Sick, Sad World

So evidently this is a thing that exists:






Meet Sketch, a young rabbit of color, whose father is arrested and hauled off to jail for a crime he didn't commit.  Sketch's father promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground where he survives as a soldier of fortune.  If you have a problem, if no one else can help-

I'm sorry.  That's the plot of the A- Team.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn6kEsloMdE

Nope, it turns out that (spoiler alert) Sketch's dad really did do it and he catches SIX YEARS in the slammer according to the book.





Keep in mind that six years to a rabbit is the equivalent of getting 20 to life.  The book doesn't actually say what Sketch's father did, but in order to get that much time on what must have been a first offense,* he must have murdered somebody.  But who?






Went nuts at the Renaissance Fair, apparently.  Tragic.

I joke, but the book is a good faith attempt to help kids whose parents end up being arrested. Evidently there are other books out there to help kids handle life's tragedies.  What's simply awful is that such a market exists.

* I assume that it must have been a first offense, because if it had been a routine occurrence, then Sketch wouldn't have been traumatized.  Ergo, no need for the book.

Letting Girls Into the BSA Not the End of Scouting

I'm an Eagle Scout, for the moment anyway.  I joined the Boy scouts late compared to most boys who eventually attain that rank. Instead of starting as a Cub Scout, I first joined up as a Webelos.  Once I was in, my parents wouldn't let me quit. As my friends all dropped out of Scouting around the time we started high school, I was forced to stick with it.  I was even inducted into the Order of the Arrow. I finally became an Eagle Scout at the age of 16.  Then I was allowed to quit. I haven't done anything with Scouting since.

Frankly, I didn't care much for Scouting. I hate camping, for one thing, along with most other outdoor activities. Still, there was a lot to be said for the BSA of old.  It did teach me a lot about leadership, honor, and all of those old- fashioned concepts.  I can still remember the 12 points of the Scout Law without prompting and I credit my status as an eagle Scout with my getting hired as a police officer as young as I did.

But the BSA, under constant attack from the political left and the LGBT advocates, has withered and collapsed.  And now they're letting girls in.  It will only be a matter of time, before an organization that was founded in 1910 disbands.  It's going to happen.  The only question is when.

Frankly, the admission of girls is not what is going to kill the Boy Scouts.  Of all of the compromises that they've been making over the last few years, allowing girls in is the only one I (tentatively) support.  And keep in mind, I'm an Eagle Scout and a member of the Order of the Arrow.  I'm BSA royalty, dammit.

Girls are not going to be an issue.  The new guidelines make it clear that the packs and troops are still going to be segregated by gender.  They're not going to be taking a bunch of teenagers on coed camping trips... at least not yet.

And I can't blame girls, particularly girls with a traditionalist mindset from conservative families, for wanting to participate in the programs and traditions of the Boy scouts instead of the ultra- feminist, leftist dominated bunch of cookie peddlers that the Girl Scouts has become.  Boy Scouting teaches you more character and gives you more practical skills that are useful to both men and women than having your parents sell cookies to their co- workers on your behalf does.

As far as "standards" go, the Boy Scouts isn't the military, the police department, or the fire service.  The natural differences in strength and endurance between men and women are not going to be a matter of life or death the way that it can be in one of those aforementioned jobs.

And, as I believe was the case with my career, the attainment of Eagle Scout is beneficial to a person's future employment compared to... excuse me while I Google whatever the highest achievement in the Girls Scouts is. Ah, the "Gold Award," which even as Wikipedia describes as "the equivalent of the Eagle Scout honor," they forthrightly admit "it does not gain the same sort of recognition."

So, yes, I understand why the gals want to join and I'm actually pretty okay with it.  What I'm not okay with is the decision to allow openly gay Scoutmasters and the more recent decision to allow transgender Scouts that preceded this change. Those are the decisions that will ultimately kill the BSA.

 I'm against transgender scouts because I do not think it is compassionate to play into a person's mental illness and I think that it is child abuse to be playing into it at the ages that children are in Scouting. The transgender decision earlier this year almost lead me to mail all my Eagle Scout paraphernalia along with a letter to the BSA, but I ended up just giving it to my mom instead.

I'm not against gay Scouts, but my experience working sex crimes for almost a decade and a half has taught me that having gay men who are single in positions of authority over pubescent and post- pubescent males is, quite frankly, asking for trouble. Men, straight or gay, who want to be involved in youth programs when they don't have biological children of their own involved in the program they are wanting to participate in, are not to be trusted. Gay men, by definition, will not have biological children involved in whatever activity they proposed to lead. The power dynamic becomes the problem. No one would seriously consider it okay for a single, childless, straight man to run a Girl Scout troop. The same dynamic applies, or would, in a sane world where people were free to openly voice their concerns.

