Category: Blogging

Convicted Felon John Tiessen: Crazy? Certainly, But Is He Also Dangerous?

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John Tiessen, ranting on YouTube about Nixon and Jesus and the Rothschilds

Where do all these crazy people on the Internet come from, and why do they always seem to end up obsessively stalking me? Maybe I should write a book, Troll Magnet: How to Become an Irresistible Scapegoat for Every Deranged Lunatic With a Twitter Account.

Sunday afternoon, I Tweeted an item that Lee Stranahan posted about how one member of Anonymous “doxxed” another member of Anonymous who is involved in the Steubenville rape story. My plan had been to write a long article about the Steubenville case, but that got pushed back a day because of the inauguration. And in the meantime, my Tweet attracted attention from a kook named John Tiessen.

Tiessen associates himself with Anonymous, and also claims affiliation with the defunct “Project PM” started by former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, who notoriously got arrested after a September online video meltdown in which Brown threatened an FBI agent’s family.

After seeing my Tweets with Stranahan and the person from Anonymous that Stranahan was writing about, Tiessen called me a “racist pig” in a message that was, for some unknown reason, also CC’d to the anti-Anonymous hacker known as “The Jester.”

Uh . . . bad move, Mr. Tiessen.

At some point in the past, it seems, Tiessen got the brilliant idea to falsely accuse Jester of being a child pornographer. This cheap smear was apparently an attempt by Tiessen to make himself a hero to the Anonymous movement, whose members all hate Jester.

John Tiessen’s Excellent Adventure, however, had the effect of making him a target for Jester and — wouldn’t you know it? — the Jester discovered that John Tiessen is a convicted felon himself:

I think at the very least, we have a classic case of something called ‘projection‘ — Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where John Tiessen subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.

Something about John Tiessen and a 1992 sex offense. While I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that “dox” — what is it with these people always doxxing each other? — Tiessen admitted that he’s a convicted felon in his weird 17-minute YouTube rant against Jester. A few excerpts:

“I do have a lot of things going on . . . Been down to Occupy Minnesota. I’ve got a lot of things going on there. . . .
“Nixon was bombing Cambodia long before Obama ever thought about bombing people. . . . And he was doing the same thing Obama’s doing today. . . . To me, nothing has really changed. . . .
“When I got out [of prison], I joined a lot of [Web] sites of ex-cons, prison groups and prison rights groups and ex-con rights groups . . .
“Most control freaks are either rapists or child molesters . . .
“I still have contacts in law enforcement. . . . I don’t lie. I have no reason to lie . . .
“Some people blocked me — ‘Anonymous.’ Some people denied knowing me — ‘Anonymous.’ Some people said some things about me — ‘Anonymous.’ . . .
“I’m a Christian. I’m not the kind of Christian you see on TV. . . . People are bashing gay people or bashing Muslims. . . .
“I’m a true Christian. . . .
“You people who kicked me to the curb because of my lifestyle, you’re doing the same thing that you’re fighting against. . . . You want these people to get out of prison and . . . you want them to be ridiculed, laughed at, made fun of. . . .
“That’s just one of many things that I’m accused of and today I still have a hard time with what I did. I know I’m guilty. . . .
“The coke whore that I picked up promised me a blow job if I gave her coke and then she tried to renege on it, and I said, ‘No, you’re going to do it.’ . . .
“Don’t ostracize people who are coming out of prison. . . .
“I’m a f–king true freedom fighter. I’m not one of these f–king wannabes. . . . You want to grow some f–king cojones and be a true freedom fighter? Stand up like Jesus did. Stand up to these kings and these so-called f–king religious leaders. . . [Tell them] ‘You’re not speaking for God.’ I don’t care who you are — Obama, Putin, on and on — I don’t care. You’re speaking for the Devil, man.
“You ain’t speaking for the people. You’re speaking for the Rothschilds and the J.P. Morgans and the f–king banks of this world.”

