The Other McCain

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

‘Arab Spring’ Update: Hostages Killed in Algeria; French Fight Islamists in Mali

Posted on | January 19, 2013 | 14 Comments

“The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! . . . But it was a beautiful piece of writing. . . . It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’”
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

If you have been troubled recently by the thought that Mr. Kurtz may have been onto something, certainly you aren’t alone. We haven’t been doing too well in the Suppression of Savage Customs lately:

In a bloody finale, Algerian special forces stormed a natural gas complex in the Sahara desert on Saturday to end a standoff with Islamist extremists that left at least 23 hostages dead and killed all 32 militants involved, the Algerian government said. . . .
The siege at Ain Amenas transfixed the world after radical Islamists linked to al-Qaida stormed the complex, which contained hundreds of plant workers from all over the world, then held them hostage surrounded by the Algerian military and its attack helicopters for four tense days that were punctuated with gun battles and dramatic tales of escape. . . .

The Obama administration remains clueless:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said much remains “sketchy” about what  happened at the remote Ain Amenas gas field.
“We know that lives have been lost,” he said.
Asked how many Americans were in danger and what happened to them, Panetta  said he knew Americans were still being held hostage earlier Saturday. On what  happened to them, he said, “we need to get better information.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on events in neighboring Mali:

With French officials saying confidently on Saturday that an advance by Islamist militants on Bamako, Mali’s capital, had been halted, France’s foreign minister told African leaders that “our African friends need to take the lead” in a multilateral military intervention in Mali. . . .
The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said Saturday that France now had 2,000 troops in Mali, with more in the region, and that France was likely to add to its forces there. . . .
Residents have told local news agencies that the Islamists have left Diabaly, which they seized as an important way station on the road to the administrative capital, Ségou, north of Bamako.
French airstrikes have halted the Islamist advance toward Mopti and nearby Sévaré, French officials said, while they confirmed that the village of Konna, north of Mopti, was now back in the hands of Mali’s government. The French have also sent troops along with Malian forces to secure a bridge over the Niger River at Markala, north of Ségou.

Mitt Romney was mocked for mentioning Mali in his final debate with President Obama. Professor Stephen Clark observed this week that the connection between “the Islamist takeover of northern Mali with the NATO-led overthrow of the Gaddafi” in Libya was overlooked by the media:

Mali is a knock-on consequence of a failed north-African policy. Just such consequences were the fear expressed by some with US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those failed to materialize. Now that they have materialized as a consequence of Obama’s policies the grand-high poobahs and their courtiers are as silent as church mice.

William Wallis in the Financial Times described the uprising in Mali as a “boomerang” of U.S. anti-terror policy, and this inspires bitter Kurtz-like reflections from Ed Morrissey:

The boomerang in this case came from our extremely ill-advised and reckless intervention in Libya, which turned that nation into a failed state and sent tentacles of radicalism throughout the Sahel. And what did we gain from the Libyan adventure and the revolution we blessed in Egypt by tossing a 30-year ally to the wolves? In the latter, we now have leadership that feels entirely comfortable using eliminationist rhetoric against Israel; in the former, we have a burned-out consulate, four dead Americans, and a central government whose writ won’t run in half the country. Our policies in the last two years in this region have emboldened our enemies and disillusioned our allies, and in this case we didn’t get anything at all in trade for the unintended consequences we have reaped.

Don’t worry, Ed: The President’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner! And I’m sure the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs is eagerly awaiting your final report.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Algeria, Barack Obama, Ed Morrissey, France, Mali, Military, Terrorism

From the NTTAWWT Files: Feds Arrest Transvestite Priest for Dealing Meth

Posted on | January 19, 2013 | 12 Comments

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That:

The Catholic priest busted for allegedly dealing crystal meth was suspended after church officials discovered he was a cross-dresser who was having sex in the rectory at Bridgeport’s St. Augustine Cathedral. . . .
Monsignor Kevin Wallin was relieved of his duties in May, but the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport had continued to pay him a stipend until his Jan. 3 arrest — a day he was planning to fly to London on vacation. . . .
At one point, Wallin was selling upwards of $9,000 of meth a week, according to his indictment.
In his post-priesthood, Wallin, 61, bought an adult specialty and video store in North Haven called Land of Oz that sells sex toys and X-rated DVDs. Investigators believe the shop helped him launder thousands of dollars in weekly profits. . . .
“We had no indication he had a drug problem and never had complaints regarding him and drugs,” said Diocese Spokesman Brian Wallace.
Instead, Wallace said they became concerned in the spring of 2011 when they began receiving complaints from parishioners regarding Wallin’s appearance and erratic behavior.
“We approached him and he admitted he was struggling a bit and shortly after that he resigned (July 2011) and the bishop granted him a sabbatical,” Wallace said. . . .
While pastor of St. Augustine’s, sources said he often disappeared for days at a time; and rectory personnel became concerned and notified diocese officials when Wallin, sometimes dressed as a woman, would entertain odd-looking men, some who were also dressed in women’s clothing and engaging in sex acts.
In addition, diocese officials found bizarre sex toys in Wallin’s residence, the sources said.

