The index of prior chapters is here.

Investigating a large-scale fraudulent enterprise can be tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. Pretty soon you run out of low-hanging free fruit (as I've covered in prior chapters) and you have to start spending real time and money — paying to pull public documents not available online, contacting live witnesses and meeting with them, re-checking your work for missed opportunities, waiting for developments in cases, etc. We're in that stage now. But rest assured the series will continue.

For now, an update, and a new variation on the theme.

Continue Reading »

Now, before you go accusing me of advocating sexual assault, I want you to know that I'm just trying to make a point.

On Monday morning, Williams appeared on Fox News and referred to Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner's June golf outing with Obama as one of the "biggest political mistakes ever" by the Ohio politician.

"It's like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu," the country singer said of the bipartisan golf game. The hosts of the conservative network's "Fox & Friends" morning program seemed surprised by the comment, with co-anchor Gretchen Carlson asking Williams to clarify what he meant by the inflammatory statement, saying, "You used the name of one of the most-hated people in all the world to describe, I think, the president."

Williams responded, "That's true … but I'm telling you like it is."

Today, after 24 hours of sober reflection, Williams clarified that he compared a friendly golf outing to the Holocaust  … to make a point.

Some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood. My analogy was extreme – but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me – how ludicrous that pairing was.  They’re polar opposites and it made no sense.  They don’t see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the President.

Every time the media brings up the tea party it’s painted as racist and extremists – but there’s never a backlash – no  outrage to those comparisons…  Working class people are hurting – and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job – it makes a whole lot of us angry.  Something has to change. The policies have to change.

Right about now you're probably asking yourself, what was Hank's point?

Was it that because the media suggest the Tea Party movement has extremists in its ranks, Tea Party friends like Hank might as well remove all doubt by comparing a President whose views would pass for moderate in France to the worst murderer in history?

No.  That can't be it.

Maybe it was that American politics is just for show, a game played to keep the rubes entertained while behind the scenes evil men plot genocide at an exclusive golf course, just like the Wannsee Conference.

No. It must be something else.

It could be that Hank was trying to tell us that being a rich celebrity, surrounded by fawning yes-men 24 hours a day,  means never having to take responsibility for saying whatever damned fool thing pops out of your corkhole, just like Mel Gibson.

Maybe best not bring up Mel Gibson.

Could it be that what Hank was saying is that American celebrity culture is just a modern form of idol worship, in which shallow airheads who haven't got a real thought in their empty heads are held up as false gods with feet of clay?  That celebrities like Hank Williams, Jr. have less business spouting their idiot opinions on politics than an average auto mechanic?

It couldn't be that.

But you can be sure that Hank had a point, and that the point will be made clear, just as long as we continue to buy Hank's cds and download Hank's songs.

Last month I wrote about how the University of Wisconsin-Stout ("UWS") tore down Professor James Miller's Firefly poster upon the silly pretext that it represented a threat, threatened him with arrest, then tore down another poster decrying fascism and threatened him over that poster as well. I also wrote about how UWS, once called out, simply doubled down, offering academic double-speak about "a campus climate in which everyone can feel welcome, safe and secure."

Have UWS or its officials gotten smarter? No. No, they have not.

Continue Reading »

Which of these quotations more nearly defines your world-view?

"You don't have to live like a refugee."

— Tom Petty

or

"Do not call up that which you cannot put down."

— Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Please provide your opinion and discuss below.  All responses will be kept in confidence.  You are free to use a pseudonym.

Your response may well advance the cause of science.

Brussels: In swift reaction to an Italian court's acquittal of Amanda Knox and Raffael Sollecito, convicted in a widely publicized 2009 case for the rape and murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher, the European Commission, sitting in emergency session, announced Directive 2011-4934, a sweeping series of measures intended to protect students in the European Union from violence.

The law, to be known as "Meredith's Directive", consists of 2,317 pages and so could not be fully studied as of this writing.  What is known is that the measure consists of generally non-controversial regulations which polling suggests to be popular among a European public surprised by the acquittal of Knox and Sollecito.  Surveys showed highest favor in the United Kingdom and Italy, whose citizens followed the Kercher case most closely.

"If this Directive will save one British child from meeting the fate of Meredith Kercher, it has fulfilled its purpose," said British Prime Minister David Cameron in a statement issued from Number 10 Downing Street.  "By criminalizing possession of knives, scissors, and needles above two inches in length, we show that Britain and Europe stand side by side in our determination to protect children from the menace of stabbing weapons."

European residents have sixty days to turn stabbing implements in to authorities under Meredith's Directive

Italian and British newspapers editorialized in favor of Meredith's Directive: L'Osservatore Romano wrote in an unsigned editorial, "Only an imbecile could disfavor an edict so excellent, so manly, so redolent of the smell of spicy sea urchins, as Meredith's Directive! It boggles the mind that some small few, no doubt Gypsies one and all, could weep and moan for the fate of a Criminal American Gangster Siren such as Knox, who massacred her loving friend. Henceforth all such foreign temptresses shall be interned, for their own protection, in guest hostels reserved for students of the arts of deception and lies!"

