The Other McCain

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

The Few, the Proud, the Normal

Posted on | August 21, 2018 | Comments Off on The Few, the Proud, the Normal

 

A concern for operational security prohibits me from bragging too much on my son’s achievements, but I suppose people can count the stripes and figure out that his military career is going pretty well. He serves in what is routinely called an “elite” unit. In the 21st century, however, merely being in the military is kind of elite, considering how the quality of young civilians has been declining:

In April, Trump followed up on his pledge by signing a defense bill that . . . called for an increase in the military’s size in 2018 by adding 20,000 new personnel — including 7,500 more soldiers, 4,000 more sailors, 1,000 new Marines, and 4,100 more airmen.
Senior military officers, and particularly Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley, celebrated the increase. . . . So it is that the Army set its 2018 recruiting goal at 80,000 soldiers. Initially, at least, Milley’s target seemed modest, reachable. It wasn’t.
In April, the Army revised that number — downwards. Instead of recruiting 80,000, it announced that it would recruit 76,500 new soldiers. But even that number might be too high, as the Army notes that it’s recruited only 28,000 in the first six months of the year. The problem, it seems, isn’t that young people don’t want to join the Army — or any of the services — it’s that they can’t. And therein lies a paradox: for while the U.S. military represents the best in America (as its most senior officers claim), it doesn’t actually represent America. For that to be true, two thirds of our military would have to consist of obese, under-educated former drug users and convicted criminals.
Here’s the arithmetic: one in three potential recruits are disqualified from service because they’re overweight, one in four cannot meet minimal educational standards (a high school diploma or GED equivalent), and one in 10 have a criminal history. In plain terms, about 71 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds (the military’s target pool of potential recruits) are disqualified from the minute they enter a recruiting station: that’s 24 million out of 34 million Americans. The good news is that while the military takes pride in attracting those who are fit, educated, law abiding, and drug-free, they’re having difficulty finding them — manifestly because fewer of them actually exist.
Then too, of the pool of remaining potential recruits, only one in eight actually want to join the military, and of that number, fully 30 percent of those who have the requisite high school diploma or GED equivalent fail to pass the Armed Forces Qualification Test (the AFQT), which is used to determine math and reading skills.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) I’ve always thought of my kids as normal — healthy, red-blooded Americans — but our ideas of what is normal will have to be re-calculated, if two-thirds of young people are either too fat or too stupid to qualify for military service. Nowadays, most kids are far below the previous average, and the old “normal” is the new “elite.”



 

Category: Military

In The Mailbox: 08.20.18

Posted on | August 21, 2018 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Did Leonardo Da Vinci Foresee John Brennan?
Twitchy: So, What’s Sarah Jeong Up To Lately?
Louder With Crowder: ESPN President Demands Less Politics on Channel – “It’s Not Our Job”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Thinker: First They Came For Alex Jones
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
BattleSwarm: What If You Gave A Netroots Nation And Nobody Came? also, Judge Ellis Tells CNN To Get Stuffed
CDR Salamander: Eight Months As The Under – On Midrats
Da Tech Guy: Trump Forces IC Elite To Squeal, also, Report From Louisiana – More Loose Thoughts
Don Surber: CNN’s Jury Tampering, also, Trump Stands Up For Free Speech – Newspapers Don’t
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, It’s Just Not Fare
The Geller Report: South Africa Farm Seizures Begin, also, Iranian-Backed Sleeper Cells In The U.S.
Hogewash: Messier 104, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, Bonus Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
JustOneMinute: Fakest News Yet, also, Who & What’s Behind The Big McGahn Leakage To The Times?
Legal Insurrection: John Brennan – When I Accused Trump Of Treason, I Didn’t Mean Treason-Treason, also, RNC Breaks Fundraising Record Again – $14.2 Million In July
The PanAm Post: UN Asks Brazil To Disregard Law, Allow Lula’s Candidacy
Power Line: Ellison Off The Brink, also, What To Make Of The WH Counsel’s Cooperation With Mueller
Shark Tank: Florida’s Unemployment Rate Drops To 3.7%
Shot In The Dark: This Is Your DFL Candidate For Attorney General
STUMP: Chicago Stupidity
This Ain’t Hell: Admiral McRaven Compares President Trump To Joe McCarthy, also, Corporal With 73 Years Time In Grade Finally Makes Sergeant
Victory Girls: Ex-CIA Chief Michael Hayden Joins The Virtue-Signalers
Volokh Conspiracy: Can There Be Capitalism Without Racism?
Weasel Zippers: Chelsea Clinton Hasn’t Ruled Out Running For Office – A “Definite Maybe”, also, Chelsea Handler Defends Al Franken, Says Groping Is Not Sexual Assault
Megan McArdle: Elizabeth Warren Wants To Make Americans Their Own Boss. Good Luck.
Mark Steyn: Dawn’s Early Light, Eighteen Months On, also, Think


