In The Mailbox, 01.24.18

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox, 01.24.18

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Fish Rot From The Head, And So Does The FBI
Twitchy: Politico Says Dems Willing To Drop DREAMers From Budget Agreement
Louder With Crowder: Scared? Cecile Richards Leaves Planned Parenthood As FBI Closes In
Quillette: Privilege-Checking The Privilege Checkers (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Leg Cutting Soars Amongst Millenial Youth, also, What Women Want
American Power: Border Patrol Arrests Radical “No More Deaths” Activists, also, The Prosperity Paradox
American Thinker: The Sinking Of The FBI
Animal Magnetism: Road Trip Totty III
BattleSwarm: FBI Amazing Coincidence Theater
CDR Salamander: A Slippery Toehold In Syria
Da Tech Guy: NFL – Let’s Listen Together, Except For AMVETS, also, Who Can Investigate The Investigators?
Don Surber: What We Saw In Trump That They Didn’t See
Dustbury: One Apple, Polished
The Geller Report: Unsealed FISA Court Ruling Shows 85% Of CErtain Obama-Era FBI/DOJ Searches Were Illegal, also, In Canada, Accused Terrorists Hired As “Anti-Radicalism Consultants”
Hogewash: I’m So Old…, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: FBI Blames Samsung For Losing Conspirators’ Texts; Media Attacks Trump For Pointing This Out
Joe For America: Judge Sentences Dr. Nassar To 175 Years For Sexual Assault On Olympic Gymnasts
JustOneMinute: If You’re Having Trouble Becoming Alarmed…
Legal Insurrection: Will Giving Ex-Con Felons The Vote Turn Florida Blue? also, Trump Reminds “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” DACA Negotiations Must Include A Wall
Michelle Malkin: Home Schooling Is Not A Crime
Power Line: Today’s Classroom Lesson – Demystifying Opinion Polls, also, The Clinton Investigation Revisited
Shark Tank: Tax Reform Working – Disney To Hand Out $125 Million In Employee Bonuses
Shot In The Dark: Dave’s Not Here
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Checking In With Worried States
The Jawa Report: Who’s Interests?
The Political Hat: Tech’s Convenient Double Standard Of Employee Behavior
This Ain’t Hell: The News You’ve Been Waiting For, also, Camels Disqualified From Saudi Beauty Pageant
Victory Girls: Oscar Nominations Are Here – Movies Glorifying Statutory Rape, Anti-Trump Media Nominated
Weasel Zippers: Trump “Looking Forward” To Interview With Mueller, also, Democratic Mayors Defend Sanctuary Cities
Megan McArdle: We Get It, Netflix, You’re Big. But Don’t Be Bad.
Mark Steyn: Hump Day

Featured Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Ursula LeGuin, RIP

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | Comments Off on Ursula LeGuin, RIP

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Not going to lie: I didn’t care much for Ursula LeGuin’s writing. Had to read The Left Hand of Darkness in college, and it was okay, but “The Word For World Is Forest” was crap, and “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” was vile. After that, none of what she wrote looked interesting to me, so I missed out on the Earthsea books. Still, she was a good writer, and won some awards back when those awards meant something, and if she wasn’t to my taste, well, neither were Hemingway and Waugh, and that’s just the way it is.
In other news, Jon Del Arroz got blacklisted from Worldcon this year for…well, the reasons kept changing and finally wound up being “‘Shut up’ they explained,” as is usual with SJWs. At this point, any conservative or libertarian going to Worldcon should really reconsider. Why are you giving money to people who -at the very least- don’t respect you? As if that wasn’t enough, SFWA promptly shot themselves in the foot by rejecting Jon’s membership application, for no better (apparent) reason than “He’s a meanie and he says bad things!” Well, as our Supreme Dark Lord has observed, SFWA is fully converged, infested with crazy cat ladies, and not doing anything to help actual authors. Richard Paolinelli is starting a new organization, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Creators’ Guild as an alternative to SFWA, and I wish him well.
While we’re on the topic of alternatives, if you haven’t signed up with the National Fantasy Fan Federation yet, why not? Public (non-voting) memberships are free!

