Category: United States

Groups the States

North! To Alaska!

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This afternoon, my wife and I will be flying the friendly skies, first to Dallas for a three-hour layover before heading to Anchorage. I’d told y’all about this trip earlier, when I thought we’d be leaving last week, but I was mistaken about the anticipated travel date.

Our Army son is stationed there with the newly formed 11th Airborne Division, developing America’s arctic warfare capacity. More importantly — at least for me — is that his wife recently gave birth to our newest granddaughter, little Juniper. So we’ll be spending a couple of weeks with little Juniper (and her big sister Eliza, of course).

While looking forward to seeing the kids, I’m dreading the long flights, and then there’s the matter of the time shift. We arrive in Anchorage at 11 p.m. local time, which is 3 a.m. Eastern, and I’m sure I’ll be disoriented by this experience: Working in the wee hours (locally) to get my dayjob work done by morning times on the East Coast, and did I mention it’s “Midnight Sun” season in Alaska? Oh, and there’s also the weather: High temperature tomorrow in Anchorage will be 59°F, with rain, but later in the week, it will get up to a sunny 62°F. Joy, joy . . .

John Wayne would never complain about the weather, of course. So I’ll endure my arctic excursion with stoic resolve, and perhaps I won’t even notice the conditions while I’m out stalking moose and bears with a Bowie knife . . . No, wait, that’s not on the agenda. Grandpa’s too old to be doing the Wilderness Survival thing. However, I did text my son to ask him to find me some kind of tavern or restaurant where I could blog with that “authentic Alaska” vibe — exposed wooden beams, moose head mounted on the wall, etc. He replied, “Every brew pub here, basically.”

We’re talking tax-deductible business expenses, see? Snap a few photos with my phone, post it under an Anchorage dateline, and it’s travel journalism. Save the receipts for the IRS, and no questions asked.

My wife just asked me, “Are you ready?”

“Honey, we don’t leave for another three hours.”

One of the secrets to a successful marriage is balance — I’m carefree and spontaneous; my wife is responsible and conscientious. So when it comes to a trip like this, I leave all the worrying to her. Why should both of us be stressed out? As they say in Alaska, “Hakuna matata.”

OK, that’s not authentic Alaskan culture, but the IRS isn’t going to notice the difference when I show them the receipts for all those meals and, uh, beverages at brew pubs in Anchorage — legitimate business expenses!

“Besides which, your honor” — here I’m imagining my testimony in a federal trial — “my son was serving his country in Alaska, and maintaining the morale of our troops is crucial to America’s combat readiness. So it was in our national interest that Bob and I had the grilled trout dinner and a few beverages. Don’t you love America?”

Just doing my patriotic duty, you see. So as I get ready to roll, I remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

Who They Think We Are

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The editor of Iowa’s Quad Cities Times has apologized for publishing the cartoon above, after being called out on Twitter by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who lamented the “shameful” cartoon and said: “It’s sad that this is how the MSM views Republicans. I’ve met with grassroots conservatives across America & never *once* experienced the kind of bigotry that I regularly see from the Left.”

Several commentators have described the cartoon as “racist,” but that’s not really the point. Rather, it is the libelous attribution of hateful bigotry to Republicans which is so offensive. What this illustrates is the assumption of liberals that they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, especially in regard to racial issues, but really on every subject imaginable — economic policy, climate change, gay rights, you name it. “Hate” is now defined as disagreeing with liberals.

Thomas Sowell’s 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy remains the definitive analysis of the psychology of liberalism, and if you haven’t read it yet, what the hell are you waiting for? There is a tremendous irony, by the way, in my having been branded a “white supremacist” by the SPLC, in that it was Sowell’s book that really opened my eyes to one of the false premises that informs liberal beliefs about race, i.e., that white “racism” is to blame for every ill suffered by black people. Sowell doesn’t address this specifically in The Vision of the Anointed, although he has elsewhere. Rather, one sees the point in Sowell’s criticism of the liberal “anointed” as assuming that their own good intentions are sufficient to justify any policy, from which they derive the belief that the opponents of their policies (the “benighted”) must be motivated by bad intentions. When liberals advocate some policy intended to help the homeless, for example, their rhetoric will seldom address the questions about the efficacy or necessity of the specific policy; rather, liberals will routinely portray themselves as caring about the homeless, while accusing opponents of selfish greed or cruel indifference to the plight of the homeless who, as Sowell observes, function as “mascots” for the liberal crusade.

In this way, the “anointed” liberals transform every policy question into a test of moral virtue, attributing malicious motives to anyone who fails to support the liberal agenda. They are intelligent and educated; you are stupid and ignorant. They are generous; you are greedy. And, as always, liberals conceive of themselves as the enlightened benefactors of oppressed racial minorities, while their opponents are hateful racists. In other words, the disagreement is not about the pros and cons of any particular policy, but rather about giving the anointed another opportunity to display their moral superiority, hence Sowell’s subtitle, “Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.”

What I deduced from Sowell’s argument is this: It doesn’t really matter what your opinion is about race, in terms of whether any particular policy helps or hurts black people (or Hispanics, etc.). And as Sowell has demonstrated in several of his books, including Discrimination and Disparities, “racism” (however you may define it) is simply insufficient as an explanation for the problems affecting black Americans. Political arguments ought to be about policy, not mere sentiment, and policies ought to be evaluated with the kind of rigorous inquiry that includes examination of alternatives, including the alternative of doing nothing. Liberals are always running around pointing to some kind of “crisis,” insisting that we must do something about whatever problem they’re focused on, and whatever this something may be, it almost always involves more taxation, regulation and/or deficit spending.

