The Other McCain

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

MS-13 Kills Man on NY Train Platform

Posted on | February 4, 2019 | Comments Off on MS-13 Kills Man on NY Train Platform

Fox News reports:

A suspect reportedly has been taken into custody Monday following the murder of a man on a New York City subway platform a day earlier in what is being investigated by police as a “gang-related” attack, possibly involving an MS-13 member.
The identity of the suspect is unclear, but a police source that spoke to the New York Post said the individual is currently being questioned by police at a precinct house.
“We have a person in custody,” the source told the newspaper. “Motive is gang-related.”
Law enforcement sources told NY1 earlier today that the shooter belongs to MS-13 and the victim was a member of the 18th Street gang, one of MS-13’s rivals. An interactive map created by the New York Daily News shows both gangs have been active in the area where the killing happened.
Police have been looking for two persons of interest seen in a graphic video of the shooting that has been circulating on social media. Police also have released an image of one of the persons of interest — the suspected shooter — fleeing the 90th Street-Elmhurst Avenue subway station in the Queens borough. It was not immediately clear Monday if that person is the one in custody.
Police say the incident happened around noon Sunday when the victim and two men started arguing on a train and the dispute spilled out onto the platform.
It’s uncertain what the disagreement was about – but the video first shows the men wrestling with the victim on the ground amid the cries of terrified passengers.
The shooter then breaks free, pulls out a small handgun and is heard firing at least six shots at the victim, sending those on the platform running for their lives.

You can watch the video:

Remember that New York politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer claim it’s “racist” to demand deportation of illegal immigrants.

Category: Uncategorized

‘Chaos’ in Virginia: Northam Besieged, Lieutenant Governor Denies Sex Assault

Posted on | February 4, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Chaos’ in Virginia: Northam Besieged, Lieutenant Governor Denies Sex Assault

 

Interesting lead from the Washington Post:

Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax issued a statement early Monday denying a sexual assault allegation that appeared on the same conservative website that posted a racist photograph from Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page.

They’re trying to discredit the story by attacking the messenger, Patrick Howley’s Big League Politics, which scooped them on the story:

A woman named Vanessa Tyson, who is a fellow at Stanford University, says that a man who allegedly sexually assaulted her at the 2004 Democratic National Convention is now an office-holder about to get a “very big promotion,” according to a screenshot provided by a tipster. A friend of Tyson’s named Adria Scharf, based in Richmond, Virginia, shared the “heartbreaking” message, which Tyson wrote as a private post.
Tyson is a fellow at California-based Stanford University and professor at California-based Scripps College, which means the alleged sexual assaulter must hold office on the East Coast. Tyson says her alleged attacker won statewide office in 2017.
Justin Fairfax was a John Kerry staffer in 2004, and won an election in 2017 in an East Coast state. Now, he is poised to become governor of Virginia if racist Ralph Northam resigns as Democratic leaders and his own state party demand. . . .
Virginia Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax took to Twitter around 3:00 AM to release a statement confirming the alleged sexual assault victim Vanessa Tyson took her allegations to the Washington Post “more than a year ago,” after which the Washington Post spiked the story.

So, in denying the allegation, Lt. Gov. Fairfax reveals that the Washington Post sat on this story for a full year. But now Northam is in trouble because of his blackface yearbook photo, and the guy who would become governor if Northam resigns is under a cloud of scandal but — plot twist — Virginia Democrats had no idea about the allegations against Fairfax because the Post was complicit in burying Vanessa Tyson’s story.

The New York Times describes the chaos in Richmond:

Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, abandoned by allies in the Democratic Party and besieged by demands that he resign, met with his cabinet Monday morning as state legislators returned to a Capitol thrown into chaos by the governor’s insistence on staying in office despite revelations that a photograph showing people in blackface and Ku Klux Klan robes was displayed on his medical school yearbook page.
But even after meeting Sunday night with a group of his African-American aides, most of whom told him the only way he could clear his name would be to quit, Mr. Northam was giving no indication that he intended to step down.
As Mr. Northam dug in, his onetime allies in the state and national Democratic Party intensified their pleas that he quit, angry and embarrassed at the prospect of being saddled with a governor suddenly compromised by his past. . . .
And the turmoil enveloping the state only grew when, at 2:55 Monday morning, aides to Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who would succeed Mr. Northam were he to resign, issued an extraordinary statement denying an online report that the lieutenant governor had once committed sexual assault.
“He has never assaulted anyone — ever — in any way, shape or form,” said two of Mr. Fairfax’s top staff members. They were responding to an accusation published late Sunday that in 2004 he sexually assaulted a woman while at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Patrick Howley has single-handedly wrecked the Democrat Party in Virginia. Remind me to buy him a beer at CPAC. By the way, I don’t claim to know whether Justin Fairfax is innocent or guilty, but the liberal media didn’t care about such things when it came to Brett Kavanaugh.



