Tag: law

Thank you, Peter

Peter Thiel was fundamental to dealing Gawker what appears to be its death blow:

Billionaire Peter Thiel, PayPal cofounder and early investor in Facebook, called financing the $150 million crushing lawsuit against Gawker filed by former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done” in a revealing interview Wednesday.

“I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest,” he told the New York Times, telling them it was “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence.”

This is first interview Thiel has granted after it was revealed that he had helped fund former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the gossip blog for posting a secretly-recorded sex tape. While a Florida jury originally rewarded Hogan with $115 million in March, the amount has since climbed by the tens of millions in further damages from Gawker Media and founder Nick Denton.

It’s pretty incredible. He spent $10 million in order to take down Gawker. Reprisals are good. Deterrence is even better. If you’re on Twitter, express your appreciation by using the #thankyoupeter hashtag.

A judge worthy of the name

I am a harsh critic of the American judiciary. I think it is, structurally speaking, probably the biggest single problem in the USA today besides the immigrant invasion. But even in the morass of political corruption that is the judiciary, there are a few good men worthy of the title they bear:

Sgt. Joseph Serna of the US Army Special Forces was arrested and charged with driving under the influence in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He got probation and entered a treatment program. He had to regularly report to the court on his treatment. During one of those court appearances, he confessed to Judge Lou Olivera that he had lied about a recent urine test.

Judge Olivera was himself a veteran, having served during the Gulf War. He understood that though Serna had broken the law, he was not a criminal by nature.

But he had to do his duty, so Judge Olivera sentenced Serna to spent 24 hours in jail. Then he took off his robe and joined Serna in his cell for the full 24 hours. The Fayetteville Observer reports:

    “Where are we going, judge?” Serna asked.

    “We’re going to turn ourselves in,” Olivera said.

    “He said he was going to stay with me,” Serna said. “I couldn’t process a judge being my cellmate.

    “They take me to the cell, and I’m sitting on my bunk. And, then, in walks the judge.

And then the two veterans talked:

    Mostly, from five in the afternoon on April 13 until 6:30 a.m. the next day, the judge and the veteran talked about their respective military service, Serna’s post-traumatic stress disorder from three tours of duty in Afghanistan and how the inmate could turn around his downward spiral that had resulted in a driving-while-impaired charge and other serious traffic offenses. […]

    “We talked for hours about our families and our military service,” Olivera says. “Our dreams for us and our families, and the road to take us there.”

The judge wanted to help Serna climb out of the hole:

    “I thought about a story that I once read,” Olivera says. “It talked about a soldier with PTSD in a hole,” he says. “A family member, a therapist and a friend all throw down a rope to help the veteran suffering. Finally, a fellow veteran climbs into the hole with him.

    “The soldier suffering with PTSD asks, ‘Why are you down here?’ The fellow veteran replied, ‘I am here to climb out with you.’

 One has the responsibility to do one’s duty. That is one measure of a man. But how one does one’s duty is arguably a more significant measure.

The abortion misstep

Trump mishandles a media ambush on abortion:

  • Host Chris Matthews presses Trump on anti-abortion position, repeatedly asking him, “Should abortion be punished? This is not something you can dodge”
    • “Look, people in certain parts of the Republican Party, conservative Republicans, would say, ‘Yes, it should,’” Trump answers
    • “How about you?” Matthews asks
    • “I would say it’s a very serious problem and it’s a problem we have to decide on. Are you going to send them to jail?” Trump says
    • “I’m asking you,” Matthews says
    • “I am pro-life,” Trump says
    • “How do you actually ban abortion?” Matthews asks
    • “Well, you go back to a position like they had where they would perhaps go to illegal places but we have to ban it,” Trump says
  • Matthews then presses Trump on if he believes there should be punishment for abortion if it were illegal
    • “There has to be some form of punishment,” Trump says
    • “For the woman?” Matthews says; “Yeah,” Trump says, nodding
    • Trump says punishment would “have to be determined”
    • “They’ve
      set the law and frankly the judges, you’re going to have a very big
      election coming up for that reason because you have judges where it’s a
      real tipping point and with the loss of Scalia, who was a very strong
      conservative, this presidential election is going to be very important,”
      Trump says
    • “When you say what’s the law, nobody knows what the law is going to be. It depends on who gets elected,” Trump says

Obviously, this was “gotcha” journalism on Matthews’ part (once he established that he was referring to illegal
abortions he knew he could pin Trump between having to either say women
should be punished or that women could break the law with impunity),
and as we saw last year with the whole Kurds/Quds Hugh Hewitt debacle,
Trump is susceptible to badgering. The other problem here is that it
isn’t clear that Trump truly believes some of the things he’s forced to
say as a Republican candidate, which leads to exchanges like that
recounted above. “Don’t overthink it: Trump doesn’t understand the
pro-life position because he’s not pro-life,” a Cruz aid tweeted. Here’s
Politico with a bit of context:

Trump’s policy idea is a departure from most state abortion
restrictions, which don’t impose penalties on the women who get
abortions. Typically, any penalties are imposed on the physician who
does the procedure.

