The Other McCain

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

More Malaysia Mystery

Posted on | March 18, 2014 | 17 Comments

The missing airliner drama doesn’t much interest me, personally, but the story continues dominating news:

The first turn to the west that diverted the missing Malaysia Airlines plane from its planned flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was carried out through a computer system that was most likely programmed by someone in the plane’s cockpit who was knowledgeable about airplane systems, according to senior American officials.
Instead of manually operating the plane’s controls, whoever altered Flight 370’s path typed seven or eight keystrokes into a computer on a knee-high pedestal between the captain and the first officer, according to officials. The Flight Management System, as the computer is known, directs the plane from point to point specified in the flight plan submitted before a flight. It is not clear whether the plane’s path was reprogrammed before or after it took off.
The fact that the turn away from Beijing was programmed into the computer has reinforced the belief of investigators — first voiced by Malaysian officials — that the plane was deliberately diverted and that foul play was involved.

Read the whole thing at the New York Times. Were there any teenage lesbian porn stars on the plane? That would be interesting.

 

Category: Uncategorized

BREAKING: Neal Rauhauser Named as Defendant in @Bullyville Federal Lawsuit

Posted on | March 18, 2014 | 104 Comments

Former Democrat political operative Neal Rauhauser has been named among the defendants in a federal lawsuit filed by the operator of the popular anti-bullying web site Bullyville.com.

In the lawsuit, McGibney v. Retzlaff, Bullyville founder James McGibney says his business was harmed as a result of online smears and harassment conducted by a Texas man, Thomas Retzlaff, a fan of so-called “revenge porn” sites targeted by Bullyville. McGibney’s lawsuit also names Rauhauser and a New York woman, Lane Lipton, as having assisted and promoted the attacks against Bullyville.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges Retzlaff, Rauhauser, Lipton and five unknown “John Doe” defendants with tortious interference with contractual relations, tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation, and public disclosure invasion of privacy.

McGibney’s lawsuit claims Rauhauser and Lipton used several online aliases, including the bvtruth.wordpress.com web site and the Twitter accounts @OccupyRebellion, @MissAnonNews and @BV_Truth, to make false accusations against Bullyville:

The very first post on bvfiles.wordpress.com is a small post asking, “Is McGibney a  pedophile?” . . . Defendants posted a picture of McGibney’s children under the Pedophilia comments with the caption “are these children in danger?”

Rauhauser, who was once a partner in the Democrat digital media consulting firm Progressive PST, has more recently been known as an associate of Brett Kimberlin, the Indiana “Speedway Bomber.” A convicted perjurer, forger and drug smuggler who gained notoriety for making unsubstantiated claims that he sold marijuana to Dan Quayle, Kimberlin created two non-profit “progressive” organizations after his release from prison in 2001. Several of Kimberlin’s critics have suggested that Rauhauser, a self-described computer hacker and ally of the so-called “Anonymous” hacking conspiracy, was paid by Kimberlin to harass them into silence. Kimberlin last fall filed a federal lawsuit accusing more than 20 defendants — including syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, Red State editor Erick Erickson, Breitbart.com and author James O’Keefe III — of engaging in a conspiracy to defame him.

PREVIOUSLY:

 

Category: The Kimberlin Files

Obama’s Part-Time Proletariat

Posted on | March 17, 2014 | 25 Comments

Victims of Obamanomics:

Having worked as a nurse’s aide for 15 years, Ms. McCurdy has been among the nearly 25 million workers in the United States who make less than $10.10 an hour — the amount to which President Obama supports increasing the minimum wage. Of those workers, 3.5 million make the $7.25 federal minimum wage or less.
And like many of them, Ms. McCurdy hasn’t been able to rely on steady full-time hours — she has often been assigned just 20 hours a week. Even if she worked full time year-round, her $9 hourly wage would put her below the poverty threshold of $19,530 for a family of three.

If the economy were in recovery, as Democrats insist, the increasing demand for labor would offer better employment opportunities for everyone. But we all know this is not true and, absent real recovery, Democrats instead want to impede economic growth by the job-killing method of increasing the minimum wage. They propose this increase not for any economic reason, but for the political purpose of maneuvering Republicans into voting against it.

