In The Mailbox: 06.29.18

Posted on | June 29, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.29.18

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Tamra Maiochi, RIP
Twitchy: Young Turks Reporter Gets Dragged HARD By Blue Checks For Hot Take After Capital Gazette Shooting
Louder With Crowder: Net Neutrality Activist Threatens To Murder FCC Chairman’s Children
According To Hoyt: Pervasive
Monster Hunter Nation: Don’t Forget To Nominate (Somebody Else) For The Dragon Awards
Vox Popoli: Quelle Surprise

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Juggernaut Of Doom Edition
American Power: Expect Ocasio-Cortez To Be Among Congress’ Fanatical Israel-Bashers, also, “The Only Good Democratic Socialist Is A Dead One”
American Thinker: How To Humanely Reduce Unlawful Immigration And Shut Down Open-Borders Democrats
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Utter Horseshit Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For June 29
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Two Big Men At PinTastic NE
Don Surber: 84% Say Report Illegal Aliens To ICE
Dustbury: Manage This, Pal
The Geller Report: NY’s New Socialist Candidate Claims Israel Guilty Of Massacring Palestinians, also, 130 Mexican Political Candidates Assassinated In Ten Months
Hogewash: Blogsmoke, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
JustOneMinute: Newspaper Shooting
Legal Insurrection: Just Desserts – Peter Fonda’s New Movie Crashes & Burns, also, Ballotpedia Report Crushes Democrats’ Hopes For A Blue Wave
The PanAm Post: Daniel Ortega, The Butcher Of Nicaragua, also, Bloomberg Reports Opposition Leader Maria Corina Machado Is Respected By Venezuela’s Military
Power Line: How Can You Tell It’s Over For Liberals? also, Thoughts From The Ammo Line
Shark Tank: NH Gov Hassan Endorses Gwen Graham For FL Gov
Shot In The Dark: Why I Worry About The American Left
This Ain’t Hell: Jesse Iwuji Saving The World, also, Harlan Ellison RIP
Victory Girls: Suspect In Capital Gazette Shooting Had Seven-Year Personal Grudge Against Paper
Volokh Conspiracy: Congrats To Orin On The Oregon Supreme Court Computer Warrant Decision, also, Short Circuit – A Roundup Of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Weasel Zippers: Democrats Introduce Bill To Strip Workers Of Rights Won In Janus Decision, also, Tom Steyer Wants Nuclear War To Provide “Course Correction” To Trump

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Category: Linkagery

They Told Me If I Voted for Trump, Gay Men Would Be Tortured to Death …

Posted on | June 29, 2018 | 2 Comments

. . . and they were right!

At 6:20 p.m., [Skip] Chasey noticed that [Doran] George was “not reacting properly.” Upon closer inspection, he realized George was not breathing at all. He then placed a call to 911 and, according to the coroner’s report, began cutting all of the plastic and tape off of George’s body. Paramedics arrived to find George lying face-up on the ground, naked save for the heavy chain and padlock around his neck and chastity cage on his penis. (A chastity cage is a device which locks around a flaccid penis, preventing erections; only the master holds the key to unlock it, giving him control over when the wearer can get an erection.) A trash can in the corner was filled with the clear plastic and tape that had encased him. Resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful, and George was pronounced dead at 6:35 p.m. Two officers with the LAPD arrived at the scene not long after and interviewed Chasey, followed by McKibben from the Coroner’s Office.
An autopsy report filed on Nov. 22, 2017, concluded the immediate cause was “sudden death during recreational mummification bondage.”

Chasey is a top Hollywood agent. George was on the faculty of UCLA. Apparently, everybody in Los Angeles has a rape dungeon in their basement.

(Hat-tip: An Open Secret on Twitter.)

Category: Hollywood

Friday Fiction: ‘Ozzysandersous’

Posted on | June 29, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: ‘Ozzysandersous’

by Smitty

The wizened old man in a land antique,
Sat in the shade before a market ruined.
He hailed to me: “Man, what do you seek,
In the Fair Trade Bazaar of Xanaxind?”
“Some cold water, since English you speak,
If one can such in this ancient rubble find.
How must the former sights have been unique,
When time to this place was less unkind.”

“What, then? This place is glorious,
For hundreds of years a Socialist paradise.
Rectifying at a pace most furious,
That steep, unpayable capitalist price.”
“Socialist works, a despair so tortuous,
Mighty often bring with their ‘nice’.”

