The Other McCain

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

Texas Democrat Student Group Leader Exposed as Convicted Sex Offender

Posted on | September 26, 2013 | 103 Comments

Convicted sex offender Billy Johnson

A convicted sex offender is the leader of a Democrat student group at a Texas university, Katherine Timpf of Campus Reform reports.

Billy Johnson, who is president of the Young Democrats chapter at the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) campus in Edinburg, Texas, was convicted in 2003 of “indecency” with an 8-year-old child, Timpf reported, citing state criminal records and a 2010 local news article about Johnson when he volunteered at an elementary school.

Earlier this month, Johnson’s work registering students at UTPA was praised on Twitter by Jenn Brown, executive director of the liberal activist group Battleground Texas:

Johnson spent three years in prison, according to records cited by Timpf, who said UTPA officials did not respond to request for comment.

 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Education, Sex

Miley Cyrus: Insult to Injury

Posted on | September 26, 2013 | 47 Comments

Alessandra gets angry about Miley Cyrus trying to use complaints about a “double standard” to defend her decadent behavior:

What few people have analyzed is how much liberals have normalized the worst of sexism in the name of liberation (sexual or for women). It’s exactly analogous to their claim that they are “liberating” homosexuals when the only thing they are doing is normalizing perverted and dysfunctional people in terms of sexuality. . . .
There was a time when Miley’s behavior would have been both frowned upon as being whorish and vulgar, because such attitudes and behaviors degrade women and sexuality . . . Then came feminism and criticized the sexual objectification of women, their exploitation, etc. And afterwards, as liberals pushed more and more to degrade women and sexuality, in a move that increasingly included women as protagonists, there wasn’t much of anyone in the liberal camp left to criticize this war on women (and sexuality), since the more liberals degrade, the more they claim they are normal and legitimate – all in the name of liberation. (Nothing like adding insult to injury!)
Basically the only people to call for respect of women and a wholesome sexuality today are social conservatives. Unfortunately, if taken as a whole, this is a group which has a serious public communication skills deficit.

You can read the whole thing. I will quibble with Alessandra’s criticism of the “public communications skills” of social conservatives. The real problem, as I see it, is two-fold:

  1. Social conservatives have allied themselves with the Republican Party in a way that makes them largely dependent on the GOP, which has shown itself willing to exploit social conservatives (when this is deemed beneficial to Republican political fortunes) or conversely to scapegoat social conservatives (when the GOP needs someone to blame for its defeats).
  2. Because academia, the news media and the entertainment industry are so dominated by liberals, it is very difficult for social conservatives to combat the Left’s harmful stereotypes about uptight puritanical right-wing “christofascists.” Furthermore, it is difficult even for social conservatives to locate their own natural leaders and spokesmen, when the liberal media focus their attention on the most idiotic kooks among social conservatives, and when various charlatans and hucksters are simply scamming for dollars, Elmer Gantry-style.

There are sane, intelligent and articulate social conservatives, but you’re never going to see them on the nightly network news, nor on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post or New York Times. But we must accept these disadvantages as inherent to the guerrilla struggle of the culture war, and find ways to overcome them.

 

Category: Celebrities, Culture, Sex

The Homeless: A Criminal Menace

Posted on | September 26, 2013 | 21 Comments

A 21-year-old woman was seriously injured Wednesday in White Plains, N.Y., when a homeless man who had been panhandling at the train station pushed her in front of a commuter train:

The suspect — Howard J. Mickens, 39, who lives in a White Plains shelter — was charged with second-degree attempted homicide, police told 1010 WINS.
The victim, who was not identified, was being treated at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla.
The victim is a Hunter College student.

Like so many of the “homeless,” Mickens is a career criminal:

According to MTA police, Mickens has 11 previous arrests, including five that were described as alleged violent felonies. He has several convictions, but officials could not provide an exact number.

