Tag: law

To be or not to be today

Looks like we’ll find out soon enough if anything is going to be done before the election about the alleged Podesta Code and the dark rumors that have been swirling around Hillary, Huma, and the Clinton Foundation:

FBI Director James Comey issued a mandate late Thursday instructing all available special agents from the Washington D.C. field office and Hoover Building headquarters to report to work immediately, federal law enforcement sources told True Pundit.

“We’re preparing for many arrests from the top down,” the FBI source said. “I cannot elaborate beyond that.”

When pressed to better define what “from the top down” meant in terms of possible suspects, the source refused to elaborate.

“You’re a smart guy; read between the lines,” the source said.

As to whether Truepundit merits being taken seriously, we do know that General Flynn appears to be taking it at face value:


General Flynn@GenFlynn Nov 2
U decide – NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc…MUST READ!

That tweet is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, US Army (ret.) is one of Donald Trump’s advisors. The seriousness of the situation may be indicated by the fact that Trump has NOT yet tweeted any direct references to it; his usual pattern is to troll people whenever there is an angle to make them look bad. Whatever it is, he is almost certain to know more about it than we do.

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump  Nov 2 Orlando, FL
After decades of lies and scandal, Crooked Hillary’s corruption is closing in. #DrainTheSwamp!

Like everyone else, I wonder why the information hasn’t been released to the public, if it is as bad as is presently being bruited about. But then, it does take time to prepare for an operation of the purported size and significance, and I have no doubt whatsoever that there have been various negotiations and discussions taking place behind closed doors concerning what must be done, what can be done, and what is going to happen regardless of what the authorities do.

Today would appear to be the day things would tend to expect things to go down, but we still haven’t seen WikiLeaks Phase Three and the only thing we know that appears to have happened is the movement of Anthony Weiner to a secure location. If anyone lives near an FBI special agent, perhaps you know if they happen to have worked late last night; other than that, we’re all still in the dark.

Regardless, let us hope and pray that the truth, whatever it is, comes to light soon.

It should be noted that, to their credit, some individuals in the media are already beginning to publicly recant their previous support of Hillary Clinton.

It took me a long time to write this. I had to dig deep into my being to come up with these words. I’m recanting my endorsement of Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

I’m aware of how vindictive Clintonians can be. I’m not speaking about the Clintons themselves, but of those surrounding them. Perhaps the saying is true: dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres. Your staff, your donors, your surrogates, and those you surround yourself with are a reflection of who you truly are, no? If not, why not curb any unacceptable behavior? Silence, indifference, or inaction is as incriminatory-at least to me.

There has been no repudiation, let alone denunciation, of what was said in those emails-just denial, finger pointing, and doublespeak. To appoint the very same folks who carried out many malicious behaviors to tip the scales for Hillary is just as unpardonable.

UPDATE: It appears the FBI and NYPD will have to act today, if they want to do so before Anonymous and WikiLeaks celebrates the 5th of November and everyone finds out what really happened.

The two-bullet theory

Scott Adams presents his two-bullet theory to explain why Comey first covered for Hillary, then exposed her:

My movie says Comey had good evidence against Clinton during the initial investigation but made a judgement call to leave the decision to the American public. For reasons of conscience, and acting as a patriot, Comey explained in clear language to the public exactly what evidence the FBI found against Clinton. The evidence looked daming because it was. Under this interpretation, Comey took a bullet to his reputation for the sake of the Republic. He didn’t want the FBI to steal this important decision away from the people, but at the same time he couldn’t let the people decide blind. So he divulged the evidence and stepped away, like the action hero who doesn’t look back at the explosion.

In the second act of this movie, Comey learns that the Weiner laptop had emails that were so damning it would be a crime against the public to allow them to vote without first seeing a big red flag. And a flag was the best he could do because it was too early in the investigation to leak out bits and pieces of the evidence. That would violate Clinton’s rights.

But Comey couldn’t easily raise a red flag to warn the public because it was against FBI policy to announce a criminal investigation about a candidate so close to election day. So Comey had a choice of either taking another bullet for the Republic or screwing the very country that he has spent his career protecting.

In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation.

How do I know the new emails are that bad?

I start by assuming Comey is the same man now as the one who was carefully vetted before being hired to protect the integrity of one of our most important institutions. And even Comey’s critics concede he’s smart.

So…

The way you know the new emails are disqualifying for Clinton is because otherwise our hero would have privately informed Congress and honored the tradition of not influencing elections. Comey is smart enough to know his options. And unless he suddenly turned rotten at his current age, he’s got the character to jump in front of a second bullet for the Republic.

According to this movie, no matter who gets elected, we’ll eventually learn of something disqualifying in the Weiner emails.

And we can’t say we weren’t warned. Comey took two bullets to do it.

