The Other McCain

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

‘After Being Denied Tenure …’

Posted on | August 5, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

How many readers recall Deborah Frisch, the former psychology professor who eventually went to prison for harassing Jeff Goldstein? Frisch was the original inspiration for my oft-repeated observation that Crazy People Are Dangerous. We haven’t had occasion to mention Frisch since she was arrested in December for violating terms of her parole, and we may hope she’s now in a padded isolation cell with no Internet access, so there won’t be any new updates on her case for a while.

What brought Frisch’s name to mind today was a story about a former Vanderbilt University assistant professor who got busted for creating a fake sockpuppet account on Twitter. Researching the long, sad story of BethAnn McLaughlin, I noted these sentences on her Wikipedia page:

After being denied tenure in 2017, she sought to have the decision overturned. The decision to deny tenure was upheld and her employment at Vanderbilt ended in July of 2019.

Ooohh! Shades of Deb Frisch! Readers familiar with Frisch know that her downward spiral into madness seems to have started when she was denied tenure at the University of Oregon, where she had been on the faculty since 1988. She left Oregon after 2001 and took an adjunct position at the University of Arizona, which is where she was working when she began using her university account to harass Goldstein in 2006. That resulted in her resigning from the university, and thereafter she went further and further into psychotic derangement.

So, what happened to #MeTooSTEM activist BethAnn McLaughlin?

It might be the nail in the coffin for a polarizing figure in the MeTooSTEM movement. Beyond the person at the center of the apparent death hoax, the weirdness that recently overtook science Twitter says something about this already strange time in academe — and the country, too.
Where to begin? Probably on Friday, when BethAnn McLaughlin, founder of the advocacy group MeTooSTEM, announced that a friend, @Sciencing_Bi on Twitter, died from COVID-19.
“She was a fierce protector of people,” McLaughlin wrote on her account, which has since been suspended. “No one has ever had my back like that.”
Sciencing_Bi, who always remained anonymous but identified as an anthropologist at Arizona State University and member of the Hopi Tribe, made a “million first nations Indigenous contacts for MeTooSTEM,” McLaughlin added. . . .
McLaughlin later held a small online memorial service for Sciencing_Bi, and that’s when things begin to unravel. Some in attendance sensed holes in McLaughlin’s account of her friendship with Sciencing_Bi. Others, wanting to hold Arizona State accountable for the death of a faculty member due to teaching-related COVID-19, could find no death announcement or any other public clues about who she was. The institution is huge — in retrospect, the perfect place to situate a fake ally — but the total silence rang alarm bells.
Arizona State eventually put out a statement saying, “Unfortunately, this appears to be a hoax. We looked into this over the weekend and were unable to verify any connection with the university. We were in touch with several deans and faculty members and no one was able to identify the account or who might be behind it.”

 

Twitter suspended McLaughlin as a consequence of her sockpuppetry. More importantly, what this tawdry episode of online deceit appears to reveal is that McLaughlin is fundamentally dishonest and therefore is undeserving of holding any position of trust. And this, in turn, leads us back to Vanderbilt’s decision to deny McLaughlin tenure. In 2015, McLaughlin’s tenure application was paused “while a three-member Faculty Investigation Committee conducted a disciplinary probe of her for allegedly posting anonymous, derogatory tweets about colleagues.” When the investigation was completed and the tenure review process resumed, the dean called attention to “allegations of violations of the Faculty Standards of Conduct” by McLaughlin, and she was denied tenure on a split decision. Many in the academic community supported McLaughlin’s claim that she was the victim of retaliation after she testified against a former colleague who was accused in 2014 of sexual harassment. However, that colleague, neuroscientist Aurelio Galli, was ultimately found innocent of wrongdoing, which raises the question of whether McLaughlin’s testimony against him was credible.

