The Other McCain

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

Blame Trump? Store Guard Murdered After Confronting Customer Without Mask

Posted on | May 5, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Friday, a security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigian, was shot to death after he confronted a customer who was not wearing a mask. Liberals on Twitter rushed to blame President Trump, claiming the shooting was inspired by Trump’s criticism of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“This is another Trump inspired murder,” one Twitter user declared. “This is what the rabid hosts on Fox and Trump have done,” said another. “A direct result of Trump’s cry to ‘liberate’ Michigan,” said yet another as the torrent of Trump-hating messages spewed forth.

Then details of the killing, and mug shots of the suspects, emerged:

Three people are charged with the murder of a Family Dollar security guard in Flint, who was enforcing the store’s policy requiring face masks.
Two men remain at large while a woman has been arrested and is awaiting arraignment in the Genesee County Jail.
The male suspects are 44-year-old Larry Edward Teague and 23-year-old Ramonyea Bishop. Teague’s wife and Bishop’s mother, 45-year-old Sharmel Teague, has been arrested.
All three suspects are facing a charge of first-degree premeditated murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole if they are convicted.
Larry Teague and Bishop also are facing several weapons charges while Teague faces an additional charge of violating Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s order to wear face coverings in enclosed public spaces.
Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said Sharmel Teague and her daughter went in the Family Dollar at 877 E. Fifth St. in Flint around 1:40 p.m. Friday. Teague was wearing a mask, but her daughter was not.
While inside, security guard Calvin Munerlyn confronted the daughter about not wearing a face mask.
Whitmer issued an order in April requiring everyone entering an enclosed space to wear a face mask or covering over their nose and mouth to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Family Dollar has adopted that as a store policy for customers.
Sharmel Teague and Munerlyn got into an argument about the policy. Leyton said Sharmel Teague spit at Munerlyn, who then ordered her to leave the store and told the cashier to refuse service to her.
Surveillance video showed Teague and her daughter leaving the store in a red GMC Envoy and enter the nearby River Village Apartments complex. Minutes later, cell phone records show Sharmel Teague made a phone call to Larry Teague, Leyton said.
About 20 minutes after Sharmel and her daughter left the store, Leyton said Larry Teague and Bishop drove the same GMC Envoy back to the store.
Leyton said surveillance video shows Larry Teague and Bishop enter the store and start an argument with Munerlyn. Witnesses reported hearing the suspects ask Munerlyn who had disrespected his wife.
During the altercation, Leyton said Bishop pulled out a handgun and shot 43-year-old Munerlyn in the head. He was rushed to Hurley Medical Center, where he died later Friday.

 

Look, I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but Hillary Clinton carried Flint, Michigan, by a wide margin in 2016, and if you were looking to find violent Trump supporters in Flint, you probably wouldn’t pick Larry, Ramonyea and Sharmel as the most likely suspects.




 

Category: Crime, Michigan

Kirby’s Birds

Posted on | May 4, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

My brother Kirby has found a way to make the COVID-19 lockdown amusing. He’s put up bird feeders behind our house and, as spring brings a return of our migratory feathered friends, he captures them in photos. You can click on any photo to see it full-size. Above, we see the brilliant plumage of the indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea).

 

This lovely creatures is the rose-breasted grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus) which is a member of the cardinal family.

And here, behold — the red-bellied woodpecker!

 

 

Melanerpes carolinus ranges as far south as Florida and as far north as Canada, but now that it’s enjoying the fruit treats that Kirby provides, I think its future habitat will be our back yard.

If you want to see more of Kirby’s photography, you can follow him on Instagram or check out his Facebook account. Of course, to help offset the cost of birdseed, etc., you can hit Kirby’s tip jar.

Category: Family

Joe Biden’s Historic Gibberish

Posted on | May 4, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Great leaders known are known for their quotes, like FDR’s line “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall.” Here’s a quote destined for the history books:

“You know, one of the things, uh, every morning — this morning I didn’t — I get a brief from medical docs on the status, the status of where things are, and uh, you know, uh, the former head of the, uh, anyway.”

What does that mean? It means that Joe Biden is losing his marbles. Not to exacerbate anyone’s paranoia, but here’s a question that has occurred to me: What if the Joe Biden sex scandal is not what it seems to be?

Tara Reade claims to be a loyal Democrat, and she might be doing her party a huge favor. Her accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 gives Democrats a plausible excuse to ditch the former vice president as their 2020 presidential nominee, thus sparing themselves a likely disaster in the fall campaign. To put it as bluntly as possible, Biden’s mental decline is so obvious as to be an embarrassment, as he stumbles in every interview, even with the most friendly journalists. Democrats and their friends in the media attempting to push Biden’s candidacy forward resemble nothing so much as the cast of the 1989 comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, hauling around their dead boss’s corpse and trying to pretend he’s still alive. . . .

