Flotsam and/or Jetsam

Great American Stories Vol 1

Posted on September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 by Mike 1 Comment

Been thinking lately of starting up a series spotlighting tales of legendary Americans from all and every era, and decided the first installment could only be about a YUGE favorite of mine back when I was but a young sprat: the amazing Robert Craig “Evel” Knievel.

Knievel started his career as a professional rider a bit late in life when he was 27 years old. He was the first daredevil biker to transform his stunts into a lucrative business and became a worldwide sensation in the 1960s/70s.

Robert Craig Knievel was born in the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, on October 17, 1938. His parents broke up not long after he was born and the kid was raised by his grandparents. Knievel was a very energetic teenager, a standout athlete in track and field, sky-jumping, and ice hockey. Unfortunately, he used part of this energy to become a petty criminal.

His very first bike was a Harley-Davidson he stole when he was 13 years old. Three years later his grandmother bought him a Triumph.

One night Robert was caught by the cops for riding his bike recklessly (no shi…!) and was taken to the local precinct. There, the police were holding a guy named Knofel, whom they called “Awful Knofel“. To call Robert “Evil Knievel” was a no-brainer. The name stuck, and some years later, Mr. Knievel legally took the name Evel, changing the “i” to “e” because, he said, he thought it looked better.

His career as a petty criminal continued, He was once again caught by the police, at this time, stealing hubcaps. Hoping the military life could straighten him up, the judge decided to give Evel a chance, it would either be going to jail or joining the army. Knievel jumped into the green uniform in the 1950s, but a regular infantry job wouldn’t do it for him; he volunteered to be a paratrooper and performed more than 30 jumps during his tenure. Afterward, he played semiprofessional and professional hockey, for a time with the Charlotte Clippers of the Eastern Hockey League. Then he took up motorcycle racing full-time until falling and breaking bones in a race in 1962.

When he was 27, Knievel became co-owner of a motorcycle shop in Moses Lake, Wash. To attract customers, he announced he would jump his Honda 350cc, 40 feet over parked cars and a box of rattlesnakes, and continue past a mountain lion tethered at the other end. More than 1,000 people came to see him, His jump was almost perfect, but he failed to fly far enough; his bike came down on the rattlesnakes. The audience was in awe.

“Right then,” he said, “I knew I could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff.”

Some guys in history were born to become legends and that might be the case with Evel Knievel, even if he turned out to be a controversial one. Some stories about his personal life are as extreme as his stunts. He said he had twice kidnapped his hometown sweetheart, Linda Bork, and married her after the second time. He said he had robbed a service station of $900 when the owner failed to pay off a $25 bet. He said he had worked as a card shark, a swindler, and a safecracker. How much of it is true or not remained unclear.

Evel started his career riding Honda, Norton, and Triumph but his favorite bike was Harley-Davidson. For an American hero through and through, there was no other brand that could fit the bill.

He chose the XR 750, a bike designed primarily for dirt track competition, but it could also perform well on paved tracks.

And the tale continues on from there, featuring some really great, seldom-seen photos of the legendary daredevil in action. The famous Caesars Palace smash-up—”by far my worst crash,” according to the man his own self—is covered in minute detail, including the backstory of what-all went into booking the event to begin with. Fascinating stuff, believe you me; the pics alone are well worth the price of admission.

Follows, the fabled Caesars Palace misadventure—the jump that made him a superstar, but which also damned near killed the guy.

Watching the crash as a 7 year old kid horrified me, the way his body rag-dolled limply, seemingly boneless, as he went bouncing along at the bottom of the ramp. A fractured skull, pelvis, hips, and ribs; a month-long spell in a coma, effectively dead to the world. God only knows what my mom must’ve thought about the whole thing.

There have been other motorcycle stunt-riders and jumpers over the years—including Evel’s own son Robbie, who died in ’23 of pancreatic cancer—but none of them quite like the one, the only, the original Evel Knievel.

Is this real? Might it actually happen?

Posted on September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 by Mike 2 Comments

Not a chance. Once-Great Britain is an abject, unqualified, Mark 1-Mod 0 tyranny, and tyrannies have never been inclined to just let people go seceding like this.

Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales leaders to meet tomorrow to plan breakup of UK: Report
The leaders of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales will meet on Monday to discuss plans for the breakup of the United Kingdom, according to The Telegraph.

First Ministers John Swinney of Scotland, Rhun ap Iowerth of Wales, and Michelle O’Neill of Northern Ireland are expected to sign a joint declaration demanding the right to hold referendums on breaking away from the UK. For the first time, the three constituent nations of the UK are held by pro-separation parties.

The Telegraph reported sources as saying that the summit’s purpose is to pile more pressure on Prime Minister Andy Burnham after he said in the parliament on Wednesday that he would back another Scottish independence referendum if public opinion backed one.

A source close to Swinney told the newspaper that Burnham “fucked up” by making the comment and unionists should be very worried.

In the UK, unionists are those who support the union of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales with England in UK, whereas parties like Sinn Féin (Northern Ireland), Scottish National Party (SNP), and Plaid Cymru (Wales) support the breakup of the UK.

The source further said: “Burnham has not read his brief and doesn’t seem to know the basics of the UK Government’s position on the Union. If I was a Unionist, I would be very worried.”

Actually, they aren’t, and there’s no real reason they should be. Vote all you like, whichever way you like; we already know too well how useful voting is as any kind of change agent all on its own, most especially in the UK—you can make a statement via voting, and that’s about it. Even in more or less honest “elections,” voting is merely a gesture, and that’s pretty much all it is.

If/when King Charles tells his restive subjects “not just no, but HELL no!” in response, then calls out whatever troops he has left to back him up, the “breakaway nations” will fold like a cheap accordion, and all the big talk about separating legally and politically from the UK will tiptoe quietly away, on little cat feet (as Sandberg said of the fog). Y’know, just like Brexit did.

