Evil isn’t just banal, it’s also petty and childish

Greta Thunberg has been released from Israeli captivity, and she talks about her capture. What’s surprising is just how childishly stupid and misogynistic the Israeli soldiers were.

Her red suitcase lies in the hall. “Whore Greta” someone has written in large black letters. Around the text: an Israeli flag and an erect penis.
The bag was confiscated by the Israeli military from the boat – and returned to her like this. She laughs.
– They’re like five-year-olds!

She was not allowed to wear her T-shirt with “Free Palestine” on it and was ordered to change, she explains. She put on an orange one with the text “Decolonize” instead.

– And then I put on my frog hat. When I’m about to get off the boat, there are a bunch of police officers waiting for me. They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.

Here, everything goes “from zero to a hundred,” several witnesses describe – the violence escalates.

Greta Thunberg describes how she is dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron fences. This is a protracted scene that lasts for over six hours, according to Greta, and is confirmed by several participants in the flotilla that Aftonbladet talks to.

– It was kind of dystopian. I saw maybe 50 people sitting in a row on their knees with handcuffs and their foreheads against the ground.

Greta gets up from the sofa and lies down, showing the position on the striped living room rug.

– They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.

Greta laughs.

– Then they ripped off my frog hat, threw it on the ground, stomped and kicked it, and kind of threw a tantrum.

– They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little whore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Whore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.

Every time someone looked up from the ground, they were knocked back down to the ground, Greta and the other Swedes recount. In the corner where Greta was sitting, the police placed a flag.

– The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.

They’re like spoiled children. Unprofessional and eminently mockable. You might think it’s because these are young soldiers, with the mentality of a college freshman at best, but even the older, unwiser senior politicians are like that.

This smug asshole

Suddenly, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the area and stood in front of everyone, Greta recounts.

– He shouted, ’You are terrorists. You want to kill Jewish babies.’ Those who shouted back were taken aside and beaten. They were thrown to the ground and beaten. But I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, because every time I lifted my head from the ground, I was kicked by the guard standing next to me.

They were humanitarians, who wanted to deliver aid to Palestinian children.

The US has given over $20 billion in aid to Israel in the last two years. It’s past time to turn off the faucet — no more aid to these immature thugs, ever. Force them to learn how to live with their neighbors in a civilized manner.

The things we do for our kids

I’m back! We went to Madison, Wisconsin for our granddaughter’s 7th birthday, and also for brats (vegetarian style) and cheese curds and the fall colors and Kwik-Trip and all that Wisconsin stuff, but also, unfortunately, for a 7 hour drive each way, which was not fun. It was worth it, though, we wish we could see our kids more often, but most likely we won’t be seeing any of our children for another year, since winter is about to clamp down and trap us at home for a while.

Next weekend, we have closer plans. The No Kings rally is taking place right here in Morris on Saturday. You know, that communist antifa plot? The administration has it’s own characterization of the event.

n criticizing the rallies, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, No Kings means no paychecks. No paychecks and no government.

I guess we’ll be poor if we don’t have any kings.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated separately that the expected millions of attendees will be part of antifa, paid protesters. It begs the question (of) who’s funding it.

Except that we’ll be paid for protesting! Or will we? I didn’t get a check for the last one.

I don’t think it’s at all a question who’s funding it. Even far-right wackos have noticed some data.

The name, on its face, is unobjectionable, even vaguely noble: “No Kings.” Americans, after all, did declare independence from one. But the historical overtones here mask something more recent and considerably less authentic. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, the ‘No Kings’ protest movement is not a spontaneous uprising of civic-minded dissidents. It is a coordinated, well-funded, tightly stage-managed campaign, backed by nearly 200 far-left NGOs, labor unions, and donor networks, many of which are directly tied to the Democratic Party’s power infrastructure. It operates not from the street, but from the spreadsheet.

200 far-left NGOs, labor unions, and donor networks? Why, that sounds like a distributed grass roots network with many donors. The organization actually lists all their donors, and doesn’t pay protesters.

I didn’t use a spreadsheet to figure out that I have to oppose this president and his incompetent cronies. I’m doing it for my kids.

He wants us all to die

It’s my granddaughter’s birthday this weekend, so yesterday we spent 7 hours traveling all across Minnesota and Wisconsin, and boy are my knees sore. We’ve got a party to go to tomorrow.

He looks like death already

In more interesting news, David Gorski tears into RFK jr with his teeth — it’s transparently clear that RFK jr is rabidly anti-vax and the he’s definitely coming for all of your vaccines, since he’s now denying that they have any efficacy at all.

