Archive for 2016
February 10, 2016
ANALYSIS: TRUE. It’s time we stopped treating all men as sex pests.
Pearson, a 51-year-old artist, was tried for a sex crime simply because he brushed past a 61-year-old female film star during rush hour at Waterloo Tube station without even breaking his stride.
His accuser (who shall remain anonymous for life) claimed Pearson penetrated her with three fingers for “two or three seconds”.
CCTV of the footage irrefutably backs Pearson’s account; it took a jury of nine women and three men just 90 minutes to unanimously reject the accuser’s version of events and find Pearson innocent.
After the case, Mr Pearson, who still suffers anxiety attacks, said, “This could have happened to anyone. For me, half a second turned into a year of hell. I feel I have undergone a form of mental torture sanctioned by the state. Why couldn’t the CPS have used common sense?”
Which begs the bigger question: why, despite having seen the CCTV evidence (there were also no witnesses nor forensic evidence), did the Crown Prosecution Service still see fit to push for prosecution?
Pearson’s acquittal topped off a bad week for the CPS – and a terrible one for men – following a damning report in which HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate concluded that “poor” decision-making in London rape cases was leading to innocent suspects being wrongly charged in an attempt to raise the number of convictions.
So why is what’s been described as a CPS “witch hunt” against men happening?
Increasingly, there is a sense that the courts are becoming the judicial hammer for the anvil of the CPS’s Violence Against Women And Girls strategy. It’s also hard to avoid the argument that innocent men like Mark Pearson are seeing their day in court because the most prolific and evil sex offender of them all – Jimmy Savile – escaped his.
Meanwhile, of course, the Rotherham rape gangs were covered up by officialdom for fear of being called racist. So it’s not actually a war against all men.
The accuser’s name should be widely publicized, and the officials here should be tarred and feathered.
February 9, 2016
MEET THE BEATLES: 73 million Americans met the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan Show on this day in 1964.
However, the birth of American Beatlemania wasn’t quite the “spontaneous, instantaneous, organic happening” as it’s since been mythologized in boomer history.
AT AMAZON, try out Amazon Echo. If anybody already has this, please share your experience in the comments.
OUTSIDERS IN: Tomorrow’s Boston Herald front page.
THAT’S BECAUSE THEIR DEFINITION OF “WORK” IS “CREATE MORE DEMOCRAT-VOTING GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES,” NOT “HELP CHILDREN.” Democrats love universal pre-K — and don’t seem to care that it may not work.
MICHAEL WALSH: Breaking: Supes Put Obama’s ‘Global Warming’ Regs on Ice –Huge blow to EPA gremlins, klimate-change kooks.
ENDORSED: A New Advocacy Group Is Lobbying for the Right to Repair Everything.
I think you should own the gadgets that you, you know, buy.
TRUMP AND SANDERS called to win in New Hampshire.
TED CRUZ’S LATEST AD: Playing Trump.
I TALK ABOUT WASHINGTON’S CULTURE OF CORRUPTION AND THE IRS SCANDALS ON DANA LOESCH’S BLAZE TV SHOW.
SURVEY SAYS…Live-Blogging the New Hampshire Primary.
THIS IS VERY BIG BREAKING NEWS: The Supreme Court has stayed the Obama Administration’s vastly overreaching Clean Power Plan:
The surprising move on Tuesday is a blow to the administration and a victory for the coalition of 27 mostly Republican-led states and industry opponents that call the regulations “an unprecedented power grab.”
By temporarily freezing the rule the high court’s order signals that opponents have made a strong argument against the plan. A federal appeals court last month refused to put it on hold.
The plan aims to stave off the worst predicted impacts of climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions at existing power plants by about one-third by 2030.
Appellate arguments are set to begin June 2.
The decision to stay the regulation was along ideological lines, 5-4.
AND IN THE LAND THAT BROUGHT YOU DIXVILLE NOTCH, TO BOOT: The Spirit of Dick Tuck Lives!
IF I WERE A CHINESE DISSENTER, I’D TARGET CHILDREN OF ELITE CHINESE STUDYING ABROAD, AS A LESSON THAT THIS CAN WORK BOTH WAYS: China’s message to dissenters: Flee if you dare. “Recent months have seen an unprecedented expansion of China’s power to snatch up detractors across borders. Under mysterious circumstances, critics of China’s ruling party have been yanked from various foreign countries as well as the quasi-autonomous city-state of Hong Kong.”
And also start exposing, or destroying, the leadership’s foreign-held assets, many of which are hidden even from their own government. But, you know, that’s just how I think.
PJTV’S LATEST SPEED ROUND: Marco Rubio Answers 44 Revealing Questions in Three Minutes (Video).
GRANDMA STILL LEARNING HER WAY AROUND STRANGE NEW TECHNOLOGY CALLED THE INTERNET: Hillary Clinton Puzzled by the Phrase ‘Went Viral.’
“You went viral?” Mrs. Clinton said to the man’s friend. “That sounds like some kind of disease.”
Earlier: “Like with a cloth or something?”
UPDATE: ‘Worth a thousand words’: One ‘disgraceful’ photo sums up Hillary perfectly. Bill Ayers approved!
ERIK WEMPLE ON HILLARY AND HER PRESS SYCOPHANTS: Corrupt journalism doesn’t pay. Nor does abetting it. And he names Marc Ambinder in the first sentence.
