The Other McCain

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

Rule Five Sunday: Night Flights

Posted on | December 16, 2012 | 16 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


On time for the first time in almost a month…what next, Smell-O-Vision? (Insert usual disclaimer here)


Laughing Conservative leads off with Vida Guerra, followed by Brian Noggle with the cover girls of Forbes. Animal Magnetism chips in with Rule Five Friday and Saturday Gingermageddon, and First Street Journal continues studying Rule 5 in uniform with Looking Down From Above.


EBL has vintage Hollywood Rule 5 Christmas, Anne Hathaway, and Hot Hobbit Women this week.


El Opinador Compulsivo, evidently affected by the Argentine economic suck, was only able to contribute two links this week, but they’re both quality: Hula-Hooping The Right Way and Before There Was Penny, There Was Bridget.


A View From The Beach submitted links of such a disturbing nature that I almost decided to omit them  – but then I figured, I had to suffer through these, why should y’all catch a break? Without further ado, Fritz discourses on Mila Kunis’ Shark Teeth, Christina Perri’s Christmas Wish, A Chanukah Carol, The Unspeakable Armenian’s Pussy Dies, That’s RAAAAACIST! Serena Williams Pantomime Edition, Curb Your Dog, Go Go Silvio! and Need Gift Ideas, Girls? Not a cave girl in the lot. 🙁


Soylent Green started the week with a Googler shoutout to Korea, Monday Motivationer Cali, Tuesday Titillation Mindy, Before I Forget, Thanks, What Was It No Tits Snark Day, Humpday Hawt Continues The Theme, Falconsword Fursday Temporarily Runs Out Of Russians, Corsetcare Cantata, ICYMI: Anne Hathaway Goes Commando, Evening Awesome Niki, and Well, She Won’t Drown.


Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Kathryn Morris, his vintage babe is Dodie Stevens, Sex In Advertising features Miranda Kerr, and of course there’s the obligatory 49ers cheerleader. Dustbury serves up a pair of vintage ladies: Yasmine Bleeth and Barbara Kent, while at the Camp of the Saints, it’s Melissa Debling and the contestants for Miss Universe 2012. Not to be outdone, Three Beers Later is all for good solid American values.


The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week included Amanda Roadmen, Nicole Scherzinger, Momo Yurino, Mana Sakura, Sasha Dindaya, and Leah Nguyen; last but not least, Bahara Golestani with a Rule 5 feast!


Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s Rule 5 Sunday to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox is Saturday, December 22.

http://sonofsoylentgreen.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/monday-motivationator-cali/

Category: Rule 5

Criticism From a Friend: Can We Help Victims of Random Sarcasm Syndrome?

Posted on | December 16, 2012 | 32 Comments

“We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.”
— Liza Long, “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mom,” Gawker

My proposal for “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013″ gets an unethusiastic reaction from Cynthia Yockey:

Dear Stacy McCain and Ace want to crack down on the mentally ill. I agree that it should be easier to force people who are a danger to themselves or others into care, including psych holds. But their proposals to further humiliate and enrage men whose mental illness and inadequacies may drive them to kill are disastrous. This will only push more men to kill as a means to make the world feel the hurt and impotence that overwhelm them. The carrot makes more sense than the stick: we need to find out if there’s anything we can do to give loners and nutjobs something useful to do even if it winds up being a form of semi-incarceration doing community service.

Permit me to say — and my post last night was intended to convey this point, however obliquely — that I have enormous personal empathy with those who are dealing with psychiatric problems, and I know that Ace does, too. Direct personal experience with the mental health community (to speak as euphemistically as possible) has led me, however, toward conclusions quite at odds with the Conventional Wisdom.

Self-pity is the enemy of agency, and nothing is more important to recovering from mental illness than acquiring a sense of agency.

If you feel helpless to solve your own problems, you will either (a) descend into a bottomless slough of despair, or (b) engage in scapegoating, blaming other people for your problems. It is reaction (b) that turns otherwise harmless kooks into dangerous menaces.

