Tag: law

Too big to jail

Karl Denninger considers the Attorney General’s recent admission that the big banks are above the law:

The Rule of Law works and guides a just society only because it applies to everyone.  Nobody gets to rape, rob, pillage or murder.  If you do, no matter who you are, you face the same punishment, the same process, the same sentence.

We all know there are disparities in the process and always have been.  But there’s a difference between the foibles of mankind — everyone has their bias, and there is no such thing as a human process that is flawless — and intentional, designed-in or willful refusal to prosecute certain people for acts that land others in prison.

The latter is the defining action of a dictatorship.

A dictatorship can only exist by declaring war upon the people.  When a certain subset of the population is given license to pillage or worse that is the very definition of “diktat” from which the term “dictatorship” comes.

Fast and Furious, incidentally, falls into this category as well.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs and must not be permitted to continue.  The government and its actors have lost all moral and ethical appeal to fair play and the rule of law — by exempting certain people they have declared both themselves and those they exempted beyond the protections that exist in a civilized society.

I’ve previously pointed out that there is no longer “law” as such, in the United States any more.  Everything about the “nation”, which is no longer, properly speaking, even a nation anymore, is fraudulent, from its “money” to its system of “justice”.  Even something as simple and basic as openly fighting a “war” is now beyond its bloated, cancerous make-believe structure.

I wouldn’t call the present system a dictatorship myself.  Dictatorships are more open and direct.  It is better described as a simulatorship, which is to say, rule by pretense.  It is remniscent of the latter days of the Soviet empire, when the Russian people pretended to work and the Soviet government pretended to pay them.  In the latter days of the US empire, the federal government pretends its actions are within the limits set by the U.S. Constitution and the American people pretend to believe them.

If a corporate entity is too big to fail or too big to jail, then logic dictates it must be cut down to a size that permits both.  Remember, corporations are not capitalism, they are creations of government and if they can’t reasonably be imprisoned, they can certainly be “executed”.  And if real American people can be “legally” executed at the order of the president, then can there really be any doubt that artificial American people are also liable to termination on command as well?

This section of the American Banker article particularly struck home:

Many are still angry about the 2008 bank bailouts, and they now have an
on-the-record confirmation from Justice’s top official that the
department is treating big banks softly just because they are large.
Compare it to how law enforcement typically treats American citizens
when they break the law — often times by throwing the book at them — and
it’s easy to understand how that anger could grow into more popular
support for a big bank breakup.

For example, my father was imprisoned for 12 years after being accused of evading $1.6 million in taxes, penalties, and imaginary “interest” despite having paid something like $75 million in state and federal taxes over the previous 20 years and forcing the State of Minnesota to admit that its agents knowingly lied when they falsely claimed he was a resident and seized his house for not paying taxes he didn’t owe. Meanwhile, Congressional investigators estimate that the big US banks launder about $250 billion in drug money every year in addition to their $12 billion in estimated annual mortgage fraud.  When caught, they occasionally pay a monetary penalty calculated at a rate which, in my father’s case, would have amounted to about a $20,000 fine.

So, I can understand why many Americans support a big bank breakup and seeing corporate criminals treated with the same severity as actual human beings.  But it’s not going to happen, because the entire financial system is already on the verge of collapse and all of the insiders know it.  That is why the banks will continue doing whatever they want and the regulators and politicians will continue to look the other way, until the moment when a critical node fails and the entire system breaks down in a manner that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular.

Kicking it old school

I have to admit, I rather like the cut of Paul the Younger’s jib:

In a rare, traditional filibuster, Sen. Rand Paul vowed to speak on the Senate floor “as long as it takes” to draw attention to his concerns about the Obama administration’s policy regarding the targeted killing of American terrorism suspects.

The Kentucky Republican took to the floor before noon Wednesday to block an expected vote on the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA, with aides saying he could continue for hours. Paul, beginning his remarks, said he would continue “until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important.”

“Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?” Paul asked. “No one person, no one politician should be allowed … to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country.”

