The Other McCain

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

‘Nice Guys Finish Last’: Red Pill Truth About a Tennessee Murder Case

Posted on | April 28, 2020 | Comments Off on ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’: Red Pill Truth About a Tennessee Murder Case

Abusive people tend to have keen sense of who will tolerate their abuse, and will not associate with anyone who stands up to them. Having extensive experience of dealing with sociopaths, my observations on this subject ought to carry some weight, and my advice to anyone would be: Avoid them, if possible, but never back down from them.

Never show weakness. Never be deceived. Don’t be played for a chump.

Sociopaths are selfish, dishonest and cruel. They take sadistic pleasure in inflicting harm on others, and congratulate themselves in getting away with it. Success in manipulating others — gaming the system to their advantage — is a source of self-esteem to the sociopath. They escape consequences by exploiting the desire of decent people to avoid unnecessary conflict. Sociopaths are very clever when it comes to enlisting others to be unwitting accomplices in their malevolent schemes.

If you are insufficiently “street smart,” you may not notice the telltale evidence that you’re dealing with a sociopath, and you won’t realize that the only safe move, in regard to such people, is avoidance.

Did I mention that sociopaths are often charming, attractive people?

 

Chandra Beth Williams was a “single mom” when she met Bryan Lawson, and that should have been a red flag warning to avoid her. Am I being too harsh here? Perhaps, but there has to be a reason — a backstory — to explain why a pretty blue-eyed blonde finds herself in that situation.

Good-looking young people are seldom single. The more attractive a person is, the more likely they are to be in a relationship. Young men have to learn this common-sense principle and act accordingly. If you meet a pretty blue-eyed blonde, just assume she already has a boyfriend or husband, because otherwise you’re likely to get in trouble. However, should you discover such a woman is single, be suspicious.

What’s the backstory? “A pretty face can hide an evil mind,” to quote an old Johnny Rivers hit, and what can you deduce from the fact that an unusually attractive woman is single? Is there something wrong with her personality? Is she on the wrong side of The Hot/Crazy Matrix?

Look, I understand that bad things sometimes happen to good people, through no real fault of their own. There are innocent victims in the world, and perhaps the good-looking single mom is one of them. But a naïve young man, dazzled by her beauty, is unlikely to be sufficiently skeptical to investigate such a woman’s character, to look before he leaps. That’s the short story of what happened to Bryan Lawson.

 

Bryan married Chandra and became a good stepfather to her son. Both he and Chandra developed substance-abuse problems, becoming addicted to opioids, but when Chandra gave birth to their son, Bryan quit the drugs. Chandra’s behavior became increasingly more abusive. After a burglary, the couple had installed a video surveillance system in their apartment, and the camera caught the last confrontation between Chandra and Bryan. She threatened him with a baseball bat, and he shot her to death.

A few hours after Bryan was arrested, a man called the sheriff’s office to report a relevant fact: Chandra’s son was not Bryan’s son.

She had cheated on Bryan. He had been cuckolded. It was not until after Chandra was dead that this truth was discovered by a DNA test.

Bryan Lawson had been the victim of a sociopath and, given the video evidence of Chandra’s abusive violence, his lawyers believed that Bryan might be acquitted by a jury, having shot her in self-defense.

As revealed in A&E’s documentary series Accused, however, Bryan Lawson ultimately decided to accept a plea bargain, being sentenced to 15 years in prison, although he’ll likely be paroled after three years.

Perhaps nothing could have saved Bryan Lawson from his fate. Some guys are just natural-born chumps, and the sociopath in search of a victim will always find such people, as if guided by radar. We could examine the Bryan Lawson case to see what factors made him uniquely vulnerable to a monster like Chandra, but that misses the point.

Anyone might be deceived by a sociopath, if we were not warned to recognize and avoid them. The danger posed by the sociopath’s warped character — dishonest, selfish and cruel — is seldom apparent when first meeting such people who, as I say, are often attractive and charming. When we look at someone like NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, for example, it’s easy to dismiss his victims as gullible fools, but that overlooks Raniere’s charismatic qualities, and the sociopathic cunning by which he attracted naïve spiritual “seekers” to himself.

One of the basic methods by which sociopaths engage their victims is called “mirroring,” reflecting back at us an image calculated to gain our trust and sympathy. Victims of this tactic will often speak of having felt an instant emotional “connection” the first time they met the sociopath.

