The Other McCain

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

Cravers of Boy-Flesh: Yet Another Sad Example of a Disturbing Trend

Posted on | December 12, 2013 | 33 Comments

Elizabeth Aponte: She likes ’em young, allegedly.

Once you start covering stories like this, people keep sending you tips. Having just recently reported the latest development in the case of Michigan teacher Neal Erickson, this one arrived via e-mail:

A 28-year-old woman charged with having sex with a 13-year-old boy in Allentown must face trial after giving up her right to a preliminary hearing on Thursday.
Elizabeth Aponte of Allentown was interviewed by police in October and admitted having two sexual encounters with the boy, the most recent on Sept. 27, according to court records. Authorities said she told a detective both sexual encounters were consensual and she thought the boy was 14, which is still a crime.

(Another stupid pervert who thinks “consensual” makes it OK, and doesn’t seem too clear about what “illegal” means.)

Aponte was charged with statutory sexual assault and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a person under 16 years old, both felonies of the first degree. She waived her preliminary hearing before District Judge Donna Butler and remains in Lehigh County Prison under $100,000 bail.

(“Involuntary deviate sexual intercourse” — wow, they really give their sex crimes scary names in Pennsylvania, huh?)

The boy’s mother told police her son came home on the night of Sept. 27 with hickies all over his neck.

(“Hickies all over his neck”? Putting a hickey on someone’s neck is so 10th-grade, isn’t it? You see what I mean about Aponte being stupid: “Hey, I’ll just create some evidence of my crime.”)

She checked his Facebook page and found sexual messages from a 28-year-old woman, identified as Aponte.

(Facebook messages = more evidence.)

The boy’s mother confronted her son and he told her Aponte forced him to have sex.
The boy was interviewed Oct. 3 by a child interview specialist and again said he was forced to have sexual intercourse with Aponte at her home on Lehigh Street.

At this point, maybe you’re skeptical: How does a woman “force” a boy to have intercourse with her? Involuntary arousal? She overpowered him, held him down and threatened him with severe injuries if he didn’t satisfy her insatiable lust for adolescent flesh?

However, just because the boy is lying, doesn’t mean he’s not a victim, nor does it excuse Elizabeth Aponte’s perverted crime. And this case helps expose the flaw in the claim — made repeatedly by supporters of Florida sex offender Kaitlyn Hunt — that what she did was really OK, because it was “consensual.” Do I think Aponte “forced” this boy to have sex with her? No, as anyone who has ever been a 13-year-old boy could tell you, that’s both impossible and unnecessary.

When I was 13, I was like the warning you hear on those Cialis ads: “If you experience an erection lasting more than four hours . . .”

Four hours? Is that all? I experienced an erection that lasted basically from eighth grade until my sophomore year of college, when it stopped for about a half-hour and then immediately returned.

So if “consent” could legally or morally justify it, any 28-year-old woman — or 38-year-old woman, or whatever — could have had her way with me, and certainly I wouldn’t have told the cops, although I’m sure I would have bragged about it to everybody at school.

Alas, I grew up in a long-ago time when no one had ever heard of a 28-year-old women wanting to have sex with 13-year-old boys.

So what’s up with this rash of women getting arrested for having sex with teenage boys? There is now an entire Web page devoted to chronicling the crimes of Female Sex Offenders, Does anyone remember how shocked we were to learn about the cases of Mary Kay LeTourneau (1997) and Debra Lefave (2004)? Now it’s a trend.

Something weird is happening to the sexual culture in our society, or else you wouldn’t see all these headlines about adult women chasing madly after sex with boys who aren’t even old enough to get a driver’s license. Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.

 

Category: Crime, Sex

Michigan Union: Teachers Still Have a Right to Benefits After Boning Teenagers

Posted on | December 12, 2013 | 47 Comments

(WARNING: This item contains strong language, sexual
perversity, an out-of-control labor union and sarcasm.)

