The Other McCain

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

The ‘Missing’ IRS Emails

Posted on | June 22, 2014 | 22 Comments

It’s a cover-up — obstruction of justice — and everybody knows it, because the subpoenaed e-mails simply cannot be “lost”:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it can’t provide emails sent between 2009 and 2011 that were requested by congressional investigators because of hard drive crashes.
The agency said that emails stored on dead drives were lost forever because its email backup tapes were recycled every six months, and employees were responsible for keeping their own long-term archives.
The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005, according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for “automatic data processing services.” Sonasoft’s motto is “email archiving done right,” and the company lists the IRS as a customer.
In 2009, Sonasoft even sent out a Tweet advertising its work for the IRS.

We therefore know for a fact that the e-mails could not have been accidentally “lost.” We also know for a fact that Lois Lerner’s hard-drive was erased within 10 days of a letter being sent from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp inquiring about the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS. We furthermore know for a fact that Nikole Flax — the former chief of staff to the IRS director, whose e-mails were also supposedly “lost” — visited the White House 35 times after Flax talked to Lerner about targeting conservative groups.

So, here you have a scandal where the smoking guns are just piled up in plain sight for everyone to see, and yet the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press are all pretending that this is not actually a scandal. It’s as if they’re competing to win a Pulitzer Prize for Best Non-Reporting of an Impeachable Offense.

 

Category: Scandal, Taxes

The Creepy Little Weirdo

Posted on | June 21, 2014 | 25 Comments

 

The #YesAllWomen hashtag went viral in the aftermath of killings perpetrated last month by Elliot Rodger. Like so much contemporary feminism, #YesAllWomen was a non sequitur. The complaints compiled under the hashtag weren’t really relevant to the Santa Barbara rampage because — wait for it — Elliot Rodger was a complete psycho.

It is usually a mistake to generalize from the example of psycho killers. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and an assassin; should we start rounding up Marxists? Jeffrey Dahmer was a gay man and a murderous cannibal; should we start rounding up gays? Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard graduate and a terrorist bomber; should we start rounding up Harvard graduates? People who commit horrific crimes can be categorized any number of ways, but the key point is that very few people commit horrific crimes. There are probably quite a few gay Marxists at Harvard, none of whom are mass murderers.

However, when you expand the category of collective guilt to include all men, and expand the category of collective victimhood to include all women, the logical incoherence of this flawed thought process should be more obvious. Instead, because the Grievance Culture of feminism has become so deeply embedded in our discourse, the incoherence of #YesAllWomen is less obvious to many people.

Perusing the Twitter hashtag, you see it used to express indignation about any number of feminist complaints, including indignation that anyone finds the hashtag illogical or offensive.

If you are offended by feminism’s routine demonization of men, apparently, you are anti-equality or perhaps even pro-rape. And the idiots who issue these hateful insults seem to believe they have discovered something original, a new insight on male behavior, when in fact they are usually recycling feminist tropes that were recognized as clichés long before anybody heard of Elliot Rodger.

Look, I’ve read more feminist literature than 99% of the women using the #YesAllWomen hashtag. Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan, Charlotte Bunch, Susan Brownmiller, Adrienne Rich, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Judith Butler — yes, I’ve read them all, so that no one can say my critique of feminist theory is based in ignorant prejudice. But feminism has proven itself a theory impervious to facts and logic, so that its errors are never acknowledged or corrected, and entire institutions are now devoted to advancing misguided feminist ideas and fallacies that were debunked decades ago.

Here is an excerpt from Daphne Patai’s 1998 book Heterophobia:

The sociologist Joel Best, in explaining how a social problem comes to prominence through the work of individuals who expand its definition and find ever more instances of it, labels this procedure the “just another example of X strategy” — where  “X” is the problem that is being dramatized. Thus, he contends, the “domain” of the identified problem “expands,” as greater and greater claims are made for the problem’s pervasiveness.

