The Other McCain

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

The Conspiracy Theory at the Heart of the Capitol ‘Insurrection’ Prosecutions

Posted on | March 16, 2021 | Comments Off on The Conspiracy Theory at the Heart of the Capitol ‘Insurrection’ Prosecutions

Julie Kelly calls attention to the federal government’s case against Christopher Worrell of Cape Coral, Florida, as evidence that prosecutions of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters are an attempt to criminalize political dissent. The feds do not even claim that Worrell entered the Capitol, but instead devote an enormous amount of effort to proving that Worrell (a) is a member of the Proud Boys and (b) sprayed pepper spray at a cop.

Let’s be clear: I am against pepper-spraying cops. However, there are a lot of Antifa who have done much worse than that, without being charged with federal felonies. So why did the FBI and the ATF raid Worrell to arrest him on felony charges? Julie Kelly explains:

Merrick Garland . . . said during his confirmation hearing the Capitol attack was “domestic terrorism” because the January 6 protestors attempted “to disrupt democratic processes.” . . .
Garland’s explanation, however absurd it sounds to the majority of Americans, bolsters one of the Justice Department’s most widely-used allegations in its Capitol investigation. More than 75 protestors now face one count of “obstruction of an official proceeding.”
The temporary disruption of Congress’ attempt to certify the Electoral College results, a task completed 13 hours after the chaos began, is repeatedly cited in charging documents as evidence of wrongdoing: “It [is] a crime to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede any official proceeding—to include a proceeding before Congress—or make an attempt to do so,” several affidavits read.
But the government’s attempt to apply this vague law to defendants in the Capitol case is a stretch, to say the least. In several instances, it represents an enhancement charge to add a felony to mostly misdemeanor offenses.

The case against Worrell and other rioters relies on the assertion that what they intended was not merely a protest against what they believed to be a massive election fraud, but rather an actual effort to prevent certification of the election results — an “insurrection.”

It is for this reason that the feds have devoted such enormous efforts to identifying members of the protest crowd, including those who, like Christopher Worrell, apparently never even went inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Probably it was his association with Proud Boys that made Worrell such a high-priority target of the FBI. The Proud Boys are an “extremist” group, according to the feds, and therefore every member who was in D.C. on Jan. 6 is apparently a focus in the “insurrection” investigation. But having met both Gavin McInnes and Enrique Tarrio, I don’t consider either of them to be terrorist threats, and the case for regarding them as such seems to rely on the dubious tautology that anyone who is an enemy of Antifa must be a fascist. In other words, the official position of the U.S. Justice Department seems to be that any organized opposition to Antifa is a terrorist group.

Again — I am against pepper-spraying cops, just as I am against overrunning police barricades and other actual breaches of law and order that took place on Jan. 6. But depicting that riot as part of a “domestic terrorist” threat requires a conspiracy theory mentality that I can’t accept, and is part of an obvious effort to suppress legitimate political dissent.

(Hat-tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)




 

Category: Crime

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

Posted on | March 15, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘Nobody’s Going to Shoot You,’ He Said, Five Minutes Before She Got Shot

“De-escalation” is the buzzword in law enforcement these days. Police are trained to reduce the risk of violence in confrontations by talking in a reassuring manner to the subjects of their investigations. There is also a lot of emphasis on “less lethal” weapons like tasers and beanbag guns as ways to avoid shooting suspects. In all of this, Nashville Officer Ben Williams was doing a great job with Melissa Wooden.

It was all fine, up until she got shot. Here, watch the bodycam video and see for yourself what went wrong with this situation:

 

When Officer Williams arrives on the scene, his first challenge is to get Wooden — who is mentally ill and suicidal — to move away from the other officer’s vehicle. He succeeds in this task, advancing step by step in such a way that she retreats from the road. Everything is going splendidly up until about the 3:50 mark on the video, when Wooden’s grandmother comes rolling down the driveway on her electric scooter.

“I ain’t scared of her,” says grandma. “Melissa, put that stuff down!”

Everything begins going downhill from there. Officer Williams now has to worry about protecting grandma from this lunatic who has armed herself with a baseball bat and a pickaxe and is obviously ready to die.

Well, “less lethal,” right? So he tries the taser, which doesn’t work.

If you’ve watched as many of these police videos as I have, this is predictable. Tasers are not a reliable weapon. The cop would have done better to charge her with a nightstick — c’mon, a woman versus a muscular cop? No doubt who would win that confrontation, but video of a cop whacking a crazy woman with a nightstick wouldn’t do much for “community relations,” see? So he used the taser, which only enraged the crazy woman. She then charged at Officer Williams, which prompted Officer Brandon Lopez to shoot her. Totally justified, I might add.

