“Apollo 8 also delineated the differences between the Soviet vision of society and the freely religious American system. Yuri Gagarin proclaimed he saw no God in space. Borman, Lovell, and Anders saw him everywhere, and said so.”
Regardless of the mountain of evidence that resulted in his convictions, actor Jesse Smollett had all his convictions overturned today by the hard-left Illinois Supreme Court. The vote was 5-0.
The AP has a decent account of the case.
Smollett, who is Black and gay, made headlines around the world after he told police in January 2019 that two men assaulted him in his downtown Chicago neighborhood, spouting slurs, tossing a noose around his neck, and yelling that he was in “MAGA country,” an apparent reference to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” presidential campaign slogan. The report prompted a massive search for suspects by Chicago police before investigators announced that they believed the attack was a hoax
And of course it was a hoax. Just another supposed “hate crime” accusation made by another Trump hater, which nonetheless got worldwide attention, owing, in addition to Smollett’s minor fame as a minor actor, being gay and black. There is no doubt in this blogger’s mind this mediocre talent knew, regardless of his earlier convictions, he would eventually be cleared of the pathetic stunt which got him his 15 minutes of fame. Because Trump. Nothing else.
Read this mealy-mouth excerpt from the Illinois justices’s [sic] opinion.
We are aware that this case has generated significant public interest and that many people were dissatisfied with the resolution of the original case and believed it to be unjust,” Justice Elizabeth Rochford wrote in the court’s 5-0 opinion. “Nevertheless, what would be more unjust than the resolution of any one criminal case would be a holding from this court that the state was not bound to honor agreements upon which people have detrimentally relied.
And here’s Smollett’s lawyer reporting his completely unrepentant client’s reaction to the Court’s ruling..
Smollett was happy and relieved but also disappointed to have been “dragged through an unfair process.”
“Even though this is over now and Jussie just absolutely wants to move his life forward, people should start asking questions. How did this happen? Why should this even happen? What can we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?” [attorney] Uche said at a news conference in Chicago.
Thankfully, Smollett’s stunt ruined his career and helped America wake up to the fact that hate hoaxes like his are common. Did you notice there weren’t nearly as many “hate crime” news reports after Trump’s win compared to 2016? That’s because now, people know they’ll be laughed out of the room if they try to say a MAGA supporter grabbed their hijab or waved a noose at them.
He’ll always be guilty in the court of public opinion, and no far-left court can fix that.
Welcome to early retirement, Jesse. You’ve earned it.
The excellent X blogress Laura Powell has compiled a list of holidays observed by different kinds of children, LGBTA activists, who must have been severly holiday-deprived in their youth.
Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Not to be confused with Trans Day of Visibility, which is in March.
Or Trans Day of Action, in June.
Yesterday was the last day of Transgender Awareness Week.
Trans Parent Day was earlier this month.
The California Legislature has declared August to be Trans History Month.
Pronouns Day is in October.
Also in October is Genderfluid Visibility Week.
Non-Binary People’s Day and Non-Binary Awareness Week are in July.
Here’s a holiday favorite, updated. Sing with me: why can’t every day be Transgender Day of Remembrance . . .
Hmm, that new lyric doesn’t seem to scan. Ah well, it’s the message, isn’t it?
A California judge has permanently stripped parental rights from Texas father Jeffrey Younger over his refusal to allow his 12-year-old son to be chemically and surgically castrated at the wish of the boy’s mom.
This is heartbreaking:
‘I lost all parental rights to my sons. Goodbye, boys,’ Younger wrote on X (formerly Twitter)
Bickerstaff believes those who espouse and commission these sadistic mutilations are a tiny, but disproportionately loud and complaining bunch of losers; who somehow have been brainwashed into believing the absurd notion human beings are not dimorphic, but that theirs and others’s sexuality may be changed willy-nilly as they please.
Of course, it is not easy as it may seem. Girls and boys not having reached their majority and supposedly desiring being changed into the opposite sex, must undergo brutal alterations by conscience-free surgeons who not long ago would have been rightfully expelled from their profession, as well arrested and charged with, say, assault and battery and perhaps even attempted murder against those which the common law deems infants, hence incapable of rational thought.
Bickerstaff professes libertarian-lite views on adult behavior. Should an adult wish to engage in perverted acts like sex changing, so be it. However that does not alter another libertarian belief, which is self-destructive behavior should not be rewarded via do-gooder laws passed by fellow travellers in the House, Senate, and state legislatures, that require private enterprise, educational and religious institutions, as well as governments to hire them or even tolerate them in the public square.