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Category: Linkagery

No Masculinity Allowed!

Posted on | August 20, 2018 | Comments Off on No Masculinity Allowed!

 

Last year, Brown University’s football team posted a 2-8 record, going 0-7 in conference play to finish dead last in the Ivy League. Brown lost 34-7 to Cornell and 53-0 to Princeton. The anemic quality of Brown’s football program is a testimony to the pathetic weakness and effeminacy of the school’s male students, and improvement seems unlikely:

Brown University is working to help its male students “unlearn” and “unpack” their masculinity.
A program at the Ivy League institution provides “safe spaces for men to unpack all of the things they have learned about masculinity and what it means to be a man,” according to its website.
“Rigid definitions of masculinity are toxic to men’s health,” campus officials state online under the heading: “Unlearning Toxic Masculinity.”
“Men will often resort to violence to resolve conflict because anger is the only emotion that they have been socialized to express,” the website states. “Unfortunately, the way that young men are conditioned to view sex and their need to be dominant and have power over others also contribute to instances of sexual assault and other forms of interpersonal violence on college campuses.”
To help combat that, the program promises to provide “safe spaces for men” to facilitate conversations to combat so-called toxic masculinity. . . .
PJ Media reported in April that at least eight students were hired to facilitate these workshops. . . .
“The goal is to help those socialized as men to unlearn some of the notions that have led to such profound harm being enacted toward others and toward themselves,” the program’s website states.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Probably none of the “interpersonal violence” at Brown involved their football players learning to block or tackle.

Other universities have weight-training programs for their football players; Brown has an anti-masculinity program for theirs. It costs $67,439 a year (including room and board) to attend Brown, a “safe space” for wimps, where no masculinity is allowed on campus.



 

 

Category: The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent

David Horowitz Schools Jonah Goldberg: #NeverTrump as Moral Cowardice

Posted on | August 20, 2018 | Comments Off on David Horowitz Schools Jonah Goldberg: #NeverTrump as Moral Cowardice

After a Twitter quarrel that made headlines, David Horowitz decided to make his case against the #NeverTrump crowd at greater length:

The posture of these NeverTrumpers is transparently self-serving. It preserves their intellectual credentials as “conservatives,” and simultaneously takes them out of the line of fire from an increasingly vicious Left whose goal is to destroy Trump and his presidency, and — incidentally — conservative America. Sitting on the fence affords them new career opportunities — appearances on CNN and MSNBC and columns in the New York Times. All that’s required is that they avoid taking sides in the political war that is engulfing the country. All this reminds me of a memorable Trotsky sneer about liberals, whom he accused of being reluctant to step into the stream of political conflict because they were afraid to get their moral principles wet. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Politics is a team sport. In a two-party system, being a team player often forces us to make difficult choices. After the 2012 GOP primary campaign, when I twice went “all-in” on candidates (first Herman Cain, then Rick Santorum) trying to stop Mitt Romney as the “It’s His Turn” establishment candidate, it was understandably difficult for me to get fired up for Mitt’s fall campaign. And yet, I did. By late September, I’d convinced myself that Mitt had a good chance of beating Obama and, even though Romney was by no means my idea of a conservative, I spent the final weeks of the campaign in cheerleader mode, hoping against hope that Obama could be prevented from getting a second term. Alas, we were “Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption,” as I declared after Mitt’s loss.

