The Other McCain

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

Beach Lives Matter? Black Leaders Say Miami’s Curfew Is RAAAAACIST!

Posted on | March 22, 2021 | Comments Off on Beach Lives Matter? Black Leaders Say Miami’s Curfew Is RAAAAACIST!

When I reported Saturday that Miami Beach had imposed an 8 p.m. curfew because of spring break mayhem (“Miami Beach Mayor: ‘If You’re Coming Here to Go Crazy, Go Somewhere Else’”), I wondered if anyone else noticed the demographic of the rowdy scene on South Beach:

After weeks of uninhibited partying on South Beach by spring breakers, police turned away throngs of people — many of them Black — from world-famous Ocean Drive with a SWAT truck, pepper balls and sound cannons.
The tactics were intended to enforce an 8 p.m. curfew announced only hours earlier on Saturday to rid the city of what police and politicians have described as unruly and sometimes violent late-night crowds. . . .
But the use of force to clear out people of color from South Beach alarmed some Black leaders. And if Miami Beach has openly recoiled at the behavior of at-times chaotic crowds filling the city’s entertainment district every weekend, some in South Florida are having a similar reaction to the way the city and its police have handled the presence of thousands of people of color.
“I was very disappointed,” Stephen Hunter Johnson, chairman of Miami-Dade’s Black Affairs Advisory Committee, said Sunday morning. “I think when they’re young Black people [on South Beach], the response is, ‘Oh my God, we have to do something.’” . . .
Miami Beach Police Chief Richard Clements told the Miami Herald on Sunday that Saturday night’s incident would be reviewed internally. . . .
But at a time when the country is undergoing a racial reckoning, the optics of police officers grappling with crowds and city leaders condemning a largely Black group of visitors has been unavoidable. Daniella Pierre, president of the NAACP’s Miami-Dade chapter, tweeted “#SpringBreakingWhileBlack” on Saturday night. She later added: “Unacceptable to say the least.” . . .
Even before Saturday night’s confrontation between police and party-hungry crowds, frustration with the way the city was policing — and talking about — spring break crowds on South Beach was growing among local Black leaders. DeAnne Connolly Graham, a member of Miami Beach’s newly formed Black Affairs Advisory Committee, told the Miami Herald Friday that “we have to realize that we are definitely fighting an undertone of racism” among the city’s largely white resident base, some of whom have called Black spring breakers “thugs” or “animals” on social media.

Gosh, I wonder why people would say such things?




 

Category: Uncategorized

An R-Rated Time Capsule From 1982

Posted on | March 22, 2021 | Comments Off on An R-Rated Time Capsule From 1982

There are basically two things everyone remembers from Fast Times at Ridgemont High — Sean Penn as the dopehead surfer Jeff Spicoli and the famous topless fantasy scene with Phoebe Cates. Along with The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it was one of the classic teen movies of the 1980s, establishing a formula — a rock music soundtrack, an ensemble cast and a plot that wasn’t really much of a plot.

Released in 1982, Fast Times was based on a book by Cameron Crowe. A prodigy who graduated high school at age 15 and then became a journalist for Rolling Stone, Crowe decided at age 22 to go undercover in the guise of a student named “Dave Cameron” at San Diego’s Clairemont High School during the 1978-1979 school year. This is an important point — while we think of Fast Times as a phenomenon of the Eighties, the teenage scene on which it was based actually happened in the late 1970s.

Because I graduated high school in 1977, there is a definite familiarity to the culture depicted in Fast Times, even though the movie is set in affluent suburban southern California rather than the redneck Bible Belt environs of Douglas County, Georgia. The casual attitudes toward sex depicted in Fast Times were generally more casual than among most Georgia teenagers at the time, but still that attitude was not unknown among my peers (for myself, I’ll invoke my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination). Very early in Fast Times, this theme is established as Linda Barrett, the Phoebe Cates character, encourages Stacy Hamilton, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, to flirt with an older guy at the pizza restaurant in the mall: “Go for it! He’s cute. Just take his order. Look him in the eye. If he says anything remotely funny, just laugh like you’ve never heard anything so funny. And smile!”

