The Other McCain

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

It’s a @CharlieSheen Christmas, Bitch!

Posted on | December 17, 2013 | 47 Comments

Perhaps you’ve forgotten the complete manic breakdown Charlie Sheen had in February and March 2011, when he announced that he was “tired of pretending I’m not special . . . a total freaking rock star from Mars,” trashing everybody, boasting about his drug intake and publicly flaunting his porn starlet “goddess” girlfriends.

What’s wrong with Charlie Sheen? Simple: He has been enabled.

His wealth and fame have been exploited by Sheen as a license to escape responsibility and treat other people as his inferiors. The TV producers who pay Sheen big bucks are part of the problem, but the real problem is Charlie Sheen himself. There are other celebrities who make big money but are not abusive a–holes. The narcissistic black hole of damaged ego at the center of Sheen’s “Hollywood Bad Boy” act has been indulged and enabled by everyone around him for so long that he doesn’t even realize how wrong it is to treat other people like objects whose only purpose in the world is to admire him and/or provide him with pleasure.

Anyway, Sheen erupted at his ex-wife Denise Richards this week:

Denise Richards is the Grinch who stole Christmas … at least according to Charlie Sheen — who’s pissed at his ex-wife for pulling the plug on his holiday plans with their daughters.
Sources close to Sheen tell TMZ Denise informed Charlie this weekend she didn’t want him to join her, Sam, and Lola on their family Christmas trip — and didn’t really explain why.
We’re told the news sent Charlie into a tailspin since he’s already not seeing twins Bob and Max this year for Christmas — they’ll be with temp guardian/Brooke Mueller’s brother Scott.
Sheen lashed out at Denise by tweeting a pic of a chopped up baseball bat — a souvenir from their wedding — with the caption, “The lie is over. I’m done being treated like a relative with a one-way ticket. #DuhNeese.”

This is typical Sheen: He habitually treats people like crap and then is outraged when they don’t tolerate his abuse.

“You’re a f***ing liar. So, you know what it’s like,
f**k you. OK, I hope you rot in f***ing hell.
You’re a piece of s**t f***ing liar and
I hope you f***ing rot in hell. So f**k you.
I hope I never f***ing talk to you again,
you f***ing c**t. F**k you.”

 Has Charlie forgotten that voice-mail message he left Denise Richards in 2005? Does he think she has forgotten it? And yet, rather than thinking about all the hurt he has inflicted on his ex-wife over the years, when she does something that makes him angry, the narcissist Charlie Sheen thinks of himself as the victim — and compounds the damage by publicly insulting her as “DuhNeese.”

Dude: Denise Richards was once the hottest woman on the planet.

There was a time when millions of guys would have died for just one smile from her, and she consented to marry you, and I don’t care what “a total freaking rock star from Mars” you think you are, you should have been grateful for that, but you weren’t.

No, you blew it, Charlie. And that’s all ancient history now, but it’s not like you’re the only dude on the planet who has problems with his ex-wife, and I make it a point never to express pity for dudes in your situation, because there’s a matter of principle involved.

“My ex-wife’s a crazy, evil, two-faced castrating bitch!”

Yeah? Well, you married her, didn’t you?

It wasn’t like somebody put a gun to your head. There are more than 3 billion women on the planet, not all of whom are crazy, evil, two-faced castrating bitches and so, even if your ex-wife is the worst woman in the world, you’re still not completely blameless.

You had a choice, and chose badly.

Or maybe not. Maybe your ex-wife is not the worst woman in the world, and you are to blame for your broken relationship. But either way, you cannot escape responsibility and the fact is, even as a 42-year-old mom, your ex-wife is still pretty doggone hot, whereas you are an increasingly grizzled old creep whose “bad boy” act has long since lost its charm. There is no reason anyone should feel sorry for you, and every reason for us to feel sorry for your ex-wife, who will always be The Only Good Thing About Starship Troopers.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to order Wild Things from Amazon Instant Video and watch “the good parts” in slow motion.