Professor Patai was here discussing MacKinnon’s “muddling of issues” involving rape and sexual harassment, specifically the conflation of offensive words with criminal deeds, which Professor Patai saw as a threat to First Amendment freedoms. But the larger point is that we fail to recognize how the definitions of problems are expanded through the “just another example” strategy.

This is what is absurd about Elliot Rodger and #YesAllWomen: Elliot Rodger is “just another example” . . . of what? Of moody loners who quietly went insane, whose profound psychiatric troubles went largely unnoticed until they perpetrated mass murder?

How can atrocities committed by psychopaths be offered as examples of anything other than the manifestations of mental illness?

What factor do we use to categorize psycho killers? Elliot Rodger spent a lot of time playing violent video games — as did Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Newtown killer Adam Lanza. The problem with that categorization is that lots of  people play violent video games without ever becomes mass murderers.

Murderous Lunatics and the Super Bowl Hoax

What transfixed feminists and inspired the #YesAllWomen hashtag was that Elliot Rodger wrote a “manifesto” and recorded a video blaming his “Day of Retribution” on women who he perceived as having rejected him. But the rationalizations of psychopaths are actually symptoms of their mental illness, and must be understood as such. If a murderous lunatic says he is Satan or Jesus Christ (Charles Manson at different times claimed to be both), we don’t analyze his claim as an expression of theology, so why do feminists insist that we view Elliot Rodger’s anti-female rants as “just another example” of pervasive sexism?

Answer: Because pervasive sexism is the raison d’etre of feminism, and feminists will opportunistically exploit any news in the headlines to promote their “consciousness-raising” agenda.

Have we forgotten the 1993 Super Bowl “Day of Dread” hoax?

On Jan. 27 [1993], a news conference was called in Pasadena, Calif., site of the forthcoming Super Bowl game, by a coalition of women’s groups. At the news conference, reporters were informed that Super Bowl Sunday “is the biggest day of the year for violence against women.” Forty percent more women would be battered on that day, said Sheila Kuehl of the California Women’s Law Center, citing a study done at Virginia’s Old Dominion University.
On Jan. 28, Lenore Walker, a Denver psychologist and author of The Battered Woman, appeared on Good Morning America claiming to have compiled a 10-year record showing a sharp increase in violent incidents against women on Super Bowl Sundays. And on Jan. 29, a story in the Boston Globe reported that women’s shelter and hotlines are “flooded with more calls from victims (on Super Bowl Sunday) than on any other day of the year.”
In this roiling sea of media credulity was a lone island of professional integrity. Ken Ringle, a Washington Post staff writer, took the time to call around. When he asked Janet Katz, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion and one of the principal authors of the study cited by Kuehl, about the connection between violence and football games, she said: “That’s not what we found at all.” Instead, she told him, they had found that an increase in emergency-room admissions “was not associated with the occurrence of football games in general.”

The alleged connection between domestic violence and the Super Bowl was a lie, entirely fabricated, contradicting actual research. Yet the vast majority of journalists never bothered to check the facts, but instead repeated the bogus claims of Sheila Kuehl, Lenore Walker and other feminists as if they were true. This was simply a dishonest attempt to exploit a high-profile news event (the Super Bowl is the most-watched televised event in America) to promote the feminist agenda, and the cynical liars behind this hoax relied on the gullibility of journalists to help them promote their phony “too good to check” statistic.

“Yes, all women have been harassed.
“Yes, all women have been judged by our looks, not our merit.
“Yes, all women have been around men who have discounted, denied and demeaned us.
“Yes, all women are outraged by the misogynistic ravings of Elliot Rodger, the narcissistic 22-year-old who went on a killing spree in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Friday night because women didn’t respond to him the way he believed he was entitled to have them respond. . . .
“Women heard Elliot Rodger. And they began flooding Twitter by the hundreds of thousands with their responses, using the hashtag #YesAllWomen.”
— Petula Dvorak, Washington Post, May 26

It’s a complete non sequitur, you see? What does the murderous madness of a psychopath like Elliot Rodger have to do with Dvorak’s complaints about being “discounted, denied and demeaned”? In some ways, Dvorak’s rant is as irrational as Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, but feminism is seldom recognized as a psychiatric disorder.

