The Other McCain

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

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | April 26, 2019 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

Three hour drive. The hike from the parking area, where he left the phone with the jeep (barely one bar, anyway) was five miles, mostly uphill.

The waves of stress rolled off during the trek. He’d return on the morrow for the supplies.

For now, the task was to get to the cabin, crack the place open, and get the heat on.

He’d sleep soundly for the first time in weeks, wake up, eat, move the aforementioned supplies, and then sit down with pen and spiral notebook, completely unplugged from the grid and contemporary distraction, and sink into his opus.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

It’s Very Simple

Posted on | April 26, 2019 | Comments Off on It’s Very Simple

 

Many of our country’s problems can be traced to a single factor:

Two headlines splashed across adjoining pages of the Wall Street Journal this week underscored a desperate but largely uncommented-on challenge facing America.
“Red Ink Seen for Social Security by 2020,” screamed one, as the program’s outlays will exceed income next year — and its trust fund will be insolvent by 2035.
And directly to the right: “High Court to Take Up LGBT Rights,” discussing three Supreme Court cases that will determine whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act covers sexual orientation or gender identity. 
What links these headlines? 
Simply this:  Social Security is going broke because we’re in a slow-motion demographic train wreck. As Chief Actuary Stephen Goss put it back in 2011, “Lower birth rates are the cause of (the) substantial and permanent shift in the cost of Social Security as a percent of GDP from 2008 to 2040.”  
America’s total fertility rate hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2017 at just under 1.8 children per woman in her lifetime. The stork’s been in free fall since 2010 — and baby-making is cratering in particular among women 20-29, prime reproductive years.  
It gets worse. The Journal coverage estimated that old age benefit shortfalls will “account for 90% of larger budget deficits.” Wonder why America is patrolling the seas with a deteriorating fleet half its size compared to the 1980s?  Why there’s no money for infrastructure?  Or why, despite the Trump boom, we may return to economic secular stagnation? 
Dare one paraphrase the 1992 Clinton campaign watchword?  “It’s the fertility, stupid!”
So why the plummeting birth rates?  Largely, according to Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), because marriage in America is in critical condition.
Stone writes that fertility among married women in 2016 remained above 4.0 per woman across child-bearing years. Yet “a smaller proportion of women are married during (their) peak-fertility years.”

In my experience, when you try to talk to young people about this problem, what you get in response are economic arguments — they can’t afford to get married and have children, they say. However, this argument is easily rebutted by the observation that, first of all, marriage itself costs nearly nothing. My wife and I will mark our 30th anniversary Sunday. On April 28, 1989, we went to the courthouse in Gordon County, Georgia, and were married by Probate Judge Johnny Parker, with two of our friends in attendance as witnesses. You don’t need a big expensive ceremony to get married and, proverbially, “two can live as cheaply as one.” Furthermore, very poor people have more babies on average than do the college-educated middle class, so that income and assets are inversely correlated to fertility. Thus, the claim that young people can’t get married and have children because of their economic circumstances is exposed as a self-justifying rationalization.

When our eldest daughter was just a baby, my father came to visit my wife and I at our tiny little roach-infested rental home in Calhoun, Georgia. When I complained about our difficult financial circumstances, Dad laughed and said, “Son, if you wait to have children until you can afford to have children, you’ll never have children.” So true!

We ultimately had six children — our youngest is a high-school sophomore, while the oldest three are married with children of their own — and we have been struggling financially the whole time. A family like ours is only possible for those who reject a prejudice I call “middle-classism,” where people’s imagination of what is possible is limited by concern for material wealth and social status. If you believe children must live in a “good neighborhood” with “good schools” (these phrases are a sort of code, if not indeed a racist dog whistle), then you will find yourself within those those imaginary limits. On the other hand, if you believe children are a blessing from God, you will have more babies and figure some way to survive despite economic adversity. And you might be surprised to discover that, whatever the financial disadvantages or loss of social status your family experiences by rejecting the prejudice of “middle-classism,” your children actually do quite well in life.

