The Other McCain

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

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

Segregation Is the New Diversity

Posted on | September 25, 2013 | 56 Comments

Tuition at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., is $45,620 a year, and the school employs Amit Taneja as Director, Diversity & Inclusion. Taneja is head of Hamilton’s Days-Massolo Center, which “was created to foster dialogue and understanding within and across differences. The Days-Massolo Center is home to Hamilton’s Womyn’s Center and the newly established LGBTQ Resource Center. So, basically, it’s diversity über alles at Hamilton, and Amit Taneja is Obergruppenführer.

This pricey liberal arts school scheduled an event called “Real Talk: A Dialogue About Internalized Racism,” about how minorities “may have accepted racist attitudes towards other racial groups and [their] own racial/ethnic communities” and, in order to create a “safe zone,” the event was open to people of color only.

I repeat, the event was open to people of color only.

No whites allowed.

Permit me to point out that annual tuition at the University of Alabama is $9,450 for in-state students, $23,950 for out of state.

Any student at Hamilton could transfer to Tuscaloosa, save $20,000 a year and get a hell of a football team to cheer for, too.

Also, the best-looking women in the world.

Screw this elite “diversity” trip. Roll, Tide.

 

Category: Education

William Bratton, ‘Broken Windows’ and the Importance of Public Order

Posted on | September 25, 2013 | 26 Comments

While writing about the Matthew Shepard case, I mentioned how a crackdown on fare-beaters in the New York City subway system turned up a number of criminals wanted on warrants for serious crime. Someone on Twitter asked for more information about this, so I found this article at City Journal featuring William Bratton, the police chief who made this breakthrough in crime prevention:

The system at the time was having a hard time dealing with the problem of fare evasion. Fare evasion, in the form of scruffy characters who would go under turnstiles, or over turnstiles, because it seemed that nobody was maintaining them or even cared about them, increased to 250,000 people a day and was growing worse all the time.
How did we know that? The subway system documented it. They would literally have people go out once a month, stand at every turnstile, and count the fare evaders. We had a very accurate understanding of the problem, but the subway police had a mentality that they didn’t want to address minor crimes like a $1.15 fare theft.
Subway police management didn’t want to deal with it because to make an arrest in New York City at that time would take approximately twelve to twenty-four hours of police administrative time—an entire day, in other words, to process a $1.15 theft of service. This meant losing an officer from the subway system for significant periods of time, and since they only had about 700 officers on the system at any given time, if they were making a lot of arrests there would be nobody left to police the rest of the system.
We developed a number of strategies to increase the number of arrests while still reducing arrest-processing time. We designed “bust busses”, so that instead of taking prisoners twenty miles down to the central booking facility, we brought an arrest bus right to the scene. We would arrest people below ground, get them up into the bus and process them there. Those that didn’t have outstanding warrants could be quickly processed and then released. Those that had warrants would be held.
And what did we find? Thanks to a very cost-effective arrest procedure, the system actually raised police morale. In a nutshell, cops like making arrests. That’s what they do. But they don’t want to make arrests that don’t have any impact. They don’t want to make arrests that keep them chained to a prisoner for twenty-four hours. They want to be part of something that they feel is going to have a demonstrable impact.
Once our program was underway, officers discovered that one out of every seven people we were arresting for fare evasion was wanted on a warrant. Often times, these warrants would be for very serious crimes: murders, rapes, and so on. One out of every twenty-one fare-evaders, at least initially, was carrying some type of weapon — ranging from a straightedge razor on up to Uzi submachine guns. Eventually this process excited police because they had a good chance of catching significant offenders without exorbitant effort.
And, perhaps most importantly, crime began to go down. Fare evasion began to go down. Why? We were using the police in a very public, visible way to control behavior. We were going after minor types of crime, and yet we were also having a significant impact on more serious crimes. If you’re a felon coming into the system to commit a robbery, you’re not going to pay $1.15 to ride the subway. Criminals are very cost-efficient that way; if you are intent on stealing through theft or violence, you won’t contribute to the MTA. Given that practical reality, cracking down on fare evasion provided a significant disincentive for other crimes as well.
Now, thirteen years later, crime in the subway system is down almost 90 percent from what it was in 1990. The MTA no longer counts fare evaders. There are so few now that it is not economically sensible to put out counters every month to keep track of them, and the MTA system now has five and one-half million riders.

