YES, YES, HIGHER PRINCIPLE. THE RIGHT NEEDS TO STOP FALLING ON THEIR SWORD. BECAUSE THE GAME THEORY ON ONE SIDE THAT WORKS FOR “HIGHER PRINCIPLES’ AND ONE WHO FIGHTS FOR POWER IS OBVIOUS:  Republicans Lose House Seat in New York Special Election.

A RIFLE BUTT WOULD PROBABLY SUFFICE:  The Army must take a bayonet to this diversity mania.

UKRAINE WAS THE SECOND DOMINO, AFTER AFGHANISTAN, AND A LONG CHAIN’S TEETERING:  Biden’s ruinous foreign policy 1: Ukraine.

Does anyone seriously doubt Russia didn’t have the facts of Hunter’s business schemes? Might that have affected Putin’s thinking?

YES, IT IS COMPLICATED, BUT IF YOU DON’T LIKE THESE METHODS, THEN YOU SHOULD INTENSELY OPPOSE THE CURRENT MOLLYCODDLING OF GANG AND CARTEL MEMBERS:  The Justice of Bukele?

Because it will inevitably lead to this.

ANTIFA’S DEMAND FOR FASCISM FAR OUTSTRIPS SUPPLY:  FCK NZS: How noble protestors “against the right” assembled yesterday evening at the Dresden Altmarkt to shout about Alternative für Deutschland and finally defeat the Nazis.

They should look in the mirror.

STOP BEATING YOUR DRUMS FOR GUN-BANNING. LAWS WERE ALREADY DISOBEYED FOR THIS. CRIMINALS DON’T OBEY LAWS:  One dead, 21 wounded amid shots fired into crowd after Kansas City Chiefs rally: Live updates.

All the bleating for more laws, and his serene CCP vice-roi Zhou Bai-Den demanding we ban guns because criminals use them to commit crimes at “unifying” events relating to the superbowl just make our conspiracy sensors tingle. Stop now while you’re ahead. This is not going to work. It would work on “progressives” yes, but we’re not stupid enough to be “progressives.”

THAT’S NOT A HUNGER STRIKE. THAT’S A WEIGHT LOSS FAST:  This is why I can’t take college activists seriously.

Many of us live like that….

OH, COLORADO!  Coming bills would ban new oil-and-gas wells, stop summertime drilling.

ARE PEOPLE THIS STUPID, OR ARE WE LIVING IN A HORROR NOVEL?  That letter is one of the creepiest things you’re going to read this century.

TOOLS OF THE REGIME ARE EXEMPT FROM SCRUTINY:

BLM's PAC spent $0 on candidates and $0 on election activities in 2023, but it did spend 61% of its money on consulting fees that went directly to a company owned by its treasurer.

BLM was always a scam. So, when will it get 1% of the investigative attention Elon Musk gets for…

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 14, 2024

OH DEAR GOD, MAYBE JUSTICE HOLMES WAS RIGHT: Ok, have a look at Buck v. Bell (“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”) Why such a statement you’d ask. This. OMFG:

“Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin, 47, reveals she is dating George Soros’ billionaire playboy son Alex, 38 – as pair take their romance public during Valentine’s Day date in Paris”

And to modernize the issue, remember the warning from my favorite Australian drinking buddy, Tim Blair:

Blair’s Law: “the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.”

I got nuthin’.

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Domestic Extremists All Helpfully Label Themselves For FBI https://t.co/olXlO0shRN pic.twitter.com/jQvfRWn1UO

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 14, 2024

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden: Should We Trust the Polls?

Polls conducted months before an election can be valuable in identifying trends in voter preferences, and in sending signals about where trouble lurks — as they have for Biden in key battleground states, where the Electoral College may be decided in 2024.

According to polling conducted last month for Bloomberg media, Biden trailed Trump in states that typically are competitive, such as Arizona and Georgia, and was tied in Wisconsin.

Outcomes in those and other swing states in November could determine who wins the presidency — much as they did in 2020. Biden carried Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, but a well-distributed shift of 43,000 votes would have given Trump victory in those states, producing a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College.

The election was that close.

It’s certainly “a live issue” whether the polls will get it right in 2024, as an academic journal article noted not long ago.

The pressure is on pollsters to avoid a recurrence of the misfire in 2020, when overall they understated Trump’s support. To that end, many of them have tweaked or altered their methodologies following the 2020 polling embarrassment.

