The Other McCain

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

Let’s Take Chris Hayes Seriously

Posted on | September 2, 2019 | Comments Off on Let’s Take Chris Hayes Seriously

 

Nothing was easier than the point-and-laugh reaction over the weekend after Chris Hayes argued on MSNBC that “the weirdest thing about the Electoral College is the fact that if it wasn’t specifically in the Constitution for the presidency, it would be unconstitutional.”

This bizarre tautology — “The ocean would be dry if it wasn’t so wet” — provoked howls of laughter, and a stinging rebuttal on Twitter:

As I’ve pointed out before, Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote majority in 2016 was entirely explained by her lopsided margin in California:

One of the “arguments” (an excuse, actually) employed by Democrats after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election was, “She won the popular vote!” To which the proper reply is, “Where?” In a handful of large urban states where Republican Donald Trump did not campaign, Clinton won by huge margins, and this proves . . .? Nothing, really.
In California, Clinton won with 62% of the vote, 7.4 million to 3.9 million, a margin of nearly 3.5 million votes (3,446,281 to be exact). Nationwide, Clinton got 65,853,516 votes to Trump’s 62,984,825 — a margin of exactly 2,868,691. In other words, her margin in California alone was more than enough to account for why she “won” the popular vote, which is completely irrelevant in our Electoral College system.

If it had been the intent of our Founding Fathers that the president be elected by a nationwide referendum, they could have done that, and yet they didn’t, to the puzzlement of Chris Hayes. Presidential campaigns might be organized much differently — why bother visiting New Hampshire or Iowa? — if it were all just a 50-percent-plus-one referendum. But the Constitution says otherwise.

When you look at election maps, you see that the Republican Party suffers from a disadvantage because it has failed to organize or campaign effectively in three large states — California (55 Electoral College votes), New York (29) and Illinois (20). Given the landslide majorities enjoyed by Democrats in those states (62% for Hillary in California, 59% in New York, 56% in Illinois), the GOP begins every presidential campaign by conceding 104 Electoral College votes to Democrats, who thus more or less automatically have 39% of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. And yet if you look at the county-by-county map, you realize that, even in these three Democrat landslide states, there are still large areas where the GOP vote is a majority. Republicans win among rural, small-town and suburban voters, whereas the Democrat vote is concentrated in urban areas. Does anyone, even Chris Hayes, imagine that the authors of our Constitution intended the federal government to represent only urban interests? Don’t be absurd.

Seriously, what was the substance of Chris Hayes’s argument?

You can see why, on just basic tactical grounds, why the Republican Party would want to continue a system in which they can lose a majority of votes and still get all the powers of the presidency, appointing the Supreme Court justices and judges and signing legislation, vetoing legislation, commanding the army, everything, right? All of that with less [or fewer] votes than the Democrat got.
No wonder they like. But I think there’s actually a deeper philosophical thing happening, which is the question of what exactly American democracy is for. And the weirdest thing about the Electoral College is the fact that if it wasn’t specifically in the Constitution for the presidency, it would be unconstitutional.
Here’s what I mean by that. Starting the 1960s, 1961 particularly, the Supreme Court started developing a jurisprudence of one person, one vote, right? The idea is that each individual vote has to carry roughly the same amount of weight as each other individual vote which is a pretty intuitive concept but it was not a reality.

In other words, Chris Hayes is basing his argument against the Constitution on Supreme Court decisions from the 1960s. What he calls “a jurisprudence of one person, one vote” was established in a series of cases (Baker v. Carr, 1962; Gray v. Sanders, 1963; Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims, 1964) in which the Warren Court replaced the actual requirements of the Constitution with an egalitarian doctrine derived from an imaginative interpretation of the Fourteen Amendment.

Justice John Marshall Harlan II’s dissent in Reynolds is a memorable denunciation of the Warren Court majority’s usurpation of authority that the Constitution never contemplated for the Supreme Court, given that nothing in the Constitution (and certainly not in the Fourteenth Amendment) gives the federal government any role in determining legislative districts. As in so many other issues during the 1960s and ’70s, the Supreme Court’s claim to near-dictatorial power (“the pervasive overlordship of the federal judiciary,” as Harlan called it) helped inspire the rise of the conservative movement as a means of limiting this kind of judicial tyranny. The mischievous activity of the Warren Court, which Chris Hayes argues is more relevant than the Constitution itself, tended toward a manifestly un-democratic system — centralized government by an elite that recognized no limitations to its power to interfere with the lives of citizens in ways that would have shocked the Founders.

