Saturday’s Forum

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Lawyers for Donald Trump appeared before a federal appeals court on Friday to argue that the US government should take his place as the defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by writer E Jean Carroll, who has accused him of rape.

    The former president’s attorneys told the judges he was not trying to dodge personal liability in the lawsuit by Carroll, who has spoken publicly about her allegations. He just wants to keep future presidents from being burdened by legal claims, they said.

    “This is not political. This is not about being a Democrat or a Republican. It is solely to protect the presidency as an institution,” attorney Alina Habba said.

    BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA… I guess Melissa McCarthy had the day off and Ms. Habba was the fill in comic.

    2
  2. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Yes, Trump is renowned for his absolute selflessness. He never, ever does anything out of self-interest. Many people are saying that.

    3
  3. CSK says:

    Holdover from very early this morning: James and Jennifer Crumbley were captured by Detroit Police after hiding in a commercial building. They had previously withdrawn $4000 from an ATM, so it seems they weren’t planning on turning themselves in any time soon, leaving the homicidal Ethan to fend for himself, I suppose.

    Models of good parenthood, those two.

    2
  4. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:

    What a wonderful family and great parents. We should fully expect that as soon as they are able they will be screaming about how they are being persecuted by the woke establishment and Democrats. Pretty soon the GWP and Am Greatness will take up their cause. TFG will mention it and it will become a cause celebre for Carlson and Ingraham.

    The dead and wounded will be forgotten.

    3
  5. CSK says:

    @Sleeping Dog:
    As I mentioned early this a.m., the ex-girlfriend and mother of James Crumbley’s 18-year-old son called James “a piece of shit.” James also has a 24-year-old daughter by another woman. He failed to pay child support, though I’m not sure for which of those two kids.

    The fact that Jennifer Crumbley is an avid Trump fan may tugs at the heartstrings of some MAGAs, but I can’t imagine even them racing to defend these two cruds. More likely, they’ll just avoid the subject at all costs.

  6. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Pinot, 27, a gold medallist at the Tokyo Olympics, had serious facial injuries including a fractured nose when she filed a police complaint in the early hours of Sunday. She said her partner and trainer, Alain Schmitt, had attacked her at her flat outside Paris, wrestled her to the ground, verbally abused her, punched her many times, repeatedly smashed her head on to the ground and tried to strangle her.

    Pinot said she managed to escape the apartment with the aid of neighbours and called police. Officers arrested and questioned Schmitt that night.

    The case was fast-tracked to a court hearing on Tuesday where Schmitt, 38, denied the allegations. The state prosecutor requested a one-year suspended sentence for what they deemed “very serious violence”. But the judge decided there was not “enough proof of guilt” for the prosecution to proceed. “A court is never there to tell who is telling the truth and who is lying,” the judge said.

    “How do we know the kitchen cabinet didn’t do it?”

    2
  7. EddieInCA(currently In NY) says:

    Hello from NYC. Damn, I’ve missed this city.

    Saw ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” at the Lyric last night. Freaking amazing!!!

    Today, pizza lunch at Joe’s Pizza. Not Fat Joe’s, not Old Joe’s, Big Joe’s, not Joey’s, not Fat Joey’s, not Joseph’s. Just Joe’s.

  8. Michael Reynolds says:

    1) We get this leak: Putin has supposedly told, or is telling, Biden he must reject any NATO expansion, specifically into Ukraine.
    2) And this leak: Russians are massing troops in preparation for an out-and-out invasion of Ukraine. One assumes their goal would be to install a puppet regime in Kiev.

    Biden is being subjected to the ritual hazing that tests new presidents. Probably not coincidentally, China is provoking Taiwan daily. China would be mad to try Taiwan now, it could very easily be a disaster for them, but my sense is that China is less confident and more worried than it lets on, and more impatient to score while they can. China has no friends, and their diplomacy is evidently alienating their acquaintances. I suspect they are lying about their fertility rate and are facing a more dramatic long-term drop in, and aging of, their population. We may be at or near peak China.

    But I’d love if Joyner posted on this. Enough Covid, enough politics, let’s have some foreign policy.

    6
  9. CSK says:

    @Michael Reynolds:
    China’s birthrate has been falling since 2015 despite the abolition of the one-child policy that year and the replacement of it with a three-child policy. Most young couples don’t want to have more than one kid, citing the pressures of work.

    2
  10. CSK says:

    @Sleeping Dog: @CSK:
    I gave the MAGAs more credit than they’re due. The consensus appears to be the Crumbleys are being railroaded by a Soros-owned prosecutor as a means of stripping us of our second Amendment rights.

  11. Michael Reynolds says:

    @CSK:
    Yep.

    IIRC China is claiming a 1.6 fertility rate, which means population growth isn’t happening, and that’s what China admits to. The CPC is not known for baring its weaknesses, so I suspect the number is lower, maybe a lot lower. The one child policy certainly exacerbated it dramatically, but birth rates are falling everywhere throughout the developed world. Japan will soon have a 1:1 ratio of workers to dependent elderly. As soon as women start to be educated and workers are making money, people stop having babies. Turns out the most effective birth control is money. Who knew?