Sympathy toward the mentally ill often leads to an apologetic attitude of indulgence, of tolerating anti-social behavior, and proclaiming that the poor kook just can’t help himself.

Well, guess what, folks? “Crazy” is not synonymous with “stupid,” and kooks are capable of learned responses. Sympathetic attention is a powerful carrot, to use Cynthia’s analogy, and if being a kook gets you sympathetic attention, then kookiness is thereby incentivized.

Look: Somebody has a mental health crisis and what do they get? Doctors and nurses who are paid to take care of them, to listen to them describe their problems, to supply them with medications and therapy and otherwise invest in their well-being.

They are being rewarded for being crazy. Read more

Category: Crime, Culture, Fear. Loathing.

Moe Lane Shocked By Incompetent Budgeting And Lightning Strike, But Mostly Incompetent Budgeting

Posted on | December 16, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Moe Lane, quoting IBD:

In the states with federally run exchanges, HHS will be tasked with hiring the people to run the exchanges, ensuring that insurance plans applying to be on the exchange are compliant with ObamaCare regulations, and setting up and running the websites for the exchanges. Congress has not yet appropriated the money to let HHS hire exchange employees.

…And why, exactly, should Congress appropriate more money for that? I’m sure that HHS can cut some discretionary income somewhere in order to handle the situation. Certainly the House of Representatives shouldn’t just give HHS a blank check, or anything so fiscally irresponsible; in fact, future House budget bills should deliberately not incorporate extra projected HHS exchange expenses at all. After all, HHS can take it out of the billion per year that they’ve already reserved out for exchange-based expenditures; the Department may have to tighten its belt a little, but this is the Great Recession, remember? And if the Senate doesn’t like any of this… well. They can put in any additional appropriations into their own budget, pass that and Congress can sort it all out in committee.

So, ObamaCare expected states (some of which are constrained by real-world budgeting) to set up internal bureaucracies, at their own expense. And 26 states are hoisting a middle finger at this top-down approach to generating bureaucracy.

We may need to extend The Federalist #62:

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

. . .adding something like. . .

And if the law be as the product of several hundred monkeys armed with quills and hookahs, who, having partaken deeply of the finest hashish, think they have produced Shakespeare, while actually having delivered a Barbary Pirate’s nightmare, well, then, the time for tar and feathers may again be at hand.

Category: Uncategorized

Guns Don’t Kill People …

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 48 Comments

. . . people we don’t like (and who actually have nothing to do with the crime) kill people:

Michael Graham actually did a very sensitive and thoughtful column about the Connecticut shooting, but the idiot liberal troll who hates Graham — a popular Boston talk-radio host — decided to blame him anyway, because that’s how trolls are.

Their hatreds define their existence.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has a story about the shooter’s first victim, his mother. Something that crosses my mind: You start your murder spree by shooting your own mother in the face, and end it by killing yourself — why kill 26 women and children in between?

Evil.

Adam Lanza wasn’t “autistic” or suffering from an “illness.” He was evil.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse cites research by Clayton Cramer that shows — unexpectedly! — there were fewer crimes committed by crazy people when it was easier to send crazy people to the loony bin.

Seems to me like this is scientific evidence in support of “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013.”

Category: Crime

‘He Was a Quiet Ewok, Kept to Himself a Lot. Kind of a Loner, I Guess You’d Say’

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 49 Comments

“Adam Lanza has been a weird kid since we were 5 years old. As horrible as this was, I can’t say I am surprised . . . Burn in hell, Adam.”
— Tim Dalton, neighbor quoted in the New York Daily News

Let’s face it, if I should die in headline-worthy fashion — losing control at 110 mph while being pursued by state troopers on a two-lane country road with seven cases of illegal fireworks in the back seat of a rented Mustang GT — my friends will say, “Yeah, he was always crazy.”

If I were a software mogul, I’d be “eccentric.” If I were a big-time Hollywood film director, I’d be “controversial.” As it is, I’m just plain crazy and my advocacy of “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013” might seem somewhat counter-intuitive. But the fact is, crazy people can only get along safely in a world where there are clear and understandable rules, written and enforced by sane people.