Weinstein Investigation Par for the Course: Prosecutors Ignore Sex Assault Cases When They Involve People Who Matter.

The news that movie producer Harvey Weinstein is alleged to have sexually harassed and sexually assaulted numerous female subordinates, from temp workers to A-list starlets, is for most people a "dog bites man" kind of story.  Yeah, of course, a guy who looks like Harvey Weinstein with lots of money and power that he can use to induce women who are way out of his league is a creep.  The pope is also Catholic, nominally at least, and water tends to be wet.

The magnitude of the scandal and the blatant ways in which others went along with the coverups is legitimately shocking, particularly the disclosure of the language in his contract that allowed him to get away with it as far as the company was concerned so long as he paid them back the costs of any associated lawsuits as well as a series of fines.  The fact that such a morally depraved clause existed in a contract is pretty much proof that Hollywood is in actual fact a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, not just a metaphorical one.  If a corporation will go so far as to indemnify in writing the expected future sexual harassment by an employee in 2017, what won't they agree to overlook?

It's one thing for a private company to be willing to overlook the sins and transgressions of an employee who had the talent to make them a lot of money.  While the actions (or lack thereof) by the board of The Weinstein Company are inexcusable, they are still somewhat understandable.  There was a lot of money to be made and Mr. Weinstein was, of course, one of the founders of the company that bears his name.  It's another thing for media outlets to sit on the story out of fear and sycophancy, as everyone from the New York Times to NBC News is accused of having done for years.  But it's quite another for the government to fail to protect citizens when presented with evidence that a crime has occurred, regardless of the relative positions of power and status that the victim and the perpetrator may hold.

A war of words broke out in the wake of the scandal between the NYPD and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office when it was revealed that a criminal complaint for sexual assault was made against Mr. Weinstein in 2015.  In a nutshell, Mr. Weinstein was accused of sexually abusing Italian actress Ambra Battilana by fondling her breast without her consent, which would have been a misdemeanor under New York law.  (In Kentucky, such an act would have been considered a felony offense of Sexual Abuse 1st degree.)  Ms. Battilana agreed to wear a wire to try and record Mr. Weinstein confessing or making admissions regarding the offense.

This is a very common investigative technique used in sexual assault investigations where, as in this case, the victim and perpetrator are known to each other.  Oftentimes in sexual assault cases, there are no witnesses.  In a sexual abuse case, particularly one in which no bodily fluids are involved as in the fondling of a female breast or buttock, there's not going to be any physical evidence.  In order to break the "he said, she said" stalemate, some sort of proof is needed.  Otherwise, a "tie" goes to the suspect.

A recorded conversation can be one way to get that proof.  Ideally the suspect will say something on the recording that can be used by a skilled interviewer during an interrogation to elicit a full(er) confession.  I've done dozens of these types of "stings" myself, usually over the telephone, through text messaging, or via Facebook instead of in person.  The goal is to get the suspect to at least admit that the event occurred and that his action was objectionable.  The magic words that you want to get a suspect to say are "I'm sorry."  With those two words, the suspect admits both that the event happened and that the victim is right to be upset about it.  From there, it's only a question of confirming the specific details.

Stings can also be helpful in disposing of false accusations.  If the encounter was actually consensual, then the suspect will oftentimes provide you with details that the purported victim left out in her initial complaint.  

In a "normal" case, which is to say a case involving two people who were not nationally or locally famous and particularly cases involving victims and suspects from one of the lower social classes,  a recorded conversation between the victim and suspect like the one obtained in the Weinstein case would be considered a slam dunk.  Even if the suspect then refused, as would be his right, to come in for an interview, a sting that went as well for law enforcement as Weinstein's did would be enough to substantiate probable cause.  He never denies or challenges the victim's narrative.  He admits it happened.  He says he's sorry multiple times.  He says he won't do it again, yet at the same time his tone and manner of speaking show him to be very domineering and borderline threatening.       

And yet the DA declined to file charges, going so far now as the scandal is mushrooming as to blame the investigators for not consulting with the DA's office beforehand.  There's a word for that and the word is "bullshit."  An anonymous NYPD official put it best when he (or she) suggested that the press "ask the DA if they would have approved the arrest if the guy's name was Harvey Schmuck."

There's been plenty of speculation after the fact regarding donations made to the DA's election campaign coffers by Mr. Weinstein's lawyers after the charges were declined.  And sure, it looks like a bribe.  It might have been, but more likely it was something more fundamental to the way prosecutors think.  At the end of the day, they can't go around "pissing on people who matter."

