The Wages of #FakeNews?

Posted on | November 11, 2017 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

I find it difficult to believe that respectable news publications would buy stories.

WaPo paid the women to smear Moore. pic.twitter.com/4Xy2RPT22X

— L Butler (@LauraButler6) November 11, 2017

No, wait: I don’t find it difficult at all.

Category: Uncategorized

A Little Due Process For Roy Moore

Posted on | November 11, 2017 | Comments Off on A Little Due Process For Roy Moore

by Smitty

The allegations of impropriety alleged in the WaPo against Roy Moore are a big deal. We can rehearse the power arrangements, the difficulties that victims face in pursuing justice against people in positions of power. But let’s throw in a word for due process.

Twice in my life I’ve had allegations levelled at me. Once, on active duty, I returned to a training installation where I’d previously had a girlfriend. Some months after I had departed on orders, I got a “Dear Smitty” letter. I’d left an item with her as an “do wait for me” token, and did retrieve it, along with a “Leave me alone” note. I also got a warning call from the police, informing me of her allegation that I was “stalking” her. I doubt that any reasonable observer of either gender (or any of the more recent ones) would in any way fault the substance of any of my conduct any toward her at any time. More likely, I would have drawn laughter. I also got to explain the entire embarrassing situation to my training command. It was somewhere between embarrassing and humiliating. Hopefully, her life has gone well in the decades since.

The other time, fresh off of active duty, a pregnant minority female on an IT project alleged in an email to HR that she had gone into labor and delivered her baby prematurely due to stress brought on by the harassment she received from me (the assistant project manager). Again, I don’t think that any reasonable jury would have found the slightest substantial (or even stylistic) quibble with our interaction. Nevertheless, our legal system is not about justice. I immediately sought a professional transition. Subsequently, I guess she did take the company to court. I’m not sure of the final details, but the company is pretty much a memory now. Hopefully her life is a good one and her family is healthy.

The point of those tales is that allegations are stressful, even when groundless. If there was a crime in Roy Moore’s past, it should be brought to light, and let the voters of Alabama judge whether this Judge merits a Senate seat. On the other hand, there is a non-zero possibility that, even though Roy Moore went to West Point and not UVA, the WaPo story is sheer hogwash of Rolling Stone proportions.

Were it true that the WaPo allegations against Roy Moore were unfounded, the unfounded allegations would be about as despicable as the crime Moore is alleged to have committed. I do hope Roy pursues legal relief from the WaPo if he is innocent.

Category: Uncategorized

In The Mailbox: 11.10.2017

Posted on | November 10, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.10.2017

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #71
EBL: A Terrible Supreme Court Decision – Wickard v. Filburn
Twitchy: Dems Aim For Roy Moore, Accidentally Put Bill Clinton Back In the Spotlight
Louder With Crowder: Sean Astin Weighs In – “I Believe Corey Feldman”
According To Hoyt: In The Name Of The Underclass
Monster Hunter Nation: MHI Savage Worlds RPG Kickstarter Update – Funded In Three Hours, also, Stretch Goal – Exclusive Challenge Coin Reveal & Pledge
Vox Popoli: The Fiend Roy Moore

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Infestation Edition
American Power: Thomas Ricks Reviews Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars, also, Joseph Wheelan, Midnight In The Pacific
American Thinker: WaPo Says Fake Hate Is Rare, And Other Fairy Tales
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Stupid Lyrics Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For November 10, also, Fat Leonard Probe Expands
Bring The HEAT: Marine Corps Birthday
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Lather, Rinse, Repeat, also, Steve Bannon Adds Context To The Roy Moore Story At Manchester Speech
Don Surber: China To Invest $84 Billion In West Virginia, also, Why Should We Believe The Washington Post?
Dustbury: Headed For 1 Terabolivar
The Geller Report: France Strips Le Pen of Parliamentary Immunity, Prosecution For Posting ISIS Videos To Follow
Hogewash: Blogsmoke, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Deported “Dreamer” Arrested Trying To Re-Enter U.S.
Joe For America: New GOP Tax Bill Slashes Subsidies For NFL
JustOneMinute: Does Roy Moore Have A Neighbor?
Legal Insurrection: Joe Biden Thinks He Was Most Qualified Person To Run In 2016, also, Lawsuit – BDS Engineered Takeover Of American Studies Association
Michelle Malkin:
Power Line: Thoughts From The Ammo Line, also, Chain Lightning
Shark Tank: Trump Continues Victory Lap Over Hillary, Democrats
Shot In The Dark: Catch And Release, also, And Here You Go
The Jawa Report: Hamza Bin-Laden’s Desperate Call To Revive Al-Qaeda’s Relevance, also, Jihad Jack Captured By Syrians
The Political Hat: Broken America
This Ain’t Hell: Veterans Day From Mike Royko, also, RIP John Hillerman
Weasel Zippers: Imam Says It’s Okay For Muslims To Eat Infidels, also, FBI Supervisor’s Gun Stolen From Hotel Room After Night Of Drinking With Strippers
Megan McArdle: Keep Your Dark Chocolate, And Your Unearned Sense Of Superiority
Mark Steyn: Snowflake Werewolves!

