Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Pepper Potts

Posted on | November 19, 2018 | No Comments

Stan Lee is dead, but along with all the costumed superheroes, he left us a cast of gorgeous & competent women in lead and supporting roles. One of my favorites is Virginia “Pepper” Potts, Tony Stark’s gal Friday and sometime love interest. Pepper’s played in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Gwyneth Paltrow, who may be a raving loony in real life, but does a great job in the role. Here she is in a promotional shot.

Christine Everheart: After all these years, Tony still has you picking up the dry cleaning.
Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts: I do anything and everything Mr. Stark requires. Including occasionally taking out the trash. Will that be all?

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off this week with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #440, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. Animal Magnetism adds Rule Five Three-Time Loser Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL brings us Clara Bow, Florence Pugh, Stan Lee Babes, National Pickle Day Rule 5, Radha Mitchell, Roy Clark, Vintage Thanksgiving, Annet Mahendru, Alexandria Occasional Cortex, Porn Prof At UW, and Turkey Time.

A View From The Beach has Some True Blood with Ana Paquin, SJWs Seek Destruction of Victoria’s Secret, Pink’s Spouse Goes Full On Vigilante, Signs of Sense in the #MeToo Movement?, Revenge Porn Victim Revictimized by Uganda, Commissioner Reagan Would Not Be Pleased, Femen Protests Trump the Only Way They Know How, First Frost! and How About An Uplifting Video for Sunday Morning?

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Billie Faiers, his Vintage Babe is Jocelyn Lane, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Calvin Klein. At Dustbury, it’s Anna Daly and Carolina Neurath.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

Two Thumbs Up for ‘Jack Ryan’

Posted on | November 18, 2018 | No Comments

While I was visiting my son at Fort Bragg a couple of weeks ago, I started watching the eight-episode first season of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime. Generally speaking, I never read or watch fiction, and the only TV I watch is news, sports, documentaries or true-crime shows like A & E’s The First 48 or Forensic Files on HLN.

This disclaimer is necessary to explaining why I was mystified when I told people I was watching Jack Ryan and everyone reacted by saying, “Oh, the guy from The Office.” Yes, lead actor (and co-producer) John Krasinski is best-known for this popular NBC sitcom which I have never watched. On the rare occasions I’ve caught a few scenes of reruns of The Office while changing channels, I found it painfully unwatchable. The Office is wretched, and if you think it’s funny, you need to contemplate how your life went so dreadfully wrong, but I digress . . .

With no Office-influenced preconceptions of who John Krasinski is, I did have preconceptions of what a Tom Clancy thriller is about. Some 30 years ago, my older brother Kirby, a big Tom Clancy fan, convinced me to read a couple of Clancy’s novels including one, The Sum of All Fears, that was ruined in the movie version by political correctness (and the casting of Ben Affleck as Ryan). The plot of Clancy’s novel was a late Cold War-era drama about “a crisis concerning the Middle East peace process where Palestinian and former East German terrorists conspire to bring the United States and Soviet Union into nuclear war.” This was realistic, because in fact there was cooperation between Palestinian terrorists and Communists, but in the movie version, the bad guys are South African neo-Nazis. This shifting of the locus of evil — from left to right, as it were — was a 180-degree reversal of meaning, a work of Cultural Marxism that Herbert Marcus might praise. But again I digress . . .

Is there political correctness in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan? Yes, in that Ryan’s CIA mentor James Greer is portrayed as a convert to Islam. This makes no sense on any level, especially when you recall the Cold War context of the original Clancy novels. Would it have been OK for Greer to have been a Marxist ideologue? Of course not, and while fighting Islamic terrorism is a different thing than fighting the threat of Communist aggression, one might suppose it would occur to the producers of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan how wildly inappropriate this Greer-as-Muslim subplot is. Nevertheless, it is only a subplot, and while it obtrudes like a politically correct sore thumb whenever it’s referenced, these instances are mercifully rare, and are only a minor distraction from the general excellence of this action thriller. And wow, what a thriller!