Most people don’t realize that, according to some studies, about half of the “homeless” population have criminal records. Many others have substance-abuse issues or are mentally ill. I described the extent of this problem in an article 10 years ago:

A survey conducted [in 2001] by the Boston Rescue Mission found that 49 percent of their clients said they had criminal records, and 32 percent said they had spent time in prison, while 12 percent said they were discharged directly from a prison to a shelter.
A study in Cambridge, Mass., found that the homeless, though 0.5 percent of the population, accounted for 10 percent of all arrests during a two-year period — including 40 arrests for assault or aggravated assault, 18 for burglary, eight for robbery, 54 for shoplifting, 18 for sale or possession of narcotics, and one for rape.
In Los Angeles, a police sweep of the homeless in December [2002] resulted in 214 arrests, including the capture of more than 100 parole violators.

Why can’t we do anything about this problem? Because the liberal media won’t tell the truth about it, that’s why. By presenting the “homeless” as helpless victims of society, the media create sympathy for dopeheads, nutjobs and thugs who are a persistent menace to public safety and need to be locked up somewhere.

 

Category: Crime

Great SF Authors That Go Well Together

Posted on | September 26, 2013 | 53 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Joe The Fat Man recommended Point Apocalypse in the comments last week, and Richard McEnroe likewise put in a good word for The Futurians by Damon Knight, The Way the Future Was by Fred Pohl, and Dream Makers by Charles Platt. There’s also Dream Makers, Vol. 2 if you can’t get enough of the SF author interviews.


C.M. Kornbluth is one of those great talents who died far too early, but he did leave us some great stories to remember him by. In addition to the classics “The Little Black Bag”, “The Altar At Midnight”, and “The Marching Morons” (for a more modern take on this, watch Idiocracy) he collaborated with Fred Pohl on the marvelously cynical Gladiator at Law and The Space Merchants, both of which look into futures where businesses dominate politics and people are shamelessly manipulated by advertising. Most of Kornbluth’s short fiction has been collected in the NESFA Press anthology His Share of Glory.


More recently, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have collaborated on some excellent books revisiting “tired” SF tropes, the best known of which is The Mote in God’s Eye , which is mainly about first contact with aliens. They returned to that topic in Footfall, in which intelligent alien elephants conquer the world – but not for long. Niven and Pournelle can also do non-SF: see Lucifer’s Hammer for their account of a cometary impact on Earth. HUGE cast of characters, all done well, unlike some other SF authors I could name. They also had the chutzpah to rewrite Dante’s Inferno and send an SF writer to hell in Inferno, and (with Michael Flynn) did a novel on global cooling in which SF fans save a pair of stranded astronauts: Fallen Angels, which may already be familiar to you through Instapundit’s mocking references to it throughout the “global warming” nonsense. As if that weren’t enough, they also collaborated with Steven Barnes on the extra-solar colonial horror thriller The Legacy of Heorot and its sequel Beowulf’s Children .


David Drake has done a whole slew of collaborations with other authors, but I’m going to focus on my personal favorites, the Raj Whitehall series co-written with S.M. Stirling. This tale of a young officer on the faraway planet of Bellevue chosen by an ancient AI to unite and save humanity comprises five novels in which Whitehall goes from one difficult campaign to another, with the ever-present threat of his paranoid governor Barholm Clerett hanging over him like the Sword of Damocles. Roughly based on the life of Belisarius, the series is full of fun little oddities -to cite but one example, riding dogs have replaced horses; for another, the predominant religion in the mostly Hispanic Gubernio Civil is the Church of the Spirit of Man of the Stars, which considers computers holy and their components sacred relics- tense battles, and political skulduggery mainly handled by Raj’s noble-born wife Suzette. The five novels got bundled into two collections by Baen, Warlord and Conqueror . The series went off-planet in three sequels: The Chosen , The Tyrant , and The Reformer. A new series of sequels seems to have begun with The Heretic , co-written by Tony Daniels. I picked up a copy from the local library back in July, and it was good, but there are too many loose ends for me to think this is going to be a one-off like the two previous sequels.


