The Other McCain

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

FMJRA 2.0: So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done

Posted on | April 2, 2023 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Passover begins on Wednesday, so it seems appropriate to use Metallica’s Creeping Death as the SOTD. Also noteworthy: this mashup of the preceding with Megadeth and The Who. ABC is showing The Ten Commandments tonight, but since I don’t have cable I’m out of luck.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

A show with everything INCLUDING Yul Brynner!

‘Limited Scientific Evidence’
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Die Macht Der Bilder
A View From The Beach
EBL

 

Fear And Loathing On The Intertubes
The Political Hat
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

NOT a Babylon Bee Headline
First Street Journal
A View From The Beach
EBL

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Riley Gaines
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Inheriting a Legacy of Liberty
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

BREAKING NEWS: Nashville School Shooter Is Probably Not a Trump Voter
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Nashville Shooter Left ‘Manifesto,’ Was ‘High-Functioning’ Autistic
The DaleyGator
First Street Journal
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.28.23 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Nashville Shooting: Expert on Violence Agrees That Crazy People Are Dangerous
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.28.23 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

The Unlimited Wretchedness of MSNBC
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.29.23
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

BREAKING: TRUMP INDICTED
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.30.23
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.31.23
EBL
357 Magnum

Top linkers for the week ending March 31: 

  1.  EBL (16)
  2.  357 Magnum (13)
  3.  A View From The Beach (12)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: FMJRA Award

‘Adult Film Actress’

Posted on | April 1, 2023 | Comments Off on ‘Adult Film Actress’

The scholars and theologians assembled under royal commission to produce the official English translation we know as the King James Bible were working with Hebrew and Greek original texts, and when it came time to decide what word to use for women who have sex for money, settled on the word whore. If that word was good enough for the finest scholars of 1611, it’s good enough for me, but the folks at CNN have chosen the phrase “adult film actress” to describe Stormy Daniels, as if sleazy porn videos deserve to be classified as “film,” as if it is “adult” behavior to watch such sleazy videos, and as if acting was her claim to fame. Or infamy, to be more exact. The fact that Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) is having her “15 minutes of fame” extended we owe to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who was elected two years ago on a simple platform: Prosecute Trump. (We are not supposed to say “Soros-funded” in connection with Bragg, although he was in fact funded by Soros, because it’s anti-Semitic to call attention to this.)

Bragg has made it a policy not to prosecute crimes he deems “low-level offenses,” and crime has skyrocketed out of control in New York, but what Bragg does prosecute is the very serious crime alleged against Donald Trump: Paying a whore to shut up.

This is only a crime if it’s committed by a Republican. Basically, being a Republican is a crime unto itself, according to Alvin Bragg.

“A whore is a deep ditch” (Proverbs 23:27) and Bragg has stumbled into this ditch by his own foolish choice, apparently ignoring the omen of Michael Avenatti’s downfall. Avenatti gained national fame as attorney for Stormy Daniels, and where is he now? Fourteen years in federal prison is a harsh lesson, and one might think Bragg would be forewarned by this example, but he is heedless of the danger, “relying on debatable facts and untested legal theories to transform minor misconduct into a felony,” to quote Jacob Sullum (hat-tip Instapundit). But I did not start this post with the intent to engage in punditry about the Stormy Daniels case, because what’s the point? Every pundit on the planet is babbling about this case, and why should I add my voice to that cacophony? No, I started this post with the intention of making fun of CNN:

Primetime ratings for CNN have fallen 61% this month — the steepest dip in viewership among the big three cable news giants, according to the latest figures released by Nielsen.
The drop in ratings is a bad omen for CNN, which has struggled to right the ship since parent company Warner Bros. Discovery tasked Chris Licht with the job of turning the news channel around more than a year ago.
Despite the poor ratings, Licht has the support of his boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who gave a pep talk to network managers urging them to steer clear of politically oriented commentary and partisanship.

Cue the Paw Patrol theme song.



 

 

Category: CNN, Crime, Donald Trump, New York, Scandal

Escaping the School Trap

Posted on | April 1, 2023 | 1 Comment

The two-room schoolhouse

Every normal boy hates school, and it is fair to say I was “educated” against my will. Maybe some of my readers are weirdos — nerds and teacher’s pets and other goody-two-shoes types who derived a perverse pleasure from school attendance — but that’s your problem, not mine.

There are few critics of public education who have been at it longer than I have, since I was a first-grader at Annette Winn Elementary School in Lithia Springs, Georgia. As I warn friends, don’t ever get me started on this subject, because I could go on for hours about what’s wrong with America’s education system, namely everything — every damned thing!

The root cause of the evil is what’s called ADA, i.e., the state makes a certain allotment of taxpayer money for every child in public schools, based on Average Daily Attendance. It therefore behooves the administrators of public schools to maximize attendance and to increase the years of schooling. If you are familiar with the history of education, you know that preschool and kindergarten were not part of public schools until quite recently and, if you go further back — prior to the 1930s — high-school attendance was neither mandatory nor commonplace in many parts of America. In rural counties, public education was provided at the two-room country schoolhouse, the curriculum of which extended only up to eighth grade. There was often only one high school in the entire county, a municipal institution in the county seat and, for example, the farm boy in rural Floyd County, Georgia, who wished to attend Rome High School circa 1914, would have to (a) find someone in town to provide him room and board, and (b) pay for his tuition and books, since the school was funded by city taxes, rather than county taxes.

