NBC Shocked by New Scandal!

Posted on | September 19, 2019 | Comments Off on NBC Shocked by New Scandal!

Before being nominated by President Donald Trump to be attorney general, William Barr strongly endorsed a 2017 book accusing colleges and universities of unfairly punishing male students accused of rape.
Barr’s praise for “Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities” by K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor, is posted on the book’s Amazon.com page. But during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, Barr was not questioned about the blurb, which suggested men are often railroaded by a politically correct campus “mob.”
In the blurb, Barr praises the book for examining multiple cases where, as he described, “Male students are sacrificed to the mob, with academic leaders happily serving as the hangmen.”

You can click here to buy The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities, which I highly recommend.

So I guess I’ll never be Attorney General now?

Category: NBC

Netanyahu Wins Re-Election UPDATE: Hey, Wait, That Was Completely Wrong!

Posted on | September 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Netanyahu Wins Re-Election UPDATE: Hey, Wait, That Was Completely Wrong!

This is kind of important:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured a clear path to re-election on Wednesday, with religious-rightist parties set to hand him a parliamentary majority and his main challenger conceding defeat.
With more than 99 percent of votes counted — ballots cast by soldiers at military bases will be tallied over the next two days — Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party looked likely to muster enough support to control 65 of the Knesset’s 120 seats and be named to head the next coalition government.
It would be Netanyahu’s record fifth term as premier. . . .
Trump told reporters at the White House that Netanyahu’s re-election improved the chances of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. “He’s been a great ally and he’s a friend. I’d like to congratulate him on a well-thought-out race.”
A team led by Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner has been working on an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, but it has not disclosed details. . . .
The close and often vitriolic contest was widely seen in Israel as a referendum on Netanyahu’s character and record in the face of corruption allegations. He faces possible indictment in three graft cases, and has denied wrongdoing in all of them.
Despite that, Netanyahu gained four seats compared to his outgoing coalition government, according to a spreadsheet published by the Central Elections Committee of parties that garnered enough votes to enter the next parliament.

So, despite his scandals, Netanyahu still won, and his coalition actually gained seats in the election, with support from Trump. The liberal media in the U.S. would have been celebrating if Netanyahu had lost, and would have considered his defeat a “bellwether” of the 2020 presidential race. Now? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. They’ll ignore it.

UPDATE: Somehow, I got the wrong news, and followed a link to an article about the April election, rather than the recent vote. So now, here is the actual latest election news from Israel:

Israel’s weakened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw his offer on Thursday for a coalition with his strongest political rival, Benny Gantz, swiftly rebuffed after failing to secure a governing majority in a tight election.
Netanyahu’s surprise move was an abrupt change of strategy for the right-wing leader. Its rejection could spell weeks of wrangling after Tuesday’s election, which followed an inconclusive national ballot in April.
Gantz’s centrist Blue and White party emerged from the second round of voting this year slightly ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud, but also short of enough supporters in the 120-member parliament for a ruling bloc. . . .
Responding to Netanyahu’s call, Gantz made no mention of the prime minister and said he himself would head a “liberal” coalition, political shorthand for one that excludes the Israeli leader’s long-time ultra-Orthodox allies.
Gantz said Israelis were eager for a unity government to end the political uncertainty.
But he then left it to Moshe Yaalon, a fellow Blue and White leader, to deliver a stinging rejection of a partnership with Netanyahu, citing looming corruption charges against the prime minister, who has denied any wrongdoing.
“We will not enter a coalition led by Netanyahu,” Yaalon said, echoing a position Gantz had taken throughout the election campaign and appearing to suggest that an alliance with Likud would be possible if it dumped its veteran chief.

Unlike the New York Times, which still won’t own up to its failed smear of Brett Kavanaugh, I don’t mind admitting my mistakes.

