Apparent Epstein Arkanicide

Posted on | August 10, 2019 | Comments Off on Apparent Epstein Arkanicide

by Smitty

Somebody forgot to wind Epstein’s suicide watch.
Twitter, of course, is on the case:

#EpsteinConspiracyTheory

1/ Jeremy Corbyn called in a favor from John Brennan, who had a couple of retired CIA agents whisk Epstein to a midget sub that will now make a trans-Atlantic run.

Upon arrival in the UK, Epstein will denounce Boris Johnson as super-freaky-deaky weirdo

— Medieval Knievel Gets Over Macho Grande FTW (@smitty_one_each) August 10, 2019

2/ with tastes as outlandish as his hairstyle. Pixelated deepfakes bolster the tale, as well as sales of niche leather goods, and the UK government collapses, catapulting Corbyn into power and delaying Brexit.

— Medieval Knievel Gets Over Macho Grande FTW (@smitty_one_each) August 10, 2019

I should have said: they ride through the Chunnel.

3/ History proved full of kinks at that point.

Macron, anxious rid himself of the gilets jaunes, cuts a deal with them, and they ride through the tunnel. There happens to be space for them some 38 miles southwest, in Hastings, so they go there.

And get rowdy.

— Medieval Knievel Gets Over Macho Grande FTW (@smitty_one_each) August 10, 2019

4/ Corbyn and some bobbies go down to negotiate, and a brawl breaks out, and tragedy strikes Corbyn.

And that is the tale of how, 953 years on, the Normans conquered England a second time, due to a lecherous American.

— Medieval Knievel Gets Over Macho Grande FTW (@smitty_one_each) August 10, 2019

Also skeptical:
Da Tech Guy
Ace of Spades
Legal Insurrection

Category: Uncategorized

Reading for the Road: I Was Born in the Backseat of a Greyhound Bus

Posted on | August 9, 2019 | Comments Off on Reading for the Road: I Was Born in the Backseat of a Greyhound Bus

No, not me personally — I was born at Georgia Baptist Hospital (since renamed Atlanta Medical Center) off Boulevard downtown — but the lyrics of an old Allman Brothers tune came to mind:

My father was a gambler down in Georgia.
He wound up on the wrong end of a gun.
And I was born in the backseat of a Greyhound bus,
Rollin’ down Highway 41.

You can’t get more Southern than that, folks. “Ramblin’ Man” was the 1973 tune that became the Allman Brothers’ first (and only) Top 10 single, and more or less created the Southern rock boom of the 1970s. The song could also be seen as part of the same “road music” as The Eagles’ 1972 hit, “Take It Easy,” co-written by Jackson Browne:

Well, I’m a-runnin’ down the road,
Tryin’ to loosen my load,
Got seven women on my mind,
Four that want to own me,
Two that want to stone me,
One says she’s a friend of mine.

The romantic idea of life on the road — carefree, escaping from the hassles and hangups of life — appeals to something essential to the American character, dating back to our pioneer roots, when restless young men would leave the coastal settlements seeking freedom on the frontier. Rock-and-roll bands often sang about the traveling life because, let’s face it, any kind of success in the music business requires touring around to play in gin joints and honky-tonks. But traveling for a living is certainly not as glamorous or romantic as some people think. After spending a few years crisscrossing the continent on the campaign trail, I understood something one of The Beatles once said about their tours — it’s just a car to the airport, then a plane, then a car from the airport to the hotel, and so on. The “glamour” of travel isn’t remotely glamorous when you’re traveling for business. When you’re covering a political campaign, there’s no time to go sightseeing or lounge around the pool. You eat the free breakfast at the hotel, head out to whatever events you’re covering, find someplace to file your story for a midnight deadline, and then maybe hit the hotel bar for a couple of cold beverages before you crash, then get up the next day and do it all again.

“Political correspondent” kind of sounds like a cool job, and I suppose there’s a certain amount of thrill value in that rush to deadline, but doing it night after night, week after week, it becomes a grind, and by the time the 2012 campaign was over, I’d had enough of it to last a lifetime.

