Officer Bandito

Another tragic and totally surprising Magic Dirt fail:

The FBI is investigating a secret society of tattooed deputies in East Los Angeles as well as similar gang-like groups elsewhere within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, multiple people familiar with the inquiry said.

The federal probe follows allegations of beatings and harassment by members of the Banditos, a group of deputies assigned to the Sheriff’s Department’s East L.A. station who brand themselves with matching tattoos of a skeleton outfitted with a sombrero, bandolier and pistol. The clique’s members are accused by other deputies of using gang-like tactics to recruit young Latino deputies into their fold and retaliating against those who rebuff them.

In interviews with several deputies, FBI agents have asked about the inner workings of the Banditos and the group’s hierarchy, according to three people with close knowledge of the matter who spoke to The Times on the condition that their names not be used because the investigation is ongoing.

In particular, the sources said, agents have been trying to determine whether leaders of the Banditos require or encourage aspiring members to commit criminal acts, such as planting evidence or writing false incident reports, to secure membership in the group.

The agents also have inquired about other groups known to exist in the department, which has nearly 10,000 deputies and polices large swaths of the sprawling county. They have asked for information about the tattoos and practices of the Spartans and Regulators in the department’s Century station, and the Reapers, who operate out of a station in South Los Angeles, according to the sources.

Import enough Mexicans, you’ll soon enough find that you live in Mexico. On the plus side, while the police are criminally corrupt, the burritos and the margaritas are amazing.

A $5 billion traffic ticket

This “record-setting” corporate penalty is the equivalent of fining the average American household $483.04:

The Federal Trade Commission voted this week to approve a roughly $5 billion settlement with Facebook that could end an investigation into its privacy practices, according to a person familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak on the record, a deal that could result in unprecedented government oversight of the company.

The settlement — adopted with the FTC’s three Republicans supporting it and two Democrats against it — could end a wide-ranging probe into Facebook’s mishandling of users’ personal information that began more than a year ago.

The FTC’s $5 billion punishment against Facebook sets a new record as the largest penalty ever assessed against a tech company that broke a past promise to the government to improve its privacy practices. The matter from here rests in the hands of the Justice Department, which typically must finalize FTC settlements, though DOJ rarely has upended them.

Facebook warned investors earlier this year it could face an FTC fine as high as $5 billion. Wall Street appeared to reward the company for setting aside a large portion of that penalty earlier this year, as the company’s stock rose almost 2 points following news of the settlement Friday.

Fines don’t dissuade corporations in the slightest. Putting the CEOs, board members, and other executives in jail when the corporation breaks the law would be a much more effective disincentive.

Still no global warming

AGW/CC is not so much bad science as Fake Science:

A new study conducted by a Finnish research team has found little evidence to support the idea of man-made climate change. The results of the study were soon corroborated by researchers in Japan. In a paper published late last month, entitled ‘No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change’, a team of scientists at Turku University in Finland determined that current climate models fail to take into account the effects of cloud coverage on global temperatures, causing them to overestimate the impact of human-generated greenhouse gasses.

Models used by official bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “cannot compute correctly the natural component included in the observed global temperature,” the study said, adding that “a strong negative feedback of the clouds is missing” in the models.

Adjusting for the cloud coverage factor and accounting for greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers found that mankind is simply not having much of an effect on the Earth’s temperature.

There is no science without truth. And there is relatively little truth without Jesus Christ. Which, of course, is why science required Christianity in the first place and why science requires it now.

Adios, Acosta

The Labor Secretary steps down over the outraged response to the 2006 Epstein plea bargain:

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta is resigning just days after he defended his role in the Jeffrey Epstein case. Acosta announced that he would leave the administration a week from now as he and President Donald Trump spoke to reporters at the White House on Friday.

Trump brought Acosta out to break the news to journalists as he left the White House for Wisconsin, capping off a week rocked by new federal charges against Epstein in New York for trafficking underage girls.

