FMJRA 2.0: Day Late & A Dollar Short

Rob and Lauren Lim are a Canadian couple with two young children. They have been together about 14 years, but a couple of years ago, Lauren “came out” as bisexual and started dating women, and the Lims tried “polyamory” until — plot twist! — Lauren decided she’s actually a lesbian. So now Rob and Lauren are getting a divorce, and Lauren is engaged to Elyse Quail, a 26-year-old dance instructor. Did I mention that Elyse has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that, until 2016, she had been in a long-term relationship with a guy? Oh, and also, Lauren and her new girlfriend have decided that Rob’s oldest son, Max, is actually a girl.

It’s your Five Basic Food Groups of Craziness, and they’ve turned this circus of insanity into a YouTube series called “This Incredible Life.”

There’s a certain element of foreshadowing in this story, like clues scattered at the scene of a crime. For example, in their first video, we learn that Rob and Lauren met in 2004 because they were both bloggers and she saw Rob’s photo of himself doing a backflip on the beach. She left a comment on his blog, then arranged to meet him at his workplace — they attended the same university — and they were instantly inseparable.

Love at first sight, or dangerous impulsiveness? With the benefit of hindsight, we must conclude it was the latter, especially when we get to Lauren’s “How I Realized I Was Gay” video, in which she says that a 2015 Hailee Steinfeld music video was the decisive moment.

Like I said, your Five Basic Food Groups of Craziness.

What I can’t understand is why Rob is cooperating with this project, the whole point of which is that he’s a clueless chump who wasted more than a decade of his life in a doomed marriage, but he’s such a Nice Guy™ that he seems perfectly OK with this Hindenburg-at-Lakehurst disaster.

We are looking for clues at the scene of the crime, and one of them is in the first video, where we learn that Lauren met Rob when he was 21, just four years after his own parents divorced. As a result, he was reluctant to get married because “just the concept of marriage itself was, like, a very constructed thing . . . I didn’t want to submit to the authority of this, like, societal pressure.” In other words, he lacked any moral idealism or religious reverence, in contrast to the Christian understanding of marriage as an institution ordained by God. If marriage is a “constructed thing” imposed by “societal pressure,” without any moral meaning, then Rob has no basis to resent that his wife is dumping him for a bipolar bisexual dance instructor she met via the Bumble dating app.

Also, hey, she’s raising your son Max to be transgender.

Here in 2019, everybody is supposed to be accepting and supportive, but what do these “progressive” values mean, except an acquiescence to moral relativism, an abandonment of any standard of judgment?

Nietzsche saw this: If there is no God, then we are Beyond Good and Evil, in a world where the will to power is everything. If there are no definite moral limits — if even “Thou shalt not kill” lacks the force of law — woe unto the weak! During the blood-soaked 20th century, we associated this moral nihilism with the violence of totalitarian dictatorships, and many failed to see how an atheistic worldview might influence life in western democracies. For a time, the social damage was limited by a sense of bourgeois respectability that remained among the middle class, even as the moral strictures of our Christian cultural heritage lost the force of law. Now, however, we behold a generation of young adults raised without any sense of moral limits in a society where abortion is celebrated with bizarre euphemisms (“reproductive health” and “a woman’s right to choose”), where sexual degeneracy becomes a lifestyle (“polyamory”) that no bien-pensant liberal would dare criticize. Of course, it is “hate speech” to express disapproval of homosexuality, and you’ll be heckled and assaulted if you criticize transgender ideology.

My intention in writing about “This Incredible Life” was more than just the usual point-and-laugh exercise, but I didn’t expect it to turn into a sermon or a lecture in moral philosophy. Rather, my intent was to point out the way so many warning signs were missed during the decade between the time Rob Lim met Lauren in 2004 and their drift into bisexual “polyamory” as a prelude to divorce. If there is no God, the phrase “holy matrimony” is a joke, and wedding vows are no more meaningful than the fine-print “terms of service” on your Facebook account. Without a binding moral obligation between them — with no sense of honor and duty in marriage — man and wife become selfish negotiators, trying to maximize their individual advantages, and the sense of teamwork is lost. In the traditional marriage ceremony, according to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, everyone was reminded at the outset that marriage was not to be “taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly . . . but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God,” as the couple were entering a divine institution “ordained for a remedy against sin.” Nowadays, of course, it seems marriage ceremonies are an extravaganza to provide commercial opportunities for the Wedding-Industrial Complex, and many middle-class girls would be disappointed if their wedding cost less than $50,000 — limousines, catered reception, honeymoon in Bali, etc.