The fact that Chris Hayes and other Democrats are now arguing for the abolition of the Electoral College is yet another reason to re-elect Trump in 2020, just in case you needed another reason.



 

Category: Constitution, MSNBC

What Was the Texas Gunman’s Motive?

Posted on | September 2, 2019 | Comments Off on What Was the Texas Gunman’s Motive?

The man whose shooting rampage in Odessa, Texas, killed seven people had been fired from his job at a trucking company shortly before the spree that ended when he was shot by police. Seth Ator, 36, had a minor criminal record involving offenses committed when he was 19, but authorities were at a loss to explain what happened Saturday:

Ator was pulled over by Texas troopers in Midland on Saturday afternoon for failing to use his signal, police said. He then shot at them with what police described as an AR-type weapon and sped away. Driving on streets and the highway, he sprayed bullets randomly at residents and motorists, police said.
The man then hijacked a postal truck and ditched his gold Honda, shooting at people as he made his way into Odessa about 20 miles away. There, police confronted him in a movie theater parking lot and killed him in a shootout.

There is no “manifesto,” no “white supremacy,” no terrorist connection, just a Texas truck driver who got fired from his job. The “AR-type weapon” is the most popular rifle in America — there are an estimated 20 million such rifles owned by civilians in the United States. Any gun-control proposal to ban and confiscate these weapons would obviously be a non-starter, particularly in Texas: “Come and take it,” as they say.

But Democrats don’t care about obvious facts.



 

Category: Crime, Texas

Rule 5 Sunday: Labor Day With Jayne Mansfield

Posted on | September 2, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

We had Sophia Loren a couple of weeks ago, and it seems only right to post Jayne Mansfield for the long Labor Day weekend, which I hope you’re all enjoying. Here she is in a fetching leopard-print bikini.

Rawr.

Leading off is Ninety Miles From Tyranny with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #727, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Cato’s Letters Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, while Bacon Time serves up Rule Five Jiggleboomers.

EBL’s heifers this week include Bond Girls, Bad Movie Rule 5, Beth Mynett, Jessi Combs RIP, Leaky Madeline Westerhout, Hurricane Pretardedness, Lana Del Rey, Polly Bergen in Cape Fear, and Dinah Washington.

A View From The Beach has more Brazilian, and lots of other goodies: Time for Another Brazilian – Juliana Martins, Leak Plugged, I Still Blame Jenny McCarthy, Fish Pic Friday – Capt. Emily Riemer, Today’s Chesapeake Bay News, “Girl with the Fishing Rod”, “No Surprises”, Maryland Gets $300k to Save the Sturgeon, Paper Straws Won’t Save the World, The Washington Post Hates Dogs, I Don’t Think That Word Means What She Thinks It Means and Let ‘Em Eat Bugs!

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe this week is Zsa Zsa Gabor, and at Dustbury, it’s Neha Sharma and Not The Formerly Unspeakable Armenian.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!


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Category: Rule 5

One Less Criminal on the Streets

Posted on | September 1, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

“Overkill is underrated,” says Jesse Kelly, commenting on video of an attempted robbery at a Metro PCS phone store in Philadelphia. The store had repeatedly been targeted by criminals in the past, but this time the clerk had a licensed firearm and was ready to use it. Video shows the robber walk in the door, pull a pistol and toss a bag on the counter. Then the robber turns to one side, apparently either to pull a mask over his face or to take his weapon off safety, but before he can do so, the clerk swiftly draws his own weapon and begins firing. The clerk doesn’t stop shooting until he has emptied the magazine, then he grabs his cell phone from the counter and leaves the store.

 

Officials say no charges will be filed against the clerk.

And there is one less criminal walking the streets of Philadelphia.

If you want to read more about armed self-defense, permit me to recommend the work of my good friend Robert A. Waters. He has written multiple books about such situations, including The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm, and his most recent book, co-authored with his son, Guns and Self-Defense: 23 Inspirational True Crime Stories of Survival with Firearms.



 

Category: Crime

Death by ‘Social Justice’: Zoe Quinn Drives Game Maker Alec Holowka to Suicide

Posted on | September 1, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Who is Zoe Quinn?

