Perhaps you’re wondering why someone would make up such a preposterous story. I have an idea.
For the last few years, there has been a string of moms going on Facebook, breathlessly claiming that they were out at the mall (or Ikea, or Target), when suddenly they realized that they were being stalked by a kidnapper clearly planning to snatch their kids and sex-traffic them.
The evidence is usually something like, “I saw a guy staring at my baby.” Or, “I saw the couple in one aisle and then I went down a different aisle and there they were again,” or, “I looked outside and there was a van with its door open!”
Inevitably, the mom congratulates herself on having had the wherewithal to figure out what was going on just in time, and bravely thwart the heinous crime by, uh, staring the guys down. Then the mom usually says something like, “if it happened to me it could happen to you,” without reminding readers that in fact, nothing happened. No one grabbed a kid. No one was sex-trafficked. (The head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, David Finkelhor, says he knows of zero cases of a child kidnapped from a parent in public and sex trafficked.) It’s all in the moms’ heads.
Yet they get thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of approving shares and comments on social media.
Here’s one story. Here’s another, and another, and another. Here’s one that went mega-viral a few years back. You get the idea. It’s a panic, with a twist: adulation.
The mom ends up the hero of the non-event, basking in comments like thank you for sharing this, and so glad you are safe and, you are such a strong, conscientious mama.
If only this hoax story could go as viral as the my-kid-was-almost-sex-trafficked posts.
Lenore Skenazy, “Mom Charged With Falsely Accusing a Man of Trying to Kidnap Her 5-Year-Old at the Mall”, Reason, 2019-07-04.
May 8, 2019
May 5, 2019
Theresa May’s awful “Withdrawal” Agreement
Hector Drummond relays a Spectator article that lists 40 problems with Prime Minister May’s agreement with the EU:
Just in case readers don’t have the time to go through the lengthly document themselves, Steerpike has compiled a list of the top 40 horrors lurking in the small print of Theresa May’s Brexit deal.
[…]
In summary: The supposed “transition period” could last indefinitely or, more specifically, to an undefined date sometime this century (“up to 31 December 20XX”, Art. 132). So while this Agreement covers what the government is calling Brexit, what we in fact get is: “transition” + extension indefinitely (by however many years we are willing to pay for) + all of those extra years from the “plus 8 years” articles.
Should it end within two years, as May hopes, the UK will still be signed up to clauses keeping us under certain rules (like VAT and ECJ supervision) for a further eight years. Some clauses have, quite literally, a “lifetime” duration (Art.39). If the UK defaults on transition, we go in to the backstop with the Customs Union and, realistically, the single market. We can only leave the transition positively with a deal. But we sign away the money. So the EU has no need to give us a deal, and certainly no incentive to make the one they offered “better” than the backstop. The European Court of Justice remains sovereign, as repeatedly stipulated. Perhaps most damagingly of all, we agree to sign away the rights we would have, under international law, to unilaterally walk away. Again, what follows relates (in most part) for the “transition” period. But the language is consistent with the E.U. imagining that this will be the final deal.
The top 40 horrors:
- From the offset, we should note that this is an EU text, not a UK or international text. This has one source. The Brexit agreement is written in Brussels.
- May says her deal means the UK leaves the EU next March. The Withdrawal Agreement makes a mockery of this. “All references to Member States and competent authorities of Member States…shall be read as including the United Kingdom.” (Art 6). Not quite what most people understand by Brexit. It goes on to spell out that the UK will be in the EU but without any MEPs, a commissioner or ECJ judges. We are effectively a Member State, but we are excused – or, more accurately, excluded – from attending summits. (Article 7)
- The European Court of Justice is decreed to be our highest court, governing the entire Agreement – Art. 4. stipulates that both citizens and resident companies can use it. Art 4.2 orders our courts to recognise this. “If the European Commission considers that the United Kingdom has failed to fulfil an obligation under the Treaties or under Part Four of this Agreement before the end of the transition period, the European Commission may, within 4 years after the end of the transition period, bring the matter before the Court of Justice of the European Union”. (Art. 87)
- The jurisdiction of the ECJ will last until eight years after the end of the transition period. (Article 158).
