The Other McCain

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

How Do Democrats Get Away With It?

Posted on | January 15, 2022 | Comments Off on How Do Democrats Get Away With It?

You have probably never heard of Terry Bean, but the multi-millionaire Oregon real-estate developer has been commonly described as a “gay rights pioneer,” a co-founder of the Human Rights Campaign, and often credited with pushing through the state “equality” law under which Oregon bakers were compelled to bake cakes for gay weddings:

Terry Bean has been a lifelong Democrat and has considerable influence in the party as a member of the Democratic National Committee since at least 2009. Among his contributions are his fundraising for Bill Clinton, serving on the DNC’s Convention Committee in 2000, serving as a co-chair of Howard Dean’s 2004 National Finance Committee,and being the first LGBT member of Barack Obama’s National Finance Committee. . . .
On November 19, 2014, Terry Bean was arrested on charges of sodomy and sex abuse in a case involving a 15-year-old boy, in what Bean’s lawyer Kristen Winemiller characterized as an extortion attempt by an ex-lover. Law enforcement sources said Bean was charged with “two counts of sodomy in the third degree, a felony, and sex abuse in the third degree, a misdemeanor.” He was arraigned in Lane County, Oregon, where the crimes allegedly occurred in 2013.
After the case continued for over a year, lawyers for Bean and the youth reached a civil agreement, which the judge ultimately rejected. The alleged victim declined to testify, his attorney Lori Deveny stating that “he did not seek out this prosecution and made his unwillingness to testify known at every step of the process”. The judge dismissed the case on September 1, 2015 without prejudice. In a statement, Bean wrote “I take some measure of comfort that the world now knows what I have always known – that I was falsely accused and completely innocent of every accusation that was made.” On January 4, 2019, Bean was re-indicted on the same charges. In March 2019, the alleged victim filed a civil lawsuit against Bean. In September 2019, Bean’s former partner was found guilty of third-degree sodomy and third-degree sexual abuse, which The Oregonian reported as “a blow” to Bean’s claims of innocence.

Now, I had not followed this case and am unfamiliar with the details, but a few facts seem self-evident here: First, that in 2013 a 15-year-old boy was the victim of sexual abuse, a crime for which “Bean’s former partner” was convicted. So this is not, as some in the media may describe it, “alleged abuse” — the abuse actually happened, as demonstrated by the conviction of Bean’s ex-partner. The only matter in dispute is Bean’s role in this crime, and the fact that “lawyers for Bean and the youth reached a civil agreement” could be interpreted as evidence that Bean was not wholly innocent. Furthermore, at the time this crime occurred, Bean was 65 and his partner Kiah Loy Lawson was 24. Would you say that a man having a partner more than 40 years his junior could be presumed to have, shall we say, an appetite for young flesh?

But who are we to judge, eh? Who can say what trouble we might get into if we were multimillionaires? The hypotheticals are perhaps limitless, so we ought to be grateful for our relative poverty, but leaving aside (possibly criminal) fantasies, now let us consider the reality:

The trial dropped bombshell after bombshell allegation: a Grindr app meeting, adult men engaging in sex acts with a 15-year-old boy, a scorned ex-boyfriend, a purported extortion plot against a well-known Portland gay activist and disavowals that any crimes occurred.
But a Lane County Circuit Court jury sorted through the messy details and took only two hours Friday to return a guilty verdict against Kiah Loy Lawson on two counts of third-degree sodomy and one count of third-degree sexual abuse.
The verdict is a blow to Lawson’s co-defendant and former boyfriend, Terry Bean — the Portland real estate developer, civil rights trailblazer and Democratic fundraiser. Bean, 71, faces trial in two months on the same charges.
Both men were accused of picking up the 15-year-old boy in Bean’s Mercedes S500 from a 7-Eleven in Eugene in September 2013 after meeting him via Grindr, an online dating app for gay men.
Police and prosecutors alleged the men drove the teenager to a Eugene motel room, sexually abused him, showered with him and then sent him home in a cab after Bean gave him $40 for his fare. At the time, Lawson was 24 and Bean was 65.
During the three-day trial, Lawson testified that he and Bean picked up the boy, but said they promptly dropped him off after learning he wasn’t 18, as he had claimed on the app. Neither of them engaged in any sex acts with the boy, Lawson said.
But Lawson conceded that he is the reason Portland police started investigating both Bean and him.
He testified that he was upset with the way Bean had treated him after their relationship ended badly. Bean had refused to give him a $40,000 payout that had been negotiated between their lawyers after Bean secretly video-recorded him in the bedroom and bathroom, Lawson said.
So in July 2014 he said he went to police with a made-up story about Bean — telling Portland Detective Jeff Myers that Bean had engaged in sex acts with the boy in the motel room.
But after Myers tracked down and interviewed the teenager, Lawson also was charged with the same crimes.
“It’s ironic how everything has essentially flipped on me,” Lawson told jurors.
Lawson described how he felt controlled and taken advantage of by Bean. He said Bean had lavished attention on him. Bean ultimately put up Lawson in his Hayden Island condo and told the younger man to quit his job because Bean would pay him a “salary,” Lawson said.
“He provided me with a lot of money, perks, travel, shopping — everything I needed and wanted, really,” Lawson said. But Bean had stipulations, too, such as he didn’t want Lawson to have a cellphone, Lawson said.
Lawson said after three to four months of dating, he felt as if Bean was using him to lure men to have sex. Lawson said he watched as Bean wooed his conquests, sometimes paying “younger people” a couple of hundred dollars to have sex.
“He would tell me how he liked younger guys,” Lawson said. “Also, he told me about a couple of times he had paid off younger people who were underage, just not to say things.”
“At first I felt special,” Lawson said. “… I thought I had it good. But then I realized that’s how he treated everybody and that was how it was just his M.O. to sleep with younger people.”

You can read the rest of that 2019 story, but you get the point: It is beyond a reasonable doubt, according to an Oregon jury, that a 15-year-old boy got picked up via Grindr and was sexually abused. And while prosecutors convinced the jury that Lawson was a liar — insofar as his denial was not to be believed — his testimony about Terry Bean’s predilection for “younger people” as sex partners seems credible. Also, don’t miss this detail near the end of that 2019 article:

In late 2014, Bean and Lawson were originally charged with sex crimes against the teen. But in 2015 on the day their cases were scheduled to go to trial, the young man failed to show up. Police and prosecutors have alleged the teen hid out in a mountain cabin because Bean agreed to pay him a total of $220,000 as a reward for not testifying then.

Again, who are we to judge? What would you do for $220,000? Speaking for myself, I think I’d probably skip court and hide out in a mountain cabin, too. The lawyer accused of brokering that payoff was found in contempt of court and is reportedly the subject of a disbarment investigation, but what about Terry Bean?

The long-running criminal prosecution of Portland real estate investor and gay rights pioneer Terry Bean came to an abrupt end today [Friday, Jan. 14] when the state moved to dismiss sex abuse charges against him.
“After a judicial settlement conference on December 27, 2021, before the Hon. Jean Maurer, the alleged victim in this matter communicated to me unequivocally that he has relocated out of state, and he no longer wishes to participate in this pending prosecution,” Lane County deputy district attorney Erik Hasselman wrote in court filings today.
The case goes all the way back to a 2014 WW cover story that detailed Bean’s tangled personal life. At the time, Bean, co-founder of the Washington, D.C., Human Rights Campaign and one of the largest Oregon fundraisers for President Barack Obama and other Democratic politicians, had recently ended a relationship with a man named Kiah Lawson.
Lawson and Bean would both later be indicted for sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy in Eugene in 2013. Lawson was convicted of that crime in 2019 but, through a series of developments and delays, Bean’s trial was set for 2022. Now, that will not happen.
“On December 28, 2021, the alleged victim’s attorneys reiterated in writing that for a variety of personal reasons, the alleged victim wished this office to resolve the pending matters against the defendant without a conviction in the case at bar,” Hasselman wrote.
“Given the alleged victim is an adult, represented by counsel, and has clearly expressed a desire not to participate in the pending prosecutions of the defendant, the State respectfully requests this Honorable Court dismiss this pending Indictment, in the interests of justice.”

Oh, it’s “in the interests of justice,” and the victim has “a variety of personal reasons” ($$$$) for wanting the state to drop the case against the multimillionaire Democratic Party fundraiser. What a coincidence!