The anti-abortion movement in recent decades has shied
away from the perception that it is “punishing” women for getting
abortions. Instead, it has focused on penalties for the
physicians who provide them, such as imposing medical or legal
restrictions on their practice. In some rare situations, women have
faced charges associated with abortions they have attempted on their
own.

Having realized this had become a PR fiasco, Trump promptly walked back his comments.

This is a statement released just moments ago, in which the
billionaire revises his statement, calling the women “victims”, and
stating it is doctors who should be held legally responsible for
performing the illegal act:

If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and
the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted
to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other
person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be legally
responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the
life in her womb. My position has not changed – like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions.

That’s one of the risks of being outspoken and unafraid. People will lay traps for you, and from time to time, you will step in them. Trump made an initial mistake by hemming and hawing, thereby letting Matthews know that he didn’t have an effective position staked out and encouraging him to press on it. Then, he made the mistake of answering the dilemma posed instead of falling back on the trusty old “I’ve got people for that” evasion.

And finally, he compounded his error by backing down. The correct thing would have been to stand by his correct position in the abstract – women absolutely SHOULD be punished for murdering children  – while providing a practical temporization of it by observing that the primary goal is to save children, and politically, it will be impossible to stop legal abortion in a female-majority democracy if women are punished for having abortions.

In other words, he should have said that while he believes women are responsible for their criminal actions, and ideally should be held responsible for them, in this particular case, the interests of the unborn children should be prioritized and the punishments focused on the abortion providers.

The medical police state

There is no way that California can be permitted to proceed with its vaccine totalitarianism:

In a brazen act of medical tyranny, California recently became the first state in the U.S. where lawmakers removed religious exemptions to those opposing vaccines for their children. The bill now signed into law, SB277, faces legal hurdles in court next.

Now, legislators in California want to pass the “first US adult vaccine mandate with NO personal exemptions and CRIMINAL penalties for failure to comply.” SB 792, would eliminate an adult’s right to exempt themselves from one, some, or all vaccines, a risk-laden medical procedure.

There is a much better case to be made for the legal rape and forced impregnation of American women than there is for forcing vaccines on adults or children. This is a moral and constitutional abomination; every legislator who voted for this should be impeached.

Hey, parent, leave the kids offline

Some of you will recall that I have repeatedly urged everyone here to stop posting pictures of your children on social media. I consider it to be a reprehensible violation of their privacy and an abrogation of one’s parental responsibilities in two ways: it robs them of the ability to make their own decisions and it risks exposing them to unwanted attention and potential danger. Worse, it does so for nothing more than to feed the short-term attention-seeking fix of narcissistic parents.

This is not a new subject. Back in 2009, I wrote:

Never, ever, put pictures of children up on the Internet. Not on Facebook, not on invitation-only Live Journals, and certainly not on public blogs. It’s not only reprehensibly stupid, it is completely disrespectful of a child’s right to make his own decisions about his public profile in the future. True, sometimes this is unavoidable, such as when a child happens to be in the news for one reason or another. But barring that, no responsible parent should ever upload a picture of a child to the Internet, no matter how proud one might happen to be.

I repeated that again three years ago:

Don’t put pictures of your kids on Facebook or Instagram.  It’s stupid.  It’s obnoxious.  It’s thoughtless and self-centered.  And it’s their life, not yours, that you’re putting on public display.

And, of course, there is absolutely no excuse for ever putting a picture of another family’s child on social media, for any reason. So, you can’t say you weren’t warned, as it appears the law in some countries is finally beginning to catch up to the obvious privacy violations involved.

French parents are being warned to stop posting pictures of children on social networks in case their offspring later sue them for breaching their right to privacy or jeopardising their security.

Under France’s stringent privacy laws, parents could face penalties as severe as a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 (£35,000) if convicted of publicising intimate details of the private lives of others — including their children – without their consent.