- The UK will still be bound by any future changes to EU law in which it will have no say, not to mention having to comply with current law. (Article 6(2))
And on for another 35 awful items.
May 4, 2019
May 3, 2019
The rarely used US Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA)
Ron Paul wonders why Russian national Maria Butina got a harsher sentence under the Foreign Agent Registration Act than an actual foreign agent who was paid millions of dollars by the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein:
Russian gun rights activist and graduate exchange student Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week for “conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without registering.” Her “crime” was to work to make connections among American gun rights activists in hopes of building up her organization, the Right to Bear Arms, when she returned to Russia.
She was not employed by the Russian government nor was she a lobbyist on Putin’s behalf. In fact the Putin Administration is hostile to Russian gun rights groups. Nevertheless the US mainstream media and Trump’s Justice Department are treating her as public enemy number one in a case that will no doubt set the dangerous precedent of criminalizing person-to-person diplomacy in the United States.
The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was passed in 1938 under pressure from the FDR Administration partly to silence opposition to the US entry into World War II. While a handful of cases were prosecuted during the war, between 1966 and 2015 the Justice Department only brought seven FARA cases for prosecution.
Though very few cases have been brought on FARA violations, one of them was against Samir Vincent, who was paid millions of dollars by Saddam Hussein to lobby for sanctions relief without registering. He got off with a fine and “community service.”
Millions of dollars in unregistered payments from Saddam Hussein gets no jail time, while Butina gets 18 months in prison for privately promoting a cause most Americans support! How is this justice?
The US Justice Department is not even as tough on illegals who commit capital crimes in the US!
Unfortunately Maria Butina was in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the rise of the “Russiagate” hysteria, Butina’s case was seen as a useful tool by Democrats to push the idea that President Trump was put into office by the Russians. Plus, many of them are also hostile to our Second Amendment and to the National Rifle Association. So it was a perfect storm for Butina.
The power of the patriarchy
As we are often told, men have distinct advantages in modern society that women are still struggling to achieve for themselves. Daphne Patai doesn’t seem to have got the memo, however:
In contemporary America, women and men still act out ancient roles. From the point of view of the men, the society is a matriarchy: Women have physically less demanding jobs — with the sole exception of childbirth, by now a rare event in the average woman’s life. Women sustain far fewer injuries on the job, are not required to go to war, take better care of their health, and for these reasons and many others enjoy a lifespan significantly longer than that of men.
In this society, men use their physical strength, when necessary, on women’s behalf. Women claim to be equal partners when that suits them and claim to be entitled to special consideration when that suits them. They insist on autonomy in maintaining or aborting pregnancies, but at the same time, they determine the fathers’ duties-and rights, if any. Women claim child support. They can either demand or impede fathers’ continuing involvement with their offspring, as the women see fit. The result is that women have advantages over men in child custody suits, just as they have learned to use charges of child sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Though dozens of studies show that women, by their own account, initiate violence against their domestic partners as often as (if not more often than) men, and cause as much injury when weapons are involved, somehow the social mythologies of this country keep that fact from gaining broad public attention, let alone credence.
But worst of all, in terms of the interactions of daily life, are women’s emotional demands on men. At home, men routinely sit through harangues that demonstrate women’s greater verbal skills and emotional agility. Men, inarticulate, try to figure out what is required of them in a given situation. Not by accident, verbal therapies in this society archetypically began with men listening and women speaking. Even as little boys, males learn to be in awe of girls’ verbal fluency. The feeling of ineptness, of being no match for females at the verbal and emotional level, is the common inheritance of all but a few exceptional males.
The matriarchy here described, structured to protect women’s interests as against men’s (and, ironically, having conned men into defending such a set up) puts a premium on women’s special social and emotional skills. Everywhere, women engage men and one another in personal conversation, offering and receiving disclosures, demanding commiseration, giving advice, spreading censure. Men, trained to keep to their workhorse style, are uncomfortably cornered by women, in the workplace, and at home, demanding that they speak from the heart. When asked “How are you?” women give a detailed and precise accounting. In offices, they spend valuable time discussing personal matters.