 

Category: Democrats, Racism, Scandal, Virginia

Another Victory for ‘White Nationalism’

Posted on | February 4, 2019 | Comments Off on Another Victory for ‘White Nationalism’

 

Wide receiver Julian Edelman was the MVP of last night’s Super Bowl in Atlanta, with 10 catches for 141 yards to lead the New England Patriots to a 13-3 victory over the L.A. Rams, the sixth NFL championship for Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Eight times, Edelman caught passes that produced first downs for New England in a defensive struggle where field position and time-of-possession were crucial factors. And, according to liberal journalist Corbin Smith of the Daily Beast, this was a victory for (you guessed it) racism:

[T]he Super Bowl-bound New England Patriots held a rally [Jan. 27] for their sweatiest fans at Gillette Stadium. Brady gave a speech. It ended… unnervingly.
WE’RE STILL HERE! WE’RE STILL HERE! Obviously, Brady is referring to his aging, decrepit, cheating-ass squad’s progression to the big game. But, imagine you didn’t know anything about football, or who Tom Brady was, or anything like that. You would think that you were watching some square-jawed grifter throwing red meat to the hogs at an alt-right rally, screaming at the libs who thought Nancy Pelosi and her gender warriors were gonna keep DECENT AMERICAN FOLKS from BEING HERE.
Of course, even if you do know stuff about Brady you may still think he’s on his way to pursuing this line of grifting. He flashed a red MAGA hat, an accoutrement that is gaining more and more traction as a symbol of white nationalism in America, in his locker back in the primary days. He wasn’t the only one! Patriots’ Coach Bill Belichick wrote a goddamn letter to Trump right before the end of the campaign that basically amounted to an endorsement, that Trump then read on stage. And Pats’ owner Robert Kraft is also his pal, and was even shouted out at Trump’s pre-Inauguration dinner in D.C. for his most deep-pocketed donors. . . .

(Note the logic: According to The Daily Beast, “white nationalism” is the only reason Donald Trump is president, therefore everyone who voted for Trump — all 62.9 million — is a racist. In this childishly simplistic liberal worldview, America is divided into two camps — good people, who vote Democrat, and racists, who vote Republican.)

Look, it doesn’t matter if the Patriots like it or not, they are the official team of American White Nationalism, the MAGA Boys On the Field. You can’t implicitly or explicitly support Trump, who reads speeches written by Stephen Miller as a matter of course, play in a market whose sporting culture is renowned for its racism, have a decade-plus organizational obsession with undersized white receivers, and be called, no shit, the Patriots, without getting the vile Fox News Soup that poisoned half the country on your shirt. Try to put on a bib of distancing yourself, deflecting questions, telling everyone your wife told you to stop talking about it, that shit isn’t gonna work. You’re the MAGA Kid. It’s on you forever. It stalks and haunts you.
When you root for the Patriots, you are associating yourself with a virulent and revolting strain of politics that seeks to Make America Great Again — which is to say, white, European, English-speaking.

You can read the rest of that deranged screed, and I should point out that the writer Corbin Smith is himself “white, European, English-speaking,” which raises the question: What’s wrong with that?

This is a question liberals avoid. In post-Obama America, the assumption that “white” is a synonym for bad or wrong permeates their minds, and you might think the only way Corbin Smith could fully expunge his sense of white guilt would be to commit suicide, but he won’t do that. Instead, his self-hatred manifests itself as Trump Derangement Syndrome, and as should be obvious by now, this is an incurable mental disorder.

What liberal journalists don’t seem to consider is the consequences of their increasing tendency to identify something that is popular or successful in American life, and then label it “racist.” If everything people actually like is denounced as “white supremacy,” well . . .?