Sociopaths have no conscience, they are incapable of empathy, and yet they are very good at faking these qualities, because they know that this charade — creating an image of themselves as sensitive and caring — will cause their victims to consider them trustworthy. And while it is possible that anyone might be deceived by the sociopath, becoming the victim of a sociopath is not entirely random.

“Nice guys finish last,” Leo Durocher once famously said, which doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be nice. Rather, the problem is that if you prioritize being “nice” as a core principle of your life, you are apt to become a victim of those who are willing to cheat to get their way.

Bryan Lawson was a textbook case of Nice Guy Syndrome, willing to play “white knight” for the single mother Chandra Williams, and patiently enduring her abusive behavior until, at last, he was forced to kill her in a desperate act of self-defense. The fact that Chandra cuckolded Bryan, deceiving him into believing he was the father of the child she conceived in adultery, is scarcely surprising under these circumstances.

You should read The Rational Male, and follow Rollo on Twitter. People don’t want to see the cold, hard truth about situations like what happened to Bryan Lawson. The Red Pill is not a pleasant taste, but the medicine is necessary if you want to avoid becoming a chump.

UPDATE: I shared this post with Rollo, who responded by referring me to his 2012 post, “Single + Hot = Crazy.” The common-sense point is this: An unusually attractive woman can have her choice of partners, so if you meet such a woman who is single, the obvious question is: Why?

Whatever the answer is, the wise man must evaluate this explanation in terms of how it reflects on the woman’s personality and habits. If a guy is just looking for a fling, he might be less scrupulous in this regard, but if he’s looking for Wife Material, it behooves him to be cautious.

If it seems too good to be true, it is probably neither good nor true.




 

Category: Crime

SHOTS FIRED: Feminist Jessica Valenti Supports Biden Accuser Tara Reade

Posted on | April 27, 2020 | 2 Comments

Karma is one cold-hearted bitch. It was inevitable that Joe Biden would someday pay a price for his role in the smearing of Clarence Thomas.

Oh, you think we forgot about that? No, baby, and we haven’t forgot Joe Biden’s role in the “campus rape epidemic” witch-hunt, either. All those college boys denied due process and expelled over some drunken hook-up? Yeah, if you’re going to be the lead stone-thrower in that kind of operation, you better be sure you’re not living in a glass house, and the Tara Reade accusation against Biden is sufficiently credible that not even a staunch Democrat like Jessica Valenti can ignore it anymore.

Less than two weeks ago, mind you, Valenti was reluctantly on Team Joe, because she’s a partisan loyalist and ORANGE MAN BAD! Since then, however, it has become apparent that Biden is so feeble-minded he couldn’t possibly handle a face-to-face debate with Trump, and now Tara Reade’s accusation has been corroborated pretty well. Valenti, who was deeply hurt by primary voters’ rejection of her darling Elizabeth Warren, is now evidently willing to dump Joe and deal with whatever the consequences may be. Maybe a brokered convention? Anything is better, from Valenti’s point of view, than watching the party establishment shove Biden forward to predictable November doom. Selah.




 

Category: Joe Biden

COVID-19: Numbers That Really Matter

Posted on | April 27, 2020 | 1 Comment

Among the dishonest games that the media have played with coronavirus is their habit of reporting cumulative totals of reported cases and deaths as if this is the only metric of the pandemic. Anyone with a functional brain, however, must realize that this is misleading and nearly useless in terms of understanding how the outbreak is actually progressing. The cumulative total always goes up, and periodically crosses certain thresholds which can be treated as “news,” for example when the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 passed 2,996, the death toll of the 9/11 attacks: DISEASE KILLS MORE THAN AL-QAEDA!

This is a game, I say, and a dishonest one, because this disease is a worldwide pandemic, and not an isolated event. What matters, if our goal is to comprehend the disease as a public health concern, is whether it’s getting worse or better, and how rapidly this change is happening. As I mentioned in my column today, epidemics tend to follow a certain bell-curve pattern, ascending to a peak and then declining. If we can accurately track new cases and deaths on a daily basis, these numbers will give us an idea of which direction we’re heading and how fast we’re going. Without that kind of measurement, we’re lost, and merely reporting cumulative totals doesn’t help us. So why is the media addicted to this? Because the useless number is effective as anti-Trump propaganda, especially when presented without appropriate perspective.