Those are merely excerpts, of course, and if you’re a graduate student working on a thesis about abnormal psychology, maybe you’ll want to watch the whole 17 minutes of pure crazy-talk:

Notice how Tiessen lacks the self-awareness to realize that this video completely undermines his avowed purposes:

  1. To convince people in Anonymous that he’s not worried about having his criminal record exposed; and
  2. To establish his credibility so that people in Anonymous will take his word — as a “true Christian” and a “f–king true freedom fighter” — that Jester is actually a child molester, because Tiessen’s law-enforcement sources told him so.

When he ends up crazy-talking about God and Obama and the Devil and the Rothschilds, everybody can see that Tiessen is a deranged wacko. Even if you’re OK with Tiessen’s method of dealing with dishonest coke whores, it’s hard to say, “Yeah, I’ll take this guy’s word that he’s got solid sources in law enforcement,” once he starts spewing lunatic gibberish about God and Jesus and the Rothschilds, with an f-bomb or two in every other sentence, just for good measure. Continue reading Convicted Felon John Tiessen: Crazy? Certainly, But Is He Also Dangerous? →

‘Arab Spring’ Update: Hostages Killed in Algeria; French Fight Islamists in Mali

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“The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! . . . But it was a beautiful piece of writing. . . . It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’”
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

If you have been troubled recently by the thought that Mr. Kurtz may have been onto something, certainly you aren’t alone. We haven’t been doing too well in the Suppression of Savage Customs lately:

In a bloody finale, Algerian special forces stormed a natural gas complex in the Sahara desert on Saturday to end a standoff with Islamist extremists that left at least 23 hostages dead and killed all 32 militants involved, the Algerian government said. . . .
The siege at Ain Amenas transfixed the world after radical Islamists linked to al-Qaida stormed the complex, which contained hundreds of plant workers from all over the world, then held them hostage surrounded by the Algerian military and its attack helicopters for four tense days that were punctuated with gun battles and dramatic tales of escape. . . .

The Obama administration remains clueless:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said much remains “sketchy” about what  happened at the remote Ain Amenas gas field.
“We know that lives have been lost,” he said.
Asked how many Americans were in danger and what happened to them, Panetta  said he knew Americans were still being held hostage earlier Saturday. On what  happened to them, he said, “we need to get better information.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on events in neighboring Mali:

With French officials saying confidently on Saturday that an advance by Islamist militants on Bamako, Mali’s capital, had been halted, France’s foreign minister told African leaders that “our African friends need to take the lead” in a multilateral military intervention in Mali. . . .
The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said Saturday that France now had 2,000 troops in Mali, with more in the region, and that France was likely to add to its forces there. . . .
Residents have told local news agencies that the Islamists have left Diabaly, which they seized as an important way station on the road to the administrative capital, Ségou, north of Bamako.
French airstrikes have halted the Islamist advance toward Mopti and nearby Sévaré, French officials said, while they confirmed that the village of Konna, north of Mopti, was now back in the hands of Mali’s government. The French have also sent troops along with Malian forces to secure a bridge over the Niger River at Markala, north of Ségou.

Mitt Romney was mocked for mentioning Mali in his final debate with President Obama. Professor Stephen Clark observed this week that the connection between “the Islamist takeover of northern Mali with the NATO-led overthrow of the Gaddafi” in Libya was overlooked by the media:

Mali is a knock-on consequence of a failed north-African policy. Just such consequences were the fear expressed by some with US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those failed to materialize. Now that they have materialized as a consequence of Obama’s policies the grand-high poobahs and their courtiers are as silent as church mice.

