The Other McCain

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

Afghanistan Resists Modernity

Posted on | March 17, 2014 | 13 Comments

Does this really surprise anyone?

More than 12 years after the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and deprive al Qaeda of a base operations, the sexual abuse of Afghanistan children has reached an all-time high, according to the U.S. State Department.
The department’s 2013 Country Report on Human Rights in Afghanistan, which was released this month, says that 60 percent of girls in Afghanistan are married before their 16th birthday.
“Despite a law setting the legal minimum age for marriage at 16 for girls and 18 for boys, international and local observers estimated that 60 percent of girls were married before the age of 16,” the State Department said in its most recent human rights report. . . .
A marriage contract in Afghanistan requires verification that the bride was 16, “but only a small fraction of the population had birth certificates,” the report noted.

One of the follies of U.S. policy in Afghanistan was the belief — or at least the claim, since we don’t know if the policy makers were actually fools enough to believe it — that we were going to impose modernity, including “women’s rights,” by force of arms.

Even if you consider cultural modernity an unalloyed blessing (an idea that conservatives, being skeptical of claims of Progress, are obliged to resist), such modernity requires a degree of economic vitality and affluence that Afghanistan does not possess.

Per capita income in Afghanistan in 2012 was $687. The 15-year-old daughter of a family of goat herders, whose parents marry her off to the son of another family of goat herders, is not thereby being deprived of any actual opportunity. Whatever we in the affluent West may imagine her “rights” to be, as a practical matter, her future is going to involve goat-herding, and whether she marries at 15 or 16 or 18 isn’t really going to make much difference in that regard.

The symbiotic relationship between poverty and cultural primitivism cannot be erased by a bunch of State Department human rights do-gooders, even if they are permitted to employ the United States military as a tool of their social-engineering schemes.

As I say, however, conservatives are obliged to be skeptical toward the blessings of modernity. We may wonder if the 15-year-old bride of an Afghan goat herder is really being oppressed in a way that, for example, a certain Duke University freshman is not.

 

Category: Aghanistan, Culture

Gays Ruin St. Patrick’s Day

Posted on | March 17, 2014 | 72 Comments

In Boston, the mayor wouldn’t march in the parade because the organizers refuse to allow a gay group to march, and in New York, pressure from gay boycotters convinced Guinness to pull its sponsorship of the parade.

Evidently, it is not enough to have a Gay Pride parade every June. Now every parade must be a Gay Pride parade.

 


Category: Gays

Crimea Votes to Secede from Ukraine, Join Russia; U.S. Lamely Objects

Posted on | March 17, 2014 | 32 Comments

How’s that “smart diplomacy” workin’ out for ya?

Crimeans overwhelmingly vote for secession
— Associated Press

Ukraine crisis: Early results show
Crimea votes to join Russia
— CNN

Crimeans Choose to Join Russia
in Vote, Exit Poll Shows
— Bloomberg

Five years into his term, President Obama has succeeded in diminishing U.S. prestige and influence around the world. We have fewer allies, who have been weakened and undermined, and we have more enemies, who have become bolder and more powerful.

The worthless administration’s worthless spokesmen speak:

“This referendum is contrary to Ukraine’s constitution, and the international community will not recognize the results of a poll administered under threats of violence and intimidation from a Russian military intervention that violates international law,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney. “No decisions should be made about the future of Ukraine without the Ukrainian government.” . . .
“We are putting as much pressure on the Russians that we can to do the right thing,” White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“We have given them the opportunity to deescalate and get this in the right place, because they know there are costs to their action here. The costs are economic. The Russian economy, the Russian stock market and ruble are at five-year lows,” he said. . . .
Secretary of State John Kerry spoke Sunday to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“Secretary Kerry reaffirmed that the United States considers the ongoing referendum illegal under Ukrainian law and restated that the United States will not recognize the outcome,” a senior State Department official said.

The empty prattle of weaklings will not deter Putin, and talk of “the international community” is just that — talk.

 


Category: Russia, Ukraine

Is Duke ‘Supportive’ of Teen Porn?

Posted on | March 16, 2014 | 121 Comments

Before we discuss the latest about Duke University freshman Miriam Weeks, let me first call your attention to a highly relevant illustration of how liberals use word games to manipulate public perception. In 1999, Maggie Gallagher produced a fascinating report entitled, The Age of Unwed Mothers: Is Teen Pregnancy the Problem?

What Gallagher’s report made clear was that the media had helped birth-control activists manufacture public concern over a “teenage pregnancy crisis” that did not actually exist. In point of fact, the birth rate for U.S. teenagers peaked during the 1950s — the Golden Age of Family Values — and has been declining ever since.

