The Other McCain

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

Rule 5 Sunday: Homeko At The Beach

Posted on | August 11, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Sometimes Rule 5 is about sexy. Sometimes it’s about cute, and this is one of those times. Given the Japanese penchant for anthropomorphizing everything under the sun that has even vaguely human characteristics, it should be no surprise that there is a whole “family” of anthropomorphized computer operating systems, a/k/a OS-tans. They started out as somewhat of a joke on Japanese image boards, but quickly became so popular that Microsoft in Singapore and Taiwan used them in promotional ads, and authorized theme packs for various OS were sold. Here we have Homeko, the home version of Windows XP, at the beach, because it’s that time of year.

Don’t get too close to the water, babe…

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Gulf, Ninety Miles From Tyranny serves up Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #706, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism it’s Rule Five Tax Deductions Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon. Bacon Time has a couple of wet ones.

EBL’s herd this week includes The Muffs, Terri Nunn & Berlin, Lady Macbeth, Betty Gilpin, Sharon Tate, Fujiama Mama, Debbie Harry, and Fay Wray.

A VIew From The Beach reels in “a fishy lot” with The Deplorable Emma Roberts, Fish Pic Friday – Jessica Jae, Susquehanna Smallmouth Sickness Solved, “Rain Fall Down”, Another Wet Shirt Wednesday, Gone With The Wind, Virtue Signalling Fail, SFO Bans Bottles to Save the World, Another Palm Sunday, Great Moments in Climate Hypocrisy and It’s Good To Be the King!

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe of the Week is Sophia Loren, and at Dustbury it’s Rebecca Maddern and Rihanna.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Slave To The Grind

Posted on | August 11, 2019 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Slave To The Grind

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The Poison Fruit of Radical Seeds
The Constitutional News Network
Nation And State
Dennis G. Hurst
Viewpoints Of The Many
EBL

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

They Told Me If I Voted for Trump, Jews Would Suffer Legal Persecution …
EBL

How Dangerous Is Baltimore?
Bacon Time
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: This Is My Rifle
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

Two Mass Shootings in 14 Hours: Thoughts on ‘The Gamification of Terror’
Dark Brightness
Nebraska Energy Observer
EBL

‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ IRL?
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.05.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

‘Aiyona Hunt’ Is Not a Woman
Bacon Time
EBL

Off the Shelf
EBL

Dayton Mass Murderer Had More Red Flags Than a May Day Parade in Beijing
Dark Brightness
EBL

DaTechGuy 2.0
Da Tech Guy
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.07.19 (Morning Edition)
Proof Positive
EBL

Police in Canada Arrest #WaxMyBalls Tranny Jonathan ‘Jessica’ Yaniv
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

The Hate They Create: Democrats Sow the Wind, and Reap the Whirlwind
EBL

This Was Probably Inevitable
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.07.19 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

8/8 = Hitler? ‘Remember, These Are the People Who Tell Us Trump Is Crazy’
A View From The Beach
EBL

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

In The Mailbox: 08.08.19 (Not The Special Hitler Edition)
Proof Positive
EBL

Biden Says What Liberals Really Think
EBL

$211.17
EBL

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

Top linkers for the week ending August 9:

  1.  EBL (23)
  2.  (tied) A View From The Beach and Proof Positive (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Posted on | August 11, 2019 | Comments Off on Dead Men Tell No Tales

 

GAINESVILLE, GEORGIA
News of Jeffrey Epstein’s “suicide” reached me Saturday morning in the parking lot of a Hardee’s in South Carolina. After driving all night, I’d stopped in for some breakfast, then took a brief nap in the car before resuming my journey. When I woke up, I called my brother Kirby to check on his plans for attending Uncle Casper’s funeral.

“Jeffrey Epstein’s dead,” Kirby said.

“What?”

“Suicide, they say.”

“You’re kidding me.”

It seemed impossible. Epstein had been placed on suicide watch after a previous reported suicide attempt at the Manhattan jail where he was being held awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Now there will be no trial on those charges, and no possibility that Epstein might implicate the many powerful men who allegedly cavorted with Epstein’s harem of teenage sex slaves. Should we, as they say, question the timing?

