The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.18.14

Posted on | August 18, 2014 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Ukraine Claims Control Of Lugansk City Center

Separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine

Rebel discipline inside the city breaking down
Red Cross waits for guarantees as Ukraine truce discussed
Germany: Some progress in “difficult” Ukraine/Russia talks


Pope Francis Calls For “Fraternal Dialogue” With PRC, Norks
Pope gets rock-star treatment at Asian Youth Day

Curfew Reimposed In Ferguson, Mo.
Protests continue; unclear whether protesters are obeying the curfew



POLITICS
Texas Governor Perry Responds To Indictment: “I Stood Up For The Rule Of Law”

Governor Rick Perry (R-TX)

Palin: Everything’s big in Texas, even this BS

Congressional Democrats Criticize Obama On ISIS Efforts

Miller Expresses Confidence Ahead Of Alaska Primary

Vulnerable Senate Dems Wary Of Obama Using Executive Powers On Immigration

Obama Interrupts His Vacation To Deal With Crises

MT Democrats Pick State Legislator To Replace John Walsh In Senate Race

LA Weighs Cash Incentive To Boost Election Turnout



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Mixed Amid Signs Of Waning Supply Threats: WTI $96.81, Brent $102.81
Shanghai Composite Index Extends Gains To Sixth Week As Shippers Rally
PRC Property Prices Skid Further In July
Bourbon Production Reaches Highest Point Since 1970s
Sultan Of Brunei Bids For Sahara’s Hotels In New York, London
Gold Declines For Second Day As Silver Drops To Two-Month Low
Internet Explorer For Android Or iOS? Not In Microsoft’s Plans
Jetpac To Withdraw Apps After Google Acquisition
Facebook Messenger Users Gripe And Grumble In Online Reviews
Don’t Touch That Update! Microsoft Pulls Latest Windows 8.1 Patch
Facebook Testing “Satire” Tags For Sites Like The Onion



SPORTS
Jeff Gordon Finally Gets Another Win At Michigan International

Celebrates winning the pole position

Thirteen years since last win – which was also the year he won the Sprint Cup

Lucroy Leads Brewers To Sweep Of Dodgers In 7-2 Win


Cubs Edge Mets 2-1

Fish Whip Snakes 10-3

Giants Top Phillies 5-2

A’s Skid Reaches Five As They Fall To Braves 4-3

Bombs Away For Astros In 8-1 Shelling Of BoSox

Soriano Blows Save, Nats Win Anyway With Sac Fly In 11th



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Lindsay Lohan Responds To James Franco’s Claim They Didn’t Have Sex

“When I started working we didn’t have Twitter, we didn’t have any of this s–t, it’s a different world now. We didn’t have Instagram, we didn’t have camera phones for God’s sake. It’s really different now.”

Still upset over theft of list she compiled as part of Betty Ford rehab


Kid Rock’s Going To Be A Grandpa


Christina Aguilera – It’s A Girl!


Justin Bieber Attends Bible Study With Selena Gomez

Jennifer Lawrence And Chris Martin Are Seeing Each Other

Paul Giamatti To Star In “Straight Outta Compton” As NWA’s Manager

Kendra Wilkinson And Hank Bassett – Happily Together?

Denzel Washington Detoxes After A Month Of Hard Partying

Jessica Simpson Snuggles With Her Kids

Beyonce Preparing To Divorce Jay-Z?

War Machine Captured By Cops Outside LA



FOREIGNERS
US-Backed Kurdish Forces Retake Mosul Dam
UNSC Blacklists Jihadis In Iraq, Syria
Netanyahu: No Deal With Gaza If Israeli Security Needs Not Met
Fifteen Missing After Indonesian Tourist Boat Sinks
Brazil Mourns Eduardo Campos
UK’s Military Role In Iraq To Expand
Monsoon Flooding Hits Uttar Pradesh, 1500 Villages Underwater
Momentum Grows For Scottish Independence Despite Failed Debate
Afghan Sikh Stowaways Found In Tilbury Container Included Thirteen Children
Japanese National Reportedly Captured In Syria