Having been busted for inventing an indigenous queer professor, and then having killed her invention with COVID-19, McLaughlin seems well on her way to the kind of personal meltdown that overtook Deb Frisch.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)




 

Category: Education

In The Mailbox: 08.04.20

Posted on | August 4, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.04.20

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Malicious software or best kouhai? Who knows with BB? From the Summer Event on Fate/Grand Order.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: So How Should The Elderly Defend Themselves?
Red Pilled Jew: Random Thoughts
EBL: What Happened In Beirut?
Twitchy: Sen. Hirono Walks Out Of Ted Cruz’ Hearing, Refuses To Denounce Antifa
Louder With Crowder: Ted Cruz Wants To Hold Liberal Politicians Accountable For Antifa Riots
Vox Popoli: The Lede, Buried, also, Facebook Has Corporate Cancer

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Gutting The Suburbs
American Conservative: Make America Fun Again, also, Joe Biden Is Not A Nice Guy
American Greatness: Obama Defends Mob Rule, also, Nevada Approves Mail-In Voting
American Power: Riots & Demonstrations From Portland To Jerusalem
American Thinker: The Real Reason Democrats Are Pushing For Mail-In Ballots, also, The Democrat Elite Is Aging, Becoming Demented
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Vaccine News
Babalu Blog: Cuban-Americans In Louisville Fight Back Against #BLM Extortion
BattleSwarm: Eric Weinstein & Bret Easton Ellis Discuss Why Trump Keeps Beating The Left, also, Joe Rogan Interviews Ben Shapiro (Again)
Cafe Hayek: Some Links
CDR Salamander: Are We Living In The Twilight Of American Seapower Dominance?
Da Tech Guy: Want Accountable Government? Vote Trump, also, Report From Louisiana – I’m Armed With A Spray Bottle & A Rag
Don Surber: Democrats Are Paying For The Mueller Report, also, Why Biden’s VP Pick Is Delayed
First Street Journal: Being #Woke Means Never Having To Think Things Through
The Geller Report: MSNBC Producer Quits, Calls Network A “Cancer” Stoking Racial Division, also, Portland Riots Grow More Violent As Feds Step Back
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Unexpectedly!
Hollywood In Toto: HBO’s The Swamp Sticks The Knife Slowly Into Three GOP Stars, also, Why The PG-Rated Tourist Trap Is As Creepy As Freddy, Michael Myers
JustOneMinute: Biden’s VP Pick
The Lid: After Lewis Eulogy, Tucker Carlson Slams Obama As “One Of The Sleaziest” Political Figures Ever
Legal Insurrection: Media Documents NYC Mail-In Voting Fiasco But Won’t Admit Trump Is Right, also, Federal Court Rules No Qualified Immunity For Mass. Judge Who Helped Illegal Alien Evade ICE
The PanAm Post: Alex Saab Used Mexican Companies To Help Maduro Evade Sanctions, also, U.S. Plans To Relocate Factories From Asia To Latin America
Power Line: Did Lockdowns Work? Evidence Says No, also, The “Abject Failure” Strikes Back
Protein Wisdom: Progressive Authoritarianism & Its Discontents
Shark Tank: Rubio Rejects Castro Sympathizer/VP Hopeful Bass’ Excuse
Shot In The Dark: The New Kulaks
The Political Hat: Joe “Bad Touch” Biden’s Plan To Destroy Small Businesses With Wokeness
This Ain’t Hell: It’s Not Quite The Inquisition They Wanted, also, Some New Endorsements For POTUS
Victory Girls: Ivanka Spearheads Human Trafficking Survivor Grants, also, Praetorian Media Calls For No Presidential Debates
Volokh Conspiracy: Extramural Speech At Auburn
Weasel Zippers: Teen Who Rallied To Remove Police From Chicago Public Schools Shot To Death, also, Federal Judge Orders NYS To Count Previously Invalidated Mail-In Ballots
Megan McArdle: We All Have A Stake In SpaceX’s Success
Mark Steyn: I’ll Never Smile Again, also, A Baroness On Barrenness

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Category: Linkagery

Florida Man Strikes Again

Posted on | August 4, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

In the annals of American journalism, one thing is forever certain. No matter what happens, “Florida Man” is always in the headlines:

A Florida man fatally shot an Orlando Burger King worker Saturday night after his friend’s drive-thru order took too long to complete, according to a report.
Kelvis Rodriguez-Tormes, 37, is accused of gunning down Desmond Joshua, 22, in the parking lot of the fast-food restaurant on East Colonial Drive about 7:30 p.m., according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
“You got two seconds before I shoot you,” Rodriguez-Tormes told the victim, who had only been recently hired, before pulling the trigger, WKMG reported, citing deputies.
Rodriguez-Tormes had earlier stormed to the Burger King at the behest of a woman who made a scene over a long wait time at the drive-thru.
The unidentified woman was refunded $40 and told to leave after she got out of her car and screamed she was going to get “her man” to come to the eatery, according to an arrest record.
She drove away, but soon returned with Rodriguez-Tormes, who targeted Joshua, demanding the employee fight him.
Rodriguez-Tormes placed Joshua in a headlock before a witness separated the two, records show.
But moments later, Rodriguez-Tormes returned from his truck with a gun and shot Joshua, police said.
The employee was taken to an area hospital and pronounced dead.
Rodriguez-Tormes was charged with murder, destruction of evidence and weapons possession.

The victim was black, but because the killer is Hispanic, nobody is calling this a “hate crime” or planning a protest march, so it’s just one more sad headline in the long, tragic history of Florida Man.





 

Category: Crime, Florida

In The Mailbox: 08.03.20

Posted on | August 3, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: No Police = Lawlessness
Red Pilled Jew: The Virus As Simon Phoenix, Part II
EBL: So Who Was St. Damien Of Molokai?
Twitchy: Mollie Hemingway Calls Out Media Who Portrayed Christopher Steele As Superspy
Louder With Crowder: Students Arrested for Writing Outside Planned Parenthood – In Chalk
Vox Popoli: Canceling Rape Rape, also, Deflationary Inaction

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Dark Days
American Conservative: How Bells, Whistles, & Greed Blew Up The Defense Budget
American Greatness: The New Old Obama, also, Cuban Restaurant Owner Says Louisville BLM Extorting Local Businesses
American Power: A Broad Ideological Project To Dominate Society, also, Stop Apologizing To The Mob
American Thinker: Strike Three – MLB’s Sordid Romance With Race-Baiting Politics
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Karen Bass As VP Would Be Highest Ranking Castro Regime Sympathizer Ever
BattleSwarm: Get Vanned, Wokies, also, BidenWatch For August 3
Cafe Hayek: Unemployment Benefits & Paid Leave Redux
CDR Salamander: Time To Get Serious About Seapower Advocacy
Da Tech Guy: Here Come The Woke Pharisees Of #NeverTrump, also, Race, Politics, & The English Language
Don Surber: Rich Lowry Outs Himself As A Fraud, also, NYC Won’t Recover
First Street Journal: Is There Zero Racism In Canada?
The Geller Report: Postal Workers Warn Mail-In Voting Will Be Catastrophic, also, NYT Op-Ed – “Let’s Scrap The Presidential Debates”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Less Lethal Advice
Hollywood In Toto: John Oliver Lies About Portland Violence, Reporters Run To His Defense, also, ACLU – Silent On Cancel Culture, But Ready To Fight For Red China’s TikTok
JustOneMinute: Duckworth For VP?
The Lid: Rep, Clyburn’s Trump Is Hitler References Are Absurd
Legal Insurrection: Portland Rioters Burn Stack Of Bibles Outside Federal Courthouse, also, Chicago Lawmaker Proposes Suspending Grade School History Classes Until “A Suitable Alternative Is Developed”
The PanAm Post: Is The Rise Of Illiberalism Driven By Fear Of Innovation & Competition?
Power Line: Portland Suffers Most Killings In Three Decades, also, Conservatism Means Sanity
Protein Wisdom: On Knees On Necks
Shark Tank: Mucarsel-Powell Voting 100% With Pelosi Could Cost Her Reelection
Shot In The Dark: Blue Fragility – Open Letter To Jonathan Chait
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – On Florida COVID-19 Deaths & Reporting Lag
The Political Hat: Institutional Privilege Of The Revolution
This Ain’t Hell: Oh, What A Tangled Web, also, The Battle For Peleliu
Victory Girls: DC Mayor Bowser Calls Lewis Funeral “Essential” For Lawmakers
Volokh Conspiracy: CT Passes Law Curbing Qualified Immunity – But With Loopholes
Weasel Zippers: Minneapolis Tells Residents To Surrender Property To Criminals, also, Cubans Rally To Support Louisville Businesses Threatened By #BLM
Mark Steyn: Marcel Dalio – Poster Boy, Invisible Man, also, Jewels & Goals

