The Other McCain

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

Today Is the Day: Patriots Can Clinch Playoff Berth With Win Over Jaguars

Posted on | January 2, 2022 | Comments Off on Today Is the Day: Patriots Can Clinch Playoff Berth With Win Over Jaguars

Yesterday someone said, “Stacy, I gotta tell ya — I liked you a whole lot more before you became a vocal Patriots fan. Remember, most of their fans are Massachusetts communists.” OK, I admit this has become somewhat obsessive, but as I say, when they drafted Mac Jones, they recruited me as a fan. It is what it is. And now this:

New England has two simple ways it can clinch a playoff spot in Week 17. A Patriots win against the Jaguars and either a Dolphins loss to the Titans or a Raiders loss to the Colts would be enough to secure a spot.

This should be as easy as an Alabama homecoming game against Mercer. It’s a home game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, who are 2-13 and haven’t won on the road all year. Jacksonville needs to keep losing so they can get the No. 1 draft pick, and it would be an embarrassment for the Patriots if this game is even close. It ought to be a blowout, so if Mac throws for 300 yards and three touchdowns, that’s just expected.

There has been talk of Mac hitting “the rookie wall,” i.e., coming into the NFL, players aren’t used to the long season — they’ve played 15 games already — and so his ability to bounce back after consecutive losses to the Colts and Bills makes today’s game important, even though it should be a walkover against the Jags. It would be valuable, also, to clinch their playoff berth now, so that their final regular season game — on the road against the streaking Dolphins — isn’t all-or-nothing.

Speaking of Miami (AOC’s preferred vacation spot), Alabama alumni Tua Tagovailoa has the Dolphins cooking lately. After starting the season 1-7, Miami has now won seven games in a row, and Tagovailoa’s performance has attracted a loyal following known online by the hashtag #TuAnon.

It’s nice to see the ’Bama boys doing good, so of the two possible clinch scenarios for the Patriots today, I’d prefer to see the Colts beat the Raiders, and let Tua and the Dolphins beat the Titans — which won’t be easy, because the game’s at Nashville, but #TuAnon will not be denied.

So, the Patriots clinch today and then we go to Miami next week, where the Dolphins will be playing for their postseason lives — nice for the narrative arc. Keep in mind, the big dream is for Mac to take the Patriots all the way to the Super Bowl. We don’t deal in small dreams here.




 

Category: Football

‘A Philadelphia Gentleman’s Club’

Posted on | January 1, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘A Philadelphia Gentleman’s Club’

These two Philadelphia gentlemen are suspects.

Euphemism alert:

Authorities have identified two suspects wanted in a double homicide that happened outside a Philadelphia gentlemen’s club on Tuesday.
Investigators say a 32-year-old man and a 42-year-old man suffered fatal gunshot wounds when an argument turned deadly in the parking lot of Club Risqué on Tacony Street around 2:30 a.m.

(Because where else would a Philadelphia gentleman be at 2:30 a.m.?)

Surveillance footage shared by the Philadelphia Police Department shows the suspected shooter and a female person of interest arriving at the club in a black Nissan about an hour before the shooting.

(A “female person of interest” is what they call a “lady” in Philadelphia.)

The suspect, who police say walks with a distinct limp, was wearing a blue coat and denim pants with dark-colored boots at the time of the shooting. The woman passenger labeled by police as a person of interest was wearing a white shirt with tan pants and white shoes.
Security footage from inside the vestibule of the club shows a second suspect also wearing a blue winter coat over a blue hooded sweatshirt.

These gentlemen of Philadelphia are part of a trend:

In 2014, after Philadelphia had recorded fewer than 250 homicides for the second consecutive year, then-Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey made a bold prediction.
“I don’t believe we’re as low as we can go,” he said, adding that the city might soon see fewer than 200 annual homicides.
Instead, seven years later, Philadelphia has recorded more killings than ever. The number of people slain this year — 557 as of Wednesday — has already doubled the 2014 total.
The reasons behind the surge — a spike in gun violence that began hitting historic levels last year and has also been seen in other cities — could take years to sort out, criminologists, police, and other experts say. There have been several once-in-a-lifetime events occurring simultaneously, each of which can cause the type of mass anxiety and distress behind a widespread rise in gun crime: a pandemic, economic upheaval, a nationwide reckoning over racial inequity, and social and political unrest.
The increase here has been intensely concentrated in communities of color where residents have long endured higher violence levels alongside other systemic issues, such as more poverty and lower life expectancy.

