The teenager who allegedly stabbed a bishop in an act of terrorism justified his actions by telling police the Christian leader had ‘sworn’ at ‘my prophet’, and reportedly screamed the Islamic phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’.
Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was attacked while performing a service at the Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, in Sydney’s west, on Monday night.
He was captured on the live stream of the attack shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he stabbed the bishop in the head, neck and torso at least eight times.
His motives are truly a mystery.
The video went out on livestream, yet no Australian news organization will show the actual video of the stabbing. Here’s one with some freeze frames:
The couple of foreign media sources that do show the video (like The Daily Mail) have age restrictions that prevent embedding. Further, tweets that show it appear to have been deleted.
Because we wouldn’t want to show actual Islamic terrorism when reporting on what authorities refuse to call Islamic terrorism…
Israel and its coalition partners in the Middle East successfully defended against an unprecedented Iranian attack featuring hundreds of drones and missiles soaring into Israeli airspace.
The Israel Defense Forces said early Sunday morning Iran launched 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles, with over 99 percent of them getting intercepted. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari called the defense “a very significant strategic success” as only a small fraction of them reached Israel itself.
A seven-year-old girl suffered severe injuries from shrapnel that fell directly onto her home. She was rushed to the hospital and underwent emergency surgery for a head wound. An estimated 31 people in total were treated for stress and minor injuries.
The U.S., U.K, France, and Jordan came together with Israel to intercept the onslaught of Iranian drones, according to multiple reports. Explosions could be seen over Jerusalem and other parts of the Jewish state as Israel and its allies defended the Jewish state. Most notably, Israel intercepted Iranian missiles headed towards the temple mount, a holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Suchomimus is reporting that seven of the missiles that got through, all of which hit Nevatim Air Base.
“Not all of these were launched from Iran. Some of the drones came from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.”
“Around seven missiles [all hit near] Nevatim Air Base. The base is still operational, however. Here is an F-35 landing shortly after the attack, so I expect the damage is actually quite minimal.”
“Some Reports say they actually landed in open areas, missing the key infrastructure.”
The Times of Israel is reporting that airbase, which is home to Israel’s F-35s, appears to have been a primary target in the strike.
While a list of sites Iran tried to hit has not been publicized by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — which launched the drones and missiles — the main target of the attack appeared to be a sensitive airbase in southern Israel, home to the F-35 stealth fighter jet, the military’s most advanced aircraft.
According to the Israel Defense Forces, Iran’s attack comprised 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles — 99% of which were intercepted by air defenses.
All the drones and cruise missiles were downed outside of the country’s airspace by the Israeli Air Force and its allies, including the United States, United Kingdom, Jordan, France, and others — according to the IDF’s top spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.
Though Israel and Jordan have been quietly working together since they signed a peace treaty in 1994, this is the first instance I can recall of Jordanian planes helping protect Israeli airspace.
The drones had a flight time of multiple hours to reach Israel, and the cruise missiles similarly would have taken around more than an hour to reach their target, according to assessments by defense officials.
The ballistic missiles, however, have a much shorter flight time — around 10 minutes — and are more challenging to intercept, and indeed some managed to evade Israel’s air defenses early Sunday.
The IDF said that the long-range Arrow air defense system managed to knock down the “vast majority” of the 120 ballistic missiles. The Arrow 3 system is designed to take out ballistic missiles while they are still outside of the atmosphere.
We’ve talked about Iron Dome, Israel’s short range air defense system, but less about David’s Sling (intermediate range) and Arrow (long range). David’s Sling is a joint venture between Rafael and Raytheon, while Arrow 3 is jointly developed between Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing.
Unlike the drones and cruise missiles, the ballistic missiles were shot down over Israel, leading the IDF to activate warning sirens over fears of falling shrapnel. The sole injury in Israel due to the Iranian attack was a Bedouin girl who was struck and seriously wounded by falling shrapnel in the Negev desert.
Snip.
Most of the sirens warning against the falling shrapnel and ballistic missiles were activated in the central and eastern Negev region of southern Israel, specifically in the area surrounding Nevatim Airbase. Sirens also sounded in the Jerusalem area, the West Bank, and Golan Heights.
A few of the ballistic missiles managed to bypass the Israeli defenses and strike the Nevatim base. According to the IDF, minor damage was caused to infrastructure at the airbase, but it was operating as usual on Sunday morning.
We’ll have to wait for satellite imagery to confirm that, but I suspect it will.