Just as weddings have become an exercise in status display, so also has the spirit of competition and envy entered marriage itself. Watch the video “Our Sex Life,” in which Rob and Lauren discuss the sources of dissatisfaction that emerged in their marriage before that Hailee Steinfeld video made Lauren “realize” she was actually a lesbian. (In case you didn’t notice, my eyes just rolled completely out of my head.) Secular readers might be surprised to learn that the ancient Book of Common Prayer also warns against this error; the purpose of marriage is not “to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding.” From this it is obvious that neither husband nor wife have any legitimate grounds for complaint merely because their sex life is less than a Fourth of July fireworks spectacular. Having entered the matrimonial bond “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly” — understanding its religious significance, with realistic expectations and a serious sense of permanent commitment “in sickness and in health,” etc. — how could a conflict over sex ever divide them?

As I say, marriage must be informed by a sense of honor and duty to succeed. The young man who seeks a bride must realize what he is asking of her — to reject any other possible future for herself, to “keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live” — and vice-versa. It wasn’t as if Rob Lim had no other options, as a promising young university student with an athletic physique, when Lauren caught sight of that profile photo of him doing a backflip and decided to lure him into her spider’s web. But his self-esteem had been wounded by his parents’ divorce, and he was vulnerable to her enticements, evidently having no religious faith and therefore being outside God’s protection. Little did he suspect that, 10 years and two children later, this woman would have a lesbian conversion experience by watching a Hailee Steinfeld video, and then drag him out for public humiliation in this ridiculous YouTube series.

The Nice Guy™ who gets played for a chump is a cliché of pick-up artist (PUA) or “red pill” discourse of the so-called “manosphere,” but feminists never acknowledge this dynamic, because it does not serve their interests to admit that women can be selfish, dishonest and cruel. While the “manosphere” is generally condemned as anti-woman, what man would not be “anti” such women as Lauren Lim? If learning how to avoid these dangerous traps is “misogyny,” every man should be a misogynist!

The most cogent analysis of what’s gone wrong with modern marriage is Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture, in which she describes (p. 143) “the post-nuclear family ideology” that “abandons the norms of permanence in marriage . . . in favor of a norm of unfettered choice.” Feminists would denounce the selfishness of any man who discarded his loyal wife to pursue sexual adventure, but when the tables are turned — when, as in the case of Rob and Lauren Lim, it is the wife ditching her husband — feminists celebrate this act of selfishness as the essence of “empowerment” for women. In a world where women’s selfishness is praised, is it any wonder that men are less respectful toward women? How many times do men have to see the Nice Guy™ get played for a chump before they come to the conclusion that women are innately cruel creatures who always perceive kindness as proof of weakness?

“Thou shalt not be a chump” is not among the commandments found in the Bible, but it is nevertheless sound advice for young men. It must be kept in mind that predators have a natural instinct for spotting prey, which is why a selfish woman will instinctively find a Nice Guy™ to serve her needs, until such time as she becomes bored with his compliant obeisance and seeks a more challenging game, casting her victim aside after draining him of whatever self-respect he ever had.

Finally, permit me to ask a question: If finding Hailee Steinfeld attractive makes a woman “bisexual,” why aren’t all women “bisexual”?

This brings up a point that I once made in conversation with Ladd Ehlinger, namely that what is called “homophobia” is an entirely normal sentiment, implicit in heterosexual identity. The political rhetoric of LGBTQ activism promotes the idea that it is wrong to disapprove of homosexual behavior, but it should be obvious that, if such disapproval were not commonplace, many more people’s lives would resemble the circus of insanity into which Rob and Lauren Lim have stumbled. Until relatively recent times, homosexuality was considered so abhorrent that it was an insult even to suggest someone might have such inclinations. You could be sued for slander for suggesting such a thing, or more commonly, be threatened with a punch in the face for insinuating that someone was homosexual. And punching someone in response to such an insult would be legal under the “fighting words” doctrine. Now, however, with the LGBTQ rainbow “pride” ideology celebrated everywhere in our culture — even in many churches! — everybody must pretend to approve of homosexual behavior, and we are all expected to have “gaydar” that enables us to perceive a subtext of homosexual desire in almost anything.

