FMJRA 2.0: Sweet Emotion

For decades, liberals have blamed the United States for everything wrong in Latin America. Now that we have an immigration crisis caused by bogus “refugees” making phony asylum claims, this “Blame the Gringo” game is being played with a vengeance. Left-wing journalist Alex Rubinstein noted on Twitter that “a US-backed coup 10yrs ago fueled the migrant crisis with skyrocketing poverty & repression by death squad.”

Oh, wait — 10 years ago, you say? Having paid little attention to U.S. policy in Honduras, this business of a U.S.-backed coup was news to me, so I started researching. An article by Vassar College professor Joseph Nevins, “How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s migration,” takes us back to the late 19th century, when American investors began developing banana plantations in Honduras. It was from the relationship between such investors and government officials that the phrase “banana republic” emerged to describe the typical Latin American “strong man” regime, where the sponsorship of U.S. businesses was crucial to suppressing radical opponents who appealed to anti-gringo sentiment.

During the Cold War, Communists sought to exploit this situation, which led to the Castro regime in Cuba and the Sandinista regime in Nicauragua, to say nothing of the various attempted Communist takeovers in other countries (e.g., Grenada). As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s impossible for anyone under 40 to understand what the Cold War was like, and the compromises and calculations necessary to defeating Soviet-backed aggression were always difficult. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, finding the right path in a post-Cold War environment has been a muddle in Latin America (as everywhere else). Looking at Bush’s misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and what a botch the Obama administration made of Middle East policy (the 2011 “Arab Spring,” Benghazi, the mess in Syria, etc.), one feels a certain nostalgia for the stark moral clarity of Cold War-era policy.

The situation in Honduras took at bad turn about 10 years ago. Manuel Zelaya was elected president in 2006 as a liberal reformer, but in office began forming alliances with the Castro regime in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. When he proposed a referendum to change the Constitution in Honduras, the military resisted. Zelaya was overthrown and sent into exile, and the Obama administration shrugged:

The 2009 coup, more than any other development, explains the increase in Honduran migration across the southern U.S. border in the last few years. The Obama administration has played an important role in these developments. Although it officially decried Zelaya’s ouster, it equivocated on whether or not it constituted a coup, which would have required the U.S. to stop sending most aid to the country.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular, sent conflicting messages, and worked to ensure that Zelaya did not return to power. This was contrary to the wishes of the Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. Several months after the coup, Clinton supported a highly questionable election aimed at legitimating the post-coup government.
Strong military ties between the U.S. and Honduras persist: Several hundred U.S. troops are stationed at Soto Cano Air Base, formerly Palmerola, in the name of fighting the drug war and providing humanitarian aid.
Since the coup, writes historian Dana Frank, “a series of corrupt administrations has unleashed open criminal control of Honduras, from top to bottom of the government.”

You see how the “Blame the Gringo” game is played. No matter what goes wrong in Latin America — where corrupt governments and widespread poverty are the norm — the U.S. always gets the blame, and it doesn’t matter whether a Republican or a Democrat is in the White House.

There is no magic formula that can cure the problems of Honduras. A rhetoric of “democracy” and “human rights” serves only to foster the delusion that there is something we, as Americans, can do to solve problems we did not actually cause, but for which we are unfairly blamed. Describing the ouster of Zendaya as a “U.S.-backed coup,” for example, is misleading, making it seem as if Obama did this through a CIA plot. As much as I hate to give any credit to Obama or Hillary Clinton, they were confronted with a difficult situation in Honduras and accepting the post-coup government as legitimate was probably the best thing to do. From a 2016 article in the Guardian:

Clinton [as Secretary of State in 2009] pushed for new elections, rather than the return of Zelaya, whom she considered a leftist troublemaker in the mould of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. . . .
In the hardback edition of her autobiography Hard Choices, Clinton wrote that the head of the Honduran congress, Roberto Micheletti, and the country’s supreme court “claimed to be protecting Honduran democracy against Zelaya’s unlawful power grab and warned that he wanted to become another Chavez or Castro.
“Certainly the region did not need another dictator, and many knew Zelaya well enough to believe the charges against him.” . . .
Clinton has claimed that calling the military coup a military coup would have increased the suffering of ordinary Hondurans as it would have triggered the suspension of US aid.
In the weeks following the coup, Zelaya made three attempts to re-enter the country, which Clinton described as reckless. She has said that her focus at the time was on electing a new leader in order to ensure an orderly transition.
In her memoir, she wrote: “In the subsequent days I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere … We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”
Leaked emails from Clinton’s private server which were published by WikiLeaks show that during this period, the US pushed the OAS to support new elections and sideline Zelaya.

