Russia is kicked off the UN Human Rights Council
The UN Human Rights Council is a joke anyway, but this happened today:
The United Nations General Assembly voted Thursday to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council following global outrage stemming from alleged atrocities recently committed by Russian troops in Bucha, Ukraine.
A total of 93 members of the assembly voted in favor of the measure, while 24 were against and 58 abstained. Those who voted against the resolution included Russia’s regional ally Belarus, China, North Korea, Iran and Syria.
What has the UN Human Rights Council ever accomplished? The current 15 members – elected by the General Assembly to a three-year term that began in January of 2021, are as follows (now minus Russia of course):
Bolivia, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, France, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Senegal, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.
As former UN ambassador Nikki Haley said, “Now do Venezuela, Cuba, and China.” I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till that happens.
The vagaries of a parliamentary system may allow Netanyahu to return to power
A defection means that Bennett’s government has lost its fragile majority:
Plunging the government into crisis, coalition whip Idit Silman announced Wednesday that she is quitting and will instead work to form a new, right-wing government without a resort to new elections.
Silman’s announcement, which she said was due to the “harming” of Jewish identity in Israel, means that the coalition no longer has a majority….
According to reports, Silman did not tell Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — head of the Yamina party of which she is a member — of the move in advance, leaving the premier to learn through media reports that he had lost his government majority.
Ouch.
In the US, such a defection would only threaten the leadership of the legislative branch involved. In Israel and other nations with a parliamentary system, it threatens the ruling executive branch as well. Here’s the way it could work:
The first option would be for it to pass a law to dissolve the Knesset. To pass, this would require the support of at least 61 of the 120 members of Knesset…
With the Knesset in recess, scheduling a vote on such a bill is thought to be unlikely before the weeklong Passover festival which begins at the end of next week, but could be arranged soon after that…
The second option would be for Likud to form an alternative government in the current 24th Knesset, although it appears it would struggle to do so…
Likud ran a scathing, months-long online campaign against Yamina joining the government and ousting Netanyahu, and Silman was a key target.
The lawmaker was frequently harassed, and she said she was physically attacked at a gas station; at the time, Netanyahu suggested that Silman could have made up the story of the assault in order to tar opponents of the coalition.
The article goes on to indicate that a significant number of former allies of Bennett’s government have turned against him, not just Silman.
As for Netanyahu’s possible return, here’s the scoop on that:
On Wednesday, Bibi called on additional members of the ruling coalition to defect and form a new government with him at the head. There is a fair chance this will happen. It’s not only right-wingers in Bennett’s anti-Bibi coalition might be tempted. Ambitious and frustrated centrists (Defence Minister Benny Gantz’s name comes up most often) who could give a new Likud government a wider public base may also wish to join.
If no one else defects, a 60-60 split will paralyse the Knesset (unlike in the US Congress, there is no tie-breaking vote). That would almost certainly lead to a new election in the summer, the fifth in the past four years. Netanyahu will be the candidate of Likud; polls show him by far the most popular party leader. He faces three indictments on criminal charges of fraud and corruption which rumble on. But those indictments are not looking as solid as the prosecution thought, and even if he is convicted, he could appeal, dragging out the process while staying in office.
In my opinion the prosecution always knew the accusations were garbage, but felt it to be politically expedient to bring the charges, hoping to turn voters against Netanyahu at the right moment. Of course, even if Netanyahu or his party return to power, they face a hostile Biden administration
Ketanji Brown-Jackson confirmed by a 53-47 vote
This action by the Senate was a foregone conclusion, even without the ever-so-helpful three Republican votes. That is because not a single Democrat defected, not even Manchin.
That does not surprise me terribly, although with the three Republican votes Manchin might have been allowed to defect had he wanted to do so. Democrats are capable of imposing tremendous discipline, and in this case I think they wanted no naysayer to disturb the confirmation of the first black female to the Court. Unfortunately – as with Kamala Harris, first female VP and first “person of color” VP – Brown-Jackson is not even close to the most impressive black female candidate that might have been chosen.
The actual effect on the Court is probably to preserve the status quo. Voting against Brown-Jackson would only have caused her replacement by someone who would be voting the same way on the Court as she will be voting.
The three Republicans who voted for her confirmation are Susan Collins (understandable, because her popularity in Maine depends on her being willing to vote with Democrats on some things), Lisa Murkowski (who needn’t vote that way, being from Alaska, but who likes to thwart the GOP routinely), and Mitt Romney (who has become some sort of malicious spoiler). I find it interesting that Lindsey Graham, who virtually always votes for the confirmation of all SCOTUS nominees, didn’t vote “Yay” on this one.
