Revisiting a little clarity on state secrets and document classification

So the Left and its RINO allies--but I repeat myself--are making hay with the appearance of a double standard regarding Trump's and Hillary's handling of classified documents.

What they try to convince you of is false.  

I will only pass over briefly their contentions about double standards at all, since their predilection for hiding behind them is self-evident.

There are obvious differences between Hillary's situation and The Donald's.  The chief of which is that Trump was the president when he took those documents home.  As president, he had full authority to declassify anything he wanted at any time for any [or no] reason.  Being chief executive, he was beholden to no one regarding what needed to remain a state secret and what did not.  I've read, even, that the mere act of him taking classified documents out of secure locations constituted a de facto act of declassification; perhaps a reader who can cite the relevant rules and regulations could elucidate this for us.

Hillary, meanwhile, never held a position that carried that level of authority.  Instead, she set up a private mail server in her home so she could conduct state business and use her clout for personal gain beyond the eye of any entities in the DOJ who were not yet beholden to her.  I've outlined elsewhere what kinds of violations this act constituted, but let me close with one last comparison:

Trump cooperated with the FBI regarding the sequestration and seizure of the documents in question at Mar-a-Lago.  Hillary's staff, on the other hand, smashed their devices with hammers in the hope of  preventing evidence of their wrongdoing (yes, wrongdoing; that is not the way you protect state secrets from federal investigators who might lack clearance) from coming to light.

Okay, one last comparison, and a rhetorical question:  if they had anything serious on Trump, why did they wait a year and a half after he was out of office--until the end of summer before some uncertain midterm elections--to move on him? 

In case I didn't emphasize this enough before, one of the problems with defining racism as depending on power rather than personal animus...

 ...is that people who are bigots but have relatively little institutional power will still tend to do evil--which still harms other people, and society, and themselves.

Why is this less urgent of a problem than the prevalence of a decent, inclusive people who happen to have white or rich or educated parents?

On the Kennedy case...been a big season for SCOTUS, hasn't it?

The prayer decision is more important than it may first seem. It’s important not just as a restoration of the first amendment, but in that it represents one of the first recent instances of opposition to the Marxist paradigm—that is, all interpersonal interactions always take place between people with dissimilar amounts of power (elites need not be considered), and so the one with more always acts evilly when not actively subjecting himself to the will of the weak. Even if they outnumber and outvote him—that kind of exercise of power wouldn't count.

What this case did was show that the weak need not fear the strong because the strong are not always malign nor even aggressive. This dovetails with the obvious outcomes of victim politics when promoted by people who, as the saying goes, make it harder for actual victims: which is to say, just because you claim to be or even are a victim doesn’t mean you’re right or entitled.

Just look at the dissenting opinion.  There was fear expressed that this decision would "open the door to much more coercive prayer in our public schools," but coercion against prayer has been steadily rising until now.  Congress isn't allowed to do either one.  But it allegedly also "sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion."  Look, that very same entanglement is what was undone here.  Coach Kennedy was penalized for praying on his own after the game--off duty, that is, when he is no longer acting as an agent of the school.  It's not reasonable to expect someone to be an on-duty representative of some organization 24/7, even if you can demand more from them in limited ways.  

The First Amendment restricts Congress from impeding or promoting religion.  Okay, a public school employee is an agent of the state, after a fashion.  Can he stay silent and not intimidate students who don't share his faith?  Yes, more or less, probably.  But that contributes to a chilling effect on the free expression of religion by people who is share his faith, which is happening all over the West.  And what about people of other faiths?  Some will be heartened to see anything they recognize as religious, and be encouraged to express and share theirs.  Others will be intimidated not for being irreligious but not fitting into Kennedy's brand.  But if Kennedy accommodated them, what about the ones he's now leaving out?  How can he be sensitive specifically to each of them--sectarian and nonsectarian--without running the risk of excluding any of them--nonsectarian or sectarian?

This is why Congress isn't supposed to meddle at all; why our government is minimalistic in the first place.  Mostly it's best to leave the tolerating up to the individuals.  Otherwise we end up with that scene in "Life of Brian" where the crowd Brian throws a shoe at is arguing about what the shoe means, only instead of a shoe it's civil rights.

Did some of his students feel forced to sit in, a la peer pressure?  Apparently so.  But unfortunately that's human nature--we're social animals.  Student athletes get pressured to drink underage all the time, and while that's not reflected in the First Amendment, it's against much more specific laws, and that kind of behavior is often ignored until the star quarterback drives home drunk right over the head cheerleader.  Did anyone approach the coach to say "hey, no offense but I'm not comfortable getting dragged into this; is this an expectation, or am I going to be all right on and off the field if I don't participate?" 