This has been called proof of the “Broken Windows” theory of crime prevention, which is really just common sense: If you tolerate minor “nuisance” crimes, the resulting public disorder creates an environment in which serious crime becomes more likely.

It’s like when cops pull over a driver for having a busted tail light on his car. This minor infraction provides a reason for the cops to check the guy’s license and registration, see if there is any odor of alcohol or marijuana, and then they run the driver’s name through the computer to see if he has any outstanding warrants.

People who commit major crimes are also prone to commit minor infractions, so that even the enforcement of things as simple as traffic ordinances can be used to reduce crime. It’s not just that strict enforcement brings criminals under closer scrutiny, but it also sends a message that police are on the lookout, enforcing public order.

 

 

Category: Crime

The Sorelian Myth of Matthew Shepard: Petty Criminals and Liberal Media Bias

Posted on | September 25, 2013 | 43 Comments

Matthew Shepard’s killers Russell Henderson (left) and Aaron McKinney (right).

When I was a freshman in college, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was an assigned reading and one of the lessons of the book — perhaps not a lesson the author intended, but one I’ve since seen replicated over and over — is how notorious crimes are usually the work of petty criminals.

Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were just a couple small-time crooks who met in prison, and Hickock’s dream of a “big score” — plus his insistence that no witnesses should be left alive — resulted in the horrendous massacre of the Clutter family. While Capote’s book is generally cited for its literary qualities as a “non-fiction novel,” its insights into the criminal mind are quite useful. From the standpoint of policy, the story of how a couple of small-timers like Hickock and Smith escalated to mass murders is important to understanding how the frequency of recidivism makes the criminal population a constant menace to public safety. It’s like how, in New York City, a crackdown on fare-beating and other nuisance crimes in the subway system turned up a large number of suspects who were wanted on warrants for robbery, assault, rape and murder. Serious criminals also commit petty crimes and, conversely, by the time a criminal commits the kind of atrocity that makes nationwide headlines, he usually has an extensive record of lesser offenses.

So it was with Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, the two local hoodlums who killed University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in 1998, a crime that became a cause célèbre for the gay-rights movement, used as a sort of rhetorical Swiss army knife.

Matthew Shepard’s death was used to argue for the inclusion of sexual orientation as a protected status in federal civil-rights law, to legalize same-sex marriage, and even to advocate for “comprehensive” sex education in schools (because tolerance).

There were nationally televised candlelight vigils featuring celebrities, and the op-ed pages of newspapers filled up with lectures about the evils of intolerance, prejudice and “homophobia.” (This word, suggesting the clinical diagnosis of an irrational fear, a mental illness, is one of the great humbugs of our age.) Of course, most of those emoting on TV and in newspaper columns were liberals, and the finger of blame was pointed at conservatives, so that you might be forgiven if you thought Matthew Shepard’s killers were a couple of fundamentalist evangelicals who attended Young Republican meetings every week.

But no, they were a just a couple of local hoodlums — trailer trash high-school dropouts — each with a record of petty crime (burglary, possession of marijuana) who were on the fifth day of a $2,000 methamphetamine binge when they encountered Matthew Shepard at the Fireside Bar in Laramie on the night of Oct. 6, 1998.

The Book of Matt, a new book by a gay writer, Stephen Jimenez, re-examines this story and concludes that there is no good reason to think of Shepard’s death as a “hate crime.”  Jimenez’s book recently received favorable notice in the gay magazine The Advocate, and yet there has been no effort by major media to correct the record about the case, as Noel Sheppard reports at Newsbusters:

At press time, there has been not one mention of Jimenez’s book or the new revelations on ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, or NBC.
Not one word.

In fact, the truth about the Matthew Shepard case — that it was a drug-fueled robbery, rather than a homophobic “hate crime” — was reported by JoAnn Wypijewski in the liberal Harper’s magazine in September 1999 without making a real dent in the hate-crime myth. It was from Wypijewski’s account that I first learned that McKinney and Henderson both had records for petty crime, which made me think of the In Cold Blood story about Hickock and Smith.