What this worldview conveys is the self-congratulatory arrogance of the gay community, where it is imagined that the only reason straight people are straight is because they lack the courage to be gay. Supposedly, everybody is secretly harboring gay desires that they are afraid to pursue, so that it cannot be presumed that straight people are capable of considering the case objectively and answering, “No, I disapprove.”

Far be it from me to presume to know exactly how gay Lauren Lim is. However, if she insists that she is completely homosexual and just failed to realize this until she saw that Hailee Steinfeld video, I must either accept her explanation as sincere, or else make the cynical deduction that she is engaged in a self-justifying rationalization. Of course, I am naturally cynical, but even if I accepted her explanation as sincere, still she has no right to compel my approval of her behavior, nor can I be forbidden to express this disapproval. She is free to ignore my opinion, or to answer in her own defense, but what we have seen recently is a trend toward silencing almost any criticism of sexual behavior — gay, straight, whatever — under the rubric of “hate speech.” This is what we see in the claim that it is “slut shaming” (a category of misogyny, and thus “hate speech”) for anyone to express disapproval of female promiscuity. Feminism’s double standard is apparent here, because feminists routinely condemn heterosexual men as complicit in “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity.” Practically anything a guy does in an effort to get laid is wrong — it’s now “harassment” for a boy to flirt with a girl — according to feminists, whereas no women can ever be criticized for her sexual behavior, no matter how selfish and irresponsible her actions may be.

Call me a hater, if you wish, but you’re not going to force me to be silent while you run that shabby three-card monte hustle on me.

It is an objective fact that Hailee Steinfeld is attractive. Insofar as a woman might harbor any homosexual inclination, I wouldn’t be surprised that she would find Ms. Steinfeld worthy of admiration, but Lauren Lim seems to imply that no woman can acknowledge Ms. Steinfeld’s attractiveness without also betraying her own homosexual desire. The word for such a claim is crazy. To most men it is obvious why, for example, women are attracted to professional athletes, but does this mean every male sports fan is engaged in some kind of subconscious homosexual activity when he cheers for his favorite NBA or NFL team?

Just because people can’t offer a sustained argument to justify their beliefs doesn’t mean their beliefs are irrational, and yet heterosexuals have allowed themselves to be shamed into silence by LGBTQ activists who claim to have a monopoly on both rationality and compassion. One does not need any elaborate psychological theory of sexuality to observe that people respond to incentives, and to suppose that someone like Lauren Lim has at all times acted in accordance to what she perceived to be her own narrow self-interest. When she believed it advantageous to herself to have Rob Lim as her husband, she pursued this outcome despite his avowed reluctance, and when she grew bored with her marriage, she pursued other options that she considered more advantageous to herself. Am I being too cynical in believing that the actual reason that her sexual preferences have changed is because the incentives have changed? That is to say, if the culture in Edmonton, Alberta, had been as avidly pro-LGBTQ (and as avidly feminist) in 2004 as it is now, perhaps young Lauren never would have bothered dating men at all. As recently as 15 years ago, however, the sort of anti-male rhetoric one now hears from the feminist movement was rather rare, and one seldom encountered the radical lesbian claim that heterosexuality is inherently oppressive to women. In 2019, however, college boys are afraid to talk to college girls, for fear of being expelled over a “harassment” complaint, and everyone has to watch their words lesy they accidentally say something that could be interpreted as “homophobic” or “transphobic” by the Thought Police who constantly monitor the Internet in search of “hate speech” to condemn. In such a climate, it’s scarcely surprising that fewer young people are having sex, nor is it surprising that so many are now identifying as “bisexual” or “queer” in an effort to escape the accusation of possessing “heterosexual privilege.”

Well, I could never be deceived by such scams, but scammers always manage to find a Nice Guy™ they can play for a chump, and so you can watch “This Incredible Life” on YouTube to witness a chump volunteering for public humiliation. But it’s not “incredible,” it’s just pathetic.