Musgrave 9mm: A Gun for the Black Market
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 27 Mar 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
In the brief couple of years between the election of a new black-majority government in South Africa in 1994 and the dissolution of the Musgrave company, it attempted to produce a new 9mm pistol to sell to the burgeoning market of black South African citizens buying handguns. Ownership of pistols by black citizens had been legal under apartheid, but was (not surprisingly) quite uncommon – this began to change in 1994. The most popular pistol at the time was the Norinco 213 Tokarev in 9x19mm, which was available in large numbers and at very low cost.
To compete against this, Musgrave designed a simple blowback, polymer framed pistol chambered for 9x19mm using Beretta 92 magazines (which Musgrave had a large supply of, being the licensed Beretta distributor in the country). The gun was extremely simple, held together with a handful of screws and using a single-action-only hammer-fired mechanism. It was a commercial flop, however — unable to match the quality and price combination of the Tokarev and only about 500 were made in 1995 and 1996.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
April 29, 2019
Cannabis stores struggling against cheaper black market weed outlets
In a rational world, a license to sell legal cannabis from a storefront where you have almost a legal monopoly would be a license to print money — the market demand is very clearly real and widespread. Yet Toronto’s legal cannabis stores are still suffering:
How much would it suck to go through all the trouble of opening a legal weed store, only to have dozens of people do the exact same thing without paying for permits, inspections or meeting any sort of government regulations?
How much would it suck to then watch these people not only get away with their illegal operations, but do so while luring your customers away with cheaper prices?
Probably as much as it would suck to sink years of your life into building a retail cannabis business and then learning that only 25 of such stores could exist in all of Ontario — and that the owners of those stores would be chosen at random.
It’s been nearly one month since Doug Ford’s PC government allowed the first wave of brick and mortar retail cannabis stores to open across Ontario. Three have launched so far in Toronto, where five licenses were issued in total, but many consumers aren’t pleased with consistently long lines and higher (than pre-legalization) prices.
So, like the rest of Canada, Toronto continues to buy black market weed.
Roughly 20 unlicensed dispensary storefronts are still up and running across the city as of April 25, in addition to more than 100 illegal marijuana delivery services.
You can find them all on WeedMaps, a popular online cannabis community that’s been listing these types of businesses for adult consumers in North America since 2008.
It’s not that police and bylaw enforcement officers can’t find these illicit dispensaries — I mean, operators are advertising their locations and menus online for all to see.
The problem is that no level of government can (or will) shut them down for very long.
“Why not?” you ask? Well, it’s complicated.
QotD: Prostitution
I had a few patients who were prostitutes. I remember one well-dressed lady in her 40s, whose profession I asked in the course of my history-taking.
“Dominatrix,” she said.
She was obviously very good at it because she had an international clientele, including, for example, a judge in Alabama. She told me that she never went anywhere in her car without her kit, for she might receive an emergency call at any time from Hong Kong or South Africa. You might have thought that being whipped by one woman in black fishnet stockings was as good as being whipped by another, but apparently this was (and I presume still is) not so: It’s the words and gestures that go with the whipping that count as well.
This activity of hers gave her a very good living (her car was far better than mine); she was sending her daughter to private school. I admired her enterprise and thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Was she or the judge in Alabama to blame? Was either of them to blame at all?
Of course, she wasn’t typical of the profession, and hard cases, as they say, make bad law. But I am not at all sure that I saw the poor prostitutes in my street as merely victims, as the new French law would have them. Not everyone with their life history becomes a crack-taking prostitute. This does not mean that I did not pity them for what they had become. If we can truly sympathize only with those who have done nothing to contribute to their own fate, we shall have very restricted sympathies indeed.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Turning Tricks Into Sympathy”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-04-09.
April 24, 2019
Opponents claim Doug Ford is using booze liberalization as a distraction … if so, it’s working well
Chris Selley documents just how Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s opponents are unable to ignore the (personally teetotal) Ford’s alcohol-related proposals:
A peculiar affliction has broken out among Ontarians who think their relatively new government is devoting far too much time and attention to liberalizing alcohol laws: They can’t stop talking about it.
