Explaining “our democracy”
This 6-minute explanation might come in handy someday:
Kash Patel wants to know about the role of Wray and Barr in the FBI and DOJ liaison with Twitter
And so do I.
Here’s Patel:
#KashPatel: The only way there would be this level of engagement from the FBI/DOJ with Twitter is if Bill Barr and Christopher Wray personally authorized it. If @elonmusk doesn’t release, everything subpoenas need to go out because nothing is ever deleted at the FBI. pic.twitter.com/4XfJ0BrHN8
— The Dirty Truth (Josh) (@AKA_RealDirty) December 10, 2022
I decided to take a trip back in time and see what I wrote when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke and was suppressed, and we also discovered that the FBI had been sitting on the laptop for a long time. Here’s a repeat of a post of mine from October 29, 2020 [emphasis added now]:
Well, we already knew the FBI was given the Hunter laptop in December of 2019, didn’t we? That was the word from the computer repairman in Delaware.
And now the following has been reported by James Rosen:
“A Justice Department official confirmed to journalist James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcasting Group that in 2019 the FBI “opened up a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden and his associates that is focused on allegations of money laundering and remains open and active today.”…
“Bobulinski told Rosen he was interviewed by the FBI on October 23, 2020, for about five hours, with up to six agents present at one time. He made three cell phones available to the agents, who ‘carefully examined the digital evidence’ contained on the phones.”
So the FBI interview of Bobulinski was only recently, after Bobulinski had gone public with his role in the Hunter and Joe Biden story.
And I hope the interview was not merely for the purpose of Flynning Bobulinski at some future date, if you know what I mean. Because I would not put it past them.
So, what was the FBI doing with the laptop in the meantime? Perhaps Toobining themselves?
Whatever they were doing, they kept mighty mum about it, as President Trump was impeached by the Democrats for daring to suggest that the Ukrainians look into the Biden corruption allegations, and Joe Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee.
Perhaps the laptop was being saved as an insurance policy for Kamala.
I would guess that Wray and Barr would say the briefings were to warn about “Russian disinformation” that might affect the 2020 election. But weekly face-to-face meetings? Seems like a lot more must have discussed than that.
What are the legal ramifications of what happened between Twitter and the government actors, whomever they were? Philip Hamburger writes about it in the WSJ (I can’t read the whole thing because of the paywall, but Instapundit has a hefty excerpt):
Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.
Therein lies the heart of the matter, of course: whether something is prosecuted or not depends on the prosecutors. Biden’s DOJ is really not going to prosecute the DOJ for doing what amounts to the Democrats’ bidding. And even any future Republican-appointed Attorney General would have to deal with the leftist nature of the DOJ itself (see this piece by J. Christian Adams for a fuller discussion of the problem). Some sort of more drastic reform is obviously needed.
More from the Hamburger WSJ article:
Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code provides: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
This post-Civil War statute responded to the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan and similar private organizations. Then as now, government officers sometimes relied on private allies to accomplish what they couldn’t—sometimes violently, sometimes more subtly. Whether for government officers or cooperating private parties, Section 241 makes conspiracy to violate civil rights a crime…
Because the First Amendment doesn’t bar private parties from independently suppressing speech, Section 241 would apply to tech censorship only if government officers, acting as part of a conspiracy, have violated the Constitution. Doctrine on Section 241 requires this underlying constitutional violation to be clear. But clarity isn’t elusive. The type of suppression most clearly barred by the First Amendment was the 17th-century English censorship imposed partly through cooperative private entities—universities and the Stationers’ Company, the printers trade guild.
Government remains bound by the First Amendment even when it works through private cutouts.
I don’t foresee the likelihood of prosecution in this matter, and absolutely not in the near future.
Alien octopus?
But the other day some commenter brought it up for discussion, and here’s the idea:
A paper published in the journal ‘Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology’ looked into the origins of life here on our planet. A team of no less than 33 researchers explored several theories. The one that catches the eye is that cephalopods, namely squid, octopus and cuttlefish, may have originated from somewhere other than Earth.
Well, they are surpassingly odd.