William Wallis in the Financial Times described the uprising in Mali as a “boomerang” of U.S. anti-terror policy, and this inspires bitter Kurtz-like reflections from Ed Morrissey:

The boomerang in this case came from our extremely ill-advised and reckless intervention in Libya, which turned that nation into a failed state and sent tentacles of radicalism throughout the Sahel. And what did we gain from the Libyan adventure and the revolution we blessed in Egypt by tossing a 30-year ally to the wolves? In the latter, we now have leadership that feels entirely comfortable using eliminationist rhetoric against Israel; in the former, we have a burned-out consulate, four dead Americans, and a central government whose writ won’t run in half the country. Our policies in the last two years in this region have emboldened our enemies and disillusioned our allies, and in this case we didn’t get anything at all in trade for the unintended consequences we have reaped.

Don’t worry, Ed: The President’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner! And I’m sure the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs is eagerly awaiting your final report.

PREVIOUSLY:

National Review Institute Summit: Will This Controversial Event Make Headlines?

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My decision yesterday to kick Jonah Goldberg in the knee promises to yield enormous dividends both ways. Goldberg has denounced my criticisms as “preening b.s.,” and he’s vowed to fire back at length later today, so I look forward to a (no doubt well-deserved) ass-chewing.

Do I expect Jonah to say nice things about me? No, but neither did I expected to be invited on a Caribbean cruise after the election. The world is generally divided that way: The cruise-worthy intellectuals and everybody else, and I’ve adjusted to life among the landlubbers.

Speaking of which, the National Review Institute “Future of Conservatism” Summit convenes next Friday at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., and it would be a terrible thing if the summit were to be embroiled in controversy because a lot of pissed-off conservatives showed up and started asking questions like, “Who was it that convinced us that nominating Mitt Romney would be a good idea?”

Who would pay $250 to go raise hell at the NRI Summit? Maybe the Ron Paul crowd would think that’s a fine way to spend a weekend. Did I mention that college students can attend the NRI Summit for free?

Our friends at the National Review Institute are providing a limited number of full “scholarships” for the upcoming “Future of Conservatism” conference this January 25-27 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. This covers the conference fee, which includes participation in all events, receptions, and meals. This is an excellent opportunity for a conservative college student to learn and network.

OK, so the “limited number” of scholarships probably diminishes the chances of Ron Paul supporters packing the NRI Summit with dopehead stooges yelling ugly things about “neocon warmongers,” but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunities for headline-making controversy during the event. Everybody’s favorite MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s going to be there, after all. For some reason, while Scarborough is an honored participant at the NRI Summit, they didn’t invite Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin. Probably an accidental oversight . . .

So when the “Joe Scarborough’s OK, But We Don’t Like Mark Levin” conference convenes next Friday at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., maybe you’ll want to be there to raise hell. If there are angry shouting matches in the hotel corridors and fistfights in the lobby bar, that might actually be newsworthy.

And I’m strictly a Neutral Objective Journalist . . .

 


The Country’s Going Straight to Hell, But at Least We’ve Got a ‘Likeable’ President

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Random adults:

[M]ore than seven in 10 are dissatisfied with the current state of the economy, and just more than a third are either “very” or “fairly” confident in Obama’s ability to promote a strong and growing economy.
And 60 percent believe the coming year will be a time to hold back and save because of harder times ahead . . .
As for views on Obama’s qualities as president, he gets the best marks for being easygoing and likeable (61 percent give him high marks here)

Pete Da Tech Guy’s non-random response:

So let’s get this straight, Over seventy percent of the public are dissatisfied with the economy, just over a third of the people are confident in the president’s ability to fix it, and 60% of the folks are battening down the hatches for rough weather.
Yet this man just two months ago won 300+ electoral votes?

Exactly: When the media deliberately mislead the public, we can expect widespread confusion to prevail. Welcome to Low-Information Nation.

Jonah Goldberg, Professional Loser?

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“We lost. We are losers. . . . Our operatives are incompetent and we live in a dream world.”
— Rob Long of National Review, in an interview with Joe Hagan of New York magazine during a Caribbean cruise in November

Has National Review, an institution founded in opposition to liberalism, become part of the problem it was intended to solve? This thought has occurred to me with increasing frequency in recent years.