Jethro Bodine and Jed Clampett

Those who’ve watched The Beverly Hillbillies laughed when Jethro would boast of his intellectual prowess: “I’ve got an eighth-grade education!” However humorous we might find it, this was the reality for most people who grew up in rural America, even as late as World War II. Girls and boys growing up on the farm didn’t have access to schooling beyond eighth grade, unless they had some way to get to town. Think of how long a 10- or 15-mile trip would take by horse and buggy on winding dirt country roads, so that even if a farm family were prosperous enough to be able to afford such an expense, difficulties of traveling any great distance were a serious impediment to pursuing education beyond what was available at the nearest two-room country schoolhouse. About 30 years ago, when I lived in Rome, Georgia, it was my good fortune to be assigned to interview several old-timers, including local historian Dr. C.J. Wyatt, about conditions in “the old days” (i.e., between 1900 and World War II).

The way education was organized in those days bore little resemblance to our modern school system. Out in the county, the two-room school might only meet for 100 days a year (rather than the 180-day school calendar than now prevails) and advancement from grade to grade was not based on a child’s age. The school was divided into the primary group, up until fourth-or fifth grade, which met in one room, while the upper group met in the other room, roughly the equivalent of a middle school curriculum. The staff of the school was exactly two — the principal teaching the upper group, and an assistant teaching the lower grades. A particularly precocious child might begin attending school at age five or six, but age seven was more common. And because children’s labor was valuable (even necessary) to farm life, many students attended sporadically, and their schooling often ended at age 12 or 13. To advance in grades, a child had to master whatever was required at each grade — there was no “social promotion” — and it might be that a child of 10 or 12 would still be toiling away on second- or third-grade lessons, while a bright and studious child the same age was already doing seventh- or eight-grade work.

Perhaps you now understand why Jethro Bodine felt he’d made a great academic accomplishment by finishing eighth grade. There were plenty of farm boys who never made it that far, and we may contrast this seemingly primitive educational system with what we have now in America.

Back in the 1990s, not long after Newt Gingrich had become Speaker of the House, I watched him give a speech on C-SPAN where he referred to modern high schools as “subsidized dating” and pointed out that many high schools were graduating kids who couldn’t even read their own diplomas. If this was true in 1995, how much worse is it now?

Before I continue further down this path — as I said, I could go on for hours in detailing what’s wrong with education in America — let me explain that this rant was inspired by a Glenn Reynolds article on Substack, “The Age Barrier, And Its Costs,” addressing the problem of age segregation. For a definition, I’ll cite Wikipedia:

Age segregation is the separation of people based on their age, and may be observed in many aspects of some societies. . . . Age segregation in schools, age grading, or graded education is the separation of students into years of education (grades, forms) by approximately the same age.
In the United States, graded education was introduced during 1848 to 1870. Age segregation in the U.S. was a product of industrialization, Western formal schooling, child labor laws, social services agencies, and the rise of disciplines such as psychology and education. A combination of these caused a shift from family working as a unit to separation of economic activities and childcare emerged.

To say that this was “a product of industrialization” is a way of implying that the division of children into age-graded classrooms was a social trend — something impersonal, a more or less natural byproduct of the processes of history — but this is false. In fact, the U.S. school system began changing in the mid-1800s because certain “reformers” had gone to Germany and came back promoting “modern” ideas based on their enthusiasm for the Prussian state school system. This “reform” movement began with Horace Mann in Massachusetts and gradually spread from there. We are far removed from Boston in the 1840s, of course, but it’s important to recognize that the ideas which shaped our public school system didn’t just happen as part of some historical trend, rather that these ideas were advanced by individual human beings, activists and organizers who had specific goals in mind.

Contrary to what you may think, education “reform” has been actively resisted at every step of the way by intelligent people who saw clear dangers in the changes being promoted by the reformers. The problems of the age-grade system were apparent long ago. Education consultant Karl Bunday cites the work of a 1912 critic quoted in Charles Silberman’s 1970 book Crisis in the Classroom:

“[The age-grade class system] is constructed upon the assumption that a group of minds can be marshalled and controlled in growth in exactly the same manner that a military officer marshalls and directs the bodily movements of a company of soldiers. In solid, unbreakable phalanx the class is supposed to move through all the grades, keeping in locked step. This locked step is set by the ‘average’ pupil — an algebraic myth born of inanimate figures and an addled pedagogy. The class system does injury to the rapid and quick-thinking pupils, because these must shackle their stride to keep pace with the mythical average. But the class system does a greater injury to the large number who make slower progress than the rate of the mythical average pupil . . . They are foredoomed to failure before they begin.”

This “lockstep” nature of a curriculum based upon the average student results in what I’ve called the “Hansel and Gretel” approach to teaching. Those who recall the fairy tale know how Hansel and Gretel left a trail of bread crumbs behind them to help them find their way back home. In a similar manner, the teacher doles out lessons in a time-ordered sequence — the bread-crumb trail of knowledge — with a certain amount of math, grammar, history, etc., to be taught each day, without regard to the abilities or interests of the students. Let us stipulate that this method cannot be separated from the classroom system; we are not passing judgment on whether teachers are “nice” people, or whether they are sincere in their desire to help students learn, when we apply critical scrutiny to the system itself. No matter how intelligent or dedicated the teacher may be, so long as “education” is a matter of group instruction, with children assigned to classrooms by age (rather than by their ability or interest), and the teacher required to bring the children along through a prescribed set of lessons, this “Hansel and Gretel” method must be used, and its effects are predictable, as the critic saw in 1912.