However poor a large family may be (in relative terms, given the general affluence of American society), if you inculcate good values in your numerous children — especially a strong work ethic — they may well accomplish great things in life, far exceeding their more privileged peers who have fewer siblings but more social status. Religious belief is strongly correlated with high fertility, and it is not surprising that U.S. fertility has declined as atheism has flourished. I have often remarked that liberals, who never hesitate to declare their commitment to Science™ — particularly Darwinism, but also such totems of the intelligentsia as “climate change,” gender theory, etc. — generally seem to be failures at the basic biological task of procreation, whereas us ignorant Bible-thumpers are winning by Darwinian terms.

Those who speak of “overpopulation” tend to think of people as statistics — interchangeable units, without any individual value — and this dehumanizing conception fails to take into account the differences in human quality. However equal we may be, in terms of our basic rights, some people are more valuable to society than others. If you consider yourself a person of superior quality, as liberals obviously do, isn’t it logical to assume that you would be a superior parent? Your children would not only inherit whatever genetic advantages you might pass along to them, but also they would also benefit from being raised under your wise guidance and, it also logically follows, your children would grow up to be very worthwhile members of society. Yet liberals don’t act in accordance with this logic, instead preferring to avoid parenthood altogether, or else having just one or two children.

Whatever else might be said in favor of larger families, the need for future taxpayers ought to be something everyone could agree on, but instead we seem to be drifting toward fiscal catastrophe because of what Bob Maistros calls our “slow-motion demographic train wreck.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

Category: Contraceptive Culture, Family, Marriage, Religion

In The Mailbox: 04.26.19

Posted on | April 26, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: It Is The Economy, Stupid
Twitchy: Dana Loesch Drops Kamala Harris For Trying To Pick A Fight With Th NRA, And BOOM
Louder With Crowder: Beta O’Rourke Claims Planned Parenthood Saves Lives
According To Hoyt: What Does Blog Want?
Vox Popoli: A Commitment To Seppuku

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The ANZAC Edition
American Greatness: Democrats Court Electoral Disaster With Trump Hearings
American Power: Joe Biden Dogged By His Handling Of Anita Hill During Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings
American Thinker: The Attacks On Christians And America’s First Freedom
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Fifth Annual Commencement Speech Friday
Babalu Blog: “Socialist” Denmark Is Actually A Thriving, Free Market Capitalist Country
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For April 26
CDR Salamander: Russia Smartly Lets The Soviets Go
Da Tech Guy: Under The Fedora – Tales Of The Clown Car
Don Surber: Noonan Blames Trump For The Attempted Coup
Dustbury: Fark Blurb Of The Week
First Street Journal: The “Justice Democrats” – A Movement Of Fools
Fred On Everything: Pence A Christian? POMPEO?
The Geller Report: Obama White House Reportedly Sought Ukraine’s Help In Taking Down Trump, also, After Sri Lanka Easter Massacre, Media Deploys “Muslims Fear Backlash” Meme
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, The Truth Is Out There
Hollywood In Toto: Is Luminary The Netflix Or MSNBC Of Podcasting?
Joe For America: Maxine Waters Claims 90% Of Americans Want Trump Impeached
JustOneMinute: If You Lack For Worries
Legal Insurrection: College Students Horrified By Joe Biden’s Handsy Behavior, also, Expectations Smashed As U.S. Economy Grew 3.2% In First Quarter
The PanAm Post: Venezuela’s Constitutional President Claims There’s No Socialism (He’s Wrong), also, Left Pole Intolerance
Power Line: Swedes Don’t Care About Rape, also, Who Was Colluding With Whom?
Shot In The Dark: The Atlantic – Like Reading Shot In The Dark Years After The Fact
This Ain’t Hell: Beta Needs Some Gender Bending, also, Valor Friday
Victory Girls: The Obama Administration’s Problem With Spying & Trump
Volokh Conspiracy: Short Circuit – A Roundup Of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Weasel Zippers: Senator Grassley’s Letter To AG Barr Should Scare Obama And “His FBI”, also, Illegal Alien Previously Deported Five Times Beat Four Month Old Baby To Death
Mark Steyn: Biden – His Time?

