The Other McCain

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

Gov. Cuomo: ‘You Can Go to Work and You Can Be an Essential Worker’

Posted on | April 23, 2020 | 1 Comment

Are you currently unemployed because your governor declared your employment to be “non-essential” and you can’t get a job working for a cable news channel? Don’t worry, says the governor:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that protesters calling for the state to reopen the economy so they can go back to work could “get a job as an essential worker.”
Cuomo made the comment at the end of a long exchange with WRGB reporter Anne McCloy, who told the governor that she spoke with demonstrators outside New York’s state Capitol in Albany before heading inside for the daily press conference. The protesters told her they can’t wait for widespread coronavirus testing – which Cuomo has been pushing — and want to return to work so they can have an income and feed their families, McCloy said.
“By the way — if you want to go to work, go take the job as an essential worker. Do it tomorrow,” Cuomo said.
“But the people aren’t hiring because of the pandemic,” McCloy responded.
“No, there are people hiring,” Cuomo said. “You can get a job as an essential worker, so now you can go to work and you can be an essential worker and you’re not going to kill anyone.”

Ace of Spades notes that the governor’s “non-essential” brother, who works for an obscure cable channel seen mainly in airport lounges, apparently infected both his wife and his son with COVID-19.




 

Category: New York

Oh, Feminists Losing Their Jobs?

Posted on | April 22, 2020 | 3 Comments

You have to read this very carefully:

An internal document at Vice Media Group lays out a plan for substantial layoffs at the new-media company’s websites, as Vice considers a variety of options to deal with coronavirus pandemic.
The planning document, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, calls for layoffs of over 300 people in digital operations, including major cuts at both Vice News and Refinery29, the women-focused digital publisher Vice acquired last year. . . .
Vice is expecting online ad sales to suffer during the crisis, with expected shortfalls of 33% at Refinery29 and 39% at Vice’s entertainment and news sites, according to the document.

More about that:

It would be shocking if Vice, which lost over a billion dollars in value over the past few years, didn’t make cuts. Vice spent roughly $400 million last year to acquire Refinery29, after investors had already begun writing down their investments in the company.

Refinery29 was originally a fashion-oriented site that, like many other such sites, went all-in on feminism circa 2014. What does it say about Vice management that they would pay $400 million for a site that published articles like “Feminist Gifts For Your Friend Who’s Fighting The Patriarchy” and “Daenerys Targaryen Is Emilia Clarke’s Feminist Inspiration”? But when you’re already losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, why not?

Vice’s bad investment in Refinery29 is part of a general trend, with the Bustle Media Group (BMG) similarly laying off staff after buying up various failed feminist-themed sites. (Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

Who keeps bankrolling these projects and why? How do these investors expect a website like Mic (now owned by BMG) to turn a profit by publishing content like, “Transplaining: My husband wants to transition into a woman. What should I do?” Is there much of a market for such content? “Get woke, go broke,” I guess. The Great Feminist Website Gold Rush lasted about four years, beginning with the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria of 2014 and ending with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. The fact that Democrats have nominated an old white guy as their presidential candidate, rejecting such “progressive” women as Elizabeth Warren, is the final death knell of that era. Now that all these feminist writers are getting laid off, what will become of their cats?




 

Category: Feminism

Study: 56% of Liberal Women Under Age 30 Have Been Diagnosed as Mentally Ill

Posted on | April 22, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Trump Derangement Syndrome is real:

Zach Goldberg . . . has analysed the latest dataset released by the reputable Pew Research Center. This is the Pew Research Panel, Wave 64, which interviewed a representative sample of 11,537 American adults between March 19th and March 24th. . . .
Among those aged 18 to 29, some 20.9% of those who described themselves as “Conservative” answered “Yes” to the question “Has a doctor or healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition?” For those in this age group who were political “Moderates,” 26.3% answered “Yes.” But among those who self-classified as “Liberal” those answering “Yes” jumped up to an astonishing 45.9%.
So, to be clear, almost half of young white American Leftists have been diagnosed with a mental illness. . . .
In general, females are more likely to suffer from mental health conditions than males, because one of the most common of these conditions is depression. According to psychologist Daniel Nettle in his 2007 book Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are, females, being more prone to worry and anxiety, are more prone to depression than males. So Jonathan Haidt, known for his Moral Foundations Theory of political preferences whereby Liberals and Conservatives have a fundamentally different system of morality, asked Goldberg if he had broken down the data by sex.
And Goldberg — who is doing a PhD in Political Science at Georgia State University — analysed the data again, breaking it down by gender. The results were as predicted and were all the more striking for it. According to Pew Research Center data, 56% of Liberal females aged 18 to 29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition . . .

The obvious question is, “Why?” And the most obvious answer, supplied by Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute, is “locus of control”:

Part of the reason liberals and conservatives disagree about the causes of poverty and wealth is that they disagree about the extent to which personal choices or external forces directs people’s lives. In other words: they disagree about the role of personal agency.
This idea is related to a concept in psychology called the locus of control. People who tend to believe events in their lives are within the control of the individual are described as having an internal locus of control. Those who tend to believe events in their lives are outside of a person’s control are described as having an external locus of control. While in reality both external forces and personal choices play a role, the question is what individuals emphasize. . . .
The [2019 Cato] survey finds that liberals emphasize external forces and that conservatives emphasize personal choices in explaining personal outcomes in their own lives. . . .
These data demonstrate that liberals and conservatives emphasize the impact of personal agency on outcomes differently. Conservatives are more likely to believe that people are responsible for their situations and use their agency to direct their lives, and liberals are more likely to believe that people’s situations are shaped by their environment and other external factors.

Modern liberalism (or “progressivism”) is obsessed with inequality, claiming that all disparities in outcomes are a result of systemic oppression, which must be ended in the name of “social justice.” Everything is interpreted through the lenses of identity politics, where racism, sexism, homophobia and other biases are believed to define the axes of oppression. Because vast social and historic forces are involved in this worldview, it is easy to see why it tends to breed an attitude of helplessness. If the “patriarchy” has been oppressing all women for the past 6,000 years — a core claim of feminist ideology — a young woman who buys into this worldview must see herself engaged in a desperate struggle, even though she herself might be highly privileged, by any objective standard. Feminist activism, I would argue, is a chief cause of the epidemic of insanity that prevails among girls at elite universities.

Think about this: You’re an upper-middle-class suburban white girl whose parents can afford the tuition at Oberlin, Stanford or Yale. Given your advantageous socioeconomic background, your success in life is almost guaranteed — or it would be, were it not for a curriculum that teaches you deranged nonsense, e.g., “gender is a social construct,” in a campus climate where becoming an “activist” is considered a smart career move. The path of progressive activism is unlikely to lead to personal happiness in life, because this sort of activism is all about grievance-mongering around claims of oppression.

Correlation should not be confused with causation, of course. Does liberalism create insanity, or does it merely attract insane people? A political movement based upon policy ideas that are obsolete, discredited and harmful will not attract the best people to its banner. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the core belief of leftism — equality through economic redistribution imposed by an all-powerful government — has been entirely discredited. No honest and intelligent person could endorse the crypto-Marxist policy agenda of the Democratic Party, which is why Democrats attract so many stupid and dishonest people.

Young people have no memory of the Cold War. They do not remember the failure of LBJ’s “Great Society” programs (about which Amity Schlaes has written a new book). Academia is now so dominated by the Democratic Party that Republicans can never be hired to the faculty at elite universities. Students thus never encounter a professor who will explain them that “progressive” policies are doomed to failure, and are instead encouraged to devote themselves to the politics of futility.




 

Category: Fear. Loathing.

CBS News: White Males Are Heroes

Posted on | April 22, 2020 | Comments Off on CBS News: White Males Are Heroes

What? The liberal media gives good publicity to Trump voters?

A company that produces raw supplies for medical manufacturers has risen to the unprecedented challenges of the coronavirus pandemic. Not only did Braskem USA ramp up production of their much-needed materials, but the company also designated “live-in” teams who stayed and worked at their facilities for nearly a month.
The Braskem employees who volunteered to live at work did so to protect others and hopefully prevent the spread of the virus to their families. After 28 days on the job, these employees finally clocked out — and the joyous moment was caught on video. . . .
The team of about 40 workers worked in 12-hour shifts. During work hours, they make polypropylene, the raw materials used to produce a non-woven fiber found in N95 masks, hospital gowns, and sanitary wipes. Occasionally during their off hours, they could watch TV or get drive-by visits from family, WPVI reports.
Knowing they were making a difference in the battle against COVID-19 made the long stay at work worth it. “All the first responders, all the people on the frontlines, we thank you. That’s what makes our job easy to do,” Boyce said.

