The Other McCain

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

The Five Million Dollar Idiot

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 18 Comments

Leftists who get worked up about the Growing Gap Between Rich and Poor really ought to organize an #OccupyChrisMatthews movement to protest this truthless waste of TV time whose NBC contract reportedly pays him $5 million a year. If I took notice every time Chris Matthews makes a complete idiot of himself, I’d never have time to write about anything else. He’s a human Stupidity Factory, with no internal mental filter that warns him when he is about to emit a steaming heap of senseless gibberish.

Look, this isn’t about ideology. Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow are more fanatical than Matthews, and I disagree with them on damned near any issue you could name. But Hayes and Maddow — and for that matter, the insufferably smug Lawrence O’Donnell — are intelligent, articulate people. Evil, yes, but intelligent and articulate.

On the other hand, transcending all partisan differences, no one with an IQ above room temperature takes Chris Matthews seriously.

How bad is he? I’d rather watch Martin Bashir, except for the purely comic value of Matthews’s idiotic utterances. And this past week, Matthews managed to say something so incomprehensibly stupid, it was remarkable even for him. The context was the swirl of scandals afflicting the Obama administration. Matthews first suggested that criticism of Susan Rice was raaaaacist:

“Here they are, the old white guys, kicking the hell out of another African-American candidate for something.” . . .
“The discourse coming from that side, I don’t use that word liar. I don’t like it being used. Because it gets to motive and you don’t know what is in another person’s heart. How do these people get away with talking like this, I mean anywhere, even on Fox?”

Keep in mind, it was Susan Rice who went on five network Sunday shows to peddle the administration’s deliberately false claim that the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was a “demonstration” inspired by a YouTube video. What do you call somebody who tells a lie like that, if you can’t call them a liar? But never mind, Mister Tingles never quits until he has made a complete fool of himself:

“Why do they get the idea, if it isn’t ethnic — and I’ll just leave the possibility that it’s not — why do they just assume evil on the part of Obama? I mean he’s raised — his whole life has been crystal clear and clean as a whistle and transparent. We know his whole life — through all the great excellent education he’s had, the good pro-bono work he’s done through his life. He’s never been a money grubber. He’s never done anything wrong in his life — legally, ethically, whatever. His family is picture-perfect. The way he’s raised those daughters. Everything is clean as a whistle. And yet, they just refer to him as evil. They just refer to him as a liar. I’ve got to believe it’s ethnic with these people. They just got a problem with this guy being president, is there any other evidence to justify why they keep calling him a bad man? And that’s what they do.”

“I’ve got to believe it’s ethnic with these people,” that is to say, Republicans — you know, the guys who impeached President Clinton?

Leaving it to commenters to remind us of anything about Obama’s life that is not “clean as a whistle and transparent,” here’s the video:

Five million dollars a year they pay for that . . .

 

Category: MSNBC

Obsessed? Who, Me?

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 20 Comments

Honestly, you start talking about this stuff, and readers in the comments call your attention to other related stuff, and it’s really pretty fascinating. But next thing you know you’re down the Rabbit Hole, lost in Wonderland. So I promise that after this post, I’m going to write something about NSA snooping or the IRS scandal, just to show that I am not personally fixated on this issue. Meanwhile . . .

Not to mimic the Marina Adshade, Ph.D.. method — i.e., nothing is valid unless empirically proven by social science research — but Clayton Cramer notes a bit of data that turns up almost coincidentally in a study that asks, “Why are lesbians usually fat?”

Correlation is not causation, and one sometimes finds two overlapping data points which are in fact both effects of the same cause. Which isn’t to say that I’m buying any particular single-factor causation argument. Having studied the phenomenon as a mere amateur — a journalist who spent years on the “culture wars” beat — I believe that much of what we now think we “know” about homosexuality is not actually true. But this is a criticism of the state of psychology in general.

Whereas once psychology told Americans to recline on the couch and talk about our mothers, nowadays it’s all serotonin-adjusting chemicals and theorizing about the adaptive value of different behaviors in primitive hunter-gatherer societies.

During the Freudian heyday of the mid-2oth century, homosexuality was explained in terms of family dynamics and “syndromes,” and now the brain-science/Darwinism psychobiology theorists have the upper hand among experts, and I think they all miss the mark.

There are different types of gay people who are gay for different reasons and, as a libertarian/conservative, I think all determinist theories of the phenomenon are misguided. For example, there is what I call the “Desire Is Destiny” mentality, wherein anything that stands between the individual and the satiation of his impulses is condemned as oppressive. And this mentality often marches alongside the “Political Identity” conception of sexual preference, where being gay isn’t something you do to get your rocks off, but rather a politicized mantle of victimhood that functions as a grievance “empowering” you to be self-righteously angry at people you don’t like.