When I was a child I was a big aficionado of Classics Illustrated, and my brother and I had – among other comics of the genre – a well-thumbed copy of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Remember the Martians?:
The Martians are described as octopus-like creatures: the “body” consisting of a disembodied head nearly 4 ft across, having two eyes; a V-shaped, beak-like mouth; and two branches each of eight ‘almost whip-like’ tentacles, grouped around the mouth, referred to as the ‘hands’. They reproduce asexually, by “budding” off from a parent. Internally, the Martians consist of a brain, lungs, heart, and blood vessels; they have no organs for digestion, and therefore sustain themselves on Earth by mechanically transfusing blood via pipettes from other animals, notably humans…The Martians’ arrival on Earth is aboard large, cylindrical spacecraft launched from some kind of immense cannon on Mars. Their chief weapon of war is the ‘Heat-Ray’, a directed-energy weapon capable of incinerating any organism it strikes. This is mounted on an articulated arm attached to the front of the tall tripod, called a ‘fighting-machine’ in Wells’ novel, which travels across the landscape destroying humans and their habitat. A secondary weapon, the “Black Smoke,” is a toxic gas released from canisters launched at a distance from Bazooka-like tubes, referred to in the novel as a “gun,” which kills humans and animals alike; it is rendered harmless by Martian high-pressure steam jets and water.
Apparently there’s something about the octopus that seems otherworldly. From that first link:
“The genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity with 33 000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo sapiens.”
And here’s the pièce de résistance: “The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus […] to the common Cuttlefish […] to Squid […] to the common Octopus […] are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant ‘future’ in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.”
They offer the possibility that today’s octopuses are the descendants of creatures that arrived on Earth frozen in an icy comet. Why the octopus in particular? “Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch colour and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.” This terrestrial evolution occurred thanks to “cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs” crashing into the ocean on comets “several hundred million years ago.”
The researchers also give another explanation. An extraterrestrial virus infected a population of early squid, causing them to evolve rapidly into the octopuses we know today.
Other scientists say this doesn’t hold up. H. G. Wells could not be reached for comment.
Open thread 12/14/22
Twitter files #5: retrofitting the “rules” in order to ban Trump
[NOTE: Part V of the Twitter files can be found here.]
The powerful wokesters at Twitter wanted to ban Trump, the guy they all knew – just knew – is a Nazi. And so when he didn’t violate their rules, they made up a new one to enable them to ban him. Let’s call it retrofitting the rules in order to get Trump.
Oh, and they broke another rule, the one about making allowances for heads of state – the one that lets people like Khameini keep on tweeting that Israel is a cancerous tumor that must be destroyed (Bari Weiss lists many such examples from around the world of heads of state explicitly calling for massive violence and being allowed to tweet on). Then again, maybe it was the Twitter gatekeepers who were the election deniers, and didn’t think that Trump was president in the first place.
There were some rather lonely voices protesting the banning, including this one: “‘Maybe because I am from China,’ said one employee on January 7, ‘I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.'”
Maybe because I am from China. Let that sink in.
The MSM apparently isn’t covering any of this – except with a pillow, till it stops moving. They want the Twitter files to be trees that fall in the forest with only the right witnessing the crash. That’s why I think that Musk’s insistence that these revelations be published on Twitter itself, rather than on something like Substack or in the NY Post, was a good move that guarantees the widest possible audience given the MSM’s refusal to deal with it.
You can find more about how how it was done here, but the gist of it is this:
Twitter executives, including former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde, reinterpreted then-President Donald Trump’s final Jan. 8, 2021, tweets to overrule the initial finding of the site’s safety team that they were not in violation of the rules, according to internal messages published by journalist Bari Weiss Monday.
Trump first tweeted that the “75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me … will have a Giant Voice long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” before tweeting a follow-up roughly an hour later saying he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. Members of Twitter’s safety team initially rejected increasingly agitated calls from Twitter staff to ban Trump, saying that neither message was in clear violation of the rules, as they contained no overt or coded incitement to violence.
