The Other McCain

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

Syrian Immigrant Ahmad Al-Issa Identified as Boulder Gunman

Posted on | March 23, 2021 | Comments Off on Syrian Immigrant Ahmad Al-Issa Identified as Boulder Gunman

Early this morning — it was about 2:30 a.m. — I noted that there was something odd about how police were dealing with the shooting in Boulder. Even though they had the shooter in custody, they didn’t name him. Why? What purpose was served by withholding that information?

It was not until about 11 a.m. today we discovered why:

he 21-year-old Arvada man arrested in Monday’s mass shooting at a Boulder King Sooper’s was violent, short-tempered and paranoid during high school, his former classmates said Tuesday.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is suspected of killing 10 people at the grocery store Monday when he walked in around 2:30 p.m. and began shooting, according to law enforcement. He was taken into custody about an hour later with a gunshot wound in his leg.
Alissa was hospitalized for treatment and is expected to be transported to the Boulder County Jail Tuesday to face 10 counts of first-degree murder.
He attended Arvada West High School from 2015 until he graduated in 2018, Jeffco Public Schools spokeswoman Cameron Bell confirmed Tuesday. He was on the wrestling team his junior and senior years.
“He was kind of scary to be around,” said Dayton Marvel, a teammate on the wrestling team. Alissa once had an outburst and threatened to kill people during an intra-team match, Marvel said.
“His senior year, during the wrestle-offs to see who makes varsity, he actually lost his match and quit the team and yelled out in the wrestling room that he was, like, going to kill everybody,” Marvel said. “Nobody believed him. We were just all kind of freaked out by it, but nobody did anything about it.”
He said he did not like spending time with Alissa, and Alissa was not close with anyone on the wrestling team. Another teammate, Angel Hernandez, said Alissa got into a fight in the parking lot after the match.
“(The other wrestler) was just teasing him and goes, ‘Maybe if you were a better wrestler, you would have won.’ (Alissa) just lost it. He started punching him,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez said Alissa frequently appeared to be paranoid about perceived slights against him, and Marvel said Alissa was often concerned about being targeted because of his Muslim faith.
“He would talk about him being Muslim and how if anybody tried anything, he would file a hate crime and say they were making it up,” Marvel said. “It was a crazy deal. I just know he was a pretty cool kid until something made him mad, and then whatever made him mad, he went over the edge — way too far.”
“He was always talking about (how) people were looking at him and there was no one ever where he was pointing people out,” Hernandez said. “We always thought he was messing around with us or something.”
In 2017, Alissa, then 18, attacked a classmate at Arvada West High School, according to an affidavit filed in the case. He punched the classmate in the head without warning, and when the boy fell to the ground, Alissa continued to punch him. The classmate suffered bruises and cuts to his head, according to the affidavit.
Witnesses told police they didn’t see or hear any reason for Alissa to attack the classmate. Alissa told officers that the classmate “had made fun of him and called him racial names weeks earlier,” according to the affidavit.
He was convicted of misdemeanor assault in 2018 and was sentenced to probation and 48 hours of community service, according to court records.
Despite his short temper, Hernandez said Alissa could also be friendly and “joyful.”
“The sad thing about it is that if you really were to get to know him, he was a good guy,” Hernandez said. “Whenever you went up to him, he was always so joyful and so nice. But you could tell there was a dark side in him. If he did get ticked off about something, within a split second, it was like if something takes over, like a demon. He’d just unleash all his anger.”
Another former classmate, Keaton Hyatt, said he took a weightlifting class with Alissa and never knew him to be violent. Hyatt liked Alissa’s quick wit and sharp comebacks during locker room banter.
“He was super cool and super funny,” Hyatt said. “… It was never violent jokes about people or America or anything.”
Arvada Police Detective Dave Snelling confirmed Tuesday the local department had at least two interactions with Alissa over the past several years, including a case of criminal mischief. The details of that case were not immediately available.
Snelling would not say whether local police had received any warnings or complaints about Alissa recently, however, and instead deferred the question to the FBI.
Alissa lived with his family in an Arvada subdivision on West 65th Place, a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes. Neighbors said the household appeared to be multi-generational with a large number of family members living there.
The home is owned by Ali Aliwi Alissa, who also owns a nearby restaurant. The eatery, in a strip mall that shares space with a coffee shop, UPS store, battery store and other restaurants, was closed Tuesday.
Jamie Poeling moved her business, Dream Dinners, a few doors down from the restaurant just over a year ago and said she ate there infrequently. Employees there gave Poeling a discount and she returned the favor.
Poeling said she doesn’t know everyone in the family by name, but that she never had a negative experience at the restaurant. Employees would go out of their way to offer food to a homeless woman living behind the restaurant, she said.
“I’ve been in the shop while they’ve given her food and they’re very kind,” Poeling said.
It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether any of Alissa’s family knew of his plan to attack King Soopers.
A relative told investigators Monday night that she’d seen Alissa “playing” with a gun that looked like a “machine gun” about two days prior, according to the affidavit.
“Alissa had been talking about having a bullet stuck in the gun and was playing with the gun,” the affidavit said. Others in the home became upset that he had the gun inside and took it from him, the relative told police, although she believed it had later been returned to him.
Alissa purchased a Ruger AR-556 pistol six days before the attack, according to a police affidavit released Tuesday. Witnesses to the shooting described the gunman as firing a “patrol rifle,” Boulder police have said.
On a Facebook page that appeared to belong to Alissa and has since been removed, the user posted in 2019 that he believed his former high school was hacking his cell phone. In a comment to someone who asked why the school would do that, he blamed racism.
“I believe part racism for sure,” he replied. “I believe someone spread rumors about me which are false and maybe that set it off.”
In other posts, the user expressed anti-LGBTQ sentiments and warned about perils he perceived from too much government control.

