christmas celebrations, sometimes going to ridiculous extremes. Nantes is now celebrating its “Winter Journey” (whatever that means), Angers is observing “Winter Suns,” Bordeaux is touting “Bordeaux in festivities,” and Saint Denis is holding a Christmas vacation called “Destination Beautiful Winter” while its mayor celebrates the holiday by shouting “Happy Winter!” The official festive brochure of this French community includes puppets, fire-eaters, craft workshops for children, and no iconic Christian Christmas imagery.
In his 2004 epic Wall Street Journal essay “It’s the Demography, Stupid,” Mark Steyn warned:
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands–probably–just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
Otherwise, JD Vance will be correct: Trump’s vice-president pick JD Vance joked UK could be ‘first Islamist country to have nuclear weapons’ under Labour.
RADICAL CHIC: THE BOY BAND ERA. Luigi Mangione and the American Abyss.
To the mainstream media, the question posed by this episode was obvious: Why are Americans so angry at health-insurance companies? And so reporters and opinion columnists got to work limning a portrait of the health-care industry—its profits, the salaries of its executives—and fleshing out the animus against it.
The only relevant question in the wake of the Thompson murder, however, is: What has gone wrong with Americans’ moral compass that so many could cheer the extrajudicial killing of an innocent man? That question has not been deemed worthy of exploring.
When the high fives for the assassin started appearing on the web, some observers dismissed that support as a minor emanation from the fever swamps of social media, where anonymity and the desire for a following push users to rhetorical extremes.
But a poll of registered voters released on December 17 undercuts that diagnosis. Over 41 percent of respondents supported the Thompson assassination, or were at best ambivalent about it. Nearly 16 percent of respondents were “unsure” or “neutral” about whether the killer’s actions were “acceptable or unacceptable.” A little over 8 percent of respondents found Mangione’s actions “completely acceptable.” Another 8.4 percent found those actions “somewhat acceptable,” and 9 percent found them “somewhat unacceptable.” (It is not clear how “somewhat acceptable” differs from “somewhat unacceptable.”) Four of every ten Americans, in other words, will not unequivocally condemn the killing.
The younger the voter, the greater the level of support for political killings. Sixty-seven percent of voters aged 18 to 29 were ambivalent about or supportive of Mangione’s actions, with only 33 percent finding those actions completely unacceptable. Fifty-seven percent of voters aged 30 to 39 were unwilling to condemn the killing unequivocally, with only 43 percent finding it “completely unacceptable.” Democrats were nearly twice as likely as Republicans to find it either somewhat or completely acceptable.
It’s no surprise that age is inversely correlated with support for left-wing assassination, since the younger the voter, the more recent his exposure to the American education system. The pro-Mangione reaction epitomizes the dominant traits of contemporary academia: narcissism, a juvenile view of economics, the inability to think in terms of principle and precedent, and ignorance about the civilizational triumph that is Western due process. Campus reaction to the October 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel put another item on that list: support for barbarism when the victims of that barbarism belong to a group disfavored by the academic Left. We can now add corporate executives to the list of acceptable targets.
The left-leaning film-oriented Cinesthethic account on Twitter descended into inadvertent self-parody with a tweet and retweet in short succession today:
Meanwhile: Colin Jost’s Reaction Says It All As ‘SNL’ Audience Cheers For Luigi Mangione. “Jost, who is married to actress Scarlett Johansson, seemed caught off guard when the audience responded with enthusiastic applause upon hearing Luigi Mangione’s name.”
America’s Newspaper of Record believes that Lorne Michaels will ultimately succumb to fan pressure, and give Saturday Night Live’s audience the host the show deserves. Sounds killer:
Truly bad timing on Mangione’s part, though. If he had acted sooner, he would have very likely been among the 37 federal inmates facing the death penalty who “President Biden” pardoned today.
SHADES OF RESUBLIMATED THITOMILINE: Quantum Physicists Just Found Evidence of ‘Negative Time.’
Classical reference in headline.
COFFEE. IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Coffee and Tea Linked to Lower Cancer Risk in Groundbreaking Study.