Jenkins v. Miller et al update

First of all, the platform host seems to have relented a bit and has allowe me to sign on without providing a second email address, so I'm back to being incognito, until further notice. So I'll go ahead and share more of what I have been able to learn about Janet Jenknin's RICO lawsuit against everyone who helped Lisa Miller shelter her daughter from the reach of her evil stepmother. Most of what I'll share is based on this website.
First of all, we learn the reason Lisa Miller is no longer named in the lawsuit: she settled privately, on the grounds that she waive her attorney-client privilege. Having accomplished that, the fight has moved into the area of just how much privileged material has to be provided. Lisa's legal team is arguing that her journals, retained by her lawyer for safekeeping, should be excluded, on the grounds of the right to personal privacy, and in a stroke of pure irony, they cite Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruling on birth control that opened up the way for Roe v. Wade and Obergeffel v. Hodges. The court shows the difficulty of settiling these issues ahead of the trial, giving us some clue as to why the lawyer fees continue to rack up without much progress. We are, as it turns out, on rather uncharted ground here.
"It is challenging to formulate a discovery plan that allows disclosure of the relevant portions of the journals while simultaneously protecting Miller's privacy. The journals likely contain private information that is irrelevant to the case. See, e.g., ECF No. 794 at 2 (Miller declaration stating that the journals contain “intimate details of romantic relations, financial struggles, personal reflections, and reflections on [her] day to day life”). On the other hand, for the reasons outlined above, they also likely contain private details relevant to the alleged conspiracy, including Miller's “spiritual beliefs” and even her “legal struggles with Ms. Jenkins.” --Jenkins v. Miller, 2:12-cv-184, 15 (D. Vt. Jun. 26, 2024)
What's particulary bizzare is that the court pages aloud through some of the allegedly privileged information, musing as to whether or not it should be allowed to be brought up at the trial--at the same time publishing it for all the world to see. In the end, it allowed the litigant to almost entirely pierce the veil of secrecy customarily allowed to a defendent in communication with his defense team.
And, despite Isabella's depostition that she is in no way having her interests defended by this proceeding, they still continue the legal fiction that this is all in the best interests of the "kidnap victim."
At last report, all defendents and ex-defendents who were overseas at various stages of this legal saga remain the the US pending outcome of the case.

Ice, a major killer in the air

The title is a little deceptive, as it's always on the ground that people die, as a result of a plane being unable to keep flying due to ice. But in my recent research on airline accidents, I've run across ice as a serious cause of airplane accidents. It turns out that there are at least three ways that ice can cause a plane to crash, all of them preventable, and mostly through designing--and correctly applying (that's the hardest part)--a mechanical solution to the problem.
1. Carb Ice: This is ice that builds up in the carburetor of a piston-powered small plane due to the cooling that air experiences as it passes through it. Just as water drips off the cooling coils of an air conditioner or freezer--becoming ice if things aren't working right--the wrong combination of humidity and altitude can easily cause a carburetor to ice up, starving the engine of air and causing it to lose power. Although this problem is easily prevented by applying heat to the air going into the carburetor, and all student pilots are rigourously drilled on the process, new pilots can become inattentive enough that carb ice continues to cause dozens of engineless landings a year, at least one or two of which, on average, are fatal.
This is not to be confused with the serious problem of water in the fuel entering and choking off a piston-driven engine, which also happened in the early days of aviation, resulting now in the highly pollutive regimen of drawing a sample of dyed aviation fuel from the low points of the fuel system and throwing it out on the tarmac after acertaining that it doesn't contain any water.
2. Rime Ice: This is ice that builds up on the leading edge of the wing, either from a plane sitting too long on the runway during an ice storm, or from flying through icing conditions in the air. Airline pilots are just as susceptible to rime ice as students pilots are--if not more so, as student pilots are warned to stay away from icing conditions, while airline pilots frequently fly through them anyway. But when they do, the results can be extremely deadly, resulting in a loss of lift that usually kills everyone on board--unless it happens on takeoff, especially if the plane comes down in a river, as did USAir Flight 405. Two methods have been developed to combat the buildup of rime ice: De-icer that is sprayed on the wings of planes awaiting takeoff in an ice storm, and either heaters or expanding rubber boots in the the wing that keep ice from being able to build up. In one case, that of American Eagle Flight 4184 (which was twice ordered to fly a holding pattern in icy conditions), the entire wing of that type had to be redesigned to avoid rime ice from coming loose and damaging the control surfaces on the tail.
3. Engine ice: This is the most insidious way that ice kills, and almost exclusively happens with airliners, because in order to get ice in the engine one either has to be flying a plane whose wings tend to shed huge slabs of rime ice into the rear-mounted engines, or flying a plane through a hailstorm, where the hail going into the engines is so heavy that they flame out, or even suffer catastrophic turbine failure. This can only happen, in the case of hail, when a pilot takes his plane into the heart of a thunderstorm, as did the pilot of Garuda Flight GA421.
Why, you wonder, would a pilot do this? Well, hopefully this will never happen again, given the dozens who have died so far, but in the early days of weather radar in airliners there was an unfortunate phenomenon in which the weather radar could only pick up rain--not hail--so on the radar what appeared to be a clear path through the thuderhead was in fact its most dangerous part, as any pilot who ever tried taking that "path through the storm" soon found out, when all his engines failed and his plane fell out of the sky. The most tragic example of this would be Southern Airways Flight 242, in which the powerless plane, minutes before crashing into a petrol station in a small town, glided right over an airport without realizing it (because neither pilot ever bothered to check their flight charts, and the passenger on board who knew about the airport didn't realize that the pilot was trying to make a much more distant air base that he was familiar with).
This is not to be confused with a jet engine running rough due to flying through high-altitude ice crystals, which so far has't caused any crashes or fatalities, as there is plenty of time for the engines to recover as the plane falls below the ice layer.
One adage of aircraft accident investigations is that every crash makes flying safer. After the earliest pilots started getting killed by carb ice, carb heat was invented to prevent it from building up. After airliners started going down with rime ice, de-icing processes and procedures were invented to prevent it from building up--and redesigned after it did so anyway. And after the extensive investigations that were required to reconstruct the accidents in which engine ice killed (as it always did), weather radars were reprogrammed, and pilots trained, to keep planes from flying into the heart of a thunderstorm.
But there is one more way that ice can kill, although it's possible that it never will, because it's only caused a crash one time--and as a result of the extensive investigation into how it was able to happen, the system that allowed it to happen was redesigned. Here's how it went down: A Boeing 747 (British Airways Flight 38) crossing Siberia after departing Beijing developed frozen water vapor in its fuel tanks, which as long as the throttles were held steady was able to build up without being dislodged. As it came in to land in London, there was turbulence, so the pilot decided to allow the plane's computer to make the approach, as it was able to adust the power level more precisely than the pilot could. As a result, the autopilot demanded a surge of power which dislodged the ice and sent it crashing against the fuel heater at the end of the fuel line, clogging it and starving all four engines simutaneously, causing the plane to crash-land short of the runway--but, due to the extreme skill of the aircrew in making a landing that they had never trained for, without any fatalities.
What the investigators finally realized (and only after it happened again, but in a 747 that was still at altitude, so there was time to allow the ice to dissapate as it descended) was that tiny projections on the fuel line heater held the ice just short of where it could be melted; all that was required was redesigning the fuel line heater, which of course should have been made that way in the first place. And, since this has only ever happened in 747's--thus it was only their fuel systems that were redesigned--it's possible that any plane flying through extremely frigid and humid air may be the first of its type to experience it.