So much for the news – on to the books!

Speaking of Jon Del Arroz, I picked up For Steam And Country during my spring semester book-buying binge, and a nice little adventure it is. Airships! Magic! Cute (and not so cute) little Ruritanian kingdoms! Last but not least, a (sometimes) heroic farm girl who discovers her swashbuckling destiny and the wild family history she never knew. It’s a fun little romp, and I am waiting to see what trouble Baroness von Monocle gets into next.

Marko Kloos’ Points of Impact, the sixth book in the chronicles of the Lanky War, brings us into a new phase of that war. Humanity has new ships and new weapons, good enough to beat the aliens in space – but as our hero Andrew Grayson and his hot pilot wife find out in a return to the icy colony of New Svalbard, that may not be enough to win the war, or even force a stalemate. Good story, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Robert Heinlein’s classic Starship Troopers was on sale for $1.99 on the Kindle, and I snapped it up. Yes, I have several paperback copies, but I’m not sure where those are, and I wanted to read it again now. It hasn’t lost anything with age, and is still driving ignorant leftists crazy.

Something I haven’t been able to bring myself to finish is The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee. It’s the biography of a young woman who grows up in North Korea, and while it starts off pleasantly enough, as she gets older she becomes more aware of the ongoing horror story she’s living in. I read books like The Theory And Practice Of Hell and The GULAG Archipelago when I was younger with great avidity, but now I find myself unwilling to slog through the descriptions of real-life horror.

On a much more cheerful note, there is Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Manga Of Tidying Up, which is just what it says on the label. There are parts of the method I’m not totally on board with, which mainly have to do with the Japanese Shinto belief that everything, even inanimate objects like books and clothes, has a spirit, and one should express gratitude toward those books and clothes before putting them out of your life. If nothing else, it’s inspired me to get going on cleaning up my apartment, which badly needs it.

What are you reading that’s good?

Category: Books

Democrats in Disarray and Denial as Schumer Shutdown Exposes Weakness

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | 2 Comments

Rich Lowry analyzes Sen. Schumer’s miscalculations:

The press wasn’t hostile to the Democrats over the shutdown, but it wasn’t uniformly compliant, either. The Left objected to a headline on a New York Times news alert right after the shutdown vote on Friday night: “Senate Democrats blocked passage of a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open.” It’s not clear how a remotely honest news writer could have described it any other way.
If the media couldn’t be counted on to be on board, neither could everyone in the party. In what is a persistent temptation for Democrats, Schumer forgot that the rest of the country doesn’t regard Trump with the deep disdain and abiding alarm of the coasts and the major metropolitan areas. The party still has senators in red states that the president won handily who can’t afford to indulge in anti-Trump flights of fancy. Five of them defected on the initial shutdown vote and more would have broken with Schumer if the shutdown had endured.

(Via Hot Air; hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Democrats are so accustomed to “uniformly compliant” media coverage that they don’t realize how little support they have outside the deep-blue zones of “deep disdain” for President Trump. As a result of Schumer’s disastrous miscalculation, conservatives now have “momentum” on immigration, and the Democrats’ failed shutdown strategy may have paved the way for the enactment of Trump’s “get-tough” border agenda.

Even Crazy Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN agrees: “Trump World and WH sources dancing in end zone: Trump wins again…Schumer and Dems caved…gambled and lost.” Thank you for your honesty Jim!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 23, 2018

Remember just a couple of weeks ago, a Yale University “expert” was claiming Trump was suffering from dementia, but who is really demented, Trump or the left-wing kooks who obsessively hate him? Trump has repeatedly outwitted his Democrat opponents, defeating Hillary despite all the “experts” who said he couldn’t win, producing an enormous surge in the economy (the exact opposite of what Paul Krugman predicted), pushing through tax cuts (from which more than 70% of Americans will see lower federal taxes) and now humiliating Senate Democrats over the DACA shutdown. Predictably, the losers are playing the blame game, further proving how out of touch they are:

The shutdown is over, and the consensus is emerging. The Democrats lost. They capitulated after getting little more than carefully worded promises from Mitch McConnell. The progressive blame game is under way, complete with accusations of cowardice that read very much like the recriminations following the GOP’s last shutdown in 2013. But there’s one explanation I’d like to discuss — not because it’s necessarily the consensus view but because it echoes sentiments I hear all the time. Believe it or not, there are those on the left who tell themselves that they lose because they’re just too darn nice. . . .
Progressives see themselves as tolerant, open-minded, and eager to engage with critics. . . .
Yet this is precisely the opposite of the way conservatives experience and perceive progressive culture. Yes, of course there are progressives who “yearn for inclusion, civility, and dialogue,” but there are also progressives who despise conservatives, attempt to silence conservative voices, and systematically exclude conservatives from the “dialogue” they allegedly crave. . . .
No, Democrats aren’t losing because they’re “too nice” or because they yearn for dialogue. The better explanation is that they’re losing in part because their own incivility and rage drive millions of Americans to the polls to vote in perceived self-defense. Their own incivility and rage falsely escalate too many political disputes to matters of life and death. What’s the argument after claiming that Republicans are intentionally killing people? Is there a rhetorical step beyond that?

Democrats don’t want “dialogue.” Democrats want power. They will tell any lie necessary to obtain that power, and their constant demonization of their scapegoated enemies — “sexist! racist! homophobe!” — is just partisan propaganda. The Democrat Party’s rhetoric of deranged hatred deceives their ignorant followers, but they eventually alienate everyone honest enough to look at the actual facts, and intelligent enough to perceive the likely result of Democrat policies. Americans do not want their country to become an impoverished socialist nightmare like Venezuela. Americans can see how the Democrats have wrecked California by providing sanctuary to millions of illegal aliens. Everyone can see what Democrats want to do to the rest of America, which is why Donald Trump won by standing up to tell the Democrats, “No.”

This is what the Left cannot bring itself to admit, that they have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Their friends in the media are trying desperately to conceal this failure, to distract Americans from the reality of (and reasons for) the Democrats’ shutdown debacle. But dishonesty is not good policy, and denial is not wise strategy.

Category: Budget, Congress, Democrats, Donald Trump, Immigration

Deborah Frisch Yelled Anti-Asian Insults During Arrest, According to Police Report

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | Comments Off on Deborah Frisch Yelled Anti-Asian Insults During Arrest, According to Police Report

Deborah Ellen Frisch, Ph.D., after her Jan. 5 arrest in Bend, Oregon.

Deborah Frisch was “uncooperative” and shouted racial slurs when she was arrested in Oregon earlier this month, according to a police report. Frisch, a former university professor who was wanted on a fugitive warrant from Colorado, became “extremely hostile and belligerent” when police confronted her at Bend City Hall.

“I had prior knowledge that Frisch had an outstanding warrant (full extradition) out of Colorado and that she had been uncooperative with police officers in the past,” Officer Cynthia Ksenzulak wrote in her Jan. 5 report. Frisch, 56, is a former psychology professor charged with two felonies in Colorado related to her harassment of conservative blogger Jeff Goldstein. Frisch was already on probation in Oregon for prior crimes in Colorado when she fled to Oregon after failing to appear at a scheduled hearing for charges of stalking and attempted bribery. She was arrested in November in Bend, but released from custody in December.

According to Officer Ksenzulak’s report, Frisch “referred to me as ‘Kung Pao Cunt’ and kept saying that she was going to resist and that we were going to have to use force on her”:

Frisch used a lot of racial epithets towards the Asian culture and called assisting officers, “Pork chops and pigs.” She screamed at the top of her lungs and then tried to fall to her back. I held her upright so that she did not lay directly onto her handcuffed hands.
Frisch continued to scream and yell. Due to her assaultive and threatening behavior, we placed her in a [restraining harness] without incident. I assisted in escorting her to a patrol vehicle by holding onto and lifting her left side upper body. During this entire time, Frisch did not stop yelling racial epithets toward me.

So much for Frisch’s “progressive” politics, eh? She faces an extradition hearing Thursday on the Colorado charges and another hearing Jan. 30 on misdemeanor charges related to the arrest incident.

(Hat-tip: @tehdailysqueak on Twitter.)