Consider, for example, that the U.S. coronavirus death toll is, as far as we know (because China is lying) the largest in the world. Yes, but our population (about 327 million) is much larger than any European country. America has more people than the combined total population of Germany (81 million), France (66 million), the United Kingdom (65 million), Italy (61 million) and Spain (46 million). Calculating COVID-19 statistics on a per-capita basis is the only reasonable measurement. Here are the 10 countries with the highest coronavirus death rates, expressed in deaths per million population, with the number in parenthesis showing the “confirmed case fatality rate”:

Belgium ………………………. 631.0 (15.44%)
Spain ………………………….. 503.4 (10.25%)
Italy ……………………………. 446.4 (13.53%)
France …………………………. 341.2 (14.10%)
United Kingdom …………… 311.8 (13.56%)
Netherlands …………………. 262.2 (11.81%)
Ireland ………………………… 227.1 (5.61%)
Sweden ………………………. 223.3 (12.02%)
Switzerland …………………. 192.6 (5.62%)
United States ………………. 171.6 (5.62%)

You see that in terms of the per-capita death rate, nine European countries are worse than the United States, with four countries at least twice as bad as us, and yet our media won’t mention this, because all they care about is blaming Trump. What has Trump done that was worse than what has been done by the leaders of Belgium, Spain, etc?

The people at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and other major media establishments don’t want Americans to ponder that question, because these “news” organizations are actually political organizations, devoted to a partisan project of electing Democrats and enacting a liberal agenda.

Another question the media don’t want Americans to think about: Exactly how dangerous is COVID-19? You might think, given that more than 50,000 Americans are already reported to have died from this disease, that the answer to that question is self-evident. But if we don’t know how many people are actually infected with this virus — and we don’t, because many infected people are asymptomatic — then we don’t know what percentage of those infected eventually die from the disease.

This is important, because our economy has been devastated by lockdown orders which are continuing because it is feared that easing restrictions on business activity would result in untold thousands of unnecessary deaths. We cannot even begin to estimate the risk, however, if we don’t know how deadly the virus really is, as a percentage of all infections. Five physicians, led by Tennessee anesthesiologist Dr. Jonathan Geach, have written an article about this problem and you should read it.




 

Category: Health Care, Media Bias, Science

New York’s ‘Curve’ Has Been Bent

Posted on | April 27, 2020 | Comments Off on New York’s ‘Curve’ Has Been Bent

 

Look very closely at that image from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s press briefing Sunday. The daily peak of new COVID-19 hospitalizations — 3,177, based on three-day rolling averages — was three weeks ago. The latest number, 1,087 on Saturday, represents a 66% reduction.

Think about this, and remember that the whole point of stay-at-home orders and “social distancing” was to “bend the curve,” to avoid a “surge” of hospitalizations that would overwhelm the health-care system. As hard-hit as New York has been, they avoided that crisis, and the “curve” has long since been bent. A two-thirds reduction in new hospitalizations, sustained over the course of three weeks, is an undeniable victory.

Yet the governor, while showing that data, laid out a plan to “re-open” his state that would not return New York to normal before mid-June:

Every day, cable-news channels provide live coverage of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s briefings about his state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. What has happened in New York is not merely the worst COVID-19 outbreak in America, but possibly the worst in the entire world. Such are the biases of our news media, however, that no one ever suggests Cuomo is responsible for the deadly toll of this disease in his state. Instead, the Democratic governor is treated with deference by the press corps, which instead — and rather illogically — focuses the blame on President Trump.
Watching Cuomo’s press briefings is to behold the work of a master in the rhetorical arts of pretended expertise and straw-man arguments against imaginary antagonists who, in opposing the governor’s orders, are irresponsible and unscientific. Cuomo employs a vocabulary (e.g., “evidence,” “research,” “transmission rate”) that conveys an advanced knowledge of epidemiological science which, of course, he does not possess. His audience is expected to forget that, just a few weeks ago, the governor was warning of a shortage of health-care resources based upon computer-modeled projections which proved to be grossly exaggerated . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: Health Care, New York

The Things That Pass for Knowledge

Posted on | April 26, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

This morning, I woke up and checked Instapundit and found an item about the wrongness of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s COVID-19 prediction — “Missed it by that much,” as Maxwell Smart would say — that included this: “The weekends at the Covid didn’t turn out like you planned.”