That’s why letting kooks like Maxine Waters and Alan Grayson into Congress is so dangerous. With kooks and dingbats writing the laws, the insanity could escalate beyond anyone’s mad imagination.

A society can tolerate a certain amount of craziness without endangering public safety and jeopardizing the continued existence of society itself. Unfortunately, the police in Livonia, Louisiana, weren’t interested in a philosophical discussion when they clocked me doing 82 in a 45 mph zone that night in March when I was desperately trying to make it to the next day’s Rick Santorum campaign event. So the law was enforced, my rental car was impounded and, all things considered, I was lucky they didn’t arrest me.

The Rule of Law is a magnificent thing, and the discretion left to law enforcement officials — who can exercise their judgment about whether a campaign correspondent’s deadline frenzy justifies extreme speed — has occasionally allowed me to plead my way down to a warning citation. If the cops never really brought the hammer down and fined the hell out of me, however, dangerous vehicular anarchy might ensue.

If everybody drove like me, your morning commute could turn into a cross between a demolition derby, the Talladega 500 and Mad Max.

That’s just one kind of crazy: The daredevil thrill-seeking extrovert, the sanguine id-monster who transgresses boundaries as a kind of sport.

And I’m pretty sure my kind of crazy is ultimately less dangerous than the other end of the extrovert/introvert spectrum: Moody loners, who quietly nurse their resentments and conceal their twisted insanity behind a facade of silence. Ace of Spades on Adam Lanza:

What we have here, it seems, was a Strange Young Man.
What do you do about Strange Young Men? The state can attempt an intervention, but that’s a nice, euphemistic way to say “interfere with their lives for no better reason than the fact that they act oddly.” Most people who act oddly or are socially inept are perfectly nice and law-abiding. (I’m one of them.)
On the other hand, you can strictly observe their freedom to be odd ducks, and suffer the occasional calamity when it turns out that this particular odd duck was the one you should have checked on.

Indeed, and Ace’s self-recognition of his own “socially inept” qualities is what prevents him from being dangerous, unless you’re a douchebag who should stray within range of his withering sarcasm. (Just ask Jackie Mackie Paisley Passey what that’s like.) Ace knows who he is, and has found ways of coping with it and — here’s the key insight — he doesn’t blame other people for his own unique situation.

Which really isn’t all that unique, after all. We’re all kind of crazy in our own way, and our patterns of craziness are not so distinctly individual that they cannot be categorized and labeled by diagnostic experts. But if you think back on your college days, every psychology major you ever knew was crazy, so why should we trust their expertise?

Sometimes, you just have to trust your own gut hunch about this stuff, and err on the side of caution insofar as your own safety is concerned:

“A deeply disturbed kid . . . He certainly had major issues. He was subject to outbursts . . . one of these real brainiac computer kind of kids . . . Adam had a lot of mental problems . . . a gamer who ‘rarely spoke.’ . . . He was weird . . . He was quiet.”

Doesn’t it seem like a lot of people had gut hunches about Adam Lanza, but for some reason didn’t feel like they could do anything about it? What is it about our culture that inhibits people from exercising common-sense judgment that might prevent a “deeply disturbed kid” from killing 27 people before killing himself?

In a word, liberalism. Read more

Category: Fear. Loathing.

Death Porn Media Victim Unexpectedly Negative About The Encounter

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Read the whole post from Mama by the Bay. A sample:

But you know what I do remember?
YOU were there. YOU, with your enormous video cameras. YOU, with your microphones poking into the bubble of grief that grew bigger as we waited for our parents to find us. YOU, with your horrible questions about what had happened, had we known Mike, had we seen anything? No parents there yet, just children. No teachers, just children. And you.
Some of us screamed at you to leave us alone. Some of us answered your sick questions, because you were the grown-ups, and we were the kids. I don’t even know how you got there so fast, before our parents, before anyone else could swoop us back inside and ask you to leave. But there you were, with your vans and your lights, asking us how it felt to know that another child had been killed. How it felt to be scared. How it felt to wonder about the names of everyone else, to be desperately hoping for more information, while feeling terrified about what the truth would really be.
I remember you. I remember your names. I remember what channel you were from. I remember that you filled the parking lot at Mike’s funeral. You stood in a line outside of the door, devouring the footage of crying football players running away from the service, like rabid hungry wolves. You replayed the video of Mike being loaded into the ambulance, over and over and over again, even when people wrote to you and asked you to stop.