If the American people can agree on nothing else, can’t we all agree — black or white, male or female, rich or poor, gay or straight — that it’s a very bad thing for teachers to have sex with students? And can’t we also agree that a middle-school teacher who has a three-year sex affair with a student beginning when the student was only 14 has thereby forfeited every “right” and “benefit” associated with his former taxpayer-funded employment in the public school system?

Can’t we agree that this is BATSHIT CRAZY?

Neal Erickson, a former math teacher at Rose City Middle School, was convicted this summer of raping a young student over three years, from 2006 to 2009, and sentenced to 15-30 years in prison. Union seeks to get him a $10,000 severance from the School District.

“Hey, yeah, Neal sodomized a 14-year-old, but he paid his union dues, so how about a $10,000 severance payment?”

We first reported on this case in August:

Former middle-school teacher Neal Erickson, 38, pleaded guilty in May to having sex with a boy beginning in 2006 — when the boy was a 14-year-old eighth-grader — until 2009. His fellow teachers in Ogemaw County, Michigan, supported Erickson, writing letters to the judge asking for a lenient sentence. . . .

Disregarding the pleas for leniency, Circuit Court Judge Michael Baumgartner imposed a 15-30-year sentence, and yet the teachers union continues to advocate for Erickson’s “rights”:

WEST BRANCH, Mich. — The Michigan Education Association is going to arbitration to try to force the West Branch-Rose City school district to pay a former teacher who was convicted of molesting a student a $10,000 severance buyout.
Neil Erickson coverThe father of the victim is outraged, calling the union’s efforts on behalf of the sex criminal “ludicrous” and saying any school money due to the teacher should go to his son, who is “out there trying to make it in this world all messed up.” . . .
Erickson was placed on paid administrative leave when state police launched an investigation in October 2012. Erickson was arrested and charged with criminal sexual conduct in December 2012.
On March 26, 2013 WB-RC officials offered a $10,000 buyout for any qualifying teacher who left the school district that year, an incentive superintendent Dan Cwayna said the district had used in the past to encourage needed staff reductions.
While its not clear when Erickson’s employment was terminated, the union’s action suggests he was still on the payroll when the buyout was offered and accepted it.
The school district declined to pay him the money, prompting the union’s action. . . .
MEA UniServ Director Ron Parkinson acknowledged that the union is taking the case to arbitration on behalf of Erickson, but declined to discuss the case further.
“We don’t make a practice of discussing any case. It’s based on contractual compliance, and that’s really all I can say,” Parkinson told EAGnews Friday. “We filed for arbitration today.”

“It’s based on contractual compliance”? Can the Michigan Education Association cite the clause in Neal Erickson’s contract that authorized him to play hide-the-sausage with an eighth-grader?

Of course, I’m not a lawyer, but it would seem to me that violating one’s employment contract — and I’m pretty sure playing naked leapfrog with a 14-year-old boy constitutes such a violation — would forfeit any right to payment due under that contract. Is it too much to ask that members of the Michigan Education Association keep their hands out of the pants of middle school kids? Because there’s way too much of this pedophile action in Michigan:

It was a quiet ceremony. Elizabeth Miklosovic had an outdoor wedding in June 2004 in Michigan’s Manistee National Forest, where the couple lit candles and exchanged vows. Miklosovic’s marriage lasted only a few months, however. Later that year, the mother of the bride found out that her daughter had, at age 13, become the lesbian “wife” of Miklosovic, who had been the girl’s language arts teacher at Baseline Middle School in South Haven, Michigan.

Follow Batshit Crazy News on Twitter.

 

 


Category: Crime, Education, Gays, Sex

Anonymous Compares Bradley Manning to Nelson Mandela (Irony Alert)

Posted on | December 12, 2013 | 71 Comments

In that analogy, President Obama is P.W. Botha and laws to punish disobedient soldiers are apartheid. Remember that Bradley Manning was the emotionally disturbed Army private who illegally provided classified U.S. documents to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.