Category: Crime, Oregon, Protein Wisdom

In The Mailbox: 01.23.18

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.23.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Republicans! You Won A Battle – Now Go Win The War
Twitchy: Kurt Eichenwald Declares America Dead Of Hatred & Tax Cuts
Louder With Crowder: NFL Refuses Veterans’ Ad Asking #PleaseStand
City Journal: Water From The Sands (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Fake News, Fake Restaurants, & Fake Ratings Websites
American Power: Officials Start Clearing Out Homeless Encampment Near Anaheim Stadium
American Thinker: Illegals With Drivers’ Licenses Eligible To Vote In California After April 1
Animal Magnetism: Road Trip Totty II
BattleSwarm: Turkey Invades Syria To Crush Kurdish Forces
BLACKFIVE: Lynette Eason, Oath of Honor
CDR Salamander: The Once And Future Arab Spring
Da Tech Guy: Democrats Played The Old Campaign Finance Game, Bluffed On DACA And Lost, also, The Great Twisting
Don Surber: “DACA Is Not A Bargaining Chip, It’s A Wedge”
Dustbury: One Banana
The Geller Report: Canadian Muslim Charged In Five Shootings, Including Four-Year-Old, also, Outrage As Multiple London Properties Only Offered To Muslims
Hogewash: Orbiting A Black Hole, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: #ShineboxSchumer Listened To The Resistance – And Lost Badly
Joe For America: Furious Progressives Slam Democrats, Especially Schumer, Over Shutdown Cave
JustOneMinute: This Is A Surprise?
Legal Insurrection: Lynch/Clinton Tarmac Meeting Now Makes Sense – It Was The End, Not The Beginning, also, “Dreamers” Furious Over Shutdown Sellout Now Protesting Democrats Around The Country
Michelle Malkin: Littlest Open-Borders Lobbyists Vow To Tear Down America’s Walls
Power Line: Trump Routed The Democrats On The Shutdown. What’s Next? also, Civil War On The Left, Part 53 – Riot Of The Cavemen
Shark Tank: Rep. Moraitis To Lead Embattled Broward County GOP
Shot In The Dark: “You Guys Are Lucky I Don’t Know How To Build A Bomb”
STUMP: New Jersey – Running Out Of Money And Options, also, The Return Of Punitive Psychiatry In Russia
The Jawa Report: Where’s Dr. Rusty? Strippers & Blow Edition
The Political Hat: News Of The Week
This Ain’t Hell: First Female Enlisted Marine To Retire Dies, also, The Gospel According To John Moses Browning
Victory Girls: Trump Admin Tells States Feel Free To Defund Planned Parenthood
Weasel Zippers: New CA Policy Opens Door To Illegal Immigrant Voting, also, Top Half Of Taxpayers Paid 97% Of Individual Income Taxes Collected In 2015
Mark Steyn: MSNBC’s House Genealogist, also, “So What You’re Saying Is…”

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Amazon Outlet Deals

Category: Linkagery

Transgender Dominatrix Speaks at Vancouver Women’s March

Posted on | January 23, 2018 | 1 Comment

As if Third Wave feminism hadn’t already jumped the shark, last weekend’s Women’s March in Vancouver was the ne plus ultra of postmodern gender theory gone mad:

Speaker Hailey Heartless recounted how she did not feel comfortable attending the march last year as a trans woman and a sex worker, as well as the hate she received for being announced as a speaker this year.
“Stigma is weaponized to keep us out of feminist spaces,” said Heartless. “[Sex workers] are not victims … Sex work is real work — we face stigma when outsiders call us prostitutes … and we face stigma from laws that take away our agency.”
But she is hopeful that this will not be the case for next year’s march.
According to their Facebook event, March On Vancouver “uses an inclusive definition of ‘woman’ that includes trans women, gender queer women, two-spirited and non-binary people.”

“Hailey Heartless” is a tall, stocky transgender dominatrix who charges $250 an hour for sessions in his/“her” BDSM torture “dungeon.”

