The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Taiwanese Animators Own Her Majesty

Posted on | November 20, 2015 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

This one just keeps getting better. Bravo zulu, ye mighty animators!

Category: Hillary Clinton, Video

‘Rape Culture’ as Stalinism: Propaganda Tactics by ‘Hunting Ground’ Makers

Posted on | November 20, 2015 | 39 Comments

Erica Kinsman is featured in The Hunting Ground.

“All these people were praising him; they were calling me a slut, a whore. . . .I kind of just want to know, like, why me?”
— Erica Kinsman

Even while the new movie Trumbo engages in a whitewash of a notorious Communist, dishonest Stalin-era Soviet propaganda tactics have been given a new digital-age update by feminists:

A crew member from “The Hunting Ground,” a one-sided film about campus sexual assault, has been editing Wikipedia articles to make facts conform with the inaccurate representations in the film.
Edward Patrick Alva, who is listed on the film’s IMDB page as part of the camera and electrical department, has been altering Wikipedia entries for months, in violation of the website’s conflict-of-interest guidelines. Alva is the assistant editor and technical supervisor for Chain Camera Pictures, the production company associated with “The Hunting Ground” director Kirby Dick. . . .
Alva created his Wikipedia account just two weeks after Florida State University President John Thrasher first called out the filmmakers for their inaccurate and unfair portrayal of the school and its handling of the rape accusation against former star quarterback Jameis Winston. . . .
Nearly all of Alva’s Wikipedia edits have related to “The Hunting Ground,” either through edits to the film’s main Wikipedia page or through edits to the pages of some of the people featured in the film.
Alva took particular interest in editing the Wikipedia page of Jameis Winston, the only person named in the film as an alleged rapist. Winston was cleared by three separate investigations, yet activists — and the film — claim this was due to a biased process and investigators seeking to protect a star football player. The film doesn’t mention the holes in Erica Kinsman’s accusation against Winston and in fact allows her to tell a story that contradicts physical evidence. . . .
The film itself is inaccurate, as the president of FSU and 19 Harvard Law professors have noted. The film distorts the evidence and uses false statistics to paint a picture of a rape epidemic at American universities. (Despite the filmmakers insistence that it is a documentary and “completely accurate,” emails between an investigator for the film and the lawyer of one of the accusers strongly suggest otherwise.) . . .

Read the rest by Ashe Schow at the Washington Examiner.

The issue here is not whether we believe Jameis Winston is innocent, but instead whether The Hunting Ground accurately depicts the Winston case, which in turn leads to the question of whether the film accurately depicts the general situation on America’s university campuses. If we catch the producers of a documentary telling a false version of one incident, we are entitled to doubt the truth of their general portrayal of the larger phenomenon (the so-called “rape culture” on campus) that is the subject of their film. And when a member of The Hunting Ground‘s crew subsequently attempts to alter the online record and delete criticism of the film — a trick reminiscent of Soviet propagandists airbrushing Leon Trotsky out of photos of the Bolshevik leadership — we may indeed wonder if this “documentary” is fundamentally dishonest:

Amid a growing controversy involving questions of accuracy and fairness, the makers of The Hunting Ground, a documentary indictment of campus sexual assaults, are defending the film, which is set to air on CNN on Nov. 22.
Florida State University, where one of the cases depicted in the documentary occurred, has asked the news network not to air the film and has produced a detailed critique of what it alleges are instances of inaccuracy and unfairness that depart from standard journalistic practice.
In response, CNN — which also will air a roundtable discussion of campus sexual assaults after it airs the film — said it is “proud to provide a platform for a film that has undeniably played a significant role in advancing the national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses.”

CNN is dedicated to “advancing the national conversation,” even if it has to tell lies to do it. But do they really want a conversation or is this actually a one-sided propaganda lecture? Because a conversation might include questions like, why were two minors — Erica Kinsman and Jameis Winston were both 18 — being served alcohol in a Tallahassee bar on the night of Dec. 7, 2012? Why did Kinsman leave the bar in a cab with Winston and two other men and go back to Winston’s apartment? She claims somebody put a drug in one of her drinks, but the toxicology report showed no evidence of any drug. And let me repeat again: The issue is not whether Jameis Winston is innocent, but whether the case is presented accurately in The Hunting Ground.

