Category: Blogging

Rick-Rolled by HuffPost

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You might think that a professional journalist would be completely immune to cheap marketing tactics, but occasionally even I fall for it.

Backstory: Last year some evil troll decided to sign me up for every single news feed at the Huffington Post. As a result, I probably get 30 or 40 different e-mail pitches a day, including some in French and Spanish. I haven’t bothered to cancel the subscriptions because (a) I’m lazy and (b) occasionally I find good blog fodder from the stuff (although I try to avoid linking HuffPo unless I have to).

OK, I hadn’t checked my e-mail in a while and was skimming through when I saw this subject line on an e-mail from HuffPo Lifestyle:

’90s Supermodel Poses Topless

Celebrity breasts don’t usually impress me much. In fact, at age 53, I’m not easily impressed by breasts in general. This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy breasts, but at some point in a man’s life he realizes that the variety is not infinite and . . . Well, breasts are breasts. The fact that a particular pair is attached to somebody famous, so what?

Nevertheless, (a) if this was some kind of “celebrity scandal” angle, it might be good for blog traffic, and (b) hey, it’s got to be more interesting than Valerie Jarrett talking health care. Given a choice between Valerie Jarrett and “topless supermodel”? C’mon.

OK so I click link and it’s Elle McPherson on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, “topless” strictly in the sense that she’s not wearing a top — with her (predictably implant-enhanced) breasts discreetly hidden — rather than “topless” in the sense of Show Me Your Boobies.

But if you want to see a really nice pair . . .

 

Selling Out Early To Avoid The Rush

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— by Wombat-socho


If this looks like a Confederate Nazi to you, you might be a UCLA law professor.
If this looks like a Confederate Nazi to you, you might be a UCLA law professor.
Ripped from the pages of this morning’s Memeorandum, we have this piece of half-witted blogging by Professor Bainbridge, in which he masks a none-too-clever slam at Sarah Palin and Mark Levin with a reference to an entirely too long and (toward the end) insanely boring alternate history series by Harry Turtledove. Look, Professor, is it too much to ask that if you’re going to call people Nazis, you just come right out and say it? Has the law school business collapsed so quickly that even Distinguished Professors of Law are trying to land gigs on MSNBC? And if that wasn’t your motive, what the hell compelled you to post this?


Glenn Greenwald Is a Ridiculous Joke (And Alas, the Internet Never Forgets)

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Ali Akbar called and I had to tell him about the infamous — indeed, epic — nay, world-historic — exposure of Glenn Greenwald’s sockpuppetry back in 2006. Many people currently active in conservative New Media didn’t really get hooked in until 2008 (Sarah Palin) or 2009 (Tea Party), and have no memory of The Way Things Used to Be back in the misty early dawn of Ye Olde Internette.

Often these newbies will ask things like, “You mean Andrew Sullivan used to be a Republican?” or “Charles Johnson? Who’s that?”

It would be easy to get lost in nostalgic reveries, but rather than bore you kiddies with tall tales about UseNet and dial-up modems, I’ll see if I can bring it to a point pretty quickly:

If a monomaniacal hysteric like Glenn Greenwald is a “serious journalist,” then the threshold of seriousness is dangerously low, indeed.

That might seem harsh, if you don’t remember July 2006:

The Glenn Greenwald Sock Puppet Story,
From Start To (Almost) Finish
— Ace of Spades

Annotated WuzzaDem: The Facts
Behind the Greenwald Sock-Puppetry
— Patterico

Please, if you don’t know the backstory, click both those links and read carefully, because it reveals three important facts:

  1. Glenn Greenwald is a raging narcissist;
  2. Glenn Greenwald is habitually dishonest; and
  3. When caught in one of his stupid lies, Glenn Greenwald’s first instinct is to try to save himself by telling another stupid lie.

Here’s an interesting question for you: Why didn’t Glenn Greenwald graduate law school until he was 28? What year did he complete his bachelor’s degree, and what did he do during the years between finishing his undergrad education and deciding to attend law school?

That’s just something I’m throwing out there, not knowing that the answer would be of any relevance, although it’s an intriguing question in light of his subsequent legal adventures:

Before he was a reporter and commentator for The Guardian newspaper, Glenn Greenwald was a lawyer — and had a part-time job in the porn business.
“It was a long time ago,” Greenwald told the Daily News. …

(Ancient history! The Bronze Age!)

The Queens native became a lawyer in 1995, after graduating from NYU.
Greenwald was enjoying a career as a litigator when friend Jason Buchtel offered him a partnership in his consulting company, Master Notions Inc., back in 2002. …

(It was “back in 2002” — mere juvenile mischief!)

