Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani

Posted on | September 6, 2019 | Comments Off on Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani

An American Airlines mechanic was arrested Thursday on a sabotage charge accusing him of disabling a navigation system on a flight with 150 people aboard before it was scheduled to take off from Miami International Airport earlier this summer.
The reason, according to a criminal complaint affidavit filed in Miami federal court: Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, a veteran employee, was upset over stalled union contract negotiations.
None of the passengers and crew on the flight to Nassau were injured because the tampering with the so-called air data module caused an error alert as the pilots powered up the plane’s engines on the runway July 17, according to a criminal complaint affidavit filed in Miami federal court.
As a result, flight No. 2834 was aborted and taken out of service for routine maintenance at America’s hangar at MIA, which is when the tampering with the ADM system was discovered during an inspection. An AA mechanic found a loosely connected tube in front of the nose gear underneath the cockpit that had been deliberately obstructed with some sort of hard foam material.
Alani is charged with “willfully damaging, destroying or disabling an aircraft” and is expected to have his first appearance in Miami federal court on Friday.
After his arrest Thursday, the affidavit says that Alani told federal air marshals assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force that “his intention was not to cause harm to the aircraft or its passengers.”
He said that his motive in tampering with the navigational system was because he was “upset” over stalled contract negotiations between the mechanics’ union and American Airlines that has raged for months — that “the dispute had affected him financially.”

So, AFL-CIO terrorism, not radical Islamic terrorism.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 09.05.19 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | September 6, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Self Defense Is Legal In Maryland
EBL: Neerja Bhanot, RIP, also, Never Realized That The Horned Lizard Was Joe Biden’s Spirit Animal
Twitchy: Here’s A Super-Hot Take On (Not) Arming Women For Self Defense Against Rapists
Louder With Crowder: Kamala Harris Wants To Regulate Your Meat

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Antifa Gives Progressives A Tin-Pot Dictator High
American Power: Joe Biden’s Eye Fills With Blood
American Thinker: #NeverTrump Nitwits Should Just Go Away
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Black Marketeer News
Babalu Blog: Caught On Video – Castro’s Elite “Black Wasps” Special Forces Hunting Down Cuban Civilians
BattleSwarm: Hong Kong On Hold
Camp of the Saints: On Pax Americana & Pax Britannica
CDR Salamander: Remember How We Laughed At The Russians…
Da Tech Guy: The Critics Vs. Reality, Chappelle/Nerdrotic Edition, also, Labor Unions Do More Harm Than Good
Don Surber: What Triggers MAGA
First Street Journal: What Has Fauxcahontas Been Smoking In Her Peace Pipe?
The Geller Report: Jewish Man & Son badly Hurt In Brooklyn Synagogue Stabbing, also, Well Over 50% Of 2018 Hate Crimes In NYC Were Antisemitic
Hogewash: I’m Not Making This Up, You Know, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Embarrassing Colbert Lets Biden Lie, Deflect, & Spin
Joe For America: Federal Judge Says “Numerous Prominent American Politicians” To Be Implicated By Epstein Files
Legal Insurrection: San Francisco Declares NRA “Domestic Terrorist Organization”, also, Harris Only Three Points Ahead Of Gabbard After Ridiculing Her Poll Numbers A Month Ago
Power Line: The Environmental Fiasco Of Wind Energy, also, Daniel Gade For U.S. Senate
Shark Tank: Rubio & Scott Ask Trump To Suspend Certain Visa Requirements For The Bahamas
Shot In The Dark: Tailgunner Joe Is Alive & Well In Hollywood
This Ain’t Hell: Drunk Marine Tells Homeowners “Go Back To Sleep”, also, Thursdays Are For Cooking
Victory Girls: Bernie Sanders Goes Full Eugenicist
Volokh Conspiracy: “The Europeans Fabricated Stories About Ancient Egyptian, Greek, & Roman Civilizations – All Based On Chinese History”
Weasel Zippers: Watch As Christine Blasey Ford’s Lawyer Admits Her Coming Forward Against Judge Kavanaugh Was Political, also, Julian Castro Says It’s Essential We Use Public Schools To Push Global Warming Propaganda
Megan McArdle: Boris Johnson Is Presiding Over Britain’s Stupidest Hour
Mark Steyn: Johnson Vs. Johnson

