The Other McCain

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

Last Night, I Hit Rand Simberg’s Tip Jar for $10, Because … Science!

Posted on | December 27, 2013 | 16 Comments

Global warming “hockey stick” theorist Michael Mann has sued several critics, a litigation that Mark Steyn calls “a textbook example” of “bollocks on stilts.” When Mann first sued in October 2012, Ken White at Popehat called it “Butt Hurt in the First Degree”:

[T]he complaint seems almost calculated to support likely conservative narratives about it. It’s very heavy on arguments by authority, citing the National Science Foundation and Columbia Journalism Review and Discovery Magazine and others for its propositions that the defendants are simply wrong in their criticisms of Mr. Mann. It fairly drips with righteous indignation over the existence of persistent global warming deniers. Global warming skeptics have been asserting that the scientific establishment is hostile to any dissent on global warming; this complaint isn’t going to dispel that impression. . . .
[T]he complaint misconstrues hyperbolic rhetoric and statements of opinion as false statements of fact.

Strong language is not defamation, and disagreement is not a tort, but attempting to sue one’s critics into silence is all the rage lately. There was an appeals court ruling in the Mann case and defendant Rand Simberg has a tip jar, so I hit it, with malice aforethought.

If there’s anything I hate worse than a phony scientific “consensus,” it’s a tenured academic suing honest citizens who work for a living.  Michael Mann is a professor at Penn State University. Has anyone in the vicinity of State College, Pa., heard any salacious rumors about Professor Mann? Molesting coeds, peddling methamphetamine, that sort of thing? Have you had a sordid encounter with Professor Mann at a Rest Area on the Turnpike? Now is the time to come forward and spill the beans.

Clearly, we must question the morals and/or sanity of a university professor who would sue Rand Simberg, and there have been reports recently that suggest America’s so-called “scientific community” is populated by madmen, criminals and degenerates. The Environmental Protection Agency’s top climate-change expert John C. Beale copped a plea for swindling the government and an Iowa State University professor faked an AIDS vaccine to defraud the National Institutes of Health for $19 million in research grants. Given this evidence of widespread moral turpitude among Official Credentialed Scientists, who knows what kind of depravity Professor Mann might be involved in, especially now that he has gone so far as to sue Rand Simberg?

So if there is gossip in Professor Mann’s neighborhood of a “rape dungeon” in his basement — ghastly screams in the night, truck-stop hookers buried in his backyard, etc. — please let us know.

Otherwise, go hit Rand Simberg’s tip jar, because . . . Science!

 


Category: Global Warming, Science

Three Gay Men Laugh About Oral Sex With Anderson Cooper’s Mother

Posted on | December 27, 2013 | 53 Comments

The weirdest thing is that Anderson Cooper himself introduced the topic in a discussion with Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan:

“My mom once wrote a romance memoir about men she had dated — and I use that term loosely — and she described one guy she was currently dating — my mom was 85 at the time — as the Nijinsky of cunnilingus. And she made me proofread the book.”

Much laughter ensued, and never mind the lifelong tragedy of Anderson Cooper’s mother, 89-year-old heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, who was the object of a notorious custody battle in the 1930s, who was married four times, and whose son Carter Cooper — Anderson’s older brother — committed suicide at age 23 in 1988.

We can only imagine what an old-fashioned Freudian analyst might say about Cooper, Savage and Sullivan sitting around laughing on national TV at Cooper mother’s sex life. However, I’m reminded of an observation Barbara Dafoe Whitehead made in The Divorce Culture: The emotional climate in certain types of families is hot or cold, but never appropriately and comfortably warm.

Anderson Cooper’s CNN show is third in cable news ratings, with 528,000 viewers, compared to 699,000 for Chris Hayes on MSNBC and more than 3 million for Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Maybe people don’t want to watch gay men talk about old women’s sex lives.

 

 

UPDATE: Curious as to who the other guests were on that Anderson Cooper segment, I checked the transcript:

Joining me now is Dan Savage, author of “American Savage,” Andrew Sullivan from andrewsullivan.com, a CNN panelist and founding editor also of “The Dish,” also CNN commentator, Michaela Angela Davis and senior legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin . . .

OK, so three gay men, a former fashion editor at Essence magazine, and a Harvard lawyer who was on “Journolist” — with such a “balanced” panel as this, is it any wonder that Anderson Cooper reaches only 12 percent of the cable-news audience? Of course, I understand that when you’re producing a New York-based show the day after Christmas, it might be difficult to find, say, a Presbyterian heterosexual guest, but is CNN even trying?

 

Category: CNN, Gays

A Bad Christmas for Neal Rauhauser

Posted on | December 26, 2013 | 47 Comments

Regular readers of this blog need no introduction to Neal Rauhauser, the disgraced former Democrat campaign consultant and associate of bomber/porogressive activist Brett Kimberlin. A few months ago, Rauhauser stalked my Army son’s Facebook page.

The latest weird turn in Rauhauser’s weird career is that his ex-wife evidently showed up on Twitter, complaining that Neal still owes some $47,000 in child support for the two children — now ages 17 and 13 — of their marriage, which ended a decade ago. Now, this caveat is necessary: I cannot verify that the Twitter account is his ex-wife’s nor, if it is indeed her, can I vouch for the accuracy of all she alleges. However . . .

A diarist at Daily Kos put up a post last Saturday which, with the necessary caveats, is certainly worth excerpting at length here:

During the years that Neal Rauhauser has been involved in internet intrigue while neglecting to pay child support, his ex-wife Nancy went through ovarian and breast cancer . . . Nancy holds no illusions about getting money out of Neal but she’s making the effort because her son and daughter asked and she wants them to go to college. For Nancy, “it’s all about the kids.”
Unfortunately Nancy lives in Nebraska and in order to get the state involved in collecting child-support across state lines she needs to give them a verifiable address for Neal. That’s no easy task. Neal tells no one where he lives, not even his mother, he has no driver’s license and he travels by train and bus. The man leaves no paper trail. So Nancy joined Twitter (where Neal hangs out) in early December as part of her quest for her children and that’s why the need for a restraining order and private security. . . .

Yeah. According to this DKos diarist, when his ex-wife joined Twitter, Rauhauser began harassing her:

Nancy has documents showing her ex-husband was clinically diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder overlaid with Reactive Affective Disorder. Neal Rauhauser is a certified Sociopath.
So in the two weeks she’s been on Twitter, Neal has begun harassing Nancy, her children and her relatives with phone calls and text messages. He also did what he calls a SWAT lite and called Child Protective Services on his ex-wife. Other strange things have been happening recently too: someone attempted to hack Nancy’s eBay account, someone attempted to use her daughter’s social security number and someone accessed her son’s school records and found out where they live.
This is why security and a restraining order are needed . . . And why a lawyer is wanted by the Rauhauser children.

To repeat: I have not verified this information. However, the “SWAT lite” — reporting his ex-wife to Child Protective Services — certainly sounds like Neal Rauhauser’s usual tricks.

There is nothing that Neal Rauhauser hates more than when people tell the truth about Neal Rauhauser. We’ll see what happens.

– – –

Category: The Kimberlin Files

Blame @Instapundit for This

Posted on | December 26, 2013 | 8 Comments

Late Surge in Web Buying
Blindsides UPS, Retailers

What caused this unexpected surge in online buying? Sunday, I put up a post about Justine Sacco that included this:

[H]er liberalism (like all liberalism) is misguided, assuming as it does that the problem of AIDS in Africa (or any similar social problem) results from a shortage of caring. This is a species of Magic Thinking: “We could solve this problem, if only we cared enough.” And from this delusion, we get a lot of empty gestures that do nothing to solve problems, but make people feel good about themselves.
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book about this, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy – a book that no liberal has ever bothered to read, because if they bothered to read it, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.

That post got linked by Instapundit, with the result that Sunday’s traffic was 170% higher than Saturday’s traffic and, over a two-day period, we sold 39 copies of The Vision of the Anointed (19 in print, 20 as Kindle e-books) via our Amazon Affiliate links, as well as 72 other items sold at Amazon, including a Garmin GPS navigator and a 4-terabyte external hard drive. Probably, Amazon and UPS just couldn’t deal with that monster blitz of orders.