From the first episode, which concludes with an exciting firefight at a U.S. outpost in Yemen, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan delivers the kind of action scenes you’d expect from a big-budget movie blockbuster. In that sense, this Amazon series follows the path paved by HBO’s Game of Thrones, delivering movie-style thrills to the home viewer, as the premium tent-pole that makes it worthwhile to buy the delivery service. And despite the occasional nod to political correctness, there is an element of realism in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan that makes it enjoyable. The firefight at the Yemen base, for example, will seem very familiar to anyone who recalls the 2012 terrorist attack at Benghazi that killed four Americans.

Likewise, there is a ripped-from-the-headlines quality to the subplot in which the wife of the terrorist leader escapes Syria with her daughters and makes her way to a refugee camp on the Turkish border. She wants to go to Europe, but this is not possible because of the recent terrorist attack in Paris that her husband masterminded. This subplot perfectly encapsulates the 2015 “refugee” crisis, when Europeans were expected to welcome with open arms millions of Muslim immigrants while Islamic terrorists were slaughtering the innocent in Paris, attacking Charlie Hebdo, and running over people in Nice. No amount of sympathy for genuine refugees, nor any politically correct pro-Muslim propaganda, could have prevented the backlash against unrestricted immigration that has since empowered the Right in Europe. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan endeavors to humanize the Muslim victims of this crisis, but it also dramatizes the actual danger posed by terrorists exploiting loopholes in the West’s immigration policies. For example, the terrorist villain Mousa Bin Suleiman makes it through U.S. Customs by going through Canada with forged documents and showing up with his preteen son who needs medical treatment for diabetes.

Didactic lessons about terrorism and immigration, of course, are not the selling-point of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. No, it’s about suspense and thrills and action! action! action! The producers do a good job of pacing the show, so that each of the eight episodes builds to an exciting climactic scene and, by the time you’ve binge-watched your way to the end (my wife and I watched the final four episodes Saturday night), a lot of details in the early episodes that may have seemed irrelevant are revealed as important foreshadowing. It is no mere coincidence, for example, that Jack Ryan’s love interest, Dr. Cathy Mueller, is an epidemiologist concerned with an ebola outbreak. But hey, no spoilers.

Probably most of my readers have already seen Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, but if you haven’t seen it yet, go ahead and buy it through the Amazon links here, because as a participant in the Amazon Affiliate program, I get a tiny commission on everything you buy through these links — greedy capitalist blogger that I so am proud to be.

Category: Amazon, Movies

FMJRA 2.0: Desperate But Not Serious

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Nurse! Nurse!
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Democrat Election Theft Update
EBL

More Florida News: Democrats Send in Soros-Connected Lawyer Marc Elias
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Back In The Saddle
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

Democrat Election Theft Update: Pigs Don’t Fly and Questions Are Racist
EBL

Anti-Trump Radical Identified as Member of Mob at Tucker Carlson’s Home
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

Reading Samizdat
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

University Begins ‘Intersectional Diversity and Sexual Harassment Training’
EBL

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 11.12.18
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Gilmore v. Jones, et al., Hearing
EBL

And we’re back
EBL

Early Afternoon With In The Mailbox: 11.15.18
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Jim Jones, Harvey Milk and the Weird Cult of ‘Revolutionary Suicide’
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.15.18
Proof Positive
EBL

Maryland Democrat Shouts ‘Heil Hitler,’ Causes Scene in Baltimore Theater
EBL

Mark Zuckerberg’s Sister Hates You
EBL

A Reliable Warning Sign of Craziness
EBL

There Are No ‘Good’ Public Schools
357 Magnum
EBL

Wretchedly Late Night With In The Mailbox: 11.16.18
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending November 16:

EBL (15)
Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!