The Phony ‘Alpha Male’ Posture

A couple nights ago, the A&E cable network showed a documentary about Elliot Rodger that made clear the nature of his mental illness. The best analysis was offered by expert Dr. Park Dietz, who was previously quoted in a May 29 New Yorker article:

On Tuesday, I spoke with Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who has worked on a wide array of mass-murder cases, including those of Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Kaczynski, and the Columbine killers. . . . “These instantaneous, off-the-cuff psychological autopsies have two giant problems,” Dietz told me. “The first is that nobody, in the midst of the news cycle, has all the data. The second is that most of the people who are performing these analyses are completely unqualified.” Dietz, who now runs a consulting firm that trains schools and workplaces on how to spot and prevent violent acts, said that all the wrongheaded analysis and the quick politicization of mass shootings leads to an instantaneous and ultimately harmful shift in priorities. “I give everyone the same warning: do not let the media set your priorities, because they will mislead you every time. Whenever mass killings become a matter of intense public debate, the issue shifts to the issue of the day rather than the more fundamental issue of how we can prevent these mass killings from happening.”

Bingo: the “media . . . will mislead you every time.” The British Independent quotes Dr. Dietz’s comments from the documentary:

“There is no question in my mind that in a society that shared data, that had a good protocol for law enforcement to make use of that data, and that had adequate mental health resources, such crimes could be prevented.”
Describing the lack of emotion shown by Rodger on a series of videos he had posted online, Dr Dietz comments: “There’s no emotion in his voice. This is the same tone that sexually sadistic killers use when they torture their victims. It’s cruel.” Speaking in a documentary being broadcast on Channel 4 tonight, he adds: “What comes through loud and clear here is his detachment. His tone during this is a cold instructional, calculated tone.”

Bingo, again. If you study mental illness and violent crime, you recognize Elliot Rodger’s “detachment” — his lack of emotion, his narcissistic arrogance — as symptomatic of his psychopathology. It was especially Rodger’s video performance, his tough-guy “Alpha male” posturing, that seems to have generated much of the initial #YesAllWomen reaction, based on a perception of Rodger as a “typical” misogynist.

Yet if you understand Rodger’s mental illness and view his video as a calculated performance — presenting himself to the world as he wished to be perceived — it looks entirely different.

The Elliot Rodger on video seems confident. He is a vain braggart, superficial and selfish. Certainly we can understand why Petula Dvorak and other feminists reacted so strongly to this video performance, as the “Alpha male” Elliot Rodger reminded them of every smug asshole who ever snubbed or insulted them. The feminist outrage might seem like a rational response to such a deliberate provocation, until we remember that this video is a calculated performance by a psychopathic murderer.

In reality, Elliot Rodger was not a confident Alpha male — he was the exact opposite, a scrawny boy who was no good at sports, who was afraid of girls, and who was so painfully shy that he couldn’t even bring himself to engage in casual small talk with girls. If you read Rodger’s 140-page “manifesto” and listen to the testimony of those who knew him, you realize how bizarre his grievance against women was. Elliot Rodger says girls “rejected” him, but he seldom summoned the courage to speak to girls, much less to express his romantic interest in them. Inside his twisted mind, he believed he was the victim of deliberate humiliation; to the outside observer, however, he was an extremely quiet person, usually so unobtrusive that most people never noticed him.

To explain the vast distance between reality and Elliot Rodger’s delusional beliefs, we need only cite the example of Monette Moio, the younger sister of one of Rodger’s middle-school classmates. He had a crush on her, but apparently never made any overt expression of his interest in her. Monette shows up on Page 41 of Rodger’s manifesto as “a pretty blonde girl” who “must have thought I was an ultimate loser. . . . I started to hate all girls because of this.” On Page 42, she re-appears as “that evil bitch Monette Moio,” and he blames her for his “intense fear of girls,” saying he was “teased and bullied.”

It was all in his mind!