“The reasons . . . could take years to sort out,” say the experts.

Experts would not dare blame the Philadelphia gentlemen. Some may use other terms to describe the people causing this violence.




 

Category: Crime, Pennsylvania

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | January 1, 2022 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous

Say hello to Harrison Foster of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. This is a mugshot from 2008, after Foster was arrested for robbing pharmacies and the judge ordered a “mental evaluation” that sent him to “Fulton State Hospital’s maximum security lockdown.” Foster was 21 at the time, and I don’t know what the results of the “mental evaluation” were, but they didn’t keep him lockdown. Perhaps they should have, because somewhere along the line, Foster hooked up with Brittany Wilson.

The best relationships are built on common interests, and it appears that Foster and Wilson had a common interest in methamphetamine.

Which is how the couple decided to celebrate Christmas Eve:

A Missouri woman was pictured with a bright smile on her face after being charged with killing her fiance with a sword on Christmas Eve after the couple was high on meth.
Brittany Wilson, 32, was found outside the Cape Girardeau home she shared with 34-year-old Harrison Stephen Foster with blood on her clothing and a sword lying in the front yard.
Wilson had called police shortly after 11p.m. Friday to report that she had killed Foster with a sword, cops said.
She told investigators that she believed he had several other entities living in his body, and she was setting him free by stabbing him, police said
After officers arrested Wilson, they went inside the home and found Harris dead with several fresh stab wounds.
Wilson told police that she and Foster had taken methamphetamine earlier in the day at the home located about 115 miles south of St. Louis.
Officers say she claimed that Foster was harvesting body parts from individuals.
In the mug shot released Saturday, an orange jumpsuit-clad Wilson, who has two children, wore a wide smile. Foster isn’t believed to be the father of the two kids.

She seems nice. Be careful who you’re doing with meth with, and maybe it’s not a good idea to leave swords laying around while you’re out of your mind on meth. Remember: Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Crime, Missouri

Jonah Goldberg Blames ‘Elites,’ By Which He Means, Everyone But Himself

Posted on | January 1, 2022 | Comments Off on Jonah Goldberg Blames ‘Elites,’ By Which He Means, Everyone But Himself

In a year-end column about the failure of “elites,” Jonah Goldberg pretends to be surprised that the Democratic Party went too far in 2021. He makes a lot of good points, e.g., that the reason the Biden administration thought they could ram “Build Back Better” through Congress was that there was no real opposition to their early COVID-19 “stimulus” bill. But there was a pent-up demand for more “stimulus” in the electorate because (in case you’ve forgotten) Democrats had blocked efforts by the Trump administration to pass a second stimulus bill before the 2020 election. They didn’t want Trump to get a boost from this popular measure, and so it was delayed until after Dementia Joe was ensconced in the White House. Biden got “the crazy idea that he could govern like he was FDR,” Goldberg says, and “spent the spring and summer gamboling along thinking he could do no wrong.” If it hadn’t been for the total botch of the Afghanistan withdrawal,which cratered Biden’s approval numbers, this “gamboling along” might have continued, but the bloom was off the rose by late August, and so here we are, with Biden a virtual lame duck after less than a year in office, and Democrats desperate to avert a bloodbath in the November midterms.

Some of this was predictable, a repeat of 2009, which was the last time Nancy Pelosi got her hands on the Speaker’s gavel with a Democrat in the White House. Nancy represents a district no less liberal than AOC’s district, really, so she sincerely believes “the American people” are down for that agenda. The alleged differences between Pelosi and AOC are not meaningful, in terms of the actual policy agenda.

Could anyone have foreseen the Afghanistan debacle? Well, we know that Biden’s military advisers pleaded with him to maintain what we might call a “foothold” force — 3,000 to 5,000 troops to keep Bagram Air Base in operation, at least — and instead Biden insisted on a complete withdrawal, regardless of the predictable consequences. “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” Obama warned, and no one now doubts the accuracy of that assessment. But what about Jonah?