“Zoe Quinn” was Patient Zero of the #GamerGate controversy. A tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, Quinn was the creator of a tediously dull game called “Depression Quest.” She broke up with her boyfriend, a software geek named Eron Gjoni, and allegedly became intimate with a videogame journalist named Nathan Grayson. In August 2014, Gjoni published a nearly 10,000-word article exposing Quinn’s alleged misconduct.

Every time she makes news, I get a surge of traffic because of that concise biographical summary, and this week the cause of the traffic surge was that Zoe had accused an ex-boyfriend, Alec Holowka, of abusing her when they lived together briefly in Winnipeg in 2009. As a result of her accusation, Holowka was fired from the game-development company he had co-founded and then Saturday, Holowka committed suicide:

No formal investigation was conducted, no reports were filed, no police were involved, no evidence against Holowka ever surfaced. It was basically career execution by the court of public opinion. . . .
I’m sure there will be a number of people hand-waving away the allegations against him, claiming that they had nothing to do with the suicide, but having an entire industry turn against you based on unproven and unsubstantiated claims with the intent of making sure you never have a successful career in interactive entertainment seems too big to ignore.
In any case, the public castigation of Holowka courtesy of cancel culture did more than just cancel his career, it ended his life.

Recall that the #GamerGate controversy involved social justice warriors (SJWs) trying to gain influence in the videogame industry, with the assistance of unscrupulous journalists acting as publicity agents.

This #MeToo game of using unsubstantiated rape accusations to destroy men — we saw it in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — is “social justice,” according to Zoe Quinn and her supporters. The issue involved here is not whether Holowka was a bad boyfriend. His sister, in reporting his death, said that Holowka had psychiatric issues, and Zoe’s psychiatric issues are notorious, so that the combination of the two was like combining two highly unstable chemicals. But whatever happened between them was never reported to police, and there was no way to establish the truth, just as we can never know what (if anything) transpired between Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford in 1982.

 

Think back to how and why the #MeToo crusade began in 2017. Feminists were angry because Trump was president, and they decided to expiate their wrath by destroying Harvey Weinstein, a powerful Hollywood producer who was a serial abuser of women. Once the Weinstein bonfire was lit, other powerful men in Hollywood, media and politics were tossed onto the flames — Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, Al Franken — in a sort of social-justice carnival. One day, a guy was a millionaire celebrity and the next day — WHOOSH! — up in flames, his reputation destroyed and his career ended by a disgruntled ex-girlfriend. Amid the climate of witch-hunt hysteria, the distinctions were blurred between minor “offensive” behavior and serious crimes.

Weinstein had long been notorious in Hollywood, and his predatory behavior was more or less continual for decades, but some of the men incinerated by the #MeToo bonfire were never accused of anything like that. As the outrage mobs danced in the lurid light of the social-justice flames, the original reason for the bonfire was forgotten.

 

This was about Trump, and because feminists felt powerless in the wake of a Republican’s election, they had begun lashing out at men whose bad behavior was in some way Trump-like (“Grab ’em by the p***y”).

Now look where it has led. Whatever anyone might say about Alec Holowka, he wasn’t a powerful Hollywood mogul. He was a geek making videogames whose misfortune was that, 10 years ago, he invited Zoe Quinn to move in with him for a month. Anyone who cares to research Zoe Quinn’s biography will discover that she has a habit of causing drama and then claiming victimhood. For some reason, there’s always a “white knight” eager to rescue the tattoo-covered damsel in distress and, by reinforcing her sense of victimhood, these rescuers encourage repetition of the cycle. When other women see Zoe Quinn celebrated as a courageous heroine (there was even talk of her being played by Scarlett Johansson in a movie about #GamerGate), this inspires emulation: “Monkey see, monkey do.” Every emotionally troubled bimbo who has ever had a “bad boyfriend” situation with a guy in the videogame industry knows she can get attention by playing the heroic victim, and it’s not difficult to imagine the climate of fear this has induced.

Suppose you’re a game-developer guy in your early 30s, and you’ve had a dozen girlfriends since you graduated high school. Most of those girlfriends you’ve met through work, and how many of your ex-girlfriends might hold a grudge against you? Probably two or three, at least. All it takes is for one of your ex-girlfriends to go public with a #MeToo story, and it’s almost certain that every ex-girlfriend with a grudge is going to come out of the woodwork to add her victimhood tale to the narrative. Somewhere along the way, of course, you might have been in a situation that could be construed as “harassment” — an incident when you had a few too many cocktails at a party, or whatever — and you can bet that story’s gonna get told if you become that target of a #MeToo mob. Over the course of the past 15 years or so, then, you’ve got two or three ex-girlfriends trashing you on the Internet, plus the possible “harassment” incident, and these tales are piled up online, forming a sort of prosecutor’s brief portraying you as a serial abuser.