Category: Gays, Marriage

Somebody Give Breathless Conor Friedersdorf’s Breathlessness A Breath

Posted on | April 13, 2019 | Comments Off on Somebody Give Breathless Conor Friedersdorf’s Breathlessness A Breath

by Smitty

It’s an easy play if a deadline looms in the age of Trump, I suppose: get all literal about some Eminence Orange utterance. Trump’s non-command of the Progressive Era definition of stateman–buries your liberty in legislation, but uses mellifluous tones while doing so–makes targeting him trivial.
Which brings us to young Conor of the singular ‘n’, as Dan Riehl is fond of noting. He doesn’t seem to have aged much since my last encounter with his work, having just graced us with this: A President Falsely Charging ‘Treason’ Is What the Founders Feared.
It seems there was a tweet:

I think what the Democrats are doing with the Border is TREASONOUS. Their Open Border mindset is putting our Country at risk. Will not let this happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2019

Poor wee Conor seems to think that the choice of adjective, “TREASONOUS”, which would, per Friedersdorf’s subtitle (and I guess this may be the editor’s contribution) “violate his oath of office.”
Breathless Conor breathlessly intones:

Trump is guilty of levying a false accusation of unsurpassed gravity and additionally guilty of violating his oath to protect and defend Article III, which defines treason as “only” those offenses.

Now, I can agree with Conor. Were the universe to blow it mightily and leave me in charge, I would not personally trot out the “T” word unless I was going to drop a subpiano^W subpizz^W–one of those legal documents on the person in question. It’s like threatening divorce or something. You just don’t even bring it up unless it’s going down.
However, Trump isn’t actually threatening anyone here, is he? He’s characterizing the behavior of the entire party. I’m relatively confident that at least half of the Democrat Party hasn’t actually done anything treasonous yet. But give them time.
Conor wanders further through Trumpisms.

The Framers were guarding against the possibility that Americans would one day elect a man so morally weak and corrupt that he would falsely accuse political enemies of treason

Truly a “blind [guide], which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”
Conor, Obama’s Administration (allegedly) subverted the intelligence apparatus and spied on American citizens! Trump is arguably the most vetted public figure in American history. Why don’t you extract your head from its sunless location and consider precisely the behavior the Founders WERE concerned about! Do you grasp that, if Her Majesty had prevailed in 2016, the stunts applied to Trump’s campaign would be used a little more, and a little more. . .
We have actual problems in this country, young man. Trump’s choice of adjectives ain’t a fart in a thunderstorm.

Category: Donald Trump

The Collusion Delusion Boomerang

Posted on | April 13, 2019 | 1 Comment

Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have still not recovered from Attorney General William Barr’s testimony Wednesday that he believes “spying did occur” in 2016, and that he intends to investigate the Obama administration’s surveillance of the Trump campaign. That word “spying” seemed to have a traumatic effect on Democrats, and their media allies immediately began to spin this as Barr promoting a “conspiracy theory,” even though it is just a plain statement of known facts: Yes, the FBI targeted Trump campaign officials for surveillance, based on the Steele dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign.

Last May, after it was revealed that the FBI had used an informant, Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, to spy on Trump campaign aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, I wrote this:

Here’s the thing: FBI officials didn’t expect Hillary to lose. As we know, text messages between two high-ranking FBI officials discussed an “insurance policy” to prevent Trump from becoming president. Because they expected Hillary to win, they also expected to be able to prevent this taxpayer-funded espionage from becoming public knowledge.
And then Trump won.
Democrat operatives — in the Clinton campaign, in the Obama administration, in the federal bureaucracy, and in the media — panicked at the thought of what the newly-elected president might do (e.g., expose the corruption at the Justice Department) used information from the Steele dossier as a pretext for the Mueller “investigation.” Yet there was never any actual “Russian collusion” to investigate, and the purpose of appointing a special counsel was . . . what? To create a phony “scandal”? To undermine the legitimacy of the new administration? To cover up wrongdoing by the Obama administration and the FBI?

The Mueller investigation was part of a cover-up, intended to prevent the public from becoming aware of the (potentially criminal) domestic espionage operation against the Trump campaign. So now, after two years, Mueller has concluded his phony investigation without producing evidence of the (non-existent) “collusion,” and there’s a new attorney general with no conflicts of interest to prevent him from investigating exactly what kind of shenanigans went on at the DOJ during the Obama years. Can you understand why Democrats are freaking out?