The producers of this documentary claim that the Jameis Winston case is emblematic of a larger “rape culture” on our nation’s university campuses. If female students are indeed routinely victimized by such an “epidemic” of sexual assault, we might suppose, The Hunting Ground‘s producers would have many clear-cut cases to choose from and, by devoting a major segment of their film to the Jameis Winston case, they imply that the failure of officials to punish the FSU star athlete is self-evidently an injustice. Yet when we look at the facts of the case, reasonable doubts are immediately apparent. There is no evidence Erica Kinsman was drugged. She and Winston were both underage and drinking in a bar. There is no evidence that she was coerced to leave the bar with him, nor any evidence that he forced her to go back to his apartment.

If these reasonable doubts are apparent, we must nonetheless ask why Erica Kinsman immediately claimed she had been raped. Unlike many other cases that have come to light, there was no dubious delay in her accusation. This wasn’t like the infamous Columbia University “Mattress Girl” case where Emma Sulkowicz waited several months to claim Paul Nungesser had raped her. No, Erica Kinsman went to the hospital and reported that she was raped, an accusation the Tallahassee police were required to investigate. The alleged inadequacy of that investigation, and claims that police and university officials conspired to protect Jameis Winston, are the real issue in this case. But does anyone want to dig down into the, uh, racial subtext of this case? Is it merely a coincidence that the producers of this documentary focused so much attention on a blonde girl claiming she was raped by a black man?

We could speculate about such factors. We could wonder what an 18-year-old girl expects will happen when she goes back to the apartment of a guy she met in a bar. We can speculate what a 6-foot-4, 227-pound star athlete like Jameis Winston might have expected to happen in that situation. It is reasonable to speculate that (a) his expectations and her expectations were not exactly the same, and (b) Erica Kinsman was not prepared to deal with the consequences of her own decisions.

Are such speculations inappropriate? Perhaps. Yet if CNN wants to generate a “national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses,” they cannot silence the voices of those who see these kinds of reasonable doubts. And let the record show that there have been allegations that Jameis Winston was the target of a shakedown:

Jameis Winston’s lawyer has fired off a letter to Florida State University … claiming the woman who accused his client of rape demanded $7 MILLION to buy her silence.
David Cornwell, the lawyer for the Heisman Trophy winner, sent a letter to FSU, saying Winston will fully cooperate with the University’s ongoing investigation into the handling of the rape charges. The alleged victim claims the University engaged in sexual discrimination by sweeping her claims under the rug to protect its prized athlete.
According to the letter — obtained by TMZ Sports — the alleged victim’s lawyer, Patricia Carroll, demanded $7 MIL to settle her client’s claims against FSU and Winston, telling Cornwell, “If we settle, you will never hear from my client or me again — in the press or anywhere.”
Cornwell says he rejected her offer and 4 days later she went to the media.
Cornwell also says Carroll claimed her client’s sexual encounter had to be rape, because she would never sleep with a “black boy.” Fact is … the alleged victim’s boyfriend at the time was black. The criminal case fell apart, partly because the alleged victim had semen from 2 different men on her shorts.

Will CNN address that claim in their “national conversation”?

Probably not. Because they don’t really want a conversation.




 

Category: CNN, Sex Trouble

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | November 20, 2015 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

“The natives probably had some rituals surrounding the berry harvest.”

“You mean your people don’t even use this?”

“What for? We shop at the big box store like everyone else.”

“Whatever. We’ve already talked about the funky native attire–”

“That Chinese supplier says they can deliver by the end of January.”

“Excellent. We’ll bring in a choreographer to give you some suitably primitive, semi-erotic, yet family-friendly dance moves.”

“OK.”

“And then you’ll need to fake some tradition about the berries. Do you guys make any sort of moonshine?”

“We. . .don’t do alcohol well. Not even for Economic Development Consultants.”

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction, Uncategorized

Barney Frank Channels The Onion

Posted on | November 19, 2015 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Barney Frank epitomizes the basic religious belief in government that has led to the success of large scale endeavors throughout human history such as the Tower of Babel and the United Nations.