You know the type: “Hater! Homophobe! Bigot!” Read more

Category: Gays, Intellectuals, Science, Sex

Why Aren’t You Homeschooling Yet?

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 10 Comments

The government school system is becoming a pathetic joke:

In what amounts to self-parody, an elementary school in California will hold a toy gun exchange — similar to the real gun exchanges run by police departments for real guns — in order to remove the, er, threat of toy guns at school.

Years ago, someone explained to me what’s wrong with the system: Government school bureaucrats are not interested in teaching facts.

What they are interested in teaching is attitudes.

Once you understand that, everything else makes sense.

 

Category: Education

‘Oh, My God. They Were Everywhere’

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 15 Comments

Young stars circa 1987: Corey Haim (left) and Corey Feldman

Apropos of recent controversies, Pete Da Tech Guy quotes a 2011 interview with former child actor Corey Feldman:

“I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia. That’s the biggest problem for children in this industry. … It’s the big secret,” Feldman said. . . .
“I was surrounded by [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. . . . Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realize what they were and what they wanted . . . till I went, Oh, my God. They were everywhere,” Feldman, 40, said.

In that interview, Feldman was talking about his former Lost Boys co-star: “There’s one person to blame in the death of Corey Haim. And that person happens to be a Hollywood mogul. And that person needs to be exposed, but, unfortunately, I can’t be the one to do it.” I reacted to Pete’s post with my habitual sarcasm:

But then I realized: Corey Haim can be reached for comment, via the “Corey Haim’s Notes on the Afterlife” series at Protein Wisdom. The dearly departed even offered his perspective on “Free Kate”:

I don’t usually weigh in on terrestrial politics, but the truth is, if  I’d been arrested every time I got a hand job from some underage kid who wanted me to sign his Lost Boys t-shirt, there would be no Dream a Little Dream, much less its (in my opinion) criminally underrated sequel.
Sometimes the law is just stupid — especially when it threatens to get in the way of art. . . .
American society really needs to get over its sexual hangups.

Please excuse “Corey’s” attitude. Sometimes dark sarcasm is the only sane alternative to screaming rage. As to this oft-heard argument — that “hangups” about sex are our real problem — it was in a 1999 interview that A Return to Modesty author Wendy Shalit offered the best rejoinder: “I don’t have hangups. You’re just a pervert.”

 

 


Category: Celebrities, Crime, Culture, Da Tech Guy, Hollywood, Protein Wisdom

This Is What #OccupyResoluteDesk Meant By ‘Fundamentally Transforming The USA’

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Insty points to Steyn, a must-read:

So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.
Here’s another congressional-subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he’s spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch. Eric Holder answers:
“With all due respect, senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.”

If you read End the Fed, “Zimbabwe” Ben Bernanke hoisted a similar digit to Ron Paul, asking after the Federal Reserve’s skullduggery.

This level of debt and corruption is the climax of 100 years of Progress.

It’s time for the GOP to either (a) morph into a full-throated reform party, or (b) just admit that all it craves is a swap on the nameplates there in the halls of corruption. Can the GOP stand and deliver? I’ve always argued that it’s better to work within the existing structure, as the start-up costs of a new party are really, really high. The longer the GOP appears feckless, the weaker that argument gets.

Reform!

Category: Corruption

FMJRA 2.0: Secret World

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


“Once you were secret – but now you are public!”
-NKVD prison camp guard, ~1946
(It seemed appropriate to the ongoing events, on a number of fronts.)


PHOTO: ‘Model Citizen’ Kaitlyn Hunt Helps Sister in 2-on-1 Beach Beatdown

Marshall University Journalism Professor Expresses Violent Fantasies Against NRA

Special Rights for Teen Lesbians?

But … It Was Consensual!

Rule 5 Sunday: Desert Plains

Damn You, Josh Barro!

‘A Conspiracy So Immense’ — Was FDR Aide Harry Hopkins a Soviet Agent?

‘Honey, I Blew $200 Million’

You Stay Classy, Cleveland!

Don’t #FreeKate: The Hunt Family’s Hate

World’s Youngest Blogger: Resist This, Rachel Maddow!

FMJRA 2.0: Keine Liebe für den Technischen Support

2004: Kaitlyn Hunt’s Father ‘Pressured a Victim Not to File a Battery Charge’

It’s the New Astrology, or Something

LIVE AT FIVEEIGHT: 06.02.13

Comprehensive Aggregation Reform

Grow Up or Go Home

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.04.13

David Frum Worries Republican ‘Frenzy’ Over Scandals ‘Will Paralyze Congress’

Adrian Lamo Is a Hero

Becky Gerritson FTW!

‘Low-Information Voter,’ IYKWIMAITYD

Why Are Lesbians So Racist?