Now watch the video:

A bunch of heterosexual white males getting good publicity? I’m sure CBS network executives will fire the producer responsible for this.




 

Category: CBS

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Is the ‘Hero of the Fascist Lockdown Lobby’

Posted on | April 21, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

So dubbed by Ace of Spades:

John Ekdahl has been on a helluva tear on Twitter.
He wonders why it is that the New York-based media is scolding Floridians for visiting the beaches in small numbers, but yet all of New York City’s parks remain open.
He wonders why people are being told they can’t drive but New York City’s subway system remains open, each car a contained petri dish. (And note — they only gave out the order to wear a mask on the subway a few days ago!)
And I’ll point this one out: The same people saying that protests are non-essential are the same people who said it would violate the Constitution to quarantine people from the New York City area to the New York City area.
Andrew Cuomo, hero of the fascist lockdown lobby, threatened to provoke a Constitutional crisis if Trump sought to limit New Yorkers’ holy right to export the plague to other states.
Why is it the Ruling Class is busy demanding lockdowns for others while accepting no restrictions at all for themselves?

Ace’s point about New York City’s subway system is more important than anyone at CNN or MSNBC is willing to admit:

In a research paper called, “The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City,” [MIT Professor Jeffrey] Harris reports that the subways were packed with five million riders a day. Harris overlaid the hot spots of the virus in NYC with the subway stations and found a correlation. “Maps of subway station turnstile entries, superimposed upon zip code-level maps of reported coronavirus incidence, are strongly consistent with subway-facilitated disease propagation.”

Of course, we didn’t need an MIT professor to tell us this, only common sense. New York City is one of the few places in America where most residents — and there are 8 million of them — don’t own a car. Nearly everybody in the city rides the subway, and commuters ride trains from the suburbs into the city, and if ever there was a petri dish that provided the perfect environment to spread a deadly epidemic, New York was it. And yet at no point during this crisis did Gov. Cuomo or Mayor Bill deBlasio do anything about their subway problem. It was only on March 20, more than a week after President Trump had declared a state of emergency, that Cuomo announced the closing of “non-essential businesses,” which produced a dramatic reduction in subway ridership.

Despite these failures, however, Cuomo gives a daily press briefing in which no reporter ever asks him a hostile question, and he lectures as if he were an expert in epidemiology. Cuomo pretends to know, for example, that it will be unsafe to reopen businesses anywhere until basically everybody can be tested for the coronavirus. But as Ann Althouse points out, most Americans live in places with no subways, and therefore are at much less risk of the kind of mass contagion that struck New York, which has 44% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths.




 

Category: New York

‘For the Wrath of God Is Revealed From Heaven Against All Ungodliness …’

Posted on | April 20, 2020 | 1 Comment

Thus begins one of the most powerful passages of Scripture, and I was pleased today to learn from Denise McAllister that this has become the inspiration for a new website, Romans One. It is an ambitious and high-minded project, as the editors explain their intended mission:

Why choose this part of the Bible as the foundation of our message? Because we are living in those times. America was once a nation in which the Christian worldview graced every part of society from academics and journalism to science and politics, but now it looks more like godless Rome in the first century when the apostle Paul wrote a “cultural commentary” of his own. No doubt the Roman Christians were as frustrated and perplexed about how to engage the culture as Christians are today. They needed help, and Paul gave it to them.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul explains that the only answer to the immorality and willful ignorance plaguing humanity is the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is as true today as it was then, especially when America, like Rome, has embraced an ethos of sex, lies, and idolatry—the trio of depravity that is intertwined like serpents to form a death grip on culture.
What are Christians to do when faced with overwhelming hostility to their faith and such profound rejection of the truth about God, human nature, and society as a whole? Some Christians today feel so besieged that they are withdrawing from the public square. Others are wringing their hands in frustration, feeling powerless to make a difference. Still others are simply ignorant of what’s going on. Worse, some Christians so reflect the image of the culture that they have become part of the problem, appearing no different from the world around them and unable to be salt and light among the lost. . . .