Public education in general violates a basic principle of successful organization, i.e., voluntary association through mutual self-selection. Think about college fraternities. Candidates for membership attend rush parties at the houses that they’re interested in joining. Members of the fraternities meet the prospective candidates, then vote on which ones should receive offers of membership. A student might receive such bids from more than one fraternity, in which case he is free to choose between them. And once an offer of membership is accepted, the pledge must go through a trial period — learning the secret handshake, etc. — before becoming a full-fledged member. Each fraternity has standards of behavior, embodied in a code, and enforced by a membership committee that can expel any member who fails to uphold the code. And if member for any reason becomes dissatisfied with the obligations of fraternity life, he is always free to quit. In a free society, this is how practically all successful enterprises are organized, and a major reason public schools are such a disaster is because they are not based on this principle of mutual self-selection. Public schools are based on government-imposed compulsion, and as such are offensive to the spirit of liberty.

The spirit of liberty at Faber College, 1962

We have heard liberals talk about “structural racism,” the idea that black people suffer disadvantage (and white people benefit from “privilege”) even without anyone in the system having racist intention, simply because of the way the system is set up. We might make a similar critique of our education system — American public schools are defined by structural failure. The problems of the system cannot be fixed by reform; the system itself is the problem. Students are collected into classrooms not on the basis of their interests or abilities, but rather on the basis of age and ZIP code. Every eight-year-old in a certain geographical district must attend third grade at the local elementary school, where they are all instructed in the same curriculum. This one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, and it hasn’t been working for a long time, and efforts to reform it by creating limited alternatives within the existing system — “magnet” schools or whatever — must be recognized as efforts to preserve the system, rather than to fundamentally change the system.

And it all goes back to the ADA. Funding schools on the basis of Average Daily Attendance creates perverse incentives which have in several cases led to scandal, as in Baltimore, where “ghost students” were listed as attending schools that they did not in fact attend. “City Schools receives $15,973 per student, every year from taxpayers,” so that a school with 20 fictitious enrollments was swindling taxpayers to the tune of more than $300,000 a year. The level of academic achievement in Baltimore schools is almost non-existent: “Just 7 percent of third through eighth graders testing proficient in math, meaning 93 percent could not do math at grade level.” This evidence of system-wide failure demonstrates the underlying problem, where the people in charge of the school think of it as a jobs program — the goal being to maximize revenue, in order to provide employment for more certified “professional educators” — with little regard to the ostensible objective of educating children.

As long as X-number of children are attending school, the school receives Y-amount of money, and nothing else matters, in terms of the basic functioning of the system where funding is determined by ADA. Basically, children are held hostage for taxpayer ransom: “Give us $15,000 a year per child and nobody gets hurt.” Except, of course, children are getting hurt by this system, but most adults don’t care because they’re telling themselves a narrative based on anecdotal experience: “Well, I attended public school and I turned out OK.” Thanks, Grandpa, we’re glad you enjoyed yourself back in the Good Old Days, but how is this relevant to the disaster in Baltimore? How can your misty-eyed memories justify imprisoning kids in failing schools until they turn 18, in order to provide employment to certified “professional educators”?

Professor Reynolds talks about age segregation as a society-wide phenomenon, but it starts with the way our schools are organized. Any reasonably bright student — say, the top 10% or 15% — could complete a high-school education by age 16, if placed on an accelerated program, but the schools don’t want to lose the revenue! In other words, if the schools allowed bright students to learn at their own pace and complete high school early, the system would lose the additional revenue it would otherwise obtain by keeping the kids until age 18. The age-grade system serves to preserve the “lockstep” fiction of everyone learning the one-size-fits-all curriculum at the same pace, so that the system maintains its iron grip on all children in a geographic district, in order to guarantee funding according to the ADA formula. The addition of kindergarten and pre-K to this system was simply a means of expanding funding by extending the system’s reach, to put 4- and 5-year-olds into its greedy clutches.

Here’s a question: If it is not necessary to keep bright students trapped in public schools until age 18 — if they could complete the required work by age 15 or 16 — what about the lesser minds among them? What about the children of below-average intelligence, who are not destined for collegiate education? Wouldn’t it be better, in terms of social benefit, to direct these kids toward a skill-based training that would prepare them for gainful employment? Shouldn’t they be directed at age 14 or 15 toward apprentice-type situations where they can make minimum wage while doing on-the-job training? And if, at age 16, they’re able to work full-time, shouldn’t the school system say, “Well-done and farewell”?