How can a pundit maintain credibility — and shift the blame to “elites” — when he himself was part of the failure that he criticizes? Was it not the case that Jonah and the rest of his #NeverTrump cohort did everything in their power to ensure that Joe Biden became president?

Where is Jonah’s mea culpa? Where is the introspective examination of his own failure? Because most of us (using the first-person plural to speak of Republican voters in general) saw the 2020 election as a stark choice. We knew damned well that Joe Biden is a doddering idiot and that Democrats in Congress are swine, and if we did not foresee every consequence of a Democratic victory in 2020, we all realized it would be very bad. So we stuck by Trump, whatever his faults, knowing that he was the only thing standing between us and an absolute catastrophe.

Why couldn’t Jonah Goldberg see this? Or any of the other #NeverTrump pundits, for that matter? Why couldn’t they see what was so obvious to the rest of us? Why did they allow their visceral hatred of Trump to blind them to the predictable disaster that is the Biden presidency? Perhaps they simple don’t care. Perhaps they are just so selfish — so devoted to careerist considerations of their own reputations — that it doesn’t matter to them whether America is utterly ruined by the Democrats.

It ill behooves Jonah Goldberg to point the finger of blame at “elites,” when he refuses to take responsibility for his own part in this disaster.

Having begun the Year of Our Lord 2022 by paying attention to Jonah Goldberg, I’ll now return to my habit of ignoring that ruined man.

Once they go #NeverTrump, they never go back.




 

Category: Jonah Goldberg

AOC and the Georgia Bulldogs Traveled to Miami This Weekend

Posted on | December 31, 2021 | Comments Off on AOC and the Georgia Bulldogs Traveled to Miami This Weekend

The Georgia Bulldogs are playing Michigan in the Orange Bowl, and I’m sure the New York Democrat has serious business in Florida:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was spotted dining in Miami Beach, Fla., on Thursday, according to a tip received by National Review, on the same day that her native New York City reported a record number of Covid-19 cases.
Photos obtained by National Review show Ocasio-Cortez seated outside Doraku Sushi and Izakaya in Miami Beach Thursday afternoon, raising a cocktail in one and checking her phone in another.
Ocasio-Cortez’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The Florida outing comes as New York City reported a record number of new, confirmed cases of Covid-19 (almost 44,000). Ocasio-Cortez represents New York’s 14th congressional district, which covers parts of the Bronx and Queens.
Back in February, when Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) drew fire for taking a trip to Cancun, Mexico, during a winter disaster in Texas that left millions without power or water, Ocasio-Cortez joined the pile on.
“If Sen. Cruz had resigned back in January after helping gin up a violent insurrection that killed several people, he could’ve taken his vacation in peace,” she tweeted at the time. “Texans should continue to demand his resignation.”
After Cruz took shots at her later that month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, she wrote, “I don’t care what Cruz said at CPAC, but I do care that it appears Texas was just a layover stop for him between Cancun and Orlando to drop a pack of water into someone’s trunk and abandon his constituents again as they get slammed with $16,000 electrical bills.”
The congresswoman was still harping on the trip two months later, tweeting during a feud with the senator in April: “Ted, this is pretty rich coming from someone who fled their own home (and responsibilities) during an environmental crisis to cross the border and seek refuge in Mexico.”

Georgia fans better hope their team doesn’t get embarrassed the way AOC did. I mean, Alabama just beat Cincinnati to qualify for the championship game, and I’m sure the Bulldogs would be eager for a rematch, after the Tide whupped them in the SEC title game.




 

Category: Democrats, Football

Nick Effing Wright

Posted on | December 29, 2021 | Comments Off on Nick Effing Wright

Nick Wright (left) has a crush on Patrick Mahomes (right)

If Satan were a sports commentator, he’d be Nick Wright of Fox Sports. And if Patrick Mahomes were gay, Nick Wright would be his boyfriend.

Any liberal who thinks Fox News is biased should turn the channel over to Fox Sports sometime and see what real bias looks like. Nick Wright, a Kansas City native who, so far as anyone knows, never played a minute on any organized sports team, might be entertaining when he’s talking about baseball or some other sport, but when it comes to football, he’s a total fanboy for the Kansas City Chiefs. Nick Wright is as objective about the NFL as my teenage daughter is about Harry Styles.