Patricia McCarthy writes:

When A.G. Barr stated he would be investigating the “spying” on the Trump campaign, the Democrats on the committee were shocked, truly stunned. How dare he suggest such a thing? These folks, for over two years, have had their heads deep in ostrich sand. They are apparently completely unaware, or pretend to be, of the massive amounts of actual proof that the Obama administration illegally attempted to eliminate Trump from the running by trying to plant its own spies in the campaign and surveil under prohibited pretexts. Part of this plan was to create and amass fake evidence to be used against him. As almost everyone knows by now, the “Russia Collusion” hoax was just that, a hoax, devised by persons with power in the FBI, the DOJ, the NSA and the Obama administration. Once Hillary lost the election, her minions, such as the disreputable Rob Mook, were right there to get the claim out that she lost because “the Russians hacked the election.” Yeah, right. No way. Not a chance. Did she know then that her supporters in the Obama administration, the FBI, and the DOJ had already implemented a stratagem to undo his victory? Probably. That would explain her leap to blame her loss on “the Russians.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) The most common-sense interpretation of what we know is that the spying on the Trump campaign was conducted with the approval of then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and, at least, the tacit approval of President Obama himself. So all the media and congressional Democrats who have spent the past two years hyping up the phony “Russian collusion” narrative will now find their demands for a thorough investigation come boomeranging back at them.

Category: MuellerGate

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Student SJW Tasered After Disrupting Campus Speech

Posted on | April 13, 2019 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous: Student SJW Tasered After Disrupting Campus Speech

Gerard Dabu (pictured above) has at least two aliases — “Jammie Jammers” and “Delta Chambers” — and was already notorious as a social justice warrior (SJW) before he disrupted a speech Thursday:

A protester was arrested after a substance was thrown at a guest lecturer on the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s campus Thursday night.
A UMKC student group, Young Americans for Freedom, sponsored the event, “A Night with Michael Knowles.”
Knowles, a conservative political commentator and columnist, was set to give a speech titled “Men are Not Women” when protesters disrupted the event.
A spokesperson for UMKC said after several warnings, disruptions to the event continued.
Video posted online of the event shows an individual wearing a mask pushing into the event with a squirt gun and spraying a substance at Knowles before being tackled and shocked with a taser by UMKC police. . . .
Officials with the university issued a statement saying in part, “While we have a responsibility to allow free speech on our campus, we cannot condone physical disruptions of peaceful campus activities. We believe that free speech can be exercised in a constructive way that doesn’t put people at risk.”
Police continue to investigate, while the university officials say they will be reviewing campus policies and procedures.
The individual arrested has been identified as UMKC student Gerard G. Dabu.
UMKC officials said Dabu has been charged with peace disturbance — disturbing schools or lawful assemblies; assault on law enforcement; and property damage in addition to assault and resisting arrest of law enforcement and in the discharge of their duties.

You can watch video of the event, sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, in which Knowles begins by saying:

“You’ll notice, by the way, our topic this evening — ‘Men Are Not Women’ — should be an uncontroversial statement. You would think it would be like saying, ‘The sky is blue.’ You would think it would be like saying, ‘Fire is hot.’ But no, tonight’s topic is very, very controversial. Nevertheless, it is in fact the case that men are not women.”

Indeed, how crazy do you have to be to get so offended by such an innocuous statement that you end up getting tasered and arrested?

Well, as crazy as Gerard Dabu, the 23-year-old son of a senior enlisted man in the U.S. Navy who, evidently, is alienated from his family. Dabu seems to have moved from Hawaii to Kansas in order to become the roommate of another notorious SJW named Leah Albee.

A self-described “fat femme queer,” Albee was employed by her father’s business until July 2016 when Albee, Dabu and some of their friends decided to have a flag-burning for the Fourth of July. This resulted in Albee’s father firing her from her job and kicking her and her friends out of their house, saying that she had “crossed a line,” and telling her in a text message: “Well I guess you can live without my capitalist money. . . . Go be a socialist. See how well it works.”

All of this drama was played out on social media (it appears Dabu and Albee may have connected via Tumblr). That same year, 2016, Dabu was interviewed by a newspaper in Wyandotte County, Kansas, identified as a member of a local feminist group, explaining that “she” feared for “her” safety if Donald Trump got elected:

“To put it bluntly, while protesting is dangerous, what would happen if Trump becomes president would be even more dangerous to us,” she said, “and even if he doesn’t become president, the white supremacists have been reinvigorated and would pose a threat to all our members.”

