The Other McCain

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

Kendall Jenner and Other Supermodels Face Subpoenas in Fyre Festival Probe

Posted on | January 27, 2019 | Comments Off on Kendall Jenner and Other Supermodels Face Subpoenas in Fyre Festival Probe

Kendall Jenner.

Did you know Kendall Jenner has over 100 million followers on her Instagram account? Do you know what that kind of influence is worth? Jenner was paid $250,000 to promote the disastrous 2017 Fyre Festival (see “‘Fyre Fraud’: A Millennial Woodstock,” Jan. 23) and now investigators are asking questions about that money:

Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and other models, Instagram influencers and artists who helped promote Fyre Festival could be forced to disclose information about payments they received from organizer Billy McFarland.
The trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of Fyre Media on Friday asked a judge for a new round of subpoenas for the celebrities who helped build hype around the ill-fated festival in the Bahamas, according to Billboard.
Among them are Jenner, Hadid, Hailey Bieber, Emily Ratajkowski and other beautiful people who frolicked in the crystal-clear blue waters of the Caribbean in a promotional video that induced serious ‘fear of missing out’ among social media enthusiasts and drove thousands to purchase tickets for the event spanning two decadent weekends in spring 2017.
Nearly two years later, the subpoenas are part of an investigation into what happened to the estimated $26million McFarland raised from investors and doled out in the weeks and months before Fyre Festival went up in [metaphorical] flames, leaving thousands of attendees and workers broke and abandoned, investors swindled out of millions and, ultimately, landing McFarland behind bars.
Trustee Gregory Messer’s latest filing is seeking answers on $5.3million-worth of payments, Billboard reported.
One of the requested subpoenas is for IMG Models, the agency that represents supermodels like including Hadid, Bieber and Elsa Hosk, who appeared in a widely-seen promotional video for Fyre Festival.
Messer said IMG received payments of $1.2million from McFarland between November 2016 and February 2017, according to Billboard.
Another subpoena is for Jenner, who received a $250,000-payment in January 2017.
Jenner didn’t indicate whether she was being paid for the now-deleted post . . . which prompted a Federal Trade Commission warning about disclosure rules for sponsored social media posts.
An additional subpoena is slated for DNA Model Management, which represents Emily Ratajkowski and was paid $299,000 by McFarland in March 2017.

Emily Ratajkowski.

Whenever international supermodels are being investigated, readers trust The Other McCain to keep them informed of the latest updates. It’s sort of a public service. Also, hit the freaking tip jar. I may not have a hundred million Instagram followers, but I’m worth something, right?




 

 

Category: Celebrities, Rule 5

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

Posted on | January 26, 2019 | Comments Off on Violence Against Women Update: Her Roommate Stabbed Her Over and Over

Police say Luisa Cutting (left) stabbed Alexa Cannon (right) more than 30 times.

Radford University is a state school in southwestern Virginia, about 45 miles down I-81 from Roanoke, and the campus was shocked this week when a senior student was stabbed to death by her roommate:

A Radford University student was accused of stabbing a fellow student to death Thursday, police announced.
Luisa Ines Tudela Harris Cutting, 21, of Jeffersonton, Virginia, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. A search warrant said officers responded to an apartment near the school and were met by a woman covered in blood. The warrant said the woman told officers to arrest her and admitted to the slaying.
“I killed her,” the woman said, according to the warrant.
The woman was on the floor with a butcher knife “sticking out of her mouth,” the Roanoke Times reported, citing the search warrant. . . .
The arrest warrant listed the victim as Alexis Cannon, who was a student at the Virginia school, the Roanoke Times reported.

Police say Cannon was stabbed more than 30 times and, while they have not said what the motive might have been, the New York Post rather artfully understates one obvious aspect of the case: “Posts on Cannon’s social media pages indicate that the girls had a close relationship.”