A willingness to “think outside the box” is necessary when the box in question is a system that has become a crime scene that ought to be surrounded by yellow tape while detectives investigate what went wrong that led to this catastrophic outcome. Beginning with the Prussian-inspired “reforms” of Horace Mann, our education system has followed a trajectory that seemed to be going upward — by the mid-20th century, American schools were producing students who would eventually send men to the moon — until, almost imperceptibly at first, signs of trouble began to appear, like a “check engine” light on the dashboard. Is it a coincidence that the great upheaval of the Civil Rights era began with a Supreme Court decision regarding schools? Is it also a coincidence that the turmoil of the 1960s was typified by protests on university campuses that shut down such elite institutions as Columbia and Yale? And isn’t the greatest threat to free speech now the climate of repression on university campuses? So many of our society’s problems are rooted in our school system. Conservatives should be paying more attention to this, and less attention to the endless political carnival of Washington, D.C.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

 

Category: Education

In The Mailbox: 03.31.23

Posted on | April 1, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

“They hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s their reason?”

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Beria Bragg, also, Gwyneth Paltrow Wins in Utah Ski Crash Trial
Twitchy: Sen. Fetterman Released From Hospital After Recovering From Being Healthy, Stephen King Shaming Trump Defenders Because “He Cheated On His Wife” Ends Badly, and NWS Weighs In On #TransDayOfVisibility And The Forecast Calls For Ratios
Louder With Crowder: Father obliterates school board over daughter’s in-class assignment about who she would do…and in what orifice, Girls sports advocate Riley Gaines stumps scientist on basic biology, crowd laughs as he pulls ‘Ph.D’ card, and Nancy Pelosi gets fact-checked into oblivion over ignorant Trump indictment tweet
Vox Popoli: Finland Joins NATO, also, He’s Not Wrong
According To Hoyt: A Weary Morn, also, It’s Memerific
Monster Hunter Nation: WriterDojo S4 E12 – On Location, also, ID2A Review
Stoic Observations: The Coming Crisis

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Greasy Pole #27 – The Anti-Semite episode
American Conservative: Public Sector Unions Threaten Our Fiscal Future, also, The Professionals
American Greatness: The Democrats’ Road to Hell, Left-Wing Violence Chic, Tennessee State Troopers Prevent Far-Left Radicals from Storming State Capitol, and Biden White House Remains Silent on Trump Indictment
American Power: Brandon Sanderson’s Fantasy Empire, Twitter’s Transgender Ideology Problem, and You Can’t Cancel Me, I Quit
American Thinker: Diversity Executives – The U.S. Version of Soviet Political Commissars, also, Christopher Wray and the Politicization of the FBI
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Welfare State Friday
Babalu Blog: Cuban dictatorship certifies its own farce election, Solidarity vs. Disparaging the flag in communist Cuba, Reports from Cuba: What it’s like to live in a medical superpower, and Father Alberto Reyes dares to challenge the ‘great lie’ of Cuba’s dictatorship
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm for March 31
Behind The Black: Two launches by Red China, Spain’s government officially establishes a Spanish space agency, and Sponge terrain on Mars
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: Trump is indicted
Da Tech Guy: It’s During Weeks like this when I get Christ’s Admonition about “Loving Your Enemies” the most
Don Surber: Banning The Truth
Gates Of Vienna: Culture-Enriching Terror Plot Foiled in Flanders, also, Enricher vs. Enricher Knife-Play in Padua
The Geller Report: Xi Jinping Says He Is Preparing Red China for War, also, Fox News Poll: Trump’s lead grows in GOP primary race, now over 50% support
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, Earendel, and Fisking a Tweet
Hollywood In Toto: Joe Rogan Was Right – W.H.O. Backs Podcaster Over Vaccine Advice
The Lid: Moses, The Prophet Who Got Cheated
Legal Insurrection: ‘This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the Highest Level in History’, A Significant Tornado Outbreak Sweeps through South and Midwest, Arizona Democrats Sue to Keep Spoiler ‘No Labels’ Candidate Off 2024 Ballot, Trans Activists Storm Florida Capitol Building Over Bill Banning Teaching Sex Orientation, Gender Identity From PreK-8, and Yes, It’s Okay To Point Out That Alvin Bragg Was “Soros-Backed”
Nebraska Energy Observer: Scattershot Friday
Outkick: LeBron James Won’t Pay For Blue Twitter Checkmark , Angels Infielder Anthony Rendon Grabs Athletics Fan, Swings And Misses, In Video Posted To Twitter, Larry Bird Felt Disrespected Pistons Used White Players To Guard Him, Says Isiah Thomas, Dodgers Fan Gets Pummeled Mid-Proposal By Stadium Security, and Colin Cowherd Roasts Will Levis For Posting Muscle Pictures
Power Line: How to Handle a Senate Demagogue, Tied Up In Knots, and Thoughts from the ammo line
Shark Tank: Florida CFO Patronis Targets ESG Standards
Shot In The Dark: Our Semi-Constitutional Monarchy, #Unexpectedly, and Sticking It To The Man
STUMP: These are a few of my favorite graphs
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – The Middle East Explosion and American Detente
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, Nidal Hasan may face execution, The Russians will stop providing the US with advanced notices on nuclear capable missile tests, and DOD Education DEI* Unit Dissolved
Transterrestrial Musings: Virgin Orbit
Victory Girls: Transgenders Shaping The Soul Of Our Nation – Biden
Volokh Conspiracy: Douglass Mackey Convicted for Vote-by-Tweet Meme
Watts Up With That: More Nonsense About Greenland, Fossil Fuels Still Dominate Security and Defense Needs, and Southern Labrador coastal landscape dominated by fat polar bears in March
Weasel Zippers: MSNBC Calls DeSantis An Anti-Semite For Saying Manhattan DA “Soros-Backed”, also, In Zambia, Kamala Harris Gives A Word Salad Definition Of “Agri-Tech”
The Federalist: Why Are Conservatives Talking About 2024 Instead Of The Wisconsin Supreme Court Election Next Week?, Trump Indictment Launches Era Of Police-State Politics In America, The Gaming Press Is A Sorry Tool For Wokescolds, Biden’s Department Of Defense Denies Drag Shows On Bases Even When Confronted With Undeniable Evidence, and Twitter Officially Joined The Censorship Regime When It Silenced ‘Trans Day Of Vengeance’ Reporting
Mark Steyn: The Indictment of a President