Road music is on my mind tonight because as soon as I finish this, I’m packing up and heading down to Georgia for my Uncle Casper’s funeral. I’d originally planned to leave this afternoon, but then I looked at the distance, figured I could drive it in 12 hours and, doing the math, decided it would be OK to leave about 10 tonight. So here are a few things for you to digest during the overnight shift, starting with Ace’s takedown of virtue-signaling #NeverTrump types:

Every morning is a new chance on twitter to seize on the SJW narrative of the day and shriek in triumph, “See? We were right about Trump, ALL ALONG! Now you see! Now you see! Now you see! We’re not the dumb ones, we’re the smart ones! YOU’RE the dumb ones! See?! See?! See?!”

It’s no longer about politics for these people, and hasn’t been for a long time now. “Politics,” for them, is merely an excuse to parade around and flaunt their moral superiority, demonstrating (to themselves, if to no one else) how much better they are than the rest of us. Ace also deserves a hat-tip for calling my attention to something I’d really rather ignore, namely Rick Wilson’s recent appearance on a network watched mainly by people trapped in airport lounges:

Tonight [Thursday] smelled like an awful lot like — although FOX has an internal philosophy of “never apologize, never back down,” that somebody finally said, wait a minute, every one of these idiots with a manifesto, it could be right off of Tucker Carlson’s teleprompter…
Every one of these idiots who comes out and says America is “browning” and we’re being invaded and we’re losing a demographic war. It all sounds an awful lot like, I think, this terrible and terrifying pseudo-intellectual framework they’re trying to build around white nationalism by excusing it.
Saying, oh, Oxycontin is causing white nationalism and economic anxiety is causing white nationalism. No, white nationalism goes of its own. It is a poisonous movement in this country and we have to be honest about it. And Donald Trump has empowered it.
Let’s not forget Donald Trump retweeted people like “WhiteGenocide99” during the campaign. I hate having to recap the whole Trump arc from birtherism to Charlottesville to the Central Park Five, all these things. We know what this man’s character is.
And what Tucker was trying to do for months on end was to gussy it up a little bit and pretend this nationalism of his isn’t driven by an underpinning of racial anxiety and hatred. And I think it’s disappointing but understandable, the Murdoch’s are not going to walk away from billions of dollars of ad revenue that they’ve been able to generate through shows like Tucker and Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity and these other guys who go out every night and, you know, they’ll wink and nod to white nats out there from Tucker’s show.
Andrew Anglin and all these alt-right guys, they call Tucker “our guy.” They love the fact that he is vectoring the normies into their white nationalist movement in a way that is, I find particularly dangerous, and I think that Tucker has a responsibility to face up to that. I think he was a little nervous tonight. I think there was something in the air that didn’t quite sit with his normal confidence.

Wilson, who has turned his #NeverTrump stance into a career of sorts, hates Tucker Carlson because . . .? Oh, because of ratings. And money.

Tucker Carlson was Number One in the 8 p.m. ET time slot Thursday, with nearly 2.6 million viewers, while Rick Wilson appeared on the 11 p.m. hour of Don Lemon’s CNN show, with less than 700,000 viewers. And, apparently, the most important thing that CNN was “reporting” at that hour was — wait for it — what Tucker Carlson had said on his show three hours earlier. Do you think that maybe having a panel discussion about what’s on a competing network might not be a surefire formula for successful “news” programming? Or do you think maybe some CNN viewers (at least, the ones who aren’t trapped in an airport lounge) might decide to change channels and see for themselves what Tucker Carlson is saying, rather than watching CNN “analysts” talk about Tucker Carlson?

Meanwhile on Facebook, Juliette Akinyi Ochieng (who is not a “white nationalist,” except that everybody who votes Republican is now a “white nationalist,” according to CNN) has some really cogent thoughts about mass shootings and the “do something” gun-control reaction. She invokes Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, first published in 1987 and more relevant now than ever.

