The Other McCain

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

Rule 5 Sunday: Under The Wire

Posted on | January 20, 2014 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

We come once again to that portion of the blog devoted to a break from demented shemales, liberals, and the other madness of the world, and turn to a healthful contemplation of God’s creation. As usual, be discreet when clicking the links, as not all of them are safe for work.

Blogfodder kicks off this week’s festivities early with a touch of Yellow Fever. Laughing Conservative follows with Dania Ramirez, Randy’s Roundtable submits Theresa Longo, and Fishersville Mike goes back to the island – Gilligan’s Island. Animal Magnetism has Rule 5 Friday and Saturday Is Legs Day, while Goodstuff alerts us to Big Bang Theory‘s Melissa Rauch getting into the raunch. Ninety Miles From Tyranny has the Morning Mistress, Girls With Guns, and Hot Pick of the Late Night; Zion’s Trumpet is back with the still-hot Christie Brinkley, and Blackmailers Don’t Shoot contributes Rule 5 With Alana Blanchard.

EBL’s herd of heifers this week starts with Resa Cooper Morning, some 49ers & Seahawks cheerleaders, Professional Victim @papierhache, Broncos & Patriots cheerleaders, and last but not least, Feminism and Topiary.

Wine Women and Politics brings us the TGIF Babe of the Day, more TGIF Babes, Beautiful Blondes, Honey Honey, Tera Patrick, Red-Hot Redheads, Hottie of the Day, Women of Wednesday, and closes with some T&A.

A View From The Beach submits Magdalena Frackowiak, High Life, Powerful Men and Pretty Women, Last Word On the “Lena Dunham Nude” Kerfluffle, Cat People v. Dog People (has cave girl content), The Bird Eating Fish, Washed-Up Actress Shocks Hollywood With “S” Word, Se Habla Obamacare Schadenfreude?, The Great Body Image Wars, and “Keep Yer Hands Off My PBR”.

Soylent Siberia opens with your Sunday Coffee Creamer, followed by Set The Snoochinator To 1982! Monday Motivationer Rocio follows, along with  I Got Snooch, Tuesday Titillation Catalina, Vintage Humpday Hawtness Leisa, Ouch My Eye, Toe De Camel, Falconsword Fursday Classic Patricia, Afternooner Business Casual, Corset Caliente, TGIF Friday, TGIF Friday Too, and Weekender Bullseye.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Margot Robbie, his Vintage Babe is Evelyn Ankers, Sex In Advertising is covered by Megan Fox, and of course there’s the obligatory 49ers cheerleader. At Dustbury, it’s Alexandra Robertson and Christie Brinkley.

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week were Lynsey Dyer, Rasheeda, Saemi Yazawa, Rebecca Herbst, Olivia Ortiz, Annabella Bottali, Silje Norendal, Nicole Zaloumis, Chandella Powell, and Ali Sonoma. Also, nurses!

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s Rule 5 Roundup is Saturday, January 25.


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Category: Rule 5

The #JusticeForDrV Madness: ESPN Offers Belated ‘Condolences’? Really?

Posted on | January 19, 2014 | 37 Comments

Does this ESPN statement make any damned sense at all?

“We understand and appreciate the wide range of thoughtful reaction this story has generated and to the family and friends of Essay Anne Vanderbilt, we express our deepest condolences. We will use the constructive feedback to continue our ongoing dialogue on these important and sensitive topics. Ours is a company that values the LGBT community internally and in our storytelling, and we will all learn from this.”

The person known as Essay Anne Vanderbilt was, by all evidence, a sociopathic con artist who got caught. Period. End of sentence.

“Dr. Vanderbilt” was neither a doctor nor a Vanderbilt, and the bogus pretense to scientific superiority was inextricably connected to the phony persona who perpetrated that hoax.

Because “Dr. Vanderbilt” was born a male named Stephen Krol, the transgender aspect of the story was impossible to ignore and — I would argue, although the reporter Caleb Hannan has not — Krol/Vanderbilt’s gender dysphoria may have been one non-trivial symptom of what was clearly a disordered, dishonest and dysfunctional personality.

