George H.W. Bush survived being #MeTooed by dying?

While alive, George H.W. Bush made the news for being a child molester: “Woman Says George H.W. Bush Groped Her When She Was 16: ‘I Was a Child'” (TIME, 11/13/2017). Also a Presidential butt-squeezer: “George HW Bush accused of groping woman while president” (Guardian, 11/26/2017).

Now that he is dead and buried, the #MeToo angle seems to have died with him. Current media stories don’t say “Former President and accused groper…”

If Les Moonves were to drop dead tomorrow, would his “transactional sex” in the workplace (nytimes) be forgiven/forgotten?

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Cash value of spinning victim narratives

“Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.” (nytimes):

Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer.

A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and earned high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.”

The narrative earned Mr. Sassau acceptance to St. John’s University in New York. There was one problem: None of it was true.

If we believe the New York Times, America’s victimhood culture has progressed to the point that one can use a victim narrative to get into college just as one needs a victim narrative to earn asylum or refugee status (see “Asylum Fraud in Chinatown: An Industry of Lies,” from 2014 when the NYT apparently thought that caravans of asylum-seekers were not a boon to the U.S.).

I wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Landry should switch to the immigration industry:

To many T.M. Landry families, tuition is not cheap — about $600 a month, or $7,200 annually. Mr. Landry’s annual salary has averaged about $86,000

Our local public school burns through nearly $25,000 per year per student. Even the lowest level workers should enjoy total comp of more than $86,000 (salary, pension, health insurance, etc.).

My favorite part of this story is that the admissions bureaucrats at the fancy schools bought it all.

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The Mother of All Christmas Tree Stands

Despite having parents who are variously Jewish and former Soviet, our kids insisted on a Christmas tree this year. I started off with a basic steel American-made stand that required tightening four bolts. The 7′ tree sagged sideways and seemed at risk of being pushed over.

It was time to try German engineering: Krinner Tree Genie Tree Genie XXL Deluxe Christmas Tree Stand. These stands are around $100, which means that Home Depot won’t carry them in the store (Americans refuse to pay up for decent quality!), but I think they’re worth at least double what they cost.

The construction quality of this device is truly awesome. It is designed for trees up to 12′ high and weighs 18 lbs. before 2.5 gallons of water goes in, so the tree is truly rock-solid. No matter what the kids get up to they will not be able to knock a tree down onto Mindy the Crippler.

Everyone who appreciates engineering and Christmas should have one of these!

(Separately, when people ask if the kids speak Russian I reply that “Their Russian is so good that I’m having them call up Vladimir Putin to find out who the next Supreme Court justice will be.)

Update from second Christmas: The device refused to unlock and release the tree. Tips received via email and phone from Krinner were not helpful. After a multi-day struggle, tree had to be cut down with a saw and the stand discarded. Under the three-year warranty, Krinner is sending a new one at an $18 shipping cost.

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White mayor of Boston wants to see more African Americans selling marijuana

I was too lazy to plug the phone into the Honda Odyssey and listen to an Audible lecture (on ancient Mesopotamia, by a professor who formerly played bass for the band that became the Bangles) on a recent short drive. The classical radio station was running a pitch for dollars so I switched to NPR talk radio. It was a call-in show with the white mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh.

The topic was recreational marijuana shops (“cannabis” for enthusiasts), which about 70 percent of folks in Massachusetts voted to legalize, but which neighborhoods within Boston now seek to exclude. (our town held a special meeting to exclude such enterprises, after previously voting for legalization statewide).

What the white mayor was most passionate about was that “people of color” be adequately represented among the owners and employees of the forthcoming marijuana retailers.

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Flying private aircraft in the Middle East

From Professional Pilot magazine, “Middle East: A trip to this region can be a straight-forward, easy and rewarding experience for the well-prepared operator.”

With todays longer range aircraft, many smaller airports – and those in less secure areas – are used much less frequently for tech stops. LUX (Luxor, Egypt), CAI (Cairo, Egypt), BEY (Beirut, Lebanon) and ADE (Aden, Yemen) are now often bypassed.

The UAE has become a predominant tech stop venue for corporate operators transiting this region. MCT (Muscat, Oman), DOH (Doha, Qatar) and BAH (Bahrain) also remain popular tech stops. ISPs say Saudi Arabia also works well for efficient fuel uplifts within the region.

Iran turns out to be the sweet spot!

Saudi permits can be arranged quickly, visas and sponsor letters are not required for tech stops, and efficient airway routings are available. For GA tech stop purposes, however, there are only 3 Saudi locations that are normally used: JED (Jeddah), RUH (Riyadh) and DMM (Dammam). Iran, on the other hand, has over 300 airports available to GA, and presents a plethora of good tech stop and crew rest opportunities with generally efficient ground services, say ISPs.

Don’t show up in a Gulfstream G280, built by Israel Aircraft Industries:

If you have Israeli citizens onboard, your aircraft was built in Israel or if your GA operation is flying out of Israel, you’re generally not welcome in this region – other than ops to either Jordan or Egypt.

Watch out for missiles…

Syria has basically become a no-fly zone, particularly for N-registered operators, as a result of ongoing military activity.