 

But speaking of “undersized white receivers,” Edelman is remarkable. He played quarterback in college at Kent State, and he was the 232nd draft pick overall when the Patriots got him in the seventh round in 2009, for a signing bonus of less than $50,000. For his first couple of seasons, he was mainly used as a punt returner, also occasionally filling in at defensive back, and didn’t emerge as a real star until 2014, when he made 92 catches for 972 yards and caught the winning touchdown in the 2015 Super Bowl. At 5-foot-10, Edelman is indeed “undersized” for an NFL wide receiver, but he is fast and muscular and he runs patterns with moves that make defensive backs look like stumbling fools. Sunday night, he was the best he’s ever been:

“I was always taught as a young boy, work as hard as you can, put in the extra time and we’ll see where it goes,” Edelman said. . . .
“Tough times don’t last. Tough people do,” Edelman said. “I preach that, and I guess you have to live to it.”

Yeah — hard work is now “white nationalism,” I guess.



 

Category: Football, Racism

Rule 5 Sunday: Naomi Wu

Posted on | February 4, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

“It’s all about about merit until merit has tits.” – Naomi Wu

Naomi Wu is a self-described “tech girl” and DIY enthusiast from Shenzhen, who advocates for open source hardware, transhumanism, body modification, and women in STEM. She’s got one of the most popular English-language YouTube and Twitter (@RealSexyCyborg) channels to come out of the southern PRC, and frequently clashes with First World feminists. Also of interest is her abuse by Vice, which sent a reporter to do interviews for three days and then betrayed her by failing to omit information that could have allowed the government to retaliate against her. So as you can imagine, she doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for “journalists” there losing their jobs as the clickbait sites implode.

“You think you were an awkward 20 year old- for months I only took off my Google Glass to charge it and to sleep.”

Ninety Miles From Tyranny kicks off this week’s post with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #517, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns – Mounted On a Motorcycle In A Bikini. Animal Magnetism follows with Rule 5 Living Dead Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s herd this week includes Daisy Appreciation Day, 45 Spider “Find A Cave”, Blondie, Soraia “Still I Rise”, Groundhog Day, Jeremy & The Harlequins, and Eva Marie Saint.

A View From The Beach brings us Skyfalling Rule 5 – Bérénice Marlohe, Run On Russigate, Need Your DNA Repaired? Have a Cup of Coffee!, Stone Cold Russiagate, Skier Steamed by Collision with Paltrow, It’s So Cold in Illinois . . ., On the March with D.C.’s Straw Nazi, Just Proving Her Collateral, Are You Ready for Summer Yet?, Melania Scores in England and Continuing the Covington Conversation.

Proof Positive shows excellent taste this week by choosing Elizabeth Pipko as his Friday Night Babe; his Vintage Babe is Julie Harris, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Essence.  At Dustbury, it’s Teresa Teng and Gemma Arterton.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Destroy Everything You Touch

Posted on | February 3, 2019 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Destroy Everything You Touch

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Monday: Elizabeth Pipko
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
EBL
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Would You Hire @ChloeAngyal? (With Extra Special Bonus Schadenfreude)
EBL
A View From The Beach

Violence Against Women Update: Her Roommate Stabbed Her Over and Over
EBL

Kendall Jenner and Other Supermodels Face Subpoenas in Fyre Festival Probe
EBL

‘An Important Discussion’
EBL

How Anti-Christian Bias in #FakeNews Media Is Encouraging Anti-Semitism
The Universal Spectator
EBL

Prejudice and Error
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.28.19
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

Madness Take Its Toll
EBL
Pushing Rubber Downhill

In The Mailbox: 01.29.19
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

Florida Man Kills Family After Stealing Money to Contact a Bulgarian Whore
EBL

Democrats Pick Unpopular Loser to Give Party Reply to Trump’s SOTU Speech
First Street Journal
EBL

Who Keeps Paying BuzzFeed’s Bills?
EBL
A View From The Beach

FMJRA 2.0: Abrasive Flow Machining
EBL
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 01.30.19
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

Suspect Arrested in Atlanta Assault
EBL

BuzzFeed Is Democracy, or Something
EBL

A ‘Right’ to Laser Hair Removal?
EBL

You Haters! Stop Questioning Gay Actor’s Claim of ‘MAGA’ Hate Crime in Chicago
357 Magnum
EBL

My Kind of People: Junior Johnson and the End of the American Way of Life
EBL
Pushing Rubber Downhill

In The Mailbox: 01.31.19
EBL
Proof Positive

Contraception by Zoning
EBL

‘Persons of Interest’
EBL

Virginia Democrat Governor Posed in KKK/Blackface Yearbook Photo
EBL
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 02.01.19
EBL
Proof Positive

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending February 1:

  1.  EBL (24)
  2.  Proof Positive (6)
  3.  A View From the Beach and 357 Magnum (5 each)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!