Why are Israeli air defense systems so much better at intercepting missiles and drones than Russia’s is? For one thing Israel’s systems are probably at least 30 years more advanced than Russia’s predominately ancient, predominately Soviet systems. For another, Russia is 779 times larger than Israel.
Right now it appears that Iran’s attack against Israel has been an expensive, colossal failure.
Update: Suchomimus has a new video up that shows minimal damage to the base.
It’s been a week of petty frustrations, with simple things like paying for online transactions made impossible by websites that send out the wrong information despite the right information being on file. Speaking of frustration, Americans continue to be battered by high inflation, blacks continue to abandon Biden, and it turns out that the Pope might, just might, be Catholic after all.
A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data — the so-called supercore inflation reading.
Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.
Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.
Tom Fitzpatrick, managing director of global market insights at R.J. O’Brien & Associates, said if you take the readings of the last three months and annualize them, you’re looking at a supercore inflation rate of more than 8%, far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.
According to a Wall Street Journal Swing State Poll, blacks, especially black males are abandoning Biden in huge numbers.
While most Black men said they intend to support Biden, some 30% of them in the poll said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for the former Republican president. There isn’t comparable WSJ swing-state polling from 2020, but Trump received votes from 12% of Black men nationwide that year, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate.
That’s an 18 percentage point swing, minimum, for black males, if the national results and the swing state voting is similar.
By confirmed, I mean those who said they intended to vote for Trump.
The gap is even larger if we factor in undecided voters. Biden is down by a massive 30 percentage points vs 2020.
Good: A teacher helping her son with homework. Bad: A teacher helping her son force female students into sex trafficking. “Klein Cain High School cosmetology teacher Kedria McMath Grigsby is accused of helping her son, Roger Magee, force the troubled teens into prostitution.”
Investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.
As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has announced his interim charges for the Senate, a set of 57 issues he is calling on Senate Committees to investigate and research ahead of the legislative session next year.
The list of charges runs the gamut of issues conservatives have called on the legislature to address, including property tax relief, protecting Texas land from hostile foreign ownership, and strengthening laws preventing electioneering by school districts and other political subdivisions.
Some of the biggest reform proposals, however, have been reserved for higher education.
Patrick has asked the Higher Education Subcommittee to study and make recommendations regarding the role of ‘faculty senates’, antisemitism on college campuses, as well as to review the implementation of a new state law banning DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in state universities that went into effect earlier this year.
“The Senate’s work to study the list of charges will begin in the coming weeks and months. Following completion of hearings, committees will submit reports with their specific findings and policy recommendations before December 1, 2024,” said Patrick.
When you think Houston Democratic Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee has already said the stupidest thing she possibly can, she goes out and proves you wrong.
Thanks to New York City’s idiotic rent control laws, not only would a hotel guest refuse to pay rent or leave, but a court actually ruled that he was the owner of the hotel.
First class stamps are going up to 73 cents. Thanks, Joe Biden.
If the commies running Vietnam accuse someone of a crime, I don’t automatically trust them, but Truong My Lan may actually be guilty.
Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.
It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan’s husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.
Snip.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
I've been waiting 29 years to tell this story about OJ and his days at USC. Now that he's dead (may he burn in hell) I have a story that I signed an NDA for that is no longer valid. I was a junior at USC working in Topping Student Center on campus in 1995. I was an administrative…
I think everything that needs to be said about the O.J. trial has been said, so I’m just using this as an opportunity to put up videos of Norm Macdonald on Saturday Night Live (which, I assure you, was actually funny at various points in its history) slamming O.J.:
Suchomimus mentions that this is long enough range to hit the large oil refinery in Omsk. Which is true, but if it can reach that far, there are a lot of logistic choke-points now in range that have the potential to put a world of hurt on Russia:
If you can hit Omsk, you can hit the Transiberian railway bridge over the Irtysh river, which Deep State marks (I’m using a launch point of Lyman in Ukraine for all these) as 2494km. As far as I can tell, that’s the only rail line in Russia that connects Moscow with Russia’s far eastern oblasts*. Russia could reroute some traffic through Kazakhstan’s rail network (which runs on the same Soviet 1,520 gauge rails), but I imagine there would be considerable pain in rerouting things that way.