That experience taught me something, namely that my efforts as a journalist to “make a difference” were futile. The primary voters had their own opinions which I was unable to influence, so I vowed to ignore the 2016 primaries and let the voters hash it out for themselves. This yielded Trump as the nominee and, rather miraculously, he won. Now, however, all the GOP pundit types who’d gone all-in trying to prevent Trump’s nomination are so butthurt about their lack of influence that they can’t get over it. They are like petulant children, ruining a birthday party with a tantrum because they didn’t get the gift they wanted.

Trump is not “my guy.” I have always been for free trade, and oppose protectionism on principle. As for Trump’s tone and temperament, I share many of the concerns of the #NeverTrump crowd, but there is one thing I like very much about Donald Trump: He wins.

You cannot argue with success, unless you would prefer failure. That’s the problem with Jonah Goldberg, et al. If they cannot win with their preferred candidates and tactics, they would rather not win at all. Trump’s success demonstrates a weakness in the “respectable” brand of conservatism the #NeverTrump crowd would prefer.

Horowitz is exactly right that we are in a “political war,” one inaugurated by the Left, in which there are only two sides, and where the consequences of defeat would be disastrous. We have already suffered too much damage from the Left’s war against basic American values and, as a practical matter, conservatives cannot hope to continue the fight unless we can maintain the momentum of winning that began with Trump’s shocking upset victory on Nov. 8, 2016.

My prediction? Trump will keep winning. He has so far defied all expectations. If he can do it again this fall, rescuing congressional Republicans from the dreaded “Blue Wave” in the midterm elections, the #NeverTrump crowd will become permanently irrelevant. Selah.



 

Category: Donald Trump

Rule Five Sunday: Barbi Benton

Posted on | August 20, 2018 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Did you know that one-time Playboy model Barbi Benton was a regular on Hee Haw for several seasons? I didn’t. She also had a decent career as a country singer. Here she is, out standing in her field.

Couldn’t find her overalls.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick Of The Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #349, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. Animal Magnetism offers Rule Five Vermont WTF and the return of the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s herd of Rule Five links includes Laraine Day, The Color Purple, Cochineal & Carmine, Aretha Franklin, Keith Ellison’s Girlfriend, Indigo, Aretha Franklin RIP, Saffron, Katherine Cunningham, and A New Species Of Waterbear.

A View From The Beach brings us The Outlander – Caitriona Balfe, Fish Pic Friday – Spanish Mackerel, Repugnant Russiagate, Chill Out For Another Wet T-Shirt Thursday, R is for Russiagate, SJWs Find Actress Too Cute, Insufficiently Lesbian for Batwoman Role, Blade Runner Babe Busted for Burglary, Can We Conquer Canada Now?, DeBlasio Sought to Block Jennifer Hudson from Going to School, Death Metal Grandma, Recoiling from Russiagate, That’s One Way to Change a Point of View, I Suppose, and Rejoicing in Russiagate.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Carice van Houten, his Vintage Babe is Laraine Day, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Victoria’s Secret. At Dustbury, it’s Halle Berry and Omarosa.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

Guilt by Association: White House Ditches Aide for Speaking at 2016 Conference

Posted on | August 19, 2018 | 3 Comments

 

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a white nationalist?”

A speechwriter for President Donald Trump who attended a conference frequented by white nationalists has left the White House.
CNN’s KFile reached out to the White House last week about Darren Beattie, a policy aide and speechwriter, who was listed as speaking at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club Conference.
The Mencken Club, which is named for the early 20th century journalist and satirist whose posthumously published diaries revealed racist views, is a small annual conference started in 2008 and regularly attended by well-known white nationalists such as Richard Spencer. The schedule for the 2016 conference listed panels and speeches by white nationalist Peter Brimelow and two writers, John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg, who were both fired in 2012 from the conservative magazine National Review for espousing racist views.
Other speakers from the 2016 conference are regular contributors to the white nationalist website VDare. Jared Taylor, another leading white nationalist, can be heard at the conference in 2016 on Derbyshire’s radio show along with Brimelow.
The White House, which asked CNN to hold off on the story for several days last week declined to say when Beattie left the White House. Beattie’s email address at the White House, which worked until late Friday evening, was no longer active by Saturday.
“Mr. Beattie no longer works at the White House,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told CNN on Friday night. “We don’t comment on personnel matters.”
Beattie confirmed to CNN he spoke to the 2016 conference, saying his speech was not objectionable.
“In 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled ‘The Intelligentsia and the Right.’ I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely,” he told CNN’s KFile in an email on Saturday. “It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent. I have no further comment.”