Conservatives are often accused of “simplistic” thinking, and liberals claim they’re all about “nuance” and “critical thinking,” but there are layers of nuance that seem to pass right over the heads of these idiot anarchists who mindlessly admire Manning. When my own son took the oath at Fort Meade, security was on high alert because there was a hearing in the Manning case that day, and the Army didn’t know if the Anonymous protesters might try some real-life “civil disobedience.” My son swore an oath that day to obey the orders of his Commander-in-Chief, whose politics and policies I have frequently criticized, but who is nonetheless President of the United States.

This is what democracy and the rule of law require. Citizens of a democracy cannot selectively decide which laws to obey, imbue their crimes with political significance, and then claim that enforcement of the law is unjust. And the security of a free state is always dependent on the service of those like my son who are bound by oath to obey orders, without regard for mere political controversies.  While there are many decisions of the Obama administration that I have criticized, the prosecution of Bradley Manning is to be applauded, because if our soldiers cannot be trusted to obey orders, none of us are safe.

My soldier son and his mother.

If Bradley Manning is a courageous hero, then is every soldier who obeys orders a cowardly villain? This is what the anarchists of Anonymous are saying by their support of Manning, whose crimes were heinous and whose punishment is thoroughly deserved.

Speaking of punishments thoroughly deserved, a friend sent me an article about the “PayPal 14” hackers whom I mentioned yesterday. It may be necessary to remind you of the sequence of events: Manning illegally provided classified U.S. documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks; PayPal suspended the WikiLeaks account; Anonymous then launched distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks to shut down PayPal. In other words, a company’s business was attacked because of their refusal to support Manning’s criminal activity.

Alas, those digital terrorists weren’t so Anonymous after all, and it was only a few months until the feds busted them. This May article by Huffington Post writers Jerry Smith and Ryan J. Reilly oozed with sympathy for the “Pay Pal 14” hackers:

Before he was charged in July 2011 with aiding the hacker group Anonymous, Josh Covelli lived what he considered the life of an ordinary 26-year-old. He spent countless hours on the Internet. He had a girlfriend. He was a student and employee at Devry University in Dayton, Ohio.
But after federal authorities accused him and 13 other people of helping launch a cyberattack against the online payment service PayPal, Covelli faced potentially 15 years in prison, and his life began to unravel.
His girlfriend broke up with him. He struggled to find an employer willing to hire an accused computer hacker. His friends “wanted nothing to do with me,” he said, and he suffered from bouts of paranoia — “looking out windows, not sure who to trust” — before checking into a behavioral health center for three days.
“It was as if I got kicked off a cliff,” Covelli, now 28, told The Huffington Post in an interview. . . .

Well, boo hoo hoo. Maybe if Josh Covelli had sought “behavioral health” treatment sooner, he would have realized how crazy he was to think that committing crime on behalf of WikiLeaks was a smart idea. But, hey, let’s all be sympathetic to stupid criminals:

Some knew each other before the indictment, but only by online nicknames such as “Anthrophobic” and “Reaper.” They had never met in person until Sept. 1, 2011, when they made their initial court appearance together.
One defendant, Tracy Ann Valenzuela, a single mother and massage therapist, told a local ABC station in 2011 that she got involved in the PayPal attack while reading the news online.
“I saw something about PayPal shutting down payments to Wikileaks, and I clicked on some other site and joined a protest,” she said. “And next thing I knew, my house was surrounded by guns.” . . .

“I clicked on some other site and joined a protest” — a protest on behalf of criminals, a protest that involved criminal acts intended to deprive PayPal of revenue, because the company refused to process donations intended to support the criminal Julian Assange.

Tracy Ann Valenzuela: Her defense? She’s stupid.

Tracy Ann Valenzuela’s defense is that she was too stupid to realize that DDOS attacks are a crime. Perhaps we need to put all the stupid people in prison, just to be on the safe side, because otherwise they might log onto the Internet and commit cybercrime.

