LIVE AT FIVE: 05.01.14

Back from Portland. Going to celebrate May Day by wearing my blue shirt, posting Live at Five, maybe a book post and FMJRA too if the energy holds out.

Category: Linkagery

Thank God for the ‘Pay Gap’!

Posted on | April 30, 2014 | 9 Comments

Ladies, if you think inequality is bad, guess what happens when women make more than their husbands?

When she makes more, marriage difficulties jump and divorce rates rise by 50%. Economists at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the National University of Singapore found that traditional views of gender identity, particularly the perception that it’s a man’s job to make more money than his wife, affect whether or not women marry, whom they marry, how much they decide to work, and even whether couples choose to stay married.
Cheating, too, becomes a greater problem. A 2010 Cornell University study examined 18- to 28-year-old married couples and couples living together for more than a year. Men who were completely dependent on their female partner’s salary were five times more likely to cheat than men who made an equal amount of money. . . .
A study from the University of Florida and the University of Virginia discovered that a man’s self-esteem and ego take a hit when his female partner prospers, and it can negatively impact his outlook on their relationship. . . .
The study suggests that “having a partner who experiences a success might hurt men’s implicit self-esteem because ambition and success are qualities that are generally important to women when selecting a mate.”
A separate body of research by Lamar Pierce, professor of strategy at Washington University’s Olin Business School in St. Louis, found that many men still believe it’s important for them to earn more than their wives.
In his study, published in early 2013, Pierce found that in relationships where women make a little bit more than their partners, men are about 10% more likely to require prescription pills to combat erectile dysfunction (ED), insomnia, and anxiety.

Read the whole thing. Congratulations on your success, ladies. Enjoy life after you divorce your cheating, demoralized, impotent husband.

Category: Economics, Marriage

Barrett Brown Pleads Guilty

Posted on | April 30, 2014 | 15 Comments

September 2012: Barrett Brown vows to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

News from Dallas today:

A writer and activist linked to the hacking collective Anonymous pleaded guilty to federal charges on Tuesday alleging that he shared stolen data and posted an online threat saying he would try to harm a federal agent who was investigating him.
Barrett Lancaster Brown, 32, pleaded guilty in Dallas federal court to obstructing the execution of a search warrant, making Internet threats and being an accessory to an unauthorized access of a protected computer.
While Brown’s attorneys got prosecutors to drop nearly a dozen other counts, he still faces up to 8½ years in prison. He will be sentenced in August.
Brown was a writer and one-time spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, a worldwide hacking collective that has staged attacks on governments, businesses and organizations. Brown acted as a self-appointed spokesman for the group and has been quoted by several news outlets, including The Associated Press, even if some within the movement dismissed him as a fabulist who craved attention.

Yes, “a fabulist who craved attention,” not to mention that he was an egomaniacal heroin-addicted paranoid nutjob who, just days before his final meltdown, threatened to sue me for defamation.

He was all that and more: “The Kook Who Knew Too Much.”

Category: Barrett Brown, Crime

She Was Buried Alive

Posted on | April 30, 2014 | 52 Comments

Oklahoma teenager Stephanie Neiman had just graduated from Perry High School that night in June 1999 when she and another girl went to visit their friend Bobby Boynt. Neiman, 19, was driving her blue Chevy pickup with a personalized license plate, “TAZZZ,” for the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. Neiman and her 18-year-old friend’s trip to the Boynt residence was one of those “wrong place, wrong time” disasters. They arrived just as Boynt, the 23-year-old father of a 9-month-old infant, was being assaulted by three men:

Clayton Lockett, 23, his cousin, Alfonzo Lockett, 17 and Shawn Mathis, 26, were already there. While Boynt’s baby son slept in another room, they had tied up and were beating Boynt because he owed money to Clayton Lockett.
When Neiman’s friend went inside the home they hit her with a shotgun then forced her to call Neiman into the home.
They repeatedly raped Neiman’s 18-year-old friend, tied up the two women then used Neiman’s truck to take the adults and the baby to a rural part of Kay County. When Neiman refused to give Clayton Lockett the keys to her truck or provide him the alarm code, he ordered Stephanie to kneel while Mathis dug a grave.
Lockett shot her and the gun jammed. While Neiman lay there screaming, the attackers cleared the jam and Lockett shot her a second time. Even though she was still breathing, he ordered the other two attackers to drag her into the grave and bury her.

