The Other McCain

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

Let’s Blame Crowder

Posted on | November 12, 2012 | 11 Comments

I mean, why not? Instead of this finger-pointing and blame-gaming and circular firing squad, let’s just grab hold of some random schmoe and make him the designated scapegoat for all our despair, rage, envy and frustration. Stephen Crowder is the new Emmanuel Goldstein!

Category: Video

When You’re Down to Your Last $4 Million, Hallucinogens May Seem Fun

Posted on | November 12, 2012 | 17 Comments

Anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee once had what is colloquially known as “f–k you money,” but suffered a reversal of fortune:

John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million. Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks.
“I had no clue,” he said, “that there would be this tandem collapse.”

What’s an erstwhile multimillionaire to do? Move to Belize!

He has spent the intervening years building a new life for himself on the coast of Central America. He has just auctioned off the last of his sprawling properties back in the United States and sold or given away many of his possessions. He has taken a huge financial hit, he says, but that’s okay. He has enough to fund his latest passion, his gift to the future: developing new kinds of antibiotics from herbs found deep in the rain forests of Belize. . . .
He describes the economic injustice of the developing world, the imbalances of education and capital, and how tapping the biodiversity of the rain forest for natural cures will help address those problems. “The product is something the world desperately needs, or will need, within a few years,” he says, “as our last lines of antibiotic defense are breached by the ever-growing ranks of drug-resistant bacteria.”

Hmmmm. Does this sound vaguely . . . flaky? Yeah, it sure does. And when the going gets flaky, the flaky get going:

As dawn broke over the interior of Belize on April 30, an elite team of 42 police and soldiers, including members of the country’s SWAT team and Special Forces, converged on a compound on the banks of a jungle river. Within, all was quiet. The police called out through a bullhorn that they were there looking for illegal firearms and narcotics, then stormed in, breaking open doors with sledgehammers, handcuffing four security guards, and shooting a guard dog dead. The compound’s owner, a 67-year-old white American man, emerged bleary-eyed from his bedroom with a 17-year-old Belizean girl. The police cuffed him and took him away, along with his guards.
Inside, the cops found $20,000 in cash, a lab stocked with chemistry equipment, and a small armory’s worth of firearms: seven pump-action shotguns, one single-action shotgun, two 9-mm. pistols, 270 shotgun cartridges, 30 9-mm. pistol rounds, and twenty .38 rounds. Vexingly for the police, all of this was actually legal. The guns were licensed and the lab appeared not to be manufacturing drugs but an herbal antibacterial compound.
After fourteen hours, the police let the man and his employees go, but remained convinced they had missed something. Why else would a wealthy American playboy hole himself up out here, far from the tourist zone on the coast, by a navigable river that happened to connect, twenty miles downstream, with a remote corner of the Mexican border? Why else would he hire, as head of security, a rogue cop who’d once plotted to steal guns from the police and sell them to drug traffickers?

You really should read the whole thing, including the part about how McAfee, 66, moved to Belize with his 28-year-old girlfriend (whom he started dating when she was still a teenager) and then developed a business partnership with a 31-year-old Harvard biologist, Allison Adonizio, who rebuffed his crude and weird advances:

He showed her websites devoted to various kinds of outré kink, and became increasingly open, when his girlfriend Irwin was out of town, about bringing prostitutes off the street and into his bedroom. (One day Adonizio came upon “literally a garbage bag full of Viagra.”) After she’d broken up with a boyfriend on the mainland, “he kept trying to set me up with these weird friends that were into polyamory and crazy kinky stuff,” she said. “He tried to convince me that love doesn’t exist, so I might as well just give in and sleep with all these crazy circus folk.” He liked to hint that he had connections to dangerous criminals, implying that he could have her ex-boyfriend killed: “I have someone who can take care of that,” he told her.
When at last she decided she’d had enough and asked McAfee to buy out her share of the company, he exploded, she says, screaming and lunging at her. She fled and locked herself in the lab. McAfee pounded on the door and shouted obscenities. Afraid for her safety, Adonizio called a friend to escort her off the property. The next day, she boarded a flight back home to Pennsylvania. . . .
“As soon as I started questioning his motives, he turned on me and became a horrible, horrible person, controlling, manipulative and dangerous,” she told me. “I’m thankful that I got out with my life.”
In the wake of Adonizio’s departure, McAfee grew more isolated. An investor who’d wanted to back the anti-quorum-sensing venture backed away. A joint-venture agreement with Dr. Louis Zabaneh, one of the country’s most powerful men, fell apart. The hangers-on drifted away. After 14 years, Irwin left him.