Amazon Warehouse – Post-Holiday Deals

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Category: FMJRA Award

Doom, Gloom and Bad Weather

Posted on | February 3, 2019 | Comments Off on Doom, Gloom and Bad Weather

 

For some reason, I was researching Hannah Gold, who writes for the feminist blog Jezebel, one of the surviving vestiges of the Gawker empire. I say “for some reason,” because I’m not certain what made me start Googling her, although it was probably her Jan. 17 column about Louis CK’s return to live stand-up comedy performances. And by the way, I have decided I am sick and tired of the fifth-grade hall-monitor tattletale mentality that the #MeToo movement has produced. While I’m not a fan of Louis CK, it seems to me that if people are willing to pay money to watch his act, even after the godawful revelations, well, OK.

Why should a social-media mob or squadrons of feminist outrage-peddlers be able to gin up a boycott that prevents Louis CK from performing for audiences who don’t mind his astonishingly creepy sexual behavior? It’s like, I don’t go watch Woody Allen movies — he stopped being funny 40 years ago — but at the same time, I’m not organizing picket lines outside theaters, either. There is something to be said in favor of not giving a damn about every controversy that makes headlines. The problem is that once people get their heads stuck inside the social-media outrage machine, they’re always angry about something, and act like you’re a bad person if you don’t share their anger. But I digress . . .

It was probably Hannah Gold’s column about Louis CK that made me start Googling her on my phone a couple weeks ago, and when I was out to dinner with my podcasting comrade John Hoge last night, I happened to notice that I had 18 tabs open on the phone’s web browser. Three or four of these tabs were about Hannah Gold — her Twitter account, etc. — and I was like, “Why?” So after I got home, I kept looking and came across a blog post Hannah Gold wrote in December: “Happy Friday, the Environment Is Headed ‘Towards the Edge of a Cliff’.”

That was her reaction to a story published in the Guardian:

Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points, according to a study that shows 45% of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another.
The authors said their paper, published in the journal Science, highlights how overstressed and overlapping natural systems are combining to throw up a growing number of unwelcome surprises.
“The risks are greater than assumed because the interactions are more dynamic,” said Juan Rocha of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “The important message is to recognise the wickedness of the problem that humanity faces.” . . .
Co-author Garry Peterson said the tipping of the west Antarctic ice shelf was not on the radar of many scientists 10 years ago, but now there was overwhelming evidence of the risks — including losses of chunks of ice the size of New York — and some studies now suggest the tipping point may have already been passed by the southern ice sheet, which may now be releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
“We’re surprised at the rate of change in the Earth system. So much is happening at the same time and at a faster speed than we would have thought 20 years ago. That’s a real concern,” said Peterson. “We’re heading ever faster towards the edge of a cliff.”

Who is this Garry Peterson fellow?

Garry Peterson is Professor in Environmental Sciences at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. . . .
Garry Peterson has a degree in Systems Design Engineering for the University of Waterloo, Canada and received a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida in 1999. Following post-doctoral positions at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara and the Centre for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, he has been an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of Geography and the McGill School of the Environment at McGill University in Canada since 2003, where he held a Canada Research Chair.

He’s a full-time professional environmental fear-monger, a diligent laborer in the Catastrophic Predictions Factory, whose entire career is based on the premise that we’re hopelessly doomed, and who periodically issues new scientific “proof” of this conclusion. And he’s one of thousands employed in this climate-change apocalypse racket, all of them tirelessly working to manufacture prophecies of ecological disaster. This racket is funded by taxpayers and also by grants from billionaires and tax-exempt foundations, and if you show the slightest skepticism toward their dire warnings — “We’re heading ever faster towards the edge of a cliff” — that makes you an anti-science “climate denialist.”