“I met this girl two years ago online and somehow we ended up living across from each other for a year, this summer she was equivalent to my mom in Cancun. And unimaginably she still puts up with me and now we’re living together next year. Love you more Lu and everyone pray that we don’t kill each other this year,” Cannon said on Instagram in March.
A post on Cannon’s Facebook page from July read: “So incredibly proud of my best friend, Luisa Cutting for becoming Latinos Student Alliance’s President! I know you’re going to be amazing with everything you do! Love you more!!”
“Love you so so much,” Cutting wrote in response to Cannon’s Facebook post.

Yes, “the girls had a close relationship,” so to speak. Here are a few photos of the couple from the deceased girl’s Instagram page:

 

 

 

 

 

Just a “close relationship” between two college girls, one of whom stabbed the other more than 30 times, according to police. It would be wrong to engage in speculation about the motive. WFIR reports that police “seized pills, smoking devices and grinders from Cutting’s bedroom along with a brown chalk-like substance from the kitchen,” according to the arrest warrant, and it’s possible the accused killer just had a bad drug experience. To suggest that perhaps this was a lover’s quarrel would be mere guesswork, which is not responsible journalism. And of course, the Women and Gender Studies faculty at Radford University will probably find a way to blame the patriarchy.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)




 

 

Category: Violence Against Women

Would You Hire @ChloeAngyal? (With Extra Special Bonus Schadenfreude)

Posted on | January 26, 2019 | Comments Off on Would You Hire @ChloeAngyal? (With Extra Special Bonus Schadenfreude)

 

Following up on Friday’s post (“‘Learn to Code’ and the Collapse of the Millennial SJW Clickbait Bubble”), we come to the case of now-unemployed Huffington Post deputy opinion editor Chloe Angyal. Professor Reynolds reminds us of the fact that after Dr. Angyal undertook this job, she focused on increasing “diversity” in HuffPo’s opinion columns by the most obvious means: Quotas.

In March 2018, Dr. Angyal boasted of her success in reducing the number of white males writing for Huffington Post:

The Huffington Post deputy opinion editor shared her publication’s policy for promoting minority writers, yet creating a quota-like system based on race or gender could violate U.S. discrimination laws.
In a series of tweets [March 14], HuffPost editor Chloe Angyal discussed the racial makeup of the news website’s opinion columnists for the month.

“Month two of @HuffPost Opinion is almost done. This month we published: 63% women, inc. trans women; 53% writers of colour.”

One tweet seems to disclose a kind of quota system at the opinion section, with Angyal discussing her “goals” for the racial and gender composition of contributors.

“Our goals for this month were: less than 50% white authors (check!), Asian representation that matches or exceeds the US population (check!), more trans and non-binary authors (check, but I want to do better).” . . .

As Angyal admits, she tracks the race and gender identity of contributors at the beginning of each week so she “doesn’t lose track” of meeting the diversity goals.

“I check our numbers at the end of every week, because it’s easy to lose track or imagine you’re doing better than you really are, and the numbers don’t lie.”

As the Daily Caller’s Joe Simonson noted at the time, this kind of “diversity” policy — a focus on “numbers” as “goals,” which could be interpreted as systematic discrimination — actually violates Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act, as well as the state law in New York, which is where Huffington Post is officially headquartered.

Of course, Dr. Angyal’s “diversity” policy, while achieving its goal of eliminating opportunities for white male writers, did nothing to increase the diversity of ideas at HuffPo — quite the opposite. During her tenure, Huffington Post became even more of a monolith of left-wing opinion than it had previously been. Did she have “goals” for, say, pro-life Christians? Or libertarian writers? Did she check the “numbers” to ensure an adequate “representation” of pro-Trump opinions? Don’t be absurd! No libertarians or Trump supporters were ever published under Dr. Angyal’s tenure, and the opinion columns at Huffington Post remained fanatically pro-abortion, anti-Christian and, frankly, anti-American.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Chloe Angyal is a foreigner?

She’s from Sydney, Australia, and in 2014 got a Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales with a dissertation entitled “Gender, Sex, and Power in the Postfeminist Romantic Comedy.” So here we have an immigrant intellectual obsessed with “Gender, Sex, and Power” who has, by her own admission, enforced discriminatory policies that violate U.S. civil rights laws and, while I’m not saying President Trump should send ICE agents to arrest Chloe Angyal and ship her back to Australia, I’m not surprised that she’s unemployed. And I’m pretty sure foreigners don’t qualify for unemployment checks, food stamps, or other benefits.

* EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS SCHADENFREUDE *

On Dec. 5, 2014, when Chloe Angyal was a columnist at Feministing, she appeared on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show to discuss Rolling Stone’s recently published article “A Rape on Campus.” As everyone would eventually learn, Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s account of a teenage girl being violently gang-raped at a University of Virginia fraternity was a complete hoax, perpetrated by an emotionally disturbed student named Jackie Coakley who had invented a make-believe boyfriend (“Haven Monahan”) and then cast him as the villain in her imaginary rape in an apparent effort to gain sympathy from Ryan Duffin, a classmate on whom Coakley had a secret crush. Eventually, Rolling Stone was forced to pay millions of dollars to settle lawsuits filed by those they had defamed by publishing this false story, but on Dec. 5, 2014, when Chloe Angyal appeared as a panelist on MSNBC, the problems with this story were only beginning to become apparent. And guess who else was on the MSNBC panel that day? C’mon, guess.

 

Sabrina Rubin Erdely was the guest of honor on that program, and Chloe Angyal went out of her way to heap praise on Ms. Erdely:

“I have to thank you, Sabrina, for writing this. I think you’ve done a tremendous act of public service, and I’m genuinely very, very grateful. It is hard to read an article like this and avoid the conclusion that we live in a culture that hates women, just hates us. It’s hard to read an article like this and conclude that the men in this culture, the boys and men in this culture, are raised to see women as not just less than them but in some cases as less than human. But one thing really stood out to me, which is the statistic about how boys and men in frats are three times more likely to commit sexual violence. . . . This is not just about party schools. And it would be at our peril to pretend that this is just a frat problem. Yes, it at frats and football teams, but it also happens on the chess team and in dance companies. This is not just a frat problem. This is an American problem.”

THE ARTICLE WAS FALSE! YOU PRAISED ONE OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS HOAXES IN THE HISTORY OF JOURNALISM!

So, yeah, I’m really sorry you lost your job, and I hope when the ICE agents show up, they treat you with the kindness you deserve.

UPDATE: James Woods is kind of harsh:

(Hat-tip: Evi L. Bloggerlady.)




 

 

Category: Intellectuals, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 01.25.19

Posted on | January 26, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Schadenlayoff
Twitchy: Telegraph Agrees To Pay First Lady Melania Trump “Substantial Damages” Over Error-Filled Article
Louder With Crowder: Texas AG Shares Startling Vote Fraud Numbers
According To Hoyt: The Despicable Savage And Other Tales
Monster Hunter Nation: Fisking The “Obsolete Man Skills” Article
Vox Popoli: Talk Talk Is Better Than War War?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Michelle Malkin Blasts Media’s Coverage Of #CovingtonCatholic Students, also, Rachel Riley’s Powerful Speech To The Holocaust Education Foundation
American Thinker: Propaganda – The Bread & Butter Of The Progressive Left
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five DinoBirds Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For January 25
Camp Of The Saints:
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: The Declination – The New Tea Party Protests, also, My Thought On The “Deal”
Don Surber: Learn To Code, Media
Dustbury: De-Accession The Whole Damned Thing
First Street Journal: Simply Wearing A MAGA Hat “Provokes & Insults People Of Color”
The Geller Report: Pope Heads To Caravan Country To Push Central American Migration, also, Dem Rep Ilhan Omar Defends Anti-Semitic Hate Group That Calls For Death of Gays
Hogewash: Bon Mot Du Jour, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Kid Who Would Be King Packs Conservative Punch
Joe For America: Covington Bishop Foys Finally Apologizes To Covington Catholic Kids
JustOneMinute: Trump Moves To Deferred Victory Status
Legal Insurrection: Fauxcahontas Proposes New Wealth Tax On “Very Rich” Americans, also, Mueller Indicts Roger Stone On Multiple Process Crimes
Power Line: Roger Stone’s Arrest – What’s Scandalous & What Isn’t, also, Thoughts From The Ammo Line
Shark Tank: Senator Rick Scott Aims To Be The Voice Of Puerto Rico
Shot In The Dark: Open Letter To All The Media Working The “Displaced Federal Worker” Angle
STUMP: Governmental Accounting Standards Board – Meep Writes A Letter
The Political Hat: The Magical Awokening
This Ain’t Hell: Proposal For Women Registering For The Draft, also, Inspector General
Victory Girls: CNN “Just Happens” To Be On Scene For Roger Stone’s Arrest – Who Tipped Them Off?
Volokh Conspiracy: Man Fined $210 In Switzerland For Publicly Saying “Allahu Akbar” To A Friend
Weasel Zippers: Sarah Sanders – When Will The FBI Surround the Homes Of Hillary, James Comey, & James Clapper? also, Catholics Demand Andrew Cuomo’s Excommunication Over HOrrifying Abortion Bill
Mark Steyn: Big Brother Is Here, also, Happy Australia Day!