In other words, there is no evidence that Beattie endorsed the opinions of anyone else who attended the Mencken Club event. Merely being at the event was considered sufficient cause to fire him. Readers will note that no such principle of second-hand guilt is ever applied to the Left. Many people in Democrat politics have associated with organizations that promote odious ideas and individuals who have committed odious deeds, but the so-called “mainstream” media goes out of its way to defend Democrats against any such claim; e.g., Barack Obama was not disqualified from office for his association with notorious terrorist leader Bill Ayers or the hate-monger Jeremiah Wright. It is only Republicans who must “vet” their schedules to ensure they can never be connected to anyone with an opinion that Andrew Kaczynski would deem offensive.

Here’s the thing: On the issue of immigration, there is no important difference between Peter Brimelow and Michelle Malkin, and on the issue of affirmative action, there is no important difference between Jared Taylor and Ben Shapiro. That is to say, those deemed “white nationalists” by the Left do not fundamentally disagree with mainstream conservatives on major policy issues involving U.S. race relations. The differences are principally a matter of rhetoric, and also one of attitude.

In general, the “white nationalists” are pessimistic about the prospects of improvement through the normal channels of partisan politics, and believe that we are likely headed toward a racial crisis in America that may be more violent than the breakup of Yugoslavia. Twenty years ago, while mainstream conservatives were preoccupied with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, men like Brimelow, Derbyshire and Taylor were already prophesying some of the effects of racial tensions that led to Trump’s astonishing 2016 election victory. Why, after all, was Obama able to win North Carolina twice, yet Hillary lost the state in 2016? Couldn’t this have something to do with the #BlackLivesMatter riot in Charlotte, N.C., just weeks before Election Day 2016? The demographic and cultural trends of the past 20 years, which Jared Taylor and others were demonized for warning about, have arguably had the effect of making many white people less “color-blind” in their politics. And when we behold the hate-monger Sarah Jeong hired by the New York Times, we can predict that this trend is likely to intensify in the future, so that “white nationalist” views will become even more common.

The reason I put “white nationalist” in quote marks is that it has become a label used to demonize anyone the Left wants to smear. It’s used much like the way “neocon” was used as a smear-label during the post-9/11 years of the Bush administration, or the way “Religious Right” was used to smear conservatives in the 1990s. The Left always does this, although the labels used in their character-assassination campaigns change, as they shift their demonized bogeymen from time to time. If you ever decide to dig in your heels and fight the Cultural Marxists, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll come up with some excuse to smear you.

By the way, this year’s H.L. Mencken Conference is Nov. 2-3. Maybe I’ll ask my friend Paul Gottfried to clear me for media credentials.

Wait — did I just call Paul Gottfried my “friend”? Darn it, I guess I’ll never get that ambassadorship to Vanuatu now . . .



 

Category: Media Bias

Live Like a Millennial Hipster …

Posted on | August 19, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

. . . die like a Millennial hipster:

Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, both 29, last year quit their office jobs in Washington, DC, to embark on the journey. Austin, who worked for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Geoghegan, who worked in the Georgetown University admissions office, decided that they’re were wasting their lives working.
“I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige,” Austin wrote on his blog before he quit. “I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned. Too many thunderstorms went unwatched, too many gentle breezes unnoticed.”
The couple documented their year-long journey on Instagram and on a joint blog. As The New York Times put it, they shared “the openheartedness they wanted to embody and the acts of kindness reciprocated by strangers.”
“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” Austin wrote. 
“People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.”
“I don’t buy it,” he continued. “Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own… By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.”
However, Austin and Geoghegan’s dream trip came to a tragic and gruesome end when they got to Tajikistan, a weak state with a known terrorist threat that shares a border with Afghanistan, where ISIS and other terrorist groups are highly active. They were riding their bikes through the country on July 29 when a car rammed them, according to CBS News. Five men got out of the car and stabbed the couple to death along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands. 
Two days later, ISIS released a video showing the same men sitting in front of the group’s black flag. They looked at the camera and vowed to kill “disbelievers,” according to The New York Times.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Jay Austin had a master’s degree from Georgetown University, a nominally Catholic school where one might think someone would have taught him that evil is more than “a make-believe concept.” But all the money spent educating Austin and his girlfriend was wasted, as they learned nothing that might have helped them survive in a world where evil does, in fact, exist. Instead, they believed the treacly popular nonsense of dumbed-down Buddhism — all that stuff about life as the enjoyment of sunsets, thunderstorms and gentle breezes — that proliferates on the Internet.