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.06.13

#DDayVA Stand Up for Veterans Today!

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.07.13

#FreeKate Update: Accused Teenager Attends Fundraising Party at Gay Bar

Obama Keeps Lying; Reporters Don’t Care

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (20 the hard way)
  2. EBL (17, ditto)
  3. The Conservatory (6)

Lots of folks who just missed the five-link threshold again…


Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, June 14.


Category: FMJRA Award

She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 59 Comments

“Pretty Baby has been banned outright in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan. No less a moral arbiter than Rona Barrett solemnly advised her TV audience that the movie is ‘child pornography.’ Others have attacked its French director . . . as a combination of Humbert Humbert and Roman Polanski.”
— Kristin McMurran, People magazine, May 1978

“Some people view children as the next sexual frontier.”
— Stephanie Dallam, April 2002

“A Dutch study published [by Paidika editorial board member Theo Sandfort] in 1987 found that a sample of boys in paedophilic relationships felt positively about them.”
— Jon Henley, Guardian (U.K.), January 2013

“So it appears that younger youth are just as capable of making healthy sexual decisions as are older youth, and yet they are treated differently under the law.”
— Marina Adshade, Ph.D., Psychology Today, May 2013

If you had to fix a date in history when the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s reached its Jacobins-and-guillotines stage, when even those who had originally welcomed and applauded the revolution began to recoil from the perverse “liberation” they had wrought, the 1978 release of Pretty Baby may well have been the pivot-point. The AIDS scare of the 1980s would accelerate the counter-revolution — in fact, the disease was already beginning to spread in the late 1970s, although it was not until the ’80s that the pandemic was recognized — but it was Pretty Baby and headlines about child pornography that alarmed American mothers about the encroaching danger to their daughters.

Of course, the slow approach toward this red line had been going on for many years, but it had occurred on the bohemian fringes of society and had escaped widespread notice by the respectable bourgeoisie. During the 1960s, there was a lot of talk about “high-school dropouts” and “runaway teenagers,” and plenty of minors — 15 or 16 years old, some even younger — were among the hippies and flower children who drifted toward San Francisco in the 1967 “Summer of Love.”

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.

Whether they were seeking enlightenment and world peace, or just “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll,” there were plenty of young teens who were drawn into the hippie orbit. The anti-Establishment mood of that radical youth culture was such that no hairy freak was going to alert police — “the pigs” — that his dopehead buddy was making it with a teenybopper not yet old enough to get a driver’s license.

“Hang-ups” about sex? That’s for squares, man.

During the classic rock heyday of the ’70s, one learns from memoirs and biographies, plenty of high-school girls were among the “groupies” who flung themselves at guitar gods and heavy metal icons. Legendary tales of hotel-room-wrecking rock-tour decadence occasionally include scenes of 13-year-olds quite eagerly donating themselves as love offerings to the platinum-album superstars of that era.

“Well . . . it was consensual.”

This attitude — expressed in many variations by the “Free Kate” fanatics who celebrate Kaitlyn Hunt as a heroic martyr for her jailbait romance with a 14-year-old — is really nothing new to those who have paid attention long enough. How strange is it, then, that more than three decades after that zenith (or rather, nadir) of the Sexual Revolution, somebody like Canadian economist Marina Adshade thinks we’re in need of a social-science lecture on this topic?

The basis of the age-of-consent laws, like the ones invoked in this case, is that young adolescents are less capable of making healthy sexual decisions than are older adolescents because do not fully comprehend the risks. . . .
So there must be pretty good evidence that younger teens are less capable of making healthily sexual decisions than are slightly older teens who are free to choose the nature of their own sexual relationships, right?
Not exactly and, in fact, comprehensive research using data collected from 26,000 high school students in British Columbia found that the sexual decision making of those who became sexually active when they were 14 to 15 years old was no worse than those who became sexually active when they were 16 to 17 years old.

Damn you, damn your “research” and damn Canada, while we’re at it.

As a general rule, the more you know about social science, the more skeptical you are about its findings, especially when confronted with studies that seem to contradict common sense. The media appetite for “counter-intuitive” research findings (as practiced by the fraudulent Jonah Lerner, for example) and the generally liberal leanings of academic researchers (we are not surprised to find the eminent professor of perversion Theo Sandfort on the Columbia University faculty) tend to generate a lot of studies (and publicity for those studies) that tell us sexual hedonism is essentially harmless, even for “younger teens.”

And if you dare so much as raise an eyebrow of skepticism toward this kind of “science,” you’re obviously a bigoted hater. Read more

Category: Canada, Crime, Culture, Intellectuals, Kaitlyn Hunt, Science, Sex

World’s Youngest Blogger Dismayed By #OccupyResoluteDesk News

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 6 Comments

Category: World's Youngest Blogger
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