At the core of the #JusticeForDrV crusade seems to be the idea that Caleb Hannan’s reporting drove “Dr. Vanderbilt” to suicide, by threatening to “out” her as a transgender, even though there is no evidence that anyone who actually knew “Dr. Vanderbilt” in Arizona ever mistook her for a genetic woman.

For crying out loud: When a 6-foot-3 middle-aged man gets a sex change, the resul is unlikely to be particularly . . . persuasive.

Beyond that, how was Caleb Hannan supposed to report that “Dr. Vanderbilt” was a phony — not an MIT-trained aeronautical physicist, as the hype for the Yar putter had claimed — without reporting that, during the years that “Dr. Vanderbilt” was supposedly working as a Pentagon contractor helping design stealth aircraft, “Dr. Vanderbilt” was working as an auto mechanic named Stephen Krol?

A well-known CBS golf announcer promoted the Yar Oracle putter as superior because of its designer’s scientific expertise, but as soon as Caleb Hannan checked into that claim, he discovered what at first seemed a mystery — no record of any MIT graduate named “Essay Anne Vanderbilt” — and was eventually revealed to be an enormous lie. Some might say at that point Hannan should have dropped the story, but if golfers were being scammed, isn’t such a scam newsworthy?

The #JusticeForDrV crusaders grabbed hold of the idea that “Dr. Vanderbilt” was driven to suicide by Caleb Hannan’s “transmisogynistic journalism” — a claim for which they offer no real evidence — while ignoring all evidence that (a) “Dr. Vanderbilt” was not a victim, but rather a person who victimized others, and (b) it was the failure of the pseudo-scientific putter scam, not fear of being “outed” as transgender, which motivated “Dr. Vanderbilt” to commit suicide. Of course, “Dr. Vanderbilt” had attempted suicide in 2008, before Hannan ever heard of her, but why let facts get in your way when you’re ghoulishly exploiting a corpse as “LGBT Victim of the Week”?

When I read the hysterical ranting from the #JusticeForDrV crowd, I have to wonder: Are they even reading the same story?

[Krol/Vanderbill] ended up in Bonney Lake, Washington, a short time later [in the late 1990s]. . . . She worked as general manager at Trax Bar and Grill, an LGBT bar in Kent, Washington. She was the subject of three separate harassment claims from her time there, including one from a male coworker who said she made “inappropriate comments about her breasts and genitalia.”

Yes, there’s your martyred victim: Someone who was accused of making weird comments to co-workers at a gay bar. And here is some more decidedly non-victim behavior from Vanderbilt:

[Leland] Frische is the risk manager for Gilbert [Arizona], and he had been there when Vanderbilt first came to work for the town. He said she was hired in April 2006 and there were problems almost immediately. Vanderbilt had applied to be the manager of the fleet services division, but she lost out on that job to someone else. She believed she was more qualified, however, and others complained that she did not try to hide that. “She would confront her boss in open meetings,” Frische told me. “She would talk down to people. She really didn’t give us many options.” The town eventually fired Vanderbilt. Not long after, she filed her lawsuit.

Hmmm. Harassing co-workers at a gay bar in Kent, Washington, a disgruntled employee in Gilbert, Arizona — am I the only one who sees “Dr. Vanderbilt” as a familiar type of troublemaker? And look at how Vanderbilt and her partner dealt with Hannan:

Now, [Yar Golf president Gerri] Jordan’s message said she was calling to propose a deal. When I phoned her back, Jordan explained the offer. I could fly to Arizona and meet with Dr. V at her attorney’s office, where she would show me proof of her degrees from both MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. V then got on the phone and added another detail. Once I saw the documents I would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring me from revealing any of the details I’d learned about Dr. V’s past.
The “deal” was one I could not accept, and when I explained this Dr. V got upset. “What is your intention?” she asked. “Are you being paid by someone to destroy Yar?”