I took that line from The Wire.  Here's the full clip with a NSFW language warning:

The nasty, simple fact is that Harvey Weinstein was a person who matters, at least in 2015.  Big donor to the Democratic party.  Friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton.  He mattered and all of the women he sexually harassed, especially a minor Italian actress that nobody ever heard of, don't.

The thing is, you don't have to be a multi- millionaire movie producer and campaign finance bundler for the Donkey party to matter enough to get love from the justice system.  And stuff like this doesn't just happen in New York and LA.

Long time residents of Lexington are familiar with the Ron Berry scandal.  For those who aren't, the short version is that Mr. Berry was the director of a disadvantaged youth program in Lexington called Microcity Government  for decades.  Over that time he sodomized and sexually abused numerous children, predominantly black males.  He was convicted in 2000 of 12 counts of Sodomy, but it is alleged that he victimized dozens of other kids.

What's worse is that numerous Lexington city officials knew about and covered up the abuse.  A lawsuit filed in 1998 named some of them as co- defendants with the Lexington- Fayette Urban County Government as well, although the individuals were eventually dismissed from the suit, leaving only LFUCG as the sole defendant. And, of course, Democrats being Democrats, Gov. Steve Beshear partially restored some of Mr. Berry's rights in 2008.

The truth of the matter was that Mr. Berry at the time that he was running Microcity Government, was someone who mattered.  He was a pillar of the black community.  He delivered the black vote.  He got things done and his victims were underprivileged youths who most certainly did not matter. 
 

Evil Has a Name

Like most people nowadays, I participate in various online forums and post in the comments threads of my favorite websites.  One of the websites I frequent quite a lot is Glocktalk, an online forum of Glock handgun enthusiasts.

In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre of October 1, a thread sprung up on Glocktalk (or GT, as we sometimes shorten it) debating whether or not society generally and the media specifically should refrain from publicly naming the perpetrators of mass shooting or other mass casualty events like Las Vegas.  The argument is that the people who engage in these shootings are losers who are seeking notoriety and fame as they initiate these attacks and that by refusing to even name them, we deny them that which they wanted above all else, while also discouraging other lunatics from engaging in rampages of their own.

The person who started the thread was passionately in favor of society engaging in this type of censorship and many of the other posters agreed with him.  I and a few others took the contrarian position, which I would like to expand on here.  

My position is that facts always matter.  When one of these mass shootings occurs, one of the facts is the name of the person who did it.  Hiding that detail, even if your motives are pure, is the first step to denying that the event happened.  That kind of denial, which I believe far too many people would be happy to embrace, is ultimately more dangerous to society as a whole than the chance that another lunatic will pick up a gun and try to beat Steve Paddock's body count.

Is there another crazy person out there planning a mass shooting event after Las Vegas?  Almost definitely.  Would they be dissuaded from launching their attack if our media was forbidden to publish Paddock's name and identifiers?  We can't possibly know for sure, but I would think not.  A disordered mind has disordered reasons that those of us in society who claim to be sane should know we will never truly discern.  We cannot reorder all of society in an attempt to accommodate the beliefs or preempt all of the possible actions of crazy people.  All we can do is try to prepare ourselves and mitigate the damage they might cause and to do that we need information.

Yes, information can be dangerous and I'm not advocating that the public has a right to know everything about a crime as soon as law enforcement knows it.  Investigations take time and society is best served when full, complete, and correct information is released deliberately.  Our current 24/7 media operations, with empty- headed news anchors trying to fill every second of the day with information of dubious reliability, has not improved our national lot one bit. I'm not arguing that law enforcement and the media shouldn't be circumspect.  What I'm against is deliberate withholding of basic information, particularly the withholding of information out of a misguided sense that to do so keeps the offender from gaining some kind of mythical power over the populace. 

For where would it stop? Okay, we don't mention Paddock by name anymore.  We can still figure out who he is from his descriptors and his associates.  Are we to begin to withhold that information as well?

And what about the details of his crime?  The big detail that we're worried about some lunatic trying to beat is his kill count.  Should that detail be hidden from the public as well? How does failing to acknowledge the victims' deaths honor their memory?

The means by which he committed his attack matter as well.  How many people knew what a "bump stock" was before last Sunday?  I'm not ashamed to admit that I had heard of them, but wasn't clear on how they actually worked or how devastatingly effective they could be. Unfortunately, I'm sure that there's at least one crazy person out there who learned about a new piece of technology that could be really useful to the massacre he's in the early stages of planning.

If we are to resist evil, we have to be willing to face it.  Facing it means being able to name it and being willing to say "This person, this man, named Steve Paddock, did this and he was evil to have done so."

But what we could- would- end up with if our society through its media outlets and government representatives started voluntarily withholding basic information from the public is confusion and ultimately tyranny.