Former Atlantic contributing editor* Marc Ambinder is showing appropriate contrition for having participating in some dubious journalistic practices back in July 2009. As exposed by some Freedom Of Information Act documents secured by J.K. Trotter of Gawker, Ambinder was pursuing a copy of the speech that then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was to make at the Council on Foreign Relations. So he emailed renowned Clinton advocate and spokesperson Philippe Reines.
The back-and-forth confirms anyone’s worst suspicions about access journalism. The transaction went like this:
• Ambinder asks for a copy of the speech;
• Reines says he’ll send it, with conditions;
• Ambinder writes back, “ok”;
• Reines lays out the conditions:1) You in your own voice describe them as “muscular”
2) You note that a look at the CFR seating plan shows that all the envoys — from Holbrooke to Mitchell to Ross — will be arrayed in front of her, which in your own clever way you can say certainly not a coincidence and meant to convey something
3) You don’t say you were blackmailed!• Ambinder writes, “got it.”
The story, it turns out, rated Clinton’s speech “muscular” and indeed made reference to the seating thing: “The staging gives a clue to its purpose: seated in front of Clinton, subordinate to Clinton, in the first row, will be three potentially rival power centers: envoys Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell, and National Security Council senior director Dennis Ross,” wrote Ambinder, completing his compliance with Reines’s conditions.
In a series of remarks to Gawker, Ambinder lamented making the deal.
Contritition after you’re caught is for form’s sake only.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: You Can Freeze Your Sperm at Home With This Kit.
NOW I TRUST THEM LESS, AND FEEL LESS SAFE USING THEM: New ‘Trust and Safety Council’ Is Twitter Version of 1984’s Ministry of Truth.
The more their stock tumbles, the more they focus on “social justice” instead of, you know, giving users what they want.
UPDATE: If you don’t like Twitter, there’s always Quitter! And yes, that’s a real, alternative service that will probably be gaining a lot of users soon. I just signed up.
WELL, YES AND NO: Sarah Wright, the chair of a group called Unmarried Equality, writes in the Washington Post, “Why It’s Time to Stop Glorifying Marriage.”
In an era when the average American now spends the majority of his or her life unmarried, it is time to stop glorifying and privileging marriage to the total exclusion of all other patterns of family formation, caregiving relationship, living arrangement and property ownership. Despite its ubiquity, marriage is exactly “one size does not fit all.” Yet at the same time, the high price of being single in the United States is a well-known fact of life. What’s a thinking person to do?
For the majority of children now born outside of marriage, (estimated atroughly half of births today), the ramifications of growing up in an unmarried household are generally immediate and negative: Increased poverty is all but guaranteed. At the same time, promoting marriage at taxpayer expense to solve this problem has been a colossal boondoggle. For starters, there was little demand from its target audience, not to mention that marriage has a nearly 50 percent failure rate. . . .
In fact, public support for people who constitute functional but poor families of any type should be based entirely on need. If the body politic ever reaches consensus on comprehensive immigration reform, for example, marital status could be replaced by citizenship as the basis for doling out various benefits. This is in line with more recent suggestions that the state remove some of the benefits attached to marriage and give them to those who need them most. Another option would be to expand the definition of family to encompass more than just romantic unions, and to extend the benefits of marriage to the unmarried, including the advantages that accrue through Social Security and tax law.
Or, the state could leave the marriage business altogether. Various red states moved to eliminate all marriage licenses as recently as last year, in anticipation of and reacting to the Obergefell gay marriage decision. Just last month, a Republican lawmaker in Indiana introduced a bill that would abolish marriage licenses in the Hoosier State. . . .
Privatizing marriage is an idea that draws together strange bedfellows — fromlibertarians to feminists; liberals to conservatives; and academics to clerics. Yet what binds our common view is the notion that personal relationships are best defined by individuals themselves. Since we all engage in various contractual agreements everyday, the basic concept is hardly new.
Abolishing marriage as a legal category would not eliminate the institution, which has enduring appeal for many people. What it could bring is a real understanding that unmarried families exist and that unmarried adults deserve full representation in society — not just a little extra love around Valentine’s Day.
The writer is correct in her observation that marriage isn’t for everyone. I (sadly) know too many people who are married solely for their own convenience (usually financial), and not because of any notions about love, fidelity or devotion. And hey, I understand how such marriages can be rationalized based purely on self-interest: Who wants to lose half of the assets they’ve worked hard to accumulate just because they aren’t “in love” anymore? On the other hand, when there is genuine love, or when there are children involved, marriage is non pareil.
The writer is also correct that the time may have come for getting the state out of the business of defining marriage. Now that the Supreme Court has made it clear that “the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy,” the scope of this “right to personal choice” regarding marriage presumably cannot be arbitrarily defined (and thus limited) by the state.
If one’s own happiness and individuality leads to loving two, three, or even four people at the same time, what right does the state have to prohibit polygamy? Now that the traditional procreative and corollary child-rearing justifications of one man, one woman marriage have been constitutionally dispensed with, there is no longer any principled constitutional basis for limiting marriage to two people. The Supreme Court in Obergefell desperately tried to use the phrase “two people” as much as possible, but logically, its autonomy-based analytical framework for recognizing same-sex marriage will not justify such numerical limitations in the long-term.
If the Constitution no longer allows gender or (presumably) even numerical limitations on state-sanctioned definitions of marriage, then perhaps it is indeed time for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether, leaving marriage as it was until about the mid-to-late 1700s: a private, usually church-sanctioned, status.
NEWSFLASH: HOMELAND SECURITY STILL A JOKE. Fusion Center Issues New Statement on Its Warning That Police Should Watch Out for Don’t-Tread-on-Me Flags.