So, “he admitted he was struggling a bit,” did he? This character just set a world land-speed record for going from “struggling a bit” to a federal drug felony indictment in roughly 18 months. And I’m certain Monsignor Wallin’s behavior with altar boys was impeccable, eh?

Category: Catholics, Crime, Gays, Scandal

Scientology ‘Advertorial’ Scandal Exposes Atlantic Executive as Truthless Swine

Posted on | January 19, 2013 | 15 Comments

If nothing else, the past week has made clear that The Atlantic‘s president, M. Scott Havens, is an unethical scoundrel who cannot be trusted in the vicinity of anything purporting to be “journalism.”

Monday, The Atlantic embarrassed itself by publishing a glowing “sponsored content” article that heaped praise on the leadership of the Scientology cult. This ludicrous “advertorial” got yanked within 12 hours, after exposing the once-reputable Atlantic to vicious (and inarguably well deserved) ridicule, including a dead-on parody by The Onion: “The Taliban Is A Vibrant And Thriving Political Movement.”

The motives of the Scientology cultists were clear enough: A shocking exposé was coming out (Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright), so they were buying some public-relations damage control with this “article” at a prestigious journal.

Unfortunately for the Scientology swindlers, that backfired disastrously and the “sponsored content” scandal led to a “Streisand Effect” that actually increased scrutiny of the ripoff science fiction cult. Going Clear is now the No. 1 bestseller among religion books at Amazon, and No. 5 overall. The surge of media attention has also boosted sales of Janet Reitman’s 2011 book Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, as well as advance sales of the soon-to-be-released Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, a tell-all memoir by Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige.

This negative publicity backlash has also damaged The Atlantic‘s upscale brand, and that damage is likely to be made worse by the attempt of the magazine’s top executive to talk his way out of this humiliation. Late Friday, M. Scott Havens sent out a company-wide memo that was immediately leaked to media watchdog Jim Romenesko. The memo was crammed with dishonest doubletalk like this:

We ran a “native advertising” campaign for a new advertiser that, while properly labeled as Sponsor Content, was in my opinion inconsistent with the strategy and philosophy for which this program is intended. In this case, we did not adequately work with the advertiser to create a content program that was in line with our brand. In addition, because we had not fully thought through the issues around commenting on Sponsor Content, we made some mistakes trying to moderate the commenting thread. The general media climate also played a role here.
Once these issues came to light and I had the opportunity to assess the campaign, I made the decision to suspend it pending further review. To be clear, our decision to pull the campaign should not be interpreted as passing judgment on the advertiser as an organization. Where I believe we erred was in the execution of the campaign.

Upon reading that self-serving heap of bullshit, one hopes, the entire staff of The Atlantic replied by e-mail with two weeks’ notice.

Havens is a lying pimp who treats his employees like dishonest whores.

(Via MediaGazer.)

 

 

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Category: Journalism

Gun-Grabbers Now Hunting Blue Dogs, Target Georgia Democrat John Barrow

Posted on | January 19, 2013 | 10 Comments

Rep. John Barrow (D-Georgia) may well be the most hated man in Congress. Liberals hate him — and he has faced challenges in Democrat primaries — because among other things, he was one of 39 House Democrats who voted against ObamaCare. Republicans may hate him worse because Barrow is one of the last vestiges of the moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats, who prevent the GOP from consolidating its gains in Republican-leaning states like Georgia. In 2010, my buddy Ali Akbar helped run the Tea Party-backed campaign of Barrow’s GOP challenger, Ray McKinney. That challenge fell short, but Republicans were more hopeful in 2012, after re-destricting moved more GOP voters into Barrow’s 12th District, but somehow that damned Blue Dog managed to escape with a 54%-46% win over Republican Lee Anderson.

