THE BUFFS LOST THEIR FIRST GAME IN THE MAUI INVITATIONAL So that means they will play #1 ranked Connecticut today at 1:30 so that means my show will be over at 1. We'll make that hour count.
STUPID MAN CHALLENGES ELK This kind of stuff makes me crazy. Watch this video from our friends at Fox 31. In it, you see a dude walking down a path on the far side of a fence, where a GIANT bull elk is standing. The man just keeps walking toward the elk and the elk charged, so the man throws his coffee at the elk. The man told bystanders he was trying to get to work, but he could easily have done that on the OTHER side of the fence. Just a guess but he seemed like a dude trying to prove something by casually strolling by the elk and the elk was having none of it. Not cool, mister, not cool. This is borderline a Tourons of Yellowstone post.
IF IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR LAUREN BOEBERT Then DANG IT I'm setting up a Cameo page. It seems the Congresswoman decided to make some easy money after her buddy Matt Gaetz set up an account and is raking in $550 per Cameo so she set up a Cameo account. Perhaps realizing it's tacky for a member of Congress to do so, she promptly removed it. To be clear, It is NOT too tacky for a talk show host so expect that in the near future. Or maybe someone pointed out that this could violate House rules. I actually don't mind her doing this, except in her intro video she said:
"It's your girl from Colorado, Lauren Boebert,"
I get that this is folksy and relatable, but Lauren Boebert is not a "girl". She's an accomplished woman and a member of Congress and I sure wish she'd recognize that and start acting accordingly. I'm guessing she is struggling to make ends meet with only her Congressional salary, which isn't a lot to maintain two households, but she needs to find real outside work instead.
THE AURORA PD USE OF FORCE REPORT IS INTERESTING Aurora PD is trying to be more transparent about how their department works, so they now release an annual use of force report. In my mind, the lede on this story would be Aurora PD uses force in less than 1% of calls. From the Denver Gazette, way further down in the article than I would have put it:
In total, Aurora officers made 6,777 arrests in 2023, meaning that 11% of all arrests involved use of force. There were a total of 253,028 calls for service to the department in 2023, meaning that less than 1% of calls involved uses of force.
The report also divided the uses of force by level — from low-level uses of force, which are unlikely to cause injury, to lethal uses of force, which result in serious bodily injury or death.
Aurora had 632 low-level use of force reports, 121 intermediate reports, and four lethal reports in 2023. The number of lethal reports last year went down from 13 in 2022 and from eight in 2021.
Instead of focusing on this, the Denver Gazette lead with the fact that Use of Force incidents went up without giving context to whether or not overall calls went up year over year. I'm very glad Aurora is doing this, but they need to add context and history to their data to make it clearer if incidents are truly going up or simply rising with rising calls and arrests. By the way, the VAST majority of these Use of Force Incidents are when cops have to take someone to the ground to arrest them and restrain them physically while doing so. See it here. I'm gonna get the Aurora PD Chief on the show when I get back.
IT'S AVALANCHE TIME IN THE MOUNTAINS A BIG FAT PILE OF SNOW is going to hit the mountains between today and late Wednesday and the Avalanche Center is warning backcountry skiers and snow shoers to be extra careful. Conditions are ripe for avalanches right now, so be prepared so you don't die.
BIG TIME SNOW FOR THE NEXT 48 HOURS Mostly in the mountains but we will get some here too, check the forecast here.
IT'S ADDICTION, STUPID this is a great editorial in the Denver Gazette repeating and reiterating what we all know. Until we treat the mental illness and addiction issues of people living on the streets we will never "solve" homelessness. Period.
RUSSELL WESTBROOK IS A GOOD MAN The Nuggets star just made a huge donation to a couple with a foundation that feeds families around the holidays among other things. Read more here.
BIDEN WILL ATTEND TRUMP'S INAUGURATION Which is more than Trump did for his, though I doubt Trump would have been welcome. Read more here.
THE UN FIRES ITS GENOCIDE EXPERT FOR NOT SAYING ISRAEL IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE That isn't EXACTLY what happened officially but it is EXACTLY what happened. From the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:
Ms. Nderitu is an accomplished mediator, whose U.N. bio describes her as a “recognized voice in the field of peacebuilding and violence prevention.” She has served in that role since 2020 and her tenure has been marked by careful study of humanity’s worst crime. She is being dismissed because she has stood firm in her belief that Israel’s war with Hamas isn’t genocide.
In 2022 her office issued a guidance paper on “when to refer to a situation as ‘genocide.’” The paper noted U.N. officials should “adhere to the correct usage” of the term because of the political and legal sensitivities that surround it and “its frequent misuse in referring to large scale, grave crimes committed against particular populations.”
Her paper explains that the term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe massacres of entire ethnic groups with the intention of eliminating them. That definition, Ms. Nderitu has said, includes the Holocaust, the Hutus’ genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, and may include the ethnic killings now unfolding in Sudan.
She then concluded that Israel's defense of itself is NOT genocide because Israel has worked tirelessly to prevent the deaths of citizens even as Hamas uses them as human shields. So of course she must go. The UN is a garbage organization that should be yeeted from New York just as they yeeted her.
WALMART DITCHES DEI AND Walmart is completely ditching it's entire DEI program. Check this out:
The changes, confirmed by Walmart on Monday, are sweeping and include everything from not renewing a five-year commitment for an equity racial center set up in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd, to pulling out of a prominent gay rights index. And when it comes to race or gender, Walmart won’t be giving priority treatment to suppliers.
This is YUGE and means perhaps we can get to that magical place where everyone gets the same opportunity to succeed or fail and we can judge people by the content of their character instead of bigoted notions about race instead.
Y'ALL...WHO DID THIS?
AN 80 MILLION DOLLAR BET ON TRUMP WAS NOT DUMB LUCK This story is FASCINATING. This article in The Free Press about a French trader who bet 80 million bucks on Polymarket that Trump would win is so worth your time. In it, we find out that the man paid for polling, but not for any polling, he paid for "social circle polling". What is that? Read this from the article:
Back in October, Grosse—who knows Théo’s true identity—told him it was extremely difficult to gauge the preferences of so-called “shy voters,” who either can’t be reached or refuse to talk to pollsters. But Théo said he had an idea. He had seen some academic literature about “social circle polling,” in which pollsters asked people not only who they were voting for but who they thought their acquaintances were voting for. Those polls had performed well. He wanted Grosse’s team to do something similar: Ask people in the three swing states who they thought their neighbors were planning to vote for. Grosse later told me she found his idea “intellectually interesting,” but she was skeptical the neighbor question would unearth anything useful.
That polling was exactly right apparently, as the man bet not only that Trump would win the three rust belt states but that he would win the Electoral College AND the popular vote. He won $85 million bucks, more than doubling his money. This is freaking genius.
AND NOW A BUNCH OF CRAZY GOOD COVERS FROM THE VOICE And not for nothing some of them are better than the original.
WE'RE STILL FAT FROM LAST YEAR Maybe not all of us but about a quarter of us say we still have LAST YEAR's holiday pounds on our waistline. A study also found that we gain an average of about six pounds per year, though they say they are carrying ten pounds from last year so I think six pounds is just optimism. Read it here and then visit here.
I FEEL SO SEEN RIGHT NOW Jim Gaffigan on passwords is so accurate it hurts.
THIS GUY GIVES HAIRCUTS TO NEURODIVERGENT KIDS And just watch the love and care he takes with this boy. He is a good man.
COUPLE GOALS! How could you not love this couple. The Dodgems are bumper cars, by the way.
STRUGGLING WITH SELF WORTH? WATCH THIS. It's so, so good.