Category: American Spectator

The American Spectator Folds Like A Cheap Tent, And Other Signs Of The End Times

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— compiled by Wombat-socho


One of the more disagreeable things I saw on Facebook this week (and, having a number of acquaintances who report crap from ThinkProgress and similar founts of stupidity, that’s saying something) was this post by Ken White at Popehat pointing out that the American Spectator had surrendered, horse and foot, to the Dread Pro Se Litigant And Alleged Pedophile Brett Kimberlin. My reaction, like Ken’s, boiled down to “WTF? You had the balls to play gadfly against the Clinton Administration, but caved to a petty jerk like this?” Well, that’s one less stream of alerts and fundraising e-mails to clutter my in-box. Semi-related: editors at Wikipedia are trying to flush The Federalist down the memory hole on account of their butthurt over Sean Davis’ exposure of their hero Neil DeGrasse Tyson as this decade’s Dan Rather.


On Wednesday, Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno announced that a division headquarters would be heading for Iraq to coordinate the efforts of the advisors, intel weenies, increased Embassy security forces and other ground troops sent to assist in the fight against the Islamic State. I could have sworn we were told there would be no boots on the ground. In related news, the family of the first female fighter pilot in the UAE disowned her Thursday after she took part in air strikes against IS forces in Syria. Oh, and that Khorasan group Obama was bragging about bombing earlier in the week? Didn’t actually exist. On the ground, Syrian Kurds in Kobane want weapons, not “humanitarian aid.”


Here at home, former Congressman Jim Traficant died of injuries from a tractor accident. You can tell he was a conservative Democrat by the kind of obituaries he’s getting from the Drive-By Media. In riot-torn Ferguson, the Justice Department has ordered police to take off bracelets indicating support for accused fellow officer Darren Wilson. The NYT is visibly hoping third-party candidates derail the GOP’s drive to retake the Senate this fall. In the recent outbreak of workplace violence in Oklahoma, it seems the suspect was canned for arguing in favor of stoning women, and that he was connected to both terrorist imam Anwar al-Awlaki and the Boston bomber’s mosque. But rest easy, there’s no connection to Islam here, right?


Speaking of boots on the ground, T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War‘s Kindle edition is on sale for $1.99. The early chapters dealing with America’s rapid demobilization after World War 2 and unreadiness for the Korean War seem especially pertinent these days, as Fate seems intent on dragging President Obama and the rest of us back to Iraq, kicking and screaming.


Why Would Brett Kimberlin Threaten to Sue the American Spectator?

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For publishing the truth:

Perhaps the most shocking element of Kimberlin’s 1978 bombing spree was that authorities believed it was an attempt to distract police investigating the murder of a 65-year-old grandmother, Julia Scyphers.
As [Joe] Gelarden reported in a 1981 [Indianapolis Star] article, Scyphers had become concerned about her daughter Sandra Barton’s involvement with Kimberlin, who had shown a “strange affection” for Sandra’s young daughter Debbie. The girl was 10 years old when 20-year-old Kimberlin met her in 1974, and Sandra permitted Debbie to accompany Kimberlin on vacation trips to Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. According to [Mark] Singer’s [1996] book [Citizen K], Kimberlin’s acquaintances recalled him introducing the preteen as “my girlfriend,” and the girl’s mother told a co-worker that Kimberlin was “grooming” Debbie to be his wife. Kimberlin’s interest in the little girl alarmed her grandmother. In the summer of 1978, Julia Scyphers arranged to have the girl and her older sister leave their mother’s home and move in with her, and when Kimberlin was unable to see his “girlfriend,” he reportedly threatened suicide. A few weeks later, Scyphers was shot dead in what investigators suspected was a murder-for-hire, and one of Kimberlin’s associates in the drug trade was identified as the shooter by Scyphers’ husband. But Fred Scyphers, the only eyewitness to the crime, died of a stroke shortly thereafter, and prosecutors dropped the murder case, which remains unresolved to this day.
Kimberlin was ultimately convicted in the bombing spree, yet has never admitted his guilt, instead claiming that he was framed by a “corrupt government.” . . .

You can (still) read the whole thing.





 



How Much Do You Hate Commies?

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Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Vietcong terrorist, February 1968.

Salon.com’s Jesse Myerson (@JAMyerson) says “misconceptions” about Communism are the real problem, although survivors who escaped Communist regimes might beg to disagree.