Kidnapping, assault, rape, murder — these brutal monsters committed multiple crimes that night. The cruel murder of Stephanie Neiman served no purpose. The killers left two witnesses alive:

They threatened to kill Bobby Boynt and Neiman’s friend if they went to police, but they did anyway. Perry police arrested the three attackers just three days later.
Alfonzo Lockett and Shawn Mathis are each serving life terms for their parts in the crime.

This brings us to Clayton Lockett:

You can read the victim statement by Stephanie’s mother, Susie Neiman, which mentions — as an incident in passing — that Stephanie was “made to do unspeakable things” by these criminals. The Washington Post says only that Stephanie was “sexually assaulted,” pointing out that Lockett already had previous felony convictions and had only been released from prison in 1998:

After the trial was completed in August 2000, the Associated Press reported that “Lockett was found guilty of conspiracy, first-degree burglary, three counts of assault with a dangerous weapon, three counts of forcible oral sodomy, four counts of first-degree rape, four counts of kidnapping and two counts of robbery by force and fear. The charges were after former convictions of two or more felonies, according to the court clerk’s office.”
Clayton Lockett was sentenced to death for first-degree murder, and more than 2,285 years in prison for his other convictions from that night. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the death sentence in April 2013 . . .

All this is necessary prelude to what happened Tuesday night:

A death row inmate spent forty minutes writhing in agony before dying of a heart attack following a new cocktail of drugs administered in a lethal injection on Tuesday night.
Oklahoma prison officials halted Clayton Lockett’s execution after the experimental drug left the man writhing and clenching his teeth on the gurney.
The 38-year-old, who was found guilty of shooting a woman and watching his friends bury her alive, was declared unconscious ten minutes after the first of the state’s new three-drug lethal injection combination was administered.
Three minutes later, though, he began breathing heavily, writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow.
It later emerged his vein had ruptured.
The blinds were eventually lowered to prevent those in the viewing gallery from watching what was happening in the death chamber, and the state’s top prison official eventually called a halt to the proceedings.
Lockett died of a heart attack a short time later, the Department of Corrections said.
Local media present said Mr Lockett sat up and said ‘something’s wrong’ 13 minutes into the procedure.
‘It was a horrible thing to witness. This was totally botched,’ said Lockett’s attorney, David Autry.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said “we have a fundamental standard in this country that even when the death penalty is justified, it must be carried out humanely. And I think everyone would recognize that this case fell short of that standard.”

Indeed. Clayton Lockett’s execution was not “carried out humanely,” but Stephanie Neiman was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, shot twice and buried alive. And in the immortal words of Inspector Harry Callahan, “Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.”

Category: Crime

What Kind of ‘Militants’ Are They?

Posted on | April 30, 2014 | 21 Comments

Probably radical Lutherans, I’d guess:

For two weeks, retired teacher Samson Dawah prayed for news of his niece Saratu, who was among more than 230 schoolgirls snatched by Boko Haram militants in the north-eastern Nigerian village of Chibok. Then on Monday the agonising silence was broken.
When Dawah called together his extended family members to give an update, he asked that the most elderly not attend, fearing they would not be able to cope with what he had to say. “We have heard from members of the forest community where they took the girls. They said there had been mass marriages and the girls are being shared out as wives among the Boko Haram militants,” Dawah told his relatives.
Saratu’s father fainted; he has since been in hospital. The women of the family have barely eaten. “My wife keeps asking me, why isn’t the government deploying every means to find our children,” Dawah said. The marriage reports have not been confirmed officially, and rely on eyewitnesses.
The 14 April abduction of the girls — students aged between 16 and 18 who were sitting a physics paper at their school, one of a handful in troubled Borno state that had opened specially for final exams — shocked a nation inured to violence during a five year-insurgency. . . .

You see we’re now four paragraphs into a story about these girl-raping “militants” who have fought a “five-year insurgency” in Nigeria, and yet there is not a word to indicate what the “Boko Harm militants” are all about. Spoiler alert: You can read all the way through the Guardian article and never get even a clue that Boko Haram is also known as “The Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad” (Jama’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da’wa wal-Jihad), a terrorist organization founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002, which “seeks to establish a ‘pure’ Islamic state ruled by sharia law.”

