The Other McCain

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

University Teacher @LarsMaischak Advocates Death for President Trump

Posted on | April 9, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

Lars Maischak teaches history at Fresno State University and hates all 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump:

Tweets from a Fresno State lecturer Lars Maischak not only demonstrate stark disagreement with capitalism, Christianity, and the GOP, but also a declaration that President Trump “must hang” to save democracy. . . .
Other tweets on Maischak’s profile demonstrate the ideology behind statements about Trump hanging and explain why universities across the country are now viewed with disdain by average, salt-of-the-earth Americans.

 

 

(Via Memeorandum.)

Lars Maischak’s hatred is not merely opposition to Donald Trump, but expresses his contempt for all Republican voters. That is to say, Maischak advocates a one-party government with the totalitarian power to suppress dissent, and he is employed by the Democrat-controlled government of California to teach this attitude to his students at Fresno State. As might be expected, when critics call attention to Maischak’s totalitarian worldview, he dismisses his critics as illegitimate.

 

 

 

Anyone who votes Republican is a “fascist,” according to Lars Maischak, and anyone who criticizes him is a “troll.” To call for the hanging of the President of the United States is a “demand for justice,” because death to Republicans is synonymous with “justice,” according to Lars Maischak.

This is the kind of person that Fresno State University considers fit to teach history to recent high school graduates. Did you know, by the way, that the state of California has “nearly $400 billion in unfunded liabilities and debt”? Did you know that California “is projected to run a $1.6-billion deficit” in the next fiscal year? It would seem that the government of California needs to reduce its expenses, and perhaps the taxpayers of California could get by with one less teacher at Fresno State.

But I’m probably a “fascist troll” for thinking this way.



 

 

Category: California, Education

‘Hate’ as a Synonym for ‘Republican’

Posted on | April 8, 2017 | 4 Comments

Pam Vogel works for the George Soros-funded group Media Matters.

The crude propaganda of the Democrat Party’s media machine isn’t likely to become any more nuanced and subtle anytime soon:

Exposing The Anonymous Right-Wing
Billionaires Behind Campus Hate
A handful of largely anonymous right-wing billionaires are using shady funding mechanisms to spark hate on college campuses—but, armed with the facts, campus activists can fight back to expose them.
College campuses have long served as unique places for the free exchange of ideas, but increasingly they’ve also become playgrounds for ideologically driven billionaires and the dark-money groups they fund. These groups range across the ideological spectrum from mainstream conservatism to so-called “alt-right” and far-right extremism to unadulterated hate, but they have one thing in common: They’re all funded by the same handful of purposefully anonymous donors.
These groups often use DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund—anonymous funding mechanisms that pool billions from wealthy individuals and then donate the money to right-wing causes while avoiding creating any public connection back to the donors. This echo chamber may hide behind the noble ideas of free speech or individual rights, but the reality is that it’s creating a friendly environment for hateful ideas to spread—and it’s putting students in danger. . . . .

You can read the rest of that at the Ms. Magazine website, but you get the point. Anything that is not liberal is labeled “hate,” and anything which is not about promoting the Democrat Party is “right-wing” or “far right.” Any appearance on a college campus by anyone associated with conservative or Republican (i.e., “far right”) political ideas is funded by “right-wing billionaires,” and this “hate” is “putting students in danger.”

The Left deliberately encourages this simple-minded intolerance, demonizing their political opponents, even while they accuse Republicans of “extremism,” “hate” and being “ideologically driven.” But yeah, let’s talk about shady billionaires with political agendas . . .