Black Friday Deals Week
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Category: FMJRA Award, Uncategorized

Feds Charge NYU Law Student Who ‘Terrorized’ Middle School Girl

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | No Comments

This guy’s probably going to be quite popular in federal prison:

A suburban Chicago man was charged Tuesday with threatening to publish sexually explicit photos of an underage girl unless she created child pornography for him.
This indictment was announced by U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr., Northern District of Illinois, and Special Agent in Charge James M. Gibbons, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
David J. Cottrell, 28, of Niles, Illinois, is charged with two counts of transporting child pornography, one count of extortion, one count of inducing a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity, one count of attempting to produce child pornography, one count of producing of child pornography, and one count of possessing child pornography.
According to the indictment and the government’s memorandum in support of detention, Cottrell in 2014 induced the underage victim into sending him sexually explicit photos through the internet.
After collecting semi-nude photos of the victim, Cottrell informed her that he knew her real name, the name of her school, and her parents’ jobs, and he threatened to post the images online and send them to her family unless the girl sent him additional, more explicit images, the government’s memorandum states.
The victim complied with Cottrell’s demands by creating and sending additional photos and videos to him, the memorandum states.
Cottrell contacted the victim on a near-daily basis until her parents discovered the messages in 2017 and contacted law enforcement, according to the memorandum.

The Chicago Tribune reports more details of the case:

A former law school student from north suburban Niles is facing federal charges alleging he extorted and terrorized a young teenage girl for more than three years by threatening to expose her if she didn’t send him pornographic videos of herself on a nearly daily basis.
David Cottrell, 28, forced the girl to comply with his every demand, including staying up late on school nights to act out pornographic “scripts” for him and leaving her middle school classes at times to take nude photos of herself in the bathroom, prosecutors alleged in an 18-page filing.
“One bad move and ur parents get a letter from concerned parents about their daughter distributing porn to other children,” Cottrell allegedly messaged to the victim, who was 13 at the time. . . .
Cottrell has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
His lawyer, Kenneth Yeadon, could not immediately be reached for comment, but in a recent court filing, Yeadon said Cottrell has “lived a quiet life” at home with his parents despite knowing he was a target in the investigation. Cottrell has lived in Niles all his life except while attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison as an undergraduate and law school at New York University in Manhattan, Yeadon said.
Cottrell left law school in 2017 to return to Niles, Yeadon said. Until he was taken into custody, he had been taking classes to finish his law degree and working at his father’s public accounting practice in Park Ridge, Yeadon said. . . .
According to prosecutors, Cottrell met the victim — identified as Minor A — in an online chat site when she was in 7th grade and he was attending law school in New York. In later conversations over Snapchat, Cottrell asked the girl to send him nude photos of herself, according to the prosecution filing. She did so “thinking she was anonymous,” authorities said.
In fall 2014, Cottrell told Minor A he knew her real name, address, her parents’ and sister’s name, where her parents worked and the middle school she attended. He started threatening the teen, saying he would “post her photos on the internet and send them to her family” if she didn’t comply with his demands for more material, prosecutors alleged. . . .
Several times, Cottrell made Minor A leave class during school to take a photo of herself in the bathroom, prosecutors alleged. In one instance in October 2016, Cottrell messaged the girl while she was in math class, telling her, “I f—— own you and don’t tolerate disobedience,” prosecutors said.
The extortion continued until July 2017 when the girl’s parents found Cottrell’s threats on her phone and contacted law enforcement, according to prosecutors. When agents searched the phone, they found a five-minute video she’d made for Cottrell just two days earlier.
“Three and a half minutes into the video, Minor A starts crying as she is forced to perform for the defendant,” prosecutors wrote.

Oh, the guys in prison are going to be so happy to see Mr. Cottrell.