I don’t mean people with entirely fair public health concerns (though I think those concerns are pretty marginal, given the modest changes). And I don’t mean the pearl-clutching hordes who think allowing alcohol consumption in parks will lead to mayhem, no matter how civilized the results might demonstrably be elsewhere. (That peculiarly Ontarian crew has certainly made itself heard, though, and it seems to include a surprising number of progressive millennials.)
I mean people who didn’t have particularly strong views one way or the other about 9 a.m. mimosas, tailgate parties, drinking in parks or buying beer at the corner store, or might even have supported some legislative relaxation, but who now can’t stop railing against them even as they deplore the government’s actions on objectively more serious files.
[…]
On letters and op-ed pages, you’ll find the topic of booze popping up in all sorts of places it objectively doesn’t belong — not if one doesn’t want to be distracted, anyway. It seems to lead people down all sorts of strange blind alleys. One Toronto Star columnist noted that neither Premier Doug Ford nor Finance Minister Vic Fedeli will “touch a drop themselves,” but that “they are making it easier for you to access just in time for breakfast, happy hour, or a nightcap.” So what? Why would anyone want the premier’s or finance minister’s personal tastes and preferences influencing public policy?
Another Star columnist spent seven paragraphs sneering at the idea of tailgating in Ontario before declaring herself perfectly fine with the idea. “But,” she asked, “is tailgating what Ontario needs?” Is that the standard, then? Government shall only allow the masses such entertainments as they “need”?
Using booze as a “distraction” is not a new tactic. It became a running joke during Kathleen Wynne’s tenure that whenever things were going (especially) badly for her government, she would pop up to announce another batch of supermarkets authorized to sell beer and cider (and sometimes, though much more rarely, wine!).
April 7, 2019
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and the murders at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey
I was too young to know anything about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter except what I “learned” from listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” long after the events. In Quillette, Lona Manning recounts the story, which doesn’t agree with Dylan’s interpretation (but Dylan was far from the only journalist or celebrity to be fooled):
How many people who followed the BBC Radio 4 podcast series about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter were startled — or even outraged — when Carter was not triumphantly vindicated in the final episode?
In the small hours of June 17, 1966, two black men walked into a late-night Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey and opened fire on the occupants. They left bartender James Oliver and patron Fred Nauyoks dead at the scene and mortally wounded a woman named Hazel Tanis, who would succumb to her injuries a month later. Another customer named Willie Marins lost an eye in the shooting but survived. Neighbors Patty Valentine and Ronald Ruggiero told police that they had seen two black males flee the scene in a white vehicle. This testimony was corroborated by petty thief Alfred Bello who walked past the dead and the dying to empty the cash register after the shooters had fled.
Half an hour later, Paterson police stopped middleweight boxer Rubin Carter and his companion John Artis in a car bearing out-of-state plates that matched the eyewitnesses’ description. A search of the car yielded a .32 and a 12 gauge shotgun, the weapons police later determined had been used in the shooting. Carter and Artis were eventually indicted by a grand jury and convicted of the Lafayette murders in 1967. Carter vehemently protested his innocence and his case became a cause célèbre after his 1975 autobiography found its way into the hands of Bob Dylan. Carter was retried in 1976, after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the first conviction had been unsafe. Despite support from Dylan, Muhammad Ali and the New York Times, the two were convicted again. John Artis was paroled in 1981, and Carter was finally released in 1985 after the second conviction was overturned and prosecutors declined to try him a third time.
Sports reporters Joel Hammer and Steve Crossman spent 18 months researching and reinvestigating the case and promised listeners of the BBC’s podcast that they would provide the “full” and “true” story. Their in-depth look at the crime provides far more detail about the murders than can be gleaned from Bob Dylan’s 1975 protest song or the hagiographic 1999 Norman Jewison film starring Denzel Washington. Dylan accused the prosecution team of framing Carter for the slayings and called them “criminals in their coats and their ties” who were “free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.” Crossman and Hammer are likewise very critical of the prosecution; for example, they think that Alfred Bello should never have been allowed to testify. How could the life of such a man, be in the palm of some fool’s hand? And they argue that the prosecution ignored — or perhaps even suppressed — an investigation into a very plausible suspect, Eddie Rawls (who is now deceased). But they stop short of calling it a frame-up and an attempt at judicial murder.