Less than 90 minutes after this initial assessment by the Twitter safety team, Gadde messaged another higher-ranking staffer that the safety team, suggesting that the team may have been incorrect to interpret the term “American Patriots” as being in reference Trump voters as opposed to the rioters present on Jan. 6…
Gadde said it was hidden code for incitement to violence. Talk about Orwellian interpretations! Or perhaps against a rule about “glorification of violence” – but to even imagine any of that, they had to interpret “American patriots” as the January 6th demonstrators rather than Trump’s voters, although Trump said the latter.
The left is used to running all the major media (except Fox) and social media outlets. It considers it their right to do so, because they are virtuous. The idea that someone else could now be in charge, allowing more voices to be heard, is anathema to them. Outrageous – how dare Musk?
Poll indicates support for Trump fading
Of course, polls can be wrong, and opinion can change – sometimes rapidly. But my gut tells me that this is substantially correct:
The poll finds Trump deeply unpopular at 30% favorable, 62% unfavorable. That places him well below Joe Biden at 46%/50% and Kamala Harris at 36%/52%. In a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, Biden wins easily, 47% to 40%.
Perhaps equally important, Ron DeSantis leads Biden by 47% to 43%. Only 25% of respondents want Trump to run in 2024. Among Republicans and Republican leaners, DeSantis is favored over Trump by 56% to 33%.
Deserved or not, the last couple of years in particular have taken a harsh toll.
Iran is executing its protesters
Evil doings in Iran [emphasis mine]:
On December 8, 2022, the Iranian regime hanged 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari (pictured, left), after a secret trial in Iran’s Revolutionary Court. Four days later, in defiance of international condemnation of Shekari’s execution, Iran publicly hanged 23-year-old Majidreza Rahnavard (pictured, right) in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad. Iranian authorities left Rahnavard’s bound body on public display, hanging by his neck on a construction crane…
Both Rahnavard and Shekari were convicted of “moharabeh,” or “waging war against God,” and after expedited legal proceedings, characterized by human rights groups as “sham trials,” were sentenced to death. Human rights advocates have highlighted the unlawfulness of the trials, lack of legal representation, and the prevalence of “coerced confessions” stemming from torture.
Medieval. But the Iranian regime has not hesitated to kill any citizen who would get in its way, right from the start. It is almost certain that more executions will follow, because thousands more protesters are reportedly imprisoned:
Iranian authorities have confirmed that another 12 individuals linked to the protests have been sentenced to death, while human rights groups have identified another 12 who have been indicted on charges carrying the death penalty.
The first man executed was accused of “blocking a street in Teheran and assaulting a member of the Basij militia, a pro-goverment paramilitary volunteer militia, with a knife.” The second supposedly “stabbed two members of the Basij militia to death.” Whether these accusations are true or not is impossible to know, but there is no reason to imagine the regime is telling the truth, and certainly no way to know the exact circumstances of anything that has happened, except the executions. Confessions were apparently gained through torture:
Mohammad Mehdi Karami says he was tortured into making a confession to security forces who were looking to pin the blame on him and 15 other protesters for the death of a member of the Basij paramilitary force during nationwide demonstrations…
Earlier, the opposition activist collective 1500tasvir reported that Mohammad Mehdi Karami said in a meeting with his family that officers beat him so badly during his arrest that they left his body in the street, thinking he was dead. They realized he wasn’t just as they were leaving…
Among the others sentenced to death in the case are Hamid Qarahasanlou, a doctor whose brother had previously revealed the severe torture that officers had inflicted on him and his wife.
The government of Iran has been roundly condemned by the usual human rights organizations and world leaders. Iran does not care in the least.
[NOTE: Our own January 6th political prisoners come to mind, of course. They have been treated harshly by US standards, but of course by Iranian standards they have gotten mere slaps on the wrist.]
[NOTE II: Please read this previous post of mine about how Iran has dealt with protesters in the past.]
Open thread 12/13/22
Sam Bankman-Fried is under arrest in the Bahamas
Despite everything SBF did, it’s almost a surprise that he’s finally been arrested.
“The Bahamas and the United States [are] holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law,” Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement.
“While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere.”
It doesn’t sound good for the disingenuous boy wonder of the crypto world. But he still has friends in high places, so who knows how this will end?