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Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 03.30.23

Posted on | March 30, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.
OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Liberal Professor Calls For Murdering People You Disagree With
EBL: War of the Sicilian Vespers, Evan Gershkovich Has A Bad Day In Russia, and TRUMP INDICTED
Twitchy: DeSantis Says Florida Won’t Help With Trump Extradition, Protesters Hold “Die-In” At State Capitol To Indicate How Many Trans Lives Could Be Lost, and @LibsOfTikTok’s Chaya Raichik Goes To Serve Occasional Cortex With Ethics Complaint And Things Get Interesting
Louder With Crowder: Man recounts the violent way he murdered the three men who molested his kid, also, LibsofTikTok serves AOC with a defamation complaint, and then it gets hilarious
Vox Popoli: The First 30 Seconds, Is AI Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good?, Devil Mouse Shenanigans, They Can’t Compete, and President Trump Indicted

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Tobacco & Booze, or zigging instead of zagging
American Conservative: Joe Manchin Feels Betrayed About the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ Implementation
American Greatness: ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ to Proceed in D.C. Despite Nashville Shooting, also, West Virginia Bans Sex Change Surgeries for Minors
American Thinker: How Much Longer Can Western Governments Spit on Their People?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Income Tax News
Babalu Blog: Cuban dictatorship demands $10 million in ‘damages’ from baseball player who defected, The world today reminds us of the post-Vietnam era, Reports from Cuba: With elections over, trash on the streets of Cuba piles up again, and Image of the Day: High-rise luxury hotel nears completion in Havana while city crumbles around it
BattleSwarm: Austin’s Ongoing Policing Crisis
Behind The Black: Russia’s Soyuz-2 rocket launches classified military satellite, Virgin Orbit shuts down, H3 failure delays Japan’s entire space program, New startup unveils 3D printer for making rocket tanks and fairings, and Frank Rubio’s flight to ISS will exceed a year, setting a new American record
Cafe Hayek: Signs of Hope
CDR Salamander: The Weapons Gap With Red China the USA Created and Funded – It Goes Boom
Da Tech Guy: Five Fast Opening Day Thoughts Under the Fedora, also, This poll proves how devastatingly effective progressive indoctrination has been
Don Surber: Post-Trump, Biden Unleashes Hell
First Street Journal: What could possibly go wrong?, also, Who would want to be a landlord these days?
Gates Of Vienna: Don’t Bug Me
The Geller Report: END OF THE REPUBLIC – GRAND JURY INDICTS PRESIDENT TRUMP, also, Biden Cabinet Member Admits the Green Agenda Makes Us Reliant on China
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, Galactic Winds, and A New (Official) Ally
Hollywood In Toto: Jennifer Aniston (Indirectly) Slams Cancel Culture, also, Snowfall’s Evan Allen-Gessesse Charts New Course
The Lid: Do You Remember When The Media First Introduced DEI Policies For Green Cluster Industries?
Legal Insurrection: More than Two Dozen Democratic House Members Join Republicans to Nix Biden’s Gas Stove Grab, “Mostly Peaceful” Leftist Mob Tries to Gain Entry into Tennessee State Capitol, Washington Post Mocks Parents for Wanting Transparency in School Curriculums, J6 ‘QAnon Shaman’ Jacob Chansley Secures Early Release from Federal Prison, and Israel Accuses Biden White House of “Inappropriately Meddling” Over Country’s Judicial Reform Plan
Nebraska Energy Observer: I’m sorry for this
Outkick: College Baseball Umpire Suspended For Viral Strike Three Call Says He Was Called ‘Uncle Tom’ By Fans, Kendrick Perkins Gets MVP Vote, Likes Tweet Suggesting He Won’t Vote For A White Player, New York Yankees Flex On Rest Of MLB With Unique Request As They Run Out Of Jersey Numbers, New York Magazine – Stop Watching The Men’s NCAA Tournament Because The Women Are More Exciting, and Kyrie Irving Calls Mavericks A ‘ClusterF**k,’ Meaning Dallas Is Screwed For A Very Long Time
Power Line: Of Mice and Walz, Sorry, Liberals, Audrey Hale Is Not the Victim, and A Rubicon Is Crossed
Shark Tank: Florida To Repeal “Resign To Run”?
Shot In The Dark: A Hell “We” Can Make Happen, What’s In A Name?, and To The Hardest Working Man In Science
This Ain’t Hell: LA releases personal info and pictures of 9,300 police to anti-cop group, World War II veteran reunites with 1st love in France 75 years after meeting, Russia’s ‘special operations’ impacts its ability to deliver military equipment, Routine Training Mission Claims 9, and Activating veteran Navy Sailors for deployment
Transterrestrial Musings: The QAnon Shaman
Victory Girls: Media Claims Protest In Tennessee Capitol Was “Peaceful”
Volokh Conspiracy: Meghan Markle Wins Dismissal of Defamation Suit Brought by Half-Sister Samantha Markle, also, How Biden’s Private Sponsorship Parole Policy Reduced Illegal Migration by Making the Legal Kind Easier
Watts Up With That: Body Blow To Activists: Whopping 82% Of Berlin’s Voters Refused To Support 2030 Climate Neutrality, UN’s climate panic is more politics than science, and Aussie Parliament Votes to Impose a Carbon Tax
Weasel Zippers: 24 Hours Later, DHS Secretary Mayorkas Still Can’t Provide A Definition Of An Assault Weapon, Netanyahu Rips Biden For Trying To “Bully” Israel, and Far-Left Rep. (D-NY) Bowman Screams “Cowards,” “Gutless” At Republicans About Gun Control
The Federalist: Ruby-Red Indiana Seeks Public Health Power Grab Despite Massive Covid Failures, The Six Christians Martyred In Nashville Are A Call To Repentance To All Who Will Hear It, Biden DOJ Throttled Arrests Of Violent Abortion Mob Surrounding Supreme Court Justices’ Homes, More Mail-In Ballots Were Rejected Than Margin Of Victory In Nevada Senate Race, and America’s Banana Republic Era Is Here
Mark Steyn: World War “C”