Monette’s father reacted furiously to Rodger’s bizarre claim:

‘She was ten years old for God’s sake — she can barely remember the guy. He’s a sociopath. She hasn’t seen him since school.’
‘She’s devastated over the whole thing. . . . It’s like she’s being implicated in this terrible tragedy for something she hasn’t done and can’t remember.’ . . .
Mr Moio added that he and his daughter only remembers Rodger as a ‘strange kid’.
‘He was weird then and he’s weird now,’ he said. ‘He had a secret crush on her, but she was completely unaware of him. She had no idea… If you think about it, he could have killed her, he could have come after her.
‘I was hands on at that school and I don’t remember him. She just remembers that he was a strange kid, she knew he wasn’t a normal type person, but there are a lot of people like that at that age.’

Elliot Rodger “was a strange kid,” not “a normal type person” — this was recognized by a lot of people, including his parents, who hired therapists and counselors to try to repair his warped personality.

As ‘Rational’ as Ted Kaczynski

With the benefit of hindsight, the overlooked red flags are now highly visible, and many have lamented the failure of police to recognize Elliot Rodger’s potential for deadly violence during their various encounters with him. Yet just as his video performance shows that Rodger was capable of imitating an “Alpha male” persona, his success in deceiving police — who could have prevented his massacre if they had searched his apartment — shows that he was capable of imitating sanity.

Indeed, if you read his manifesto, Rodger’s prose doesn’t seem very much like the ravings of a lunatic; it’s as “rational” as Ted Kaczynski’s infamous anti-technology manifesto. Elliot Rodger determined before he began his killing spree that he would end it by committing suicide.

If he hadn’t killed himself, however, would he have been able to avoid conviction at trial by using the insanity defense? I doubt it. He was sane enough to be legally responsible for his crimes, no matter how crazy his motive was. The key to understanding Elliot Rodger’s murderous madness is his refusal to accept responsibility for his failures. He scapegoated women, imagining them as monsters who “bullied” and “rejected” him, as a way of externalizing blame, making himself the victim of the cruelty he attributed to them.

In a way, Elliot Rodger’s worldview is a mirror-reverse of feminism, an ideology that scapegoats men for women’s unhappiness. There are plenty of happy, successful women in the world who refuse to embrace victimhood as an identity, as feminism tells them they must.

One “recovering feminist” described her confusion at watching the #YesAllWomen hashtag turn from Elliot Rodger into an endless reiteration of the “rape culture” discussion, and she finally “reached the end of her feminist rope” when she encountered an article proclaiming that all men are “part of the rape culture.” Right.

And all blondes were part of a conspiracy to humiliate Elliot Rodger.

The ideology of feminism — its insistence on collective male blame and collective female victimhood — rejects the concept of personal responsibility. Feminism encourages self-pity, envy and resentment.

All men are not “part of the rape culture,” and Elliot Rodger is not “just another example” of anything except creepy little weirdos who sit around all day playing video games and brooding because of their own inadequate social skills. The attempt by feminists to exploit the Santa Barbara massacre with the #YesAllWomen campaign has succeeded only in providing further evidence of feminism’s fundamental irrationality — as if more evidence were needed.




 

 

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Category: Crime, Feminism

Munchausen Blogger Syndrome

Posted on | June 21, 2014 | 17 Comments

#YesAllWomen, anybody? The worst “mommy blogger,” ever:

A 26-year-old “mommy blogger” was arrested Tuesday and charged with murdering her 5-year-old son by poisoning him with salt.
According to the Washington Post, blogger Lacey Spears wove an intricate web of lies about herself and her son on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and may have killed the boy to satisfy her need for attention and the support of strangers.
The Scottsville, Kentucky woman was indicted in White Plains, New York on second-degree charges of depraved murder and manslaughter in the Jan. 23 death of Garnett Paul Spears. . . .
Garnett, she said, was the son of a police officer named Blake who was killed in a tragic car accident. The Daily Mail claimed that the boy’s father was actually a garage door installer named Chris Hill who lives in Georgia.
In January, the boy was admitted to Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, New York, when doctors noted that his sodium levels were shooting up in a way that was “metabolically impossible” for his body to do on its own. Assistant District Attorney Doreen Lloyd said in court on Tuesday that Lacey Spears would wait for hospital personnel to leave, then inject high doses of sodium into the Garnett’s gastric feeding tube. . . .
She is believed to suffer from Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, a disorder in which a parent or other caregiver inflicts harm on a child to gain sympathy and support from people outside the family.