On the other hand, Crossman and Hammer think the “racial revenge motive” was a reasonable one. The very first newspaper accounts of the slaughter at the Lafayette Grill included the speculation that the murders were committed in revenge for the slaying, earlier that night, of black bartender Roy Holloway and this would also be the prosecution’s contention. That Crossman and Hammer now accept the plausibility of this theory is a significant concession to the prosecution’s version of events, not least because it was Judge Lee Sarokin’s rejection of this motive which led him to overturn the second conviction—the prosecution’s case, he ruled, had been based on “racism rather than reason.”
Coincidentally, on the front page of the East Bergen Record, under the murder story, there was a wire service article about Stokely Carmichael proclaiming “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi, an event which marked the transition from the peaceful civil rights tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King to the radical activism of the Black Panthers. These two articles encapsulated all the elements of the Lafayette Grill case that continue to be debated over 50 years later. Why did someone walk into a working-class bar and slaughter the occupants? Was the black community in Paterson in a ferment that night because a white man blew off Holloway’s head with a shotgun? And what, if anything, did this have to do with the state of race relations in America at the time?
Justin’s SNC-Lavalin swamp … how deep does it go?
For a penny-ante scandal where there’s no hint of sexual impropriety or unmarked bundles of bills being passed along in brown paper bags, Justin’s SNC-Lavalin scandal looks more and more interesting the more we look at it:
A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould.
It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist — Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post — has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story.
The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It’s bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money.
The Trudeau-SNC-Lavalin scandal is so much more, involving the corruption of the supposedly non-partisan civil service, and even the judiciary, for the political benefit of a disgraced political party, and a cover-up endorsed, encouraged and actively engaged in by the sitting Members of Parliament of that political party.
[…]
Which brings us to the ticking-timebomb-evidence the committee and the public didn’t get to hear.
In between the appearances by Butts and Warnick, Wilson-Raybould testified to getting a report from her chief of staff who had had a meeting with Butts and Trudeau’s chief of staff Katie Telford. They aggressively pushed the attorney general to get an “outside” opinion from someone like the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Beverley McLachlin, on dropping the criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin in favour of a non-criminal plea deal.
Wilson-Raybould took contemporary notes of what her staff member told her.
“My COS (chief of staff…ed) asked what if the opinion comes saying “She can review it, but she shouldn’t” or simply “She can’t review it” end of story? Mr. Butts stated “It wouldn’t say that.”
BOOM!!!!!!
Read what Butts said again. And again. And again.
“IT WOULDN’T SAY THAT”
H/T to Halls of Macademia and Small Dead Animals for the link.
April 6, 2019
SNC-Lavalin – Justin couldn’t admit that he was wr… wr… wr… not right
Chris Selley on the Prime Minister’s odd decision not to get ahead of the SNC-Lavalin scandal while he still had some credibility with the public:
It seems like another century, but was in fact only a few weeks ago, that Justin Trudeau had a plausible plan to cauterize the SNC-Lavalin wound within his party: He would apologize for … something.
Presumably he would not apologize for trying to protect 9,000 jobs, and presumably he would not admit improper interference in the attorney general’s and director of public prosecution’s roles. But perhaps he might cop to overzealousness in concern for those jobs, or for poorly communicating his entirely appropriate concerns, or for the various anonymous party sources who were slagging off Jody Wilson-Raybould to friendly journalists.
The latter, certainly, seemed downright imperative. Trudeau and his minions, either under orders or self-assigning, had snatched calamity from the jaws of bother. They were badmouthing an accomplished Indigenous female lawyer for being headstrong, “difficult to work with,” and various other descriptors commonly attached to Type A women when they behave like Type A men. When they ran out of those, they started insinuating she wasn’t a very good justice minister — which is certainly an arguable point, but which rather clashed with Trudeau’s insistence she would still hold that title if not for Scott Brison’s impending departure.
