The Other McCain

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

Semi-Literate Man Writes Book ‘Appealing to the Better Nature of Pedosexuals’

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 12 Comments

He’s just a disinterested advocate for child safety:

Thousands of people on the Internet may be protesting Amazon’s decision to continue sales of a self-published book on pedophilia, but at least one person stands by its decision: the author.
Philip R. Greaves II, author of the electronic book, “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover’s Code of Conduct” . . . argued that his critics are misunderstanding the point of his book.
“They’re accusing me of wanting to hurt children. They’re accusing me of encouraging pedophilia and all these other things. But that’s not why I wrote the book,” the 47-year-old from Pueblo, Colo., said. . . .
“This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certain rules for these adults to follow,” the author wrote in the product description. “I hope to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter [sic] sentences should they ever be caught.”

Note that Greaves (a/k/a, “Ray”) misspells “lighter” and that he misspelled “variety” in the description of his previous book, The Grand Book of the Godless and Free: The Fall of Faith and the Rise of Reason:

Phillip R. Greaves, 2nd. is a rogue scholar with respect to the topics of religion, sexuality and politics. “The Grand Book Of The Godless And Free,” is a collection of essays regarding these general subjects with titles exploring the nature of “God” to parenthood for single-gender families. This is a contraversial volume presenting the often unique views of the author. Thus far, everyone who has read this work has been impressed by its wit and depth. Ray (as he is more commonly known) began his path to knowledge and enlightenment at the ripe old age of ten. When he left the Baptist tradition in which he had been raised and sought-out a new faith beginning with his studies at the local library. He was already familar with sex by the age of seven. Soon he met a varity [sic] of people from foreign lands and cultures, from whom he acquired much additional knowledge. Later he joined the Christian cult of the Way Ministry, followed by his joining the Baha’i Faith at the age of eighteen. Next, Ray joined the U.S. Army. Eight years later he embraced the view of rational disbelief, which he is happy to share and discuss with the world. Mr. Greaves is an admirer of Aristotle and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

Why are these misspellings and the general clumsiness of Greaves’ writing relevant? Because Greaves is not a professional writer.

He does not write for money. His book is not commercial product. Ergo, he is an amateur, whose writings are the product of deeply felt personal beliefs in (a) the non-existence of God, and (b) sex with children.

Greaves himself says that he was “familiar with sex by the age of seven” and we have reason to believe that he thinks that’s just hunky-dory. He gave an interview to The Smoking Gun:

In an interview today, the author at the center of a controversy about Amazon’s sale of a self-published pedophile’s guide told TSG that he has sold exactly one copy of the book and revealed that he was involuntarily hospitalized following a “mental breakdown.”
Noting that, “I have what they call manic depression,” Phillip Greaves, 47, said that he himself was not a pedophile and said that “the best advice I can give a pedophile is accept that masturbation is your best friend.” . . .
Speaking from his Colorado home, Greaves said that he was introduced to sex at age seven by a 10-year-old girl. “I learned about oral sex that day,” he recalled. Greaves said that he continued to engage in sexual activity with other children until he was 15 . . .
Greaves denied ever being arrested, but revealed that his mental troubles “came to a head about three years ago” when he suffered a “mental collapse.” . . .
The breakdown was so severe, said Greaves, that he was involuntarily hospitalized for about nine months, and spent some of that time in a state mental facility. When he emerged from that hospitalization, Greaves recalled that he decided to go back to writing, which he first started doing while in eighth grade. . . .
He said [criticisms of his book] were based only on the book’s title since, “I’ve sold one copy so far.”

Please understand that I’m not arguing for banning online writing by psychotic perverts — where would DailyKos be without them? — but I am saying that this points to the truth of Samuel Johnson’s maxim: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

In the age of online DIY publishing, anyone can become an author. But what is the point of publishing a book that no one will pay to read?

But why bring Ted Rall into this?

On the one hand, everybody hates media “gatekeepers” — the publishers, editors and others who exercise control over what gets into print or onto the broadcast airwaves. Yet free-for-all amateurism has its pitfalls, too. The profit motive is often said to inspire evil, but most evil tends to be a not-for-profit enterprise.

Exit question: What will Objectivists say about being endorsed by Phillip “Ray” Greaves?

Category: Sex

‘Keith [Olbermann] Tended to Wear Out His Welcome at Stations and Networks’

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 5 Comments

So says Pat Sajak, who played midwife in the Rosemary’s Baby tale of Olbermann’s career by giving him his first network TV appearance in 1989:

Category: Celebrities, MSNBC, Video

Yglesias: Asking NIH to Get By On 95.7% of Its Current Budget? The Sky Is Falling!