Paranoia? Baseless accusations of bad motives? But what sort of “proof” did Jordan and Vanderbilt plan to show Hannan of educational credentials that Vanderbilt clearly did not have? Never mind that, the  #JusticeForDrV crusaders say, what matters is that Vanderbilt was transgender and Hannan practically murdered her:

A transgender woman known as Dr. V invented a new type of golf club and lied about her academic qualifications. A journalist called Caleb Hannan threated [sic] to publish details about these professional lies and also out her as transgender against her will. A few days later she killed herself.

That’s a goddamned lie. Journalists don’t “threaten” to publish stories, and in point of fact, Hannan never published anything about “Dr. Vanderbilt” prior to her suicide in October 2013.

Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said. And the simple fact is that Essay Anne Vanderbilt’s entire life was a huge lie.

 

Category: Gays, Media Bias

FMJRA 2.0: Rock Show

Posted on | January 19, 2014 | 13 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


It’s Come to This: Plus-Size Models Just Aren’t ‘Plus’ Enough for Some People

Rule 5 Sunday: Take It Off

Up Through the Ranks, Under the Bus

Lena Dunham: ‘If You’re Not Into Me, That’s Your Problem’

32 GOP Presidential Choices? Nuts!

Florida Atrocity: Girls Beat Teen, Held Her Down as She Was Raped on Video

Diversity, Ethnic Studies and Phone Sex

New York Times Plays the Koch Card, Reporting Democrat ObamaCare Panic

Transgender Feminist @papierhache Volunteers for Twitter Victimhood

Macho @EdShow Gets Called Out on Twitter by @AnnCoulter: ‘Lying Pussy’

Happy Birthday to My Sexy Wife

‘Mister, You Are a Two-Bit Hoodlum’

R.I.P. Ariel Sharon, a Tough Jew

The Christie GWB Scandal Bubble

Lauren Harrington-Cooper and Other Teachers Arrested for Sex Crimes

In Which @NYTimeskrugman Exposes His Own Structural Stupidity

‘Idiocy Is Not a Zero-Sum Game’

FMJRA 2.0: Frisby

She Craved the Taste of Boy Flesh

Egalitarianism Triumphant

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.13.14

Kimberlin Lawsuit Hearing Today

As Though CNN Knows Christianity

Brett Kimberlin Allegedly Alleges

#UniteBlue In Which @7serf7 Denies Being Convicted Felon Bill Talley

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.14.14

The IRS Scandal Cover-Up

The Rocky Horror Dating Game: Translesbians Encounter Queer Hate

Another Community Organizer Non-Victory In New York

The ‘Emerging Awareness’ Continues

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.15.14

Had The Man Brains, He’d Be Dangerous

#NV04 Gets Interesting

World’s Youngest Blogger, App Reviewer

Pervert Teacher Alicia Gray: ‘Hey, I’m Totally Sorry for Boinking a 14-Year-Old’

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.16.14

‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran’s “Occupy NOVA” Reign Of Error Staggering To A Halt

‘I Didn’t Want to Seem Crazy’

NBC’s Maria Shriver Raves About How Abortion Barbie ‘Became a Star’

Word of the Day: ‘Transmisogyny’

Ed Gillespie? A Button Marked ‘Crap’ Would Be An Improvement Over Warner

‘Blood Bath’ at O.C. Register

Their Propaganda, and Ours

Mister Popularity, Edward Snowden

Earth Heals, Oceans Recede, So Now It’s Time to Trust President Obama, Right?

In The Mailbox, 01.17.14

Psychiatrist Arrested With Crack Cocaine and a Dead Man Buried in His Backyard

Scientists Decide Americans Are Too Stupid to Understand Global Warming

Top linkers this week:

  1. Dead Republican Party (62, includes 18 from Dead Citizens Rights Society)
  2. Rick’s Rants (48)
  3. Regular Right Guy (14)
  4. A View From The Beach (6)
  5. Batshit Crazy News (6, including 2 from EBL)
  6. DaleyGator (5)