Nobody rioted in Nashville. CNN didn’t go 24/7 on the story. There were no #Justice4Melissa hashtags or “Crazy Lives Matter” marches.

Cops can shoot white people every day and nobody cares.

Melissa Wooden was in critical but stable condition as of Saturday, so she failed at her suicide-by-cop gambit — just barely — and I will leave it to readers to decide for themselves the lessons of this encounter, beyond the most obvious lesson: Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Crime, Tennessee

Something Has Gone Disastrously Wrong With the Criminal Justice System in Ohio

Posted on | March 15, 2021 | Comments Off on Something Has Gone Disastrously Wrong With the Criminal Justice System in Ohio

Say hello to Cortez Turray Larkin, Ohio’s one-man crime wave.

If I were a citizen of Ohio, I would be bombarding my state legislators with emails and telephone calls demanding to know why the state has been unable to keep this lifelong criminal locked up. On Memorial Day 2016, police in Columbus arrested Larkin for shooting a man in the head. Police noted: “One of the gunshots missed the victim & struck the home of a neighbor. Luckily no one was injured inside.” The report also noted that this was the 14th time Larkin had been arrested by Columbus Police. That doesn’t include his arrests in other jurisdictions.

At the time of his Memorial Day 2016 shooting arrest, Larkin was 33 and had only recently been released from an Ohio prison after serving time for charges in Marion County, where he had been arrested in November 2014 and charged with receiving stolen property, falsification and conveyance or possession of a deadly weapon.

Did I mention he shot somebody in the head? The victim somehow survived, but still you might think shooting somebody in the head would be a serious enough crime to put Cortez Larkin away for a long time. But this is Ohio, where apparently it’s impossible to lock anyone up for anything, so by 2018, Larkin was back on the streets. How do I know this? Because he was committing felonies, which is what he does whenever he’s not behind bars. One imagines detectives in Ohio have an easy time solving cases; just ask, “Where was Cortez Larkin when this crime happened?” If he doesn’t have an alibi, he did it.

In January 2018, a Delaware County grand jury indicted Larkin for two felony counts of receiving stolen property, but if you thought these charges would be enough to put this criminal back in prison for a long sentence, you don’t know how useless Ohio’s criminal justice system is.

On January 5 of this year, a state trooper clocked a speeding car near Bowling Green, Ohio. After running the license plate, the trooper learned that the Ford Escape was stolen. The driver of the stolen Ford then led troopers on a 60-mile pursuit all the way down I-75 to Cridersville. Police used “stop sticks” to deflate the tires on the car, but the suspect kept going another 10 miles driving on the rims, and wasn’t stopped until troopers set up a “rolling roadblock” and rammed the Ford off the highway. Another 20 minutes was spent in a standoff before the suspect finally exited the vehicle, at which point troopers learned they had apprehended — you guessed, didn’t you? — Cortez Turray Larkin.

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that, after troopers arrested Larkin, they learned there were “multiple felony warrants out for his arrest.”

Why even bother arresting criminals, if judges just turn them loose?

Next time some liberal starts whining about “mass incarceration,” just cite the example of Cortez Larkin. If this guy can’t be kept in prison, how can anyone claim we have a “mass incarceration” problem?

And if you live in Ohio, please for the love of God contact your state legislators and ask them to do something to stop this madness. Unless Ohio starts locking up habitual offenders for long sentences, nobody’s life or property will be safe. If you can’t keep Cortez Larkin behind bars, what’s the point of even having prisons at all?




 

Category: Crime, Ohio

Something Old, Something New

Posted on | March 15, 2021 | Comments Off on Something Old, Something New

— by Wombat-socho

You might think that with St. Patrick’s Day (or as we Irish like to call it, Amateur Night) coming up, this post would be about Irish authors, books about the various Irish Brigades, and suchlike things. Maybe next year.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Things have slowed up in the tax mines, so I’ve actually been able to get some reading done. The book I’ve been spending most of my time on these past couple of weeks is James Blish’s Cities In Flight, the classic collection of his novels about the Okie cities, entire Earth cities freed from a tyrannical Bureaucratic State by antiagathic drugs and the spindizzy, an antigravity device that can serve as a spaceship drive but is much more effective grouped together to lift an entire city and its industries. Written between 1950 and 1962, the four novels (They Shall Have Stars, A Life For The Stars, Earthman Come Home, and The Triumph Of Time) for the most part deal with the adventures of New York, New York and its mayor, John Amalfi, as they wander through human space doing jobs for various human colonies that don’t yet have enough of an industrial base to do those jobs themselves. They Shall Have Stars is a prelude to these adventures, describing how the last and greatest American engineering project, the Bridge on Jupiter, leads to the invention of the spindizzy and to the founding of the first extrasolar colonies. I personally prefer Earthman Come Home, which pits New York against several historical enemies of humanity: the rump of the Hruntan Empire, the legendary Vegan orbital fort, and finally, the most notorious Okie city of all, hiding in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. 