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 7 Comments

“Dire consequences,” the Harvardian at Think Progress says, echoing predictions of “devastating” results from . . . uh, the director of the agency whose budget might get cut by 4.3%.

No matter how serious the deficit, there will always be intellectuals who tell us that any proposal to reduce federal spending — even by a measly 4.3% — is devastating, catastrophic, apocalyptic, whatever scary adjective comes to mind.

Thus the draft proposal of President Obama’s bipartisan deficit-reduction commission is “unacceptable” to Nancy Pelosi, who perhaps doesn’t realize that she recently lost the power to declare what is or is not “acceptable” in Washington.

Allahpundit recommends the collection of “apocalyptic quotes from hysterical progressives” aggregated by ABC’s Jake Tapper. But Tapper also quotes Grover Norquist saying “this commission is merely an excuse to raise net taxes on the American people.”

Ace invokes P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores.

UPDATE: A belated welcome to Instapundit readers. By now you know that the White House has given in on the “Bush tax cuts” — which thereby become the “Obama tax cuts.” Did you know, however, that you could have made a profit of more than 17% in six months if you had listened to Glenn Beck?

Category: Economics

Grow or Die

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 2 Comments

There is no end to innovation, and those who fall behind the curve are doomed to decline, as witness the eclipse of Slate:

It was born in 1996, which is not just pre-Twitter, but pre-Google, a time when people got online by opening the CDs AOL sent them in the mail. . . .
[Slate honcho Jacob Weisberg said:] “We basically invented blogging. And sort of the whole tone of the Web, which to me comes out of email more than anything else, a much more colloquial, personal form of diction. I think Slate was the publication that really, more than anyone else, developed that voice, which in some ways has now infiltrated back into print.”

Montgomery Ward, Sears & Roebuck, W.T. Grant, J.C. Penney — all were once retail leaders, now eclipsed by Wal-Mart.

The same principle holds true in the online world. Five million hits? It’s a good start. That’s all it is.

UPDATE: The Rhetorican points out that Salon is still bleeding red ink after 15 years online. Hey, when you post a quarterly loss of more than $800,000 and that’s an improvement . . .

In its most recent SEC filings, Salon Media Group showed losses of $817,000 in the second quarter of this year, an improvement on the $1.255 million the company lost during the same period of last year. Including physical property, Salon currently has total assets of $2.027 million, but the company also has $9.477 million in liabilities for a total deficit of $7.45 million.
For now, Salon is staying afloat with the help of loans from investors. Between now and March 31, 2011, the end of the fiscal year, Salon “anticipates continued but reduced operating losses.” Salon’s second quarter earnings report includes this eye-poppingly vague admission: “Salon estimates it will require between $500 and $1 million in additional funding to meet its operating needs for the balance of its fiscal year. If planned revenues are less than expected, or if planned expenses are more than expected, the cash shortfall may be higher, which will result in a commensurate increase in required financing.”

BTW, if there are any investors out there who feel an overwhelming urge to lose $272,000 a month publishing a Webzine, please drop me an e-mail. I’d be glad to advise you on money-losing opportunities in the online world.

Or just hit the tip jar and we’ll call it a “consulting fee.”

Category: Blogging

Patterico’s Latest Gambit: Trying to Pit Michelle Malkin Against Mark Levin?

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 20 Comments

More unfortunate fallout today from the Delaware Senate campaign, a subject about which I know a lot but have said relatively little in recent weeks. To explain my side of the story:

From early October onward, I tried to turn my attention (and readers’ attention) to House races. The Senate campaigns were getting plenty of coverage on Fox News, talk radio and other media, and I thought it a far more valuable service to highlight GOP House candidates. Certainly there were plenty of people — pro-Christine, anti-Christine and otherwise — covering the Delaware Senate campaign after the primary, and it didn’t seem like a wise investment of my time to keep adding my two cents’ worth merely for the sake of being “part of the discussion.”

So I shut up about it, even though I had O’Donnell’s campaign manager, Matt Moran, on speed-dial and could have been all-Christine-all-the-time 24/7 if I wanted to. After a couple of weeks of post-primary coverage, my main contribution was to feature two O’Donnell campaign mailers:

And, after she debuted her first “I Am Not a Witch” TV ad, I made one complaint:

It seemed to me that the O’Donnell campaign was making a strategic error. Being strictly a neutral and objective journalistic observer (nudge, nudge), I’m not in the business of running people’s campaigns for them. Nevertheless, while talking to Matt Moran the day after the Delaware primary — when O’Donnell’s upset victory over Mike Castle had opened the floodgate of online donations — I suggested that the first order of business was to get on air as quickly as possible with TV ads attacking Coons for his tax-hiking record. 