So what are you reading this week?


Category: Uncategorized

News Flash: Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | September 26, 2013 | 35 Comments

This isn’t really surprising, is it?

The man who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard 10 days ago left behind electronic documents saying that the government had been attacking his brain for the past three months using “extremely low frequency” electromagnetic waves created by the Navy . . .
The documents provide the most detailed explanation to date for what investigators believe motivated the rampage by Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old military contractor and former Navy reservist from Fort Worth who was killed in a shootout with the police at the navy yard.
“Ultra low frequency attack is what I’ve been subject to for the last three months,” Mr. Alexis wrote in one document found by investigators . . .
Mr. Alexis had a history of angry outbursts over the last decade, and he had been arrested three times in three states, though he was never prosecuted in any of those episodes. . . .
A month before the shootings, Mr. Alexis told the police in Newport, R.I., that he had been hearing voices sent by a “microwave machine.” . . .
The Navy has used low frequency electromagnetic waves, or ELF, for submarine communications. But some conspiracy theorists say the government has weaponized the frequencies to monitor and manipulate unsuspecting citizens, Ms. Parlave said. The phrases “my elf weapon,” “end to the torment,” “not what ya’ll say” and “better off this way” were etched into the side of the shotgun that Mr. Alexis used to kill many of the victims, she said.

Used to be, we locked up crazy people in the looney bin. Nowadays, we we give them jobs as government contractors. Progress!

 

Category: Crime

The Secret Sell-Out of ‘Pro-Sex Feminism’

Posted on | September 26, 2013 | 47 Comments

Yesterday’s mention of pornography’s influence (“The Vagina as Commodity: What Does the Pubic Depilation Phenomenon Mean?“) stirred the memory of one reader, who e-mailed:

That got me to thinking about the relation between feminism and porn. Back around the 1980s or so, there was an important strand of feminism which was vocally and unashamedly anti-porn. However, as far as I know this population went extinct during the past 15-20 years. And that begs the question: what happened?

To which I replied:

Yes, there were anti-porn feminists in the 1970s and ’80s. What happened — and you could look this up — is that the porn industry (including Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Foundation) sponsored pro-porn feminist groups to counter them. Anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin, among others, have discussed this. In the 1980s, there was a de facto alliance between radical feminists and Christian conservatives against pornography and, indeed, conservative Phyllis Schlafly cited feminist critiques of pornography. But the anti-porn feminists were shouted down by so-called “pro-sex feminists” who were in many cases subsidized by the porn industry.
— RSM

A quick Google search turns up little on this subject. The leaders of the feminist anti-pornography movement tended to be radicals like Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon, who saw porn as a violation of women’s rights. Among those who continued that radicalism was Nikki Craft, whose work exposing child pornography advocate Lawrence Stanley was helpful to me in my 2002 coverage of Stanley’s arrest (see “Porn lawyer charged in Brazil girls case“).

If you talk to radicals like Craft — who carried out civil-disobedience protests against Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler — they will tell you bluntly that so-called “pro-sex feminists” sold out. Women Against Pornography co-founder Dorchen Leidholdt demonstrated that the Playboy Foundation helped fund the ACLU as well as various front groups, such as the National Coalition Against Censorship, that fought to keep pornography legal. This is a chapter of history that contemporary feminists are eager to suppress, the way Stalin had Trotsky airbrushed out of photos of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Left must constantly re-write its own history to create the appearance of consistency in its advocacy of progress, but the Left’s definition of progress is itself constantly changing, and feminism’s embrace of pornography — celebrating objectification as “empowerment” — is but one example of this re-definition project.

UPDATE: Linked by Ann Althouse, who remembers anti-porn feminism, and cites a 1990 book by Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice Raymond, Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, which I’m sure is omitted from “Women’s Studies” curricula nowadays.