So, if you were a gambler, would you bet that things got better or worse after that? If you bet on “worse,” you’re a winner:

Antivirus pioneer John McAfee is on the run from murder charges, Belize police say. According to Marco Vidal, head of the national police force’s Gang Suppression Unit, McAfee is a prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was gunned down Saturday night at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

The report goes on to explain McAfee’s downward spiral into oblivion:

In July of 2010, shortly before Allison Adonizio pulled the plug on their quorum-sensing project and fled the country, McAfee began posting on a drug-focused Russian-hosted message board called Bluelight about his attempts to purify the psychoactive compounds colloquially known as “bath salts.”
Writing under the name “stuffmonger,” a handle he has used on other online message boards, McAfee posted more than 200 times over the next nine months about his ongoing quest to purify psychoactive drugs from compounds commercially available over the internet. “I’m a huge fan of MDPV,” he wrote. “I think it’s the finest drug ever conceived, not just for the indescribable hypersexuality, but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown.”
Elsewhere, he described his pursuit of “super perv powder” and warned about the dangers of handling the freebase version of the drug: “I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst paranoia of my life.” He recommended that the most effective way to take a dose is via rectal insertion . . .

Ah, so the software genius and former multimillionaire becomes a crazed and lonely recluse in a Central American jungle, shoving weird hallucinogenic drugs up his bunghole, suffers some kind of psychotic breakdown, shoots a man and takes it on the run, an international fugitive wanted on a murder charge.

They say that the difference between “crazy” and “eccentric” is that eccentric people are rich. John McAfee used to be eccentric.

 

Category: Uncategorized

Ace of Spades: Eric Holder Is Obviously Lying About the Petraeus Affair

Posted on | November 12, 2012 | 18 Comments

The logic is impeccable: Holder’s FBI discovers the CIA chief is dangerously compromised and doesn’t tell the President?

Bovine excrement!

Therefore, the alternative hypothesis that Holder was negligent in not telling the President is merely an interesting counterfactual along the lines of, “What if Lee’s army had AK-47s at Gettysburg?”

We know Holder is lying. The question is, “Why is he lying?”

Category: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Military, Scandal, Sex

The Triumph of Androgyny

Posted on | November 12, 2012 | 30 Comments

“O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it!“

Katie Hill and her boyfriend Arin Andrews share a unique bond — they were both born as the opposite sex.
Katie, 18, spent the first 15 years of her life as Luke, son of a Marine colonel, while Arin, 16, was born a girl called  Emerald who excelled at ballet dancing and won beauty contests.
Both struggled with their sexuality all through their childhoods and were teased and bullied but their lives were  changed when they both began hormone therapy and later met at a trans support  group in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and instantly fell in love. . . .
High-school student Arin undergoes  testosterone shots to give him the more masculine shape he’s craved his whole life. Meanwhile high-school graduate Katie, 18, has finished her female hormone course — oestrogen shots — which helped her to  develop natural breasts with no silicone implants.
Katie, who has legally been a female since  she was 15, believes she was born with naturally high levels of oestrogen and  was teased as a boy throughout school for having small AA-cup breasts.
An anonymous donor was so touched by her story they paid for her £25,000 ($40,000) gender reassignment surgery just four  days after her 18th birthday on May 16, 2012.

 

Welcome to the The Rocky Horror Picture Show as reality.

 

Category: Culture, Gays, Sex

Please Don’t Tickle Me, Elmo — Or: What’s the Muppet Age of Consent?

Posted on | November 12, 2012 | 17 Comments

The punch lines write themselves — “WHAT DID BIG BIRD KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?” — but of course, this isn’t a joke:

The man who voices the puppet of Elmo on Sesame Street has taken leave amid allegations he had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy.
Kevin Clash, 52, has taken a leave of absence from the popular children’s show after the programme’s lawyers were contacted by a 23-year-old man who claims he had a sexual relationship with the puppeteer seven years ago, when he was aged 16.
TMZ, who reported the allegations, said that Mr Clash had admitted he had a relationship with the man, but only after the accuser was an adult and said the accusations were both false and defamatory.
‘I had a relationship with [the accuser]. It was between two consenting adults and I am deeply saddened that he is trying to make it into something it was not,’ said Mr Clash . . .

So, Elmo admits he’s a gay Muppet who pursues sex with men less than half his age, but insists that he scrupulously avoids sex with those who are under the age of legal consent, so that the day before your 18th birthday, you’re strictly off-limits, but the minute you are legally an adult, you’re fair game for the Furry Red Humping Machine.

