The Other McCain

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

In Which @MattKLewis Makes @BenHowe His Enemy for Life

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 49 Comments

Ben Howe: Just some random dude on the Internet?

“The socially-awkward gadfly who might once have been relegated to writing letters to the editor of Ron Paul’s newsletter, can today build an online identity that disguises his quirks. . . .
“Some of my colleagues actually take perverse pleasure in fighting with their stalkers. . . . . My arms are getting tired from punching down, as it is.”
— Matt K. Lewis, Daily Caller, Jan. 9, “Confronting Ben Howe: My own personal Twitter troll”

Let’s talk about professionalism, shall we? Let’s also talk about ambition and misguided career strategies, while we’re at it.

There is no rule that requires everybody in the conservative movement to like everybody else in the conservative movement. But it is a good idea to choose one’s enemies wisely, to keep one’s Enemies List as short as possible, and to avoid turning minor squabbles into all-out feuds.

In September, for reasons best known to himself, Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller decided that he needed to be on Michelle Malkin’s Enemies List.

This created serious problems for Matt Lewis’s friends because, in such a situation, how can one continue to be Matt Lewis’s friend without risk of adding one’s name to Michelle Malkin’s Enemies List?

Dude: “Execrable”?

No one is so powerful, so successful or so popular that they can just go around making enemies like that without eventually paying a price for it. People need to think before doing stuff like that.

Avoid escalation. A few weeks ago, Ali Akbar got into a Twitter argument with John Ekdahl and, when I found out about it, I told Ali to lay off. John Ekdahl is good people and a contributor at AOSHQ, so whatever quarrel Ali had with Ekdahl, it wasn’t worth turning into a blood feud that would risk estranging Ace. As much as Ali might have wanted to double down, entrench his position and turn his disagreement with Ekdahl into an online Battle of Verdun, it was a bad move.

Forget it. Just walk away. Read more

Category: Matt Lewis

Smitty’s Corollary To Godwin’s Law

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

I’m likely not the first to notice this effect, varying Mike Godwin:

Category: Uncategorized

Rush Limbaugh Is Right: The Academic Pro-Pedophile Movement Is a Real Danger

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 44 Comments

Rush Limbaugh sparked criticism this week by pointing to an article in the British Guardian newspaper as evidence of “a movement to normalize pedophilia.” Limbaugh’s liberal critics are ridiculing his contention, but the movement he described is very real.

In 2002, Judith Levine published Harmful to Minors, a book which stirred a massive controversy because of its claims that the dangers of pedophilia were exaggerated. I covered the controversy in a long article for The Washington Times:

[Levine] said, “The research shows us that in some minority of cases, young — even quite young — people can have a positive sexual experience with an adult. That’s what the research shows.”
Featuring a foreword by Clinton administration Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Ms. Levine’s book endorses a Dutch law, passed in 1990, that effectively lowered the age of consent to 12. Ms. Levine cites research about “happy consensual sex among kids under 12,” and writes: “America’s drive to protect kids from sex is protecting them from nothing. Instead, often it is harming them.” . . .
A 1998 “meta-analytic” study in an American Psychological Association (APA) journal argued, among other things, that “value-neutral” language such as “adult-child sex” should be used to describe child molestation if it was a “willing encounter.” . . .
Ms. Levine’s book favorably cites the Rind study and, in a telephone interview, she defended the study as “methodologically meticulous.” But Baltimore psychologist Joy Silberg, whose clinical practice involves treating child-abuse victims, says the study is “horribly flawed.”
“I can’t call it science,” she said.
One co-author of the 1998 study was Robert Bauserman, now employed by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. As early as 1989, Mr. Bauserman had written about “man-boy sexual relationships” in Paidika. He also co-authored a 1993 article with Mr. Rind about “adult-nonadult sex.”

You can read the whole thing. The point is that, more than a decade ago, there was a clearly identifiable movement within academia that was attempting to normalize “adult-child sex.”

