Next, the New Orleans police department – with actual video of a sex crime in their possession- stupidly decided they couldn’t investigate unless the victim stepped forward.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s imagine that this was a girl who drank herself stupid. Let’s imagine that she was touched, her breasts were fondled, and that a man rubbed his genitals on her while she was unconscious.  Can anyone imagine the NOPD – or any police department, anywhere – dragging their heels on investigating unless she came forward?

Dale Standifer, of the Metropolitan Center for Women and Children, summed it up:

“The man was obviously passed out, intoxicated and unable to defend himself, and he was assaulted,” Standifier said. “He was sexually assaulted, and humiliated and tormented while people cheered, and he shouldn’t have to stand up for himself and say, ‘I want to press charges.’ The city should be pressing charges and trying to move forward. If you had a murder victim, you can’t expect the victim himself, the corpse, to testify.”

Just as women’s domestic abuse against men is routinely blown off, it certainly appears that the police are willing to overlook a sexual crime against a man. Sure, everyone involved was an idiot. And maybe their reasoning is that idiocy should not be prosecuted. But if the victim were a woman, they wouldn’t hesitate, and the law needs to be enforced equally. As The Hayride put it (and click through to read the applicable criminal code),

This isn’t Gumps Gone Wild. It’s sexual battery. You can get 10 years for that, and it’s not acceptable for the cops not to ID this perp and bring his ass in for trial.

Added: Dr. Helen writes:

Given the way that our society laughs and mocks men who are abused in this way, I can understand the guy not coming forward, but he must. It is only when individual men start to say “No, this is not justice for all” and endure the ridicule that men everywhere will no longer have to endure their rights and bodies being violated in this absurd manner without consequence.

More on this at my post at Hot Air’s Green Room.

UPDATE: It turns out this is not a college prank in any sense of the word. Brian Downing, the man Deadspin identified as the teabagger is in his 30s, married, with a child.  And at the moment he is on his way – with his attorney – to New Orleans to have a little chat with the NOPD. I’m sorry for his family, but I’m glad that it’s looking like there will be some consequences for his behavior.  And what little amusement there is in this whole train wreck can be found in the fact that the tips identifying Downing apparently originated on an Auburn message board.

Apart from all that – here’s my latest at Hot Air’s Green Room. If it’s not the government trying to crack down on internet freedom with SOPA/PIPA, it’s the media.  I can understand where they’re so upset.

For decades, the legacy media had full control of the conversation. If you didn’t like the political bent of your newspaper, your only real options were to unsubscribe or to write a letter to the editor which may or may not have been published and may or may not have been edited without your consent.  And fact-checking was hard. Libraries contained outdated information, unless you wanted to rely on the very newspapers you were trying to debunk.  It was a very closed system.

For example, since 1895, the media has been hyping climate change.  They switch between warming and cooling approximately every 20-30 years. But in the 1970s, in the throes of a cooling “we’re all gonna die” freakout, who had access to the New York Times archives from 85 years before and could put the pieces together?  After those archives were digitized fifteen or twenty years later, it was very easy to see the pattern from the turn of the century, the 30s, the 50s, the 70s, and then from about 1985 through today.  And now – right on schedule – we’re beginning to embark on a cooling scare again.  There were a few articles about the cooling trend in 2007, and it’s been increasing every year since.  And now with “Climategate” where we can read the hacked emails of climate scientists and see how they manipulate and try to control information and silence skeptics behind the scenes, it’s obvious that the problem is not just media hyping a story, but the whole theory of anthropogenic global warming.

In the internet age, people started having more access to varied sources of information and gained the ability to inexpensively self-publish, and people started to see that maybe the local paper and Dan Rather weren’t the be-all and end-all information sources for current events.

Now add to the increasing lack of information control, the fact that the media is no longer as profitable as it was, especially newspapers.  Paper and ink are expensive, but pixels are cheap.  And information gathering is expensive. Newspapers apparently have no idea how to adjust to this new reality, and here come bloggers who read their work product, summarize it, complain about their political bias and critique it in other ways, and publish that for next to nothing.

While HotAir.com can’t compete with the New York Times or the LA Times (yet), it has about twice the reach of my local newspaper website, even including the Times Picayune’s paper circulation of about 150,000 a week.

There are three main bloggers there and probably about 15 others, including me.  Most of us have no journalism training at all. And Hot Air is not the biggest blog on the internet. Imagine how this situation must grate on the nerves of the Jschool grads at papers like the Times-Picayune.  Less credentialed writers with more influence and reach, and from the point of view of the press, making a living off of “stealing” their product.