Liberals who praised Hillary’s qualifications to be president, and who automatically condemn as “racist” any criticism of the Obama administration, cannot have their cake and eat it, too. If it is true that Hillary opposed Zendaya’s restoration because of concerns that he might follow the path of Chavez in Venezuela, she deserves either credit for her wisdom or blame for her folly, but you can’t have it both ways. Personally, as a conservative, I’m inclined to say she did the right thing, and however bad things are in Hondura now, they would be much worse if Zendaya had gone in the direction of Chavez. But this still involves us in the “Blame the Gringo” game where U.S. policy is presumed to be the determining factor in the fate of Latin America, which has the effect of absolving the people of countries like Hondura of any blame for their own problems, treating them like irresponsible children who constantly need the assistance and supervision of a benevolent Uncle Sam.

Furthermore, conservatives have to resist the temptation of embracing liberals’ quasi-religious belief in “democracy” as a universal panacea that can cure all the problems of all people at all times. Given the recent results of “democracy” in, say, San Francisco or Chicago, do Americans really wish to impose such a system everywhere? Representative government works best where there is a large middle class and widespread economic prosperity; trying to force-feed “democracy” to the ignorant peasantry of Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t work out so well, and American conservatives ought to be hesitant to condemn “right-wing” elements in Latin America or other places who resist any “democracy” that would mean allowing radicals and revolutionaries to turn their countries into Marxist-Leninist hellholes. The rise of populist right-wingers like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil suggests that it is possible for democracy to produce effective antidotes to leftism in countries where the social, economic and cultural conditions are favorable. We ought not despair for the possibility that such leaders might yet emerge in countries like Honduras, so that real democracy — the rule of law — can restore order, ending the migration crisis.

Finally, however, conservatives must reject the “Blame the Gringo” game every time we are invited to play it. While wise U.S. policy is beneficial to Latin America, it is insulting to the more intelligent and responsible citizens of those countries to depict them as helpless children, permanently dependent on our paternalistic assistance. While I would never pretend to be an expert on Honduras, the general case in such countries is that the responsible middle-class element of society must deal with the inevitable consequences of “democracy” where the majority of voters are poor and ignorant, and thus susceptible to left-wing demagoguery and the politics of envy. But you could say the same of Baltimore, Detroit or St. Louis. We have our own urban “banana republics” to deal with, and we cannot solve their problems by importing millions of impoverished “refugees” from Central America.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! You’ll find some fascinating discussion in the comments, and I hope you don’t mind if I remind you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Category: Honduras, Immigration

In The Mailbox: 07.05.19 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | July 6, 2019 | 1 Comment

a– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Frederick Douglass – What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?
Twitchy: NYT Editorial Writer Butthurt Over Ted Cruz Giving Colin Kaepernick A Reality Check
Louder With Crowder: Eight-Year-Old “Mini AOC” Forced Into Early Retirement Over Death Threats
According To Hoyt: And Our Flag Was Still There
Vox Popoli: She Blames Scalzi, also, A Charade Of Justice

