What Political Speech is Protected?
The FBI is allegedly engaging in a "purge" of employees with conservative viewpoints and retaliating against whistleblowers who have made protected disclosures to Congress by revoking security clearances, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan told Fox News Digital.
Mr. Garland wrote that all communication with Congress must be conducted through the department’s office of legislative affairs.The policy is “to protect our criminal and civil law enforcement decisions, and our legal judgment from partisans or other inappropriate influences, whether real or perceived or indirect,” he said in the memo, sent late Tuesday.He stressed that the new policies “are not intended to conflict with or limit whistleblower protections” and that “Congress may carry out its legislative oversight functions.”Kurt Siuzdak, a former FBI agent and a lawyer who represents bureau whistleblowers, said the memo is targeting employees who want to speak out against misconduct.“There’s no whistleblower status, per se. If you make a protected disclosure of criminal wrongdoing or serious misconduct, and then they retaliate, you go to the office of attorney recruitment and management and they basically will remove any personnel actions after two to five years, and people know it’s two to five years. And they know the office of general counsel is going to fight and cause [sic] them lots of money,” he said.“‘So if it’s not a whistleblower, then we’re coming after you’ is what they would say,’” he said. “‘If we determine you’re not a whistleblower, then we’re going to retaliate. … Because if you’re going to report misconduct to the Congress, and that doesn’t rise to the level of misconduct, then we’re going to take action.’’’
Sunset on the far Wall
The rain was still in Savannah at sunset, but the farthest cloud wall was visible in the south. Rain originally was predicted to start tonight, but now it sounds like the afternoon or evening of Friday. We should be perfectly ready.
Bank Robbery by the FBI
Legal Insurrection cites the LA Times: In asking for a warrant to search private safe deposit boxes, FBI did not disclose its intention to steal everything it found worth more than $5,000.
The language in the two versions differs, as one would expect, but it is pretty strong even in the LAT version which can be expected to have no right-wing sympathies (but, probably, connections to aggrieved rich LA people who lost property in the raid). I'll quote from that one.
FBI misled judge who signed warrant for Beverly Hills seizure of $86 million in cash
The privacy invasion was vast when FBI agents drilled and pried their way into 1,400 safe-deposit boxes at the U.S. Private Vaults store in Beverly Hills.
They rummaged through personal belongings of a jazz saxophone player, an interior designer, a retired doctor, a flooring contractor, two Century City lawyers and hundreds of others....
Eighteen months later, newly unsealed court documents show that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got their warrant for that raid by misleading the judge who approved it.
They omitted from their warrant request a central part of the FBI’s plan: Permanent confiscation of everything inside every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.
The FBI’s justification for the dragnet forfeiture was its presumption that hundreds of unknown box holders were all storing assets somehow tied to unknown crimes, court records show.
Now, I'm not a lawyer, but that looks like a prima facie, plain language violation of the 4th Amendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
No warrants shall issue except on probable cause of a crime, not a presumption that unknown crimes may have occurred; and property to be seized is to be particularly described, not just generally entailed by a broad warrant.
That police are not supposed to keep from the judge that the purpose of the raid is to collect vast wealth and then keep it didn't make it into the text, probably because the Founders thought you'd need a letter of marque and reprisal for that kind of wholesale privateering and seizure. That was already covered in Article I, Sec. 8:
"To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water[.]"
This should have required issuance of such a letter by Congress, following a declaration of war on the people (citizens of Los Angeles, I suppose) who were to be subject to such piratical predations by armed agents of the state.
Massive Hells Angel Funeral Addressed by... Tucker Carlson
One Would Need A Heart of Stone
The General’s Hot Sauce
My sister sent me these, which is lucky because I probably would not have bought them for myself. However, I'm really impressed. The pepper sauce is 86% ripe peppers, the rest being small amounts of garlic, vinegar, and salt. Even though this is their hottest version, it is not super hot because they are using natural peppers -- from left to right, cayenne, a mixture of cayenne and habanero, and pure habanero.