What had changed since the 1950s, Gallagher demonstrated, was not that more teenagers were getting pregnant (they weren’t) but that pregnant teenagers were no longer getting married. One of the sneaky little tricks by which public perception was manipulated, Gallagher noted, was by including births to 18- and 19-year-old women — young adults — in  “teen pregnancy” statistics:

[T]he bulk of today’s teen pregnancy problem is less “children having children” than increasing numbers of young adult women having babies outside of marriage. The majority of unwed births in the United States today are to single women in their 20s — neither “children” nor “Murphy Browns.” Unwed teen moms account for over 30 percent of U.S. babies born outside of marriage. But unwed teen moms younger than 18 account for only 13 percent of babies born out of wedlock.
Thus, even arbitrarily confining our concern to mothers under 20, rising rates of teen births are being driven not primarily by minors, but by young women old enough to vote, sign contracts, and serve in the armed forces. Almost three-fifths of unwed teen births are to young adult women who are 18 and 19 years old.

Of course, it is true that a 19-year-old is a teenager, but this isn’t what most people think about when they hear crusaders talking about the need for educational programs to prevent “teen pregnancy.” No, that term conjures up visions of a pregnant 14- or 15-year-old, a mere school girl, probably from an impoverished family, at risk of becoming a high-school dropout dependent on welfare.

This emotional trigger is exactly what the birth-control/abortion/sex-education lobby intend to exploit to gain taxpayer-funded support for their programs and, if you oppose their projects, they will imply that you’re in favor of “kids having kids” — and never mind, of course, that many of these “kids” are 19-year-old women.

So now we return our attention to 19-year-old Miriam Weeks who, as “Belle Knox,” has been doing porn videos to pay her tuition at prestigious Duke University. William McGurn notes a detail:

Since the first headlines about the Duke University freshman making her way through college by making porn, we have learned many details about her life.
We’ve learned, for example, that being paid to have sex on camera is “freeing, it is empowering, it is wonderful, it is how the world should be.” . . .
Yet perhaps the most indecent detail in this tale is a tidbit about her university that has received almost no attention. It appears near the end of a profile that ran in The Chronicle — Duke’s student paper — which refers to her as “Lauren.” Here’s what it says:
“Lauren reached out to Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta. Moneta affirmed that the University’s policy was to be supportive of all student identities.”
Note: He didn’t say “supportive of all students.” He said “supportive of all student identities.”
When this reporter e-mailed Moneta to ask if his words mean Duke really makes no judgment on a student who has become a porn actress, Moneta replied that federal law and Duke policy preclude him from talking about a student’s case. But he didn’t take issue with the Chronicle characterization.
Neither does the young woman. Her name is Miriam Weeks, and in a recent CNN interview with Piers Morgan, she affirmed that Duke had been “very supportive” of her.

Read the rest at the New York Post. A detail of this “empowering” career that almost no one in the media has mentioned is that “Belle Knox” is being marketed at sites that specialize in “teen porn,” featuring barely legal girls whose appeal is their extreme youth.

No feminist or liberal seems to find this objectionable. Apparently, it’s OK for teenage girls to get paid to provide perverse entertainment for creeps, just as long as the girls don’t get pregnant.

 

Y’know, I’m almost tempted to take the Amtrak train to New York, just to get a story about the media mob scene we can expect when America’s new feminist icon appears at a public event.





 
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Category: Education, Sex

‘Camp Epic’: Gay California Teacher Molested Boys as Young as 11

Posted on | March 16, 2014 | 129 Comments

“Allegedly” — it’s important always to add “allegedly”:

Even as he allegedly abused the middle-school age children left in his care, even as he purportedly lied to parents about field trips throughout the Bay Area, court documents show that Ronald Guinto articulated a strict code to his campers: “What happens at Camp Epic stays at Camp Epic.”
What allegedly happened on the off-campus, overnight camping trips was repeated sexual abuse of 11-and 12-year old boys, the documents say. . . .
Authorities say Guinto recruited his victims while he was teaching at Making Waves Academy, a charter school in Richmond near Hilltop Mall, to join Camp Epic, an organization he founded in 2009 as part of his Master’s degree program in urban education. Nineteen students have been identified as participating in Camp Epic, which has no affiliation with the charter school . . . investigation into Guinto began on Oct. 29, when an administrator at Making Waves called Richmond police to report Guinto had been placed on administrative leave for an inappropriate Facebook conversation with an 11-year-old student, according to a probable cause statement by lead investigator Detective Walton Nelson.
Within weeks, investigators uncovered Guinto had taken students on trips to Mount Diablo State Park, San Jose, Yosemite, and Napa, engaging in sex acts with students inside tents beginning in December 2012 and ending as recently as Oct. 26, three days before police were notified, according to documents. On that outing, the parents of one of the boys said they thought their son and other students were camping overnight at Mare Island, but Guinto instead took them [to] a Motel 6 in Vallejo, Nelson wrote. Guinto allegedly slept in the same bed as two boys.
One 12-year-old boy told an investigator that his alleged abuse began in December 2012, when he was sleeping in a tent with Guinto and another student. Guinto allegedly asked the boy if he could fondle him, the first of about 30 such incidents spread over about 10 campouts, according to documents.
At a camping trip in Napa Skyline in 2013, the boy said, Guinto woke him up in the middle of the night to show him a video titled “Teacher Porn,” and then performed oral sex on him. . . .

