I had a GF who was hot and smart, but her best quality was her quality of being intensely present. It would disconcerted some people but I loved it. I never had to explain myself to her because she could truly listen.
The gift of my addiction is that it shows me how disconnected I am from God, others, and my true self.
Love is love.
LA TIMES: An openly gay YouTube star who said that he was brutally assaulted by three men in West Hollywood was charged Wednesday with filing a false police report.
Los Angeles County prosecutors allege that Calum McSwiggan, known by thousands of fans for his YouTube channel on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, knowingly lied when he told sheriff’s deputies that he was beaten early Monday.
McSwiggan, a resident of London who was visiting Southern California, was scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. If convicted, he faces up to 364 days in county jail.
The charge marks the latest chapter in a drama that has played out on the online star’s social media platforms — and with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department publicly releasing a statement and photo that rebutted McSwiggan’s allegations.
McSwiggan wrote in an Instagram post that after visiting a gay club, three men attacked him. He said he suffered three broken teeth and required six stitches in his forehead.
“The authorities should have been there to help and protect me but instead they treated me like a second-class citizen,” McSwiggan wrote in his post, which showed him in a hospital with bandages affixed to his forehead.
“I’ve never felt so terrified to be a gay man in the public eye.”
The Sheriff’s Department confirmed that deputies responded early Monday to McSwiggan’s report of assault after leaving a West Hollywood nightclub. But deputies at the scene “were unable to substantiate the assault,” according to a statement.
Deputies then placed McSwiggan, 26, under arrest about 2:30 a.m. Monday after he allegedly vandalized a car along Santa Monica Boulevard near Robertson Boulevard, in the heart of the city’s LGBT nightlife district.
McSwiggan was booked on a count of vandalism with property damage greater than $400 and held on $20,000 bail, according to jail records.
Before being placed in his jail cell, deputies had McSwiggan stand for a booking photo, which appears to show no obvious injuries.
Once inside a solo jail cell, McSwiggan “was then observed injuring himself with the handle and receiver to a payphone,” sheriff’s officials said in a statement.
He was taken to the hospital for treatment. McSwiggan was released from custody just before 9:15 p.m. Monday with a citation to appear in court.
Ann Coulter writes: How’d you like to be running a presidential campaign dependent on Muslims not acting up again between now and Nov. 8? It’s getting awfully hard for the media to keep being indignant about Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, as long as Muslims keep blowing things up and shooting people.
I’m assuming here that The Washington Post has not already ruled the Muslims who blew up the Istanbul Airport to be self-hating gays infected by America’s culture of homophobia.
It turns out, Omar Mateen, the Orlando nightclub shooter, also wasn’t a self-hating gay, despite media excitement over that rumor. The FBI has now run down every alleged gay partner of Omar’s, searched his phone and computers, and the alleged gay lovers either had the wrong guy or were lying, and there’s no evidence he was on any gay websites or apps.
As a Muslim immigrant explained in a curbside interview videotaped by Tony Vera at the Los Angeles International Airport recently—before she was arrested—”that’s what we do, we bomb people.”
With impeccable timing, three days before the Istanbul bombing, the liberal Guardian (UK) ran an article sneering at Brexit supporters for wanting out of the European Union before Turkey became a member and the door was thrown open to unlimited migration from this Muslim country that shares a border with Syria, Iraq and Iran.
The article by Liz Cookman was titled, “Turkey, the Brexit bogeyman, is not so different from the UK.”
Liz had a lot of fun with the Brexit-supporting ninnies, so relieved that “the Turks are no longer coming.” She referred to Turkey as “the country whose people Britons are apparently petrified of,” despite the fact that “it turns out Britain and Turkey are not so different after all.”
One way they’re a little different is that Britain has fewer Muslims on hand to blow things up. The attack this Tuesday, which left dozens dead and more than 100 wounded, is the seventh major terrorist bombing in Turkey so far this year, with a total death count in the hundreds.
As with the British media, the American media keep telling us that all these Muslim terrorist attacks have nothing to do with Muslims, and Donald Trump’s suggestion that we impose a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration is madness, bigoted, racist.
Thank God Hitler didn’t claim “Mein Kampf” was a holy book and the Fuhrerbunker a mosque.