Such lofty moral standards . . .

Category: Gays, Scandal, Sex

The Republican Clown Car Campaign

Posted on | November 12, 2012 | 115 Comments

Susannah Fleetwood has a long critique of the 2012 campaign today at Right Wing News that makes an important point early:

Mitt Romney out-performed eleven out fifteen of the Republican Senatorial candidates, and the four that he didn’t out-perform were from very blue states that Republicans never win. . . .
In other words, if the problem was that Romney was a weak candidate (and the Republican brand was in good shape), then those numbers would be flipped the other way around. What the numbers tell us is that Mitt Romney performed well in those states in spite of the Republican brand–not because of it (people who came out to vote against Akin still voted for Romney).

This fact must be explained by anyone who wants to scapegoat Mitt Romney, to say that mistakes by the campaign or weaknesses of the candidate entirely explain what went wrong in 2012. If the Republican Party were generally in good shape, it would not be attracting to its ranks and nominating to high office such catastrophic disasters as Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who lost Senate races in states that Romney won.

Nor can we blame this debacle on the “GOP Establishment.” Susannah quotes me (from a long phone conversation we had while I was driving home from Ohio) about the problems of “selfishness masquerading as populism” and people who weren’t “task-oriented or mission-focused.” You saw this, for example, in the case of Akin, who refused to resign the GOP nomination even after such eminent conservatives as Mark Levin urged him to quit for the good of the country. Akin selfishly clung to the nomination (which he’d won with just 36% of the primary vote) as if he owned it, as if he were the living embodiment of the Republican Party grassroots and anyone who criticized him was part of the “Beltway elite.”

When I say that people weren’t “task-oriented or mission-focused,” I refer among other things to people who let their leftover disgruntlement from the GOP primary campaign distract them from the key task of 2012: Defeat Barack Obama at all hazards.

Look: Mitt Romney wasn’t my dream candidate. I went all-in for Herman Cain and, when that campaign ended, I went all-in for Rick Santorum, because I saw them as best positioned to stop Mitt from becoming the “It’s His Turn” nominee. But once the alternatives were eliminated, I put aside my dissatisfaction and got in step. (See my May 7 column, “Mitt’s Men Don’t Plan to Fail,” which includes a few sharp hindsight ironies.) Meanwhile, however, there were devotees of various failed Republican primary challengers who couldn’t turn loose of the anti-Romney arguments they had parroted for months, and who continued bitch, bitch, bitching all the way to November.

If selfishness and stupidity are “True Conservative” principles — if an unwillingness to engage in broad-based coalition politics is celebrated as a virtue — then we are truly doomed. Puerile gestures and egocentric bullying are incompatible with effective teamwork. To borrow a phrase from Elbert Hubbard, “Get Out or Get In Line.”

OK, so much for my lecture. Now go read Susannah Fleetwood’s article, “Romney Lost Because Republicans Behaved Like Undisciplined Clowns.”

UPDATE: In the comments, I found myself accused of being part of the “Establishment,” engaged in “blame the base” messaging. Whatever. Some people will not listen to arguments that are not personally flattering to them, that do not elevate to a pedestal their particular beliefs. Evidence that does not confirm their beliefs must be ignored or rationalized, and the bearers of bad news must be demonized. Psychological defense mechanisms are not a political philosophy. People who are incapable of self-criticism are incapable of self-improvement. If you cannot learn from failure, you are doomed to repeat your failures. Attempting to externalize blame, to abdicate responsibility for failure by reference to convenient scapegoats, is not conservatism, it is narcissism.

UPDATE II: I’m grateful to Mark Steyn for this analysis:

Regardless of what kind of Republican you are, the electorate was antipathetic to you.
In other words, whatever the weaknesses of a supposedly weak candidate, the party was weaker. With hindsight, that first debate performance appears to have made Mitt sufficiently likeable for a narrow slice of voters to overlook the R after his name. The candidate was less of a problem than the Republican brand.

Dead on target: The Bush-era “brand damage” problem, which conservatives hoped had been vanquished by the Tea Party uprising and the “Republican Mandate” of 2010, came back with a vengeance. The problem is not conservatism, nor is it “centrism,” but rather the success of the Democrat-Media Complex in making the Republican label a negative symbol. To the extent that various GOP candidates or spokesmen cooperated in that project — e.g., “legitimate rape” — then they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

To put it another way, the problem is political and cultural, rather than ideological, and we need to learn to distinguish these categories. Constant invocations of ideology — the claim that any Republican we disagree with is guilty of insufficient fidelity to conservative principle — tend to sow suspicion within our ranks and undermine effective cooperation. This is not to say that there are no RINO sellouts, or that the Charlie Crist/Richard Lugar types don’t do damage to the GOP, but rather to say that ideological deviation cannot be blamed for every problem in the Republican Party.

