Law Enforcement Progressive-Democrat Style

Here’s yet another example of the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s contempt for law in the US and for us average Americans:

The City of Sacramento, California’s, legal department threatened to fine a popular retail store for public nuisance over numerous calls to police after thieves stole from its Land Park location multiple times, according to a [Sacramento Bee] report.

Stop troubling our police department with all these nuisance calls regarding repeated thefts by folks who know they’ll go unpunished. The poor, unfortunate thieves are more important to the Left than are the people and businesses being stolen from.

This lawless attitude of Party is on the ballot this November. Us voters need to vote accordingly.

Bad Analogy

Kat Rosenfeld, writing for The Free Press and attempting to defend Alec Baldwin and his negligence on the set of his movie Rust, looked to lay off the hue and cry over his shooting two people, killing one, with an “unloaded” gun, and Baldwin’s trial for that, on the man’s status as an old, white, rich and famous man.

Then she used a wholly inapt analogy in her attempt to excuse his negligence. She likened Baldwin’s mishandling (my term here, not Rosenfeld’s) of the revolver that was handed to him to a party-goer being handed a lit stick of supposedly fake dynamite, the party-goer then passing the stick back to the one who’d handed it to him, and then the stick—real dynamite, it turns out—detonates.

It’s a bad analogy: there was no way for the two individuals to ascertain whether the supposedly fake dynamite was, in fact, fake.

There was, however, opportunity—and obligation—for Baldwin to ascertain whether the revolver he’d just been handed was, in fact, loaded only with blanks and that no live rounds were in the cylinder.

It doesn’t matter that the man who’d handed the revolver to Baldwin had himself just checked the firearm for live rounds when he’d picked it up to hand to Baldwin. It doesn’t matter whether the man had then told Baldwin it had no live rounds or whether Baldwin had witnessed the other man’s check. It is every firearm handler’s obligation to personally check the firearm for live rounds. It’s no insult to the one who just did the check before handing the firearm over; the receiving man must check for himself that the firearm has no live rounds.

Full stop.

It’s easy enough, too, to flip the cylinder out and check. It’s easy enough, further, to dump the loaded rounds into the palm of a hand, or onto a nearby shelf, or even onto the ground, and inspect the rounds so ejected to see whether they’re all blanks or if one or more live rounds have gotten into the mix.

Baldwin chose—negligently—not to do so. And from his negligence, a woman was killed and a man severely injured because Baldwin pointed the revolver he’d just been handed at them—also negligently, since the scene being filmed wasn’t ready for him to do that; he was just playing around—and he squeezed the trigger. That the trigger squeeze at that point may have been unintended by Baldwin is just another act of his negligence.

It was a tragic but accidental death, Rosenfeld insisted. Nobody is arguing otherwise. The accidental nature of the killing and wounding, though, in no way alters the fact of Baldwin’s atrocious negligence in mishandling the revolver in his hand. It’s Baldwin’s negligence that led to the tragic but accidental death and the nearly as tragic and just as accidental wounding, and Baldwin’s negligence is what has led to his felony trial, not any “get the celebrity” nonsense nor any gross authoritarianism.

Cognitive Fitness Tests for Presidents

The Wall Street Journal spent a lot of electrons on the utility of cognitive tests for Presidents and other government officials. The TL;DR version is that cognitive tests are only initial screens for cognitive ability; they cannot diagnose, only point at areas for more in depth examination.

That’s fine. Then don’t stop there for government officials as critical to our nation’s safety as Presidents and Vice Presidents, and House and Senate leadership and Supreme Court Justices.

Do the cognitive testing as a matter of course, and then do the follow-up, in depth, examinations also as a matter of course.

The importance of such in depth examinations is clearly illustrated by the obvious mental decline in our current President. Has his decline progressed to the point that he’s no longer capable in that office? We the People need to know, and sooner is better. And we need to know for future elections to high office.

Smart Bots

AI is making them smarter, smart enough to fool even some of the more savvy among us.

Gone are the poorly worded messages that easily tipped off authorities as well as the grammar police. The bad guys are now better writers and more convincing conversationalists, who can hold a conversation without revealing they are a bot, say the bank and tech investigators who spend their days tracking the latest schemes.

And

AI has enabled scammers to target much larger groups and use more personal information to convince you the scam is real.
Fraud-prevention officials say these tactics are often harder to spot because they bypass traditional indicators of scams, such as malicious links and poor wording and grammar. Criminals today are faking driver’s licenses and other identification in an attempt to open new bank accounts and adding computer-generated faces and graphics to pass identity-verification processes. All of these methods are hard to stave off, say the officials.

That much is on the banks’, et al., IT folks, and I’m unsympathetic to them. This sort of thing is an arms race, and the thieves usually have the initiative of the first move. However, harder, and hard, mean possible; there’s no excuse for being slow to respond—and by slow, I mean as late as the next day or two to advise the victim and to correct the problem.

Even the late Muammar Gaddafi’s widow is becoming a better writer as she appeals to each of us.

However, the victim and potential victim—you and I—have certain critical responsibilities, too. One of those is to check our accounts frequently to look for unusual, unexpected, unknown charges and expenditures. That means checking much more frequently than the monthly account statement: at least a few times per week. Sure that takes a bit of time, but what’s the cost of letting a bogus charge go undetected for so long?

There’s a proactive step we can take, too, that will take longer to bring to fruition because it involves our legal system, but it can have broader and more permanent outcomes. The bad guys are now…more convincing conversationalists. Since they’re willing to talk, ask the conversationalist straight out if it’s a bot or an AI-generated conversationalist. If the answer comes back “Yes,” you can continue or not with a better understanding of the risk you’re taking.

If the answer is to hang up the call or otherwise quit the conversation, you’ve gotten an even clearer answer.

If, though, the answer comes back “No,” and something untoward happens to you through that conversation, now you have the programmer who wrote the bot, and likely his employer, too, whether an otherwise legitimate company or a dark net entity, engaging in any number of frauds, including false advertising and theft. Convicting the programmer and burning the employer will take that longer time, but the outcomes are more permanent.

In the end, though, an old and tritely phrased aphorism is absolutely true: if the arrangement on offer seems too good to be true, it isn’t true.

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer

A portion of oral argument in Moms for Liberty and Young America’s Foundation, et al v US Department of Education was relayed to Southeastern Legal Foundation Executive Director Kim Hermann while she was at a Heritage Foundation conference centered on addressing the Biden administration’s general penchant for putting boys into girls’ locker rooms and sports prioritize[ing] gender identity over sex in a broad range of milieus. That portion:

The judge allegedly asked a Justice Department lawyer to explain what expertise the Department of Education has on human biology and sexuality that justifies judicial deference to the feds’ new interpretation of “sex.” The DOJ lawyer replied “I guess I’m not sure,” according to Hermann’s colleagues.

What a sweeping indictment of Chevron Deference by the Biden administration defendants in the case.