Programming note: Join me later today for another edition of our weekend show, Mark Steyn on the Town, which airs on Serenade Radio every Saturday at 5pm GMT - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Forty-eight hours after a midair collision that the President correctly says should never have happened, a second plane has fallen from the skies - thirty seconds after takeoff in Philadelphia - and crashed into a nearby row of houses, where it exploded "like a missile":
🚨 UPDATE: MASSIVE blaze at the scene of the Philadelphia plane crash.
Debris and smashed cars everywhere.
Holy hell. https://t.co/oHe8dWQFqD pic.twitter.com/OKtgVQJPPy
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) January 31, 2025
It was a Learjet air ambulance bearing a sick child and her mother plus two doctors and two pilots. Presumably they had been visiting the city's world-renowned children's hospital. All are dead. The casualties on the ground are not yet known.
~Yesterday some commenters argued I should not be speculating on the DC crash until the investigation has been completed. That's the same argument the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt FBI give us about presidential assassination attempts and pretty much everything else. Increasingly in America, speculation is all there is ...because the "investigation" is never "completed". Hours before the second air crash of the week, Powerline printed excerpts from the latest mailout of Abe Rosenthal's Commentary email:
Here's a current-events quiz aimed at regular news consumers: Why did Los Angeles officials ignore dozens of warnings about the county's failing water system in the run-up to this year's wildfires? What caused the Dali cargo ship to crash into the Francis Scott Key Bridge almost a year ago? Who was the captain of that ship? Why were security bollards not in place on Bourbon Street when a terrorist attacked New Orleans on New Year's Day? What was the ISIS-inspired jihadist who carried out that attack doing in Egypt and Canada in the summer of 2023? And why did a gunman shoot and attempt to assassinate Donald Trump last July in Butler, Pennsylvania?
Don't feel bad about not knowing the answers. You never got them.
As I wrote in a post on COMMENTARY's website almost two years ago, "We Don't Get Answers Anymore." I was then talking about official public mysteries such as what intelligence the Chinese spy balloon may have obtained in its flight over the U.S., who leaked Justice Alito's draft opinion on Dobbs, and the origins of Covid. Two years later, and our public officials have still provided no conclusive answers to those. Yet the catalog of mysteries grows before our eyes.
To which John Hinderaker adds:
We could easily add many more unsolved mysteries. Such as, what was the deal with Stephen Paddock, who carried out the worst mass shooting in American history, at a country music concert in Las Vegas?
Ah, yes, the ever blanker slate of Stephen Paddock. After the mass murder, the coppers from the usual 147 federal, state, county and local agencies failed to secure the perpetrator's house, so someone broke in and burgled it. And after that the most basic facts about the case all mysteriously dissolved into nothingness and we never learned another thing.
~Pennsylvania, scene of the week's second air disaster, has given us another mystery in recent days: it has provided two of the victims in a murder spree that culminated on Inauguration Day with the death of a Border Patrol agent on a remote strip of highway just south of the Quebec frontier in north-east Vermont. Because of the Border Patrol's presence, one might assume it was some undocumented lowlifes on a drug run "gone wrong". In fact, the guy was an H1B twentysomething German math whiz making a quarter-mil a year as a quantitative trader with Tower Research Capital on Wall Street.
Odd. So had his visa expired? Initially, the FBI said yes. And then the FBI said no. And then this minor detail sort of went away. But it looks as if the G-men, several hours away, used the Border Patrol as a pretext - which didn't work out too well for the poor agent.
On Monday members of the SteynOnline team were in federal court in Burlington, Vt, for the seven-minute hearing of the surviving perp. Until xyrs arrest, the accused used the pronouns xe/xem/xyrs and called xemself "Milo". But the pronouns and the non-binary "gender identity" had gone by the time xe showed up in court under her "deadname" of Theresa and was dispatched to a ladies' prison. Her deceased accomplice, Felix Bauckholt, was more conclusively transitioned and went by the name of Ophelia. He had left Germany to pursue the American Dream of making boatloads of dough in Lower Manhattan as a bepenised woman. Along the way, he joined the Zizian cult of "trans vegan activists", now wanted for a killing spree with victims in at least three states.
In a healthy media culture, even Burlington's somnolent Gannett monodaily would be running screaming front-page headlines about "PSYCHO TRANNIES ON THE RAMPAGE!" Instead, precisely because they're trans - and in a week when another trans "activist" was arrested at the Capitol en route to kill the Treasury Secretary - the "mainstream" press have decided to give the entire story a very wide berth and leave it all to the tireless Andy Ngo.
So many "unsolved mysteries" ...and all in a 24/7 panopticon security-state. But on it goes... The week's excitements already have the vague feel of being readied for the memory hole...
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