Paul is absolutely right.  And it does not speak well of the Republican Party that so few of his fellow Senators are joining him in taking what should be the obvious position that the President of the United States cannot simply murder any American he wants whenever he wishes, without trial, sentencing, or even a warrant.

Banning drones

It’s a positive and encouraging first step.  But every city and township in America must follow suit just in case Washington fails to come to its senses:

Charlottesville, Va., has become the first city in the United States to formally pass an anti-drone resolution. The resolution, passed Monday, “calls on the United States Congress
and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt
legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of
drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court,” and
“pledges to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or
borrowed drones.”

I imagine that liberal and conservative Americans can find common ground in not wanting death-dealing, missile-equipped remote-controlled drones flying over their heads.  After all, it could be the likes of (George Bush/Barack Obama) with his evil (Republican/Democrat) on the trigger.

I don’t recall the right to fly drones everywhere being a power granted to the Federal government anywhere in the Constitution.  Not even in the emanations and penumbras.

In defense of sexual predilection

Ed Trimnell follows through and posts an admirably substantive critique of what he describes as my sexual determinism:

 Vox took issue with my earlier statement that “Conservatism is for men as well as women.” He is also on record as being opposed to female suffrage.  Now, before you ask, “Why bother to refute such ideas?” let me inform you that Vox Day is not some babbling nut job. On the contrary, Vox is highly articulate, and the author of a number of successful books.

However, Vox has been seduced by the doctrine of sexual determinism—and the notion that one’s sex determines one’s ability to function in the political realm. Like most false ideologies, this one, too, is based on an initial premise of truth that is over-extrapolated to a false conclusion.

I think it can be reasonably said that I subscribe to the doctrine of sexual predilection and predictability, thought not absolute determinism, and I readily assert that one’s sex can be used to reliably predict one’s ideological and political predilections, as well as many other things.  I should note here that one of the things that often trips up my critics when they attempt to attack my positions is that they tend to operate in binary terms whereas I always think in terms of probability even if my rhetoric often sounds superficially binary.  Since binary-based attacks are necessarily crude in comparison and therefore off-target from the start, they are easily defeated.  As for whether that doctrine is false, or over-extrapolated, let us see if Ed is able to adequately support those assertions.

Ed begins with an analogy.

Vox is Tom Peters in reverse. The mistake that Vox commits is to interpret female differences as weaknesses (rather than the strengths that Peters claims them to be). Vox asserts that:

    “…women would not be permitted to vote in any society that wishes to sustain itself…”

According to Vox, the proof is in the pudding. The Western democracies introduced female suffrage around one hundred years ago. And in the intervening years, most have adopted some form of the welfare state.

Women—given their predisposition toward cooperative, group-directed activity—may be more susceptible to the arguments of Democrats, socialists, and similar collectivists. Perhaps. (Of course, Tom Peters asserts—relying on the same data—that these traits make women better corporate managers!)

How can deterministic arguments be turned against men? Men are by nature more aggressive, and more prone to violence and antisocial behavior. Most violent crimes are committed by men; and almost all rapes are committed by men. Compared to women, men are far more inclined toward violent, sexually aggressive, and antisocial behavior.

This is an excellent of example of reason needing to be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions.  Ed makes a basic logical error here in attempting to equate my logical and empirical argument with Tom Peters’s logical argument.  I am not familiar with Mr. Peter’s post-In Search of Excellence work, so I don’t know if he empirically proves his case that women are better corporate managers or not.  But it should be obvious that if Peters has done so, then Ed has shown my argument to be correct, analogically speaking.  If Peters has not, then it has absolutely no relevance to my case that women’s suffrage is inimical to human liberty, national sovereignty, and the survival of Western civilization because I have provided empirical evidence to prove my case by a variety of metrics.

Ed goes on to provide a historical metric of his own:

However, history proves that sex does not equal destiny at the voting booth. In the close election of 1976, the gender gap was nil. Reagan’s “gender gap” was in the single-digit range in 1980. In 1988, George H.W. Bush actually captured a majority of the female vote.