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




 

Category: Joe Biden

Study: The Internet Has Made It Harder to Ditch Your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Posted on | May 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Study: The Internet Has Made It Harder to Ditch Your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Glenn Reynolds highlights a study from Florida Atlantic University:

Defined as using technology to repeatedly harass a love interest, partner, or crush in order to coerce, control, intimidate, threaten, or just plain old annoy, digital dating abuse has developed into a disturbingly common phenomenon. The research team analyzed over 2,200 U.S. middle and high school students, and 28.1% admitted they had been subjected to a form of online dating abuse over the past year.
Perhaps surprisingly, the study also noted that boys (32.3%) appear to be experiencing this type of abuse more often than girls (23.6%).

This finding would seem to contradict what feminists say about abuse generally being something that males inflict on females, but of course, women often don’t recognize their own abusive behavior as abusive. Rollo Tomassi has talked about solipsistic tendencies among women, their inability to view any situation objectively, instead making everything about me! me! me! I don’t wish to generalize too broadly, but I have noticed that women tend to regard their emotions — their personal likes and dislikes, their hurt feelings — as if they were a concrete reality.

Any man who wishes to succeed in relationships with women has to learn to negotiate this typical aspect of the female personality. Boys are raised (or perhaps I should say, boys were once raised) to disregard or restrain our emotions, to shrug off pain, never to pout over disappointment, and thus often find it difficult to cope with female irrationality.

The Internet, smart phones, social media and dating apps have added a new aspect to this problem. Ask any young man today what it’s like when a girl starts “blowing up your phone” with messages to which she expects answers. A guy may be busy doing something — work, school, whatever — and if he does not immediately respond to his girlfriend’s messages, she attributes malign motives to his non-answers: “Why are you ignoring me?” He hasn’t done anything wrong, but try telling her that.

Let us stipulate (and the FAU study shows) that guys also engage in “digital dating abuse,” but apparently women are more likely to do it. And the influence of digital technology has made it more difficult to escape abusive relationships. Your crazy ex-girlfriend can stalk your social-media profile, harass anyone you’re dating, etc. Perhaps worst of all, whether you are male or female, your dating history creates a digital permanent record that may be difficult, if not impossible, to erase. Your past can come back to haunt you in ways that may surprise you. Today’s teenage boy who harbors any ambition toward public life must be extraordinarily careful in his romantic encounters, lest in 20 or 25 years — when he’s running for Congress, perhaps — some crazy ex-girlfriend pops up online to accuse him of rape. Such is the price of “progress.”




 

Category: Sex

Your Low-Rent Friends Are Dead

Posted on | May 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Your Low-Rent Friends Are Dead

 

Glenn Reynolds continues piling up the obscure Steely Dan references, and spotting them is becoming easy: If you see any phrase on Instapundit that doesn’t make sense, Google it, because it’s probably a Steely Dan reference. As for example when, in reference to Joe Biden’s doomed campaign, he drops in a lyric from “Kid Charlemagne”:

You are obsolete.
Look at all the white men on the street!

The professor is educating us here because, even though I vaguely remember “Kid Charlemagne,” a minor hit (#82 on the Billboard chart in 1976) from their fifth album, The Royal Scam, I’d never paid any attention to the lyrics, and had no idea what the song was about. Turns out it’s the story of the downfall of legendary LSD maker Owsley Stanley.

On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean.
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home.

That last line refers to the Merry Pranksters‘ bus, and you can see how, by the mid-1970s, that psychedelic hippie vibe was long gone:

Now your patrons have all left you in the red.
Your low-rent friends are dead.
This life can be very strange.
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face
They’ve joined the human race.
Some things will never change.

Yes, we’ve all joined the human race, and some of us have even become Republicans. This life can be very strange, indeed.