 

Category: Celebrities

‘Nobody Matters Less to Our Society Than Young Black Women. Nobody.’

Posted on | December 17, 2013 | 18 Comments

The headline quote is from a very long Village Voice interview with former Chicago Sun-Times reporter Jim DeRogatis about the sexual accusations against pop singer R. Kelly. Since the release of the singer’s latest album, Black Panties, DeRogatis has quite evidently become angry at the way Kelly’s predatory conduct has been glossed over, or even tacitly endorsed, by some music journalists.

Part of the problem, as the interview makes clear, is the issue of race: “Kelly never misbehaved with a single white girl who sued him or that we know of. Mark Anthony Neal, the African-American scholar, makes this point: one white girl in Winnetka and the story would have been different. No, it was young black girls and all of them settled [their lawsuits against Kelley]. They settled because they felt they could get no justice whatsoever. They didn’t have a chance.”

That’s only part of the problem, however: Civil lawsuits are a poor substitute for criminal prosecution. Because Kelly’s accusers filed civil suits and accepted settlements rather than making criminal charges, the impression was created that the crimes alleged against Kelly weren’t actually crimes, and that the girls involved were just “bitches, hos, and gold diggers,” as DeRogatis says.

Another part of the problem, DeRogatis explains, is that many music journalists aren’t very good journalists. That is to say, they’ve never done any actual reporting outside the world of record reviews and publicity-oriented interviews, and therefore don’t really know how to report a crime story:

A lot of people who are critics are fans and don’t come with any academic background, with any journalistic background, research background. Now, nobody knows everything, and far be it from me to say you’ve got to be a journalist or you have to have studied critical theory in the academy. Part of what we do is journalistic. Get the names right, get the dates right, get the facts right. Sometimes, on a very rare number of stories, there’s a deeper level of reporting required.

The interviewer, Jessica Hopper, makes this point:

Some of our young critical peers, they’re 24 and all they know of Kelly’s past is some vague sense of scandal, because they were introduced to him as kids via Space Jam. A lot of your reporting on this is not online, it is not Google-able. Collective memory is that he “just” peed in a girl’s mouth. . . .
I feel that a lot of younger journalists came up through blogs, not journalism school. They are fearful to write about it because they don’t know what they can say, what language they can use, if they can be sued for even acknowledging charges.

 Now, let’s be clear: This is not about whether or not you went to journalism school. I didn’t go to j-school, nor did a lot of the journalists I’ve worked with over the years. In fact, many editors will tell you not to major in journalism, but to study history or political science.

The point is, most of the skills involved in reporting can only be learned on the job in real-world situations. How do you learn to do cops-and-courts reporting? By doing cops-and-courts reporting. Unfortunately, a lot of people in the world of journalism today have never had the experience of working at a small newspaper where a staff writer has to be able to do all kinds of reporting: If the cops-and-courts guy is out sick, somebody in the newsroom draws the short straw and has to go get the daily blotter report down at the sheriff’s department.

Anyway, as Jessica Hopper says, a lot of the original reporting about the accusations against R. Kelly is “not Google-able,” which is another problem of 21st-century journalism: The absurdly lazy belief that everything worth knowing about any subject will show up on the first page of a Google search. Everything on Wikipedia is accepted as gospel, and nothing else matters.

At the end of her interview with Jim DeRogatis, Hopper embeds multiple Scribd documents with Lexis-Nexis printouts of the original Sun-Times reporting about the accusations against R. Kelly and she quotes DeRogatis about Kelly’s crimes:

Rapes, plural. It is on record. Rapes in the dozen. So stop hedging your words and when you tell me what a brilliant ode to pussy Black Panties is, then realize that the next sentence should say: “This, from a man who has committed numerous rapes.” The guy was a monster! Just say it! We do have a justice system and he was acquitted. OK, fine. And these other women took the civil-lawsuit route. He was tried on very narrow grounds. He was tried on a 29-minute, 36-second videotape. He was tried on trading child pornography. He was not tried for rape. He was acquitted of making child pornography. He’s never been tried in court for rape, but look at the statistics. The numbers of rapes that happened, the numbers of rapes that were reported, the numbers of rapes that make it to court and then the conviction rate. I mean, it comes down to something minuscule. He’s never had his day in court as a rapist. It’s 15 years in the past now, but this record exists.