Court papers show that one of the company’s clients was then known as HJ — short for “Hairy Jocks” — and that Greenwald was the one who negotiated their deal. …

(“Trust me, Jason — there’s big money to be made here!”)

Owner Peter Haas “had this pornographic company he wasn’t able to maintain,” Greenwald said.
Greenwald and Buchtel agreed to help Haas in return for 50% of the profits. …
[Haas] accused Greenwald of having bullied him into signing the deal, citing several twisted emails that he said were from Greenwald, whose email address was, “DomMascHry31.” In one, Greenwald allegedly called Haas “a little bitch” and “a good little whore.” …

Well, you can read the whole thing, which includes Greenwald’s denials, and threats to sue everyone for libel, and climbing up on the cross to suffer as a Sacrificial Martyr for Truth.

Here’s the thing: We know from the 2006 sockpuppetry escapade that Greenwald is a liar with a habit of masquerading behind online aliases to achieve his dishonest purposes. (“Thomas Ellers” and “Rick Ellensburg” can vouch for this.) And here’s a dirty little secret about why Greenwald is now an expatriate living abroad:

The New York County Clerk’s office shows Greenwald has $126,000 in open judgments and liens against him dating to 2000, including a $21,000 from the state Tax Department and the city Department of Finance. . . .
Records show the IRS has an $85,000 lien against him.

Douchebag, thy name is Greenwald!

 

Speaking of Kooks …

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Glory days: Barrett Brown interviewed by Michael Isikoff, 2011

“A self-described anarchist, [Barrett] Brown claims he’s policing wrongdoing, at least as Anonymous describes it. . . .
“[Brown said:] ‘When we break laws, we do so in service of civil disobedience.'”
— NBC Nightly News, March 8, 2011

Dan Collins seems envious of my success at becoming the idée fixe of so many deranged lunatics. The relevant question: Is this a natural talent or an acquired skill? Maybe it’s a bit of both, but my extensive experience in the field of kook-baiting has not yet been recognized as the sort of expertise that would merit a “six-figure” book deal like the one Barrett Brown announced in November 2011, about 10 months before the infamous meltdown that led to his arrest by the FBI.

Combining narcissistic grandiosity with the arrogance of an outlaw anarchist is a pretty good recipe for a spectacular flame-out, and there is a lesson to be learned from Barrett Brown’s pathetic fate, but most of the punks who admire Brown share his worldview, so it’s unlikely they’ll derive the correct lesson from his sad saga.

Alas, further obscuring the unfortunate reality of Brown’s descent into criminal madness, the Edward Snowden/NSA story and the sudden death of Michael Hastings have led some on the Left to attempt a rehabilitation of Brown’s (deservedly bad) reputation. In separate but related items, Brown had been the subject of recent articles in The Nation, the U.K. Guardian, and the Huffington Post.

You can read all of those articles without learning the most important thing about Barrett Brown: He was completely bugfucking nuts.

Do you really need to watch this 13-minute video again?

No journalist on the planet chronicled Brown’s march to destruction as regularly as I did, and today I summarized it in 2,000 words:

. . . Brown, who hadn’t contacted me directly in more than a year, suddenly popped up and began harassing me on Twitter in early September 2012. He accused me of libel and menaced me with threats of terrible consequences if I did not immediately respond to his demands that I answer various insulting questions. This bullying motif — “Answer my question, or else!” — is characteristic of a style that I’ve come to think of as Cargo Cult Journalism. Like the rituals of certain South Pacific islanders, the Cargo Cult Journalist hopes that his simulacrum of what he ignorantly imitates will magically bring the same result as the real thing. Cargo Cult Journalism is the kind of stuff we once encountered in smudgy mimeographed newsletters, “underground” newspaper tabloids, cheaply printed pamphlets and self-published books by crackpots who warn about conspiracies involving the Bavarian Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission and/or the Military-Industrial Complex. In the digital age, however, many people have trouble distinguishing between this kook-fringe imitation of “reporting” and genuine journalism, a distinction blurred by the increasingly shabby quality of product issued by respectable organs of the mainstream media. . . .
What one usually finds among practitioners of Cargo Cult Journalism is a grandiose posture of contempt for the unglamorous toil of the workaday reporter. Many people who have never covered a county commission meeting, a high-school basketball tournament or a Fourth of July parade — such local tedium is beneath their notice — seem to harbor Walter Mitty fantasies of gaining worldwide journalistic significance. The Internet is a medium that permits these would-be Seymour Hersh types to catapult past the minor leagues of journalism where real reporters learn their craft. While I enthusiastically encourage the burgeoning phenomenon of online citizen-journalism, it is important at the same time to discourage the type of “famewhore” act that led Barrett Brown to his pathetic fate. Thinking himself a sort of one-man Woodward and Bernstein who would heroically expose the Hidden Secrets of the Surveillance State, Brown instead exposed himself as a blundering amateur who got himself in so far over his head that he couldn’t handle the catastrophic result. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 