BLOGS & STUFF
American Power: Black Panthers Chant “We Want Warren Wilson Dead” In Ferguson
American Thinker: College Board Erases The Founding Fathers
BLACKFIVE: Priorities For The President
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Los Angeles Is Officially A Third World City
Conservatives4Palin: Obama’s Docu-Drama
Don Surber: Political Scoreboard, August 15
Jammie Wearing Fools: High Fashion, Expense For Hillary’s Travels
Joe For America: Rick Perry Indicted – All You Need To Know
JustOneMinute: Salt – The Science Was Settled!
Protein Wisdom: Texas Democrats And Criminal Drunkard Rosemary Lehmburg Use Lawfare Against Gov. Rick Perry
Shot In The Dark: All That DFL Happy Talk About The Economy…
STUMP: Obamacare (And Government Corruption, BIRM) Watch – Amateur Hour With E-Mail
The Gateway Pundit: Eyewitness At Crime Scene Vindicates Officer Wilson In Michael Brown Shooting
The Jawa Report: Yezidis Commit Suicide Rather Than Bear ISIS Children After Rape Jihad
The Lonely Conservative: Here’s Another Rich Democrat Donor Nancy Pelosi Subsidized With Our Tax Dollars
This Ain’t Hell: The Militarized Police Discussion
Weasel Zippers: Alan Dershowitz Outraged By Perry Indictment – “Everyone Should Stand Against It”
Megan McArdle: Old Debts, Shady Collectors, And Your Rights


Shop Amazon Fashion: Backpack Shop

Category: Live at Five

Rule 5 Sunday: Dirty Denim

Posted on | August 17, 2014 | 20 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The band formerly known as the Electrocutes

Can’t remember where I first heard the Donnas; probably in 2002 when they were having their 15 minutes of fame from “Take It Off”. Anyway, for reasons only a psychiatrist would be able to unravel, I’ve always liked the band and its songs, and both seem to fit what we do here at the weekly Rule 5 roundups pretty well. As usual, refrain from making with the clicky on the links where others might get bent out of shape and/or accuse you of being a Giant Patriarchal Tool, with unpleasant consequences for your relationships and/or work.

Goodstuff leads off this week with a megablog featuring (among other things) Grace Parks and nanoboobs. Ninety Miles from Tyranny chipped in with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Girls with Guns, and Morning Mistress; Animal Magnetism contributes Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot adds Rule 5 Linkfest with Katy Perry, and First Street Journal is as usual all about our women in uniform; this week he spotlights The Big Red One.

EBL’s herd this week includes Radical Lesbian Feminists, Lauren Bacall, two hot girls in a hot car, Fountains of Wayne’s “A Summer Place”, and Joni Ernst.

Postaldog returns with Jessica Alba, vintage see-through hotness, Courtney Stodden, Sally Charles, and Carrie Coon from “The Leftovers”.

A View from the Beach makes up for lost links last week with Lana Del Rey – Enough to Sing a Gay Girl Straight, “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright”, It Took a Brave Woman to Tame the Cow, Silly Brits Think Gardening is Racist, “Thunderstruck”, Actress a Bad Judge of Schlock, CNN Anchor Accused of Drunken Biting, “Sonnentanz”, and Desert Pete’s Vision.

At Soylent Refuge, it’s the breakfast spread, Sweater Puppy Interferometry, Evening Awesome Ahoy Matey!, your Monday Motivationer, French Black Panther comics, The Only Reason I’d See Another Batman, Tuesday Titillation Sideboob Sonata, Overnighty – Another Future Ex-Mrs. Soylent, Humpday Hawtness Leanna, Falconsword Fursday Vintage, Fursday Overnighty Awesome, Corset Cornucopiainator, T-GIF Friday Milkshake, Evening Awesome Wild Flower, Weekender Tiffany, and Bath Night Bamboo.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Kat Torres, his vintage babe is Teri Garr, Sex in Advertising is Fashionable, and with the return of the NFL, here’s The Power of the Cheerleader. At Dustbury, it’s Electra and Elise Avellan, Lauren Bacall, and Kesha, while Three Beers Later checks in with Rule 5 – Village Girls!

Thanks to everyone for your linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox is midnight on Saturday, August 23.


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Category: Rule 5

Kimberlin Trial: The ‘Yuck’ Factor

Posted on | August 17, 2014 | 12 Comments

“Brett Kimberlin is a pedophile.”
— Ali A. Akbar, Aug. 11, 2014

Aaron Walker is transcribing (Part I, Part II, Part III) this past week’s trial in the Maryland case Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., in which John Hoge, Ali Akbar and myself were co-defendants. Of all that he alleged in his original complaint — stalking, harassment, etc. — Brett Kimberlin seems to have decided that his case in court would focus almost exclusively on the use of the word “pedophile” to describe him.