Category: Crime

Rick Scott Wins, as Democrats Admit Nelson Doomed in Florida Recount

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | No Comments

The bungling dimwits in Broward County are still counting ballots, but there’s no hope left for Democrats to keep the Senate seat:

Sen. Bill Nelson has run out of time, run out of favorable court rulings and is about to officially run out of votes.
After losing to Gov. Rick Scott on Election Day, losing after an automatic recount and appearing to not make up the gap following a manual recount Friday, Nelson’s campaign was dealt a mortal blow later that evening by U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker, who crushed the Democrat’s last major hope by upholding a Florida law that forbids county election offices from counting vote-by-mail ballots received after 7 p.m. Election Day.
“It’s done. But it was done before today. This was a total Hail Mary,” said a top Democrat involved in Nelson’s campaign who didn’t want to speak publicly before the Democratic Party icon conceded defeat to one of the party’s most-hated rivals. . . .
Without favorable court rulings to expand the available ballot pool, Nelson has no way to make up his 12,603-vote deficit with Scott. . . .
The counties officially have to submit their manual recount totals to the state Sunday. The election is supposed to be certified Tuesday. . . .
While party officials refused to discuss the hopelessness of the situation on the record, the Florida Democratic Party on Friday continued to fundraise off the recount, suggesting to donors that Nelson had a shot when his own top backers knew he didn’t.
Nelson, a three-term U.S. Senator, was the last Democratic statewide elected official in Florida for years. . . .
Scott’s defeat of Nelson certifies him as a Democratic giant-killer who continues to prove party elites wrong. In three straight elections, Democratic insiders have predicted his defeat. Scott first beat Alex Sink, the woman once thought to be the future of the party, in his first gubernatorial race. Then he defeated former Gov. Charlie Crist, a once-highly popular governor. And now he has bested the one politician Democrats thought was unbeatable in a Florida general election, Nelson.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) In case you missed it earlier, Republican Ron DeSantis will be Florida’s next governor, defeating Democrat Andrew Gillum by more than 30,000 votes, enough to avoid a manual recount. So, it would appear, #StopTheSteal was effective. Good work.

Category: Election, Florida

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | No Comments

Does this guy look crazy to you? Yeah, it’s obvious. Gregory Allen Bush should have been locked up a long time ago:

According to court records, Bush has a history of domestic violence against his parents, his brother and his ex-wife, who is African American.
Sheryl Bush married Gregory Bush in 1997, according to court records. They had a son in 1998, before separating in 1999. According to divorce records, Gregory Bush attempted suicide in 2000 while his 2-year-old son slept in a bed in the next room.
In 2001, Sheryl Bush filed a domestic violence petition, telling a court that when she went to pick up her son from Bush’s home, he threatened her and called her the n-word.
In 2009, Gregory Bush’s father, William Bush, filed a restraining order against his son, telling a court that Gregory Bush “put his hands around my wife’s neck and picked her up by her neck and put her down.”
The court ordered Bush to comply with mental health treatment and prohibited from him possessing a weapon. A judge wrote on the order, “No Guns!”

If your own father is forced to take out a restraining order against you because you tried to strangle your mother, you shouldn’t be allowed to roam around freely, because you’re likely to do bad things:

Gregory A. Bush, 51, was indicted today by a federal grand jury on hate crime and firearm charges arising out of the racially motivated murder of two African-American patrons at a Kroger grocery store, and the attempted murder of a third, on Oct. 24 in Jeffersontown, Kentucky. The indictment was announced by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman, and FBI Louisville Special Agent in Charge James Robert Brown, Jr.
Today’s indictment charges Bush with hate crimes for shooting and killing two victims because of their race and color; and for shooting at a third man because of his race and color. The indictment also charges Bush for using and discharging a firearm during and in relation to those crimes of violence. The indictment alleges that Bush committed the offenses after substantial planning and premeditation, that he killed more than one person in a single criminal episode, and that he knowingly created a grave risk of death to others on the scene.
The maximum penalty for the charges in the indictment is life imprisonment or the death penalty. The Justice Department will determine at a later date whether, in this particular case, it will seek the death penalty.
“The crimes alleged in this indictment are horrific,” Acting Attorney General Whitaker said. “We cannot and will not tolerate violence motivated by racism. We will bring the full force of the law against these and any other alleged hate crimes against fellow Americans of any race. And so I want to thank the FBI, Trial Attorney Christopher Perras, and Assistant United States Attorney Amanda Gregory for all of their hard work that has made this indictment possible. Today we take one step closer to justice for the victims and their families and one step closer to helping this community try to heal.”
“There is no place for hate-fueled violence in our community or Commonwealth,” stated U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman. “Federal, state, and local law enforcement stand united to ensure that Kentuckians can shop, worship, or attend school without the specter of fear.”
“The tragic events of October 24, 2018, are a grim reminder of why the FBI prioritizes investigations of civil rights violations among the top of its criminal programs,” said FBI Louisville Special Agent in Charge James Robert Brown, Jr. “Today’s indictment should be a reminder to those who are motivated by hate and are intent on committing violence; your hateful ideology will not have the last word. The FBI, and the Department of Justice, will be there, and you will be caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Far be it from me to question the FBI’s priorities, but maybe they wouldn’t have so many “civil rights violations” to investigate if dangerous lunatics weren’t allowed to run around on the streets.

Speaking of dangerous lunatics, a Salon-dot-com writer mentioned this Kentucky crime among those he blamed on — you guessed, didn’t you?

Donald Trump has made a decision that he isn’t the president not of the United States of America, but president of the red states of America. Trump has embraced a new confederacy, and he is their Jefferson Davis, and a new civil war has been joined.

Maybe this Salon-dot-com writer is off his medications? I dunno.

Crazy People Are Dangerous.

Category: Crime, Kentucky, Racism

Stacey Abrams Loses in Georgia, and Democrats Claim GOP ‘Stole’ Election

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | No Comments

As a native Georgian, I’m frankly shocked that this election was even close, but Democrats don’t live in reality:

Democrat Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams admitted Friday that she cannot win against Republican opponent Brian Kemp and vowed to file a federal lawsuit challenging the “gross mismanagement” of the state’s elections
Abrams made her announcement shortly after 5 p.m., the earliest state officials could certify the results after a court-ordered review of absentee, provisional and other uncounted ballots. Abrams’ campaign had contended there were potentially enough uncounted votes to force a runoff.
Abrams told supporters that Kemp placed “his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote.”
“Concession means to acknowledge an act is right, true or proper…I cannot concede that,” she added. . . .
“In the coming days, we will be filing a major federal lawsuit against the state of Georgia for the gross mismanagement of this election and to protect future elections,” she said.
Abrams had hoped to become the first black governor of the Deep South state and the first black female governor of any state.
Abrams and voting rights activists have claimed for months that Kemp mismanaged the elections system in his post as secretary of state. . . .
Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams’ campaign chairwoman, is overseeing a team of almost three-dozen lawyers who in the coming days will draft the petition, along with a ream of affidavits from voters and would-be voters who say they were disenfranchised.

Call this what it is, a paranoid conspiracy theory, a partisan propaganda claim deliberately intended to inflame racial fear: “The white folks cheated! We’re disenfranchised! It’s a 21st-century Jim Crow!”

Bullshit.

Permit me to explain, in case it is not obvious, what happened in Georgia. National Democrats had hoped that an anti-Trump backlash would inspire a “blue wave” of such miraculous proportions that, for example, Beto O’Rourke could beat Ted Cruz in Texas. You can see the delusional aspect of Democrats’ 2018 hopes in the kind of candidates they nominated in various “swing” congressional districts. In race after race where the GOP was vulnerable, Democrats lost because their primary voters went for nominees (e.g., Gina Ortiz Jones in TX23, Lauren Baer in FL18, Leslie Cockburn in VA5) who were simply too extreme to be competitive. And this was the story of Stacey Abrams in a nutshell — another far-left candidate who won the Democrat primary on the basis of unrealistic “blue wave” hopes. Inside the echo-chamber of liberal media, Abrams’ primary victory in May was celebrated with this CNN headline: “Stacey Abrams wins Democratic primary in Georgia. She could become the nation’s first black woman governor.”