 

Category: Democrats

Woman Explodes in Rant Against Kissing Couple, Achieves Unwanted Fame

Posted on | April 8, 2017 | 2 Comments

OK, so here’s the set-up: A couple is waiting to order at a fast-food place in Santa Monica, California, and the guy’s got his arm around his girlfriend, affectionately nuzzling her. “Out of nowhere,” the guy explained, a woman who was finishing up her transaction at the cash register “looks at us and exclaims emphatically how inappropriate PDA was and how uncomfortable it was making her.” So the guy then kisses his girlfriend on the cheek, at which point the woman begins freaking out and the guy starts recording her on video with his phone:

 

 

The temptation to play armchair psychiatrist here is difficult to resist. Why was this lady so offended? I mean, some levels of affectionate behavior in public places may be inappropriate, but what the guy describes didn’t seem unusual for young couples and, hey, it’s Santa Monica, a beach town in Southern California. Like, chill out.

So why the freakout? Was it perhaps because the guy’s girlfriend is very attractive? Was the girl clearly enjoying her boyfriend’s affection? Did the woman freak out because of the perceived unfairness of it all? Like, “How dare this good-looking girl enjoy having her boyfriend wrap his arms around her in public, displaying how much he loves her, when nobody ever treated me that way?” Maybe that’s what it’s about.

Whatever it is, it’s not about the couple, it’s about what’s going on inside this woman’s mind, as she rants that the girl is a “prostitute,” a “whore,” etc. She goes on and on in this angry unhinged rant despite the fact that she knows she’s being recorded on video. And the payoff?

Well, they had to lock down the thread on Reddit after the woman was identified as Anna Marie Storelli, a 28-year-old Bay Area native who graduated from the University of California-Davis in 2010 and here’s where the story, as told at Turtleboy Sports, gets really weird: While she was in college, Storelli reportedly participated in a project led by Micha Cardenas that involved spending hundreds of hours immersed in the virtual-reality game Second Life. Storelli has since reportedly developed “serious mental health problems” which, among other things, led to multiple restraining orders being issued against her in 2014 and 2015. Also, it appears that Storelli has gained a lot of weight and possibly gotten breast implants since graduating UC-Davis. She has reportedly used multiple online accounts to post pornographic videos and images of herself, and was trying to get the attention of Justin Bieber.

Crazy is as crazy does, and there is every reason to believe that this woman is suffering from chronic schizophrenia, which typically manifests itself among people in their late teens or early 20s. Many of these people are highly intelligent, even genius-level, but start coming unraveled in early adulthood. Think about Ted Kaczynski, a math prodigy who graduated from Harvard at age 20 and by age 25 was teaching at UC-Berkeley. Within two years of being hired, however, Kaczynski suddenly resigned and by 1971 was living in a hut in the Montana wilderness.

The reason Kaczynski (a/k/a the “Unabomber”) comes to mind is because, like Anna Storelli, he participated in a research project while in college, one which involved a “brutal” psychological assault on the subjects’ sense of identity. Some have theorized that this experiment may have led to Kaczynski’s subsequent descent into dangerous madness, and there is another case which has long intrigued me: Valerie Solanas.

 

Solanas became infamous after she tried to assassinate Andy Warhol in 1968 and wrote The S.C.U.M. Manifesto which arguably made her the founder of radical feminism. (Some of the early radical feminists cited Solanas, and rallied to support her legal defense in the Warhol case. See Susan Brownmiller’s In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, pp. 27-28. Also see Sarah Evans’s Personal Politics, p. 209, where she notes that when Roxanne Dunbar formed a radical feminist group in Boston in 1968, “there first order of business” was reading The S.C.U.M. Manifesto.)

