Saturday Miscellany

First, it reads like self-parody. One Duane Owens was executed by the state of Florida the other day. His crimes, murder and rape. Heck, he even raped the corpse of one of his victims.

One must accept that he received a proper punishment.

Yet, the ACLU, descending into self-parody, greeted the execution with a moronic statement about how Florida had deprived Owens of his trans rights. Let’s see, the serial rapist told people he was a woman. How stupid do you have to be to believe that? You need to be ACLU stupid.

The statement reads thus:

The state of Florida never provided medically necessary gender-affirming care to Duane Owen — causing her enormous suffering and violating her right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment for the more than 30 years she was in state custody.

Second, David Rieff comments on San Francisco’s current call for slavery reparations:

The city whose City Council speaks of paying billions of dollars in reparations to African-American residents in fact will have great trouble keeping the lights on, the schools open, & city employees paid, & is almost sure to soon default on its own debt.

For those of you who do not inhabit the literary world, Rieff’s mother was Susan Sontag. His father was Philip Rieff.

Third, in the Bud Light death watch, what used to be the nation’s best selling beer had its worse week ever, with sales dropping another 27%. Good.

Fourth, somehow or other this story has not been widely reported. A Penn State professor, by name of Themis Matsoukas, was caught engaging in sexual acts with a dog, specifically with his collie. He has been arrested.

Now, Matsoukas is a former professor. 

Fearless journalists have reported that Matsoukas was a Hillary Clinton supporter. He also contributed to the campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and John Kerry.

It gives a new meaning to the idea of going to the dogs.

Fifth, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, he of the out-of-control appetite, suggested that it would be fine to give transgender children puberty blockers, as long as parents consent. And, when governor, he signed a law allowing trans girls to use girls’ rest rooms. Would he say the same about allowing children to have sex with adults?

Anyway, this ought to doom the already doomed Christie candidacy.

Sixth, some children in Great Britain have taken to insisting that they are animals, as in cats and dogs. No kidding. And, children who refuse to accept this animalism have been reprimanded.

The London Telegraph has this story:

Difficult as it may be to believe, children at a school in East Sussex were reprimanded last week for refusing to accept a classmate’s decision to self-identify as a cat. 

The Year 8 pupils were told they would be reported to a senior leader after their teacher said they had “really upset” the fellow pupil by telling them: “You’re a girl.”

The Telegraph has discovered that a pupil at a secondary school in the South West is insisting on being addressed as a dinosaur. At another secondary school in England, a pupil insists on identifying as a horse. Another wears a cape and wants to be acknowledged as a moon. 

Some of these stories have been hoaxes, so the Telegraph tells us to maintain some doubt.

Seventh, the president of Human Rights Campaign, one Kelley Robinson, announced at a senate hearing that Serena Williams can beat any man at tennis.

To which the highly estimable Riley Gaines responded:

“Both Serena and Venus lost to the 203rd-ranked male tennis player.” 

Eighth,  We spent a week agonizing over the rescue of five undersea adventurers, only to discover that the United States Navy had known for days that their submarine had imploded.

Some have suggested that the Biden administration held up the news in order to use it to counter some bad news about Biden family corruption. Of course, such is possible, but it grants to the Biden family perhaps more intelligence than is their due.

Ninth, the Biden administration has chosen to believe that it must solve the Palestinian problem in the Middle East. The Trump administration made great progress in the region by sidelining the Palestinian issue, but the Biden people chose to do otherwise.

Obviously, this has encouraged a flurry of terrorist actions by Palestinian activists.

And now, we have this, from a former Kuwaiti minister, published in a Saudi publication, All Arab News. You would have thought that the American government could have shown such good sense, but alas:

Kuwait’s former information minister blamed the Palestinian Authority leadership for the suffering of its people.

In an article entitled “If a Palestinian State Had Been Established” in the Saudi Daily Independent Arabia, Sa’ad Bin Tefla Al-’Ajmi, placed the responsibility for the suffering of the Palestinian people on the leadership and blamed them for the lack of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute.

He cites several reasons for this, among them the endless schisms and divisions among the leadership and the corrupt and tyrannical nature of the Palestinian authorities, both in the West Bank and Gaza. He contemplates what an independent Palestinian state might look like given that the Palestinians modeled their government after Iraq and Iran, whose rulers Al-‘Ajmi says, are perpetrators of widespread destruction and bloodshed.

“The official Gaza [authorities] currently praise Iran and erect mourning-tents for its martyrs, from [Iranian general] Qassem Soleimani to Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, [the deputy-commander of the Iran-backed militias in Iraq],” he wrote. “And in the West Bank they erected a monument in honor of Saddam Hussein and named major streets after him. In other words, [for the Palestinians,] the models of heroism in the region, whom they wish to emulate, are people like Saddam Hussein and Qassem Soleimani.”

Al-‘Ajmi points to the fact that since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, not one Israeli Arab has given up his Israeli citizenship in favor of Palestinian citizenship. He also notes that Palestinians are eager to obtain work permits in Israel and are even willing to work in Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank.

This, he says, reflects a dire situation under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas rule.

Anyway, happy weekend to all. You can celebrate by subscribing to my Substack.