Thunder Run is the sixth of Peter Nealen’s Maelstrom Rising series of technothrillers, and it moves the action back to Poland, where apparently the Russians (at least some of them) may be getting more involved in the EU/Poland War, and not in a way that benefits the Poles. Haven’t finished it quite yet, perhaps because it’s a little too close to reality at the moment.

Inferno by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle is an audacious reboot of Dante’s Divine Comedy – well, the first third of it, anyway. Allen Carpentier is an SF writer who winds up in Hell after a stupid drinking bet goes awry, and he spends a good part of the book frustrating his guide by insisting that no, this isn’t really Hell…until he is forced to realize that yes, this is actually Hell, he’s actually in it, but there’s a way out. Along the way we meet all kinds of sinners, some of a kind unknown to Dante Alighieri but plenty that he’d recognize just fine, even if the sins have been slightly updated to keep up with the times. The sequel, Escape From Hell, follows Carpenter* on a second journey through Hell as he tries to guide other repentant sinners out. His companion is Sylvia Plath, who he has to free from the Wood of the Suicides, and they meet more Americans along the way down…including some folks from the first book (and otherwise) who have taken jobs in Hell and seem content to do so.  I find I like the sequel better than I did when it first came out, and wonder if I simply read it too fast to appreciate some of the things that happened. Well, the book (almost) ends with a bang when Allen and Sylvia meet a famous physicist in the Ninth Circle, but all’s well that ends well, and Escape From Hell definitely does. 

What can one say of the mighty P’thok, Gilgamesh of the Trea’nad people, who stole ice cream and cigarettes from the ferocious feral monkey-boys of Terrasol and changed his people forever? What can one say of P’thok, who singlehandedly (and entirely on purpose!) saved Christmas? One can say, buy the P’thok Chronicles and RTWT!  The best part of the book, of course, is that it is merely the introduction to Ralts Bloodthorne’s epic First Contact tale, which is over 400 chapters long at this point and can be found on the r/HFY forum of Reddit. Imagine a space opera full of high technology, evil on a scale barely comprehensible by the human mind, courage, cowardice, deranged humans cosplaying as Orks and Hello Kitty 40K characters and superheroes in real life, one last mad immortal cyborg warrior who just wants to be left alone, not one but several flavors of Berserkers…if Doc Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Keith Laumer, Gene Roddenberry, and Fred Saberhagen had had their brains uploaded to one mighty WordBorg, perhaps they might have produced something like this epic. Gloriously pulpy, loaded with violence both up close & personal as well as big enough to shatter entire stellar systems, and yet occasionally…there is tenderness, love, and tragic sacrifice to be found. I can’t wait for the whole thing to come out as a series of books someday.

*This is not a typo.  

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Category: Books

Rule 5 Sunday: Kalinka Fox

Posted on | March 14, 2021 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Kalinka Fox

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Russian cosplayer and model Christina Fink, better known as Kalinka Fox, is doing pretty well with this sort of thing; she has a Patreon for people to support her work, along with a sizable presence on the internet including her own subforum on Reddit. No OnlyFans, though, apparently she’s not that kind of model. What attracted my interest was this pic of her cosplaying Lola Bunny from Space Jam; apparently the rebooted version of the cartoon has a more “realistic” look in order to satisfy the director, who apparently can’t handle sexy bunny girls, and a lot of artists & cosplayers are striking back by portraying the original, more voluptuous, Lola.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

A little short (on clothes) for a Stormtrooper?

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick Of The Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1288, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. 

Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Woke Herd Immunity Friday, also, the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Manon Lescaut, Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci, Adriana Lecouvreur, Francesca Da Rimini, Fedora*, Vanessa Ray, Andrea Chenier, and MAGA National Guard.

A View From The Beach: Rachelle Monet, Fish Pic Friday – Mandy Tillman, Hogan Lifts WuFlu Restrictions, Tattoo Thursday, Election 2020: The Party’s Over, Some Wednesday Wetness, CDC Loosens Mask, Durum, The Monday Morning Stimulus Package, and  Palm Sunday.

