The Other McCain

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

No School Like the Old School

Posted on | March 10, 2013 | 6 Comments

Ed Driscoll has memory. Intelligence is, in fact, mostly about memory. So the more you remember, the smarter you are. This is why old people are smart and young people are stupid.

So I was reading Ed’s account of “The State of Journalism in 2013,” and I was stunned when Ed reminded readers — I knew, but had forgotten — that Mark Steyn used to write for The Atlantic.

Category: Ed Driscoll

Alexis C. Madrigal, Harvard ’04

Posted on | March 10, 2013 | 42 Comments

“I remember walking down Barlett Street in the Mission and saying to myself, out loud, ‘I’m a writer. I’m a writer! I’M A WRITER!’ It was all I’d wanted to be since I was 16 years old. And I was making it.”
— Alexis C. Madrigal, “A Day in the Life of a Digital Editor, 2013,” The Atlantic

You need to descrease your Red Bull intake, kid. And your dream? Too small, really. Certainly too small to pile up student debt for the tuition at Harvard ($54,496 a year). There’s a book about that.

An Ivy League education is not a prerequisite to being a writer, yet I have long noticed that The Atlantic has a fetish for Harvardians, so there is this sense of clubby cliqueishness about it. This is not mere elitism and it’s not “meritocracy.” It’s credentialism, is what it is.

And it is impossible to imagine that any Harvard alumnus ever would have walked into the offices of the (now defunct) Cobb News-Chronicle on Love Street in Austell, Georgia, on a spring day in 1986 and walked out with an assignment to cover the City Council meeting that night.

While I don’t recall saying out loud, “I’m a writer,” I was happy to have a job, and the pay was $4.50 an hour.

This was less than I’d been paid to drive a forklift in a warehouse on Fulton Industrial Boulevard for the past year and a half, but I didn’t have to wear a hard hat, there was no heavy lifting involved, and this entry-level gig offered hope that one day at the Jax State reunion, I’d have a respectable answer to the question, “What are you doing these days?”

Being a reporter — or, subsequently, a sports editor, etc. — was at least the kind of coat-and-tie job a college graduate was supposed to have. Whether journalism is an altogether respectable profession is a subject of much debate lately. Apparently, everybody in this racket is now either (a) plagiarizing, (b) working for shady foreign dictators, or (c) hustling for peanuts while competing for page-views with LOLCats.

Would it be wrong to blame this on Alexis C. Madrigal, Harvard ’04? Yes.

But we need someone to blame, kid, and you’ll do for now. So . . .

This self-indulgent and arguably self-aggrandizing rant of yours about what it’s like to work as Web editor for The Atlantic? I’m not saying that there is anything factually inaccurate about it, but the general tone of the thing is insufferably smug, Harvard Boy.

Like you invented the fucking Internet or something. We took a vote, Alexis, and it was unanimous: We all want to stab your eyes out.

How dare you — who have never been down range, as it were — presume any standing to lecture Nate Thayer as having done something “nasty,” about which you have any right to be “incensed”?

Whatever stuff you were flinging over the digital transom circa 2004 that made you say, “I’m a writer,” I’m reasonably certain it wasn’t the kind of work Nate Thayer does, which involves traveling places where news is happening, seeing it with your own eyes, and taking notes.

As I say, I’m reasonably certain you never did that kind of work, Alexis, because if you had paid those kind of dues, you certainly would have shared the universal umbrage at the disrespectful way your “global editor” Olga treated Nate Thayer.

Your pious sermonette about how hard it is to do your job, and why Olga couldn’t have at least offered Nate $50 for the 1,200-word article she solicited from him, would never have come to my attention, Alexis, if I hadn’t been monitoring my Site Meter and noticed incoming traffic from liberal economist Brad DeLong’s blog.

“Oh, shit,” I thought. “What have I done this time?”

Generally speaking, liberal blogs never link me except in scornful outrage, but this time — “Noted for March 10, 2013” — I found a link down at the end for my take on the Juan Williams scandal. Thanks, Professor DeLong, and thank you also for linking Alexis C. Madrigal, Harvard ’04, because my blood pressure probably wasn’t high enough already, and there’s nothing like aerobic cursing to get that cardiovascular thing going.