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Category: Linkagery

BREAKING: TRUMP INDICTED

Posted on | March 30, 2023 | Comments Off on BREAKING: TRUMP INDICTED

Welcome to Soviet America, comrades:

The Manhattan grand jury hearing evidence in the Stormy Daniels “hush money” investigation on Thursday voted to indict the former president, two sources with knowledge of the case told The Post.
The vote sets the stage for the first ever criminal prosecution of a former US president.
The grand jury that returned the unprecedented indictment had since January been hearing evidence and witness testimony related to a hush-money payment made on Trump’s behalf to porn star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign.
It comes as Trump, 76, is attempting to regain the White House for a third time, running for the 2024 Republican nomination.
He has blasted the investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as a “political Witch-Hunt trying to take down the leading candidate, by far, in the Republican Party” and insisted “I did absolutely nothing wrong.”
Trump, who announced he expected to be arrested March 21 and called on his supporters to protest, also accused District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, of “prosecutorial misconduct,” and claimed any charges brought against him would be barred by statute of limitations.
In the lead up to the 2016 election, Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair she had with the New York real estate mogul in 2006.
Trump denies the affair.
Cohen pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court in 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes related to the Daniels payment and another to model Karen McDougal he helped arrange prior to the election.
Trump, who was president at the time of Cohen’s guilty plea, did not face charges by federal prosecutors over the payments.
The Manhattan DA’s office then launched its probe into the Republican, with the case gaining momentum in recent months.
Bragg had reportedly been building a case based on the Daniels payment being made with the intent to conceal or commit another crime. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Basically, Democrats want to outlaw opposition. Trump’s real crime — why he’s actually being prosecuted — is that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. So now they’ve gotten one of their reliable party henchmen, Soros-funded DA Bragg, to convene a grand jury in Manhattan (where Hillary got 87% of the vote in 2016) to indict Trump on the basis of a far-fetched theory that the payment to Stormy Daniels was somehow felonious. Question: How many other men has Alvin Bragg prosecuted in Manhattan for paying money to whores?

Because I’m pretty sure this payment to the whore Stormy Daniels is only being treated as a felony by Bragg because a Republican is accused of it.



 

 

Category: Donald Trump, New York, Scandal

In The Mailbox: 03.29.23

Posted on | March 30, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Compliance Does NOT Guarantee Safety
EBL: Dog Eating Dead Russian Soldiers in Ukraine Finds His Forever Home
Twitchy: Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) Comes Unhinged After Rep. Thos. Massie’s (R-KY) Suggestion To Stop School Shootings, Interior Sec. Haaland’s Inability To Answer Basic Questions Is This Entire Administration Summed Up, and DHS Sec. Mayorkas Wants To Ban “Assault Weapons” But Can’t Define Them
Louder With Crowder: Man attempts armed robbery of this grandmother’s food truck, but she has a gun of her own and he’s dead now, “I’d do it again”, and Democrat spox calls for “transphobes” to be murdered hours after trans shooter murdered Christian schoolchildren
Vox Popoli: Stonetoss Hits it Hard, The End of the Cult of Free, A Government of Literal Morons, and Substack Submerging
Gab News: Being Winsome And Nice Won’t Cut It Any More, Christian

