Monthly Archives: December 2018

Side Note

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Much has been made of the Republican Party’s “control” of a unified Federal government these past two years, with Republicans “controlling” the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency.  Much is made, also, of the Republican Party’s continued “control” of the Senate, indeed its increased “control” following the mid-terms, as a result of which Republicans extended their majority from 51 to 53.

The latest is Matthew Continetti’s claim on last Friday’s Special Report (hosted by Bret Baier on Fox News): in discussing the Schumer Shutdown Redux (my term, not Continetti’s), Continetti insisted that this shutdown began in that unified government—repeating particularly the claim that Republicans “controlled” the Senate.

After all this time, the claim of Senate control cannot be simply a misspeak or a one-time bit of sloppy journalism; I have to ask.

In what fantasy world do Continetti and his fellows live where 60 is less than 51?  Less even than 53?

Afghanistan and A World’s Policeman

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The US currently supplies 14,000 of the 16,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan trying to shore up the government and rid the nation of Taliban, al Qaeda, and Daesh terrorists.  President Donald Trump is thinking about cutting our contingent in half over the coming year.  Trump’s rationale is that we shouldn’t continue to be the world’s policeman—unless and until other nations start picking up some of the costs of that role (or, in Trump’s terms, pay us something).

Germany objects.

I disagree with Trump on the world’s cop bit; there is a great deal of national security flowing from our being the cop on the beat rather than one or more of our enemies (as Russia already is demonstrating in Europe, the People’s Republic of China throughout Asia and associated Seas, Iran in the Middle East), regardless of the cost, even if all of that is borne by us.

Germany’s hypocrisy is instructive.  As is Deutsche Welle‘s careful omission of that “unless and until” continuation of Trump’s statement on being world policeman.

Germany has a contingent in Afghanistan, too—in a support role.  It’s a highly useful support role, but Germany demands its soldiers—soldiers!—be protected from risk by our soldiers.  Consequently, if we reduce our presence, Germany may well withdraw altogether.

And:

Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign policy committee, expressed his concern at the development on Thursday. The US was “irreplaceable” as power for maintaining world order, he told public broadcaster ARD.
By withdrawing from this role, the US would make the world “less safe, more unstable, and more egotistical,” he added, before dismissing the term “world policeman” as outdated. “This is much more about world order, stability, balance, and diplomacy[.]”

Yet Germany declined to play any serious role in an order and stability exercise in Iraq.  Germany demands to play only that minor role in the order and stability exercise in Afghanistan.  Germany and most of the rest of European NATO, for decades, has been freeloading off American weal and soldiers for protection from Russia, not even keeping their own voluntarily entered into promise to commit 2% of their national GDPs to supporting NATO with soldiers and equipment—until publicly shamed into it over the last couple of years.  And even now, the majority of those nations continue to refuse even to try to honor their word.

The US [is] “irreplaceable” as power for maintaining world order[.]

But expose their troops to actual danger, even only in support?  Nah—you Americans do that.  We’ll hold your coats.

This Sallah-ian attitude—this timidity—makes it difficult, indeed, to sell the need for us to continue as world policeman (because I choose not to hide behind Röttgen’s meekly wordy euphemism) to our domestic audience—the very folks who are abandoned left to pay the cost in blood and treasure.

Facebook’s Secret Rule Book

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Facebook has written a massive, byzantine, and secret document of rules packed with spreadsheets and power point slides to help it censor the news posted tackle misinformation posted to its facility.

Even the New York Times gets it, at least to an extent.

The closely held rules are extensive, and they make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself[.]

It’s also internally inconsistent.

The [NYT] discovered a range of gaps, biases and outright errors—including instances where Facebook allowed extremism to spread in some counties while censoring mainstream speech in others.

Are these deliberate?  It’s hard to believe the smartest kids, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, their management team, wouldn’t be doing this deliberately.  But it’s also hard to discern the logic of their inconsistencies in their rulebook, too.

Inconsistencies like

outsource[ing …] content moderation to other companies that tend to hire unskilled workers…. The 7,500-plus moderators “have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to ‘jihad,’ for example, forbidden? When is a ‘crying laughter’ emoji a warning sign?”

Sara Su, a senior engineer on Facebook’s News Feed:

It’s not our place to correct people’s speech, but we do want to enforce our community standards on our platform. When you’re in our community, we want to make sure that we’re balancing freedom of expression and safety.

Facebook’s definition of “balance.”  Facebook’s definition of “freedom of expression.”  Facebook’s definition of “safety.”  And so Facebook, appropriately, does not try to correct speech.  Instead, it openly bans speech of which it—Zuckerberg and Sandberg—personally disapprove.  And so it bars some individuals altogether, it blocks some Presidential tweets, it blocks administration immigration advertisements.

An this, from Monika Bickert, Facebook’s global policy management honcho:

We have billions of posts every day, we’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems.  At that scale, even if you’re 99% accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes.

This is utterly disingenuous; it shows that Facebook isn’t even trying.  Not in a world where car makers and other manufacturers have, for years, demanded and achieved six-sigma accuracy.  Can’t reach six-sigma accuracy in speech censorship?  Not yet, perhaps.  But a serious effort would achieve better than 99%.  Or–work with me on this; it’s a concept still under development–maybe Facebook should stop censoring altogether.