Open thread 4/7/22
My favorite part starts with the lyric, “Not quite a year since you went away.” It’s the quietest part but so effective:
Roundup, roundup!
(1) A January 6th defendant who elected to be tried by a judge rather than a jury has been found not guilty:
[Judge] McFadden said that the first charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building was a “close call,” but said there was reasonable doubt as to whether Martin knew he was entering a restricted building (though he said it was “more likely than not” that Martin knew he wasn’t supposed to go inside).
McFadden said it was “not unreasonable” for Martin to assume that outnumbered officers were allowing protesters to enter the Capitol. McFadden said that the government did not show evidence of Martin crossing police lines that had been broken down by the mob before Martin arrived.
Most of these January 6th cases are absurd, and would never be prosecuted if the supposed offenders hadn’t been on the right.
(2) There are many many videos such as this one purporting to document Russian atrocities in Ukraine. They include drone videos and much testimony by survivors. I find them very convincing for the most part, but of course a lot of people are commenting to the effect of “It’s all fake.” Or, “It’s the MSM so of course they’re lying!” or “We do the same!” as well as “Who cares?”
The documentation is widespread, however, and the eyewitnesses are especially meaningful. The time frame is that these things have come out almost immediately on the retreat from these areas by the Russians, and the drone footage is from when the Russians were in control. One thing I find possible is that Chechnyan troops rather than Russians may mostly be the ones responsible. Sure, the whole thing could be the most convincing and widespread hoax, complete with stinking dead bodies that the Ukrainians supposedly killed in order to make the deception have the smell of truth. Or it’s all Nazis Nazis Nazis, just like what the left says about the January 6th defendants.
One of these days soon I plan to write a post on the larger question of the split on the right concerning opinions about the Ukraine war. That post is a little bit more than I can bite off and chew at the moment, but I have thoughts on the subject.
(3) The Durham case inches forward:
On a Sunday night just weeks before the 2016 presidential election, top Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann allegedly texted his old friend, the FBI’s then-general counsel James Baker, to say that he urgently needed to convey “sensitive” information to the Bureau — “not on behalf of a client or company,” but just because he was a good citizen who wanted to help the government.
The information, it turns out, was sculpted to portray Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee for president, as if he were in cahoots with the Kremlin…Sussmann was actually representing two clients: Rodney Joffe, an information technology expert, and the Democratic campaign of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.
The text [of the email], as Durham framed it in Monday’s court submission, is “the same lie” that Sussmann stands accused of, told “in writing” by Sussmann himself. As such, it is virtually the whole case in a small compass.
(4) Obama upstages Biden in a White House appearance. Not very hard to do.
(5) Seeing Lia Thomas’ naked male genitalia on view is something the women on Penn’s swim team just have to deal with, according to the school authorities
“In the fall of 2019, when Lia first came out, the girls were told she would have her own separate space somewhere,” the father said regarding Thomas sharing the locker room with female swimmers. “For some reason, that obviously changed. I’m not sure why it changed. Was it money? Was it legal threats?”
More:
Penn wouldn’t listen to any female swimmers’ complaints about having to be exposed to male genitalia, he said. Penn basically told them to shut up and deal with it.
“Regarding Lia in the locker room, Penn told any female swimmers who had issues to essentially ‘get over it,’” the father said. “They can’t ostracize Lia.”
I wonder whether U Penn – and/or Thomas – could be sued for sexual harassment.
What to do about the Smiley Martins of the world?
Six people were murdered Sunday in Sacramento:
Sacramento police say that two groups of men began firing at each other in Sunday’s shooting downtown and that at least five shooters were involved in what authorities are now saying was a gang dispute that left six people dead and 12 wounded. “Evidence in the case indicates that at least five shooters fired guns during the shooting, and that an exchange of gunfire took place between at least two groups of men,” police said in an announcement Wednesday. “As detectives continue to identify shooters and weapons involved, the number of identified shooters may grow beyond five…
Law enforcement sources have been saying since Monday that the incident appeared to be a shootout between rival factions rather than the “mass shooting” that officials initially described in the wake of the 2 a.m. shooting that occurred near 10th and K streets as downtown bars were closing and large crowds were emptying out into the streets.