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Category: Linkagery

New Trouble for High-Tech Totalitarians

Posted on | April 26, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Earlier this month, we learned that Google was blacklisting The American Spectator. Tuesday, a former Google engineer published a column in the New York Times explaining that he left the company because of their cooperation with China’s Communist government. So, Communists good, conservative bad, according to Google, and you might suppose the executives of this multibillion-dollar tech giant would be experiencing some sort of cognitive dissonance about the dubious principles they’ve embraced. Nevertheless, they persisted:

A complaint has been filed with the National Labor Relations Board accusing Alphabet Inc.’s Google of violating federal law by retaliating against an employee.
The filing was made this week by an unidentified individual and the case has been assigned to the agency’s New York office, according to the agency’s website. It involved an alleged violation of a New Deal-era ban on punishing employees for involvement in collective action related to working conditions, according to a case summary posted online. An attorney listed as representing the complainant didn’t immediately comment in response to an inquiry.
It’s unclear who the complainant is. Over the past year, staff have protested over workers’ rights, a divisive military contract and the company’s handling of sexual misconduct. Tens of thousands of Google employees around the world participated in a November walkout, demanding changes. The company’s since addressed some of the organizers’ demands, announcing it would let employees pursue claims as class actions in court rather than forcing them into arbitration.
This week, the internet giant came under fire from two leaders of the walkout, who alleged in a message posted internally that the company has been retaliating against them — a claim Google has denied. The activists, whose message was first reported by Wired, announced a planned town-hall meeting on the issue Friday.

“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .”



 

Category: Economics

‘No One Could Have Predicted This Tragedy’ (But It Was Predictable)

Posted on | April 25, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

Say hello to Robin Steinberg, a feminist lawyer and “social justice advocate” who founded a non-profit that helps criminals get out of jail:

“The Bail Project is an unprecedented effort to combat mass incarceration at the front end of the system,” according to the group’s website. “We pay bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence.”
The Bail Project is comprised of “passionate advocates” known as “Bail Disruptors and Client Advocates…many of whom have experienced the bail system firsthand,” according to the website.
“We believe that paying bail for someone in need is an act of resistance against a system that criminalizes race and poverty and an act of solidarity with local communities and movements for decarceration,” the page read.

Now, say hello to Samuel Scott, beneficiary of this “social justice”:

 

Just hours after a nonprofit group posted bail for a man accused of assaulting his wife, the suspect went to the woman’s home and brutally murdered her, according to prosecutors.
Samuel Lee Scott, 54, was arrested for domestic abuse on April 5, after he allegedly beat 54-year-old Marcia Johnson, injuring her cheekbone and ear, the Associated Press reported.
Scott also allegedly told Johnson that the “might as well finished what [he] started since [she] was going to contact the police,” the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office wrote in a probable cause statement.
On April 9, the court granted Johnson’s request for an order of protection, and he was notified that he was prohibited from going to her residence or within 300 feet of her, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Later the same day, the St. Louis Bail Project posted Scott’s $5,000 bail. . . .
Within hours after The Bail Project enabled Scott’s release, he made his way over to Johnson’s home, arriving there at approximately 7:45 p.m., the Associated Press reported.
He proceeded to violently assault her, then left her bloodied body lying inside her home, prosecutors said.
A friend found Johnson at approximately 11 p.m., and rushed her to a hospital.
“[She] was unconscious, had a broken eye socket, several broken ribs, and was bruised from head to toe,” according to court documents.
A family member said that the attack also left Johnson with “brain damage,” KTVI reported.
The battered woman died of the blunt force trauma injuries five days later. . . .
The Bail Project Executive Director Robin Steinberg said the group was “deeply saddened” by Johnson’s murder, but said that they were in no way responsible for what had occurred.
“No one could have predicted this tragedy,” Steinberg claimed, according to the Associated Press.