Let me propose an alternative theory of Tracy Ann Valenzuela’s crime: (a) she knew damned well this DDOS “protest” was criminal, but (b) she had contempt for the law and (c) she thought she could get away with breaking the law, because … Anonymous! and (d) oops.

Reminds me of the 18-year-old who thought she could get away with having sex in a school toilet stall with a 14-year-old. Oops.

It’s weird how millions of Americans go through life without ever being arrested for sex offenses or cybercrimes, but whenever the liberal media want to portray some criminal as a victim of social injustice, they always manage to find a way to do it:

In interviews with The Huffington Post, defendants in the PayPal case said they have spent the past two years burdened by pre-trial conditions that restricted their Internet usage. Many also struggled to secure employment.
“When you’re applying for a job and someone Googles you, you have a lot of explaining to do when you want to point out that you were standing up for free speech and a worthy cause and the government says you’re a cyber terrorist,” said Graham E. Archer, an attorney who represents Ethan Miles, one of the defendants.
Archer said being on pre-trial release has been “extraordinarily stressful” for Miles. Court records note that he spent time at a mental health facility. . . .

What? Ethan Miles “spent time at a mental health facility”? It’s hard to get a job if “the government says you’re a cyber terrorist”?

Ethan Miles: A criminal who is crazy.

Strip away the HuffPo’s sympathetic spin — and the lawyer’s claim that the kook Ethan Miles thought DDOS attacks were a way of “standing up for free speech” — and what you get is this: Crazy people commit crimes and nobody wants to hire crazy criminals.

Where do these crazy and/or stupid criminals get the idea that any time there is a protest — because somebody said it’s about “peace,” or “free speech” or “social justice” — they can just join the protest and be exempted from potential negative consequences? Pardon me for thinking maybe they get that idea from the liberal media:

Most Americans have never heard of Chris Hani or Oliver Tambo, both of whom died in 1993, and there was no fanfare in the U.S. media when Arthur Goldreich died two years ago. Since Nelson Mandela’s death last Thursday, the names of his former comrades in the anti-apartheid struggle have been omitted from the media narrative. The MSNBC hostess who last week enthusiastically credited Mandela with having “singlehandedly” ended apartheid was merely reducing to its ridiculous essence a myth that has become ubiquitous. What has been carefully omitted from the media myth — along with the names of many of Mandela’s colleagues in the African National Congress — is that the ANC was a communist-dominated party closely allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The controversy that erupted Tuesday after President Obama shook hands with Cuban dictator Raul Castro at a Mandela memorial in South Africa should have provided an opportunity to explain the history that has been deleted from the media’s Mandela myth. After all, Fidel Castro’s communist regime sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Angola to fight in a civil war where South Africa’s apartheid government sent troops into combat against Soviet-backed Marxists. The fact that Moscow and Havana spent the final 15 years of the Cold War fighting to spread communism in sub-Saharan Africa, and that Pretoria was a key Western ally against that effort, got no mention in the obituary praise for Mandela, who remained imprisoned until 1990. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator. Maybe I’m “on the wrong side of history,” but at least I’m not a stupid criminal kook.

Also, it’s not a crime to hit my tip jar: PayPal is your friend!





 

Category: Crime, Culture, History, Terrorism

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.12.13

Posted on | December 12, 2013 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Speaker Slams Conservative Groups Opposed To Budget Deal

Groups “using” Republicans. Americans

Boehner betting groups’ influence will fade if budget deal passes


Ukraine Police Stand Down After Clashing With Defiant Protesters
Barricades rebuilt after unsuccessful crackdown


International Space Station Reports Cooling System Failure
Crew not in danger; ground teams looking into fixes



POLITICS
Sebelius Claims Obamacare Enrollment Up As Healthcare.gov Improves

HHS Secretary arrives to testify before Congress

Search for scapegoats – er, “review of problems” launched

Democrats Advance Homeland Security Nominee Despite GOP Objections, Ongoing Investigation