Meanwhile, there must be thousands of guys in Oregon serving time in prison, or out on parole and permanently on the sex offender registry, for crimes no worse than those involved in this case, and the only difference is that those perverts are not multimillionaire Democrats.

The moral of the story is that $200,000 is now the going rate for teenage hookups with rich Democrats, who can never be convicted in Oregon.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Gays, Oregon

CNN: ‘Disgraced, a National Punchline’

Posted on | January 15, 2022 | 1 Comment

CNN has lost 90% of its audience since Donald Trump left the White House, a predictable consequence of Jeff Zucker’s decision to go all-in on anti-Trump programming. John Nolte at Breitbart comments:

CNN is left-wing talk radio with pictures, and CNN is failing at that because MSNBC does it a whole lot better with superior production values and appealing anchors. . . .
CNN chief Jeff Zucker sold the soul of the 40-year-old CNN brand to enjoy a few good ratings months during the Trump years. And it worked. But only for a few months. Now CNN is disgraced, a national punchline, and other than pointing and laughing, no one pays attention to it anymore.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

It is difficult to explain, and impossible to exaggerate, just how far CNN has fallen. In October, it was noted that CNN’s Reliable Sources program with Brian Stelter attracted only 85,000 viewers ages 25-54 (the so-called “demo” on which advertising rates are based), which was lower than re-runs on other cable networks of Friends, Golden Girls and Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and even lower than the cartoons Paw Patrol and Spongebob Squarepants. In a nation of 325 million people, a demo audience of 85,000 is microscopic; Stelter is irrelevant, an asterisk in the ratings.

Rather than comparing CNN to other cable-news programs, it is more instructive to compare them to YouTubers. My favorite fireworks channel, CodyBPyrotechnics, has 338,000 subscribers and the video of Cody’s New Year’s Eve show has gotten 78,000 views — roughly twice Stelter’s audience on CNN. The video of Cody’s Fourth of July show has gotten nearly 750,000 views, which is equal to many primetime programs on CNN. Then there is the Police Activity channel, which is mostly dashcam and bodycam footage of police shootings, and has 3.2 million subscribers. Their most recent video, of a burglary suspect getting shot in Seattle after stabbing a police dog, has garnered more than 200,000 views in two days. You might say, “Well, but that’s fun stuff — fireworks and suspects getting shot by cops, everybody loves to watch that.” This is true, but what about YouTube channels that do the same thing CNN does, i.e., talk about politics? Tim Pool’s channel has 1.3 million subscribers and most of his videos get 200,000+ views. That’s one guy talking to a webcam, OK? But Tim Pool’s audience is still bigger than Brian Stelter, who has an entire network staff producing his program on a channel that’s part of every basic-cable package in the country.

CNN is a failure — useless garbage, rejected by the American people.




 

Category: CNN

Back to the Burrow

Posted on | January 15, 2022 | Comments Off on Back to the Burrow

— by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Memento mori

I figured I should make a post about where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to these last three weeks. I have not been on vacation; rather, I have been in hospitals as close as Hawthorne, Nevada and as distant as Provo, Utah, dealing with a nasty infection in one of my legs that required most of those three weeks to beat down with intravenous antibiotics until the docs felt I was well enough to change over to oral antibiotics, which I’ll be taking for the next week and maybe longer. 

Because I was too sick to pack my laptop, and the availability of the Intertubes was questionable anyway, I couldn’t have posted even if I wanted to. This bothered me somewhat, but as I’m sure you understand, I had more important things to worry about. I did make some videos with my phone and posted them to YouTube, starting with this one, so if you want a more detailed account of what was going on, that’s where you want to look. 

I don’t expect I’ll have the energy to do either the FMJRA or Rule 5 Sunday this weekend, though things could change. (Dubious.) 

Finally, thanks to those of you who e-mailed and/or called. It was very much appreciated. 