There is a place in Hell for her.

 

Category: Crime

Is the Mississippi GOP Corrupt?

Posted on | June 21, 2014 | 15 Comments

The dishonest effort to re-elect Thad Cochran hits a new low:

The “super PAC” supporting the senator . . . is paying African-American leaders, including Bishop Crudup, to help lift black turnout on Tuesday, said Pete Perry, a Republican strategist here who is working for the group.

Who is Pete Perry? Who is funding this pro-Cochran “super PAC”? Is there illegal coordination between the super PAC, the Cochran campaign and the state Republican Party? Most of all, exactly how much has Bishop Crudup been paid for his support?

Pete Da Tech Guy wants some answers to these questions — or, at least, he’d like to see professional journalists start asking them.

 

Category: Election, Mississippi, Republicans

‘No One Deserves to Be Violently Murdered and Set on Fire’

Posted on | June 20, 2014 | 16 Comments

Well, we can all agree on this, I’m pretty sure. But apparently there is someone in Florida who feels otherwise:

FORT MYERS — Fort Myers police are trying to find the killer of a transgender woman whose body was found burned behind a garbage bin Thursday.
Police on Friday identified the victim as Eddie James Owen, 31, but family members said Owen identified as a woman and went by the name Yazmin or Yaz’min Shancez.

(Warning: Pronoun confusion ahead.)

Fort Myers Police Lt. Jay Rodriguez said they have not determined a cause of death, and are not investigating the homicide as a hate crime.
“We have no indication at this time to say this was specifically done because it was a male living as a female or anything like that,” Rodriguez said. “If you really think about it, a hate crime is killing someone for a specific reason, being black, Hispanic, gay. We’re investigating as we would any other homicide.”

(Keep this in mind: Police don’t even know the cause of death yet. They haven’t identified a suspect or a motive.)

The body was found on a dead-end, private road near Fowler Street in an industrial part of the city. The victim’s father, Harvey Loggins, said his family left balloons and stuffed animals behind the Budget Truck Rental site Friday to bring some light to the crime scene, which was still bloody and charred when he first arrived after hearing the news.
“We didn’t hate him for what he was,” Loggins said of Shancez. “Still to this day I love him. I wish he was here right now.”

(The father of the victim uses male pronouns for his son, Eddie.)

The victim was identifying as a woman as early as 2004, according to a police report where officers spelled her alias as “Jasmine.” At the time, the 20-year-old was working as a self-employed hair stylist, according to records for a failure to appear on a charge of battery.
Ross Murray, a spokesman for GLAAD, an advocacy organization for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, said he didn’t know if Thursday’s killing was a hate crime, but said “no one deserves to be violently murdered and set on fire and put behind a Dumpster.”

(Again, there is no disagreement about this. We are against murdering people. We are against setting people on fire.)

In 2013, 13 of the 18 documented anti-LGBTQ homicides were transgender women and 89 percent of the victims were people of color, GLAAD reports.
“Transgender women, particularly transgender women of color, face the most violence against them,” Murray said.

(Hmmm. There are about 15,000 homicides annually in the United States. If there were “18 documented anti-LGBTQ homicides,” this would mean that about one-eighth of one percent — 0.12% — of U.S. homicides were motivated by “anti-LGBTQ” sentiment. There would have to be an 800% increase in anti-gay hate crimes for such murders to amount to even 1% of the total.)