DIE, YOU FUCKING HARVARD PUNK!

And I say that not merely on my own behalf, but on behalf of every other doomed soul hustling for nickels and dimes without benefit of a Harvard diploma or a staff gig or an academic/think-tank sinecure. Because here’s the thing, Alexis: It ain’t like you didn’t have a choice.

“I asked myself whether I should have stayed at the hedge fund job that I took right out of college and hated so much I quit before the summer ended.”

Show of hands?

Yeah, it’s unanimous again, Alexis. We all wish you had stayed with that hedge fund job you took right out of college, because none of us ever got that kind of offer. We didn’t go to Harvard.

You quit a job that none of us ever got offered, Alexis, and now you’re over here telling Nate Thayer how to do his job — and do it for free?

What part of “fuck you” is so hard to understand?

Anyway, I don’t have time today to thoroughly fisk your article, so I’ll have to crowd-source it to what some guy called the Army of Davids. And like I said, it’s not that you got anything factually wrong.

It’s your punk attitude — your lack of respect — that is the problem.

Did you know Bill Quick at Daily Pundit named the blogosphere? Because I’m thinking he might have a thing or two to say about this.

Journalism is not rocket science. You didn’t invent the Internet, Alexis. And if Ace of Spades decides to rip you apart, hey, stuff happens.

 

Category: Blogging, Intellectuals, Journalism

Adam Carolla’s Righteous Indignation

Posted on | March 10, 2013 | 18 Comments

He rips up the liberal media the way you wish you could rip up the media. Never have you heard f-bombs stacked up with such raging fury. Ed Driscoll says, “You’ll like him when he’s angry. A lot.”

 

Category: Media Bias

FMJRA 2.0: Venus, The Bringer Of Peace

Posted on | March 9, 2013 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Report: Team Kimberlin Harassment Now Targeting ‘Blog Bash’ Event at CPAC

Malaysians, and Other Foreigners I Might Be Able to Give a Damn About, If You Could Pay Me $389,724.70 to Care

Brett Kimberlin Calls Blog Bash Venue, Vows to ‘Put You Guys Out of Business’

American Guts: #StandWithRand

‘MalaysiaGate’ Day Four: Conspicuous Silence and Convenient Memory Lapses

Hugo Chavez, Looter

Shorter Juan Williams: I’m Sorry My Underpaid Assistant Plagiarized That Column With My Byline I Didn’t Write

CPAC 2014 Idea

How Much Cash Did Jerome Armstrong Collect in the ‘MalaysiaGate’ Operation?

FMJRA 2.0: Shout

‘MalaysiaGate’ Update: Still More Questions Than Answers (So Far)

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.04.13

Is It Time For The Two Scandinavian Ladies To Sing On Defunding ObamaCare?

  • Daily Pundit

@Rare-in To Go

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.05.13

The Rev. @ThorHalvorssen’s Universal Holiness Temple Choir of ‘Human Rights’

Atlantic Editor to Freelancer: ‘We Unfortunately Can’t Pay You for It …’

Also Sprach Daniel Hannan

Go, Kira Davis!

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.06.13

Thoughts on Teamwork

Rule 5 Wednesday: Snowed Out At The Tax Mines

Lying by Euphemism: ‘New Revenues’

World’s Youngest Blogger Simulates Reaction To Incoming Drone Strike

Tell The GOP We Want Reform

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.08.13

Just in Case New York Times Readers Don’t Feel Enough White Guilt Yet …

So, These Two Republican Senators Walk Into An Elevator. . . #StandWithRand

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (17 the hard way)
  2. The Camp of the Saints (6)
  3. (tied) Da Tech Guy, Lonely Conservative, Hogewash and Daily Pundit (5)

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, March 15.

Category: FMJRA Award

Barrett Brown Trial Pushed Back to September, at His Lawyer’s Request

Posted on | March 9, 2013 | 16 Comments

September 2012: Barrett Brown threatens an FBI agent in video

Missed this news earlier: There was apparently a hearing Wednesday in which an attorney for former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown, who had been scheduled to stand trial later this month and in April on federal charges, was granted a continuation pushing the trial back to September. It’s important to make the point this delay was at the request of Brown’s own lawyer, because here’s the inflammatory headline:

Anonymous ‘spokesperson’
to spend year in jail without trial

This makes it seem like it’s the government’s fault, which it’s not, nor is it the government’s fault that nobody will go Barrett’s bail.