The guy, who works as an “audio consultant” at the stereo store in the mall, is 26 and Stacy is only 15, but she tells him she’s 19. After the guy gets her phone number, Stacy is encouraged by Linda to pursue him: “Stacy, what are you waiting for? You’re 15 years old. I did it when I was 13. It’s no huge thing. It’s just sex.”

This attitude — “It’s just sex” — was perhaps not the majority opinion among teenage girls at the time, but it wasn’t rare, either. Doing it at age 15, or even 13, wasn’t viewed as unusual, and there were indeed girls like Linda, a high school senior who didn’t date guys her own age, but instead had an older boyfriend (“fiancé”) who worked for an airline.

Watching Fast Times again over the weekend, I was struck by how much of the film’s plot revolves around sex. The scene in which Stacy has sex with Mike Damone had to be edited after the first screening because the ratings board wanted to give it an “X.” The final version was just barely under the limit for an “R” rating but, to be quite honest, I’d entirely forgotten that Leigh appears topless in the movie.

Did you know that Jennifer Jason Leigh’s father was the actor Vic Morrow? And that she is actually of Jewish ancestry? I didn’t pay much attention to her in Fast Times, and was instead captivated by Phoebe Cates as Linda, stepping out of that swimming pool to a tune by The Cars: “Hi Brad, you know how cute I always thought you were.”

It was just a stupid teen movie, but Fast Times at Ridgemont High is worth watching nearly four decades later, as a sort of time capsule of a bygone era. One of the best scenes in the movie is when nerdy Mark “The Rat” Ratner seeks advice from Mike Damone about how to win his dream girl — Stacy — who is in his biology class:

Damone: This is what you do — start from the minute you walk into biology. I mean, don’t just walk in. You move across the room. And you don’t talk to her. You use your face. You use your body. You use everything. That’s what I do. I mean I just send out this vibe and I have personally found that women do respond. I mean, something happens.
Ratner: Well, naturally something happens. I mean, you put the vibe out to 30 million chicks, something is gonna happen.
Damone: That’s the idea, Rat. That’s the attitude.
Ratner: The attitude?
Damone: Yeah! The attitude dictates that you don’t care whether she comes, stays, lays, or prays. I mean whatever happens, your toes are still tappin’. Now when you got that, then you have the attitude.

This is entirely valid, as is Damone’s famous “Five Point Plan”:

First of all Rat, you never let on how much you like a girl. “Oh, Debbie. Hi.”
Two, you always call the shots. “Kiss me. You won’t regret it.”
Now three, act like wherever you are, that’s the place to be. “Isn’t this great?”
Four, when ordering food, you find out what she wants, then order for the both of you. It’s a classy move. “Now, the lady will have the linguini and white clam sauce, and a Coke with no ice.”
And five, now this is the most important, Rat. When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, put on side one of Led Zeppelin IV.

Take notes, kids. This will be on your final exam.

UPDATE: Not to turn this into Adam Sandler’s “Hanuhkah Song,” but my mention that Jennifer Jason Leigh is actually Jewish prompted one commenter to mention that Phoebe Cates is also Jewish on her father’s side (originally Katz), although her mother is Filipina. Of course, Sean Penn is Jewish on his father’s side, and I suppose someone will go through the entire cast this way. I remember a conversation with Andrew Breitbart: “Do the Jews run Hollywood? Yes. So what? Next question.”




 

Category: Movies

Rule 5 Sunday: Lilly Bakamoto

Posted on | March 22, 2021 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Lilly Bakamoto

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I am grateful to the r/CosplayGirls subreddit for supplying ongoing inspiration for these posts.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Mercy from Overwatch

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1295, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Miseducation Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon

EBL: Happy Pi Day, Tales Of Hoffman, The Golden Girl Of The West, Anna Bolena, Akhnaten, Jordan Fuchs – Liar, The Barber Of Seville, Eugene Onegin, Agrippina, and MAGA Spring Stumble Bumble Biden

A View From The Beach: Maddison Jaizani, Election 2020: Just a Little Bit, Fish Pic Friday – Chelsea Hagan, Election 2020: Feelings, Nothing More than Feelings, Some Thursday Tanlines, A Chesapeake Bay St. Patrick’s Day Miracle in Ireland, Happy St. Patrick’s Day!, Wild Child, Your Monday Morning Stimulus, Happy Pi Day, Palm Sunday and Maryland Joins Potomac Bass Management Group

Proof Positive’s Vintage Gal Of The Week is Cleo Moore!