Last January, immediately after Rick Santorum’s stunning upset victory in the Iowa caucuses, I attended a debate-night event in Manchester, New Hampshire hosted by National Review and was stunned at their cheerful acquiescence in The Inevitability of Mitt Romney. The primary campaign had just begun, and it took another three months for Romney to lock up the nomination, yet the NR crowd were ready and willing to applaud the coronation of the GOP Establishment choice.

This apparent unwillingness to fight tough battles against long odds disturbed me then, and at Christmas, I was further disturbed to read the New York magazine account of National Review‘s post-election Caribbean cruise, which I summarized thus:

[A]n article you should read in its entirety, if you want to be thoroughly depressed about the uselessness of our conservative elite: Wonks, pundits, pollsters and consultants on a free tropical vacation paid for by elderly magazine subscribers who, we presume, were grateful to be in the intellectual presence of the presumed heirs of Bill Buckley.

Unless you consider pre-emptive surrender to be a clever strategy, there is clearly something wrong when a political movement’s flagship institution shows such a willing acceptance of defeat.

The problem is not merely that National Review was aboard the Romney bandwagon early, nor that Romney was subsequently defeated, but rather that no one at National Review seems ashamed of themselves for their roles in helping to bring about this disaster. If they are leaders of the conservative movement, and if the conservative movement has failed — which it quite obviously has, or otherwise Obama would not be ruling by executive fiat — where is the accountability?

While I’m not saying that Rich Lowry must commit seppuku, why is there no admission by anyone at National Review that they have failed the movement they presumed to lead? A contemplation of these dark thoughts was inspired by Jonah Goldberg’s latest column:

[The conservative] movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.
A conservative journalist or activist can now make a decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people only what they want to hear has become a vocation. Worse, it’s possible to be a rank-and-file conservative without once being exposed to a good liberal argument.

OK, a few questions immediately come to mind:

  • Who are these “hucksters”? If they are merely “stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal” for their own selfish purposes, they must be eliminated. Name names, please.
  • How much of this “bothering to persuade a liberal” has Jonah Goldberg done? Where is this legion of converts to conservatism — the Goldbergites, as it were — to whom he may point as evidence of his successful persuasion?
  • To which “good liberal argument” do we need to be exposed? Because the very fact that an argument is liberal would seem to me sufficient evidence that it is wrong, and so I’m having trouble with the concept of arguments that are both liberal and “good.”

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding Jonah’s argument. Maybe I’m just a huckster “stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal.” However, Goldberg seems to be on more solid ground here:

To listen to many grassroots conservatives, the GOP establishment is a cabal of weak-kneed sellouts who regularly light votive candles to a poster of liberal Republican icon Nelson Rockefeller.
This is not only not true, it’s a destructive myth. . . .
It’s not that the GOP isn’t conservative enough, it’s that it isn’t tactically smart or persuasive enough to move the rest of the nation in a more conservative direction.

Because Goldberg is insufficiently explicit — he won’t name the “hucksters” — it is only by inference that we may deduce that this is a reference to the embarrassingly ineffective “Dump Boehner” movement that sought to unseat the Republican Speaker of the House. And if that’s the case, I agree: Boehner and the House GOP aren’t the problem. The real problem is the gross ineptitude of Senate Republicans, whose warped political judgment was manifested in the May 2009 decision of NRSC Chairman John Cornyn to back Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio, and which has been further evidenced in their multiple blunders of the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. But I digress . . .

While Goldberg’s vague jab at “hucksters” is likely aimed at those who organized the “Dump Boehner” movement, perhaps it is also retroactive excuse-making for National Review‘s Romney bandwagon trip that so disturbed me last January in New Hampshire. The unwillingness of the NR crowd to consider Santorum as a viable alternative to Romney bugged me then, and it still bugs me now.