How could you begin to explain to someone like Hannah Gold why they should stop publicizing this doom-and-gloom nonsense? If you’re my age, you understand that the global warming scare emerged rather suddenly in the 1990s, and that this timing is significant. During the 1980s, the Left had devoted enormous effort to convincing us that Ronald Reagan was a dangerous right-wing warmonger whose policies would lead to the annihilation of human life in a thermonuclear holocaust. That was the not-too-subtle message of War Games (1983), and the Hollywood Left was protesting at Diablo Canyon and also enthusiastically supporting the so-called “Nuclear Freeze” movement:

On Veterans Day in 1981, the Union of Concerned Scientists held teach-ins in 150 schools, and in April of that year, Ground Zero mobilized a million Americans in high schools and colleges to circulate petitions, listen to debates, or watch films. . . .
On June 12, 1982, the largest peace rally in U.S. history was held concurrently with the Second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, with approximately a million participants. . . .
In March 1982, a plan to introduce a Freeze resolution in Congress was announced by Senators Kennedy and Hatfield. The following May, the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives passed a Freeze resolution by a vote of 278 to 149. In 1984, the Freeze was backed by all the major candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination and became part of the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign platform.

Guess how that turned out? Ronald Reagan was re-elected in a landslide in 1984, the Berlin Wall came down five years later, and by 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed into “the ash heap of history.”

Well, what next to justify the Left’s gloom-and-doom hysteria? In 1992, at the so-called U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, global warming theory obtained official sanction as the basis for international “development” planning, and for the past 25 years, they’ve been ratcheting up the fear. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) became part of the curriculum in many schools, so that millennials like Hannah Gold have been indoctrinated in this apocalyptic cult since high school. Academia and basically the entire media establishment are devoted to propagating this fear-based worldview, and dismissing skeptics as anti-science bigots, so that when someone like Garry Peterson issues a new warning — the sky is falling! the end is near! we’re losing “chunks of ice the size of New York”! — this confirms the quasi-religious faith of the climate-change True Believers. You are a bad person is you don’t share their fear, in quite the same way that you’re a bad person if you’re not outraged that people are buying tickets to see Louis CK.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on [Jan. 21] said she thinks that there is an urgency needed in addressing man-made climate change, warning that it will “destroy the planet” in a dozen years if humans do not address the issue, no matter the cost.
During an interview at the MLK Now event in New York City honoring Martin Luther King Jr., Ocasio-Cortez told interviewer Ta-Nehisi Coates that younger Americans are looking for bold solutions to climate change, and are not concerned about the cost.
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’ ” Ocasio-Cortez asked Coates.

Translation: “Economics be damned, we must save the planet!”

If you want to understand why idiots like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez flourish in our current political environment, it’s because there is a sort of Greek chorus constantly applauding their idiot ideas. Everything is now political, including the weather and stand-up comedy. Young women like Hannah Gold are part of the vast communications apparatus that amplifies these messages — #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter and the entire constellation of hashtagged identity-politics themes that reinforce the worldview in which the greatest threats to human survival are perverted comedians and bad weather. However, if you point out the madness of this belief system, you’re a rape apologist and a climate-denialist, who hates women and science (not necessarily in that order).

Anyway, I spent time figuring out who Hannah Gold is, so you don’t have to, and you should be grateful for that, I guess.

 

Category: Feminism, Global Warming

Ralph Northam Press Conference

Posted on | February 2, 2019 | Comments Off on Ralph Northam Press Conference

 

The Virginia Democrat’s raging dumpster fire continues:

Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) revealed in a press conference Saturday that he once darkened his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume in 1984.
The admission came after denying he wore backface or a KKK outfit in a photo published in his 1984 medical school yearbook.
“My belief that I did not wear that costume or attend that party stems, in part, by my clear memory of other mistakes I made in the same period of my life,” Northam told reporters. “That same year, I did participate in a dance contest in San Antonio in which I darkened my face as part of a Michael Jackson costume.”
“I look back now and regret that I did not understand the harmful legacy of an action like that. It is because my memory of that episode is so vivid that I truly do not believe I am in the picture in my yearbook.”
Prior to the eyebrow-raising admission, Northam has vowed to remain in office despite widespread calls for his resignation after a racist photo resurfaced on Friday in his yearbook page from more than 30 years ago.
Northam stated at a news conference Saturday that he had prematurely apologized for appearing in a picture of a person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit. The photo appeared in his Eastern Virginia Medical yearbook.
The Democrat governor said Saturday that he, in fact, was not in the photo and had never even seen the yearbook until Friday.
His refusal to resign signals a potential bruising fight between Northam and his former supporters. Leaders in both parties have repeatedly urged Northam to resign, saying he’s lost the public’s trust.
The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, the state House Democratic Caucus and the state Senate Democratic Caucus all called on Northam to resign, along with several key progressive groups that have been some of the governor’s closest political allies. . . .
Several Democratic presidential hopefuls and potential presidential candidates, including Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker [and] former Vice President Joe Biden, also called on Northam to resign.