And when he starts talking about Patrick Mahomes, it’s like gay porn.

Why should I care? Because this evil clown — he’s Satanic, I tell you — has spent the past season slagging Mac Jones, and the source of his bias is obvious. You see, the departure of Tom Brady from New England opened the window by which the Kansas City Chiefs (and Nick’s boyfriend Patrick Mahomes) could make it to the Super Bowl. So if the Patriots’ first-round draft pick out of Alabama turned into the greatest rookie quarterback in NFL history, this would have put a damper on Nick Wright’s hope for another AFC championship for his beloved Chiefs. Therefore, Nick has been deriding Jones’ abilities all season long, because he doesn’t want to see New England return to its accustomed AFC dominance. Any intelligent person can see this, but the executives at Fox Sports either (a) are extraordinarily stupid or (b) just think it’s great programming to have this Kansas City fanboy on TV five days a week.

Maybe fans of other teams hate Nick Wright as much as I have come to hate him this season — when the Patriots drafted Jones, they thereby recruited me as a fan — but I think it’s New England that is Wright’s personal obsession. He hates the Patriots the way Joy Reid hates Donald Trump, because if New England is playing at championship level, the Chiefs are doomed to also-ran status. Go back to the 2019 AFC championship game where Brady and the Pats beat KC 37-31 in overtime, with Nick Wright’s boyfriend getting sacked four times. That was also the last time the Chiefs lost to New England. What inspires Nick Wright’s fear and loathing of Mac Jones is the nightmare of the Patriots once again becoming a permanent obstacle to Kansas City’s Super Bowl hopes.

It’s possible to be both biased and honest. Nobody who knows me would expect me to be objective about the University of Alabama, no more than I could be objective about my wife or my children. As a lifelong Crimson Tide fan, I’m clearly prejudiced against Auburn (or Georgia, or whatever other team may stand between ’Bama and a national championship). Because I am consciously aware of my own prejudice, however, I am capable of the kind of objectivity that prevents me either from ignoring Alabama’s faults or from unfairly slagging the Tide’s opponents.

Is Bryce Young really all that and a stack of pancakes? Eh, he sure didn’t look like it for the first three quarters of that Auburn game. But he led the Tide to a decisive victory over the Bulldogs in the SEC title game and won the Heisman Trophy, so there’s some objective data that would say Young is awesome. Personally, however, I don’t think he’s as good as Tua Tagovailoa and, in my estimation, Mac Jones is even better than Tua.

Here, watch the highlights of Mac’s championship season at Alabama:

 

Say whatever you want, but that’s some damned fine football there. And when Mac got drafted by the Patriots, I struggled to resist my enthusiasm. Lots of first-round draft picks never really make it in the NFL, and few rookies start at quarterback. My expectation was that Jones would begin the season as backup to the veteran QB Cam Newton, and that only if Newton got injured — or if his performance was subpar, and the Patriots were losing — would Mac get a chance to show what he could do. So when it was announced that New England had cut Newton loose, I was astonished. By the way, I had every reason to dislike Newton, as he was the quarterback who led Auburn to their only National Championship. Being aware of this possible source of bias, however, I was determined to think well of him, so long as he was Mac’s teammate. Football is a team sport, and far be it from me to wish ill on the starting quarterback, just because I am partial toward the backup. Once the Pats cut Cam, however, I was free to go back to hating him, and his subsequent flop at Carolina was an excellent “I told ya so” opportunity.

Be classy — that’s the thing we should strive for as sports fans.  Mac Jones is a classy guy, and I think he took no joy in Cam Newton’s downfall, even though he profited from it. Everybody who watched the Patriots in preseason (e.g., Tom Curran) vouched that Jones won the starting job fair and square. He was simply a better quarterback than Newton, and keep in mind that Newton is a former MVP who once led the Panthers to the Super Bowl. Granted, injuries have since diminished Cam’s once astounding mobility, but for Jones to beat him out for the job in preseason was all the testimony anyone should need that Mac is a first-rate talent. Oh, but that’s not enough for Nick Wright, who has never missed an opportunity to badmouth Mac Jones.