Breanna Fahs, a feminist professor at Arizona State University, recently published a biography of Valerie Solanas which makes clear (a) she was the product of a seriously disturbed family background, but also (b) she was a promising young student of psychology. Solanas got her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in 1958 and enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Minnesota, but dropped out after a year and began roaming around aimlessly. She turned up in Berkeley in 1960, then headed back east where she gravitated to the bohemian scene in New York’s Greenwich Village. Professor Fahs blames sexist bias for Solanas leaving grad school, but there were many women who got advanced degrees in psychology in the 1950s and ’60s, so some factor beyond mere sexism must explain why Solanas dropped out. I actually emailed Professor Fahs to suggest the possibility that Solanas was the unwitting victim of psychedelic drug research which, as is now well-known, was going on at many universities at the time. For example, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were doing experimental research with psilocybin in 1960-62 at Harvard, and Humphry Osmond used LSD in experimental treatments in the 1950s. Was it possible, I asked Professor Fahs, that somehow Valerie Solanas was involved in this kind of “research” while at the University of Minnesota? She replied that she had found no indication of that, but on the other hand, the possibility hadn’t ever crossed her mind and some of this kind of “research” was done quite secretly, funded by the Pentagon or the CIA. But I digress . . .

My point is that while this crazy woman ranting about a couple kissing in public is being regarded as a sort of joke, what apparently happened to Anna Marie Storelli is a very serious problem that affects many young people. The great psychological challenge of adolescence and young adulthood is the formation of personal identity, to develop a sense of one’s self that is stable and functional, and enables social success. Anything which disrupts this identity-formation process can have catastrophic results, leading to insanity and criminal behavior.

Read this story about Micha Cardenas using Second Life immersion in connection with his/“her” gender transition and ask yourself, “What could the effect of such a project have been on Anna Storelli?”

We are too quick to dismiss cases like this — just another kook — when closer examination may reveal important clues about how this kind of craziness develops, from which we can learn how to prevent (or at least try to discourage) such craziness from turning otherwise promising young people into dangerous maniacs who probably voted for Hillary Clinton.

What?

Oh, come on, you didn’t expect me to resist a chance for a cheap laugh like that, did you? Probably a therapist could explain my irrepressible tendency to sarcasm, but I’ve spent years avoiding psychiatrists because craziness is sort of an occupational skill for me. Otherwise, how could I possibly endure three years of researching radical feminism without becoming a gibbering lunatic? Holding onto my sanity under such circumstances requires me to keep an emotional distance from the subject matter, and my crazy sense of humor is all that has saved me so far.

But who knows? I might suddenly snap any day now . . .



 

Category: Crime, Sex Trouble

Shortly Before The Detour

Posted on | April 8, 2017 | Comments Off on Shortly Before The Detour

— by Wombat-socho


First, some administrivia: I’ll be in Minnesota from tomorrow morning through next Tuesday night, and so there will be no daily bloggage, nor will there be an FMJRA this Saturday. Rule 5 Sunday will be delayed until Sunday, April 16, when we’ll have the Easter Sunday Double-Dip Edition, so go ahead and send in your links this weekend and I’ll collect them all on the weekend after I get back.


Given that it’s tax season, I’m not getting as much reading done as usual (and still less since Block cut my pay this season, the bastards) but I am getting some done, and I have a few opinions to share. I checked John C. Wright’s Somewhither out of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and just couldn’t finish it. It’s heroic fantasy, and very well-written, but I put it down one night and never picked it up again. Your mileage may vary. On the other hand, Marko Kloos’ Fields Of Fire, is a very different kind of book, seeing as how it’s the fifth book in his Frontlines series, and it does not disappoint. Humanity is striking back at the alien Lankies, with a massive invasion of Lanky-occupied Mars with everything including the kitchen sink, but as the blurb reminds us, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Kloos may have lined up with the Puppy Kickers, and there’s an occasional guffaw-inducing moment, but by and large this is a good book and I fully intend to pay for a copy once the cash flow improves.

Also worth reading is Nick Cole’s Soda Pop Soldier, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin, a novel about a young man fighting for a soda company. It’s virtual warfare, of course, and unfortunately PerfectQuestion’s been on the losing side for a while now, which means life is hard and he has to scrape up money where he can – by fighting in the highly illegal Black. There’s also a mysterious fellow who wants to buy his help in dominating the world, the equally mysterious Grandfather, and a spy who’s selling out Perfect and his buddies. Cole does a great job of keeping all the plot balls in the air and bringing them together in a (literally) explosive climax. Five stars, will definitely be reading again. A heck of a bargain for $3.99.