Perfecting Nature through Reason
New Appalachian Country Music
Heck of a Speech, Ma'am
Now you're talking. Her name is Giorgia Meloni.
I expect her references to 'speculators' will be said to be anti-Semitic, especially since she is openly Catholic and Christian. That was likely enough a hundred years ago when Europeans spoke of speculators, bankers, or even capitalists; these days it's not a code word for a race or a religious group, because there are speculators from all over the world. The objection to them undoing sources of human dignity as a way of making us rootless and helpless before wealth and power is reasonable.
She mentions how she is no longer allowed to be a mother, just 'Parent 1' or 'Parent 2.' I actually just filled out a Federal form today that insisted on using that exact formula for me and my wife.
UPDATE: A report from the opposition on their interpretation of your interpretation of this person many of you, like me, hadn't heard of before yesterday.
In the way of such things, I gather that 'most far-right leader since Mussolini' must have gone out in a distribution list as the approved way to describe her: the line appears here also, as well as 'first fascist PM since Mussolini.' So must have 'anti-LGBTQ' rather than 'pro-traditional family.' I didn't hear in the clip anything about gay rights, either for or against them; I did hear her talk emphatically about being a mother and not just a number.
Of perhaps greater interest, she's a big Tolkien fan. That piece of writing is around twenty-five years old, when she was quite young, so don't judge it too harshly. If she found her way from a youthful embrace of Tolkien and his fantasy to full-fledged Catholicism, she followed a well-worn path that was exactly what he'd hoped people would find in his work.
Halfway There
An essay called 'On the Idea of Equality' makes some important points. Equality is badly understood.
When I say, “One should not confuse equality with sameness,” my interlocutor frequently responds that such a banal truism is unworthy of articulation. I wish this were true, and that this moral principle were self-evident. But it is not.
Just a few days ago, the Atlantic published an essay skeptical of sex segregation in sports which concluded with the assertion that, “…as long as laws and general practice of youth sports remain rooted in the idea that one sex is inherently inferior, young athletes will continue to learn and internalize that harmful lesson.” The unstated premise of this argument is that empirical claims about differences between men and women are also moral claims about the relative value (inferior vs superior) of men and women.
Equality is said in many ways, and as he points out two people may be equally valuable as moral beings without being equally good at basketball. That points up the fact that equality of moral value requires someone who has the right standing to value someone: in the Declaration's formula, the Creator stands in that relationship. God values everyone equally, and bestows dignity and rights in one motion and in the same way for everyone. That kind of equality is true equality.
In the absence of God, the majestic State or the Law has to do this work. But the law does not, empirically, value everyone equally. The Law exists to discriminate between the honest man and the thief, the murderer and the victim. Justice such as laws and states are even capable of are not forms of equality, but forms of balancing: taking life or freedom or property from one, and bestowing it on another. Even when this is done as justly as possible, it is an act of discrimination and differently-valuing. It can of course be done quite unjustly.
The author is not concerned about that.
At one time, many believed that humans were equal because they were equal “in the eyes of God.” Then Darwin and secularism arrived, and today many people no longer believe in a literal human creator. But that does not vitiate the force of the moral claim that humans are equal. In fact, most of us would be appalled by the assertion that, “Since we know that humans are just evolved creatures, they do not deserve equal moral consideration.” Our endorsement of metaphysical equality is not tethered to belief in a benign creator. This is why we can continue to celebrate the eloquent defense of human equality expressed in the US Declaration of Independence while embracing evolution.
It's a bigger problem than he admits. Evolution is what has given rise to all these inequalities, especially the heritable ones he mentions as central. If people who are mathematically and empirically un-alike are to be truly equals, the equality has to be a bestowal. There aren't many metaphysical candidates who stand in the right relationship to us all to be positioned to make such a bestowal, to have both the power and the right.
Shape Note Singing
This is one of Tex’s things, and she can doubtless speak more intelligently about it than I can. All the same, here is a photo from today’s Mountain Heritage Festival at Western Carolina University. I tried to upload a video but it didn’t work.