Personally, I think the main problem with Communism is that we haven’t shot enough evil lying Commie scum:

Five years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises predicted that the Soviet project was doomed to fail. In his classic work Socialism, Mises explained that the attempt to replace the market system with central economic planning could not succeed, because the planners could not possibly have the information necessary to make all the decisions which, in a market economy, are made by individuals whose needs and desires are reflected in prices: “The problem of economic calculation is the fundamental problem of Socialism.”
“Everything brought forward in favour of Socialism during the last hundred years,” Mises wrote in 1922, “in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make Socialism workable. …. Socialist writers may continue to publish books about the decay of Capitalism and the coming of the socialist millennium; they may paint the evils of Capitalism in lurid colours and contrast with them an enticing picture of the blessings of a socialist society; their writings may continue to impress the thoughtless — but all this cannot alter the fate of the socialist idea.”
Undeterred by Mises’ criticism, the Soviet Union spent the next seven decades proving his prediction correct. By the time the Communist utopia collapsed in bankruptcy and disgrace, it seemed that everyone with two eyes and a brain understood the lesson: The Marxist-Leninist project was a complete failure and, as historians documented in The Black Book of Communism, tens of millions of people had died for this mistake, deliberately starved or slaughtered by totalitarian Communist governments.
The persistence of Marxist-Leninist regimes in Pyongyang and Havana notwithstanding, socialism has been utterly discredited in exactly the way Mises prophesied in 1922. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator. It’s already a Memeorandum thread, linked by Instapundit and Patterico — thanks! — and to answer the question, “How much do you hate Commies?”

Probably not as much as you should.

 

 


Q.E.D.: @MaxBoot Is a Lying Swindler

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Daniel J. Flynn is a gentleman and a scholar and a fellow contributor at The American Spectator, which sure as hell has never paid either of us $2 a word — !!!! — the rate that Wall Street Journal editor Gary Rosen offered The Lying Swindler Max Boot to, in essence, re-write a column about football by Flynn that WSJ editors rejected.

Flynn has a new book out, The War on Football: Saving America’s Game. Flynn wished to promote his book and, of course, Gary Rosen and the editors of the Wall Street Journal were under no obligation to publish Flynn’s column. But once Flynn had submitted his column and they had rejected it, what the WSJ were certainly wrong in doing was to offer an exorbitant rate to Max Boot (two bucks a word? for an op-ed essay?) to write a piece derived from Flynn’s ideas.

Flynn has a column at The American Spectator telling his side of the story. As for Max Boot and Gary Rosen, their side of the story is the rationalization of thieves who have been caught red-handed.

Gary Rosen plotted this crime, and Max Boot signed his name to it.

To hell with Max Book and to hell with Gary Rosen. Here I paraphrase from Ken White’s memorable denunciation of Charles Carreon: Fuck Max Boot and Gary Rosen. They are vermin. They’re not forgivable. Let any good they have ever done be wiped out. Let their names be synonymous with dishonest swindling thievery. Selah.

I just blocked @MaxBoot on Twitter. Every honest man must.

 

 

UPDATE: Following up:

Every honest man must do this, or no one is safe from these thieves.

Dog and Man at Yale: Hugo Schwyzer Is Merely a Symptom, Not the Disease

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Did you know some Yale University students have had sex with animals? Three percent of Yale students in a “sensitivity training” workshop reported they had engaged in bestiality, so it’s taken us about 60 years to go from God and Man at Yale to Dog and Man at Yale.

This was one of the weird little facts I uncovered while trying to answer the question: How did Hugo Schwyzer get away with it so long?

Hugo Schwyzer is insane and is also a college professor, and one imagines his employer using this in a promotional campaign: “Pasadena City College: You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Teach Here, But It Helps!”
Professor Schwyzer’s madness suddenly burst forth as headline news this month after he first announced that he was quitting the Internet and told L.A. Weekly he had suffered a “mental breakdown.” But then the professor went on Twitter and began spewing out a series of bizarre confessions, admitting that he was off his medication. His weird online meltdown inspired concerns for Professor Schwyzer’s safety and he was hospitalized again. He told the Daily Beast that he had been to the psychiatric ward three times in the past month and had suicidal thoughts. He told a Daily Caller reporter that he had made a “serious” suicide attempt.
As spectacular as his manic disintegration was, there had been clear warning signs for years that Professor Schwyzer was a sex-crazed lunatic. However, the red flags of mental illness were evidently ignored by the administration of Pasadena City College (PCC) and Professor Schwyzer’s peers, perhaps because sex-crazed lunatics have become so commonplace in 21st-century academia. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

UPDATE: Did you hear about the University of Georgia professor who had sex with a student during a trip to Costa Rica?