For those who ordered The Vision of the Anointed, I promise I’m not exaggerating: It’s the best single-volume analysis of liberalism ever written and could cure the delusions of any liberal who reads it (assuming that the liberal is intelligent enough to understand it, admittedly a large assumption). And once they’re through reading that, maybe they’ll want to try reading Sowell’s The Quest for Comic Justice in which, among other feats, he dismantles Lenin’s Imperialism in less than two pages.

While I can’t speak for Instapundit, on behalf of myself and Thomas Sowell, I apologize to America for crashing Amazon and UPS, but destroying liberalism requires certain sacrifices.

 

 

Category: Amazon

‘Discrimination,’ Arguing by Exceptions, and the Obvious Insanity of Androgyny

Posted on | December 26, 2013 | 46 Comments

Liberalism’s obsession with equality requires us to pretend that such distinctions as “male” and “female” are ultimately meaningless, and that any policy which recognizes these categories as significant must be abolished in order to prevent discrimination.

This is where the rhetoric of liberalism is exposed as a species of madness. While proclaiming their devotion to “diversity,” what liberals are actually striving for is homogeneity and conformity: All institutions must be equally diverse. Institutions that are not “diverse” — all-male clubs or all-female schools or all-black fraternities — are inherently discriminatory, by this logic, which is how the American Studies Association justifies boycotting Israel, making the Jewish nature of the Israeli state analogous to apartheid.

In this way, “diversity” becomes the enemy of pluralism, and the next thing you know, you’re nose-counting some more-or-less randomly selected category and denouncing the discrimination that results in the shocking shortage of Latino gynecologists.

“We must end this Social Injustice because . . . Progress!”

Perhaps the best example of this weird worldview is the crusade for “gender integration” in the military. Liberals believe women must have the “opportunity” to march 12 miles in full combat gear and engage America’s enemies in firefights or it’s “discrimination.”

Unfortunately, this “discrimination” can only be abolished by lowering standards, as the case of Kara Hultgreen demonstrated nearly two decades ago. Under pressure from the radical avant-garde of political correctness, the Navy and the Air Force had gotten into a competition to see which service could produce the first female fighter pilot, which resulted (predictably) in the destruction of a $38 million jet and the death of its unqualified pilot:

On approach to the USS Abraham Lincoln, Lt. Hultgreen made five major errors and ignored repeated wave-off signals by ship’s landing officer. One of those errors caused the F-14A’s left engine to stall, sending the plane out of control, because Lt. Hultgreen mistakenly jammed on the rudder. In the twenty years of F-14A’s service, no pilot had ever stalled an engine this way. . . .
Documents obtained by Elaine Donnelly, director of [the Center for Military Readiness], shows that Lt. Hultgreen not only had subpar performance on several phases of her training but had four “downs” (major errors), just one or two of which are sufficient to justify the dismissal of a trainee. The White House and Congress’ political pressure to get more women in combat is the direct cause of Lt. Hultgreen’s death.

So said Professor Walter Williams in 1995 and, whatever the number of female jet fighter pilots in the U.S. military today, every one of them is stained by tokenism, their status as aviators tainted by the knowledge that they “qualified” only because they were graded on the curve, so that qualifed male candidates were flunked out of training merely to make a way to fill a gender quota.

Nobody in uniform — and certainly no officer who aspires to promotion — can speak that truth out loud, however, and so there is a silent conspiracy of dishonesty, everyone going along with the androgynous myth that justifies the “gender integration” policy.

One can always say that, in a nation of 300 million people, there must be some women who are physically strong enough to endure the rigors required of candidates for elite military roles. But even if we stipulate this, the overwhelming majority of qualified candidates for those roles will always be male and therefore, even if you had no traditionalist objections to women serving in combat, only a fanatical obsession with “equality” could justify abolishing the all-male status of those roles.

Alas, some people are just obsessed fanatics:

Last month, three women became the first of their sex to graduate from the Marine Corps’ famously grueling Advanced Infantry Training Course. The Marine Corps was asking a simple question by running small groups through these courses in experimental test batches, two to five women at a time: Can the female body withstand the rigors of infantry training? The answer, these women showed, is that it can.