Congressional Staffers Told Not To Trust Info From Healthcare.gov

Rand Paul: Budget Deal “Shameful”, “Huge Mistake”

US Suspends Aid To Syrian Rebels

IRS Nominee Gets Support From GOP

Republican Study Committee Fires Director For Leaking

Biden Guarantees Victory On Immigration Reform

Homeland Security Fires Employee Over Racist Website

Sen. Alexander’s Chief Of Staff Arrested On Child Porn Charges, Fired



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Brent Slides Towards $109 On Tapering Concerns: NYMEX $97.41, Brent $109.49
California Puts Sriracha Shipments On Hold
Stanley Fischer Favored For #2 At The Fed
Japan Stocks Lead Losses In Asia
S&P 500 Drops Most In A Month As Budget Deal Spurs Stimulus Bets
Housing Foreclosure Crisis Finally Winding Down?
Dell Introduces Chromebook 11 For Education Market
XBox One Sales Neck And Neck With PS4
Yahoo Forced To Acknowledge Yahoo Mail Problems In Worst Failure Yet
Apple Scores Legal Victory Over Samsung In ROK
Facebook Brings Autoplaying Videos To Mobile Devices And The Web



SPORTS
MLB Plans To Pan Home Plate Collisions By 2015

1970: Pete Rose slams into Indians catcher Ray Fosse at the All-Star game. The collision broke Fosse’s shoulder and ended his career.

Players union approval needed for rule to take effect in 2014

Blackhawks Use Big Second Period To Rout Flyers 7-2

Mets Agree To Two-Year Deal With Bartolo Colon


Kings Top Maple Leafs For Fifth Consecutive Win

Knicks Blow 23-Point Lead, Recover To Edge Bulls

Getzlaf Extends Scoring Streak To 13 As Ducks Beat Wild 2-1

Pelicans Take Down Pistons In OT

Thunder Keep Rolling With Blowout Of Shorthanded Grizzlies

Nationals Acquire LOOGY Jerry Blevins From A’s



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
TIME Magazine Names Pope Francis Person Of The Year

The People’s Pope

Count your blessings. It could have been Miley Cyrus.

Taye Diggs, Idina Menzel Separate After Ten Years

Drew Barrymore’s Expecting A Girl

Stars React To SAG Nominations

Bradley Cooper, Suki Waterhouse Make First Joint Appearance

Madonna Drops Boy Toy After Three Years Due To Work Commitments

Oprah: Why I Never Wanted To Raise Children

Adam Lambert’s “Glee” Future All Up In The Air

Weinsteins Sue Time Warner Over “Hobbit” Sequel Profits

Lil’ Wayne’s Baby Mama Arrested In Georgia

Spencer Pratt: I Gained 50 Pounds Eating Pie; “Hills” Producers Wanted Me To Leave Heidi Montag At The Altar

Paramount Finds Its Director For “World War Z” Sequel

NBC Greenlights “Rosemary’s Baby” Miniseries



FOREIGNERS
Finally, The People’s Turn To Grieve For Mandela
Thai PM Says Protests Won’t Prompt Repeat Of Military Coup
Deaf Advocates Call Out Translator At Mandela Funeral As Fake
Syrian Refugees In Lebanon Suffer Through Winter Storms
Australian Court Overturns Gay Marriage Law In Capitol Territory
16 Killed, Five Injured In Shenzhen Market Fire
$cientology Recognized As Religion In UK
Uruguay Legalizes Marijuana: A White Flag In The War On Drugs?