A Cure for the Wokeness Problem in Corporate America?
TheNational Center for Public Policy Research may have found a brilliant solutionto the problem of woke corporate America- they are taking Starbucks to
court, arguing its discriminatory policies put shareholders at risk- Turning
the very woke programs they enacted favoring certain races against them, and
all of them at once, rather than piecemeal.
Perhaps we have finally figured out the terrain we are fighting on and
how to fight back.
The lawsuit, filed on August 30 by the public interest law firm the American Civil Rights Project, will showcase a novel legal approach to challenging the race-conscious policies of publicly owned corporations. Typically, the plaintiffs in such cases are employees or job applicants who say the policies violated their civil rights. Here, however, the plaintiff is a conservative nonprofit, the National Center for Public Policy Research, that owns shares in Starbucks.
The group is arguing that the coffee giant’s programs endanger "Starbucks and the interests of all its shareholders"—which the company’s officers have a legal duty to protect—by inviting "nearly endless" civil rights litigation that could force Starbucks to pay out damages.
If they are successful, corporations would have to steer clear of racial preference policies of any type- and go back to being race blind. What an improvement that would be!
Outlaw Country
So I've been seeing a lot of commentary online about how contemporary Nashville country is not very much like country music has been historically. I didn't know how seriously to take it because I don't listen to the radio and don't watch TV.
Yesterday, however, rain forced me into a bar in what was styled as a "Barn & Grill," which bar turned out to be marble and which was playing contemporary country on its audio system. Good gracious. That is the worst stuff I have heard in ages.
Guess the Dallas Moore band was right.
Teachers as Moral Exemplars
For about six years, Sarah Juree worked full-time as a teacher in South Bend, Indiana.... [b]ut the single mother of twins said she was unable to support her family on the modest salary of $55,000 per year, especially as the cost of living continues to rise across the U.S.Juree said her rent alone cost nearly half of her income and her employer didn’t offer health insurance.
The Use of Trucks as Hate Crimes
Brandt admitted to consuming alcohol before the incident, and stated he hit Ellingson with his car because he had a political argument with him. Brandt also admitted to deputies that he initially left the crash scene, then returned to call 911, but left again before deputies could arrive.
[Sheriff] Waldschmidt said Navarro told detectives he targeted Thiessen because he was riding a Harley and “in Wisconsin white people drive Harley-Davison motorcycles and that the Harley culture is made up of white racists."... “Navarro said that if President Donald Trump and white people are going to create the world we are living in he has no choice and that people are going to have to die,” Waldschmidt said.
Putin Reminds NATO that Russia is a Nuclear Power
Tolkien as Painter
Aristotelian Men's Fashion
I had never heard of the Cosmos Club. The email invitation I got mentioned the address of the place, and the name, but nothing more about it. Emailed invitations are particularly informal; this one came from a US Marine, for a time after business hours; and it was at a place called a "club." So, naturally I assumed it was a bar of some sort.It happened that I had another engagement in town that required semiformal dress, so I figured I'd take a bit of ribbing. Still, I had no way to change, so I planned to go in my suit. It's charcoal grey, in a traditional cut. I wore it with my black Ariat boots, my black Stetson hat, and a bolo tie.The Cosmos Club turns out not to be a bar at all. It turns out to be...the place where the National Geographic Society was founded in the 19th century. It is contained in a mansion with Second Empire architecture. The interior is as rich as the exterior, and includes numerous treasures of great value, brought back from the corners of the earth and donated by the members.Well, I'm a gambler from way back, so I simply put on my best poker face and walked right in. The doorman bowed as I entered, and I went upstairs to the gathering.After a few minutes, a gentleman came up to me and shook my hand. He introduced himself as LtCol Couvillon, United States Marines, and former military governor of Wasit province."I had to shake the hand of any man," he said, "who could get in here wearing cowboy boots and a bolo tie."