Well, congratulations, but I’d be interested to hear from other Marines in that AITC session whether they think these women got any special breaks, and I’d also like to hear from veteran Marine sergeants whether they think there has been any relaxation of standards, because (a) I’m just skeptical that way, and (b) the Kara Hultgreen Syndrome inevitably persists. But never mind that, because now they’re trying to revive the G.I. Jane fantasy:

So if the barrier to integrating women into the infantry isn’t a physical one then what is it?
It’s cultural. And that’s why the infantry may not be the best place to start in military gender integration. Instead, as counterintuitive as it might sound, the military should begin with its Special Operations Forces: elite units such as the Green Berets and SEALs. Although not the obvious move, starting here would likely make for a smoother transition over all. . . .

(Note that the inevitability of a “transition” to a gender-neutral military is assumed as the premise of the argument.)

So how do you responsibly alter the culture so women are accepted and the force remains effective?
The solution currently being proposed is to conduct these test cases and then, based on the results, add a small number of women to a 140,000-man infantry force in the Army, Marine Corps, and National Guard while leaving our much smaller 8,500-man force of special operators all male for the foreseeable future. This would drop a very small number of female infantrymen and infantry officers into a culture they’d be too small to affect, putting them at an enormous disadvantage. . . .
If the military were to integrate elite formations such as the SEALs, Marine Special Operations and Army Special Forces, a few highly capable women in those communities would provide cultural proof that females can hang with “the toughest of the tough.”

Yeah, good luck with that. Let us assume that, as with the three women who made it through Marine AITC, you were able to find some exceptional women who could scrape through SFAS with a little nudge-nudge wink-wink “adjustment” to the standards.

Fine. You’ve got yourself a handful of token Lady Green Berets, and then what? At what point does the calculus of this social-engineering project have more to do with fielding the most effective combat force than with satisfying your idol Equality?

Men and women are different in fundamental ways. Attempting to argue away the truth of this general observation by calling attention to exceptional examples is the same kind of dishonest intellectual gamesmanship which justifies the legality of abortion — the vast majority of which are simply matters of after-the-fact contraception — by talking about rape. At some point, public policy has to be based on common-sense general principles, and not twisted into pretzels to conform to intellectual abstractions.

No heathen sacrifice at the altars of Moloch required more fanaticism than does our latter-day devotion to Equality.

 

 


Category: Feminism, Intellectuals, Military

You Stay Classy, MSNBC!

Posted on | December 26, 2013 | 44 Comments

Many days, I Watch MSNBC So You Don’t Have To™, but it’s not safe for children and the kids are out of school this week, so I wasn’t watching Monday when the World’s Worst Network featured this:

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and the rest of those folks ought to be ashamed of themselves. And gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual people ought to speak up and link their own fate to African-American people because ultimately we’re in the thing together.

What twisted travesty of logic is this? Dyson is a Professor at Georgetown University, which is another reason you should never let your kids attend Georgetown University, but it got worse:

Jesus was a Jew who, around whom a religion was made. So the anti-Semitism of many of the Christians is ironic to begin with.

(Note the casualness with which Professor Dyson  smears “many of the Christians” with the accusation of anti-Semitism.)

And then secondly, the gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual stuff — look through the Bible. There’s a lot of interesting things. The same men who will stand up in the church of all men. “I put my God, Jesus, overall women. I love him more than I love her.”
Hmmm. Do you really? That sounds interestingly homoerotic to people who are outside your religious traditions. I’m not suggesting it is but I’m suggesting that there are some very interesting, subtle, narrative tensions within the Bible itself and within Christianity beyond that.

Wait a doggone minute! Did you just gay-bait Christians while condemning their alleged “bigotry”? Ed Morrissey remarks:

This is the kind of commentary that only occurs in profoundly unserious circles, with MSNBC among the leading examples. I doubt that Dyson buys this schtick, which is just intended to tweak Christians who believe that Corinthians is scripture by using the “you guys are so gay!” insult, but it’s more an insult to his own audience.

