With the most recent images coming out of Gaza, the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT), Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo, have announced a class-action lawsuit against Hamas for copyright infringement. The lawsuit seeks $4.3 billion dollars in punitive damages for immeasurable reputational damage.

Exhibit A from the lawsuit

I think the opportunity we’re maybe missing in all these pardons – or preemptive pardons – even is how useful they’ll be in providing transparency for investigators. A pardoned person no longer has a 5th Amendment protection, since they’re not at risk of prosecution… So drag them into Congress (or even grand juries) and ask for the allocution. What exactly have you been pardoned for? And with whom have you committed these crimes? And let’s see all the documentation in regards to the activity you’ve been pardoned for.

I don’t think it’s important to prosecute Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton or even Dr. Fauci … But it is vitally important to get their minions and co-conspirators to understand what they conspired to do.

For an awkward 1 minute 50 seconds, Carrie Underwood and the rest of America waited for the music to play at the inauguration. It started for a moment, then stopped. And it didn’t come back. The sound technician apologetically came up to Carrie and said something. She responded, “Let’s sing.”

Carrie asked the crowd to back her up and proceeded to belt out a beautiful a capella rendition of “America the Beautiful.” You could hear the crowd joining in.

Source CNN: Schumer and Pelosi respond to Trump’s 2019 national address on border security

I don’t pay a great deal of attention to the mainstream media.  The benefit of this is that I tend to be happier.  The problem with this, of course, is that I sometimes miss the message they are trying to tell me, and sometimes that message can be rather important.  This is why it has taken until today – the last day of the Biden Administration – for me to recognize three obvious truths, which the mainstream media has been patiently trying to explain to me for the past 10-20 years:

I’ve had it on my radar for some weeks to write a post about the subject of work, but I haven’t gotten around to it before now because I’ve been really busy…well…working.

Now Christopher Rufo has stirred the pot on X about the very subject I had intended to write about, and there has subsequently ensued a kind of online firestorm on the right-ish side of the social media divide.

G-d tells Moshe to go and save the Jews. Moshe’s reply is a question: “Who am I?”

G-d seems to ignore the question, almost as if it was the wrong question! Instead of answering the question directly, G-d replies:

Vaccines may not be the most spectacular of all the miracles of modern medicine, but they are arguably the most beneficial. They have virtually eliminated the infectious diseases of childhood, including measles, diphtheria, mumps, rubella, smallpox and polio that were once the sources of unimaginable worry and grief for parents everywhere.

Vaccines are estimated to have saved over 150 million lives in the last five decades, cutting infant mortality by 40% globally and over 50% in Africa. Closer to home, of all babies born in the US in 2001 alone, a 2005 study showed that vaccines prevented 33,000 deaths and 14 million illnesses. Vaccines are also the most cost-effective of all medical interventions, easily yielding the greatest amount of benefit received per dollar spent.

David Lynch, who only last year announced that many years of smoking had left him with emphysema so serious he could no longer leave the house, has died.

As a lifelong movie fan, I have had something of a love-hate relationship with the work of David Lynch. When I was studying film in college, and had grandiose aspirations of becoming a film auteur myself, I was a big fan. In retrospect, that wasn’t based on much: at that point, he had only two features to his name, Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. But for a teenaged film buff with an interest in the avant-garde, Eraserhead was a masterpiece, a singular vision like nothing else. And The Elephant Man was brilliantly atmospheric, adapting the grim and unsettling tone of the earlier film and packaging it into something that was almost, but not quite, mainstream.