Something else: Liberals never acknowledge that the problem they’re calling a “crisis” today may have been caused by the “solutions” they imposed decades earlier to address some previous “crisis.” If you ever feel neglected because you haven’t been called “racist” lately, try pointing out that many (perhaps most) of the problems now afflicting black America may be direct consequences of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Because it is seen as the signal victory of the civil-rights movement, the details of the 1964 bill — the final bill was 18,000 words long — are considered to be beyond criticism. Yet the bill was such a vast expansion of government authority, and subjected so many areas of life to supervision of federal courts, that its potential consequences were nearly infinite in scope.

Sen. Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 act, specifically citing Title II and Title VII as unconstitutional, and likely to lead to the government mandating racial quotas in employment decisions. Beyond the specific problems with the bill, anyone can see with the benefit of hindsight that 1964 marks a dividing line — a historical fulcrum — in terms of race relations and the situation of black people in urban areas affected by “white flight.” Whether or not any of the opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 predicted every harmful consequence of that legislation is beside the point. Because it represented The Vision of the Anointed — the good intentions of its sponsors — the possibility that the bill in some ways hurt black Americans is never even considered. To suggest that some of the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act need to be repealed or revised is to invite denunciation as a crypto-Nazi, as if you were advocating a return to Jim Crow segregation or worse. Emotion rules the day.

Thus we return to Vivek Ramaswamy and this insulting cartoon for which the Quad Cities Times was forced to apologize. Readers will recall how, at CPAC this year, I praised Ramaswamy as “an outspoken and articulate critic of the religion of ‘Wokeism,’ but more than that . . . an enthusiastic proponent of American exceptionalism.” And I suppose that any conservative who has paid attention to Ramaswamy feels the same way, whether or not they support his presidential campaign. Conservatives still believe America is, and always should be, the land of opportunity, where anyone willing to work hard can have a shot at the American Dream, and we are sick and tired of how Democrats depict America as a wicked oppressor, crammed full of helpless victims.

Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t buying any of this victimhood narrative, and conservatives applaud him for standing up in defense of a pro-America, pro-liberty worldview. Yet liberals evidently think GOP voters would respond to Ramaswamy’s message by shouting, “Get me a Slushee, Apu!”

Because liberals are anointed, and think we are benighted.

There is so much cause for discouragement about America’s future. And yet Vivek Ramaswamy dares to express hope. Were I asked to help write his speeches, I’d encourage him to quote a great American:

“My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

Deo vindice.



 

 

The Wonderful Joys of ‘Progress’

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“In our day, innovations march with so rapid a stride that they quite take away one’s breath. The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be to-morrow the accomplished fact.”
— R.L. Dabney, 1871

The person now known as Stacie Marie Laughton went by the name Barry Charles Laughton, Jr., when he was convicted in 2008 of credit card fraud. At the time, Laughton was living with his wife Lisa in Laconia, N.H. After serving four months of a 12-month sentence, Laughton evidently realized he was actually “she,” and also, a Democrat.

Innovations were indeed marching with a rapid stride, so that by 2012, Laughton had gone from the jailhouse to the statehouse, winning election as a state representative, New Hampshire’s first transgender lawmaker.

A glowing profile at Huffington Post quoted Laughton: “My hope is that now maybe we’ll see more people in the community running, maybe for alderman. . . . I want the community to feel inspired.” Unfortunately for him/“her,” Laughton had forgotten to consult the election laws of the state for which he/“she” proposed to make laws. Under New Hampshire law, a person convicted of a felony must complete their entire sentence (including probation, the payment of restitution, etc.) before being eligible to hold office, and Barry/“Stacie” had not done this. Perhaps he/“she” believed that the change of identity might conceal his/“her” criminal past, but a local newspaper reported the facts, and Laughton was forced to resign before taking office. Less than three years later, Laughton made headlines again — not in a good way:

Stacie Laughton, the state’s first openly transgender legislator, was arrested [March 12, 2015] by Nashua police after saying she is the person responsible for calling in a hoax bomb threat at a local hospital.
Laughton, who was elected to the House of Representatives and then withdrew her candidacy days later, turned herself in . . . on a warrant for the Feb. 27 incident after spending two weeks receiving treatment at a Vermont hospital for bipolar disorder.
Police charged her with a felony count of falsely reporting an explosive.
“I have had a mental illness my whole life, and I guess this was my worst break with it. I was untreated for a long time, and I didn’t have medication,” Laughton told the New Hampshire Union Leader, adding she is very remorseful for her actions.
Laughton said she was not in the right frame of mind when she called in a bomb threat to Southern New Hampshire Medical Center around 8:30 a.m. on Feb. 27. Laughton, who also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, described feelings of extreme impulsivity when she made the phone call.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, and it was totally out of character for me. I have put a lot behind me, and I never thought I would do this in a million years,” she said.
Laughton is expected to be charged with a felony for calling in a fake bomb threat, which prompted a systematic search of the hospital by local authorities and hospital security.
She fully admitted her involvement to police, who opted not to formally charge her until her stay at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental health and addiction treatment facility in Vermont, was complete. Laughton maintains that she was not under the influence of anything at the time of the incident, says she is cooperating with police and is grateful that they allowed her to seek medical assistance before her arrest. . . .
“I never thought I would see the inside of a police station again,” Laughton said on Thursday before turning herself in. “I am extremely remorseful. I have been crying frequently, and I wish I had never done it.”

