The Other McCain

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

Nuance For Scalia: It’s The Commie Takeover Of Liberal Arts We Hammer

Posted on | March 28, 2015 | 31 Comments

by Smitty (via HotAir)

Christopher Scalia in the WSJ:

Dismissing the liberal arts seems to have become a litmus test for conservative politicians.

Earlier this month, addressing the issue of student debt, Sen. Marco Rubio joked that students ought to know in advance “whether it’s worth borrowing $40,000 to be a Greek philosophy major. Because the market for Greek philosophers is tight.” His remarks echo North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, who in 2013 mocked liberal-arts courses and said, “I don’t want to subsidize [a major] that’s not going to get someone a job.” Gov. Rick Scott of Florida and former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas have passed legislation encouraging students to major in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines rather than the liberal arts.

There is no shame in the liberal arts per se. It’s their inversion into a quagmire of illiberality that we denounce:


Everything about modern liberalism is about destroying the mind, as though the goal of education were some infantile, Commie Zen. Or maybe breeding immature dependency upon the uber-State is just a Cloward-Piven driven plantation management strategy.

TFA:

Thomas Jefferson recognized that a broad education could ensure the survival of the new democracy. He recognized that “even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” To defend against this threat, Jefferson wanted “to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purpose.”

Alive Today, one suspects that Thomas Jefferson would arrive at UVA armed with a rubber chicken and flog-march President Teresa Sullivan right off campus. Amiright? If the ridiculous insult to education, justice, and rationality itself perpetrated at UVA bears any useful fruit, may mark the turning point when we start to flush our institutions of those inimical to learning.

If my little guys want to study liberal arts, the short list includes Hillsdale.

Update, from the comments:

. . .those who obtain degrees today in the liberal arts disciplines are not thinkers; they are mere parrots capable of rote recitation of whatever lunacy their professors insisted the learn.

Societal improvement shall commence subsequent to the purge of this intellectual deadwood.

Category: Education

Asian Infrastructure Development Bank

Posted on | March 28, 2015 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

 

Ain’t It Interesting Barack,

All International Intelligence Battling,

Another Inimical Institution Begets

Agression. Instinctively, Intrisically: Bejing.

 

via Instapundit

Category: China, Instapundit

What the #EllenPao Verdict Actually Means About the ‘Rights’ You Don’t Have

Posted on | March 28, 2015 | 135 Comments

A California jury on Friday rejected the claim by Silicon Valley executive Ellen Pao that her rights had been violated by her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer. And this verdict is a teachable moment.

The modern concept of employee “rights” is antithetical to economic liberty. Employment in a free-market system is always a matter of voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit. You need a job. You apply to an employer. Among many applicants for the job, the employer chooses you. This is the basis of a contractual agreement: You do the work, the company pays you. It’s simple.

If you subsequently become dissatisfied with your job, you can quit and go work someplace else. If the company becomes dissatisfied with your work, they can fire you. This is also simple.

Oh, but you’ve got “rights,” you say. So if you don’t get a promotion you want, or you don’t think you’re treated fairly otherwise, you’re going to file a discrimination lawsuit.

Might as well get the word LOSER tattooed on your forehead.

Winners don’t file lawsuits. Winners don’t whine about “discrimination.” You know why? Because winners win. Even if, in the course of a lifelong career of winning, the winner suffers an occasional defeat, the winner just grins and moves on with his life. Company X doesn’t treat him right? They don’t appreciate his valuable skills? Fuck Company X.

The winner will find a job at Company Y or, perhaps, he’ll walk out and start his own company. Life’s too short to waste time working for a bunch of losers who don’t appreciate quality work.

If Ellen Pao was such a hotshot in the venture capital field, don’t you think there would have been other companies eager to hire her away from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer? It’s a very lucrative field, and if Ellen Pao was such a goddamned rising star, it stands to reason that some other firm would have jumped at the chance to hire her. So if she felt she was a victim of discrimination, all Ellen Pao would have had to do is to talk to somebody at a rival VC company, “Hey, Kleiner passed me over for promotion. You guys hiring?” Boom — they’d leap at the opportunity to have this young genius Ellen Pao on their payroll.

That’s didn’t happen, did it?

Hell, no, it didn’t happen, because Ellen Pao is a loser.

