It’s Friday, November 3rd, 2017…but before we begin, in honor of the great Thomas Sowell, we offer several random thoughts on the passing scene. First, though we’re certainly not big on conspiracy theories, Zero Hedge may well have a point:
“It is without a doubt, our news cycle – in the age of 24/7 constant-connectedness – moves at a breakneck pace. With so much information and news reaching us, it’s easy to become overburdened and burned out on the world around us and the things taking place.It is true, too, that the mainstream media dictates what stays center in the mind of the public and what is allowed to fade away and be forgotten.It is of the utmost importance we remain aware – however exhaustive it may be – of stories that just don’t add up.
Enter the Las Vegas shooting; the worst mass-shooting in U.S. history…
…A full month later, and we are still without any answers. Even more worryingly, the Vegas shooting has disappeared from any cable news channel. Even online, discussion over the shooting has all but vanished, save from the more conspiratorial corners of the web…”
Second, any question had this been a White “artist”…
…standing over a body attached to a toe tag entitled “Obama“, their career not only would have been over, but their life likely in jeopardy?!?
“The best way to think of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Monday-morning indictments is as a compliment—backhanded as it may be—to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes.
Like the special prosecutor, Mr. Nunes and his committee have been investigating the 2016 presidential campaign. Unlike the special prosecutor, Mr. Nunes has unearthed hard evidence about both Russian influence on the election and domestic spying on Trump campaign officials. And if the committee gets the documents it has been demanding for months about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of the salacious Christopher Steele dossier, this week may end even more explosively than it’s begun.
Right now that’s hard to imagine, given how Washington has been overwhelmed by Monday’s indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former business associate Rick Gates, as well as news that another former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts.
…Meanwhile Mr. Nunes and the Republicans on his intel committee plod on. They do so in the face of mockery and contempt from the Beltway press corps, and sabotage and obstruction by Democrats, especially those on the committee. The obstruction includes a manufactured ethics charge against Mr. Nunes that has deliberately been kept unresolved in the House Ethics Committee as part of an effort to keep a cloud hanging over Mr. Nunes so long as he continues to ask real questions about not only the Russians but our own government.
…Here’s another way to put it: As all eyes remain on Special Counsel Mueller and the men he’s indicted, it may be well to pay more attention to a much-maligned committee on Capitol Hill. Because after months of stonewalling and the public intervention of House Speaker Paul Ryan, the FBI has agreed to provide the documents Congress asked for.Mr. Nunes’s office confirms that the FBI documents it has long sought are supposed to arrive this week.
Messrs. Manafort and Gates may well be guilty of everything they’ve been charged with. But this week, thanks to a congressional committee’s persistence, we may find out the answer to what surely is a much more combustible question: whether a presidential campaign was able to leverage opposition research based on Russian disinformation to bring about an FBI investigation into its rival’s campaign.“
We don’t know where Mueller’s going, but given his supporting cast resembles a reunion of the Obama Administration, we’ll depend on Devin to dig up the real dirt.
By the way, if you need proof of the Dims’ desperation to make hay of what Mueller hasn’t harvested, consider the following exchange on MSLSD:
This from the folks who, since the ’60s, have urged America to…
Since we’re on the subject of dirty Dimocrats, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty is, if nothing else, decidedly politically-incorrect as he offers…
A Rough Thought About Deterring Serial Sexual Harassers
“Go near Gwyneth again Harvey and I’ll cut the other one off!”
There was a time not that long ago when a man who mistreated a woman had good reason to think that at some point, he would encounter the woman’s father, brother, husband, boyfriend, or some other male that cares about her, and the protective male would register his objection to the abuser’s behavior across the bridge of his nose. Yes, yes, I’m oversimplifying, no doubt there are many cases of unprovoked violence and mistaken identity and other unjust outcomes. We don’t want every workplace dispute settled with fisticuffs.
And yet…
Modern society tells us that there’s no need for such Neanderthal notions of chivalry. Instead of women relying on other males for protection, today’s working women have…the human resources department. If a young woman’s boss demands she sit on his lap as he’s aroused, she’s supposed to go to the human resources department. If the boss sticks his tongue in her mouth, she’s supposed to go to the human resources department. If he threatens that she will never work in her profession again if she speaks about his repulsive behavior, she’s supposed to ignore the threat and go to the human resources department, because the HR department is supposed to protect her from the threatened retaliation.
It’s increasingly obvious that the human resources departments of America have, in far too many cases, done jack squat about continued patterns of harassment. The Weinstein Group’s HR department didn’t stop the guy whose name was on the door. Apparently no one at ABC News could stop Mark Halperin. No one at Fox News could stop Roger Ailes or Bill O’Reilly. Apparently the existing human resources authorities have utterly failed to deter “a culture of rampant sexual misconduct in and around the state government in Sacramento.”
But we have one reported case of Weinstein apparently being successfully deterred:
[Actor Brad] Pitt, who was dating Paltrow at the time, confronted Weinstein about the incident at a Hollywood party around 1995, a source tells PEOPLE. “Brad threatened Harvey,” says the source. “He got right in his face, poked him in the chest and said, ‘You will not ever do this to Gwyneth ever again.’”
The source adds that Pitt “made it clear there would be consequences” if Weinstein tried anything again, and “described it as giving Harvey a ‘Missouri whooping.’” (Pitt grew up in Springfield, Missouri.) “He made it absolutely clear this was not going to happen again and it didn’t,” explains the source.
As for Weinstein’s response, the source says, “At first Harvey tried to explain, then he stopped and listened and got the message.”
Yes, it is possible that this is an exaggerated or inaccurate version of events.