So, 250 teenage schoolgirls are kidnapped and reportedly forced into Islamic “marriage” to their terrorist captors — a practice justified by reference to the Koran and other Muslim teachings — and these violent girl-rapers are just “militants,” you see.

“It’s unbearable. . . . The abduction of our
children and the news of them being married off is
like hearing of the return of the slave trade,” said
Yakubu Ubalala, whose 17- and 18-year-old daughters
Kulu and Maimuna are among the disappeared.

Thanks, Militants of the Religion No Liberal Dares to Name!

In today's #RapeCulture news, it's time to play "Name That 'Militant' Girl-Raping Religion"! http://t.co/kKkGy5EXqT #fem2 #p2 #tcot

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 30, 2014

#RapeCulture Maybe someone from the State Department can go on all five Sunday shows to talk about this. http://t.co/kKkGy5EXqT #tcot

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 30, 2014

Category: Islam, Nigeria, Terrorism

Pedophile ‘Schemed to Elude Justice’

Posted on | April 30, 2014 | 27 Comments

Allegedly, I hasten to add. However, the phrase quoted in the headline doesn’t appear in this San Francisco Chronicle article:

A well-known Livermore [California] golf coach charged with 75 felony counts alleging that he molested children is now facing accusations that he tried from jail to hire a hit man to kill three alleged victims, authorities said Tuesday.
Andrew Michael Nisbet, 32, wrote letters from Santa Rita Jail in Dublin expressing his interest in having them “taken care of,” Alameda County district attorney’s Inspector Jeff McCort wrote in a court affidavit. . . .
A search of Nisbet’s jail cell uncovered driving directions to the home of the alleged victim in Pleasanton and “many other letters” from Nisbet to the informant discussing the murder-for-hire plot, according to McCort. . . .
Nisbet was arrested in December and had originally been charged with 65 felonies, including lewd acts with a child, oral copulation of a child, sending harmful matter and arranging a sexual meeting with a minor. Authorities said Nisbet sexually assaulted several boys between the ages of 12 and 17 between 2009 and 2012.
Prosecutors later added 10 more felony charges, including allegations that he possessed child pornography.
He now faces three felony counts of solicitation of murder.

Hat-tip to Stephen Sheiko on Twitter, who seems to think this story should remind us of someone we know. Allegedly.

Category: Crime, Gays

A Typical ObamaCare Nightmare

Posted on | April 29, 2014 | 47 Comments

The damage caused by the ObamaCare catastrophe — arguably the worst federal public policy initiative of the past 40 years — are usually discussed in terms of politics and macroeconomic statistics: X-number of jobs lost, an X-percent decline in President Obama’s poll numbers. True enough, the harms of the paradoxically named “Affordable Care Act” have impacted our entire society, hindering economic growth, incentivizing job losses, and resulting in policy cancellations and higher premiums for millions of Americans.

The very worst has been suffered by small businesses (both owners and employees) and by self-employed independent contractors. Statistics cannot adequately express what at an unprecedented nightmare many people have gone through. One of these ObamaCare victms, blogger Rich Vail, describes his frightening ordeal:

Last fall we received a letter saying that because of the myriad of changes that HHS had ordered health insurance companies to make to individual policies that were purchased on the open insurance market, that our health insurance would be cancelled…and it was despite they lies presented by President Obama and Sen’s Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski. “If you like your insurance, you can keep it, period.”
Because last year was a pretty good year for me, we don’t qualify for subsidies…so my insurance which had costs us $132 per month rose to $137 per week. We had the choice of paying that or the rent…
The problem now is that I have four fractured ribs…

Read the whole thing and please hit Rich’s tip jar. I did.

Category: Barack Obama, Health Care

« go back — keep looking »

About

This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.01.14

In The Mailbox: 04.30.14

Thank God for the ‘Pay Gap’!

Barrett Brown Pleads Guilty

She Was Buried Alive

What Kind of ‘Militants’ Are They?

Pedophile ‘Schemed to Elude Justice’

A Typical ObamaCare Nightmare

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Search

Recent Posts

RSS reader subscription

MEMEORANDUM

Recent Comments

THE AMAZING GONZO FEED

Major Leagues

Archives

Free Agents

SHAMELESS CAPITALISM

Triple-A Franchises

Blogroll

About

Subscribe to our feed

Search

Admin