Rind and Bauserman were part of it, and Bauserman’s history of association with the Dutch pedophile journal Paidika should raise red flags. Indeed, the Guardian article that caught Limbaugh’s attention actually cites a Paidika contributor:

A Dutch study published in 1987 found that a sample of boys in paedophilic relationships felt positively about them.

That study was by Theo Sandfort, a Dutch academic and member of Paidika‘s editorial board. Sandfort contributed an article entitled “Constructive Questions Regarding Paedophilia” to the third issue of the journal in 1988, contributed another article (“The World is Bursting with Adults, so I’m always Glad to See a Little Girl”) to the eighth issue in 1992, and published a two-part article (“The Sexual Experiences of Children”) in consecutive issues of Paidika in 1993 and ’94.

For several years, Professor Sandfort wrote about almost nothing else. He is author of the 2001 book Childhood Sexuality and co-edited the 1990 book Male Intergenerational Intimacy with fellow Paidika contributor Edward Brongersma, who was convicted for having sex with a 16-year-old boy. Readers will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Sandfort is now on the faculty of Columbia University.

Judith Levine’s 2002 book cited Sandfort and Brongersma among her sources, and she also cited another Paidika contributor, a lawyer named Lawrence A. Stanley, as an expert on the supposed non-danger of child pornography. Under the aliases “N.S. Aristoff” and “L.A. Stanaman,” Stanley was quite directly involved in the business, and was arrested a few months after Levine’s book was published:

An American lawyer who specialized in defending those accused of child pornography is under arrest in Brazil, charged with violating that country’s laws against child exploitation.
Lawrence Allen Stanley, 47, was arrested June 8 after police in Salvador say they found more than 1,000 photographs and more than 100 videos of young girls in swimsuits and underwear.
The arrest came days after the Brazilian magazine Epocha reported that Stanley, a fugitive who has lived in Brazil since 1998, had built an international business photographing Brazilian girls and selling their photos through the Internet. . . .
Under the alias L.A. Stanaman, Stanley operated the “MiniModels” Web site, featuring photos of girls ages 8 to 14 in what police Officer Rui Gomes described to the Associated Press as “sensual poses.” . . .
Stanley has been identified as the owner of Alessandra’s Smile, a New York company that sells erotic material about girls. He is also the publisher of Ophelia Editions, which produces books with pedophile themes, and Uncommon Desires, a newsletter that has called itself “the voice of a politically conscious girl-love underground.”
Stanley has a criminal record. He was charged with “sexual aggression” against a girl in Quebec in 1990, but Canadian officials never sought extradition. In 1998, a Dutch court convicted Stanley in absentia for sexual abuse of three children ages 7 to 10, Epocha reported. He faces a three-year prison sentence if he returns to the Netherlands. . . .
In 1989, federal authorities accused Stanley of conspiring with a client, photographer Don Marcus, to import child pornography. Marcus — who fled to France to escape prosecution and is still a fugitive — asked Stanley to pick up a suitcase that was found to contain child pornography. His attorney argued that Stanley did not know what was in the suitcase, and a jury acquitted him in 1993. . . .

Read the whole thing. The point is that the “research” cited in favor of the normalization of pedophilia is generally produced by “experts” of a very dubious nature, whose interest in the subject matter does not seem to be merely academic. And yet, as evidenced by Columbia University’s hiring of Professor Sandfort, there are evidently those in the academic community who do not see this movement as dangerous.

When Rush Limbaugh called attention to this Monday — after National Review‘s Wesley J. Smith wrote about the Guardian article — Limbaugh was mocked by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien:

Rush Limbaugh speaking out against what he is calling a liberal attempt to, quote, “normalize pedophilia.” The conservative radio show host says it could be the next step for those who support gay marriage. . . .
Limbaugh citing a column in the “Guardian” newspaper that quotes researchers that claim pedophilia is a distinct sexual orientation. He said, Exhibit A, is that the media went easy on Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash who lost his job on Sesame Street after several men came forward saying they had a sexual relationship with Clash back when they were teenagers.

