The Other McCain

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

$211.17

Posted on | August 9, 2019 | Comments Off on $211.17

It’s 715 miles to LaGrange, Georgia. Saturday afternoon, they’re having the memorial service for my Uncle Casper, a combat veteran of Vietnam who married my mother’s baby sister Barbara. I’ve reserved a rental car ($211.17) for this road trip, and will leave this afternoon heading “south to see my kin.” You can figure the cost of gas, etc., and I would be grateful to readers who could chip in $5 or $10 or $20, and please remember that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Thanks in advance. Depending on how things go, I might detour back through South Carolina on the way home and see if I can catch some kind of Democratic primary campaign activity.



 

Category: Family, Shoe Leather Fund

Biden Says What Liberals Really Think

Posted on | August 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Wealthy liberals pretend to believe in “equality,” even while they scheme ways to get their kids into Harvard, knowing that attending an elite university is the only way to obtain the kind of credentials and social connections necessary to membership in their club. This is why they have such contempt for working-class people, and do everything possible to degrade and humiliate the “deplorables.” Their oft-repeated concern for “diversity” and “inclusion” reflects the liberal elite’s obsession with protecting their own status — acting as Benefactors of Brown People is their political raison d’être, and they are sure to be mortified now that Sleepy Joe Biden has let the cat out of the bag:

Gaffe-prone presidential hopeful Joe Biden put his foot in his mouth during an Iowa campaign stop on Thursday when he told a group of predominately Asian and Hispanic voters that “poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids.”
Biden committed the stunning blunder while speaking about education at a town hall with the Asian and Latino Coalition in Des Moines, where he’s campaigning and fundraising for the 2020 Democratic primary.
“We should challenge students in these schools and have advanced placement programs in these schools. We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it,” Biden said at the event, according to video of his remarks.
“Poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids,” he added.
Biden almost immediately went into damage control mode, quickly adding: “wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”

Biden’s conflation of race and economic status — “white” as a synonym for “wealthy,” and “brown” as a synonym for “poor” — reflects a categorical error that is altogether common among wealthy liberals, who have internalized a lot of slogans about “white privilege,” etc., without bothering to analyze the relevant data. The existence of a substantial black middle class, for example, is a phenomenon no Democrat ever wishes to acknowledge, because their party’s electoral success requires persuading black voters that they are oppressed victims of racism (and making Republicans the scapegoats for racism). Persuading ordinary white voters to believe this, of course, is rather difficult, because however stupid the “deplorables” might be, we are at least close enough to the reality of life to see that it doesn’t match Democrats rhetoric.

In the uproar over this gaffe, nobody in the media will point out the other fallacies involved in Biden’s rhetoric. Why is being “smart” considered synonymous with “getting good grades in school”? Despite my prominence as a high-IQ kid who nearly flunked out, no Ph.D. researcher has ever consulted me to investigate why my intellectual potential was not manifested as outstanding scholastic achievement.

“Gee, Stacy, why did you hate school so much?”

Because school hated me, that’s why.

The Public Education Bureaucracy does not exist for the benefit of students, but rather for the benefit of the bureaucrats who operate it.

The typical teacher is a small-minded mediocrity who, when given power over a classroom of children, will use this official authority to reward some children — the unctuous teacher’s pets — and to punish any child who does not meekly comply with the bureaucratic system. Thus, from an early age, my energy and intelligence made me a target for the sadistic impulses structured into the public-education system. The authority of the bureaucrats rests upon their supposed expertise in developing children’s academic aptitude, and nobody inside the system ever questions this claim to expertise. The possibility that favoritism might cloud the judgment of teachers is not part of their calculations, yet the “good student” is always the obedient child, eager to cooperate with the system. My own teachers were shocked and embarrassed when, in fifth grade, I knocked the top off the standardized test — 99th percentile, reading at a collegiate level of comprehension — after years of being punished as a habitual discipline case. Despite being a Bad Student, I was actually one of the smartest kids in the entire state.