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Miserable Cretin Edition
American Greatness: Antifa – Terrorists Of The Bourgeoisie
American Power: Celebrating Our Unique Country’s Origins
American Thinker: Christian University Caves In To The LGBTQ+ Crowd
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Those Pesky Physics Friday
Babalu Blog: US Accuses Cuba’s Colony Venezuela Of Killing Thousands Of Dissenters
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For July 5
Camp of the Saints: Homework – Catechism Of A Revolutionist
Da Tech Guy: Hey, The Salute To America Is Done & The Left Is Still Alive & Well!
Don Surber: Dragging Schiff Out Of Congress
Dustbury: Nothing For Me, Thanks
First Street Journal: I Twinged My Back!
The Geller Report: ICE Releases List Of Murderers & Rapists Protected By Sanctuary City Policies, also, Public Pool In Germany Closed After Hundreds Of Migrants Harass Families
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Bad First Amendment News
Hollywood In Toto: Olivia Munn Is Right – Tarantino Got A Pass On Weinstein Dirt
Legal Insurrection: Police Beleive They’ve Identified Viral Ice Cream Licker; Charges Will Be Filed, also, Fartacus Helps Five Female Asylum Seekers (Illegally) Cross Into America
The PanAm Post: Jesus Santrich Case Proves The Failure Of Justice In The Colombian Peace Process, also, Why Nobody Reports That Capitalism Saved The Bees
Power Line: Trump’s Independence Day Speech (With Video), also, Loose Threads In The Curious Case, Part 7
Shot In The Dark: Cafeteria American
This Ain’t Hell: Posthumous Award Upgrade, also, Made In America – Yeah!
Victory Girls: Independence Day Trump Style Was Revolutionary
Volokh Conspiracy: The Case Against The Case Against The American Revolution
Weasel Zippers: CNN Admits June Job Report “Blows Away Expectations”, also, Biden – I’d Slap Trump In The Face
Mark Steyn: Milkshakes Come In Vanilla, Chocolate, & Concrete

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

She knows.
I’ve been gone six years. A random Friday morning seemed good to sneak back into the house at dawn to pick up some documents.
My daughter’s are judge, jury and executioner.
“Hi. *Dad*.”

A three letter wrecking ball. All of my rationalizations, anger, and self-righteousness are suddenly gone.
“Oh my God, Angela. . .I’m so sorry. . .”
Her dirty, smiling rag doll is the last thing I see before the lawn rushes up to kiss me.

* * *

That was 10 years ago.
Getting my life squared away was hard.
Today is her wedding day.
She breaks me again.
Thank you, Lord.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Police Find Body of Mackenzie Lueck; Suspect’s Family Worries About Fair Trial

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Police Find Body of Mackenzie Lueck; Suspect’s Family Worries About Fair Trial

Ayoola Ajayi (left) is accused of murdering Mackenzie Lueck (right).

When it was reported last week that charred “female tissue” had been found in suspect Ayoola Ajayi’s backyard, I thought her entire corpse had been incinerated, but now we learn more of the story:

The body of University of Utah student Mackenzie Lueck has been found in a canyon north of Salt Lake City, police said Friday.
Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown said in a news conference that he was “relieved and grief-stricken” to report that Lueck’s body was recovered Wednesday in Logan Canyon, about 90 miles north of Salt Lake City. Investigators were subsequently able to forensically confirm it was Lueck, Brown said.
The 23-year-old was last seen in the early morning hours of June 17 when she was dropped off at a park in North Salt Lake City. There, police have said, she met another individual and vanished.
Last Friday police arrested 31-year-old Ayoola Ajayi in connection to Lueck’s death and at the time said he was expected to be charged with aggravated murder , aggravated kidnapping, obstruction of justice and desecration of a body. He’s currently being held without bail.
Police said at that time they had searched Ajayi’s home and property. Neighbors told police they saw Ajayi using gasoline to burn something in his backyard on June 17 and 18, Brown said last week.
A subsequent search of the burn area yielded “several charred items that were consistent with personal items of Mackenzie Lueck,” Brown said.
Police also discovered charred material that was determined to be female human tissue consistent with Lueck’s DNA profile, he said.
Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, who earlier this week was granted an extension to file charges against Ajayi, said at Friday’s news conference that his office would move forward with formally filing charges in the “early part of next week.”
The investigation, Gill stressed, remains ongoing.

Meanwhile, concerns about “RAAAAACISM!”