The world doesn’t owe you a living. No employer is obligated to hire you or give you a promotion. Ellen Pao’s claim that she was a victim of “gender discrimination” was just a typical loser’s way of rationalizing her own failure. And the lawyers who thought they could get rich off her case are nothing but greedy parasites exploiting “equal opportunity” nonsense. Pao and her lawyers sued for $16 million and they’re walking away without a nickel, and if they’d gotten a nickel that would have been five cents more than what they deserved. Fuck you, losers.

UPDATE: David Graham at the Atlantic:

The verdict is the culmination of a three-year case in which Pao said she’d been denied a promotion and then fired, and that she’d been retaliated against after complaining about discrimination. Her suit opened up a range of questions about the culture of tech investing and Silicon Valley more broadly. . . .
She says she was pressured into an affair with a colleague, and when she broke off the affair, was punished. She was denied a promotion and then fired.
The case she later brought was seen as an important moment for tech, long a place where men got ahead by default and women were outnumbered and often felt marginalized. . . .
Pao couldn’t convince a jury to side with her, but the case forced Silicon Valley’s widespread gender inequality out into the open, and put specific instances of harassment into the court record. As my colleague Olga Khazan wrote, the system as it stands is stacked against women.

How many ways can I say “bullshit”? Any high-stakes, highly competitive business environment is likely to be male-dominated and if women feel “marginalized” in such an environment, whose fault is that? There are nevertheless females who flourish in such environments, however much they may be disadvantaged and outnumbered. To talk about “gender inequality,” to claim that men get ahead “by default” in such environments, is a misleading waste of words. The company is competing in a market; if the company is successful — and Kleiner has been vastly successful — that success justifies its policies, and the wise employee is the one who adapts best to the company’s policies.

If you don’t like the policies at Kleiner, don’t work for Kleiner.

Also, don’t tell me you were “pressured into an affair.” That’s another typical loser rationalization. Ellen Pao rolled the dice — gambling that she could fuck her way to a promotion — and she lost that bet. Period. End of sentence.

UPDATE II: Phil McG in the comments links to a Vanity Fair profile of Pao and her husband and comments:

Meet the new Affirmative Action elite. They go to Princeton and Harvard, then earn millions of dollars. But as soon as some minor setback happens to them, it turns out that they were poor wretched victims of racist or sexist discrimination all along!

The Ivy League elite of Special Snowflakes.

UPDATE III: Here is a Business Insider profile of the major personalities involved in the Pao lawsuit. The man with whom Pao had an affair in 2006, Ajit Nazre, also allegedly hit on another woman at the firm. All in all, this story is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel.

 

Category: Economics

The Social Justice Lynch Mob

Posted on | March 27, 2015 | 61 Comments

Ashe Schow demolishes the Obama Age media:

The point here is that in example after example, the prevailing narrative sold by the media and social justice activists has been disproven after an investigation of the facts. When it comes down to it, it’s cheap and easy for Obama to say something in public to show solidarity with popular opinion. But having to back up that same popular opinion in a legal proceeding . . . is often impossible.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Whenever I see the liberal media jumping to a particular conclusion, my instinct is that the opposite must be true. Whenever I see the liberal media ignoring a story, I figure that story must be very important. Is it possible that the liberal media sometimes might be correct about one of these “social justice” narratives? Hypothetically, I suppose, but you’re seldom going to lose money betting against them.

Meanwhile, Christian Adams offers an important media parable.

 

Category: Media Bias

‘You Know You’re a Big Deal, Right?’

Posted on | March 27, 2015 | 20 Comments

The New York Times:

A trophy case framed in brass, set inside a wall near the entrance to the Bronx High School of Science, testified to the triumph of the school’s debate team. So did classroom 203, the de facto debate headquarters, where the sunlight danced off a collection of plaques and trophies.
The dynamic force behind that success was a teacher and coach named Jon Cruz, who transformed the debate team from a relatively modest club to a juggernaut that had nearly 300 members. . . .
One of his signature sayings, which he used to pump up students before an important round of debate, a recent graduate recounted, was to take them aside and say, “You know you’re a big deal, right?”
At the same time, the popular teacher and respected coach was regularly communicating with teenagers from outside Bronx Science. According to investigators, he was using a messaging app to flirt, cajole and coerce, to extract suggestive photographs of the boys, sometimes in the nude.
“Pictures just have a huge impact on me,” Mr. Cruz wrote in a conversation with a teenager from upstate New York, according to a criminal complaint. “Seeing your feet and face and muscles and room and awards and stuff reinforce what a big deal you are.”
Mr. Cruz, 31, was arrested on March 6 on charges that he persuaded three teenage boys to send him nude or suggestive photographs in exchange for gift cards. He was charged with possessing, receiving and producing child pornography. . . .