Western governments have devoted incalculable resources to developing some diagnostic test other than “Muslim” to predict terrorism. As the New York Times reported earlier this year:
“What turns people toward violence—and whether they can be steered away from it—are questions that have bedeviled governments around the world for generations. Those questions have taken on fresh urgency with the rise of the Islamic State and the string of attacks in Europe and the United States. Despite millions of dollars of government-sponsored research, and a much-publicized White House pledge to find answers, there is still nothing close to a consensus on why someone becomes a terrorist.” [Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues, By Matt Apuzzo March 27, 2016]
I have a possible indicator! M-U-S-L- …
After the July 7, 2005, London subway bombing by Muslim terrorists that killed 52 people, the British MI5 undertook its own highly sophisticated study, examining hundreds of cases. But the UK’s security agency discovered that terrorists are a wildly diverse lot. They worshipped at a variety of different mosques, for example.
Some terrorists were very religious Muslims and some barely practicing. Most were men, but some were women. There were young and old terrorists, highly educated as well as uneducated, some loners and some married with children.
So, according to MI5, the predictive power of every factor is very low—other than: Is a Muslim.
The researchers claimed their work would “challenge the stereotypes” about who becomes a terrorist, but it pretty much confirmed mine.
Republicans who are furious with Trump for proposing that we hit the pause button on this one category of Third World mass immigration have nothing at all to say about the census report this week showing Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act has so transformed the country that a majority of babies born in the United States today are not white.
The only thing Republicans can do is denounce Obama for not using the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” (As long as they brought up Words Politicians Refuse to Use, when will the eunuchs work up the nerve to say “illegal alien,” “anchor baby” and “amnesty“?)
Obama is a hapless fool, but what is so special about the words “radical Islam”? Maybe it’s not radical Islam. Maybe it’s just “Islam.”
The reason Republicans obsess over Obama’s language is that they can’t go on TV and say nothing, and no one but Trump will say anything useful. To wit: Let’s stop dumping a million Muslim immigrants on the country every year, some percentage of whom we know will commit mass murder.
* For centuries, thousands have given their lives for England, as have thousands for France, Poland, and Germany. I wonder if you could even fill a conference room in Brussels for those who would die for the European Union. You’d probably have better luck filling it with native Esperanto speakers.
* Great column. Thoughts:
1. You can’t keep the Germans down, and you can’t make them likable. (Kind of like their old ex-enemies. 😉 ) They’re too smart, too organized, too neurotic, and too arrogant as a result. The irony is they’ve managed to conquer Europe through transnationalism just after failing to do so through nationalism. Funny how that works.
2. Elite-populace conflicts have been around since civilization, things are just now slipping toward the populace and the elite is beginning to react.
* Washington Post: Why Brexit Voters Are The World’s Losers
* This is from the Guardian. Could someone please translate it into English:
“If David Cameron had opted for the genuine participation of citizens, he would have obtained a much clearer view of what people really wanted, a powerful list of shared priorities, an agenda for further negotiations, and created much less distrust between the masses and the ruling class. On top of that, he would have gained global admiration for daring to tackle a complex challenge by an innovative process that values people’s voices instead of counting their votes. He could have set a new standard for democracy, rather than serving as its gravedigger.”
* Translation: The job of the politician is to pretend to be pro democratic, but ignore the voters.
* The best I can tell it means that Cameron failed in telling people what they wanted rather than allowing them a direct voice, which because it yielded the “wrong” result is not democracy and indeed is the antithesis of democracy.
I don’t even think it’s sophistry – the sophist knows he’s drawing the wrong conclusion and doing it for his own purposes. This is more of an inability to reconcile a vestigial or rhetorical commitment to participatory democracy with the outcome demanded by the elite view of the “inevitable right side of history.”
The Brits who voted Leave likely saw the immigration endgame. If – as proposed generally and supported by PM Cameron – Turkey were to be admitted to the EU it could grant millions of economic migrants from MENA posing as refugees citizenship status in Turkey and then let them loose on the Continent and then into Great Britain.
In contrast, the Remain vote seems to consist of the young who have become accustomed to visa-free travel on the Continent and low cost roaming charges for their mobile phones as well as people who derive some benefit from the free flow of capital. The idea of perfunctorily acquiring a visa to travel on the Continent is apparently unbearable to the extent that avoiding the paperwork is worth an existential crisis for Britain.
* The political elites in the West appear to be blind to the great trend of the last 40+ years, and that is the disaggregation of conglomerate political organizations (breakup of: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia). The more regulation-heavy and bloated the EU has become, the more it has become perceived as sclerotic, undemocratic, and past its prime.
Even in the business world, the old multi-product conglomerates of the 60′s-70′s broke up because they were vastly more inefficient together then the smaller single product lines were separate. You’ve also wrote about how it used to fashionable to think of trusts and monopolies as not healthy for competition. Large trusts and monopolies become more inefficient as the incentive to change spurred by competition is dampened. Same applies to the political realm.
