The Other McCain

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

Trey Gowdy Is Well Worth Your Time

Posted on | August 26, 2018 | Comments Off on Trey Gowdy Is Well Worth Your Time

by Smitty

Not present, but looming large during this: Senator Tim Scott.

Trey speaks on themes present in his book with Scott.
A very timely speech with plenty of Biblical allusions.
Hope to see Gowdy continue in public service.

via JoanOfArgghh

Category: Uncategorized

RIP, Senator John McCain

Posted on | August 25, 2018 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

Stacy will doubtless have a more eloquent word at this difficult time.

Cancer is a horrific way to go. May the Lord rest his soul and strengthen his family.

His centrist, bi-partisan stances were very often controversial. But this is not the time to dig up old bones.

I do hope that he left a memoir to illuminate his viewpoint on events. Maybe clear up some lingering questions. Or even raise a few more.

Godspeed, warrior.

Biographical detail at Victory Girls.

Category: Uncategorized

Fake Hate (Because It’s an Election Year)

Posted on | August 25, 2018 | 1 Comment

This is how you know a crucial election is coming up. If there’s not enough racism to energize black voters, Democrats will just invent some:

A story about a white man urinating on a 5-year-old black child and calling her a racial slur was fabricated, police said.
Grand Rapids police and prosecutors late Friday, Aug. 24 said they determined the story was not valid and said no charges would be issued against a 60-year-old man arrested following the initial report on Wednesday.
Police said several children, all 7 or younger, were playing together sometime before 6 p.m. Wednesday when one of the children urinated on the 5-year-old girl.
Kent County prosecutors said the parents of the children, in talking with them, ultimately determined the children “concocted the story to avoid trouble.”
“We appreciate the conscientiousness of the parents in bringing the matter to the attention of the police, and continuing to ask their children questions as new evidence was obtained,” prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said the 60–year-old man had a “verifiable alibi” from other people who vouched for his whereabouts.
The allegations, when first reported late Wednesday, caused concern across the community and NAACP leaders on Friday said the incident should be considered both a hate crime and sex assault.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Remember that the #BlackLivesMatter movement began in the summer before the 2014 midterm elections, when Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) invented a fictitious narrative around the police shooting of Michael Brown. As it turned out, Brown was a robbery suspect and was shot by a police officer in a struggle over the officer’s gun. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, however, CNN went into 24/7 coverage mode based on a false story that Brown was an innocent honor-roll student who had been shot by a racist cop (the “hands up, don’t shoot” myth, which became a protest slogan). Even though practically everything about the shooting of Brown was misrepresented by the liberal media, they nevertheless continued to report on the riots they had helped incite as if these were a spontaneous expression of “community” outrage, rather than the result of an election-year propaganda campaign funded by George Soros. The message of #BlackLivesMatter could be summarized in two words: Vote Democrat.

This partisan propaganda is about exploiting ignorance:

By depicting criminals like Michael Brown as innocent victims of racist police, activists sought to exploit widespread public ignorance about the reality of crime and law enforcement in America. Heather Mac Donald exposed this reality in her book The War on Cops, pointing out that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by black man than the other way around (see “Putting Homicide in Perspective vs. the Media’s ‘Atrocity Narrative’ Propaganda,” Oct. 3, 2017). 

What are the facts about crime in America?

Of the 15,070 U.S. homicide victims in 2016, more than half — 7,881 (52.3%) — were black. As to the perpetrators, the FBI reports: “When the race of the offender was known, 53.5 percent were Black or African American, 43.9 percent were White, and 2.6 percent were of other races.” Black people are 12.7% of the U.S. population, and are over-represented in murder statistics — both as victims and perpetrators — by a factor of more than 4-to-1.