You’ll want to read the whole thing, including the part about the teenage boy in California whom Cruz sent “$10,000 over several years,” but then “became less complimentary and more abusive” when the boy didn’t meet Cruz’s expectations for more “hot” photos.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Gays, Sex

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Posted on | March 27, 2015 | 38 Comments

Liberals in California think their sex-offender laws are too strict:

California officials announced Thursday that the state would stop enforcing a key provision of a voter-approved law that prohibits all registered sex offenders from living near schools.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said it would no longer impose the blanket restrictions outlined in Jessica’s Law that forbids all sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park, regardless of whether their crimes involved children. . . .
The California Supreme Court on March 2 unanimously ruled that Jessica’s Law violated the constitutional rights of parolees living in San Diego County who had argued that the limitations made it impossible for them to obtain housing.

Keep in mind Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown has initiated a controversial prison “reform” program in California. In his first three years in office, Brown authorized the release of 1,400 criminals who had been sentenced to life in prison. Under Brown’s “reform,” California officials are releasing “non-violent” offenders from prison, which is why Robert L. Ranson was set free in June 2013:

He was considered a non-violent offender because his most recent prison term was for possession of a firearm by a felon. Ranson had previously served time for two carjackings and an assault with a firearm, prison officials said.

Carjacking, assault, possession of a firearm by a felon — yeah, let’s just turn that guy loose. What could possibly go wrong?

A man on probation as a “non-violent offender” under California’s prison realignment program has been charged with kidnapping, raping, and torturing a 16-year-old girl in South Los Angeles, and detectives suspect he may be connected to three other recent murders. Robert L. Ranson, 30, was arrested in late March [2014] after the girl escaped from a U-Haul van in an alley near Imperial Highway and New Hampshire Ave., according to police and booking records. The girl was covered in gasoline and said her attacker, later identified as Ranson, had tied her hands and taped her mouth, and was trying to light her on fire when she ran away, naked.

Now they’re going to let sex offenders live near schools.

No way that policy could lead to trouble.

Will the last sane person leaving California please turn out the lights?

 

Category: California, Crime, Liberals

Police Say Teacher’s Texts Expressed ‘Deep Love’ for 11-Year-Old Girl

Posted on | March 27, 2015 | 19 Comments

Geraldine Alcorn, 28, was arrested this month in Pittsburgh after police say she became obsessed with an 11-year-old student at Beechwood Elementary School, where Alcorn was a pre-kindergarten teacher:

Alcorn took the student ice skating and later lured the 11-year-old girl to her house, according to a criminal complaint.
Another time, Alcorn was found alone with the girl in the student’s home while the girl’s mother was at work, according to the complaint.
Police say Alcorn and the girl sent each other more than 2,400 text messages during a two-week span in late January and early February.
In the messages, both expressed “a deep love for each other,” according to the complaint.
The two also talked of Alcorn adopting the girl and discussed running away together. Alcorn told the girl they would “be on the run” for a while, according to the complaint.
The girl told police she and Alcorn tried to keep their interactions a secret from the girl’s mother.

Police say there was no indication of sexual activity between Alcorn and the girl. However, the relationship was emotionally intense:

The complaint further states the mother discovered Post-It notes and letters from the girl to Alcorn on which the girl had written, “Things Ms. Alcorn and I can do,” “What we can do” and “When we can do it,” CBS Pittsburgh reports. . . .
Contact between the two continued even after school district officials suspended Alcorn on Feb. 13 and warned her not to contact the girl again, reports the Tribune-Review.
On March 13 — the same day that Alcorn met with police — she returned to her school to collect her belongings. The girl subsequently found gifts and a letter from Alcorn in her locker, including a math worksheet encrypted with circled numbers requesting the girl to call her, according to the criminal complaint.
After her arrest Tuesday, Alcorn was arraigned Wednesday on charges of child luring, corruption of minors, and attempting to interfere with custody of the child.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review notes that in Allegheny County, “there are at least three other active criminal cases against teachers accused of behaving inappropriately with students”:

  • Megan Batykefer, 31, was arrested in August after she admitted to police she had a sexual relationship with a male student at North Allegheny High School. The boy was a member of the school’s rowing team, which Batykefer coached. Although she did not have sex with the boy until after his 18th birthday, Batykefer was charged with institutional sexual assault under state law forbidding sex between students and teachers.
  • Jason Cooper, 38, was arrested in February after police say he had sex with an 18-year-old girl who was a student at Plum High School, where Cooper was a science teacher. Cooper was charged with institutional sexual assault, corruption of minors and furnishing alcohol to a minor. Two weeks later, his bond was revoked when police say Cooper called the girl involved in the case, and he was charged with witness intimidation.
  • Joseph J. Ruggieri, 40, was also a teacher at Plum High School, and was arrested just days after Cooper was first arrested. A girl told police she had sex with Ruggieri at his home. He was vice-president of the district’s teachers union and his salary was more than $100,000 a year. Last week, Ruggieri’s bond was revoked and he was charged with witness intimidation after police say he contacted his accuser using online video chat software, telling the girl, “My livelihood will be ruined,” “My kid’s life will be ruined,” and “I miss you.”

Why aren’t you homeschooling your kids yet?

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex

Just Murder, Not a ‘Hate Crime’

Posted on | March 26, 2015 | 26 Comments

The headline in January was frightening:

Lesbian gunned down in North Philly
A North Philadelphia lesbian was shot in broad daylight [Jan. 13] while on her way to work.
Kim Jones, 56, was shot in the head at 9:30 a.m. while she was standing on the corner of 12th and Jefferson streets near Temple University, waiting to take the bus to work, police said.
The gunman came up behind Jones, who was wearing headphones, and shot her point-blank in the back of the head.
Investigators believe Jones was targeted, but a motive had not been announced as of presstime.
“She had her purse, she had her cellphone, she had jewelry on, none of which was taken, none of which was disturbed,” said Homicide Capt. James Clark in a press conference Tuesday.
Officer Tanya Little, a police spokesperson, said investigators are aware that Jones, who married her partner last month, was a lesbian, and do not yet know if that could have played a role in her killing.
“Investigators have not ruled out anything at this point,” Little said.

That fear-inspiring possibility — an incipient wave of anti-lesbian terrorism, perhaps? — was left to dangle in the public mind for a couple of weeks until police solved the case:

Randolph Sanders was careful.
Lurking in a breezeway on the morning of Jan. 13, with a gun tucked into his duffel bag, Sanders hid his face under a cap and bulky headphones.
He was careful, police said, not to look at the security cameras that captured him when he approached his boss — Kim Jones — and shot her in the back of the head as she waited for a bus. . . .
Police said Jones suspected him of stealing funds — about $40,000. He was convinced that she would report him to authorities and that he would lose his job at Turning Points for Children, the organization where they worked, police said.
On the morning Jones was killed, she had scheduled a meeting with the Department of Human Services, which funds Turning Points.
Sanders, 36, knew she was going to turn him in, Homicide Detective James Clark said.
“He laid in wait, and he ambushed her,” Clark said.
Sanders had been hired by Jones in 2012 and served as the assistant director of the nonprofit’s Families and Students Together (FAST) program, an after-school outreach designed to strengthen parents’ bonds with their children.
Turning Points said in a statement Monday that it believes the alleged misappropriation of funds was “an isolated incident” but will hire a third-party investigator to look into the matter.
An investigation into the allegedly stolen funds is ongoing, but Clark said police believe Sanders had been stealing gift cards meant for families participating in the FAST program and keeping them for himself.
He has been charged with murder and related offenses.

The anti-gay hate-crime angle was never a valid concern despite the LESBIAN GUNNED DOWN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT fear-mongering coverage. It is important to understand how the media deliberately manipulate perceptions. The murder of Matthew Shepard was portrayed as a hate crime, despite every evidence to the contrary, because gay activists figured out that depicting homosexuals as victims — and depicting opponents of the gay agenda as motivated by dangerously violent “hate”– was the key to political success. Both the news media and the entertainment industry have seized on this theme, promoting the Gay Victimhood narrative so relentlessly as to foment paranoia and generate a certain number of fake hate-crime hoaxes. Meanwhile, public school administrators are twisting themselves into pretzels to be “inclusive” and “tolerant” of homosexuality, implementing “anti-bullying” campaigns based on the belief that our society is pervaded by an irrational homophobia that causes gay kids to commit suicide.