Doug Morris, a public defender appointed to serve as Brown’s defense counsel, asked for an extension in order to evaluate the evidence against his client, the Associate Press reports. US District Judge Sam Lindsay obliged on Wednesday this week.
The AP adds that Brown’s trial for one indictment is now slated for September 3, 2013, with trials for his second and third indictments scheduled to start on Sept. 23. Brown was arrested on Sept. 12 last year and has been in law enforcement custody for the nearly six months since.

I’m not sure what Barrett’s bail would be, but he might be considered a flight risk, given that “Commander X” (Christopher Doyon) jumped bail and is now a fugitive, and other members of Anonymous have reportedly fled the United States.

Anybody who’s seen the immortal YouTube rant in which Barrett threatened to “destroy” an FBI agent (and it helps to read the indictment that mentions an unnamed co-conspirator who helped “dox” the agent) knows that the feds have got Brown dead to rights on that charge, even if they can’t make anything else stick. The logical thing would be for Barrett to cop a plea, but apparently the U.S. Attorney’s office in this case isn’t in a mood to let Brown off with a wrist-slap, so he’ll sit in jail and wait for his trial while his lawyer from the public defender’s office “evaluates the evidence,” and good luck with that, eh?

Something else: Barrett was in custody for more than four months before the court determined he was sane enough to stand trial — just barely, perhaps — and it’s certainly not the government’s fault that Barrett Brown is crazy, unless . . .

Look, I hate to feed into anyone’s paranoia here, but everybody knows about how Neal Rauhauser helped push Barrett over the edge. And there are those who have long suspected that Rauhauser wasn’t just bragging about having FBI connections. If you had a conspiratorial worldview (as many Anonymous members do), and you knew about that unindicted co-conspirator (“another person known the grand jury“), wouldn’t you be tempted to suspect maybe Rauhauser was part of some kind of elaborate set-up, an agent provocateur who helped the feds bust Barrett?

Not that I believe that myself, you understand. But if some crazy paranoid Anonymous types believed it, who could really blame them? Because why has the unindicted co-conspirator not been indicted?

 

Category: Barrett Brown

Sen. McCain Fears Crazy Birds Dumping Whitewash On TSA Security Theater

Posted on | March 9, 2013 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

Are Piers Morgan and John McCain the New Hotness?

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is calling for congressional hearings to see if a new rule allowing airline passengers to carry knives and bats on flights should be blocked.
His intervention comes after the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) relaxed post 9-11 rules to allow blades up to 2.36 inches long. Razors and box cutters, which the terrorists used on Sept 11, 2011, are still banned.
“We need a congressional hearing on the whole issue of what is a danger to the entire flight,” McCain said in an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan. “I think we need to call witnesses since they have made this policy change.”

Maybe McCain would have the integrity to get somebody with a clue to testify, despite the TSA, as noted in this post from right at a year ago:

I was supposed to testify today about the TSA in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I was informally invited a couple of weeks ago, and formally invited last Tuesday:

The hearing will examine the successes and challenges associated with Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT), the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program, the Transportation Worker Credential Card (TWIC), and other security initiatives administered by the TSA.

On Friday, at the request of the TSA, I was removed from the witness list. The excuse was that I am involved in a lawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program. But it’s pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it’s easier for them to do that if I’m not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position. Unfortunately, the committee went along with them. (They tried to pull the same thing last year and it failed — video at the 10:50 mark.)
The committee said it would try to invite me back for another hearing, but with my busy schedule, I don’t know if I will be able to make it. And it would be far less effective for me to testify without forcing the TSA to respond to my points.
I’m there in spirit, though. The title of the hearing is “TSA Oversight Part III: Effective Security or Security Theater?”

So, go ahead, Senator McCain: use public hearings as a means of exposing the waste, absurdity, ineffectual nature, and anti-Constitutional flavor of our shiny regulatory state. Such a non-choadtzpa move would go do a bit to walk back the tired-old-warhorse reputation that hangs over you, the way bricks do not.