BTW, notice how Professor Dyson feels obligated to do the full laundry list — “gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual people” — as if each subcategory must be name-checked? It’s as though he fears that, if he merely said “gay people,” the network  would get angry e-mail from angry lesbians, radical transgenders and militant bisexuals who felt snubbed by the omission. But the connotation of the word “gay” as a synonym for “homosexual” obviously includes lesbians, too. The “transgendered community” is a tiny decimal-point fraction of a percent, a minority so small as to be quite nearly invisible were it not for all the media hype. And as for bisexuals, everybody hates them, including gays and lesbians who are offended by their (usually closeted) indecisiveness.

Liberals like Professor Michael Eric Dyson can exist only within environments like media and academia, where the fundamental absurdities of their rhetoric are never directly challenged.

 


Category: Gays, MSNBC

Two Words You Probably Never Want to Think About: ‘Botched Vasectomy’

Posted on | December 26, 2013 | 15 Comments

Also, “shooting rampage”:

Newly released 911 tapes reveal what the Reno, Nev., hospital shooter apparently told trapped patients and employees as he terrorized a medical office, killing one doctor and wounding two other people before taking his own life last week.
His apparent reason for the rampage? A vasectomy he said wrecked his life.
One man hiding in a bathroom with 10 other people told a 911 operator that the gunman was “pissed off because he had a vasectomy here and it ruined his life. … He says, ‘As long as you’re a patient you can leave; otherwise, I’m going to shoot you.’ ”

There were warning signs:

The California man accused of fatally shooting a urology doctor and injuring two others at a Reno medical office has spent three years struggling with ailments resulting from a botched vasectomy, according to his messages on a Yahoo support group and a law enforcement investigation.
Reno police confirmed [Dec. 19] that 51-year-old Alan Oliver Frazier’s focus during the shooting was the doctors at Urology Nevada. . . .
Frazier told the online Vasectomy Pain group on Aug. 25, 2012 that his post-vasectomy pain, or PVP, “was like I got run over by a truck.” . . .
“Yes, yet another victim of an inhumane medical procedure from hell,” Frazier said in his first post on Aug. 11, 2012.

Of course: He’s a victim, which is why he had to shoot three people before committing suicide. And I’m not saying this is an argument against vasectomy, per se, because I’m sure severe complications like Frazier’s are rare, but on the other hand:

  1. Nobody’s getting anywhere near my scrotum with a knife;
    and
  2. If you decide to undergo “an inhumane medical procedure from hell,” you’ve got to be prepared to deal with it.

 

Category: Crime, Health Care

Value Judgments

Posted on | December 26, 2013 | 11 Comments

This seems simple doesn’t it?

If it isn’t wrong to kill children, then it can not be wrong to do anything else. . . .
Believe it or not, even politically incorrect comments about homosexuality have to be excused if we are to believe that baby killing is a moral act.
I’m often told that I need to be more understanding on this topic, but this is an unfair request. There are people — millions of them, in fact — who think it should be legal to murder babies, but then illegal to, say, pay a fast food worker less than minimum wage, or refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. How could I possibly understand this mentality? How could I wrap my head around the thought process that leads one to conclude that the latter cases are so atrocious — so dehumanizing — that they ought to be outlawed, but the former case is so acceptable that it ought to be vigorously defended, and even funded, by the federal government? . . .
I say all of this because my initial intention was to sit down and write about the couple in Washington who just won a 50 million dollar “wrongful birth” settlement. Brock and Rhea Wuth sued a hospital because their son was born severely disabled. No, they were not alleging that the hospital caused the disability; they alleged that the hospital (and a lab testing facility) did not run the correct tests that would have detected the genetic defects while the child was still in the womb. Had they been given the correct tests, they would have known that the baby was “defective,” and then killed it. Tragically, they were robbed of the opportunity to abort their son, so the hospital must pay for the son’s care — for the rest of his life.

“Wrongful birth”? You can sue somebody for that?

Does this mean Red Sox fans can sue because Bill Buckner was born?

 


Category: Abortion
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