You can (and should) read the rest.

Lot of that “wrath of God” stuff going around lately . . .




 

Category: Culture, Religion

Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo: The Media’s Favorite Scientific Geniuses

Posted on | April 20, 2020 | Comments Off on Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo: The Media’s Favorite Scientific Geniuses

 

Watching MSNBC today (so you don’t have to) and it’s amazing how laser-focused they are on the blame-Trump narrative of COVID-19. The MSNBC viewer is given the impression, for example, that Joe Biden was presciently warning about this Chinese disease in January, when what is being quoted is not what Biden himself said, but campaign statements issued on the candidate’s behalf. Likewise, Joe Scarborough passes over as inconsequential the fact that Nancy Pelosi, who now presumes to lecture the president about “science,” was in January and February leading an impeachment effort in Congress that might have distracted the president from keeping up with the latest developments in the pandemic.

And what about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo? The media, which relentlessly attacks Trump at the White House coronavirus briefings, has nothing but praise for Cuomo, despite the fact that Cuomo has presided over the worst outbreak in the country. The most insulting part of the media’s coverage of COVID-19, however, is that they claim for themselves the authority of scientific experts — and expect to be taken seriously:

A virus is not magic, epidemiology is not voodoo, and the credentialed experts are not a priesthood. Yet the reporters, anchors, and commentators on cable TV news — most of whom have no more claim to expertise in such matters than you or I — exhibit a cult-like faith in the ability of the Pandemic Priesthood to predict the future. Previous failures by these experts to predict the course of the COVID-19 outbreak are ignored, as the television preachers of “science” encourage their viewers to regard the priesthood with religious reverence. Most amazing of all is how the media has conferred expert status on certain politicians, as if New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were qualified to deliver scientific lectures on preventing the spread of contagious disease.
All of this, of course, has little or nothing to do with actual science, and very much to do with political bias. . . .

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




 

Category: Donald Trump, Health Care, Joe Biden, Media Bias, Nancy Pelosi, Science

Crazy People Are Dangerous: If You’re Watching ‘Tiger King,’ You Know It

Posted on | April 18, 2020 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous: If You’re Watching ‘Tiger King,’ You Know It

 

What remarkable luck — five years ago, Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin began working on a documentary about Americans who own private menageries of exotic animals and, almost accidentally, found their protagonist in an eccentric Oklahoma zoo owner, Joe Schreibvogel, a/k/a “Joe Exotic.” In 2019, he was sentenced to federal prison, giving their documentary its dramatic conclusion, and their film was released on Netflix just about the time the coronavirus lockdown created a captive audience. During its first 10 days of release, more than 30 million people watched Tiger King, which instantly attained the status of cult classic.

The other day, my son Jefferson and I binge-watched the first three or four episodes (I lost count), and it’s easy to see what has made this the most successful documentary in history. Prior to the release of Tiger King, little attention was paid to the strange subculture of exotic animal collectors. Bizarre fact: The number of tigers privately owned in America exceeds the number of tigers that live in the wild. We might take patriotic pride in this fact — an endangered species is flourishing here, thanks to American capitalism — but the filmmakers are not sympathetic to the private ownership of exotic cats. (Producer Eric V. Goode is a wealthy conservationist.) And the type of people who pursue the hobby (or business) of breeding tigers and other exotic species in captivity . . .

Well, “eccentric” is perhaps the most polite adjective that comes to mind.

These people are not just crazy, they’re trashy. You have never in your life seen so much trash outside of a landfill. The filmmakers do an excellent job of conveying this with subtlety. For example, after our introduction to Joe Exotic and his downscale zoo in Oklahoma, we then meet Kevin Antle, a/k/a “Doc Antle,” a/k/a “Mahamayavi Bhagavan Antle,” owner of T.I.G.E.R.S. (The Institute for Greatly Endangered and Rare Species) near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Doc Antle with Jay Leno on ‘The Tonight Show’ in 2003.

In contrast to Joe Exotic’s redneck persona, Antle seems far more reputable. Antle is a multimillionaire who has worked as an animal trainer for such big-time Hollywood productions as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the 1998 remake of Dr. Doolittle. Antle’s attraction in Myrtle Beach is very professional-looking and charges more than $600 for admission, giving visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get up close and personal with these animals. However . . .