This is an allusion to a Steely Dan song, “Reelin’ in the Years”:

You been tellin’ me you’re a genius
Since you were seventeen.
In all the time I’ve known you
I still don’t know what you mean.
The weekend at the college
Didn’t turn out like you planned.
The things that pass for knowledge
I can’t understand.

Professor Reynolds and I are about the same age, so obviously I caught the reference, but some of you kids might have missed it. For your education, I’ll explain that Steely Dan was a group formed by keyboardist Donald Fagen and guitarist Walter Becker. Their hit singles included “Do It Again” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” Fagen and Becker met in 1967 as students at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, which is referenced in their 1973 hit, “My Old School”:

California tumbles into the sea —
That’ll be the day I go back to Annandale.

The clever, tightly rhymed lyrics pair that with:

Tried to warn you about Chino and Daddy Gee,
But I can’t seem to get to you through the U.S. Mail.

“Daddy Gee” is a reference to none other than G. Gordon Liddy, who was the Dutchess County prosecutor behind a drug raid on Fagen’s house his senior year at Bard. The charges against Fagen were dropped, but Liddy went on to notoriety as the mastermind of the Watergate burglary. And, subsequently, after his release from federal prison, Liddy became a conservative talk-radio host who frequently had me on as a guest.

Small world! How weird that I, a former teenage dopehead who spent a lot of his adolescence getting high and listening to Steely Dan, later became friends with the guy who busted them for dope back in the day.

Curiosity killed the cat, as they say, but in my case, habitual curiosity merely led to acquiring a vast hoard of trivia in my head. As a teenage dopehead, the allusions in Steely Dan’s lyrics were opaque and puzzling. “My Old School” was really an inside joke for Fagen and Becker, which only their friends at Bard College would understand. And it was not until decades later that curiosity led me to research the song’s background. I had mistakenly thought that the “Annandale” in the lyrics referred to a town in Fairfax County, Virginia. Why Virginia? Because the lyrics make reference to William and Mary, a Virginia college. Another obscure reference in the song is to the “Wolverine” train which, I discovered via Google, was a service of the New York Central line that ran through Annandale, making its last run in 1967, Fagen’s junior year at Bard.

I remember the 35 sweet goodbyes
When you put me on the Wolverine up to Annandale.
It was still September when your daddy was quite surprised
To find you with the working girls in the county jail.
I was smoking with the boys upstairs
When I heard about the whole affair.
I said, Oh, no, William and Mary won’t do.
Well, I did not think the girl could be so cruel.
And I’m never going back to my old school.

Students of poetry appreciate the cleverness of this, and there was always an aura of intellectualism around Steely Dan, as Fagen said in his memoir: “We were perceived as artists just by virtue of our wisenheimer personalities and transparent resentment of authority.”

Ah, so were we all, back in the day! If you were the type who aced your English exams with little to no studying — getting high all the time tends to reduce a teenager’s devotion to schoolwork — you probably were digging on Steely Dan circa 1974. And I suppose you don’t mind a 600-word digression inspired by a phrase on a blog.

Hey, did you know they named their band for a dildo?

“Far out, man.” Reelin’ in the years, indeed.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Need I remind you that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

Category: Music

Rumor: North Korean Dictator Dead?

Posted on | April 25, 2020 | Comments Off on Rumor: North Korean Dictator Dead?

 

Important, if true:

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un may be dead or near death, according to several reports that circulated Saturday.
Former Fox News reporter Adam Housley cited a Hong Kong media outlet that reported the North Korean leader had passed.
Japanese sources reported that the Supreme Leader had undergone a cardiac procedure and was left braindead. “Wild if true. Japanese magazine reports Kim Jong Un may be in a vegetative state after doctors struggled to insert stents in his arteries following a collapse. Source is one Chinese medical official,” Wall Street Journal Japan’s Alastair Gale tweeted.
Reuters reported late Friday that a team of Chinese medical experts had been sent to North Korea “to advise on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un” — a report Housley noted had come out of Taiwan two days earlier.
Housley also noted that Kim Jong Un’s absence from Army Day celebrations were a fair indicator that he was at the very least not doing well.

“At the very least not doing well.”

Yes, and perhaps also “pining for the fjords.”




