JAMIE K WILSON: The Missing Hero’s Journey: Why Our Culture Can’t Grow Up. “This isn’t about politics. It’s about process. Our culture rewards arrival but skips the journey. We crown heroes who never faced the dragon.”
Archive for 2025
November 5, 2025
TRIM YOUR NAILS: 360° Rotating Toenail Clippers. #CommissionEarned
REGIME CHANGE? Trump Weighs Options, and Risks, for Attacks on Venezuela. “President Trump has yet to make a decision about how or even whether to proceed. Officials said he was reluctant to approve operations that may place American troops at risk or could turn into an embarrassing failure. But many of his senior advisers are pressing for one of the most aggressive options: ousting Mr. Maduro from power.”
OLD AND BUSTED: No Kings!
The New Hotness? These Kings!
B.B. King:
Freddie King:
Albert King:
Carole King:
King Curtis:
Clarence Clemons, the King of the World:
And Jason King of Department S:
YEP, THEY’VE GONE WAY OVERBOARD IN THE OTHER DIRECTION: How nursing home residents got caught in the opioid backlash. “Since the height of the opioid epidemic, doctors have been prescribing fewer of these medications. A new study from UC San Francisco shows that this trend extends to nursing home residents who may need opioids to manage chronic pain.”
Helen had dental surgery a couple of weeks ago, and the pain meds they gave her were woefully inadequate.
THEY WILL TELL YOU WHAT THEY’RE DOING IF YOU JUST LISTEN: Mamdani’s Victory Speech Was the Most Disturbing Since Biden’s ‘Red Speech’ at Independence Hall.
ROGER KIMBALL: Time for a reckoning on the 2020 election.
In 2008 the super-smooth historic cleans-up-well rocket man Barack Obama got 69.4 million votes, crushing John McCain. (In 2012, Obama snagged just shy of 66 million.) In 2020 sleepy Joe Biden, campaigning from his basement, seems to have blown by Obama’s historic victory. Biden, remember, clocked in at 81.3 million votes. Turnout in that election was an astonishing 66.6 percent, a number that dwarfed Obama’s 61.6 in 2008. Amazing. Astonishing. Or anomaly number two?
It was such numbers that led some observers to speak not of “turnout” but rather of “turn-in” in the 2020 election. All those mail-in ballots. All those drop boxes. There were plenty of recounts following the 2020 election. But how many audits were there? It is one thing to count the number of pebbles in a box two or three separate times. It is something else to find out how the pebbles got there in the first place.
We haven’t done that. And, as the canny former prosecutor who writes on Substack under the soubriquet “Shipwreckedcrew” observed in a newsletter on October 26, it may well be “impossible to know with any certainty… whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump received more validly cast and counted ballots in the 2020 election.”
And that fact, the fact that we just do not know what happened in the 2020 election, means that lurking just behind the word “anomaly” is the word “fraud.” As Shipwreckedcrew notes, because every state has its own procedures for administering presidential elections and for dealing with challenges to the results, “there is no uniform standard for what is to happen if outcome-determinative fraud isdiscovered.” Moreover, “we do not have a solution for the problem of fraud that changes the outcome of a presidential election.”
Flashback: 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. “I would like to see some accountability for the election of 2020. A cabal of insiders colluded to control the outcome, through all sorts of underhanded tactics. (Tech companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story broken by The Post, and retired intelligence officials falsely claimed it was fake, Russian disinformation). The press allowed Biden to campaign from his basement, covering up the truth that he was already unfit for office.”
HEH: Trump Mocks JD Vance to His Face, and It’s Hilarious.
If you work for Donald Trump and you don’t have a sense of humor, he might just give you one.
A BLOW AGAINST RACIAL DISCRIMINATION: Legal Challenge Overturns Scholarship Limited to Black Students in California.
HMM: Supreme Court justices appear skeptical that Trump tariffs are legal.
Lower federal courts have ruled that Trump lacked the legal authority he cited under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose the so-called reciprocal tariffs on imports from many U.S. trading partners, and fentanyl tariffs on products from Canada, China and Mexico.
Sauer, who is defending the tariff policy as grounded in the power to regulate foreign commerce, said “these are regulatory tariffs. They are not revenue-raising tariffs.”
“The fact that they raise revenue was only incidental,” Sauer said, shortly after oral arguments in the case began.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberal members, told Sauer, “You say tariffs are not taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.”
“They’re generating money from American citizens, revenue,” Sotomayor said.
She later noted that no president other than Trump has ever used IEEPA to impose tariffs.
Developing…
QUESTION ASKED: Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians?
So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offence? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room.
Women’s rights have been broken on the wheel of the trans ideology.
Ms Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered a man who identifies as a woman in the changing area of the gym she uses in LA. She was shaken.
‘I was naked in the locker room’, she said. ‘I turn around and there’s a man there in boy clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me. I’m butt naked.’ Understandably unsettled by this experience, she made a fuss. And yet it was reportedly her who was kicked out.
Clips of the showdown between Ms Hyman and the gym staff have gone viral. They make for extraordinary viewing. In one, Hyman makes an impromptu and thundering speech in the gym’s reception area.
Language warning:
If we saw boldness like this back in 2020, this insanity would've never been allowed to fester like it has.