Now brace yourself for this:

The suspect’s identity was known to the F.B.I. because he was linked to another individual under investigation by the bureau, according to law enforcement officials.

So the FBI actually knew about this gun-wielding Syrian psycho, but they were too busy chasing down “white supremacists” to do anything.




 

Category: Colorado, Crime

Boulder: 10 Dead, Including Police Officer; Suspect in Custody, Not Yet Identified

Posted on | March 23, 2021 | Comments Off on Boulder: 10 Dead, Including Police Officer; Suspect in Custody, Not Yet Identified

There is something . . . off about this story, and I don’t know what it is yet. We saw the suspect walked out in handcuffs and yet, several hours later, police have still not identified him. While I have seen some speculation online about the gunman’s identity, the fact that police did not name him at their press conference strikes me as significant, because why not name him? Certainly, his identity will be public very soon, so what is accomplished by delaying the release of this information?

What this delay has done, in practical terms, is to allow the media to build the narrative that this is a gun-control story. The shooter reportedly used an AR-15-style weapon, and so the narrative is not about the shooter and his motive, but rather about his choice of weapon.

Is it paranoid to suspect that perhaps police delayed the identification of the shooter for this very reason? That is to say, it may be that police believed that publicly naming the shooter would have some undesired political consequence, and so they delayed this, to prevent the public from reacting in an undesirable way. Meanwhile, this delay gives the media a chance to spin it as a gun-control narrative, even though we have no reason to believe that any proposed gun-control measure (short of outright confiscation) could have prevented this particular shooting.

As always in cases like this, I discourage speculation about motives, particularly when we don’t know the identity of the shooter. Yet the delay in identifying the suspect strikes me as significant. Once we learn who it is, perhaps we will be able to deduce the reasons for the delay.

Anyway, here is what is actually known so far:

The Boulder Police Department confirmed 10 people are dead, including one Boulder Police officer, in a shooting at the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive.
Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold confirmed Officer Eric Talley, 51, was the first to respond to the King Soopers minutes after initial 911 calls around 2:30 p.m. He was shot and killed. Talley had been with the department since 2010.
“I’m grateful for the police officers that responded, and I am so sorry about the loss of Officer Talley,” Herold said. . . .
The Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said the suspect is in custody and his office will do everything they can do to get justice for the victims.
“I also want to stress how incredibly sorry I am for all victims who were killed at King Soopers. These were people going about their day, doing their food shopping, and their lives were cut abruptly and tragically short by the shooter who is now in custody,” Dougherty said.
Officials confirmed the suspect went to the hospital. They say he is the only person injured that they’re aware of and they know of no other serious injuries at this point.

To summarize, we don’t actually know much yet — and this is unusual. I’ve covered plenty of events like this, and cannot remember any case where a mass-shooting suspect was in custody but police waited more than eight hours before publicly identifying the suspect, as in this case.

In a paranoid age, where trust of the media is at an all-time low, this concerns me, and not just because CNN is using this as an excuse to run 24/7 gun-control propaganda. Let me get ahead of that by saying that the vast majority of homicides in America (about 45 a day, on average) are committed with common pistols — 9mm, .380, .40 — and that the use of “assault rifles” in homicides is a statistical rarity. So the predictable push to ban “assault rifles” in the wake of this Boulder massacre will be in contradiction of facts and logic. For 10 years, beginning in 1994, we had a federal ban and, after Congress allowed it to expire in 2004, it was demonstrated to have no impact on the overall level of violent crime.