FBI data shows Fort Myers had one hate crime, which was racially-based, in 2012, the most recent year of available data. Collier County also had one reported hate crime, which was based on sexual orientation, according to the FBI.
“I think that transgender people are still marginalized and stigmatized in our society,” Murray said. “We tend to talk about transgender people in a way that discounts their experience and makes them a butt of a joke or deviant or suspicious and doesn’t take (their) whole life into account.”

(Perhaps, but remember that so far police have provided no indication of the motive for this particular murder.)

In October 2012, a man who once rented a room from Shancez filed for a restraining order, saying Shancez had threatened him and his girlfriend. According to the petition, the man said Shancez yelled out a car window that the couple “will be laying in our death beds together” and threatened to file a false report that said the couple came to her house and beat her.
A judge denied the couple’s petitions, saying there was not enough evidence of repeat violence or stalking.

(Could this point toward a possible motive? Does it indicate that the victim maybe had a bad temper? Again, we have no indication of a motive for the murder, and this 2012 restraining order situation probably had nothing to do with it.)

The SWFL Equality Coalition is planning a vigil for Shancez at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday at Centennial Park in Fort Myers.

Well, OK, and maybe by Sunday the police will have a suspect in custody, so that maybe we will know something about the motive. At this point, however, we know nothing at all about the motive, and I object to the pre-emptive journalistic speculation that amounts to the newspaper hinting around that there could be a hate crime here, just because the victim was “transgender.”

Of course, maybe this was a hate crime, but we don’t know that. Does Fort Myers have a gang problem or a drug problem? Then why isn’t the newspaper dropping hints about that? Dope dealers and gang-bangers probably commit more than 0.12% of murders. Why isn’t the newspaper asking whether Yazmin was involved with drugs? Why doesn’t the story mention gang-related violence in Fort Myers?

There is no journalistic speculation that maybe Yazmin got ripped off on a meth deal by some local Crips, because it would be irresponsible to do so without any substantiation, and yet without any evidence of a hate motive for Yazmin’s murder, the reporter has to call up a national spokesman for GLAAD to declare that ““no one deserves to be violently murdered and set on fire and put behind a Dumpster” — as if Fort Myers newspaper readers needed such a lecture: “Hey, murder is a bad thing, you guys!”

Irresponsible journalism makes some people wish they could murder the media, set them on fire and put them behind a Dumpster.

For the record, I’m against that, too.

 

Category: Crime, Gays, Media Bias

Professor Ludlow Defends His Right to Have Sex With Grad Students

Posted on | June 20, 2014 | 31 Comments

If you’re a bald middle-aged guy with an Ivy League Ph.D., academic tenure is basically a license to have sex with college girls:

A Northwestern University professor has filed a Title IX federal lawsuit against school officials for gender discrimination, defamation, and invasion of privacy over their handling of what he insists are false sexual assault accusations.
Two different graduate students have accused Philosophy Professor Peter Ludlow of sexual offenses in recent years.
In February, a Medill School of Journalism student filed a Title IX lawsuit against Northwestern for not taking her seriously when she reported that Ludlow sexually assaulted her in 2012.
Ludlow also lists her as a defendant in his lawsuit, claiming these allegations are “flawed and one-sided,” according to an article in The Daily Northwestern, the school’s official student newspaper.
Ludlow’s suit also shows that the school had investigated him in March after a philosophy graduate student reported that he had had non-consensual sex with her.
He admits that he and the student had a “consensual sexual relationship” from October 2011 to January 2012.

So, Professor Ludlow admits he had sex with one grad student, but she says it was “non-consensual.” And as to the other student’s claims, well, isn’t it horribly unfair to assume that a 55-year-old professor is constantly on the prowl for collegiate poontang?

According to her complaint, the student originally accused Ludlow of getting her drunk, and then kissing and groping her while she blacked out. . . .
The student hoped he would be fired, or at least disciplined. Instead, she claims, Northwestern stood by ineffectually as Ludlow threatened defamation litigation. While she spiraled into depression and attempted suicide, Ludlow continued to work as a tenured professor with full privileges.