Category: Israel

In Which @LaurenDuca Gets Cancelled

Posted on | September 19, 2019 | 1 Comment

The first time I took notice of Lauren Duca was in June 2016, when she wrote a Teen Vogue article about herpes that was simply false. Teen Vogue subsequently ceased print publication after publishing an article about anal sex, and I wrote in November 2017:

In the months leading up to the 2016 election, Teen Vogue (at least in its online version) was taken over by left-wing political operatives. . . .
So why did the editors of Teen Vogue wish to tutor young girls about anal sex? Perhaps because the magazine’s digital director is a young gay man, Phillip Picardi and, beginning in 2015, the magazine deliberately decided to shift its focus to “activism” and identity politics:

“I am an activist [said the magazine’s editor Elaine Welteroth]. And I think the readers that we reach would all consider themselves activists, too.”
What issues are most important to their young readers? “Identity is big. We want to help make them feel better about themselves, whether that’s giving beauty tips, or empowering them with political information to have smarter conversations and feel they can stand up for themselves.”

That identity-politics activist mentality worked out about as well for Teen Vogue as it did for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

It was a perfect example of the “Get Woke, “Go Broke” syndrome, where companies wreck their brand by pandering to the social-justice mobs.

Of course, because advocates of “social justice” do not believe in personal responsibility, they will never admit error. Those who destroyed Teen Vogue for the sake of “activism” would have us imagine that it was their critics, and not themselves, who are to blame for this destruction. And when people who were insulted by Lauren Duca’s obnoxious “activist” journalism complained, she claimed to be a victim of “harassment.”

In 2016, the same year she became notorious as Teen Vogue‘s designated attack dog, Lauren Duca married Kristopher Fleming, but this was (rather predictably) an ill-fated union.

There was a time when such behavior would be considered scandalous, but among liberals today it is a cause for celebration, and so the newly divorced (and newly “queer”) Lauren Duca was still a member in good standing of the “progressive” community. Thus, she got a book deal from Simon & Schuster and was hired to teach at New York University:

Duca . . . spent this past summer teaching “The Feminist Journalist,” a six-week New York University journalism course for both high school and college students. After Duca agreed to our interview, she also acquiesced to letting me sit in on the final day of the class. She asked her students to come prepared with questions for her for what would be an AMA-style session in Washington Square Park. Her students sat in a circle around her in the wet grass. It was, I imagine, exactly what Tucker Carlson would envision a liberal journalism class might be: a bunch of kids from varied backgrounds, ethnicities, orientations, and gender identities, who could each afford a $6,500 class, wearing T-shirts that said “GenderQueer” or “Kill Patriarchy.”
In the park, Duca praised her students for their ideas and pitches: “You so totally learned what I was trying to teach you.” Nearly four weeks after the course ended, however, her students sent a collective formal complaint to the heads of the NYU journalism school about Duca’s conduct. “We are disappointed at the department and NYU for hiring a professor with more interest in promoting her book than teaching a group of students eager to learn,” they wrote. In the days after the course ended, several of the students also reached out to me to share more of their concerns. “Her ability to exploit the movement is really frustrating,” one former student said. . . .
Out of 10 students, five spoke to me on the record, under the condition of anonymity, specifically due to fear of reprisals from Duca or any of her professional connections. All of them had similar allegations against Duca and the class’s structure: that Duca didn’t follow her own syllabus, that she spoke often and inappropriately about her personal life, that she would belittle and yell at students, and, most pressingly, that she targeted one student in particular. All the students wrote a formal letter of complaint to NYU and signed it, “Sincerely, ‘The Feminist Journalist’ Class – Summer 2019.” When I reached out to Duca for her comment on the complaint, she started by saying, “I guess I’m not a teacher.”
The complaint, filed to NYU journalism school’s institute director, Ted Conover, and associate director, Meredith Broussard, on Sept. 11, details many of the same things the five students told me. “There was a consistent lack of professionalism that persisted throughout every aspect of the course,” the complaint reads. . . .
All five students alleged that Duca’s class was disorganized and “a master class in Lauren Duca’s personal life.” (“The point of it is that I’m oversharing all the time. And I think that, yeah, some people like it, some people don’t. Apparently you fucking hate it, but that’s fine,” Duca told me.) They said that she would vanish for 30 to 45 minutes per class to “meditate.” (“It was a three-hour class and we took a break and I would meditate for 15 minutes and they would be gone getting snacks and stuff,” Duca responded.) And that the class was a “waste of six weeks for all of us, and we don’t want anyone else to make this mistake again.” They claim Duca would snap at them for small problems, accuse them of not having done the readings, and never actually read any of the assignments they submitted to her.
Duca responded that she did read all the assignments, though she added: “It’s okay if I’m not a great teacher because I’m great at lots of other things.”
But most galling is that all the students — both in interviews and in the formal complaint to the college — claim that Duca went out of her way to target one student in particular: an exchange student who was visiting New York for school. “Her English wasn’t perfect but that’s hard,” one student told me. “She came from another country. She was very courageous for taking this class.”
The students claimed that Duca would unfairly admonish this particular individual in class. “We all clocked it two or three classes in,” said a classmate. They claimed that Duca said the student “won’t have a lot to say” during class presentations, that she refused to accept assignments from this student while accepting them from others, that she called her work “basic” and “vague,” and that during one class Duca made the student cry during a one-on-one meeting. To this Duca responded, “I said, ‘You need to do the work’; she cried. Like, come on. Is that targeting? What am I supposed to do? ‘You didn’t do the work; here’s a trophy’?”
“That day was the day that I decided that there’s no way we’re going to let this person teach students again. It was awful. It was absolutely awful,” one of the students told me. “She definitely picked favorites, and she picked people she blatantly didn’t like,” said another. (In the complaint the students wrote to NYU, it says that Duca “consistently targeted this student on the basis of a communication difficulty the student cannot change.”)