So, in addition to being transgender, Laughton is also bipolar and suffers from PTSD. “I have had a mental illness my whole life” — well, can’t all Democrats say the same thing? At any rate, “a judge reduced the charge to a misdemeanor and sentenced her to a six-month suspended jail term,” because Democrats never suffer serious consequences for their crimes. Just ask Hunter Biden. You might think the voters of New Hampshire would have had enough of Laughton, but you would be wrong. Despite the fact that he/“she” is mentally ill and has a criminal record, Laughton was elected to the state legislature again in 2020.

You may be shocked (but probably not) to learn that this was not the end of Laughton’s criminal career. In 2021, while serving in the legislature, Laughton was once again arrested for criminal charges:

State Rep. Stacie Laughton (D-Nashua) was arrested [July 27, 2021] on seven counts of penalty for false information, all misdemeanors. Police accuse Laughton of misuse of the state’s 911 texting system.
“From May 2021 to July 2021, officers from the Nashua Police Department’s Uniform Field Operations Bureau responded to (an apartment on) Elm Street on several occasions due to text messages being sent to the state of New Hampshire E-911 center from a telephone number associated with Laughton,” Capt. Matthew DiFava of the bureau. “On each occasion, it was determined there was no emergency by officers.”
After the seventh incident, police applied for an arrest warrant against Laughton, which was approved.
“This investigation is still ongoing and additional charges are expected,” DiFava added.

Despite this, Laughton was re-elected to the legislature in 2022, but a few weeks after election day, he/“she” was arrested on new charges:

State Rep. Stacie Marie Laughton, 38, was arrested by Nashua police on [Nov. 12, 2022] on a warrant out of Hudson on a violation of stalking order charge. She is being held in the Valley Street Jail in Manchester.
Limited information is available about the case. But Lt. Roger Lamarche, the second shift commander of the Hudson Police Department, confirmed the arrest and charge. Laughton was accused by police of communicating with the victim on social media on Nov. 8.
The protective order was filed against Laughton, who also serves as a city selectman, on July 25.
According to Lamarche, this was not the first time Laughton was arrested on charges for communicating with the victim. She was accused of stalking and harassment in late August and was arrested in early September.

Wouldn’t it appear that Laughton is a habitual offender? And given Laughton’s admission of having “mental illness my whole life,” wouldn’t you think the taxpayers of New Hampshire would be better served by sending Laughton to a state mental hospital, rather than to the state legislature? And now there’s more news about Laughton:

The arrest Thursday of a former state representative from Derry, New Hampshire, is connected to a woman from Hudson who is accused of taking explicit photos of children in her care at a child care facility in Massachusetts, sources told News 9 Investigates.
Sources did not explain the exact connection between Lindsay Groves, 38, of Hudson, and Stacie Laughton, 39, of Derry.
Groves is facing state charges in New Hampshire and federal charges in Massachusetts. She is in preventative detention after she waived her arraignment in Nashua.
Groves is charged in New Hampshire with four counts of possession of child sex abuse images. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts is also charging her with one count of sexual exploitation of children and one count of distribution of child pornography.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Groves worked at Creative Minds Early Learning Center in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, where she allegedly used the children’s bathroom breaks to take nude photos of them in a private bathroom and text them to a person she was in a relationship with.
The pictures included four photos of children who appear to be 3 to 5 years old.
Officials said there were more than 2,500 text messages sent between Groves and a former partner talking about transferring the photos.
Groves wasn’t in the New Hampshire courtroom as she waived her arraignment, and the prosecution and defense agreed that she be held without bail. Groves’ parents were in the courtroom in Nashua and said she’s innocent. . . .
Groves is scheduled to be back in court in New Hampshire on Aug 30. She will appear in federal court in Boston on a future date.
Nashua police on Thursday evening announced the arrest of Laughton on four counts of distribution of child sexual abuse images.
Investigators said they spoke to people on Tuesday who indicated Laughton had distributed sexually explicit images of children.
Laughton was arrested on Thursday and was expected to appear in court on Friday for an arraignment.

Documents in the federal case against Groves do not identify Laughton, but you can read between the lines:

An employee of a Tyngsboro day care faces federal child exploitation and pornography charges after she allegedly took nude photos of children at the day care and then shared the images with a person she had previously been in an intimate relationship with. . . .
The alleged photographs were taken between May 2022 and June of this year.
An affidavit filed in federal court by a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security states the investigation began on June 20, when the Nashua Police Department was contacted about a woman who was allegedly showing pornographic images of children to other adults.
According to the affidavit, the woman allegedly disclosed to one adult that she had obtained the images from Groves.
The affidavit states on June 20, the Nashua Police interviewed the woman, who is not identified in the charging documents. The woman confirmed she had formerly been in an intimate relationship with Groves and allegedly admitted that Groves had sent her sexually explicit images of children.
The following morning, police executed a search warrant at Groves’ home in Hudson. At that time, the affidavit states Groves told police that her former intimate partner had requested she take photos of nude children at the day care for her “sexual gratification.”

Wow, this is bad — even by Democrat standards.

Does the community feel “inspired” yet?



 

 

Crazy People Are Dangerous

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James Lanier (left); Express Mini Mart (right)

Everyone agrees that the late James Windale Lanier had “been dealing with mental health issues,” as WCTI-TV put it. But despite the relevance of this information to Lanier’s untimely demise earlier this year, I’ve been unable to find any media account that specifies how these “issues” had been diagnosed or treated. Because I’m not a licensed clinician and don’t have a copy of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders handy, I should avoid speculation about Lanier’s mental condition on the evening of Feb. 24. However, based on the report of his behavior, I think it fair to conclude that he was daft, demented, deranged, bonkers, berserk, off his rocker, nuttier than a Snickers bar, a few fries short of a Happy Meal, and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

You see, the late James Lanier was naked at the Express Mini Mart in Wallace, North Carolina, on the evening in question. A clerk at the convenience store called 911 at 10:56 p.m. to report that Lanier was naked, spitting on customers, and trying to start a fight. Three minutes later, the first cop arrived on the scene, and immediately confronted Lanier. Less than 30 seconds after the officer exited his patrol car, Lanier struck him. The officer retreated, repeatedly yelling “get back” at Lanier, who nevertheless advanced on the officer. The officer deployed his taser, but it had no apparent effect. Then the officer pulled his pistol and fired three shots, one of which fatally struck Lanier.