Notice that this young couple were childless? Yeah, childlessness is part of the same cluster of values that defines the Millennial hipster lifestyle. They don’t want to have kids, they want to be kids. Childlessness enables childishness, but they rationalize this as a humanitarian do-gooder project by telling themselves that overpopulation causes global warming. They strive to avoid adult responsibilities as long as possible, so they go to grad school — a master’s degree gives you an excuse to postpone adulthood until you’re 25 or 26 — and they want life to be an endless vacation. “Let’s ride our bicycles around the world!” is the perfect Millennial hipster idea, especially when undertaken with the noble-sounding goal of proving that evil doesn’t exist and that your “fellow human beings” around the world are “wonderful and kind,” despite “holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.”

Indeed, the “values and beliefs and perspectives” of Tajikistan are different. The total fertility rate (TFR, average lifetime births per woman) in Tajikistan is 2.63, ranking 72nd in the world, according to the CIA. Women in Tajikistan have more babies than women in Bolivia or Botswana, and about 40% more babies than are born to the average woman in the U.S., where the TFR of 1.87 ranks 143rd in the world.

The total fertility rate of Lauren Geoghegan, of course, was zero. There will be no grandchildren for her parents, as is the case for so many Boomers who have indulged their offspring by sending them off to prestigious universities where they absorb the Mlllennial hipster worldview. To live a regular life, according to the hipster, is to waste one’s life “in swaths of grey and beige,” when instead you could be enjoying picturesque sunsets while biking across Tajikistan. Until you discover — alas, too late! — that evil is not a “make-believe concept,” and that maybe staying home would have been a better idea.



 

Category: Terrorism

FMJRA 2.0: Talk Dirty To Me

Posted on | August 18, 2018 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Guess Who’s Having A Baby?
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

The Party of Hate (Continued)
357 Magnum
EBL

Further Correspondence Regarding Deranged Ex-Professor Deborah Frisch
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
EBL

How @CNN and Other #FakeNews Media Are Now Working to Silence Dissent
Small Dead Animals
The Political Hat
A View From The Beach
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Fair Warning
The Pirate’s Cove
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

The Lesbian NYU Professor Who Sexually Harassed Her Gay Male Student
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.13.18
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Russia! Russia! Russia!
The Pirate’s Cove
EBL

Ruby Rose: Not Lesbian Enough for SJWs
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.14.18
Proof Positive
EBL

Sudanese Immigrant, 29, Identified as Perpetrator of London Terrorist Attack
EBL

CNN’s Chris Cuomo Goes Full Antifa
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
EBL

The Rocky Horror Democrat Party Show
EBL

The Rocky Horror Middle School Show
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.15.18
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

The ‘Deep State’ Is Real: Whistleblower Punished for Pentagon Spy Complaint
A View From The Beach

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 08.16.18
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Denver Teenager Murders Nephew, 7, After Argument With Lesbian Girlfriend
EBL

Poll Finds Most Young Women Do Not — Repeat, DO NOT — Identify as Feminists
A View From The Beach
EBL

More News About ‘Rape Culture’ That Feminists Won’t Notice, for Some Reason
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.17.18
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending August 17:

  1.  EBL (18)
  2.  A View From The Beach (10)
  3.  Proof Positive (5)

Also, a tip of the Wombat’s fedora to long-time linkers Animal Magnetism, Ninety Miles From Tyranny, The Pirate’s Hat, and The Pirate’s Cove. Every link helps!


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Category: FMJRA Award
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