In fact, bloggers generally don’t steal reporters’ work product – that would be wholesale swiping of articles, which reputable bloggers never do – but we do respond to it. Even today, it’s like pulling teeth to get a newspaper to acknowledge factual error.  And as for getting them to correct their political bias and actually practice the non-partisan journalism they preach… not gonna happen.  Consequently more and more people are skipping the middle man and going straight to blogs as an information source.  Blogs are more accountable – reputable bloggers make corrections promptly and in the same article were the inaccuracy is located – and we are straightforward about our bias so the reader knows exactly what he’s going to get. Bloggers are meeting a demand that newspapers are not even acknowledging, much less meeting.

This is the new reality.  Instead of altering their product – either actually practicing nonpartisan journalism or else just coming right out and doing what newspapers in the turn of the century did, publicly picking a side – the press is fighting tooth and nail to shut down blogging or at least make bloggers pay.

The problem is a little thing called Fair Use.  United States intellectual property law provides for the limited use of copyrighted material for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship.  Instead of accepting that and modifying their product so that the demand for bloggers is reduced, or else improving their product so that bloggers become customers – by creating a product line that bloggers would gladly pay for, like unpublished information or early access – the newspapers keep trying to sue their way out of their conundrum.  It’s not going to work.  So with all that in mind – if you are still awake – here’s my Green Room post with more on the media’s latest effort to return to their glory days.

It’s not just the loss of a House district. Louisiana vs. Bryson (that’s John Bryson, Obama’s controversial Secretary of Commerce) points out that with the loss of the House district comes a reduction in electoral college votes.  As Lyle Denniston writes at Scotusblog:

The result of these disparities, Louisiana said, is that the votes of its citizens are worth less “in terms of electoral power” than in a state like California, with a large population of undocumented aliens.  Here is how that comes about, according to Louisiana’s lawsuit: a state with a small population of illegal aliens winds up with a greater proportion of eligible voters per district, because fewer of its residents are deducted from the voting population.  The state illustrated the point with these figures: 748,160 voting-age individuals in Louisiana will elect a Representative in each district in the state, while only 656,452 Californians are needed to elect a member of the House in each district in that state.  That is a nearly 14 percent decrease in Louisiana’s electoral power, the state said.

While the trend has been to move from labels like “illegal alien” to “illegal immigrant” and “undocumented immigrant” or even “migrant” this lawsuit puts the issue into sharp relief by identifying them as “Non-Immigrant Foreign Nationals.”  The case will decide whether we have the right to exclude non-citizens from our political calculations.  If we’re going to count them for those purposes, granting non-citizens voting rights is just a small step from there.

Crossposted.

What is even more incredible that no one speaks up, points the finger, and acknowledges that what’s cost us all those jobs is computers. Millions, billions of types of work, especially clerical, gone forever thanks to computers. The billionaires introduce the computer and no one provides the method by which all those people displaced by it are to now get work. Why is this such a big problem now? Because it’s been going on for 30 years and no one has taken responsibility for solving it. I could solve it, but I don’t have the power. Where are those in power (which includes high-flying journalists) on this? By the way, the billionaires, who should be run out of the country, have been sitting back, laughing, and eating cake.

woowoo27

Toronto

August 27th, 2011

6:03 pm

Yes, okay, woo is a Canadian and what do you expect, eh? But it’s an astonishing comment nonetheless.  Does woo think Kristof’s article just magically sprang into existence on his/her/its screen?  Has woo stopped to consider the process it took – the factories where people worked to create the computer, the offices where people worked to created the software that runs it, the miles of cables that were run and the labor of the thousands of people that it took to bring that drivel to his/her/its screen and enable him/her/it to respond with even more drivel?

No.  Because woo is a moron. And while I am thankful that woo at least can’t vote here, I can’t rest easy because at least some of woo’s 43 supporters surely can.  That’s how we got into this handbasket.

In May 1993, the bodies of the boys, Christopher Byers, Steve Branch and James Michael Moore, were found in a drainage ditch in a wooded area of West Memphis, Ark., called Robin Hood Hills. The bodies appeared to have been mutilated, their hands tied to their feet.

The grotesque nature of the murders led to a theory about satanic cult activity. Investigators focused their attention on Mr. Echols, at the time a troubled yet gifted teenager who practiced Wicca, a rarity in the town of West Memphis. Efforts to learn more about him, spearheaded by a single mother cooperating with the police, led to Mr. Misskelley, a passing acquaintance of Mr. Echols, who is borderline mentally retarded.

