Category Archives: rights

The Party of…Something

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The editors of the Wall Street Journal warned us last Sunday to be heads up: the Progressive-Democrats are not going to let this Kavanaugh thing go, even now that the confirmation is done.  Shamefully, neither are they going to let Dr Christine Blasey Ford go.

The Minority Leader made clear that Democrats are going to use accuser Christine Blasey Ford as a campaign prop from here to November and beyond.

Schumer, Feinstein, Hirono, Gillibrand, Durbin, Spartacus—all of these, and each of them, have abused Dr Ford nearly as badly as did her unknown assailant all those decades ago.  So has nearly every member of the Progressive-Democrat Party up for reelection this cycle.

And they intend to go on abusing her.

Dr Ford isn’t an abused woman in these Progressive-Democrats’ eyes; she isn’t even a human being. She’s just an inanimate gear for the Progressive-Democrat vote creation machine. She has expressed her desire to go back to her private life and her anonymity; these Progressive-Democrats won’t even let her do that.

The Party is utterly despicable.

Promise

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The People’s Republic of China has been rolling out its system for spying on surveilling its citizens for a while now.  This is the system that develops social scores for every PRC citizen, and the system has bennies for achieving high scores:

…waived deposits on hotels and rental cars, VIP treatment at airports, discounted loans, priority job applications, and fast-tracking to the most prestigious universities.

Things that can detract from those high scores include

[j]aywalking, late payments on bills or taxes, buying too much alcohol, or speaking out against the government….
Other mooted punishable offences include spending too long playing video games, wasting money on frivolous purchases, and posting on social media….

Get too low a score, and citizens will be punished:

…los[e] the right to travel by plane or train, social media account suspensions, and being barred from government jobs.

The system isn’t all bad, though, assuming private citizens can learn their scores.  Those with low scores are showing themselves to be trustworthy—at least by their fellow citizens—and high scorers expose themselves as puppets of the government.

Flipping Witnesses

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President Donald Trump decries it.  So have I in writing about the Manafort case and the credibility of Mueller’s prosecutors’ witnesses.

What’s interesting to me and saddening, and what’s dangerous to our system of justice—which includes justice for the accused as well as the victim—is prosecutors’ response to Trump’s decrial.

Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor, said that Mr Trump’s comments amount to “an absolutely outrageous statement and to any prosecutor would just be shocking to hear.”

“It’s hard to overstate how fundamental” to prosecutions cooperating witnesses are, Mr Zeidenberg said.

And Stephen Gillers, a New York University School of Law professor:

Trump’s idea would effectively demolish one of the basic and valuable tools of criminal law enforcement in the US.

It’s dangerous for our prosecutors to so blatantly and avidly rely on their ability to do the testifying by using the mouths of “witnesses” they’ve either browbeaten into testifying in a certain way or who’ve sold their testimony to the prosecutors like Thursday night hookers.

If the prosecutors can’t make their case without such witnesses, they don’t have a case to make.

Accountability

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Fr James Connell, of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, had a thought on the recently exposed massive child abuse perpetrated by priests and bishops of the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.

Civil governments must take the lead, as was done in Pennsylvania, and do what the church won’t do. Many more grand juries need to be impaneled and empowered to find and declare the truth. Without truth, there can be no justice, and without justice, there will be no healing.

Take the lead?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  Certainly, civil authority must deal with the secular crime aspect of this.

However, the Church must act too, not just write pretty letters.  The priests who committed these atrocities should, at the least, be removed from the priesthood and sent to isolated monasteries to contemplate their sins and set about atoning for them.  The Bishops and Cardinals who covered up the priests’ atrocities should be excommunicated; they did monstrous evil.  They lied and covered up the heinous sins of the priests: they abandoned those children, and they helped sell the souls of the priests to Satan.

Only the Church can exact those consequences.  Forgive these thugs (with apologies to thuggery)?  Of course, even (especially) the Bishops and Cardinals.  But forgiveness neither demands forgetting nor obviates punishment.  Without punishment in addition to the truth, there can be no justice, and without justice, there will be no healing.  And if we forget, these crimes will happen again.

A Question of Credibility

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Google is being sued for invasion of privacy and for what approximates false advertising.

“Google expressly represented to users of its operating system and apps that the activation of certain settings will prevent the tracking of users’ geolocations,” says Patacsil’s suit, which was filed Friday in California federal court. “This representation was false.”
“Despite users’ attempts to protect their location privacy, Google collects and stores users’ location data, thereby invading users’ reasonable expectations of privacy, counter to Google’s own representations about how users can configure Google’s products to prevent such egregious privacy violations,” the complaint says.

The plaintiffs want Google to cease and desist and to destroy all data obtained “from unlawful recording and use of the location information.”

Let’s say Google is guilty as charged, and the court orders it to “cease and desist and to destroy all data obtained ‘from unlawful recording and use of the location information.'”  The trial hasn’t begun, yet, much less reached a verdict, so Google isn’t actually guilty of anything yet.

On the premise of guilt, though, my questions are these: on what basis would we believe that Google will have stopped collecting the data, and on what basis would we believe that the heretofore collected data have been destroyed?

What mechanism would exist to confirm any of that?  What independent body—capable of the forensic analysis required, since Google has claimed it doesn’t collect the data without prior permission and so unauthorized data don’t exist in Google’s systems—would do the verification, and how deeply and broadly would it be allowed to penetrate Google’s software and hardware systems in order to carry out any verification inspection(s)?

How often would that body—or those bodies, since multiple sets of eyes are better than a single one—be allowed to conduct those inspections and with how much notice (no notice at all would be optimal)?