I can see some kids not being comfortable even bringing it up.  But none?  And no parents?

I don't know all the details, but apparently the problem started when Kennedy's school district asked him to stop out of fear for litigation--another instance of "there isn't an issue, but there's fear of a possibility of an issue." Which smells more like a disgruntled school board member than a principal who has received some difficult phone calls from people who followed up with mail on fancy letterhead.

Actually it didn't even start there; Kennedy started praying on his own, and students started joining him. When he was asked to stop praying in the locker room and on the field, he did, but continued praying by himself after the game.  Apparently that was too much.

Please.  This is not some high-profile representative of a lofty organization abusing his power to tarnish the organization's reputation.  This is a high school football coach.  He's allowed to have a private life.

Even if people can see him having it. 

A few final words on the Dobbs case, at least for now....

For those of you complaining that this was the first crack in the wall protecting abortion rights and that it never should have gotten this far, well, this is the first crack, you're right about that--in a sense.

But you have to keep in mind that Roe was not a piece of legislation.  It was a Supreme Court case we were told to consider to be law.  Now it's back in the hands of the states, where legal questions of life and death are supposed to be handled.

This is a good thing for you.  Now, it is a matter of legislation.  Now any laws that get passed will have a more sound basis than Roe did.  You'll lose some states, but you gain security in others.  And all your threats and promises to leave your reddish communities that voted for Trump or against abortion or whatever the hot topic was, will now be easier for you to consummate.

And for those of you who are demanding that SCOTUS be stripped of its "jurisdiction" to "rule over" abortion, let me enumerate a few of the ways in which that is stupid.

1. That's what the Dobbs case actually was about.  Did you not read the decision, or any of the actual-news articles about it?
2. What do you think would happen when someone wanted to file a lawsuit against a pro-life law, and SCOTUS wasn't allowed to hear it?
3. SCOTUS's powers might not be clearly defined on all sides--I'm just saying for the sake of the argument, not as a legal scholar--but what do you think would a precedent of "there are certain civil, humanitarian, legal, and moral matters the Supreme Court can't weigh in on" in the way you're proposing, do to our country when other people try to apply that logic to other topics?  What if someone challenged certain labor laws?  Proposed mandatory servitude for immigrants?  Moved to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment?  Moved to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, with the stipulation that women thereby would exempt from all forms of taxation?  Sometimes convincing five justices instead of 51% of voters is an abuse of democracy--so don't talk to me about democratic crises--but it is also a necessary hedge against mob rule.
4. Maybe you're not as dumb as all this, but are playing to the crowd.  That's the name of the game, okay, but do the people who are gullible and ignorant enough to believe you, tend to show up at the polls?

Posted to Reddit: "Department of Misinformation Paused over Free Speech Concerns"

Comment from a Redditor:  "Progressives have been warning about 1984 for decades.  It's republicans who try to bring them to life."

First, that's an interesting juxtaposition between the leftist movement and a specific political party.  The DNC hasn't been in the business of equal civil rights since the 20th Century.

Second, it's the Democrat president Joe Biden who, after a contentious election, brought Minitru to life.  Are you even trying to appear plausible to anyone but the people who already want to believe you?

I'm confused...

 ...by people who, bemoaning the recent Dobbs decision, try to draw parallels between that "no, the Burger Court did not justify its claim that abortion is implicit in the Bill of Rights) and other non-fascist facts about our country like a lack of universal health care, universal child care, government regulated time off, and so on.  People who post such a laundry list and say it's proof that the people who don't want abortion or government control of health care and so on, are really just interested in "control."

Bish, who is in control under a regime of universal health care?  Who is in control when child care and work benefits are managed by the federal government?  When there is no monopoly on ownership of firearms (along side other means for committing violence, like riots and arson and vandalism, which we're now told is a necessary part of desperate democracy).

Do you even know what "control" is?

Since it's pride month, here's something to reconsider.

According to the recent documentary "What is a Woman?" the average person undergoing transsexual medical treatments represents a $1.3 million payday to pharmaceutical companies.

Those of you who have rattled the bars of socmed griping about the evils of so-called capitalism and market forces and the bourgeoise and whatnot, keep that in mind.

At the grocery store I frequent, in between the Muzak they have ads for special sales they have, convenient but obscure services they provide, and other trendy things.

"Trendy things" might just be about holidays.  Like, leading up to Memorial Day, they talked about grilling hot dogs and how you'll need buns for them and beer to wash it all down, but they also praised our soldiers for their sacrifices.