The myth of Matthew Shepard as a victim of homophobia, for which gay rights activists blamed Christian conservatives and Republicans, is one of those media narratives that Andrew Breitbart was always railing against. The Big Picture story of What It Means, crafted by a process of selective editing that omits any fact that contradicts the narrative, is the daily business of the media, and their choices are influenced by a one-sided political bias, so that stories which appear to confirm liberal beliefs are hammered home day after day, even if these stories must be carefully controlled so that contradictory facts don’t cloud the political message.

This is not news, but propaganda, and it has become so pervasive that fundamentally false narratives (e.g., Trayvon Martin as a helpless victim of white racism) take on a reality in the public mind.

This is what Ed Driscoll is talking about in discussing the “Sorelian myth” of Cold War liberalism, wherein the atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the traitor Alger Hiss are portrayed as innocent victims of anti-Communist witch-hunt hysteria.

By making people believe in politically crafted falsehoods, media propagandists seek to inspire action — “to make a difference” — and so the record of the media’s past failures (Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, et al.) is carefully suppressed.

The one thing the news media will never do is to confess their own lack of credibility, to expose their own errors and biases. So when it turns out that what the media promoted as an anti-gay “hate crime” was, in fact, the act of two petty criminals in the throes of a five-day meth binge, this is a truth that the media will ignore, because it is a truth that exposes the media itself as untrustworthy.

 

Category: Crime, Gays, Media Bias

Kenya Massacre: Still No Confirmation of ‘White Widow’ Samantha Lewthwaite

Posted on | September 25, 2013 | 28 Comments

Fake passport identifies Samantha Lewthwaite as ‘Natalie Faye Webb.’

Since Monday, we have awaited official confirmation of press reports that Britain’s notorious “White Widow” Samantha Lewthwaite was among the Muslim terrorists who perpetrated the massacre at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya.

There is still no such confirmation, but the speculation has become so intense that the New York Times was obliged to acknowledge it:

Much speculation has swirled around the question of whether any of the heavily armed militants were women.
Kenyan officials initially asserted that there had been no women among the shooters, but on Tuesday Mr. Kenyatta seemed to revive the possibility that one of the assailants was a British woman.
Several intelligence analysts in Nairobi speculated that the woman was Samantha Lewthwaite, a Muslim convert who had been married to one of the four suicide bombers who struck the London transit system on July 7, 2005, killing 52 people and themselves.
Kenyan authorities suspected that Ms. Lewthwaite had risen up through the ranks of extremist groups and was leading a terrorism cell on the Kenyan coast; though they almost swooped in on her in 2011, she escaped. In Kenya and in Britain, she is now known as “the white widow.”

Officials believe Lewthwaite entered Kenya in 2011 on a fake South African passport under the alias of “Natalie Faye Webb.”

Donald Douglas at American Power has been following the story — there is a sort of “White Widow” frenzy in the British press — and links this account from The Australian:

A SHOP worker has described how a woman resembling the ‘White Widow’ sprayed bullets in her direction during the terrorist attack on a Kenyan mall.
The witness says she was cowering under boxes when an AK-37-wielding, pale-skinned woman with long dark hair locked eyes with her.
She then opened fire from a balcony.
The witness, named only as Caroline, told the Daily Mail she managed to escape unharmed as the terrorists advanced through the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi.
“She was high up but not far from me, close enough that I saw her looking along the floor where I was until she saw me,” Caroline said.
“She stopped and aimed at me and then opened fire.”
The shop assistant said the woman was wearing a baggy black top and had long black hair.
“I can’t remember very much, but I remember she had pale skin,” she said.
This witness account is but one of several reporting a white female among terrorists who attacked the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi at the weekend, killing 61 civilians and six security forces.

Amid the confused aftermath of the siege in Kenya, where investigators are just now beginning to sift through the evidence, this kind of speculation is understandable, but we still have no official confirmation that Lewthwaite was involved. Stay tuned.

 

Category: Kenya, Terrorism
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