But there’s another, perhaps deeper reason, one that’s both a cause and an effect of the political dysfunction from which we now suffer: a sharp decline in the public’s belief that government works.

If you’ll permit me a scatalogical reference, Frank is merely echoing a 1998 article from the Onion, with a steamingly prophetic faux-quote from then-Senatorial knob John Kerry:

Calling the American people’s enormous s**t-belief capacity “one of the cornerstones of our democracy,” U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) stressed that it is the patriotic duty of all citizens to grant our leaders the benefit of the doubt with regard to their s**t.
“If the American people are no longer willing to believe this s**t, who will?” Kerry said. “Somebody’s got to take this s**t at face value. Otherwise, why are we even doing all this s**t in the first place? I am truly saddened by the lack of faith that the citizens of this country are willing to put in my s**t, as well as that of my esteemed colleagues. We must repair our society’s fraying trust in the s**t of our elected officials, or you would not believe the kind of hardcore, heavy-duty s**t that will come down.”

Sorry, Barney. There is nothing ennobling about politics. No amount of wishful thinking on your part can turn the anything we do together into an instrument of human redemption. Quite to the contrary: the virtue of the government, as a whole, and akin to the resistance in a parallel circuit, is just a little less than the worst example among them. But why mention Her Majesty?

So, should we be buying Frank’s nonsense? Why, no: no, we should not. Instead, we need to let the Information Age revolution transform government as much as it has the private sector. In some glorious future, all legislation will be done in the style of GitHub, and every paying customer (that’s YOU) should have read-only access to be able to track the pedigree and detail of every piece of legislation of interest.

Put all the scoring work for the legislation out there, too.

Fundamentally, the Barney Franks of the world forget that American Exceptionalism means the government works for us, not the reverse.

That sort of practical transparency would imply that all of the non-enumerated power hooey that the federal government engages in would suddenly become hard to pass, once it becomes easy to track who put what riders in the legislation when during the process. A relatively more participatory democracy would likely be relatively less corrupt.

Or so I theorize. Are we ready for the next step in our experiment in self-government? As a jolly side-effect, we’ll probably enjoy some precious Barney Frank tears.

via HotAir headlines

Category: Democrats

Your Heterosexual Feminism Is Wrong

Posted on | November 19, 2015 | 66 Comments

 

Miriam Mogilevsky (@sondosia on Twitter) describes herself as “queer, gay, femme, and homoflexible . . . a lesbian with exceptions,” furthermore explaining: “I’m on the asexual spectrum somewhere . . . I don’t experience primary sexual attraction.” Also, she is into polyamory, “which means that I’m open to multiple committed and loving relationships, but with minimal life enmeshment and no ‘rules’ placed on me.” In other words, she’s a weirdo. But in 2015, feminism is all about weirdos, which brings us to her latest column at Everyday Feminism:

5 Ways Straight Women Can Be
Better Allies to Queer Women

Perhaps you didn’t realize that feminists are obligated to be “Allies to Queer Women,” but as Professor Mimi Marinucci has explained Feminism Is Queer, and therefore heterosexual women in the movement are expected to regard lesbians as their moral and intellectual superiors. Exactly why heterosexual women would want to be part of a movement that requires them to be lectured by weirdos, I can’t explain, and yet Miriam Mogilevsky presumes they are in need of her instruction:

Most queer women have stories of things straight women have said or done that stung unexpectedly, that casually wore down our senses of self.
Some of those things we would’ve resignedly expected from straight men — but coming from women, they were powerfully painful. . . .
By deconstructing some of these dynamics, I hope to inspire straight women to find better ways to relate to and support their queer female friends.