Operators are advised to stay above FL260 when overflying the Sinai region of Egypt, while the eastern side of the Black Sea has become problematic as many airways push you into eastern Ukraine, which is a no-fly zone.

Fuller suggests caution when planning routings through the Middle East region. “It seems like 50% of the countries in this region have had reports of missiles going through their airspace over recent years,” he says. “Route of flight and overflight permits can be significantly impacted by no-fly zones, restricted airspace and SOPs of the particular flight department.”

But we’re getting a return on our multi-trillion-dollar investment in the Iraq War:

Previously, special permission had been needed to overfly Iraq but this situation has recently changed. “Iraq airspace opened up earlier this year and N-registered aircraft may now overfly the country with few restrictions,” says Williams. “Above FL260, all airways are available for GA overflight although not all operators are comfortable with doing this.”


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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Most guys are guilty (but there is at least one exception!)

“On Being Accused” is Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response to “Two More Women Accuse Neil deGrasse Tyson of Sexual Misconduct” (Patheos). The opening sentence:

For a variety of reasons, most justified, some unjustified, men accused of sexual impropriety in today’s “me-too” climate are presumed to be guilty by the court of public opinion.

If it is mostly justified to presume a man guilty, isn’t this accused guy saying that most men are in fact guilty?

Here’s a passage that seems not to have been written with the advice of an expert legal defense team:

Practically everyone she knows on set gets a daily welcome-hug from her. I expressly rejected each hug offered frequently during the Production. But in its place I offered a handshake, and on a few occasions, clumsily declared, “If I hug you I might just want more.” My intent was to express restrained but genuine affection.

Dr. Tyson relates an encounter with Elizabeth Warren:

I never touched her until I shook her hand upon departure. On that occasion, I had offered a special handshake, one I learned from a Native elder

Do not major in physics:

I entered astrophysics graduate school directly out of college in 1980. It’s a grueling adventure-marathon, and many people do not finish the PhD. In fact, it was not uncommon for half the admitted students to leave after two or three years, finding some other kind of work in their lives.

Regarding a survivor:

For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life, long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, she was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets.

Shouldn’t it be “tuning forks of color”?

Related:

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George H.W. Bush and the Thousand Points of Light

What can we remember George H.W. Bush for? Is it fair to say that Operation Desert Storm was our last truly successful war?

How about GHWB’s “Thousand Points of Light” speech in 1988? He celebrated volunteerism, but between 1988 and 2018 the government has grown to consume a larger percentage of GDP and provide a larger array of services to anyone who might previously have been the target of a volunteer effort. Is it fair to say that the U.S. has turned its back on this idea? We chose a bigger government rather than relying on citizen effort? Or has the time people put into voluntary “civil society” organizations just moved online? (see “N.J. woman in alleged GoFundMe scam was duped by boyfriend, homeless man, lawyer says ‘I’m confident that in the end the evidence will reveal that Kate had only the best intentions,’ said the woman’s attorney.” (NBC))

GHWB was the last pre-consumer-Internet president. Could that be one reason why there aren’t a lot of folks who hate him? Newspapers didn’t have to fight for readers with outrage-generating headlines. There was no Facebook where one could display one’s virtue by expressing outrage at a politician’s actions or statements.

Readers: What do you remember as salient about GHWB and his Presidency?

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South Sudanese traditional culture meets Facebook

A bunch of my neighbors here in virtueland (Lincoln, Massachusetts) pull away from the virtue pack by devoting themselves to South Sudanese immigrants to the U.S. These folks don’t make the news too often, presumably due to our money-uber-alles culture (South Sudan’s per capita income, adjusted for purchasing power, is 220th out of 228 countries; each woman has an average of 5.3 children, 27 percent of the adult population is literate, and “Educational attainment is extremely poor” says the CIA).

from the Town Hall parking lot

The news blackout is over, though, thanks to Silicon Valley tech… “Child bride auctioned on Facebook in ‘barbaric use of technology'” (CNN):

An auction was held on the social media platform for a 16-year-old girl in South Sudan which sought payment for her hand in marriage.
Facebook said the post was taken down as soon as the company learned of it, but that wasn’t until after the girl was married.

According to children’s rights organization Plan International, the girl was bid on by five men, some of whom were reportedly high-ranking South Sudanese government officials

Activists are concerned that this auction — for which the father reportedly received 500 cows, three cars and $10,000 in exchange for his daughter — could inspire other families to use social media sites to receive larger payments.

Otim from Plan International told CNN that offering payments is part of the country’s culture, but that in this case it “was taken to another level because of technology.”

Natana said that this is the highest bride price that has been reported in the region. She added that NAWL is against the process of bidding because “it makes you more of a commodity instead of a human being.

Readers: What do you think? If we are not supposed to judge another culture as inferior to ours, why is it okay to criticize folks in South Sudan for using Facebook to implement an electronic version of their traditional culture?

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McMartin Preschool Abuse and O.J. Simpson trials

The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, wraps up with two California trials that dragged on forever and cost taxpayers more than $60 million in today’s mini-dollars ($15 million on the McMartin Preschool prosecution, which is about $35 million today).