You can read the whole thing. The main point seems to be, Lauren Duca is a narcissistic egomaniac who considers “feminism” to be whatever serves her personal interest. Of course, this is true of feminists in general, but perhaps Ms. Duca is just too blatant about her selfishness.

You
will
NEVAH
be
woke
enough! https://t.co/K0Au8Z0KAm

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 19, 2019

So Lauren Duca is now #cancelled, as the kids say, although her cancellation is probably not going to be permanent. Simon & Schuster invested big money in her book, and is therefore invested in maintaining Ms. Duca’s “brand” value. By the way, have we forgotten this?

Notice that Ms. Duca doesn’t make any actual argument here. She just assumes that everyone agrees with her, and thus no argument is necessary to refute the quotes from Billy Graham. Her attitude is astonishingly common among young progressives, as the current culture is so dominated by enthusiastic advocates of homosexuality that they are shocked to encounter anyone who doesn’t share their enthusiasm.

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 09.18.19

Posted on | September 18, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 09.18.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Bacon Time: Doing The Brass Dance
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #747
EBL: Who Won In Israel? also, Lucille Ball, The Mother Of Star Trek
Twitchy: Queer Activist Rages About The “Poison” Chick-Fil-A Spreads In Toronto
Louder With Crowder: California Bank Robber May Also Be Charged With Cultural Appropriation

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: SNL – Hire A White Guy So You Can Fire A White Guy
American Greatness: Lewandowski’s Contempt For A Contemptible Congress
American Power: Erasing America
American Thinker: Mayor Pete Can Explain About Pro-Abortion Jesus
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Senile Viejuco Joe Biden Visits Little Havana In Miami, Makes No Mention Of Cuba
BattleSwarm: Kavanaugh Farce Explodes In A Shower Of Radioactive Clowns
Camp of the Saints: The Right, The Moral Thing To Do
Cafe Hayek: “Scientific” Predictions About Humanity & Resources
CDR Salamander: Your Power Phrase Of The Day – Turbo Activation
Da Tech Guy: Abortion – It’s A Matter of Ownership, also, The Other Opioid Crisis
Don Surber: Hillary Is Cursed
First Street Journal: Mocking NBC News On Climate Change
The Geller Report: American Airlines Muslim Mechanic Who Sabotaged Plane Had ISIS Videos On Phone, Ties To Jihadis, also, Antisemitic Harassment On American College Campuses Hits Historic Levels
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, No. Just No.
Hollywood In Toto: Hollywood Doubles Down On Open Borders Proaganda
Joe For America: CNN – Christians Should Keep Their Thoughts And Prayers To Themselves
Legal Insurrection: Corey Lewandowski Trolls Befuddled Democrats On Judiciary Committee, also, Usual Suspects Cry Foul As GOP Makes The Odd Squad Focus Of 2020 Campaign Ads
Michelle Malkin: Facebook Incites Violent War On ICE
The PanAm Post: Chavez Ordered Cartels To Flood U.S. With Cocaine, also, Costa Rican Government Forgets The Day Venezuela Rescued Them
Power Line: Coolest Baseball Story Of The Year, also, Hugo Chavez, Drug Lord
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Rips CBO For Not Pricing Out “Medicare For All”
Shot In The Dark: Prediction
The Political Hat: The UK Cracks Down On Illegal Baking?
This Ain’t Hell: Wolf! Wolf!! Wolf, I Tell Ya!!! also, Happy Birthday, Air Force!
Victory Girls: Saint Greta Sails In & Shames Democrats
Volokh Conspiracy: CFPB Decides That The CFPB Is Unconstitutional, also, Imagine A World Without Qualified Immunity, Part III
Weasel Zippers: Fail Of The Day, also, Al Sharpton Eulogizes Cokie Roberts With Pics Of Christiane Amanpour
Megan McArdle: Face It, There Will Never Be Any Certainty About The Kavanaugh Allegations
Mark Steyn: Michael E. Mann, Loser