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Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 09.05.19 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | September 5, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Labor Day Weekend In Chicago
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #733
EBL: Ilhan Omar’s Husband Tells All
Twitchy: Blue-Check Climate Change Warrior Live-Tweets CNN’s Climate Town Hall And Even She Thinks It Was Dumb
Louder With Crowder: Socialism Has Killed More Gays Than…

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Barbershops, The Last Male Space
American Greatness: The Two Ticking Time Bombs Of The Coming Election
American Power: Chaos Excitement
American Thinker: When Trump Fights The Left, He Punches Up
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: With The Help Of Cuba & Venezuela, Colombia’s Marxist Narcoterrorist FARC Is Back In Action
BattleSwarm: SD Democratic Party Gives Up
Camp of the Saints: Friend In The Ether @WombatSocho Has Out A New Book
CDR Salamander: Red China – An Autocratic STEMocracy
Da Tech Guy: Dorian Vs. CNN & Global Warming UPDATE
Don Surber: Xi Blinks In Hong Kong
First Street Journal: Womens’ Economic Choices & Salaries
The Geller Report: Texas Muslim Murders Sisters Friend In Honor Killing For Encouraging His Sister To Marry A Christian, also, Paul McCartney Outraged At Sadiq’s Londonistan Violence, Reveals Grandson Mugged At Knifepoint
Hogewash: As Autumn Approaches, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: What If American Skin‘s Nate Parker Is Innocent?
Joe For America: Biden & Obama Were Briefed On Private Trump Meeting BEFORE Comey Reported To FBI
JustOneMinute: Vox Unpopuli
Legal Insurrection: Hong Kong – Category I Insurgency, also, NYC Mayor De Blasio Worked A Whole Seven Hours In The Month He Launched His Presidential Campaign
Michelle Malkin: Stop Mental health Data Mining Of Our Kids, And Deplatform Google From Our Public Schools!
The PanAm Post: Maduro’s Fundamental Role In FARC’s Affluence & Power
Power Line: Tien An Men Square & Hong Kong – The Same Showdown, also, Ilhan Omar – NY Post Remix
Shark Tank: Rubio Defends Trump’s Natural Disaster Leadership
Shot In The Dark: Documents Ex Machina
The Political Hat: College Madness – Obsession With Whiteness, Mandatory Social Justice, and Adversity Scores
This Ain’t Hell: Hurricane News For Wednesday, also, Sadly, VOV Has Run Out Of Amendments To Discuss
Victory Girls: Walmart & Kroger Succumb To Gun Grabber Pressure
Volokh Conspiracy: My Contribution To The Symposium On Jason Brennan’s Book Against Democracy
Weasel Zippers: Video Montage – Dems Hammer Away At The 2nd Amendment, also, Russia Probe Reckoning?
Mark Steyn: Bedbug Journalism

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Category: Linkagery

Fat, Black, Queer and ANGRY!

Posted on | September 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Fat, Black, Queer and ANGRY!

Ashleigh Shackelford (@ashleighthelion on Twitter) has described herself as “a queer, nonbinary Black fat femme writer,” complaining in 2016 she was “always scripted as the angry Black bitch” in her “organizing spaces.”

As a one-woman embodiment of the identity politics that now defines the Democrat Party, Ms. Shackelford has few rivals, which may be why she was paid to contribute to a new series of Teen Vogue articles “celebrating what it means to be fat, from destigmatizing the word to taking stock of the discrimination fat people face.” In case you’re wondering why an angry fat black queer would be considered a proper contributor for a teenage fashion magazine, I’ll remind you: “Condé Nast Is Decadent and Depraved” (March 24). Condé Nast has joined the anti-Trump #Resistance, which means publishing a lot of radical left-wing agitprop, even if this means losing readers and advertisers (Teen Vogue ceased print publication in 2017). One doubts that Ashleigh Shackelford appeals to a demographic coveted by the clothing and cosmetics merchants whose advertising dollars are necessary to the financial success of a fashion magazine, but Trump Derangement Syndrome has so completely seized the minds of the New York-based publishing industry that Teen Vogue editors gave Ms. Shackelford a platform for a genuinely bizarre rant:

For me, fat is a way of saying “f*ck you.” . . .
How fat is weaponized, and the reclamation of the word, goes beyond size. Fat stigma is also tied to anti-blackness, in that being black is the abundance that white supremacy seeks to shrink. . . .
My definition of fat is Black AF, multidimensional, and futuristic. Fat means I exist. Fat means taking up space and demanding more. Fat means black. Fat means f*ck you. Fat means human. Fat means creating a world full of possibility without shame. Fat means saying f*ck you.