Linder concurs with previous scholars that the original driver for the McMartin case was a single mother named Judy Johnson (see “Window into American criminal justice system from the daycare sexual abuse trials of the 1980s”) and then things spun out of control when the local police sent a letter to hundreds of parents asking them to (a) keep the letter confidential, and (b) tell the police if their own children had also been abused. Four hundred children were interviewed by the Children’s Institute International (still thriving on tax dollars?) and, via leading questions, the psychologists got the answers that they wanted. From the preliminary hearing:

Children testified that sexual assaults took place on farms, in circus houses, in the homes of strangers, in car washes, in storerooms, and in a secret room at McMartin accessible only by tunnel. One boy told of watching animal sacrifices performed by McMartin teachers wearing robes and masks. In response to a defense question, the boy added that the kids at the ceremony were forced to drink the blood of the sacrificed animals.

Kee MacFarlane, a therapist from CII, was on the witness stand for five weeks!

The prosecution resorted to using a “nine-time felon and confessed perjurer,” George Freeman, to testify that Ray Buckey had made a jailhouse confession.

Defendant Ray Buckey “denied, for example, ever killing a horse with a baseball bat, as one child had testified. He noted that he was not even teaching at the school during many of the times in which he was accused of abusing children. What happened?

On November 2, 1989, after nearly 30 months of testimony, the case went to the jury. The jury spent more than two months deliberating. In the end, the jury acquitted on most of the 65 charges, including all of the charges against Peggy Buckey. On 13 of the charges against Ray Buckey, the jury announced that it was hopelessly deadlocked.

A 2.5-year trial! California taxpayers paid for a second three-month trial, which also resulted in a hung jury. Charges were dropped and Ray Buckey was in the clear nearly 10 years after the investigation began.

How did this go so far off the rails? The professor:

The McMartin case was hounded by journalists publishing stories slanted heavily toward the prosecution. The journalists churned out sensational headlines day after day and almost never seriously questioned allegations. Their actions helped turn the McMartin trial into the expensive fiasco that it became.

I watched the O.J. verdict with a bunch of white colleagues (stunned and amazed) and one black guy (laughed), but hadn’t followed the trial carefully. The professor attributes the prosecution’s loss largely to choice of courthouse:

The first big decision the prosecution made might have been the one that doomed their case. Prosecutors chose to file the Simpson case in downtown Los Angeles, rather than—as was normal procedure—the district where the crime occurred, in this case Santa Monica. This meant that the Simpson jury would be drawn from a largely nonwhite jury pool. A jury in Santa Monica would have been mostly white.

The result is a jury “of nine African Americans, two Hispanics, and one white.” (Tellingly regarding modern academia, this mostly-black jury is described as “more diverse” than downtown LA overall.)

A brilliant move by the defense was to redecorate O.J.’s house before the jury came over for a site visit. The guy was an avid golfer, lived in a white neighborhood, and had lots of photos of himself with white friends. These all came down and were replaced by pictures of extended family members (who happened to be black). A Bible was strategically placed in the living room.

The trial lasted from January through October 1995 and yet the jury deliberated for less than 3 hours. All of the DNA analysis was for naught since the jury didn’t trust the police not to plant evidence.

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Illustration of the value of a good criminal defense lawyer

“Cops worked to put serial sex abuser in prison. Prosecutors worked to cut him a break” (Miami Herald) seems intended to provoke outrage among readers (the three-article series is titled “Perversion of Justice”). I wouldn’t expect criminal defense lawyers to complain, however, as the article shows the value of hiring the right attorney.

It was Epstein’s contacts with powerful and famous people that first propelled him into the public spotlight. In 2002, he flew former President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Chris Tucker and others to South Africa on his private jet as part of a fact-finding AIDS mission in support of the Clinton Foundation.

But Epstein, a Clinton donor who contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and causes, realized that his Democratic connections weren’t going to help him in 2006, when the federal prosecutor was Acosta, a conservative Republican appointed during the George W. Bush administration.

The story is too involved to summarize, but the alleged perpetrator hires the right lawyers for the job and the Feds begin to see the allegations (paying teenagers to have sex) in a softer light:

Assistant U.S. Attorney A. Marie Villafaña was the lead prosecutor on the Jeffrey Epstein case and seemed at times to want to minimize the severity of the potential charges. In one email to a lawyer for Epstein, she wrote: ‘I’ve been spending some quality time with Title 18 [the U.S. criminal code] looking for misdemeanors.’

“How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime” (same series) features a photo of the defendant’s Gulfstream, N212JE, a 2007 G550 registered to a Virgin Islands LLC. (Score a victory for Gulfstream’s PR agency; the word “Gulfstream” does not appear in the article. The G550 is instead characterized only as a “private plane” despite its centrality to the case, in which flight logs were pulled and on which sex that violates U.S. law may have been purchased.

Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.

The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.

Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.

So the guy with the dream legal team serves roughly the same amount of prison time as would someone in Massachusetts convicted of questioning a person with XY chromosomes who was entering the locker room reserved for “women” and “girls” (punishable by up to a year in jail).

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