What makes it easy for the media to promote the myth that cops are “racist” is that, in the day-to-day business of apprehending criminals, the police must deal so often with black suspects, who are about 1/8 of the population, but commit more than half of all violent crimes. We must note that the vast majority of the victims of these crimes are also black, so that the allegedly “racist” cops are saving the lives of innocent black people by putting black criminals behind bars. Yet because Democrats are so invested in promoting a “blame whitey” mentality in the black community — in order to mobilize black voters at election time — the facts about crime are ignored, and counter-factual myths are promoted by the liberal media, with the result that anyone who tries to tell the truth about all this is demonized as a “racist.” Meanwhile, the most dangerous place for black Americans to live is in Democrat-controlled fiefdoms like Chicago, where more than 2,000 people have been shot so far this year, more than 300 of them fatally, and 80% of the victims are black.

It is a sad testimony to the effectiveness of the anti-white propaganda promoted by Democrats and their media allies that even children use this “blame whitey” myth as an excuse when they get in trouble.



 

 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Media Bias, Michigan, Racism

A Fake Jew in the Identity-Politics Age

Posted on | August 25, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Julia Salazar is not Jewish. Nor is she a working-class immigrant. Her mother is an Italian Catholic from New Jersey and her father, a native of Colombia, was a commercial pilot who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1982. Julia grew up in a middle-class home in Florida and graduated from Columbia University, an elite Ivy League school where the annual cost of attendance is $80,826 including room and board.

All of this information, available from public records, was discovered by Tablet magazine for a fascinating story about how Julia Salazar invented a fictional identity as a working-class Jewish immigrant in order to run for a state senate seat in New York, as a progressive Democrat.

Perhaps the weirdest revelation in the story is that, when she first got to Columbia University, Salazar identified as a conservative pro-life Christian. At some point midway through Obama’s second term, however, she became obsessed with Israel and began creating her fictional identity, as a left-wing Jew supporting anti-Israel politics.

The second-weirdest revelation is that, despite widespread attention to her campaign in the liberal media — she’s supported by the Democratic Socialists of America and, at 27, is viewed as a progressive “rising star,” a la Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez — it seems that no reporter previously bothered to check the facts of her biography. The headline on a profile feature last month in the Forward was “Julia Salazar Says Jewish Roots Helped Inspire Her Political Activism,” but it turns out those roots are entirely fictional, like “Haven Monahan,” the non-existent frat-boy rapist invented by Jackie Coakley at the University of Virginia.

When President Trump criticizes the “fake news” media, liberals claim that this represents a threat to freedom of the press. However, then the press fails to do its job — as the case of Julia Salazar illustrates — they are their own worst enemies. In an era where the Democrat Party has devoted itself to identity-politics victimhood narratives, how many more fake candidates with phony biographies will the media sell us?

(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

Category: Democrats, Election, New York

In The Mailbox: 08.24.18

Posted on | August 24, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.24.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Why Tinder Is Toxic – Natasha Aponte
Twitchy: Laura Ingraham Only Needed One Tweet To Shred John Brennan’s Bleating About “The Rule Of Law”
Louder With Crowder: Facebook, Google, Twitter And More Meet To “Discuss” Election “Meddling”
According To Hoyt: Getting Your Due
Monster Hunter Nation: I Know Now Why You Cry, K Tempest Bedford Forrest, But It’s Something I Can Never Do
Vox Popoli: Silicon Valley’ Success