Ed Driscoll refers to O’Brien’s reaction as evidence of “epistemic closure” on the Left, and it goes to show the reflexive political reaction of liberals to everything nowadays: If conservatives are on one side of an issue, liberals feel obliged to weigh in on the other side.

Therefore, if Rush Limbaugh warns against the dangers of an effort to normalize pedophilia — a very real movement, and one which the administration of Columbia University evidently approves — liberals must declare that the movement is not dangerous.

 

Category: CNN, Crime, Culture, Education, Sex, Talk Radio

Doggy Style: Delaware Couple Arrested, Now Facing Felony Bestiality Charges

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 95 Comments

Police say Samantha L. Golt had sex with a dog.

A 24-year-old Delaware mother had sex with a dog while her boyfriend took pictures, according to officials who arrested the couple this week.

Samanth L. Golt and 25-year-old boyfriend James P. Crow were arrested Tuesday and charged with felony bestiality and felony second-degree conspiracy for the alleged sex act that police say occurred at the couple’s Milford home, Delaware State News reports:

The investigation began when a Delaware State Police trooper was contacted by a concerned citizen in reference to abuse of a canine on Dec. 28, papers said.
During the investigation, photographs taken by Mr. Crow were collected as evidence, court documents said.
Police said they compared a Delaware Justice Information System Web Portal photograph to the evidence photo and positively identified Ms. Golt as the female having sex with the dog. . . .
Bestiality is a class D felony under state law. . . . A person convicted of bestiality would be placed on the state’s sex offender registry, the Delaware Attorney General’s Office said.

Samantha Golt is the mother of a 4-year-old girl. Golt had mentioned on Facebook that she owned three dogs, pit bulls and mixed breeds, the Digital Journal reported.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Crime, Delaware, Sex

Friday News Dump: D.C. Won’t Prosecute David Gregory’s Clear Violation of Law

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 7 Comments

District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin Nathan won’t prosecute David Gregory “despite the clarity of the violation of this important law” — the city’s ban on high-capacity magazines — and as Professor Glenn Reynolds says, “you can tell how proud they are of this decision by the fact that it came out on a Friday afternoon.”

So the Network Celebrity Loophole in D.C.’s draconian gun laws is now an established principle of jurisprudence in our nation’s capital.

Category: Celebrities, Crime, NBC

NYT Has Bum Strapped To Column, Plus, Introducing: ‘The Krugmanerrand’

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Emphasis mine:

Finally, just consider the vileness of that G.O.P. threat. If we were to hit the debt ceiling, the U.S. government would end up defaulting on many of its obligations. This would have disastrous effects on financial markets, the economy, and our standing in the world. Yet Republicans are threatening to trigger this disaster unless they get spending cuts that they weren’t able to enact through normal, Constitutional means.
Republicans go wild at this analogy, but it’s unavoidable. This is exactly like someone walking into a crowded room, announcing that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, and threatening to set that bomb off unless his demands are met.

The only way in which Krugman could seem to be rational is if one were to accept that the Progressive Project has affected some kind of Article V re-write of our Constitution, via stare decisis, over the last century. If you accept such an oath-shattering premise as driving the pretzel logic of our Ruling Class, then, sure: the idiocy of Krugman and the rest of the Beltway Clown Car comes into focus.

Once we’ve departed the Rule of Law, and the beautiful people can get away with breaking the law on TV, because

D.C. attorney general Irvin B. Nathan announced his decision Friday afternoon by releasing a letter to an attorney for NBC. Nathan wrote that though the device Gregory held up “meets the definition” of the criminal statute, he wrote that prosecution “would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust.”

After a line of nonsense like that, why not just mint coins in Weimar German denominations?