“I didn’t ever want to commit fraud on anyone,” he said during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at a conference put on by The New York Times in November. “I was shocked at what happened this month.”
I find it impossible to believe a word that he says. And yet its very preposterousness, combined with his air of jejune earnestness, almost pulls it off successfully.
SBJ exudes a very different air from the sophistication sported by another youthful entrepreneur who conned people into investing big bucks and later ran afoul of the law, Elizabeth Holmes. She founded her company Theranos in 2003, when she was 19 years old and a student at Stanford. It’s instructive to take a look back:
In 2003, Holmes founded the company Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, to “democratize healthcare”. Holmes described her fear of needles as a motivation and sought to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood. When Holmes pitched the idea to reap “vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger” to her medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, Gardner responded, “I don’t think your idea is going to work”, explaining it was impossible to do what Holmes was claiming could be done. Several other expert medical professors told Holmes the same thing. However, Holmes did not relent, and she succeeded in getting her advisor and dean at the School of Engineering, Channing Robertson, to back her idea.
In 2003, Holmes renamed the company Theranos (a portmanteau of “therapy” and “diagnosis”). Robertson became the company’s first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists.
Holmes was an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and deliberately copied his style, frequently dressing in a black turtleneck sweater, as Jobs did.
I’ve long thought “Theranos” to be an odd name for such a company, because to me it conjures up the word “Thanatos.” The naysayers who said what Holmes was trying to do was impossible turned out to be right, of course, and Holmes is now in prison for fraud [CORRECTION: on her way to prison].
Perhaps SBF will end up the same way; perhaps not. I’m not even going to guess at this point.
But I have a gut feeling that for both SBF and Holmes – and maybe even for someone like Bernie Madoff, who knew exactly what he was doing and was not the least bit young – it helps to have an element of self-deception, if only a little. If the con artist believes the con even a tiny bit, it helps make the pitch seem more sincere, doesn’t it?
More posts are coming tonight
I had a busy day today and got a bit behind. I’ve put up one post (see below), but I have a few more things to do out there in the real rather than the virtual world at the moment. I plan to write another post or posts tonight.
I’ll add that, even though it gets dark so very early and the shortest day of the year has yet to arrive, we’ve passed the afternoon of earliest sunset and the sun has started to set a tiny bit later each day. Hooray!
“Unsafe” at any speed
[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on a 1965 Ralph Nader book about auto safety.]
You’ve probably noticed the prominence of the words “unsafe” and “safety” in the working lexicon of the woke youngsters who now have gained outsize power in the world, through influential positions at Twitter and other media companies, government, education, and what passes for journalism these days. But when Yoel Roth, for example, speaks about it, what does he mean?
First, see this video from Glenn Greenwald featuring Roth and a discussion about him:
It seems that Roth’s entire working career has been involved with defining what words are “unsafe” to special interests groups, targeting those words, and censoring them. He seems to think that his personal opinions on this, forged in the atmosphere of the modern “woke” university and shared by so many of its denizens and graduates, are some sort of universal truth. Once given the power – and he was given a great great deal of power – he sought to put his virtue into operation.
Ban a president of the US? No problem. After all, on day one of that president’s term, Roth already knew he was an ACTUAL NAZI. There’s no way to read Roth’s old tweets and think he could maintain any type of objectivity or neutrality in making decisions; he was the most lefist of partisans. And yet he was hired to be the censor (head of “Trust and Safety”) for Twitter. It is truly mindboggling.
What happens at the university does not stay at the university. It goes on to deeply affect the rest of the world, as its graduates fan out into various jobs and apply their woke standards to the rest of us, sometimes clandestinely. To put someone as young as Roth in such a position of power is ridiculous, too, but it happens all the time these days. And make no mistake about it – Roth didn’t do this by himself at Twitter, either. He had plenty of willing help.
And what do Roth and the others mean by “unsafe”? Something is “unsafe” if it makes them or anyone in one of their favored groups feel bad. Note the elevation of mere words, another hallmark of the young and the left. And yes, of course words can led to violent actions on occasion. But it’s the actions that are the problem, not the words, and in a society concerned with preserving liberty – as ours used to be, but increasingly is not – the words are protected.