 

UPDATE: Hat-tip to Dan Collins again — you are following Dan on Twitter, aren’t you? — for this interesting item:

Boredom is behind many incidents of cyberbullying and trolling on social media sites, according to the first major study into the matter.
Linguistics expert Dr Claire Hardaker, of Lancaster University, studied almost 4,000 online cases involving claims of trolling.

No offense to Professor Hardaker, but hers is scarcely “the first major study” of trolling. While I don’t claim that my methods are entirely scientific, I’ve been studying this phenomenon at close range ever since Charles Johnson went crazy. This stipulates the hypothetical that Charles was once sane, of course. As far-fetched as that may seem, it would be unscientific to rule it out categorically as impossible.


‘It’s Tough to Be a Man, Baby!’

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The title line from the unfortunately forgotten 1983 comedy D.C. Cab came to mind today when I encountered yet another reaction to the controversial new bestseller by Dr. Helen Smith, Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream–and Why it Matters. It seems that everyone has an opinion on this book, one way or the other, and a pseudonymous contributor to Ricochet offered his own anecdotal reflections:

Here’s a bit on Fox and Friends discussing it. One quote from the book pretty much sums up the problem as seen by the author:

[The] new world order is a place where men are discriminated against, forced into a hostile environment in school and later in college, and held in contempt by society. Maybe there is no incentive to grow up anymore. It used to be that being a grown-up, responsible man was rewarded with respect, power and deference. Now, not so much.

While all that is true, I think it misses another, possibly bigger, dynamic, namely that being a man is hard. . . .
While the things pointed out in the book may be true, I think the real reason many men are abandoning traditional roles is plain old-fashioned selfishness. Society pushes self first in every aspect of our lives. Selflessness and sacrifice are scorned. Boys are taught about their rights rather than instructed in what is right. The author is wrong. Real men were never in the marriage/family game for what they could get out of it; rather, they were in it because it is the right and good thing to do, even if it’s hard.

Although I hesitate to quote anyone saying flatly that the InstaWife is wrong (!) certainly the Ricochet commentator has a point: A stoic commitment to duty, without regard for narrowly selfish interests, is the essence of responsible manhood. My father worked 37 years at the Lockheed Georgia plant in Marietta not because he had no other ambition beyond the factory gates, but because providing for his family was his foremost obligation as a man. And very few young people today, male or female, seem to understand that old-fashioned idea.

Yet this does not prove Dr. Helen wrong. The incentives that once encouraged men to do the right thing — the sensibility of duty — were complex and layered, not simple and superficial. Our culture once venerated Great Men who by word and deed exemplified that nobility of character required to accept responsibility for failure, and to quietly pursue the course of honor, rather than to scapegoat others for our misfortunes and dishonestly seek undeserved glory.

No man should crave a respect he has not truly earned, nor resent the humiliation for any failure that was within his power to avert.

In every enterprise we undertake, therefore, we must do everything within our power to achieve success and, should our efforts fail, blame only ourselves: “It is all my fault.”

People don’t think that way any more. Craving a good reputation in a superficial culture, they concern themselves with the external representation of virtue, rather than its true essence, and lose sight of the distinction between seeming and being.

A society that celebrates victimhood has little regard for the spirit of loyalty and humility that endures hardship without complaint. It is precisely these manly virtues which deserve more praise, and which are instead stigmatized by the radical egalitarian obsession with “rights.”

And you should buy Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream–and Why it Matters.

 

 


@TedCruz & The Broken Immigration Record: Heard This Bef–Heard This Bef–

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by Smitty

Senator Cruz at Red State:

On Monday at 5:30pm, the United States Senate will vote on the most sweeping immigration reform proposal it has considered in almost 3 decades – and it will do so having only seen the nearly 1200 pages of text for approximately 72 hours. Americans – including myself, my fellow senators and our staffs – are still trying to figure out exactly what is in the new Schumer-Corker-Hoeven “deal.”
Sound familiar? Pass it to find out what’s in it? Reminiscent of Obamacare, the lengthy amendment to replace the Gang of 8’s original bill was crafted behind closed doors and introduced late on Friday, after many members had left town. In the 2007 immigration debate, close to 50 amendments were considered. But this year, we have only debated 9 – with some of us being completely shut out.
Given only a weekend to review the language, we will now vote on whether to end a debate that never really began. To be clear – this is not a difficult vote. On process alone, we should all vote “no.“ This was by design – the President, Harry Reid and the Gang of 8 preferred all along to ram through a “deal,” and not have a real debate – just like Obamacare.