In that same vein, one of the ads is about their cooperation with some outfit called something like the Fluid Foundation.  It's apparently about providing gender-neutral clothing so people can express themselves through fashion in a non-binary way.

Meanwhile most people can describe their casual outfits as something like "jeans and a t-shirt," and the uniform for that grocery store's employees, whether male or female, masculine or feminine, is a blue polo shirt and black or tan pants.

Sure, there are variations available for civilians as well as employees, but it's all down to personal preferences, see?

Like it always was.

This foundation or whatever the clothing company is calling itself isn't doing something innovative or groundbreaking.  It's repackaging what you were already getting into something trendy.

Why?  So you'll spend more money on the fad in your rush to get on the bandwagon.

They were only half right when they said "No service is free; if you're not paying for it, you're the product."  There are also movements you're encouraged to buy into but it's like brand loyalty with a moral dimension--or rather, a facade, something just painted on top.  The movement itself is the product, but if it reaches its destination, its goal, it will no longer need to exist, and the "movers" will be out of a job.  They might say they look forward to that day, but for most humans, big money that easy is too great a temptation.

So those movements "move," all right; but they don't go anywhere.

Gun controllers aren't seriously interested in public safety. They're interested in public control.

This is why they openly admit, in the wake of a mass shooting, that we as a nation need to rise up and pass new rights-surrendering legislation while emotions are still high. 

But when cooler heads finally prevail, they don't persist in their crusade.  They don't look around, see the urgency starting to flag, and say "Okay, well, let's at least sit down and take the time to figure out something that works." They give the idea lip service, but for the most part they just give up and pursue tyranny by other means.  They tried it with the Brady Bill, and Biden's weepy exhortations notwithstanding, it wasn't effective enough to reinstate when it lapsed; there was no surge in "gun violence" that made everyone go "oh no, letting the Brady ban lapse was a mistake; we have to put these fires out before things get worse than they were before."

"Gun violence."  What a canard.  They talk about it, but they want to eliminate guns in the hope that the violence will just stop happening.  Meanwhile, we have knife crime increasing when gun access drops--say what you want about stabbings being less deadly than GSWs, they're more personal and they prove that you haven't solved the violence problem at all--and people turn to even less discriminate means when numerous deaths are their goal, as we saw in Bath, Michigan and Oklahoma City.  They talk about gun violence like it's something special, like childhood cancer--like other kinds of violence aren't just harder to commit but are really less offensive, like someone stabbed or beaten to death or thrown off a balcony is just not as morally important.  And they act that way.

It's savvy to recognize you should never let a crisis go to waste.  But if all you're doing is skipping from the crest of one crisis to the next, you aren't going to accomplish anything except maybe filling your own coffers.  So what use are you to the electorate?

21 deaths is certainly a tragedy (unless you're making a point like "tragedies are horrific accidents and natural disasters; this was categorically worse;" fair enough).  But that same weekend in Chicago, there were something like 46 shootings, six of which proved fatal according to my source at the time.  The other forty aside--which it's not fair to dismiss, but for the nonce--six deaths is fewer than twenty-one.  But that twenty-one was one event.  Chicago, a city with some of the toughest gun laws in the nation, has bad weekends...every weekend.  So we're not going to be able to factor out many of the mass shootings people want to say is endemic to America thanks to the Second Amendment.

Doesn't that tell us something?

Does the Uvalde shooting prove that "a bad man with a gun is stopped by a good man with a gun" is false?  Well, no; not at all.  There, the security plan that had been in placed was relaxed due to activities going on at the school, and once the shooting started, police focused on stopping anyone from doing something proactive instead of being proactive themselves.

Here is a case where it did work.  Here is another--I'll tell you now, this one is about an aborted church shooting in Texas, so you remember that "armed churchgoer keeps the body count from being higher than it would have been" is common enough to be a cliche and a good thing no matter how you personally feel about Texans or Christians.  And since some people understandably feel weapons in a house of God to be, at best, tacky, here is one more going back several years but is interesting because a customer at a shopping mall stopped a shooter without himself having to fire his pistol.

So we're not in a "you're just doing what socialist apologists do when they say real communism has never been tried" situation.  

We're actually in a "don't trust the government to solve your problems for you because if they choose not to, you have no recourse" situation.

Epoch Times: "Citing Racial Discrimination, Black Leaders Target Roe v. Wade"

Article here, although it may be behind a paywall.  It's about the possibly-upcoming Supreme Court case about Planned Parenthood targeting black populations for abortions.