From the Daily Northwestern:

[Ludlow] is alleging that the graduate student, along with philosophy Prof. Jennifer Lackey and director of NU’s Sexual Harassment Prevention Office Joan Slavin, who are also named in the suit, defamed him in statements they made during a third-party investigation into the student’s allegations.
Ludlow said Slavin, Lackey and the student made false claims against him during the investigation. The University hired Patricia C. Bobb, an independent investigator, to look into the graduate student’s claims.
Ludlow’s suit says that Bobb found the claims of non-consensual sex unsubstantiated, but that she did find Ludlow had violated NU’s sexual harassment policy because he had “unequal power“ in his relationship with the graduate student. Ludlow contests this finding from Bobb’s report, according to his lawsuit.
Bobb’s report was then distributed within the University against Ludlow’s wishes, the suit says.

Bottom line: Ludlow says he’s a victim. Despite the “unequal power” clause, Northwestern’s policy doesn’t specifically prohibit professors from having sex with students. Why? Because the whole point of becoming a professor is to have sex with students.

Everybody who knows anything about academia understands this: Graduate students are basically college kids who don’t want to grow up and get a real job. So they stay in school and, while pursuing their advanced degrees, they work as “teaching assistants” and have sex with their students. It’s a piece of cake, because they are “mature” 20-somethings with off-campus apartments, and they’re teaching classes full of freshmen and sophomores who are impressed by talk about “working on my dissertation,” blah blah blah.

Then the grad student finally gets his Ph.D., lands a tenure-track job and just keeps on doing the same thing he was doing as a grad student — teaching classes and screwing students. Every year, there’s a fresh supply of new meat, and by the time he gets tenure, your typical professor has probably been through a dozen affairs with students. The problem is that old habits die hard, and as the professor approaches middle age, his romantic attentions are not usually reciprocated as enthusiastically as when he was a hip, young teaching assistant.

Oh, sure, there are always going to be some naive students who are grateful to have the professor “mentor” them, but by the time a professor is Peter Ludlow’s age, there is an unmistakably creepy aura of desperate lechery about this kind of “mentoring.”

Is it possible that Peter Ludlow is the target of a campus “rape culture” witch hunt fostered by feminists eager to claim a scalp? Sure.

Does this make Peter Ludlow a victim for whom I should have sympathy? No, he’s got a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Fuck him.

Besides which, Peter Ludlow is an Anonymous sympathizer who defended that criminal wackjob Barrett Brown. Fuck him.

 

Category: Education, Sex

Does That Mean That BHO’s Actual Birth Certificate Was An Attachment?

Posted on | June 20, 2014 | 32 Comments

by Smitty

For a warmup, via Insty, we have Paul Ryan skewering the smarmy IRS commissioner John Koskinen:
JK is all: “Yeah, yeah, we all know I’m bullet-proof. Get your piece and make room in line and for the next guy. Imma have a second bourbon after this for you, Ryan.”

The kicker is the Joe Crowley chaser (via Breitbart) where he tries to link anyone not buying the IRS line to those who think Obama was born in Kenya:

“Like those who continue to refuse to believe the birth certificate from the state of Hawaii is actually real, conspiracy theorists will continue to rattle sabers,” Crowley said. “But really dose anyone in this room want to be seen in that light.”

Now that the IRS is up to seven (7) [VII] hard drives full of email for employees connected with the case mysteriously deciding to imitate Obamas foreign policy at the same time, anyone stupid enough not to suspect some amount of conspiracy afoot is probably stupid enough to think Sarah Silverman is a nun. New York, go ahead and send Lady Gaga to Congress in place of Crowley. If our Congress is to be a joke, might as well toss in a little song & dance.


And no, this post is not an endorsement of Birtherism. The title is pure sarcasm directed at Crowley. Obama was a dope smoking twerp who grew up in Hawaii, and the IRS is, IMO, guilty of any accusation anyone cares to hurl, until they quit jacking about and deliver the evidence.