Large, centrally-controlled multi-ethnic empires never last (graveyard: Greece, Rome, Persia, China, Austria-Hungary, Britain, and etc.), so why do the elite think that growing the EU and amassing unaccountable powers to its bureaucracy will be different? Eventually, the managing structure at the center becomes way too inefficient to handle the proliferating burden of more disparate polities (your language example, to take one instance). The management is not nearly as competent to take care of it all as they think they are. Heck, even Diocletian split Rome into the Eastern and Western Empires, with two Emperors to manage it, having realized it was too big for one god-emperor to handle.
My pet prediction is that the US will eventually suffer this fate. We’re too big to govern a continent-wide nation with so large a population with a one-size-fits-all single federal approach to every political issue. Combine that with our winner-take-all Presidential process, which increasingly disenfranchises the losing party, and we’re set up for an eventual split or some form of regional break-up. It will take time as regional politics consolidates around new political first principles, followed by a slow then increasing internal migration as people move to their preferred location, followed by agitation and pressure to leave DC behind. Already see it in small fits and starts in places like NorCal, Texas, some Western states. etc.
* Surprisingly, the biggest casualty of brexit so far has been the Labour Party, which campaigned to stay in, yet most of whose voters wanted out.
Tired old bearded loon, Jeremy Corbyn has ‘lost the confidence of the vast majority of the parliamentary party, yet still retains the support of paid up members. He refuses to go. A truly bizarre, dysfunctional crisis of a meltdown.
Where this will end no one knows.
I can’t help thinking that Labour is reaping the bad karma from millions of Britons over decades due to anger and frustration at their lunatic Economist inspired policy of massive immigration.
I’m not a superstitious man, but brexit day was marked, in London at least, by unseasonably bad weather, torrential rain, flooding and heavy thunderstorms.
The anger of the gods mirrored the anger of the English people.
“Lone wolf jihadists should target white Americans so no one mistakes their terror attacks for hate crimes unrelated to the cause of radical Islam, Al Qaeda writes in the latest edition of its online magazine.”
* Productivity is the key statistic that determines an economy’s first/third world status.
Most citizens of America and Europe intuitively grasp that if gains in productivity do not outpace population growth, then the average citizen will be poorer tomorrow than he was yesterday. This, and not jingoistic or retrograde nativism is why they oppose immigration. People also object to the loss of space due to overcrowding–an irredeemable loss that cannot be easily quantified or modeled and so is ignored.
* I do think nationalism is ultimately unavoidable and I think the nationalist reaction to globalism has been held back for quite a while, which means it is going to be dramatic when it reemerges. And the various articles by the elite lackeys (aka MSM) insisting that globalism is good for you and that cultural particularism is somehow evil are remarkably unpersuasive.
I also am not surprised that the elites and their media servants have all of a sudden decided that democracy is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is nothing new. This is how populist and fascist movements gain traction, and yet the elites still refuse to do anything for the Great Middle or to even recognize their concerns, about immigration, and about their own lives.
* I am very taken with Scott Adams’ point about sowing idea bombs so that people can be deprogrammed from progressive views by having their inner doubts repeatedly confirmed.
Merkel’s Boner was awful but useful in being so obviously wrong and destructive – few semi-serious people could, in their hearts, defend it.
The problem in much of Europe is that the press is a lickspittle thing: counter narratives are more likely to be screened off. The howl of outrage and astonishment in the German press over Brexit is extraordinary after Merkel’s B. Did none of them not see that as soon as we saw the Islamic cohorts marching into the heart of Europe something had broken, even if it was not quite clear what.
People really need to start pointing out that picking up opportunists off the coast of Africa to bring them into Europe is laughably moronic.
* Germany has been destined to be the dominant state in Europe since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-’71. Perhaps we should’ve skipped the unpleasantness of 1914 (to say nothing of 1939!), and just embraced this reality at any earlier stage? Frau Merkel could’ve wound up as a Lutheran Deaconess, or some such relatively harmless thing.
* When the pendulum starts swinging back the other way, I hope the Jews manage to rejigger their existential rhetoric to accommodate it.
It really shouldn’t be that hard, particularly for Israelis. From its very inception, Zionism has been perfectly compatible with nationalism, socialist nationalism, religious nationalism, even racial nationalism. Zionism, in essence, is Jewish Nationalism: it is not enough to BE a Jew, we must also rule Jewish soil.