By the way, Northam couldn’t explain something else:

Virginia Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam said on Saturday that he was not sure why friends called him “coonman” in college. . . .
CBS News uncovered a page from Northam’s yearbook at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) that had nicknames under his name, which includes “Coonman,” a racial slur.
During the press conference, Northam said that many friends often called him “Goose” due to his changing voice; however, he does not know why some college friends called him “Coonman.”
“I don’t know what their intent was with that,” Northam said during the press conference.
Northam said that he never wore a KKK robe, nor has he ever been a member of the KKK.

Scott Johnson: “It takes a certain crazy willfulness for him to defy the mob when he has become such an inconvenience to his party’s vested interest in deploying the race card at will. Northam’s fellow Democrats badly want him to disappear. So long as his memory remains cloudy and the evidence remains less than conclusive, they deserve his continued tenure in office. He fairly represents the (black)face of the Democratic Party.” (Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

 

Category: Democrats, Racism, Virginia

Chad Allan & the Expressions

Posted on | February 2, 2019 | Comments Off on Chad Allan & the Expressions

Chad Allan and his groovy band, circa 1964.

My mind works in mysterious ways and I’ve forgotten why I started the research that led me down a rabbit hole into an obscure tale from Canadian musical history. In 1958, a singer named Allan Kowbel formed a band in Winnipeg originally called Allan and the Silvertones. By 1962, Kowbel had adopted the stage name “Chad Allan” and his band was called the Reflections. They recorded a few records, but with little commercial success. Then in 1965 a U.S. group called the Reflections had a hit, which caused the band from Winnipeg to change its name to Chad Allan and the Expressions. It was under this name that they recorded what was to be their only hit, a cover of a 1960 record by British rocker Johnny Kidd, “Shakin’ All Over.” But the reason you’ve never heard of Chad Allan and the Expressions is because their record company got an idea for a publicity stunt to promote the single. They sent out promotional copies labeled only “Guess Who?” a trick that caused some DJs to think this was actually the band’s name. And after some confusion, Chad Allan’s group officially adopted The Guess Who as their name.

A 1965 ad promoting “Shakin’ All Over” by “Guess Who?”

Unfortunately for Chad Allan and his newly renamed band, rock music was now progressing rapidly. By 1965, the Beatles were producing far more sophisticated music — “Help!” and “Day Tripper” and “Yesterday” — and while Allan’s sound might have been quite popular a year earlier, it was now becoming passé. Although “Shakin’ All Over” made it to No. 1 on the Canadian charts, it peaked at No. 22 in the U.S.

 

In 1966, Burton Cummings replaced Chad Allan as the lead singer for The Guess Who, who got a gig as house band on a weekly Canadian TV teen-music show, Let’s Go, that lasted two seasons. In 1969, the group had three Top Ten hits with “These Eyes,” “Laughing” and “No Time,” which was followed in 1970 by their all-time biggest hit, “American Woman,” which made it all the way to No. 1. This success was short-lived, however. Guitarist Randy Bachman developed health problems and Cummings developed an ego problem, and The Guess Who never recovered.

After he left the band, Bachman would later recall, he was labelled “a lunatic and a loser” and “nobody wanted to work with me,” except his old buddy Chad Allan, with whom he created a new group, Brave Belt, that recorded a couple of albums. Bachman recruited bassist/singer Fred Turner to join and, by the time their third album was released, Chad Allan was gone, and the band was now called Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.

By 1974, Bachman-Turner Overdrive was No. 1 on the charts with “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” and also the Top 10 “Takin’ Care of Business.”

 

 

So, while you’ve probably never heard of Chad Allan, he somehow managed to be present at the creation of two groups — The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive — that each later made it to No. 1 without him. Amazing the things you can learn on the Internet . . .

 

Category: History, Music
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