Read the whole sordid account.
Via his petition link:
There really isn’t terribly much hope in the Senate. Meanwhile, to clip Drudge:

And as if all that didn’t suck enough:

Opponents of the Gang of Eight immigration bill have spent the weekend looking for hard-to-find changes in a piece of legislation that was substantially re-written by the Hoeven-Corker amendment. But there’s one big change that’s right out in the open — impossible to miss, in fact.
The original Gang bill ended with a section designated Title IV, which was headlined REFORMS TO NON-IMMIGRANT VISA PROGRAMS. The Hoeven-Corker version of the bill added a Title V, with the headline JOBS FOR YOUTH. The measure would provide $1.5 billion in the next two years to provide jobs for Americans between the ages of 16 and 24. It was originally pushed by Democratic Sen. Bernard Sanders, who wanted to come to the aid of young workers who were “hard hit by the Wall Street-caused recession.” Now, Sanders says immigration reform will further damage youth job prospects.

How rich would we all be if they’d just taken all of the giveaways, divided by the population, and cut us all a check? The answer is: no more rich, because proper economics don’t work the way this tooth-fairy government seems to think they do.
John Boehner, you’d better not go wobbly.

In Praise of Conor Friedersdorf

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— by Wombat-socho


Everyone who’s raised a child, or housebroken a puppy, knows the importance of rewards and punishments.* So it is with young pundits who show the occasional flashes of conservative or libertarian leanings: we must fisk them, or at the very least point and laugh, when they write something stupid for public consumption, but by the same token we must link and give praise when they write something worth reading. This is how we get to today’s reflection on a post by Conor Friedersdorf** at The Atlantic, notorious haven of half-bright intellectualoids of the “progressive” persuasion. Conor has been (deservedly) mocked on this blog for thinking he is smarter than he actually is and making noises about being conservative when in fact his writings would lead one to suspect that his politics are somewhere between Chris Christie and Megan McArdle, and I am being generous here.


Conor does a fine job of fisking epically stupid pieces by Jonathan Chait and Julia Ioffe (BIRM) who through the magic of advanced cognitive dissonance technology manage to claim that Rand Paul is some kind of Objectivist monster who hates personal freedom even while acknowledging that Paul has been on the right side of every fight this year over the First, Second and Fourth Amendments. “Everything is wrapped in paranoia,” Conor correctly observes. Read the whole thing; it is refreshingly free of backhanded slaps at the GOP and conservatives, and even if fisking Jonathan Chait is like shooting fish in a barrel with an automatic shotgun, it still needs doing, especially in the pages of websites like The Atlantic, which still makes some pretense of being politically neutral.


Tip o’ the Wombat’s fedora to Instapundit for linking the article and inspiring this.
*Actually, I’m beginning to suspect a lot of parents don’t know this, judging from the number of rotten little kids I’m exposed to when I go out in public.
**Yes, one “n” in “Conor”.

Has Bill Schmalfeldt Forgotten?

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Aaron Walker points out something about Bill Schmalfeldt’s harassment that had escaped my notice: When Schmalfeldt first began cyberstalking Walker, on June 3, 2012, it was only four days after Brett Kimberlin had gotten Walker arrested at a Maryland court hearing.

The judge at that Maryland hearing had ordered Walker not to write anything about Brett Kimberlin, and yet here was Schmalfeldt on Twitter, interrogating Walker about Kimberlin — as if attempting to bait Walker into violating the (soon-to-be-overturned) court order.

Maybe that was just a coincidence, eh?

Aaron also quotes at length some of Schmalfeldt’s symptomatic ravings. Any psychologist would note Schmalfedlt’s inability to accept responsibility for his own failures, and his habit of blaming all his problems on demonized scapegoats. Persistently ignoring the wrongs he has committed, he makes accusations of wrongdoing against others as justifying further sadistic harassment of his chosen enemies.

The clear evidence of Schmalfeldt’s madness, however, does not rule out the possibility that he has also been manipulated into joining an orchestrated campaign to harass Aaron Walker and other of Brett Kimberlin’s enemies. But at this late point in his descent into abject lunacy, I’m not sure that Schmalfeldt still retains enough of his mental faculties to remember what he has done or why he did it.

Read more at Aaron Walker’s “Allergic to Bull” blog.