So much for the argument that women are destined to vote for the Democrats.

Why then, has the political gender gap become so pronounced in recent election cycles? It might be because women (along with other groups) are voting according to their biology, whereas they mysteriously weren’t in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ed’s error here is caused by the erroneous equivalence he makes between voting Democratic and voting against human liberty.  He is assuming that the Republicans are the pro-liberty party, which is simply not true.  Because women are smaller, weaker, more emotional, more fearful, and have a more active left amygdala than men, (to list only a few of the sex differences relevant here), they reliably throw their political support to the party who more adeptly plays upon their fears.

This is not an abstract argument, it is observably a political practice that has been in use since the beginning of the 20th century, which just happens to coincide when women received the right to vote in many countries.  Note that women’s suffrage is literally the very first plank in the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle, which in its demand for proportional representation is more radically pro-female than any current Western political party outside of Scandinavia. 

Here is the program of a genuinely Italian movement. It is
revolutionary because it is anti-dogmatic, strongly innovative and
against prejudice.

For the political problem: We demand:

a) Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with
proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility
for women.

The party that plays most upon female fears in the USA is usually the Democratic Party, but was the Republican Party at the time of George H.W. Bush’s first campaign.  The Republicans were offering more credible security promises in a perceived time of global insecurity.  UPDATE: as one reader comments, we should not forget either “Willie Horton” or “Dukakis in the tank”.

The Republican security case was trumped in 1992, when Bill Clinton played upon economic fears and made an overt play for female voters by “feeling their pain”, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Gulf War turned out to be considerably less apocalyptic than anticipated.  The Republican Party’s objectives have since been significantly feminized, even though they have been trumped by the Obama Democratic Party’s abilities to one-up them.  The reason the political gender gap has become increasingly pronounced is that in an environment of increased economic fear, the party that does a better job of appealing to the more fearful portion of the electorate will inordinately prosper from its advantage in that regard.

Consider the fate of Switzerland.  Women were not permitted to vote there until 1971, much later than the rest of Europe.  This is the primary reason why Switzerland retains its sovereignty whereas neither democracy nor national sovereignty presently exists in any of the member states of the European Union, which is ruled by an unaccountable, unelected European Commission.  But even in Switzerland, it only took 28 years post-suffrage for the national constitution to be modified to permit the passage of gun laws, and for extensive restrictions to be placed upon the ownership of firearms.  As for the EU, note that in Italy, even the pretense of popular rule was abandoned in 2011 as the government is headed by an unelected, EU-selected Senator-for-Life.

It is easy to establish an objective metric to consider the effect of female suffrage on a nation without waiting to see how long it takes for female suffrage to be followed by the complete cessation of democracy or the loss of national sovereignty, which I note took as little as 19 years in the case of the German Weimar Republic.  A law is, by definition, a restriction on a human activity.  So, to prove that female suffrage is not inimical to human liberty, all that is necessary is to show that the number of laws being passed post-suffrage is equal to or less than the number of laws being passed pre-suffrage.  Alternatively, one could compare the lifespans of sovereign democracies and/or republics where women are, and are not, permitted to vote.

So my question to Mr. Trimnell is if he accepts the number of laws and regulations in effect as a reasonable metric for measuring human liberty in this regard?  And if so, what are the historical cases he believes favor his anti-determinism case?

Creeping out from under their rocks

The advocates of unlimited government are beginning to sense that their long-sought victory over the concept of limited government is finally within sight:

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are
reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is
broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on
obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and
downright evil provisions…

it is hard to take seriously the claim by the
Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state
of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our
sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos
or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and
prosper.

This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands.
Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and
protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or
property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We
should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not
obligation. 

Make no mistake, getting rid of the Constitution has always been the penultimate goal of the Left.  Everything they have done, from expanding the franchise to women and younger voters to changing the demographic makeup of the electorate and buying off the elderly, has been with this object in mind.  Unlimited government is the goal, and even though the Constitution is mostly honored in its breach these days, it is still a reminder that the real America, the historical America, is a nation of laws and not men.