Maybe I used the phrase “sc0rched earth” and alluded to the fire-bombing of Dresden.

But this was a neutral objective fact, you see: It was already apparent that the media was trying to make the campaign about Christine O’Donnell’s personal biography — every wacky thing she’d ever said or done — and what she needed to do was to change the subject. Make the campaign about Chris Coons and his record in public office.

Chris Coons raised taxes three times in four years.

Anybody who couldn’t turn that nine-word sentence into a brutally effective attack ad has no business in politics. As I wrote on Oct. 5:

Having some relevant experience with video production, I bet it wouldn’t take 48 hours for anyone with access to Final Cut Pro to turn those basic facts into a hard-hitting 30-second ad. And had I been in charge of the O’Donnell campaign, saturating the Delaware TV market with that attack ad would have been Priority One. Yet here we are three weeks after the primary, and it hasn’t been done yet.

It wasn’t that the “I’m You” ads by Fred Davis were bad, you see, it was just that those ads were the opposite of what the O’Donnell campaign needed, strategically. To hell with trying to improve her “image” — make the campaign about the opponent’s vulnerabilities.

OK, so that’s a long preamble intended to show that there is at least one valid alternative hypothesis to the now widely held view that O’Donnell was doomed to defeat from Day One.

Maybe it is true that Delaware is such a deeply “Blue” state that a worthless RINO like Mike Castle was the only hope for a Republican to get elected there. Or maybe O’Donnell was so intrinsically flawed as a candidate that, regardless of ideological issues, she would have lost no matter what. But I think we need to consider the possibility that O’Donnell could have won — or at least run a much more competitive race — had her campaign adopted the Fire-Bombing-of-Dresden strategy.

Having established that alternative view, now let’s look at the latest eruption of Patterico’s weeks-long jihad against Mark Levin. Patterico:

I see commenters on sites like mine saying that we need to move past the whole O’Donnell/Castle controversy. And, it does seem to be getting a little old, huh? Yet there are demagogues like Levin, together with certain bloggers who are desperate to get Levin’s attention, who seem content to pick at this scab, with no signs of letting up. Do their readers and listeners tell them to move on? I see little evidence of that. . . .

But then there’s this:

Conservatives ought to be able to disagree without being at each other’s throats. And it is possible. Michelle Malkin, for example, endorsed O’Donnell, but explicitly said that she was not throwing conservatives overboard for disagreeing with her. I felt the same way about Michelle: I thought the candidate she was endorsing was dishonest and highly unlikely to win, but I also know that Michelle is no dummy. She knew the flaws of her candidate going in, and chose to endorse her despite the fact that the candidate wasn’t perfect — because she thought there were sound reasons to do so. Michelle and I can emerge from something like that respecting each other. Someone like Mark Levin, who twists the facts and plays the authenticity game? Not so much.

Wait: Using Michelle Malkin as a stick to beat Mark Levin? Suggesting that Malkin “knew the flaws” of Christine O’Donnell, thereby inviting the reader to assume that Levin didn’t?

Patterico’s absolutely right about one thing: Malkin almost never does “Red-on-Red” action. She’ll criticize elected Republicans, yes, but she very seldom engages in fights with other pundits on the Right, instead focusing her fire on liberals to the exclusion of almost everything else.

So why is Patterico trying to drag Malkin into his feud with Levin? Cui bono?

In doing this, Patterico links a Stephen Hayes article about the Marco Rubio campaign, calling Levin “petty” and accusing him of unjustly claiming credit for being the first talk-radio host to endorse Rubio.

Does Mark Levin feel that he gets insufficient credit for his work? Yes, I’m sure he does. Dubbed “F. Lee Levin” by Rush Limbaugh and called “The Great One” by Sean Hannity, Levin was a conservative activist serving in the Reagan administration back when I was still a long-haired rock-and-roller partying my way through college.

Since then, as head of the Landmark Legal Foundation and subsequently as a talk-radio host, Levin’s influence has expanded enormously. Because of his long friendship with Limbaugh and Hannity, Levin often functions as a sort of conservative radar, and Levin attracts an activism-oriented audience. This was why, during the 2010 campaign cycle, many Republican candidates were vying for Levin’s attention, knowing that if they could get a mention — or, ideally, an interview — on his show, they’d get a fund-raising boost and were also likely to get picked up by Limbaugh, Hannity and other conservative New Media.