The Supreme Soviet Of Love – See Red
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Category: Linkagery

The Catfish Sports Writer: ‘Ryan Schultz’ Is a Lesson in Social-Media Deception

Posted on | November 10, 2017 | Comments Off on The Catfish Sports Writer: ‘Ryan Schultz’ Is a Lesson in Social-Media Deception

“Ryan Schultz” was a sports writer for the digital age, in which anyone with a laptop can be anything they want to be on the Internet. According to his profile, Schultz was a married father of two children, working as a pharmacist and also writing about his love of baseball.

None of that was true, but nobody bothered to check Schultz’s credentials or else they would have noticed, inter alia, that the university Schultz claimed to have attended didn’t offer a pharmacology degree. This is a cautionary tale for the Social Media Generation:

For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way.
On Wednesday night, a woman named Erin tweeted a series of screenshots announcing that Schultz is not actually Ryan, a married father of two studying to become a pharmacist. Instead, Schultz is a 21-year-old college student in the Midwest, whose entire career as an aspiring baseball writer has been under a fraudulent byline.
Schultz began contributing to Baseball Prospectus’s local White Sox blog at the end of the 2016 season and wrote for BP South Side and BP Wrigleyville throughout the 2017 season. Additionally, Schultz wrote for the SB Nation sabermetrics site Beyond the Box Score throughout 2017.
People who knew Ryan Schultz online say that in retrospect, some of his behavior seemed odd, but no one expected that this moody White Sox fan from Missouri would actually be a teenage girl. . . .

You can read the rest of that and ask yourself, “Why would women let themselves get emotionally involved with this online persona?”

This is the aspect of the Ryan Schultz saga which deserves careful scrutiny, if we are to understand its larger significance. When we meet human beings in real life, we immediately assess them on a superficial basis — what they look like, their mannerisms of speech and behavior. Are they tall or short, fat or skinny, old or young, ugly or beautiful? And, arguably most important of all, are they male or female?

People who claim to believe that “gender” is “socially constructed” have obtained a cultural ascendancy in recent years in large measure because the Internet has become a playground for such make-believe, giving plausibility to the idea that men can be women and vice-versa. However, as critics of The Transgender Cult have pointed out, this belief is as phony as Ryan Schultz’s pharmacology degree.

Beyond that, however, the tale of Ryan Schultz shows that men and women are different in how they typically use the Internet. Why were so many women willing to interact with Schultz in a way that made them vulnerable to harassment and manipulation? Why did Becca Schultz believe she could get away with using her online persona in this way? Was she engaged in a “monkey-see, monkey-do” imitation of male behavior? Did she exploit her own knowledge of female psychology to create a male persona that would be especially appealing to a female audience? And didn’t her success in this endeavor prove something?

Sigmund Freud once famously asked, “What do women want?” And if you consider how easily Becca Schultz used her baseball-expert male persona to collect an online harem of female admirers, you find some answers to that question. Women want men who are successful, confident and — this is a crucial factor — desired by other women.

By making her baseball expert “Ryan” married with two children, Becca Schultz conveyed what PUAs called “pre-selection,” the advantage enjoyed by men who, by virtue of already having a wife or girlfriend, are validated as a desirable mate in the eyes of other women. Becca Schultz says she originally created “Ryan” with the idea that an adult male would be taken more seriously as a baseball writer than would a 13-year-old girl. But I don’t believe that explanation because (a) it is obvious that Schultz is a pathological liar, and (b) within a year of creating her online persona, she had gotten herself into an online “relationship” with a woman. In other words, Becca Schultz is a lesbian who decided to engage in a sort of virtual transgenderism because she wanted to attract women who would relate to her the way heterosexual women typically relate to men.

