(You’re going to have to wait until the end to learn who that is in the photo above….)

I’ve been trying to figure out an ethics angle for the best news story I saw today; the best I can come up with is “life incompetence.” The headline was “Woman Breaks Jaw After Biting into Jawbreaker Candy.” Apparently Canadian student Javeria Wasim wondered if someone could bite through a giant jawbreaker, and took it on as a challeng. She barely made a dent in the candy when she felt a pop followed by piercing pain in her lower jaw. Yup, it was a jawbreaker, all right! She had fractured her mandible in two places and also loosened her top and lower front teeth. Now her jaw is wired shut.

1. You’ve noticed “shrinkflation,” but have you picked up on ‘thinflation’? It appears that clothing manufacturers are using thinner, lighter fabric for such staples as T-shirts and chinos. “Pretty much everything is lighter and thinner,” Sean Cormier, a professor of textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told Slate. He said chinos that used to weigh 8 ounces per square yard of fabric might be only 6 ounces today.

“It’s a trend in the industry, and not one that’s sustainable, because obviously the thinner the garment, it’s not going to last as long,” Cormier says. Two decades ago a T-shirt might have weighed 8 to 10 ounces per square yard of fabric. Today, experts report, it’s half that. Clothing doesn’t last as long as it used to, fabrics are generally thinner, and the quality of clothing has decreased. Not the prices, however. The garments also don’t have as much “covering power,” meaning that not only wet T-shirts but the dry ones too are revealing.

2. Apparently some people have a problem with this statement. Not me! An Illinois homeowner’s surveillance camera detected motion on the side of the home and he spotted two masked men. After instructing his wife to seek cover, he grabbed his gun. Then he shot shot and killed Jorge Nestevan Flores-Toledo, a 27-year-old from Mexico with a long criminal record. The second man, an illegal immigrant, aka. “a visitor” skedaddled but was tracked down by K9 dogs and arrested a few blocks away. Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells said, in describing the incident, “This is the state of Florida. If you want to break into someone’s home, you should expect to be shot.” I don’t see why you shouldn’t expect to be shot when you want to break into anyone’s home in any state.

3. Even kids? A Houston couple were returning home from a Christmas party when three or four armed boys ranging in age from 12-14 surrounded them. When it became clear that the kids were intending to rob the pair, the man, 25, drew his pistol and shot one of the boys multiple times. That young attempted mugger is under arrest, and so is their intended victim who had the gun. If you want to rob someone on the street in Texas, you should also expect to be shot.

4. Did you know Donald Trump lies all the time? After repeatedly denying that he had ever met any of his ne’re-do-well son’s clients in his various influence peddling schemes, smoking gun photos surfaced showing that Joe was lying. And, of course, his adamant cover-up agents either believed him or were lying right along with him, like hyper-partisan hack, Oversight Committee Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who insisted in February that there were no such meetings. The newly released photos—here’s one…

… show Biden as Vice President shaking hands or posing with the incoming CEO of Chinese state-backed BHR Partner, Jonathan Li, and BHR’s managing director Ming Xue during a December 2013 official trip to Beijing. Hunter held a10% stake in the firm. Says the New York Post, “A review of Biden’s public statements demonstrate a pattern of dishonesty as a mountain of evidence — including photos, emails and witness statements — showed that he did indeed interact with his family’s business partners.”

I’m shocked…shocked!

5. Weasel Words of the Year? The Azerbaijani president described the reason an Azerbaijani airliner crashed in Kazakhstan killing 38 as “external physical and technical interference.” It was shot down by a Russian missile.

6. Red-pilled ex-Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi wrote on his substack in part,

That everyone from Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! to Michael Moore to writers at the New York Times and Washington Post would sign on to Mangione’s Bonnie-and-Clyde ploy and turn a murder into a referendum on health insurance and a forum for recognizing “public anger” (ten minutes ago denounced as both imaginary and a threat to democracy) is ….surprising, but only slightly so.

2024 was the year of the pseudo-event. Journalists shouldn’t have to read Daniel Boorstin or Jean Baudrillard or bother with terms like “hyper-reality,” but in 2024 world events were driven by people more sunk in grad school gibberish than Alvy and Annie Hall in their infamous subtitle scene. Take the “politics of joy” episode, in which media figures tried to write a “cultural shift” into existence. The Kamala Harris slogan was sold as instant zeitgeist, a sign of “surging” popularity and an “out-of-body experience” allowing campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio to boast, “We have suspended reality.” We lately learned from Harris advisors that the campaign was never ahead in internal polls, making the mountains of stories about Harris jumping to big leads during the “joy” cycle (“Today, the winds have turned in Kamala Harris’ favor,” one Democratic pollster beamed) more absurd. This was Trump’s “people are saying” trick pulled to scale, trying to create “momentum” by mass-reporting its existence, the ultimate in what Boorstin might have called “intellectually planned” news.

I have a better word: bullshit.

Meanwhile, as Democrats are blaming Joe Biden for not getting out of the race early enough for his party to have a real convention (Pssst..the Democrats were still going to be stuck with Kamala), Biden is reportedly telling people that he would have beaten Trump if he had remained the nominee, even though his approval ratings are approaching Herbert Hoover territory.

And that he never met any of Hunter’s clients…

7. See, in the UK, prisoners wouldn’t want to have their sentences commuted…It appears that British prisons are fun places. There has been an epidemic of female prison guards makin’ whoopie with prisoners, and taking photos and videos. I said the prisons were fun, not smart. That’s former prison officer Rachel Stanton above: she was fired after being caught on camera having sex with armed bank robber Edwin Poole. Their tryst was discovered after staff found intimate photographs of the pair in his cell. She continued to visit him after being relieved of her duties, and had his child. Another female prison officer, 19, was arrested last week after being caught on video having oral and groinal sex with an inmate at the Category C Five Wells jail in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. That video had circulated among the prisoners before the lovebirds were found out. There are other similar episodes in other prisons. A source in Stanton’s prison told the media, “I know they’re called screws but you can’t be sleeping with prisoners in your prison and definitely shouldn’t do it on camera.”

Ya think?