Look at the exit polls: In Ohio, Romney got only 81% of the conservative vote, while Obama got 88% of the liberal vote. Thirty-five percent of Ohio voters called themselves conservative, as compared to 22% who identified as liberal. If Romney had gotten a larger share of the conservative vote, he would have won Ohio. Now, here are the truly frightening numbers: Obama got 44% of the Catholic vote in Ohio, and 29% of the evangelical (or “born again”) Protestant vote.

Is Jonah Goldberg willing to admit what seems obvious to me, namely that nominating a moderate Mormon contributed to the weakening of GOP support among conservative Christians? Isn’t it possible that an adamantly pro-life Catholic would have done better?

Understand that this isn’t an argument about “purity.” It’s an argument about competence: How do you win in politics?

The fact that the Romney campaign failed to win a sufficient share of conservative voters cannot be blamed on “hucksters.”

Scapegoating and blame-shifting are not attributes of responsible leadership, and if National Review claims to be leading a movement, shouldn’t the recent electoral catastrophe cause them to reflect on their own role in this defeat?

Losing makes me angry. It enrages me. Defeat is a humiliation that insults my sense of personal honor. And what I’m hearing from Jonah Goldberg and his National Review colleagues does not convey a similar feeling of outrage. They have been beaten, embarrassed and publicly shamed, and yet they don’t seem even slightly bothered by their current status as ineffectual laughingstocks, objects of scorn and ridicule.

Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you . . . a loser.

The National Review Institute Summit will convene Jan. 25 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC., and while I deny any intention to stir up rage, paranoia and so forth, I sure hope some pissed-off conservatives will show up and ask tough questions of those who claim to be the rightful heirs of Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan.

Oh — did I mention Joe Scarborough will be there?

 


Ed Said Nix Flick: Odd ‘Squad’ Cop Flop, Mugs Thugs With Lame Gang Bang-Bang

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Ed Morrisey pans the new movie Gangster Squad as an all-star ripoff:

Contrast this with The Untouchables, which I think is overrated but at least addressed the moral issue of crossing the line between law enforcement and thuggery.  For that matter, skip The Untouchables and watch the infinitely superior L.A. Confidential , which dealt with the same issues in nearly the same time and place — but put the thugs in the right moral position, and managed to get the Cohen story more accurately than this movie did even as a subplot.

L.A. Confidential is one of the few movies of recent years to come close to capturing the film noir feel, and especially the moral tension that Morrissey finds woefully missing in Gangster Squad.

The classic film noir set-up requires a flawed protagonist who finds himself trapped in a situation where right and wrong are not clear, where sinister individuals are trying to deceive him, and he must rely on his wits to survive. Also, there is usually a dame involved in the problem.

The 1947 noir classic Out of the Past (Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Jane Greer) was successfully re-made in 1984 as Against All Odds (Jeff Bridges, James Woods, Rachel Ward), but it is otherwise difficult to find good recent examples of the genre.

Why was that particular sensibility so distinct to a certain period of time? It’s hard to explain, but notice this: The producers of Gangster Squad, while making a movie set in Hollywood during the same era of the late 1940s — and quite conscious of the visual elements of the noir style — neverthless can’t capture the moral element. Ed Morrissey observes:

This film does nothing but glorify violence, not just as stylish entertainment but also as the answer to crime and social problems.  It’s an almost-unending series of bullet eruptions that numbs much more than it excites. . . .
It’s not appropriate for children of any age, and I’d argue not really appropriate for anyone else, either.

Film noir is never just a shoot-’em-up. The danger of violence — a sense of menace — is very real in film noir, but the movie is not about violence.

 


New Year, New Awesomeness: Jimmie Is Ready for His Instalanche, Professor

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Jimmie Bise Jr. describes improvements to his Sundries Shack blog, including “a new webhost that will give me a lot more bandwidth so that the next time Glenn Reynolds wants to Instalanche me, my blog will withstand the traffic onslaught like Lieutenant Dan strapped to the main mast.”