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Empowering Women

Posted on | September 18, 2019 | 1 Comment

Feminists probably won’t approve what’s happening in Tennessee:

Imagine being defenseless during a dangerous situation. You might feel helpless and scared.
To change all that, one woman is leading a new gun safety group just for women.
“Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. OK, get deep, bend your legs.” Kristin Corbitt explained steps of holding a gun to a woman at a shooting range in Blount County.
She wants to help protect women by showing them how to protect themselves.
“We can’t always wait for help to come,” said Corbitt.
That’s why she says she plans to lead a new shooting chapter called “The Well Armed Woman.”
“We are here to help women be educated, empowered and equipped with firearm safety,” explained Corbitt, “I wanted to bring this chapter here because we don’t have very many opportunities for women around here like this.” . . .
“When I was sixteen I was attempted kidnapped and my mom took me out to shoot,” said Corbitt. . . .
She has one goal.
“I would like to see every woman that would like to be equipped in how to use a firearm become more educated on how to use that firearm,” explained Corbitt.
The first meeting is Friday night at 6:30. It will be held at New Providence Masonic Lodge at 318 Ellis Ave. in Maryville. Meetings will be held monthly on the third Friday and are open to women 21 years and older that may legally own a firearm.
The annual chapter membership costs $50 and offers members local and national discounts and covers chapter expenses.

Category: Tennessee

Horror in Ohio: Pedophiles Raped Little Boys in ‘Satanic’ Videos, Police Say

Posted on | September 17, 2019 | Comments Off on Horror in Ohio: Pedophiles Raped Little Boys in ‘Satanic’ Videos, Police Say

Shocking beyond words:

Two alleged pedophiles have been charged with raping children in a case involving a depraved ‘sex room’ filled with satanic imagery and cameras. William Bustillos III, 25, was arrested in Lockland, Ohio on [Aug. 28] after police say he raped a five-year-old boy. His arrest came after police found hundreds of horrific pornographic images from Joseph Lee Suder’s cellphone. Suder, 36, is charged with raping a 7-year-old child on camera was arrested in Milford, Ohio earlier this month. Lockland police told Fox 19 that Suder supplied the boy to Bustillos, who is 360 pounds and ‘confessed in a recorded interview to photographing the minor, aged 5, for sexual gratification.’