Category: FMJRA Award

MSNBC: Trolls Under a Bridge

Posted on | January 19, 2014 | 5 Comments

Let’s start with this: I don’t give a damn about Chris Christie. Didn’t give a damn about him before “BridgeGate,” and don’t give a damn about him now. Nevertheless, influential people in the Acela Corridor feel otherwise, and the attempt by the liberal media to take down a Republican is always newsworthy, whether or not the Republican is anybody I give a damn about. And Jennifer Rubin — who predictably has a fangirl crush on her Acela Republican pinup idol — devastates the media’s takedown effort on Governor Fat Boy:

The bridge scandal started out as a test for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R). Now it has become a test for the media. MSNBC, which long ago stopped being a news outlet in the sense of going out to find facts and is largely indistinguishable from Democratic Party talking points, has been going 24/7 since the bridge story broke. No surprise. But then Saturday MSNBC decided to throw even the pretense of journalism overboard.

Read the whole thing, which is interesting even if you wouldn’t vote for Chris Christie under any imaginable circumstance. As bad as he is, at least he’s not a liar from Hoboken.

Ali Akbar makes the case that bloggers have had an impact here:

While big media is busy obsessing over the supposed bridge scandal with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a moderate Republican, they’re getting backlash from their viewers. So instead of 100 articles about “bridgegate,” there are now 50 articles about “bridgegate” and 51 articles of the media examining its own coverage of “bridgegate.” It’s definitional insanity! In every single poll, the public is telling the media to move on from this story. The public is so disinterested in the story,that even in this hyper-partisan climate, no one’s opinion of the Governor has changed. But the Sunday shows couldn’t get away from it all. . . .

Read the whole thing.

 

Category: Chris Christie, MSNBC

Stand By For GOP Disaster On ObamaCare

Posted on | January 19, 2014 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Pardon the pessimism, but the GOP seems to differ with the Administration more on style than substance, as Hayward notes at Breitbart:

…indications are that the Republicans are backing away from ObamaCare, or at least from efforts to kill it. Jon Terbush at The Week delivered the news in an article entitled “It’s Official: The Republicans Are Done Trying to Kill ObamaCare.” Actually, the body of the article makes it sound more like the GOP leadership still wants to repeal, or mostly repeal, ObamaCare and replace it with a Republican alternative proposal, which is more a change of tactics than strategy.
“In that light, simply saying that an official GOP alternative is on the way is a big step away from the nihilistic rhetoric of the past,” writes Terbush.
But their rhetoric was never entirely nihilistic; that’s a false Obama talking point echoed robotically by the media. There have been solid GOP alternatives since Day One of the ObamaCare disaster. It sounds as if the Republican leadership wants to bring the entire party together behind something they can officially brand as The Republican Alternative ™ and push with a united effort. Until now, some strategists have suggested that would be a mistake, because it would give the Democrats and their media allies a target to demolish, drawing attention away from ObamaCare’s failure. It sounds like the time for standing back and letting Americans get a taste of the nightmare souffle whipped up by the Administration’s gremlins – supposedly with nearly zero oversight from the Smartest President In History – is over, and the GOP wants an alternative they can run on.
The troubling thing about Terbush’s article are the indications that groups like the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce are giving up the fight and making their peace with ObamaCare as a permanent tumor in the American system.

The over-arching, fundamental, intrinsic problem with ObamaCare is that it was Ever. The. Government’s. Constitutional. Job. To. Pull. This. Stunt.

This country is riddled with little brain-dead proto-Commies who think “liberty” means getting the government out of the womb and into the wallet. Wow, that sentence looks stupid, but it seems a fair assessment of the idiocy under consideration.

Getting into blogging a half decade ago was about joining the chorus of Buckley wannabees, standing athwart history asking: “Why’re they calling me a thwart? And why’s Obama prescribing the IRS as a treatment for thwarts?”

Five years on, the question has morphed into: “After years of hearing about ‘Constitution this’ and ‘Founding principles that’ from the Repubulican Party, where is the reformer attitude that the thwarts thought they were supporting?”

Not only is ObamaCare a dead parrot, the whole New Deal has completely run out of gas. I do not want to hear another godforsaken word about trying to shore up these entitlements. I want to hear about the transition plan that protects both those who’re locked into these bad ideas from total loss, and also protects the young from increased abuse from the bureaucracy.