 

Category: Music

Death Is a Democrat: Florida Fearmonger Stalks Beaches as ‘Grim Reaper’

Posted on | May 2, 2020 | Comments Off on Death Is a Democrat: Florida Fearmonger Stalks Beaches as ‘Grim Reaper’

 

It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how evil and dishonest the Democrats have become. Daniel Uhlfelder is a Florida lawyer who previously made headlines by suing over a private beach in Walton County where former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee happens to live. Huckabee is just one of 900 beachfront property owners in the county, but his name was invoked as a publicity stunt by Uhlfelder first during the 2018 campaign, and then in launching a super PAC earlier this year. Now, Uhlfelder wants people to believe they’re going to die because of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to re-open Florida’s beaches:

Most Floridians hitting the newly reopened beaches are trading stay-at-home sweatpants for shorts and swimsuits.
But when he heads out, Daniel Uhlfelder dons a raggedy black robe, conceals his face with a black cloth and wields his scythe.
Uhlfelder, an attorney, is haunting Florida beaches dressed as the Grim Reaper to protest their reopening, which he believes is premature.
It’s a macabre plea to beachgoers to stay home.
Uhlfelder is a staunch advocate for public beach access in the state, even butting heads with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whose Florida Panhandle home is parked on a private beach. But allowing anyone on the beach during the pandemic is a mistake, he said — one that could endanger the community.
“We aren’t at the point now where we have enough testing, enough data, enough preparation for what’s going to be coming to our state from all over the world from this pandemic,” the lawyer told CNN.
Scythe in hand, he traveled to beaches around Walton County, Florida, that have reopened ahead of the state’s planned May 4 reopening. “Phase One” of the reopening will allow restaurants and retailers to open at 25% capacity. Bars, salons and gyms will stay closed for now.
The beaches he visited Friday were “very crowded,” he said.
“I know how beautiful and attractive our beaches are. But if we don’t take measures to control things, this virus is going to get really, really out of control,” he warned.

Except (a) no, he’s wrong, and (b) the media reports won’t mention the highly relevant fact that Uhlfelder is a Democrat activist, and that this isn’t about public health, it’s about partisan politics — falsely smearing the Republican governor. Actual research indicates that there is little or no danger of the virus spreading outdoors in the sunshine. That’s just not how viruses operate. True, some college kids who traveled to Florida for Spring Break in February and early March contracted coronavirus, but that was probably from partying in crowded nightclubs, or perhaps just from being on commercial airlines. Being outdoors in the sunshine is probably the safest place to be, and if Uhlfelder says the beaches were “very crowded,” could he please specify what that means, in terms of people per square foot? Because I doubt very much that any beach was too crowded to observe the six-foot “social distancing” limit.

Facts don’t matter to the liberal media narrative.




 

Category: Florida

Blue-State Media Continue Wishcasting Coronavirus Epidemic in Red States

Posted on | May 2, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Since mid-March, at least, we have seen endless reiterations of this narrative: “Oh, sure, the virus is devastating Democratic-controlled urban areas now,” the media keep saying, “but just you wait — eventually those Trump voters out in the sticks will pay the price!”

Two assumptions are baked into this narrative:

  1. Trump is to blame for the COVID-19 catastrophe. Despite the fact that the U.S. coronavirus per-capita death rate is far below the rate in many European countries — Belgium, Spain, France, etc. — liberals want Americans to believe that it’s actually worse here, and that this is Trump’s fault.
  2. Contagious diseases are a sort of political karma. If you vote Republican, you deserve to die, according to the media elite.

Of course, these assumptions are never expressed overtly, but what else can explain this gleeful desire to see rural America devastated?

Rural Counties Seeing Faster Growth in COVID-19 Cases, Deaths
The coronavirus was slower to make an impact in much of rural America, but cases and deaths have risen significantly in recent weeks, a new analysis shows.
The toll of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has shocked urban areas like New Orleans and New York City. But concerns abound that the virus could devastate rural communities, where populations tend to skew older and sicker and where there are fewer intensive care beds. Since 2010, more than 120 rural hospitals have shuttered altogether.
The new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation indicates that while rural communities have fewer COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people than urban areas, rates of both coronavirus cases and deaths have surged at a faster pace in more rural counties in the last two weeks. The average number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people rose 125% in non-metro counties — or those that are largely rural, according to the analysis — and by 68% in metro counties between April 13 and 27, according to the analysis. Deaths rose 169% in more rural areas and 113% in the more urban counties, reaching respective rates of 4.4 and 17 per 100,000.

There is some statistical voodoo involved in this claim, which I’ll address in a minute, but notice how the headline and lead portray this study: “Finally, the Red State COVID-19 Apocalypse has arrived!”

One can imagine the MSNBC producers grinning at this news that — at last! — those Fox News-watching rubes in the hinterlands are finally getting the karmic retribution they deserve. Except . . .

No, it’s not really happening. This is statistical voodoo, based upon a simple fact: When you are starting from near zero, a fast rate of increase is not difficult to achieve, but this does not mean that the tortoise, who has just taken his first step, will soon overtake the hare. What is embedded in this “watch out, rural America” theme is a message in support of more or less permanent quarantine lockdown orders.