Can Republicans beat Barrow in 2014? It’s too early to say, but right now Barrow is being targeted by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence:

Will Barrow risk his amazing record of political survival by voting for Obama’s gun-control proposals? Georgia Republicans are perhaps secretly hoping he’d be that stupid, because he’s already their Number One target for 2014 and a vote like that would likely doom him. And so the profound irony is, your Second Amendment rights are unlikely to be infringed by Congress, because of this crafty Blue Dog’s determination to be the last surviving white Democrat in Georgia.

(Hat-tip: Nathaniel Botwinick at The Corner.)

Category: Constitution, Democrats, Georgia

The Choices We Actually Have

Posted on | January 19, 2013 | 20 Comments

Reading the liberal Gin and Tacos blog yesterday — “It’s Not Like Intellectuals Hating Their Stupid Parents Is a Cliché or Anything” — I came across what the pseudonymous assistant professor of political science offered as a statement of his philosophy, a rant against libertarianism.

That rant by “Ed” was inspired by an 2008 airline trip to Boston for a meeting of the American Political Science Association, where he was job-hunting. He attended APSA receptions hosted by two rightward organizations, the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies, and was revolted:

Amid the pie-in-sky libertarianism, free-market circle jerks, and talk of regulation as a criminal enterprise, I suddenly want to be surrounded with libertarians on this plane. I want them as brave volunteers for my experiment in the majesty of the unfettered free market at 35,000 feet. Like there are allegedly no atheists in foxholes, I intend to prove that there are no libertarians in airplanes. . . .
Markets will force airlines to keep their planes safe, otherwise no one will pay to fly with them!
In order for the market to punish the backsliders, consumers must be made aware that Airline X is unsafe. Since we don’t have regulations and inspections, how will we know? Well, look up. We will know which airlines shirk on maintenance and safety when we see their planes plunging out of the sky. Here’s where my Mises Institute friends come in.
As market acolytes, I believe that they should volunteer to be on the plane(s) that serve the purpose of communicating this essential information to all of us. In the airline industry, the market’s way of telling us who is inferior involves a lot of people dying. The system works really well — let airlines be, see who fails, and punish them with one’s wallet — for everyone except the people on the plane.
Inasmuch as I do not think that uncontrolled flight into terrain at 500 mph is a worthy sacrifice for the glories and benefits of unchained race-to-the-bottom capitalism, I am a liberal. . . .

You can read the whole thing, but the point is that this puerile rant is erected on a false-dilemma fallacy. (Question: Shouldn’t introductory logic be a required course for political science majors?) We are not now, nor are we likely ever to be, presented with a choice between (a) complete deregulation and (b) total government control, especially in regard to the field of commercial airline travel.

In fact, as the professor almost surely knows, the air-travel market was substantially deregulated in the 1980s, which helps explain both its relative cheapness and (alas) its routine crappiness. The airlines have never been very profitable, and competitive pressures to lower fares have resulted in cost-cutting efficiencies that make the flying experience generally less pleasant than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

Strange to say, however, safety is the one aspect of commercial air travel that has actually improved in recent decades:

There were 0.2 fatal accidents per 1 million departures in the United States in 2008, compared to 1.4 per 1 million departures in 1989, for example, and a review of the statistics in intervening years shows an improving trend overall.
Over the last decade, there has been “a remarkable decrease in accidents globally,” said Bill Voss of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Alexandria, Va.

Weird, huh? Measured in fatalities-per-departure, that’s an 86% improvement in airline safety in the span of less than 20 years.

Whatever the effects of this dreadful libertarian influence in air travel (which the professor offers as the argument for why he’s a liberal), a decline in safety isn’t one of them.

Are there free-market ideologues arguing for the complete repeal of all federal air-travel regulations, the total privatization of air-safety requirements, so that the airlines are self-regulated, answering only to the free market? Maybe there are such arguments being made — perhaps I haven’t been reading Reason magazine or checking the Cato Institute as regularly as I should — but it’s not as if these radical free-market proposals are currently being debated in the halls of Congress. So the theoretical surrender of airline safety regulations to libertarianism is a moot argument at best and, given the fact that substantial deregulation has been accompanied by improvements in safety, not a very good one.

Making far-fetched arguments for the sake of argument is a thing that intellectuals routinely do, and I’ve dabbled in that game myself. As a matter of practical politics, however, we seldom face choices between two extremes and none of us has the authority to impose upon the world his personal ideal set of policies. So my abstract mental exercises — e.g., the abolition of public education — are destined to remain moot, as are whatever utopian schemes Professor Ed may propose.