My outstanding test score, however, did not gain me any benefit. Nobody bothered to ask why I’d spent the idle hours of my childhood reading through the World Book Encyclopedia, nor was there any accommodation to my unusual abilities in art, music, etc. Instead, the gap between my bad grades and my spectacular standardized test performance was explained as my failure to “apply myself” in class. Yet if I had actually learned more than other children while not applying myself, what did this say about the pedagogy and curriculum? That is to say, when the Bad Student is demonstrated by objective measure to be a better student than the Teacher’s Pets, the educational bureaucrats will ignore this evidence that their system isn’t working, and instead will intensify their scapegoating of the non-conformist.

“YOU MUST COMPLY WITH THE SYSTEM!”

What is clear to me in hindsight, of course, was quite confusing to me as a 10-year-old who couldn’t understand why something that should have been a cause for celebration — 99th percentile! — was immediately turned into an excuse for further punishment and humiliation. Yet it was obvious to me that the system was a fraud, and my response to this was to become even more of a rebel than I had been by natural instinct.

Because politicians, like teachers, are part of the university-educated class, Joe Biden cannot imagine any concept of “smart” that does not translate to “make good grades and go to college.” Yet when the “check engine” light comes on in your car, shouldn’t you hope that the mechanic at the garage is smart enough to figure out what’s wrong with it and repair it correctly? The mechanic doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree from an elite university and wasn’t the high-school valedictorian, but isn’t a smart mechanic better than a dumb one? The same is true for truck drivers, construction contractors and other trades that don’t require four-year college degrees. A good electrician can make far more money than a typical sociology major, but this isn’t acknowledged in the kind of discourse where Biden speaks of (presumably poor) brown kids being “just as bright, just as talented” as (presumably rich) white kids.

Of course, as I’ve often remarked, the public school bureaucracy is an institution completely controlled by Democrats, who collect many millions of dollars in contributions annually from teachers unions, and who expect public schools to teach children to be loyal Democrat voters. No matter how badly our public schools fail, in terms of preparing children for real life, they will be judged a success by Democrats so long as the children are all indoctrinated with liberal beliefs.



 

Category: Education, Joe Biden, Racism

In The Mailbox: 08.08.19 (Not The Special Hitler Edition)

Posted on | August 8, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I was briefly tempted to go through and change all the names of the Democrats in the news to Hitler and other Nazis as appropriate, but it seemed like more trouble than it would have been worth for the lulz it might have produced.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Bacon Time: Because it Amuses Me
EBL: President Trump Visits Dayton & El Paso
Twitchy: Philanthropist Pledges $100,000 To Help Clean Up Baltimore If The Baltimore Sun Retracts Its Hit Piece On Volunteers
Louder With Crowder: Amnesty International Issues Travel Warning For US Due To “Gun Violence”, Gets Rekt

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Scientific Case Against Redheads
American Greatness: Everything They’re Telling You About Mass Shootings Is Wrong
American Thinker: The Ideological Roots Of “The Squad” In “Academic Postcolonial” Theory
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily SanFran Kookery News
Babalu Blog: Castro Dictatorship Sentences Independent Journalist To A Year In Jail For Reporting The News
BattleSwarm: Borepatch Says Red Flag Laws Are Stupid & Useless
Camp of the Saints: Helter Skelter At 50 – Redux?
CDR Salamander: NTSB Speaks On The McCain Collision
Da Tech Guy: Government Solutions To Mass Shootings Won’t Solve The Problem, also, The Blog Transition Clock Has Now Started
Don Surber: Don’t Go Ann Coulter Over A Washington Post Story
Dustbury: It Crawled Into My Shorts, Honest
First Street Journal: A Good Start, But It Isn’t Enough
The Geller Report: Jihadi Stabs London Police With Machete In Frenzied, Unprovoked Attack, also, Senate Minority Leader Schumer Calls For Killing 1st Amendment Protection Of Political Speech
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of the Day, also, NPR & Defamation
Hollywood In Toto: Brian Banks Director Broke All the Hollywood Rules
Joe For America: Did Joe Biden Suggest A Shooting War Against Conservatives Is Coming?
Legal Insurrection: Baltimore Sun Shamefully Questions Motives Of Scott Presler For Organizing West Baltimore Cleanup, also, Twitter Locks Out “Team Mitch” For Sharing Video Of Protesters Chanting Death Threats At McConnell’s Home
The PanAm Post: AMLO Calls For US To Try What Didn’t Work In Mexico
Power Line: Madness – Twitter & Beyond, also, Germans Rebel Against Meat Tax
Shark Tank: DeSantis Moves To Wipe Out Invasive Python Population
Shot In The Dark: The Left’s Inner Id
STUMP: Governing Magazine – In Memoriam
The Political Hat: Elder Non-Gender Specific Sibling Is Watching Leviathan’s (Formerly Your) Children
This Ain’t Hell: About That Illegals Issue, also, Murders That Didn’t Fit The Leftists’ Narrative
Victory Girls: Sean Hannity Interviews Mayor DeBlasio
Volokh Conspiracy: Study Shows Prejudice Has Declined Among White Americans Since Trump’s Election
Weasel Zippers: Biden Tells Crowd “We Choose Truth Over Facts”, also, MN GOP Legislators Ask IRS To Investigate Ilhan Omar
Mark Steyn: Identity & The Elites

