Rule 5 Monday

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

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“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.

 


Homophobia: Pathology or Tautology?

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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.

 

Russia Reverting to Totalitarianism?

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Kim Zigfeld at American Thinker exposes how Russia’s state-controlled media are misreporting the Ukrainian uprising:

With every day that passes, ordinary Russians are more and more cut off from basic facts about the world, just as they were in Soviet times. . . .
All of the major broadcast TV networks are state-controlled in Russia, and the lies they told about the massive protests were amazingly bold. . . .
Instead of reporting that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had gathered in Kiev, as was the case, Russian TV told its viewers there were just a few hundred. Again and again, with no proof at all, Russian TV reported that the demonstrators had been bought and paid for by Russia’s enemies in the West. . . .

(Gosh, this kind of reminds me of how CNN and other pro-Obama media covered the Tea Party protests in 2009-2010.)

As the Economist puts it, Russian state TV, which Kiselyov charging at the lead and looking like “a caricature of a Soviet propagandist,” has been “churning out propaganda” lately to an extent that “would have made Soviet predecessors blush.” The magazine shows how Kiselyov “reversed and twisted the order of events” in Ukraine, lying to and deluding his fellow citizens to keep them mired in neo-Soviet darkness. . . .
If you tune in to Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda TV network, you see exactly the same kind of America-bashing that you saw from the USSR. American companies like Walmart are trashed, American values are smeared, and those who work against the American way of life are glorified.

This latter point is worth considering: Anti-American propaganda may actually be based on factual reporting. There are things our government does, especially in the area of foreign policy and national security, which we don’t necessarily endorse. However, these actions must be understood in an international context. What are our nation’s enemies and rivals doing? Our nation’s policies cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and especially we cannot permit propaganda by hostile powers to suggest that the United States is uniquely evil, so as to undermine our prestige, demoralize our citizens and weaken our defenses against aggressors.

Am I the only one who has noticed that Russia Today has been a reliable cheerleader for Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, the Anonymous hackers and Edward Snowden?



You may be in favor of all that, but where are Russia’s Assanges, Mannings and Snowdens? Where are the hackers and “whistleblowers” exposing the secrets of America’s enemies?

It’s strange how people who think of themselves as cosmopolitan sophisticates — enlightened “world citizens” — are often so naive.

 


In The Mailbox: 12.16.13

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— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: The Obvious, Unmentioned Problem
Proof Positive: Quiptoon Du Jour
Michelle Malkin: Culture Of Corruption – The Dems’ Dangerous DHS Pick
Twitchy: Martha McCallum Slams Obama, Funeral Selfie With Crushing Quote


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Megyn Kelly Shines On Fox
American Thinker: Has The Catholic Bubble In Chicago Finally Burst?
Blackfive: Two Golden Knights Receive Soldiers’ Medal
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: “The Hunger Games – Catching Fire” A Haterific, Spoilertastic Review
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – Happy Friday The 13th! Here’s Some Delays, Extensions, And General Dithering
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, December 13
Jammie Wearing Fools: SNL Goofs On Obama’s Mandela Memorial Fiasco
JustOneMinute: Peak Schadenfreude Alert
Pat Dollard: Issa Says Sebelius Pressuring Contractors To Defy Congressional Subpoenas
Protein Wisdom:“Dirty Jobs” Star Mike Rowe On The High Cost Of College
Shot In The Dark: Just A Few Dozen Things Missing
The Jawa Report: Danish PM Goes Basic Instinct On Obama
The Lonely Conservative: #WarOnWomen – Democrats Attack, Belittle Female Physician For Testifying About Obamacare
This Ain’t Hell: Stephen Kowalyshyn, Marine Sniper Phony
Megan McArdle: No Antibiotics, No Sexual Revolution


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Patch: AOL’s Expensive Failure

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Do you remember in February 2011 when AOL bought the Huffington Post for $315 million? Did that price tag come to mind in August when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million?

Do these numbers even make sense?

Huffington Post = $315 million
Washington Post = $250 million

Excuse me for suspecting that the brand Bezos bought was far more valuable than the brand AOL’s Tim Armstrong bought, and excuse me also for thinking Armstrong is one of the most clueless executives in online media.

AOL’s Tim Armstrong reluctantly lets go
of Patch as shareholder pressures mount

Maybe you don’t care about this little media industry story, but it’s fascinating how the failure happened, and how Armstrong was permitted to throw away money on this pet project:

Mr. Armstrong had a sentimental, and some would say debilitating, attachment to Patch. He helped create it in 2007 while a senior executive at Google. When he got the top job at AOL in 2009, he persuaded the company to buy it. Patch then proceeded to churn through leadership, business models and write-downs on the way to its reduced state.
The board of AOL, handpicked by Mr. Armstrong, authorized him to invest $50 million on the idea in 2010 and after that, it became a black hole for cash. By the end, it had cost an estimated $300 million. (AOL said the figure was more like $200 million.)