This was rather unwise. Most of his claims had been disallowed in preliminary proceedings, so that the case as it went to court was simply defamation and so-called “false light invasion of privacy.” For Kimberlin to prevail at trial, he would have had to prove that allegations of pedophilia were false. And, as everyone who has read the Indianapolis Star‘s coverage of his Speedway bombing spree knows, the suspicions regarding Kimberlin’s involvement with Debbie Barton — granddaughter of Julia Scyphers, who was the victim of an unsolved murder — were quite disturbing. Nor was this all the available evidence on this subject. In his 1996 biography of Kimberlin, Citizen K, journalist Mark Singer used the pseudonym “Jessica” for Debbie Barton, as he recounted Kimberlin’s relationship with the girl:

From the beginning of his friendship with Sandi [Barton], Kimberlin said, her younger daughter developed an attachment to him. Sandi would come to Eagle Creek, to tend his horses and ride her own; Jessica would tag along, and “she used to hang on me, she didn’t want to let me go.” Jessica was ten years old and Kimberlin was twenty. . . .
For three consecutive summers, 1974 through 1976, they took vacations of a week or longer in Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. Sandi couldn’t get time off from work, so on these summer trips it was just the two of them — Brett and Jessica.
Eyebrows levitated. A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: “We’d see a girl, who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, ‘Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?’ It made me very uncomfortable.” Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as “my girlfriend,” and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker . . . Sandi confided that Kimberlin was “grooming Jessica to be his wife.” . . .

You can buy Citizen K via Amazon and read the whole thing for yourself, and you will find that Debbie Barton was not the only young girl in whom Brett Kimberlin expressed interest. There was another girl — 15 at the time of her “romance” with Kimberlin, then 24 — who figured in Kimberlin’s alibi for his whereabouts on the day in 1978 that Julia Scyphers was shot to death in an apparent contract killing. However, Debbie Barton was very important to the story of Kimberlin’s bombing spree because, as the Indianapolis Star’s Joe Gelarden reported at the time, after bombs began exploding around the Indianapolis suburb of Speedway, police eventually concluded that this was an attempt to distract them from their investigation of the Scyphers murder. Because she had reportedly intervened to prevent Kimberlin from having access to her granddaughter, Debbie Barton, Kimberlin was a suspect, as Gelarden wrote: “Kimberlin seemed to be the only one with a possible motive — to distract police attention from the Scyphers murder and delay or halt their quiet investigation of him.”

It is impossible for any journalist to report accurately on Kimberlin’s criminal career and ignore this aspect of the case, nor can any honest reporter ignore evidence suggesting that Kimberlin’s interest in underage girls was a persistent pattern. Toward the end of Citizen K, Mark Singer describes how, while in federal prison, Kimberlin met a fellow inmate who was a Ukrainian immigrant. This inmate had in his cell a photo of his teenage niece, Juliya. According to Singer, Kimberlin pestered this man for his niece’s mail address and, when he obtained it, Kimberlin then began a three-year pen-pal correspondence with the girl. After he was released from prison in 1994, Kimberlin brought this Ukrainian girl (by then in her early 20s) to America, where they had a relationship that broke up after a few months.

Think about this: Here was a federal convict whose crimes were reportedly believed by investigators to have been related to his interest in a young girl. While serving time in prison, now in his late 30s and early 40s, Kimberlin then begins writing love letters to a teenage girl he’s never met. Indeed, as Mark Singer reported, Kimberlin composed a song for this girl called “Waiting to Meet.” Furthermore, in a 1996 interview with Washington City Paper, when he was futilely pursuing a rock music career, Kimberlin seemed quite unapologetic about his sexual enthusiasm for young girls:

Not all the songs on his album — which Mahern characterizes as minimally produced and “pretty much Brett” — have political overtones, which in some respects may be unfortunate: While tracks like “Life’s a Bitch (For a Government Snitch)” and “Who’s Next” (a song about unfounded sex crime accusations) have a definite edge to them, others, like “Waiting to Meet” and “Teen Dream” (both about having sex with teenage girls) are lacking in subtlety and tend to make one squirm. But this is exactly what Kimberlin wants.
“I say things a lot of people are afraid to say. Yeah, ‘Teen Dream’ is about fucking a teenage girl. Every guy who’s seen a good-looking teenage girl has thought about it. I’m talking about that lecherous quality that every man, though he won’t act on it, has.”

Kimberlin was a 41-year-old recently released federal convict in 1996 when he proclaimed his desire to have sex with teenage girls. Insofar as he sued us for $1 million, claiming among other things that it was defamation to apply the word “pedophile” to him, any juror could have looked at this evidence — had the trial proceeded to the point where the defense presented its case — and decided whether such a label was appropriate. However, the law regarding defamation is quite clear that it is the plaintiff’s burden to show that a statement of fact by defendants is false; the defense need not prove any such statement true. It can be (and probably would have been) argued that someone who said “Brett Kimberlin is a pedophile” was merely expressing an opinion based on available facts. As a matter of law, then, it was impossible for Brett Kimberlin to prevail at trial. Once Kimberlin concluded his two-day courtroom presentation, the defense made a motion for a judgment in their favor, which Judge Johnson was obliged to grant.