One of the involved men who was wounded, Smiley Martin, is being charged with multiple gun violations. He has been a criminal since his 18th birthday (my guess is that he was involved with the juvenile justice system prior to that, but those records are not available to the public):
Smiley Allen Martin, the second man arrested after Sunday’s mass shooting in Sacramento that killed six, has a criminal record stretching to 2013 and last year was the subject of a plea by Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert’s office that he not win early release from prison, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for domestic violence and assault with great bodily injury. Despite a two-page letter to the Board of Parole Hearings urging that Martin remain in custody, he won his release and was in Sacramento on Saturday night recording himself on a Facebook Live video brandishing a handgun hours before the shooting…
He faces charges of possession of a machine gun and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. A law enforcement source confirmed the machine gun is a handgun that was found at the scene Sunday that had been converted to be capable of firing as an automatic weapon.
He’s a violent career criminal, whether or not he was responsible for the deaths on Sunday. I have no idea whether any sort of three strikes law would have applied to him. But it’s certainly crystal clear that California’s strict gun laws had zero effect:
So what we have here are two prohibited persons with stolen firearms (that’s illegal) one of whom had a machine gun (against the law). They allegedly opened fire on a crowd of people (also illegal) killing six (we’re sure there’s a law against that, too). It’s almost as if criminals don’t give a flying fornication about gun laws…or any other kind, come to think of it…
…[T]he President was handed a note with the administration’s rote talking points on the topic . . .
“We also continue to call on Congress to act. Ban ghost guns. Require background checks for all gun sales. Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability. Pass my budget proposal, which would give cities more of the funding they need to fund the police and fund the crime prevention and intervention strategies that can make our cities safer. These are just a few of the steps Congress urgently needs to take to save lives.”
Apparently no one in the White House is aware that California already has the first four items on Uncle Joe’s wishlist in place. They have for years. Yet those laws did literally nothing to keep a gun out of the hands of a pair of recidivist felons.
It’s obvious that criminals know how to get guns, and they know how to use them, and that gun control laws are a joke to them.
You may have noticed…
…that I’m back to blogging more in real time now rather than just pre-scheduled posts from before my surgery. I plan to take it a bit slower for a while, although it really depends on how I feel.
Also, I’m out west. So the posting may be skewed somewhat later in time. I’m usually a latish poster anyway, so any change may not be all that noticeable. I’m probably going to stay out here a few more weeks.
My eye is still pretty much as it was yesterday, which definitely represents an improvement over about the last ten years. For those of you who didn’t see my original posts about my eye surgery, I had a cataract in my left eye removed. But I also had a great deal of scar tissue in that eye, probably from a previous surgery although no one knows exactly. It pinned down much of the lens, which had adhered to it, and therefore presented the doctor with an unusual and significantly more challenging task. This was all known in advance. I plan to write a longer post about that at some point.
It occurs to me that Elon Musk is somewhat the anti-Soros
Now that Musk has become the largest shareholder in Twitter, it seems he has plans to change some things:
Elon Musk filed a new disclosure on his Twitter Inc. stake with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, admitting that he invested in the company with the goal of effecting change and that his stock purchases began months ago.
Musk disclosed Monday morning that he had purchased 9.2% of Twitter’s TWTR, -0.88% outstanding stock, but he did so on a 13G form suggesting the investment was passive, meaning he would not seek change at the company. Tuesday afternoon, he filed a form 13D, more often used by activist investors, that detailed an agreement the Tesla Inc. TSLA, -3.93% chief executive has reached with the social-media company that was disclosed by Twitter earlier in the day.
More here:
Now, it is becoming more clear why Musk did not officially declare passive status, as if his intense passion about how Twitter should be run, his recent outcry about free speech, and his frustration that right-wing zealots have been banned didn’t make that clear enough.
“They know he can buy the whole company,” Ives said. “It’s rare that someone has $300 billion in cash or net worth. That’s why they did that. If they didn’t embrace it, he would just go and buy another 10 % and get more and more control.”
Musk has already shown how he can agitate for change at the company. He recently asked his 80 million-plus followers whether they wanted an edit feature on Twitter. In late March, he had asked whether or not Twitter adheres to free speech, leading right-wing users to clamor for Musk to reinstate the banned Donald Trump to the platform. Users responded with a resounding no to the free-speech question, and a yes to an edit feature.
“Right-wing zealots” – how is that defined, exactly? That’s sarcasm on my part, because of course it’s not defined exactly.
And sacré blue, an edit feature!
We’ll see what happens with Trump and Twitter.
But back to my original contention about Musk being the anti-Soros – as in matter and anti-matter. Soros is supposedly worth 8 billion dollars and is heavily involved in political change, in recent years most particularly changing (that is, destroying, IMHO) our criminal justice system with so-called “Soros DAs,” whom he sponsors and promotes with large donations of money. Musk makes Soros look like a piker, with Musk’s net worth estimated to be somewhere near 300 billion (mostly in stocks, though).