We must keep in mind that (a) the Women’s March originated as a protest against President Trump’s inauguration, (b) Vancouver is in Canada, and therefore (c) WTF are they protesting about? Nobody expects logic from Canadians, of course, and if their “inclusive definition” can include “Hailey Heartless” as a feminist, protesting an American election in Vancouver is small change in their oxymoronic calculations.

Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who is actually a woman, was enraged by the idea that “Hailey Heartless” speaks for women:

A little over a week before the Women’s March was to take place in Vancouver, BC, March On (the organization that put on the event this year) announced one of the speakers would be “Hailey Heartless” (legal name Lisa Kreut), a male dominatrix. Women everywhere expressed shock and anger at this choice — this was, after all, a march for women, initially stemmed by Donald Trump’s presidency, intended to build solidarity among women, support our reproductive and human rights, and challenge misogyny and male violence against women. Why on earth, then, would it be appropriate to have a male promote prostitution and sexualized violence at the event?
March On Vancouver promptly blocked all of those questioning this decision on Twitter, making very clear that not only was this not up for debate or discussion, but that women troubled by their choice of speakers were not welcome at the march.

The BDSM transgender dominatrix’s speech was . . . uh, interesting:

When you welcome us into your spaces, and allow us to be open and honest, you’ll find that we have so much knowledge to bring you, and not just about how to have amazing sex.
We can teach you life skills, like how to take amazing selfies, how to use bitcoin, how to build a following on social media.
We can teach you lessons about yourself, like how to practice excellent hygiene, how to do amazing contouring for low light venues, or how to practice radical self care.

Do Canadian women need hygiene lessons from “Hailey Heartless”?

WTF, Canada? You have a feminist protest against our President, and your idea of an “empowering” speaker for this occasion is a transgender weirdo who offers $250-an-hour sado-masochism dungeon service?

Category: Canada, Sex Trouble

Guys: Don’t Date Abby Nierman

Posted on | January 23, 2018 | Comments Off on Guys: Don’t Date Abby Nierman

When I wrote a long article about “Grace,” the 22-year-old who accused comedian Aziz Ansari of sexual assault, I guessed from textual clues that she was a student at New York University, an elite private school where the annual cost of attendance is $68,128. A rich girl, right?

Wrong. In fact, my guesswork was unnecessary, as “Grace” had already been identified as Abby Nierman, who attended a community college in northern Illinois before enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2016. Also, I had guessed that “Grace” was very good-looking, because she attended the 2017 Emmy awards as someone’s date:

If you’ve got tickets to the Emmys, do you invite an ugly girl as your date? No, of course not. We can assume Grace is quite a looker, and one with lots of Daddy’s money.

Talk about getting it wrong! It’s embarrassing to admit how badly wrong I was, but let this be a lesson: Speculation is not journalism.

So instead of being a spoiled-rotten Daddy’s girl attending a $68,128-a-year elite school, she’s the ambitious small-town striver who worked her way through a trade school with a variety of jobs. And while I don’t wish to derogate her looks, she’s not magazine-cover beautiful.

Abby Nierman attended the Emmys as the date of Ibanda Ruhumbika, who plays tuba in the band on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” And that’s why guys should be warned: Don’t date Abby Nierman. She went to the show with Ruhumbika, but during the after-party, she was making eyes at Aziz Ansari across the room. She eventually gave Ansari her phone number, which is how she ended up going on a date with him a few weeks later. Mick Jagger wrote a song about girls like her:

All classic rock-and-roll songs are now “rape culture,” of course, but what are we to surmise from Abby Nierman’s behavior? Aziz Ansari probably figured, “Well, if she dates tuba players . . .”

Readers may have noticed that Ms. Nierman’s feminism is, as the Gender Studies majors would say, intersectional. Free-speech advocates might defend the use of some other adjectives (and perhaps a few derisive nouns) to describe Ms. Nierman, but really, why give the SPLC any further pretext to accuse us of Thoughtcrime? Let’s just say she’s a “composite” girlfriend and leave it at that. However, others haven’t been so reticent or tactful in criticizing Ms. Nierman’s intersectional feminism: “How a White Woman Destroyed a Brown Actor’s Name.”

You forgot to include the word “trash,” sir. I’ll notify the SPLC.

Category: Celebrities, Sex Trouble