Yet during the trial, which concluded before the defense could present the case I have just briefly summarized, the testimony and questioning during Kimberlin’s presentation brought up an important point: Kimberlin presented no evidence that any of the defendants had used the word “pedophile” to describe him prior to July 2013, when his estranged wife filed third-degree sexual assault charges against him.

Charges State v Kimberlin (Redacted) by himself2462

Kimberlin’s wife told John Hoge and Aaron Walker that Kimberlin met her on a beach in Ukraine when she was 14, shortly after his release from prison. As she later explained, Kimberlin brought her to the United States in September 1996, a few weeks before her 16th birthday. Kimberlin also brought over some of her family members from Ukraine, his wife said. As she said in her sworn affidavit, Kimberlin began having sex with her when she was still 15, before he subsequently married her when she was 16 and he was 42. Because the legal age of consent in Maryland is 16, the claim by Kimberlin’s wife that they had premarital sex when she was still 15 gave grounds for a charge of third-degree sexual assault. His wife also said in her affidavit that she had once seen Kimberlin make sexual advances toward her 12-year-old cousin.

This was made a matter of public record by Kimberlin’s estranged wife a few weeks after her split from him became public when Kimberlin filed for a domestic protective order against her, and also sought to have criminal charges filed against her boyfriend, Jay Elliott. This courtroom battle, which Kimberlin himself initiated, became the basis of my coverage, which was both newsworthy in its own right (given Kimberlin’s notoriety) and relevant to his prior criminal history. Furthermore, Kimberlin’s wife said he had threatened her, and had falsely claimed that she was mentally ill, so this story was a matter of public interest, insofar as the safety of a woman and her children might be at stake.

T. Kimberlin v. B. Kimberlin Petition for Protective Order 7.9.13 (OCR) by AaronWorthing

After an August 2013 hearing in Maryland in the Kimberlin v. Kimberlin proceedings, Mrs. Kimberlin was apparently discouraged. She reportedly decided against pressing the sexual assault charges, which were then dropped by the State’s Attorney. The last I heard — and this was hearsay, which would have been inadmissable at trial — Mrs. Kimberlin and her boyfriend Jay Elliott had left Maryland; some said she went to Illinois; others say she is now in Utah. During the trial, Kimberlin claimed his wife had returned home, although he produced no evidence of this, and even the judge asked why Kimberlin didn’t bring his wife to testify at the trial:

THE COURT: You know the witness you really need?
KIMBERLIN: Huh?
THE COURT: Is your wife here?
KIMBERLIN: She’s, she’s packing. We’re leaving on vacation tomorrow—
THE COURT: Is she gonna testify? See, that’s — if she were going to testify, that would be one thing, but a 15 year old?

None of the defendants ever expected that Brett Kimberlin would make this the basis of a $1 million lawsuit, and we were all shocked that this lawsuit — which seemed bogus from the start — was allowed to proceed all the way to trial after 11 months of preliminaries. The most shocking thing of all was that, during the trial, Kimberlin insisted on putting his own 15-year-old daughter on the witness stand. Aaron Walker transcribes the courtroom discussion:

Court: You… she’s not a party in this case.
Kimberlin: She’s not a party, she’s a witness.
Court: To what that they did?
Kimberlin: That they harmed me and my family and she’s, you know, I ask you to give me a chance to make that [unintelligible]
Court: But she can’t testify what? Her school and all? That is not relevant.
Kimberlin: She can testify that I’m not a pedophile. She can testify that…
Court: How can…? She can testify that you never did anything to her.
Kimberlin: Or anyone she knows.
Court: Or anyone that she knows.
[Defense attorney Patrick] Ostronic: I will stipulate that he never did anything to her. We’ll stipulate to that.
Kimberlin: No. I want her… I want the harm, there’s harm . . . these people . . . this jury needs to know the harm that this has caused my family.

Every decent person in the courtroom, I believe, was disgusted by Kimberlin’s insistence on compelling his daughter’s testimony. This was his choice, and not ours, and entirely his responsibility.

Please donate to BomberSuesBloggers.com to help defend First Amendment rights that were threatened by Brett Kimberlin.

