Awards are Gay and Literally Fake

ESPN was caught winning more than 30 Emmy Awards for individuals who are imaginary employees of the Disney network:

In March 2023, Shelley Smith, who worked 26 years as an on-air reporter for ESPN, received a call from Stephanie Druley, then the network’s head of studio and event production. Druley said she wanted to talk about something “serious” that needed to stay between the two of them, Smith recalled. She then told Smith that Smith needed to return two sports Emmy statuettes that she had been given more than a decade earlier.

That request was one of many ESPN made of some of its biggest stars last year after the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS), the organization that administers the Emmys, uncovered a scheme that the network used to acquire more than 30 of the coveted statuettes for on-air talent ineligible to receive them. Since at least 2010, ESPN inserted fake names in Emmy entries, then took the awards won by some of those imaginary individuals, had them re-engraved and gave them to on-air personalities… The fraud was discovered by NATAS, which prompted an investigation by that organization and later by ESPN.

Sadly, it turns out that the legendary, award-winning broadcasters Kirk Henry, Lee Clark, and Dirk Howard don’t even exist.

Now, I’m fairly notorious for my indifference to awards. I’ve understood that most of them are nothing but popularity contests or marketing tools since my junior year of high school. And that’s not sour grapes or anything; I declined my high school’s attempt to invent a fake award when the soccer team coach wrongly felt I’d been robbed when the MVP award went to the spiritual leader of our undefeated team instead of to the leading scorer.

But a lot of people take them seriously even though they prove absolutely nothing about excellence or quality. And even if you weren’t convinced of that by the Sad/Rabid Puppies campaigns, or the fact that Mark Clifton and Frank Riley won the 1955 Hugo Award for their unforgettable novel They’d Rather Be Right over some little book written by an English professor called The Lord of the Rings, I should hope that ESPN winning 30 Emmies for people who don’t even exist would suffice.

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Demolition in Dallas

Green Bay is up 41-16 and it’s not even the fourth quarter yet. There is no way Mike McCarthy is back in Dallas next season after this debacle.

Also, it is looking disturbingly like Green Bay has a third-straight generational talent at quarterback. This is irksome in the extreme.

UPDATE: Quote of the night from Ahmed Fareed, who grew up in Michigan, when asked to pick the Rams-Lions game.

“I’m a journalist. I have to pick with my mind, not my heart. Lions 56-10.”

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Remigration in Germany

The AfD party is rapidly rising in Germany, in part due to its promise to remigrate millions of people who have invaded and degraded Germany.

Germany’s left-liberal establishment media has been promoting a “secret’ deportation plan formulated by the Alternative for Germany (AfD); however, AfD politician René Springer says the plan is no secret and vowed to deport millions should the AfD come to power.

“We will return foreigners to their homeland. By the millions. This is not a secret plan. This is a promise. For more security. For more justice. To preserve our identity. For Germany.”

Springer’s message on deportation comes at a time when the AfD just hit a record high of 24 percent in a new national poll from YouGov, a poll result once thought unthinkable by most just a year ago.

AfD politician vows mass deportations as his party reaches record polling high, REMIX, 11 January 2024

There are precisely four options for Germany and every Western country, including the United States:

  1. Remigrate the invaders and return them safely to their native lands.
  2. Fight a war with the invaders, culminating in a historical Immicaust.
  3. Decline into violent post-civilized, post-European anarchy.
  4. Be invaded and occupied by the Russian Army.

The option that the AfD is proposing is by far the most civilized and humane option. It’s also one of the two options that will permit Germany to remain both a) German and b) sovereign. It is therefore an absolute moral imperative.

The Boomers and their Enlightenment delusions are finished. There is no longer any need to avoid openly discussing the necessity of what is obviously necessary if the various nations of the West are to survive. After all, what is the alternative? To continue to sink deeper into the mire of denationalization and decivilization?

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There is No Catching Up

Andrei Martyanov explains why it’s not just the loss of US industrial capacity that has hamstrung its once-superlative military infrastructure and rendered the US military incapable of defeating Russia, China, or quite possibly, even Yemen.