Eric Delcroix, an expert on internet law and ethics, said: “In a few years, children could easily take their parents to court for publishing photos of them when they were younger.”

Grown-ups who sue their parents for breaching their right to privacy as children could obtain substantial compensation awards, according to French legal experts.

I won’t have any sympathy for the parents who find themselves getting hoist by their own narcissistic petard in the future. They will whine and cry about their ungrateful children, who will rightly respond: “why should I harbor any concern for your financial interests when you demonstrably didn’t give a damn about my legal and moral right to not be put on display to the world like a pet or a trophy?”

Interview with Mike Cernovich

Mike Cernovich is one of the most inspiring individuals I have ever had the privilege to meet, and I’ve met everyone from Donald Trump and Henry Kissinger to Dolph Lundgren, Slash, and David Lee Roth. As you might expect, the interview is both interesting and informative:

You took, and passed, the California bar first time out of the box, yet failed to get your ticket punched.  Since you’ve written about it publicly, I need to ask: you were the target of a false rape accusation, back in the days when rape still meant rape. What happened? How did that experience affect you, shape your perspective?  What did you learn about the criminal justice system from having been in its clutches?

I was Patient Zero to the false rape epidemic. “Date rape” was common, the media said, and thus there was pressure to prosecute rape cases where there was no evidence of rape.

My case was bogus. I slept with the girl on the living room floor while her best friend was in the room. (Anyone who wants to fact-check me, ask me for a copy of the case file. It’s somewhere in my Gmail, I’m sure.)

The prosecutors were highly sensitive of the media, as was the judge, who once said to my lawyer, “Think about what the media would say if I dismissed this case!”

I was full of rage, anger, depression, and every other toxic emotion. I had followed all of the rules, and my life was “ruined” by a feminist media and legal system.

The biggest lesson of my rape case is to stay far away from the criminal system. Never talk to the police, even if you’re a witness, because who knows…Maybe they need to close a case, and you were there, after all.

You wrote a book review on Ordinary Injustice, and that was my case. I was a kid with such promise who worked hard, but hey, the media might say something rude about the judge or District Attorney. That’s what really matters.

That mindset, that the players within the system matter more than men charged with serious crimes, is yet another ordinary injustice of our day.

At some point, you “morphed” from the Mike Cernovich at Crime & Federalism, to the Danger & Play guy, your latest venture into blogging, where you have taken up arms promoting masculine health, both physical and mental. What happened? Was this a response to your youth, your having been falsely accused of rape? Your growing fat and realizing you needed to get your shit together?  What turned you into @PlayDangerously?

When you are falsely accused of rape and see the legal system from the inside as a client and the outside as lawyer, your eyes open up. You realize that everything you had been told about the legal system was a lie.

What other lies have we been told, and what are the source of those lies?

We’ve been lied to about rape culture. If you took the arguments about college rape culture seriously, you’d never send your daughter to college. That’d be like sending her to the Congo. Yet, people claim 1 in 4 women are raped while simultaneously sending girls off to college, and those girls even go walking in public and attend parties. It’s almost as if those rape statistics are made-up.

We have been lied to about gender, especially about a man’s role in society. As a man, you’re supposed to live for everyone except yourself. Make a woman happy, even if she nags. Please everyone, expect nothing for yourself because that’s selfish.

When a man buys a cool car, it’s because he’s having a mid-life crisis. A man can’t have fun or do anything he likes without being attacked.

A man who divorces a harpy is evil. A woman who divorces a man because she “just doesn’t feel it anymore” is a hero. Even a woman who cheats on her husband will be celebrated under the Eat, Pray, Love attitude towards women.

Those were lies resulting from what Nietzsche, who I read in college but never understood until I became a man, would call the “slave mindset.”

I began examining those lies one-by-one, and as I did, more lies were revealed.

What Mike saw in the legal system, I saw in the political and business worlds. And later, in the legal system. We both decided we would not play along to get along. After all what profits a man to gain the world if it costs him his soul?

Obama makes a list

He’s getting ready for the Supreme Court appointment battle in the Senate:

Moving quickly to begin the process of filling the unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama spent much of the weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual abortion doctors to replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources confirmed Monday. “These are all exemplary candidates with strong homosexual values and proven records of performing partial-birth abortions, but am I missing anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself while reviewing his list of queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist Planned Parenthood employees, all of whom were also said to be black immigrants. “I definitely have enough post-op transsexuals on the list, but it is a little light on pre-op candidates. And I should probably add a cop killer or two on here just to round out my options.”