Here’s how it would work: The Treasury would mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion (or many coins with smaller values; it doesn’t really matter). This coin would immediately be deposited at the Federal Reserve, which would credit the sum to the government’s account. And the government could then write checks against that account, continuing normal operations without issuing new debt.

The Krugmanerrand

Why bother with a denomination at all? As long as we’re punching the clown, just slap an ? symbol on the thing and declare victory. We’re a fundamentally unserious people with a fundamentally unserious government, advised by fundamentally unserious ‘eclownomists’: we deserve a fundamentally unserious currency.

via jwbrown1969

Category: Uncategorized

A Lesson from Lindsay Lohan

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 18 Comments

Last weekend I remarked that I’ve had several long conversations with Ali Akbar about plans for his Viral Read news site. One of the things I’ve repeatedly stressed is how important it is in the news business to be task-oriented and mission-focused. People must be judged strictly on their ability to get the job done. It doesn’t matter whether you “like” somebody or not. It’s not about friendship or popularity. The key to survival is to focus on the task in front of you — cranking it out day after day on deadline — while ignoring all merely personal considerations.

This is one of those big Life Lessons that young people have to learn the hard way, if they are ever to succeed at the highest levels. The real world isn’t like high school. A childish fascination with “popularity” is counter-productive in most real-world work environments. People who attempt to manipulate their way to undeserved success by playing office-politics games will ultimately produce harmful effects to the organization.

Well, so much for the lecture. What got me thinking about this topic was a long article by Stephen Rodrick in the New York Times about the difficulties of working with Lindsay Lohan. Desperate to rescue her career from her self-inflicted disasters, Lohan agreed to work with Paul Schrader, a 65-year-old director who was himself desperate to maintain his viability in the 21st-century movie market.

The set-up: Schrader is attempting to make a feature film on a shoestring budget of $250,000, and it is a measure of how far Lohan has fallen that she’s willing to participate in this project. What Lohan can’t seem to understand is that show business is a business:

The first child of a drug-abusing, felonious stock trader and a failed dancer, Lohan survived her Long Island childhood, moved to Hollywood and became America’s newest sweetheart with winning turns in “The Parent Trap” and “Mean Girls.” She cut an album that went platinum. In 2006, she was the best thing in Robert Altman’s “Prairie Home Companion.” The future was hers to write.
Then­­ — as the voice-over in an “E! True Hollywood Story” would put it — it all fell apart. Big-budget films need insurance in case an actress dies or becomes incapacitated and can’t go on with a role. Lohan’s misadventures made her uninsurable, her work dried up and she settled in as a generation’s snarky punch line.

This should put Lohan’s tabloid-headline life into proper perspective. Undeniably talented, Lohan can’t find work because her personal problems make her an unpredictable workplace liability. Read more

Category: Celebrities

@Gabby_Hoffman Strangely Uncomfortable With Federal Ponzi Scheme

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Gabby Hoffman seems uncertain about whether the additional money the government is extracting is going toward anything useful:

Hoffman, a 21-year-old Virginian who works at a nonprofit, estimates her paycheck will be roughly $30 less this biweekly pay period, or about $780 annually, thanks to the end of a two-year cut on payroll taxes, which fund Social Security. The tax has risen back up to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent, costing someone making $50,000 annually about $1,000 per year and a household with two high-paid workers up to $4,500.
“As a newly-graduated person, someone coming straight out of college, I don’t like the idea of having less money coming to me due to the selfish interests of people in Congress who don’t have any interest in reducing our financial problems,” Hoffman told FoxNews.com. “This is an impediment for future economic growth. It’s going to make it harder for young people like myself to get married, find a better job, you name it.”

Read the whole thing.

I, for one, hope to hear from Paul Ryan at CPAC13 just how the GOP proposes to emancipate Americans from working on the Social Security Plantation. There has got to be some way to craft a legal theory that a Ponzi scheme is a Ponzi scheme, despite the dodgy SCOTUS history.

via Sissy Willis

Category: Uncategorized
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