The sex was consensual, the committee concluded, though both parties “were under the influence of alcohol and/or potentially behavior-altering medication,” according to their May 2 report to Adams.

What’s amazing about this story is not that Georgia taxpayers spent money to send a professor to the tropics for a drunken sex romp with a coed. No, what’s amazing is that the professor lost his tenure over this incident. “Academic freedom” is under siege!

 

Mediocrity Celebrated, Greatness Ignored

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And douchebags insufficiently denounced:

Liberal bias is not a matter of unfairness, but rather a matter of dishonesty — deliberately ignoring some facts, and misrepresenting other facts, in order to misinform the public by portraying to them a politically falsified view of events and personalities. If there were ever any honest person employed by the  New York Times (we stipulate the hypothetical), that person would have been obligated to quit Thursday morning, when the banner headline on the front page of the paper should have been: “ANDREW BREITBART WAS RIGHT.” (An appropriate subhead might be, “Anthony Weiner Is a Typically Dishonest Democrat Dirtbag.”) Cheating a great man out of his posthumous vindication is, however, just small change in the vast franchise of journalistic dishonesty of which the New York Times is the flagship enterprise. The fundamental falsehood of the whole Big Lie business is that Democrats are virtuous simply because they are Democrats, which is the only reason any fool ever could have thought a wretched human stain like Anthony Weiner worthy of admiration. . . . .

You can read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 


Mega-Dittos, @RushLimbaugh! Credit Where Credit Is Due and More Questions

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“So what you had here was a bureaucracy that was intent on making itself look good, and they were playing games with numbers.
“So real crimes would be committed by students, not just Trayvon, and rather than being categorized as such they were just pushed over here into another column on the spreadsheet that said ‘disciplinary actions.’ . . .
“The upshot is that criminal activity wasn’t punished.
“And so the perpetrators were never held to account, nor did they ever have to come to grips with the severity of their actions.”
— Rush Limbaugh, “The Left Throws a Temper Tantrum Over the Zimmerman Verdict”

When I heard that Rush Limbaugh had read my American Spectator article — “How a Miami School Crime Cover-Up Policy Led to Trayvon Martin’s Death” — on his radio show today, obviously credit was due to many others. It was Pamela Geller who called my attention to it Sunday and, in doing so, she mentioned that Andrea Shea King and Pat Dollard had been calling attention to it before. But the yeoman’s work in exposing this cover-up was done months ago by The Last Refuge blog.

What did I do? Well, I immediately recognized it as newsworthy. And, rather than just blogging it here, I realized The American Spectator would be ideal because everybody knows Rush Limbaugh reads The American Spectator. Could I have written the same article here, or at ViralRead? Yes, but I put it where I hoped Rush would see it.

So, I recognized it as legitimate news, and decided to write it where it would have the best chance of attracting high-profile attention, and then I wrote it as clearly as I could: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Part of the reason it was difficult to get that story across was that it wasn’t easy to explain. It’s a complex story and boiling it down to less than 700 words took me several hours, because I had to sort through a lot of stuff and double-check basic background facts. And here is the most important fact of the whole story:

TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NOT FROM SANFORD

The liberal media keep leaving that out, don’t they? And why do you think that is? Because if they told you he was from Miami Gardens, more than 240 miles from Sanford, then the media would have to explain why Trayvon was in Sanford the night of Feb. 26, 2012.

Sometimes, if you pull one thread of a story, the whole narrative unravels and this question — “Why was Trayvon in Sanford?” — is one that the liberal media don’t want to talk about.

This is how you know it’s probably the most important question of all.

Strange as it may seem (or not), the liberal media broke this story before George Zimmerman was ever arrested but never followed up. Frances Robles of the Miami Herald reported it on March 26, 2012: “Multiple suspensions paint complicated portrait of Trayvon Martin.”

And then . . . nothing. Even while Robles’ story triggered an internal investigation within the Miami-Dade Schools Police Department (MDSPD) that helped eventually to bring about the resignation of MDSPD Chief Charles Hurley, nobody else in the mainstream media thought Trayvon Martin’s school record relevant to the story.