 

Category: The Kimberlin Files

Feminism as Rationalization

Posted on | August 17, 2014 | 61 Comments

One thing you notice if you pay close attention to the autobiographical details that feminists let slip as they’re telling their narratives (because “the personal is political,” y’know, and feminism enthrones extreme subjectivity as “the authority of experience”) is that many of these women have psychological damage they channel into political belief because they can’t come to grips with it any other way.

Her misfortunes can never be chalked up to mere bad luck, nor can the source of her hurt feelings be accepted as “the way of the world.” Still less can any feminist look at her problems and ask to what extent she is responsible for her own failures and unhappiness. Instead, her ideology offers her ready-made rationalization that seem to explain her problems: Whatever is wrong with her life, somehow it can be blamed on men and the patriarchal system of male domination. In any other context, we recognize this as blame-shifting and scapegoating, but when women explain their personal miseries by yelping that they are victims of oppression by the patriarchy, we dignify their rationalization by calling it a political philosophy.

OK, so I’ve been researching feminist “gender theory” as part of my “Sex Trouble” series on radical feminism. And while looking for a certain article I’d read earlier but forgot to bookmark, I was Googling about butch/femme lesbian identities. (Much weirdness out there, folks.) There among the several search results, I turned up this:

Heteronormativity and Homophobia:
A Femme’s Perspective
“But you don’t look gay!”
That is the resounding response I get whenever I come out to people. I vent a lot about how hard it is to be an invisible member of the LGBT community, but my frustration goes a lot deeper than people think.
A lot of people assume that “gender-conforming” queer women don’t experience homophobia and harassment because they often “blend in” with heteronormative society, but I most certainly experience homophobia- just in a unique way. I’m at my breaking point in dealing with peoples’ ignorance and disrespect on a weekly basis — and the worst part is I’m told that it’s not a big deal and I shouldn’t let it upset me. It’s easy for people who have no idea what it’s like to have their sexuality questioned and pried into at every turn to tell me to just relax and get over it. That’s why I’m writing this post: I hope that people will learn to take a walk in the shoes of a sexual minority- particularly an invisible one. . . .
Homophobic people who might otherwise snub me are nice to me because on the outside, I appear conventional. The homophobia often comes later, once I choose to come out. I choose to come out, because to me, being closeted is not an option. If I hide who I am, homophobia wins. I’m also a walking contradiction to many lesbian stereotypes, so I think it’s important to break down peoples’ misconceptions by living my life openly.
Being treated differently than my straight counterparts — being treated like a spectacle, a liar/fake/confused person, an “exception” to someone’s homophobia, a male fantasy — isn’t any less hurtful or discriminatory than being hated on sight for being gay. If you’re a member of the LGBT community who accuses femmes of being privileged or a straight person who doesn’t recognize this type of homophobia, I hope my experience gives you a new perspective.

Hmmm. The whole “femme invisibility”/”femme privilege” thing has been endlessly discussed among lesbian feminists, and this article is by some random girl with a Blogspot site, not from a professor or journalist, but still there was something intriguing:

Jessica
I’m a 24-year old woman with a BA in Psychology and Women’s Studies, looking to go to graduate school for clinical psychology.

Oh, a young Women’s Studies major! How delightful! 

Jessica Clayton-Matthews attended Simmons College in Boston (tuition $35,200 a year) and she doesn’t blog frequently on her feminist site, but she’s got another blog devoted completely to her struggles with eating disorders, from which we learn:

For as long as I can remember I had . . . been a picky eater and generally “weird about food” . . .
I started restricting when I was 12, but I wasn’t diagnosed with an eating disorder until after I was hospitalized at 15. I was dealing with trauma at home and I had severe social and generalized anxiety as well as depression. Restriction and later over-exercise became a way for me to calm my anxiety and distract myself from the trauma as well as confusion regarding my sexual orientation. Restriction also became a form of self-punishment, because I had very low self-worth and felt that I didn’t deserve nourishment.
Another contribution to my eating disorder was going to school in a very wealthy community that placed a high value on appearance — I switched schools halfway through the sixth grade, but the damage had already been done. I was a few pounds heavier than most of my friends simply because I was a year older and started going through puberty sooner and I was made to feel ashamed of that. . . . I developed body dysmorphia as early as 11 years old and felt painfully uncomfortable in my own skin. . . .
My family is very loving and supportive, but it took them awhile to understand the severity of my eating disorder. When I was diagnosed at age 15 I don’t think any of us took the diagnosis very seriously, because my other mental health issues felt like more of an immediate threat (I was suicidal at the time).

Hmmm. Anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, suicidal feelings. You see she had all kinds of mental health issues which can’t be blamed on homophobia or the patriarchy. She had “confusion regarding [her] sexual orientation,” but was that all?