You could hit the E30 highway bridge over the Ishim river near Abitskiy AKA Abatskoe (2324km). Compared to America and China, Russia has a very poor road network east of the Urals. E30 is their only decent east-west highway. You could possibly run some trucks down smaller roads, some of which may not even be paved, or, again, reroute some traffic through Kazakhstan’s highway network, depending on how the Kazakhs feel about it. At the very least, they’ll want to get paid…
There aren’t many crossing spots across the Ob river further north. Hit the rail bridge near Surgut (2582km), the one south of there across the Protoka Yuganskaya Ob (2577km), and, for good measure, the highway bridge just south of Nefteyugansk (2549km), and you’ll put northern Russian transportation in a world of hurt. (Of course, those areas are sparsely populated, and I don’t know how much material extraction done there is vital to the war effort.)
This is hardly an exhaustive list, and was only what I came up with off the top of my head and with a little Google map work. Russia east of the Urals is has extremely poor infrastructure, is crossed by rivers with few bridges (some places where you think there has to be a bridge only has a ferry), and hitting the right parts of that would require Russia to expend a lot of time, effort and logistical difficulty to repair. (Russia’s military has an number of railroad repair units, with the 48th Separate Railway Brigade in Omsk being the most relevant to this discussion, but they have to be able to get there, and get the materials to repair the damage, and bridge repair presents a whole different level of difficulty, like finding a floating crane and getting it in place.) You hit a few Transiberian choke-points and it puts a serious crimp in Russia-China trade, including most heavy military equipment China is selling.
Caveats: The map is not the territory, and bridges can be hard to take out. But 350kg of a modern explosive is not a small charge, and there are a whole slew of logistical targets to be found within 3,000km of Ukrainian territory.
*And krals. And autonomous okrugs. Russian administrative divisions are weird…
Numerous commentators—especially those defending President Biden’s economic record—have puzzled over why Americans are sour about the state of the U.S. economy. Unemployment rates have returned to pre-pandemic lows, commentators correctly point out, and the official rate of inflation is declining. So why are Americans ignoring the view of many experts that the economy is doing well?
According to a striking new paper by a group of economists from Harvard and the International Monetary Fund, headlined by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, the answer is that Americans have figured out something that the experts have ignored: that rising interest rates are as much a part of inflation as the rising price of ordinary goods. “Concerns over borrowing costs, which have historically tracked the cost of money, are at their highest levels” since the early 1980s, they write. “Alternative measures of inflation that include borrowing costs” account for most of the gap between the experts’ rosy pictures and Americans’ skeptical assessment.
“Backlash Is Real‘: DEI Exodus Gains Steam Across Corporate America.”
The unraveling of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives was seen on the state level, as Red states rushed to ban DEI programs in 2023. Google, Facebook, and other tech companies slashed DEI staff by late last year. Early this year, universities began rolling back diversity programs, while Harvard President Claudine Gay was demoted.
DEI was doomed to fail, and corporations have been quickly scrambling to abandon mindless and profitless diversity programs with Marxist roots. The latest earnings call data shows that “DEI” mentions have collapsed from their peak in 2021, according to Axios, citing data from AlphaSense.
In January, Johnny Taylor, president of the Society for Human Resource Management, told Axios that corporate executives are fed up with DEI.
“The backlash is real. And I mean, in ways that I’ve actually never seen it before,” Taylor said, adding, “CEOs are literally putting the brakes on this DE&I work that was running strong” since George Floyd’s murder in early 2020.
Kevin Clayton, senior vice president and head of social impact and equity for the Cleveland Cavaliers, said the chief diversity officer role was all the rage across corporate America after Floyd’s murder. He said companies filled these positions “out of gilt,” and hiring wasn’t the best.
Axios noted, “Some businesses are cutting back funding, trimming DEI staff — and even considering pulling back on things like employee resource groups comprised of workers of various races, ethnicities or interests.”
The pushback on DEI is finding momentum across corporations and universities. Subha Barry, former head of diversity at Merrill Lynch, told Bloomberg last month: “We’re past the peak.”
Let’s hope so.
No one at the wheel: “Biden Reportedly Has No Idea He Issued ‘Trans Day Of Visibility’ Proclamation.”
Gen Z hates the lousy Biden economy and favors Trump over Biden. Though a word to those Gen Z sorts who complain about a 9-5 schedule being “unnatural”: A “natural” schedule is performing backbreaking hunter/gatherer or subsistence agriculture work from dawn to dusk 6-7 days a week and dropping dead before you turn 40…
Ukrainian drones hit a Russia drone production facility at Yelabuga, Tatarstan, which is almost 1,000 miles inside Russia, using a drone that looks a whole lot like a light aircraft.
Ukraine hits another Russian airbase with over 40 drones, and presumably took out even more Su-34s.