Nick Saban has referred to the “rat poison” effect whereby players on a winning team start listening to the media sing their praises and get overconfident. Well, the cure for “rat poison” is to listen to your haters, and if I was Bill Belichik, I’d force Mac Jones to watch a highlight reel of Nick Wright disparaging him. Here he is Monday:

 

“You have one way to win: Get out to a lead, run the ball, let (Bill) Belichick work his voodoo on the other coaches and coast in,” Wright said on FS1. “But at the first sign at adversity, at the first sign of, ‘Hey, Mac. Can you complete a pass?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, I did that at Alabama a lot.’ It’s like, yeah, it’s a little different. You don’t have three first-round wide receivers running wide open. We need tight windows, we need good decisions, we need third-down conversions. Mac Jones is like, ‘Oh, boy. They didn’t tell me it was going to be like this at the trademark office.’ Instead, he’s 14-of-32, he has a 31 passer rating.
“Sometimes a guy’s numbers are awful and it’s like, oh, he played better than that. Mac’s numbers were awful and he played worse than that. It was a total disaster.”

Make Nick Wright shut his damned mouth — that should be the Patriots’ goal from here on out. Forget about everything else. Never mind who your opponent is, or what the down and distance may be. No, think of that son of bitch Nick Wright, and what he would say if you lose this game, and then play so hard that you shut his mouth.

By the way, I’ve looked at the standings and the schedule for the last two weeks of the regular season, and this scenario occurs: The Chiefs, now 11-4, lose their two final games, while the Patriots, now 9-6, win their two final games. That could conceivably result in a Chiefs-Patriots first-round playoff meeting, and if ever New England needed an incentive to play their hearts out, the opportunity to eliminate Kansas City — and ruin Nick Wright’s entire year — ought to be all the incentive necessary.

Oh, and lest I forget, just in case Nick Wright reads this: You’d better be praying to God that Patrick Mahomes stays healthy. There is a reason, after all, why old-fashioned dropback passers like Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers stay around the league longer than run-and-gun types like Mahomes. See, as long he’s in the pocket, a quarterback enjoys special protection under the rules. Once he starts running downfield, however, he’s just another runner, and that involves a greater risk of injury. Take away the amazing mobility — which is what happened to Cam Newton — and the run-and-gun QB can never again be what he once was.

A quarterback like Patrick Mahomes is racing the clock, really, hoping he can become a champion before he suffers the (statistically inevitable) injury as a result of his tendency to run for it whenever the pass protection collapses. It would be poor sportsmanship for me to hope that Mahomes gets hurt, but at the same time, I have a duty — as an objective observer of football — to warn Nick Wright that he’s putting all his eggs into a fragile basket. Maybe the KC QB will miraculously escape the statistical probabilities long enough to take the Chiefs to another Super Bowl, but Nick Wright ought to be a nervous wreck every time his boyfriend Mahomes takes off on one of his downfield escapades.

Karma is proverbially a bitch, and Nick Wright’s piled up enough bad karma that he’ll have no room to complain if the wheel turns and bad things happen to his precious Chiefs. Selah.




 

Category: Football

Denver Shooting Rampage Update: Gunman Identified as Tattoo Artist Lyndon McLeod, Was Known to Cops

Posted on | December 28, 2021 | Comments Off on Denver Shooting Rampage Update: Gunman Identified as Tattoo Artist Lyndon McLeod, Was Known to Cops

Before the identity of the Denver shooter was known, I’d predicted that we would “eventually be told the gunman ‘struggled with mental health issues,’” and sure enough, Lyndon James McLeod, 47, “had a history of psychiatric episodes,” according to “multiple law enforcement sources.” McLeod had twice been the subject of police investigations in the past two years, perhaps because of his habit of threatening to murder people.

The same “law enforcement sources” say that McLeod “harbored extremist views,” without being more specific.

And really, if you have “a history of psychiatric episodes,” how much do the details of your delusions matter? It appears that McLeod, a Texas native, was into some kind of ultra-macho “Alpha male” trip, and had self-published novels without much success.