Conspiracy theorizing

Posted on September 16, 2026September 16, 2026 by Mike 1 Comment

Gotta admit, I never have heard this one before.

Ten months after JFK’s assassination, Mary Pinchot Meyer was gunned down. Hours later, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief was caught picking the lock to her art studio to seize her diary.

A Georgetown socialite, painter, ex-wife of a top CIA official, and a rumored lover of the president, Meyer had been deeply shaken by Kennedy’s death in November 1963. While the nation grieved, she became convinced that the assassination was not the work of a lone gunman. She began quietly asking questions, purportedly telling friends like Timothy Leary that the murder was a conspiracy orchestrated by powerful elements within the government.

Less than a year later, on October 12, 1964, Meyer’s search for answers came to a violent end. She was taking her daily walk along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown. Just after noon, a mechanic working on a nearby car heard a woman cry out for help, followed by two gunshots. Meyer was found dead, shot once in the head and once in the back at close range.

Police arrested Ray Crump Jr., a young man found wandering nearby completely soaked, though he claimed he had fallen into the Potomac River while fishing. No murder weapon was ever found, and forensic evidence failed to link Crump to the crime. His lawyer successfully argued that the police case was entirely circumstantial, leading to his acquittal. The murder remains officially unsolved.

The aftermath of her death read like a spy novel. When Meyer’s brother-in-law, Newsweek editor Ben Bradlee, rushed to her Georgetown art studio to secure her private diary, he arrived to find James Jesus Angleton—the aforementioned CIA chief and a friend of Meyer’s—already there. Eventually, Bradlee’s wife found the diary and handed it over to Angleton under the agreement that he would destroy it. Years later, Angleton admitted he had kept the journal, which was said to contain details of her affair with Kennedy. Its contents were never fully publicized, cementing Meyer’s legacy as a central figure in Cold War conspiracy lore.

Hm. Interesting, veddy. More:

When Mary Meyer died, no one knew about her affair with John Kennedy, or about her ex-husband’s job managing the CIA’s clandestine services. In newspapers, Cord Meyer—wounded World War II hero and young idealist who helped found the United World Federalists—was identified as an author, with a vague government job. The papers noted that Mary, 43, was a Georgetown artist, born to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, daughter of Amos Pinchot, the Progressive lawyer, and niece of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester. Her younger sister, Tony, was married to Ben Bradlee, then of Newsweek, later of the Washington Post. It was Bradlee who identified the body at the morgue.

Then other news supervened. There was a presidential election coming, Johnson (who had recently signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) versus Goldwater (the warmonger, according to the 1964 narrative). Khrushchev was deposed. China exploded its first nuclear bomb.

But over the years, sensational fragments of the story (JFK, CIA) turned up. Inevitably, conspiracy theories emerged. Who killed Mary—really? Was Ray Crump set up? By whom? Why?

As real evidence went mute, the public imagination worked on two possible narratives.

The first was what might be called the Oliver Stone Solution—that is, to posit a conspiracy elaborate enough and sinister enough to do imaginative and, as it were, cinematic justice to the murder of a woman with such suggestive, powerful connections. The journalist Nina Burleigh sifted through plot possibilities in her excellent book on Meyer, A Very Private Woman (1998), and quoted the critic Morris Dickstein on the temptations of the 1960s’ paranoid style—”a sense at once joyful and threatening that things are not what they seem, that reality is mysteriously overorganized and can be decoded if only we attend to the hundred little hints and byways that beckon to us.”

Thus in the Stone Solution, popular on the Internet, Meyer was done in by “the same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy,” as one writer, C. David Heymann, claims he was told by the dying Cord Meyer. Another writer, Leo Damore (also dead), argued that Crump “was the perfect patsy, better even than Lee Harvey Oswald. Mary Meyer was killed by a well-trained professional hit man, very likely somebody connected to the CIA”—the idea being that she knew “too much for her own good.”

The second scenario might be called the Richard Wright Solution, after the author of the 1940 novel Native Son, whose protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is tormented by the oppressions of poverty and racism: “To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.” In this scenario, Crump one day left his home in black Southeast Washington, crossed the segregated city, passing the Capitol and the White House, and entered white Georgetown. And there—on the home turf of mandarins, of Joe Alsop and Kay Graham and Scotty Reston and Dean Acheson—his path intersected for a moment with Mary Meyer’s.

You could choose your movie. Solution One drew Mary Meyer into the world of James Ellroy, the grassy knoll, Jim Garrison, the Mafia, Judith Exner, Fair Play for Cuba, Operation Mongoose and so on. Solution Two inserted Mary Meyer by accident into an entirely different story: the primal drama of race in America.

The author gropes further with it from there, trying to make it all make sense somehow. As with JFK’s death, though (not to even mention the Epstein foofaraw—YIKES!!), I’d bet way too much water has gone under the bridge for us to ever know for sure the real truth about what happened—memories have faded; investigators, eyewitnesses, and/or protagonists have passed away; evidence been discarded or otherwise lost; public interest wandered.

Happy 9/11 Day!

Posted on September 11, 2026 by Mike Leave a comment

My usual sarcastic title, for a post that’s in no wise unserious.

Never Forget 9/11
I was sitting in my home office not far from the Pentagon when it happened. The TV behind me had the sound lowered, but I suddenly became aware of a major development. I reached for the remote and cranked up the audio.

A plane had struck one of the twin towers in New York. TV anchors initially speculated it must have been a small plane that had run off course, but a much larger plane struck the building, and then a second one hit the other tower. It quickly became clear America was under attack. I saw smoke rising from the Pentagon and went up on the roof to get a better look. My son, who was a firefighter, later told me he pulled bodies out of the wreckage. He still doesn’t like to talk about it, likely because of the horrible experience.

Later, United Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because of the bravery of Todd Beamer, who led other passengers and crew in a revolt that stopped the hijackers from possibly hitting the White House or Capitol Building.