Kindle Unlimited Membership Plans

Category: Linkagery

‘Learn to Code’ and the Collapse of the Millennial SJW Clickbait Bubble

Posted on | January 25, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

If you don’t know what Iowahawk is mocking, this week has seen a wave of layoffs in Internet journalism, including Huffington Post:

The Huffington Post began laying off employees Thursday as part of its parent company Verizon Media Group’s corporate restructuring plans.
HuffPost employees started receiving calendar invitations to meet with human resources in the morning, according to HuffPost reporter Andy Campbell. Among the areas impacted was the opinion editorial team, which was eliminated, Deputy Opinion Editor Chloe Angyal reported.
Verizon is cutting about 800 jobs, or 7 percent of its media and advertising employees, as it reorganizes the troubled division. The wireless company had hoped to create an ad business that could compete with Google and Facebook. It spent roughly $10 billion buying up former Internet pioneers Yahoo and AOL. However, Verizon found benefits from integrating those two companies were less than expected. The company slashed the value of its media unit by nearly $5 billion in December. The new CEO of Verizon’s media division, Guru Gowrappan, informed employees of the layoffs in an email Wednesday. He says the division’s priorities will now include focusing on mobile and video products and stemming declines with desktop users.
According to Politico media reporter Michael Calderone, the number of unionized employees axed from the media company stands at 15 with more cuts scheduled to be announced.

Remember that AOL paid $315 million for Huffington Post in 2011. That was triple what HuffPo’s estimated valuation had been in 2009, and the unavoidable question was, “Why?” It appears, in retrospect, that AOL was trying enhance its brand, which paid off in 2015, when Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion. As we now see, however, Verizon vastly overestimated the value of the properties it was buying, e.g., Tumblr, part of the Yahoo deal, is now regarded as “effectively worthless”:

Tumblr has no justifying rationale as a business. It has never done anything but lose money. The billion-plus that Yahoo paid for Tumblr [in 2015] was a total loss. Now that Tumblr has been acquired by Verizon as part of its purchase of Yahoo, surely someone at Verizon headquarters must be looking at Tumblr and asking, “Why should we keep operating this toxic waste dump of bandwidth?”

Last month, Tumblr announced it would ban “adult content” in a bid to attract more advertising to the aforesaid toxic waste dump, which tells you that Verizon is increasingly desperate for revenue to offset the massive losses from its media properties. The layoffs at HuffPo are another indicator of this revenue squeeze, and the announcement of layoffs at BuzzFeed prompted talk of a “crisis” in digital news:

After a brutal year in the digital advertising space, after budgeting and strategic review and board meetings in January, BuzzFeed said it was cutting 15 percent of its staff (with pink slips to go to up to 400 people, according to one insider). Verizon said it was shedding 800 jobs in media — meaning AOL, Yahoo, Oath and HuffPost.
This follows other radical cuts by digital news organizations — the millennial news site Mic laid off its entire editorial staff last November before selling off its remaining assets, Refinery29 hacked 10 percent of its staff in October, and Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter trimmed 22 people this month as parent company Valence Media restructured its business operations.