Yet an important question to be answered is, why do so many low-wage workers find themselves stuck with part-time jobs?

Most commentators viewed the February jobs report released on March 7 as good news, indicating that the labor market is on a favorable growth path. A more careful reading shows that employment actually fell — as it has in four out of the past six months and in more than one-third of the months during the past two years.
Although it is often overlooked, a key statistic for understanding the labor market is the length of the average workweek. Small changes in the average workweek imply large changes in total hours worked. The average workweek in the U.S. has fallen to 34.2 hours in February from 34.5 hours in September 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That decline, coupled with mediocre job creation, implies that the total hours of employment have decreased over the period. . . .
The decline in the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by 3/10ths of an hour — offset partially by the increase in the number of people working — means that real labor usage on net, taking into account hours worked, fell by the equivalent of 100,000 jobs since September. . . .

And why is this?

Another possibility for the declining average workweek is the Affordable Care Act. That law induces businesses with fewer than 50 full-time employees — full-time defined as 30 hours per week — to keep the number of hours low to avoid having to provide health insurance. The jury is still out on this explanation, but research by Luis Garicano, Claire LeLarge and John Van Reenen (National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2013) has shown that laws that can be evaded by keeping firms small or hours low can have significant effects on employment.

ObamaCare is killing Hope. We need a Change.

 

Category: Barack Obama, Economics, Health Care

Ukraine Ready for War in Crimea?

Posted on | March 17, 2014 | 35 Comments

This could be serious:

In the wake of a March 16 referendum in which Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation, Ukrainian leaders refused to cede any part of the peninsula, calling on their troops to prepare for war.
“Crimea was, is, and will be our territory,” said Defense Minister Ihor Tenyukh in a statement delivered at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center on March 17. . . .
When asked whether Ukrainian troops would fight to defend Crimea, Tenyukh replied tersely, “The armed forces will execute their tasks, ” later adding, “Ukrainian forces will stay [in Crimea] until all their tasks have been completed.”

(Via Gateway Pundit.)

 

Category: Russia, Ukraine

Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt and His ‘Progressive’ Homophobia

Posted on | March 17, 2014 | 46 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

“He’s banned on Daily Kos. He’s banned at the Examiner. He gets angry about being ignored, and erupts in frothing rage. So then people pay Bill the only kind of attention he deserves — pointing out that he’s a brain-damaged troll — at which point he claims victimhood. Then the cycle begins again, and Bill makes new threats . . .”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 6, 2013

Some things are more predictable than others, and no despicable expression of hate from Bill Schmalfeldt is ever really surprising, but this latest outburst was a complete non sequitur, apropos of nothing.

Signifying nothing except the rancid contents of his own reprobate mind, Schmalfeldt’s weird rant merits no rebuttal, however:

  1. If, by “constant woman-hating” he means my writing about feminism, perhaps Schmalfeldt is simply too dense to comprehend a point I have frequently made, namely that it is not misogyny to disagree with, e.g., Mary Daly;
  2. Schmalfeldt’s attribution of “anti-gay rhetoric” to me, which can be shown to apply more accurately to him, is nevertheless wide of the mark because disagreements over policy or criticism of media bias are not the same as hate;
    and
  3. None of my children have “turned out to be gay,” although it has been said that among Schmalfeldt’s adult children (all of whom are estranged from him) is a lesbian daughter.

Why would Bill Schmalfeldt think it was “progressive” to deride an antagonist as “a simpering, limp-wristed, glory-hole queen” and “a pillow-biting, studded leather collar-wearing bukkake boy“?

Hasn’t he already damaged himself enough with “the Butt Stuff”?

“Who is Bill Schmalfeldt?
“Schmalfelt’s a guy who describes himself as a progressive . . . He leaves no sense of what values he promotes, only of what groups and individuals he hates. There’s only one circumstance when you get a sense that he’s enjoying what he does, that he has a craft or a calling. That’s when he’s describing someone being raped, murdered, or otherwise abused, or when he’s pursuing the families of someone he hates.”
— Ken White, Aug. 6, 2013




 

 


 

Category: Bill Schmalfeldt

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
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