 

Category: Crime, Culture, Music, Sex

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.17.13

Posted on | December 17, 2013 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Judge Rips NSA Phone Snooping

Spy Central

District Court Judge grants injunction against phone snooping, stays injunction pending inevitable appeal
Related: Top tech execs meeting with Obama to push for surveillance limits

Putin Expected To Offer Financial Lifeline To Ukraine
No commitment to politically hazardous customs union, though

Socialist Bachelet Wins Chilean Runoff
Defeats center-right candidate for presidency 62-38



POLITICS
Senate Confirms Jeh Johnson As Homeland Security Chief

Meet the new boss…

Least qualified nominee cruises to 76-16 confirmation with endorsements from predecessors

Texas Congressmen Take Aim At Obamacare Navigators

Sen. Ayotte To Vote No On Budget Deal


Utah Governor Expresses Concern Over Polygamy Ruling

Corps Of Engineers Wasted $5.4 Million On Unusable Trash Incinerators

Sen. Sessions Fights Cuts To Veterans Benefits Ahead Of Budget Vote

Even The Employer-Insured Feeling The Shock Of Obamacare Changes

Pelosi Calls On Obama To Halt Deportations

Ethics Committee To Begin Probe of Rep. Radel



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Falls On Stimulus Speculation: NYMEX $97.37, Brent $109.21
Poll: Americans See End Of Stock Surge
Glaxo Bets A Billion On Indian Subsidiary
Euro Stands Tall, Dollar Wobbles Ahead Of Fed Meeting
Boeing Announces $10 Billion Buyback, Raises Dividend
GM Investing $1.3 Billion In Three Midwest Plants
Google Will Keep Robot Maker Boston Dynamics In Massachusetts
Facebook Gives Back With “Donate Now” Button
Amazon Really, Really Wants To Sell More Kindle Fire HDX Tablets
After AT&T Deal Fizzles, San Francisco Builds Its Own Free Wifi
Sprint Considering A T-Mobile Takeover? (Video)



SPORTS
Ravens Kick Lions In Nose, 18-16

Justin Tucker nailed six FG to give Baltimore the win

Record 61-yard FG seals Monday Night victory


MLB, NPB Reach Deal On Posting Fees

Pistons Hand Pacers First Home Loss


Crosby’s 19th Goal Propels Penguins Past Leafs

Beal Returns, Carries Wizards To Win Over Knicks

Kane Returns From Injury, Scores Game Winner As Jets Edge Blue Jackets

O’s Sign Nationals’ 2006 First-Rounder Chris Marrero



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Joan Fontaine Dies, 96

Won Oscar for her role in 1941’s “Suspicion”

Known for lifelong feud with sister Olivia de Havilland; died of natural causes


And The Rock Says…It’s Payday!

Judge Revokes Chris Brown’s Probation In Rihanna Assault


Fifty Shades Star Jamie Dornan Is A Dad

Charlie Sheen: Denise Richards RUINED Christmas

Jessica Simpson Drops Pounds From Second Baby

Former Disney Star Dylan Sprouse Admits Leaked Nude Pics Are Real

Jerry O’Connell And Rebecca Romijn’s Christmas Card Is Going To The Dogs



FOREIGNERS
Norks Commemmorate Second Anniversary Of Kim Jong Il’s Death
WFP: Syrians Have No Food Security
SecState Kerry Visits Philippines
Curfew In South Sudan Capitol After Reported Coup Attempt
Fake Interpreter At Mandela Memorial Linked To Brutal “Necklace” Murders
Car Bomb Hits Hezbollah Checkpoint In East Lebanon
Thai Opposition Debates Whether To Run In February Elections
Sinkiang Riot Leaves 16 Dead
Ukraine Opposition Calls For Big Protest As Yanukovich Heads For Moscow
Russia Moves Nuke-Capable Missiles To Polish, Lithuanian Borders
Protests In India Against Supreme Court Ruling On Gay Sex