The comments are a mixed bag.  Apparently Planned Parenthood sent its minions out to blame everyone else for "forcing" unwanted children on young people who had already conceived them; another mentioned doing a school paper in the 70s on it and seems to claim that the absence of bad press back then proves Margaret Sanger was on the up and up.  Fortunately someone else commented--since a lot of those minions don't waste the time to read the articles they're criticizing once they receive their marching orders--that 70% of PP clinics are in black neighborhoods.  Couple that with the fact that "well, abortions are only one option we provide that isn't even a big part of the business no matter how much we promote it" is a deception, and you can see where the arrow of deliberateness is pointing.

But regardless, I think this is the inevitable result of the thinking that justified what became America's institution of chattel slavery, and even LBJ's own "southern strategy."  

I'm not confusing that with what they accused Nixon of.  I'm talking about the stuff that echoes what slaveowners used to tell their discontented slaves:  "If you leave the plantation, who will feed you?  Where will you find shelter? Who will give you clothing to wear?"

Is that really so far off from the welfare rhetoric we hear today?  

Of course it's not.  And it all stems from the notion that black people are unable to overcome, whether by their own efforts or by help from those bleeding-heart burdened White Men, their victimhood.  And no, I won't say "people of color" instead of "black" because American chattel slavery was primarily a phenomenon attached to people of African descent, not Latin America or Asia--even though in the early days, some slaveowners were black and some slaves were white; not to mention slavery that exists outside of or existed before western civilization itself.

Think about that the next time someone tries to convince you that white hegemony is an end in itself.  Accusations of being white on the inside will only get you so far.

Joe Biden disappoints again...

 ...and I don't mean because his oddly timed speech interrupted a show I was just starting to enjoy watching.

He seemed oddly morose at first--it would have been more odd if he hadn't shown any sympathy at all, but for a minute there I was wondering if he was going to get around to making a point--until I remembered that he had lost a son, himself; albeit under very different circumstances.

Then he tore into the gun lobby as if the only problem was that Congress and voters were simply afraid of gun manufacturers.

The same gun lobby that did not shoot up the school.

The same gun lobby that did not shoot his grandmother.

The same gun lobby that did not pass or fail the gun store background check.

The same gun lobby that did not exhibit many warning signs that went uncaught by red flag laws and federal NICS checks that state regulations cannot circumvent.

Meanwhile, Joe makes a number of incorrect statements; I no longer give him the benefit of the doubt, even in his upset state, in assuming he made an honest mistake.

Despite Joe's insistent repetition of the word, the shooter did not have any assault weapons.  He had a semiautomatic rifle that looks scary and may have had a pistol.  

The shooter carried in a bag full of ammunition, that at this time has been tentatively determined to have been in 30-round magazines, yet Joe insists that magazine capacity limits are important to legalize.  But if he had a whole bag full--that would probably be hundreds of rounds--what difference would it make if the contents of that bag was parceled into, say, ten 30-round clips or fifteen 20-round clips or thirty 10-round clips?  I don't think we're in the territory anymore where we can pretend it's worth talking about how small differences in inconvenience to a mass shooter might meaningfully affect the outcome.

And of course Joe holds little to no discussion about what drives someone like Tuesday's shooter to do something like that.  Instead he just wants to ban it.

Funny:  when we talk about banning abortion, the closest they come to agreeing with us is with rhetoric like "we need to make abortion unthinkable before we can make it illegal."  How nice:  take away all the things that make abortion seem like a worthwhile option before making it an unviable option directly.

I'm all for fixing things that make abortion appealing, separate from the legal considerations.  But why doesn't Joe and the rest of the gun control lobby feel the same way about that?  Why do they seem to think not only will gun violence go away but all other violence won't rise as violent people resort to other means?

I don't think they really fear another Bath, Michigan disaster even though that's what would happen.  I think the gun violence crusaders have a tactical opposition to guns but virtually none against violence.

Pro-life centers attacked in wake of SCOTUS abortion decision leak

Meanwhile, abortion clinics are "preparing" for the same thing to happen to them if the Supreme Court does end up scuttling Roe.  Even though, if the laws change, such acts would no longer be necessary--so to speak--to stop abortion.   Even though it hasn't happened since the last century. 

Well, abortionists and choicers, there goes all your pretense at moral superiority based on an allegedly more consistent life ethic.  Were you surprised at this level of violence?  We weren't.

So I've been taking in a little bit of news about the war in Ukraine...

 ...not obsessively, since I can do more by praying and donating to charitable relief agencies than by worrying myself to death giving my custom to the MSM.