Well, that’s enough reading to keep you busy overnight. It’s past 10 now, and time for me to pack up and hit the road, but not before reminding you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Category: Shoe Leather Fund

$211.17

Posted on | August 9, 2019 | Comments Off on $211.17

It’s 715 miles to LaGrange, Georgia. Saturday afternoon, they’re having the memorial service for my Uncle Casper, a combat veteran of Vietnam who married my mother’s baby sister Barbara. I’ve reserved a rental car ($211.17) for this road trip, and will leave this afternoon heading “south to see my kin.” You can figure the cost of gas, etc., and I would be grateful to readers who could chip in $5 or $10 or $20, and please remember that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Thanks in advance. Depending on how things go, I might detour back through South Carolina on the way home and see if I can catch some kind of Democratic primary campaign activity.

Category: Family, Shoe Leather Fund

Biden Says What Liberals Really Think

Posted on | August 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

Wealthy liberals pretend to believe in “equality,” even while they scheme ways to get their kids into Harvard, knowing that attending an elite university is the only way to obtain the kind of credentials and social connections necessary to membership in their club. This is why they have such contempt for working-class people, and do everything possible to degrade and humiliate the “deplorables.” Their oft-repeated concern for “diversity” and “inclusion” reflects the liberal elite’s obsession with protecting their own status — acting as Benefactors of Brown People is their political raison d’être, and they are sure to be mortified now that Sleepy Joe Biden has let the cat out of the bag:

Gaffe-prone presidential hopeful Joe Biden put his foot in his mouth during an Iowa campaign stop on Thursday when he told a group of predominately Asian and Hispanic voters that “poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids.”
Biden committed the stunning blunder while speaking about education at a town hall with the Asian and Latino Coalition in Des Moines, where he’s campaigning and fundraising for the 2020 Democratic primary.
“We should challenge students in these schools and have advanced placement programs in these schools. We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it,” Biden said at the event, according to video of his remarks.
“Poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids,” he added.
Biden almost immediately went into damage control mode, quickly adding: “wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”

Biden’s conflation of race and economic status — “white” as a synonym for “wealthy,” and “brown” as a synonym for “poor” — reflects a categorical error that is altogether common among wealthy liberals, who have internalized a lot of slogans about “white privilege,” etc., without bothering to analyze the relevant data. The existence of a substantial black middle class, for example, is a phenomenon no Democrat ever wishes to acknowledge, because their party’s electoral success requires persuading black voters that they are oppressed victims of racism (and making Republicans the scapegoats for racism). Persuading ordinary white voters to believe this, of course, is rather difficult, because however stupid the “deplorables” might be, we are at least close enough to the reality of life to see that it doesn’t match Democrats rhetoric.

In the uproar over this gaffe, nobody in the media will point out the other fallacies involved in Biden’s rhetoric. Why is being “smart” considered synonymous with “getting good grades in school”? Despite my prominence as a high-IQ kid who nearly flunked out, no Ph.D. researcher has ever consulted me to investigate why my intellectual potential was not manifested as outstanding scholastic achievement.

“Gee, Stacy, why did you hate school so much?”

Because school hated me, that’s why.

The Public Education Bureaucracy does not exist for the benefit of students, but rather for the benefit of the bureaucrats who operate it.

The typical teacher is a small-minded mediocrity who, when given power over a classroom of children, will use this official authority to reward some children — the unctuous teacher’s pets — and to punish any child who does not meekly comply with the bureaucratic system. Thus, from an early age, my energy and intelligence made me a target for the sadistic impulses structured into the public-education system. The authority of the bureaucrats rests upon their supposed expertise in developing children’s academic aptitude, and nobody inside the system ever questions this claim to expertise. The possibility that favoritism might cloud the judgment of teachers is not part of their calculations, yet the “good student” is always the obedient child, eager to cooperate with the system. My own teachers were shocked and embarrassed when, in fifth grade, I knocked the top off the standardized test — 99th percentile, reading at a collegiate level of comprehension — after years of being punished as a habitual discipline case. Despite being a Bad Student, I was actually one of the smartest kids in the entire state.

My outstanding test score, however, did not gain me any benefit. Nobody bothered to ask why I’d spent the idle hours of my childhood reading through the World Book Encyclopedia, nor was there any accommodation to my unusual abilities in art, music, etc. Instead, the gap between my bad grades and my spectacular standardized test performance was explained as my failure to “apply myself” in class. Yet if I had actually learned more than other children while not applying myself, what did this say about the pedagogy and curriculum? That is to say, when the Bad Student is demonstrated by objective measure to be a better student than the Teacher’s Pets, the educational bureaucrats will ignore this evidence that their system isn’t working, and instead will intensify their scapegoating of the non-conformist.

“YOU MUST COMPLY WITH THE SYSTEM!”

What is clear to me in hindsight, of course, was quite confusing to me as a 10-year-old who couldn’t understand why something that should have been a cause for celebration — 99th percentile! — was immediately turned into an excuse for further punishment and humiliation. Yet it was obvious to me that the system was a fraud, and my response to this was to become even more of a rebel than I had been by natural instinct.

Because politicians, like teachers, are part of the university-educated class, Joe Biden cannot imagine any concept of “smart” that does not translate to “make good grades and go to college.” Yet when the “check engine” light comes on in your car, shouldn’t you hope that the mechanic at the garage is smart enough to figure out what’s wrong with it and repair it correctly? The mechanic doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree from an elite university and wasn’t the high-school valedictorian, but isn’t a smart mechanic better than a dumb one? The same is true for truck drivers, construction contractors and other trades that don’t require four-year college degrees. A good electrician can make far more money than a typical sociology major, but this isn’t acknowledged in the kind of discourse where Biden speaks of (presumably poor) brown kids being “just as bright, just as talented” as (presumably rich) white kids.

Of course, as I’ve often remarked, the public school bureaucracy is an institution completely controlled by Democrats, who collect many millions of dollars in contributions annually from teachers unions, and who expect public schools to teach children to be loyal Democrat voters. No matter how badly our public schools fail, in terms of preparing children for real life, they will be judged a success by Democrats so long as the children are all indoctrinated with liberal beliefs.

Category: Education, Joe Biden, Racism

In The Mailbox: 08.08.19 (Not The Special Hitler Edition)

Posted on | August 8, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I was briefly tempted to go through and change all the names of the Democrats in the news to Hitler and other Nazis as appropriate, but it seemed like more trouble than it would have been worth for the lulz it might have produced.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Bacon Time: Because it Amuses Me
EBL: President Trump Visits Dayton & El Paso
Twitchy: Philanthropist Pledges $100,000 To Help Clean Up Baltimore If The Baltimore Sun Retracts Its Hit Piece On Volunteers
Louder With Crowder: Amnesty International Issues Travel Warning For US Due To “Gun Violence”, Gets Rekt

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Scientific Case Against Redheads
American Greatness: Everything They’re Telling You About Mass Shootings Is Wrong
American Thinker: The Ideological Roots Of “The Squad” In “Academic Postcolonial” Theory
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily SanFran Kookery News
Babalu Blog: Castro Dictatorship Sentences Independent Journalist To A Year In Jail For Reporting The News
BattleSwarm: Borepatch Says Red Flag Laws Are Stupid & Useless
Camp of the Saints: Helter Skelter At 50 – Redux?
CDR Salamander: NTSB Speaks On The McCain Collision
Da Tech Guy: Government Solutions To Mass Shootings Won’t Solve The Problem, also, The Blog Transition Clock Has Now Started
Don Surber: Don’t Go Ann Coulter Over A Washington Post Story
Dustbury: It Crawled Into My Shorts, Honest
First Street Journal: A Good Start, But It Isn’t Enough
The Geller Report: Jihadi Stabs London Police With Machete In Frenzied, Unprovoked Attack, also, Senate Minority Leader Schumer Calls For Killing 1st Amendment Protection Of Political Speech
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of the Day, also, NPR & Defamation
Hollywood In Toto: Brian Banks Director Broke All the Hollywood Rules
Joe For America: Did Joe Biden Suggest A Shooting War Against Conservatives Is Coming?
Legal Insurrection: Baltimore Sun Shamefully Questions Motives Of Scott Presler For Organizing West Baltimore Cleanup, also, Twitter Locks Out “Team Mitch” For Sharing Video Of Protesters Chanting Death Threats At McConnell’s Home
The PanAm Post: AMLO Calls For US To Try What Didn’t Work In Mexico
Power Line: Madness – Twitter & Beyond, also, Germans Rebel Against Meat Tax
Shark Tank: DeSantis Moves To Wipe Out Invasive Python Population
Shot In The Dark: The Left’s Inner Id
STUMP: Governing Magazine – In Memoriam
The Political Hat: Elder Non-Gender Specific Sibling Is Watching Leviathan’s (Formerly Your) Children
This Ain’t Hell: About That Illegals Issue, also, Murders That Didn’t Fit The Leftists’ Narrative
Victory Girls: Sean Hannity Interviews Mayor DeBlasio
Volokh Conspiracy: Study Shows Prejudice Has Declined Among White Americans Since Trump’s Election
Weasel Zippers: Biden Tells Crowd “We Choose Truth Over Facts”, also, MN GOP Legislators Ask IRS To Investigate Ilhan Omar
Mark Steyn: Identity & The Elites

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery, Uncategorized

Texas Psycho Killer’s Parents Claim They Taught Him ‘Love, Kindness … Tolerance’

Posted on | August 8, 2019 | 2 Comments

The emerging profile of the accused El Paso gunman shows him to be the spoiled and incompetent offspring of clueless parents:

The family of accused El Paso mass shooter Patrick Crusius has released a statement that says he was raised to love and accept others.
“Patrick’s actions were apparently influenced and informed by people we do not know, and from ideas and beliefs we do not accept or condone,” the statement said. “He was raised in a family that taught love, kindness, respect, and tolerance — rejecting all forms of racism, prejudice, hatred, and violence.” . . .
In court documents, Crusius said he was receiving benefits including food stamps and mentioned he had been receiving benefits from a public housing program, according to the El Paso Times.
Crusius had been living with his grandparents in Allen, about 30 miles north of Dallas, while he attended Collin College. He moved out of the house about six weeks before the shooting but spent a few nights in their home while they were out of town, the grandparents said in a statement.
Police said Crusius legally bought the gun he used in the shooting near his hometown. He drove the 10-hour trip to El Paso straight from the Dallas area. They said he got lost in an El Paso neighborhood and stopped at the Walmart where the attack happened because he was hungry.

Meanwhile:

The mother of the El Paso shooting suspect called Texas police weeks before the shooting to relay concerns about the semi-automatic rifle her son had acquired, according to reports.
The call, to the City of Allen Police Department, was passed onto a public safety officer who told the mother of Patrick Crusius, 21, that he was legally allowed to own the weapon, attorneys for his family told CNN and ABC News.
She was concerned about her son’s age, maturity and lack of experience and whether he should therefore be allowed to own an “AK” type weapon, CNN reported. . . .
His mother did not give her or her son’s name to Texas police and they did not seek any more information from her after the call, CNN quoted the family’s lawyers, Chris Ayres and R. Jack Ayres, as saying.

Here was an unemployed 21-year-old attending community college while living with his grandparents, and receiving food stamps, yet he somehow managed to come up with the cash to purchase a rifle. His mother — who insists her son was “taught love, kindness, respect, and tolerance” — becomes concerned about her son’s behavior and calls police, but does not give them sufficient information to alert them to a potential threat. She doesn’t want to take responsibility for her failure as a parent, having raised a mass murderer who, not coincidentally, was such a hopeless loser that he got lost on his way to his planned target.

What? Your idiot son didn’t even know how to use GPS?

Before my oldest son was 21, he was very competent with firearms and was also capable of navigating even without GPS, because they teach that kind of stuff at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg. But while allegedly teaching their son love and kindness, et cetera, the Crusius family evidently failed to impart to their son the basic skills necessary to success in life. Would you care to guess what the psycho killer’s father does for a living?

Patrick Crusius’ dad, John Bryan Crusius, is a licensed professional therapist at Dallas Addiction Recovery Therapy, also called Infused Being Therapy and Counseling. His Twitter page, LinkedIn Page and website described his therapeutic approach as holistic. It appeared his counseling is focused on addiction recovery.
“I use an integrated treatment approach to all my therapy and counseling,” the website says.
His services include treatment for alcohol, co-dependence, substance abuse and PTSD, the website said. He also wrote a book called “Life Enthusiasm: A Path to Purpose Beyond Recovery.” . . .
[Patrick Crusius] attended Liberty High School in Frisco, Texas and transferred to Plano Senior High School in Plano, Texas. Frisco, Plano and Allen, Texas are all in the Dallas/Forth Worth area.
Patrick Crusius also has an older brother and a twin sister, according to public records. His mother, Lori Lynn Crusius, filed for divorce in 2011. She works as a nurse, according to PBS.

The professional therapist’s wife divorced him, and his son grew up to be a crypto-Nazi mass murderer. Way to go, “expert” dad!

Category: Crime, Terrorism, Texas

8/8 = Hitler? ‘Remember, These Are the People Who Tell Us Trump Is Crazy’

Posted on | August 8, 2019 | Comments Off on 8/8 = Hitler? ‘Remember, These Are the People Who Tell Us Trump Is Crazy’

So says Professor Reynolds, referring to the conspiracy theorists who babble lunatic gibberish on an obscure cable networks:

MSNBC analyst Frank Figliuzzi drew a numerical connection on Monday between neo-Naziism and the Trump administration’s decision to fly flags at half-mast until Aug. 8 in honor of the victims of a pair of mass shootings.
Figliuzzi is a former FBI assistant director who has been feted for predicting last month that white supremacist violence was potentially imminent due to President Trump’s rhetoric. . . .

Permit me to interrupt here and say that, even without his bizarre Neo-Nazi Magic Decoder Ring theory, it’s frightening to think that Figliuzzi was ever in a position of trust at the FBI, given his willingness to promote this cause-and-effect linkage between “Trump’s rhetoric” and “white supremacist violence.” In point of fact, the El Paso shooter said explicitly that he was acting as a copycat of the New Zealand mosque shootings in March. You can blame 8chan or /pol for the shooter’s action, but blaming Trump is a non sequitur. We continue with the article:

In an interview with host Brian Williams, Figliuzzi ripped Trump for not using the first-person voice to condemn white supremacism in an address on Monday, given the anti-immigrant motives of the killer in El Paso, Texas.
Part of countering the adversary of white supremacism, he said, was in understanding the significance of how they think. While he wouldn’t accuse Trump of purposefully flying flags until Aug. 8, he also darkly wondered who wrote the speech.
“If we don’t understand how they think, we’ll never understand how to counter them,” he said. “The president said that we will fly our flags at half mast, until August 8. That’s 8/8. Now, I’m not going to imply that he did this deliberately, but I am using it as an example of the ignorance of the adversary that’s being demonstrated by the White House.
“The numbers 88 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and to them the numbers 8-8 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ So we’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk on 8/8.”
“No one is thinking about this,” he added.

Is he off his meds? Has he sought counseling? Back in November 2016, I mocked liberals for claiming they were “traumatized” by Hillary’s defeat, but now I’m beginning to suspect that they have never really recovered from the psychological damage they suffered on 11/8/16 — a number that must have some arcane significance, I’m sure, but unlike MSNBC guests, I haven’t been reading Nostradamus or consulting psychics or whatever paranormal means they use to divine the auguries and omens.