Category Archives: culture

Due Process and Colleges/Universities

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Recall the Department of Education’s 2011 egregious and cynically biased Dear Colleague Letter and its attack on due process and equal protection under law.  Things are being restored to legitimacy under the  Betsy DeVos DoEd via interim guidance just issued.

Colleges can now apply a higher standard of proof when determining guilt in sexual misconduct cases and must offer equal opportunity for the accused and accuser to have legal advisers participate in their hearings, according to interim recommendations issued by the US Department of Education on Friday.

Because

The Education Department on Friday formally rescinded guidelines issued by the Obama administration in 2011 and 2014….

There is one item to be cleared up; hopefully it will be when formal, final guidance is issued by DoEd.

Schools now have the discretion to apply either the “preponderance of the evidence” standard, or the higher “clear and convincing evidence” standard….

The criminal standard, preponderance of the evidence, must be the only standard allowed.  And the accusation must be investigated by the police, not by ad hoc amateurish kangaroo courts and pseudo-investigators of school faculty or staff.  A victim of sexual misconduct is not helped in the slightest by a jumped up school tribunal bent on social justice rather than justice.

More Mueller Leaks

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Even Howard Kurtz seems to be catching on, as he wrote for Fox News.

Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation leaks are continuing apace.

Suddenly, there are a whole lot of leaks about Paul Manafort.

Could this, just possibly, be the special counsel’s way of putting pressure on President Trump’s former campaign chairman?

And

[T]he detailed nature of the leaks is also troubling. As a onetime Justice Department reporter, I can tell you that such leaks in a criminal investigation are rare, as well as illegal.

Here are two of the latest Mueller team leaks (leaks Mueller continues to allow, if not encourage, as demonstrated by his choosing to do nothing about stopping them):

The [New York] Times discloses that when federal agents conducted an early-morning raid at Manafort’s Virginia home in July, they picked the lock. As for details, the story says the agents not only took documents and copied computer files, “they even photographed the expensive suits in his closet.”

Who knows such detail other than Mueller’s agents conducting the raid (assuming we can accept that the NYT isn’t making up such entertaining items)?  Certainly not Manafort; had he been there he surely would have opened the door for the agents.

And

CNN reported that federal investigators wiretapped Manafort both before and after the election.

Certainly, Manafort or anyone associated with him would not have known about the taps and so could not have leaked this item.  Their knowledge would have defeated the purpose of the tap.

And another leak, this one unmentioned by Kurtz:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has interviewed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about President Donald Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The only people familiar with the investigation would be Rosenstein and his team and Mueller and his team.  Rosenstein and his associates have no interest in leaking this interview; indeed, Rosenstein and his associates plainly know better than to leak, both from a legal perspective and a political one as members of the Trump administration.  Only Mueller has an interest in leaking this interview.

It’s time for Mueller and his team to be fired for cause and an honest cop put in charge of the special investigation, together with an honest team of investigators.  And yes, at this late date, an honest investigation needs to occur—promptly, efficiently, and speedily—in order quickly and without further delay or stall either to vindicate Manafort, Trump, the Trump campaign, et al., or to produce legitimate and serious charges.

And Mueller and each member of his team need to be investigated regarding the felonious nature of these leaks.

Antifa, a Gang

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David Pyrooz and James Densley had some thoughts on this in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.  They’re on the right track in that they urge Antifa be formally designated a gang with all the social—and legal—ramifications that would flow.

There are a couple of points I’d like to make or emphasize.

[D]on’t be fooled by Antifa’s diffuse structure. Conventional street gangs are pretty disorganized too.

Diffuse isn’t, of necessity, disorganized: the Bloods and Crips, which Pyrooz and Densley cite in their piece; the Black P-Stone Nation; al Qaeda; and the Daesh all are diffuse, by design, and well organized.

The emphasis:

Which brings us to the caveat: most gangs are apolitical. The line between domestic extremist groups and gangs is blurry at times. Antifa’s agenda sets it apart to the extent….

No, Antifa’s agenda doesn’t set it apart. Antifa meets the definition of “gang” laid out by Pyrooz and Densley. There’s no need to cloud the question with concern about motive.

Aside from that, we convict criminals for their behavior, not for their alleged motives. Motive is a concern only for sentencing.

Further aside: much of Blood, Crip, and Black P-Stone Nation behavior is domestically terrorist in nature; they consciously use terror to control their territories. We don’t waste time on irrelevant labels on their members; when they behave criminally, we convict them for that behavior, not for their “purposes.”

The irrelevancy of a “domestic terrorist” label was correctly dismissed by Pyrooz and Densley.

Just apply the “gang” designation, and move on from there with the full force of the law and the courts.

The PRC and Bitcoin

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The behavior of the People’s Republic of China regarding bitcoin has purpose far beyond controlling bitcoin.  As background, The Wall Street Journal had this assessment of the PRC’s financial industry:

China has digitized its financial sector faster than any other nation.

The reason for their rapid pace is this according to Li Lihui, a spokesman for the National Internet Finance Association of China, and it has nothing at all to do with a sovereign nation’s legitimate desire to control its own currency and money supply:

A goal of China’s monetary regulation is to ensure that “the source and destination of every piece of money can be tracked[.]”

That end-to-end tracking, to the extent it can be done, guarantees that the PRC will know who is spending and for what.

And that means that the PRC, a nation that rules by “law” (rather than operates under rule of law) and that brooks no dissent from the pronouncements of the Communist Party of China, can control whether any given individual or organization will be permitted to spend for any particular purpose—or even whether that person or individual will be allowed access to his money at all.

Our Pledge of Allegiance and God

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A Detroit teacher is forced onto leave now because she forced a student to stand for the class’ routine recital of our Pledge of Allegiance.  Used to be, such disrespect was handled in exactly this way, and quite properly so.

The boy actually had a good reason, though, even if he misunderstood what the pledge of allegiance is about:

God said don’t worship anything other than me, don’t worship any idols, and pledging to a flag would kind of be like worshiping it[.]

It’s certainly true that our pledge opens with a pledge of allegiance to our flag, then moving on to our Republic.  However, it’s no violation of God’s injunction to have no other gods before him, nor is it a violation of His injunction to worship no graven images.

The pledge demands no worship, only loyalty, allegiance, to our nation.  The flag is no graven image; it’s a symbol of our nation—for which it stands—not of any god.

This is a missed teaching opportunity.  It was missed by the teacher, who was inarticulate in this particular moment, and it was missed by a stupefying margin by the school’s administration, which plainly doesn’t even understand the question.

This also is an illustration of the shabby condition of our public schools today.