The Other McCain

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

Get Woke, Go Broke: NY Daily News Cuts Staff by 50%, Fires Editor-in-Chief

Posted on | July 23, 2018 | 1 Comment

Ashe Schow delivers the schadenfreude:

For weeks now, staffers at the New York Daily News have braced for cuts. On Monday, those cuts were announced in an impersonal email. It doesn’t appear as though everyone who is being laid off even knows yet.
Tronc, which owns NYDN, sent an email to staff Monday morning announcing it would be “fundamentally restructuring the Daily News,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by the Daily Beast’s Max Tani.
“We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility,” the email said. . . .
Those who are laid off, per the email, will “be paid for the next 90 days and be eligible for transitional benefits after that.”
The biggest cut was editor-in-chief Jim Rich, who foreshadowed the layoffs in an ominous tweet Monday morning. . . .

(“If you hate democracy and think local governments should operate unchecked and in the dark, then today is a good day for you,” Rich wrote.)

He also changed his Twitter bio to read: “Just a guy sitting at home watching journalism being choked into extinction.”

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll, who somehow has not yet been “choked into extinction.”) If you don’t know why I’m happy about the slashing of staff at the Daily News, they went “all-in” on anti-Trump propaganda since 2016, and especially demonized the National Rifle Association.

They’ve been losing $30 million a year since 2014.

The ex-journalists “are now free to pursue their dream of submitting listicles for Buzzfeed,” as Ace of Spades quips.

 

Category: Journalism, Media Bias

‘I’m Literally a Communist’

Posted on | July 23, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Ash Sarkar is a 26-year-old “senior editor” for a left-wing blog who was a guest July 11 on the Good Morning Britain program as part of a panel discussing the protests against President Trump’s visit to England. She and the show’s co-host, Piers Morgan, got into a shouting match when Morgan kept pushing the point of why there had not been massive protests against Obama, when he visited England, considering the similarities between Obama’s and Trump’s policies:

Morgan repeatedly asked Sarkar where her Obama protests had taken place, speaking over Sarkar’s efforts to answer. After Morgan’s cohost, Susanna Reid, pointed out that you don’t have to take to the streets over every issue, Morgan again refused to let Sarkar explain the work she had done to protest Obama’s policies, calling Obama her “hero.”
“He’s not my hero,” Sarkar replied. “I’m a communist, you idiot.”
“Have you ever considered chairing a debate without straw-manning your guests, Piers, to make up for your own incompetence?” . . . When Morgan again labeled her “pro-Obama,” Sarkar responded, “I’m not pro-Obama. I’ve been critic of Obama. I’m a critic of the Democratic Party because I’m literally a communist.”

This outburst earned Ms. Sarkar an interview in Teen Bolshevik, the journal of the fashion-conscious Marxist-Leninist proletariat:

If anyone wanted an encapsulation of the screwiness of our times just consider the following straight question being asked of an interview subject.
‘How does being a communist impact your view of the US presidency, whether it’s Obama or Trump?’
And then consider that this pleasant question was being asked by Teen Vogue.
It was posed to a young woman called Ash Sarkar who writes for an obscure blog named Novara Media. . . .
Teen Vogue decided that she was a suitable subject for puffery, and presumably young female emulation. . . .
Sarkar and her colleagues are now (and I refuse to link to this) even trying to monetise their communism.  They have already made t-shirts available for purchase with the hilarious slogan ‘I am literally a communist’ on them.  I suppose capitalism must have its uses after all. . . .
For alarming though it is, many people when they hear ‘communism’ do not think of the NKVD and the knock on the door.  They do not think of the graves of tens of millions of people all across the globe.  The millions of wasted lives, from the wastelands of Siberia to the blackened piles of human skulls in Cambodia.  They do not think of the witness of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  Nor of Anna Akhmatova, whose husband was executed in a mass shooting and whose son was later sent off to the Gulag.

Communism being celebrated in teen fashion magazines? If that’s not enough to make you want to vote Republican, I don’t know what is.

(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas on Twitter.)



 

Category: Great Britain

‘Equality’ and the Loss of Decency

Posted on | July 23, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Maria Hernandez at Victory Girls notices that feminists are now complaining that men are being ostentatiously rude, i.e., failing to yield their seats to pregnant women on public transportation.