Family members of the man suspected of murdering Mackenzie Lueck said they don’t believe he will receive a fair trial in Utah.
Speaking from her office in New York, attorney Janet Fashakin said the presumption of innocence is a civil right in the United States and she questioned if Ayoola Ajayi will be entitled to that right if the trial takes place in Salt Lake City.
“AJ is being crucified already,” she said.
Fashakin said she got a call from Nigeria, where Ajayi’s mother has been reading news reports in disbelief.
“There is no way you can watch all this that`s being said about your loving son and you be able to be at peace,” said Fashakin.
She insisted the man the media has characterized is not her son.
“Mrs. Ajayi wants me to let you know that she has a good son. A very hardworking son at that. A son who cares about others,” said Fashakin.
The family is afraid judgments are being made based on a limited amount of evidence revealed by police. . . .
Fashakin believes Ajayi will not be able to receive a fair trial in Utah, at least in part due to his skin color.
“There is no way AJ can get a fair trial in Utah considering the racial disparity over there,” said Fashakin.

Remember, there are five A’s in “RAAAAACISM!”

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Utah, Violence Against Women

In The Mailbox: 07.05.19 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.05.19 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #672 – Independence Day Extravaganza!
Knowledge Buffet: No Anarchists, Only Communists
EBL:Vintage Hollywood 4th Of July
Twitchy: Nazi-Spotting Ex-DNC Staffer With Hero Complex Comes back For Second Dose Of Public Humiliation
Louder With Crowder: NYT Opinion Crapping All Over America Actually Proves America Is Pretty Great

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: I Likes The Onions In The Salads
American Greatness: Calvin Coolidge – “If All men Are Created Equal, That Is Final”
American Power: This Guy. I Can’t Even.
American Thinker: “Ancient Priciples” Birthed The Greatest Nation The World Has Ever Known
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Independence Day!
Babalu Blog: On This Fourth Of July, Cuban-Americans Say “Gracias, USA!”
BattleSwarm: Happy July 4th! (Fireworks videos)
Camp of the Saints: Independence Day 2019
CDR Salamander: Words Have Meaning
Da Tech Guy: Even The CSA Founders Knew The Founding Fathers Thought Slavery Was Wrong
Don Surber: Highlights Of The News
Dustbury: The Call Is Coming From Inside The House
The Geller Report: Remembering Entebbe – July 4, 1976, also, Happy Birthday To The First Nation In Human History Founded On Individual Rights & Freedom
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, So If She Weighs The Same As A Duck…
Hollywood In Toto: Showtime Mocks Conservatives Being Censored, Attacked
JustOneMinute: Meanwhile, Back At The Mall…
Legal Insurrection: Georgetown Prof Michael Eric Dyson Likens Betsy Ross Flag To Swastika, also, Administration Reverses Course On Census, Will Pursue Path Forward On Citizenship Question
The PanAm Post: US Sanctions Cuban State Company For Transporting Venezuelan Oil
Power Line: The Eternal Meaning Of Independence Day (Part One) (Part Two), also, What A Conservative Learns At College
Shark Tank: Trump Praises American Greatness On 4th Of July
Shot In The Dark: Burn Portland (Legally) To The Ground
STUMP: Deaths In The Dominican Republic – Bad Booze?
The Political Hat: When In The Course Of Human Events…
This Ain’t Hell: Free Health Care For Illegals? What About The Elderly? also, USN Commander Relieved After LCS Hits A Cargo Ship In Canada
Victory Girls: Does Justin Amash Have An Ulterior Motive?
Volokh Conspiracy: What The Declaration Of Independence Said & What It Meant
Weasel Zippers: Huge Percentage Of Republicans “Extremely Proud” To be American, Democrats Not So Much, also, Border Patrol Refutes Occasional Cortex’ “Toilet Water” Claims
Megan McArdle: Dear Democrats – I’ll Vote For Any Of You, But Please Nominate Someone Who Can Actually Win
Mark Steyn: You’re A Grand Old Flag

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

The Four Most Important Words About Fireworks: ‘Light Fuse, Get Away’

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on The Four Most Important Words About Fireworks: ‘Light Fuse, Get Away’

If you love shooting fireworks as much as I do, you have to be serious about safety. Later this month, my sons and I will be shooting a genuinely massive show — a belated Fourth of July celebration, delayed for family reasons — and we are experienced enough to do things right. Unfortunately, some people are not so experienced:

A fireworks store in Indiana was forced to recall 25,000 individual fireworks after a boy lost his hand in an accident, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced in a statement.
According to Oxford, Ohio, police, Caleb Bogan and Brendon Jones found the end of a Talon rocket on the evening of March 19, lit it and were injured by the explosion. Caleb, 12, was flown to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital after sustaining serious injuries, while Brendon suffered only minor injuries.
The recall entails that all products and fireworks be immediately returned for a refund to Grandma’s Fireworks in West College Corner, Ind., which is located just on the Indiana-Ohio state border.