All of this information is derived from a 14-page statement issued last month by District Attorney Ernie Lanier, whose report noted that the situation “rapidly escalated,” and that less than a minute transpired between the officer exiting his patrol car and the fatal shot being fired. Lee said that the officer’s actions were justified, based on the threat posed by Lanier’s behavior. No charges will be filed.

Of course, the family demands answers:

Attorney Ben Crump was in Wallace on Wednesday for a press conference where he demanded the release of video footage in the death of James Lanier.
Crump was joined by members of the victim’s family along with additional attorneys, members of the Duplin County NAACP and others who spoke and kept the chant of “release the video.”
“Don’t say no more, release the video, don’t say no more, release the video,” Crump said as others joined in his chant.
Crump, a nationally renowned civil rights and personal injury attorney, and the others spoke at Adoram Baptist Church in Wallace during the press conference. Together, they demanded the release of footage in the death of Lanier, an unarmed Black man who was shot and killed outside the Express Mini Market at 814 N. Norwood St. around 11 p.m. on Feb. 24. . . .
“Just understand this thing. I’m trying to say we are trying to save our race and all this stuff. The officer incited race when he shot and killed a black man with a mental health crisis,” Crump said. . . .
“James should be with us,” said Dawn Blagrove, an attorney with Emancipate NC. “And we’re not asking that general had been treated with special care. We’re just asking that he be treated with the same care.”
Family members said they are pushing for the video footage to be made public so people can make their own opinions on the incident.
“I need somebody to help me find justification for them shooting my son, so I want everybody to watch the video so they can show me what I see,” said James Lanier Sr., the father.
Meanwhile, Crump is standing beside the family, fighting for justice.

Oh, he’s “fighting for justice,” is he? Isn’t it more likely that Crump is fighting for a large payoff from the city, so he can collect his lucrative fee as attorney for the Lanier family? It seems to me that this demand for releasing the video (both from surveillance cameras at the store and from the body-worn cameras of the officers on the scene) reflects a belief on the part of Crump that the video would help incite the kind of destructive race riots mostly peaceful protests that would give the city an incentive to make a wrongful death settlement, despite the DA’s finding that the officer acted legally during the incident. And to point out a common factor this incident shares with lots of similar incidents, why is it that no reporter who does these “Family Demands Answers” stories ever asks: “Why didn’t you do something about your nutjob kid before he got shot by the cops?” I mean, how is it that Lanier’s family bears no responsibility for him ending up naked at the Express Mini Mart that night?

Wouldn’t it have been better for him to be strapped into a straitjacket, locked in a padded cell and dosed with Thorazine, than to let his mental illness — whatever the diagnosis was — escalate until he ended up in what seems to have been a suicide-by-cop situation? Because you’ve got to be far gone down the road to Crazytown not to realize that when a cop points a gun at you and yells, “back up,” maybe you should back the fuck up.

Oh, the local police chief has thoughts:

Wallace Police Chief James Crayton came to Wednesday’s press conference to listen to what the community had to say.
“Race had absolutely nothing to do with this,” Crayton said. “The police officer was not white. If and when the superior court judge orders that release, we’ll be happy to release it.”

Does it strike you that Chief Crayton is demonstrating the serenity of a Christian holding four aces? He’s seen the video. He’s not afraid of anything. That speaks volumes about this case.

Mental illness is a serious problem in our society, and nobody wants to see people die this way. As a treatment for acute psychiatric disorders, 124 grains of lead traveling at 1,000 feet per second is perhaps not the preferred medication, but it usually provides a permanent cure.

Remember: Crazy People Are Dangerous.



 

 

Do Ghouls and Witches Count for ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ at Harvard?

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Clockwise from top left: Cedric Lodge, Jeremy Pauley, Katrina Maclean

The manager of the morgue at Harvard Medical School somehow got involved with a macabre collection of death-obsessed weirdos, and now all of them are facing multiple felony charges:

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that Cedric Lodge, age 55, of Goffstown, New Hampshire, Katrina Maclean, age 44, of Salem, Massachusetts, Joshua Taylor, age 46, of West Lawn, Pennsylvania, Denise Lodge, age 63, of Goffstown, New Hampshire, and Mathew Lampi, age 52, of East Bethel, Minnesota, were indicted by a federal grand jury on conspiracy and interstate transport of stolen goods charges. Additionally, Jeremy Pauley, age 41, of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, was charged by Criminal Information, and Candace Chapman Scott, of Little Rock, Arkansas, was previously indicted in the Eastern District of Arkansas.
According to United States Attorney Gerard M. Karam, the indictments and information allege that a nationwide network of individuals bought and sold human remains stolen from Harvard Medical School and an Arkansas mortuary. The charges allege that from 2018 through 2022, Cedric Lodge, who managed the morgue for the Anatomical Gifts Program at Harvard Medical School, located in Boston, Massachusetts, stole organs and other parts of cadavers donated for medical research and education before their scheduled cremations. Lodge at times transported stolen remains from Boston to his residence in Goffstown, New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Denise Lodge, sold the remains to Katrina Maclean, Joshua Taylor, and others, making arrangements via cellular telephone and social media websites. At times, Cedric Lodge allowed Maclean and Taylor to enter the morgue at Harvard Medical School and examine cadavers to choose what to purchase. On some occasions, Taylor transported stolen remains back to Pennsylvania. On other occasions, the Lodges shipped stolen remains to Taylor and others out of state.
Maclean and Taylor resold the stolen remains for profit, including to Jeremy Pauley in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Jeremy Pauley also purchased stolen human remains from Candace Chapman Scott, who stole remains from her employer, a Little Rock, Arkansas mortuary and crematorium. Scott stole parts of cadavers she was supposed to have cremated, many of which had been donated to and used for research and educational purposes by an area medical school, as well as the corpses of two stillborn babies who were supposed to be cremated and returned as cremains to their families. Scott sold the stolen remains to Pauley and shipped them to Pauley in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Pauley sold many of the stolen remains he purchased to other individuals, including Matthew Lampi. Lampi and Pauley bought and sold from each other over an extended period of time and exchanged over $100,000 in online payments.
“Some crimes defy understanding,” said United States Attorney Gerard M. Karam. “The theft and trafficking of human remains strikes at the very essence of what makes us human. It is particularly egregious that so many of the victims here volunteered to allow their remains to be used to educate medical professionals and advance the interests of science and healing. For them and their families to be taken advantage of in the name of profit is appalling. With these charges, we are seeking to secure some measure of justice for all these victims.” . . .
“The defendants violated the trust of the deceased and their families all in the name of greed,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Jacqueline Maguire. “While today’s charges cannot undo the unfathomable pain this heinous crime has caused, the FBI will continue to work tirelessly to see that justice is served.”

Maclean owned a business in Salem — yes, that’s right, Salem, Massachusetts — which appealed to morbid obsessions:

An artist from Salem who has been accused of buying and selling stolen body parts had posted on Instagram about having a “real human skull” and offering to sell human body parts to the public, in a picture with one of her creations from February 2020.
Katrina MacLean, the bone art, doll-creating and oddity-collecting artist behind Kat’s Creepy Creations, was named in an indictment against Cedric Lodge, who officials said supplied MacLean and others with the body parts, according to court documents. . . .
Officials stated Lodge allowed MacLean and another named in the indictment, Pennsylvania man Joshua Taylor, to enter the morgue and choose the body parts MacLean and Taylor wanted, or that Lodge would ship them parts by mail.
MacLean was vocal about her artwork on social media and especially on Instagram, where she routinely sold the baby dolls she reworked, according to a comment she responded to on her account.
The Salem artist also sold her art at “oddities markets and expos,” she had said, and had “two cases at Witch City Consignment and Thrift” in the city. Additionally, she is the curator of Freaks Antiques Uniques, a pop-up dark art and oddities market located in Salem, according to her account. . . .
In a post on Feb. 9, 2020, during the time MacLean was believed by officials to be receiving and selling human body parts from Lodge, the Salem woman posted an image of a reworked, “killer clown”-style doll with a skull between its fingers.
The caption on her post read, “Throwback to the set of Hubie Halloween. This doll has been sold and yes that is a real human skull. If you’re in the market for human bones hit me up!”
Even after the FBI searched MacLean’s home in March, according to multiple reports, MacLean continued to post on her Instagram about her reworked dolls and bone art with no apparent signs of issues happening in her personal life. Her most recent post was May 28.
In several other posts, MacLean gave insight into who she is as a person.
From a March 23, 2020 post, MacLean said, “Meet the maker! I’m Kat, I like to turn regular porcelain dolls into nightmare fuel. I started painting horror dolls back in September of 2018 in an attempt to decorate the store windows @witchcitythrift.
“Everyone wanted to buy the dolls so I began selling them….. I have sold 239 dolls since then! I also make dark art, bone art, human bone jewelry and shadowboxes,” the post went on.
“I joke with my friends and say that my super power is ‘the ability to creepify’ Art and creating is my passion and my therapy. I am also the curator of Freaks Antiques and Uniques dark art and oddity market in Salem MA. Please give my page a follow @freaksantiquesuniques to check out our talented crafters, vendors, artists and creators,” MacLean said.

Think maybe those Salem witch-hunters had the right idea?



 

 

Approaching the Nadir of Wokeness

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How far down the slippery slope of “woke” craziness have we slid? Well, California is evidently ready to mandate insurance coverage for gay men hiring women to be surrogate babymakers:

California lawmakers are advancing a bill that would redefine the inability of men to get pregnant as “infertility” and entitle them to insurance-covered fertility treatments.
The legislation, which passed in the Senate late last month and is about to be taken up by the Assembly, would require employer-sponsored insurance plans to cover all nonexperimental fertility treatments, including artificial insemination of pregnancy surrogates. Supporters of the legislation have touted it as an overdue step toward “fertility equality” for LGBT people.
Freshman state senator Caroline Menjivar (D.), who coauthored the bill with Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D.), said: “It will ensure that queer couples no longer have to pay more out of pocket to start families than non-queer families. … This bill is critical to achieving full-lived equality for LGBTQ+ people, as well as advancing well-rounded and comprehensive health care for all Californians.”
In liberal California, opposition to the bill, S.B. 729, has been mild and focused on concerns about ballooning insurance premiums. But the measure is part of a nascent campaign by LGBT rights advocates that could open a new front in the national culture war over gender.
California already requires health care insurance providers to cover fertility treatments other than in vitro fertilization for policyholders who are medically infertile. The law defines infertility based on a physician’s diagnosis or according to the widely accepted definition of not being able to have a child after a year or more of trying.
The fertility insurance bill would expand the coverage mandate for employers to include IVF and expand the legal definition of infertility to include, “A person’s inability to reproduce either as an individual or with their partner without medical intervention.” Infertility would no longer be defined only as a disease or medical condition but also as a “status,” such as being in a gay or lesbian relationship or being single.
California business and insurance groups have objected to the bill’s projected price tag for employers, even as they have been careful not to criticize its intent. According to an analysis by the California Health Benefits Review Program, the coverage mandates would raise annual premiums for employer-sponsored plans by more than $330 million a year. The California Association of Health Plans said the coverage mandates are the most expensive of 16 that the legislature is considering, which together would add about $1 billion to the premiums. . . .
One of the bill’s nonprofit sponsors, Men Having Babies, describes its broader goal as “to remove financial barriers to surrogacy parenting for gay men worldwide, a cause which we refer to as Fertility Equality.”
“Central to our fight for more equitable access to parenting options is what we know from our combined experiences: The anguish and yearning that same sex couples and singles feel due to their inability to reproduce without medical intervention is equal to the anguish of heterosexual couples who suffer from ‘medical infertility,'” the group says on its website.
Men Having Babies—along with another S.B. 729 sponsor, LGBT powerhouse Equality California—successfully lobbied to insert key language into the bill. The groups also claim to have added LGBT-friendly wording into infertility insurance mandates in Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. California would be the second state, following Illinois in 2021, to adopt a version of their redefinition of infertility.

You really have to give them credit for coining these euphemisms. “Fertility equality” and “more equitable access to parenting options” — phrases like these function as a sort of rhetorical sedative, lulling the listener into a stupor where they can ignore the stark madness of forcing people to subsidize such craziness. Because that’s what this is really about — money. In order to achieve this “equality,” everybody will be forced to pay more for health insurance, to subsidize “access to parenting options” for men disinclined (or unable) to do what men otherwise do to become parents. And if you complain about this, of course, you’re a dangerous extremist and the FBI will soon be wiretapping your phone.



 

 

Chaos in NYPD as Commissioner Resigns

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Keechant Sewell (left) with NYC Mayor Eric Adams

Three kids “horsing around” with a basketball in Brooklyn somehow set in motion a chain of events that has led to the resignation of New York City’s first female police commissioner. One of the first moves Mayor Eric Adams made when he took office in January 2022 was to appoint Keechant Sewell as the new NYPD Commissioner. Adams, himself a retired NYPD officer, was praised for choosing a woman as the city’s top cop. Sewell had spent more than 20 years as a cop in Nassau County.

What does any of this have to do with three kids in Brooklyn? Well, it’s kind of a long story. Sewell had complained that City Hall was interfering with her authority as commissioner:

Sewell’s authority became more tenuous after she sided with the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board’s decision to discipline Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer.
Maddrey, who was found by the police civilian’s watchdog to have abused his authority in a 2021 gun case, was highly regarded at City Hall, which “wanted him to get a pass,” according to sources.

Having researched this, I can assure you that “2021 gun case” was the biggest nothingburger in the history of nothingburgers, and that if it had happened anywhere else — OK, well, anywhere saner than New York City, at least — nobody ever would have heard about it. Yet somehow, because it is New York City, where everybody’s crazy, it turned into a cause célèbre and has now thrown the entire NYPD into turmoil.

Jeffrey Maddrey (left); Kruythoff Forrester (right)

Let’s begin by acknowledging that everybody involved in this story is black. The mayor’s black, the police commissioner is black, Chief Maddrey is black and so, too, is retired cop Kruythoff Forrester. Therefore, anyone trying to find a “social justice” angle here is going to be disappointed. Whatever else is involved in this story, there’s no “systemic racism” or “white privilege” to blame. So . . . November, 2021:

One of the highest-ranking members of the NYPD is being eyed by Brooklyn prosecutors for his role in getting a retired cop cleared of gun charges, The Post has learned.
The probe centers around an incident from the night before Thanksgiving, when former NYPD Officer Kruythoff Forrester allegedly pulled a gun on a trio of kids in Brownsville, according to sources with knowledge of the ordeal.
Chief Jeffrey Maddrey — who has been bragging to others in the department of his impending promotion with the incoming Eric Adams administration — got wind of the collar, showed up at the 73rd Precinct and ordered officers to void the arrest, sources tell The Post.
Just over 45 minutes later, Forrester was cut free, sources said.
Accompanying the off-duty, three-star chief that night to the stationhouse was Deputy Chief Scott Henderson, commanding officer of Brooklyn North Patrol Borough, sources said.
It’s unclear how Maddrey — who was tapped to run the NYPD’s community outreach last year despite prior scandals involving romantic indiscretions — learned of Forrester’s arrest or how the two men know each other.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board has opened a probe into the incident and referred the officers’ actions, including Maddrey’s involvement, and the gun charge Forrester faced to the Brooklyn DA’s Office Tuesday evening for potential criminal charges, sources said.
The gun case allegedly involving Forrester unfolded on Nov. 24 on Saratoga Avenue, where a trio of boys, ages 12, 13 and 14, were horsing around outside a real estate office that’s owned by the retired cop’s family, sources said.
At one point, one of the boys accidentally tossed a basketball into a camera set up on the outside of the storefront and ran off down Pacific Street.

(Oh, “accidentally”? These three young hooligans just happened to be “horsing around” at night and knocked out a security camera in front of a business “accidentally”? But never mind . . .)