Two words of advice, Jimmie: Dog sex.

2012 was all about elections and “issues.” 2013 . . . dog sex.

Messed-Up People Make Bad Choices in Disastrously Dysfunctional Relationships

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Instapundit had this headline:

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:
My Ex Posted “Revenge Porn” Photos Of Me.

OK, so this was intriguing, but the whole “revenge porn” theme was forgotten as soon as I started reading the article by the (obviously pseudonymous) “Rhoda Kelly”:

I started dating Rob toward the end of high school. He was five years my senior.

Whoa. Full stop. Isn’t this a gigantic red flag? I’m not saying that it is impossible for a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old to have positive romantic experience together, but it was like the first clue (besides the headline, of course) that this story wasn’t going to end happily ever after.

He added me on Myspace, and we talked online occasionally. Then, after hanging out in real life only a handful of times, he insisted that we become a couple.

See there? That’s three warning signs right away:

  1. Older guy dating teenager.
  2. Meeting via online social-networking.
  3. Guy insists on quick rush into “couple” status.

Just on the basis of that, I figure there’s not only something wrong with the guy, but there’s something wrong with this girl, too.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned. Maybe I don’t “get” the whole online-dating thing. But it seems to me that, unless the girl was of the lonely/desperate misfit/oddball type, she’d be meeting guys through the regular real-life routines — a guy from school, someone she met through an after-school job, “friend of a friend,” whatever. When somebody asks, How did you meet your boyfriend? and your answer is, He added me on Myspace, excuse me for thinking there’s something wrong with you. So I keep reading and find out, yeah, my hunch was right:

I liked him. He played guitar in a punk band and was a gifted graphic designer. He was quiet and cynical, but sweet to me.
Fast-forward three years, after the initial sweetness diluted considerably, and what was left was a controlling, territorial, sardonic, and deeply troubled man who I knew I had to leave, but who by then was like an extension of me. We both struggled with psychological disorders: I was diagnosed with major depression when I was nineteen, and he would have such severe depressive episodes that he couldn’t get out of bed to go to work many days. Or he’d stay awake for two weeks straight because of his recurring nightmares about being abducted by aliens. Once, believing me to be an alien, he lay in my bed sobbing uncontrollably. Later, I looked up alien-abduction dreams and found that many studies pointed to childhood sexual abuse as a cause; after we broke up, he told me that he had in fact been molested as a child.

OK, you can go read the whole thing, and you’ll eventually get to the part where she gets drunk and lets him take a video of them having sex,  then finds out he’s posted it online as an act of revenge after they broke up, but that’s not what the story is really about.

What the story is really about is a vulnerable misfit/oddball chick who has trouble attracting a boyfriend in her real-life environment, and instead hooks up with some weirdo she meets online.

Insufficiently aware of her own vulnerability, and apparently incapable of recognizing that Mr. Controlling Older Guy She Met Online might have problematic “issues” of his own, Little Miss Oddball is therefore shocked to find that this leads to a Harmful Relationship That Ends Badly.

The “revenge porn” thing may be the hook that sells the story, but more important is the lesson about How Not to Find Healthy Relationships.

If you’re in that lonely/desperate situation where you’re willing to accept “He added me on Myspace” as an invitation to romance . . .

Do I even have to finish that sentence to explain why it’s a signal that you might be vulnerable to a bad relationship?

Seventeen-year-old girls aren’t always good judges of character. This is why, in ancient days of yore (i.e., when I was a kid), parents made it their business to keep an eye on their 17-year-old daughters. And the default parental position was, Keep Away From My Daughter, Creep.

Lots of bad things happen to people who stray from the wise ways of the ancient days of yore, and being victimized by “revenge porn” is certainly one possibility. All things considered, though, “Rhoda Kelly” should be thankful she’s alive to tell her story. A lot of stories like hers end up with headlines like, “Woman Slain by Obsessive Stalker Ex-Boyfriend.”