What should disturb us about this is how unbalanced and unrealistic these perceptions are. Studies indicate that only 2.3 percent of the U.S. population (about 1-in-40) is gay or bisexual, and yet media have exaggerated this to the point that young adults believe 30 percent of people are gay! The same media which so exaggerate the size of the gay population also foster the idea that gay people are persecuted victims of oppression and, because elite culture has become so oriented toward the protection of victimized minorities, anyone attempting to counter-balance this narrative is more or less automatically accused of hate.

Crazy people don’t need any special incentive to be crazy, but this victimhood rhetoric can incite crazy people to do crazy things: Floyd Lee Corkins told the FBI he attacked the headquarters of the Family Research Council because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified them as a “hate group” due to their traditional marriage views. And then there’s the case of Jan Hamilton of Aspen, Colorado.

In 2001, when she was 59, Hamilton was attending a Bible study class at a Baptist church in Aspen when she and another woman in the class became involved in a lesbian relationship. After a couple of years, the other woman broke off the relationship and “Hamilton became relentless in her quest to re-enter the woman’s life,” according to an Aspen Times article about the case. In 2005, Hamilton was banned from the church and it appears that her stalking of her ex-lover escalated:

[The victim testified at a 2012 hearing] that despite a restraining order she filed in 2008, Hamilton would often show up at her home uninvited, or send emails and other bits of correspondence, until some point in 2010.
Hamilton’s activities affected her well-being to the point where eating and sleeping were difficult, the woman testified.
“It’s very upsetting,” the woman said. “I have come to understand that Ms. Hamilton is relentless in the pursuit of her agenda and will stop at almost nothing.”
The restraining order, and promises from Hamilton that she would leave her alone, made no difference at all, the woman said.
“I live constantly knowing something’s going to happen, but I don’t know how or where or when,” she said.

And then there’s this:

Hamilton has filed numerous lawsuits over the past few years against her perceived adversaries, claiming everything from sexual discrimination to retaliation and defamation to attempted second-degree murder. . . .
Hamilton says she is afflicted with cancer because of the stress that residents, landlords, churchgoers and others have inflicted upon her. Others have suggested, in court and otherwise, that Hamilton has extreme mental-health issues.

Kuh-RAY-zee! It’s not against the law to be crazy, but our nation’s mental-health facilities are overcrowded, and so it’s impossible to lock up all the lunatics. Earlier this month, Jan Hamilton was back in court:

An Aspen woman [March 6] was arrested for the 16th time in six years after she allegedly violated restraining orders by driving by a church from which she is banned — to the point where the pastor said congregation numbers are dwindling — and using a networking website to contact a person named in a protection order.
Judge Jonathan Pototsky of the 9th Judicial District set bond for Jan Hamilton, 73, at a cash-only amount of $30,000, telling her that he would raise it to $50,000 or $100,000 if she bonded out and continued to commit offenses.
Hamilton, as she has repeatedly, said she was innocent and is being persecuted for being a lesbian. She once spent 25 months in jail on similar accusations; was on trial March 4 for harassment and bail-bond violations (the judge has not yet rendered his verdict); and is to be sentenced [March 16] in two cases in which she was convicted for false reporting and harassment.
In the latest case, a member of Christ Episcopal Church of Aspen contacted Aspen police officer Jeff Fain on March 1. The man told Fain that Hamilton drove by the church repeatedly and asked members going in and out to pray for her. A restraining order prevents her from contacting the man, his wife and others, and Hamilton is also prevented from going to places where she knows the people will be.

Of course, Jan Hamilton has a Twitter account — all the lunatics are on Twitter now — and has used it to claim that she is a victim of a “Religious Extremist Lynch Mob,” invoking the 2009 Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. When federal law encourages this victimhood mentality, are we surprised that paranoid lunatics like Jan Hamilton think they have a “right” to harass people at churches? And a very similar phenomenon is at work when we see rape hoaxes on university campuses. Sen. Kristen Gillibrand continues her crusade to deny male students ordinary due-process protections, and liberals claim that fraternities trying to protect themselves against false accusations are a “rape lobby.”

The problems caused by endless celebrations of victimhood are going to keep getting worse, until people wake the hell up.

Speaking of crazy, years ago I convinced Mrs. McCain this “blog” thing could be an actual business and it’s been amazingly successful, but the past few months have been kind of rough financially., and a little extra support from the tip-jar hitters — $5, $10, $20, whatever you can spare — would be deeply appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

Category: Crime, Gays, Sex Trouble
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