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Video

Joe Biden: Slandering the Dead

Posted on | January 14, 2022 | Comments Off on Joe Biden: Slandering the Dead

Apparently tired of campaigning against Donald Trump — because not being Trump is the only reason anyone voted for him — Joe Biden this week decided it was time to start campaigning against Jefferson Davis:

“I ask every elected official in America,” Biden said in Atlanta during a passionate and wildly demagogic speech designed to make Twitter blue-checks do a Snoopy dance of joy while embracing an effort with no chance of actual success. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

All of this demagogic hyperbole was expended for the sake of distracting voters from Biden’s failure to “shut down” COVID-19 (as he repeatedly promised to do while campaigning in 2020) by “pivoting” to an entirely fictional issue, i.e., “voting rights.” The right of Americans to vote is today no less secure than it was when Biden was elected; what the so-called “voting rights” bill currently pending in the Senate would do is to destroy the existing electoral system by making permanent the abuses by which the Democratic Party seeks to steal future elections. The question of whether Democrats stole the election for Biden in 2020 is one we need not address here, except to note that mail-in-voting — and the accompanying fraud of “ballot harvesting” — was enacted by many states as an emergency measure in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and there is no compelling argument why this emergency measure should be extended. What Biden is claiming is that anyone who wants to keep running elections the way they were run when Barack Obama was elected president is comparable to Bull Connor, et al.

The argument for nationalizing election procedures (which is what the legislation Biden advocates would do) is really a non sequitur.

There is nothing wrong with the existing system of having elections run by state and local governments, as has always been the case, and the only semblance of an argument offered by Biden and his partisan allies involves manufacturing phony claims of “disenfranchisement” which no serious person actually believes. Biden’s demagoguery in Atlanta this week was aimed at pressuring two members of his own party, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, to go along with Chuck Schumer’s scheme to use the “nuclear option” to pass what is being called “the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act.” Riddle me this: How was it that John Lewis was elected to 19 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives if black voters in Georgia were “disenfranchised”? But there is no logic behind what Democrats are doing, except the logic of trying to “energize their base,” as the pundits say, by which they mean, make black people turn out to vote Democrat again.

Manchin and Sinema show no sign that they’re about to yield to Biden’s bullying tactics which means, as John Podhoretz notes, that there is a near-zero chance that this legislation will be enacted, and the so-called “strategists” advising Biden know this as well as anyone. What they seem to be trying to do — the real purpose of Biden’s Atlanta speech — is first of all, to change the subject from Biden’s yearlong record of failure by raising false hope of future success. Secondly, however, they’re trying to set up a campaign theme for this fall’s midterms, by labeling their Republican opponents as racist bigots who want to “disenfranchise” black voters. You might think that no one is actually stupid enough to believe such a preposterous claim, but nearly 42% of people actually approve of the job Biden’s doing as president, so you may have underestimated the vast depths of American stupidity. It’s very important for Democrats, in terms of the fall elections, to keep all these stupid people angry at Republicans, and so they send Biden down to Atlanta to shout a lot of rhetoric about Bull Connor and George Wallace and Jefferson Davis.

You may recall that, a couple of years ago, I wrote about the 1779 Battle of Kettle Creek in Wilkes County, Georgia, during the American Revolution:

One of the Patriots wounded in the Battle of Kettle Creek was a Georgia militia private named Samuel Emory Davis, a 23-year-old Augusta native whose father immigrated to Georgia from Cardiff, Wales. Samuel Davis later raised a company of mounted troops and rose to the rank of major. After the war, he married Jane Cook, the daughter of a South Carolina Baptist minister, and settled down to farm in Wilkes County, Georgia, not far from the battlefield at Kettle Creek. By 1797, the Davises had five children when Samuel made the decision to relocate his family to the Kentucky frontier, where they established a settlement about 20 miles north of present-day Fort Campbell. There the Davis family kept growing, with their 10th child being born in 1808, when Samuel was 52 years old.
Samuel Davis later moved his family twice again, first to Louisiana before finally settling in 1812 near Woodville, Mississippi. When America went to war against the British that year, three of Samuel Davis’s sons enlisted, and two were commended by Andrew Jackson for their gallantry in the 1814 Battle of New Orleans. Samuel’s oldest son, Joseph Emory Davis, became a lawyer and one of the wealthiest men in Mississippi, but it was his youngest son who was destined for historic fame. A brilliant scholar, Samuel’s youngest son was the only Protestant student enrolled in a Dominican Catholic boarding school in Kentucky. He later studied at Transylvania University in Lexington. He was 16 when his father died in 1824 and shortly thereafter, his brother Joseph helped him gain appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he graduated in 1828. Second Lieutenant Davis was assigned to the First Infantry Regiment, stationed at Fort Crawford on what was then America’s remote northwest frontier, in present-day Wisconsin.
The commander at Fort Crawford was Col. Zachary Taylor. Four years later, the Black Hawk War broke out, ending with the defeat of the hostile tribes and the capture of Chief Black Hawk. Taylor assigned Lieutenant Davis the duty of escorting the prisoner to St. Louis. With peace restored to the northwestern frontier, it was now safe for Taylor’s family to join him at Fort Crawford, and Lieutenant Davis fell in love with the colonel’s beautiful daughter Sarah. Her father opposed this romance, not wishing his daughter to have the difficult life of a soldier’s wife, but love won out.
After consulting his brother Joseph, Lieutenant Davis resigned from the army, and Sarah Knox Taylor became Mrs. Jefferson Davis. . . .