I wrote six columns in a row and many others following that modern day of infamy. Here are some excerpts that ring true 25 years later.

Follows, a sometimes-bloodcurdling reminiscence of that awful day, from a skilled writer who experience the waking nightmare in person, as it happened. In one specific instance, his sense of the likely near-future dovetails neatly with my own.

On the day of the terrorist attacks, I wrote: “It brings into clear focus the state of war that has existed for some time between America and those who oppose our values and way of life.” I called for the expulsion of people and organizations with ties to radical terrorist groups. Unfortunately, that did not happen, and the threat from within remains and appears to be growing. There are still unanswered questions about how those attacks were allowed to happen.

It didn’t take long before the “blame America first” crowd was heard from. They are still around, as we see in the current election cycle. The Mufti of Jerusalem had recently called on Allah to destroy America, which he said “is controlled by Zionist Jews.” Nothing has changed, and antisemitism has gotten worse.

And so it has indeed, unfortunately for saner sorts. Go read the whole thing anyhow, don’t let my harrumph-harrumping put you off any. That bit above, about what he aptly terms the “‘blame American first’ crowd” I find especially poignant; it’s the very reason why, when I originally got down to registering a domain for my newfound blog-home, I chose the one I did. Cold Fury felt like the obvious choice to me for a name. Seeing the pictures of liberal New Yorkers in the aftermath of 9/11—shocked, scared shitless, waiting anxiously for the inevitable next blow to fall on them, deeply dismayed, and entirely discombobulated—suddenly flying the stars ‘n’ stripes from the open (NYC in early Sept can be downright glorious weatherwise, as the Mohammedan Day Of Infamy had been) street-facing windows of their cramped apartments.

Lower est Sida shitlibs, too, seemed to be atypically unperturbed by the USAF/National Guard F15s and 16s overhead, flying CAP after the open barn door had been closed too late; only a few days ago, the sight of jet fighters circling overhead would have stirred them to bluster angrily against “Fascist intimidation”, “military thugs in their precious little Flying Death Machines,” and/or some other such brattish gasbaggery, along the way condemning the uncnsconable waste of expensive fossil fuel, needlessly polluting that good, clean NYC air with their toxic emissions. CONTRAILS, JUST LOOK! CONTRAAAIIIILS!!!

But NOOOOO; instead, they were gassing endlessly on about their newfound love for our/their country and all its works, with Jurassic Media helpfully bloviating, in their habitual forelock-tugging lockstep with Official Authority, about a New Era of American unity, patriotism, real Progress, and amicable brotherhood—I knew perfectly well, as every RightWingNaziDeathBeast© should have, that it was all arrant bollocks, insubstantial, featherweight puffery that would blow away again on the first light breeze.

Yeppers, it was clear to me that it would be no time at all before the Shitheel Left’s visceral, intractable loathing for America, Americans, American ideals and morals, and basically just any and everything you can think of even marginally associated with America would be oozing back to the surface again right away, as pus from an infected wound will do.

And boy oh boy, did I ever call THAT one right! Can’t really remember any exact dates off the top of my head, but it was no more than about three-four days (there was dust and filth, composed mostly of crushed sheetrock, ashes of bruned-up office supplies, curtains, and miscellaneous furnshings, as well as of course several thousand cremated bodies) coating Downtown: cars, streets, sidewalks, awnings, tree limbs, everything. A choking, foul-smelling smoke was still wafing up off the rubble piles; the smell was inescapable, my old among others of my NYC peeps complained about it continually) when I first saw a report on Teewee about some Village bitchtard female, late 30s-early 40s, not too bad-looking for her age, lifestyle, and ideology, really. who had taped up a homemade sign in her front window saying that, basically, America had it coming. In the accompanying interview with this slattern, she said the same an∂ even worse, musing moronically about why those poor, mistreated Arabs, having been run over, abused, and heartlessly exploited by us for so long, .hadn’t done something like this long ago.

And that’s when I knew what I had been fretting about was already becoming ugly reality: the shitlib Left entire would soon be joining this spoiled-rotten dullard in her shallow, feckless denunciation of the very system to which she owed her misspent existence. That’s when I first felt that strong, icy, steely gust of Cold Fury blasting through my body and my brain at Gale force 46.

Blame America for these unwarranted, ruinous assaults against it? SRSLY?!? Of course, according to these Sooperdoopergenii, the TRUE cause of 9/11 was long, untold years of American imperialism and expansionism, unearned wealth and ill-gotten prosperity, American cruelty, rapaciousness, and soulless exploitation of poorer and weaker nations, you see.

As if the complex history of 250 years of international relations and interaction between national governmental entities could be boiled down to a forlorn, trite, 3rd-grade-level analogy featuring a schoolyard bully ruthlessly beating up on younger, smaller, weaker kids and shaking them down for their lunch money. Leftwits will always identify most strongly with the helplessness of those weaker kids, casting in the “bully” role those savage, knuckledragging Others who aren’t quite so close as they to being living, breathing incarnations of Darwin’s idea of a soon-to-be extinct species from his Unfit class.

And they’re still at it today; all you have to do is take a casual gander, if you can stomach it, at the candidates running for Congress in places like Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and of course California and New York.Says all you’ll ever need to know about who actually remembers what around here.

Christ on a crutch, dude, New York Fucking City—ie, the place where GROUND ZERO is and always will be sitting, for an ever-dwindling few of us anyway—has gone and gotten itself a jihad-loving, fellow-terrorist-appointing, Jew-hating Commie MAYOR now, Gawd help us.

Cold Fury? Yeah, I should think so, pal. Sorry, not sorry. Don’t anyone get too het up when my bitterness over shitlib irreverence for 9/11, America, and all they represent gets expressed in a post or sarcastic post title here. I’m venting my spleen, taking out my frustration with the gormless, self-serving forgetfulness of those who dare to make ugly cracks about how we “deserved” 9/11, laugh at our ever-present grief for those poor, blameless sods who were murdered—wantonly slaughtered by Moslem animals that terrible morning, as if they were no more than livestock—and the dismal tide of rank sewage of every imaginable variety, all puked forth from the same old shitlib mouths.