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Wall Street Journal Takes the Pulse of a Dying America, also, Close the Border to Change Mexico’s Policies
American Greatness: George Soros Donates $1 Million to Wisconsin Democrats Ahead of State Supreme Court Election, also, Merrick Garland Refuses to Investigate Nashville Shooting as Hate Crime
American Thinker: Ukraine and the FBI – Profiles in Corruption
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Star pitcher for Cuba at the WBC defects, seeks to play in the MLB, Puerto Rico’s governor blasts Cuba’s sock puppet president for remarks on Puerto Rican independence, More apartheid, please! Cuba’s prime minister says tourists deserve more luxury goods and services, and NPR now stands for Not Popular Radio
BattleSwarm: Have 155mm Gun, Will Travel
Behind The Black: Hakuto-R1 snaps first picture of Moon from lunar orbit, Israel launches spy satellite, SpaceX launches another 56 Starlink satellites, Boeing & NASA Announce 1st Starliner manned mission to now launch on July 21, In U.S. sales of dumb phones are up, and Midnight repost – Genocide is coming to America
Cafe Hayek: I’m Sick of Having My Intelligence Insulted
CDR Salamander: Seriously…Who’s Been Running Our Wargames Then?
Da Tech Guy: Voices of the 2023 Catholic Men’s Conference Jeff Joaquin
Don Surber: LGB Without The TQ
First Street Journal: The laughable contortions taken by the professional media when a school shooter is #transgender
Gates Of Vienna: Culture-Enriching Knife Rampage in Lisbon, Fretting Over the Pronouns of a Mass Murderer, and Intoxicated Culture-Enriching Ecdysiast Terrifies a Church in Monza
The Geller Report: They’re Just Getting Started…Hyper-Violent Transgender Militants Call for Widespread Violence Against Christians
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, also, Zooming in on a Gravitational Lens
Hollywood In Toto: Russell Peters – Why Are We Celebrating Cancel Culture Bullies?, also, Guy Pearce Just Made Cancel Culture Worse
The Lid: REVEALED – Multiple Feds Embedded in J6 Capitol Crowd
Legal Insurrection: A ‘resistance’ coup just defeated Israeli democracy, California’s Descent Accelerates as Newsom’s New Bill Dings Oil Companies for “Excessive Profits”, Have Law Schools Abandoned Free Speech?, DOJ Memo Told U.S. Marshals Not to Arrest Protestors Outside of SCOTUS Justices’ Homes, and AZ Gov. Katie Hobbs’ Press Secretary Resigns After Threatening Violence Against ‘Transphobes’ After Nashville Shooting
Nebraska Energy Observer: The Public Order Bill
Outkick: CNN Draws Lowest-Rated Primetime Quarter On Record, Memphis’ Jamirah Shutes Pleads Not Guilty Over Handshake Line Punch Because, Hey, It’s Worth A Shot, Major League Baseball’s Pitch Clock Is Speeding Up Games, But There’s A Major Issue Lurking, Lamar Jackson Pushes Back On Claims Of Him Being Injury Prone, and Joe Rogan Is Right About The Absurdity Of Lia Thomas, Trans Threatening Female Sports
Power Line: A Walter Hudson footnote, Nebraska Fats or Minnesota Thins?, and As Matt Taibbi Testified About Weaponization of the Government, the IRS Made a Housecall
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Yet Another Hump Day Shrapnel Post
Shark Tank: Fried Files Ethics Complaint Against DeSantis
Shot In The Dark: Not For Turning, The H Word, and By The Book
The Political Hat: “Organoid Intelligence” Of Lab Grown Brains Mean One Thing – Hyperintelligent Bioroid Catgirls
This Ain’t Hell: Three More Accounted For, The last of U.S. combat troops out of Vietnam, 50 years ago today, Murder trial begins for Daniel Perry, who shot Garrett Foster in self-defense, and Marine Reaper Woes
Transterrestrial Musings: The Evolution Of Choo Choos, The Latest Economic Insanity From California, The IPCC Reports, and Starburst Ventures
Victory Girls: Twitter Says No Pointing Out The Vengeance Talk!
Volokh Conspiracy: Apache Stronghold v. U.S.: Religious Freedom and Government Property
Watts Up With That: Breakthrough! A Big Utility Says Net Zero May Not Be Reliable, also, Berliners Fail to Endorse Climate Neutral by 2030 Ballot
Weasel Zippers: Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) Pushes False Claim About Israeli Soldiers Attacking Palestinians, Sen. Kennedy (R-LA) Says Mayorkas Unqualified “To Manage Chuck E. Cheese”, Biden Claims His Economic “Plan” Is “Working”, and Biden’s DHS Budget Mentions The Word “Cartel” Zero Times
The Federalist: Twitter Bans Federalist CEO Sean Davis For Reporting On ‘Trans Day Of Vengeance’ Following Nashville Shooting, Rep. Tom Tiffany Requests Federal Funds Pulled From Indian Tribe Guilty Of Illegally Holding Wisconsites Hostage , How To Win The New Cold War With China: Restore Faith, Community, And Industry, Voter Suppression Is Real And It’s Not What You Were Told, and Twitter Cannot Be Saved. It’s Time For Free Speech Proponents To Let It Die
Mark Steyn: Misgendering a Murderer

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Category: Linkagery

The Unlimited Wretchedness of MSNBC

Posted on | March 29, 2023 | 2 Comments

This morning I switched my office TV to MSNBC — I watch, so you don’t have to — and it quite frankly ruined my whole day. After having watched coverage of the Nashville shooting on Fox News, the thought occurred to me, “Hey, I wonder what they’re saying about this over on Morning Joe?” Because when a transgender maniac slaughters six people (including three 9-year-old children) at a Christian school, you might think such an atrocity would give pause to liberals who’ve spend years claiming that “right-wing extremists” are the greatest threat to the nation.