Forrester then allegedly chased after the boys, came up behind them and threatened them with a gun, possibly firing at least one shot, sources said.
The 12-year-old boy sprinted home and called 911, and the other two ran off in a different direction, according to the sources.
The three kids independently gave cops identical accounts of the encounter and described the gun, which matched the description of the loaded pistol found on Forrester when cops questioned him, according to sources.
Forrester never said he feared for his safety or announced himself as current or former law enforcement, according to sources, who added that the ex-cop denied pulling a firearm.
Investigators have a video showing Forrester leaving his storefront and returning — but it doesn’t show the confrontation between him and the kids, sources said. In another video, first reported by The City and found by investigators, the kids can be heard yelling that Forrester had a gun.

See? Nothingburger.

Being chased by an angry gun-waving property owner is the kind of educational opportunity more “youth” in New York City need. There are plenty of places in America where if a property owner had shot such young vandals, no charges would have been filed, and most folks in the community would have said, “Served ’em right.” But whatever else you say about Forrester, he didn’t shoot anybody. He just gave those kids a good scare, and who can fault him for that? These kids nowadays . . .

Now imagine the situation when Chief Maddrey finds out a retired cop has been arrested over this silly nothingburger case. He did exactly what anyone would have expected him to do: Back the Blue, baby.

Being a cop in New York City is a tough job. Every day is Rorke’s Drift, surrounded by screaming hordes of Zulu warriors. Anyone who would volunteer for the job of trying to keep the lid on the boiling cauldron of violent criminality that is New York City deserves a certain amount of deference and, while the liberal wussies on the Civilian Complaint Review Board might fault Chief Maddrey’s exercise of his prerogative, I’d have to rule in his favor. The whole thing was just a nothingburger.

So far, I’m not a big fan of Mayor Adams, but if Commissioner Sewell sided with the review board against Chief Maddrey, I guess I’m glad to see her resign, even though I think the situation at NYPD is likely to go from bad to worse in the future. New York City, like most other major cities in America, is increasingly ungovernable, and my advice to anyone still living there is simple: Get out before it’s too late.



 

 

No Heroes for You, Whitey: Albany, N.Y., Has ‘Cancelled’ Gen. Philip Schuyler

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Decades have now passed since left-wing activists started a ruckus about the Confederate flag that had long flown over the South Carolina statehouse. It occurred to me at the time that, if the flag couldn’t be flown there — where the South Carolina convention had voted to secede from the Union, thus precipitating the war — then it must eventually be banned everywhere, and once all the Confederate flags were gone, then what? Such movements do not simply stop once their initial demand has been granted; every concession to such radicals will only incite them to make new demands. It’s like Hitler — give him the Sudetenland today, and he’ll take the rest of Czechoslovakia a few months later, then invade Poland next year. Appeasement is never successful when dealing with totalitarian aggressors, and perhaps you don’t wish to think of the advocates of “civil rights” as totalitarians, but do we invoke Godwin’s Law if we notice how, just like Hitler, they can never be appeased?

At any rate, when the quarrel over the flag in South Carolina first started making national headlines, several defenders of Southern heritage prophesied that anyone who imagined that the demands would stop with Confederate symbols was sadly deluded. Those prophecies have been amply vindicated in recent years, especially during the George Floyd BLM/Antifa riots of 2020, which saw the toppling or desecration of statues coast to coast. Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, Junipero Serra — the iconoclastic mob attacked monuments to all kinds of historic figures who never had anything to do with the Confederacy. And now, they’ve come for Revolutionary War heroes:

The statue of General Philip Schuyler that stood in front of Albany City Hall for nearly a century is gone. The city moved it to storage early Saturday morning—which was about much more than what first meets the eye.
“We’re happy that the statue has finally come down,” said Dr. Alice Green, Executive Director of the Center for Law and Justice. “I don’t know what they’re going to do with it, but at least it’s not in a public space.”
Green has been pushing city leaders to take down the statue for years. She said it was a constant reminder of what General Schuyler did to her ancestors.
“He robbed them of their humanity, their dignity, and their labor,” said Green. “Labor that brought him money.”

We shall get to the matter of Doctor Green and her ancestors momentarily, but first let us address the question: Who was Philip Schuyler and why was he honored in Albany, New York?

Philip John Schuyler was born on November 20, 1733, in Albany, New York, to Cornelia Van Cortlandt (1698–1762) and Johannes (“John”) Schuyler Jr. (1697–1741), the third generation of the Dutch Schuyler family in America. His maternal grandfather was Stephanus Van Cortlandt, the 17th Mayor of New York City. . . .
[I]n 1755 during the French and Indian War, [Schuyler] raised a provincial company, and was commissioned as its captain by his cousin, Lieutenant Governor James Delancey. In 1756, he accompanied British officer Colonel John Bradstreet to Oswego, where he gained experience as a quartermaster, which ended when the outpost fell to the French. Schuyler took part in the battles of Lake George, Oswego River, Carillon and Fort Frontenac. . . .
Schuyler became colonel and commander of a militia district regiment in 1767. In 1768, he served as a member of the New York Assembly.
Schuyler was elected to the Continental Congress in 1775 and served until he was appointed a major general of the Continental Army in June. General Schuyler took command of the Northern Department and planned the Invasion of Quebec. . . .

Schuyler was blamed for the fall of Fort Ticonderoga, but was vindicated by a court martial, and played a key role in the American victory at Saratoga, where British General Burgoyne’s entire army was captured, and thus persuaded France to officially enter the War on the American side. The site of the battle is now called Schuylerville, which ought to convince anyone of how highly esteemed the general and his family were in upstate New York. Speaking of General Schuyler’s family, his kinship to the Van Cortlandt and Delancey families has already been noted, and he married a daughter of the Van Rensselaer family, who were arguably the most prominent of the Old Dutch settlers of New York. His wife was also a cousin of the Livingstons of New Jersey, so that the couple’s numerous children were connected to some of the most illustrious families in the American colonies. Their second-oldest daughter, Elizabeth Schuyler, married a young military officer.