Really? “No one” could have predicted it? You could have asked me, or any other adult with the sense God gave a mule, and we’d have predicted it. You start turning criminals loose, bad things happen. But this is just more “violence against women” feminists will ignore, for some reason . . .

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

Category: Violence Against Women

In The Mailbox: 04.25.19

Posted on | April 25, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.25.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Calling 911 – Never Underestimate The Power Of Stupid
EBL: Joe Biden 2020
Twitchy: Girl Who Wants To Become A Meme Becomes A Meme With Her Ambiguous Selfie/Question Combo
Louder With Crowder: Why Slavery Reparations Will Never Happen

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Girls, Your Sexual Market Value Is Much Lower Than You Think
American Greatness: 25 Questions For Robert Mueller
American Power: How Trump Can Win Reelection
American Thinker: Propaganda, Trust, And The Media
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Semi-Auto News
Babalu Blog: 1986 Bernie Sanders Loved Fidel, Sandinistas, Hated U.S. – Is 2020 Bernie Any Different?
BattleSwarm: Former Williamson County DA Jana Duty Found Dead
CDR Salamander: We Have To Sell A Larger Navy
Da Tech Guy: Imagine If Charlize Theron’s Son Thought He Was Trump, also, Earth Day – A Progressive Holy Day Overflowing With Propaganda
Don Surber: “The Mark Of Impeachment”
Dustbury: Buy This Man A Beer
First Street Journal: The Sourest Of Grapes!
The Geller Report: Paris Jewish Couple Brutally Beaten By Muslim Gang In Their Own Home, also, Editor Of Architectural Review Suggests Islamic Minaret Should Replace Notre Dame Spire
Hogewash: The TL:DR On The Mueller Report, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Left Won’t Cede Pop Culture Without A (Nasty) Fight
Joe For America: High School Principal Makes A New Dress Code – For Parents!
JustOneMinute: Lots Of News
Legal Insurrection: Dear Elizabeth Warren – No, I’m Not Paying Other Peoples’ Student Loans For Them, also, Don’t Rule Out Michelle Obama As Dems’ Hail Mary Pass To Avert Sanders Apocalypse
The PanAm Post: Ecuador Plans To Remove Socialist Indoctrination From School Textbooks
Power Line: Elijah Cummings Won’t Let Witness Have Lawyer, also, Poll Says Government & Immigration Worry Americans Most
Shot In The Dark: For The Media
The Political Hat: South African Land Grab – Just Kidding, Actually Not Kidding, & Seriously Not Yours Any More
This Ain’t Hell: Bigger Retirement Plan Needed To Maintain Officer Experience Levels, also, Such A Jerk
Victory Girls: Baltimore’s Mayor Pugh Has A Very Bad Day
Volokh Conspiracy: MA Judge Indicted For Helping Illegal Alien Avoid ICE Arrest
Weasel Zippers: FBI, IRS Raid Baltimore City Hall, Mayor Pugh’s Home, Four Other Locations, also, Biden Claims He Asked Obama Not To Endorse Him
Megan McArdle: Meet Your New Woke Inquisitors, Same As The Old Ones
Mark Steyn: Tiger Hunting In Sri Lanka


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Category: Linkagery

Are You Ready for … JOE-MANIA?

Posted on | April 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Are You Ready for … JOE-MANIA?

 

Try to control your excitement, America. Yes, he’s already run unsuccessfully for President twice — if you’re under 30, you weren’t even born the first time he lost — but this time Joe Biden is ready to win it all, baby. His platform for 2020? ORANGE MAN BAD!