BLOGS & STUFF
First Street Journal: For The Left, It’s More Important To Be Anti-Israel Than Liberal
The Looking Spoon: Hottest Liberal Toy Of This Holiday Season?
Proof Positive: This Guy Puts The Self In Selfie
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: More On The Tarantino Presidency
Michelle Malkin: Obama’s Cash For Universal Preschool Clunker Plan
Twitchy: Larry The Cable Guy Has A Message For Folks Angered By His Obamacare Jokes
Chicks On The Right: Um, Can We Get A Freaking Background Check Up In Here?
American Power: Income Inequality – The Defining Lie Of The Radical Left
American Thinker: The Future Of Medical Specialists Under Obamacare
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – HHS (Pre-Effectuated) Enrollment Numbers
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, December 11
Jammie Wearing Fools: Selfiegate An International Embarassment
JustOneMinute: Live Free Or Die Hard
Pat Dollard: O’Reilly, Kurtz Shred Sharpton For Deceptive Editing, Swipe At MSNBC’s Ridiculous Fox Obsession
Protein Wisdom: #WarOn Boys – Pathologizing Of Normal Boy Behavior Continues
Shot In The Dark: The Many Lies Of “Protect” Minnesota, Part XXIV
The Jawa Report: Oregon Spends $300 Million To Sign Up 44 People For Obamacare
The Lonely Conservative: How Harry Reid Pushed Through Visa Applications For Foreign Investors
This Ain’t Hell: Gawker And The Truth – Never The Twain Shall Meet
Megan McArdle: Republicans Get The Better End Of The Budget Deal


Category: Live at Five

‘Misogyny’! If You RT This, Will @CCriadoPerez Report Your Account?

Posted on | December 11, 2013 | 44 Comments

Probably not, but you never know, and while I generally have zero sympathy for Anonymous, this news is rather troubling:

More than 30 Anonymous-related Twitter accounts, including @Anon_Central, one of the largest with over 150,000 followers, have been suspended by Twitter following a campaign of misogynist abuse aimed at feminist campaigners on the social network.
The four women, Labour MP Stella Creasy, Times columnist Caitlin Moran, freelance journalist Caroline Criado-Perez and campaigner Hannah Curtis, were all named in a document shared by the largest anonymous Twitter account, @YourAnonNews, which claimed that “mentioning these accounts can result in suspension and possible scrutiny for future accounts.” It also claimed that “Perez and Creasy appear to have some direct line to Twitter to get accounts suspended sooner.”
Criado-Perez, who has been the subject of campaigns of misogynist abuse before, says that those claims are nonsense. “I certainly don’t have the power to ban accounts, but I do report accounts that send threats and harass me,” she said. “Sometimes they get suspended and sometimes they don’t.
“I don’t bother reporting accounts that just call me a cunt, which is what they seem to think. Just ones that are directly threatening or are inciting harassment, like the Anonymous accounts have been.”

It’s nice to have this promise from Caroline Criado-Perez that you are free to call her the c-word without fear of being reported, eh?

I have no idea how @Anon_Central got suspended, but using “Twitter gulag” tactics to silence opposition by falsely claiming harassment is a continuing concern and, given the essentially totalitarian impulse of feminism, is this claim by Anonymous really surprising?

Guardian columnist Emer O’Toole seems to justify the bannings:

At the same time that the “PayPal14” face felony charges in California for involvement in an Anonymous DDoS campaign in support of WikiLeaks, other Anonymous cells are using their hacktivist energies against feminists who report misogynist harassment on Twitter. . . .
In one document, an Anonymous cell names four women as having “pull” in getting Twitter accounts suspended; two feminist activist groups are also criticised, despite having no such power. This hints that the Anonymous cell’s problem is not feminists with influence over Twitter per se, but the feminist goal of changing attitudes to gendered hate speech. And herein lies a delicate tension: what, for some Anonymous cells, constitutes feminazis instigating an evil Trollocaust against free speech, I understand as activists working with an awareness that rape and harassment don’t happen in a vacuum, but in a cultural climate in which it is OK to intimidate women sexually.

Uh, “the feminist goal of changing attitudes to gendered hate speech“?

What can this possibly mean, except perhaps, “Be nice to girls”?

In case Emer O’Toole, Caroline Criado-Perez and other feminists haven’t noticed, conservative women online are subjected to some of the most hateful language imaginable. You could ask Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Dana Loesch or Katie Pavlich about this.