You can read the rest of that and ask yourself why Jefferson Davis should be demonized, at this late date, by such a notorious liar as Joe Biden.

That worthless son of a bitch ain’t fit to tie Jefferson Davis’s shoes.




 

Category: Joe Biden

‘Watch This!’

Posted on | January 13, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Watch This!’

The headline is a two-word text message I sent to my youngest daughter after watching producer Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great” video about the 1970 Chicago hit, “Make Me Smile,” which is an absolute must-see. I’ve talked before about my love of Chicago:

It happened the other day (thank you, YouTube algorithm) that I started watching old videos of the jazz-rock band Chicago. Did you know that Chicago’s guitarist Terry Kath was Jimi Hendrix’s favorite guitarist? To listen to Kath play on “25 or 6 to 4” is to be amazed, and it’s a pity that Kath (who died tragically in 1978) is so seldom mentioned among the rock-and-roll greats. Kath could also sing like Ray Charles, a distinctive bluesy baritone . . .

Rick Beato is not just a music producer, but an accomplished musician who earned a master’s degree in jazz from the New England Conservatory of Music. What he provides on his YouTube channel is a far better educational experience than most kids get in school nowadays. One of the things Beato does occasionally is to review the Top 10 list on Spotify, the general point of his reviews being that most contemporary pop is puerile four-chord garbage produced by computer simulation of actual music. (See 357 Magnum’s “Rick Beato Listened to These Songs, So You Don’t Have To.”) Of course, it’s a steady fact of history that every generation believes that the younger generation’s music is crap (e.g., Richard Weaver denouncing the “barbaric impulses” of jazz), but things have gotten very bad indeed now. My teenage daughter is, God help us, a Harry Styles fan and, to be honest, some of his stuff is OK, but he is nearly the apex of sophistication in the vast wasteland of contemporary pop.

Baby Boomers like me grew up with Top 40 radio without realizing at the time we were living through the Golden Age of Classic Rock, to say nothing of all the other excellent music that was being produced. Some of the pop stuff that we sneered at back in the day — when cool kids were into Zeppelin and Floyd, and disdained those catchy singles on radio — was, in retrospect, very good music. For example, I wasn’t really “into” Steely Dan as a teenager, but they were excellent and “Do It Again” (a Top 10 hit in 1973) is a marvelously sophisticated piece of work. Because we were absolutely inundated in quality music in our youth, Boomers are not likely to enjoy the simplistic dumbed-down stuff that is popular with our children and grandchildren. But I digress . . .

Terry Kath was the heart and soul — especially the soul — of Chicago. As a guitarist, he was incomparable — so good that Jimi Hendrix, after seeing Chicago play a club date in L.A., said Kath was better than him. And his vocals were just so incredibly soulful. How could a Midwestern white guy in his early 20s sing like an aged blues legend? Very rarely do you encounter a lead guitarist who is also a talented lead singer, and Kath had that magic combination. “Make Me Smile” was the first time Chicago had a single make the Top 10, and there’s an important story behind that.

Like most rock bands of the late 1960s and 70s, Chicago was album-oriented — serious music listeners weren’t interested in 45-rpm records, but in the aftermath of what the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967, were more focused on producing long-form music on 33-rpm albums.

As part of their deal with Columbia Records, Chicago secured an agreement that their first album would be a double album — something usually reserved for proven hitmakers, but Columbia’s president Clive Davis really believed in the band, so 1969’s Chicago Transit Authority was a double album with 12 mostly long tracks, including their 7-plus-minute cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m a Man.”