Antle appears to be running a sex cult, with multiple “wives” chosen from among his female employees. We meet a former employee who joined Antle’s operation as an 18-year-old and left after more than a decade, describing her experience at T.I.G.E.R.S. as something akin to slavery.

Another exotic animal owner we meet — who “seems chill,” in my son’s words — is a former Miami cocaine kingpin who served time in federal prison for the murder of an FBI undercover agent. And so it goes with everyone we encounter in Tiger King. There are no heroes here, no one you would think of as members of the respectable bourgeoisie. In general, they could be categorized as “grifters,” who in one way or another have cashed in on the public fascination with rare exotic animals. The producers are holding up a mirror to American society, inspiring us to ask why so many people are willing to pay money to have their picture taken with a tiger. How did the “tiger selfie” become a status symbol?

One is reminded of the old saying about legislation and sausage, and how you don’t want to know what goes into making it. The business of breeding wild animals in captivity, which makes it possible for people to pay for that “tiger selfie,” attracts a certain type of person, because the work required behind the scenes is not something that the respectable bourgeois would be interested in doing, or even knowing about. For example, an adult tiger requires a diet of a certain number of pounds of meat daily. This is quite expensive, and early in the series we are told that Joe Exotic has more than 200 tigers in his Oklahoma zoo.

That number boggled my son’s mind: “Two hundred? What the . . .?”

My son had thought that somebody would own maybe 10 tigers, which would still be a lot of tigers, but 200? “That’s an insane number of tigers.” How did Joe Exotic go from zero tigers to more than 200 in less than decades? Ah, but how is not the question, rather why.

It’s about the cubs, you see. Federal safety regulations do not allow for the general public to interact with exotic big cats as adults because an adult tiger (spoiler alert) might bite your arm off. What these private zookeepers can do, however, is let someone handle a tiger cub, up to a few months in age. Thus, exhibitors like Joe Exotic must have their cats continually breeding, producing new litters of cubs on a regular basis, to give them the product that pays their bills.

Perhaps you see the problem with this. If the big money is to be made with baby tigers, what happens when they grow up? Well, animal-rights activists, whom I despise quite generally, have nonetheless made a reasonable point in voicing their suspicions that some of these private menagerie owners are killing their “excess” adult animals. After all, what is the bottom-line incentive of continuing to feed hundreds of pounds of meat every month to adult tigers and lions, if these animals make no meaningful contribution to the profit of your operation?

And then, of course, there is Joe Exotic’s nemesis, Carole Baskin.

What an evil witch she is, masquerading as philanthropic animal-rights activist when she is not really any better than the for-profit zookeepers whom she attacks in the name of “animal rights.” Joe Exotic made many mistakes in his life, but none was more foolish than ramping up his personal feud with Baskin’s “Big Cat Rescue” into an obsession.

This reminded me, actually, of Bill Schmalfeldt, who in 2012 decided to make himself part of the Brett Kimberlin saga, and didn’t stop until . . .

Well, you can read the files about Bill at Hogewash.

Joe Exotic had a habit of making boastful threats. He was going to “destroy” Carole Baskin, et cetera, and as my son observed, you feel sorry for Joe because he has so obviously gotten in over his head, antagonizing Baskin in ways that are certain to boomerang back against him.

Did I mention that Carole Baskin murdered her second husband?

“Allegedly,” I hasten to add.

Missing millionaire Don Lewis (left) and his widow, Carole Baskin (right).

Don Lewis was a successful businessman, a 42-year-old married father of four in 1981 when he first met 20-year-old Carole Jones Murdock. Lewis was a rather notorious womanizer, and commenced an affair with Carole, a high-school dropout who was also married at the time. Carole divorced her first husband and, in 1991, became Mrs. Don Lewis. Six years later, however, Don was ready to divorce Carole, whom he claimed had threatened to kill him. Then one day, Don mysteriously disappeared.