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: We’re An American Band

Posted on | March 22, 2021 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: We’re An American Band

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Rule 5 Sunday: Kalinka Fox
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Democrats and the War on ‘Whiteness’
The Political Hat

The Lynching of Derek Chauvin
Bacon Time
Proof Positive

FMJRA 2.0: Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
A View From The Beach
EBL

Why Isn’t Manhattan Underwater Yet?
The Political Hat

Something Has Gone Disastrously Wrong With the Criminal Justice System in Ohio
The Universal Spectator
357 Magnum

‘Nobody’s Going to Shoot You,’ He Said, Five Minutes Before She Got Shot
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

The Conspiracy Theory at the Heart of the Capitol ‘Insurrection’ Prosecutions
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.16.21 (Morning Edition)
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

‘15 Days to Slow the Spread’
Bacon Time

Georgia Massage Parlor Massacre
Rotten Chestnuts
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.17.21 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

‘This Case Is a Great Example of Why Our Deputies Wear Body Cameras’
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.17.21 (Evening Edition)
357 Magnum
EBL

Nika Holbert and the BLM Myth
Dark Brightness
EBL

Milwaukee: Sarah Hoyt’s Shocked Face Could Not Be Reached for Comment
Dark Brightness
357 Magnum
EBL

Wokies Ruin Everything
357 Magnum
EBL

NYPD to Combat Thought Crimes?
Dark Brightness
The Pirate’s Cove
357 Magnum
EBL

Atlanta: The ‘Yellow Fever’ Theory
First Street Journal
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.18.21
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

‘Level With the American People’: Tennessee Senator Slams Biden
EBL

Gentle Reminder To Instapundit
A View From The Beach
EBL

Joe Biden Can’t Even Walk Up Stairs
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.19.21
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending March 19:

  1.  EBL (17)
  2.  357 Magnum (11)
  3.  Proof Positive (7)
  4.  A View From The Beach (6)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Atlanta: The Backstory Emerges

Posted on | March 21, 2021 | Comments Off on Atlanta: The Backstory Emerges

The bottom line is that anti-Asian racial prejudice was not the motive for the shooting rampage at three Atlanta-area massage parlors.

The Washington Post assigned a team of reporters to do a full background profile on gunman Robert Aaron Long. The resulting article is nearly 2,000 words, with four bylines and five other reporters listed as contributors. This is the kind of all-out journalistic blitz that major news organizations rarely do on any crime story, which shows what a priority it was for the editors. Here is the summary paragraph:

But over the past four years, Long’s life turned toward the tumultuous. He started college classes and left after one year. He believed he was straying from his faith, telling friends that he was fixated on sex to the extent that he thought he was addicted. His relationship with a girlfriend collapsed after she found out that he frequented massage businesses, according to his roommate. His bond with his parents frayed; on the night before the shootings, they threw him out of their house, according to police.

Being kicked out by his parents seems to have been the event that precipitated his shooting rampage. This appears to have been part of a pattern of parental efforts to control their son:

[A]fter finishing high school, Long seems to have drifted. He took odd jobs for neighbors. He enrolled at the University of North Georgia campus in Cumming, 45 minutes from home, but left after one year without completing any degree program at the school, which primarily offers community college-level courses.
In 2018, he was baptized at his family’s church.
By January 2019, he was involved in a relationship with a woman in Chattanooga, Tenn., but his parents called the police that month to report that Long, then 19, had gone to visit the girlfriend and refused to return, according to a report from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office.
A deputy who met with the parents at their house wrote that Long had not returned on time from the girlfriend’s home in Chattanooga and had texted his parents to inform them that he would not be coming back. “He wanted a fresh start,” the deputy wrote. Long and his girlfriend ignored his parents’ repeated calls, they told the deputy, so they called 911. . . .
By August of that year, Long was back in Woodstock, but not home with his parents. He was living, for about six months, at Maverick Recovery, a 12-step transitional-housing facility in Roswell, Ga., about 13 miles from home. He was also frequenting massage spas, one of his friends said — including, according to Atlanta police, the same Atlanta spas where this week’s slayings occurred.
Long sought treatment for his pornography habit and penchant for buying sexual services at massage facilities, according to his parents and Tyler Bayless, a roommate at Maverick from August 2019 through at least January 2020. . . .
Long blamed his troubles on pornography, Bayless said: “He hated the pornography industry. He was pretty passionate about what a bad influence it was on him. He felt exploited by it, taken advantage of by it.”