Alleged sex-changers, your Tatler believes, deserve no more empathy than the man who pleasures himself in front of children in the school yard. They are depraved individuals and if normal folk choose not to be in their company, too bad, that is their right and privilege.
Despite all the wonderful modern recordings of Rach 3, Bickerstaff’s favorite has always been the first one made in 1940 on 78 rpm records, the soloist being none other than the old man himself, Rachmaninoff, he of the giant hands and fingers, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Even with its primitive audio, the composer’s performance, to these ears, has outclassed all the otherwise excellent later ones.
Today however your Tatler streamed a recording he had somehow missed before, the 1960 Mercury recording with the late Byron Janis piano and Antol Dorati conducting the London Philharmonic. Not only is the audio first rate, with its remastering in 192 kHz, 24-bit sound, Janis’s extraordinary playing is the equal of Rachmaninoff’s, an audacious claim indeed, but your Tatler stands by it. Listening to it is as if Rachmaninoff and Ormandy had come back from the dead to record it one last time.
Which is not to say Janis’s recording is a carbon copy of the first one. Janis was his own man and his interpretation differs from the composer’s throughout, but they are relatively minor differences. Rach 3 fans, if they haven’t heard this recording already, must listen to this one, whatever the format. Prepare to be dazzled.
He landed in Guadalcanal then saw action at Bougainville, lost his hearing under shelling on Guam, and was finally invalided at Iwo Jima
John Kinsel: devised by a cohort of Navajo, the code substituted a Navajo word for each English alphabet letter and for common military term
John Kinsel, who has died aged 103 (or possibly 107), was one of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers, recruited by the US Marines in the Second World War to baffle Japanese cryptologists by sending messages in their native language.
The Americans had pioneered the use of Native American speakers to send secure messages in the First World War, and the practice was resurrected ad hoc in the Second World War, if a unit had enough speakers from the same tribe to make it viable. The Marines’ programme, however, differed in being far more extensive and systematic.
It was born out necessity, after the Japanese proved adept at breaking the codes that the Americans had time-consumingly devised. The idea came from Philip Johnston, a civil engineer in the Los Angeles shipyards who had been raised by his missionary parents on a Navajo reservation, and had read that Comanches were using their own language in training manoeuvres. In mid-1942 he was made director of a Navajo Code Talker training school at Camp Elliott.
The Code itself was devised by a cohort of 29 Navajo, who substituted a Navajo word for each English alphabet letter, and for common military words. John Kinsel was in the second cohort to be trained at Camp Elliott by the original 29, memorising over 400 terms, and helping them to devise extra words such as “route”, using the Navajo for “rabbit trail”. His own Navajo name, Hash-keh Nah-adah, meant “leader who does a lot of talking”.
Fresh out of high school, he breezed through the tests for complicated words like “amphibious” and “infiltrators”. He was tough and self-sufficient, the product of an early life that had been far from easy.
Born on January 22 (account vary as to whether the year was 1921 or 1917) on the Navajo reservation near Lukachukai, Arizona, he was a baby when he lost his father, and grew up herding his grandfather’s 1,000 sheep. His stepfather was indifferent to him, and he was parked in a disciplinarian government boarding school at Fort Defiance, where he was bullied, underfed and failed to learn English. “I probably just knew ‘yes’ and ‘no’,” he recalled. The language only came to him in 1929, when his grandfather moved him to St Michael Indian School, run by nuns.
In 1942 he joined the 9th Marine Regiment. After Camp Elliott, he spent eight months training in New Zealand before in 1943 landing in Guadalcanal, scene of the ferocious battle the year before, and still subject to Japanese bombing. They nicknamed the noisy enemy aircraft “Washing Machine Charlie”.
He first saw action in late 1943, at the Battle of Bougainville, where the jungle was so thick he lost any sense of where the front line was. When a coded message was needed, someone would say “New Mexico” or “Arizona”, cue for the Navajo signallers.
In July 1944 he landed on Guam, struggling through rice paddies under heavy fire from three Japanese positions. “It was just like lightning,” he recalled. His hearing never recovered. He could see the Japanese picking out high-value Marine targets with their binoculars. Later, he encountered decapitated Guamanian citizens, their hands tied behind their backs, but he did not disturb the bodies as they were often booby-trapped.