More gruesome details:

Lockland police describe the case as the worst they’ve ever seen. They say they found the pornographic images, including child bestiality, on the suspects’ phones during rape investigations in Clermont and Hamilton counties. . . .
Bustillos indicated in an interview with police Wednesday he was sharing the pornography with others in the Cincinnati area, according to Lockland Police Sgt. Chris Lind.
“I’ve seen bad before but this was the absolute worst I’ve ever seen. I hardly slept last night because of it,” Lind said.
“His apartment was basically set up as a sex room. His bedroom included a bed with nets to mount cameras to record sex acts and a little satanic ritual set up with cameras [and] satanic totems. He had dildos in the showers and these pictures of these kids in the shower with the dildos. . . .
“He couldn’t deny the pictures. We found them on his phone. We seized his laptop and he said there was going to be more photos on the laptop. We got several hundred photos from Milford (police).” . . .
A relative of the children who requested to not be named tells FOX19 NOW “This is just the beginning.”
“It’s going to get worse. When William admitted to the fact that he was also sending pictures out to people, that’s another reason why they are bringing in the FBI. They are sex trafficking the photos and they are on a website and they can’t shut it down.”

More charges:

One of two men under arrest on child rape and pornography charges was indicted [Sept. 10] on 51 additional charges.
A Clermont County Grand Jury indicted Joseph Lee Suder on 3 counts of rape, 3 counts of gross sexual imposition, 16 counts of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material or performance, 27 count of pandering in obscenity involving a minor, one count of trafficking in persons, and one count of tampering with evidence.

Two men, at least three victims, to say nothing of the international child-pornography distribution network these two guys supplied with videos.

“Allegedly,” I hasten to add.

Category: Crime, Ohio

No, Your AR-15 Is Not the Problem

Posted on | September 17, 2019 | 1 Comment

Why do Democrats want to take away your AR-15? The fact that such a weapon was used by the Odessa shooter was the basis for Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke’s infamous declaration: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” But this is like banning cars because automobile accidents kill more than 40,000 Americans a year, or banning tall buildings because more than 35,000 Americans die each year from accidental falls. O’Rourke is advocating what might be called the Instrumental Theory of Evil: The cause of our problems is not bad people, but bad things. Therefore, ban the evil things!

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke dismissed criticism and “hang-wringing” about his much-discussed debate statement that “Hell yes” he wants to confiscate assault weapons, saying those concerns “just show you how screwed up the priorities in Washington, D.C., are.”
“I refuse to even acknowledge the politics or the polling or the fear or the NRA,” O’Rourke told “NBC’s Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd on Sunday. “That has purchased the complicity and silence of members of Congress.”

See, according to O’Rourke, the reason we have not yet banned the evil AR-15 is because, unlike him, other people lack courage and integrity. Democrats believe guns are evil, and therefore only bad people own guns, which means that prejudice against gun owners is a virtue. This explains why the campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination has become a contest to see who hates gun owners the most. Does it matter that the premise of their argument is demonstrably wrong?

In 1994, a ten-year prohibition on the manufacture, possession, and transfer of certain “semiautomatic assault weapons” was signed into law.
And what was the result of this ban? . . . A Justice Department report examining the impact of the ban was underwhelming at best. “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” the report states.
The report goes on to explain that the law’s larger impact on overall gun violence was minimal, because the banned weapons were rarely involved in criminal acts in the first place. According to the FBI, rifles — a broader category that lumps together your grandpappy’s hunting rifle with military-style rifles — constitute an average of 340 homicides per year. Though any loss of life is tragic, these numbers don’t exactly rise to the occasion in solving what is commonly characterized as a national epidemic. . . .
Between 2007 and 2018, 173 people were killed by mass shooters using an AR-15, according to a New York Times analysis — roughly, 15 per year. (For perspective, 13 people die per year from vending machines falling on them.) The fearmongering regarding this weapon becomes even more apparent when one considers the estimated 8 million AR-15s currently in circulation — the vast majority of which will never be involved in a crime.

So, just to make sure everybody’s got this in proper perspective: According to the FBI, there were 17,284 murders in the United States in 2017. Also, according to the FBI, in an average year, rifles are the weapons used in 340 homicides. Simple math tells us that rifles — all rifles, of every kind — are used in less than 2% of U.S. murders, and AR-15s account for only a tiny fraction (0.09%) of U.S. murders.

Even if we banned all rifles, 98% of murders would still happen, and banning AR-15s wouldn’t even reduce murders by one-tenth of 1%! Yet the audience at the Democrat debate erupted in applause when O’Rourke promised that “we” (i.e., Democrats) are “going to take your AR-15.”

Democrats hate you. They really, really hate you.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)