Georgia Republicans were laughing out loud at that headline. Brian Kemp might not have been the smoothest politician in the GOP field, but he wasn’t so bad he could lose to . . . well, an Atlanta Democrat.

Do I really need to explain what that means? I should hope not.

We live in the real world, and not in the liberal fantasyland inhabited by CNN viewers, so we understand why an Atlanta Democrat might have difficulty winning a statewide election in Georgia. But let’s take a look at some exit-poll numbers, just to make the point.

White voters went 3-to-1 for Kemp, who also won 2-to-1 among married voters, and won decisive majorities of all voters earning over $30,000. Did you notice, by the way, that Kemp got more than 10% of black male voters? You can bet most of those are upper-income married black men. Despite the polarizing effect of Trump — whose personality tends to alienate some respectable church-going types who normally vote Republican — Kemp nevertheless won what we might call the bourgeois vote, because Stacey Abrams was simply not the kind of candidate who could appeal to responsible middle-class taxpayers.

Why, then, are Democrats claiming Kemp had to cheat to win?

Democrat donors like George Soros poured millions of dollars into the Abrams campaign, because “experts” (like former Clinton strategist Peter Daou) somehow convinced these wealthy idiots that Abrams had a chance of winning. If you spend enough money, and get Oprah and Obama to campaign for you, it’s possible to “energize the base” enough to make such an election competitive, even in a Republican stronghold like Georgia. But even with a maximum turnout of, uh, Atlanta Democrats (Abrams racked up more than 300,000 votes in Fulton County, and more than 250,000 in DeKalb), liberal fantasies ultimately encounter the “red wall.” Go look at the election map in Georgia, particularly in those counties north of Atlanta — Kemp won Paulding with 67%, Forsyth with 71%, Cherokee with 72%, Hall with 73%. Abrams amassed huge margins in Atlanta, and even won about 55% in the Cobb and Gwinnett suburbs, but in vast swaths of the state, Kemp won by 70% or more. (In Gordon County, where I spent four years as sports editor of the local newspaper, Kemp got 82%.) Democrats and their big-money donors simply can’t cope with that kind of political reality. It’s racist for white people in Georgia to vote Republican, liberals believe, and so they claim “voter suppression tactics” must have been involved. As if officials in Atlanta were “suppressing” Democrat voters? Never mind. It’s a paranoid conspiracy theory, and as such doesn’t require facts or logic.

One the one hand, Democrats claim the election was “stolen” as an excuse for wasting all that money from their liberal donors, but on the other hand, such claims are about maintaining anti-white resentment among their voter base, because if Democrats don’t get 90% of the black vote (and 80% of the Hispanic vote) they can’t win any elections anywhere south of Illinois or east of Nevada. There simply aren’t enough white liberals in most of America to make up a Democrat majority, and so the kind of people who live inside the CNN echo chamber must always have some kind of wacko theory to explain away Republican victories.

By the way, does anyone think racism alone explains why Abrams lost?

“One million dollars — that’s how much Stacey Abrams made over the last five years. But when it came time to pay her $54,000 tax bill, she didn’t. Instead, Abrams decided to loan her campaign for governor $50,000. Pushing a radical agenda to raise your taxes while delaying what she owes in order to fund her political campaign — Stacey Abrams, a self-serving, fiscally irresponsible career politician.”

That ad highlighted something Peter Daou and the Democrats don’t want to talk about. Despite her high income, Abrams had personal debt of more than $170,000, including a $54,000 debt to the IRS. Is that the kind of person you want to elect governor? Maybe if you’re a Democrat, but most Georgians are Republicans. And thank God for that.