After a nearly 12-hour interrogation by the police, Mr. Misskelley confessed to the murders and implicated Mr. Echols and Mr. Baldwin, though his confession diverged in significant details with the facts known by the police.

I first heard of the case in 2007 thanks to Thomas, the Badass Bard – he was curious to hear a Christian perspective on it, since the case hinged on “satanic cult activity” because one of the defendants practiced Wicca.  Because of an entirely unrelated child murder case that I was peripherally involved in, I didn’t feel able to study this case or write about it.  At the time it was just too upsetting to see crime scene video or even read about child murders.  But over time I’ve read bits and pieces and I can completely understand why, as Thomas put it, “In the Pagan community the case has been a symbol of oppression, one of the most egregious examples of a Pagan being persecuted for their life choices.”

Now from my fundamentalist perspective, of course Wicca is satanic in the sense that it’s not worshipping God – my God, the only true God, etc.  Naturally I believe I’m right and that people who disagree with me are, sadly, incorrect and being led astray. (Who’s leading them? Could it be… Satan?) Oh, sure, Christians rarely say this outright. It’s rude. But when you parse it out, it’s what we believe. 1 However – and this is a mighty big however – it’s rank ignorance to compare Wiccan and modern day pagan practices with “devil worship” as most people think of it.

Ignorance was no barrier for an Arkansas jury led by a prosecutor determined to railroad three teenage defendants, so in spite of an inaccurate confession, lying witnesses and precious little evidence, one boy was sentenced to death and two received life sentences.  It’s details like this that so outraged the Pagan community, and should have outraged everyone else:

[Prosecution witness] Vicki Hutcheson made a statement to police that two weeks after the murders she had gone with Jessie and Damien to an Esbat (a ritual observance of the full moon within Wicca and other Wiccan-influenced forms of Neopaganism) in Turrell, AR. She claimed that Damien had driven his red Ford Fiesta to the empty field where the Esbat supposedly occurred. Although Damien Echols did not have a driver’s license and did not own or have access to a Ford Fiesta, and Vicki was not able to identify anyone else attending the Esbat or even find its location, Vicki Hutcheson was still used during the trial as a corroborative witness to Damien and Jessie’s Satanic involvements. After the trial Vicki admitted that she had made up the story.

The prosecution must have known before trial that Damien did not have a drivers license or own such a car.  There is no excuse for how Vicki Hutcheson was permitted to testify. There is no excuse for the fact that she has never been charged with perjury.  And this is one example of how Echol’s religion was used to influence the jury. How much of this railroading was allowed to occur (in a conservative Baptist community) because of the media hype about Damien Echols’ – a troubled, nonconformist teenager with a dicey history – practice of Wicca?

The documentary, Paradise Lost: Child Murders at Robin Hood is worth watching if you want the full story – it’s available via Netflix. You can also read about the case here.  The “Reader’s Digest” version is that DNA evidence eventually exonerated the Memphis Three, and in fact pointed to an entirely different suspect who was never charged – and now probably never will be.  The massive injustice done to the Memphis Three is now being compounded by the fact that they had to plead guilty to get out of jail.  At least they’ll be free, but nothing can ever make this right.

A good discussion on this is taking place at Hot Air.

1  A sampling of verses:

Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
(1 Corinthians 8:4-6 ESV)

Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. Consider the people of Israel: are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar? What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.
(1 Corinthians 10:14-21 ESV)

It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the god**** word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.

Put aside the fact that the warmists never wanted to “come to an agreement.” What they wanted was for the rest of us to get in line and agree to hamstring the economy and empower government to control minute details of our lives (like lightbulbs and toilets and our freedom to travel) based on science so shaky that scientists routinely refuse to release data, and have been caught falsifying and hiding evidence.

And now by ManBearPig’s own account, we have a significant victory.  Apocalyptic prediction after prediction has failed to come to pass, and people can’t help but notice they’ve been lied to.  His Oscar-winning propaganda film was found by a court to have errors so significant it cannot be shown to UK schoolchildren without disclaimers.  After years of warmists comparing “climate deniers” to Nazis and terrorists, it’s Gore’s views which are “no longer acceptable” to the majority of us.

The photo of Bush and the  ”Mission Accomplished” banner was used deceptively by the left in that the mission that was accomplished in that case was the limited, 10 month mission of the aircraft carrier. The banner was not intended to signal “mission accomplished” over the overall Iraq war.  Similarly, Gore’s spittle-flecked diatribe indicates a battle won, not the war. We’re now near the end of the current global warming scare, but this cycle has been played out five times since the New York Times first hyped climate change in 1895.  True victory will be transparency on the part of scientists and accurate and fair reporting on climate, and we are nowhere near that yet.  Still, Gore’s public frustration is a very satisfying marker.