Sources later confirmed that Obama was attempting to rapidly narrow the list down to the single best nominee to submit to the Senate in hopes of wrapping up confirmation hearings before his choice had to leave to attend the Hajj pilgrimage.

In related news, Majority Leader “Vichy” Mitch McConnell refused to reveal his plans for the upcoming Republican surrender in the Senate. “We haven’t decided exactly how, or how fast, we’re going to collapse,” the U.S. Senator from Kentucky said. “Perhaps just a few of us will bravely cross the aisle and join the Democrats in supporting whatever illiterate, homeless person of color is put up for the Court by the President, or maybe we’ll go all in and stab the grass roots in the back en masse. We’re still working out the strategy.”

When asked if he, personally, had held the pillowcase over the late Justice Scalia’s face, Sen. McConnell shook his head before replying, “No comment.”

The last defender of the Constitution

RIP Antonin Scalia:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at the age of 79, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement on Saturday. The statement did not indicate the cause of death, but several news
outlets reported that he died of natural causes while in Texas this
weekend.

Scalia was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986.

It’s sobering to think that he may be the last genuine Constitutionalist to sit on the Supreme Court. One can only expect that he’ll be replaced by a black female Marxist.

Ross Douthat summed up the man well: “We should all die full of years, with 28 grandchildren, in our sleep after quail hunting.”

That is the sign of a life well-lived.

National Review risks non-profit status

Justin Raimondo observes that Rich Lowry appears to have committed a serious legal blunder, as well as the obvious political one, with the “Stop Trump” issue:

The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The Donald as a threat to the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement….

All well and good: there are plenty of reasons for principled conservatives (and libertarians) to oppose Trump. However, there’s one big problem with this well-publicized blast at The Donald.

In March of last year, Politico reported that National Review was becoming a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, which would enable it to solicit tax-deductible donations: “Since its launch, the magazine has operated as a not-for-profit business, even as it came to rely on more and more donations in recent years. Starting next month, it will become a nonprofit organization, which will make it exempt from federal taxes. National Review also plans to merge with the nonprofit National Review Institute, its sister organization, according to a source with knowledge of the plans.”

Rich Lowry averred that the shift would be good for the magazine, which was fighting a costly lawsuit and had never been profitable anyway. “We’re a mission and a cause, not a profit-making business,” he told Politico. “The advantage of the move is that all the generous people who give us their support every year will now be able to give tax-deductible contributions, and that we will be able to do more fundraising, in keeping with our goal to keep growing in the years ahead.’”

This anti-Trump issue of National Review is, in effect, a campaign pamphlet directed against a political candidate—indeed, the cover proclaims “Against Trump”—and, as such, is in clear violation of IRS statutes regulating nonprofit organizations.

The regulations are quite explicit that nonprofit organizations must “not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

I’m sorry, I have no cogent analysis to offer; I’m not even sure what the article said. I found it hard to pay attention after cracking up when I got to the part about “the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement.”

That’s a good one!

Secularism is not constitutional

Justice Scalia calls out those who would suppress Christianity in the USA:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday the idea of religious neutrality is not grounded in the country’s constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the U.S. exactly because Americans honor him.

Scalia was speaking at a Catholic high school in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana. Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 is the court’s longest serving justice. He has consistently been one of the court’s more conservative members.

He told the audience at Archbishop Rummel High School that there is “no place” in the country’s constitutional traditions for the idea that the state must be neutral between religion and its absence.

“To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from?” he said. “To be sure, you can’t favor one denomination over another but can’t favor religion over non-religion?”

He also said there is “nothing wrong” with the idea of presidents and others invoking God in speeches. He said God has been good to America because Americans have honored him.

Scalia said during the Sept. 11 attacks he was in Rome at a conference. The next morning, after a speech by President George W. Bush in which he invoked God and asked for his blessing, Scalia said many of the other judges approached him and said they wished their presidents or prime ministers would do the same.

“God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor. In presidential addresses, in Thanksgiving proclamations and in many other ways,” Scalia said.

“There is nothing wrong with that and do not let anybody tell you that there is anything wrong with that,” he added.

Moreover, the idea that Congress shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion” does not bar the several States, or the executive branch, from doing as it likes with regards to any religion. The fact that various courts have interpreted this as meaning that Christian football players cannot pray before a football game doesn’t mean that it actually does mean that, it merely means that Christians should use their weight of numbers to do whatever they please.

The public is under no moral obligation to obey the courts. Law that is invented out of thin air can be justly ignored. Whether it can be safely ignored, of course, is another question.