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Category: Linkagery

Targeted for Destruction

Posted on | August 3, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

When I was a road warrior on the campaign trail years ago, I got into the habit of using the blog as a sort of notebook — three or four posts a day, with photos, quotes, etc. — which I would then cannibalize in the evening for my American Spectator column. Sometimes I still utilize that modus operandi, as for example in my COVID-19 coverage, where I would often do a midday rant inspired by Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings (dear God how I despised those), and compose some statistical comparisons that were then fed into my regular columns on the pandemic.

All of that is preamble to explaining that yesterday’s blog rant (“Democrats vs. Suburbia: Biden Will Make ‘Magic Dirt Theory’ Federal Policy”) was really a warm-up for a 1,900-word opus that begins thus:

One of the basic tasks of the political Left, not only in contemporary America but on a worldwide basis ever since the French Revolution, is to identify those social institutions that are healthy and functional, then ruin them completely, and call this result “reform.” Sometimes millions of people die as a result of the Left’s appetite for “reform” (e.g., collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union), but always innocent people are made to suffer on behalf of the allegedly idealistic motives of the self-anointed progressive “reformers.” . . .

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

By the way, our commenter “JeffS” deserves a hat-tip for calling my attention to the anti-zoning measure enacted last year in Oregon, thus informing two paragraphs toward the end of my column.




 

Category: American Spectator, Joe Biden

Rule 5 Sunday: Summertime 2D Girls

Posted on | August 3, 2020 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

For the last couple of years, I’ve been playing a mobile game, Fate/Grand Order, and while the main storyline is interesting enough, between the chapters Type Moon diverts us with seasonal events, which provide an opportunity to pick up materials and perhaps acquire new Servants. This season, one of the possible waifusServants is an Assassin version of Ushiwakamaru.

“…Pursued by her brother’s assassins, Ushiwakamaru and Benkei fled into the country. They encountered soldiers of the Shogunate who commented on how much she looked like the fleeing Yoshitsune. Immediately Benkei began beating her with his staff. ‘How dare you look like Yoshitsune!’, he yelled.”

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick Of The Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1063, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Flaming Hypocrite Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Jhene Aiko, Olivia De Havilland, Lucia Di Lammermoor, July Child, Hassie Harrison, Tosca, Julie London, Ava Gardner, Rigoletto, Misty Boyce, Il Trovatore, Shayna Leigh, Candace Owens, Carole King, Rusalka, Ernani, and Die Walkuere.

A View From The Beach: Bebe Rexha, Fish Pic Friday – Gianna Goots, Thursday Tanlines, Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday’s Temptations, Motorcycles for Monday, Hot Time!, RIP: Olivia de Havilland, Greenlanders Defy BLM Movement, and Palm Sunday.

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe is Olivia De Havilland, Bacon Time has Butt It’s Friday, and Red Pilled Jew brings us Women With Stars Of David.

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Gonna Teach You Tricks That’ll Blow Your Mongrel Mind

Posted on | August 2, 2020 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Gonna Teach You Tricks That’ll Blow Your Mongrel Mind

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Kate Upton To The Edge Of Madness
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Arson, Shooting in ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Protests Against Police Brutality
Bacon Time
The Political Hat
Today’s News & Updates
EBL

Origins of an Error
Bacon Time
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: A Fistful of Yen
A View From The Beach
EBL

The Usual Suspects
Dark Brightness
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.27.20
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.28.20
Proof Positive
EBL

Democrats Debut New 2020 Campaign Slogan: ‘Reclaiming My Time!’
357 Magnum
EBL

Antifa Trash Fire Roundup
First Street Journal
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.30.20 (Morning Edition)
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Herman Cain, R.I.P.
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.30.20 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Stupid Is as Stupid Does
357 Magnum
EBL