This month’s blast from the past is Michael de Larrabeiti’s The Borribles, the first book in a picaresque trilogy that continues in The Borribles Go For Broke and Across The Dark Metropolis, which has the dubious distinction of having its publication delayed for fear it would exacerbate existing tensions between the police and Londoners. I suppose that technically these are urban fantasies, though there’s nothing magical in them but the Borribles themselves (and their Rumble enemies, a parody of the popular Wombles) who are street kids with elvish ears who never grow up or grow old, and live by petty theft and scrounging in the decaying older parts of London and other cities. The plot of the three novels revolves around the Great Rumble Hunt, an assault by a picked squad of Borribles on the headquarters bunker of the Rumbles with the aim of killing the twelve leaders of the Rumbles; this done, the two sequels deal with the consequences of the hunt – factional fighting between the Borrible tribes, and the rescue of Sam the horse from the bobbies’ Special Borrible Group. Worth reading if you haven’t already.


Category: Books

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | April 7, 2017 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

Joe & Rose had done thousands of shows. A living.

Of a sweltering day, they were approaching a “dangerous” point, when “Dracalcoatl, the Blood-Drinking Vampire Snake” would appear to be about to fang Rose’s helpless throat. Of course, “D” was out of range; the tension delivered by illusion.

Until Sparky in the front row let fly with a slingshot round, the steel ball grazing the snake’s head and hitting Joe in the windpipe.
Rose came up; “D” came down; her passing was mercifully brief.

Sparky, acquitted for manslaughter, subsequently had a “David/Goliath Show”, giving most of his wages to the surviors.

—
Thanks, Darleen!

Category: Friday Fiction

THE BIG STICK: Trump’s Missile Attack on Syria Is the New ‘Smart Power’

Posted on | April 7, 2017 | Comments Off on THE BIG STICK: Trump’s Missile Attack on Syria Is the New ‘Smart Power’

 

President Trump’s statement Thursday night at the White House:

My fellow Americans: On Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.
Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons. There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and ignored the urging of the U.N. Security Council.
Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically. As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies.
Tonight, I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types. We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world. We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who have passed. And we hope that as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will, in the end, prevail.

The military action:

The United States fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria overnight in response to what it believes was a chemical weapons attack that killed more than 100 people.
At least six people were killed, Syria claimed, but the Pentagon said civilians were not targeted and the strike was aimed at a military airfield in the western province of Homs.
The action completed a policy reversal for President Donald Trump — who once warned America to stay out of the conflict — and drew anger from Damascus and its main ally, Russia.

The domestic political consequences? Let’s just say Democrats will have a hard time saying Trump was wrong, considering that this was exactly what Hillary Clinton had suggested in an interview Thursday. So the President had political carte blanche to launch this attack, and finally enforce the “red line” Obama had failed to enforce against Syria.

The Obama administration talked a lot about “smart power,” but Trump actually used it. Military power is meaningless, as an instrument of diplomacy, if your would-be adversaries think you won’t use it. While it is unwise for the United States to pursue the kind of “nation-building” interventions that have characterized our post-Cold War foreign policy, neither is it wise for America to allow its international prestige to be undermined by a perception that we are unwilling to take risks. War is always an uncertain venture, and we cannot predict the consequences of military action against Syria, an ally of Russia. Yet there are also consequences of not acting, of doing nothing and thereby sending the message that your likely response in the future is . . . nothing.

“Talk softly, but carry a big stick,” Teddy Roosevelt famously said, and it is occasionally necessary to use that big stick to whack someone over the head, to demonstrate what the big stick can do.

Ralph Peters in the New York Post:

Leadership. That’s what we lacked for eight years. In the early hours of Friday morning in Syria — late Thursday evening here — our military, acting on the order of our commander-in-chief, avenged the slaughtered innocents in Syria and sent a clear message that we will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons. Well done!