Read the whole thing. Nothing to see here. Move along.

 

 

Category: California, Crime, Education, Gays, Sex

Malaysia Mystery Deepens

Posted on | March 16, 2014 | 18 Comments

Honestly, I expected this missing jet thing to be resolved quickly, but now it’s taken a decidedly weird turn:

Malaysian authorities said Sunday that the number of countries involved in the search for the missing jetliner has increased from 14 to 25, as the investigation shifted its focus toward the actions of the flight crew. . . .
The widening of the search for the jet follows authorities’ revelation on Saturday that someone on board the vanished jet made a series of highly technical actions to deliberately hide the plane from modern detection systems.
The homes of both the pilot and the co-pilot were searched on Saturday, and a flight simulator belonging to pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 59, is being examined, Hishammuddin said. Authorities are also investigating the engineers who worked on the plane.
The South China Morning Post reported Sunday that Zaharie has close ties with Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who was recently sentenced to prison on a charge of sodomy, which the opposition has appealed. Speaking to USA TODAY, a close friend of Zaharie’s, Peter Chong, said Zaharie does support the opposition but that the reports that he may have had a role in diverting the plane were “not true.”
“He is a political activist, yes. And yes, he was in court for Anwar’s trial and he is our strong supporter, but that does not make him a terrorist,” said Chong.

There were two Iranians on board with stolen passports, but let’s ignore that, because the pilot had ties to a jailed opposition leader?

This kind of stuff practically guarantees that, whenever the truth about Flight 370 is finally discovered, many people will reject it, preferring to believe in conspiracy theories. Fire can’t melt steel!

 

Category: Conspiracy Theories

His Daughter’s Ex-Boyfriend

Posted on | March 16, 2014 | 48 Comments

Or, How to Get Shot Dead in Texas:

The Houston father who police say fatally shot a 17-year-old boy who was inside his daughter’s bedroom early Thursday morning will likely not be charged, an area prosecutor told MyFoxHouston.com.
Although a grand jury will review the case, prosecutor Warren Diepraam said it is unlikely that the father will be charged.
“What was going on in the person’s mind at the time of the shooting, [not] what they found out after the fact” is key, Diepraam said. “They’re looking at what he was thinking when he made the decision to shoot.”
The investigation into the shooting is ongoing, and a grand jury will ultimately decide if charges are appropriate. But so far it appears the father, who was only identified as a 55-year-old in reports, was awaken[ed] by one of his other children at about 2:20 a.m. He was told someone was in his 16-year-old daughter’s bedroom and he grabbed his gun.

(As any father in Texas would do, naturally.)

He reportedly found the teen in bed with his daughter and confronted him. His daughter apparently told him she did not know the boy.
The father said he told the teen not to move, but reportedly saw the teen reach for something, at which point police say the father opened fire. The teen did not have a gun. His daughter later confessed that she snuck her boyfriend, 17, into the house, the report said.

Everywhere across America, the parents of teenage girls are saying to each other, “Honey, we ought to move to Texas.”

 

Category: Texas

The U.N. And $5 Are Worth A Beverage At A Coffee Shop

Posted on | March 15, 2014 | 24 Comments

by Smitty

Via Hot Air:

Russia has vetoed a UN Security Council draft resolution that declared a planned referendum on the status of Ukraine’s Crimea region “can have no validity” and urged nations and international organisations not to recognise it.

“This is a sad and remarkable moment,” Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said after the vote by the 15-member Security Council.

I’m fond of saying that the U.N. is slightly better than no U.N. From the standpoint of the Ukraine, one is unsure what difference, at this point, it would make if the U.N. got the Ambassador Stevens treatment.
All this reminds me about a parody project I need to get to: “Backin’ the U.S.S.R.”

Category: Ukraine, United Nations
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