Notice that Ms. Mogilevsky assumes that her readers at Everyday Feminism share her contemptuous disdain for “straight men”; feminists are expected to recoil in horror at the accusation that their own behavior is as bad as the behavior of heterosexual males (who are always wrong about everything, of course). Well, you may ask, how do straight women fail as “Allies to Queer Feminists”? Ms. Mogilevsky lectures them:

Most queer women I know have stories of straight women touching them without consent — often in ways that read to us as very sexual, and ways that they would (rightfully) be furious if men touched them.
Maybe it’s because we feel “safe” to them, and they feel comfortable expressing affection or attraction to us in ways that they don’t feel comfortable doing with men.
But maybe it’s because they like having that feeling of power over someone.
It’s probably true that if a woman touches another woman, that’s less likely to be interpreted as a come-on than when she touches a man. . . .
However, when women assume that there’s no chance that another woman would ever interpret a touch in a sexual way — not even when they touch her breasts or butt — they desexualize her.
To these women, touching men can be a sexual gesture; touching women cannot.
Straight women touch us in these ways while insisting that there’s no need to ask for consent because there’s nothing sexual about it. . . .
When straight women casually touch me in intimate ways without asking first, it hurts. Not only because I wasn’t given the chance to consent, but because they don’t understand that for me, these types of touches are something to share with a partner.
They’re sexually charged and erotic. It’s an interaction that’s supposed to happen in bed with someone I’m into, not at the bar where you’ve decided that my butt is “soooo cute!” that you want to grab it without asking.

So, that’s Rule One: Never touch Miriam Mogilevsky. And honestly, if you feel an overwhelming urge to touch her, you should seek psychiatric help immediately. But remember there are five ways you heterosexual feminists are failing as “Allies to Queer Women,” according to Ms. Mogilevsky, and let’s just cut to Rule Five:

5. Remember That We Aren’t Your ‘Experiments’ . . .
If you feel like you have to try sex with people of different genders to help yourself understand what kinds of partners you’re looking for, by all means, get consent and go for it.
But treating people as “experiments” is different. Straight or questioning women who treat queer women as “experiments” treat them as disposable, as objects, as a means to an end.
They feel no responsibility — before or after the hookup — to be honest with their partner about their reason for seeking out the hookup or their intentions afterward.
Sometimes they enter explicitly queer spaces despite comfortably identifying as straight and knowing that they’ll be assumed queer in that space. Some straight women I’ve met even seem to take a gleeful pride in their ability to seduce and mislead queer women, toying with them for their own amusement. . . .
But because of the negative experiences many of us have had with women who saw us as nothing more than an “experiment,” many of us are no longer willing to consent to these types of encounters.

Well, you can read the whole thing. Or you can gouge your eyes out with a rusty screwdriver. Either will do you as much good.

Perhaps, if you are a heterosexual woman who considers yourself a feminist, this presumptuous lecture from Ms. Mogilevsky will make you reconsider. As a heterosexual male, however, I am perplexed that Ms. Mogilevsky thinks she’s such a hot commodity that people she meets cannot resist the temptation to “touch her breasts or butt.” Really?

Maybe that’s your idea of an irresistibly attractive “queer, gay, femme, homoflexible lesbian with exceptions,” in which case you should seek psychiatric help immediately. But speaking of exceptions, Ms. Mogilesky recently shared this strange and alarming confession:

So I’d been dreading the inevitable moment when I’d find myself interested in a guy again because I figured it’d be confusing and awful, but now it’s happened and it’s actually not a big deal. If anything, I’m only more comfortable with my gay identity because I could immediately feel the difference from previous times I’ve been interested in men. I have no investment in this, “this” being the idea of dating this person or any other man. I’m not worried about the fact that the attraction will inevitably fade, because I don’t *have* to make it last. I don’t have to make it serious and committed. I don’t have to do anything with it at all. I don’t have to appeal to this person or make myself palatable to him or any other man, because it doesn’t matter to me if I have men in my life as partners or not.
(And yes, I know plenty of women who are attracted to men have similar thoughts, but believe me, it feels completely different from when I was bi.)
It doesn’t really bother me because it’s only natural that something like this would happen. I’ve entered a time of my life that’s more colorful and dynamic than probably any other previous time, and I’m meeting interesting people constantly, and things are stable enough for me now that genuine attraction to people is a thing that actually happens, so it was probable that eventually one of those people would be a man. It doesn’t *have* to mean anything about My Sexuality; it’s a statistical fluke. These results are not statistically significant. They are, however, quite enjoyable in the moment.
(This also makes me realize that one of the reasons I mostly stopped being attracted to men to begin with is that whenever I felt and expressed that attraction, they would more often than not freak out, shame me, etc. They’d be all “whoa you’re acting weird” and “um wow isn’t that kind of forward,” and of course the next day they’d be texting me at midnight asking “what’s up,” but that was enough. Men in general can’t handle women expressing interest in them directly, so I gave up and eventually the interest went away.
Well, now it doesn’t bother me if my attempt to be clear and direct gets stigmatized and ridiculed, because I don’t f–king need them. If they’re going to act like children, I’m out.)