If the Vichy GOP doesn’t get that the New Deal is dead, and wants to try to keep ObamaCare afloat, it’s got another thing coming.

Category: Health Care, Republicans

Journalist @CalebHannan Exposes Sociopath and Is Accused of Transphobia

Posted on | January 19, 2014 | 46 Comments

On Oct. 18, 2013, MIT-trained aeronautical physicist Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt — a former Pentagon contractor who had worked on the Stealth bomber project — committed suicide, which must have been difficult: It’s hard to kill a person you invented.

Known as “Dr. V” in the world of golf, the person who died of an overdose last fall in Gilbert, Arizona, had won fame as the reclusive inventor of an innovative putter, the Yar Oracle GX1. What made the putter an overnight sensation in 2012 was its claim to scientific superiority on the basis of Dr. V’s advanced knowledge of physics.

Except “Dr. V” had no such knowledge and was not a Ph.D.

Never attended MIT. Apparently had no college degree at all.

As reporter Caleb Hannan learned, Essay Anne Vanderbilt was a Pennsylvania native whose birth name was Stephen Krol, a former auto mechanic who had been married and divorced twice before deciding, at about age 50, that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body.

Seven years ago, now living in Arizona, “Dr. Vanderbilt”  met Gerri Jordan, a retired Bank of America senior analyst, who became both Vanderbilt’s girlfriend and president of Yar Golf:

In 2008, [Vanderbilt] tried to kill herself with an overdose of prescription drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning from closing herself in a garage with her car running. A police report offered some explanations for why she might have tried to take her own life — Yar’s business was slow and Dr. V’s romantic relationship was on the ropes. She had recently fought with her girlfriend, Gerri Jordan, president of Yar Golf. Jordan told police that she and Dr. V were in a monogamous relationship and that they had gotten into an argument two days before. She had found Dr. V in the passenger seat of her car after the suicide attempt and tried to keep her awake. Jordan had also presumably been the first person to read the suicide note Dr. V had taped to the window of the car door, which read in part, “Tell Gorgeous Gerri that I love her.”

Narcissistic sociopaths have trouble coping with failure, and there can be little doubt that “Dr. Vanderbilt” was in fact a con man person, as Caleb Hannan discovered:

I heard from a mysterious “silent investor” whom both Jordan and Dr. V had alluded to in our previous talks. His name was Phil Kinney. He was a retiree from Pittsburgh and he said he wasn’t the only one who had put money into the company. He had invested $60,000 — money that he believed he’d never see again. . . .
Dr. V had told him that she was a $1,000-an-hour consultant. She said she was one of the original designers of Bluetooth technology. She even suggested that her status as a Vanderbilt provided access to some exclusive company who could help Yar’s business. Kinney said Dr. V told him she was good friends with the Hilton family, and that the relationship would pay off in the form of putters sold at their hotels. Kinney also recalled a trip he had taken to Arizona where, in Dr. V’s house, she had shown him a computer that she said mirrored the one in Phoenix’s airport traffic control tower.

This shameless liar had evidently conned the old man out of tens of thousands of dollars, and was hiding another busted scam:

I also found a lawsuit filed against the town of Gilbert, Arizona, in July 2007. The plaintiff’s name: Essay Vanderbilt, who had accused the town and three of its employees of sexual discrimination. The suit alleged that the previous year Vanderbilt was working as a “vehicle service writer” in Gilbert’s Fleet Management Division. In other words, at the same time that Dr. V claimed to have been working on top-secret government projects in D.C., she was actually coordinating car repairs for a Phoenix suburb. Vanderbilt didn’t win her case. . . .

The claim of sexual discrimination failed not merely because it was untrue, but also because Vanderbilt had lied her way into the job, making up jobs she never had and schools she never attended. Her entire existence was an enormous lie and, like all sociopaths, she feared nothing so much as exposure of the truth.

Once you know someone is a liar, it is impossible ever to trust them again, and the sociopath’s exploitation of credulity therefore depends on concealment of their deceptions.