Soros was born in Hungary in 1930 and became a US citizen in 1961. Musk was born in South Africa in 1971 and became a US citizen in 2002, making an interesting parallel in the age at which they both became citizens. They are on different sides of the political spectrum, but Musk does not identify as being on the right:
Politically, Musk has described himself as “half Democrat, half Republican” and “I’m somewhere in the middle, socially liberal and fiscally conservative.” In 2018, he stated that he was “not a conservative. I’m registered independent [and] politically moderate.”
My sense of things is that he leans more to the libertarian side of things, although not the fanatical libertarian side. As such, it makes sense that his Twitter dealings have as a goal the expansion of freedom of expression there.
Musk has described the United States as “[inarguably] the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth,” describing it as “the greatest force for good of any country that’s ever been.” Musk believes democracy would not exist any longer if not for the United States, saying that it prevented this disappearance on three occasions through its participation in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Musk also stated that he thinks “it would be a mistake to say the United States is perfect, it certainly is not. There have been many foolish things the United States has done and bad things the United States has done.”
In September 2021, in response to Texas Governor Greg Abbott saying that Musk supported Texas’ “social policies”, Musk tweeted “In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness” and “That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics
His opinions re Trump have been somewhat mixed. He’s also on record as being against short-selling, whereas Soros is one of the leading and most successful practitioners of short-selling (see this). There’s tons more about Musk’s politics at this link.
Whatever is going on, the left isn’t happy about Musk and Twitter.
Open thread 4/6/22
Two’s company, three’s a lichen:
Update on my surgery, the day after
It’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride today, but starting this afternoon things have been good with my operated eye (knock wood). I’m going to do a bit of computer work now but not too much. At some point I plan to tell the longer story, but not tonight.
Once more, thanks to you all for your prayers and good wishes!
“Politics is downstream from culture”
Commenter “Frederick” asked an interesting question:
[Breitbart said] “Politics is downstream from culture.”
Was he right about this? Take CRT for example. How did people who hold CRT views accumulate so much political power when they are such a tiny minority? They didn’t take over the culture, win elections, and THEN impose CRT when everyone agreed with them. Same with some of these other issues like men competing in women’s sports. Only a very tiny minority of the culture has this huge and outsized political influence. How is this happening if it’s like Breitbart said?
I think it is as Breitbart said, except that it depends what is meant by “culture.” I don’t think culture necessarily means majority culture. It can mean culture within a certain institution. For example, take CRT, which began as an academic formulation. Academia is a subgroup that is very atypical, where quite some time ago the left got a large toehold and then kept expanding until it dominated the culture of academia. Once that happened – combined with a technique of threats, which I’ll get to in a minute – it became a powerful group able to impose its will on the others and eager to impose its will on the others, and then to spread outward into society – into the larger culture.
The spread was accomplished through education rather than persuasion of the population as a whole. Once believers in the value of CRT and its corollaries began to dominate education schools, school boards in many localities, and trainings for businesses and government, they could reach a lot of people. The way this was all accomplished was through a simple threat: the threat of calling those who disagreed racists and bigots.
And that’s where the larger culture was important. Beginning some time in the 60s, by my estimation, being called a racist began to be just about the most dreaded epithet in the world, something people would bend over backwards to avoid. Obama used the threat in fairly subtle but nevertheless powerful ways during his campaign (see this). The false charge was used to torpedo the Tea Party movement. It’s used against the GOP as a whole. It’s in the false Charlottesville narrative against Trump, and that narrative is what Biden led with when he began his campaign.
I could go on and on with examples, but I doubt I have to convince you of the power of accusing people of bigotry. And it is that that became an integral part of the culture and of politics: the idea that bigots were everywhere in the US and that America continues to be a highly racist country. Many people and institutions would do almost anything to deflect that charge. It gave the accusers tremendous power over the culture – at least, until now.
The second example Frederick gave – men who identify as trans women competing in women’s sports – is only slightly different, because it rests on the same foundation: the accusation that those who oppose it are bigots.
I believe that there are signs that the left has taken this about as far as they can, and that people have seen the “racist” and “bigot” accusations used so often and in such absurd ways that the epithets have lost some of their power and people are willing to defy those who would label them that way. In turn, I see this change affecting certain political areas – the Virginia governor race, for example, and later the school board elections in San Francisco. Whether this is the start of a trend that will spread I don’t know, but I think it began with another cultural change: race card fatigue on the part of the public.