In a more just world, he’d also be prosecuted. Whether there was undue pressure from on high or not, the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand why the deal was so obscenely wrong is deeply troublesome. And I can’t say I’m terribly impressed with President Trump’s response here, although I’ve learned to take his public statements with very large grains of salt.

But his resignation is the right thing to do at the moment, so there is that.

When the wolf cries wolf

In case you’re wondering why I never, ever take cries about “anti-semitism” at face value, this expose about the behind-the-scenes editorial action at Vanity Fair may help explain why:

One aspect of the story seemed like it would be the most delicious candy to Vanity Fair in that era: Bloom, expecting to make a life-altering killing on the stock, had built a multimillion-dollar house near Sun Valley, Idaho. I put in the God-is-in-the-details goodies: I remember there was a jacuzzi room graced with a large Buddha’s head. But things had gone south so fast with Planet Hollywood that Bloom was forced to put the house on the market before he really got to enjoy it. Not only was it a matter of public record, it was a perfect metaphor for hubris and thwarted ambition.

But Bloom told me that I absolutely could not mention the house — not because the anecdote was embarrassing but because, he said, there were armed anti-Semites in the area where he had chosen to build who might attack him. Bloom didn’t explain why he would want to spend time and money in an area where he thought his life was at risk, or why he thought the local killers would know nothing about a house valued — if memory serves — at $15 million until they … read about it in Vanity Fair.

The more he demanded that I omit any mention of the house, the more determined I was to include it. Then I got a call from a Graydon underling. There was a problem fitting in the piece, she said, and the one thing that needed to be cut was the house. I said I could easily suggest other parts of this overly long story that could be trimmed but no, it had to be the house.

Was including the house important in the grand scheme of things? Maybe not. But I felt that I was being sold out. I was confident that kind of information would not have been cut for anyone other than a Graydon friend. In the end, Bloom didn’t look great in the piece, but at least he got to sell his house without embarrassment.

On the one hand, you really can’t blame anyone for making use of a tactic that has reliably worked proved effective over the years, however dishonestly it is utilized. On the other, you absolutely can and should blame the morons who are dumb enough to continue falling for that tactic, over and over again, for a period of decades.

And like the author, I too very much doubt Mr. Carter’s explanation for why he scrubbed the Epstein article.

Leashing the tech giants

I did a Darkstream just last night on France enacting a new tax on the big tech companies to prevent them from accounting their way out of taxes. Now the UK has followed suit:

Britain is on a collision course with Donald Trump today after unveiling a ‘digital services tax’ to grab £400million-a-year more from global tech firms such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook. The UK is pushing ahead with plans for a proposed two per cent levy on sales starting next April targeting online giants with global sales of more than £500million and at least £25million in UK revenue.

Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook would pay an extra £300million-a-year to the Treasury based on their current revenues, MailOnline has calculated, with up to 30 companies set to be hit.

Britain wants more cash from major search engines, social networks and online marketplaces who use legal loopholes to ensure their UK profits are taxed in countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands at a lower rate than in London.

These revenue-based taxes are an absolutely necessity given the global nature of these businesses. There is no reason global corporations should be permitted to be active in a jurisdiction if they’re not going to pay any taxes there. And before you get all libertarian-indignant about this, remember, corporations are a) even less accountable to the nations in which they are not based than the national government and b) they are literally government agents themselves.

The PLA quakes

Forget women in combat, now the Marine Corps is embracing full-scale Diversity:

A Marine captain who was dropped from the F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet training pipeline in 2016 has been granted rare permission from the head of Marine Corps aviation to try again, following a report that revealed instructors and staff had acted unprofessionally and made racial jabs in a private chat group.

The pilot will report for training at Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron (VMFAT) 101 in Miramar, California, next month, said Capt. Christopher Harrison, a Marine Corps spokesman. Military.com has previously spoken with the pilot under condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution; the publication will continue to honor that agreement….