It has not escaped the notice of our media class that the pressure to end these orders — to “re-open America” — has been strongest in areas where infection rates and death rates of COVID-19 have been low. Therefore, they must scavenge around for some kind of “evidence” to suggest that ending the lockdowns will produce catastrophic rural outbreaks.

Let’s disambiguate the data. Obviously it is true that a rural community that has had very few COVID-19 cases thus far could suffer a disastrous outbreak, as has happened in Dougherty County, Georgia, and a few other cases. By and large, however, the disease has mainly affected urban areas where higher population density enables the disease to spread faster. However many new cases emerge as a result of ending the lockdown in Tennessee or Texas, it is impossible that these states will ever eclipse New York as the “epicenter” of the pandemic, in terms of per-capita death rates, simply because (a) the conditions enabling transmission of the virus are not equal and (b) New York has such an enormous head start in the cumulative death toll. Here are the highest per-capita death rates, expressed as deaths per million population:

New York ………………….. 1,227
New Jersey …………………. 849
Connecticut ………………… 653
Massachusetts ……………. 544
Louisiana ………………….. 422
Michigan …………………… 388
District of Columbia …… 337

And here are the rates for other selected states:

Georgia ……………………. 113
Ohio …………………………. 86
Florida ……………………… 64
North Carolina …………… 41
Tennessee ………………….. 31
Texas ………………………… 30

You see that, for example, the death rate in Georgia is about 79% lower than in Massachusetts, and Tennessee’s rate is 95% lower than Connecticut’s. What would it take for the low-rate states to “catch up” with the high-rate states? Whatever hypothetical scenario of a catastrophic rural epidemic you imagine, is it really likely, at this point in the pandemic, that such an outbreak will happen? The fact is, our awareness of how the virus spreads, and who is most vulnerable, has increased a lot since mid-March and, even if all the lockdown orders were rescinded tomorrow, this awareness would have a protective effect, in terms of people taking precautions. Yet the media will not let go of their prejudices, believing that somehow this virus will act as an instrument of “social justice” revenge against those stupid Trump voters in rural areas.

It hasn’t happened yet, nor is it likely that it will happen in the future, but because this belief is rooted in a basic prejudice of the media class, they will continue writing stories reflecting this fantasy narrative.




 

Category: Media Bias

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Did This Feminist Just Endorse Holocaust Denial?

Posted on | May 2, 2020 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous: Did This Feminist Just Endorse Holocaust Denial?

 

Let me start by saying that I am not sure Lux Alptraum is actually a woman, considering her interest in transgenderism and homosexuality, but that’s scarcely relevant to her decision to reinterpret the Holocaust from a perspective that views Jews as possessors of “white privilege.”

On the other hand, perhaps it is relevant whether Lux Alptraum is transgender, in terms of how Third Wave gender theory relies on the postmodernist ideology of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, et al, insisting that there is no such thing as a natural structure of human society. The postmodernist can argue that up is down, black is white, male is female — anything can be made its opposite, if you believe that no binary is valid.

So the problem of anti-Semitism in black culture ceases to be problematic when, by the prestidigitation of Third Wave “intersectional” theory, Lux
Alptraum invokes “institutional power” as an excuse. Thus black violence against Jews — which has become widespread in New York City — isn’t really dangerous because the “proximity to whiteness” means that Jews deserve to get bashed in the head, or something. Lux Alptraum never provides a coherent syllogism, instead walking away with the declaration that “terrible takes” on Twitter make further discussion impossible.

Notice that Lux Alptraum falls back on identity politics, saying that as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, her argument could not possibly be viewed as excusing anti-Semitism or being disrespectful of Holocaust victims. In other words, she’s invoking her Jewishness as a privilege, saying that because she is a Jew, she should be exempt from criticism for making arguments that are offensive (and possibly dangerous) to Jews.

This is a GPS-coordinated trip to insanity. By making membership in an identity group the determining factor in the validity of arguments, the “social justice warriors” undermine basic moral truth, so that whether an action is right or wrong depends on who is doing it. This is an adaptation of Lenin’s notorious formula for terror: “Who, whom?”

No one can advocate this totalitarian worldview without risking the consequence that their enemies will turn it against them, but young fools like Lux Alptraum are ignorant of this lesson of history.

UPDATE: In case you’re wondering how “Anne Frank Is a Becky” got started, a black nationalist who goes by the name of Gazi Kodzo began it with a rant that got him suspended from Twitter.

 

What does it say about Lux Alptraum that she was trying to engage seriously with such hateful craziness? Birds of a feather . . .

Oh, and if want more of this? Vote Democrat!




 

Category: Racism
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