While I agree with Scott’s conclusion that the emails have to be THAT bad in order to justify Comey’s change of heart, I don’t agree with his twice-heroic interpretation of Comey’s actions. Comey strikes me more as someone who did the dirty the first time around, felt guilty about having failed in his duty, and when given the opportunity to do the right thing and redeem himself, leaped at the chance.

The fact that we have word of an internal rebellion at the FBI and his wife’s initial disappointment in him tends to support this theory. The good news about the redemption theory is that having failed once, and having personally experienced the negative consequences of that failure, I expect Comey is much more likely to hold firm under fire this time around, especially given that he knows he will have the support of those around him. He’s going to need it, too, because he is already coming under tremendous fire from some very powerful people.

Besides, if we’re talking about movies, the Redemption motif is stronger than the Machiavellian Hero story.

Not guilty in Oregon

A welcome smackdown to federal prosecutorial overreach:

A jury Thursday delivered a stunning across-the-board acquittal to the leaders and participants in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation and a remarkable blow to the federal government as it tries to tamp down a national movement led by a Nevada family to open public lands to ranchers, miners and loggers. The verdicts finding Ammon Bundy, older brother Ryan Bundy and five others not guilty of a federal conspiracy drew elation from defense attorneys who spent five weeks arguing that the armed takeover amounted to a time-honored tradition of First Amendment protest and civil disobedience.

I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t, in part, a consequence of the total refusal of the local, state, and federal authorities to respond in any serious matter to all the Black Lives Matter protests this summer.

The one thing is clear is that white people across the country are increasingly beginning to understand that the federal government and its agencies are not on their side. The days of using the equivalent of “broken taillight” laws to lock up enemies of the state may be coming to an end.

It certainly was the right verdict, considering that the “crime” of which the men were actually accused was a conspiracy to prevent federal employees from going to work.

The Reynolds Reform

Instapundit has to be pleased with this call for lobbying reform on the part of Trump.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday will propose a five-year ban on executive branch officials lobbying after they leave government if he is elected, according to excerpts of a speech on fixing ethics problems in Washington. Trump also will say he plans to ask Congress to impose its own five-year ban on former lawmakers and their staff lobbying as well as set a lifetime ban on senior executive branch officials lobbying for foreign governments.

It’s not quite as strong as Reynolds’s call for a 100 percent tax, but it would certainly help drain a little corruption from the swamp.

Retreat is pointless

Christian organizations might as well learn to start standing firmly on their principles, because you either use them or you lose them:

One of the largest evangelical organizations on college campuses nationwide has told its 1,300 staff members they will be fired if they personally support gay marriage or otherwise disagree with its newly detailed positions on sexuality starting on Nov. 11.


InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA says that it will start a process for “involuntary terminations” for any staffer who comes forward to disagree with its positions on human sexuality, which holds that any sexual activity outside of a husband and wife is immoral.

One of Rod Dreher’s commenters adds an observation.


Federal law makes it pretty much impossible to take a stance along the lines of, “This is what we believe, but out of compassion and pragmatism we’re willing to be flexible for a certain amount of time, with certain people, and/or in certain situations.” Either you have a blanket policy that applies to all people in all instances, or federal courts will rule that you don’t “really” have a principled position and invalidate the broader policy because of the exceptions.

So, do the right thing. Don’t make exceptions. Tolerance is not a Christian virtue, it is the first step along the path to destruction.

Immigration trumps law

How is it possible to argue that immigration is beneficial to a society when the mere presence of immigrants involves rendering that society’s laws moot?

Child brides as young as 14 are being reunited with their older, migrant husbands in Denmark after authorities decided that upholding Danish law breached their “human rights”. The legal minimum age for marriage is 18 in the Nordic nation, yet the exemptions are being made for migrants because separating the couples is said to violate the right to family life guaranteed in the European convention on human rights.

There are 27 migrants under 18 who were known to be married Denmark, and among the influx arriving in the past year were two 14-year-old girls, wed to 24 and 28-year-old men. One 14-year-old was expecting a baby. The age of consent in Denmark is 15 for the rest of the population, and those found guilty of sexual acts with minors are liable for 8 years in jail.

One simply cannot take ANY of the Left’s claims seriously anymore. The leftists strain at gnats and swallow mammoths. They are not fit for Western civilization.

Why I no longer link to Steve Sailer

Or quote him, or quote the Saker, or link to any other writer on the Unz Review. I received this notice from Blogger yesterday:


We have received a DMCA complaint for your blog, Vox Popoli. An e-mail with the details of the complaint was sent to you on Sep 30, 2016, and we reset the post status to “Draft”; you can edit it here. You may republish the post with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention.