So if Levin occasionally unleashes his sarcasm at those he views as Johnny-Come-Lately ingrates, is his wrath without justification? And, BTW, the larger point of Levin’s Facebook post — the one that provoked Stephen Hayes — was exactly right: It is incoherent to celebrate Rubio’s defeat of Charlie Crist while lamenting the defeat of Mike Castle.

Jeffrey Lord wrote a great article about the influence of Levin’s book Liberty and Tyranny, which ought to be the last word here.

But as O’Donnell supporter Jerry Wilson has pointed out, the “Last Word Syndrome” is a big part of Patterico’s problem.

UPDATE: Longtime Patterico nemesis Jeff Goldstein picks a bone over the Alaska Senate election, another situation where I know a lot but haven’t said much lately.

UPDATE II: You’ve got to admire Sam Foster’s strategy: Pop some popcorn, sit on the sidelines and collect the traffic.

UPDATE III: Linked at Mark Levin’s Facebook page.

Category: Christine O'Donnell, Delaware, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin

Inspector General: Obama Administration Edited BP Oil Spill Report to Falsely Suggest Consensus for Gulf Drilling Ban

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 1 Comment

The administration’s six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t “peer reviewed” at all. No, it was an executive decision by President Obama, and the report was then edited — apparently by a staffer for Carol Browner — to make it look like experts had “peer reviewed” that recommendation.

The experts had complained in June about the report’s false implication that they supported the drilling moratorium. The administration’s editing of the report moved a passage containing the peer-review language from page two — where it followed the expert panel’s list of 22 specific safety recommendations — to page one, immediately after the drilling moratorium.

This editing had the effect of lending the prestige of “science” to the administration’s policy. Ed Morrissey:

 The White House version of the report gave Obama political cover to order the six-month moratorium — at least until those involved in its peer review cried foul after the White House publicly used them to defend the action.

Ed asks some relevant questions:

Why was the staff of energy “adviser” Carol Browner allowed to edit a report issued by the Department of Interior’s blue-ribbon panel in the first place?  Why did no one review those changes at Interior to determine whether the edits were justified, especially since the IG report indicates that the edits took place because the staffer or Browner didn’t think it summarized the findings properly?  Why not just ask the report’s authors to rewrite it themselves?

More relevant questions: Why should we give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt here? Why not just demagogue this the way the Left demagogued Bush over the failure to find WMD stockpiles in Iraq?

OBAMA LIED! JOBS DIED!

Vicki McClure Davidson did an excellent roundup on the Gulf drilling moratorium in June.

Category: Barack Obama

Obi’s Sister: Movin’ On Up!

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 2 Comments

Our longtime blog buddy is now a front-page contributor to Peach Pundit, the premier Georgia politics blog.

She celebrates by throwing out the five-dollar word “praxeum” (an inside joke for Star Wars geeks, it seems) because she’s now the William F. Buckley Jr. of Georgia bloggers or something.

Congratulations, Ginny!

Category: Georgia, Obi's Sister

‘Herewith, a Brief Primer’

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 6 Comments

Michael Gerson — he of that silly phrase — comes off like an arrogant chump in an interview with Laura Ingraham:

In this morning’s “Live at Five,” Wombat linked Ken Larrey’s “Big Journalism” piece on Gerson, which you should certainly read.

Gerson is one of many (including David Brooks and, let’s admit it, both President Bushes) whose hybrid “conservatism” is based on an internalization of liberal critiques of conservatism. And their beliefs are more a matter of politics than policy: They simply don’t believe that the Goldwater/Reagan limited-government message can produce GOP majorities.

So while the likes of Gerson are often accused of saying the stupid things they say out of self-interested motives — e.g., a desire to get invited to the “right” cocktail parties in Georgetown — it’s really much more useful to credit them with being sincerely stupid.

They are simply wrong, and too stupid (or vain) to admit how wrong they are, not even in the wake of a historic gain of at least 60 House seats in a year when GOP candidates were hammering home the limited-government message with gusto.

Of course, campaigning on a limited-government message is easier than governing according to that philosophy. But if the new House GOP majority will be smart about picking its fights with the Senate and the White House, voters will appreciate these efforts to check the limitless ambitions of big-government Democrats.

Category: Republicans
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