Four words: “Light fuse, get away.”

Every consumer firework sold in the United States carries that warning, and yet every year, people are injured because they ignore that warning.

Three words: “Always brace cakes.” (The ABC Rule.)

Aerial repeaters (known as “cakes”) are the most popular consumer firework product. You light one fuse, and multiple shots fire into the sky — or rather, they’re supposed to fire into the sky. If not properly braced, some cakes can tip over and start firing sideways. Three times I’ve been present when that happened (none of the tip-overs were my fault), and it’s a genuinely frightening experience. Therefore the ABC Rule is always enforced when I’m in charge of a show. But not everybody understands why this rule is so important:

Nine years ago, Kryshelle Houghton safely stood on her driveway watching friends shoot off New Year’s Eve fireworks. She never imagined what impact that celebration wound have on the rest of her life. After a friend lit off a firework ironically named the “Lucky Seven,” it accidentally tipped over and hit Houghton directly in her left eye. Tragically, Houghton, who was 19 at the time lost the vision in her eye that night.
In Houghton’s case, she wasn’t participating in any sort of risky firework behavior at the time of her accident. “I wasn’t doing anything unsafe – I was standing there in the driveway watching a show in the road,” Houghton said. “People don’t realize how unsafe (fireworks) can be.

One look at the “Lucky 7” tells you why it can so easly tip over:

There are several ways to brace cakes. You can drive a stake into the ground and use duct tape to wrap the cake to the stake. Or if you’re shooting on the street, a driveway or a parking lot, you can use bricks to brace your cakes. What we do in our shows is glue the cakes to a board and use fuse to connect them to fire in sequence. Here’s a 3-minute video (not mine) that gives you the basic idea of how it’s done:

The ABC Rule and the four basic words (“Light fuse, get away”) of fireworks safety will eliminate 99% of the risk involved. Once you’ve done that, the biggest remaining risk is a blowout, which is when an aerial shell fails to launch and explodes inside the tube on the ground. If one of the shots in a cake does this, often it will blow the whole cake apart, sending some of the shots going sideways. Every pyrotechnicians’s worst nightmare is to have a blowout on a mortar rack that splits the rack, leaving chain-fused mortars firing sideways. Before shows, I always tell people, “We have a lot of things that fire at different angles, but the one angle we don’t want is sideways. If you see me running? Run for it!”

A lot of fireworks fans have been worried that President Trump’s trade war with China will cause an increase in prices, because nearly all consumer fireworks sold in America are made in China. This is one product we should be grateful to have the Chinese manufacture, not only because they have thousands of years of expertise — they did invent gunpowder, after all — but also because it’s very dangerous work. “12 killed as explosion rips through fireworks factory in China” (September 2014) and “7 killed in East China’s firework plant blast” (September 2017) are typical headlines. Can you imagine the insurance costs if we were making fireworks in America? So thank you, Communist China and your nimble-fingered peasant workers! But every once in a while, we get a glimpse of the dangers of mass quantities of fireworks:

FORT MILL, S.C. – Firefighters had to dodge exploding rockets to douse a spectacular fire that destroyed containers of fireworks stored for sale on the Fourth of July.
Now, investigators believe that fire may have been intentionally set. According to the York County deputy fire marshal, they are investigating [the] fire as a possible arson.
No other details about the investigation have been released.
Crews spent nearly an hour extinguishing the fire that broke out before dawn at the fireworks storage center in Fort Mill.
Emergency crews were called around 5:45 a.m. to the fireworks storage containers near Davey Jones Fireworks along Carowinds Boulevard, just off Interstate 77. . . .
York County deputies said the fire was not actually at the fireworks store but started in containers just outside the store.