As Glenn wrote at his Substack: Time for Consequences. The “Cabal” who bragged about rigging the 2020 election stuck us with an incapable president at a time of crisis. Examples need to be made.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Fueling issue delays Intuitive Machines lunar lander launch.

HOWIE CARR: Fani Willis drama must-see moment.

President Trump, please, I’m begging you, fly to Atlanta tomorrow for that court hearing on whether to disqualify the corrupt Democrat prosecutor behind that phony-baloney Georgia election-interference case against you.

Word leaked Monday night that POTUS might be heading to Fulton County, and it seemed like a brilliant plan. Then yesterday morning he decided instead to head to New York to attend another of the fake cases – Stormy Daniels.

But what Lawfare is trying to do to him in Georgia is far worse than that NDA against a porn star.

This Georgia persecution, er prosecution, by DA Fani Willis blew up last month, after it was revealed that she’s been seeing a lot of her (very) special prosecutor and maybe lying about it, under oath.*

This Fani Willis scandal includes every imaginable juicy tabloid angle – cheating, that married boyfriend on her public payroll for $654,000, his scorned wife, a disgruntled business partner of the gigolo who can contradict Fani’s sworn statements, fake invoices (boy-toy billed his sugar mama for 24 hours at $250 an hour on his fourth day on the job), whistleblowers in her office lining up to rat her out, plus at least three ongoing investigations of the DA by 1) Congress, 2) the state of Georgia and 3) Fulton County….

You can see why state-run media is running in the other direction from this story. Another anti-Trump bombshell blows up in their hands.

The only way the Democrat stenographers with press passes could ever be forced to even mention this mega-scandal would be if Trump were sitting in the courtroom. Wherever Trump goes, they follow. Trump is ratings.

Whatever he does, they go after him like moths careening into a klieg light. They can’t help themselves.

There’s an old saying, a lie goes around the world in the morning while the truth is putting its pants on. Since 2015, alt-left media coverage of Trump has proven that beyond a reasonable doubt. This Atlanta case is just more of the same.

And none of the low-info, no-info Democrat voters know anything about what a con job the entire story is because the truth doesn’t fit the Democrat narrative.

That’s why Trump should be there in Atlanta, in the front row, scowling, his arms folded.

* How dare you say that, sir! Will It Ever Be Acceptable to Simply Expect a Professional WOC to Be Accountable for Her Actions?

WHAT TOOK THEM SO LONG? Notorious race faker Rachel Dolezal loses elementary school teaching job after district learns about her OnlyFans posts: officials.

Infamous race faker and former NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal lost her job teaching at an Arizona elementary school after the district learned about her OnlyFans account, school officials said.

Dolezal, who is going by Nkechi Diallo, came under fire on Tuesday following reports that the Catalina Foothills School District teacher had an OnlyFans page listed on her public social media account that appeared to be operated by her, News4 Tucson reports.  

Dolezal was allegedly making $19 an hour in her teaching job, while also selling content on OnlyFans for $9.99 a month.

Julie Farbarik, the district’s director of alumni & community relations, said in a statement that Diallo’s “posts are contrary to our district’s ‘Use of Social Media by District Employees’ policy and our staff ethics policy”

“We only learned of Ms. Nkechi Diallo’s OnlyFans social media posts yesterday afternoon,” Farbarik added. “She is no longer employed by the Catalina Foothills School District.”

Was it the new name that kept the school district at bay for so long? Because otherwise: ‘Transracial’ icon Rachel Dolezal has been reduced to doing OnlyFans and Black Twitter has thoughts­­.

—Louder with Crowder, September 27, 2022.

UPDATE: Libs of TikTok gets results again?

Meet Rachel Dolezal, former leader of the NAACP who resigned in disgrace after pretending to be black. She changed her name and is now a teacher in Catalina Foothills School District, AZ.

She’s also very active on OnlyFans and links her OF in her public Facebook profile.

Would… pic.twitter.com/3hOstl3cIY

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 13, 2024

ARMY OF DAVIDS UPDATE: Watch: Brave Chiefs Fans Tackle Suspected Parade Shooter in Wild Video, Hold Him Till Cops Arrive.

RIP: William Post, who played a key role in developing Pop-Tarts, dies at 96.