More on computers crashing planes

 I've continued to follow flight crash investigations, and I'm finding that flight computers are now always implicated in crashes--even in cases of mass murder by pilot, it's the flight computer that flies the aircraft into the ground--as if the suicidal pilot himself lacks the nerve to keep a hand on the controls all the way to impact. The response of the pilot when a computer starts to crash his plane is thus crucial; however, to date it doesn't appear that pilots are being trained to fight with their computers, and in one crash report after another I read of the confusion of the pilot as to why his control inputs aren't working. 

So definitely, pilot training needs to change. Flight simulators need to teach the problems of computer takeover, and, since I'm reviewing accident reports from years ago, this process may well have already been begun. But there's one more thing: when an engine begins to self-destruct, normal procedure is for the flight crew to try to re-start the engine. This is madness: they should be focused on finding the nearest safe place to land, engineless. All commercial aircraft should have backward-facing cameras with monitors in the cockpit that visually show each engine. Thus if an engine can be seen to be aflame, or flying apart, no attempt should be made to restart it. All attention should be focused on getting the plane down safely.

And, I suppose, given the inevitable continuation of takeover by computer, flight computers should be programmed to pull up the aircraft any time they are programmed to fly it into the ground--or at the least, unlock the cockpit door authomatically any time a terrain warning goes off.

Air Safety Advisory

 

I've been watching a lot of air crash videos lately, so I thought I'd make one more post on the topic, as air travel begins to heat back up again after the relaxation of travel restrictions. These are likely to be re-imposed, and re-eased, multiple times, so this post should remain relevant.

I've come to the conclusion is that by far the most dangerous commercial aircraft to fly in is one that is of a new design the pilots are not familiar with. This is because today's aircraft are so computerized that as often as not, now it's the computer that crashes the plane when it disregards what it regards as nonsense input from the pilot. A pilot not familiar with how to deal with this is likely to die along with his passengers, despite his best efforts to regain control. Although the recent 737 Max debacle showed, Boeing is not immune to this problem--but it affects Airbus planes more often, and with more deadly results, because Airbus planes are totally fly-by-wire, meaning that all control signals initiated by the pilot have to be approved by the computer before being passed on to the control surfaces.

If there's any comforting thought in all of this, it's that the airline safety business is extremely heuristic: whenever people die in a plane accident, the response is always two pronged: first to determine exactly what happened, and then to take whatever steps are necessary to keep it from happening again. If only the criminal justice business worked that way: it's real good at the former, but horrible at the latter.