BLOGS & STUFF
Michelle Malkin: Video – Udall Lied, Health Plans Died
Twitchy: “$40,000 Debt In A Stocking?” Toure Says There’s Already A Benevolent Black Man Who Gives Gifts To Kids
Chicks On The Right: And In More Awesome Obamacare News, The Washington Exchange Is Arbitrarily Debiting Checking Accounts
Michael Boskin: Obamacare’s Troubles Are Only Beginning
American Power: NH Democrats Send Tracker To Funeral To Dig Dirt On Sen. Ayotte
American Thinker: Did Rush Limbaugh Just Endorse iCongress?
Blackfive: Book Review – American Heroes: On the Homefront by LTC Oliver North
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Potheads Hurt Their Cause By What They Say
The Necropolitan Sentinel: They’re Always After Me Lucky Charms!
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, December 16
Jammie Wearing Fools: Denver Post Editor Offers Lame, Insulting Excuse For Removing “Socialist” From Description Of Accused Colorado Shooter
JustOneMinute: A Nation Of (Overlooked) Laws, Not Of Men
Pat Dollard: 2013 Ratings Champ Fox News Continues To Hammer Its Enemies
Protein Wisdom: IRS Now To Make Its Targeting Of TEA Parties Legal
Shot In The Dark: Gun Control PR Fail
The Jawa Report: Tolerance, I Do Not Think It Means What Islam Thinks It Means
The Lonely Conservative: Texas Governor Candidate Wendy Davis Campaigns In NY, Calls Texas “Toxic”
This Ain’t Hell: A-10 On The Chopping Block Again
Megan McArdle: No One At Ford Is Laughing Any More


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Category: Live at Five

Alabama Tea Party Leader Compares ObamaCare to ‘Lord of the Rings’

Posted on | December 16, 2013 | 32 Comments

Becky Gerritson, leader of the Wetumpka (Alabama) Tea Party, made headlines in June when she testified to Congress about how her organization was treated by the Internal Revenue Service. Monday, in a speech to a meeting of the Alabama 60-Plus Senior Association in Montgomery, Gerritson compared the fight against ObamaCare to the Lord of the Rings saga, an analogy in which President Obama is Sauron. Here is the text of her speech:

Hello. I’m Becky Gerritson. I’ve been asked to explain how Obamacare will affect you all in five minutes. I think I can do it in less than one.
Remember Lord of the Rings?
Well, we are all happy hobbits. Washington, DC is Mordor. Barack Obama is Sauron. Kathleen Sebelius is Sarumon. The hideous, despicable army of evil orcs would be the IRS. And the Affordable Care Act is their plan to reorganize the Shire.
That metaphor works for several reasons. I love it because it highlights a certainty that many of us would prefer to ignore: a battle is coming.
As natives of the Shire, we don’t like conflict. We like to work hard. We like to take care of our families. We like our churches. We like our communities. When we see a neighbor struggle, we like to band together and bear each other up.
But outside forces think they know better. They’ve announced their new edict. Very soon, they will commence its enforcement. And now, we are being forced to make a choice: submit or fight.
And what does submission require?
Obamacare may begin with health care, but it’s much more than that — more than your individual policy, more than a government takeover of 1/6th of the American economy.
Try not to focus on the politics of the moment. Forget about your personal relationship with your family doctor. Forget about broken promises. Forget about the technical failures of healthcare.gov. The real nightmare arrives when Obamacare starts to function properly.
Complying with Obamacare means that your tax dollars will directly fund abortions as of January 1st, 2014. It means that religious institutions will have to violate their consciences if they want to keep their doors open.
If the government orders you to kill a baby would you do it? No? Then why would you agree to pay someone else to do it?
What is religious freedom if the government can force you to violate your religious convictions?
Maybe you’re not religious. And maybe you don’t care about abortion. Are you comfortable with the government redefining freedom whenever they change their mind about the “greater good?”
That’s the most troubling aspect of Obamacare. It’s not just an enormous government welfare program that asks younger Americans to pay for the decisions of an older generation. Obamacare presents a competing system of values that cannot co-exist with our local values.
I like to make my own decisions about my life and family. But if I’m forced to deal with a collective, I would rather trust the strangers in this room than federal bureaucrats. And that is exactly what Obamacare forbids: individual decision-making and communities expressing local values. With Obamacare, the moral decision-making occurs in Washington. We just follow their orders. As such, Obamacare is the keystone to a fundamental transformation of our culture.
If you think I’m being dramatic, I urge you to remember the name Ezekial Emanuel. He’s the chief architect of Obamacare. He’s also the author of the Complete Lives system. That system is his blueprint for how health care dollars should be allocated to benefit the most productive in a society. He says his program will serve the “greatest good.” Emanuel believes that too much money is spent on the elderly. He also believes that children born with serious disabilities and illnesses siphon off more than their share of collective dollars that could be better spent elsewhere. In short, the Complete Lives system would focus health care expenditures to aid the most productive in society (roughly those between 18 and 50) at the expense of the elderly and the infirm.
When it comes to sick kids and grandparents, sometimes difficult decisions must be made. I think those decisions should be made by families. Obamacare will leave the decision to a panel of bureaucrats.
I believe that Obamacare will be deeply destructive — both to American health care and to American culture — but Obamacare is just a vessel. It is not nearly as sinister and threatening as the idea behind it: social justice. Over the last five years, you’ve heard the term “social justice” uttered by President Obama and his czars and czarinas somewhere around 14 billion times. The president can’t complete a sneeze without mentioning it.
As a concept, social justice means that we have an obligation to those less fortunate than us. On the surface, there’s nothing especially new about that. Christians and Jews believe something similar. We know that the poor will always be with us, and it is always our duty to reach out and be charitable.
I urge you not to fall for this. Christianity calls individuals to be generous to the less fortunate. Christianity is concerned with each individual soul. Though social justice cloaks itself in similar language, it asserts that some debt exists between one citizen and another. This is an enormous difference. Recipients of charity are grateful. Those who believe that they have been denied justice are not.
If social justice exists, where are the courts? If a debt exists between citizens, how much is owed? And who owes it? If these questions can’t be answered, then social justice is a fraud, and those who propagate it are promoting violence between citizens.
Obamacare was sold under the banner of social justice. In nearly every speech, President Obama suggests that part of the population has taken more than its fair share. Conversely, he is telling part of the population that they have been robbed. This is a morality fairy tale spun by a man who doesn’t understand the free market or respect American traditions.
I know the Shire, and I know Shire folk. We’re generous and hospitable to those in need. We’re happy to support charitable causes, near and far. But submitting to outsiders is not generosity. It’s surrender. And I won’t play a part in it.
As I said at the beginning, a battle is coming. If you’re interested in joining the resistence, we need your help.

Category: Alabama, Health Care, Tea Party

Reann Murphy, 9, Murdered in Ohio, Body Found Dumped in Trash Bin UPDATE: ‘Diminished Mental Capacity’

Posted on | December 16, 2013 | 63 Comments

Dan Riehl blogged about this case Sunday, and my immediate suspicion was that this wasn’t Jarrod Metsger’s first crime.

Criminals do not usually begin their careers with murder.