William Post, a Michigan man who played an important role in the development of Pop-Tarts, has died at age 96.

Post died Saturday, according to a family obituary which provided no details on his death but says he was raised in Grand Rapids as “one of seven children of Dutch immigrants” and had retired at age 56 as a senior vice president with Keebler Company and settled in Glen Arbor, Mich.

Kellanova, formerly known as Kellogg Co., said in a statement Wednesday that it was “deeply saddened” by Post’s death.

“He played an important role in co-creating the iconic Pop-Tarts brand and we are grateful to Bill for his legacy and lasting contributions to our company,” Kellanova said without elaborating.

Pop-Tarts debuted in 1964 in Cleveland, Ohio. The toaster pastry was originally sold in four flavors — strawberry, blueberry, brown sugar cinnamon and apple-currant — before it was released nationwide the following year, Kellanova’s website states.

I haven’t had one in over four decades — maybe more — but they were certainly enjoyable as a staple element of “the Cookie-Crisp Total Health Plan,” as Jerry Seinfeld would say:

QUESTION ASKED: Is Marvel dying?

Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. “The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,” he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some theaters, eager to fill the demand, screened the film over and over for seventy-two straight hours.

Now everything’s coming up Scorsese. The Marvel strongmen have fallen from the sky and landed, cape-first, onto concrete. Last year’s The Marvels, a group outing of female superheroes, made a profit of only $47 million on its $200 million budget — the lowest box-office takeaway of any Marvel film. The film blog Deadline blames Disney+ streaming services. In its on-demand delivery of superhero “content,” it does away with most of the magic of going to the movies. Fair enough. But there are other dimensions to the decline.

I survey friends who like superhero films, only to find they’ve all gone off Marvel films. One says she hasn’t seen a Marvel film in nearly six years because the plots are too complicated. All of the heroes operate in the same universe: you have to have watched every Marvel release of the last decade to understand whatever they put out next. Another used to watch the films regularly but found that the different fight scenes started to merge into each other. Some pin the decline to the birth of Disney+ and others to the release of Endgame, which killed off several of the franchise’s most recognizable characters. “Too many movies and shows to keep track of,” explains another ex-fan.

In his new book Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV, veteran Hollywood journalist Peter Biskind writes:

WandaVision is full of echoes, allusions, callbacks, and Easter eggs from old TV sitcoms and previous Marvel shows, creating a puzzle for superfans by entangling them in the increasingly intricate Marvel maze, all of which is fine. But when Black Widow was released, requiring The Washington Post to run a piece entitled, “The 7 Marvel Movies You Should See Before Black Widow,” the danger is that those who merely want to watch, not research a PhD in MCU studies, are left out in the cold. Ditto Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For those studying for their MCU exams, The New York Times recommended rewatching five films to fully understand it.

The current incarnation of Hollywood began with George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977. It’s opening crawl began with the words, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” which alerted moviegoers they needn’t know anything about the backstories of the characters they were about to watch for the first time to enjoy the movie. Comic book-based Hollywood would be wise to recapture that ethos.

FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists Engineer Human T Cells 100x More Potent at Killing Cancer Cells.

BOB MCMANUS: Progressive government in action: Migrant beats cop, set free, shoplifts.

THAT’S KIND OF COOL. First Look at Asteroid Hints It’s a Fragment of a Lost Ocean World. Let’s see if the hints pan out.

21^st CENTURY HEADLINES: ‘Serious national security threat’ is ‘Russia wanting to put a nuclear weapon in space’: Biden urged to declassify all materials after ominous warning from top Republican Mike Turner.

When Biden announced his run for the presidency in 1988, he read from a speech that contained the following passage:

There are risks we must take in foreign policy and national security if we are going to shape our children’s world.  America can not retreat from the world.  We can not succumb to the isolationist instincts of those who would put up trade walls to keep out the world, or others who would pull a Star Wars cover over our heads – a modern “Maginot Line” – ravaging our economic capital, nuclearizing the heavens, and yielding the fate of our children’s world to the malfunction of the computer, Like it or not, our only choice is to compete and prosper in the world beyond our shores.

In 2024, Sundown Joe probably doesn’t remember reading that, and he’s likely too far gone for his worldview to have advanced much beyond it.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! Rate of long COVID may be lower in pregnant people, study suggests. “Pregnant people.” LOL.