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Category: Linkagery, Uncategorized

Texas Psycho Killer’s Parents Claim They Taught Him ‘Love, Kindness … Tolerance’

Posted on | August 8, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

The emerging profile of the accused El Paso gunman shows him to be the spoiled and incompetent offspring of clueless parents:

The family of accused El Paso mass shooter Patrick Crusius has released a statement that says he was raised to love and accept others.
“Patrick’s actions were apparently influenced and informed by people we do not know, and from ideas and beliefs we do not accept or condone,” the statement said. “He was raised in a family that taught love, kindness, respect, and tolerance — rejecting all forms of racism, prejudice, hatred, and violence.” . . .
In court documents, Crusius said he was receiving benefits including food stamps and mentioned he had been receiving benefits from a public housing program, according to the El Paso Times.
Crusius had been living with his grandparents in Allen, about 30 miles north of Dallas, while he attended Collin College. He moved out of the house about six weeks before the shooting but spent a few nights in their home while they were out of town, the grandparents said in a statement.
Police said Crusius legally bought the gun he used in the shooting near his hometown. He drove the 10-hour trip to El Paso straight from the Dallas area. They said he got lost in an El Paso neighborhood and stopped at the Walmart where the attack happened because he was hungry.

Meanwhile:

The mother of the El Paso shooting suspect called Texas police weeks before the shooting to relay concerns about the semi-automatic rifle her son had acquired, according to reports.
The call, to the City of Allen Police Department, was passed onto a public safety officer who told the mother of Patrick Crusius, 21, that he was legally allowed to own the weapon, attorneys for his family told CNN and ABC News.
She was concerned about her son’s age, maturity and lack of experience and whether he should therefore be allowed to own an “AK” type weapon, CNN reported. . . .
His mother did not give her or her son’s name to Texas police and they did not seek any more information from her after the call, CNN quoted the family’s lawyers, Chris Ayres and R. Jack Ayres, as saying.

Here was an unemployed 21-year-old attending community college while living with his grandparents, and receiving food stamps, yet he somehow managed to come up with the cash to purchase a rifle. His mother — who insists her son was “taught love, kindness, respect, and tolerance” — becomes concerned about her son’s behavior and calls police, but does not give them sufficient information to alert them to a potential threat. She doesn’t want to take responsibility for her failure as a parent, having raised a mass murderer who, not coincidentally, was such a hopeless loser that he got lost on his way to his planned target.

What? Your idiot son didn’t even know how to use GPS?

Before my oldest son was 21, he was very competent with firearms and was also capable of navigating even without GPS, because they teach that kind of stuff at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg. But while allegedly teaching their son love and kindness, et cetera, the Crusius family evidently failed to impart to their son the basic skills necessary to success in life. Would you care to guess what the psycho killer’s father does for a living?

Patrick Crusius’ dad, John Bryan Crusius, is a licensed professional therapist at Dallas Addiction Recovery Therapy, also called Infused Being Therapy and Counseling. His Twitter page, LinkedIn Page and website described his therapeutic approach as holistic. It appeared his counseling is focused on addiction recovery.
“I use an integrated treatment approach to all my therapy and counseling,” the website says.
His services include treatment for alcohol, co-dependence, substance abuse and PTSD, the website said. He also wrote a book called “Life Enthusiasm: A Path to Purpose Beyond Recovery.” . . .
[Patrick Crusius] attended Liberty High School in Frisco, Texas and transferred to Plano Senior High School in Plano, Texas. Frisco, Plano and Allen, Texas are all in the Dallas/Forth Worth area.
Patrick Crusius also has an older brother and a twin sister, according to public records. His mother, Lori Lynn Crusius, filed for divorce in 2011. She works as a nurse, according to PBS.