When I was 12 I started having romantic feelings towards women, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was very ashamed and confused and I just wanted to go back to being a little girl with no hormones so I wouldn’t have to deal.

OK, fine. Lots of kids experience “confusion” about their “romantic feelings” without going totally psycho. “Body dysmorphia”? Wanting “to go back to being a little girl with no hormones”? Feelings of “very low self-worth”? These are extreme reactions. One wonders about the “family trauma at home” she was experiencing, but with no further details available, that’s a dead end. Were all her problems psychological? It turns out there’s more to the story:

To give an example of a piece of my internalized patriarchal values that I’ve been working through: I have PCOS (Poly-cystic ovary syndrome), which is one of the major causes of infertility in women. Now, for as long as I can remember, I haven’t been interested in having biological children. I want to be a mother, but I’ve always wanted to adopt and somehow known that it was what I am meant to do. But, when I was diagnosed with PCOS, I felt depressed and broken. I started mourning the possibility of not being able to have a biological child, not because I ever really wanted one, but because I thought it made me “less of a woman”. And I kid you not, this thought crossed my mind: “What kind of woman am I if I can’t have a biological child? I am useless!” My reaction was 100% due to the damn patriarchy convincing me that my most important asset as a woman is my ability to bear children.
This is terribly embarrassing to admit, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that, feminist or not, the ideals of the patriarchy are so integrated into our culture that we internalize certain ideals without even realizing it.

Hmmm. She has a disease that causes infertility, but “for as long as [she] can remember, [she hasn’t] been interested in having biological children”? That would seem rather convenient, but she still feels bad about it and, of course, she blames “the damn patriarchy”!

Hey, what do we know about Polycystic Ovary Syndrome?

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), also called hyperandrogenic anovulation (HA), or Stein-Leventhal syndrome, is one of the most common endocrine disorders among females. . . .
Polycystic ovaries develop when the ovaries are stimulated to produce excessive amounts of male hormones (androgens), in particular testosterone, by either one or a combination of the following (almost certainly combined with genetic susceptibility:
the release of excessive luteinizing hormone (LH) by the anterior pituitary gland through high levels of insulin in the blood (hyperinsulinaemia) in women whose ovaries are sensitive to this stimulus.
Also, reduced levels of sex-hormone-binding globulin can result in increased free androgens.

Ms. Clayton-Matthews, it would seem, suffers from an endocrine disorder involving “excessive amounts of male hormones,” and we  may wonder if this in turn explains other problems, including her pubescent “confusion regarding . . . sexual orientation.” But it’s easier to blame “the damn patriarchy,” you see, and to think that this woman has a degree in psychology is astonishing. Guess her double-major in Women’s Studies cancelled out everything else.

 

 

Category: Feminism

Texas Democrats vs. the Rule of Law

Posted on | August 16, 2014 | 44 Comments

Even a liberal like Jonathan Chait can see it:

They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole, until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting — which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question — make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is.
Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg — a Democrat who oversees the state’s Public Corruption unit — was arrested for driving very, very drunk. What followed was a relatively ordinary political dispute. Perry, not unreasonably, urged Lehmberg to resign. Democrats, not unreasonably, resisted out of fear that Perry would replace her with a Republican. Perry, not unreasonably, announced and carried out a threat to veto funding for her agency until Lehmberg resigned.
I do not have a fancy law degree from Harvard or Yale or, for that matter, anywhere. I am but a humble country blogger. And yet, having read the indictment, legal training of any kind seems unnecessary to grasp its flimsiness.

You can read the whole thing. It is only logical that it is a bad thing to have a state official whose job is to investigate corruption charged with drunk driving. Yet because she is a Democrat and the governor is a Republican, Lehmberg refused to resign for strictly partisan reasons. The governor then exercised his prerogative in an effort to force Lehmberg to do the right thing — and Democrats then decided that the governor’s exercise of lawful authority was a crime.

 

Category: Democrats, Rick Perry, Texas

FMJRA 2.0: Call Me

Posted on | August 16, 2014 | 13 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

‘Hi, We’re Lesbian Feminists and We’re Here to Talk to Your Daughter About Sex’

Sue Me Again, You Evil Liar

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.11.14

Rule 5 Tuesday

What To Think Of Kevin Drum

Shrew Culture Update

FMJRA 2.0: My TV And You

TRIAL BEGINS TODAY

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.12.14

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.13.14

Elementary School Teacher’s Lesbian Affair Causes Texas Political Scandal

“Wacky Conservative Hit Piece About Raging Lesbian Feminist Carmen Rios”

Smittypalooza? Delayed Victory Celebration? Whatever!

