They want endless praise for abandoning their duties.
Nothing gets you in the Christmas spirit quite like a highly public family feud. I know, I know — you don’t care about the royals. But the latest episodes in Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Netflix series exemplify the modern trend of abandoning family pieties.
She points out easily overlooked but illuminating particulars
Body aches, chills, fatigue, dizziness, shortness of breath: for the third time since the COVID pandemic began, I’ve either got the damn thing or some other malady with very similar symptoms. It’s unpleasant, it’s uncomfortable, and, above all, it’s a big, big bore, if only because it makes it a lot harder to get writing done and, even worse, may put the kibosh on our usual family Christmas. Lingering in bed these last couple of days, I’ve shuffled back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness, and at one point I found myself trapped in that tiresome no man’s land between the two, where one’s mind churns out an exhausting series of bizarre and disjointed thoughts — although “thoughts” isn’t exactly the right word for them — that make no sense whatsoever. In other words, pretty much the sort of stuff that Joy and Whoopi say on The View every day when they’re supposedly wide awake.
A reader pointed me to one of the stranger articles to ever grace the pages of the Wall Street Journal last night. Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the WSJ’s editorial board who reports on business and financial matters. But the subject he weighed in on yesterday had little to do with those matters. The title was, “The UFO Crowd Wants an Alien Invasion for Christmas.” The even more curious subtitle reads, “The Pentagon discovers it’s not the flying saucers but their admirers who may be the real security threat.”
Many police chiefs say staffing levels have not rebounded from a wave of resignations that started with the pandemic and the 2020 unrest.
WASHINGTON — As American police departments seek to overcome an exodus of disgruntled officers and a sudden decline in applications, they are wooing recruits with some of the tactics a football coach might use to land a prized quarterback.
In Fairfax County, Va., in the suburbs of Washington, future officers are being treated to a “signing day” ceremony where they formally accept their job offers.
Out-of-state residents who want to join the police force in Louisville, Ky., are being flown in to take entrance tests, put up in a hotel and paired with an officer for a ride-along.
Thomas Lifson and other observes have noticed the strange kid-glove treatment that accused crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has been getting since his arrest in the Bahamas after reportedly misappropriating and losing billions in customer funds.
It was natural to note the huge campaign funding Bankman-Fried delivered, particularly to Democrats, at least $40 million, making him their second-largest donor.
But now another shoe seems to be dropping …
A new law in the province of Alberta radically circumscribes federal authority, advancing the agenda of the province’s far-right secessionist movement.
OTTAWA — In the heavily conservative western prairie province of Alberta, Canada, many residents, especially those on the far right, chafed at the Covid-19 restrictions imposed by the Liberal federal government in Ottawa, the country’s capital.
The widespread resentment helped fuel the enormous truck blockade this year that disrupted trade with the United States and paralyzed Ottawa for a month.
Now, oil-rich Alberta has ratcheted up the long-running schism between western and eastern Canada by approving a bill allowing the province to ignore any federal laws and regulations it opposes, a move some critics described as an unconstitutional threat to the basic fabric of the country’s government.
Italy’s biggest farmers’ association is waging a battle against the “scandalous” use of mafia terms to sell a variety of food and drink products around the world, from Cosa Nostra whiskey to Chilli Mafia tomato sauce.
Coldiretti undertook an extensive investigation and also discovered that almost 300 restaurants beyond Italy have mafia-themed names, including El Padrino in Spain, Don Corleone in Finland, Burger Mafia in Germany, Falafel Mafia in the US and Nasi Goreng Mafia in Indonesia.
Alessandro Apolito, a branch manager at Coldiretti, said the most shocking discovery was a machine gun-shaped bottle of whisky produced in Scotland and called Cosa Nostra Shot.
“Innocent beautiful family-friendly entertainment” pic.twitter.com/dMDefPp60C
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 25, 2022
Merry Christmas Everyone! Welcome to the Christmas Day edition of Reader Faves! Thank you all for participating, you make it great fun every year.
Enjoy!
Whitney Houston – Do you hear what I hear from Kiki982
Christmas Must Be Tonight | The Band from headhunter9
Hallelujah Chorus, from Messiah | The Tabernacle Choir from Norman_In_New_York
Mary did you know? from Sweetpea
Snoopy’s Christmas vs. The Red Baron – The Royal Guardsmen from kkruger71
Andy Williams – It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year from kiki982
And also … Kenny Rogers – Christmas Everyday
And… Johnny Mathis – It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
Plus … White Christmas
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht (Silent Night, holy Night) by MoonSun from Malcolm Y
Martina McBride – O holy night from bargogx1
The Shepherd – Frederick Forsyth – read by Alan Maitland from CBC Radio from Mr_bigstuff
We have reached the second Christmas of the war, and we are keeping it with what heart we may. No confidence in the rightness of our cause is lacking, nor has doubt emerged about the ultimate issue of the struggle. What penetrates men’s souls today is not concern for their personal fate, or even for their country’s, but a sense, borne in on them with sombre force as this festival comes round, of the tragedy of the conflict in which millions of human beings are still locked on the day when the message of peace and good will to all mankind should be sounding from every pulpit and rung out by the bells of every steeple.
This is an article to show your haughty, “know-it-all” brother-in-law who thinks our government is somehow squeaky clean.
The “Twitter Files” have now officially had more sequels than Planet of the Apes and can be difficult to absorb. Thus, I don’t think they’re getting the attention they deserve.
STONEA, England — It is the immovable object that keeps meeting up with a resistible force: a bridge in eastern England that trucks, campers and vans smash into with startling regularity.
Located in Stonea, about 30 miles from Cambridge, the bridge was struck 33 times in one recent 12-month span by drivers misjudging its height. That makes it the most bashed rail bridge in Britain, according to official statistics, and many local residents say those numbers actually understate the frequency of the crashes.
Russian military lore is full of references to the cold months ahead in that part of Europe as “General Winter”. So, it is no surprise that President Vladimir Putin, disappointed in the performance of his generals, is looking at “General Winter” to help him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat as it had helped Kutuzov against Napoleon.
Putin’s reading of history, however, is slanted in favor of his illusions. In the Napoleonic war, “General Winter” was on the side of the defender, not the aggressor. With “General Winter” unlikely to work for Putin, he may have to look at another grand old man, this time a diplomat, to help him out of the hole he has dug for Russia.
Five teenagers were charged with second-degree murder in connection to the Christmas weekend fatal shooting at Minnesota’s Mall of America.
SWAT officials arrested two 18-year-old men and three 17-year-old boys at a home in nearby St. Louis Park at 8:40 a.m. Saturday, about 12 hours after a 19-year-old man was shot dead during a brawl inside the shopping complex, Bloomington Chief of Police Booker Hodges said at a press conference.
The Ardennes Forest is located in Belgium and Luxembourg and extends into France and Germany. It’s a sparsely populated region of rolling hills and thickly wooded forests, known for picturesque valleys and charming cities, whose shops and cafes and bike paths have slowly grown around ancient citadels and castles and 13th century churches.
In December of 1944, it was an area of intense fighting, as the Allies fought back against a German offensive – the Ardennes Offensive – that would come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. The German plan of desperation in the face of Western advances was to split the Allies where they were purportedly weak. As said by Adolf Hitler himself: “A blow here [at the Ardennes] would strike the seam between the British and Americans and lead to political as well as military disharmony between the Allies.”
Via CG via Hotair.