Am I the only one who thinks the lady doth protest too much? She wants it known to everyone on Tumblr that she doesn’t really care about men and they don’t matter, but then there’s this jarring assertion: “Men in general can’t handle women expressing interest in them directly.” What? According to who? Maybe men have a problem with Miriam Mogilevsky “expressing interest,” but we can’t blame them for that, can we? If this weirdo “expressed . . . attraction” to you, wouldn’t you “freak out”?

Yet this is feminism in 2015: The “queer, gay, femme, homoflexible lesbian with exceptions” is a columnist for Everyday Feminism, and heterosexual women are expected to be grateful that Miriam Mogilevsky has taken the time to tell you exactly how and why your heterosexual feminism is wrong. You are so ignorant you wouldn’t even know how to be “Allies to Queer Women” unless she told you, and if you find her attitude insulting, then perhaps you’re not a feminist at all.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

Planned Parenthood: A Taxpayer-Funded Democrat Party Campaign Organization

Posted on | November 19, 2015 | 77 Comments

This subverts the legitimacy of government:

Planned Parenthood is planning to spend at least $20 million fighting Republicans at the ballot box next year as the group punches back against GOP efforts to end its federal funding.
“Extremists made the 2016 election about attacking reproductive rights,” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, who was grilled extensively on Capitol Hill in September, said in a video announcing the effort Tuesday.
The group is planning to focus on the White House and Senate races in a few key states, including New Hampshire, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The states not only have potentially competitive Senate races, but are also key swing states on the presidential map.
The $20 million will be spent on a mix of volunteer and activist organizing in each state and advertising.
“Enough is enough,” Richards said in the video. “With our supporters, we’re launching ‘I Vote Planned Parenthood Action.’ We’ll organize and mobilize to elect lawmakers who are in our corner.”

Can anyone explain the logic of forcing taxpayers to fund an organization that in turns spends money to elect Democrats?

Besides which, Planned Parenthood kills babies. Cecile Richards speaks of “extremists,” but she is the totalitarian fanatic who wants to use government power to silence dissent and punish her critics.





 

Category: Abortion, Planned Parenthood

Hurt Feelings = Oppression?

Posted on | November 18, 2015 | 54 Comments

In her perpetual hunt for victimhood, Jessica Valenti devotes an entire column to a “perhaps more insidious” form of discrimination, “everyday slights women can’t tangibly attribute to sexism”:

These subtler forms of sexism that women face can be even more difficult to handle than explicit discrimination. If your pay is unfair or a boss makes a pass at you, most of the time you can go to human resources. There’s a process in place for how to handle the sexism we know about, but there’s less direction about what we can do about a work culture that doesn’t value women.

In her quest to encourage women to believe they are victimized, Valenti cites an account by former Gawker staffer Dayna Evans, “On Gawker’s Problem With Women.” That is worth reading if only because Gawker is a liberal organization and the complaints of sexism by Nick Denton and his minions thus demonstrate that it is misguided to blame conservatives for discrimination against women, as so many feminists are prone to do.

That Gawker is something of a “boy’s club” is not the least bit surprising, because we hear similar complaints about almost every major online news operation. We heard it, for example, when Michelle Fields left the Daily Caller. I recall such complaints at the Washington Times during my decade there; even though there were female editors and reporters who were manifestly successful and valued in the organization, there were other women who, dissatisfied with their jobs, complained they were treated unfairly. Without clear evidence of outright discrimination, it is always difficult to assess claims of “sexism” in any workplace, because you can’t quantify and measure hurt feelings — which is what these complaints so often are actually about.