Caleb Hannan is a reporter who followed the old newsroom maxim, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” And if someone tells you they are an MIT-trained physicist — especially if that claim is basic to their story — this is the kind of biographical fact a diligent reporter must verify. So when Caleb Hannan attempted to verify the facts about “Dr. Vanderbilt,” he quickly discovered that her story didn’t check out.

Then weird things started happening, things which might surprise people who haven’t had any experience dealing with sociopaths. “Dr. Vanderbilt” and her girlfriend Gerri Jordan claimed victimhood:

The last time I heard from Dr. V she warned me that I was about to commit a hate crime. But before that, I received a voice mail from Jordan.
Neither of them had contacted me in months, since I had sent an email trying to confirm what I had discovered, and Jordan wrote back to deny everything. “Your attack tale should be published in the National Enquirer,” Jordan wrote, “right next to the article on Martians … If I am to believe your diatribe, what you are telling golfers is that the most scientifically advanced Near Zero MOI putter, and the science of the Inertia Matrix was invented by a lesbian auto mechanic.”

Jordan and “Dr. Vanderbilt” threatened Caleb Hannan and accused him of crimes and you can real the whole thing.

Predictably — that is, if you’ve been paying attention to these things — the sociopath’s posthumous enablers ganged up on Caleb Hannan, accusing him of transphobia and breaches of ethics:

Dr. V Is Dead, Caleb Hannan Is
Celebrated: Why We Can’t Accept
Lazy, Transmisogynistic Journalism
— Audrey Zee, Autostraddle

Careless, Cruel, and Unaccountable
— Melissa McEwan, Shakesville

Caleb Hannan, Gender Identity
and Journalistic Ethics
— Jonathan McLeod, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Digging Too Deep
Grantland’s exposé of a trans con artist
privileged fact-finding over compassion
— Josh Levin, Slate

All of this is preposterous hysterical bullshit. Caleb Hannan spent months working on that story, and didn’t publish it until three months after “Dr. Vanderbilt” committed suicide. His attackers — mimicking the tactics of “Dr. Vanderbilt” — are trying to make the story about Caleb Hannan, but he is merely the storyteller.

Josh Levin’s claim about “moral dilemmas” involved in the story is insulting. The villain in this story is the phony “Dr. Vanderbilt,” who was responsible for initiating a chain of events that Caleb Hannan merely describes. Remember the old “Schoolhouse Rock” jingle?

Mr. Morton is the subject of the sentence
And what the predicate says, he does.

The same is true of Caleb Hannan’s story: “Dr. Vanderbilt” was the subject of the sentence and the predicate was “lied.”

Professor Donald Douglas called my attention to this story because he was himself targeted by this “Accuse the Accusers” tactic:

This is the problem with sociopaths who claim victimhood: Invariably, the con man will succeed in deceiving some people who, buying into the clever victimhood narrative, will attack those who tell the truth. If you arrive late to the story, it is easy to become confused by the claims made on behalf of the sociopath by defenders who hurl accusations of mala fides at the truth-tellers. “Dr. Vanderbilt” has acquired a mob of defenders who insist that this is a story about “transmisogynistic journalism,” when in fact it is the story of a dishonest creep who committed suicide rather than cope with exposure of the truth.

If those who are attacking Caleb Hannan genuinely want to rectify an injustice, perhaps they could ask a few questions about the still unsolved murder of Julia Scyphers. Somehow, I doubt they will.

 

BomberSuesBloggers.com




 

 


Category: Crime, Gays

B.A. in Special Snowflake Studies

Posted on | January 18, 2014 | 58 Comments

Instapundit wants to be lenient on Randye Hoder — “it’s not a ‘useless’ degree if in fact it teaches students ‘to think critically and analytically, read widely and write well’” — which means that I’m obliged to play bad cop with this overindulgent mother:

My oldest child, Emma, just returned to campus after a long holiday break to finish up her last semester of college.
But even before she has put the final period on her senior thesis, friends and family have been bombarding me with one question: What is she going to do after graduation?
The job market is, after all, awfully tough. Just this month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study showing that “recent graduates are increasingly working in low-wage jobs or working part-time,” if they’re lucky enough to find work at all.
The bright spot, according to the Fed analysis, students who majored in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — areas in which recent graduates “have tended to do relatively well, even in today’s challenging labor market.” But Emma is a student of the much-maligned humanities — an American Studies major with a focus on the politics and culture of food at a small liberal arts school. . . .