It’s been a rough couple of years at BuzzFeed, which had already announced 100 layoffs in November 2017, “after the company missed revenue targets.” So they’ve lost roughly 25% of their staff since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, but we are not supposed to connect these dots and surmise that their anti-Trump bias is part of BuzzFeed’s problem. (Can you say “get woke, go broke,” boys and girls?)

Ace of Spades notes that the laid-off BuzzFeeders do not enjoy being taunted with “learn to code,” which was what liberals kept telling coal miners who lost their jobs due to Obama-era energy regulations (which Trump repealed with a stroke of his pen, of course). Recall also that liberals have applauded efforts to “deplatform” and “demonetize” conservative sites, and cheered on advertising boycotts against Fox News and conservative talk-radio programs. So, yeah, “learn to code,” you BuzzFeed creeps and I especially mean you, Tyler Kingkade.

 

For those of you who don’t know who Tyler Kingkade is, for about five years, he was at HuffPo before joining BuzzFeed in 2016, and his “beat” was campus sexual assault. The “rape culture” hysteria that suddenly swept over university campuses in 2014 had few more enthusiastic cheerleaders than Tyler Kingkade, whose work I frequently encountered through Google searches while covering that phenomenon. Kingkade’s coverage was utterly one-sided, deriding any criticism of this witch-hunt climate as the work of misogynistic “men’s rights activists,” and completely ignoring the infringement of due-process rights under policies inspired by the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter.

Young men’s lives were being destroyed by false accusations — last time I checked, about 150 lawsuits had been filed by male students who said they had been falsely accused of sexual misconduct and denied fair treatment in campus kangaroo-court tribunals. Over and over again, those of us who paid attention to these cases read about young men who offered plausible arguments that they had targeted by vindictive ex-girlfriends, or because some girl they met at a party regretted their drunken hookups and, in many cases, the accused male student was denied the opportunity to present clear evidence supporting their innocence. (The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities by K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. examines this phenomenon in depth.) With the backing of the Obama administration, feminists had incited a climate of sexual paranoia that encouraged these false accusations, a witch-hunt that culminated in the notorious 2014 gang-rape hoax at the University of Virginia. Even after it became apparent there were problems with Rolling Stone‘s story, however, Tyler Kingkade tried to prop up their narrative.

 

 

On Dec. 8, 2014, Kingkade reported that Emily Clark, a former roommate of false accuser Jackie Coakley, believed her story. The timing of this is crucial, if you’ll check the timeline of Rolling Stone‘s UVA hoax. “A Rape on Campus” was published online Nov. 19, the first serious questions about Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s reporting were raised by veteran journalist Richard Bradley on Nov. 24, and Reason‘s Robby Soave was among the first to suggest the story could be “a gigantic hoax.” By Dec. 5, after Washington Post reporter T. Reese Shapiro unearthed serious problems with Erdely’s reporting, Rolling Stone was forced to issue a statement acknowledging errors in their editorial judgment, especially their failure to contact any of the accused participants in the alleged rape. So by the time Kingkade published his Dec. 8 article about Emily Clark (“Jackie’s Roommate Insists Sexual Assault Account In Rolling Stone Is No Hoax”), the story was already well on its way to being completely debunked — a truth-finding process that Kingkade obviously tried to impede with his HuffPo article. Keep in mind that university President Teresa Sullivan had suspended social activities for all UVA fraternities, that the fraternity named in Erdely’s article was targeted for vandalism, and that a climate of fear had descended on the campus, with female students saying they were afraid to go out lest they become victims of sexual assault.

Real people were suffering real harm as a result of this hoax, and what did Tyler Kingkade do? He doubled-down on “rape culture” hysteria.

 

 

Good luck trying to find anything by Tyler Kingkade that acknowledges the known problems with the bogus “1-in-5” statistic used by activists to justify a federally enforced campus witch-hunt that cast suspicion on all male university students as complicit in “rape culture.” Even after Rolling Stone had been forced to shell out millions in damages, and Kingkade had left HuffPo for BuzzFeed, he continued pursuing the same theme of an “epidemic” of sexual assault on campuses, depicting Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as a villain for rolling back the clearly flawed policies resulting from the Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letter.

Well, BuzzFeed’s revenue projections missed the mark again and, in the new round of layoffs, somebody apparently did a cost-benefit analysis on the continued employment of a guy who’s been recycling the same narrative since 2014, and guess what? Learn to code, Tyler.




 

 

Category: Journalism

Married Gay Couple Lured Teen Boys in Florida ‘Sex Slave’ Ring, Police Say

Posted on | January 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Married Gay Couple Lured Teen Boys in Florida ‘Sex Slave’ Ring, Police Say

Police arrested Mark Dennis (left) and his husband Andrew (right).

In 2017, a 15-year-old boy disappeared from Marion County, Florida, and was not found until nearly a year later. In May 2018, acting on a tip about another missing boy, a 17-year-old from Louisiana, police in St. Petersburg went to a rundown mobile home park and found that both teenagers were living with a married gay couple, Mark and Andrew Dennis, and two other men, Curtis Gruwell and Michael Schwartz. It took several more months of investigation for police to gather the evidence necessary to charge the Dennises, Gruwell, Schwartz and three other suspects with what prosectuors describe as a human trafficking ring:

“The teenage victim in this case was lured with promises of a better life,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said at a press conference [Jan. 14]. “Instead, he was moved into a filthy trailer and used as a sex slave for nearly a year.”
The investigation began on May 9, 2018 after Louisiana officials contacted police in St. Petersburg with information about another missing boy, 17, who they believed had been lured through the online gaming app Discord.
According to police, the suspects used it to communicate with the teen, who they picked up and drove to St. Petersburg.
When investigators went to a mobile home in North St. Petersburg where Louisiana authorities said he was, they found both teens living in the trailer with four men, Mark Earl Dennis, Andrew Barry Dennis, Curtis Lee Gruwell and Michael Wayne Schwartz.
Dennis initially told authorities he was the 16-year-old’s father, which turned out to be false, police said.
The 16-year-old, from Marion County, Florida, was 15 when he disappeared. Police say his family found a note from their son saying not to look for him. Investigators now believe one of the suspects, Eleanor Faye McGlamory, had befriended the boy and lured him to the trailer.
“For the next year, he was introduced to sadomasochism and used as a sex slave by Mark and Andrew Dennis, Gruwell, Schwartz and their associates, Michael Ray Blasdel and JR Gauthier,” police said in a news release. During the time he was held in the mobile home he did not attend school and wasn’t given medical treatment, according to police.
All seven face charges of conspiracy to commit human trafficking and interference with custody. Mark Earl Dennis, Andrew Barry Dennis, Michael Ray Blasdel and JR Gauthier also face charges of sexual battery with a child under age 16.

St. Petersburg police at a Jan. 14 press conference.

More background from the Tampa Bay Times:

The group met both boys through video games, primarily communicating through the messaging app Discord.
The Louisiana boy told the Dennises he was on the verge of a breakdown and needed to get away from school and his parents, according to copies of messages included in the complaint.
“I would like to run away to y’all since I know y’all are great people that love to help others,” he wrote in May.
Gruwell and McGlamory drove to Louisiana to pick him up. The Dennises, under the username “BeenUsedAgainNOMORE,” told the teen he’d have to get out of the car and walk across state lines.
“We would get a felony charge otherwise,” one of them told him.
The Marion County boy also came from a vulnerable place. He had come out as gay to his mother, who didn’t take it well, according to the complaint. In February 2017, he started confiding in McGlamory. She offered to take him to a gay wedding to show him a more positive experience.
The wedding, the complaint says, was between Mark Dennis and Andrew Clements, who took his husband’s last name. It was on April 22, 2017, at the Flamingo Resort in St. Petersburg.
Over the next month and a half, McGlamory and the newlyweds concocted a plan to move the teen in with the Dennises. . . .
In St. Petersburg, the boy lived with the Dennises, Gruwell and Schwartz. They, along with Blasdel, were part of what they called a “family circle.” Gauthier was Blasdel’s boyfriend.
The Dennises, Gauthier and Blasdel performed sex acts on the boy, with Mark Dennis as the dominant figure according to the complaint. Gruwell and Schwartz watched but didn’t intervene, the document says.
In May, the boy confided in Blasdel that he was tired of being a sex toy for the men, according to the complaint. He said he was embarrassed and “tired of it from day one and still annoyed,” according to copies of their Discord messages in the complaint.
“I’m sorry hun,” Blasdel wrote, “but you have to communicate when something is bothering you or we don’t know.”

CNN sent a camera crew to Florida for Roger Stone’s arrest, but they haven’t covered this Florida story. Just “local news,” I guess.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain.)




 

 

Category: Crime, Florida, Gays

Roger Stone Indictment: Not ‘Collusion’

Posted on | January 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Roger Stone Indictment: Not ‘Collusion’

 

As Professor Glenn Reynolds remarks, the latest indictment from the Mueller investigation is about process crimes, not “Russian collusion.” Everyone is commenting about how the televised pre-dawn raid — reminiscent of the Branch Davidians at Waco — on the Florida home of 66-year-old Roger Stone was so over-the-top as to suggest Mueller was seeking a public relations coup to obscure the lack of results yielded by his interminable investigation. The charges against Stone are one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering, all of which seems to be related to WikiLeaks. So, according to the indictment, Stone tried to conceal this from investigators. Period. That’s it. Not “collusion.”

It appears that the witness tampering charge against Stone involves his discussions with journalist Jerome Corsi (“Person 2” in the indictment), but nothing in those conversations is about Russia. WikiLeaks had obtained DNC emails from hackers working for Russian military intelligence (GRU), but there is no indication to connect Stone (or anyone else associated with the Trump campaign) to this GRU operation. WikiLeaks has obtained information from all kinds of sources (including leftist hero/heroine Bradley “Chelsea” Manning); the communication between Stone and WikiLeaks was not “collusion” with Russia.

While I cannot, on the basis of what is now known, rule out the possibility that we may see proof of actual “collusion” in the future, this indictment certainly is not that proof. Beyond all this, however, this whole investigation seems to be premised on the idea that the DNC emails somehow influenced the outcome of the 2016 election — Team Clinton’s excuse for her defeat. It is illegal to hack emails, but Roger Stone is not the GRU, and some people seem to presume that Stone (and by extension, Trump) is somehow responsible for what the Russians did. If this could be demonstrated as fact, rather than mere presumption, this would be a whole new ballgame, but so far we have seen no such fact and, as I say, this whole investigation is really about validating the Clinton campaign’s excuse for losing the election. Once this political motive is recognized, you understand why things keep happening the way they do.




 

 

Category: Crime, Russia

‘Get It First, Get It Right’

Posted on | January 25, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Get It First, Get It Right’

The six-word slogan of The Washington Times under the editorship of Wes Pruden should be drilled into the mind of everyone who wants to be taken seriously in the news business. Mister Pruden hated blogs and was not an enthusiast for the concept of “citizen journalism.” (He hated the pretentious word “journalist,” and preferred “newsman.” We might call someone a reporter, an editor, a columnist, but we never used the word “journalist” in the pages of the Times.) Mister Pruden had a low tolerance for many bad practices which are now sadly common in the media, including the kind of rush to judgment that led so many people to denounce the Covington Catholic boys before seeing the full video.

“Get It First, Get It Right” — and you’re doing a disservice to your readers if, in your haste to be first, you’re wrong. When I worked at the Times, we used to laugh at daily corrections page in the Washington Post, which despite their greater prestige (and larger staff) made far more mistakes than we did. You didn’t want to be the guy who was responsible for an error that caused the Times to have to issue a correction, and during my time there we certainly never had anything as embarrassing as the Post‘s Janet Cooke scandal, when a Pulitzer-winning article was proven to be fabricated, or the New York Times‘ Jayson Blair scandal.

Mister Pruden’s old-fashioned attitudes — he was the son of an Arkansas Baptist preacher — were resented by some people in The Washington Times newsroom, but nowadays when we witness the media destroying their own credibility on a daily basis, we could use some Prudenism.

Julie Kelly observes how Jonah Goldberg rationalized National Review‘s haste to condemn the Covington Catholic boys:

The easy explanation for their bad behavior this weekend would be confirmation bias, the propensity to select or ignore evidence to support a specific viewpoint. Anti-Trump “conservatives” long ago decided that Donald Trump not only is unfit for office, but that his supporters are ignorant rubes with racist tendencies. . . .
In an interview Monday night, Goldberg again defended his side’s confirmation bias by invoking another tactic — false equivalence. “The confirmation bias that says, ah ha, this proves that the people I disagree with aren’t just wrong, they’re evil, which is rampant on both sides of the aisle these days.” Contrary to how Goldberg tries to sell it, it’s pernicious on one side: His.

Indeed, it seems the anti-Trump crowd (whether out-and-out liberals or #NeverTrump Republicans) have regularly out-blundered the pro-Trump Right when it comes to impulsive seat-of-the-pants judgments.

It doesn’t matter how “rampant” confirmation bias may be “on both sides of the aisle.” What matters is whether our gut hunches lead us to get it right, or whether our instincts lead to errors. And what also matters is being willing to distrust our instincts, to second-guess our hunches, to wait for facts to develop before deciding to comment. It is foolish for Goldberg to try to excuse a blunder as spectacular as Nick Frankovich’s National Review piece, ”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross,” by saying “both sides” make such mistakes.

(Also, my editor’s eye notices Julie Kelly used “pernicious” where she probably meant “pervasive,” but why be pedantic at this point?)

How many times have I watched Twitter’s reaction to a possible terrorist event — a mass shooting or whatever — and cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the motive? As a general rule, we cannot know why an act of violence happened until we know who committed it, and until police name the suspect (or unless he was doing something as obvious as shouting “Allahu Akbar!”) we should avoid speculating on the motive.

Does the name Jarrod Ramos ring a bell?

When a gunman went on a rampage at the offices of the Annapolis Capital, a lot of liberals immediately jumped to the conclusion that this must be right-wing terrorism inspired by Trump’s criticism of the “fake news” media as “the enemy of the people.” But no, it was Jarrod Ramos:

A Laurel man with a long-standing grudge against The Capital is being held as the suspect in the deadly shooting Thursday at the Annapolis newspaper, according to law enforcement sources.
Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, was charged with five counts of first-degree murder, according to online court records. . . .
In 2012, Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper and a columnist over a July 2011 article that covered a criminal harassment charge against him.
He brought the suit against then-columnist Eric Hartley, naming Capital Gazette Communications and Thomas Marquardt, the paper’s former editor and publisher, as defendants. . . .
Marquardt said he wasn’t surprised to hear Ramos identified as the alleged gunman, saying he started harassing the paper and its staff shortly after the 2011 article. The harassment escalated for years with online threats, Marquardt said.
“I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence,” Marquardt said from his retirement home in Florida. “I even told my wife, ‘We have to be concerned. This guy could really hurt us.’ ”

 

Not terrorism. Not inspired by Trump. Just another deranged wacko, confirming my frequent observation that Crazy People Are Dangerous.

Don’t let a fear of being scooped on a breaking news story lead you to engage in unwarranted speculation. Distrust your own biases, whatever that bias may be, when you feel an urge to comment on a situation where you don’t know all the facts. It’s one thing to say, “Well, this might be terrorism,” if you immediately follow that by saying, “But we don’t know, and maybe it’s just some random maniac.” There are lots of random maniacs out there nowadays, some of whom will sue you for calling them maniacs, and you might have to ask your friends to fly down to Vero Beach to testify that in their professional opinion, the plaintiff is indeed a maniac. But why bring that up at such a time as this?

Well, there’s breaking news this morning, so I’ll have to leave off this lecture about jumping to conclusions. We’re all innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, even Roger Stone.




 

 

Category: Journalism, Media Bias
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