Senator McCain, the adult, traveling public is sick to death of the TSA and the security kabuki. Take a cue from Senator Rand Paul and fight for our Constitution, sir.

via PoliticsOfFear

Category: John McCain

‘Clean-Up on Aisle Nine!’

Posted on | March 9, 2013 | 41 Comments

Am I a good judge of what is or is not offensive? Usually, and at times I am quite deliberately offensive. National Offend a Feminist Week each May is an annual occasion (always the week leading up to Mother’s Day, because if there’s anything feminists hate, it’s motherhood).

However, just because there’s one special week doesn’t prevent me from offending feminists the other 51 weeks of the year, and I should have seen trouble coming when I did this morning’s Ashley Judd post. Thus we return to a personal problem I’ve been dealing with since I was a class clown in elementary school: You’re never going to find out where the line is until you cross it and get sent to the principal’s office.

Random Sarcasm Syndrome — help me, I’m a victim.

Did I intend to cut deep on would-be Sen. Puffy Face? Yes.

And are there people who would have thoroughly enjoyed such an expert filet job had I not crossed the line? Yes.

Are there people who weren’t offended? Yes, but when you get yourself into one of these jams — and trust me, I’ve been doing this my whole life — it’s best not to let your buddies egg you on further.

So when one of the pro-Stacy commenters (a regular) described the chief anti-Stacy commenter (a newbie less frequent commenter) as a “concern trollette,” I figured it was time to stop arguing, concede the offense, and clean it up.

Usually in such situations — we need not cite the specific incidents — I just drop it and move on, like the guy who knocks over a stack of cans in a grocery story and then just walks away whistling casually to himself. Take your hits, stoically accept your error and try not to screw up again.

However, it just so happened that the comment field on this Ashley Judd post started blowing up right about the time I finished laying about two tons of whup-ass on Bill Schmalfeldt’s thick head.

Bill’s got a lot of problems, chief among them an inability to admit his mistakes or learn from them. The same was true of Barrett Brown, who is now in federal custody awaiting trial in Texas.

Arrogance is a fault with which I am intimately acquainted, but for which I’ve learned to compensate enough that I usually rein it in before I inflict irretrievable damage on myself. There is a familarity to such situations — “Oh, crap, I’ve done it again” — so that you’d have to be an outright fool not to recognize one’s own typical error, recall the previous consequences of such errors, and avoid doubling down on stupid.

It’s the double-down reaction that is always the biggest error.

Convinced of our own essential rectitude, we do not appreciate criticism, and so it is a natural instinct in such conflicts to start entrenching one’s position like the French defending Verdun. But if you always take that attitude toward conflict, if you are never willing to admit error, eventually that tendency will bring you to grief (cf., Charles Johnson).

Most times in such a conflict, you may feel that you’re basically right. There was some valid larger point you were making, and the critic who is unloading a truckload of indignation on your head about your inflammatory rhetoric is — from your perspective — missing the point. So, rather than let yourself get concern-trolled out of an important argument, you raise the black flag, yell “No Prisoners!” and turn it into one of those Armageddon struggles where anyone who tries to talk you out of it is suspected of being an active accomplice of The Enemy.

No need to get specific as to examples here. IYKWIMAITYD.

Having the balance of righteousness in your favor will do you little good if, by waging a too-fanatical war in your own defense, your friends desert the fight because you’re acting like a lunatic.

In the case of the Ashley Judd Armageddon, in making a sharp cut at the foe — which I intended as a very specific criticism — I managed to cause people to perceive that this specific criticism might also generally apply to others who are in fact, friends and allies in the fight.

OK. Error acknowledged.

Could I have spent a lot of time taking on every hostile comment, debating each point of disagreement, entrenching my position? Yes.

Would such a course of action have been prudent? No.

A deliberate insult to an enemy is one thing. To accidentally insult one’s friends is not something to make a habit. My longtime friends are used to my ways, and don’t take it personally when I say stupid things. A willingness to say stupid things once in a while makes for fun, except when it’s not fun at all. Operating on a trial-and-error basis means you’ve got to be able to recognize what a error looks like.