 

How strange it is that a band who could jam like that should have gained a reputation, just a few years later, as an “easy listening” pop group. And yet, by the time I was in my mid-teens, that’s how I thought of Chicago. But this was because of their subsequent success with hit singles that smashed through the Top 40 charts, completely against the wishes of the group itself! The earliest attempts to turn Chicago’s songs into singles flopped, but after the release of their second album in 1970, Clive Davis personally intervened to insist that “Make Me Smile,” which was more than four minutes long on the album, be edited down to under three minutes as a single. It has even been claimed that Davis himself was in the booth for the final edit, although this has been disputed and may be apocryphal. At any rate, the horn introduction to “Make Me Smile” was shortened, and Kath’s guitar solo was deleted from the middle of the song so that the single version was 2:58. It is this version that Beato analyzed in his “What Makes This Song Great” video:

You really must watch that video, as Beato isolates individual tracks to call attention to parts of the song you might never have noticed before. One thing that particularly impressed me was just how great drummer Danny Seraphine was (and is, as he’s still playing at age 73). Some of those parts are just incredible, and the whole group’s performance is a tour de force, made more enjoyable by Beato breaking down the chord progressions — A-flat+4, C-minor and so forth. Did we even know we were listening to Phrygian mode back in the day? No, but after Beato pointed it out, I felt ashamed that I didn’t appreciate it before.

Anyway, after watching that video, I sent it to my daughter in hopes that she will appreciate it, but she’d probably rather listen to Harry Styles, I suppose. Alas, these kids today . . .




 

Category: Music

Everything You Love Is Cancelled Now

Posted on | January 13, 2022 | Comments Off on Everything You Love Is Cancelled Now

You can still purchase Elvis Costelo’s 1979 album Armed Forces, but who knows how much longer this will be possible? How long before we’re required to forget that it ever existed?

Elvis Costello has said that he will no longer perform one of his biggest hits, “Oliver’s Army,” and has urged radio stations to also stop playing the song because of its use of the N-word.
The song, which is taken from Costello’s 1979 album “Armed Forces” and is one of the rockstar’s best-known hits, was written about The Troubles in Northern Ireland — a long and deadly conflict between mostly Protestant unionists determined for Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom and Catholic republicans desperate to break away and create a united Ireland.
The anti-Black racial slur is used during the song to describe a British soldier. The line in question reads: “Only takes one itchy trigger, one more widow, one less white n——.”
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Costello said he plans to go on tour this summer, but will no longer be performing “Oliver’s Army” as part of his setlist.
“If I wrote that song today, maybe I’d think twice about it,” he told The Telegraph in a recent interview.
“That’s what my grandfather was called in the British army — it’s historically a fact — but people hear that word go off like a bell and accuse me of something that I didn’t intend.”
Costello continued to say that he censored “Oliver’s Army” during his last tour, but he no longer believes that censorship is the correct method.

If you are familiar with British culture of the time, you understand how the word was used to denote someone of lowly status — a lackey, a stooge, expendable. John Lennon famously used it that way in another song we’re supposed to forget ever existed and nobody — absolutely nobody — could plausibly claim Lennon was racist. Nor have I ever encountered evidence that Elvis Costello (whose real name is Declan Patrick McManus) harbored any prejudice against anyone. If such evidence existed, surely it would be widely publicized, and yet this lyric, whose meaning was always clear to any educated person, must now send “Oliver’s Army” down the Memory Hole, airbrushed from existence like Trotsky during the Stalinist era. Has anyone in the Permanently Indignant class even bothered to ask what the song is about?

Hong Kong is up for grabs.
London is full of Arabs.
We could be in Palestine
Overrun by the Chinese line,
With the boys from the Mersey
And the Thames and the Tyne.
But there’s no danger,
It’s a professional career.
Though it could be arranged,
With just a word in Mr. Churchill’s ear.
If you’re out of luck or out of work,
We could send you to Johannesburg.

What an astonishingly brilliant commentary on imperialism and its consequences. Costello was expressing the view of the British soldier — a cynical working-class chap, generally — posted in Belfast, risking his life to keep the Irish down while, at the same time, “London is full of Arabs” (even more true now than then) and Britain’s Pacific outpost of Hong Kong was “up for grabs.” The soldier mocks the absurdity of his helpless situation in Northern Ireland, comparing it to the prospect of World War Three breaking out in the Middle East (“overrun by the Chinese line”) or being deployed to South Africa to prop up the apartheid regime. This was written during the dark era of the late 1970s, before the economic revival that followed under Thatcher’s administration, and there were a lot of young men “out of luck or out of work” in England, including not a few like Costello, who was a Catholic of Irish ancestry.