Former Vice President Joe Biden announced his 2020 campaign in a video on Thursday, warning about the rise of white nationalism under President Donald Trump.
The candidate featured lengthy footage of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, calling it a “defining moment” in the country’s history.
“It was there on August of 2017 we saw Klansman, and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and baring the fangs of racism,” Biden said.
He praised the “courageous Americans” who clashed with the group of protestors creating violence in the city.
“That’s when we heard the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” Biden said, repeating the hoax that the president called neo-Nazis “very fine people.”
He scolded the president for equivocating between “those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”
“At that moment, I knew that the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden said, announcing his run for president.

The problem with this narrative is, it’s not true. The people “spreading hate” in Charlottesville were a comparative handful of extremists, whose takeover of what had been intended as a peaceful demonstration produced a wild mob scene in which a young fanatic drove his car into the crowd. President Trump did not say that the neo-Nazi nutjobs were “very fine people,” but this distortion has been repeated so often on MSNBC, CNN, etc., that it has entered the world of liberal mythology, like the belief that Ronald Reagan was to blame for the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Nevertheless, here is 76-year-old Biden — who was elected and re-elected in the 1970s on a platform of opposition to school integration — pretending to be the conscience of the nation vis-a-vis racism.

Of course, the “social justice” mob on the Left isn’t going to let Joe off the hook for that, or for the rest of his extensive political record.

Biden enters the race with 29% support in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls, and my money says it’s all downhill for him from here. The Democrats have gone so far left now, Kamala Harris is considered a moderate candidate in what I’ve called the “clown car” primary. It’s absurd to think that Biden can overcome his gaffe-prone habits, or that the radical grassroots in the early primary states will suddenly develop a fondness for the geriatric white guy. Daniel McCarthy writes:

Joe Biden’s inevitable 2020 presidential candidacy is a strange, strange thing. Biden has longed to be president all his political life: he first ran in 1988; he ran again 20 years later. Now we’re more than a decade past his last grab for power, and Biden, as he nears 80, thinks his day has come once more.
What are voters supposed to think is different this time? If Biden wasn’t good enough in 1988 or 2008, why should Democrats accept him as the best they can do in 2020? . . .
Do the voters who rejected experience and devotion to long-term status quo in 2008 and 2016 really want to embrace those things now? Signs point to ‘no.’ . . .
Biden has none of Obama’s charm or historic significance; just the opposite. And the Obama record without Obama is a pitiful thing.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)



 

Category: Election, Joe Biden

Violence Against Women Update

Posted on | April 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Violence Against Women Update

 

An elderly pro-life woman in Kentucky was doing “sidewalk counseling” outside a Louisville abortion clinic when she was assaulted, suffering a broken leg and other injuries:

Kentucky police are investigating an alleged assault on an older pro-life woman who was hospitalized after being pushed to the ground outside the state’s last abortion facility.
A surveillance video of outside EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville also provides new evidence of the April 13 incident, WLKY News reports.
Louisville Metro Police told the local news that they are investigating the incident that left pro-life sidewalk counselor Donna Durning with a broken leg and head injuries.
According to a Facebook post about the incident, Durning has been a pro-life sidewalk counselor for 23 years and, on April 13, she was assaulted outside the EMW abortion facility in Louisville.
The surveillance video confirms what Durning and other pro-lifers said: A young woman exited the abortion facility and, as Durning approached her and attempted to give her literature with information about abortion alternatives, the woman grabbed her and pushed her to the ground.
“I had a little card from Little Way Crisis pregnancy center, and I just offered it to her. And I said, ‘Honey, if you need to talk to anybody, there’s a number on here,’” Durning told the local news.
On the video, viewers can hear someone scream after Durning was pushed to the ground. The woman quickly gets in her car and drives away, as another sidewalk counselor walks to the vehicle, supposedly to write down the license plate number.
“Police officers were across the street at the time and came over as soon as they saw the attack. They took the abortion facility’s surveillance tapes. Witnesses wrote down the license plate number of the car Durning’s attacker left in,” according to LiveAction.

WLKY quotes Durning: “I saw a lot of hatred in her face and, I’m not exaggerating, I saw the face of Satan in her eyes.”



 

Category: Abortion, Violence Against Women
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