My hunch is that this suspect probably had a record of petty crimes — burglary, theft, drug possession, etc. — but maybe my usually inerrant hunches are wrong this time. At any rate, it’s a horrible crime:

An Ohio man who authorities believe killed a 9-year-old neighbor and dumped her body in a trash bin was ordered held on $1 million bond Monday pending another hearing next week.
Jerrod Metsker, 24, appeared for an arraignment before a Wayne County municipal court judge via video from jail. The county public defender was appointed to represent him on charges that he killed Reann Murphy, whose family lives across from him in a trailer park in Smithville, about 30 miles southwest of Akron.
A preliminary hearing was scheduled for Dec. 23. County prosecutor Daniel Lutz said the case could go to a grand jury on Friday if the evidence is processed in time.
Metsker was arrested Sunday, about 12 hours after deputies found Reann’s body in a trash bin near her home.
The girl was last seen Saturday night playing outdoors at the park. Her body was found about five hours after she was reported missing. . . .
Authorities have not offered a possible motive for her killing. Lutz said a coroner will determine the cause of death but that the girl was not shot or stabbed.

By process of elimination, if she was neither stabbed nor shot, the cause of death will be strangulation, suffocation or blunt force trauma. As for the motive, we shall see if Metsker (or Metsger, depending on which report you read) is charged with sexual assault, but that’s what the charge of “aggravated murder” usually means in such a case. This crime shook the whole community:

Friends, family and community members gathered Sunday evening at the pavilion in Apple Creek to remember the life of Reann Murphy, 9, who was found dead earlier in the day.
“There’s nothing I can say,” said Richard Murphy, Reann’s father, visibly shaken after a ceremony and candlelight vigil at the pavilion. . . .
“I hope our justice system does the right thing, regardless of the circumstances,” said Ken Murray, Reann’s uncle. “Our baby was murdered.”
Gary Lambert, a Mansfield pastor, said he made the trip over not because he had any answers.
“I wish I had words to stop the pain,” Lambert said. “Somewhere in the portals of heaven, she’s O.K. … if there’s any comfort tonight it’s that she’s O.K.”
Near the end of the remembrance, Reann’s cousin, Paula Watts, godmother Subrena Daughtery, and friend Sue Lazzaro remembered a girl who was a “daddy’s girl” and enjoyed things that challenged her.
“(Her father, Richard) lost his best friend,” Murray said.

News reports did not explain why Metsker was charged, and it’s quite likely he made incriminating statements to police. The background of the suspect and more facts about the crime are likely to be reported by Ohio media in the next couple of days.

UPDATE: Important details in the latest update:

A man accused of killing a 9-year-old neighbor and hiding her body in a trash bin had been building a snowman with her just hours before she was reported missing, investigators said Monday. . .
Investigators with the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office described Metsker as a family friend and neighbor. Capt. Douglas Hunter said Metsker has a “diminished mental capacity,” but he wouldn’t release information about a specific diagnosis.
People who live in the trailer park said Metsker would play outside with the neighborhood children and built a playhouse out of blankets alongside his home, where he’d spend time with youngsters less than half his age.
Reann and her mother had just moved into the trailer park a few months ago around the beginning of the school year, relatives said. . . .
The girl’s mother was at work Saturday afternoon while she was at home with her mother’s live-in boyfriend, Hunter said. She went outside to play in the snow and was with several other children in the trailer park’s courtyard, but the others went home, leaving Metsker alone with her, he said. . . .
Preliminary autopsy results showed the girl likely had been strangled with an unknown object, county coroner Dr. Amy Jolliff said.

So, “diminished mental capacity,” playing with children “less than half his age,” and he apparently strangled the girl.

How could this crime have been prevented?

UPDATE II: Further evidence of Jarrod Metsker’s “diminished mental capacity” can be seen on his Facebook page, where he is a fan of Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift and such child-oriented shows as “iCarly” and “Spongebob Squarepants.”