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.14.14

The Unspeakably Vile David Brock

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.15.14

So Nice, We’re Doing It Twice

Off The Shelf

Don’t Mistake Disinterest in Emotionalism for Cowardice, @PatDollard

Top linkers this week:

  1. (tied) Batshit Crazy News and EBL (17)
  2. That Mr. G Guy (14)
  3. Regular Right Guy (8)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA is noon on Saturday, August 23.


Parallel Lines

Category: FMJRA Award

Reality TV Mom Gets 10 Years in Prison

Posted on | August 16, 2014 | 32 Comments

Andrea Clevenger with daughter Kylie (left); going to prison (right).

Did you ever watch reality TV and think, “These twisted freaks need to be in jail”? I mean, the entire cast of Jersey Shore, for example, or the parents of Honey Boo-Boo, or the “Real Housewives” or that evil sadist Abby Lee from Dance Moms — so-called “reality” shows offer up a sociopathic smorgasbord of exhibitionist weirdos who get paid to parade their neuroses in front of the cameras for the entertainment of America’s cable-TV audience. If somehow, by the modern miracle of satellite communications, the Lifetime network is accessible in the remote mountain regions of Pakistan where fugitive al-Qaeda terrorists are still hiding out, you can understand some of their Islamic rage: “Who is this hateful Abby Lee woman? Death to the infidels!”

For 16 episodes from July 2012 until its cancellation in October 2013, the TLC series Cheer Perfection featured the training and competitions of youth cheerleading teams from Cheer Time Revolution, based in Sherwood, Arkansas. It was, to some extent, a spin-off of TLC’s creepy pageant show, Toddlers & Tiaras, because some of the families from T&T were also on Cheer Perfection. Hyping the pilot episode, ABC’s Juju Chang reported for Good Morning America:

In Sherwood, Ark., where cheerleaders are like royalty, Alisha Dunlap is the queen bee.
TLC’s new reality-TV show, “Cheer Perfection,” depicts the competitive world of cheerleading, and shows that the cheerleaders’ mothers are just as competitive as their daughters and are unapologetic about living vicariously through them.
The show takes viewers behind the scenes of a sport that is not for the faint of heart. And Dunlap, the co-owner and coach of Cheer Time Revolution in Sherwood, is tough.
“If you fall again, I’m going to replace you,” she tells daughter Cambry, a cheerleader.
Asked whether she could be viewed as being too hard on the cheerleaders, Dunlap said, “These kids know me so well. It doesn’t even bother them. … I think they like to get me excited. They know I care.”

“They know I care.” Yeah, and 15 years from now when that girl is on Prozac and going through an ugly custody battle with her abusive ex-husband, I’m sure you’ll be there for her, right? When the show got picked up for its first eight-episode season in December 2012, New York Daily News critic David Hinckley was brutal:

Watching children get abused to satisfy the performance fantasies of adults got old several reality shows ago.
But it sells, so here’s the latest, an eight-episode look at a cheerleading program for preteen girls.

How is it that cheerleading, an extracurricular activity that began as simple rah-rah squads for school football teams, has metamorphosed into this high-pressure all-or-nothing cutthroat competition? Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of anything that gets kids off the videogame console and engaged in vigorous exercise, but why indoctrinate girls in this Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest mentality? One could criticize this phenomenon from either a feminist or a traditionalist perspective, politically. More importantly, however, one could criticize it from a psychiatric perspective. Parents who maniacally push their kids into this stuff are clearly crazy, and they’re making their kids crazy, too. Which brings us to the disturbing story of Andrea Clevenger:

Andrea Clevenger, a mom who was on the TLC cheerleading show, “Cheer Perfection,” pleaded guilty [Aug. 7] to having sex with a 13-year-old boy.
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Clevenger acknowledged in court that she had sex in her home and in a car with the teenage boy, who knew her own daughter. She also admitted sending him sexually explicit photos.
The 34-year-old mom, who is from the Little Rock, Arkansas suburb Sherwood, will have to register as a sex offender . . .
Clevenger received two 10-year prison sentences — one for sexual assault, another for engaging a child in sexually explicit conduct — but will serve them concurrently.