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Feminism Is Socialism
American Power: Trump Supporters Don’t Care About Cohen & Manafort Convictions, also, Jean-Francois Revel, How Democracies Perish
American Thinker: A Facebook Story
Animal Magnetism: Travel Totty Day 5
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For August 26
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Washington Insiders Better Beware Trump’s Jacksonian Response To Cohen & Manafort, also, Voices Of CMN 2018 – Kevin Rush, The Lance & The Veil
Don Surber: The Post-Reagan Years Summed Up In One Photo, also, Democrats Stuck With Impeachment
Dustbury: BReachwood4-5789
First Street Journal: We Need A Computer Nerd IMMEDIATELY
The Geller Report: Having Pulled Out Of UNHRC, Bolton Says US Will Now Cut Its Funding, also, French Woman Burns To Death As “Youths” Harass, Block Firefighters
Hogewash: Closing In On Bennu, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day (Plus Bonus!)
JustOneMinute: Cheapshotting Andrew Sullivan
Legal Insurrection: New Model Has Hawley Over McCaskill In MO-Sen, also, Swedish State TV Admits 58% Of Those Convicted Of Rape Are Migrants
The PanAm Post: To The Washington Post – Venezuela Is In Fact An Example Of Socialism’s Failure
Power Line: Facebook Censorship Strikes Again, also, Bolton’s Zero Option
Shark Tank: Bushes To Stump For Governor Scott
Shot In The Dark: The Power Of “No”
This Ain’t Hell: SPC Nicole McKenzie Saving The World, also, Senator McCain Stopping Brain Cancer Treatment
Victory Girls: Comey Lied – Majority Of Hillary Emails On Weiner’s Laptop Never Examined
Volokh Conspiracy: Short Circuit – A Roundup Of Current Federal Court Decisions
Weasel Zippers: Netflix Star Apologizes After Being Outed As Liking Rubio, Shapiro, & Trump, also, Official Concerned That Skidmarks On LGBT Crosswalk Might Be Hate
Megan McArdle: Imagine A Word Without Mandatory College Diplomas
Mark Steyn: The Roaches In Their Heads Each Morning


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Category: Linkagery

Big Brother, Inc.

Posted on | August 24, 2018 | Comments Off on Big Brother, Inc.

From the Drudge headline stack:

Tech Companies Gather For Secret Meeting To Prepare Election Strategy...

FACEBOOK Censors More Stories...

SNEAK PEAK: Documentary to reveal how they manipulate your searches; power to control info... 

GOOGLE quietly purges user-generated reviews?

PUTS DOWN MORE ROOTS IN CHINA...

Readers may recall that Darren Beattie, the former Trump speech-writer who got chased out of the White House for attending a 2016 conference where he delivered a speech about “The Intelligentsia and the Right.” In that speech, Beattie used the term “Corporate Marxists” to describe those whose ideal is a society “in which a vanishingly small wealthy, gated, insulated elite lords it over hordes of easily controlled helots.”

These elitists — alumni of prestigious universities, where they were indoctrinated with prejudices that are generally anti-American and anti-Christian — are the kind of people running Silicon Valley nowadays. To describe their worldview as “progressive” would be to mistake selfishness and snobbery for a coherent political ideology. They endorse left-wing politics not because they have any systematic understanding of politics, but rather because leftism is fashionable in their social milieu.

What do they have in common? Well, they are rich — the 1% — and attended the “best” schools, and none of them have ever served in the military. Because of their indoctrination, they ooze politically-inspired sympathy for brown people, homosexuals and foreigners, while reflexively disdaining white heterosexual males (despite the fact that they are mostly white male heterosexuals themselves). These attitudes of the elite are, as I say, not really a coherent ideology, but simply a set of fashionable prejudices — the world according to the kind of people who find Jimmy Kimmel funny. And these are the people running Facebook, Google and Twitter, corporations that exercise an effective monopoly on the distribution of online information. They are seeking to use that power to impose their political prejudices on the rest of us. Instead of Orwell’s “Big Brother” being a totalitarian political party, it turns out “Big Brother” is a bunch of uber-geeks living in California.

 

Category: Politics

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | August 24, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

The right eye looked outside of the perimeter. The neural coupler beneath the feathers picked up the signal and transmitted it back to the FOB control center.

A blip appeared. The bird shifted its head to view with the other eye. AI in the FOB effortlessly integrated the new picture, along with that of other sensor birds.

A drone. It passed for a bird at a glance, but its flight pattern was too erratic, even with the latest enemy AI. More coming with the dawn, sun to their backs.
The AI suggested it, but his finger already stabbed the alarm.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Hollywood Boy Toy Shakedown Racket

Posted on | August 24, 2018 | Comments Off on Hollywood Boy Toy Shakedown Racket

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
— Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time, 1967

Look, I’m only going to say this once, so pay attention: No sane person believes that a 17-year-old boy is so traumatized by having sex with a 37-year-old woman that he deserves $380,000 in hush money.