You may have heard of him, or seen his picture on a $10 bill.

Despite his subsequent accomplishments, in his wedding to Philip Schuyler’s daughter, Alexander Hamilton very much married up, considering the prominence of both sides of her family. As further proof of how highly Philip Schuyler was esteemed:

He was a member of the New York State Senate from 1780 to 1784, and at the same time New York State Surveyor General from 1781 to 1784. Afterwards he returned to the State Senate from 1786 to 1790, where he actively supported the adoption of the United States Constitution.
In 1789, he was elected a U.S. Senator from New York to the First United States Congress, serving from July 27, 1789, to March 3, 1791. After losing his bid for re-election in 1791 to Aaron Burr, he returned to the State Senate from 1792 to 1797. In 1797, he was selected again to the U.S. Senate and served in the 5th United States Congress from March 4, 1797, until his resignation because of ill health on January 3, 1798.

This was why the citizens of Albany were once proud to erect a public statue honoring their native son, and as for how and why it was decided to dishonor Schuyler, well, the 1790 Census found 21,193 slaves in the state of New York, of which 3,722 were in Albany County, “the most of any county in the state at the time.” The Dutch patroons who settled the Hudson River valley were substantially reliant on slave labor and, the 1790 census showed, Philip Schuyler “owned 13 slaves at his South End mansion in 1790 and another four slaves worked on his farm in Saratoga County.” To which any sensible person might respond, “And . . . ?”

In historical context, there is nothing remarkable or controversial about Schuyler’s status as a slaveowner. If one studies slavery from a global and historical perspective, the idea of a transtemporal collective grievance — an idea Thomas Sowell addresses in The Quest for Cosmic Justice — is simply absurd. To carry around permanent grudges over the practices of antiquity is a foolish posture. Believing ourselves to be the beneficiaries of progress, ought we not rather be grateful for that progress than to spend our time endlessly rehearsing a vengeful script about how oppressed our ancestors might have been? What possible benefit do black people in Albany, New York, derive from dishonoring Philip Schuyler? How does removing his statue make their lives better? And what did General Schuyler have to do with George Floyd’s death?

There were riots in Albany in the summer of 2020, and the city’s liberal mayor decided now was the time for an empty and futile gesture:

Mayor Kathy Sheehan has ordered city workers to remove the statue honoring Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler from in front of City Hall. . . .
“Scores of community members have reached out to my office requesting the removal of the statue of former slave owner Gen. Philip Schuyler and I thank those residents for making their voices heard,” she said in a statement.
The statue will not come down immediately. Sheehan’s executive order directs the Department of General Services to take steps to remove the statue as soon as possible, including an engineering study to determine the statue’s structural integrity. The statue will not be destroyed, instead it will go toward a museum or other institution, according to a news release.
City Auditor Dorcey Applyrs said the statue’s removal doesn’t eliminate any institutionalized racism but it a symbolic acknowledgement by the city that slavery was wrong.
‘The removal of this statue also acknowledges the horrific and negative implications of slavery and its impact on the lives of black Americans in the city of Albany every day,” she said.

The one thing missing from this? Logic. How is it that the death of George Floyd (in Minnesota, where slavery was never legal) should cause riots in Albany, New York, thus requiring removal of the statue of a Revolutionary War general who has been dead more than 200 years? Whence the need for “symbolic acknowledgement” of the “horrific . . . implications of slavery” in upstate New York? One might wonder why “scores of community members” would have “reached out” to the mayor, but their motive is irrelevant to the real question, i.e., exactly how do these “community members” benefit from the statue’s removal? The rhetoric about slavery’s “impact on the lives of black Americans in the city of Albany every day” seems to imply some logical connection between the statue and the aforesaid “impact,” but I’ll be darned if I can figure out what that connection might be. Imagine yourself presented with a choice: Would you like a nice cold beer? Or would you instead prefer “symbolic acknowledgement” of some injustice that your remote ancestors may have experienced 200 years ago? Give me that cold beer, pal.

What seems to be going on in this kind of “social justice” transaction — the unspoken implication of the “symbolic acknowledgement” — is that (a) the condition of black people in 21st-century America is presumed to be one of misery and hardship, which (b) is so deep and pervasive as to require a Grand Unifying Theory of Oppression to explain it, and therefore (c) The Horrific Implications of Slavery are summoned forth as the ultimate cause of black misery, and thus (d) tear down that statue!

One might write 10,000 words explaining what’s wrong with this line of thought, but why bother? It’s not about logic, it’s about feelings — irrational sentiments which are immune to argument. And now, as promised earlier, we return to Doctor Green who, since the mid-1980s, has been working her social-justice hustle through the tax-exempt nonprofit Center for Law and Justice.

Doctor Green has “several degrees from SUNY Albany . . . [which] include a bachelor’s in African-American studies, master’s degrees in education, social welfare and criminal justice, and a doctorate in criminal justice.” According to WTEN-TV, Doctor Green viewed the statue at City Hall as “a constant reminder of what General Schuyler did to her ancestors.”

Except he had nothing to do with her ancestors. Doctor Green was born in South Carolina. Her family later moved to upstate New York. So whoever enslaved Doctor Green’s ancestors, it wasn’t General Schuyler.

Facts, logic — these are the weapons of white supremacy! Whereas social justice relies on “symbolic acknowledgement,” but speaking for myself, I’d still rather have a cold beer. Perhaps you feel the same.