“That dude was so bad. I can’t even comprehend how someone does not have the most basic level of self-awareness and realize he’s going to kill himself or someone else,” an instructor wrote of the Marine in the chat.

During training, the Marine had been responsible for one significant mishap, when he misunderstood an instructor’s order and ended up blowing the canopy off his F/A-18. For that, he said, he was pilloried in his unit, and the embarrassing incident was commemorated on class T-shirts with the slogan, “Once you pop, the fun don’t stop.”

This should end well. And it should totally convince everyone that Diversity Marine pilots are just as elite as Marines who have to actually avoid crashing their planes.

The problem of Susan

An intelligent and surprisingly sensible take on a character from Narnia:

How do you solve a problem like Susan Pevensie?

Oh, Susan.  The most maligned and misinterpreted of Pevensies.  And, incidentally, my favorite character.  Let’s talk a moment about these misinterpretations, particularly the ones that have absorbed themselves into the popular consciousness despite how many times I yell about them on Twitter.

In a Time Magazine interview, J.K. Rowling described her debt to C.S. Lewis.

“I found myself thinking about the wardrobe route to Narnia when Harry is told he has to hurl himself at the barrier in King’s Cross Station—it dissolves and he’s on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and there’s the train to Hogwarts.”

However, she points out that there were aspects of the Narnian chronicles that bothered her.  She also points out that Susan Pevensie

“…is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a real problem with that.”

On that note, Philip Pullman penned an angry Guardian article where he claimed that for Lewis, a girl’s achieving sexual maturity was

“so dreadful and so redolent of sin that he had to send her to Hell.”

It’s so unsurprising that Pullman proves to be as hapless a reader as he is a writer.

Facebook approves death threats

Then quickly backtracks once saner minds had the chance to review the updated policy:

An update to the Facebook Community Standards which appeared to sanction calls to violence against “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” identified by Facebook was quickly deleted amid public backlash.

On July 9th, Facebook changed its policy regarding “violence and incitement,” amending the policy to allow for “Calls for high-severity violence” against targets which have been identified as dangerous by Facebook itself:

“Do not post:

Threats that could lead to death (and other forms of high-severity violence) of any target(s), where threat is defined as any of the following:

– Statements of intent to commit high-severity violence

– Calls for high-severity violence (unless the target is an organisation or individual covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organisations Policy)

– Including content where no target is specified but a symbol represents the target and/or includes a visual of an armament to represent violence

– Statements advocating for high-severity violence (unless the target is an organisation or individual covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organisations Policy)

– Aspirational or conditional statements to commit high-severity violence (unless the target is an organisation or individual covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organisations Policy”

The “dangerous individuals and organizations” policy concerns “terrorist activity,” “organized hate,” “mass or serial murder,” “human trafficking,” and “organized violence or criminal activity.” Under this updated policy, calls to violence could be incited against individuals such as Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopolous, all of which were banned from Facebook for violating the policy.

I don’t think there is much question that the SJWs who run converged sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia would love to be able to publicly endorse death threats against the individuals they deplatform, but it appears that the lawyers have prevailed. For now.

It’s interesting to see how they are showing their hand so clearly, though. This is all part of the developing weaponization of information that we’ve seen in attacks like the termination of the Alt-Hero:Q campaign that was seeded by NPR and Bleeding Cool and the deplatforming of the Rebel’s Run movie by WeFunder that was seeded by The New Republic and Wikipedia.

It’s only a matter of time before those media seedings, which are actually the informational equivalent of artillery spotting, lead to high-severity violence and fatalities on both sides. There will be war.

Medieval History 101 Episode 3

Prof. Rachel Fulton Brown presents Medieval History 101 Episode 3: Getting Medieval on the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories on Unauthorized.TV. For subscribers only. The episode guide, complete with reference texts and Infogalactic links, is available here.

“The literal sense teaches what happened, the allegorical sense what you should believe, the moral sense what you should do, and the anagogical sense where you are going.”