An interesting point gets made about the refugees fleeing to Poland and through other Eastern European countries:  

They are predominantly women and children.

This isn't just a function of able-bodied men being required to stay behind, pick up a rifle, and defend their homeland.  It's that men will tend to do this for their families anyway.  It's not always about defending their homes literally, but it is about being the first line of defense, of giving one gun to Mom and telling her to go on ahead with the kids, while he stands in the breach with his own gun and promises to catch up later if possible.

Contrast this with what we've been seeing at our southern border, but moreso what the rest of Europe has been seeing, particularly in Germany and Scandinavia the past few years.  

In those cases?  More young single men than anything else.  What you would see if you took an army out of uniform and told them to casually infiltrate a target country.  The would-be noncombatants are there for political window dressing and colonization.

Those are not just men looking to take local wives and acculturate because the pickings are slim back home.  Those are people looking to export their way of life.  Do you want it?

 From Reddit:

"My son knows what gay is since 3 yrs old and nothing is wrong with him. I rather explain it to him than have a conservative pastor show him with 2 fingers inserted into his bum. Smh"

Just conservative pastors, huh? Is that how you determine if they're conservative? Because maybe we're having the wrong conversations.

"And that is the exact reason they want to stop sex ed for 5 year olds. Because they don't want 5 year olds to learn that they shouldn't be touched in private places. Because that is what sex ed is at that age."

No. No, it's not. You can explain consent and boundaries--and at that age, there pretty much should be no consent questions outside of basic hygenic and medical needs--without talking about "gay" and suggesting to kids that since they haven't formed strong opinions about sex yet that they're already open to experimentation with things that have strong positive correlation to life-shortening pathologies.

"My daughter's catholic school had lessons for 5 year olds to know that abuse is wrong and how to report. They called it a 'circle of grace' and that no one should violate it. There are ways to teach sex ed that are religiously conservative. These laws want to keep kids ignorant to make them easier to abuse."

That first part is nice, but the second part is false. These laws want to keep kids from being open to adults or even other children who are inclined to suggest that exploring the next step beyond the tame stuff they've discussed--it'll be couched in terms like "self-exploration" or "experimentation" or "learning about yourself" or "subverting conservative mores" (this last one being especially pernicious, not because it's a thumb in the eyes of the GOP and Old Fashioned Jesus, but because it's encouraging children to destroy themselves piecemeal in symbolic protest against a phantom bugbear). That's why there are concerns about grooming.

These people obviously think, due to the lop-sidedness of their news intake, or just want to believe/want you to believe, that "don't say gay" is really the point of legislation that literally calls for age-appropriate education. So I wonder, further, if these people even believe grooming is a real thing.

Because in my mind, there's not much moral difference between a "conservative" pastor who likes to diddle children and a "progressive" one who likes to tell children that it's okay to diddle themselves or each other or him or get diddled by him.

If the kids these groomers were feigning to protect were sixteen instead of six, if these kids were their own children being predated by the proverbial frat boys and star quarterbacks at college who came home to check out the "fresh meat," they'd be on the front lines--and rightly so--reminding everybody that date rape is still rape.

Because that's essentially what it is.

Recent discussion on local leftist radio: "Those pro-lifers aren't arguing in good faith. 'Hypocrite' is no longer a word sufficient to describe the evils of those sex-trafficking kiddy-porn users."

 Well, to the extent that's true, I respect their outrage.  But even if their contention that most in the pro-life movement were vile criminals who just liked taking questions of life and death into their own hands--projection much?--and not a gross misrepresentation designed to help them fool themselves into moral complacency...

...it's still not an argument against abortion.

It's not even an argument at all.  Just emotionally-charged deflection.  A distraction.

Meanwhile, they keep feigning outrage at being called groomers while all the big names in their own movement keep doing that Jeff Epstein schtick.

"I don't know how you feel about politics," my new coworker said, "but I wish people wouldn't drag it into family gatherings and holiday dinners and such. I don't want to listen to their arguments about how mask mandates impose on their freedom."

Well, we've been indulging perpetually adolescent progressives who insisted on bringing Karl Marx and Harvey Milk home for Thanksgiving for decades.  By now you should be mature enough to have a conversation with people who have ideas you aren't familiar with.

We're not afraid anymore.  You squandered our goodwill and wasted the tolerance we extended to you when you wouldn't stop talking politics and wouldn't change the subject.  This is the bed you made and now is the time for you to sleep in it.

Better now than later.  When your chickens come home to roost, it won't be people looking for a conversation who will be kicking down your door (or welding it shut) that you would have any hope of converting or cowing.