The professional therapist’s wife divorced him, and his son grew up to be a crypto-Nazi mass murderer. Way to go, “expert” dad!



 

Category: Crime, Terrorism, Texas

8/8 = Hitler? ‘Remember, These Are the People Who Tell Us Trump Is Crazy’

Posted on | August 8, 2019 | Comments Off on 8/8 = Hitler? ‘Remember, These Are the People Who Tell Us Trump Is Crazy’

 

So says Professor Reynolds, referring to the conspiracy theorists who babble lunatic gibberish on an obscure cable networks:

MSNBC analyst Frank Figliuzzi drew a numerical connection on Monday between neo-Naziism and the Trump administration’s decision to fly flags at half-mast until Aug. 8 in honor of the victims of a pair of mass shootings.
Figliuzzi is a former FBI assistant director who has been feted for predicting last month that white supremacist violence was potentially imminent due to President Trump’s rhetoric. . . .

Permit me to interrupt here and say that, even without his bizarre Neo-Nazi Magic Decoder Ring theory, it’s frightening to think that Figliuzzi was ever in a position of trust at the FBI, given his willingness to promote this cause-and-effect linkage between “Trump’s rhetoric” and “white supremacist violence.” In point of fact, the El Paso shooter said explicitly that he was acting as a copycat of the New Zealand mosque shootings in March. You can blame 8chan or /pol for the shooter’s action, but blaming Trump is a non sequitur. We continue with the article:

In an interview with host Brian Williams, Figliuzzi ripped Trump for not using the first-person voice to condemn white supremacism in an address on Monday, given the anti-immigrant motives of the killer in El Paso, Texas.
Part of countering the adversary of white supremacism, he said, was in understanding the significance of how they think. While he wouldn’t accuse Trump of purposefully flying flags until Aug. 8, he also darkly wondered who wrote the speech.
“If we don’t understand how they think, we’ll never understand how to counter them,” he said. “The president said that we will fly our flags at half mast, until August 8. That’s 8/8. Now, I’m not going to imply that he did this deliberately, but I am using it as an example of the ignorance of the adversary that’s being demonstrated by the White House.
“The numbers 88 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and to them the numbers 8-8 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ So we’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk on 8/8.”
“No one is thinking about this,” he added.

Is he off his meds? Has he sought counseling? Back in November 2016, I mocked liberals for claiming they were “traumatized” by Hillary’s defeat, but now I’m beginning to suspect that they have never really recovered from the psychological damage they suffered on 11/8/16 — a number that must have some arcane significance, I’m sure, but unlike MSNBC guests, I haven’t been reading Nostradamus or consulting psychics or whatever paranormal means they use to divine the auguries and omens.



 

Category: MSNBC, Terrorism

In The Mailbox: 08.07.19 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | August 7, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.07.19 (Evening Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Twitchy: Even More Of Joaquin Castro’s Donors Aren’t Happy To Show Up On His List of Shame
Louder With Crowder: Dear Hollywood, Enough With The Lazy Remakes