Because they are a disgusting pack of cowardly liars, that’s why. Some of them were down for the left-wing agenda, and some just let themselves be mau-maued by the thug mob that was demanding George Zimmerman’s prosecution. In fact, the Miami Herald actually quoted leaders of the thug mob in its March 26, 2012, article:

“It’s completely irrelevant to what happened Feb. 26,” said attorney Benjamin Crump. “They never heard this, and don’t believe it’s true. If it were true, why wouldn’t they call the parents? Why wasn’t he arrested?”
Trayvon, who was a junior at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School, had never been arrested, police and the family have said.
“We think everybody is trying to demonize him,” Crump said. . . .
Trayvon’s parents viewed the new reports as an orchestrated campaign to demonize their son as a “junkie and thief,” a routine occurrence in such cases, the Rev. Al Sharpton said at an afternoon press conference. Zimmerman, Sharpton said, had no way of knowing about Trayvon’s school record — “because he didn’t interview him before he shot him.”
“The only thing that’s relevant is what Zimmerman knew,” Sharpton said. “Let’s not play this double standard of trying to damage who is dead and sanitize who is the cause of the death.”
Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, said her son never had any problems with gangs or the police. In fact, she said, when she transferred him out of Carol City High School to be closer to home, the school wanted him to stay at Carol City because they liked him and he was a good student.
“They killed my son, and now they are trying to kill his reputation,” Fulton said.

Let’s leave aside for now this accusation that the only reason anyone would care about Trayvon Martin’s school disciplinary records was because they wanted to “demonize” the dead teenager and “kill his reputation.” Instead, let me call your attention to this: Sybrina Fulton says “she transferred him out of Carol City High School to be closer to home,” but Sybrina Fulton lived near Ben Franklin Park, and it doesn’t take a genius to check Google Maps: Carol City High School is at 3301 Miami Gardens Dr, Miami Gardens, FL — 7.4 miles from Ben Franklin Park — while Krop High School  is at 1410 County Line Rd, Ives Estates, FL, 8.1 miles from Ben Franklin Park.

Whatever reason Trayvon transferred from Carol City High to Krop High, being “closer to home” doesn’t really seem to explain it. Maybe there’s some other explanation that I don’t understand, but we know that Trayvon was suspended three times from Krop High. It might be interesting to know more about Trayvon’s years at Carol City High, besides his mother’s claim that “the school wanted him to stay at Carol City because they liked him and he was a good student.”

I’m just sayin’ . . .

You never know the answer to a question you never ask, and after this one story by Frances Robles in the Miami Herald, it seems that the media stopped asking questions about Trayvon. But that one article by Frances Robles pulled the thread that unraveled an important story, and for a long time, the only people who kept digging on that story were the bloggers at The Last Refuge.

MDSPD Chief Charles Hurley was suppressing the truth about the crime problem within the Miami-Dade school system, and this was why Trayvon Martin never got arrested for his crimes. Instead, he got suspended from school, and I repeat:

TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NOT FROM SANFORD

The reason Trayvon was in Sanford, Florida, more than 240 miles north of his home in Miami-Dade County, was that he had been suspended from school, and was staying in a townhouse community known as The Retreat at Twin Lakes. Trayvon was staying there with Brandy Green, who was dating Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin, which brings us to another story the media doesn’t want to report.

Trayvon Martin comes from what used to be called “a broken home,” back in the days when most Americans got married and stayed married, so that kids had a Mom and a Dad and brothers and sisters — y’know, what we used to call a “family” once upon a time — instead of a kaleidoscopic arrangement of stepparents and half-siblings, Baby Daddies and Mama’s New Boyfriend and so forth. Call me old-fashioned, if you will, but I tend to think it might be relevant when we learn that a Troubled Youth comes from a Broken Home.

Well, let’s not be judgmental. And while we’re not being judgmental, say the mainstream media, let’s just not even mention these facts, because we don’t want to demonize anyone, see?

Start asking questions about Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin and Brandy Green — hater! — and you have no idea what you might find because, quite frankly, nobody in the national media seems to have asked any questions about these people. This is why, for example, you may not know that there was a stepmother, Alicia Stanley, who says she practically raised Trayvon Martin for 14 years before she got shoved aside for Tracy Martin’s new girlfriend, Brandy Green.

How many other wives or girlfriends has Trayvon’s father had? How many brothers and sisters and half-brothers and half-sisters and step-brothers and step-sisters did Trayvon have?