We may withhold congratulations until we see what effect this strike will have, and how Trump deals with future developments. At this point, it appears Trump’s action was the smart thing to do, but we have seen in the past that seemingly smart decisions can produce bad results. Personally, I have long felt that the United States and Russia should not be enemies, and it was only Soviet Communism that created this hostility. Vladimir Putin came to power during an era when the Clinton administration had fumbled away the opportunities America had in the post-Cold War era, and Putin’s ruthlessness is well known. The accusation (made by Hillary Clinton just yesterday) that Russia interfered in the U.S. election raises the question, “Why?” And now that Trump has attacked Putin’s ally in Syria, what did Russia gain by its alleged “hacking” of the election?

As a symbolic gesture, Trump’s attack on Syria has enormous importance, but we do not know what it will mean beyond mere symbolism.

 

Category: Donald Trump, Military, Syria

Fake Hate: Guess Who Made ‘Hundreds’ of Hoax Calls Targeting U.S. Jews?

Posted on | April 6, 2017 | Comments Off on Fake Hate: Guess Who Made ‘Hundreds’ of Hoax Calls Targeting U.S. Jews?

 

Hundreds of bomb-threat hoaxes and other harassing calls have been phoned into U.S. Jewish community centers, synagogues and other Jewish organizations in recent months, but finally, law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrator of this anti-Semitic crime wave.

Neo-Nazis? No.

Radical Muslims? No.

Trump-supporting “alt-right” nationalists? No.

An autistic Israeli-American teenager:

The suspect arrested [in March] for a wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers in the United States employed an array of technologies, including Bitcoin and Google Voice, to make himself virtually untraceable for months, The Daily Beast has learned. But in the end, it only took one careless slip-up to lead police to his door.
Police arrested 19-year-old Michael Kaydar, who has joint Israeli-U.S. citizenship, at his home in Ashkelon, a coastal city in southern Israel. He’s suspected of phoning in over 100 bomb threats to JCCs and Jewish day schools in 33 states since January, with the most recent calls made [in early March]. Police also suspect him of making similar threats in Israel, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

The teenage hate-hoaxer’s parents claim that their son cannot be held responsible because he is suffering from autism and a brain tumor:

The father of the Israeli-American teen behind hundreds of hoax bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the US issued an apology “from the bottom of our hearts” to all American Jews on Monday, and stressed “there was no hatred” behind the threatening calls.
Speaking two days after the 18-year-old’s mother had blamed her son’s autism and a tumor on his brain for the hundreds of hoax calls he made, his father also said that it was “illness” that was responsible for his son’s actions. “The child is different. He is unique,” said his father, who appeared in silhouette on Channel 2 news and was identified by the pseudonym Eli. (A police gag order [on Israeli media] prevents the naming of the 18-year-old suspect, who is being identified only as “M.”) “There was no motive of hatred. The motive was illness.” . . .
In comments on Monday. M’s mother said her son has been diagnosed with autism and could not control his actions due to a tumor in his brain.
She said she was “shocked” to discover her son was behind a spate of US bomb scares and wished “I had known and could have prevented it.” . . .
The teen, whose family lives in Ashkelon, is facing charges of extortion, making threats, publishing false information and is accused of sowing widespread fear and panic.
Police say he was behind a range of threats against Jewish community centers and other buildings linked to Jewish communities in the United States in recent months, and is alleged to have made hundreds of threatening phone calls over the past two to three years, targeting schools and other public institutions in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
His mother . . . said it was clear from a young age that her son, while highly intelligent, could not function in the regular education system.
She said she was 40 when she gave birth to him, in the US, and that he had an unusually large head, and did not develop speaking skills at a normal rate, but was very good at solving puzzles and was later diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. . . .
He couldn’t cope with the formal framework of preschool education, she said. When he was about 6, the family moved to Israel, and he could not function in the school system.
The boy’s parents decided to homeschool him, and the mother gave up her job as a biochemist to care for her child from first grade through twelfth.