The Jews that are going face very real difficulties as the pendulum reverses direction are not Israeli Jews but galut Jews, with their cognitively dissonant “nationalism for me but not for thee”.
God bless ‘em, I hope they start modifying their rhetoric before all Holocaust sympathy runs out. I suspect it’s going to take a newer, younger generation to make the rhetorical transition. Miller, perhaps? The Abe Foxmans, I fear, are too old to moderate their thinking.
* “The Last Whites of the East End” is a wonderful and recent documentary by the BBC that looks at the racial cleansing of whites from the East End of London with remarkable sympathy.
I recommend it to get a sense of what is happening in London.
* Canadians and Americans can wander around each others’ countries without bothering with visas. Canadians don’t even need to apply for the perfunctory ESTA visa waiver that Europeans do.
In light of the current migrant situation, Britain might decide to require visas from Continentals, or Continentals might decide to require visas for Brits as an act of retaliation for daring to declare themselves independent; but it’s not a given that anything more than a passport will be required to travel between the UK and the Continent.
What Brits will, at least in theory, have to do is go through border controls and customs lines that EU citizens do not have to endure. To object to sovereignty for your own country simply because it requires you to wait in a few lines now and again is the height of spoiled entitlement and decadence.
* George Soros is one of the very few people whose native language was Esperanto (strange but true).
* There’s already a very aggressive campaign underway to de-legitimize the referendum due to the age skewer, because old people’s opinions don’t matter. I predict that, should they somehow succeed in ignoring the result they (meaning both Labour and Tory) will do everything possible to jack up immigration even more, so as to prevent this from ever happening again.
* As long as decisions are made by professional politicians, the EU has an irresistible momentum. The EU is a senior tour for politicians, quite literally a tour as they can wine and dine at meetings around the continent.
* Here’s an article that says that Trump supporters are more likely than Hillary supporters to believe that blacks are “violent”, “criminal”, and “lazy” than whites.
But, forgetting about the factual basis of any of these beliefs, the numbers are striking. Apparently about half of Trump supporters believe these scurrilous things, but about a third of Hillary’s supporters do as well.
And here’s the highly pertinent fact that doesn’t get mentioned in this account: the vast majority of blacks themselves are, of course, Hillary supporters. How many of Hillary’s supporters are black? Since 13% of the US is black, I’d guess about 25%. How many of her supporters are white? Well less than 75%, given that most Hispanics and Asians support her. So how different are the whites supporting Hillary in their attitudes from whites supporting Trump? Not much I’d guess. Or if indeed they are still pretty different, than it would have to be, say, Hispanics who have these attitudes toward blacks — which would also not be a very inspiring story.
* When respectful disagreement is outlawed only outlaws will respectfully disagree…
Steve Sailer writes: An anonymous commenter speculates on why Bill Clinton refuses to give up his membership in Trump National Golf Club-Westchester, Trump’s personal golf club, even though many institutions (NBC, the golf tours, Macy’s, etc.) that aren’t actually married to the presumptive Democratic nominee are boycotting the presumptive Republican nominee:
Three possibilities: Bill really thinks Hillary is going to win, so he intends to keep his membership and say, “Hey, no hard feelings,” after the election and simply wait until Trump gets over his sulk about losing, and then they pat each other on the back and Bill can continue golfing and schmoozing.
Second idea is that Bill isn’t very concerned if Hillary loses because he isn’t keen on being Mr. Hillary Clinton. He’s got an ego, and he’s in two minds about playing second fiddle his wife. He doesn’t want to say to her, “Mrs. President,” and see her in the most important place in every social function they’re required to attend. This would probably feel great to Hillary after Bill humiliated her with all his affairs, and she intends to rub her new, higher status in his face if she wins, and he knows it. It’s part of the psychological warfare inside their marriage, and for all I know, it may be one of her primary motivators for running for the office. Some women say, living well is the best revenge once they’ve dumped the cheating spouse, but in Hillary’s case, I think the best revenge on her hubby is becoming president herself and staying married to him so she can rub his face in it. You know, the “I’m somebody!” notion. Or, “they like me better than you,” referring to the American public.
Third possibility is that if the Clintons lose, Bill still wants political influence, and he intends to patch things up with Trump and intends to be an ‘adviser’ and big influence. After all, what way to arrange for big donors to give to the Clinton foundation by saying to them, “You know, I may be able to do something for you via my good friend, President Trump.”
Hardened politicos like Bill never cut loose anyone who can be useful to them.