I’m sure we’ll get the full story eventually, but apparently the immediate cause of his murder rampage was that his tattoo business was failing, and he seems to have targeted other local tattoo artists. So the motive was revenge, probably for imaginary wrongs. That is to say, the people McLeod murdered hadn’t actually done anything wrong to him, but in his mind they were villains, because they were successful and he was not. It’s the “grievance collector” motif in action:

A grievance collector will move from the passive assumption of deprivation and low expectancy common to most paranoid personalities to a more aggressive mode. He will not endure passively his deprived state; he will occupy himself with accumulating evidence of his misfortunes and locating the sources. . . .
Grievance collectors are distrustful and provocative, convinced they are always taken advantage of and given less than their fair share.

This type of thinking is common to mass murderers — they are obsessed with the idea that they have been cheated out of their “fair share” in life. Y’know, like Bernie Sanders voters. Except, instead of trying to get their revenge against society by voting for cranky Vermont senators, the grievance collector plots actual violence against the people who, in his mind, have done him wrong. As I say, these wrongs are usually imaginary, a product of the grievance collector’s antisocial mentality. He is an unhappy failure, and therefore is likely to view as a potential enemy anyone who is happy and successful. Combine that brooding victimhood mentality with the type of ultra-macho trip that Lyndon McLeod was on, and it’s a recipe for violent craziness. You can’t lock people up simply for being weird or scary, but making murder threats is a different matter.

What does it take to prosecute such a threat? I’m not a lawyer, but it appears cops missed a chance to lock this guy up when they had a chance. On the other hand, if we’re going to treat vandalism, looting and arson as “mostly peaceful protests,” then I guess we can’t get too draconian in enforcing other laws, which means that this particular kook was on the loose. And as you know, Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Colorado, Crime

Denver Gunman Kills 4, Wounds 3

Posted on | December 28, 2021 | Comments Off on Denver Gunman Kills 4, Wounds 3

Motive unknown:

A lone gunman shot four people to death and wounded three, including a police officer, on Monday in a Denver-area shooting spree that unfolded at several locations and ended with police killing the suspect, authorities said.
Investigators have yet to determine a motive for the rampage, which began around 5 p.m. when the gunman shot and killed two women and wounded a man near downtown Denver, Police Chief Paul Pazen said a news briefing.
The suspect then fled in a car and fatally shot a man in east Denver’s Cheesman Park neighborhood, before opening fire again in a west Denver community where no one was hit, Pazen said. According to Pazen, the suspect twice exchanged gunfire from his vehicle with Denver officers pursuing him, disabling a police cruiser.
From there, the gunman drove into the neighboring city of Lakewood, where he shot and killed a fourth person inside an unspecified business, according to Lakewood Police spokesman John Romero.
The gunman fled from Lakewood police when they attempted to pull him over and engaged in a running gun battle with officers before fleeing on foot and entering a hotel, where he shot and wounded a clerk, Romero said.
He then shot at police officers again, wounding one of them, before police shot him dead, Romero told reporters. Authorities did not publicly identify the suspect, and said circumstances leading to the shooting remained under investigation.

The fact that police have not yet named the suspect could lead people to speculate about his identity and motive, which is irresponsible. But I’m going to take a wild guess that we’ll eventually be told the gunman “struggled with mental health issues.” For some reason, we only hear about such struggles when the result is tragic. There must be people who are successful in their mental health struggles, but only the failures ever make national news. Once upon a time in this country, we kept people locked up in lunatic asylums while they “struggled with mental health issues,” but now the policy is to let the kooks roam around until they die in a shootout with cops. Or so it seems because, as I say, this is the only circumstance in which such “struggles” are deemed newsworthy.

Of course, what counts as a “mass murder” in Denver is just a typical weekend in Chicago, in terms of total body count. Is everybody in Chicago having a mental health crisis? They must be crazy to elect Lori Lightfoot as their mayor, but other than that — and the constant gunfire — there are few other symptoms of their struggles with mental health.

Crazy People Are Dangerous.

UPDATE: Denver Shooting Rampage Update: Gunman Identified as Tattoo Artist Lyndon McLeod, Was Known to Cops.




 

Category: Colorado, Crime
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