Damned if I know the answer to those questions, because it seems like nobody covering this story ever asked any questions like that. This kind of explains why I didn’t know until Sunday:

TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NOT FROM SANFORD

Because if the media had made a point of mentioning that, people might wonder why a kid from Miami-Dade County got shot dead in Sanford, more than 240 miles away. And the weird thing about it is, before this turned into the Murder Trial of the Century, there were people who actually reported some of these facts:

The night his son was killed, [Tracy] Martin, 45, was out to dinner with his fiancée, Brandy Green. Martin, who was divorced from Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, in 1999, is a truck driver from Miami who has a long-distance relationship with Green, a resident of the Retreat at Twin Lakes subdivision in Sanford where Zimmerman also lived.
Martin would visit Green on weekends, making the four-hour drive to the Orlando suburb of Sanford. In late February he was able to bring his son because Trayvon, a junior, was serving a 10-day suspension from Miami’s Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School. He’d been caught with a plastic baggie that contained traces of marijuana.

That article by Reuters reporter Daniel Trotta was published April 3, 2012, and  it included important facts that subsequently disappeared from The Narrative of this story, which is what tends to happen to facts that don’t fit The Narrative. Once the liberal media decide to turn what had been strictly a local crime story into a politicized Morality Tale, some facts are more equal than others.

So “a truck driver from Miami” was in “a long-distance relationship” with “his fiancée, Brandy Green,” and there was this 17-year-old son whose mother had been divorced by the truck driver 13 years earlier. While the two lovebirds Tracy and Brandy were out to dinner, Trayvon walked to the store for Skittles and Arizona Tea, and got shot to death by Zimmerman, who was the captain of the neighborhood watch that had been formed in this community a year earlier in response to a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood.

And in October 2011, six months before he was killed, Trayvon had been caught at school in Miami-Dade County with jewelry coincidentally matching the description of items stolen in the burglary of a house about a half block from school. But this wasn’t treated as a crime, because MDSPD Chief Charles Hurley wanted to reduce the number of reported crimes in the school system, see? This evidence was therefore listed as “found items” and the Miami police investigating the burglary didn’t even know this evidence existed, because nobody charged Trayvon Martin with a crime. Instead, it was just a disciplinary infraction and he was suspended from school not for suspicion of theft, but for the act of vandalism (“mischief”) that had led the school police officer to search Travvon’s backpack.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along . . .

Sometime in the past year, the media decided to join this cover-up, evidently agreeing with Al Sharpton that Trayvon Martin’s background was irrelevant to The Narrative, in the same way it was irrelevant that Trayvon was three or four inches taller than George Zimmerman, who said he shot Trayvon in self-defense.

Never mind that, and never mind that George Zimmerman’s mother is Peruvian. Never mind those who knew Zimmerman and said he wasn’t a racist — none of that fits The Narrative, and if you so much as mention any of these irrelevant facts . . . RAAAAACIST!

This explains why I never knew until Sunday that Trayvon Martin was not from Sanford, and why people who have been following this story for months had never heard of MDSPD Chief Charles Hurley. So they can be excused for not realizing that when Chief Hurley started an internal affairs investigation, trying to find out who leaked the facts to the Miami Herald, a series of dominoes began to topple, leading eventually to Chief Hurley’s resignation in February.

No, you never knew about that, even though The Last Refuge had been trying to call attention to it, because the media decided that this is a story about civil rights and racism: Trayvon Martin was killed because he was black, and a half-Peruvian neighborhood watch captain was a fitting symbol of White Racism and Social Injustice, and facts that did not support The Narrative were irrelevant.

Meanwhile — more facts nobody is supposed to mention — President Obama last August signed an executive order that would, in effect, “mandate racial discipline quotas,” so that the methods employed by Chief Hurley are now likely to become nationwide policy.

What could possibly go wrong?

Trayvon’s father divorced Trayvon’s mother when Trayvon was 4. The Miami-Dade schools didn’t want to report Trayvon’s crimes as crimes. So instead Trayvon was suspended from school at age 17, which was why he was in Sanford on the night of Feb. 26, 2012, while Trayvon’s father went out to dinner with Brandy Green.

What could possibly go wrong?

But never mind any of that. Some facts are more equal than others, and Our Moral Superiors in charge of The Narrative know what’s best.

Thanks for the shout-out, Rush. There are some people who need to demonized, and they’re called “liberals.”

 

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.