In defense of the Death Porn Media, if we don’t cram some sand in everyone, the seed pearls of the next atrocity may not be sufficient. Picking up the pieces may be hard, but fomenting the next round is harder still.

The media always gets a pass, unless they form a heavy metal band, which can bring them under attack for inciting violence. Rap music still gets the raaaaacist pass, however.

via Beregond

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

Category: Crime, Culture, Journalism, Media Bias

FMJRA 2.0: I Can’t Stay Long

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Accuse the Accusers: @scrowder Gets the Left’s ‘Plate Glass Window’ Treatment

BREAKING VIDEO: MI Union Thugs Greet Right-To-Work Law With Thuggery And Cupcakes, But Mostly Thuggery

CONNECTICUT SCHOOL SHOOTING UPDATE: Death Toll 27; Gunman Now Identified as 20-Year-Old Adam Lanza

‘Through a Plate Glass Window’: How Liberal Media De-Legitimize Dissent

Fiscal Clif Bar

‘They Should All Be in Prison’

They’re Still Hating Breitbart

June 3: Bill Schmalfeldt Begins Cyberstalking Aaron Walker

Sen. Rubio Weekly GOP Address

In Case Our Orwellian Reality Had Eluded You

‘At a Time of My Choosing’

FMJRA 2.0: Day Late & A Dollar Short II

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.10.12

Two Weeks Until Christmas and
Three Weeks Until ‘Fiscal Cliff’

Obama Has Consequences

REPORT: @NadiaNaffe’s Lawsuit Against @Patterico Flounders in L.A. Hearing

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.11.12

No, We Can’t.

SHOOTING AT OREGON MALL UPDATE: Eyewitness Tells TV Station Shooter Was Teen in Hockey Mask

Rule 5 Tuesday

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.12.12

#WarOnWomen Democrat Congressman’s Son Pleads Guilty to Assaulting Girlfriend

AFL-CIO OMG WTF?

2022 Election Results

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.13.12

Mad Scientist Calls for ‘Murderous Rampage’ Against Watchdog Group

On Journalism and Walter Duranty

Naked Celebrity News Update (Or, the Parable of the Prodigal Upskirt)

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.14.12

Left’s ‘Tent Truthers’ Claim Union Attack on AFP in Lansing Was an ‘Inside Job’

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (10, the hard way)
  2. (tied) Lonely Conservative and Daley Gator (7)
  3. Hogewash (6)
  4. Jackie Wellfonder (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next Saturday’s FMJRA will be Friday, December 21.

 

Category: FMJRA Award

DeMint Hasn’t Departed Senate Yet, Already Placing Markers

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Breitbart talked to Jim DeMint on the cusp of ejecting from the Senate.

The Republican Party used to be very good at targeting voters. We asked the Senator what he thinks happened to the party’s ability to do this well:

Well, I think we tend to put political people into positions where we should have CEOs who know how to run things. When you’re running a big organization its not the time for red meat for the grass roots. Its the time to make good people around you with good data. And, there are some groups out there beginning to do that…the expertise is out there.

In general, and the Sandy Hook reporting fits my amorphous theory: appeals these days are purely emotional, as though our leadership has either

  • lost faith in the ability of the people to reason, or
  • is deliberately undermining the ability of people to reason, as this may make them more docile.

So, what I crave from Mr. DeMint at Heritage is a renewed emphasis on reform. Put the facts out there, make the case for a responsible government, in contrast with the current clown car on parade.

We The People are deeply aware that we have, as a whole, shanked it badly for decades. Let’s have a dispassionate, non-hormonal come-to-Beavis meeting, and set ourselves on a course to fix it, knowing that we’re talking about a decades-long project.

via Jewish Odysseus

Category: GOP
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