Or: Facebook already is achieving that greater accuracy—it does, after all, succeed in censoring speech from the right side of center.  It hides its evident bias, though, behind an internally inconsistent, multi-thousand-page rule book.  Maybe that’s the logic to the inconsistencies.

And maybe that’s why they wanted to keep their rulebook secret.

What We Can Look Forward To

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Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan called out California’s sanctuary laws after the murder of a Newman police officer by a suspect who is in the US illegally.

That murdered cop, by the way, was himself an immigrant—a legal one from Fiji.

I’ve mentioned before that House Speaker-to-Be Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) refuse at all to negotiate.

Here’s another example.  Congressman Jim McGovern (D, MA), rather than making a reasoned argument for his claimed bipartisan proposal, rather than offering a rational explanation for President Donald Trump’s rejection of it (if McGovern’s proposal existed), simply said that Trump had gone off his meds.  Not only do Progressive-Democrats refuse to negotiate the wall, they refuse any sort of serious discourse about it—preferring, instead, their tactic of ad hominem smear.

Are they incapable of forming coherent arguments on the matter, or are they simply refusing to do so?  Your call.

Here’s another example.  Trump, apart from a trip to visit the troops in Iraq, has been in DC all along.  The Progressive-Democrats, though, went home to enjoy their Christmas vacation.  They’re home enjoying their vacation instead of staying in DC to negotiate a deal.  They’re home enjoying their vacation even as they shed copious crocodile tears over the Federal workers whose paychecks will be delayed as a result of this Schumer Shutdown Redux.

In any event, increasing violence and murders by illegal aliens can only be an inevitable outcome of the Progressive-Democrats’ no border barriers, no open borders, disband ICE and curtail CBP position.

It’s absolutely true, as the Progressive-Democrats constantly assert, that only a small minority of aliens who enter our country illegally are violent and will continue their violence.

But what those Progressive-Democrats also know full well but carefully, deliberately omit as they wail and rip their bodices is that that small minority is capable of massive destruction.  Just look at the butchery inflicted by MS-13 and M-18—who represent only a small number of the aliens who entered our country illegally.  Individual examples abound, too, from Kate Steinle’s murder by an illegal alien to that just committed murder of a northern California cop by an illegal alien and gang member.

Child Molestation and Bankruptcy Escapes

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Ironically, it’s the Catholic Church that has invented this ruse.

The Archdiocese of Portland was the first to do it. Three months later the Roman Catholic Diocese in Tucson, AZ, followed suit and three months after that the diocese in Spokane, WA, did it, too.
They all filed for bankruptcy and since then more than 15 other Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from lawsuits by sexual-assault victims, resulting in about 4,000 claims seeking compensation for past wrongdoing. This year, three more Catholic dioceses announced intentions to file.

Escaping debt—escaping court ordered financial penalties for the Church’s abuse of children and women—through bankruptcy.

But, of course. The outcome of this ruse is

[T]he legal strategy uses the law that protects companies from creditors to help preserve its mission and shield assets from claims made by victims of sexual abuse. Filing for chapter 11 freezes lawsuits and provides breathing room to work out a plan to compensate abuse victims.

Never mind that there already are plans for compensating the children and women: the courts’ judgments and assigned penalties from those cynically frozen suits.  There’s nothing to work out.  Aside from that, I’m not sure that a mission that includes condoning officials’ abuse of the most helpless of their flock is a mission worth preserving.  Condoning? See the Pope’s response to attempts to punish priests who are found abusive. See his attempts to absolve higher officials—bishops and cardinals—of their responsibility for the abuses.

And the strategy is spreading.  USA Gymnastics and the Boy Scouts of America are both in or looking to bankruptcy as a way to escape judgment.  Condoning?  See USAG’s—and USOC’s, come to that—covering up of a doctor/trainer’s decades long abuse.

This stinks.

I’m not much enamored of Federal laws, but we need one here: bankruptcy must be legally barred as a means of avoiding financial responsibility for this sort of abuse.  We even have a precedent: college students can’t duck their student debt through bankruptcy, albeit that bar is newly in flux.

Churches (not just Catholic), and any other organizations whose leadership teams or individuals are found culpable of child abuse or sexual abuse of women, cannot be allowed to run away from their fiscal responsibility (criminal courts work the crimes here, already; although I’d certainly like to see the employing institution punished, also).  No debt “reorganization” through bankruptcy should be allowed.  Pay the judgment in full or cease to exist.  With one exception: the guilty ones must be permanently barred from taking any role other than parishioner or line employee in any religious institution, regardless of religion, or in any company in the originating industry.  If the bankruptcy court is empowered to require that, then any fiscal penalties could legitimately undergo some adjustment once publicly available proof has been provided that all the named individuals—and all of the individuals responsible must be named—have been so barred.

Sadly, this bar will have to be done civilly, since the Church, of which the Catholic Church and USAG have shown themselves the canonical examples for all institutions—have chosen not to.