Whoa. Stop right there: “an American Studies major with a focus on the politics and culture of food at a small liberal arts school.”

First of all, that’s not “the humanities.” It just isn’t.

Second, if you’re going to study some ridiculous made-up gimmick of a major — “the politics and culture of food”? really? — why on earth would you study it “at a small liberal arts school,” i.e., an expensive college for overprivileged trust-fund babies?

[W]e are not immune to the high cost of college. Emma’s father and I have made sacrifices to give her, and her brother, the kind of education we value. There will be loans to pay when she graduates—and, yes, my husband and I will foot that bill.

Oh, now I see! Mommy and Daddy will pay the bill for their daughter’s luxurious four-year-vacation — “the kind of education we value” — because their Special Snowflake (a) didn’t have the scores to get into Berkeley, and (b) Cal State’s for losers.

See, this is the niche that “small liberal arts schools” fill: The offspring of permissive parents who will give their Special Snowflakes whatever their selfish hearts crave. The kid isn’t smart enough or hard-working enough to get into a genuinely elite school, but they’re just too doggone special to attend a state school (let alone community college), and so there’s always that trendy little campus that will charge them $35,000 a year to pretend that they’re better than those disgusting low-brow slobs at State U.

This is not about education, it’s about aspiration.

The “small liberal arts school” is a luxury that the rich can afford, but borrowing money to attend one? That’s just crazy.

Maybe Randye Hoder‘s daughter can apply her knowledge of “the politics and culture of food” at Burger King.

 


Category: Education

Latina Actress Blacklisted for Supporting Republican Candidate

Posted on | January 18, 2014 | 60 Comments

If I had ever heard of Maria Conchita Alonzo before now, I don’t remember it, but I know I’ll never forget her after this:

A famed actress is facing backlash in San Francisco’s Latino community, after she voiced support for a conservative candidate for California governor.
Maria Conchita Alonso starred in a campaign ad for Assemblyman Tim Donnelly of San Bernardino County, a Tea Party favorite who is seeking the Republican nomination. . . .
“Politicians and big government are killing our prosperity, pushing welfare costs through the roof and driving our schools into the ground,” Donnelly said in the ad.
Standing next to Donnelly, Alonso jokingly translated in Spanish, “We’re screwed.” . . .
Alonso is an actress of Cuban and Venezuelan descent. She is perhaps best known for her role in the movie “Moscow on the Hudson” which also starred Robin Williams.
The actress was to perform next month at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco’s Mission District in a Spanish-language version of “The Vagina Monologues,” scheduled for a run from February 14th through 17th. The show is being produced by none other than Eliana Lopez, wife of San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.
“We really cannot have her in the show, unfortunately,” Lopez told KPIX 5. . . .
“Of course she has the right to say whatever she wants. But we’re in the middle of the Mission. Doing what she is doing is against what we believe,” Lopez said.

Regular Right Guy notes the irony that Alonzo escaped totalitarianism in Cuba only to suffer political repression in San Francisco.

A couple years ago, Alonzo called Sean Penn a “communist a–hole,” a statement that everybody knows is true, but which has so much more authority when it is said by a refugee from Cuba.

By the way, Michelle Malkin had a very heartfelt column this week about the hurtfulness of left-wing identity politics. It is sadly remarkable how some “progressives” think it is clever to deride Malkin — an Oberlin College alumna who is one of the most successful businesswomen of the New Media age — with such grossly derogatory slurs as “Manila whore” and “Subic Bay bar girl.”

UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread with more commentary by Ann Althouse, Vox Day and Darleen Click at Protein Wisdom.

 

Category: California, Celebrities
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