Whoops, make that three Russian airbases hit. including reports of three Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” bombers damaged. (Yes, Russia still has a propeller-driven bomber in service. It can carry nuclear weapons and launch cruise missiles.)
Gun crimes evidently mean being released without bail if the perp is an illegal alien.
“Cost estimates more than double to replace failing Austin arts center building.” Note the “Extended community engagement: $1 million” which is code for “Payoffs to leftwing activists.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Paxton Seeks to Investigate Boeing Parts Supplier, DEI Initiatives. Attorney General Ken Paxton is seeking to investigate Spirit AeroSystsems after public outrage involving Boeing’s aircraft manufacturing issues.”
Boeing stated in 2022 that “for the first time in our company’s history, we tied incentive compensation to inclusion.”
Boeing’s 2023 Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion report explains that “diversity must be at the table for every important decision our company makes – every challenge we face, every innovation we design. Equity, diversity and inclusion are core values because they make Boeing — and each of us individually — better.”
According to the report, racial and ethnic minorities now hold 41.4 percent of jobs in the U.S. Boeing Commercial Airplanes Unit, and 28.3 percent in the U.S. Boeing Defense, Space, and Security. In 2022, U.S. racial and ethnic minorities made up 47.5 percent of new hires at Boeing.
You know what I want at the table for every important Boeing decision? Planes not falling out of the sky.
Intel lost $7 billion last year. Intel has a technology roadmap to get its process tech back on track, but failure to execute on previous nodes is what got them into this mess.
In addition to having fingers in the pie in Syria and Yemen in addition to their proxy war with Israel, Iran also has to deal with Sunni Baluch separatist organization Jaish al-Adl (“Army of Justice”) on their own territory, where they killed at least 11 Iranian security force members.
“Belew, Vai, Levin and Carey Play 80’s King Crimson.” Sign me up. Edited to Add: Crap, tickets went on sale for the Austin show in September TODAY. I was just barely able to snag two tickets in nosebleed…
The radical left-wing anti-farm green agenda isn’t just trying to destroy agriculture in foreign locales like The Netherlands, it’s also happening in Oregon.
“The state of Oregon has effectively shut down small farms and market gardens on a large scale, and they’re actually sending out cease and desist letters to farms.” (By “market gardens” he means small farms that only supply produce locally.)
“They’re using satellite technology to find their victims and then send them these letters, and say you can’t operate, and they’re doing it in the name of water conservation.”
“Oregon’s government and dairy industry [have joined] forces against small farmers.”
“There are two different laws that they’re using.”
“They’ve redefined what a CAFO is.” CAFO stands for “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.” According to Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, a CAFO is where “over 1,000 animal units are confined for over 45 days a year. An animal unit is the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of “live” animal weight.[1] A thousand animal units equates to 700 dairy cows, 1,000 meat cows, 2,500 pigs weighing more than 55 pounds (25 kg), 10,000 pigs weighing under 55 pounds, 10,000 sheep, 55,000 turkeys, 125,000 chickens, or 82,000 egg laying hens or pullets.”
Oregon seems to have redefined that. “This applies to people who have chicken houses, who have goat farms, basically anybody who has a barn or a facility that has a gravel or concrete floor.”
“What’s happening in Oregon, and why the small dairies have filed a lawsuit against the state…it doesn’t matter the size of the operation, you could have two milking cows.”
“Sarah King, who owns Godspeed Hollow Farm in Newberg, Oregon, has a pickup station that’s just 100 ft in length. She has an 11 acre property, and keeps things pretty simple. She has three milking cows. [Because] she has that milking stand, the state of Oregon said you are a CAFO, and because you are considered a CAFO, they require you to put in this infrastructure improvement which would cost her $100,000,”
“We’re requiring this massive infrastructure upgrade for you to continue to operate your facilities to protect our ground water from your two cows standing on a milking stand.”
Even if you have a gravel floor in a chicken coop, Oregon wants to come after you. “They have redefined CAFOs. This is going to impact nearly everybody.”
“This law is being enforced in the state of Oregon. It has already shut down some farms.”
There is an injunction on the definition of the law until it can be heard in court.
“You would think that they were going after raw milk, that always seems to be the case with a lot of these things, but this is actually going after anybody. Egg producers, anybody who has chickens that go up in a chicken house at night that may have a concrete floor.”
You have to go through a permitting process, and a lot of what they’re requiring is just simply too much for the small farmer. So that’s rule number one.”