No longer acceptable.

“Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer. Pull your pants up and buy a belt ‘cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ‘cause you look like you’re crazy. You have damaged your own race.”

And on the parents of those young people:

“The Immaculate Conception of our Lord Jesus Christ took place a long time ago, and it didn’t happen here in Philadelphia. So every one of these kids has two parents who were around and participating at the time. They need to be around now.”

Obviously he’s black.  No white politician would ever dare say such things. But this kind of direct, no-holds-barred language is so rare that it’s a bit shocking when we do see it.

Dr. Richard Land heads the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “I’m told by the Hispanic community that perhaps 40 percent of all the Southern Baptist Hispanics in America are undocumented — which shouldn’t surprise us,” he says. “I mean, they come here to work, and we aggressively evangelize and they find Jesus as their Savior.”

It’s rare indeed to find an “undocumented” illegal alien. To the contrary, illegal aliens tend to be as documented as any American – it’s just that their documents are forged.  Even those aliens not actively engaging in identity fraud – by that I mean taking the identity of an American citizen – they routinely break laws that Americans would routinely be fined or jailed for breaking.

Dr. Richard Land brushes criminal behavior off as “undocumented,” and essentially says Praise God! they’re being evangelized!

Well, I join him in celebrating when anyone – in any location – of any nationality – is saved.  But part of that amazing transaction – when we become God’s subjects and members of His Kingdom – is repentance and a turning away from sin.

Imagine, for a moment, an SBC leader congratulating himself that 40% of Southern Baptist men are embezzlers, but praise God! they are saved! How about 40% of SBC children are pot smokers, but praise God! they are saved!  40% of SBC women commit adultery, but praise God! they are saved!  That’s ridiculous, of course.  Such a statistic would be reported soberly, with a fresh commitment to preach and teach on subjects that will help those people turn away from sin.

Everyone would rejoice when a drug dealer turns to the Lord.  But no one would take his claim of salvation seriously if he carried on selling drugs.  But if that’s too dramatic an example, try this one – the man who swears incessantly and indulges his temper does not undergo sanctification so that people who know him, over the course of time, see no changes in his behavior.  They will reasonably wonder exactly what changes the Holy Spirit wrought in him, and treat his claims of being a new person in Christ with skepticism. As they should.

If 40% of Southern Baptist Hispanics are here illegally, they need to obey our laws, self-deport, and come back legally.  Alternatively, what a testimony to send them back to their home countries as missionaries! “I went to the US illegally and broke many laws, but now I know Jesus and I’ve stopped breaking the law to come back to tell you about Him.” Get Lottie Moon to put those folks on the payroll.

But rather than acknowledging each person has responsibility for his own actions, Land blames the government for the fact that we have so much illegal immigration.

Suppose the government informed me that they had been monitoring my driving and now they were going to fine me for every time I had exceeded the speed limit for two decades. I would owe a tidy sum, whereas if they had stopped me the first couple of times, I would have slowed down permanently. Most Americans would reject such a policy as unfair.

Most Americans would be wrong to do so. Would it suck? You bet! But is it unfair? Not at all.  I earned every speeding ticket I ever got and a lot more besides.  Is breaking the law not a sin? Surely Richard Land is not proposing that a sin that goes unseen is less of an offense against God.  As Christians, we are blessed with abundant mercy and grace.  But “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live therein?”

Land continues on to propose a plan that most of us – as numerous polls have indicated – already think is rational, though not particularly fair or just: close the borders, enforce our laws so that only people legally entitled to work here can do so, and after those tasks are completed, provide a final amnesty – with fines and restitution and assimilation requirements – to those illegals who remain here.  Except even then, Land cannot bring himself to call it the amnesty that it is any more than he can describe illegal immigration as the crime that it is.  Is he just so desperate to keep people in his pews?

The question is not whether helmets are efficacious. The question is whether we have the right to indulge in risky behavior, or whether the state has the right to restrict us in order to preserve our lives.

Helmets and seatbelts today – a requirement to lose weight and exercise later? Questions that seemed ridiculous before Obamacare and a legal decision that a lack of activity – the refusal to buy health insurance – constitutes activity are now on the table.  Questions about whether there are any actual barriers to what Congress can require of us are currently being debated.  Helmets are the least of our worries.  Our very independence is at stake.

According to the court papers, the cemetery’s director, Arleen Ocasio, bans the word “God” and requires prayers to be submitted for government approval.

This cannot stand.