In the years when I routinely rode the Metro to work in D.C., I was rather astonished by the lack of courtesy. The way I was raised, no man should be seated, as long as any woman was standing. Customary deference to the fair sex — holding the door open for ladies, etc. — was habitual, something every Southern boy used to be taught from childhood, a matter of personal honor, so that I felt a sense of regret and shame when I occasionally forgot my manners and offended a woman. Of course, feminists are so easily offended that merely to exist as a male is a sin in their sight, and Rule Five turned this into a sport.

Feminism is a menace to everything good and wholesome in human life, and I make no apologies for treating feminists as earthly agents of Satan, but good and decent women should not suffer on their account.

The problem is that “equality” destroys the basis of social order. Edmund Burke prophetically warned of this in the French Revolution:

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. . . . I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. . . .
“The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!”

To whom is deference owed? What can be the basis of courtesy, if there is no recognized social hierarchy? What honor can there be in behaving like a gentleman, if women refuse to behave like ladies? Under the regime of “equality,” life becomes a scramble for advantage, a relentless power struggle — as Hobbes said, “the war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes) — and this competition makes cooperation impossible.

Antifa thugs riot to prevent campus speeches by anyone they disagree with, Maxine Waters calls for mobs to harass Republicans in public, and then feminists wonder why men are behaving so rudely?

It is our duty to future generations to resist these latter-day Jacobins and their destructive schemes of “equality.” If anything of grace and courtesy is to survive in our society, we must raise our children to be polite, but we must also teach them to oppose the forces of the Cultural Left, which are implacably hostile to the gracious and courteous life.

(Hat-tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Sunday: Alexa Davalos

Posted on | July 22, 2018 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I don’t waste a lot of time paying attention to the San Diego Comic Con, but the fact is that a lot of news about upcoming movies & TV series gets released there, and this week Amazon announced that The Man In The High Castle, the alternate-history drama based on Philip K. Dick’s novel by the same name, had been renewed for a fourth season. One of the stars of the series is Alexa Davalos, who plays Julianna Crain, one of the central characters in the series, and it seems appropriate to have her be this week’s appetizer.

Alexa Davalos as Julianna Crain in promotional art for The Man In The High Castle

We start off with Ninety Miles From Tyranny and Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #321, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. Animal Magnetism adds Rule Five Space Force Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL has the World Cup Finals (Don’t look in the stands! Don’t look at the femmefans! – FIFA), National Ice Cream Day, Kelly Reilly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, National Tattoo Day, Kelly Asbille Chow, National Hot Dog Day, Occupy Airports!, Secret Tapes, and Proscuitto Barbie.

A View From The Beach brings us Rule 5 Saturday is All About Amy Childs, Gone Fishin’, “Sweet Child O’Mine”, Wet T-Shirt Thursday,  Retrograde Russiagate, Russian Student Arrested for Colluding with NRA, Model Makes a Milk Run, The Last Straw At Starbucks and  ScarJo Submits to Transsexual Pressure.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Perdita Weeks, his Vintage Babe is Eunice Gayson, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Calvin Klein. At Dustbury, it’s Nicolette Larson and Tamron Hall.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious links!

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Amazon Fashion – Jewelry For Women

Category: Rule 5

SJWs Are Killing Comedy

Posted on | July 22, 2018 | Comments Off on SJWs Are Killing Comedy

 

Social justice is not funny and Twitchy has taken note of a rather weird article featuring a rather weird comedian:

In Hannah Gadsby’s highly acclaimed comedy special Nanette, she announces that she’s quitting comedy. Jokes are too simplistic, she says: they convert her trauma into humor and obscure the ugly truth of her story. Comedy, says Gadsby, has prevented her from evolving.
Gadsby isn’t the only comedian taking at least an occasional break from humor. . . .
Having become political comedians, they’re dropping the comedy act and becoming straightforward commentators. Why?
According to Gadsby, comedy is too simplistic a medium.

To say Gadsby’s show is “highly acclaimed” is to say liberals like it.