What shocked me about the Asia Argento-Jimmy Bennett revelations was not that Argento is a kinky freak — Hollywood is full of kinky freaks — but that the age of consent in California is 18. In most of the United States, the age of consent is 16, but apparently it’s been 18 in California for more than a century:

The age of consent in California has been 18 since 1913. Some media sources reported that the age of consent in California in the 1970s was 14 or 16 but in fact it was and has been 18.
In the 1990s Governor of California Pete Wilson stated that there was a trend of men in their mid-to-late 20s having sex with and impregnating teenage girls around 14 years of age and that the statutory rape laws needed to be enforced to prevent this.
In 2012 Kristin Olsen, a Republican member of the State Assembly of California, sponsored a bill that criminalizes sexual relations between K-12 teachers and students, including students over 18, as well as sexual text messages and other communications aimed at seducing a student. The bill was proposed after a 41-year-old teacher and 18-year-old high school student publicly announced that they were in a relationship. The bill was killed in committee by Democratic lawmakers concerned about the constitutionality of the proposed legislation.

So says Wikipedia, at any rate, and the fact that teachers unions are a powerful influence in the Democrat Party probably explains why the Olsen bill never made it out of committee. But I digress . . .

A lot of people are high-fiving each other because Asia Argento was one of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers. OK, fine, she’s a kinky freak and a hypocrite, and the fact that Bennett once played Argento’s son in a movie makes it a little extra creepy, but still: $380,000?

The claim states Bennett was a little over 17 years old at the time of the alleged assault, which took place in a California hotel room in 2013 when Argento was 37. . . .
The lawyer for Argento who handled the settlement, Carrie Goldberg, in the documents described the money as “helping Mr. Bennett.”
“We hope nothing like this ever happens to you again,” Goldberg wrote. “You are a powerful and inspiring creator and it is a miserable condition of life that you live among s—-y individuals who’ve preyed on both your strengths and your weaknesses.”
According to the documents, Bennett’s initial notice of intent to sue was for $3.5 million in damages for the intentional infliction of emotional distress, lost wages, assault and battery.

What the heck is this? Can anyone explain how a hook-up in a hotel room inflicts “emotional distress” on a 17-year-old boy? Because I distinctly remember being a 17-year-old boy, and I was out for all the “emotional distress” I could get. My problem at 17 — a quite common problem in the Bible Belt back in the day — was that my adolescent lust was condemned as sin by the prevailing social standards, which tended to limit one’s opportunities for fornication. Far be it from me, as a Christian and a father of six, to advocate or endorse sin, but my religious beliefs do not require me to pretend that I don’t know what teenage boys are like.

You may be able to convince some fools that Jimmy Bennett was a victim of “emotional distress,” but I am not one of those fools.

No, sir, this was blackmail. Isn’t extortion a crime in California?

It was morally wrong, and a crime under California law, for Asia Argento to have sex with Jimmy Bennett, but it was also wrong — and arguably criminal — for him to threaten her with a $3.5 million lawsuit in what was quite plainly a shakedown racket: “Pay me, or I’ll tell.”

Some of my conservative friends are enjoying Asia Argento’s embarrassment because they figure that turnabout is fair play, that after years of “rape culture” hysteria on university campuses and the attendant evisceration of due-process protections, it’s about time a woman should suffer the painful consequences of the presumed-guilty standard that feminism has foisted upon us. As tempting as it may be to enjoy the schadenfreude of this moment, however, do we really want to applaud this kind “social justice”? Isn’t the real lesson here about the way a culture of victimhood creates incentives for spurious accusations?

Like so many of the campus sexual-assault cases we’ve seen in recent years, the Argento-Bennett scandal is a “he-said, she-said” story:

In a series of newly surfaced texts allegedly between Asia Argento and a friend, the Italian actress claims her assault accuser Jimmy Bennett initiated their sexual contact and continued sending her nudes after their encounter.
The texts, published by TMZ, purport to show Argento, 42, talking about the alleged incident between her and Bennett, 22, back in 2013. . . .
In the texts, Argento denies knowing Bennett was a minor until he contacted her and Bourdain last fall following her public accusations against Harvey Weinstein. She also allegedly says she “felt weird” after the two had sex and pointed out that the legal age of consent is 15 in France and Italy.
“The public knows nothing, only what NYT wrote. Which is one sided,” she allegedly wrote in the text, according to TMZ. “The horny kid jumped me.”