—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Jarrod Ramos Identified as Shooter in Maryland Newspaper Mass Murder

Posted on | June 29, 2018 | 2 Comments

When I went to sleep Thursday night, my post about the shooting at the offices of the Annapolis Capital had been updated six times, and the media had (incorrectly, as it turned out) reported that the gunman was “a white male in his 20s.” On Twitter, leftists were going crazy with speculation that somehow this atrocity was inspired by President Trump’s frequent criticism of the media’s “fake news.”

Having been through similar situations so many times — a bombing or shooting, watching people on the Internet engaging in baseless guesswork about the motive and perpetrators — I urged caution:

It is important to avoid speculation in the immediate aftermath of incidents like this. What was the gunman’s motive? We don’t know, because we don’t even know who the gunman is yet. Of course, it’s possible that the shooter had some sort of political motive, but so far we have no evidence to indicate what that motive might be.

Was it political terrorism and, if so, what kind of politics? Is the killer a radical Muslim? Or some kind of “right-winger”? That’s what such speculation is about — people trying to score political points from mass murder — and it’s distasteful, not to mention foolish.

Just wait, I always say when these things happen, and let’s get the facts first. Overnight, the facts finally emerged:

A Laurel man with a long-standing grudge against The Capital is being held as the suspect in the deadly shooting Thursday at the Annapolis newspaper, according to law enforcement sources.
Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, was charged with five counts of first-degree murder, according to online court records. . . .
In 2012, Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper and a columnist over a July 2011 article that covered a criminal harassment charge against him.
He brought the suit against then-columnist Eric Hartley, naming Capital Gazette Communications and Thomas Marquardt, the paper’s former editor and publisher, as defendants. . . .
Marquardt said he wasn’t surprised to hear Ramos identified as the alleged gunman, saying he started harassing the paper and its staff shortly after the 2011 article. The harassment escalated for years with online threats, Marquardt said.
“I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence,” Marquardt said from his retirement home in Florida. “I even told my wife, ‘We have to be concerned. This guy could really hurt us.’ ”
Marquardt said he called the Anne Arundel County police about Ramos in 2013, but nothing came of it. He consulted the paper’s lawyers about filing a restraining order, but decided against it.
“I remember telling our attorneys, ‘This is a guy who is going to come in and shoot us,’ ” he said.
Ramos’ aunt Vielka Ramos, 59, said she couldn’t believe he was the suspected gunman. She said her nephew had a good childhood, growing up in Severn, and attended Arundel High School.
“He was very intelligent. He would try to communicate with people but he was a loner,” she said.
After his grandmother died several years ago, she said, he stopped attending family gatherings. She had not talked to him in several years, the aunt said.
“He was distant from the family. He just wasn’t close to anybody,” she said.
In the 2011 column about the harassment charge, Hartley identified Jarrod Ramos as a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employee with no previous criminal record and a degree in computer engineering.
The harassment case centered on an online relationship Ramos tried to kindle with a former high school classmate. Hartley’s column said Ramos sent a friend request on Facebook to the woman, and the experience turned into a “yearlong nightmare.” Ramos allegedly wrote the woman and said she was the only person who ever said hello to him or was nice to him in school.
Ramos then allegedly called her vulgar names and told her to kill herself, Hartley wrote. He allegedly emailed the bank where she worked to get her fired. Ramos pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor harassment charge, receiving probation from a judge who called his behavior “rather bizarre,” the column said.
Ramos’ subsequent defamation suit against The Capital worked its way through the Maryland courts until 2015, when the state’s second-highest court upheld a ruling in favor of the newspaper.

This guy was a cliché, a stereotype of a deranged loner, and he should have been locked up in a lunatic asylum or a prison. Because I’ve had to deal with this kind of psycho — in 2013, I was one of the defendants in a baseless defamation suit, and in 2016, a guy who targeted my family for SWATting was sentenced to federal prison — I have repeatedly warned readers: Crazy People Are Dangerous.