Gadsby is a lesbian and in her Netflix special, to quote Wikipedia, “Gadsby uses the piece to deconstruct the nature of comedy and asks the ‘straight white male’ to undergo the same tension that marginalised people go through every day. . . . She explains that some are brought up to hate themselves, while others are brought up with the license to hate others.” Oh, what a festival of fun this SJW rant must be!

Is this a comedy routine or a Gender Studies lecture? To invite an audience to your personal pity party, celebrating your victimhood — your status as a marginalized person — is stupendously arrogant. Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock never played the race card in such a manner, so why so much “acclaim” for Gadsby’s social-justice sermon? Isn’t this just about liberals feeling sorry for themselves because Hillary lost?

Ann Althouse says we’re living in “The Era of That’s Not Funny.” The only acceptable target of humor is heterosexual white male Republicans, and the only “jokes” are Democrat Party talking points.

“Get woke, go broke,” as Professor Reynolds says, but I suppose Hollywood executives won’t figure it out until they’re bankrupt.



 

Category: Hollywood

The Carter Page FISA Documents: The Steele Dossier, the Leaks, the Witch Hunt

Posted on | July 22, 2018 | Comments Off on The Carter Page FISA Documents: The Steele Dossier, the Leaks, the Witch Hunt

Here are some headlines from September and October 2016:

U.S. intel officials probe ties
between Trump adviser and Kremlin
— Michael Isikoff, Yahoo News, Sept. 23, 2016

Michael Isikoff has the latest tale
of people with questionable ties
to Russia within the Trump campaign
— Washington Post, Sept. 23, Sept. 23, 2016

Donald Trump advisor meetings
with Russian officials being investigated
— New York Daily News, Sept. 23, 2016

U.S. Officials Probe Ties
Between Trump Adviser and Russia
— CNN, Sept. 26, 2016

Who is Carter Page?
— Politico, Oct. 6, 2016

Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees
No Clear Link to Russia
— New York Times, Oct. 31, 2016

All of these articles, published in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, were the result of (a) the infamous Steele dossier, created for Fusion GPS under contract with Democrats, and (b) unauthorized leaks from within the FBI and other federal agencies. We know that senior FBI officials were biased against Donald Trump, that the Mueller investigation has made no charges of wrongdoing by Carter Page, and that “Source #1” for getting a FISA warrant for surveillance of Page was the Steele dossier:

Given that most of the application that Barack Obama’s Department of Justice submitted to the FISA court to obtain a surveillance order on Carter Page has been redacted, what we can say about the application is limited. Still, a few things stand out.
First, the FISA application expresses confidence that Page was an agent of the Russian government, and engaged in criminal activity . . .
But Page has never been charged with anything. Accordingly, the least we can say is that Obama’s FBI and DOJ were wrong.
Second, the application’s description of Christopher Steele and the provenance of his dossier was misleading at best . . .
The “identified U.S. person” is Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS. Source #1 is Christopher Steele. The DOJ’s statement that “the FBI speculates that the identified U.S person [Simpson] was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s [Trump’s] campaign” could only have been an intentional effort to deceive the FISA judge. The FBI was perfectly well aware that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC hired Simpson through their lawyers, and the purpose of doing so was to attack candidate Donald Trump. References to “speculation” about “likely” motives are entirely dishonest.
Third, the application relies to an astonishing degree on anti-Trump news stories published in the Democratic Party press. Does the FBI really get surveillance warrants on the basis of partisan press accounts? Apparently so.

FBI director James Comey and deputy attorney general Sally Yates signed the FISA warrant application, and we should therefore not be surprised that Trump fired both of them. Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller:

The dossier is the first piece of evidence cited in the FISA application section laying out the allegations that Page coordinated with Russian government officials on election-related “influence activities.”
That section cites information from “Source #1” who alleged that during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page met secretly with two sanctioned Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin, as part of a collusion scheme involving the Trump campaign.
The source appears to be Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier.
Steele also alleged in the dossier that Page worked with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to exchange information with Russian operatives. Page has vehemently denied the dossier’s allegations, and says he has never spoken to Manafort. He also says he has never met Sechin and Diveykin while denying that he is a Russian agent.
FBI officials have told Congress that investigators had not corroborated the dossier’s allegations when it was cited in the FISA applications. But the FISA application shows that the FBI and Justice Department believed Steele to be a “reliable” source. Steele has been compensated for other work by the FBI, and his intelligence has been used in other criminal proceedings, the FISA application says.