Artist's conception of a Foreign Guest Hostel to house non-European exchange students, and Roma, under Meredith's Directive

The Daily Mail, discussing a tax impost redistributing 95% of fees earned by privately retained defense attorneys to the new European Centre for Prevention of Stabbing, was more concise:

The Daily Mail, October 4, 2011

Passage of Meredith's Directive was not assured.  Sources close to the Commission informed us of some resistance by the French, who were placated by assurance that the provision for mandatory "chemical castration" of accused rape suspects could be waived by judicial or Commission finding that the treatment would be "against principles of European harmony" in special cases.

Related complaints by Germany that the Directive's Europe-wide prohibition on speech tending to suggest that accused murderers, or rapists, were innocent would burden that nation's thriving ScheisserRapeUndNekrophiliaVideo industry were mitigated by an amendment specifically exempting makers and consumers of ScheisserRapeUndNekrophiliaVideos, and the provision of 650 million Euros for construction of the Karl Blumenfeld Institute for the Study of ScheisserRapeUndNekrophilaVideos, to be headquartered in Stuttgart.

Prior to press time we attempted to contact various European libertarian think tanks and non-governmental organizations for comment on Meredith's Directive, but none could be found.

Fear not, America: in a world where so many wish you ill, the Transportation Security Administration is still vigilant against your greatest foe: Americans who have survived cancer.

Via Letters to my Country and Amy Alkon (who, you might recall, had her own recent run-in with the TSA), I encountered this rage-inducing story by Lori Dorn:

Yesterday I went through the imaging scanner at JFK Terminal 4 for my Virgin America flight to San Francisco. Evidently they found something, because after the scan, I was asked to step aside to have my breast area examined. I explained to the agent that I was a breast cancer patient and had a bilateral mastectomy in April and had tissue expanders put in to make way for reconstruction at a later date.

I told her that I was not comfortable with having my breasts touched and that I had a card in my wallet that explains the type of expanders, serial numbers and my doctor’s information (pictured) and asked to retrieve it. This request was denied. Instead, she called over a female supervisor who told me the exam had to take place. I was again told that I could not retrieve the card and needed to submit to a physical exam in order to be cleared. She then said, “And if we don’t clear you, you don’t fly” loud enough for other passengers to hear. And they did. And they stared at the bald woman being yelled at by a TSA Supervisor.

I'm sure the TSA will explain why it was necessary to grope a cancer patient in public, just as soon as their official blogger finishes bragging about how the TSA's explosive detection technology helps them interdict smuggled fish.

This is, by far, not the first time we've heard that the TSA acts in an inhuman fashion to people with illnesses and disabilities. We've seen wanton treatment of people with urostomy and colostomy bags, the sick torment of the mentally disabled, and the demands that cancer survivors remove prosthetic breasts. Throughout, for the most part, the media remains the TSA's compliant fluffers. So, though what happened to Lori Dorn is sick and infuriating, it is not new.

One of the questions I've been asking here is why do we let this happen? But there's another apt question: these TSA agents are human beings, of a sort, so why do they act this way? Is there something about recruiting on pizza boxes that attracts a statistically unlikely cluster of sociopaths?

I think the answer is an old one and a simple one, congruent with one of the main themes seen on this blog: power corrupts. If you confer upon a man or woman the power to inflict tyrannies and indignities upon his or her fellow citizens, he or she will slowly grow to hate those fellow citizens, feel justified in mistreating them, and increasingly inflict the indignities with aggression and contempt.

Stanford University has offered two very apt studies, one old and one new. First, there's Philip Zimbardo's chilling and classic prison experiment, which illustrated how ordinary college students — people who on a more typical day would be thinking about weed and sex and avoiding work, people who were probably more countercultural than authoritarian — were transformed by being given even temporary power over others as mock prison guards. And now, more recently, a joint study by Stanford, USC, and Northwestern shows how petty power corrupts:

In a new study, researchers at USC, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Kellogg School of Management have found that individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, "The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status," the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be a toxic combination.

The research, forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is "based on the notions that (a) low status is threatening and aversive, and (b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings."

(Thanks to Greg Lukianoff for the pointer to that study.)

This study could have been written explicitly about the TSA. TSA agents are poorly paid, work in nasty conditions, and have little status. Yet they have, within their petty fiefdoms, tremendous power to humiliate and demean. And God, do they ever use it.

The fact that this is a recognized psychological phenomenon explains, but does not excuse, any more than it excuses police abuse and bureaucratic indifference. Nor does it excuse the leaders of the TSA and the Department of Homeland security, who have decreed a feckless facade of security theater that is calculated to lead to this result, all in the name of promoting unquestioning compliance.

What are you going to do? Are you going to retell these stories on social media and forums and blogs? Are you going to make it clear, when asked, that you don't accept the security state's excuses at face value? Are you going to write your representatives?

Are you going to stand up? Or is it really no big deal that a petty authority groped and humiliated a cancer survivor in public, purportedly for your safety?

Potentially, very.

Just ask Albin H. Gess of the Costa Mesa branch of the firm Snell & Wilmer. He's making stupid and meritless censorious threats on behalf of Meghan McCain.

Continue Reading »

I LIED!

These soldiers are warriors for free speech and the American way.

Their response to a hateful bigot was to create a viral image that makes them world-famous* and gets them dates with hot chicks (or men if that's how they roll).  Politicians, on the other hand, responded by enacting laws that allow cops to arrest legitimate funeral mourners on a pretext.

Via Chris Berez

*The last time I checked Technorati (as if anyone uses it since they borked the search functions) Popehat was the 347th most cited blog in the world.