Oh, how well I remember the year I posted an image of an upside-down American flag as the 9/11 masthead image—MAN, did I get some hate-email for that one! Knowing that an upside-down flag has been recognized as a distress signal by mariners since about, ohh, forever, the notion that this country was definitely in distress and needed help immediately was just the thing for 9/11, or so I thought.

Au contraire, mon frere! Contraire to the friggin MAX, I tells y’uns. Many of you felt I was being flippant, (mis)appropriating Old Glory without showing the respect, the deference and seriousness I should’ve, and did you fine folks ever let me know about it. I’ve received my fair share hate-emails over the years, buI can’t recall ever receiving so many of them in such a short time, no seeing this much passion, pain, and just plain old acrimony being expounded over some stupid something I did or said on this silly little ol’ blog.

Trust me, people, you will NOT be seeing any more upside-down US flags around these parts again. Not unless I’m writing the post from a seat on the deck of a foundering ketch, you won’t. And that, my friends, is a one-hunnert-an-ten percent Cold Fury Guar-on-TEE. As Ringo always says: Period fucking DOT.

STANDARD IRRITATING DIGRESSION: Nowadays, running across the words “cold fury” in some novel or other I’m reading always brings a smile to my craggy, withered old face. Makes me want to write to the author and insist that the “C” and “F” therein should always be in upper-case, according to the universally-acknowledged standards of modern English-language grammar. I have actually sat down and composed such a missive a time or two, always with as much good humor and lightness of heart as this half-mad old dog can scrape up. Never have actually hit “Send,” I do confess. Not yet, at any rate.

Anyhoo: if the Left’s vomitous, abominable tsunami of provocation, credible threats of violence, grievous bodilfy harm, and outright murder, and just general abuse both rhetorical and physical—intolerable speech and acts which are not just ongoing but actually getting worse and worse, all to date unanswered by those who are pleased to think of themselves as “better men” than the ones presently kicking their asses up between their shoulder blades, all the while sermonizing. to their like-minded confreres in favor of an impassive, mild, restrained, supine response, if in fact a response absolutely MUST be made—doesn’t make you mad enough to want to disassemble The Enemies, Domestic™ with your bare fucking hands (special tools neither needed nor desired)—then I can think of nothing whatsoever to say to you. It’s enough to make any half-decent sort literally sick to his/her/its pyloric sphincter. To my way of thinking, Cold Fury© is the only rational response to it that doesn’t of necessity introduce edged, projectile, explosive, eletroshock, nor bludgeon-type weapons into the imbroglio.

Not YET, at any rate.

After 9/11/01, Business As Usual ought to’ve been over and done with, gone for good, never to be missed or lamented. A good many of the more-Pollyanna-ishly hopeful among us seriously imagined that the terrorist attacks and the All Americans Togther feel-good chorus in their aftermath woud bring about the dawning of a New Era, wasting many column inches/pixels heralding the coming of a more forthright, honest, brave, and clear-eyed Golden Age.

Alas, it was no such thing, as a fair few of us already knew. The Old Folly was only sleeping, not dead, and almost immediately the Ghastly Left’s ragtag assemblage of spirit-thingies wholly dedicated to blanket opposition against tangible, visible reality; basic human decency; humility; common sense; traditional values; freedom; and righteousness arose from their dank, lonely, foul-smelling crypts one by one until all were present and accounted for. The demonic spectral entities had been recalled to Earth, out of the most noxiously-reeking precincts of Gehenna itself, by the Leftard leadership-coven incantating away in their private Las Vegas Shabbat Suie—a ghostly army assembled, organized, and ready to once again set upon the sensible, upright, clean-living Americans their dimbulb Leftist masters hate so very desperately after a brief interlude off pretending to be all about unity, patriotism, and the American way after seeing a huge majority of NormalAmericans all fired up to bark back and wreak roper vengeance upon their longtime tormenters of the Traitor Left.

Plus, Dolly died, and that grievous loss didn’t brighten anybody’s mood much, I shouldn’t think.

Okay, okay, I admit I mighta got a little bit fanciful there, took the imagining-and-supposing and psycho-delicized ideation just a leetle too far, as now and again I can be prone to do. On the other hand, though, you all know as well as i do that if those Hateful Leftists WERE capable of summoning an army of Hell’s Own SpecWar fiends. ghouls, and monsters to wage all-out war against us Just Leave Us Alone, PLEASE™ Real Americans, they wouldn’t waste a minute thinking it over, they’d just do it, as a certain shambolic, once-beloved, successful, and financially solvent sneaker company used to say back before they destroyed themselves via going full-on Wokester.

Waitwait, whuuuhhh…?

Posted on September 6, 2026September 6, 2026 by Mike 1 Comment

What with all the Batshit Left rubber-room refugees loose and running wild all over the place these days, you had to know it was just a matter of time before the lunatics were gonna go there.

The Lindsay Clancy case has brought the TikTok Detective bureau out of the shadows. These women, experts in everything from police procedure to medicine, psychology, forensic evidence collection, law, military tactics, and nuclear physics are on the case and have declared Lindsay to be not guilty for reasons ranging from insanity to “her husband did it.”

Of course claims she didn’t do it at all for some reason, including claims that it was her husband are demonstrably false. As evidence, we can take the word of her attorney. No, not the attorney in the current criminal trial, but her attorney from January, where she was the plaintiff in a lawsuit against her doctor. I’m posting a pdf of the notes from the case and the actual complaint filed with the Norfolk, Mass. court (pdf warning).

The Lindsay Clancy case has brought the TikTok Detective bureau out of the shadows. These women, experts in everything from police procedure to medicine, psychology, forensic evidence collection, law, military tactics, and nuclear physics are on the case and have declared Lindsay to be not guilty for reasons ranging from insanity to “her husband did it.”