The complaint was related to a post entitled Cold War II, in which I extensively quoted The Saker and provided a link to The Saker’s article on the Unz Review from which I quoted. There are three problems here.

  1. It is obnoxious to file a DMCA complaint instead of directly contacting the writer with a request to take down or modify his post. My words get quoted, repeated, copied, and even plagiarized every day, and I have never filed a DMCA complaint about anyone. This is only the second DMCA complaint I have received; the first was from SFWA when they wanted to hide their embarrassing report about me from the public.
  2. I have an email from the Saker giving me permission to utilize all of his work; we’re even planning to release a collection of his excellent work on the Russian invasion of Syria in an ebook one day.
  3. The Saker told me that the rights to his work have been released to the public under one form of GPL or another; I’ll have to look it up to determine precisely which license it is.

So, until I a) hear from someone at the Unz Review, b) the DMCA complaint is either withdrawn at their own request or Blogger is informed that it is illegitimate and was filed by someone without the rights to do so, and c) I am assured that no DMCA complaints will be made against VP or AG in the future by anyone in their organization, I will neither cite nor link to anything on the Unz Review.

Caveat: if I go to the trouble of successfully counter-claiming and proving that I have the rights to quote the Saker as I see fit, I will continue to read and quote and link to him.

Lest anyone doubt that I am serious about this, I should mention that there was a strategy-related service that used to send me emails, unrequested, every day. One day, after I posted a quote from one of their emails and linked to their site as I had previously done from time to time, they sent me an email demanding that I stop posting quotes from their emails. So, I promptly unsubscribed, and after a few months went by and they realized they had lost an amount of regular traffic, they asked me to resubscribe and start linking to their posts again. I declined to do so, having found superior alternatives in the meantime, and spamfiled them. That was years ago. I haven’t visited their site or read a single email from them since. I don’t even know if they’re still around.

If any site doesn’t want a writer with monthly traffic of ~3 million pageviews providing them with links and traffic, that’s fine. I am too busy to waste time working with fools, the obnoxious, or the obtuse, and I have a surfeit of prospective sources from which to draw. I already feel that I don’t read half the material or address one-quarter the subjects I should. Regardless, as you can see, I have removed Steve Sailer from the list of Day Trips on the sidebar so as not to risk any future violations.

And just to be clear, I’m not blaming Ron Unz, Steve Sailer, or The Saker for this. I tend to doubt any of them even knew about it.

UPDATE: This appears to be an SJW attack on the Unz Review. He said the following in the comments:

Someone mentioned this situation to me. As might be guessed, this was the first I’d heard of it, and I assume it’s some sort of hoax intended as petty harassment by some random activist on the Internet. Anyway, I’m not too familiar with either these DMCA complaints or how Blogger works, but if you’ll drop me a note explaining whom I should email to explain that it’s fraudulent, I’ll be glad to do so.

Regards,
Ron Unz, Publisher

I have, of course, restored the link to Steve Sailer at the Unz Review and I will be contacting Blogger accordingly.

UPDATE: I have filed a counter-complaint with Blogger, citing Mr. Unz’s statement as proof that the complainant did not have the right to the content. That should suffice to resolve the issue.

“Marital rape” does not, and cannot, exist

Judgy Bitch considers my debate with Louise Mensch on the matter, thinks everything through and concludes that my position is the correct one:

I think we have to clearly distinguish between having a right and exercising that right. Under the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, every American has the right to keep and bear arms. Lots of Americans choose not to exercise that right. They still have the right, whether they use it or not. The question under consideration in this particular debate is whether marriage confers consent to sex that cannot be withdrawn except by the dissolution of the marriage.

If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have sided with Mensch. If I say no to my husband, I expect him to respect that, although if I’m being honest, I would be very insulted and sulky if he rejected my advances. In the 18 years we’ve been together, I do not recall him ever rejecting me, and I can count the number of times I’ve absolutely refused to have sex with him on one hand.  Pondering the idea more carefully, I have now come to the conclusion that Day is correct – rape cannot exist within a marriage. If marital rape is a thing, then 100% of the sex I have ever had with my husband has been rape.

I have never obtained his consent and he has never obtained mine.

Consent is assumed as a basic function of marriage. Consent to sex is part of what marriage is. Mensch acknowledges the general obligation spouses have to one another to have sex, but refuses blanket consent. I think the most interesting part of the discussion surrounds the use of force and violence. Marriage confers the right to have sex with your spouse, but it does not confer any right to assault your spouse. By what means could a spouse force sex that was not wanted without the use of force?

It’s not an accident that the same ideology that has expressly stated “all sex is rape” is the same one behind the push to create the oxymoronic legal concept of “marital rape”.

If they could, feminists would outlaw both marriage and normal sex. Marital rape is an effective way for them to attack both.