Almost everybody, I assume, at times feel they have been treated unfairly by their employer, and perhaps rightly so. However, a corporation is not in the business of producing fairness.

A company makes profit by delivering goods and services to its customers. Nothing is more important than this goal, because if the company doesn’t succeed in producing profit for investors, the company will go out of business, and the employees will no long have a job to complain about. Of course, we could say that discrimination might negatively impact a company’s profitability in various ways. Discrimination could means that the company is failing to gain the maximum advantage of employees’ abilities, and obvious unfairness might be harmful to employees’ morale, undermining the sense of teamwork necessary to success. However, in a competitive marketplace, it would be foolish to think that real discrimination — bad treatment of good employees — could coincide with success, simply because the employee treated unfairly in one company would be hired by a competing firm, which would thereby gain an advantage. If Dana Evans is a productive employee and was treated unfairly by Gawker, we must assume, she would be able to find another employer happy to hire her — and, indeed, she now writes for New York magazine’s site The Cut. Here are Ms. Evans’ 10 most recent contributions there:

11/17/2015
Adele Knows That There Are More Interesting
Things to Think About Than Body Issues

11/17/2015 at 2:06 p.m.
Zayn Malik Is Shirtless, Pouting, and
Riding a Dirt Bike Back Into Our Hearts

11/17/2015 at 12:52 p.m.
Puppy Tries Desperately to Escape
Relationship With John Mayer

11/17/2015 at 9:27 a.m.
Like a Good Friend, Amy Schumer Is Helping
Amber Rose Work on Her Confidence

11/16/2015 at 6:05 p.m.
Eating Requires More and More Effort Every Day

11/16/2015 at 2:10 p.m.
$2,000 Seems Like Kind of a Lot of Money
for a Selfie With Justin Bieber

11/16/2015 at 11:35 a.m.
When the Rock Cries About the Special Bond
He Has With His Daughter, I Cry, Too

11/16/2015 at 10:47 a.m.
World’s Worst Husband Returns Late Wife’s
Glamour Women of the Year Award

11/13/2015 at 5:52 p.m.
The Supreme Court Will Hear
A Challenge to Texas Abortion Law

11/13/2015 at 4:42 p.m.
Diane Keaton, 69-Year-Old Actress,
Is Horny As Hell, and We Love It

Quick, somebody alert the Pulitzer Prize committee. We have a winner.

 

Who is Dayna Evans? She attended New York University (annual tuition $46,170), graduating in 2009 with a B.A. in creative writing, worked a little more than two years for Simon & Shuster and, since leaving there in 2011, has worked 17 months teaching English in Bangladesh, seven months as web editor for a California gift shop, and 18 months at Gawker before leaving there in July. This kind of job-hopping resume is certainly not unusual for a 20-something liberal arts major (by the time I was 28, I’d worked eight different jobs since my college graduation, including a stint as DJ in a strip club), but how does this experience qualify Ms. Evans as an expert on discrimination? Her article about the alleged sexism at Gawker carries a preface explaining that executive editor John Cook declined to publish it because he was “done with Gawker writing about Gawker.” And her article also included this:

Diversity in general is a blind spot for Gawker Media. On Monday, John Cook published race and gender diversity statistics for the entire company: Overall it is 79 percent white and 57 percent male. In editorial, the staff is 61 percent male and 38 percent female, though given the fact that Jezebel.com is almost 100 percent female, excluding the women-focused site from his stats would skew editorial to being only 28 percent female. The statistics were released by Cook after BuzzFeed did the same for their company in October, in an equally unsatisfying look at who exactly runs the media.

And . . .? Your point is . . .?

Who cares what percentage of Gawker employees are white or black or Asian or female or gay? All that matters is profit.

If Nick Denton could outsource Gawker’s editorial work to Guatemalan peasants working in squalid huts for a few pesos a day, I’m sure he wouldn’t hesitate to do so. There is no feasible limit to Nick Denton’s unscrupulous greed, and this is why investors put their money into Gawker media, because they trust Nick will be absolutely ruthless in his quest to make a dollar, and “diversity” is only of interest to Gawker’s investors if it somehow impacts Nick’s ability to produce revenue.

