Monthly Archives: July 2024

It’s Out

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My latest Peter Hunt novel, Dodger, is out and available in Kindle format on Amazon. See my Author Page link in the sidebar.

“Blackmail targets generally fall into two categories in this modern age.” He cocked an eyebrow at that. “One—” thumb up “—the blackmailee really does have something to be blackmailed over. There are subcategories of that.” Index finger up. “The other is the blackmailee is innocent as that chair you’re sitting in, but he’s being scammed by somebody with a good photoshop package. Some folks are timid enough or exposed enough in other ways—a delicate reputation in a sensitive line of work, maybe—to be bothered by the attempt.”

I mentioned sub categories. One—” thumb again “—is the blackmailee really did the thing he’s being blackmailed over. The other—” index finger; I resisted pointing it at him “—is he did something he doesn’t want exposed, maybe is blackmailable, maybe just embarrassing, and he doesn’t want that out during the blackmail about the thing he didn’t do.”

And then Peter Hunt’s client fired him from the blackmail case.

Not too long after that, a hitter took a run at him, and while he’s at the police station reporting the matter in detail, he learns that other hitters had run at his pseudo-niece, Trang Thi Thao, who was chasing a lead on her late sister’s drug supplier.

Hunt decided it was time for Plan C.

I looked from one to the other and said, “Time for me to go to Plan C.”

“I don’t like Plan C,” Thao said.

“You don’t even know what Plan C is.”

“It’s one after Plan B, which means it’s even more desperate and risky and with even less chance of succeeding.”

“What happened to Plan B?” Jackie said.

“Way things are going, it’s time to skip ahead,” I said. “Get out in front.”

Jackie said, “You’ve been out front all along. You’ll get shot. Again.”

“Out front is different from out in front. One of those nuancicals. Been shot before. I’m still here. Besides, if I do, we’ll know who they are and where they are. If I don’t, we’ll still know who they are and where they are. Win-win.”

Jackie said, “And just what is this Plan C of yours, O Wise One?”

“I’ll let you both know right after I figure it out.”

A Supreme Court Justice Doesn’t Understand our Constitution

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The Supreme Court has a very good code of ethics—pronounced so by no less a light than Justice Elena Kagan—but it lacks teeth sufficient enough to suit that same light. So Kagan wants—and she’s serious—a panel of lower court judges to pass judgment on claimed ethics violations done by a Justice.

There’s a problem with that. Here’s what Art III, Section 1, of our Constitution says about our courts and our judges and Justices:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

The editors of the WSJ understand this full well:

The Supreme Court was established by the Constitution, but the lower courts were created by Congress. A lower-court tribunal would therefore subject the High Court to supervision by a creature of Congress, which is constitutionally dubious.

It’s not just dubious; such a travesty would be a blatant violation of the separation of powers that our Constitution has created for our Federal government.

How is it that the Light of the Supreme Court does not understand this?

How Concerned?

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Just the News recently ran a poll of its readers—entirely unscientific, since the respondents are far from a random sample even of readers of JtN, and JtN makes no bones about this with any of its polls—that asked How concerned were you by FBI Director Wray’s testimony on attempt to assassinate Trump? regarding FBI Director Christopher Wray’s initial House testimony that he couldn’t be sure that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, in the recent assassination attempt, was hit by a bullet—it might have been, speculated Wray, a piece of shrapnel.

You can guess how the poll went (I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two won’t count), but that’s not what’s important here.

What’s important is the speed with which “the FBI” reacted to pushback on that “uncertainty” and moved to correct/adjust Wray’s testimony to indicate that Wray was, after all, confident that Trump was hit by a bullet. The initial testimony and the clarification, especially as it was a response to the hooraw over that initial testimony, when taken together are concerning: the whipsaw change suggestd that the FBI and its Director were not thinking overmuch about what actually had happened.

What has become of the FBI’s claim to operate on facts, wherever those facts might lead? What has become of Wray’s respect for facts?

It’s Still the Case

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Sundar Pichai’s Google is busily censoring/shadow banning Google searches for information about the recent assassination attempt against former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Billionaire Elon Musk suggested that Google’s omission of search functions for the assassination attempt against former President Trump may be improper.
Musk took to social media to highlight that Google Search’s autocomplete feature omitted results relating to the July 13 shooting. Google has denied taking any action to limit the results.

A carefully anonymous Google spokesman clarified that there has been no manual action taken on these predictions. This is cynically disingenuous. Pichai’s Google programmers are responsible for that absence; they’re the ones who wrote the algorithms that omit exactly those search suggestions.

That same Unknown Spokesman further insisted that

Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring[.]

Indeed, as this screenshot, published on Fox Business on 28 July, demonstrates:

Yet, suddenly, similar searches regarding the Trump assassination attempt are seeing similar autocomplete suggestions censored out. That’s continuing even after Pichai’s censorship has been exposed. That Google still is censoring the search effort is demonstrated by this screen shot that I took shortly after noon CDT on 29 Jul.

Still no autocomplete output there. If a searcher doesn’t come up with the precisely correct—Pichai’s and his Google programmers’ definition of correct—the searcher will find nothing.

Race and Gender in our Presidential Election Campaign Season

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Sadly, this is being thrust into the faces of us average Americans, riding on Progressive-Democrat Vice President and nominal Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Joshua Jamerson, John McCormick, and Tarini Parti put it in their WSJ article,

Harris’s rapid ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, expected to become official early next month, has thrust race and gender into the center of the contentious 2024 presidential election, in a country where scars of racial segregation and sex-based discrimination still linger.

It’s true enough that those scars still linger; it’s true enough that there remain instances of actual race and sex bigotry. However, the only ones thrust[ing] race and gender into the center of the current election season are Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their frontmen of the press. It was, after all, then-Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden who announced that his choice for his Vice President candidate would be, first and foremost, a woman who was black—qualification was a distant tertiary consideration. Then it was Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden who announced that his first pick for the Supreme Court would be a black woman; her qualification for the bench again was a distant tertiary consideration.

Now pressmen are (see above) making a big deal about Harris’ race and gender as somehow qualifying, in addition to making her merely popular; qualification for office, even her experience as VP, are distant tertiary and quaternary considerations. This is manufacturing racist and sexist bigotry where it does not exist—here, in candidates for office. It’s hard to get any more invidiously bigoted than that. Yet here is where Party is, along with their press communications arm.

This is despite the article’s authors contradicting themselves later in their piece:

A Wall Street Journal poll conducted July 23 to 25, after President Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Harris, found 81% of respondents said Harris (who is also of South Asian descent) being a Black woman made no difference in whether they would support her for president.

Us average Americans—which is to say, us honest Americans—don’t give a rat’s patootie about Harris’, or any other candidate for office’s, race or gender. We only care that, beyond being old enough and a born-American citizen, the candidate actually is capable of handling the demands of being President. Even those constitutionally mandated minimal eligibility criteria (note: these are not qualification criteria) are background considerations; our primary concern is whether the candidate is qualified for the Presidency, what that candidate’s claimed policies and goals are, and what that candidate’s empirically demonstrated history of achieving those goals is.

For pressmen and Party politicians to give primary emphasis to race and gender in the present season is at once their confession that their candidate has no record worthy of campaigning on, and nakedly insulting to us Americans.