But perhaps the question you need to be asking is, “Why does Anonymous seem to have a misogyny problem?”

An answer to that question may be as simple as taking a nice long look at the mug shots of the “PayPal 14” (click image to enlarge):

Twelve of the 14 accused hackers (86%) are male, and what a lovely bunch of fellows, eh? Between the “Living in Mom’s Basement” boys and the “Smoked Too Much Weed” weirdos, you get the general idea that maybe they haven’t enjoyed very active social lives.

Also, notice five of them have the silly “hipster goatee” look.

Of the 12 male suspects, how many of them would you guess have wives and children and mortgages and other adult responsibilities?

It’s a self-selection factor, see? Kinda like the sexual assault problem with the “Occupy” movement: Who wants to camp out in a city park with a bunch of smelly anarchist losers? Chicks don’t dig that scene, and the kind of guys who are attracted to anarchist demonstrations . . . Well, maybe they haven’t enjoyed very active social lives.

This observable pattern may also explain why feminists seem so angry all the time: They’re always hanging out with guys on the Left, who are mostly a bunch of wimps, geeks and freaks. If those creeps were your available choices, wouldn’t you be angry, too?

 


Category: Feminism

Women: Is It Possible You’re Entirely Too Self-Conscious and Judgmental?

Posted on | December 11, 2013 | 61 Comments

Julie Eckert has written an article for Verily magazine called “The Care and Keeping of Online Personas” which is interesting in what it unwittingly conveys about the female worldview, namely their innate concern about courtesy, relationships and “popularity.”

This girlish concern for social status is something I’ve noticed since I was in elementary school. Among boys, social status is basically a matter of physical dominance: The big guys shove everybody else around, and if you’re not the biggest kid on the playground, your safety is dependent in large measure on having buddies, belonging to a gang of friends, being part of what is basically a self-defense league.

Male relationships therefore tend to be utilitarian alliances. You have your old buddies and best friends, but these friendships are absent a lot of the emotional fuss and bother that typify female friendships, because that kind of drama-queen act — the backstabbing and gossip and the “Mean Girls”-style cliqueish exclusion — would quickly be settled by physical violence among guys. Courtesy among men is basically a matter of (a) being careful not to piss off a stranger who might decide to kick your ass, and (b) being loyal to your friends, so you can count on having back-up if a fight does break out.

Female relationship are more complex and nuanced and inscrutable, and there’s always that whole “Pretty and Popular Club” thing: Keeping score of who’s friends with who, and who’s not friends with who, and did you see the hideous dress that slut Tiffany wore?

Please, ladies: Don’t give us guys any lectures about “equality,” as if we haven’t seen how you constantly scheme to enhance your own social status relative to other women, and as if we haven’t heard the workplace complaints of women about their female managers, who are in many case brutal tyrants to their female subordinates.

Anyway, Julie Eckert offers many excellent tips about maintaining decorum in the world of social media, but in a way that makes me ask: “Are women thinking way too hard about this stuff?” That is to say, have the real-life status games women play transferred themselves to the online world, where the related phenomena of judgmentalism (toward others) and self-consciousness (about how one is perceived by others) are now applied to social media?

“OMG! Did you see Tiffany’s new avatar? Isn’t it horrible? And did you see how she was tweeting to Josh? What a low-rent tramp!”

Realizing I’m at risk of sounding like Professor Henry Higgins — “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” — I also realize there’s no point trying to change human nature. Women are women.

Follow Julie Eckert on Twitter.

 

Category: Culture, Feminism

Shorter Ryan: I’m Gonna Kick Tomorrow

Posted on | December 11, 2013 | 39 Comments

by Smitty

It maybe be that Paul Ryan sincerely believes that Congress is EVER going to reduce spending of its own volition. In the same vein, Obama has stated that he believes his own BS. Gently as it can be put, Paul, CONSERVATIVES DO NOT. We don’t believe Obama. While some might be swayed by you confident tones, the last time a Congress successfully bound a subsequent Congress was when the follow-on Congress borrowed more money, not when that future Congress actually cut spending. All I can say is that, sometimes, you need to step away from the problem to gain some perspective.
Erick Erickson calls this budget deal the BOHICA Act of 2013.