 

Category: North Korea

1993 Video Emerges Supporting Sexual Misconduct Accusation Against Joe Biden

Posted on | April 25, 2020 | Comments Off on 1993 Video Emerges Supporting Sexual Misconduct Accusation Against Joe Biden

 

The hashtag #DropOutBiden began trending on Twitter this morning in the wake of yesterday’s exclusive report by Ryan Grim at The Intercept:

A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.
In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me. . . .
On August 11, 1993, King aired a program titled, “Washington: The Cruelest City on Earth?” Toward the end of the program, he introduces a caller dialing in from San Luis Obispo, California. Congressional records list August 1993 as Reade’s last month of employment with Biden’s Senate office, and, according to property records, Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:

KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.
CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.
KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?
CALLER: That’s true.

 

This is far more solid corroboration for Reade’s claim against Biden than there was for any of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers, yet the media devoted round-the-clock coverage to the Kavanaugh accusations. Scott Whitlock at the Media Research Center asks:

Journalists have largely buried this story. ABC, NBC and CNN have not reported on it AT ALL. CBS, PBS and MSNBC have offered very minimal coverage. How long will journalists keep covering up this explosive story?

How long, indeed?



 

Category: Joe Biden, Media Bias, Scandal

‘Morning Joe’ Goes Nuts, Screaming About Fox News: ‘They Never Learn!’

Posted on | April 24, 2020 | Comments Off on ‘Morning Joe’ Goes Nuts, Screaming About Fox News: ‘They Never Learn!’

 

Joe Scarborough is smarter than everybody, so smart that he had foreknowledge of the coronavirus pandemic — “back like in February!” — that would have saved “more people . . . than died in the entire Vietnam tragedy!” Despite this, I have never heard Joe Scarborough criticize Andrew Cuomo for New York’s lack of pandemic preparedness. (New York and New Jersey have 53% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths.) Instead, in his Thursday meltdown, Joe seemed obsessed with Fox News:

 

To sustain his “Orange Man Bad” belief system, Scarborough and others in the anti-Trump media mob must ignore a lot of actual science.

For example, the recent reclassification of a California woman’s death in early February contradicts what we thought we knew about how soon COVID-19 began spreading in the United States. This is related to the discovery, from antibody testing, that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases is actually a fraction of those infected. In other words, because only a small percentage of infected people experience symptoms serious enough to seek medical treatment, the disease was being spread quite widely by people who were asymptomatic long before the presence of the disease was known by U.S. public health officials.

I’ve pointed out before that New York didn’t report its first coronavirus case until March 1. Within two weeks of that first case, however, there were hundreds of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in New York, and the sudden nature of that “surge” can only be understood in the context of what we now know about the high percentage of asymptomatic cases. So if you want to cite to me quotes from President Trump or Fox News personalities from February or early March, expressing a belief that the threat of COVID-19 was exaggerated, you must first answer, what was the known number of cases at the time of the quote? And then you must produce evidence that you (or your preferred sources) were contemporaneously offering better information about the disease.

It was not until the first week of March that the size of the coronavirus threat became evident, and even then, there were still plenty of Democrats — New York Mayor Bill de Blasio among them — who didn’t take it seriously, so it’s not as if Republicans had a monopoly on doubt.

On Jan. 22, President Trump said the coronavirus was “totally under control” and, as far as anyone knew at the time, that was true. Those who claim Trump ignored advice from scientific experts must reconcile their claims with the fact that, until March, even Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that the public was at little risk from the disease. The situation changed very rapidly, and Trump was understandably reluctant to shut down the entire economy over a comparative handful of cases. It was not until the pandemic in Italy spiraled out of control, prompting a nationwide lockdown order, that the threat here became undeniable.

The key to all the Trump Derangement Syndrome reactions to the coronavirus pandemic — including Joe Scarborough’s screaming rant — is the belief that somehow America is worse than other countries. But this belief is false, as the deaths-per-million rates demonstrate:

Belgium …………….. 576
Spain ………………… 482
Italy ………………….. 423
France ………………. 335
U.K. ………………….. 276
Netherlands ………. 250
Sweden ……………… 213
Ireland ………………. 161
United States …….. 152

Good news! Our COVID-19 death rate has been less than one-third the rate in Belgium or Spain. But you won’t see them report that on MSNBC.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)




 

Category: MSNBC
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