 The boy was reportedly a friend of Clevenger’s daughter Kylie, who was one of the cheerleaders featured on “Cheer Perfection,” and I’m sure all the kids in Kylie’s school were entertained when police released to the media her mom’s arrest affidavit:

I, Detective Frank Spence of the Sherwood Police Department, do attest the following statement is true and known to me through investigation.
At approximately 9:22 a.m., on November 27, 2013, I received a referral from the Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline regarding a juvenile victim, a 13-year-old white male, having disclosed being raped by Andrea M. Clevenger (white/female/DOB 05/21/1980), at her residence, in Sherwood, Arkansas. . . .
The juvenile victim said he was at the home when Clevenger began making advances toward him. The juvenile victim said Clevenger instructed him to sit on the couch in the common area of her residence and remove his pants, and he complied. The juvenile victim told me after he removed his pants at her direction, she got “on top” of him, put his penis in her vagina and engaged in sexual intercourse with him. The juvenile victim related she also told him to relay when he was close to ejaculation and when he did so, she removed his penis from her vagina and placed it in her mouth, where he ejaculated. He also told me she engaged him in oral sex by putting his penis in her mouth on two separate occasions, both times in mid to late October of 2013, while parked in her vehicle in an area unfamiliar to him. In addition, he said she sent him multiple multimedia messages depicting sexual explicit conduct . . . and sent him pictures, depicting herself without clothing. . . .
While the victim’s mother wrote her statement, I published to the victim the images extracted from his telephone and he identified thirty-two (32) images as those he received from Clevenger. . . . Of those images, eighteen (18) depicted bare breasts, seven (7) depicted breasts in a bra or corset, and six (6) depicted a bare vagina.

Any psychologist would say that this kind of depraved behavior between a 34-year-old mother and her daughter’s 13-year-old friend is symptomatic of an extremely selfish, narcissistic and irresponsible personality. Leaving aside any question of why a grown woman would be sexually attracted to pubescent boys, we must ask why Clevenger would act on that deviant urge, heedless of the potential consequences for the boy, for herself, and especially for her own daughter. Kylie Clevenger is surely now traumatized twice over: First, by the devastating knowledge that her mother is a pervert, and second, by the predictable cruelty of her peers. We shudder to imagine what taunts her schoolmates now hurl at this poor girl because of her mother’s infamous criminal conduct.

As the ABC News report said, however, we’re talking about a mother who was “unapologetic about living vicariously through” her daughter, and any Freudian would have a field day psychoanalyzing the implications of Andrea Clevenger’s heinous perversity.

Maybe TLC should produce a new “reality” series about female sex offenders. Call it Creepy Criminal Cougar Moms.

(Hat-tip: Interested Participant.)

ADDENDUM: If you want to understand the cultural impact of media on young people, please permit me to recommend Neil Postman’s 1994 book, The Disappearance of Childhood.

 

Category: Crime, Sex

The Moral Case is the Simple One

Posted on | August 16, 2014 | 56 Comments

by Smitty

The question is not: “What if your daughter was a porn star?” The question is “How shall one maximize joy in life?”

Linker starts off with observations that are fair as far as they go:

No, libertarianism hasn’t consistently changed how Americans think about taxation, government regulation, or foreign policy. But it is transforming how we think about morality. We can see it in rapidly changing views about gay marriage, in the growing acceptance of recreational marijuana usage, and in the rise of a non-judgmental outlook on sex and pleasure more generally.

The point here is that we’re being instructed NOT to think, to reflect, to ponder, to do cost/benefit analysis, to learn vicariously from the mistakes of others, to picture how we assume a matriarchal/patriarchal role in our extended families as a result of our choices.

No, we’re all eat, drink, and be merry these days. If we’re not having fun, it’s Bush’s fault.

Ask yourself how you would feel if Weeks — porn star Belle Knox — was your daughter.

I submit that virtually every honest person — those with children of their own, as well as those who merely possess a functional moral imagination — will admit to being appalled at the thought.

And with good reason. You put massive amounts of effort into raising a son/daughter. You want to impart timeless values that ensure continuity of society to them. And they. . .debase themselves. Now, the Godless Commie Sodomites have been quick to attack anything positive in the way of traditional morality, saying, essentially: “Hedonism is the new morality.”

Satan’s lies are neither new nor sustainable. Belle Knox–will she achieve happiness and honor under the sun? Can you name ANY porn stars who’ve EVER achieved any place of honor in society? It’s fairly simple: once you get on all fours and lower yourself to being a common dog, it’s not easily recoverable. Also simple: retaining some dignity.

This post is not even some hyper-morality play, trying to say you’re going to Hay-Ell if you [screw/smoke/sniff/sin]. No. This is an appeal to pragmatism. Look at who is successful: the sober, educated, modest, spiritually alive, professionally reliable people.

I haven’t had as much sex as Belle Knox. I’ve also never viewed sexuality as some kind of video game or competitive sport. I hope that she and her ilk repent of their ways and pursue that which is of lasting value in life, for such is not to be found in the canine position.

Category: Culture
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