UPDATE III: More from Dan Riehl:

I’m still not entirely willing to believe that this murder was (allegedly) this guy’s first crime. Surely, there were warning signs.

 

Category: Crime

Rule 5 Monday

Posted on | December 16, 2013 | 15 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Standard disclaimer: some of the following links are to photographs liable to cause unfavorable reactions from wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, fellow workers, bosses, Gender Studies majors, and other people in a position to make your life miserable or otherwise pollute your purity of essence.

Blogfodder kicks off the festivities this week with a sampling of Star Trek lovelies, followed by Randy’s Roundtable with Kelly Scern, Ninethy Miles From Tyranny with Morning Mistress, Hot Pick of the Late Night, and Girls With Guns. Subject to Change returns with some pix in the kitchen; meanwhile, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’s Pretty Girls On A Thursday is all about beach volleyball. First Street Journal once again crosses the Rule 5 and milblogging streams with this post on the IDF.

EBL’s herd of heifers this week includes the 49ers cheerleaders, a farewell to the Snuggle House, South African women, The Sound Of Music live, Emmy Rossum, Carla Bruni, a paean to kale, and unofficial NY Giants cheerleaders.

A View From The Beach brings Merry Christmas from Nicola McLean, The Carla Bruni Honey Trap, A Silly Sex Post, Obamacare Schadenfreude Nipping At Your Nose, Russian Ginger Gets The Stuffing Beat Out Of Her, Chesapeake At The Crossroads, more Obamacare Schadenfreude, Rashida Jones and the Year Of The Very Visible Vagina, Why Chinese Kids Learn So Fast, Stormy Weather, and Many Fish Bite If You Got Good Bait.

Soylent Refuge inquires about the Wonder Woman casting before moving on to the Sunday coffee creamer, egg breakfast, some Aerosmith music, Monday Motivationer – Gone Fishin’, Tuesday Titillation Rachelle, More Chalk Needed, Humpday Hawtness Kennedy, Ginger Awesome, Falconsword Fursday Flashback Kathryn, Corsetcare Cascade, T-GIF Friday Leanna, Overnighty Juliette, and a weekend champagne cocktail.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Barbara Palvin, his vintage babe is Shari Lewis, and the Sex In Advertising is by Victoria’s Secret. Also, obligatory 49ers cheerleader! Dustbury offers Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Rita Moreno, while at The Camp of the Saints, it’s Karla James and the Rule 5 News.

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week included Kaitlyn Leeb, Kim Loan, Emma K, Giselle Windecker, Hilarie Burton, Maggie Lawson, Daisy Marie, Melissa Grace, Emmy Rossum, and Chocolat Ikeda. Also, a double scoop of Saturday Beauty.

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, December 21.


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Category: Rule 5

EPA Climate-Change Expert Admits ‘Historic’ Fraud for $900,000

Posted on | December 16, 2013 | 31 Comments

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, How could this possibly
have happened in this agency?’ . . . I’ve worked
for the government for 35 years. I’ve
never seen a situation like this.”

The story of John C. Beale,  the Environmental Protection Agency’s “highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change,” could be a stake through the heart of the global warming hoax comparable to the 2009 release of the “ClimateGate” e-mails.

Defenders of the climate-change “scientific consensus” will, of course, claim there is no larger significance to Beale’s bizarre fraud, in which he told his bosses he “was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job“:

Beyond Beale’s individual fate, his case raises larger questions about how he was able to get away with his admitted fraud for so long, according to federal and congressional investigators. Two new reports by the EPA inspector general’s office conclude that top officials at the agency “enabled” Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover stories about CIA work, and failing to check on hundreds of thousands of dollars paid him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses — including first-class trips to London where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up thousands in bills for limos and taxis.
Until he retired in April after learning he was under federal investigation, Beale, an NYU grad with a masters from Princeton, was earning a salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, making him the highest paid official at the EPA. He earned more money than Gina McCarthy, the agency’s administrator and, for years, his immediate boss, according to agency documents.
In September, Beale, who served as a “senior policy adviser” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, pled guilty to defrauding the U.S. government out of nearly $900,000 since 2000.