Of course claims she didn’t do it at all for some reason, including claims that it was her husband are demonstrably false. As evidence, we can take the word of her attorney. No, not the attorney in the current criminal trial, but her attorney from January, where she was the plaintiff in a lawsuit against her doctor. I’m posting a pdf of the notes from the case and the actual complaint filed with the Norfolk, Mass. court (pdf warning).

Which he promptly does, evincing neither remorse nor shame over this act of ugly, woman-h8er bigotry. What the hell are you anyhow, DM, some kind of dangerous anti-feminist Nazi or sumpin’?

“Her husband did it.” And I will guar-on-gottdamn-TEE you that most of the crazy cat-ladies spewing this insane swill really do believe it, too. Over the 60-plus-year course of my life, this formerly great nation has definitely lost its way, having been turned upside down, inside out, and torn to pieces by the E-ville Left©.

Lots more to this most excellent piece still, of which you will surely want to read the all.

Comic relief

Posted on September 5, 2026September 5, 2026 by Mike 1 Comment

Y’know, the thing I hate most about this awful, terrible, double-plus ungood Trumphitler regime is that not a man jack of them shows the slightest sign of having any kind of sense of humor, at ALL.

Vance’s RFK Jr. Weight-Loss Story Takes a Hilarious Turn at Rubio’s Expense
But one of the funniest moments was when he was asked about his weight loss by Fox’s Peter Doocy. “You’ve lost a ton of weight lately,” Doocy asked. “How much sauerkraut do you eat every day?” That made Vance laugh.

Vance explained how he thought he was going to give up sugar and social media for Lent. He described how he called Bobby Kennedy (Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). Kennedy said he had something far better for Vance, and “way more intense.” Vance explained how RFK then had him eating a lot of high-protein stuff and sauerkraut. “Let’s just say if that was Fat Tuesday, Fat Wednesday never came.”

“So my advice to you is, if you want to lose weight, call Bobby Kennedy. But if you want to enjoy what you eat, do not call Bobby Kennedy,” he laughed.

Secretary Kennedy’s response was funny. Not only did he respond to Vance with a picture showing him being fed sauerkraut, but Kennedy trolled Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well.

And did he ever. To wit:

Join the party, @SecRubio. https://t.co/ik9y06atxc pic.twitter.com/Dv3mK1HXII

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy)

September 3, 2026

Heh. That Marco and his fuggin’ Pop Tarts.

Miller asked (Rubio) if he was MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) like Kennedy. He said he supported it, at which point his wife interrupted and said definitively no, he was not adhering to healthy eating recommendations. She revealed he ate Pop-Tarts. Marco protested that it was one of man’s great “innovations in the history of the world and comes in a beautiful foil package.” His wife said he eats “all the things he should not be eating. Every single thing.”

Yeah, no yocks from these stoneface killjoys, not EVAR.

Marco’s Pop Tart assessment, especially that “beautiful foil package” tag-line, just lays me right the fuck out.

“Is Amazon Suppressing a Book That Criticizes Islam?”

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Mike

Probably so, yeah. I mean, what the hey, why not?

Yes, I wrote the book in question, but that’s beside the point. If they can do it to me, they can do it to anyone who doesn’t hold the views that the leftist establishment finds acceptable. With Amazon being almost the only source for books now, and by far the largest, that’s a dangerous development for any society that values the freedom of speech.

It’s an odd thing. My latest book, The Tragedy of Islam: it has an Amazon page, and that page seems to be in full working order. You can find it here.

If, however, you didn’t click on that link I just provided, but instead went to Amazon and tried to find the book yourself, if your experience is anything like mine just now, you will see that the book is impossible to find. Search for it every which way, and it does not come up. Is Amazon trying to suppress access to this book? It sure looks as if it is.

I asked several other people to replicate this experiment, and they had the same results: They could find the book by clicking on a pre-existing link, but no matter what they searched for at Amazon, including the book’s specific title, subtitle, and author, it doesn’t come up. If you have a minute, please try it yourself and let me know in the comments what results you get.

I found this out because I needed the link to the book’s sale page, and as I was already at Amazon, instead of going to my website and clicking on the link there, I typed the book’s title into the search bar. What came up for “The Tragedy of Islam” was Imam Mohammad Tawhidi’s book from several years ago of the same name and a host of other books with similar names, but my book The Tragedy of Islam was nowhere to be seen. In fact, my book did not appear on the entire page of results for a search of the exact title of the book.

This is not normal. I typed in the names of a few of my other recent books, and they came right up in the searches, either as the first or second result.

So I started to search for The Tragedy of Islam with more information: by the full title, The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses, as well as “The Tragedy of Islam Spencer,” “The Tragedy of Islam Robert Spencer,” “The Tragedy of Islam by Robert Spencer,” and even “The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses by Robert Spencer, Bombardier Books.” Every search turned up another book I had written, or else Tawhidi’s book. None of the searches, not one, turned up the actual book The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses anywhere on the first page of search results.

Yet the book is offered at Amazon. Apparently, however, you can only get to it by clicking on a link to it you may find somewhere, not by searching at Amazon. This is a new form of censorship I haven’t encountered before. Amazon can say that they are offering the book for sale and that all is well. They’re just hiding it.

I pulled up the Amazon site and tried Spencer’s experiment my own self, with similar yet different results: as the man said, the new book was nowhere to be found, although most or maybe all of his previous works were there listed.

Interestingly enough, you can search for “robert spencer the tragedy of islam” with my preferred search engine, Luxxle, and the first result you get is the Simon & Schuster website page featuring Spencer’s latest, Coming in second you have a link that whisks you right off to Amazon’s page for the Spencer book. Passing strange, no? I confess myself to be stumped here. Spencer seems a bit bemused as well:

But remember the old adage: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Or maybe the whole thing is just some glitch. Maybe. But my work has been censored in all kinds of ways for years. And it looks as if it’s still going on.