The debate between Left and Right, between Democrats and Republicans, actually takes place as a series of scrimmages between the 40-yard lines of the spectrum, and the choices we actually have are far less drastic than anything proposed by John Stossel or Professor Ed.

What we are really debating is in which direction society should go: What do we need from government, and what can we afford to do without? These are not moot arguments, given the trillion-dollar annual deficits of recent years and the stagnant economy. Can we afford more Keynesian “stimulus”? Can we afford more “green energy” boondoggles for Obama’s campaign donors? Should we shove Grandma over the cliff?

For all of Professor Ed’s anti-libertarian grievances (and he seems to spend a lot of time fuming about “Randroids”), there doesn’t really seem to be much danger of radical free-marketeers seizing power in Washington anytime soon, so that we are stuck with the D-and-R show.

Here’s the the choice we actually have: Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats can’t produce a budget to save their political lives.

Nobody’s really even asking Harry’s gang to produce a balanced budget —  just give us some kind of budget with actual numbers in it, so we can have a definite idea of where the tax money’s going. But that corrupt swine and his Democrat colleagues either can’t do it or won’t do it, because they know that an actual budget would make clear their fiscal ineptitude, with dreadful political consequences.

Why does Professor Ed spend his time dismantling libertarian strawmen, rather than debating the choices we actually have? For roughly the same reason that Harry Reid won’t produce a budget: Irresponsibility, a desire to enjoy his big-government cake without bothering to explain how he proposes to pay the cost of eating it, too.

It’s cowardly and childish, and no amount of clever blog snark from Professor Ed can conceal his essential irresponsibility.

 

Category: Economics, Education, Intellectuals

Great @PJTV Bill Whittle Essay For Those Needing A Little Perk-Up

Posted on | January 19, 2013 | 4 Comments

by Smitty


Whittle touches on the real point at 2:42 in the clip: faith.

The broad-spectrum media onslaught continues, attempting to diminish the soul and the mind, leaving a more readily biddable body. Here is a bit of doggerel on the point:

Seed

Seed in a seed in a seed.
A mystical view of man,
Having body, mind and soul.

The flesh, by natural plan,
After gestation is freed,
As the mine emits the coal.

The mind bursts forth as it can,
Striving for worldly control,
The soul an internal need.

Should God it onward cajole,
The soul by Spirit is drawn,
Knowing the Christ in its stead.

Dodging sin’s ultimate toll,
A Crown of Life’s on the head,
As seen from Heavenly scan.

The arch of marriage, indeed,
Halts solitary patrol,
Sowing seeds new as the dawn.

Thus can life in time succeed,
As God that life once began,
Forming the eternal scroll.

If you’ll forgive my Godbag Christofascist tendencies here, the real point is that the basic character of the United States has been attacked on every level, by the Progressives to the Commies. After figuring out how to leverage the Fatal Sequence:

The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more.

for political power has been brilliant, in its diabolical way.

Folks, we now have the technology to catch up to the Founder’s mostly libertarian vision of a federal government that handles multi-state and international issues, and lets the States follow their own cultural bent, from the Judeo-Christian to wherever. We merely need to band together, restore our culture, and then restore the 9th and 10th Amendments to relevance.

Category: PJTV

Free Leadership Training Program

Posted on | January 18, 2013 | 16 Comments

It’s called the United States Army. We had a couple of letters from our son who seems to be at the Holy Crap phase of training, where it has begun to dawn on him exactly what he has signed up for: Sergeant wakes them up in the middle of the night and makes them stand in formation an hour or so, just for the sheer sadistic hell of it.

Psychological brutality serves a purpose for the former civilian, and what might be called Introduction to Military Discipline — you will obey the order because it is, by God, an order — is a prerequisite to all later lessons. The private must fear his sergeant more than he fears the enemy.

OK, that thought occurred for non-random reasons, including the idiotic alternative of getting a Ph.D. in Gay Lumberjack Studies.

Aaron Clarey of “Captain Capitalism” fame is the author of Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major, which I recommend. Not necessarily because I agree with it 100%, but with a son currently majoring in Kill America’s Enemies, I figure maybe your kids need to think more seriously about this stuff.

 

Category: Education, Military

Dear Tina Fey: Sometimes The Foolishness Undermines

Posted on | January 18, 2013 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

See, the time unfunny
statements trigger frolicking un-seriousness, (they)
should then find useful
storage toward future un-interring.

Less obtusely stated, Tina:

via Breitbart

Category: Uncategorized
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