The Steele dossier and media leaks were the only basis for this surveillance, so far as we know, and more than a year into Mueller’s investigation, there has been zero evidence of wrongdoing by Page.

All of this indicates that the Obama administration wrongly targeted a U.S. citizen for surveillance, in service to a partisan effort to discredit the Republican presidential candidate, by giving a semblance of official credibility to the Steele dossier that Democrats paid for. Note that the liberal media were willing participants in all this, repeatedly publicizing the federal “probe” of the “Trump adviser” and his Russian “ties.”

This is the real “Russian collusion” scandal — the Deep State colluding with the “fake news” media in an effort to help Hillary Clinton win and, when that failed, working to sabotage Trump’s administration by creating the appearance that his victory was illegitimate.



 

Category: Corruption, Donald Trump, Media Bias, Russia

Disney Drops ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Director Over ‘Indefensible’ Tweets

Posted on | July 22, 2018 | Comments Off on Disney Drops ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Director Over ‘Indefensible’ Tweets

 

James Gunn, who directed the Disney-owned Guardians of the Galaxy superhero movies series, had recently used his Twitter account (with more than 500,000 followers) to bash President Trump.

 

Gunn’s unapologetic leftism attracted scrutiny from Trump supporters, including Mike Cernovich, who discovered and publicized Gunn’s old tweets making tasteless jokes about rape and pedophilia.

The ironic point, that Gunn had applauded Roseanne Barr’s firing from Disney-owned ABC because of her offensive tweet about former Obama White House official Valerie Jarrett, seems to have been missed by Gunn’s defenders. At any rate, Disney was not amused:

James Gunn is exiting Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
The move comes after conservative personalities resurfaced old tweets Thursday in which the filmmaker joked about controversial topics such as pedophilia and rape. Gunn has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump.
“The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him,” Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn said in a statement Friday.

There is a debate among conservatives about whether this was a good thing. Do we really want to play by the Left’s rules?

The counter-argument here is that only when the left is forced to live by the awful rules it tolerates for the right will the rules change. . . .
Maybe this is a teaching moment for the left but I sort of doubt they’ll get anything out of it. They don’t really think they’ll ever pay a price because they’re absolutely certain they are on the side of the angels (about everything). So I think the main thing to do here is to keep saying that social media mobs are a bad thing and not stop saying it just because the mob got someone on the left this time.

Streiff at Red State points out:

Hunting through people’s writings and social media comments is not something we invented. It isn’t conservatives who demand people be fired for WrongThink. It isn’t conservatives who SWAT people. It isn’t conservatives who harass kids of political targets or assault them in restaurants. But those are the new rules. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to go along with unilateral disarmament and unconditional surrender.

An important point to mention here is, Disney is the Left. Think about that. This gigantic entertainment conglomerate, a famous family-oriented brand, is controlled by people who didn’t mind hiring a guy who constantly spewed anti-Trump rhetoric on his Twitter feed. It was only when Gunn’s history of joking in ways certain to offend the feminist #MeToo mobs that he became a liability Disney couldn’t afford.

By the way, there are some who suggest that Gunn wasn’t just “joking” about pedophilia. Gunn is friends with Huston Huddleston, who recently pleaded guilty to child pornography charges.

 

Category: Hollywood

The New Totalitarians

Posted on | July 21, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

In Seattle, a green-haired “nonbinary” person attacked a teenage Trump supporter who was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.

Meanwhile, the Christian blogger Eternity Matters has been suspended from Twitter for saying transgender people are mentally ill, an assertion which just happens to be a matter of fact. Elsewhere, Baltimore Pride’s 2017 “Youth Activist of the Year,’ Kevi Smith-Joyner, went on a Facebook rant against “TERFs,” after lesbian activists were accused of “hate speech” for a protest at this year’s Baltimore Pride asserting that lesbians are women (again, a matter of fact).

Do you see the pattern here? Disagreement is “hate speech,” according to SJWs, and this justifies anything — including violence — in response.



 

Category: Culture
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