Nothing is more dangerous than the delusion of victimhood which is so typical of sociopathic personalities. No matter how obvious it is that they are responsible for their own personal problems, sociopaths refuse to accept responsibility, instead engaging in rationalizations that shift the blame to their scapegoated “enemies” who, in reality, are just innocent law-abiding citizens who had the misfortune of attracting the sociopath’s attention. The former high-school classmate who became the object of Ramos’s fixated obsession was the first target of the sociopath’s dangerous craziness, and he might have continued stalking her forever, had Eric Hartley not distracted him by writing about the case:

The victim, who asked that her name not be printed, said she lived in fear for her safety for months. The emails started in late 2009 or early 2010 — she can’t remember exactly, because it was only a few months later that they grew disturbing and she started documenting things. At first, she felt bad for him, so she shared some personal information and offered advice.
“But when it seemed to me that it was turning into something that gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, that he seems to think there’s some sort of relationship here that does not exist … I tried to slowly back away from it, and he just started getting angry and vulgar to the point I had to tell him to stop,” she told the judge. “And he was not OK with that. He would send me things and basically tell me, ‘You’re going to need restraining order now.’ ‘You can’t make me stop. I know all these things about you.’ ‘I’m going to tell everyone about your life.'”

Crazy People Are Dangerous, and one of the things a sociopath can’t stand is for someone to tell the truth about their craziness. When you come to the defense of their victims — when you tell the story of the sociopath’s wrongdoing — you become the next scapegoated “enemy.”

Well, I’m sure John Hoge and I will discuss this case Saturday night on The Other Podcast. We have both had to suffer with the consequences of a notorious sociopath’s deranged pursuit of revenge.

UPDATE: Speaking of my friend John Hoge — great minds think alike — he quotes the judge who rejected Ramos’s defamation lawsuit:

“I think people who are the subject of newspaper articles, whoever they may be, feel that there is a requirement that they be placed in the best light, or they have an opportunity to have the story reported to their satisfaction, or have the opportunity to have however much input they believe is appropriate,” Judge Maureen M. Lamasney said when dismissing the case. “But that’s simply not true. There is nothing in those complaints that prove that anything that was published about you is, in fact, false.”

The truth is an ironclad defense against claims of libel, under U.S. law, where freedom of the press and freedom of speech always prevail over whatever “rights” the criminal sociopath imagines himself to possess. Some people (and Brett Kimberlin is a textbook example) seem to believe that they have a “right” to a good reputation, no matter what crimes they commit. Convicted in federal court of serious violent felonies, Kimberlin has spent decades thinking of himself as a victim, and demonizing anyone who tells the truth about him. Kimberlin has bragged about his pro se lawfare as a means of harassing anyone he targets as an enemy.

“I have filed over a hundred lawsuits and another
one will be no sweat for me. On the other hand,
it will cost you a lot of time and money . . .”

Kimberlin’s infamous reputation is well-deserved, and he should never be able to deceive any honest and intelligent person. Every American is entitled to their day in court, of course, but convicted criminals should not be allowed to use lawsuits as a weapon against people who tell the truth. Judges need to be able to impose harsh sanctions against criminals who file lawsuits like the one Ramos filed against the Annapolis Capital, or the various baseless lawsuits filed by Kimberlin. When I call someone a dangerous son of a bitch who ought to be in prison, this is defensible as the expression a personal opinion, my lawyer friends say, although I insist that I’m stating a neutral objective fact.

Category: Crime, Maryland, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 06.28.18