The religious background of the conflict in Ireland is signified by the “Oliver” in the title which “refers to English Parliamentarian leader Oliver Cromwell, who personally led the English forces which subjugated Ireland in 1649.” So the entire song, really, is about the cruel absurdity of this centuries-long warfare, with Catholic boys in England required to do service in “Oliver’s Army” fighting the Irish Catholics!

It doesn’t matter what your opinion was (or is) about British policy in Northern Ireland, the song is pure genius, in quite the same way the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic “Fortunate Son” is pure genius, no matter your opinion about U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Some would argue that “Oliver’s Army” is the best song Costello ever wrote, rivaling even his poignant breakthrough hit “Alison.” But now he can’t even play it anymore, because of stupid Political Correctness.

Well, you can still buy it. Just don’t tell anyone, or else you could become another dot on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map.”

The eyes of Texas are upon you,
’Til Gabriel blows his horn.

IYKWIMAITYD.




 

Category: Music, Racism

The Theme From ‘Cheers’ and Other Fundamental Errors of Reason

Posted on | January 12, 2022 | Comments Off on The Theme From ‘Cheers’ and Other Fundamental Errors of Reason

Before proceeding to the main topic of my philosophical discourse, permit me to point out that you can purchase a 7-horsepower wood chipper from Amazon for $619 through our associates program, which pays me a modest commission on all products purchased through our affiliated links, at no cost to you. And you might say to yourself, “What would I do with a 7-horsepower wood chipper?” Trust me, it could come in handy, and I think you might soon decide you need one.

Now, the main topic: Did you ever listen to the lyrics of the Cheers theme song? That popular sitcom ran on NBC for more than a decade, from 1982 to 1993. The Applebee’s restaurant chain has been using that theme song in their TV commercials, although of course it subverts the original idea — a gigantic restaurant chain is not, and can never be, your friendly neighborhood tavern — but the song itself has always seemed to me somewhat problematic. It’s this part that bugs me:

You want to go where people know
People are all the same.
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

There is a word for people who “know” — or at least claim to know — “people are all the same.” We call such people “fools,” because as a matter of indisputable fact, people are definitely not “all the same.”

If you believe in something that is self-evidently false, you are a fool, and anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that people are different.

No two of us are exactly alike, not even identical twins, and the vast disparity in human beings — in tastes and temperament, in abilities and attitudes, whatever metric you choose — is beyond dispute. While all human beings can be said to share certain traits, as a species, the differences are large enough and important enough that only a fool could possibly disregard them. No one would seriously argue, for example, that Charles Manson and Jonas Salk were “all the same.”

This idiotic phrase from the Cheers theme song has always bothered me, as I say, but just today I happened to catch it again on an Applebee’s commercial, which was why I felt a need to write about the fundamental error in this lyric. Also, coincidentally, USA Today ran an article attempting to “destigmatize” pedophilia:

Pedophilia is viewed as among the most horrifying social ills. But scientists who study the sexual disorder say it is also among the most misunderstood.

See? Pedophiles aren’t the problem. No, the problem is you, because you misunderstand pedophiles. You’re an ignorant bigot, and probably voted for Trump. This USA Today article goes on with a lot of reference to what “scientists” and “experts” say. The article endeavors to portray transgender Allyson “Allyn” Walker — who was forced to resign from Old Dominion University because of her pro-pedophile advocacy — as the victim of an “outcry” which, it is implied, occurred only because she/“he” used the phrase “minor-attracted people” to describe pedophiles. But let us imagine, for example, that the university had a neo-Nazi on their faculty; if the neo-Nazi got fired, would USA Today claim that it was just an “outcry” caused by their use of the word “kike”?