    Russia has the same problem. They’re admitting to 1.5, so again, fewer and older, and they have the problem of defending a massive and massively empty country. Projections suggest Russia will lose 10 million in just the next 20 years or so, even as ages creep up. Fewer and older is not great for a militaristic country.

    Our fertility rate is also below replacement, but we have the ability to throw open the borders and increase population whenever we like. That’s not something China or Russia can do.

    1
  12. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:

    That didn’t take long.

  13. CSK says:

    @Michael Reynolds:
    Increased affluence has pretty much always led to decreases in the number of children couples have. So have the huge leaps and bounds in medical care. Even in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, parents could expect to lose at least two kids out of six or seven to some illness that a course of antibiotics and a few days in bed will take care of now.

    1
  14. CSK says:

    @Sleeping Dog:
    I suppose I still haven’t fully grasped the depths to which these people can sink.

  15. dazedandconfused says:

    @CSK:

    They will now spend the better part of a year in jail awaiting trial. This will affect their ultimate sentencing ungoodly. Perhaps in 3-4 years Ma and Pa will be spit out of the can, poor as church mice and with criminal records. Life, as they knew it, is over.

    Mind-bendingly stupid mixed with the gun culture…it’s always a sad story.

    1
  16. CSK says:

    @dazedandconfused:
    What I wonder is…were the Crumbleys just going to flee to Canada (or elsewhere) and abandon their kid to the judicial system? Granted, Ethan’s an appalling little monster, but he’s still their son.

  17. dazedandconfused says:

    @CSK:
    A couple that hands a pistol to a 15 year old to go play with is making do with brain-stems only. For them, everything beyond the moment at hand is probably inscrutable mystery.

    2
  18. Bob@Youngstown says:

    “withdrawn $4000 from an ATM” (Re:Crumblys)

    Does a 4000 ATM withdrawal seem extraordinary?
    (My bank limits daily ATM checking withdrawals to 500/day, unless I’m closing out a savings account, and then it will depend on the location of the ATM)

    1
  19. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:
    @dazedandconfused:

    There is no bottom with people on the crazy right. The echo is amplified and fed by the trolls that include a healthy number of Ruskies and Iranians. Their cultural and political gatekeepers will say nothing and go along with most everything.

    My guess is that they somehow believed that they could disappear into militia, white supremacist movement. That their allies would protect and hide them. I wonder if among the crazy right that there isn’t some minor meme about how the violent, radical leftists of the 60’s. the Weatherman, etc., were able to hide in plain sight with the assistance of their fellow travelers. That today’s RW’s can do the same.

    I will say that I was pleasantly surprised that they gave up peacefully and didn’t try to become martyrs in a fussilade of bullets. Stupid, but not that stupid.

    2
  20. CSK says:

    @Bob@Youngstown:
    It depends on the bank. You can withdraw anywhere from $300 (tops) to $5000 (tops). Maybe they went to different ATMs. They turned off their cell phones so they couldn’t be tracked. It seems pretty clear they were going to flee.
    @Sleeping Dog:
    I wonder how they feel about QAnon.

  21. Jax says:

    @Sleeping Dog: I was half expecting that outcome, as well.

  22. Gustopher says:

    @CSK:

    so it seems they weren’t planning on turning themselves in any time soon, leaving the homicidal Ethan to fend for himself, I suppose

    Ethan would have been better off if his parents abandoned him a lot earlier.

    1
  23. Gustopher says:

    @CSK:

    The fact that Jennifer Crumbley is an avid Trump fan may tugs at the heartstrings of some MAGAs, but I can’t imagine even them racing to defend these two cruds.

    Ok, you’ve already been proven wrong there, but I raise you this bit of reporting.

    https://twitter.com/skepticalspice/status/1467055081300312068?s=21

    Even with the “you will not guess where this is going” I was not prepared for where it went.

  24. CSK says:

    @Gustopher:
    True.
    @Gustopher:
    I freely admitted I was wrong. That shot of the kid looking prayerful is nauseating. But most of the press pics I’ve seen of him since show him to be the surly, evil little fuck that he is.

    1
  25. Gustopher says:

    More children acting badly, likely because of scumbag parents:

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/aNQgIFOBevdT/

    (Courtesy of my idiot brothers, who love it. Best not read the comments)

  26. Gustopher says:

    @CSK: But that final line in the report… I really can’t tell parody from reality these days, and I think I should just never mention that to my shrink.

    1
  27. CSK says:

    @Gustopher:
    I agree that the distinction between parody and reality is vanishing.

  28. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: Many people say lots of ridiculous sh!t; why should FG be any different?

    1
  29. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: Yesterday, did I remember to say I didn’t believe they would turn themselves in or appear at their arraignment? I really hope I remembered. It’s so hard to catch up on being cynical once one’s fallen behind.

  30. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    though I’m not sure for which of those two kids.

    Pour quoi pas les deux?

  31. CSK says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:
    I think it was pretty clear once the four o’clock deadline had passed that they weren’t going to turn themselves in.

    As far as I can tell, they took off right after the kid was arrested.

  32. CSK says:
  33. Kathy says:

    The moral of the Chris Cuomo story is: break it off with the scumbag relative before the scandal breaks. Before.