Oh, I’m completely confident of that, at any rate. Nothing else can spark a barking-mad, violent shitfit in Leftwits quite as fast and as thoroughly as whenever some reasonable, sane, intelligent sort says, writes, or publishes anything they don’t like, even slightly. It never changes, and neither do they; at this point, I very much doubt they CAN change, even if thy wantted to…which, they assuredly do NOT. To quote a little dialogue from the immortal classic movie, Easy Rider, which sums the sorry situation up as well as has ever been done, either before or since.

GEORGE: “Oh yeah, they’re gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, and it’s gonna scare ’em.”

BILLY: “Yeah, well, it don’t make ’em running scared.”

GEORGE: “No. It makes ‘em dangerous.”

It was all too true back in 1969, and hits home particularly hard today, in a truly gutwrenching way.

KHAAAAANN!

Posted on August 22, 2026August 23, 2026 by Mike

First up, let’s check out this phat meme (courtesy of Ms Hoyt, thanks!) which is what reminded me of this cool-ass little story in the first place.

Heh. By cracky, that’s just too darn punny right there. Now, let’s get to it.

The Picture That Settles The Khan Chest Debate
It’s been years since I’ve looked at Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but I do remember as a youngster buying into the idea that Ricardo Montalbán, who played the titular villain Khan, was wearing a prosthetic chest.

In case you’re not aware, it’s sort of an old urban legend that has been around for 35 years. Here is what the trivia on the IMDb says:

It has been widely debated that Ricardo Montalban’s chest was actually a prosthetic piece that he wore during the film. In the director’s commentary in the special edition DVD, Nicholas Meyer is quoted as saying that it was, in fact, Montalban’s actual chest and that he was a very muscular man who worked out. During publicity for the movie, during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1982) Montalban explained that he was able to achieve the look seen in the film by doing push-ups. “A lot of push-ups.”

The problem some people had was that Montalbán was an older gentleman at the time of filming and had a chest that was alpha as fuck, coupled with some curious attire positioning and a necklace that in theory would hide a suspect seam, and some poor VHS quality, some insisted it was fake. The layers of crude, fake, makeup Nimoy and Shatner wore — it looks like they rolled their faces in their wive’s makeup drawers — probably didn’t help.

Well, the following pic puts that to rest decisively.

Which, for my money, it….does. I’m satisfied that Montalban’s sculpted, manly chest is/was in fact the genuine article, no prosthetics required. Funny thing is, as a diehard Trek fanboi for pretty much my whole life, I never knew until just now that there ever even was a “Khan’s chest” debate; all along, I had just assumed it was either plastic or some other type of movie-magic fakery. Glad we finally got that all cleared up, aren’t you?

Funniest of all is that in the flick, Montalban’s Khan character was, in fact, a genetically-altered Übermenschen, specifically bio-engineered to be vastly superior in every way to us pathetic, flabby Normals. So in the end, not only was Montalban’s studly bod the real deal, but the man’s Rodin-statue-esque physique was probably a major part of the reason he got picked for the role to begin with. The above article appends another pic from early in Montalban’s acting career that’s even more convincing:

Yep, if THAT don’t persuade you, I can only guess that “Khan’s fake chest” is a position you simply aren’t open to changing yur mind about.

Update! Did a quickie Luxxle search, and whaddya know, further evidence in support of the proposition that Ricardo Montalban had a seriously carved-up, cut-up phyzz.

Montalban 2.

From another of his early movies, 1950’s Right Cross, in which Mr Rich Corinthian Leather portrays (you guessed it) a Mex-American boxing champeen.

Updated update! You wanna see something that really IS fake, phony, and fraudulent? Try this on for size.

Corinthian leather is a marketing term coined by copywriter Jim Nichols with the Omaha-based Bozell advertising agency in 1974 to describe a leather upholstery used in certain luxury vehicles of the Chrysler automobile company.

The advertisements developed the term Corinthian leather to imply a premium product of foreign origin denoting something rich, rare, and luxurious, though the product was in fact made by the Radel Leather Manufacturing Company in Newark, New Jersey.

Though Chrysler first used the term Corinthian leather in advertisements for the 1974 Imperial LeBaron, the term itself would ultimately become heavily associated with the 1975 Cordoba, an intermediate personal luxury car. The success of the advertising campaign closely associated actor Ricardo Montalbán, the spokesman, with the Cordoba’s so-called Corinthian leather. In promoting the Cordoba model, Montalbán described a car interior with thickly-cushioned, luxury seats upholstered in what were variously described as either fine, soft, or rich Corinthian leather.

When asked on Late Night with David Letterman what the term denoted, Montalbán said that Corinthian leather was a marketing term. Montalbán credited commercial writer Jim Nichols for the term. In promoting the Chrysler New Yorker in 1988, Montalbán described the Corinthian leather as a “rich” leather. The term came to include the vinyl upholstering for interior surfaces, such as the backs of the front seats and the head rests, and the lower parts of door facings.

Just in case any of y’all miscreants had somehow conjured the erroneous idea that We Duh Peepul being lied to, led astray, hornswoggled, and duped was something new.

Best argument yet for the death penalty

Posted on August 21, 2026August 21, 2026 by Mike

A prime candidate for Ol’ Sparky, I’d say.

“When I stab somebody I’m gonna lick their blood off the blade.”

New evidence coming out surrounding the Karmelo Anthony case, including the disturbing text prosecutors say they found on his phone that could be fair game if he gets a new trial.

Prosecutors say the message was… pic.twitter.com/HO4cWOcEz8

— Fox News (@FoxNews)

August 20, 2026

All too much more.