Among his many lies, this one is classic:

He also claimed to be suffering from malaria that he got while serving in Vietnam. According to his lawyer’s filing, he didn’t have malaria and never served in Vietnam. He told the story to EPA officials so he could get special handicap parking at a garage near EPA headquarters.

So, the “senior policy advisor” is an admitted liar, but don’t worry: His lawyer says Beale is also crazy!

“With the help of his therapist,” wrote attorney John Kern, “Mr. Beale has come to recognize that, beyond the motive of greed, his theft and deception were animated by a highly self-destructive and dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior.” Kern also said Beale was driven “to manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose narratives … that are fueled by his insecurities.”

In other words, a top EPA official was a corrupt liar because he was mentally ill — “highly self-destructive and dysfunctional” — but that is no reason (the global warming fanatics will assure us) to doubt the validity of their implausible hypothesis.

 


Category: Environmentalism, Global Warming, Scandal, Science

Homophobia: Pathology or Tautology?

Posted on | December 16, 2013 | 69 Comments

A good friend, who spent many years as an active lesbian, but then met and married a man, becoming a Christian wife and mother, absolutely hates the word “homophobia.”

The implied psychiatric diagnosis — that the person so labeled has an irrational fear or hatred of homosexuals — is absurd, and can probably be best understood as an act of revenge: Whereas the psychiatric community for decades categorized homosexuality as a mental illness, now gay activists seek payback by accusing heterosexuals of being in the throes of an abnormal psychological reaction.

Bullshit.

Hustle me no hustles and scam me no scams.

Only people with an idolatrous reverence for the ideological abstraction of “equality” — people willing to discard common sense and ignore plain facts of real life — could be fooled by this humbug. I don’t care if public opinion polls show that a majority of Americans are the kind of total chumps who are the natural prey of Nigerian scam spammers, you’re not going to run that kind of flimsy con on me.

Exactly who are the “experts” delivering these categorical diagnoses? What are their credentials? What is the basis of their authority to declare the most venerable traditions of Anglo-American law and Judeo-Christian morality a species of madness?

To wit: Who the fuck is Mark Joseph Stern?

Can a person oppose equal rights for gay people and not be, in some fundamental way, a homophobe? The answer seems to me to be a pretty obvious no. Opposition to gay marriage isn’t just some abstract principle with little practical effect. It’s a harmful belief with real-world consequences, and it has contributed immeasurable pain, sorrow, and suffering to the lives of gay people throughout history.

Hyperbole much? Stern blames the “suffering . . . of gay people throughout history” on opponents of a policy that had few if any advocates until the past couple of decades.

Of course, during most of human history (and for many millions of people even today), our entire Western notion of democratic “rights” had no meaning. But one can generally endorse the idea of democracy and the concept of individual rights without embracing the radical egalitarian mania to which Stern has evidently succumbed.

Men and women are fundamentally different. Therefore, the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality cannot be wished away, as if it were irrelevant and, indeed, one might observe that male and female homosexuals are at least as different from each other as either of them are from heterosexuals. In fact, the “born that way” claims of biological determinism for homosexuality (employed as the premise of making homosexuality analogous to race, in terms of civil rights law) would seem to directly contradict the claims of feminists that the inherent biological differences between male and female are meaningless.

So which is it, egalitarians? Would you have us accept the biology-means-nothing argument for androgynous sexual equality, or would you have us accept the biology-is-everything argument that gay people are born with same-sex attraction? Perhaps you can reconcile the two claims, but forgive my street-smart skeptical hunch that you’re just being disingenuously opportunistic.

People need to wise up to these intellectual scams, and not let themselves be bamboozled by egalitarian con artists.

 

Category: Culture, Feminism, Gays, Intellectuals
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