Use of the phrase “minor-attracted people” (MAP) is like a dye marker for a dangerously permissive attitude toward pedophilia and, I’d bet you dollars to donuts, this phrase was originated by pedophiles themselves who are very much interested in this project of “destigmatizing” their preferred perversion. Breitbart’s Paul Bois observes:

The article quoted no psychologist or forensic researcher with a different viewpoint on pedophilia – those who might rather characterize it as a severe mental disorder rather than a sexual orientation. It only gives a passing mention that the well-being and protection of children should be society’s top priority when it comes to handling such disorders. Instead, the article keeps asserting the need for treatment, allowing pedophiles to live openly without fear of social ostracization, not accounting for the risks involved.

Yes, the way is being paved to “destigmatize” this perversion by employing the same step-by-step methods by which homosexuality was normalized. First, advocates must undermine any moral objections to the practice, by treating it as a medical condition rather than a sin, which will then give way to arguments in favor of “reforming” laws against child molestation. Finally, the argument will come down to equality — because “people are all the same,” you see — and a majority of the Supreme Court will declare that laws against raping children are a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Only bigots will disagree.

The Breitbart article was linked at Instapundit by Ed Driscoll, who also linked a Twitchy post about this USA Today article and, for some reason, people on Twitter keep posting images of wood chippers.

Did I mention, by the way, that you can purchase a 7-horsepower wood chipper from Amazon for $619 through our associates program?

Might come in handy around the house. You never know.




 

Category: Crime, Media Bias

Low-Level Drug Crimes

Posted on | January 9, 2022 | Comments Off on Low-Level Drug Crimes

In September 2013, sheriff’s deputies in Mobile County, Alabama, spotted a stolen car parked in front of a home in the rural community of Wilmer. Deputies knocked on the door of the house, seeking to speak to Kenneth James Colburn (pictured above left) who was suspected of stealing the car. Deputies became aware of “a strong chemical odor” in the home and found a methamphetamine lab. Colburn, 24, was arrested along with Joshua Foran, 31, and Jeremy Love, 20. This was not Colburn’s first arrest: “In 2007, Colburn was charged with possession of a controlled substance. Two years later in 2009, Colburn faced one count of manufacturing a controlled substance.” Well, it’s just drugs — a low-level non-violent crime, as some advocates of “criminal justice reform” would have us believe. Some of us, however, have had direct experience in the field of freelance pharmaceutical distribution and have personal familiarity with the criminal underclass, and not so easily deceived.

Go peddle your “reform” somewhere else, because I ain’t buying it. There’s an old saying, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” Dope dealers know they’re breaking the law; they do it because they have no respect for the law. This is why decriminalizing drugs is not the answer, because the criminal mindset is such that, if you legalize one thing, they’ll just find some other law to break. No “reform” can solve this; the criminal is a danger to society and the only way to protect society is to put the criminal behind bars. Getting busted for a meth lab (and a stolen car) didn’t end Kenneth Colburn’s criminal career. Less than five years after his bust in Mobile, he was arrested in Troup County, Georgia, on charges of “theft by receiving stolen vehicle, amphetamine-possession, possession of marijuana less than one ounce, possession of firearm by convicted felon, obstruction of officer.” Colburn’s criminal career continued, and here is the mug shot from his most recent arrest:

This time, the charge is murder:

Two people have been arrested for the death of a Fairhope woman.
44-year old Tammy Wedgeworth was originally reported missing by the Fairhope Police Department on January 3rd. Wedgeworth was last seen around 9 p.m. the night of January 1st when she left her home in Fairhope in a white Ford F-150 heading to Mobile.
Mobile Police were assisting Fairhope Police in the investigation when her body was found on Friday. Police say they also found the victim’s vehicle and credit card.
33-year-old Kenneth Colburn was arrested and charged with murder and fraudulent use of a credit card.
35-year-old Amanda Miller was also arrested and charged with fraudulent use of a credit card.
Police haven’t said what, if any, connection the victim had to the two suspects. Colburn has an extensive arrest record with several bookings into the Mobile County Jail starting in 2006.

We don’t yet know anything about the circumstances that led to Tammy Wedgeworth’s murder; police say that “to protect the integrity of the investigation,” they aren’t releasing details. What we do know is that just three years ago, Kenneth Colburn was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. If Colburn had been in prison, Tammy Wedgeworth would not have been murdered. When will people wake up from their dreams of “reform” and start living in the real world? How many more people are going to be killed because the system keeps turning loose dangerous criminals?




 

Category: Crime
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