My dear readers, I believe her!

As I say, I remember being a 17-year-old boy, and if Argento said Bennett “jumped” her in that hotel room, this seems entirely plausible to me.

She could have accused him of rape, but she didn’t, which I interpret as evidence that she enjoyed being “jumped” by a teenage boy, but that is immaterial to the legal issues involved. We do not know what actually happened in that hotel room, but if Jimmy Bennett was a victim — suffering “emotional distress” from whatever it was that happened — why didn’t he go straight to the police with his accusation? Why did he wait four years, and then threaten her with a lawsuit, rather than to report this alleged crime to the police? Because it was a shakedown, that’s why.

Once you pay the Dane-geld, you’ll never get rid of the Dane. Once feminism created a culture in which victimhood was celebrated and rewarded, it was inevitable that claims of victimhood would proliferate. When everybody in the workplace is required to be careful what they say, lest they be accused of “harassment” or “discrimination,” and when it seems every college girl in the country is claiming to be a rape victim, people become cynical about these claims. And this cynicism gives rise to the kind of situation where Jimmy Bennett, watching Asia Argento being praised for her courage in calling out Harvey Weinstein, decides to call a lawyer and threaten Argento with a $3.5 million lawsuit.

This business of destroying people’s reputations for profit — or to advance a political cause — has gotten out of control. It has fostered a climate of sexual paranoia, where no college boy can ever be sure that tonight’s hook-up won’t become tomorrow’s Title IX complaint.

It’s a hustle, a scam, a racket. Certainly, I am not the kind of fool who believes that those who claim to be pursuing “social justice” are never motivated by factors as simple as revenge and greed. Just like “Mattress Girl” at Columbia University, who tried to ruin her ex-boyfriend’s life because he didn’t want to be more than “friends with benefits,” so do many of these #MeToo allegations seem to be more about a sadistic desire for revenge than “social justice.” When the Nietzschean “will to power” derives from victimhood, as Ed Driscoll has observed, we should be skeptical of anyone who claims, as does Jimmy Bennett, that he has suffered “emotional distress,” when common sense tells us otherwise.

While we’re at it, can we please stop pretending that the legislative intent of age-of-consent laws is to protect teenage boys from older women? As a conservative, I don’t believe in “gender equality,” so it is not hypocritical for me to defend a double standard. Men and women are different, and we are engaged in a damaging distortion of reality when we compel people to pretend otherwise. While the law in California may declare that Jimmy Bennett is the victim of a crime, common sense declares that he was quite happy to be “victimized” by Asia Argento. Only later — maybe because she wasn’t interested in any future hookups with her one-time boy toy, and maybe because his acting career wasn’t very successful — did Bennett decide he could cash in by threatening her with a lawsuit.

Perhaps I should buy my 17-year-old son a ticket to L.A. My son’s kind of cute, and maybe he could lure a 30-something actress into a sordid affair, snap a couple of selfies in her hotel room, then claim “emotional distress” and shake her down for a few hundred thousand dollars.

But that would be wrong. Not only would it be sinful, it would also be dishonorable. Decent people don’t engage in blackmail, nor do they seek publicity for their sexual escapades, especially by such dishonest means as Jimmy Bennett’s bogus claim of victimhood. While I suppose I should be happy that Asia Argento has been caught up in her own #MeToo scandal, my pleasure is diminished by the knowledge that many others caught in similar situations have not had the luxury of being able to buy their way out of prison with a $380,000 settlement. At least now we’ve established the market value for boy-toy blackmail, however, so if any teenage boys want to shake down a cougar, they know the going rate.



 

Category: Hollywood, Sex Trouble
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