Hello, greetings, salutations, and all that. It's Sunday, August 23, 2026 — nerds, Cuban sandwiches, and sponge cake all sharing the calendar, which sounds like a genuinely solid Sunday lineup.
My calendar says it's Find Your Inner Nerd Day, Cuban Sandwich Day, Sponge Cake Day, and Ride the Wind Day. Embrace your inner nerd, make yourself a Cuban sandwich, slice into a sponge cake, and if the weather cooperates, get outside and actually ride the wind — kite, sailboat, paraglider, your call.
Today in History:
1541: French explorer Jacques Cartier arrives at the site of present-day Quebec, credited with naming Canada after the native word "kanata," meaning village.
1775: Britain's King George III formally proclaims the American colonies to be in a state of "open and avowed rebellion."
1856: Scientist Eunice Foote presents her research to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany, N.Y., becoming the first person to articulate the possibility of global warming from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
1864: The Union navy captures Fort Morgan, Ala., breaking Confederate dominance of the Gulf of Mexico's ports.
1914: Japan declares war on Germany, joining World War I on the side of the Allies.
1926: Silent film star Rudolph Valentino dies in New York at age 31, triggering scenes of mass public mourning across the country.
1927: Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed in Boston for a 1920 robbery-murder, a case still debated as one of the most controversial in American legal history; Massachusetts formally vindicated both men 50 years later.
1939: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact in Moscow, secretly agreeing to carve up Eastern Europe between them.
1944: Romania's King Michael dismisses pro-Axis Prime Minister Ion Antonescu, paving the way for Romania to abandon Germany and join the Allies.
1945: Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, who had been held prisoner since surrendering at Corregidor in the Philippines, is freed by Soviet forces from a POW camp in Manchuria.
1977: The Gossamer Condor 2 becomes the world's first successful sustained human-powered aircraft, completing a Kremer Prize-qualifying flight — the very reason for today's Ride the Wind Day.
2023: India's Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully lands near the moon's south pole, making India the fourth nation to achieve a lunar landing and the first to reach that unexplored region.
Birthdays Today Include: Louis XVI, King of France; Gene Kelly, actor and dancer (Singin' in the Rain); Kobe Bryant, NBA Hall of Famer; Rick Springfield, singer and actor ("Jessie's Girl"); Barbara Eden, actor (I Dream of Jeannie).
If today's your birthday too, happy birthday. Make it a good one.
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From Fox News this morning:
A Texas judge denied Karmelo Anthony a new trial Saturday, after his attorneys argued that courtroom restrictions, hearings held without Anthony present and the handling of an unwritten agreement between his former lawyers and prosecutors violated his rights.
Retired District Judge Michael Chitty denied Anthony's request after reviewing the motion, court record, evidence and arguments, briefs and relevant case law, according to his order. The order did not detail his reasoning for the decision.
The decision leaves Anthony's murder conviction and 35-year prison sentence in place. His challenge will continue on direct appeal.
Well, look at that. Sometimes the system actually works. The guilty get held accountable, the legal process runs its course, and the sky somehow remains above our heads.
I've watched this case unfold from the beginning, and longtime readers already know my usual approach: let the story actually play out before rendering my own verdict in these pages. Don't convict somebody because Twitter demands it. Don't exonerate somebody because activists demand it. And, above all, don't decide the answer first and then go rummaging through the facts looking for something you can staple onto it.
Well, the story has now played out about as far as it can, at least for the moment. My reaction to this ruling is therefore pretty straightforward: satisfaction. The jury got it right the first time, and Judge Chitty has now rejected the effort to undo that verdict.
A quick refresher for anyone who's lost track of the details: on April 2, 2025, 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, a track athlete at Frisco's Memorial High School, got into an altercation with Karmelo Anthony, a student from a rival school, at a track meet — reportedly over seating arrangements under a shared tent. Anthony stabbed Metcalf, who died shortly afterward at the hospital. Anthony claimed self-defense. A Collin County jury that looked at the evidence didn't buy it.
The jury convicted him of first-degree murder in June and handed down a 35-year sentence. Personally, I think a life sentence would have been more appropriate, but at least the jury didn't decide to overturn the evidence because the defendant happened to be black. And before somebody starts hyperventilating into a paper bag, let's acknowledge something important: this latest hearing wasn't simply about race.