The institutionalization of feminism within academia is a subject that ought to get more scrutiny than it does, and we should acknowledge the difference between feminism as an anti-institutional protest movement (as it was in the late 1960s and ’70s) and feminism as a powerful force within institutions (as it is now).

 

Category: Feminism

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.26.13

Posted on | September 26, 2013 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
House GOP Considers Shutdown Options

No Obamacare? No government!

Pressure building on Tea Party Caucus to cave

Iran’s Rouhani Denounces Holocaust At UN, Ignites Controversy
CNN says he did, Iranian news agency blames translation error


Chicom General’s Son Gets Ten Years For Gang Rape
Party cracking down on elite childrens’ rowdiness



POLITICS
Cory Booker’s E-Flirt With Raunchy Stripper

“The East Coast loves you, and by East Coast I mean me.”

Spokesman: “I think it’s pretty well known that the mayor talks with people from all walks of life on Twitter.”

Senate Advances Funding Bill With ObamaCare Defunding After Cruz Filibuster

Poll: Lindsey Graham’s Re-Election Chances Uncertain

SAT Scores Flat, Raising Concerns About Students’ Readiness

Senate Considering Postal Service Rate Hike Proposal

Sources: Theft Of US Weapons In Libya Involved Hundreds Of Guns

Bush The Elder Serves As Witness At Gay Wedding

“Betray The US And Join ‘The Real Disneyland’ Of African Jihad”



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Prices Continue Drop On Unexpectedly Bulging US Stockpiles: NYMEX $102.30, Brent $108.08
JPMorgan In Talks To Settle Government Cases For $11 Billion
Nikkei Stages Turnaround To Lead Asia; Shanghai Market Falls 2%
Walmart Whacks Wall Street
Burger King Tries To Satisfry
AllThingsD Founders In Talks To Value New Venture At Up To $40 Million
Valve Steam Machines To Be Tested By Public
Amazon’s On-Demand Report Could Be A Scaling Nightmare
Google Apologizes For Monday’s GMail Delays
Not Online? Maybe The Internet Isn’t Relevant To Your Interests



SPORTS
Oracle Team USA Defends America’s Cup After Greatest Comeback

Oracle tactician Sir Ben Ainslie holds the cup high

Oracle comes back from 1-8 deficit to win last eight heats, defeat Kiwis by 44 seconds

Gomez Not Sorry For Brawl; Brewers Blank Braves

Rays Eliminate Yankees From Contention

ADs Suggest Changes, Not Pay, For College Athletes

Tigers Win Third Straight AL Central Title With 1-0 Win Over Twins

Rockies’ Todd Helton Goes Out With A Blast In Final Home Game

Cleveland Browns Ban Streaker From Stadium For Life

Rangers Keep Pace In Wildcard, Hand Astros Franchise-Record 108th Loss

Jordan Zimmerman Can’t Stop The Sweep: Cardinals Win 4-1



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Melissa Joan Hart’s Tell-All Book Hits The Street

Former child star bares all

Drug use, wild parties, casual sex, yawn, snore…

Jennifer Lawrence, Gary Ross Reunite On Steinbeck’s “East Of Eden”

Lindsay Lohan’s Half-Sister: “I Got Surgery To Look Like Lindsay!”

Lamar Odom’s Buddies Say He Didn’t Write Angry Tweet To Dad

Daniel Radcliffe Shoots Down Freddie Mercury Rumors

“I’m 124 Sandwiches Away From An Engagement Ring”


Rumer Willis Joins E! Pilot “Songbyrd”

Vida Guerra Has Emergency Boob Surgery: The Rack Is Intact

“Mistresses” Renewed For Second Season At ABC

Paramount Could Shift “The Wolf Of Wall Street”, “Jack Ryan”

How Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones Are Fighting To Save Their Marriage

Troy Polamalu – I’m Not Cutting Off ALL My Hair, Are You Nuts?