Karmelo Anthony prosecutor reveals trove of evidence jury never saw — including disturbing texts: ‘Low key on the verge’
Karmelo Anthony’s ex-girlfriend reported that he was stalking her hours before he stabbed Austin Metcalf — and he had threatening and violent texts on his phone, the prosecutor revealed at Anthony’s appeal hearing Thursday.

The jury never heard about Anthony’s disturbing history, or about Metcalf’s juvenile criminal record because of a “gentleman’s agreement” with the 19-year-old’s defense ahead of his murder trial, Collin County Assistant District Attorney Bill Wirskye revealed.

He told the court Anthony’s high school girlfriend confided to an assistant principal on April 2, 2025 that Anthony was stalking her after a breakup, and that he was obsessed with fights, guns, and knives, according to local outlets at the hearing.

Anthony also sent a picture of the knife and told his ex-girlfriend, “I’m low key on the verge,” Wirskye said.

“He was spiraling,” the prosecutor added.

The agreement was meant to keep the publicly fraught trial from becoming an even more volatile racial tinderbox, he said.

Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison — but he is appealing the conviction.

This maniac ought never to see the light of day again, outside of a Supermax recreation yard.

If that. “Retrial,” my baggy white ass.

America’s Sweetheart

Posted on August 16, 2026August 17, 2026 by Mike

Might she be the new Sydney Sweeney?

After the Fever game last night, Sophie Cunningham showed up at a bar and started singing “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”

Legend pic.twitter.com/eHYfK9Vlf1

— OutKick (@Outkick)

August 15, 2026

GOD, how I love this woman. If you don’t feel the same way, you’re just a gottdamned un-American shitheel gooberhead, that’s all. Sophie is beautiful, sexy, fearless and indomitable, and eminently sensible, with good instincts and a finely-calibrated bullshit detector. The girl is as all-American as they come, with all those fine qualities and more rolled up into one sassy, smoking-hot package. I ask you, people: what’s not to like here?

Schooling Fake Jake

Posted on August 11, 2026August 11, 2026 by Mike

All right, class, what have we learned today?

The story: Iran had a serious plot to kill the president.

The headlines: OMG Secret Service protected the president and not every asshole in the media. https://t.co/2xshtu9LSz

— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe)

August 11, 2026

CLUE FOR THE CLUELESS: The Secret Service’s job, in fact its primary raison d’être, is to PROTECT THE PRESIDENT. “White House staffers,” not so much. “Reporters,” not at ALL.

(Via Stephen Green)

Jew-hate: upfront, unadorned, unabashed

Posted on July 29, 2026July 29, 2026 by Mike

Mask OFF, but good.

In Packed Synagogue, a Democrat Scrambles to Defend Vote Against Arms for Israel
President Trump marvels regularly at how the Senate Democratic leader, Charles Schumer of New York, who used to be pro-Israel, has become “like a Palestinian.” (D-Mass Rep Jake—M) Auchincloss is lower profile than Schumer and much younger (Schumer graduated Harvard College in 1971 and Auchincloss in 2010), but on the basis of Auchincloss’s performance Monday night, it’s pretty much the same pathetic story. The press will try to spin it as how Netanyahu lost America, but one can just as easily see it as the tale of how the Democrats ditched the Jews.

Auchincloss, a Marine veteran who was raised Jewish and whose mother, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, was CEO of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, had amassed a reputation as something of a pro-Israel moderate since winning election in 2020 to a seat that had been held by Joe Kennedy III and before that by Barney Frank. The district includes Newton, Brookline, and Sharon Massachusetts, which are dense with Jewish schools, congregations, bakeries, old age-homes and butcher shops.

The appearance at Temple Emanuel, a large and prosperous congregation that is part of the religiously centrist Conservative movement of Judaism, featured Auchincloss blaming Israel for what he called an illegal war against Iran in which 18 Americans have been killed.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump, they did cook up this catastrophic war together,” Auchincloss said, ignoring that Iran has been at war against America for 47 years. “Netanyahu zoomed into the situation room and made a direct pitch to the president.”

Auchincloss acknowledged that support for Israel among Democrats is “getting shaky,” but insisted that he himself still supports a qualitative military edge for Israel and American diplomatic backing for the Jewish state. He said he supports the Abraham Accords. He tried to downplay the significance of his vote on the grounds that even Prime Minister Netanyahu has said he wants to eliminate U.S. military aid to Israel when the ten-year memorandum of understanding reached with President Obama expires. He said he doesn’t favor an embargo on U.S. arms sales to Israel, but in the context of the war, he wanted to say, “we’re not paying for it, the American taxpayer.”

The flaws in the logic came out in the question and answer session. Auchincloss told Michael Segal, a member of the congregation, that he supported continued aid to Jordan.

One audience member announced “We feel abandoned. What do you say to the liberal Jews who are feeling lost?”

Dunno about anybody else, but here’s what I say to the self-gassing shitlib stupes: Figure it out, genius. The writing is on the blasted wall, has been for a goodish while now, so fucking READ IT already, willya?

Update! UNEXPECTED!!!™

One of the most telling moments in the evening came when the former vice chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, Tom Mountain, rose after Auchincloss’s initial remarks and attempted to offer a Republican response. He was ejected by a trio of security guards.

At last, something ALL Masshole LibTards can agree on and unite behind.

Iowa and Missouri to NY: stay in your own fuckin’ lane

Posted on July 29, 2026July 29, 2026 by Mike

One simple, obvious solution suggests itself here.

Iowa and Missouri Tell New York to Keep Its Climate Rules at Home
New York is demanding emissions data from ethanol and biodiesel plants hundreds of miles outside its borders, plants that may have no idea their fuel ever crossed into the Empire State. Iowa and Missouri are fighting back in federal court.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway renewed their case Wednesday in a joint op-ed, putting the constitutional principle plainly:

“One state’s authority ends where another state’s sovereignty begins.”

Bird and Hanaway argue New York’s greenhouse gas reporting rule can reach producers in their states simply because that fuel is later sold in New York, even when the producer never sold it there directly.