The Orwellian U.S. courts

Black is white.  War is peace.  Non-compliance is compliance.  Concealment is disclosure:

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed most of two lawsuits seeking disclosure of US government documents related to the Obama administration’s claim of legal authority to order the killing of American citizens overseas….

At issue was whether the administration would be ordered under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to disclose to the public legal memos written by government lawyers defending the targeted killing of US citizens overseas who were suspected of involvement in terror operations.

“This Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests,” McMahon said.

She added that the government thus could not be “compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Got that?  The Government has not violated FOIA by violating FOIA. That is, if nothing else, a violation of Aristotelian logic.  The fact is that regardless of what the captive courts declare, the Obama administration has absolutely no authority to order the killing of American citizens without trial or due process, overseas or within the borders of the States. The fact that the courts are too corrupt to even hold them accountable is further evidence of the ongoing decline of the United States into historical irrelevance.

Abolish the death penalty

It’s not often that I agree with a New York Times editorial, but I, too, oppose the death penalty.  I don’t oppose it because there are not criminals who merit death, but rather because I do not trust the state to be able to carry it out responsibly and in a strictly limited manner, a doubt that the historical and scientific evidence tends to strongly bolster:

Thanks to the Innocence Project
and the overturning of 18 wrongful convictions of death-row inmates
with DNA evidence and the exonerations of 16 others charged with capital
crimes, the American public is increasingly aware that the system makes
terrible mistakes. Since 1973, a total of 142 people have been freed
from death row after being exonerated with DNA or other kinds of
evidence.
All of these factors have led the states to retreat from the death
penalty in recent years — in both law and in practice. In 2012,
Connecticut became the fifth state in five years to abolish the penalty.
Nine states executed inmates, the fewest in two decades. Three-fourths
of the 43 executions in 2012 were carried out in only four states. The
number of new death sentences remained low at 77 — about one-third the
number in 2000 — with just four states accounting for almost two-thirds
of those sentences. While 33 states retain the death penalty on their
books, 13 of them have not executed anyone for at least five years.

It is always important to keep in mind that murder and other capital crimes are far less significant problems than mass murder by government.  The very last thing any libertarian should support is a government that wants to confiscate firearms being empowered with life and death over its citizens.  Moreover, a death penalty ban should also include a ban on the Obama administration’s claim of a power of secret president-ordered assassinations.

If the federal government cannot execute a citizen with a trial, it bloody well can’t assassinate him without one either.

Let Science be silent

There is an wise old saying that I very much attempt to apply to life, the universe, and everything.  “Let Reason be silent when Experience gainsays it.”  In this postmodern scientific age, we very much require a new aphorism.   

Let Science be silent when it cannot predict future events.  

The fear and outrage being expressed in light of the conviction of the Italian geologists who are guilty of manslaughter at L’Aquila are entirely misplaced, as it is not science that is being found guilty, but rather, the abuse of the common man’s faith in science by scientists.  Consider the facts of the case, as described by Nature, a publication that can hardly be considered hostile to science:

The indictments have drawn global condemnation. The American
Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS), both in Washington DC, issued statements in support of
the Italian defendants. In an open letter to Napolitano, for example,
the AAAS said it was “unfair and naive” of local prosecutors to charge
the men for failing “to alert the population of L’Aquila of an impending
earthquake”. And last May, when Italian magistrate Giuseppe Gargarella
ruled at a preliminary hearing that the scientists would have to stand
trial this September, the Italian blogosphere lit up with lamentation
and defence lawyers greeted the decision with disbelief….

The view from L’Aquila, however, is quite different. Prosecutors and
the families of victims alike say that the trial has nothing to do with
the ability to predict earthquakes, and everything to do with the
failure of government-appointed scientists serving on an advisory panel
to adequately evaluate, and then communicate, the potential risk to the
local population. The charges, detailed in a 224-page document filed by
Picuti, allege that members of the National Commission for Forecasting
and Predicting Great Risks, who held a special meeting in L’Aquila the
week before the earthquake, provided “incomplete, imprecise, and
contradictory information” to a public that had been unnerved by months
of persistent, low-level tremors. Picuti says that the commission was
more interested in pacifying the local population than in giving clear
advice about earthquake preparedness.