Let’s take a look at how RFK Jr. demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt in this video that he is, in fact, antivaccine. I will repeat what I’ve been saying for months now: RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines; he’s coming for all vaccines, in fact. It’s just that he’s strategic enough to know that he can’t do it all at once, which is why he purged the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace the fired members with antivaxxers and the antivax-adjacent, only one of whom has any significant experience in public health or vaccine policy. Personally, I’ve been saying that the only thing that’s saved us (thus far) is the inexperience and incompetence of RFK Jr.’s ACIP. In the meantime, President Trump has embraced Andrew Wakefield’s old grift about separating the components of the MMR vaccine as somehow being “safer,” even as he talks about adding autism to the list of table injuries for the Vaccine Injury Compensation System, a move that would certainly bankrupt and destroy it.

Yes, things are grim out there.

Fortunately, my granddaughter has responsible parents who have kept her vaccination status up to date, which is why I get to go hang out with her and watch her open presents and celebrate her 7th birthday. It’s absolutely insane that we have a director of health and human services who is committed to killing young children with disease, while our Secretary of War favors more direct execution of children. This really is the death cult coming into fruition in our federal government.

Reminder: we have a podcast this afternoon!

Portland is burning?

The Oregon GOP posted this image on Twitter.

Oh my goodness. I had no idea the anarchy was so bad.

On all three platforms, the statement was illustrated with an image that seemed designed to support Trump’s false claim that protests against immigration sweeps in Portland are so out of control that the city is “burning to the ground”. On one side of the image, a line of police officers held riot shields; on the other, a crowd of young men held up flares that lit up a night sky filled with red smoke.

Except…the police on the left side of the image are Ecuadorian, and the photo was from 2008.

And the fiery protest is a photo from Brazil in 2017.

Do you realize what this means? South America has invaded the United States! The spearhead has been driving up the West coast for the last 17 years, and we’re only finding out now! MAGA was right all along about the Hispanic invasion.

Or, I suppose, it’s possible that Republicans are terrible liars.

The president is insane

He just posted this.

Bonkers. Certifiable. Loopy. Totally nuts.

I’d say it’s 25th Amendment time, except that amendment is useless.

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

So it’s up the the vice president to call out the president? Vance is as demented and vile as Trump is. We’re stuck with this incompetent dingbat.

Nazis will be prosecuted

The Seattle Times covered the story of that Nazi who crashed a University of Washington psych class. A couple of new details: he invaded the class twice, once at the beginning when he ran away when campus security was called, and then at the end, which prompted the mass uprising by the class. And now we know a little more about his fate:

In a statement, the university called the classroom disruption “completely unacceptable” and said the individual is not a UW student. “The instructor and several students from the class followed the person until UWPD (University of Washington Police Department) personnel arrived and took him into custody,” the statement read. “We will be issuing a ban from campus.”

UW said the case remains under investigation, with criminal charges pending. The matter will be referred to the King County prosecuting attorney’s office.

University campuses are fairly open places — you want to visit the student union and buy an ice cream cone? Go ahead. You want to stroll through the hallways and see what students are doing? You can. You want to walk into a classroom and listen to a lecture for an hour? Entirely possible, although if you disrupt the class we will have zero tolerance for that nonsense. I’ve had visitors to my classes, and it’s never been a problem. Of course, they haven’t been Nazis.

The country is being run by snot-nosed, immature teen-aged man-children

I didn’t know this until now — universities don’t make these, I guess — but there is a class of memorabilia called challenge coins. Usually, these are given out by military organizations to commemorate specific events, ranging from a visit to a major victory, but there are many other organizations that hand them out for all kinds of reasons. I’ve never received one, or given one out, and I felt briefly left out when I discovered that the FBI is also handing them out, especially this one that Kash Patel is proudly giving people.

The challenge coins being handed out by @FBIDirectorKash. Seems someone put a lot of thought into this.

A skull with guns for teeth, and oh my god, it has spiders in it’s eye sockets, based on the Punisher logo? It’s just cartoonishly evil.

“Looks like a nerd stuck forever in puberty designed a challenge coin while being on 15 cans of Monster,” one user commented on the design.

Others quickly pointed out that the Punisher symbol might not be the best choice for an FBI director.

“The Punisher is a symbol of “law and order” failing. It has very little business in the office of the FBI Director,” one user posted.

The use of the Punisher logo by law enforcement and the military has drawn criticism from the character’s creator, Gerry Conway, who told Forbes: “It always struck me as stupid and ironic that members of the police are embracing what is fundamentally an outlaw symbol.”