‘Drop the Knife!’
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

Feds Arrest Democrat Voters in Chicago
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.31.20
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending July 31:

  1.  EBL (16)
  2.  357 Magnum (7)
  3.  Proof Positive (6)
  4.  A View From The Beach (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Democrats vs. Suburbia: Biden Will Make ‘Magic Dirt Theory’ Federal Policy

Posted on | August 2, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

When President Trump first raised the accusation last month that Joe Biden is planning to destroy the “Suburban Dream Lifestyle,” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and half believed the media claim that Trump was just “stoking fear.” And then I investigated, and discovered that Democrats plan to abolish single-family home zoning.

Crazy? Yes, it sounds so crazy that you can’t imagine that anyone would seriously propose such a policy, but this goes back to something the Obama administration actually did (by executive order) in 2015, “tying federal community development grants to proactive efforts by communities to integrate neighborhoods,” as left-wing Mother Jones described it. This issue gets very deep very quickly, but the basic idea is that suburban communities that maintain single-family zoning thereby restrict the areas in which “affordable housing” can be built and — stay with me here — “affordable housing” is just code for homes for black people because, presumably, “black” is a synonym for poor.

If we’re going to be slinging around unsubstantiated accusations of racism (which is what the media do with Trump 24/7), can’t we discuss how racist it is to assume that all black people are poor, and vice-versa? As if there is no such thing as “white trash”? I mean, if you’re living in an upscale suburb neighborhood, and somebody proposes to build “affordable housing” right down the street, you’re going to be angry as hell. Does it really matter what race the residents of “affordable housing” are? Like, somebody is building a trailer park full of Kentucky hillbillies, but you’re OK with that, just so long as no brown people move in?

This is absurd, but you see that “proactive efforts . . . to integrate neighborhoods” was a policy based entirely on statistics about where people of different races live. Even if there is no discrimination, you see, there are still statistical disparities in housing patterns, and these disparities must be eliminated by “proactive efforts” or else, no federal money for your community. In 2018, the Trump administration rescinded that Obama-era rule, but almost nobody noticed at the time, mainly because the media was so busy with “Russia! Russia! Russia!”

What happened last month to turn housing policy into headline news? Stanley Kurtz of National Review got poking around on Biden’s website, saw what the campaign was proposing, and wrote an article with the headline, “Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs.”

This is quite literally true. Biden is proposing to effectively destroy the ability of suburban communities to govern themselves, so that all zoning decisions will be subject to veto from the federal government if any such local decision were insufficiently “proactive.”

Biden and the Democrats have embraced, as the basis of policy, what Vox Day has called Magic Dirt Theory, “the idea that beliefs, behaviors, and values somehow appear in particular geographical areas, from the air, from the water, or from the ground, rather than being carried from place to place by groups of people wherever they happen to be.”

Basically, you have to be hate-listed by the SPLC to say in plain words what’s wrong with Magic Dirt Theory. Patterns of human behavior cannot be automatically transformed by transferring a person (or a group of people) from one geographical location to another. I was born and raised in Georgia by parents who grew up in Randolph County, Alabama; despite having grown up in a middle-class suburb of Atlanta, my behavioral patterns in some ways still reflect the folkways of my rural ancestors. If this is true of myself, I suppose it’s likewise true of others.

For example, my friend Pete Da Tech Guy has never set foot in Sicily, but anyone who has ever met him would have no trouble guessing that he is a man of Sicilian ancestry. We do not need to deny the possibility of cultural assimilation to observe that differences in ethnic cultures persist. Therefore the attempt to “solve” the problems of racial minorities by relocating them to majority-white communities — a Soviet-style policy of forced resettlement — is apt to disappoint the utopian hopes that inspire such proposals (to say nothing of the violations of liberty involved). I could continue this discussion at some length, but the point is that this lunatic scheme of the Biden campaign is being dismissed by the major media as a “right-wing conspiracy theory,” despite the fact that it is described at length on Biden’s own website.

It is now “racist” to quote Democrats, I guess.




 

Category: Joe Biden, Racism
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