While your mind races ahead to the psychosexual insights this exposes, let’s quote some more of the Deadspin story about Becca/“Ryan”:

“I wanted to be a sportswriter,” she said, “but I was young and thought that the only way people would notice me is if I was the stereotypical guy. So I chose a name that was similar enough to mine, and I went with it. It was fine and probably would’ve been over a year or two later if I hadn’t ‘met’ Alex [a woman with whom “Ryan” developed an online relationship]. I was young and had no idea what to do, so I just acted like I thought a man would do. That slowly led me down a path to some things that I was very uncomfortable doing but didn’t even realize were happening. At the time I still probably had the valid excuse that I was young. But things started to get serious, and I had no clue how to dig myself out of the hole I was in.”

The pathological liar Becca Schultz would have us believe that it was just a coincidence that, while masquerading as a “stereotypical guy” online, she attracted the romantic interest of a college girl. Although the Deadspin article uses pseudonyms for most of Schultz’s victims, I’m going to guess that “Alex” was relatively good-looking — better-looking than any girl Becca Schultz would have been able to attract if she had pursued a lesbian relationship in real life. Think about that.

As I say, there are many psychosexual insights exposed by this story, but I’m sure the commenters will have their own thoughts to share, so I won’t bother to expound on my theoretical interpretation just now. Instead, I will remind readers how often I have warned against online dating:

Research indicates a male-female ratio of 3-to-1 on OKCupid, and women users say that 80% of the men on OKCupid are “below average” in looks. Of course, these men are also below average in intelligence, because in real life the male-female ratio is 1-to-1, so an average guy actually lowers his chances of success by dating online, where the odds are always against him. This is why there are no decent guys on OKCupid. If a guy was decent, he’d already have a girlfriend or, at least, he’d be sufficiently optimistic about finding a girlfriend in a real-life face-to-face encounter that he wouldn’t bother with OKCupid. Because the available pool of men in online dating is such a notorious swamp of inferior quality, only women who are truly desperate for companionship would sign up for OKCupid.

Finally, I’ll impart this bit of wisdom: Anything that seems too good to be true is probably neither true nor actually good.

Category: Sex Trouble

Can Roy Moore Still Win?

Posted on | November 10, 2017 | 1 Comment

By now, I’m sure every reader is familiar with the news. The Washington Post reported Thursday that in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when Roy Moore was a lawyer in his early 30s, he pursued relationships with three teenage girls, the youngest of whom was 14 at the time. This would seem to be fatal to Moore’s hopes as the Republican candidate for Senate in next month’s special election in Alabama. So far, Judge Moore has adamantly denied the accusations, but the Post article is more convincing than Judge Moore’s denials. Is there any hope at all?

Judge Moore has made the Ten Commandments, and the defense of Christian moral standards, the central theme of his career. This scandal, involving his alleged sins more than 30 years ago, must surely seem to Judge Moore as a divine chastisement to try his faith. Indeed, he is like David confronted by the prophet Nathan: “Thou art the man.”

The day of judgment is at hand, as it were, and surely Judge Moore and all who support him must be praying in great earnestness now.

If what the Post reported is true, Judge Moore must account for his behavior, no matter how painful the accounting might be. And it occurs to me that the people of Alabama are also on trial here. While they await further explanation from Judge Moore, they must consider what they will do — how they will vote — depending on what happens over the next month. Alabama is more or less the buckle of the Bible Belt, and this scandal puts to test their willingness to forgive sin (as Jesus commanded), even as it tests Judge Moore’s own character.

It would take a miracle for Judge Moore to be elected, but Alabama is full of people who believe in miracles. Last night, Steve Bannon addressed the scandal in a speech in New Hampshire that my friend Da Tech Guy covered (there’s video), and Bannon’s belief is simple: Keep fighting.

Indeed, there is nothing else we can do now but fight — and pray.

Category: Alabama, Election

In The Mailbox: 11.09.17

Posted on | November 9, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.09.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Last Minute Scandal Attack
Twitchy: Bill Nye’s Reddit AMA Didn’t Go So Well For “The Science Guy”
Louder With Crowder: CMAs Parody Trump’s Twitter Habit, Hillary’s Book