Anthony's new defense team argued procedural violations, including that hearings occurred without him present and that a "gentleman's agreement" between his original lawyers and prosecutors improperly limited what he could testify to on the stand. Judge Chitty heard those arguments and denied the motion anyway, without elaborating on his reasoning.
Collin County DA Greg Willis's response was blunt: "We respect, and expected, the court's decision denying the motion for a new trial. The jury's guilty verdict stands."
There's been a lot of chatter — and by "a lot," I mean enough chatter to power a small wind farm — claiming that Anthony's conviction happened because he's black.
Admittedly, some of that chatter isn't baseless noise from anonymous accounts. Wikipedia's own detailed writeup of the case notes that the trial jury included no black jurors, which fueled real, documented scrutiny over jury selection and allegations of bias.
A William & Mary law professor quoted in A&E's coverage even acknowledged that "any plausible 'neutral reason' to strike jurors typically satisfies the judge — even in cases where the strikes, if not racially motivated, obviously produce significant demographic distortion in the jury," adding about Anthony's defense specifically, "I don't think there is anything the defense could have done."
So no, I'm not going to pretend the racial-composition argument materialized from thin air. It didn't. It's a legitimate and documented part of the story, and pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. A question about the racial composition of a jury and a claim that the resulting conviction itself was racist are two very different propositions. One can be legitimately debated without automatically proving the other.
So let's flip the roles. I mean, here's where we put all of this argument about race driving the conviction to the test:
Imagine Austin Metcalf had been the one who pulled the knife, and Karmelo Anthony had been the 17-year-old bleeding out on the infield grass. Would the exact same people currently spending so much energy, outrage, and digital spittle defending Anthony have shown up with anything remotely resembling the same passion to defend Metcalf? Would we have seen the rallies? The GoFundMes? The national commentators? The claims that the conviction represented some grotesque miscarriage of justice?
Sorry, but I doubt it. I doubt it about as much as I doubt the people who spent years assuring us that basement dweller Joe Biden was "sharp as a tack," and for the same reasons. And that's really the tell, isn't it?
Look, gang: If your outrage over this case depends entirely on which color the teenager holding the knife happened to be, rather than on the facts a jury spent more than a week weighing — 21 prosecution witnesses, autopsy photographs that jurors reportedly couldn't look at without covering their mouths, a full defense case presented and rejected — then your objection was never really about justice in the first place. It was always about which team you picked before the opening argument.
I argued in my spleen vent of the other day, “Pick a Lane and Stick With It,” principles don't magically change depending upon which team you're on.... in this case, which color the kid standing in the legal crosshairs happens to be.
Apparently, that's a difficult concept for some.
Which brings me to something that seems increasingly quaint these days: whatever happened to the race-neutral society Martin Luther King Jr. described in his 1963 speech? You know — the one where we judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin? Apparently, that particular operating system didn't survive the latest software update.
The jury looked at the evidence.
The judge looked at the evidence.
The judge has now looked at the arguments for overturning the verdict and the underlying record in detail. The answer came out the same way: no.
At some point, "the system got it wrong because of race" stops being a serious legal argument and becomes a prerecorded, knee-jerk response. Press button. Insert racial explanation. Ignore inconvenient facts. Repeat.
That's not justice. That's tribalism wearing a judicial robe. This case provides an unusually useful demonstration of the difference.
You can question jury selection. You can question prosecutorial decisions. You can scrutinize courtroom procedure. You can appeal a conviction. That's precisely what a functioning legal system permits. What you don't get to do is declare the entire process illegitimate simply because the verdict wasn't the one you wanted.
The courts have now had their say on this particular effort to obtain a new trial, and for once, the machinery worked exactly as it was supposed to. The jury heard the evidence. It rendered a verdict. The defense challenged that verdict. The judge considered the challenge. The judge rejected it.
That's not tyranny; that's due process.
And if you're genuinely interested in justice rather than merely looking for a politically convenient villain, you should be adult enough to recognize the difference.
Thought for the Day: We live in a society where homosexuals lecture us on morals, transexuals lecture us on biology, baby killers lecture us on human rights, communists lecture us on economics, and satanists lecture us on religion. — Ted Nugent
VIP members, let's hear from you in the comments. Your voice matters.
Have a great Sunday, gang. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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