God bless you for speaking the truth loudly, @listen2tish pic.twitter.com/KrmZ75bsJL
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) November 3, 2025
Related: Gym Chain at Center of Tish Hyman Dispute Flooded With Negative Reviews.
MORE PLAIN TALK FROM DATA REPUBLICAN:
As an example, look at Indivisible job postings (for context, Indivisible organized NoKings). Their postings speak an entirely different vocabulary of expertise which is foreign to anyone who's working in the private sector. pic.twitter.com/MUoy6cpuzh
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 5, 2025
The Right faces hurdles, but ones that can be overcome. Just not if we ignore them.
Related thoughts from Charlie Kirk last year:
Please listen to Charlie. pic.twitter.com/8FyHUOlnVU
— Jammles (@jammles9) November 5, 2025
VICE, VIRTUE, AND VICTORY: Dick Cheney, RIP.
Dick Cheney, the widely beloved wartime vice president, oil executive, and outdoor sports enthusiast, entered the kingdom of heaven on Monday to avoid watching New York City be overtaken by a trust fund communist who loves terrorism. He was one year and nine months older than Joe Biden.
Cheney was best known for his world-historic bromance with George W. Bush. The iconic duo will be remembered as one of the most successful partnerships since Michael Jordan (Cheney) and Scottie Pippen (Bush). Their steady leadership in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks helped Americans heal our trauma by rekindling our passion for killing terrorists and other enemies of freedom. They launched a series of successful wars and pioneered enhanced interrogation techniques that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. They protected the homeland through military strength abroad while cruising to reelection in 2004, forestalling the disastrous consequences of a John Kerry presidency. Cheney helped seal the victory by humiliating John Edwards on live television.
From 2004 Vice Presidential Debate, Dick Cheney to John Edwards: "Senator, frankly, you have a record in the Senate that's not very distinguished. You've missed 33 out of 36 meetings in the Judiciary Committee, almost 70 percent of the meetings of the Intelligence Committee.… pic.twitter.com/XW9CN32RTp
— CSPAN (@cspan) November 4, 2025
“In my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.”
Now that’s shock and awe. Read the whole thing, which is a hoot.
THERE’S A REPUBLICAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE, SO EXPECTATIONS GET LOW-BALLED AND THE REVISIONS GO UP INSTEAD OF DOWN: The Economy Added More Than Expected Jobs in October.
GOOLOO A3 Jump Starter with Air Compressor. #CommissionEarned
SOME HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Dick Cheney, RIP. “Until Trump broke liberal brains, there were generally only two ways the modern left-leaning press thought of Republican Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates: Evil masterminds (Nixon, Agnew, Dole (to an extent)) or dunces (Ford, Reagan, Bush43, Quayle, Palin, Ryan). If Bush43 was the dunce, then Cheney must be the evil mastermind. Cheney didn’t mind being the heavy, and didn’t seem to care what the press thought about him. (Accidentally shooting a guy in the face on a hunting trip didn’t help either.) Republicans liked Cheney for the same reason; he may have been a sonofabitch, but he was our sonofabitch. Having never been elected to the House or Senate, Bush43 delegated a lot of tasks to Cheney, since he knew the ends and outs of how the sausage got made, which gave rise to the leftwing myth of Cheney being the ‘evil puppetmaste’” controlling 43. This was always bunk.”
Cheney bought plenty of goodwill from me more than 30 years ago, when he canceled the Navy’s overpriced and overweight (and, of course, late) A-12 Avenger II attack jet — contractors be damned. But he spent the Trump years pissing away all that goodwill.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Why Male Teachers Left Elementary Schools And Won’t Go Back.
INDEED:
Western Civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard, but necessary for survival https://t.co/aIVbe1fRKS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2025
JUDICIAL TEMPERAMENT: Justice Jackson Is The Supreme Court’s Mean Girl.
While Sotomayor and Kagan have shown some semblance of restraint in their criticisms of the majority’s decisions, Jackson has held little back, often allowing her personal animus to trickle into her opinions.
Frustrations with Jackson’s antics among her conservative-leaning colleagues appeared to reach a breaking point in the court’s Trump v. CASA case earlier this year. Writing for the 6-3 majority on the scope of nationwide injunctions, Barrett blasted Jackson’s dissenting opinion as “a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever,” and that “is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”
What’s become glaringly apparent, as further indicated by the Times’ story, is that Jackson has completely forgone (assuming she considered it at all) the Kagan approach of building bridges instead of burning them. Rather than forge professional, working relationships and write to convince her colleagues to come around to her side of the argument, she’s opted to pen left-wing “girl boss” fiction for her legacy media fanbase.
That strategy may garner her glowing articles and “news” segments, but it’s not getting her anywhere with her Supreme Court colleagues — conservative or liberal. It simply makes her the school mean girl whom everyone tolerates but can’t stand all the same.
Read the whole thing.
DATA REPUBLICAN CALLED IT, AND HAS THOUGHTS ABOUT WHY:
As far as I know, I was one of the few who expected a clean D sweep, and hopefully that gives me at least a little credibility in talking about why it happened. This is a structural problem and one that’s only going to intensify as the Buffett heirs begin spending their father’s…
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 5, 2025
ATHENA THORNE: Touché, Lefties. “Now that you got your election winnings, will you allow vulnerable Americans to eat again?”
LIMITED TIME DEAL: 4500 Sq.Ft Most Efficient Energy Star 2025 Dehumidifier. #CommissionEarned