You can read the entire thing, but the question is: Who thinks it’s a good idea to celebrate being fat and angry as a source of empowerment? Even if you share the anti-Trump politics of Teen Vogue‘s editors, does it make sense to encourage this attitude? Do they think this will help Democrats in 2020? And why is this kind of stuff — FAT ANGRY BLACK QUEERS! — being published under the masthead of a teen fashion magazine?

Category: Gays, Media Bias, Racism, Sex Trouble

Joe Biden’s Slow-Motion Implosion

Posted on | September 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Joe Biden’s Slow-Motion Implosion

Viewers of Wednesday’s climate-change “town hall” on CNN witnessed former Vice President Joe Biden suffer a hemorrhage in his left eye:

Former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to have a blood vessel burst in his left eye while participating in CNN’s town hall on climate change.
A broken blood vessel in the eye, also known as a subconjuctival hemorrhage, can be caused by several things, including high blood pressure, bleeding disorders, blood thinners, or even excessive straining.
Biden, 76, has long been plagued by health issues. In 1988, he suffered an aneurysm that burst and required him to undergo emergency surgery. The then-senator was so close to death that a Catholic priest began preparing to administer the sacrament of last rites.
Months later, surgeons clipped a second aneurysm before it burst. Biden then took a seven-month leave from the Senate following the surgery. Describing the operation, he once said, “They literally had to take the top of my head off.”

Why is Biden enduring this public humiliation? To maintain the pretense that Democrats are still a party that cares about working-class voters, and that “moderate” liberalism is still viable, despite every evidence that the party has been completely taken over by the radical fringe Left.

Consider the latest New York Times exposé:

Former Vice President Joe Biden is facing increased scrutiny over his record on busing and racial issues, and this week old comments resurfaced in which he said, in 1977, that non-“orderly” racial integration policies would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”
The quote was originally discovered by University of Southern California Law School professor and scholar Daria Roithmayr and first reported by The New York Times, which published a lengthy story on Biden’s record on busing and school de-segregation on Monday morning.
In the quote, which appears to come from a congressional hearing related to anti-busing legislation, Biden emphasized wanting to “insure we do have orderly integration of society,” adding he was “not just talking about education but all of society.”
He then said: “Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We have got to make some move on this.”

Anyone old enough to remember the 1970s understands that, in opposing court-ordered school busing, Biden was taking a mainstream position supported by a solid majority of voters in both parties. In fact, many black parents opposed busing not only because of the inconvenience — having their children removed from neighborhood schools to be bused across town to majority-white schools — but also because of the insulting implication that black children couldn’t succeed academically without being in close proximity to white children. And everybody, black and white alike, could see that these busing plans, imposed on communities by federal judges, were creating racial conflict where none had previously existed. Growing up in Douglas County, Georgia, where schools were peacefully desegregated before I entered first grade in 1965, I was astonished to watch TV news coverage of the violent protests over busing up North in the 1970s. I clearly remember seeing school buses on fire in Pontiac, Michigan, and when busing was ordered in Boston — good God! Who could have imagined that Yankees in Massachusetts, who had spent the past 20 years lecturing Southerners about the evils of Jim Crow bigotry, were capable of such flagrant racial hatred?

The history of that era is being re-written by journalists too young to remember what actually happened and why, and I guarantee you that in all the coverage of Biden’s opposition to busing, no one in the media will point out the elitism and hypocrisy involved. One of the ugly little facts of the Boston busing drama, ignored by most media coverage but notorious among the protesters in South Boston, was the federal judge responsible for this nightmare lived in suburban Wellesley. In other words, while Irish Catholic working-class parents in South Boston were being forced to subject their children to this social-engineering scheme, the children of the judge who ordered it would be exempt from the consequences of his federal decree. This little fact was a microcosm of the whole controversy: Wealthy white liberals, who could afford to live in lily-white suburban enclaves or else send their kids to private schools, were using the children of poor whites as guinea pigs in these “desegregation” experiments.

Joe Biden actually deserves praise for his opposition to forced busing, and the fact that he’s being dragged through the mud by the New York Times tells you a lot about where the Democrats are heading.