“The second rule: In the state of Oregon, if you are using water, even groundwater, the only water that you can legally harvest and use without a permit is actually rainwater. They consider all water in the ground a resource of the public. Even if you have a private well on your property, that belongs to the people of Oregon.”
“This is a rule that went into place back in 2021, and then it has slowly rolled out to the point where market gardeners with a half acre of land are now receiving cease and desist orders saying you can’t water your gardens. Figure out another way to do it.”
The law says you can use up to 5,000 gallons a day, but market gardeners are proably only using 1,000 gallons a day. “You would think that they’re saying you’re a commercial business, because if you are growing food for yourself [But] There’s a lady has been growing food and selling it to neighbors. It’s been her primary income source and they shut her down.”
“Christina Del Campo um has just over a half acre. She grows blueberries, local vegetables, things like that. Her farm is called Oak Song Farm near Eugene. She’s operated there for 7 years and she recently received received a letter from the regional office of the Oregon Water Resources Department. It was a notification that the farm couldn’t irrigate its commercial crops without a water right.”
“They shut her down because, according to the Oregon Water Resources Department, the exemption for commercial use does not include irrigation of land.”
“Basically, the state of Oregon is coming in now and they’re they’re putting things on people’s wells to measure the amount of water. It’s very invasive.”
“Supposedly Oregon had these rules in place since 1909. They just keep changing them.”
“They’ve sent out letters not just to this one farmer, but multiple small farms, market garden farms, saying you can’t water your crops anymore.”
“This is actually a war on small farms.”
“We’ve seen this happening over and over and over again, where we’re seeing them utilize water rights [protection] to shut down farms across our country.”
“If you look at the number of farms that we’ve lost since 2000, it’s staggering. We’ve gone from 2,100,000 farms in 2000 down to 1,850,000 farms at the end of last year.”
“You’ve seen a lot of these cases where they’ve gone in and they’ve just shut off farms to water rights to an entire valley at a time.”
“We’re seeing them take control over people’s wells putting meters on people’s wells, shutting down small farms.”
“Everybody should have the right to farm fresh food. Oregon is basically taking that right away from every Oregon citizen by taking away the rights of the small farmers to operate their businesses in the name of some laws that were originally put in place to protect groundwater from much larger scale operations.”
If there isn’t some sort of sinister agenda behind these new regulatory pushes, destroying small farms certainly gives a pretty good impression of a sinister agenda. And no points for guessing which political party enjoys uncontested control of Oregon. Remember when Democrats claimed to be looking out for family farms? Doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Someone should ask Willie Nelson about all this…
Texas has a Right to Farm statute that should (theoretically) prevent such abuses here.
Indeed, this is the first interest rate hike for Japan in 17 years.
According to Keynesian economics, Japan should have experienced an economic boom from all that monetary stimulus. It did not. Prices were stagnant. Wages were stagnant. GDP growth was anemic.
Yet deficit spending remains the preferred policy solution of just about every damn country in the world.
Back in the dim mists of time (i.e., the 1980s), Japan Inc. was going to take over the world. That didn’t happen either. Instead, the Japanese bubble, based in huge measure on wildly unsustainable real estate valuations (“At the peak of the bubble economy, Tokyo real estate could sell for as much as US$139,000 per square foot, which was nearly 350 times as much as equivalent space in Manhattan. By that reckoning, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth as much as the entire US state of California.”) popped. There then followed three decades of economic stagnation.
Remember the WNBA? The women’s basketball league the NBA started to draw more women into watching basketball? In its inaugural season, the WNBA finals drew 2.85 million viewers, when the Houston Comets won the first of their four championships.
It’s never reached those heights again, and the Comets folded in 2008. There was a mild uptick to 728,000 viewers last year.
So you’d think the league would welcome an exciting, highly skilled new breakout player.
You’d be wrong.
“For almost three decades the WNBA has been a laughing stock and disgrace of a professional sports league that only survives due to NBA subsidies.”
“A possible turning point for this sad existence of a league has arrived in the form of a basketball messiah.”
“Caitlin Clark, the greatest and most popular female college basketball player of all time, has announced she’ll be joining the WNBA this upcoming season, and some think she can do for the WNBA what Larry, Magic or Jordan did for the NBA.” I think she can make it more popular, but I sincerely doubt she can produce the same boost that trio gave to the NBA’s fortunes.
“The WNBA’s players don’t want Caitlin Clark to succeed.”
“The WNBA is made up primarily of players who’ve been infected with the false ideas of modern feminism, which heavily focuses on issues related to race, sexuality, gender identity and participating in the oppression Olympics.” I would say “Get woke, go broke,” but the WNBA was already broke without NBA subsidies.