In theory the US may build, in the next 10+ years, some facilities to increase production of 155-mm shells or drones. But it will not be able to match industrial capacity of Russia in this respect, even with theoretical addition of future, if any, European capacity. The issue here is not just quantity–the target impossible to reach due to utter destruction of US manufacturing base and an extremely complex supply chains for military production. This all is just the tip of the iceberg. The main body of the iceberg is a complete catastrophe that the US military doctrine, and, as a result, procurement development is.
I spoke about it for years–some gaps, such as in air defense or missilery the US will not be able to close, because as I type this, this gap continues to grow. It is measured not in years but in generations. This is, as an example, the result of misguided and illiterate approach to air defense based on… air power. You have to literally undo the whole thing, and this requires not just building some facilities, but a complete rethinking of America’s defense or, rather, “offense” philosophy which doesn’t work. It never did. This is impossible in the present state of the American geopolitical thought without rethinking the United States as it perceived itself in the last hundred years. The US has no courage, intellect and will to do so because it leads to a destruction of America’s mythology.

So, the US is stuck. So, it is good that John Mearsheimer understands parts of it, but he doesn’t understand the heart of the matter. After the US strategically and operationally “planned” VSU’s “counteroffensive”, the question of the competence of the US military establishment arose and was answered–it is incompetent! It will take a generation or two to even teach those who are currently in the plebe years in US service academies to think properly and within the framework of America’s REAL military and industrial capability. This REAL capability has nothing in common with the US halcyon years of WW II and after and it is not coming back. Russia will not allow the US to unleash the war in Europe while thinking that the US can sit this one out again behind the ocean. Doesn’t work like this anymore, especially with the construction tempo of Russia Navy’s subs such as 3M22 Zircon carriers Yasen-class subs and frigates which already have Zircons deployed. These are technologies the US simply doesn’t have and are nowhere near of getting them. China can rely on them, and much more from Russia in case of the US deciding to commit suicide, the US cannot.

It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual within the US military and foreign policy establishment, and what John Mearsheimer fails to understand–these are not just some pieces of hardware whose utility the US suddenly recognized. Nope, the REAL experience of SMO is way more than technological, it is above all operational and strategic, which made Russia’s General Staff a well-oiled machine which merely uses 404 as a trap and a junkyard for NATO’s military capacity, because Russia fights not Ukraine, she fights NATO.

Having read two of Martyanov’s excellent books on US military and imperial decline, both of which were written and published well before the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, it’s clear that he’s identified something that goes well beyond the common level of military analysis in the Western think tanks.

What he’s talking about here is neither the loss of US industry nor the inability of the US to design, build, and procure hypersonic missiles, inexpensive missile platforms, and squad-level drone swarms. It’s not even the demographic changes, and the fact that the USA is now an empire with a foreign elite ruling over a melange of peoples who have no connection to the heritage Americans or even first-wave immigrants who fought its previous wars. What’s he’s talking about is the fundamental failure of the US military strategists to understand the realities of military power and the way that a sea-based naval power accustomed to relatively small expeditionary conflicts well away from home simply doesn’t possess the operational and strategic capability to defeat a massive land-based power that is on a reasonably similar technological level.

Britain couldn’t defeat France. The USA couldn’t defeat Germany. And Athens lost to Sparta in the end.

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I’m the Real Victim Here

A woman complains of her virtual gang-rape on Facebook:

A woman has revealed she was ‘virtually gang raped’ by four male avatars in Meta’s Horizon Worlds – and she said the trauma is similar to a real-world assault. Speaking to DailyMail.com, psychotherapist and start-up co-founder Nina Patel said that her attackers may have felt ‘disinhibited’ due to being in a virtual world.

I don’t mean to minimize Ms Patel’s experience, but let’s face it, it simply can’t compare to the way I have been repeatedly murdered in World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. And I can assure you, each and every experience was every bit as traumatic as being murdered in real life!

To this day, I find myself shaking uncontrollably whenever I encounter a Tauren, or a Blood Elf, on the street.

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Run Gavin Run

Vincent James: If you were given the choice, if you had to get rid of one religion, and it was Islam or Catholicism, which one would you get rid of?

Gavin’s Jewish Partner: Catholicism.

Gavin: What?

Gavin’s Jewish Partner: Yeah, of course. What do you think? Who do you think you’re talking to?

Vincent James: This is what we’ve been trying to tell you for a long time, Gavin.

Gavin: Yeah, I’m out of here.

There is no “judeo-christianity”. There is no such thing as “judeo-christianity” any more than there is “satano-christianity” or “demono-christianity”. Judaism is intrinsically antithetical to Christianity, and no amount of post-WWII rhetoric, Scofield Bible shenanigans, or Boomers waving Israeli flags inside their churchian sanctuaries is going to change that.

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You Get What You Gave

An aging woman laments how the post-Boomer youth no longer respect the elderly:

Once revered, age is now a sign of your irrelevance to modern life.