That is not a hypothetical edge case. Ethanol produced in Iowa routinely passes through multiple distributors, terminals, blending facilities, rail cars, and trucks before arriving at a New York gas station. The plant that made it may have had no say in where it ended up.

The price tag is steep: New York estimates annual compliance costs of $17,500 to more than $91,000 per facility. Larger facilities face an additional $4,000 to $17,000 per year for mandatory outside verification.

Miss a deadline or submit an incomplete report? Every single day counts as a separate violation, with civil fines up to $8,000 per day or criminal penalties including jail time. New York regulators can also show up and inspect your property, and under the rule, businesses have no real way to challenge that inspection before it happens.

“New York bureaucrats cannot tell Iowa farmers and ethanol and biofuel producers how to do their job or what regulations they need to follow,” Bird said when the lawsuit was filed.

Iowa’s biofuels industry is not a rounding error. The state’s 42 ethanol plants produced about 4.6 billion gallons in 2025, roughly 28 percent of the national total, supporting more than 31,000 jobs and generating over $5.6 billion in state GDP.

Its eight biodiesel plants rank first in the nation. Missouri ranks thirteenth in ethanol and second in biodiesel, with six and five plants respectively.

The lawsuit alleges New York’s green regulatory overreach violates constitutional limits on state regulation outside its borders, conflicts with the federal Clean Air Act, targets businesses without sufficient ties to New York, and authorizes inspections that violate the Fourth Amendment.

That solution I mentioned just now? Easy-peasy: a total nationwide embargo on all gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum products for NY—sales, shipments, trades, the whole megilla. Oil company execs fretted about loss of profits caused by such a move should think about what they’ll be saving in taxes before they turn up their noses at shutting off the Texas Tea spigot to Shitlib Nirvana precipitately. Let’s see what the grabby, domineering sumbitches have to say for themselves after the traditional Beggars/Choosers relationship has been restored.

In a Yugo

Posted on July 24, 2026July 24, 2026 by Mike

Of all the riotously funny song parodies that ran on the late, lamented Rush Limbaugh radio program, this here one is my hands-down favorite. Don’t know for sure if it’s Paul Shanklin or not, but I assume so.

The bit where the Yugo driver “swerves to miss a baby duck” and then gets “squashed by a produce truck” makes me laugh till my sides ache every single time.

Salisbury steak

Posted on July 23, 2026July 23, 2026 by Mike

The fascinating tale of Dr James Salisbury’s renowned brainchild.

alisbury steak — seasoned ground beef patties mixed with breadcrumbs or other ingredients — was invented by James Salisbury, a New York physician who was fascinated by the relationship between diet and health. In the 1850s, he conducted a series of self experiments in which he exclusively ate a single food for a few days or weeks. His first test, a diet of only baked beans, produced disastrous results: “I became very flatulent and constipated, head dizzy, ears ringing, limbs prickly, and was wholly unfitted for mental work,” he wrote in The Relation of Alimentation and Disease (1888). Next came oatmeal and other staples, but it was ground beef, which he called “muscle pulp of beef,” that finally delivered the results he sought.

His prescription was simple: broiled beef patties, served with simple seasonings such as butter, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon. This recipe, he wrote, “affords the maximum of nourishment with the minimum of effort to the digestive organs.” Vegetables, on the other hand, were not only unnecessary but also harmful in his view; Salisbury declared that vegetarians had “less nervous and muscular endurance than meat eaters.”

During the Civil War, Salisbury applied his nutrition theories to Union soldiers, who were fed a diet of beef patties instead of the usual hard biscuits, which tended to cause digestive issues. In the decades following the war, Salisbury’s diet evolved from medical prescription to one of America’s first fad diets, spurred on by the rise of wellness culture and increased public interest in healthy food. (Other notable 19th-century foods believed to promote health included graham crackers, which were originally intended to suppress the libido, and Kellogg’s cornflakes, which were served by their inventor John Harvey Kellogg at his world-famous sanitarium.)

World War I was a further boon for the Salisbury steak, as the name became preferred to the German-sounding “hamburger.” By the mid-20th century, the dish had become a blue-collar classic. Hearty, inexpensive, and easy to prepare in large batches, it appeared on diner menus and Navy cookbooks across America.

Then came the postwar boom — and with it, the rise of television. In 1953, the Swanson company introduced the TV dinner, a frozen meal packaged in a compartmentalized aluminum tray. Within its first year of production, more than 10 million trays were sold in the U.S., and the Salisbury steak was one of the TV dinner’s most enduring offerings. For a generation of midcentury families, Salisbury steak was the taste of modern life: a hot meal ready in minutes, eaten in front of the television.

The same forces that made Salisbury steak famous would later make it unfashionable. In the 2000s, Americans began to fall out of love with processed foods, in part due to growing awareness of their negative health effects. In 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a ban on large sodas in the city, and First Lady Michelle Obama encouraged children to “Move!” The Salisbury steak, which was by then synonymous with microwaved TV dinners, fell victim to its association with cheap, unhealthy meals.

That said, not all processed foods suffered this fate, and another reason for Salisbury steak’s decline may be that it was outcompeted by its more convenient cousin, the burger, which rose to prominence as one of America’s most popular and iconic meals during the latter half of the 20th century. With the spread of fast-food chains such as McDonald’s and Burger King, many customers opted for the Salisbury steak’s handheld cousin when in the mood for a beef patty.

Though Salisbury steak has faded from the cultural spotlight in recent years, it is viewed with nostalgia by many who grew up with it and can still be found in home kitchens across America.

I ate a gracious plenty of those Swanson dinners featuring Salisbury steak when I was a kid, and it doesn’t seem to have done me any harm. Not that I know of, at any rate.

Via Insty, who quips, “Dr. Salisbury had your best interests at heart.” In stark today’s crop of Goosesteppin’ Left dietary/health/lifestyle scolds, who assuredly do not.

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