Five years later, Carole had Don declared legally dead, and thus inherited his substantial fortune, rumored to be several million dollars, and including the Florida property which she subsequently turned into Big Cat Rescue. You see, among his other enterprises, Don had been a collector of exotic wild animals, including dozens of big cats, and Carole’s enemies — chief among them, Joe Exotic — suspect that after killing her husband, Carole feed Don’s remains to the tigers. Such is the suspicion expressed by several people in Tiger King, but as a professional journalist certainly I would never make such an accusation myself, because that might be construed as libel. You can Google it yourself, however.

 

As I say, there are no heroes in Tiger King, and whether or not Don Lewis was murdered, he was no innocent saint. Adultery is a sin, after all, and perhaps the “Red Pill” guys like Rollo Tomassi would find some lesson in whatever happened to Don Lewis, who was definitely an Alpha male.

As every student of Aristotle knows, hubris is essential to tragedy. In his arrogance, the protagonist fails to recognize the destructive fate which approaches, and there is a lot of hubris evident in the fate that befalls Joe Exotic. He staffs his Oklahoma zoo with the lowest sort of human trash, perhaps not merely as a way of saving money — his people work for substandard wages — but also because ex-convicts and drug addicts can be bossed around more easily. One cannot help but notice that Joe Exotic is not alone among big-cat aficionados in having a domineering, control-oriented personality. All of them, Carole Baskin included, take pleasure in the superiority of their status within their private fiefdoms, a status that requires a number of inferior minions to do their bidding. There is a sadistic quality to this type of personality; such people cannot see others as equals, and so they will always seek out or create situations in which they are the unquestioned Boss, surrounded by lackeys and sycophants.

The spirit of voluntary cooperation — teamwork in pursuit of a common goal — is alien to the domineering personality. There is nothing wrong with ambition, and every team must have its leaders, but anyone who aspires to such a role generally will encounter an institutional structure that requires them to “pay their dues” and work their way up the ranks before obtaining a position of independent leadership. Nick Saban didn’t just decide one day to start a football team and appoint himself as head coach. No, he first worked as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, Kent State, in 1973, and spent the next 16 years as an assistant coach (at Syracuse, West Virginia, Ohio State, etc.) before finally getting his first head coaching job in 1989 at Toledo State, when he was almost 40. It was more than a decade later that Saban became head coach at LSU, where he led the Tigers to the National Championship before being hired at the University of Alabama in 2007, when he was age 56.

Nick Saban did not suffer from a lack of ambition, and he is a demanding taskmaster, but you see that he had to pay his dues, working within the system, to make it to the top of his field. This is a very different thing than the way someone like Joe Schreibvogel makes himself the boss of a private zoo, and collects a bunch of underlings to do his bidding. Even the more respectable operators, like Doc Antle, are part of a fringe subculture that lacks the kind of institutional framework that limits the authority of the boss. You may see Nick Saban shouting on the sidelines and think he’s some kind of tyrant, but he is accountable to the university, and governed by the authority of the NCAA, so that he must work within the limits of this framework. While there have been documented abuses within the world of college athletics, the process by which someone becomes a head football coach is such that the wheat are separated from the chaff. You can’t buy your way into an NCAA head coaching job, the way that a Miami drug kingpin bought himself a menagerie of exotic pets.

Viewers of Tiger King are sympathetic to Joe Exotic because they see him as an underdog who fought (and lost) a war against a powerful enemy. The animal-rights movement, as personified by Carole Baskin, has enough money and prestige to make life miserable for private zoo owners.

The regulatory power of the federal government is part of this equation. In addition to allegedly trying to hire a hitman to kill Carole Baskin — oops, spoiler alert! — Joe Exotic was sent to prison for violating two federal laws, the Lacey Act and the Endangered Species Act. It is quite probable that these laws that Joe Exotic was convicted of violating have also been violated by many other proprietors of private menageries, but Joe more or less drew a target on his own back. He just pushed things too far, and made himself conspicuous. It’s like the difference between a local drug dealer who avoids arrest by keeping his enterprise small, selling only to a trusted circle of clients, and the big-time smuggler who drives flashy sports cars and, predictably, finds himself forced to defend his empire by murdering rivals or suspected snitches.

“A man’s got to know his limitations,” to quote Inspector Harry Callahan, and it’s obvious that Joe Exotic didn’t recognize any limits.

Joe Exotic was crazy, and Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Celebrities, Crime
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