At what point do we conclude that complaints about “sexism” are in fact complaints about capitalism? Because if Gawker is successful as a commercial enterprise — if it is competitive in the marketplace — this suffices to justify the company’s policies, from a capitalist perspective. It is only when we judge the company by a political calculus of “social justice” that there is any reason to demand that Gawker justify itself in terms of “diversity.” Well, I’ve got news for Jessica Valenti and Dayna Evans: Social justice is a mirage.

There is no such thing in the world. Never has been and never will be. You can run your mouth about “equality” until you’re blue in the face, but you cannot thereby conjure equality into existence. Sometimes hurt feelings are just hurt feelings. You are not a victim of injustice.

You can bet Nick Denton is glad he got rid of Dayna Evans, and after she eventually leaves New York magazine, they’ll be glad she’s gone, too. Nobody likes a whiner.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

TERROR RAID: French Police Kill Two, Arrest Seven Suspects in Saint Denis

Posted on | November 18, 2015 | 73 Comments

 

In a pre-dawn raid reportedly aimed at the mastermind of the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, at least two suspects were killed and five arrested in the suburb of Saint Denis. CNN initially reported three suspects had been killed, including one female who blew herself up with a bomb, during the raid targeting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, suspected of organizing the Paris attacks. The Washington Post reports:

Gunshots and explosions rang out from the northern suburb of Saint-Denis early Wednesday as more than 100 French police and army troops laid siege to an apartment with at least six terror suspects, potentially including the alleged ringleader of Friday’s deadly attacks in Paris.
The narrow streets of Saint Denis were clogged with police vehicles and ambulances as witnesses reported multiple explosions. The operation began around 4:30 a.m. [11:30 p.m. ET], and left several police officers wounded and at least two suspects dead. The dead included a woman who blew herself up, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
The prosecutor’s office said three men were removed from the besieged apartment block and taken into custody. Their identities were not given. A man and a woman were arrested next to the apartment and also taken into custody. One suspect appeared to be still holed up.
Police may have been targeting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian man authorities believe has led the Islamic State’s effort to terrorize Europe, according to an official familiar with the operation. He is seen as the “guru” of Friday’s deadly attacks at a stadium, concert hall and bars and restaurants in Paris, which killed at least 129 people and wounded more than 300 others.
French police have not officially confirmed who was the target of the raid.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports:

After a series of gun battles early Wednesday, the French police arrested five suspects hiding out in an apartment in the northern Paris suburb of St.-Denis in an operation aimed at detaining the Belgian militant suspected of organizing the attacks that killed 129 people on Friday. One woman died in the police assault when she detonated an explosive vest.
The raid began at 4:20 a.m., the Paris prosecutor’s office said, as special police forces, backed by truckloads of soldiers, cordoned off an area near Place Jean Jaurès, a main square in St.-Denis not far from the Stade de France, where three of the seven attackers who died on Friday blew themselves up. The shooting went on for 20 minutes, residents said, and continued in bursts until 7:30 a.m., when there were several explosions and gunfire.
Three men hiding out in the apartment were taken in by the police, the prosecutor’s office said, without identifying any of the three. A man and a woman were also captured near the apartment and have been taken in, the authorities said. Five police officers were lightly wounded, the police said.

UPDATE II: CNBC reports seven arrests:

The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed one woman has died after detonating a suicide bomb, while sources told Reuters earlier a man had also been killed.
It also confirmed that five people have been placed under police custody following the raid. Two more have were arrested later in the morning, according to Reuters. . . .
Some more reports from Reuters about the suspects in the St. Denis raid. The news agency, citing a source, says they had planned an attack on the French business district.

The BCC reports:

The female suicide bomber who was killed in the Saint Denis raids was a relative of lslamic State militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud, BFM TV in France reports. Abaaoud is suspected of masterminding Friday’s attacks. . . .
Seven people were arrested in the raid, police are quoted by the AP news agency as saying. . . .
Several police officers were injured and a police dog killed.

PREVIOUSLY:




 

Category: France, Islam, Terrorism
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