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Charlie Sheen, You’re Going To Burn In Hell
American Thinker: Down The Memory Hole – Obama Stole The 2008 Primary With The DNC’s Help
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Grandstanding Windbag News
BattleSwarm: Texas News Roundup For November 9
CDR Salamander: Trumpism Without Trump? No, Trumpism-Light Without Hillary
Da Tech Guy: Roy Moore, The WaPo, And The Problem With An Untrustworthy Press, also, I’ll Never Forget When My Life Ended
Don Surber: Draining Foggy Bottom, also, People Who Cannot Condemn Roy Moore
Dustbury: Top Election Coverage
Fred On Everything: Kidporn, And A Suggestion, For Which I Will Probably Be Lynched
The Geller Report: Citizens Outraged At San Diego City Council For Declaring “CAIR Day”, also, UK “Loses” 56,000 Muslim “Migrants” Slated For Deportation, Including 700+ Ex-Cons
Hogewash: Why Do You Think They Call It Dope? also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Woman Confused That She Can’t Buy Fries At Taco Bell, Blames Racism
Joe For America: Forty Journalists Reveal Their Election Night Meltdowns
JustOneMinute: Mowing The Lawn, Digging Up Dirt
Legal Insurrection: All Signs Point To Attack On Senator Rand Paul Being Politically Motivated, also, Man With The Supposed “Dirt” On Hillary Disappears
Power Line: Sabotage At USA Today? also, The Blabbermouth Angle (2)
Shark Tank: House Bill Filed To End Diversity Visa Program
Shot In The Dark: Stage IV Pauline Kael Syndrome
STUMP: Public Pension-Related Ballot Measures…and Results
The Jawa Report: Good News! Only 583 Years Left! also, The Key
The Political Hat: The Modern Academic – Unbound From The Constitution, Decentered From English, Pledged To Goodthink
This Ain’t Hell: Appeals Court Overturns Sniper-Urinator Verdict, also, Dems Fooling Themselves Over Election Results
Weasel Zippers: George Soros Continues To Quietly Pile Up Wins In District Attorney Races, also, Watch Liberals Scream At The Sky On Election Anniversary
Megan McArdle: What If Taxes Could Make Divorce Even More Painful?
Mark Steyn: Bagmen And Media Suckups, also, Bray New World

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Category: Linkagery

REPORT: Charlie Sheen Raped 13-Year-Old Actor Corey Haim on Film Set in 1986

Posted on | November 9, 2017 | Comments Off on REPORT: Charlie Sheen Raped 13-Year-Old Actor Corey Haim on Film Set in 1986

A shocking allegation from The National Enquirer:

HIV-infected Charlie Sheen is finally being unmasked by The National ENQUIRER as a twisted child molester — the ruthless adult rapist who child star Corey Haim said sodomized him and pushed him down a drug-fueled path to an early grave!
What’s more, The ENQUIRER’s five-year probe into Haim’s tragic and untimely death at age 38 also unearthed other disturbing accounts of Sheen preying on more children connected to the 1986 film “Lucas” — when the predator, 19, sexually abused then 13-year-old Haim.
“Haim told me he had sex with Sheen when they filmed ‘Lucas,’” Dominick Brascia, a former actor and a close friend of the “Lost Boys” legend, exclusively told The ENQUIRER. “He told me they smoked pot and had sex. He said they had anal sex. Haim said after it happened Sheen became very cold and rejected him. When Corey wanted to fool around again, Charlie was not interested.”
But Brascia said Haim claimed he hooked up with the “Wall Street” star another time — when he was in his mid-to-late 20s. “Haim told me he had sex with Sheen again,” Brascia told The ENQUIRER. “He claimed he didn’t like it and was finally over Sheen. He said Charlie was a loser.”
Brascia is just one of more than 100 people, spread across ten states, contacted by The ENQUIRER as part of its exhaustive probe. His horrid account — after 30-plus years of self-imposed silence — matches those of dozens of other sources who also told The ENQUIRER that Haim named Sheen, now 52 and considered a pariah in Hollywood, as his abuser before he died of pneumonia in 2010.
Brascia’s testimony is specifically backed up by a longtime Sheen confidant, who told The ENQUIRER — on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussion — the “Platoon” bad boy admitted to a liaison with Haim, but insisted it was consensual. A third individual — a convicted child sex offender — told The ENQUIRER Haim revealed sordid details about the Sheen incident when they worked together on “Lost Boys.”

For the record, Charlie Sheen has “categorically” denied it, but what else do we expect him to do? Since we’re on the subject of Charlie Sheen, however, did anyone even suspect Sheen was bisexual until he admitted he had HIV? No, of course we didn’t. But now that we do know, doesn’t it seem like Sheen’s outrageous “bad boy” behavior — dating porn stars and hookers, etc. — might have been overcompensation? A charade?

Remember that in her 2006 divorce filing, Sheen’s ex-wife Denise Richards said that, among other things, he was into “gay pornography also involving very young men who also did not look like adults.”

Also, remember when Sheen wanted the President to die?