This was an error, and so I’ll concede this: At the very least, I did not choose my words wisely. Now I’ll shut up and move along, and find some new way to piss everybody off next time.

Because I’m innovative like that.

 

Category: Uncategorized

You Stay Classy, Bill Schmalfeldt!

Posted on | March 9, 2013 | 31 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt: Proud to be a ‘Brain-Damaged Troll’

It’s been more than a week since we took notice of Brett Kimberlin fanboy Bill Schmalfeldt, who has been charged in Maryland with Internet harassment of Lee Stranahan. Before examining Schmalfeldt’s latest eruption of obscene idiocy, however, I’d like to treat you to an amusing blast from Schmalfeldt’s disreputable past.

Right Wing Scrambles to Reassign
Blame for Tucson Tragedy

That was the headline on Schmalfeldt’s debut as the self-described “Brain-Damaged Troll” columnist at Technorati in January 2011. Bill’s theme was, as usual, completely wrong — the exact opposite of truth. Even as Schmalfeldt was ranting on about the Tea Party, “Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly” as the culprits in the Tucson massacre, actual reporters were quietly working to determine the nature of the madness behind Jared Loughner’s bloody crimes.

Loughner was not a Republican, not a conservative, not a Tea Party activist. He was a paranoid schizophrenic. Once a promising young musician — he had played saxophone in a high-school jazz group — Loughner got involved with drugs:

Some friends have traced the start of his decline to his sophomore year of high school in 2005, when he broke up with a girlfriend. He dropped out of high school after his junior year and thereafter lost touch with many of his former friends, including Caitlyn Parker. On the day of the shooting which targeted Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, Parker was one of the first of the accused gunman’s acquaintances to push back against speculation that the crime had been perpetrated by a right-winger. No, Parker said in a series of Twitter messages, the Jared Loughner she remembered was “quite liberal,” even “radical” in his politics.

Ah, so the dope-addled crazy was not a Rush Limbaugh listener, not a Glenn Beck fan, not a Fox News viewer. Well, what set him off?

The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” —parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”

So, the belief that Bill Schmalfeldt expressed in his Technorati column on Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011 — that the Tea Party and conservative media personalities were directly at fault for the Tucson massacre, and that the Right was dishonestly attempting to “reassign blame” — was 180 degrees opposite of the truth. In fact, insofar as the crimes of a madman can be said to have a political motive, Loughner’s motives were those associated with the radical Left, including 9/11 Trutherism, anti-Christianity and anti-capitalist beliefs not unlike those of the “Occupy” movement.

The account of the Tucson gunman’s madness cited above is my own American Spectator column, “Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession” (Jan. 17, 2011), and regular readers will recall how much coverage of the Loughner/Zeitgeist phenomenon I provided here:

So, while I covered Loughner’s actual motive every day for seven consecutive days (Jan. 12-18), Schmalfeldt lost interest in Loughner’s motives as soon as evidence emerged proving Schmalfeldt’s original “pin-the-tail-on-the-famous-right-wingers” smear was false.

And here’s the thing: Bill Schmalfeldt never owned up to the falseness of his accusation. He continued being published at Technorati until November 2011 without ever once acknowledging that his very first column for Technorati was a big, fat, evil lie.

There are many faults and personal shortcomings that can be tolerated in journalism. Deliberate malicious dishonesty is not one of them.

All that is necessary to discredit Bill Schmalfeldt is to quote Bill Schmalfeldt. The vile creep got banned from Daily Kos for his grossly offensive writings about anal sodomy. Schmalfeldt’s penchant for obscene defamation, as Lee Stranahan pointed out last week, includes describing his own ex-wife — the mother of his children, whom Schmalfeldt divorced in 1988 — as a “meth-abusing serial adultress.”

You may ask, how would such a person choose to honor the memory of his recently deceased mother? By accusing his ex-wife of “sucking Stranny Balls” and “sucking Stranny dick,” calling her an “adulterous slut” and a “lower form of life,” and also describing one of Lee Stranahan’s female friends as a “throbbing hemorrhoid” and a “cunt.”

You stay classy, Bill Schmalfeldt!




 

 

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Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, Zeitgeist
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