Category: Democrats, Scandal

Brett Kimberlin Annoys a Judge

Posted on | June 20, 2014 | 22 Comments

It’s been weeks since I’ve paid any attention to Brett Kimberlin’s ridiculous federal lawsuit, the one that my co-defendant John Hoge has described as Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al. The reason for this long silence is that there just hasn’t been any real news in the case. Judge Grimm issued a letter order that put a lid on the extraordinary number of filings made in the case, and the defendants are basically now waiting to learn (a) if Kimberlin’s motion to amend his complaint will be accepted or (b) whether the various motions to dismiss and objections to the amended complaint have sufficed to show that (c) the amended motion is futile and (d) the entire lawsuit should be dismissed. Meanwhile, the case has been handed over to a new judge, George J. Hazel, who has this week received two letters from the Perjuring Pro Se Pipsqueak.

The first letter asks for more time to effect service on several defendants, including Ali Akbar and Breitbart.com, despite the fact that Kimberlin was already granted an additional 60 days on April 28. Now, having failed to effect service for more than six weeks — and with just days remaining until the June 28 deadline — Kimberlin wants to move the goal posts, asking that the court ignore his failure. Instead, Kimberlin wants the court first to rule on his motion to amend and then extend the deadline 60 days past that ruling.

Some of my fellow defendants (or their lawyers) are sure to point out what’s wrong with this: If the court denies the motion to amend — as I hope and expect they will — the suit would then be ripe for dismissal, except for the fact that not all the defendants have been served, some eight months after Kimberlin first filed his complaint. That would be extended to at least 10 months if Kimberlin were granted the delay he now seeks. Those defendants who have already responded to Kimberlin’s suit (including those who have spent money to hire lawyers) can very well argue that such a delay would be unfair to them, leaving them in limbo because of Kimberlin’s failures.

Of course, if the court should grant Kimberlin’s motion to amend, this would re-start the clock for everybody — but I honestly don’t think that’s going to happen, because the arguments made in opposition to the amendment were very strong. Kimberlin’s original suit is so badly flawed, as a matter of law, that it’s a slam-dunk for dismissal, and his proposed amended complaint did not substantially improve the suit, while adding numerous new errors in the process. When these problems were pointed out by the defendants in their opposition motions, Kimberlin’s response was just a lot of arm-waving and a repetition of his claims that the defendants are Very Bad People Who Do Very Bad Things.

Kimberlin’s second letter to Judge Hazel is simply absurd: He invokes the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling rejecting the defendant’s appeal in the case of United States v. Osinger. The irrelevance of this to Kimberlin’s case is obvious to anyone.

Here is a brief summary of Osinger’s crime:

Osinger was prosecuted for cyberstalking under 18 U.S.C. § 2261A. Among the things he did was create a phony Facebook page for his ex-girlfriend and post grossly inappropriate photos. He sent emails to her boss, co-workers and family members about it. And not to be subtle, he sent her about 40 texts over two days to let her know how he was going to destroy her life.

This was a crime, not a civil tort. Neither I nor any of the 20 other defendants in Kimberlin’s suit have violated 18 U.S.C. § 2261A. None of us have been arrested or indicted for violating 18 U.S.C. § 2261A or any other federal criminal statute, and no one is investigating us for such a crime. In writing to Judge Hazel, however, Kimberlin says he alleges that the defendants in his suit have “engaged in . . . criminal conduct that is not protected by the First Amendment.”

And the point is . . . what?

Anybody can allege anything, but the federal government has not appointed Brett Kimberlin to prosecute criminals, and his claims that he has been a victim of felonies by the defendants reminds me of nothing so much as it does an old episode of The Andy Griffith Show in which Gomer Pyle runs around shouting “citizens arrest.”

The law doesn’t work that way. If Brett Kimberlin has been the victim of felonies perpetrated by the defendants — who include Erick Erickson, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck, among others — where are the indictments? Why isn’t the FBI slapping the cuffs on these alleged Very Bad People Who Do Very Bad Things?

Answer: Because Brett Kimberlin is full of crap.

Is it a federal crime to call somebody “full of crap”? I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know. Maybe you should hit my tip jar, just in case.





 

Category: The Kimberlin Files
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