Category Archives: culture

That’s Not All

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Amid the press coverage of a variety of recent video clips showing Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s apparent physical and mental decline—standing motionless in the middle of a number of dignitaries swaying and bobbing to some music, wandering off in the middle of a parachute team demonstration, being taken by the wrist and led off the stage—there comes Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s full throated and angry denunciation of the video clips as cheap fakes and deep fakes.

Among the press’ snark corps commentary ridiculing Jean-Pierre’s claim there were a few suggestions that were more serious.

The least among the more serious is Guy Benson’s unsubstantiated denial:

But it’s literal misinformation to pretend the videos themselves are fake. They are not.

Based on what evidence, Benson?

Some more serious questions include these:

Senator Mike Lee (R, UT):

Wait, exactly which videos we’ve all seen—of Biden freezing or looking lost—are deepfakes?

Stephen L Miller:

A reporter needs to genuinely ask her what she thinks a deep fake is[.]

This line of questioning badly lacking, however, which is all too typical of today’s cute sound bite-driven media. A reporter—a myriad of reporters—also need to ask (to get back to Benson’s failure from the right) for the specific data that shows the videos to be deep fakes, or cheap fakes, or in any way altered other than—perhaps—being clipped out of longer videos showing more of Biden’s behavior both before and after the clips in question.

Maybe the lack of calls for hard evidence—and Benson’s evidence-free claim—is of a piece with what passes for today’s journalism: sound bites don’t have room for facts.

Journalist Complaining about Violation of Journalistic Ethics

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This is rich. Here’s David Brooks, complaining about a journalist penetrating a private gathering hosted by a historical society and attended by some Supreme Court Justices:

It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up.

I’ve addressed this concept of ethics in journalism—rather the lack of ethics in journalism—before. I’m addressing it again here, now that the highly esteemed (at least in some circles) Brooks has brought the matter up.

Today’s journalists news writers and opinion personalities think it’s jake to base their pieces entirely on “anonymous sources,” leaving readers and listeners no means of assessing for themselves the accuracy of the claims made or the credibility of the unidentified claimers.

Today’s news writers and opinion personalities think it entirely appropriate to treat their anonymous sources as though they actually exist, and subsequently that they are truthful solely because the writer and personality say so. Never mind that such a source, if it exists, is likely violating his terms of employment if not his oath of office by leaking, and so is empirically dishonest at the outset. Alternatively, an anonymous source, if it exists, is hiding behind anonymity out of cowardice, and cowards will always and only say what he believes will be personally beneficial with his leaks.

Some writers and personalities think it sufficient to address those points by claiming the source is a whistleblower. They consciously choose to not provide any evidence that the source has exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues of objection before he chose to become a leaker. Again, we’re supposed to believe the writer/personality solely on the basis of his smiling face and congenial rhetoric.

Finally, and of overarching importance, journalism used to have a standard that required two on-the-record sources to corroborate the claims of anonymous sources.

Today’s writers and personalities have long since walked away from that standard. On top of that, today’s writers and personalities, and their Editors-in-Chief, refuse today to identify the standard of journalistic integrity they use in its stead.

“Journalistic ethics.” A canonical oxymoron.

The Left’s Antisemitic Bigotry

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The blind hatred of the Left for America’s Jews, Israel’s Jews, and for Jews everywhere was on full display in New York City, and the hatred and bigotry is showing no signs of doing anything but growing.

On Monday anti-Israel protesters wouldn’t even let a tribute to Israelis murdered at the Nova Music Festival on October 7 be held in peace.
Hamas massacred some 260 people, mostly young, at that festival. Women were raped and their bodies mutilated before they were killed. The butchery and sadism were the point, inflicted out of hatred merely because the victims were Jews.
The protesters in New York didn’t kill anyone, at least not yet. But the hatred for Jews was on ugly display. The protest was part of a “Citywide Day of Rage” that targeted New York’s museums. The group Within Our Lifetime, which organized the protests, says cultural institutions are “drenched in the blood of Palestine’s martyrs.” They seem to mean the museums’ Jewish donors.
“Long live Intifada,” the crowd cheered, waving flares outside the exhibit commemorating the hundreds who were massacred at the Nova festival. “Israel, go to hell.”

This is the Left from which the Progressive-Democratic Party draws so much support. It’s instructive that, so far at least, the Progressive-Democratic Party as a whole is determinedly silent, choosing to not condemn their supporters’ bigotry, even as the dominant faction of Party, led by Congresswomen Ilhan Omar (MN) and Rashida Tlaib (MI) and by Congressman Jamaal Bowman (NY), actively celebrates Hamas’ terrorism and their own Jew-hatred.

Some Thoughts on the Supreme Court

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The Wall Street Journal has an article regarding claimed internal dissention in the Supreme Court. There are some items within that article that triggered my pea brain.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said she sometimes weeps in her chambers after the conservative majority issues one of its polarizing rulings.