Posted on | June 28, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.28.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Jeffrey Toobin, STFU
Twitchy: WaPo Fact Check Torpedoes Dem/Media SCOTUS Narrative
Louder With Crowder: Whoopi Goldberg Demands Everyone “Stay Out Of Her Vagina”. Who Wanted In?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Selling Our Childrens’ Future
American Thinker: ICE At Bay – Siege At Portland Continues As Similar Insurrections Spread Nationwide
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Messed Up Mexico News
BattleSwarm: Former Democrat State Senator Uresti Gets 12 Years For Fraud, also, Brexit Now Official
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: The Left Wants YOU! As Their Next Kent State Martyr, also, Pintastic NE 2018 Starts Today!
Don Surber: Peter Fonda Joins The Trump Schadenfreude List
Dustbury: When You Shouldn’t Brag
Fausta: A Return To Civility?
First Street Journal: #TrumpDerangementSyndrome Anyone?
The Geller Report: Muslim Brotherhood Rep Hakim Muhammad (a/k/a Keith Ellison) Melts Down When Questioned About Farrakhan, also, Mike Pence Lays Down The Law To Central Americans
Hogewash: I Was Told The Attack Was Caused By A Video, also, Oumuamua Speeds Up
JustOneMinute: Going South Of The Border For Some Fake News
Legal Insurrection: CA Supremes – Bullet Stamping Law Survives Despite Being Impossible To Comply With, also, UMass Will Continue Offering “Resistance Studies” This Fall
Michelle Malkin: The #AbolishICE Fringe Is Now The Democrat Party Center
The PanAm Post: Nurses Strike In Venezuela – The Complete Collapse Of The Healthcare System
Power Line: Rod Rosenstein – It Ain’t Me, Babe, also, House Vote Adds To Pressure On DOJ
Shark Tank: Republican Immigration Bill Fails
Shot In The Dark: I Hate To Indulge In Schadenfreude
STUMP: SCOTUS Doings – Public Employee Union Dues And Justice Kennedy
The Jawa Report: Where’s Dr. Rusty? Down Under Edition
The Political Hat: Unwoke – Problematic Horse, Oppressive Bell, And Non-Heathen Leadership
This Ain’t Hell: Military Religious Freedom Foundation v. U.S. Navy Hospital Okinawa, also, Thursday Morning Feelgood Stories
Victory Girls: Laura Ingalls Wilder No Longer Acceptable Because Identity Politics And Racism!
Volokh Conspiracy: Say Goodbye To The Kennedy Court
Weasel Zippers: Ocasio-Cortez Calls For Raising Taxes To Fund Socialist Policies, also, SC Man Pleads Guilty To Lying About Military Service; Collected $200K From VA
Megan McArdle: Behold The Priest-Kings Of The Future Supreme Court
Mark Steyn: Extreme? I’ll Show You Extreme

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Category: Linkagery

The Worst People in the World Are in Charge of Our Public Education System

Posted on | June 28, 2018 | Comments Off on The Worst People in the World Are in Charge of Our Public Education System

Recent news from the Department of Stupidity and Corruption:

Lest you thought we were finished with tales of unfathomable incompetence on the part of Broward County, Florida, authority figures, consider this: The first Marjory Stoneman Douglas security guard who spotted Nikolas Cruz on campus and took no action to detain him was previously suspended for sexually harassing students.
Due to his inaction during the shooting, Andrew Medina was initially reassigned to an administrative position elsewhere in the Broward County school system. But on Tuesday, the superintendent finally decided to terminate his employment.
Medina worked as an unarmed security guard at Stoneman Douglas. In 2017, a disciplinary panel recommended that he be fired for sexually harassing two female students. (One of those students, Meadow Pollack, was later killed in the shooting.) But school officials decided to suspend Medina for three days instead, according to CBS News.
On the day of the shooting, Medina was the first school official to spot Cruz — who was no longer welcome at the school, and known to be a threat. He did not confront Cruz, and apparently failed to realize that Cruz was armed. He took no action, other than radioing another unarmed security guard, David Taylor, to inform him that Cruz was headed his way. When the shooting started, Taylor hid in a janitor’s closet, according to The Sun Sentinel. He was initially reassigned as well, but has now been fired.
Unlike School Resource Officer Scot Peterson — who also proved to be incompetent — neither Medina nor Taylor were armed. But if Medina wasn’t aware that Cruz was armed, he should have pursued him. If he was aware, but was afraid to approach, at the very least he should have made a “code red” call. He did not.

This incompetent “security monitor” is 39 years old:

According to records obtained by the South Florida SunSentinel, Medina, who is also an assistant baseball coach, asked one girl to go on a date and another said he made lewd comments to her and said he wanted to visit her at work. Broward County Schools investigators say one of the students’ stories was corroborated by surveillance video of Medina approaching her in a hallway on Feb. 16, 2017.
According to [Meadow’s father] Andrew and [her brother] Hunter Pollack, Meadow was one of the girls. They said Medina would call Meadow, then 17, “beautiful and sweetheart,” making her uncomfortable. They say that when her boyfriend confronted Medina, Medina threatened him. Meadow and her mother then reported Medina, they said.
Hunter Pollack said the other girl told him Medina made comments about her body and invited her over to his house for drinks.
“If I knew at the time, he would have been fired right away,” Hunter Pollack told CBS Miami. “It’s very unacceptable that the school board allowed this pervert to say stuff to my sister and other girls.”