 

Category: Colorado, Crime

In The Mailbox: 03.22.21

Posted on | March 23, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.22.21

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Trying to find a pic from r/CosplayGirls that isn’t NSFW

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Someone Look Up The Word “Hypocrisy” For This Guy
EBL: Biden Puts Kids In Cages
Twitchy: Kamala Harris Tweets Airport Pic From Florida Proclaiming “Help Is Here” As Ronald Reagan Quote Gets Renewed Life
Louder With Crowder: Bad Orange Woman Gets Called Out – Hotel Rooms For Illegals, Parking Garages For National Guard?
Vox Popoli: Ending With A Whimper, also, More SJW Than SJW
Stoic Observations: The Limits of Funk (Now Hear This V5)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Womensz Will Eat Themselves
American Conservative: Hollywood’s Obsession With Rewriting History, also, The Ford Foundation Is Funding Chicom Propaganda
American Greatness: What Is Alejandro Mayorkas’ Problem? also, Follow The “Science”, They Said
American Power: Tammy Duckworth Blames Trump For Border Crisis; Margaret Brennan Botches Followup On Asian-American Attacks
American Thinker: America Has Had Enough Of Anthony Fauci, also, The Great Pretender
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Prominent German Politician Dies On Flight Home From Cuba, also, Cuban Agents Infiltrating Spanish Political Parties, Fomenting Violence
BattleSwarm: Stairs 3, Biden 0, also, Project Veritas On Biden’s Border Crisis
Behind The Black: Glynn Lunney, RIP, also, Today’s Blacklisted Americans
Cafe Hayek: They Don’t Make Movie Scenes Like This Any More
CDR Salamander: A March Madness Midrats
Da Tech Guy:  Five Thoughts Under Other Peoples’ Fedoras, also, My Woke Breaking Point, Circa 1988
Don Surber: Government Experts Don’t Know What They’re Doing, also, Twitter Is Ruining Liberals
First Street Journal: At What Point Will We Start Treating Crime Seriously? also, Consumers Don’t Want Electric Cars, So The Government Will Have To Force Them
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, And Now For Something Completely Different
Hollywood In Toto: How A Micro-Movie Success Story Fueled Dead Air, also, Plummer Pulled Off The Impossible In All The Money In The World
The Lid: Pelosi – Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes, Biden Has The Border Under Control
Legal Insurrection: Polls Show Netanyahu Holding Slim Lead Ahead Of Tomorrow’s Vote, also, Democrats Going All In To Seize Iowa House Seat They Lost By Six Votes
Nebraska Energy Observer: Random Observations, also, Why Good Wins – Eventually
Outkick: Karen Forde Celebrates Apparent Mask Enemies’ Losses In NCAA Tourney, also, Former Lakers Great Elgin Baylor Dead At 86
Power Line: Freedom In The Face Of Tyranny, also, The Harm Done By Environmentalists
Shark Tank: Eskamani, Wasserman-Schultz Silent Over Pork In “COVID Relief” Bill 
Shot In The Dark: Hometown Boy Makes Idiot Of Himself
STUMP: Meep’s Mortality Update, Math Matters, & A Few Bailout Reactions
The Political Hat: Woke Genocide – Social Justice & Aztec Gods In California, also, Anti-Gun Bill Puts Nevada CCW Permit Holders In Jeopardy
This Ain’t Hell: Congressman Wants To Strip Benefits From Veterans Involved in January 6th Protest, also, Another Eight Identified
Transterrestrial Musings: Dear White Leftists, also, Lori Pulls No Punches
Victory Girls: Kamala Harris Dreams Of National Struggle Sessions, also, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) Leaks Pix Of Detained Border Kids
Volokh Conspiracy: Biden Stimulus Bill Provision Targeting State Tax Cuts May Be Struck Down On Same Grounds As Trump Attempts To Pull Federal Grants From Sanctuary Cities
Weasel Zippers: Sheila Jackson Lee Claims Border Crisis Is “Distraction” Manufactured By GOP, also, These Are The Conditions Joe Biden Is Leaving Illegal Alien Children In
The Federalist: Judge Silberman – “One-Party Control Of The Press & Media Is A Threat To Democracy”, also, Illinois School District Pays Speaker $175 A Minute To Criticize White People
Mark Steyn: Turning Points, also, Michael E. Mann, Loser (Again)

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Category: Linkagery

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!

Amazon Warehouse Deals




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
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