The word boomer – short for baby boomer, anyone who was born between 1946 and 1964 – has become an insult for older people who are out of touch…

I’ll be honest – and in saying this I’m aware I may receive some ageist insults myself in response – I don’t think it was like this when I was young.

Elders were respected. Their words carried weight and gravitas.

They were more likely to be cared for within family homes when the time came, and within society, too.

Most importantly they were listened to, rather than being swiftly dismissed as irrelevant.

It wasn’t like this when I was young either. But the Boomers are actively disrespected by the succeeding generation because they broke the tradition of respect for their elders. Now that they are the elders, they are harvesting the fruit of the seeds they planted in their youth. The first problem is that they never grew up. When I was a kid, I can’t count how many times I was told by my friends’ Boomer parents “don’t call me Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson is my father.” So, many members of Generation X grew up accustomed to referring to their elders as their peers, by their first names.

The second problem is that they had less interest in their children and their children’s activities than they probably should have. Every member of Generation X can tell stories of what sounds like a near-feral childhood, of being kicked out of the house in the morning and only being allowed to go back inside for meals and sundown. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it turns out, but when your parents require the television to remind them that you exist at 10 PM at night, it’s probably taking a good thing too far.

And while I was fortunate that my parents took an interest in my athletic activities, it wasn’t uncommon for my dad to be the only father at a number of my soccer games and track meets. And my mother religiously attended the high school soccer games for all four of her boys, although she somehow managed to do so without ever quite grasping the offsides rule. But as a general rule, our parents were simply not very interested in anything we did, no matter what it was.

The third problem was a real eye-opener, however, when Generation X began having children and discovered that as little interest as the Boomers had in us, they had even less in their grandchildren. Many of us were close to our own grandparents, indeed, some of us were much closer to them than we were to our parents. So it was shocking to discover that our parents didn’t even want to babysit their own grandchildren for a few hours a week, and were prone to vanishing across the country, or around the world, for months at a time on vacations and cruises rather than spend any substantial time with their grandkids. In contrast, I remember being sent to stay with my grandparents in Virginia for an entire month during the school year, and they were delighted to have me there. And I still remember that visit and look back on it as being absolutely idyllic.

So this disinterest was not only bewildering to us, but also prevented any close relationships from being developed between Boomer grandparents and Millennial or Z grandchildren.

Fourth and finally, given the behavior demonstrated over the last 50 years, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of the younger generations that many, perhaps even most Boomers, who collectively were the recipients of the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, are going to die leaving absolutely nothing at all to their children or to their grandchildren. Their homes and their second homes have already been sold or reverse-mortgaged to fund their five annual cruises; they’ve funded their retirements with debt that will never be repaid.

The Census Bureau data confirmed that most Baby Boomers’ wealth is tied up in their homes. In the past, the family home would be the most significant piece of an inheritance, but now, seniors can tap into their home’s wealth before they pass with a reverse mortgage. The wealth and the home go back to the mortgage company rather than staying in the family. Many seniors would rather live in luxury during their final days than offer their kids financial assistance.

Generational Wealth Lost: Why Boomers Aren’t Leaving Their Kids an Inheritance

So, it shouldn’t be surprising that young people who neither know nor owe anything to an elderly population that has never shown any interest in them do not treat their elders with the respect that we used to back in the day. Because today’s elders, quite frankly, never earned it.

 A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children
–Proverbs 13:22

UPDATE: A GenX response. No doubt we’ll be hearing from the Boomers soon…

I completely agree with this. I’m a GenXer and when my kids were little it seemed like my mom thought it was such a chore to watch our kids even just once a month. Now that my children are married and having children, I just don’t get my mom’s reluctance to babysit because I LOVE being with my grandchild. My husband and I both love being grandparents and we help out whenever and however we can. The joy we find in being grandparents has made us realize that, for whatever reason, our parents did not love their grandkids anywhere near as much as we love our grandkids. I just don’t get it.

Or as much as our grandparents loved us. I don’t get it either.

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Gonzalo Lira RIP

Gonzalo Lira, Sr. says his son has died at 55 in a Ukrainian prison, where he was being held for the crime of criticizing the Zelensky and Biden governments. Gonzalo Lira was an American citizen, but the Biden administration clearly supported his imprisonment and torture. Several weeks ago we spoke to his father, who predicted his son would be killed. – Tucker Carlson, 12 January 2024

UPDATE: It’s confirmed.

Chilean-American blogger Gonzalo Lira has died in a Ukrainian prison, Russian news agency TASS said on Saturday, citing a response it received from the US Department of State.

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