In February 1945 he joined the Battle of Iwo Jima five days after the initial landing, sprinting across the airfield to avoid the bullets which “you could see ricocheting off the floor”. He spent that night in a hole under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. The next day, the transmission station he had set up in a nearby cave was blown up by the Japanese, and a boulder hit him in the leg. He was evacuated to the USA by ship and a fellow Navajo aboard brought him cake and ice-cream.
To reach his family on the reservation he had to walk the last seven miles with a suitcase. “It was the best day of my life, when I saw my mom,” he later said. The medicine man performed a ceremony to rid him of the war.
Postwar he found work at a school, walking 20 miles each way, and built a log cabin where he lived until his final years.
His war work was classified until 1968. In 1989 Kinsel received a Silver Heart and in 2001 a Congressional Silver Medal for his role as a Navajo Code Talker, of whom only two others are thought now to survive.
His survivors include a son, who found Catholic records that suggest his father may have been born in 1917, rather than 1921 as John Kinsel had believed, which would make him 107 at the time of his death.
John Kinsel, born January 22 1921 or 1917, died October 19 2024
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
He landed in Guadalcanal then saw action at Bougainville, lost his hearing under shelling on Guam, and was finally invalided at Iwo Jima
John Kinsel: devised by a cohort of Navajo, the code substituted a Navajo word for each English alphabet letter and for common military term
John Kinsel, who has died aged 103 (or possibly 107), was one of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers, recruited by the US Marines in the Second World War to baffle Japanese cryptologists by sending messages in their native language.
The Americans had pioneered the use of Native American speakers to send secure messages in the First World War, and the practice was resurrected ad hoc in the Second World War, if a unit had enough speakers from the same tribe to make it viable. The Marines’ programme, however, differed in being far more extensive and systematic.
It was born out necessity, after the Japanese proved adept at breaking the codes that the Americans had time-consumingly devised. The idea came from Philip Johnston, a civil engineer in the Los Angeles shipyards who had been raised by his missionary parents on a Navajo reservation, and had read that Comanches were using their own language in training manoeuvres. In mid-1942 he was made director of a Navajo Code Talker training school at Camp Elliott.
The Code itself was devised by a cohort of 29 Navajo, who substituted a Navajo word for each English alphabet letter, and for common military words. John Kinsel was in the second cohort to be trained at Camp Elliott by the original 29, memorising over 400 terms, and helping them to devise extra words such as “route”, using the Navajo for “rabbit trail”. His own Navajo name, Hash-keh Nah-adah, meant “leader who does a lot of talking”.
Fresh out of high school, he breezed through the tests for complicated words like “amphibious” and “infiltrators”. He was tough and self-sufficient, the product of an early life that had been far from easy.
Born on January 22 (account vary as to whether the year was 1921 or 1917) on the Navajo reservation near Lukachukai, Arizona, he was a baby when he lost his father, and grew up herding his grandfather’s 1,000 sheep. His stepfather was indifferent to him, and he was parked in a disciplinarian government boarding school at Fort Defiance, where he was bullied, underfed and failed to learn English. “I probably just knew ‘yes’ and ‘no’,” he recalled. The language only came to him in 1929, when his grandfather moved him to St Michael Indian School, run by nuns.
In 1942 he joined the 9th Marine Regiment. After Camp Elliott, he spent eight months training in New Zealand before in 1943 landing in Guadalcanal, scene of the ferocious battle the year before, and still subject to Japanese bombing. They nicknamed the noisy enemy aircraft “Washing Machine Charlie”.
He first saw action in late 1943, at the Battle of Bougainville, where the jungle was so thick he lost any sense of where the front line was. When a coded message was needed, someone would say “New Mexico” or “Arizona”, cue for the Navajo signallers.
In July 1944 he landed on Guam, struggling through rice paddies under heavy fire from three Japanese positions. “It was just like lightning,” he recalled. His hearing never recovered. He could see the Japanese picking out high-value Marine targets with their binoculars. Later, he encountered decapitated Guamanian citizens, their hands tied behind their backs, but he did not disturb the bodies as they were often booby-trapped.
In February 1945 he joined the Battle of Iwo Jima five days after the initial landing, sprinting across the airfield to avoid the bullets which “you could see ricocheting off the floor”. He spent that night in a hole under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. The next day, the transmission station he had set up in a nearby cave was blown up by the Japanese, and a boulder hit him in the leg. He was evacuated to the USA by ship and a fellow Navajo aboard brought him cake and ice-cream.