“I’m not crazy,” Picuti says. “I know they can’t predict
earthquakes. The basis of the charges is not that they didn’t predict
the earthquake. As functionaries of the state, they had certain duties
imposed by law: to evaluate and characterize the risks that were present
in L’Aquila.” Part of that risk assessment, he says, should have
included the density of the urban population and the known fragility of
many ancient buildings in the city centre. “They were obligated to
evaluate the degree of risk given all these factors,” he says, “and they
did not.”

“This
isn’t a trial against science,” insists Vittorini, who is a civil party
to the suit. But he says that a persistent message from authorities of
“Be calm, don’t worry”, and a lack of specific advice, deprived him and
others of an opportunity to make an informed decision about what to do
on the night of the earthquake. “That’s why I feel betrayed by science,”
he says. “Either they didn’t know certain things, which is a problem,
or they didn’t know how to communicate what they did know, which is also
a problem.”

The article and the account it provides of the fate of the Vittorini family is damning to guilty geologists.  It is clear that the Italian families resident there no longer abided by their traditional custom of clearing out of their houses when there were tremors, primarily due to the assurances they received from the National Commission, which is why the death toll was larger than it would have been if it hadn’t been for those assurances.  The defenders of the scientists around the world are observably bending the truth, even lying, for claiming that science is on trial or that the basis of the charges are that they failed to do the impossible by not “pinpointing the time, location and strength of a future earthquake in the short term”, as Nature puts it.

As the prosecutor points out, the basis of the charges is not that the scientists didn’t predict the earthquake, but rather that they did not fulfill their legal duties to perform a proper risk assessment.  Moreover, if it is impossible to predict an earthquake, then how could any honest geologist accept a paid position on a government body called the National Commission for Forecasting
and Predicting Great Risks?  If you know you can’t do the job required, then you had better not accept it in the first place.

I have to disagree with Instapundit’s take on the matter.  He sees this Italian attempt to hold scientists accountable for engaging in unscientific activity that led directly to great loss of life as creating “incentives for scientists to leave Italy and
to avoid giving any sort of earthquake advice to the Italian government.
I predict a run of bad luck.”

First, I note the inapplicability of the quote to the situation.  Heinlein was talking about entrepreneurs and technological and conceptual innovators when he described his “extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people”.  He most certainly wasn’t describing publicly acclaimed, government-funded individuals hailed as the nation’s “most respected geophysicists”.

Second, I very much doubt Italy will have any trouble at all finding top-credentialed scientists to continue accepting government funding.  And to the extent that those scientists learn to keep their mouths shut about things they can neither predict with any reasonable accuracy nor support with credible scientific evidence, that would be an entirely desirable advancement from the current state of scientistry, which so often attempts to confuse credentialed democracy and amateur editing for genuine scientody.

La responsabilità della scientista

Avanti azzurri!  Much to the shock and horror of the world’s scientists, Italy holds seven “experts” accountable for their criminal negligence:

An Italian court convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter
on Monday for failing to adequately warn citizens before an earthquake
struck central Italy in 2009, killing more than 300 people.  The
court in L’Aquila also sentenced the defendants to six years in prison.
Each one is a member of the national Great Risks Commission.

Scientists worldwide had decried the trial as
ridiculous, contending that science has no reliable way of predicting
earthquakes.  Among those convicted were some of Italy’s most
prominent and internationally respected seismologists and geological
experts, including Enzo Boschi, former head of the national Institute of
Geophysics and Volcanology. 

It’s both fascinating and informative, isn’t it.  Scientists are absolutely certain that the science is settled and they are more than willing to declare what laws should be passed, what classes should be taught, and what massive economic interventions and intrusions on individual freedom should be suffered due to the absolute reliability of their scientific knowledge.