But being a liberal in the media means never having to question your values, because you are surrounded by like-minded people, and are never challenged by anyone whose opinion makes any difference to your well-being. In fact, liberalism endows its advocates with carte blanche, a practically unlimited license to misbehave, so that Jeffrey Toobin can masturbate during a Zoom meeting with his CNN colleagues without damaging his career prospects. And if you work for MSNBC, you can say anything — anything at all — as long as you never forget that your main job is to blame Republicans for all evil in the world:

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Wednesday that Republicans have “made up” freedom in the Second Amendment and blamed them for Monday’s shooting at a Christian elementary school.
The Nashville Police Department received a call at 10:13 a.m. Monday morning about shots fired at a private Christian elementary school and arrived on scene. Upon arrival, 28-year-old transgender Audrey Hale opened fire on the officers from the second floor before five officers entered the building and fatally shot Hale.
Scarborough argued the Second Amendment doesn’t protect “the right to carry around weapons of war.”
“They talk about a freedom — they talk a freedom that they have made up in their own twisted heads because they have been whipped into a paranoid frenzy by the NRA for twenty-five years. From jack-booted thugs when Bush 41 quit, all the way through where now they’re claiming the Second Amendment protects things it just doesn’t protect. They should read Scalia’s own words in Heller. It doesn’t protect the right to carry around weapons of war,” Scarborough said.

Got that? The reason the transgender psychotic went on a murder rampage at a Christian school is because . . . the NRA and a “paranoid frenzy” that afflicts Republicans:

“Because of Republicans, because of the NRA, because of the gun manufacturers who make millions and millions and billions of dollars, we now live in a society where the cops are afraid of the convicts, where former presidents … they make martyrs out of convicts who stormed the United States Capitol. These Republicans are the enemy of the rule of law,” Scarborough said.

 

You knew he’d find a way to throw J6 in there, right? While jabbering his madcap world-salad, you may have noticed where Joe threw in that bit about “jack-booted thugs when Bush 41 quit,” which is a reference to a controversy over a fundraising letter sent out by the NRA in 1995:

The National Rifle Association’s top official yesterday defended the language his organization has used in describing federal agents, saying references to “jack-booted government thugs” were accurate. “Those words are not far — in fact, they are a pretty close description of what’s happening in the real world,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The NRA’s criticism of federal agents in a fund-raising letter has been cited as an example of the kind of rhetoric that creates a climate for violent acts such as the Oklahoma City terrorist attack. LaPierre insisted that’s not the case.
“That’s like saying the weather report in Florida on the hurricane caused the damage, rather than the hurricane,” he said. . . .
The six-page NRA letter signed by LaPierre and sent out last month singles out lawmakers who are pressing for gun control legislation and says: “It doesn’t matter to them that the semi-auto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”
It goes on: “Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens.”
The NRA is demanding congressional hearings into what LaPierre said was “a major trend toward abuses” by federal agents of constitutional guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said the Senate Judiciary Committee he heads has no plans to open hearings on the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian religious cult near Waco, Tex., an event that galvanized antagonism in some groups against federal law enforcement officers.

Context is everything. In 1994, the Democrat-controlled Congress rammed through a “comprehensive” crime bill that, among other things, outlawed various types of semi-automatic weapons. This came in the wake of the Waco “siege” — a federal raid that turned into a deadly atrocity — and a lot of people were angry about it. Not as angry as Timothy McVeigh, perhaps, but very angry. This widespread anger was a major factor in the “Republican revolution” election of 1994 that gave Republicans majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The accusation that it was the NRA’s “rhetoric” which created “a climate for violent acts” — where’s the evidence for that? My memory of the 1990s is pretty good, and I don’t recall any NRA members deciding to go on a rampage because of a letter from Wayne LaPierre. But you see that this controversy from nearly 30 years ago gets recycled on MSNBC as proof that, somehow, Republicans and “the gun lobby” are to blame for this deranged tranny’s murder spree in Nashville.

Most of my readers probably own guns, so let’s ask, did your gun kill anybody this week? No, of course not. But Joe Scarborough insists that you and your guns are somehow to blame for what happened in Nashville. It’s an obvious non sequitur, once the syllogism of Scarborough’s assertion is extracted from the emotional barrage of verbiage with which it is delivered. We all want to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people, right? Well, then, your choices are (a) lock the crazy people up in lunatic asylums, or (b) ban guns. Joe Scarborough seems to be insisting that deranged trannies have a right to roam around wreaking havoc — we can’t lock them up — and so, by process of elimination, the only solution is to shut down all the gun stores.

As bad as Scarborough’s logic was, the truly insulting part of today’s Morning Joe was when they had a panel discussion with Al Sharpton. Because whenever it’s time to discuss public safety, we must consult the Jew-baiting monster who incited the Freddy’s Fashion Mart massacre.

Well, despite the fact that I’ve ruined my whole day — it’s 7:30 p.m. now, and Joy Reid is on MSNBC — I’m not angry enough to firebomb a retail store, and I’m too lazy to build a truck bomb, so I guess I’m not the kind of kook “whipped into a paranoid frenzy” that Joe Scarborough conjures up to scare his viewers. I’m sure there are such kooks out there, but James Hodgkinson could not be reached for comment.



 

 

Category: MSNBC
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