Epstein’s death comes just 24 hours after more than 2,000 pages of documents detailing the lurid allegations of his sexual abuse of underage girls were unsealed to the public.
On Friday morning, a federal appeals court published explosive documents pertaining to a 2015 lawsuit that Virginia Roberts Giuffre had filed against Epstein’s associate, socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.
Giuffre claimed Epstein and Maxwell kept her as a ‘sex slave’ in the early 2000s, whilst she was underage.
The unsealed papers — which made international news on Friday — implicated a number of high-profile men in sex scandals.
They include transcripts of a May 3, 2016 deposition made by Giuffre, in which she alleged that she was trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell to have sex with and provide erotic massages for politicians and affluent businessmen.
Giuffre claimed that she was ‘instructed’ by Maxwell to have sex with two high powered Democrats — former Senate Majority George Mitchell and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.
Both Richardson and Mitchell have denied the allegations.
According to the documents, Giuffre claimed she also had sex with Epstein’s friend Prince Andrew when she was 17 years of age.

Words like “claimed” and “alleged” must forever be used in connection with these stories, because without Epstein — either as a defendant in his own trial or as a witness against others, if he had reached some sort of agreement with prosecutors — it is unlikely that anything can ever be conclusively proven as to the involvement of “high powered Democrats” with the underage girls Epstein procured for such purposes.

* * * * *

If you’re wondering about the Gainesville dateline, I spent the night at my son’s house here, a stone’s throw from the shore of Lake Lanier. Woke up this morning to the pitter-patter of granddaughter Eliza’s feet running around, which was nice. Yesterday’s funeral for my Uncle Casper was a “celebration of his life,” as the pastor said. Afterwards, the family gathered at Casper’s granddaughter’s home, and somewhere during the conversation over barbecue, one of my cousins asked, “Do you think Trump will be re-elected?” Keep in mind that many of my family are staunch Democrats, so my answer to that question had to be phrased tactfully, and thus I stuck to the facts: If the economy stays strong — a big “if” — for the next 15 months, it’s almost certain Trump will be re-elected, based simply on historical precedent. The problem, I explained, is that everybody who follows politics (including journalists) has a tendency to get so excited about the day-to-day drumbeat of headlines. Today’s Drudge headline or whatever “scandal” is being talked about on cable news isn’t going to change the basic political situation. When voters go to the polls in November 2020, they’re not going to be thinking about whatever was big news in August 2019. If the economy keeps going like gangbusters, Trump can claim to have delivered on his promise of making America “great again,” and gets re-elected, no matter who the Democrats nominate. This isn’t a controversial analysis, and I hope none of my kinfolk were offended by how I answered my cousin’s question.

Most people don’t pay attention to politics on a daily basis. TV talking heads, who get paid to care about politics, never seem to grasp how little the ordinary American cares this stuff. The beautiful thing about limited government is that we are free to live our lives without worrying too much about what happens in Washington. We should be grateful for that freedom, and perhaps Democrats who were emotionally traumatized by Hillary’s defeat in 2016 might wish to reconsider their efforts to make the federal government such an omnipotent force in our lives that elections become an all-or-nothing struggle for total power.

* * * * *

My rental-car contract requires me to return this Nissan sedan by 6 p.m. Monday, so I’m likely to spend this afternoon chilling out here at my son’s house, maybe go out to dinner this evening and get back on the road early tomorrow morning with 614 miles to drive home. And of course, the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Shoe Leather Fund

Note To Self: Heed Surber

Posted on | August 10, 2019 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

I admit to some mild anxiety over Trump going wobbly regarding guns. Then I read Surber:

President Trump is playing Democrats again. They want to make gun control an issue. He said, OK, and took control of the gun control debate. The debate will be on his terms and in his language. That is power positioning.

The mopes at the Post and Matt Drudge thought they could divide President Trump from his supporters with the report on the NRA warning the president on guns.

I knew in an instant what was happening. I knew Democrats would lose because President Trump never engages the enemy without first winning the battle. I also knew the president, a busy man, had outsourced the terms of the Democrat surrender to the NRA.

Whatever deal is made will have the NRA’s approval.

I knew because of the First Squeal Rule. Whenever decisions are made privately, the loser is the one who goes public first in an effort to save face.

Which invites the ugly question: how do we follow Trump?

Category: Uncategorized

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:


I should have said: they ride through the Chunnel.

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
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