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The #1 Thing You Must Do As Parents To Raise Successful Kids
American Greatness: Upcoming Movie Features Trump Supporters Being Hunted By Liberal Elites
American Power: The Lie That Latinos Are “Living In Fear” After El Paso Shooting
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: The Beto Man Is A Disgrace
BattleSwarm: Joaquin Castro Does Something Really Stupid
Camp of the Saints: “For Duty & Humanity!”
CDR Salamander: We Need A Material Condition Standdown
Da Tech Guy: All The Site Moves, Fixes, Etc. Will Cost $1000, also, No Surprises Under The Fedora
Don Surber: Today In Hate
Dustbury: In Lieu Of Actual Panic
First Street Journal: The Special Snowflakes Are Terrified
The Geller Report: Cannibal Reza Aslan Calls For Genocide Against Trump Supporters, also, Let’s Review Obama Shootings – Fort Hood Vs. El Paso
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, The New York Times And Defamation
Hollywood In Toto: Are Deplorables The Good Guys In The Hunt?
Joe For America: Sara Carter – The Rats Are Turning On Each Other
Legal Insurrection: Left-Wing Mob Outside Mitch McConnell’s House Shouts Death Threats, also, Nicole Wallace Accuses Trump Of “Talking About Exterminating Latinos”, Offers Lame Apology After Uproar
Michelle Malkin: How The VA “Red Flags” Patriots
The PanAm Post: Brazil Nixes Entry For Maduro, Top Regime Officials
Power Line: A New Low For Democrats? also, Mental Illness & Mass Murder
Shark Tank: Wasserman Schultz Says Trump Gave White Supremacists “Permission” To Kill
Shot In The Dark: Just Another Kid Concerned About The Environment
The Political Hat: One Country, One Tyranny
This Ain’t Hell: Navy Dismisses More SEAL War Crimes Cases, also, ISIS Regroups
Victory Girls: Peter Strzok Sues FBI, Whines That His Privacy & Freedom Of Speech Were Violated
Volokh Conspiracy: The Growth Of The “Cultic Milieu” And The Spread Of Harmful Ideas
Weasel Zippers: 8chan Owner Says El Paso Shooter Didn’t Post Manifesto Media Are Reporting On, also, Baltimore Sun Attacks Scott Presler For Organizing Trash Cleanup In West Baltimore
Mark Steyn: The Mad Waxman

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Category: Linkagery

This Was Probably Inevitable

Posted on | August 7, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

“Dark psychic forces,” you might say:

A group of supporters of 2020 White House hopeful and Marianne Williamson has put together an “occult task force” in support of the spiritual guru; however, her campaign is none too pleased about the move.
In an interview with the Washington Post, the anonymous individual heading up the “task force” told the Jeff-Bezos owned newspaper that 13 witches, chaos magicians, and energy workers performed “gestures” in an effort to get Williamson more speaking time during Tuesday’s Democrat presidential primary debate in Detriot, Michigan.
“The whole orb gang community is tapping into the power of memes to reflect back on, and multiply, the sort of pulsing undercurrents of our collective unconscious,” the person emailed the Post. According to the publication, Williamson supporters refer to themselves as the “orb gang,” who share memes of the candidate on social media.

Basing such a story on an anonymous email? Professional Journalism!

Leaving aside metaphysical speculation about weird occult phenomena, let’s talk real politics: The Democratic National Committee has set a deadline of Aug. 28 for presidential candidates to qualify for the next round of debates in September. One of the criteria is having 130,000 unique donors and, as of 8 p.m., Marianne Williamson was at 113,521. That means she needs to get 16,479 new donors in the next three weeks.

Even a contribution of one dollar counts toward that total.

 

Category: Democrats

The Hate They Create: Democrats Sow the Wind, and Reap the Whirlwind

Posted on | August 7, 2019 | Comments Off on The Hate They Create: Democrats Sow the Wind, and Reap the Whirlwind

Daniel Greenfield explains at Front Page:

Identity politics was born out of an effort by leftist activists to identify and mobilize potential supporters by breaking down a sense of national solidarity along the lines of group victimhood. Every act of terror breaks down national solidarity further and strengthens the appeals to race over nationality.
Lessons about tolerance, white privilege and racial consciousness don’t end racism. They spread it.

Keep in mind that America’s public school system is an institution wholly controlled by the Democrats, who collect millions in contributions annually from teachers unions. Because a college diploma is a prerequisite to employment by the public school system, the Left’s control of university campuses ensures that all teachers are indoctrinated with left-wing ideology. That’s why the K-12 curriculum is no longer about teaching children important facts and useful skills; rather, it is about training children to be “progressive” activists.

Public schools are now dedicated to teaching children to hate Christianity, to hate their parents, to hate capitalism — to hate America — and a crucial part of this curriculum is systematic indoctrination about race, gender and sexuality: White heterosexual males are evil!

Having been taught (at taxpayer expense) that their lives are worthless, young white males internalize a suicidal sense of self-hatred, and then everyone acts surprised when some pathetic young loser decides that it would be cool to end his life with a mass-murder rampage.

Next time one of these massacres happens, will anyone in the media mention the role of public education in turning boys into killers? No, of course not, because the media is part of the same system.

(Hat-tip: J.J. Sefton at AOSHQ.)



 

Category: Education
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