So, a woman who worked as a biochemist and became a mother at age 40 has a child who is, for lack of a better phrase, mentally defective. Resisting the temptation to  go off on a tangent here, I’ll just say that there are known risks of delayed childbearing, and this is one of those risks — your mentally defective child turns out to be an evil genius:

The Israeli-American teenager behind hundreds of hoax bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the US reportedly earned millions of shekels’ worth of digital currency by selling counterfeit documents over the internet.
Police suspect the 18-year-old — whose name is sealed under gag order in Israel — sold forged identity cards, passports and driver’s licenses over both the internet and the dark net in exchange for bitcoins, a cryptocurrency often used in illicit transactions online, according to a Channel 2 report Thursday. . . .
Investigators are said to have have learned of his counterfeiting activity online after discovering millions of shekels’ worth of the digital currency in his bitcoin account, and are currently working to determine who purchased the forged documents, Channel 2 reported.

This is 21st-century parenting: Your mentally defective child is such a weirdo you couldn’t let him attend school, but yeah, just let him have unrestricted Internet access, because what could possibly go wrong?

Well, we could go off on another tangent about that — why do you think feminist Tumblr is such a hellhole of craziness, huh? — but the point here is that, contrary to liberals claiming that Trump’s election spawned a wave of anti-Semitic harassment, it was just this one teenage weirdo.

 

Category: Crime, Israel, Racism

The Kaiser and the Clintonistas

Posted on | April 6, 2017 | Comments Off on The Kaiser and the Clintonistas

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana remarked, and young people today know so little about the past that they are well and truly doomed. The teaching of history has been replaced by indoctrination for progressive activism, as Jane Shaw has recently explained, which means that the more “educated” a young person is, the less they are likely to know about the past. There are patterns in history, and the more we study history, the more easily we recognize the repetition of these patterns. In the last couple of weeks, my bedtime reading has been Martin Gilbert’s history of the First World War, a book I’ve already read twice, but one thing about good books is that you can enjoy re-reading them at intervals of five or 10 years.

At any rate, while re-reading Gilbert’s book, I took note of a certain pattern that some people with bad memories are condemned to repeat:

Few things are more likely to precede defeat than the conviction that you are on the verge of victory. One hundred years ago, in the spring of 1917, Germany had every reason to believe that it would triumph over its enemies in the First World War. France had been bled white in repeated attacks on the German army’s fortified lines, England was suffering from shortages of both munitions and military manpower, and Russia was descending into a revolution that would, within a year, enable Germany and its Austro-Hungarian allies to shift enormous numbers of troops and guns to the Western Front. Yet the entry of the United States into the war on April 6, 1917, proved to be the counterweight that shifted the balance. By the autumn of 1918, the fond hope of Germany victory had been exposed as a delusion. The ultimate result of the Kaiser’s war was the destruction of the Kaiser’s empire, and of much else besides.
What is true in war is true also in politics. Hubris is nearly always the precedent to unexpected defeat. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory; less than four years later, LBJ could not even win his own party’s nomination for re-election. In 1972, Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide; less than two years later, he was forced to resign from office. More recently, after George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election, some imagined that this victory was the harbinger of a “permanent Republican majority” — a GOP electoral hegemony based on a so-called “center-right” realignment — but two years later, Democrats captured control of Congress and in 2008 Barack Obama was elected president. Obama’s success in turn led Democrats to become overconfident, and Hillary Clinton’s supporters believed they were “on the right side of history,” as rock singer Bruce Springsteen told a rally in Philadelphia on the eve of the 2016 election. Unfortunately for Democrats, history disagreed. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.



 

 

Category: Democrats, Hillary Clinton, History
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