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe this week is Christie Brinkley.

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

*No, not that one. 

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Category: Rule 5

Why Isn’t Manhattan Underwater Yet?

Posted on | March 14, 2021 | Comments Off on Why Isn’t Manhattan Underwater Yet?

Nearly five years ago — it was September 2016 — New York magazine featured the above article, illustrated by a “speculative rendering showing what a hundred-year storm could briefly do to the Meatpacking District decades from now, when sea levels have risen several feet.”

“Global warming” alarmists have learned to place their dire predictions decades into the future, so that the failure of events to match their predictions cannot be easily demonstrated. Indeed, they have quietly changed the name of the catastrophic scenario from “global warming” to “climate change,” so that any unusual weather event — including blizzards and record-setting cold waves — can be cited as “proof.”

The problem they experience, however, is that they’ve been warning us that the sky is falling for decades now, so that even their long-term predictions can now be demonstrated to be false.

John Nolte quotes a New York Times article warning that a “continuing rise in average global sea level” means that “most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years.”

That was published in 1995 — 26 years ago. Oops.

Turn on the TV. It’s spring break. Kids seem to be having lots of fun at those East Coast beaches we were told would be gone by now.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)




 

Category: Global Warming, Science

FMJRA 2.0: Scenes From An Italian Restaurant

Posted on | March 14, 2021 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Scenes From An Italian Restaurant

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Not going to lie – growing up as an alienated Catholic service brat in the DC suburbs back in the 70s, this song was one I couldn’t relate to. It was like looking at some alien culture whose ways and morals were utterly strange to me, and trying unsuccessfully to figure out what was going on in their heads. Still, it’s a n interesting song, and I’ve come to like it after all these years.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Rule 5 Sunday: Irina Meier
Harsh Brutus
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 03.08.21
Harsh Brutus
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 03.11.21
Harsh Brutus
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Joy Reid Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
First Street Journal
Harsh Brutus
EBL

R-A-A-A-A-A-CISM!
Harsh Brutus
The Political Hat
Bacon Time
EBL

Blood in the Water: Why Have Democrats Turned Against Andrew Cuomo?
Bacon Time
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow
A View From The Beach
EBL

XXPEN$IVE: Beverly Hills Lawyer Paid High Price for His ‘Trophy Wife’
EBL
357 Magnum

Tedious Royal Celebrities
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.09.21
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

What the Princess Said
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.10.21
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Kevin Pudlik, Victim of Injustice?
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.12.21
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending March 12:

  1.  EBL (14)
  2.  357 Magnum (8)
  3.  A View From The Beach (7)
  4.  Proof Positive (6)
  5.  Harsh Brutus (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

The Lynching of Derek Chauvin

Posted on | March 13, 2021 | Comments Off on The Lynching of Derek Chauvin

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline:

[Friday] the city of Minneapolis announced a $27 million settlement with the family of George Floyd. The family had sued the city for the alleged wrongful death of Floyd.
The announcement comes as the trial of Derek Chauvin proceeds through its early stages. The court is in the midst of selecting a jury.
Given its timing, the announcement looks to me like an attempt to prevent Chauvin from getting a fair trial, assuming there was ever any chance of him getting one in Minneapolis. But even if I’m wrong in saying that this is the city’s motive, it is almost certainly the effect of its announcement.

Indeed, how can Officer Chauvin expect to be acquitted, if the city has already admitted guilt to the tune of $27 million? But the facts are still the facts, and the fact is George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose.

This trial is about politics, period. Let’s quote Tucker Carlson here:

There are a lot of things going on in the world right now, but we thought this was significant. Jury selection has just begun in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin. Chauvin is one of the officers who has been accused of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis last Memorial Day.
Now on one level, this trial is a local crime story, one of many unfolding right now. But of course, it’s also incalculably more than that.
The death of George Floyd changed the United States profoundly and forever. George Floyd, we were told wasn’t simply an individual, he was every African-American in the country. Derek Chauvin wasn’t just a cop, he was the physical embodiment of America’s institutions.
When Chauvin murdered George Floyd, he was doing to one man what our country has done to all African-Americans. Many people told us this, including Joe Biden. . . .
George Floyd murdered because he was black. That’s what they told us. They demanded that we believe that, and if you doubted it in any way, if you had any questions about the facts of the case, then you were effectively as guilty as the racist cop who killed George Floyd.

Watch the whole thing:

 

We will discuss this among the topics on The Other Podcast this week.




 

Category: Crime, Racism
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