Your career is over. You’ve been “canceled,” as they say.

It was inevitable, from the moment the first spark of the #MeToo bonfire was lit, that eventually some man would commit suicide as a result.

R.I.P., Alec Holowka. Cause of death? “Social justice.”



 

Category: Sex Trouble

FMJRA 2.0: Winged Hussars

Posted on | August 31, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Fall Back To The Fortified Blogs!
Da Tech Guy
357 Magnum
Animal Magnetism
The Universal Spectator
Dark Brightness
EBL

Rule 5 Sunday: Katie Williams
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Democrats: No More Heterosexuals!
Bacon Time
Dark Brightness
Living In Anglo-America
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

Hey, Kids: Communism Isn’t Cool
Tai-Chi Policy
Dark Brightness
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: But They’ll Never Take The Man Alive
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

Feds Charge Transgender Activist With Raping 4-Year-Old on Video
Dark Brightness
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.26.19
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.27.19
Proof Positive
EBL

The Final Frontier: Lesbian Astronaut Becomes First Criminal in Space
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.28.19
Proof Positive
EBL

The Smear Machine Fails (Again)
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

Do You #BelieveWomen?
A View From The Beach
EBL

IG Report Confirms Comey’s ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Against Trump
A View From The Beach
EBL

A Farewell To Analog
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.30.19 (Early Edition)
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.30.19 (Evening Edition)
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending August 30:

  1.  EBL (16)
  2.  A View From The Beach (7)
  3.  Proof Positive (6)
  4.  357 Magnum (5)

Honorable mention: Dark Brightness

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery!


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Category: FMJRA Award

‘Mothers Tell Your Children’

Posted on | August 31, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Legend has it that the original “House of the Rising Sun” was a New Orleans brothel, its name derived from a literal translation of the name of its first proprietor, Madame Marianne LeSoleil Levant. Destroyed by a fire, this notorious establishment inspired a folk song about a woman lamenting her fate, having stumbled into a life of degradation:

Oh, mothers tell your children
Not to do what I have done,
Spend your life in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun.

After that old song became a hit for the Animals in 1964, attempts to find the factual basis of the legend failed, but New Orleans certainly was (and still is) one of the most wicked cities in America, so the idea of a broken down whore lamenting what happened to her “down in New Orleans” conveys a definite sense of historical reality.

What shall we say, then, of “sex workers” in the Social Media Age? In 2015, a Netflix documentary about young porn performers, Hot Girls Wanted, was nominated for an Emmy Award. One critic called it “the most depressing documentary you’ll ever watch.”

The brutal supply-and-demand equation of what is euphemistically called “the adult entertainment industry” results in a premium for so-called “barely legal” performers — girls 18 or 19 years old — and as one of the men involved in this loathsome business says in Hot Girls Wanted: “A lot of them know it’s a trap but the money’s there in their face, right now — cash! They take it and just hope for the best.”

Being lured into a trap by the offer of quick cash produces some very sad stories. Consider the class-action lawsuit filed against the producers of the “Girls Do Porn” series. The plaintiffs claim they were misled, told that their performances would only be distributed overseas in limited-edition DVDs and, instead, the videos were all over the Internet, where the performers were identified by their real names:

On Monday, the first of these women, identified as Jane Doe 15, finished her testimony. During three days of examination, Doe 15 recounted for the court a nightmarish sequence of events, which started with a Craigslist ad in 2016 and ended in doxxing, harassment, job troubles, expulsion from her cheerleading squad, fleeing her college town, and fractured relationships with her family, classmates, and boyfriend.
Girls Do Porn, a San Diego-based adult subscription service formed in 2006 by New Zealand man Michael Pratt, trafficked in XXX videos with amateur actresses, ages 18-22. . . .
“If I had known that, not only was it going on the internet,” Doe 15 said in her testimony, “but that they were posting it on the internet, that my name would be attached to it, that it would be in the United States, and that I wouldn’t be paid $5,000, but $2,000 less, and insulted because I was pale and bruised; if I had known that it was more than 30 minutes of filming, if I had known any of that, just any one of those; if I had known that other girls had been harassed and kicked out of school for it, if I had known that I would be kicked off the cheer team; if I had known any of that, I wouldn’t have done it.”

Oh, so she wanted to be a secret whore, not a public whore, and therefore she is a victim of . . . what? Her own stupidity, I’d say. What happened, you see, was that whatever the producers were telling these girls verbally, when they signed a contract, the fine print gave the producer unlimited rights to distribute the videos. One of the porn whore lawsuit plaintiffs described the impact on her life in a court filing:

“I have contemplated suicide. I have cut myself. I became depressed, could not leave the house, and considered dropping out of school. People started to message me with video screenshots or they would send screenshots to my friends making fun of me. My mom knows of the video, which shames and humiliates me. I had to drop out of college to avoid ongoing harassment from classmates. I have been harassed at work about the video to the point that I had to quit. I am now scared to apply for new jobs. I get random requests on social media from strangers asking me to have sex with them. I live in fear every single day that I will run across someone that knows about the video. I am trying to move to another state soon.”

Oh, the unbearable shame of it all! You were whoring around and thought nobody would ever find out what a nasty whore you are? Oops.

What is happening, obviously, is that the parents of these girls have failed to warn them of the dangers, and probably most parents would not believe how common such behavior has become. Consider a criminal case that recently made headlines in Maryland:

Maryland’s law against distributing child pornography applies even when the person distributing a pornographic video is the video’s minor subject, Maryland’s highest court ruled on Wednesday in a 6-1 vote.
The girl in question, identified only as “S.K.” in court documents, was 16 years old when she performed oral sex on an unidentified male. The act was captured on video — he appears to have been holding the camera — and S.K. shared the video with two friends via a text message. She eventually became estranged from one of the friends, a 17-year-old boy, and he showed the video to a police officer at the school.
The government charged the girl as a juvenile for distributing child pornography and displaying an obscene item to a minor. . . .
It’s not clear if anyone else will be charged in the case. By the time S.K. was charged, the video of her performing oral sex had begun to circulate more widely around her high school. She says she only shared the video with her two friends, which implies one of them shared the video with others.

Well, of course, the video was circulated all over the high school — and who knows where else? The sharing of obscene photos and videos has become shockingly commonplace among young people, who don’t seem to understand the potential consequences. Parents have to warn their teenagers explicitly against this kind of behavior: No nudes, ever.

Don’t send such pictures of yourself, and don’t solicit them from others. If someone offers to send you such photos, tell them “hell, no,” block their phone number and avoid associating with them. Otherwise, you might “live your life in sin and misery,” and that’s a sad song you don’t ever want to sing. (Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)



 

Category: Sex Trouble

‘My Word as a Biden’

Posted on | August 31, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘My Word as a Biden’

 

The thing that gets me about Joe Biden’s latest spectacular gaffe — where he tried to tell a story about pinning a medal on a war hero and managed to get every fact wrong — is the part where he vouches for the truth of his story by saying, “my word as a Biden,” as if the Biden family name was synonymous with honesty. And everybody’s like, what?

Could someone go up to Joe’s hometown in Scranton and investigate whether the Biden family was considered especially trustworthy by the locals? Was the honesty of his ancestors so famous that people would say, “Well, he gave his word as a Biden, so it must be true”?

After the Washington Post called attention to Biden’s errors in this story, he defended himself by saying that the “central point” of his story — that American troops are heroically courageous — “was absolutely accurate,” as if his critics were arguing otherwise. But nobody has cast doubt on the courage of the soldier in the story, Army Staff Sgt. Chad Workman, so that Biden’s explanation is basically a straw-man argument.

In point of fact, Biden has a long history of being less than honest, but this gaffe wasn’t really a lie, it was just another example of “Sleepy Joe” becoming confused in public, as he has been doing more and more lately.

Even thought Biden continues to lead the Democratic nomination contest by double digits according to the Real Clear Politics average, his front-runner status is unlikely to endure if he continues to be a babbling idiot every time he speaks in public. The very fact that the Washington Post was willing to report on this incident shows that the pro-Democrat media are unwilling to play defense for the front-runner. Now that the Democrat debate field has been narrowed enough that the candidates can debate on a single stage, what happens when Biden finds himself on national TV flanked by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, with Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg also joining the “Get Joe” mob?

My hunch is that Biden will have a rough night in next month’s debate, and if the front-runner loses his front-runner status, what then?



 

Category: Joe Biden
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