 

 


Category: Conservatism 101, Election 2012

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 11.12.12

Posted on | November 12, 2012 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Lawmakers Want Probe Of Petraeus Investigation

General David Petraeus and Linda Broadwell in happier times

Senator Feinstein, Congressman King smell a rat, want investigation timeline


Bipartisan Agreement On Fiscal Cliff Compromise
GOP willing to consider increasing pain of the AMT


GOP Opens Door To Immigration Reform
Boehner, Rubio call for comprehensive immigration reform after Hispanics go for Obama 3:1



POLITICS
The Mayor In The Eye

Mayor Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s fumbling response to Sandy and the “empathy deficit”


Veterans Unsure How To Accept Your Thanks

Project ORCA: Fail Whale

120,000 In NY/NJ Still Without Power After Storms

Thirty Years After Unveiling, “The Wall”  Draws Vets And Their Loved Ones

GOP Post-Mortem: The Circular Firing Squad Convenes

Can Obama Schmooze His Way To Bipartisan Consensus?

Grauniad To America: Your Constitution Sucks



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Prices Drift Amid Fiscal Cliff Uncertainty: NYMEX $85.84, Brent $108.92
Europe Haunted By The Greek Debt “Monster”
Asian Stocks Drop As Japan GDP Shrinks; Euro At Lowest In Two Months
SAS To Sell Assets, Cut 800 Jobs To Bolster Finances
Raley’s, Union Return To Bargaining Table
Bakery Workers Picket In Sacramento As Hostess Struggles
Dismal Trade, Production Data Deepen Fears About Indian Economy
HTC, Apple Settle iPhone Patent Complaints
Ballmer Says Surface Sales Off To Modest Start
Skype For WinPhone 8 Released
UK Court Slams Apple Over Samsung Notice
Windows Defender Stops 85% Of Common Malware
Activision Announces Live In-Game Streaming For “Black Ops II”
Walmart Fires Workers Who Smashed iPads On Camera



SPORTS
Saints End Falcons’ Unbeaten Streak, 31-27

Atlanta head coach Mike Smith

New Orleans takes advantage of Falcons’ multiple failures

Cutler Gets Bell Rung As Bears Fall To Texas 13-6

Lakers Bid Phil Jackson Goodbye, Sign Mike D’Antoni

Brawl Erupts In Garage After Bowyer/Gordon Wreck

NHL, Union Take Lunch Break; Still No Cure For Lockout

Vick Or No Vick, Eagles Have No Shot To Turn Their Season Around

Jimmie Johnson’s Title Hopes Take Big Hit At Phoenix; Keselowski Leads Chase With One To Go

Dodgers Bid $25.7 Million For ROK Lefty

One Year After Kidnapping, Wilson Ramos In Good Spirits As Rehab Goes Well



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Bieber And Gomez Split Up

Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber

Apparently it is a matter of trust


Kat Von D Breaks Up With DJ Deadmau5

Justin Timberlake & Jessica Biel Lend Helping Hand To Sandy Victims

Halle Berry Shut Down In Custody Battle – Daughter To Stay In US

Lindsay Lohan Settles Out Of Court With Limo Company

Fired Lakers Coach Drowns Sorrows At Chick-Fil-A

Kirstie Alley Says Swayze, Travolta Relationships Not Sexual

Rosemarie DeWitt, Patton Oswalt Join Sorkin’s “Newsroom”

Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson Among Additions To “Lego” Movie Voice Cast


< FOREIGNERS
Syrian Opposition Signs Unity Agreement
Turmoil Spreads At BBC As Two More Executives Step Aside
Earthquake Collapses Bridge, Mine In Northern Burma
Politicians Split On Possible Gaza Ground Operation
Hollande Pledges Support As ECOWAS Meets On Mali Intervention Force
Israel Fires On Syria After Army Post Mortared
PRC Criticizes Dalai Lama Over Island, Immolation Comments
Morsi To Meet Abbas Regarding Escalation In Gaza
Iran VP Threatens To Break Obama’s “Grasping Hands”