Well, $200 million, $300 million, what’s the difference? Either way, it was a lot of cash: At least $50 million a year for four years. And for a dollar amount similar to what Tim Armstrong pissed away on this experimental network of hyper-local news sites, he could have bought the Washington Post, but Patch was Armstrong’s beloved brainchild:

Mr. Armstrong is nothing if not a true believer. Even though Patch is being dismantled or perhaps sold off to various partners, he still believes that he had the right product in the right space, and that he just ran out of runway.
That runway ended because of a schedule he set. In May 2012, he promised restive investors on an earnings call that he would make Patch profitable by the end of 2013. That page of the calendar arrives this month while profitability remains on a far shore, so Mr. Armstrong is reluctantly throwing in the towel.
The theory was that Patch would use a single news person and a single advertising person, at least initially, to create a digital maypole in hundreds of communities at a cost of about $100,000 annually per site. . . .
The execution risk was large — Patch was all moving parts, many undermanaged. At its peak, some 900 sites employed 1,400 people.

This is from a 2011 interview with Armstrong:

Patch was something I started on a personal level that I funded and co-founded with another person who’s at AOL with me now, Jon Brod. Basically, Patch was formed because in my community [of Riverside, Conn.], we had a real lack in information. As the economy got worse, there was less and less journalism in my town and there was a lot of missing information online. So Patch started as a personal project to see if I could help solve the issues in my town. As we got going and realized it was broader and broader, we decided to ramp up and do a much bigger project. I think Patch is in about 800 communities across the U.S. It will go up to 1,000 communities this year. We’ve hired about 1,000 journalists. I brought Patch into AOL when I came to AOL.

So, what began as “a personal project to see if I could help solve the issues in my town” turned into a sucking chest wound that bled AOL’s bottom line to the tune of at least $200 million. By the way, Armstrong’s Patch co-founder recently left AOL:

Brod is one of the last AOL executives with longstanding ties to Armstrong. He was one of Patch’s co-founders, and joined AOL after Armstrong, an early Patch investor, bought the company in June 2009.
After that, he held a variety of roles: He first ran AOL Ventures, and at one point was in charge of “integrating” Arianna Huffington and her operation after AOL bought her company. Armstrong moved him back to Patch in 2011.

Also last week, it was reported that AOL editor in chief Cyndi Stivers, who was only hired in May, is leaving the company.

Rats, sinking ship, some assembly required.

At some point, AOL’s stockholders will either wise up and get a new CEO, or else they’ll sell off, but however it shakes out, Tim Armstrong will not be allowed to continue failing this way.

 

18-Year-Old Beats, Rapes 85-Year-Old Nun Who Was ‘Advocate of Nonviolence’

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What a monster:

A nun who police in Beaver County said was raped and beaten so badly that her jaw was dislocated and she was unable to speak to police at the scene was expected to be released soon from the hospital.
The Sisters of St. Joseph in Baden called the 85-year-old retired nun “a passionate advocate of nonviolence, peace and justice, and each month she conducts a prayer vigil for peace in the chapel of our Motherhouse.”
Andrew Bullock, 18, of Aliquippa was arraigned Friday night on charges that he raped and beat the nun in the parking lot of St. Titus Church in Aliquippa around 11:30 a.m. Friday, according to court documents and Aliquippa police.

Because feminists are supposed to be anti-rape, I checked Amanda Marcotte’s site to see if she cared. Crickets chirping. Instead . . .

Why Is The Religious Right
Intensifying Attacks On Women?

Uh, Amanda, who is attacking women? Raped nuns evidently don’t bother Amanda Marcotte, but popular Fox News hosts?

Priorities. It’s all about priorities.

 

A ‘Gay App’ for 12-Year-Olds, and Hey, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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Creeptastic software:

Some very clever Harvard types (are there any other kind?) believe that, when it comes to apps, the gay community hasn’t offered the full bloom of its most tasteful side.
So they’ve created Distinc.tt. This, they claim, is “the only gay social app approved by the iTunes store for 12-year-olds and older.” . . .
Distinc.tt “uses real-time collective knowledge to connect trendsetting crowds and travelers to the places and people that best reflect their distinct interests.” . . .
“With an emphasis on good taste, Distinc.tt is sleekly designed to easily lead users to the right event, restaurant, party, or vacation spot for the moment or upcoming calendar, where their friends are or plan to go soon.” . . .
In the iTunes store, Distinc.tt has a charming way of describing itself: “Finally, an LGBT app that you can bring home to Mom!” . . .
[CEO Michael Belkin] wants “the good-taste part of the gay stereotype to gain traction with advertisers and cross the mainstream divide.”

Oh, great: It’s time to “cross the mainstream divide” — with a gay-oriented software application approved for 12-year-olds.