Yet here we are, more than two years into the Trump presidency, and we must ask, who poses a threat to whom? Knowles was standing at a lectern in a university classroom, delivering a speech on a topic which, as he says, should not have been controversial at all, when he was assaulted by Dabu. You can watch the video and note how civil Knowles was in responding to the disruptive hecklers:

The incident that led to Dabu’s arrest happens at about the 19-minute mark, and let’s hope law-enforcement authorities inflict the maximum penalty on Dabu, who should be locked up in jail — or perhaps a mental-health facility — for a long, long time. Crazy People Are Dangerous.

Category: Crime, Education, The Transgender Cult

In The Mailbox: 04.12.19

Posted on | April 13, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Obama WH Counsel Greg Craig Indicted For Unregistered Lobbying On Behalf Of Ukraine
Twitchy: Libs Are Noticing Pelosi, Schumer Other Dems Not Defending Ilhan Omar’s 9/11 Comments
Louder With Crowder: Trump Calls Democrats’ Bluff, Wants To Send Illegals To Sanctuary Cities
According To Hoyt: Clearing The Fog
Monster Hunter Nation: My Schedule For FanX
Vox Popoli: Pope Benedict On The Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – We’re Back, Baby!
American Greatness: China Is Slowly Killing King Dollar
American Thinker: Sicko, Southern Border Style
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Reparations Friday
Babalu Blog: Cuba’s Food Shortage To Be Solved By Ostriches, Crocodiles, & Rodents, also, Ceremony Honoring Brigade 2506 Heroes this Weekend
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For April 12
CDR Salamander: Justice Delayed, Then Thrown Away…And A New CNO, also, Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Of Ecclesiastes And Weezer, also, The Holiest Of Weeks
Don Surber: NY Dems Vote For Illegal Aliens & Against Gold Star Families
Dustbury: House Mondelez Enters The Fray
First Street Journal: Bring Back Hanging!
The Geller Report: Ilhan Omar – The Most Ungrateful Immigrant In America, also, Fake News CNN Sinks To 15th Place, Maddow Viewership Still Down Double Digits
Hogewash: NIMBYs And Illegals, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Culture War – Google Labels Unplanned As “Propaganda”
Joe For America: Adam Schiff Facing Expulsion From Intel Committee, Loss Of Clearance
Legal Insurrection: Chicago Sues Smollett After His Failure To Reimburse City For Expenses Of Investigating False Hate Crime, also, Senator Wyden (D-OR) Has “Breathtakingly Terrible” Plan To Tax Unrealized Capital Gains
The PanAm Post: In The Midst of A Food Crisis, Cuba Caters To Jet Set Elite
Power Line: We’ve Gone Through The Looking Glass, also, Barr Brings Accountability
Shark Tank: Senate Democrats Continue Blocking Disaster Relief Funding
Shot In The Dark: When The Hail Mary Pass Falls Incomplete
STUMP: Others Notice That A Long Bull Market Hasn’t Improved Public Pension Fundedness
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – The Warren Report, Fact Or Fiction?
This Ain’t Hell: Yet Another Phony SEAL, also, Valor Friday
Victory Girls: White House To Screen Gosnell And The Media Throws A Fit
Volokh Conspiracy: Short Circuit – A Roundup Of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Weasel Zippers: Assange Fears Being Beaten In US Prison, also, Conservative Writer Sprayed With Bleach-Like Liquid By Protester At UMKC
Megan McArdle: Irish Cultural Pride Gives This Cosmopolitan Second Thoughts
Mark Steyn: Revenge Of The Deep State

H&R Block Deluxe Tax Software With Refund Bonus
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | April 12, 2019 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

Crazy Uncle Eddy stared at the room full of fuming relatives from the portrait.
“Screw him and his stupid scarf! I just want my share of the inheritance!” railed John Wentworth.
“He used to sit and knit and mutter ‘String literals, or literal strings?'” said John’s brother Tim.
And Greg knew.
It was all he could do to wait a few weeks and come back alone, with a piece of paper.
Right there, in the picture. Yes. The stripes were Morse code for the digits to the safe combination.
The others could get stuffed, he mused, boarding a Caribbean flight.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Isn’t She Adorable?

Posted on | April 12, 2019 | 1 Comment

My buddy Benny Johnson, who I’ve known since 2007, posted this photo of himself with Candace Owens at Reagan National Airport. According to Benny, he was running to catch a flight when he bumped into Owens, fresh from her recent congressional testimony, wearing a MAGA hat and carrying “a sizable amount of Chic-fil-A.”