I am old enough to remember when the GOP said not to worry about it caving on Obamacare funding because, by God, it would hold the line on sequestration.
Hell, that was a month ago.
Amazing how much can change in a month. Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray have decided to give up the last thing the GOP was fighting for — spending restraint. “Don’t worry,” Paul Ryan says with his boyish charm designed to induce sweats and heart palpitations among conservatives, “it’s only a little less restrained.”
The budget deal puts discretionary spending over $1 trillion, which is higher than the sequestration deal of 2011, which was at $967. This is, in fact, a spending increase.
It funds Obamacare.

It gets worse as you read RedState from there.
New rule: all talk of future spending cuts is rejected, in advance, as pure hooey. Don’t bother with it, Paul. No amount of poker face, boyish good looks, and irresistible masculine charm can sell something we know is fundamentally not gonna happen. Peddle those wares to a more gullible audience.
Going with this Jane’s Addiction cut, since “Been Caught Stealing” is probably too pejorative, if also more accurate.

Category: Budget

A Scoop That Was Not a Scoop: The ‘Spying on Gamers’ Story Is Old News

Posted on | December 11, 2013 | 20 Comments

You perhaps saw the headlines:

Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games
— New York Times

Xbox Live among game services targeted
by US and UK spy agencies
— The Guardian

World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA Spied in Online Games
— Pro Publica

Don’t believe the Greenwald/Snowden media fanboy hype, says Paul Hair at The Security and Culture Intelligencer:

Virtual worlds interest the Intelligence Community (IC). That’s the news coming from the latest leak of classified material that’s part of the Russian-backed subversion and espionage operation that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and the Media continue conducting against the U.S.
But this “news” isn’t news at all.
The New York Times, ProPublica, and The Guardian published their latest stories as if they were revealing to the world that virtual worlds interest the IC. They failed to make clear that the IC has long acknowledged the basic (and unclassified) information regarding its interest in virtual worlds.
The online version of WIRED published, “U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft,” during February 2008. WIRED published its story based on unclassified information that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) published about its data mining activity. A version of that data mining report remains available on the ODNI website.
Furthermore, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA—a component of the ODNI) explicitly acknowledges its interest in virtual worlds with an entire program about it. The program and related documents are readily available to everyone. The specific program is called, “Reynard,” and one of the documents is a 50-page, “Reynard Proposers Day,” PDF that provides a wealth of information.

How is it that a program which was first reported by Wired more than five years ago should suddenly be treated as front-page news?

Many of my blogger friends on the Right have joined the media’s breathless enthusiasm for Edward Snowden’s leaks: “Obama’s spying on us! Big government out of control!” Excuse me for courting unpopularity by dissenting from that viewpoint. The work done by our intelligence agencies is both necessary and necessarily secretive, and we seem to be entering an era like the mid-1970s, when Watergate-era revelations created a widespread hostility toward the CIA, the FBI and the entire concept of “national security.”

I’m one of the few journalists who has consistently regarded Snowden skeptically. See my June article at Viral Read, “Who Is Edward Snowden? Background on NSA Leaker Emerges.”

America has real enemies, and don’t expect me to applaud the willful disclosure of the classified means by which we keep track of America’s enemies. It is one thing to denounce specific abuses — which, admittedly, the government tried to conceal — but there is no need to buy into the mindset of the Left, which cheers every new “leak” because the leaks hurt America and the Left hates America. Paul Hair again:

It also remains to be seen if politicians, pundits, bloggers, private citizens, alternative media outlets, the tech industry, and gamers will begin to examine the motives and veracity of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and the Media as they continue conducting a Russian-backed subversion and espionage campaign against the U.S.

You can follow Paul Hair on Twitter.

 


Category: Journalism
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