In The Mailbox: 08.24.18

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

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

Rare STD Reported in England

Posted on | August 24, 2018 | 1 Comment

It’s getting scary out there:

A rare sexually transmitted disease that causes flesh-eating ulcers on patients’ genitalia has popped up in England, the Lancashire Post reported.
An unnamed female patient, who lives in Southport and is between the ages of 15 and 25, reportedly was diagnosed with donovanosis within the last 12 months.
Donovanosis, which is spread through sexual intercourse with an infected patient, or by coming into contact with a patient’s infected ulcer, is typically seen in India, New Guinea, parts of the Caribbean, central Australia and southern Africa.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the painless disease causes progressive ulcerative lesions on the genitals or perineum, which are prone to heavy bleeding.
Patients are at risk of extragenital infections that can occur in the pelvic regions, or in intra-abdominal organs, bones or mouth. The lesions may also develop secondary bacterial infections.

The case was made public as the result of an investigation that “also reported that in 2017, 420,000 STDs were diagnosed in England, with chlamydia accounting for 48 percent of cases.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Great Britain

In The Mailbox: 08.23.18

Posted on | August 23, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: #MeToo – Famous Lefty Opera Couple Accused Of Rape
Twitchy: So, That Crazy Tinder Dating Story Actually Gets WORSE
Louder With Crowder: White House Releases “Permanently Separated” Video About Illegals Killing Americans

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Of Course The Earth Is Flat
American Power: Commentator Paris Dennard Suspended After Leftist CNN Hacks Dredge Up Old Sexual Assault Allegations, also, Kate Morton, The Clockmaker’s Daughter
American Thinker: The Socialist Party Platform Is Pathetic & Ignorant
Animal Magnetism: Travel Totty Day 4
BattleSwarm: How To Lie With Polls, Texas Senate Race Edition
CDR Salamander: LCS – An Easy Post As Always
Da Tech Guy: Thoughts After Rome, also, The Great Green Energy Boondoggle
Don Surber: Antifa And The Midterms
Dustbury: Ancient Smut
The Geller Report: Flashback – Obama’s $150,000 Bribe To Reverend Wright, also, Hillary Clinton Illegally Laundered $84 Million
Hogewash: People Eating Tasty Animals, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day plus Bonus TKPOTD
JustOneMinute: The Day After
Legal Insurrection: Is Mitch McConnell The “Michael Jackson Of Owning The Libs”? also, Neil DeGrasse Tyson Calls For “Truth Force”
Michelle Malkin: Let’s All Join Together To Stop Out-Of-Control Prosecutors
The PanAm Post: Democracy – Between Anarchy & Tyranny
Power Line: Democrats, Be Careful What You Wish For, also, Trump Is Right About Stormy Daniels
Shark Tank: Putnam Chides DeSantis Over Trump Endorsement
Shot In The Dark: Berg’s Seventh Law Is Getting Worn Flat From Overuse
The Political Hat: Leviathan As Parent – Racializing Patriotism, Trans In Kindergarten, & Medical Ownership
This Ain’t Hell: USN Hospital Ship Sent To Aid Venezuelan Refugees, also, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) Wants To Stifle Free Speech
Victory Girls: Confederate Statues To Stay At NC Capitol
Volokh Conspiracy: Netherlands Prosecuting Man For Insulting Turkish President Erdogan
Weasel Zippers: Attorney For Tibbetts Murderer Claims He’s An “All-American Boy” With No Past Record, also, House Committee Approves Defense Fund For Democrat Accused Of Child Molestation
Megan McArdle: The Spectacular Greed & Stupidity Of Team Trump
Mark Steyn: That Dress, Twenty Years On, also, Trump, Trudeau, & Trade

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Category: Linkagery

Another Illegal Alien Kills a Woman

Posted on | August 22, 2018 | Comments Off on Another Illegal Alien Kills a Woman

This time in Minnesota:

The man charged with fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend in the Shakopee apartment they once shared before slashing his own throat has a criminal history that led to his deportation to Mexico as an illegal immigrant several years ago, federal officials said Tuesday.
Enedelia Perez Garcia, 27, died in the apartment on Aug. 12 from “multiple stab wounds all over her body,” according to a second-degree murder charge filed Monday against Fraider Diaz-Carbajal, 35.
Garcia was killed late that afternoon during an argument at the residence in the 1200 block of Taylor Street, roughly 5 miles west of the Shakopee home where she moved to about a month ago, police said.
Diaz-Carbajal was treated at the scene for his wounds and hospitalized in critical condition. He was booked into jail Monday. . . .
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesman Shawn Neudauer said Diaz-Carbajal has on his record three drunken-driving convictions and another for domestic assault against Garcia. A federal immigration judge in December 2012 ordered him deported to Mexico, and ICE officers carried out that order two days later, Neudauer said.
“Since then, he illegally re-entered the United States, which is a felony,” the ICE spokesman said.

But never mind. “Diversity is our strength.”

Category: Immigration, Minnesota, Violence Against Women