It was absolutely torching their brand. People were laughing in their faces. Something had to be done. And this stand-by-for-contrition narrative was lent some credence, fittingly enough, by anonymous sources. “A senior government official said one of the options being discussed is for Trudeau to ‘show some ownership over the actions of his staff and officials’ in their dealings with his former attorney general,” CBC reported on March 5.
Floating a trial balloon to measure potential reactions is not often prelude to the sincerest of apologies. But in the end, no real apology was forthcoming. The brand-torching continued unabated. And by Wednesday this week, the Anonymous Sources had come full circle: Wilson-Raybould had set various extraordinary conditions for remaining in Cabinet, they told various outlets.
One of them was that Trudeau apologize.
In Maclean’s, Paul Wells wonders why SNC-Lavalin has shaken the Liberals so much:
How did this scandal manage to rattle this government so profoundly? And the best answer I can find is this: Because it reveals truths about this Prime Minister that shake many Canadians’ confidence in him.
As my moral betters in the newspaper columns never tire of repeating, by many standards the SNC-Lavalin mess is quite modest. It seems probable that no money changed hands improperly in 2018 and no law was broken. The protagonists were motivated mostly by a kind of distracted hunch that jobs might be at stake. I mean, the extent to which they had zero evidence for that is breathtaking, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. And also by a similarly vague suspicion that it might be bad for branded Liberal candidates if SNC ran into trouble ahead of a Quebec or federal election.
[…]
Finally, all three of these scandalettes have laid bare a stubbornly ramshackle approach to running what has sometimes been a serious country. When flying to India, sure, pack your embroidered sherwani and your convicted attempted murderer, but also maybe bring along a travel plan, a sales pitch and a list of objectives worth achieving. Especially if your ineptitude is about to guarantee you will never get a second chance to visit India.
On SNC, what emerges from all the testimony is the impression that a dozen kids from the McGill debating team snuck into the abandoned ruins of Ottawa and started pretending to be the government of Canada. Jody complained to Bill that Elder and Ben were being mean to Jessica. Justin sent Michael but somehow Michael didn’t have the Section 13 ruling Jody had sent to Mathieu. Then it was Christmas and they all went home for a month.
Where the hell were the 208,000 public servants whose job was to ensure options were explored and workflows respected? Why, in September, when Wernick says everyone was distracted by NAFTA, did nobody at the weekly deputy ministers’ meeting say, “Well, there’s only room for 10 people at the NAFTA table, so why don’t the rest of us strike a working group of officials from Justice, Finance, Innovation and the Privy Council to ride this SNC puppy until we know what’s what?”
I’m pretty sure the reason this didn’t happen is that Butts found it thrilling to have all the important conversations run through his phone. That’s a bush-league reason to stumble into a government-shaking mess.
April 4, 2019
LPC Omertà in action
Omertà, according to Wikipedia, is “a Southern Italian code of honor and code of silence that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders; non-cooperation with authorities, the government, or outsiders; and willfully ignoring and generally avoiding interference with the illegal activities of others.” It’s also a remarkably appropriate way to describe the Liberal Party of Canada’s standard operating procedure:
“Ultimately the choice that is before you,” Jody Wilson-Raybould pleaded with her caucus colleagues, in a letter written hours before they were to pass sentence on her, “is about what kind of party you want to be a part of, what values it will uphold, the vision that animates it, and indeed the type of people it will attract and make it up.”
But they made that choice long ago. They knew what kind of party they wanted to be a part of from the moment they accepted their nominations; indeed, were they not the type of person that party attracts they would not have been recruited for it. It is the kind of party, and person, that unquestioningly puts loyalty to party before principle — and mercilessly punishes those who do not.
So on the question of whether to expel the former minister of justice and attorney general — along with the former Treasury Board president, Jane Philpott — for the crime of denouncing the attempt, by the prime minister and senior government officials, to interfere with a criminal prosecution, there could have been little doubt how they would vote.