Wait, didn’t liberals tell us pornography is harmless? But we will leave that aside to the more immediate point: Nothing in this extensively reported Washington Post account shows any indication that Long was motivated by racial prejudice, despite the fact that, at the same time their editors were assigning this story, they were also publishing numerous analysis/commentary articles which sought to frame this crime within the preferred political narrative of anti-Asian “white supremacy”:

Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives.

That’s from Andrew Sullivan, of all people, giving Ed Driscoll a chance to employ the “BIZARRE HELL-WORLD” theme. Sullivan also extensively documents the reality that anti-Asian “hate crimes” are most often committed by black suspects, so read the whole thing.




 

Category: Crime, Georgia, Racism

Miami Beach Mayor: ‘If You’re Coming Here to Go Crazy, Go Somewhere Else’

Posted on | March 20, 2021 | Comments Off on Miami Beach Mayor: ‘If You’re Coming Here to Go Crazy, Go Somewhere Else’

It’s not a party until somebody calls the cops:

Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber declared a state of emergency and set a curfew Saturday, saying the crowds that have descended on the city recently are “more than we can handle.”
“Too many are coming, really, without the intention of following the rules, and the result has been a level of chaos and disorder that is just something more than we can endure,” Gelber told CNN’s Ana Cabrera.
An 8 p.m. curfew will be put in place in the city’s entertainment district, and some roads will be closed, Gelber said at a news conference Saturday. The measures will be in effect for the next 72 hours, he said.
The causeways to Miami Beach from the mainland will be closed to non-local traffic starting at 9 p.m. for the next few nights, Gelber said.
At night, “it feels like a rock concert, wall-to-wall people over blocks and blocks,” Gelber told Cabrera.
On Friday night, someone shot a weapon into the air, and there was a riot, he said. . . .
“If you’re coming here because you’ve been pent up and you want to let loose, you think anything goes, please don’t come here,” Gelber told CNN. “We have extra police everywhere, we’re going to arrest people, and we have been. We’re going to keep order.”
“If you’re coming here to go crazy, go somewhere else. We don’t want you,” Gelber said.

Some videos of the South Beach scene have made the rounds:




 

Category: Crime, Florida

The ‘Extremist’ Boomerang

Posted on | March 20, 2021 | Comments Off on The ‘Extremist’ Boomerang

Why has the media become so obsessed with “white nationalism” as a domestic terrorist threat? Kyle Shideler makes an interesting argument that what has happened is an indirect consequence of the refusal of national-security officials, in the post-9/11 environment, to be specific in naming the nature of the threat we faced. Because they did not wish to define the threat as Islamic terrorism, instead the national security establishment defined the problem as “extremism.”

That rhetorical evasion has boomeranged around in a perverse way so that mainstream beliefs are now defined as “extremist”:

Forbidden from discussing the actual nature and ideology of the threat which they were instructed to counter, America’s intelligence and law enforcement officials lived and died by euphemism. And like the bureaucracies which perpetuate them, government euphemisms tend to expand even beyond the original logic for their creation. So, when “Islamic extremist” was no longer sufficiently vague, the phrase “homegrown violent extremist” was adopted, where “homegrown” paradoxically refers to those operating in service to a foreign ideology perpetuated by international terrorists.
The very logic of denying that foreign terrorists could be motivated by an ideology developed from within the context of their own society necessitated believing that any mainstream American within our society could be a potential threat.

Read the whole thing.




 

Category: Terrorism

Kentucky Cops Shoot a White Guy

Posted on | March 20, 2021 | Comments Off on Kentucky Cops Shoot a White Guy

The Police Activity YouTube channel has put out a lot of content in the past week, including bodycam footage from the Feb. 20 incident in which police in Kentucky shot 57-year-old Randall Lockaby:

 

When watching that 10-minute clip, I was impressed by how friendly the cop’s conversation with Lockaby seemed, up until the moment when he asked Lockaby to step out of his pickup truck and Lockaby emerged pointing a 9-mm pistol at the cop. Why did it escalate so suddenly?