Democrats will not nominate Biden in 2020. He currently leads the polls among Democrat primary voters (about 30% in the Real Clear Politics average) because of his name-recognition factor, but the 70% of primary voters who support other candidates will eventually coalesce behind one of his “progressive” rivals, and once Biden loses the aura of being the “inevitable” nominee, his support will collapse. It’s also entirely possible that Biden’s health problems will end his campaign long before the Iowa caucus next February. He is manifestly too old for the job, and unable to endure the ordeal of a presidential campaign. And the Democrats are never again going to nominate a white male candidate for president.

Category: Election, Joe Biden, Racism

Oops! Tried to Rob the Wrong Woman!

Posted on | September 4, 2019 | 2 Comments

The unlucky criminal made a bad choice:

A woman shot and wounded a suspected robber who reached for her purse, police say.
It happened around 2:30 a.m. Tuesday on Creekbend at Fondren in southwest Houston.
Police say Lachelle Hudgins had just parked her vehicle outside her home when two men reached through her driver’s side window and grabbed her purse. Before they could take it, Hudgins frantically reached into her bag and grabbed her gun.
“I couldn’t do anything except scream. At one point, they told me to stop screaming, and he reached his hand inside my car,” Hudgins explained.
Officials say she fired two rounds and the men ran away.
“It was all I had in my gun. I shot until I couldn’t shoot anymore,” Hudgins said.
A short time later, authorities received a call about a man found shot on the other side of the complex.
The suspect underwent surgery. He’s expected to face aggravated robbery charges.
Hudgins told ABC13 that she still can’t believe she survived an attempted robbery unscathed.
“I saved my life,” Hudgins said.

A panic-stricken woman with only two bullets in her gun, and yet she managed to hit one of her assailants? Pretty good result, I’d say.

If you want to read more about armed self-defense, permit me to recommend the work of my good friend Robert A. Waters. He has written multiple books about such situations, including The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm, and his most recent book, co-authored with his son, Guns and Self-Defense: 23 Inspirational True Crime Stories of Survival with Firearms.

Category: Crime, Texas

‘Monster People’: Were Alec Holowka’s Fears Paranoid — Or Prophetic?

Posted on | September 4, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Monster People’: Were Alec Holowka’s Fears Paranoid — Or Prophetic?

Last week, independent videogame developer Alec Holowka committed suicide four days after being accused by Zoe Quinn of abusive behavior when Holowka and Quinn briefly lived together in 2009. Nearly three years before his suicide, Holowka wrote a Facebook post in which he said “monster people” in the gaming community were attempting to destroy his career in order to drive him to suicide. Diana Davison described Holowka’s 2016 message:

He discussed “cognitive distortion” and stated, “I believe that certain people in the indie game community want me dead.” He elaborated, saying that on a daily basis he lived with the fear “they are trying to covertly hurt me and my career to the point where I’m driven to suicide.”
Holowka said he had trouble attending conferences, knowing that these people who he believed wished to harm him would be at those events but had tried to engage in exposure therapy by forcing himself to attend. He doesn’t name any of the individuals who he felt held this animosity towards him and acknowledges that he was struggling with a psychological problem.

Holowka says his enemies in the indie game community “committed actions and created circumstances that lead me to suicidal ideation. They are smart people who are capable of predicting what results their actions would cause.” Holowka says these enemies are “sociopathic” in their hostility toward him. He discusses how he’s trying to deal with his “cognitive distortions” through therapy. Here’s the whole post:

The question is whether Holowka’s fears were paranoid — an irrational delusion — or whether the hostility he perceived was real. In the wake of last week’s events, it certainly would seem that Quinn, at least, harbored a deep grudge against Holowka and, after soaring to prominence in the wake of the 2014 #GamerGate controversy, Quinn gained enough influence that, when she went public Aug. 27 with her accusations against him, Holowka’s partners almost instantly dropped him from the development project he’d co-founded. Was Quinn one of the “monster people” he was talking about in that October 2016 Facebook post?

We don’t know. It could be that other of Holowka’s former associates had their own grudges against him, and that he perceived their animosity as dangerous to his career, even if he didn’t expect Quinn to be the agent of his destruction. What is clear is that Holowka felt that he had enemies who were “trying to covertly hurt me and my career,” and that he believed the intention of these enemies was to drive him to commit suicide.

Category: Sex Trouble