Whether they chose to shoot the messengers so spontaneously, over Justin Trudeau’s objections, as some reports have claimed — they were “determined to take the matter into their own hands,” according to a Canadian Press story, as if MPs were so eager to prove their obedience to the leader as to be willing to defy him — or whether they did so under orders doesn’t much matter. The rotting of the soul is the same either way.
We can now see, if it were not already apparent, the moral compass by which the prime minister and his caucus steer. The scandal in the SNC-Lavalin affair is, by this reckoning, not the months-long campaign to subvert the independence of the attorney general and, through her, to force the independent director of public prosecutions to drop charges of fraud and corruption against a long-time Liberal party contributor, but the opposition to it.
Traditional political theory teaches that the executive branch of government is responsible to the legislative. It is now clearer than ever that the reverse more nearly applies: members of the Liberal caucus plainly see it as their role, not to hold the government to account, but rather their fellow MPs — on behalf of the government. When wrongdoing by those high in government is alleged by a pair of whistleblowers, their first thought is to root out the whistleblowers.
March 29, 2019
March 28, 2019
QotD: Sharia law
In order of importance, [Sharia] has four sources. First, there is the Koran, which is the record of what was revealed to Mohammed by God, speaking through the Archangel Gabriel, Its injunctions are absolutely binding on the faithful. Second, there is the sunna, or the practice of Mohammed, as understood from the hadith, or traditional stories of his sayings and doings. These are less holy than the Koran, being only what was observed of a particularly honoured man, and not the direct Word of God given at third hand. Also, there are nearly two million of them, and they often contradict one another. But they count, once any consistent doctrine can be divined from them on a particular issue, as reliable guides. Third, there is the ijima or consensus of opinion among the ulema, or learned Moslems. Fourth, there is qiyas, or a process of analogical reasoning by which, in the absence of any rule or precedent, a case is to be decided in a manner consistent with the existing body of law. In addition to these, we can be fairly certain that much law has been inherited from pre-Islamic Arabian custom, and from the near eastern societies that subsequently became Moslem.
The main development of Islamic law came to an end in the eighth century with the Foundation of what remain the four traditional schools of legal interpretation. The task of all succeeding jurists was seen increasingly to consist as no more than the application and development of principles already laid down. Then, some time during the tenth century, there came what is known as “The Closure of the Gate of Interpretation ”. Since then, the exercise of itjihad — or independent judgment — has not, in theory, been permitted at all.
Islamic law differs from our own not only in its derivation, but also in its content. With us, despite what remains from the old regimes, and despite a great mass of socialist legislation during the present century, law is a means largely of protecting life and property. Among the Islamic lawyers, this has been an end only incidental to the main one, of ensuring conformity to the will of God. “The sacred law of Islam…” according to the great western scholar of the subject, Joseph Schacht, “is an all-embracing body of religious duties, the totality of Allah’s commands that regulate the life of every Muslim in all its aspects”. Not surprisingly, any country where the government takes Islam seriously is invariably, in western terms, an exceptionally gloomy and repressive place.
Let us look at Saudi Arabia. Within the bounds set by Islamic law, the country is an absolute monarchy. It lacks even the pretence of representative institutions and freedom of the press. All public officers are appointed by the King, and are responsible in the final instance to him alone. No religion other than Islam is tolerated in public — not even the sale of crosses being allowed — and anyone who is not a Moslem is made a victim of official discrimination. All publications are subject to a searching, and what often strikes westerners as a frivolous, censorship. On the 13th of March, 1989, The Times was allowed on sale only after the censors had snipped out the relevant part of a photograph in which a lady was showing more of herself than was thought decent. Women, indeed, are treated as inferior beings, and this treatment goes far beyond the close regulation of their dress by the police. They can be divorced at will. The range of employments open to them is restricted by law, and they can take none that involves contact with any man not related to them. They cannot drive cars. They cannot travel unaccompanied by a male relative. Adultery and certain other sexual acts carry the death penalty. The drinking of alcohol, while not absolutely prohibited, is discouraged. Tobacco is only grudgingly allowed. Gambling is forbidden. Music and dance are frowned on.