Kenton County Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Sanders said Friday that two Villa Hills officers were justified in the use of force in a Feb. 20, 2021, death of Randall Lockaby during a traffic stop on I-75.
Lockaby, 57, of Manchester, Kentucky, was taken to St. Elizabeth Hospital Medical Center in Florence where he died. The shooting took place outside of Villa Hills, but police have county-wide jurisdiction.
Officers Sean Dooley and Jacob Bolton did not violate any laws based upon a review of the Kentucky State Police investigation, said Sanders.
Lockaby was seen drawing a handgun from his waist and pointed the gun at officer Dooley, according to a letter Sanders sent to Villa Hills and KSP officials. Dashboard camera video from Bolton’s cruiser and body camera video from both officers captured the entire incident in which Lockaby refused to follow Dooley’s commands to step to the rear of the vehicle, according to the letter.
Sanders said Bolton fired after he saw Lockaby point a gun at Dooley. Bolton reasonably perceived the need to use deadly force to prevent Dooley from being shot, according to the letter.
The prosecutor said the officers had a reasonable belief they would be harmed based upon Lockaby’s threat to use the handgun on the officers.
Sanders told The Enquirer that he has spoken with Lockaby’s family.
“They say this is very out of character for him, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family,” he said.
Police started the traffic stop as a speeding incident on I-75, Sanders said.
Investigators found that Lockaby was a convicted felon who was not legally allowed to carry a gun.
Lockaby may have known officers would find multiple handguns in the car, and that he would go back to prison, he said.
“I don’t think this confrontation was anything anyone knew was coming other than Mr. Lockaby,” Sanders said.

Compare this to the shooting of Nika Holbert, which I examined yesterday and said “race had nothing to do with it.” In that case, what caused the situation to “escalate” was that Holbert had a prior record, she had drugs and a gun in the car, and knew that if she allowed cops to search the car she would be facing prison time — the same basic reason that caused the sudden escalation of Randall Lockaby’s traffic stop.

It is the consciousness of guilt that causes these deadly confrontations. Always the national media want to call attention to the relatively rare cases where the police shooting of a black suspect is not legally justified, where racism can be suggested as an explanation, but such cases are statistical anomalies in the overall pattern of law enforcement. The vast majority of cases in which police shoot suspects (whatever their race) are proven to be justified, a fact well known to the audience of the Police Activity YouTube channel, which has more than 2 million subscribers. The more of these videos you watch, the more you recognize the behavioral patterns which lead to shooting incidents.

Over and over again, we learn that the suspect who got shot by cops was not a first-time offender. Many, if not most, of them are habitual offenders with the proverbial “record as long as your arm.”

We don’t know the details of Randall Lockaby’s criminal record, except that he was a convicted felon who could not lawfully possess firearms. From the moment he got pulled over for speeding, Lockaby was conscious that he would go to prison if cops found the guns he had in his truck. And the police officer’s seemingly friendly conversation with Lockaby was actually part of his investigation technique:

“Listen, man, you’re not hauling anything illegal in here are you? Nothing illegal in here? No large amounts of anything you’re trying to haul or anything like that? . . . If I were to ask you for consent to search the vehicle, would you let me search the vehicle real quick? . . . Listen, partner, you’ve had a lot of pretty nervous behavior sitting here talking to me, OK? . . . You know what I do for a living, man? I catch drug dealers and drug smugglers. . . . A lot of your mannerisms and gestures while you’ve been sitting here talking to me, I’m trained to read people, OK?”

Bingo. The superficial friendliness of his conversation was a tactic — the cop talks in a friendly manner, so that the suspect has no obvious reason to feel intimidated, and if the suspect then shows telltale behavioral signs of nervousness, why is that? Consciousness of guilt.

Cops aren’t mind-readers, but with training and experience, they become quite good at recognizing the behavioral patterns of criminals.

There ought to be a default of respect for police who, after all, are acting as public servants on behalf of all law-abiding citizens. The two officers here in this small town in Kentucky showed remarkable professionalism, and as such are a credit to their community. No protest marches about this shooting. CNN doesn’t care. White lives don’t matter.




 

Category: Crime, Kentucky
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