How does society deter bad behavior?
We certainly know how it doesn’t!
Moral instruction and appeals to conscience and empathy are, sadly, not always enough.Then society must enforce consequences.
It is painfully clear that the most shameless sexual predators do not fear the human resources department. In many cases, the human resources department may report to them. The powerful predators have the financial resources to offer settlements, and they have enough powerful allies to smear or blacklist any accuser. They have the lawyers to threaten libel or slander suits to prevent any reports of their behavior. There is really nothing that the modern corporate structure or culture can throw at them that they fear.
But they might just fear “a Missouri whooping.”
All that money and all that power and all those lawyers might not count for all that much when a father, brother, husband, or boyfriend is coming at you with rage in his eyes. Sure, you can press charges after you’ve found all of your teeth that were knocked out, and you’ll have a lot to tell the police once your jaw is unwired. It only takes seven to nine pounds of pressure to break a nose. Any significant blow to your head can cause your brain to bounce within your skull and cause a momentary “knockout.” Hopefully in the melee, nothing you really need like a kidney, spleen, or lung will get all that banged up. (Sufficient blunt trauma upon your kidneys will cause them to fail.) The odds of a fatal cerebral hemorrhage from your head hitting the ground or a wall or something else hard are small, but not quite nonexistent.
You might win a civil lawsuit against that father/brother/husband/boyfriend, but you’ll be enduring a lot of physical pain in the meantime.And you never really know who the jury will believe.You had better hope there aren’t any fathers, brothers, husbands or boyfriends on that jury. Yes, you can claim that this was an unprovoked attack, but everyone’s going to wonder why this seemingly mild-mannered guy chose to assaultyou. If you’ve earned a bit of a reputation as an aggressive sleaze, a lot of people will know exactly why this happened.
These are the sorts of thoughts that we need to be running through every predator’s head when they feel the temptation to grope their underlings.
Regardless of race, religion, sex, color, creed or…
…position!
Next up, courtesy of Townhall.com, Christine Rousselle relates why, just when you thought Progressives couldn’t stoop any lower (i.e., the Northam/Latino Victory Fund attack ad), the primary purveyor of the only legal form of mass murder in the United States brings the bar below where it’s ever been before:
“In the spirit of Halloween, Planned Parenthood sent out a truly ghastly tweet: they claimed it’s “statistically safer” for a black woman in the United States to have an abortion than to actually give birth to a baby.
Planned Parenthood justified this by saying that over the last decade and a half, 108 women died during abortions. Conversely, many more black women died during childbirth.
This, of course, doesn’t take into account that for every abortion there’s (at least) one death: the baby or babies being aborted. For these very small unborn women, abortion is definitely not the “statistically safer” option.These stats also don’t consider the non-fatal complications of abortion, which include infection, infertility, and mental illness…”
Speaking of the criminally insane, also writing at Townhall.com, Matt Vespa informs us why a…
“…In the aftermath of the attack, Kristof tweeted, “The NYC terrorist had a pellet gun and a paintball gun. Good thing that in NYC he couldn’t buy assault rifles, or the toll would be higher.” Dude, are you kidding me? First, yes—let’s breathe a sigh of relief that he didn’t use a gun. It’s not like he used a motor vehicle or anything. Second, terrorists and criminals don’t follow the law (obviously), and Saipov wasn’t from New York, so what does strict gun laws have anything do with it? Did Kristof even read the Associated Press or any other news report prior to sending this tone-deaf tweet? If he didn’t know, then it’s still inexcusable. This was a terrorist attack; it’s not the time to hold a study hall on gun control, man. Kristof got torched—and rightfully so. And the liberal media wonders why they’re not trusted. You think he would’ve stopped commenting on gun policy after his misfire on the Las Vegas shooting.”
This goes back to what we said in the aftermath of the Vegas massacre: as terrible as it was, those unfamiliar with the methodology of mass murder failed to understand the death toll would undoubtedly have been even higher had Paddock driven a Stepvan filled with ammonium nitrate, diesel fuel and ball bearings into the crowd, let alone careened a speeding semi off the Strip straight into the mass of country music fans.
Here’s the juice: if a formerly normal individual suddenly becomes intent on killing people…a lot of people…there’s very little anyone…or any law…can do to prevent their commission of mayhem. Consider the preparation Paddock put into his plan. Does anyone doubt, had he opted for the fertilizer bomb, he could have purchased a vehicle, then made innocuous purchases of fertilizer and fuel in enough different locations so as to avoid detection?
Of course he could…and anyone who tells you different is either uninformed or pushing an agenda.
Which brings us, inappropriately enough, toThe Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with News You Can’t Use, courtesy today of as meaningless a survey as we’ve ever seen:
“Chicago has been named one of the safest cities in the world. While this may come as a surprise given Chicago’s murder statistics and the fact that U.S. President Donald Trump not long ago called the city a “war zone,” it sits as 19th-safest on the 2017 Safe Cities Index, the New York Post reports. London-based research firm The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks 60 global cities using four factors, including digital, health, personal and infrastructure security.
Chicago may be home to escalating gun violence, but its efforts in the realm of digital security boosted its ranking.The report placed particular emphasis on a cybersecurity initiative that was announced earlier this year and will provide training through local colleges and the Department of Defense, the Post reports.
The city was notably absent from the personal security ranking, however, which factored in both terrorism and urban violence…”
Imagine you’re a fuzzy, little millennial, walking down a street in Chicago, face stuffed in your smartphone, sucking on a double fat-free latte, secure in the knowledge your communications and information are secure, when…
In all seriousness, WTF cares about digital security when they’re gittin’ their ass capped?!?
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