“The players that have been infected with this ideology don’t want Clark to be the face of the league and will do everything in their power to stop it from happening.”
“The first problem Clark will face is that she will be a straight player in a primarily LGBT dominated league, which some of you may think is nonsense and won’t have any effect.”
“But don’t take it from me, take it from former WNBA champion and number three overall draft pick Candace Wiggins, who claimed that 98% of the league is gay and that the toxic environment within the the league affected her as a straight woman and made her retire early.”
“From her first moment in the league, she was targeted and harassed because she was straight and a nationally popular figure, and that many of the other players were jealous and consistently tried to hurt her.”
“After Wiggins came out with these comments, the media didn’t support her. Instead they tried to tear down and diminish her.”
“If you look at viewership numbers since the start of the league, you’ll see viewership is still down tremendously. But the league and the media will still try to create a positive narrative by saying things like how this year’s finals had the highest viewership for a game three in 18 years, without mentioning it was still over 200,000 viewers short of the game three 18 years ago, and one of the teams that played in that game [doesn’t] even exist anymore.”
“Even worse for Caitlin Clark is that, unlike Wiggins, in the minds of those who participate in the oppression Olympics, Clark bears the ultimate sin of being white.”
“We’ve already seen this be a problem for other WNBA Stars. For example Sabrina Ionescu. She’s of course the player who took Steph Curry to the wire in the Three-Point Contest, which was probably the most exciting thing of that dumpster fire of an All-Star weekend.”
“Like Clark, Sabrina was a dominant college player who won awards and consistently pulled in higher attendance numbers for her college game than the average WNBA game, yet ever since she’s been in the league she’s faced criticism from players and the media because she’s white.”
“With an Emmy-nominated sportscaster [Chris Williamson] straight up saying the reason people aren’t rocking with Sabrina is because she leans into her white privilege and benefits from her whiteness and doesn’t use it to uplift and amplify her black co-workers voices in the WNBA.”
Plus the usual accusations of racism for putting her on the NBA2K24 cover. (Which is, I think, a special WNBA edition available only at Gamestop? I don’t play sports video games, so I have no idea how these various editions work.)
“This past year, Sabrina was ranked six by the fans and media among guards for All-Star voting, but was ranked 19th by the players.”
“Articles have already started to emerge which claim Clark’s whiteness is the reason she has been elevated to superstar status instead of, you know, the fact that she’s actually a legit college superstar who’s scoring points at a level not seen since Pistol Pete and bringing in more fans to the women’s game than ever before.” This is hyperbole. Though quite impressive, Clark’s 27.8 points per game in NCAA Division 1 doesn’t come close to Pete Maravich’s insane 44.5 points per game, and Chris Clemons averaged 30 points a game 2018-19.
“Those in and around the league subscribe to beliefs that simply don’t allow them to build the WNBA around Caitlin Clark, but rather instead actually urge them to tear her down.”
Is the commenter (TooLazyToHoop) overselling Clark? Maybe. I’m hardly an expert on the WNBA or women’s college basketball. (Although, since I could, in fact, name five past WNBA players with a gun to my head, I probably do know more than 99% of the American public.) But the video shows Clark does have a very sweet 3-point stroke.
And now Bill Burr’s quite relevant WNBA rant:
“Nobody in the WNBA got Covid.”
“We gave you a fucking league! None of you showed up! Where are all the feminists? None of you went to the fucking games. You failed them, not me.”
“Women failed the WNBA.”
“Meanwhile, the Kardashians are making billions. Those Real Housewives shows are making money hand over fist. That’s what women are watching.”
It’s been a while since we did a “just for fun” video roundup of ridiculously large caliber guns. So here it is!
First up: Scott of Kentucky Ballastics shoots the TII .500 Bushwacker. Given Scott’s previous critical failure with other .50 ammo, you can bet that he’s put on a lot of personal protective gear for this shoot.
“Let’s ride the lightening!”
A much bigger blast than the S&W .500 Magnum.
2410 fps.
It makes it all the way through one ballistic gel block and into a second.
Both the S&W .500 Magnum and the .500 Bushwacker absolutely obliterate 6 pound cans of food, and eventually the collateral damage destroys the folding table.
If that wasn’t big enough, he also fires a punt gun against a gun safe. The safe doesn’t fare well.
Finally, to end with the most ridiculous, here’s someone firing a singles-shot 20mm Vulcan:
