The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 07.05.19 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | July 6, 2019 | 1 Comment

a– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Frederick Douglass – What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?
Twitchy: NYT Editorial Writer Butthurt Over Ted Cruz Giving Colin Kaepernick A Reality Check
Louder With Crowder: Eight-Year-Old “Mini AOC” Forced Into Early Retirement Over Death Threats
According To Hoyt: And Our Flag Was Still There
Vox Popoli: She Blames Scalzi, also, A Charade Of Justice

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Miserable Cretin Edition
American Greatness: Antifa – Terrorists Of The Bourgeoisie
American Power: Celebrating Our Unique Country’s Origins
American Thinker: Christian University Caves In To The LGBTQ+ Crowd
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Those Pesky Physics Friday
Babalu Blog: US Accuses Cuba’s Colony Venezuela Of Killing Thousands Of Dissenters
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For July 5
Camp of the Saints: Homework – Catechism Of A Revolutionist
Da Tech Guy: Hey, The Salute To America Is Done & The Left Is Still Alive & Well!
Don Surber: Dragging Schiff Out Of Congress
Dustbury: Nothing For Me, Thanks
First Street Journal: I Twinged My Back!
The Geller Report: ICE Releases List Of Murderers & Rapists Protected By Sanctuary City Policies, also, Public Pool In Germany Closed After Hundreds Of Migrants Harass Families
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Bad First Amendment News
Hollywood In Toto: Olivia Munn Is Right – Tarantino Got A Pass On Weinstein Dirt
Legal Insurrection: Police Beleive They’ve Identified Viral Ice Cream Licker; Charges Will Be Filed, also, Fartacus Helps Five Female Asylum Seekers (Illegally) Cross Into America
The PanAm Post: Jesus Santrich Case Proves The Failure Of Justice In The Colombian Peace Process, also, Why Nobody Reports That Capitalism Saved The Bees
Power Line: Trump’s Independence Day Speech (With Video), also, Loose Threads In The Curious Case, Part 7
Shot In The Dark: Cafeteria American
This Ain’t Hell: Posthumous Award Upgrade, also, Made In America – Yeah!
Victory Girls: Independence Day Trump Style Was Revolutionary
Volokh Conspiracy: The Case Against The Case Against The American Revolution
Weasel Zippers: CNN Admits June Job Report “Blows Away Expectations”, also, Biden – I’d Slap Trump In The Face
Mark Steyn: Milkshakes Come In Vanilla, Chocolate, & Concrete

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

She knows.
I’ve been gone six years. A random Friday morning seemed good to sneak back into the house at dawn to pick up some documents.
My daughter’s are judge, jury and executioner.
“Hi. *Dad*.”

A three letter wrecking ball. All of my rationalizations, anger, and self-righteousness are suddenly gone.
“Oh my God, Angela. . .I’m so sorry. . .”
Her dirty, smiling rag doll is the last thing I see before the lawn rushes up to kiss me.

* * *

That was 10 years ago.
Getting my life squared away was hard.
Today is her wedding day.
She breaks me again.
Thank you, Lord.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Police Find Body of Mackenzie Lueck; Suspect’s Family Worries About Fair Trial

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Police Find Body of Mackenzie Lueck; Suspect’s Family Worries About Fair Trial

Ayoola Ajayi (left) is accused of murdering Mackenzie Lueck (right).

When it was reported last week that charred “female tissue” had been found in suspect Ayoola Ajayi’s backyard, I thought her entire corpse had been incinerated, but now we learn more of the story:

The body of University of Utah student Mackenzie Lueck has been found in a canyon north of Salt Lake City, police said Friday.
Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown said in a news conference that he was “relieved and grief-stricken” to report that Lueck’s body was recovered Wednesday in Logan Canyon, about 90 miles north of Salt Lake City. Investigators were subsequently able to forensically confirm it was Lueck, Brown said.
The 23-year-old was last seen in the early morning hours of June 17 when she was dropped off at a park in North Salt Lake City. There, police have said, she met another individual and vanished.
Last Friday police arrested 31-year-old Ayoola Ajayi in connection to Lueck’s death and at the time said he was expected to be charged with aggravated murder , aggravated kidnapping, obstruction of justice and desecration of a body. He’s currently being held without bail.
Police said at that time they had searched Ajayi’s home and property. Neighbors told police they saw Ajayi using gasoline to burn something in his backyard on June 17 and 18, Brown said last week.
A subsequent search of the burn area yielded “several charred items that were consistent with personal items of Mackenzie Lueck,” Brown said.
Police also discovered charred material that was determined to be female human tissue consistent with Lueck’s DNA profile, he said.
Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, who earlier this week was granted an extension to file charges against Ajayi, said at Friday’s news conference that his office would move forward with formally filing charges in the “early part of next week.”
The investigation, Gill stressed, remains ongoing.

Meanwhile, concerns about “RAAAAACISM!”

Family members of the man suspected of murdering Mackenzie Lueck said they don’t believe he will receive a fair trial in Utah.
Speaking from her office in New York, attorney Janet Fashakin said the presumption of innocence is a civil right in the United States and she questioned if Ayoola Ajayi will be entitled to that right if the trial takes place in Salt Lake City.
“AJ is being crucified already,” she said.
Fashakin said she got a call from Nigeria, where Ajayi’s mother has been reading news reports in disbelief.
“There is no way you can watch all this that`s being said about your loving son and you be able to be at peace,” said Fashakin.
She insisted the man the media has characterized is not her son.
“Mrs. Ajayi wants me to let you know that she has a good son. A very hardworking son at that. A son who cares about others,” said Fashakin.
The family is afraid judgments are being made based on a limited amount of evidence revealed by police. . . .
Fashakin believes Ajayi will not be able to receive a fair trial in Utah, at least in part due to his skin color.
“There is no way AJ can get a fair trial in Utah considering the racial disparity over there,” said Fashakin.

Remember, there are five A’s in “RAAAAACISM!”



 

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Category: Utah, Violence Against Women

In The Mailbox: 07.05.19 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.05.19 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #672 – Independence Day Extravaganza!
Knowledge Buffet: No Anarchists, Only Communists
EBL:Vintage Hollywood 4th Of July
Twitchy: Nazi-Spotting Ex-DNC Staffer With Hero Complex Comes back For Second Dose Of Public Humiliation
Louder With Crowder: NYT Opinion Crapping All Over America Actually Proves America Is Pretty Great

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: I Likes The Onions In The Salads
American Greatness: Calvin Coolidge – “If All men Are Created Equal, That Is Final”
American Power: This Guy. I Can’t Even.
American Thinker: “Ancient Priciples” Birthed The Greatest Nation The World Has Ever Known
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Independence Day!
Babalu Blog: On This Fourth Of July, Cuban-Americans Say “Gracias, USA!”
BattleSwarm: Happy July 4th! (Fireworks videos)
Camp of the Saints: Independence Day 2019
CDR Salamander: Words Have Meaning
Da Tech Guy: Even The CSA Founders Knew The Founding Fathers Thought Slavery Was Wrong
Don Surber: Highlights Of The News
Dustbury: The Call Is Coming From Inside The House
The Geller Report: Remembering Entebbe – July 4, 1976, also, Happy Birthday To The First Nation In Human History Founded On Individual Rights & Freedom
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, So If She Weighs The Same As A Duck…
Hollywood In Toto: Showtime Mocks Conservatives Being Censored, Attacked
JustOneMinute: Meanwhile, Back At The Mall…
Legal Insurrection: Georgetown Prof Michael Eric Dyson Likens Betsy Ross Flag To Swastika, also, Administration Reverses Course On Census, Will Pursue Path Forward On Citizenship Question
The PanAm Post: US Sanctions Cuban State Company For Transporting Venezuelan Oil
Power Line: The Eternal Meaning Of Independence Day (Part One) (Part Two), also, What A Conservative Learns At College
Shark Tank: Trump Praises American Greatness On 4th Of July
Shot In The Dark: Burn Portland (Legally) To The Ground
STUMP:  Deaths In The Dominican Republic – Bad Booze?
The Political Hat: When In The Course Of Human Events…
This Ain’t Hell: Free Health Care For Illegals? What About The Elderly? also, USN Commander Relieved After LCS Hits A Cargo Ship In Canada
Victory Girls: Does Justin Amash Have An Ulterior Motive?
Volokh Conspiracy: What The Declaration Of Independence Said & What It Meant
Weasel Zippers: Huge Percentage Of Republicans “Extremely Proud” To be American, Democrats Not So Much, also,  Border Patrol Refutes Occasional Cortex’ “Toilet Water” Claims
Megan McArdle: Dear Democrats – I’ll Vote For Any Of You, But Please Nominate Someone Who Can Actually Win
Mark Steyn: You’re A Grand Old Flag

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

The Four Most Important Words About Fireworks: ‘Light Fuse, Get Away’

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on The Four Most Important Words About Fireworks: ‘Light Fuse, Get Away’

 

If you love shooting fireworks as much as I do, you have to be serious about safety. Later this month, my sons and I will be shooting a genuinely massive show — a belated Fourth of July celebration, delayed for family reasons — and we are experienced enough to do things right. Unfortunately, some people are not so experienced:

A fireworks store in Indiana was forced to recall 25,000 individual fireworks after a boy lost his hand in an accident, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced in a statement.
According to Oxford, Ohio, police, Caleb Bogan and Brendon Jones found the end of a Talon rocket on the evening of March 19, lit it and were injured by the explosion. Caleb, 12, was flown to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital after sustaining serious injuries, while Brendon suffered only minor injuries.
The recall entails that all products and fireworks be immediately returned for a refund to Grandma’s Fireworks in West College Corner, Ind., which is located just on the Indiana-Ohio state border.

Four words: “Light fuse, get away.”

Every consumer firework sold in the United States carries that warning, and yet every year, people are injured because they ignore that warning.

Three words: “Always brace cakes.” (The ABC Rule.)

Aerial repeaters (known as “cakes”) are the most popular consumer firework product. You light one fuse, and multiple shots fire into the sky — or rather, they’re supposed to fire into the sky. If not properly braced, some cakes can tip over and start firing sideways. Three times I’ve been present when that happened (none of the tip-overs were my fault), and it’s a genuinely frightening experience. Therefore the ABC Rule is always enforced when I’m in charge of a show. But not everybody understands why this rule is so important:

Nine years ago, Kryshelle Houghton safely stood on her driveway watching friends shoot off New Year’s Eve fireworks. She never imagined what impact that celebration wound have on the rest of her life. After a friend lit off a firework ironically named the “Lucky Seven,” it accidentally tipped over and hit Houghton directly in her left eye. Tragically, Houghton, who was 19 at the time lost the vision in her eye that night.
In Houghton’s case, she wasn’t participating in any sort of risky firework behavior at the time of her accident. “I wasn’t doing anything unsafe – I was standing there in the driveway watching a show in the road,” Houghton said. “People don’t realize how unsafe (fireworks) can be.

One look at the “Lucky 7” tells you why it can so easly tip over:

 

There are several ways to brace cakes. You can drive a stake into the ground and use duct tape to wrap the cake to the stake. Or if you’re shooting on the street, a driveway or a parking lot, you can use bricks to brace your cakes. What we do in our shows is glue the cakes to a board and use fuse to connect them to fire in sequence. Here’s a 3-minute video (not mine) that gives you the basic idea of how it’s done:

 

The ABC Rule and the four basic words (“Light fuse, get away”) of fireworks safety will eliminate 99% of the risk involved. Once you’ve done that, the biggest remaining risk is a blowout, which is when an aerial shell fails to launch and explodes inside the tube on the ground. If one of the shots in a cake does this, often it will blow the whole cake apart, sending some of the shots going sideways. Every pyrotechnicians’s worst nightmare is to have a blowout on a mortar rack that splits the rack, leaving chain-fused mortars firing sideways. Before shows, I always tell people, “We have a lot of things that fire at different angles, but the one angle we don’t want is sideways. If you see me running? Run for it!”

A lot of fireworks fans have been worried that President Trump’s trade war with China will cause an increase in prices, because nearly all consumer fireworks sold in America are made in China. This is one product we should be grateful to have the Chinese manufacture, not only because they have thousands of years of expertise — they did invent gunpowder, after all — but also because it’s very dangerous work. “12 killed as explosion rips through fireworks factory in China” (September 2014) and “7 killed in East China’s firework plant blast” (September 2017) are typical headlines. Can you imagine the insurance costs if we were making fireworks in America? So thank you, Communist China and your nimble-fingered peasant workers! But every once in a while, we get a glimpse of the dangers of mass quantities of fireworks:

FORT MILL, S.C. – Firefighters had to dodge exploding rockets to douse a spectacular fire that destroyed containers of fireworks stored for sale on the Fourth of July.
Now, investigators believe that fire may have been intentionally set. According to the York County deputy fire marshal, they are investigating [the] fire as a possible arson.
No other details about the investigation have been released.
Crews spent nearly an hour extinguishing the fire that broke out before dawn at the fireworks storage center in Fort Mill.
Emergency crews were called around 5:45 a.m. to the fireworks storage containers near Davey Jones Fireworks along Carowinds Boulevard, just off Interstate 77. . . .
York County deputies said the fire was not actually at the fireworks store but started in containers just outside the store.

 

The fact that this happened in storage containers that should have been locked is probably why authorities suspect arson. If indeed this proves to be the case, I hope the culprit is prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Wasting perfectly good fireworks like that? It’s so wrong.



 

Category: Fireworks

Kathryn Narcisi (a/k/a ‘KC Hill’) Wins Injunction in Bogus Defamation Case

Posted on | July 5, 2019 | Comments Off on Kathryn Narcisi (a/k/a ‘KC Hill’) Wins Injunction in Bogus Defamation Case

Kathryn Cahill Narcisi is allegedly a singer, who seems to have spent years trying to Be Somebody on the Internet, with such a lack of success that the blogger Turtleboy has dubbed her “Failure Swift.” She evidently has a pattern of marrying and divorcing men, and also of claiming to be sick to get attention and money. Her current husband, jazz saxophonist Medoro “Metro” Narcisi III, was a high school music teacher until February 2018, when he was apparently forced to resign not long after Kathryn filed a domestic violence complaint against him. A couple of months later, a GoFundMe page claimed that Kathryn was suffering from lupus and scleroderma and that doctors had found tumors in her breasts and liver. She posted a video accusing doctors at a local hospital of mistreating her after she claimed to have had a stroke, and this was the video that drew Turtleboy’s attention to her. Well, she didn’t like what Turtleboy wrote about her — shabby grifters don’t like being called shabby grifters — and so she sued him (a total shabby grifter move).

The Rhode Island ACLU came to Turtleboy’s defense:

Aidan Kearney, whose business is based in Worcester, Massachusetts, runs a website and blog on www.turtleboysports.com. In February, he re-posted a video and numerous Facebook comments originally posted to the web by Hopkinton resident Kathryn Narcisi. He did so after Narcisi’s Facebook postings requested media coverage of an incident at Kent County Hospital, where she claimed the hospital refused to treat her for autoimmune disease. . . .
Last month, Narcisi filed a libel lawsuit claiming the blog post “defamed and discredited” her, and that it led to her receiving unwanted messages “from followers of the defendant’s website.” At a court hearing held before Kearney was ever notified, RI Superior Court Judge Susan McGuirl issued a temporary restraining order requiring the removal of any and all references to Narcisi from Kearney’s website and all other “associated” sites. . . .
ACLU executive director Steven Brown added: “The court’s order requiring the removal of items from a website is a classic prior restraint that the First Amendment simply does not countenance. In order to avoid a chilling effect on Internet speech, we are hopeful that this suit will be dismissed promptly.”

Click here to read Kathryn Narcisi’s bogus defamation claim. Whether or not she is suffering from any physical illness, she seems to exhibit symptoms of a sociopathic personality disorder. As the ACLU points out, she “requested media coverage” of her claim that the hospital mistreated her, and she has sought publicity in various other ways, which means that she is arguably a public figure, which has legal consequences. People who seek publicity can’t claim “harassment” just because some of the publicity they get is negative. Like, if Madonna goes on tour, she can’t file “harassment” complaints against critics who call her a flabby old skank. Shabby grifters like Kathryn Narcisi never seem to understand that when they seek publicity — through a GoFundMe account or a YouTube video — they thereby forfeit the expectation of privacy. Particularly in this case, where Kathryn Narcisi claimed that she had suffered medical mistreatment and sought media coverage for her story, it is absurd to argue that Turtleboy was engaged in harassment or defamation simply because he mocked her and expressed doubt about her claims.

My podcasting partner (and former co-defendant) John Hoge called my attention to this story, which resembles in many ways the legal entanglements we had with Brett Kimberlin years ago. For a court to have granted an injunction in this case is just wrong, and suggests that Rhode Island judges don’t know crap about the First Amendment.



 

Category: Journalism

Why Hilllary’s 2016 Overconfidence Bothered Me

Posted on | July 4, 2019 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

I grasp that political leaders tend to be mediocre people who do the networking thing well. It’s hard to build those ‘people skills’ while also honing, say, guitar chops.

However, the media is going to tell you that an otherwise pedestrian figure whom they fancy is somehow brilliant. Yet whatever brilliance they display, whatever articulate use of English, or grasp of a subject is likely to be provided by a staff.

So why did Her Majesty’s staff blow it so badly in 2016? For a modicum of effort in a handful or Rust Belt states, Stacy and I could be sporting coveralls in a re-education camp in North Dakota.

An explanation that I haven’t heard previously might be called “To Build a Firewall“. We know that the Clinton campaign failed utterly to secure electoral votes around the Great Lakes that tipped the election to Trump.

But why? Why did she let Trump deliver an Arkanicide to her ambition? Was she just as overconfident about those blue states as she was her email server security?

The idea that the Left considered the Tea Parties a dead issue occurred to me today. After the 2009 demonstrations on the Mall, which was the high point of the whole blogoshpere experience, there was pretty much nothing. ObamaCare happened anyway; Breitbart died; Obama was re-elected: the country seemed pacified.

The 2016 election came. A Trump Administration was simply beyond the imagination of most of the conservative blogosphere. Important exceptions included Surber, Hoft and my buddy M. Joseph Sheppard, who was very patient with my skepticism about Trump. I just knew that Her Majesty was going to hang Trump out to dry after the nomination.

Except she didn’t.

And this invites the question: why do people who should know better somehow not know better? Lack of imagination.

People who think that the government ‘solves’ problems (hint: government occasionally maintains problems passably well) seemed to have thought the Tea Party problem solved.

Trump’s close reading of Sun Tzu has been celebrated. But Her Majesty’s sudden lack of paranoia about those Blue States, her complacent willingness to go ahead and lose an election instead of putting in the effort to retire all risks, even the unimaginable ones, underscores why she deserved the loss. Don’t tell me how qualified you are: prove it.

Trump’s willingness to take calculated risks–run an understaffed, shoestring, actually chaotic campaign, continue to pay dividends as he colors outside the lines of accepted diplomacy.

Hillary’s overconfidence in 2016 is related to the horror of the Foreign Policy ‘experts’ at Trump’s non-approach to diplomacy: the creative, one-man show is both:

  • a blast to watch, and
  • impossible to duplicate.

Unless Trump can magically nail everything before his term ends, we could be in a situation where a traditional politician, e.g. a Pence, just can’t even try to get his Trump on.

Which is what happened when Bush 41 failed to keep the Reagan going.

Our system is engineered against black swan figures like Trump.

Enjoy the Donald show while here.

Category: Uncategorized

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Posted on | July 4, 2019 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

And here it is:

The original:

Category: Uncategorized
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