The first thing we do

Is shoot all the lawyers. Glenn Reynolds draws our attention to an absurd parody of justice and recompense:

In 2013, Yahoo announced that it would begin scanning its users’ e-mail for targeted advertising purposes—just as Google does. As is par for the course, class-action lawsuits were filed. The Silicon Valley media giant, according to one of the lawsuits, was violating the “personal liberties” of non-Yahoo Mail users. That’s because non-Yahoo Mail users, who have sent mail to Yahoo mail users, were having their e-mail scanned without their permission.
…
The suit, which was one of six that were co-mingled as a single class action, demanded that a judge halt the scanning and award each victim “$5,000 or three times actual damages” in addition to “reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.”


Fast forward three years. The case is now closed. Days ago, a Silicon Valley federal judge signed off (PDF) on a settlement (PDF). The lawyers won, they were awarded $4 million (£3 million), and the public got nothing. What’s more, the settlement allows Yahoo to continue to scan e-mails without non-Yahoo users’ consent.

It’s almost as though class-action suits have become nothing more than shakedown operations for lawyers.

We will, of course, spare Dr. Reynolds as the proverbial exception to the rule and award him his pick of his former colleague’s estates.

It would be in the definite interest of the American people to pass a law that forbids lawyers to collect more than 10 percent of any settlement or court-dictated award. Unfortunately, the lawyers in Congress are very unlikely to ever permit the passage of anything that would restrain the rapacious predation of their colleagues.

The media is not above the law

I’ve been hard on Jonah Goldberg of late, and correctly so, which is why it is important to give the author of Liberal Fascism his due when he gets it right, as he does here with regards to the death of Gawker.

The real issue seems to be that journalistic corporations are just different than every other kind of corporation. No one would bat an eye if, say, George Soros, bankrolled an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit by the ACLU against a “normal” corporation like Microsoft or Bank of America. But when a media outlet is in the dock, the rules are different.

Gilles Wullus of the group Reporters Without Borders told the BBC that the Gawker case poses a dire threat to press freedom. “Journalism ethics should be taken care of by journalists themselves,” he said. “In case they do not, we think that nobody else can do it in their place, neither states nor governments; especially not wealthy individuals.”

A free press is an important institution in a democracy, but journalists don’t have any rights the rest of us don’t. What nonsense.

Yes, a free press is an important institution in a democracy (and even more important in non-democracies), but journalists don’t have any rights the rest of us don’t. A reporter has the right to free speech, and so does a plumber. Indeed, in the era of smartphones, it has never been more true: We all have the right and ability to commit journalism. That right manifests itself in people, not corporations. The New York Times, to the extent that it is a “corporate person,” should have no more (and no fewer) rights than Exxon Mobil.

Imagine the outrage if I said, “Petroleum-industry ethics should be taken care of by petroleum industry executives themselves.” It’s certainly fair to argue against the merits of the verdict. But no one is above the law. Not even journalists, never mind corporations in the journalism business.

There is no “Fourth Estate”. There is nothing special about the media and they have no rights that anyone else doesn’t have. And when they break the law, be it criminal or civil, they are liable for the consequences.

On the other hand, Jonah’s NRO colleague, Mario Loyola, fails to understand that the conservative media is, in part, culpable for the declining regard in which America’s institutions are held in a piece that is unmitigated cuckservative blather.

Democracy depends vitally on reverence for “the majesty of the democratic system.” That means reverence for its basic institutions, if not for the men and women who run them as individuals. It’s one thing to criticize politicians as crooked and mendacious, but quite another to say that our democratic institutions are themselves corrupt. If that is true in any major respect, it is vital to solve the problem fast. Democracy begins to die when democratic institutions lose the people’s trust.

Alas, such talk finds a willing audience today, across the political spectrum. During Obama’s entire presidency, trust in government has bounced along rock bottom at less than 20 percent — unprecedented in the history of polling.

While in power, Democrats have done enormous damage. During Obama’s first two years, when they controlled Congress, and since then in the form of unilateral executive actions, the Democrats have verbally assailed the legitimacy of vital democratic institutions, including the Constitution, the police, corporations, and, of course, elections….

President Bush’s last words were “I believe I have upheld the honor of the presidency.” We could do worse than to ask God to bless the next president with a similar sense of humility and dignity, and a similar awe for the majesty of the democratic system, but it will be for naught if the American people aren’t thankful for it.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
One reason the people don’t trust the institutions anymore is because commentators like you are constantly lying to them.

Mario Loyola @Mario_A_Loyola
Tell me Dark Lord, do you sit around at home all day defeating the enemy with these flaccid little one-liners? Wow

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You can lie to people all you want, but no one is buying it anymore. The nation is dying and you’re still virtue-signaling.