When I shared that on my Facebook page, a friend commented, “She is such a doll,” and indeed, she is. You may recall the story of how it was Owens became a conservative. She was a liberal, but during the #GamerGate controversy, she was “doxxed” by the Left, and had a road-to-Damascus awakening: “I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.”

In this, she reminds me of Michelle Malkin. When she was a student at Oberlin College, Malkin became an object of left-wing scorn when she dared to question the school’s “diversity” agenda, and that experience — being called all the awful things the Left calls people who don’t “know their place” in the official victimhood hierarchy — galvanized her.

Going back at least as far as Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist who exposed Alger Hiss, some of the fiercest conservatives have been former leftists who got disgusted by the hatefulness and dishonesty of the Left. What happened when Owens testified Tuesday was astonishing:

Tensions at a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing on online hate speech boiled over on Tuesday, when conservative commentator Candace Owens accused Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., of distorting her comments on Hitler so flagrantly for the sake of a smear that he must “believe black people are stupid.”
“In congressional hearings, the minority party gets to select its own witnesses,” Lieu began. “Of all the people the Republicans could’ve selected, they picked Candace Owens. I don’t know Miss Owens; I’m not going to characterize her; I’m going to let her own words talk.”
Lieu then produced a cellphone and played a short clip of Owens’ previous remarks at a conference in December, which were widely circulated in February: “I actually don’t have any problem with the word ‘nationalism.’ I think the defintion gets poisoned by elites that want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want. When we say ‘nationalism,’ the first thing people think about — at least in America — is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK then, fine. The problem is, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everyone to be German. …”

Now, let me say here: Owens is exactly correct. No one could have criticized Hitler if his “nationalism” had consisted solely of attempting to restore Germany’s confidence in the wake of its World War I defeat and the subsequent sufferings under the punitive measures of the Versailles treaty. By the early 1930s, many in the West were willing to heed the argument that Germany had suffered enough and, having not read Mein Kampf nor realizing how serious Hitler was about his hatred of the Jews, many failed to perceive the danger in his brand of “nationalism.” This historical context is relevant to what Owens was saying in the audio clip — she obviously is not pro-Hitler — and is also relevant to the dishonesty of the Left’s propaganda about “white nationalism.”

As Victor Davis Hanson said Wednesday on Tucker Carlson, this propaganda is simply about the “demonization of Trump supporters.” While there certainly are people who might be willing to commit criminal violence in pursuit of “white nationalism” (however that term is defined), the Left is using this term as a smear, implying that all 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump are crypto-Nazis. With that background, we return to the House hearing Tuesday:

Lieu then asked committee witness Eileen Hershenov: “When people try to legitimize Adolf Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?”
But Owens soon made clear she felt Lieu had intentionally misrepresented her views to drive a false narrative not just against Owens, but also Trump and Republicans in general.
“I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety,” Owens said.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-NY., interrupted, telling Owens, “It is not proper to refer disparagingly to a member of the committee. The witness will not do that again.”
After clarifying that she had not, in fact, called Lieu stupid, Owens continued: “As I said, he is assuming that black people will not go and pursue the full two-hour clip. He purposefully cut off — and you didn’t hear the question that was asked of me. He’s trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany, when in fact the question that was presented to me was pertaining to whether I believed in nationalism, and that nationalism was bad.”
As Owens went on, Lieu tapped his hands together silently.
“And what I responded is that I do not believe we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist,” Owens said. “He was a homicidal, psychopathic maniac that killed his own people. A nationalist would not kill their own people. … That was unbelievably dishonest, and he did not allow me to respond to it.”
Owens concluded: “By the way, I would like to also add that I work for Prager University, which is run by an orthodox Jew. Not a single Democrat showed up to the embassy opening in Jerusalem. I sat on a plane for 18 hours to make sure I was there. I am deeply offended by the insinuation of revealing that clip without the question that was asked of me.”
Turning to her 75-year old grandfather seated behind her, Owens remarked, “My grandfather grew up on a sharecropping farm in the segregated South. He grew up in an America where words like ‘racism’ and ‘white nationalism’ held real meaning.”

Her poise in defending herself won Owens millions of new admirers — the C-SPAN clip set a new record (4.5 million views on Twitter in 24 hours) for the cable network. There are some people who’ve just got it — they were born to be TV stars — and she’s one of them. What she’s got, America loves, and I expect her to be a powerful force in coming years.

Category: Congress, Racism

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