FOREIGNERS
Pakistan Earthquake Creates New Island
Baluchistan Quake Death Toll Hits 350
Russian Court Expected To Rule On 30 Greenpeace Activists Arrested On Arctic Oil Rig
Pakistan’s National Assembly Condemns Church Attack
Split Weakens US-Backed Rebels As Jihadis Grow
Egypt’s Foreign Minister Says Relations With US Unsettled
Merkel’s CDU Woos Socialists With Talk Of Tax Hikes
French Interior Minister Defends Roma Expulsions



BLOGS & STUFF
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Vicious Heteropatriarch Oppresses Sandwich-Making Kidnap Victim
Michelle Malkin: Obama Lied, My Health Plan Died
Twitchy: Bette Midler Accuses Ted Cruz Of Not Being A Real Christian, Beclowns Herself
American Power: Confessions Of Pop’s Wildest Child
American Thinker: Obama Has Dismantled America
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – You Mean It’s Not Free?
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, September 25
Jammie Wearing Fools: Obama Turns To Iran For “Elusive Second-Term Victory”
JustOneMinute: But At Least Obama Now Supports Gay Marriage
Pat Dollard: Newt Gingrich – It’s An Establishment GOP Myth That Government Shutdowns Hurt The Party
Protein Wisdom: “No Washington Exemption – Equal Treatment For All”
Shot In The Dark: Preference
The Jawa Report: Al-Shabaab Says Women, Children, Infidels “Legitimate Targets”
The Lonely Conservative: Dick Durbin Thinks Being Poor Enough To Qualify For Medicaid Is “Good News”
Megan McArdle: IT Is One Of Obamacare’s Weakest Links


Category: Live at Five

Ken Cuccinelli Wins Virginia Debate

Posted on | September 25, 2013 | 75 Comments

Speaking ex-officio in my role as The Decider, I declare Republican Ken Cuccinelli the winner of tonight’s gubernatorial debate in Fairfax. The main reason, of course, is that Cuccinelli is totally awesome, but there’s also the important fact that Terry McAuliffe sucks:

McAuliffe has proposed all kinds of new spending, but can’t say how he would pay for it. Here is Cuccinelli’s closing argument from the debate:

The Northern Virginia Technology Council’s TechPAC and Virginia’s small, independent businesses endorsed me this past week because they know I’m best prepared to fight to bring jobs to Virginia.
My opponent is the only one in this race that has driven jobs from this state and has no plan to bring them back. He’s sold more visas to Chinese citizens than his failed company has sold cars.
I’ll be a governor who fights for you. Terry will fight for Terry, because he always has.
If you’ll give me your support on November 5th, I’ll fight for education and economic policies that grow jobs for the middle-class by leaving families and businesses with more of their own money, so they can invest those hard-earned dollars to grow jobs right here, in Virginia. My jobs plan will create 58,000 good paying jobs for Virginians.
I have faith in the people of Virginia and that if we remain true to our deepest ideals and most noble traditions — limited government, strong families, economic opportunity; we can be even greater in the future than we’ve been in the past. Thank you.

UPDATE: Statement from RGA Chairman Bobby Jindal:

“Ken Cuccinelli demonstrated tonight, just as he has demonstrated consistently throughout the campaign, that he is a serious, knowledgeable candidate who is willing and prepared to lead Virginia to a brighter future. His commitment to the Commonwealth and his vision for the years ahead is abundantly clear: make Virginia a great place to live, work and learn. Meanwhile, his opponent Terry McAuliffe continues to embarrass himself and make reckless statements while proving that he has no understanding of today’s most pressing issues. Terry McAuliffe demonstrated again tonight that he is an entirely unserious candidate who is unprepared to serve as Governor. Virginians deserve better. The Republican Governors Association congratulates Ken Cuccinelli on his commanding win this evening.”

KEN CUCCINELLI for GOVERNOR
Because He’s Awesome (And Terry McAuliffe Sucks)

 

Category: Debates, Virginia
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