BLOGS & STUFF
American Power: Canada Lures Energy Workers From US
Valley Of The Shadow: Welcome To The Status Quo
Power Line: All In, Benghazi Edition
Gateway Pundit: Broadwell Reveals Secret Prison Within Benghazi Annex
Belmont Club: Feet Of Clay
NRO Corner: DOJ Knew About Petraeus’ Affair This Summer
Lonely Conservative: The Enemies Within
Conservatives4Palin: Allen West Election Still Waiting For Overseas, Military Ballots
Atlas Shrugs: Gaza Jihadis Pound Southern Israel; Over 80 Rockets Launched
Legal Insurrection: Post-Election Breitbarting

Category: Live at Five

Bizarre Drama Surrounds Teenage ‘Modern Family’ Starlet Ariel Winter

Posted on | November 11, 2012 | 12 Comments

If you’re like me, your TV viewing is limited almost entirely to news, more news, documentaries and old movies, which means you don’t watch network primetime shows, and therefore have never heard of Ariel Winter. She is a 14-year-old actress who stars in the ABC comedy Modern Family, which is one of the network’s most popular shows, with an audience of more than 12 million viewers.

Like most of you — we’re all political news junkies here, right? — I was only vaguely aware that this TV show existed and had never heard of Ariel Winter at all until last week when the tabloid sites like TMZ started going nuts about an ugly custody battle involving Winter, her mother and Winter’s older sister.

A California court ordered Ariel removed from her family home because of accusations that her mother physically abused her:

[O]n October 3rd, after a guardianship hearing, a judge determined the allegations  that Ariel was being physically and emotionally abused by her mother Chrystal Workman were serious enough that the judge placed  Ariel in a temporary guardianship with her older sister Shanelle  Workman. . . .
Ironically, we’ve learned Shanelle suffered the  same alleged abuse as Ariel.  Nearly two decades ago, the Department of  Children and Family Services removed her from Chrystal’s home based on similar  abuse allegations. Law enforcement sources tell us … D.C.F.S. placed Shanelle  in foster care for more than 2 years. She never went back to her mother.

OK, this is serious stuff. But there is another side of the story: Ariel has reportedly been dating an 18-year-old actor named Cameron Palatas and, according to Ariel’s mother, the two young lovebirds were, um, inappropriately intimate:

The mother of Modern Family star Ariel Winter filed an incident report with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department after she allegedly caught her 14-year-old daughter engaged in a sexual act with an 18-year-old man.
The police filing — obtained exclusively by Celebuzz — details “suspicious circumstances, possible unlawful sex with minor,” according to the officer who spoke to Chris Workman, Winter’s mother, on October 6. . . .
“On 09-24-12, at approximately 2200-hours, she walked in the guest bedroom of her home and found her daughter, Ariel Winter Workman, in bed with boyfriend, [Name Redacted],” the three-page report claims.
Workman told the Sheriff explicit details about what she saw when she walked into the room at her Montrose, Calif. home. . . .
“According to the informant, Ariel and [Name Redacted] have been boyfriend/girlfriend for approximately 5 months. She has attempted to break them up because of their age difference.” . . .
In an earlier statement on Thursday, Workman claimed her teenage daughter’s relationship with the man, four years her senior, was the real reason behind the young actress’ decision to ask a judge to temporarily place her in her sister’s care. . . .
Workman told Celebuzz she “caught them engaging in behavior that I feel my daughter is too young mentally and physically to understand.”
“I put a stop to it immediately,” Workman said.
“I filed charges against him because legally he is an adult and if he wants to engage in adult behavior with a minor than he should also be ready to suffer adult consequences for his actions and poor judgment.”

The gossip site makes a big deal of not naming Ariel’s boyfriend, but it’s not exactly a secret, per this Newark Star-Ledger headline:

More ‘Family’ drama: Ariel Winter’s
boyfriend Cameron Palatas targeted by mom

So we have Ariel accusing her mom of abuse and Ariel’s mom accusing Palatas of robbing the cradle, and all of this lurid stuff involving the young star of one of TV’s most popular sitcoms is being played out daily in the gossip headlines.

TMZ seems intent on making Ariel’s mom the villain in the story, implying that she just made up the sex allegation after she lost custody, but as a parent — and having once also been a teenage boy — I’m decidedly more sympathetic to the mother’s side of the dispute.

All in all, this story does not bode well for Ariel Winter’s future and, having watched similar dramas play out in the cases of former teen stars like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, I’d say we’re just a few years away from seeing headlines along the lines of “Ariel Winter gets another DUI” and “Ariel Winter goes back to rehab.”

On TV, Modern Family is a comedy. In real life, not so much.

Category: Celebrities, Scandal
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