Justice Sotomayor may well weep over the rulings and their nature; emotions can run high. But there’s nothing polarizing over the Court’s decisions to adhere to what our Constitution and a statute actually say, rather than what this or that Justice might wish either to say. Nothing polarizing, that is, except in the fetid imaginations of the Left and of some WSJ news writers.

And this from Daniel Ortiz, a University of Virginia Professor of Law:

There’s a lot of ill will and anger that’s been building up, and now that they are in the crucible, it’s just going to get worse.

A lot of that ill will and anger is borne of the distrust that has developed from the despicable leak of a draft opinion, a leak whose perpetrator has not been identified, and which investigation the Court’s Chief Justice John Roberts apparently has decided not to pursue with any seriousness, using only the Court’s own policing agency, the Marshal of the Supreme Court and her staff, which have no investigatory experience. That much is on the Chief Justice for his decision to not take the leak seriously except rhetorically.

And this:

Democratic lawmakers called on Justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself from those cases after reports that MAGA-associated flags flew from his homes in Virginia and New Jersey. Alito said no, declaring that his impartiality in the cases couldn’t reasonably be questioned—the legal standard—because it was his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, who raised the flags, at times over his objection.

“At times over his objection” is wholly irrelevant here. The Progressive-Democrats’ objections are insults to all women, not just to Ms. Alito, and to husbands everywhere, not just to Justice Alito. Progressive-Democrats are suggesting that the little woman cannot act on her own initiative, but only within the bounds of husbandly…guidance. And husbands don’t respect their wives’ intelligence and independence of action, needing always to…guide…them in all areas. The little woman isn’t the man’s partner in life, but his subordinate. This is the utter contempt the Left has for the rest of us.

Soft-on-Crime DAs…

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…and citizen’s arrest. I was…triggered, you might say…by an article describing a Connecticut neighborhood that has set up an evolution of the old Neighborhood Watch or New York City’s Guardian Angels groups. The good folks in the neighborhood have set up a “Self Defense Brigade,” a group 40-ish legally armed citizen volunteers, all living in the neighborhood, who do carry and who actively patrol their neighborhood or watch video feeds from drones that the residents have agreed to. Unsurprisingly, crime is way down in their neighborhood, from the Self Defense Brigade’s deterrent factor.

But what if there’s a need for an arrest? What if the brigade doesn’t only see evidence of a crime done, but see a criminal in the act? The cops, when called, will come fairly quickly (I don’t know the urban area’s defund the cops movement, or the level of staffing of the local police department), but in the meantime, the group would need either to track and maintain contact with the perp until the cops arrive, or actively detain the perp until the cops arrive.

That last amounts to a citizen’s arrest, which still is a thing in our nation, even if it has fallen into disuse.

Cop arrest or citizen’s arrest, though, to have useful effect there needs to be a couple of follow-on steps: prosecution and, if the case can be made—the neighborhood group has the evidence—conviction, followed by punishment serious enough to match the crime for which the neighborhood group made its move.

That brings me to the title of my post: DAs who are soft on crime, who have decided they’re not going to prosecute certain classes of crime that they’ve deemed not worth the trouble or not violent enough, without any regard for the damage done the victims of these crimes.

Such DAs, I claim, are not exercising prosecutorial discretion, even though those DAs claim they are. Prosecutorial discretion is a matter of assessing the specifics of a particular case and deciding to prosecute the instance at a lower level than initially charged or to not prosecute the instance at all. This must be done, further, on a case-by-case basis, treating each on de novo. Deciding a priori not to prosecute whole categories of crime has nothing to do with discretion; the DAs doing this are aiding and abetting the class of criminals they’re refusing to prosecute. This would seem to put them beyond the reach of any level of immunity, qualified or blanket, from civil suit, and the criminality of their action leaves them open, or should leave them open, to criminal prosecution.

Which brings me to the opening of my lede: citizen’s arrest. When the neighborhood group—Self Defense Brigade, or Guardian Angels, or an ad hoc collection of individuals—arrests or detains for police arrest a criminal, and the local prosecutor decides that the crime alleged falls within his predetermined class of no prosecution crimes, then it’s time for the neighborhood group, or others aligned with the group, to execute a citizen’s arrest of the DA and force his prosecution. And subsequently, if necessary, move politically against the judge who tosses the case rather than allowing it to go to trial and get him removed from the bench (this step will take some time, since it may involve electing a legislature willing to impeach and convict the judge, but it would be time well spent. If local judges are elected, the time could be as nearby as the next election cycle.)

Especially in cases stemming from citizen’s arrests, the matter should go to a jury, a collection of citizens drawn from the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.

There’s one more factor in play here, and that is the DA’s oath of office. With his blanket decision to excuse whole classes of crime, he’s clearly violating his oath. There could be, if a bit more tenuous than the direct criminal prosecution, a case for criminal perjury to be made. At the very least, though, his oath violation is an impeachable event, and aside from that, if he’s an elected official, his removal could be as nearby as the next election cycle.