To reach his family on the reservation he had to walk the last seven miles with a suitcase. “It was the best day of my life, when I saw my mom,” he later said. The medicine man performed a ceremony to rid him of the war.
Postwar he found work at a school, walking 20 miles each way, and built a log cabin where he lived until his final years.
His war work was classified until 1968. In 1989 Kinsel received a Silver Heart and in 2001 a Congressional Silver Medal for his role as a Navajo Code Talker, of whom only two others are thought now to survive.
His survivors include a son, who found Catholic records that suggest his father may have been born in 1917, rather than 1921 as John Kinsel had believed, which would make him 107 at the time of his death.
John Kinsel, born January 22 1921 or 1917, died October 19 2024.
ATHENS, Ga. — Tren de Aragua gang member Jose Ibarra was sentenced to life without parole Wednesday for the vicious murder of promising nursing student Laken Riley in a case that ignited a national firestorm over the Biden administration’s open border policy and coddling of illegal immigrants.
At last a proper sentence for a vicious career gangster who was here illegally. Bickerstaff however would have preferred bringing Old Sparky out of retirement. It’s quicker and cheaper, justice is dispensed promptly and the expense of feeding and housing for life a murderous thug is eliminated. Just the same. this is a step in the right direction.
Panic engulfed MSNBC headquarters on Wednesday after parent company Comcast confirmed a massive spinoff of its cable properties — with a top executive even suggesting the left-leaning network may be forced to change its name.
Is it finally happening? Can one no longer espouse hard-core left-wing, self-righteous reporting and expect to get rich from it?
Hard to say. Even if the top MSNBC news readers get the ax, other left-wing media may snatch them up, though probably at more reasonable pay. It remains to be seen if Rachel Maddow would accept slumming it on a lower salary, say a paltry $25 million per annum compared with her present $30 million. After all, a gal has to maintain her standards and self-respect. Mingling with hoi polloi pulling in mere seven figure amounts may prove to be anathema to Ms Maddow.
To paraphrase, the likes of Rachel Maddow are different from you and me. Yes, they’ve got more money. Or as Bickerstaff’s father, quoting family friend Herman Westinghouse, liked to say: “the poor have their troubles as well as the rich.”
Poor little rich girl?Henry Herman“Uncle Herman” Westinghouse
American-made missiles just struck deep inside Russia. The Kremlin’s response was to authorize the use of nukes.
Biden’s parting gift?
From CNBC@CNN
Russia says Ukraine attacked it using U.S.-made missiles, signals it’s ready for nuclear response.
Of course, it wasn’t Biden’s decision to send up the rockets, since he’s non compos mentis, rather the yes men and toadies that surround the hapless fool. They told him to do it and they must know the possible ramifications of this act of war. The only real explanation why this blog can come up with is, they wanted to leave a parting gift for Donald Trump to deal with after he’s been sworn into office.
President-Elect Donald Trump announced Linda McMahon will be the next US Secretary of Education, which could be a short-lived job if Trump keeps his promise to end the Department of Education.Trump promises McMahon will fight to expand “Choice” to every state in America, even Connecticut.McMahon spent a couple years on the Connecticut State Board of Education and has served on Sacred Heart University’s Board of Trustees for over 16 years.She’s also been an advocate for Parents’ Rights through her work as Chair of the Board at the America First Policy Institute and America First Works where she worked to achieve universal school choice in 12 states.Congratulations, Linda!
Indeed, but your Tatler hopes, as alluded to above, President Trump will shut down this redundant, unneeded, and hugely expensive cabinet position. As Bickerstaff well remembers, this absurd department was the creation of the Carter White House and served as payback, nothing else, to the teachers’s unions for endorsing, campaigning and delivering lots of voters to Jimmy Carter’s successful presidential campaign.
The unions lusted for a DOE for one reason: to extend their reach by providing a mechanism for them to worm their way into every state in the Union’s educational programs. Since they knew their socialist ways would never pass in the voting booth, a powerful DOE could force them upon state and local governments via fiat. That was DOE’s raison d’être.
Since its creation, DOE has greatly expanded and now has 4400 employees and a budget of $238 billion. Not bad for a totally useless arm of the government.
THE TAOS TATLER. 