The fact that this happened in storage containers that should have been locked is probably why authorities suspect arson. If indeed this proves to be the case, I hope the culprit is prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Wasting perfectly good fireworks like that? It’s so wrong.

Category: Fireworks

Kathryn Narcisi (a/k/a ‘KC Hill’) Wins Injunction in Bogus Defamation Case

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Kathryn Narcisi (a/k/a ‘KC Hill’) Wins Injunction in Bogus Defamation Case

Kathryn Cahill Narcisi is allegedly a singer, who seems to have spent years trying to Be Somebody on the Internet, with such a lack of success that the blogger Turtleboy has dubbed her “Failure Swift.” She evidently has a pattern of marrying and divorcing men, and also of claiming to be sick to get attention and money. Her current husband, jazz saxophonist Medoro “Metro” Narcisi III, was a high school music teacher until February 2018, when he was apparently forced to resign not long after Kathryn filed a domestic violence complaint against him. A couple of months later, a GoFundMe page claimed that Kathryn was suffering from lupus and scleroderma and that doctors had found tumors in her breasts and liver. She posted a video accusing doctors at a local hospital of mistreating her after she claimed to have had a stroke, and this was the video that drew Turtleboy’s attention to her. Well, she didn’t like what Turtleboy wrote about her — shabby grifters don’t like being called shabby grifters — and so she sued him (a total shabby grifter move).

The Rhode Island ACLU came to Turtleboy’s defense:

Aidan Kearney, whose business is based in Worcester, Massachusetts, runs a website and blog on www.turtleboysports.com. In February, he re-posted a video and numerous Facebook comments originally posted to the web by Hopkinton resident Kathryn Narcisi. He did so after Narcisi’s Facebook postings requested media coverage of an incident at Kent County Hospital, where she claimed the hospital refused to treat her for autoimmune disease. . . .
Last month, Narcisi filed a libel lawsuit claiming the blog post “defamed and discredited” her, and that it led to her receiving unwanted messages “from followers of the defendant’s website.” At a court hearing held before Kearney was ever notified, RI Superior Court Judge Susan McGuirl issued a temporary restraining order requiring the removal of any and all references to Narcisi from Kearney’s website and all other “associated” sites. . . .
ACLU executive director Steven Brown added: “The court’s order requiring the removal of items from a website is a classic prior restraint that the First Amendment simply does not countenance. In order to avoid a chilling effect on Internet speech, we are hopeful that this suit will be dismissed promptly.”

Click here to read Kathryn Narcisi’s bogus defamation claim. Whether or not she is suffering from any physical illness, she seems to exhibit symptoms of a sociopathic personality disorder. As the ACLU points out, she “requested media coverage” of her claim that the hospital mistreated her, and she has sought publicity in various other ways, which means that she is arguably a public figure, which has legal consequences. People who seek publicity can’t claim “harassment” just because some of the publicity they get is negative. Like, if Madonna goes on tour, she can’t file “harassment” complaints against critics who call her a flabby old skank. Shabby grifters like Kathryn Narcisi never seem to understand that when they seek publicity — through a GoFundMe account or a YouTube video — they thereby forfeit the expectation of privacy. Particularly in this case, where Kathryn Narcisi claimed that she had suffered medical mistreatment and sought media coverage for her story, it is absurd to argue that Turtleboy was engaged in harassment or defamation simply because he mocked her and expressed doubt about her claims.

My podcasting partner (and former co-defendant) John Hoge called my attention to this story, which resembles in many ways the legal entanglements we had with Brett Kimberlin years ago. For a court to have granted an injunction in this case is just wrong, and suggests that Rhode Island judges don’t know crap about the First Amendment.

Category: Journalism

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

FMJRA 2.0: Sweet Emotion

Which Gringos Are to Blame for the Ongoing Disaster in Central America?

In The Mailbox: 07.05.19 (Evening Edition)

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Police Find Body of Mackenzie Lueck; Suspect’s Family Worries About Fair Trial

In The Mailbox: 07.05.19 (Afternoon Edition)

The Four Most Important Words About Fireworks: ‘Light Fuse, Get Away’

Kathryn Narcisi (a/k/a ‘KC Hill’) Wins Injunction in Bogus Defamation Case

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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