But hold them personally responsible for their predictions and declarations?  Well, that’s an outrage!  Science isn’t actually expected to be reliable, after all!  I look forward to seeing climate scientists being similarly prosecuted one day for the complete failure of their predictive models.  The evolutionary biologists should be safe, unfortunately, since they don’t even have any predictive models.

Mailvox: continuing education

Robwbright, Esq. continues to discover that the lawyer’s approach of attempting to poison the well isn’t the wisest tactic when dealing with a superintelligence:

 Is human superintelligence armed with facts & logic a legitimate source of authority?

Before
you answer, allow me to appeal to another authority – higher than
either of us… Note that God answers the above question “No”:  He
catches the wise in their own craftiness”; and again, “The LORD knows
the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” and “Therefore let no
one boast in men.”

A wise (and pretty intelligent) man once said:  “But
may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus,
the Messiah, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the
world!

It is interesting that you always call out someone when
they appeal to their own authority, but you CONSTANTLY appeal to and
boast about your own superintelligence and consider that acceptable
behavior.

Will you directly answer the question “Yes” or “No”. It should be a simple question for a superintelligence to answer.

It most certainly is a simple question.  Is “human superintelligence armed with facts and logic” a legitimate source of authority?  No, of course not.  Neither are royal bloodlines, academic credentials, or guild licenses.  None of these things are conclusively determinative of the truth.  But what robwbright quite amusingly reveals in his attempt to impugn my credibility here is that he doesn’t even know what an appeal to authority is.

This is readily apparent due to his claim that I “CONSTANTLY” appeal to the authority of my own superintelligence.  This is absolutely and totally false.  I will go so far as to assert that I have never once appealed to the authority of my intelligence in the 11-year history of my WND column or the 9-year history of this blog.  I should welcome the citation of any evidence that purports to prove otherwise.

Now, it is certainly true that I rub the oft-demonstrated fact of my superior intelligence in the face of my critics, for the reason I have often explained.  Both the political Left and the militant atheists regularly resort to the logical fallacy of appealing to the authority of intelligence; in fact, atheists even utilize it in a bizarre and illogical argument against the existence of God.  My overt assertion and subsequent demonstration of an even higher degree of intelligence than most of them can muster thereby removes one of their favorite intellectual weapons from their arsenal and tends to make them look foolish when they attempt to use it to dismiss me in the manner that they dismiss so many others they attack.

This is why you will often see them theorizing that I must be crazy, because they are so attached to their logical fallacy that they literally cannot grasp that someone can be more intelligent than they are and nevertheless reject their left-liberal ideology or their godless scientism… even though it has been statistically demonstrated that there are more high IQ theists than atheists.  IQ-flaunting is a useful rhetorical device that trumps a common rhetorical argument, nothing more.  And it is obviously an effective one, as most of my critics eventually get around to complaining about it sooner or later.

What robwbright tried to do here is the clever legal tactic known as “I know you are but what am I?”.  This is the second time he has unsuccessfully tried to attack my intellectual credibility in defending the legal system against my charges of corruption, while repeatedly engaging in the logical fallacy of appealing to his own experience.  Because lawyers are hierarchical credentialists prone to thinking they are more intelligent than everyone else, they are particularly susceptible to the same rhetorical baiting that so easily discombobulates the leftists and the atheists.

No one who is truly intelligent ever appeals to that intelligence because he knows that there is always someone smarter out there, and because he is confident that he can make his logical case based on the relevant facts.  I’ve already shown how  logic dictates robwbright’s claim that legislative law always trumps interpretive rulings MUST be incorrect, given that a) there is a long and sordid history of interpretive rulings trumping legislative law, and, b) the obvious distinction between “an interpretive ruling based on legislative law” and “an interpretive ruling that the judge pretends to have been based on legislative law”.

Finally, I have two return questions for robwbright.  First, are you an Officer of the Court?  Second, when you are in the courtroom, is the law what the presiding judge declares it to be?