Yeah, you’re a 39-year-old guy hired to protect kids at a high school, and instead you’re making moves on 17-year-old girls. When the girls complain, the school system only gives you a three-day suspension and then you don’t bother calling cops when a notorious psycho shows up on campus and kills everybody. Public education is so excellent!

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Education

UPDATED: At Least Five Dead in Shooting at Annapolis, Md., Newspaper Office, Suspect Is a Young White Male

Posted on | June 28, 2018 | 1 Comment

Breaking news from Maryland’s state capital:

A shooting has occurred at the Capital Gazette in Anne Arundel County, a paper that is owned by The Baltimore Sun, according to reports from Gazette staff.
Anne Arundel County Police confirmed there was an “active shooter” at 888 Bestgate Road, where the newspaper’s offices are located. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed it was responding to a “shooting incident” at the Gazette.
Phil Davis, a Gazette reporter, said that multiple people had been shot. Police did not immediately respond to requests for further information.
Police were also at The Baltimore Sun newsroom in Baltimore. Police said there was no threat on the Sun, and that their presence was a precaution.

UPDATE: CBS News:

A law enforcement source confirms to CBS News’ Jeff Pegues that there are injuries.
An aerial view shows a massive police presence and people being led out of a building with their hands raised. Medevac helicopters could also be seen responding.
White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters says President Trump has been briefed on the shooting and “our thoughts and prayers are with all that are affected.”

CNN says sources tell them one person is in custody, although it is not clear whether this is the shooter, and the motive is still unknown.
UPDATE II: Annapolis is about 30 miles south of Baltimore, which is one of the most violent cities in America:

Baltimore has set a new per-capita homicide record as gunmen killed for drugs, cash, payback — or no apparent reason at all.
A surge of homicides in the starkly divided city resulted in 343 killings in 2017, bringing the annual homicide rate to its highest ever — roughly 56 killings per 100,000 people.

Baltimore is second only to St. Louis for highest per capita murder rate. Whether this has any relevance to the shooting in Annapolis, I don’t know, but the point is that six people are murdered during an average week in Baltimore, without ever attracting national media attention, but this shooting at an Annapolis newspaper office is all over CNN.

UPDATE III: Fox News reports:

Multiple deaths were confirmed in Maryland on Thursday after a suspect opened fire outside of the Capital Gazette’s newsroom in Anne Arundel County — as journalists covering the terrifying scene inside their building.
The suspect was apprehended, Sheriff Ron Bateman told Fox News, but local police confirmed news of an “active shooter situation” on Twitter. The FBI’s Baltimore field office has responded to the scene.
Amid the shooting, reporters and employees for the local newspaper continued to do their jobs.
Anthony Messenger, an intern for the news outlet, tweeted of an “active shooter” at 888 Bestgate — the office building of the Gazette. “Please help us,” Messenger wrote.
Reporter Phil Davis detailed more information of what happened in his newsroom online, writing: “A single shooter shot multiple people at my office, some of whom are dead.”
“Gunman shot through the glass door to the office and opened fire on multiple employees,” he said. Davis said that while he couldn’t give a conclusive number of fatalities, “it’s bad.”

UPDATE IV: In a news conference at the scene, authorities confirmed “several” fatalities and “several” wounded. The suspect is in custody and “is being interviewed by detectives.”

UPDATE V: According to CBS News, the shooter is a white male in his 20s who wasn’t carrying any identification and refused to tell authorities his identity. At least five people are dead, while the number of wounded has not been confirmed.

UPDATE VI: CBS News adds further details:

The suspect accused of killing five people in a shooting at a Maryland newspaper had damaged the tips of his fingers in an apparent attempt to thwart efforts by police to identify him by his fingerprints, a law enforcement officials tells CBS News. Authorities said the suspect is a white male in his 20s who they have not yet identified. . . .
The suspect did not have identification on his person. He’s described as having long hair. A law enforcement source says authorities are using other means of identifying him, including facial recognition technology to search databases of passports and driver’s licenses.
A law enforcement source said he carried smoke bombs or flash bangs in his backpack. Police said he used a “long gun” in the shooting, which a source said was a shotgun.
CBS News has also learned the gunman opened fire through the glass door into the newsroom. Eyewitness told authorities the shots sent reporters and other employees under desks and other hiding places.
Pegues reports that investigators will be trying determine the suspect’s motive. They will try to recover the suspect’s electronic devices — if there are any — and to see if he has any social media accounts.

Category: Crime, Maryland