Liberals, Conservatives, and Traditionalists

 I've been musing lately on a certain sociological phenomenon, that humanity (at least in the cultures with which I'm familiar) can be divided into three distinct categories. Now, whilst the categories are distinct, it's also a phenomenon that many people, and groups, can be placed into one category for one issue, and into yet another on a completely different issue, and that these positions can change over a generation, and over a lifetime. Now, the distinctions all relate to how people view change. Liberals embrace change, believing it by nature to be good; on the other end of the spectrum, traditionalist reject change, believing it by nature to be bad; and, in between, conservatives are reluctant to change, but do not resist it per se, realizing that it may result in an improvement, just not assuming so without testing it first. A conservative came up with these categories, so those in the other two camps may not agree that they even exist as described; being probably too close to the question to further describe one of the categories objectively, I'll just focus my detached objectivity on the others.

Liberals tend to confuse the other two categories, as the people within both categories will often line up on the opposite sides of an issue, and seem to be the same. But traditionalists will likewise confuse liberals with conservatives, as those two groups will often appear to line up on the opposite side, all depending in either case on whether the change in question has passed the testing and found the approval of the conservatives.

The labels themselves can also be problematic: traditionalists don't call themselves by that title, and even liberals often prefer a label like 'progressive'. So it's one thing to label the categories, and yet another to get people to accept the label that describes them best.

Another interesting thing is the instability seemingly inherent in two of these categories. One would think perhaps that traditionalists, who hold that no improvement is possible over the old ways, would have passed on that belief from ancient times. But it turns out that in many cases, today's traditionalists are less than a handful of generations removed from liberal who got tired of stridently proclaiming that every new thing was by its very nature an improvement over the old, decided to give the pendulum a nudge back toward the other side of the spectrum, and didn't know when or how to stop its momentum. And many liberals are but one or two generations removed from traditionalists who had made a similar decision, just in the other direction. Apparently few can long endure a residence on either edge of the spectrum; excepting those few, and of course the many for whom the pendulum has happily found rest at the bottom of the arc, all are on the move, across any given generation, in one direction or the other.

I have seen this happen over the past generation with the licensing of homosexual relationships, which has become official government policy in the USA, and indeed throughout most of the world, only within the past decade. For a long time before that it was becoming more widely acceptable to liberals, at least in theory, being part of the preference for change which their category demands. But once the public policy debate was over, and it actually began to happen, many liberal Christians found that they didn't really want to be that liberal after all—that here was one issue on which they did align more with the conservatives and traditionalists. Thus a split began between those liberals holding tight to that end of the spectrum, and those liberals (for now) who wanted to nudge things back in the other direction, and that division continues to this day among the large denominations in America. One may be tempted to think by this that some sort of revival is afoot, but it's more likely just revealing a sociological axiom at work.

The Duggar Disaster deepens

 I see that this blog is drawing in a number of people seeking information on Josh Duggar, so it's time for another update. First of all, Blogspot has announced that as of July, they will no longer be sending email updates whenever I post on this blog, so this may be the last such announcement you get. Google continues to limit my exposure, since I refuse to participate in this for mutual gain, so anything I post here will get a diminished number of views at any rate. 

Now, on to the Duggars. Josh Duggar turns out to be an incorrigible sexual addict after all, having found a way to work around every limit put on him to date. This is of course a source of deep grief to his parents; his wife appears to still be in denial (she is currently expecting their seventh child--which, if he ends up serving anywhere near the prison term he faces, is likely their last). 

Now, what can I say to all that. Well, a few things. First of all, I'm glad he got caught. As careful as he was, clearly the feds have ways of locating people who seek out and share material online that's not protected by the Bill of Rights. I'm rather astounded, though, that it was Homeland Security who investigated the matter. Obviously this sort of crimes occurred before HS was a department of the federal government, but for some reason the investigation of these crimes has been taken away from the FBI at some level and transferred to them. It is a bit of concern that a cabinet department, familiar to those in totalitarian countries as focusing on defending the ruling party from the members of the opposition, is now in charge of investigating unprotected speech. 

Secondly, I receive a lot of inappropriate emails, with (usually somewhat blurred) obscene suggestions right in the subject line. They all go directly to Spam, and I never open the images in them, or click on any link in them. But the mere fact that they are emails addressed to me means that, from the perspective of someone monitoring traffic on my server, it's possible that I look like someone who is viewing illegal material. And such material could well be sent to me disguised in such a way that I would unsuspectingly open it to view--this did happen once, several years ago. So don't be too quick to judge someone who comes under such an accusation. Josh Duggar, on the other hand, had clearly structured his computer in such a way as to hide what he was doing--even going so far as to set it up on his work computer, where he could close his office door and indulge without the risk of his wife or kids catching him in the act.

Lastly, a brief comment on the costs of fame and fortune. When the Duggars embarked on their public career, it was in the realm of politics: Jim Bob ran for an open Senate seat. He lost, big time, but the fame that ensued catapulted him into the State House, and from thence to a gig on cable television. The Duggars thought the exposure was worth the opportunity it gave them to proclaim the virtues of a godly lifestyle to the world. But was it? Less than quarter century in, it certainly doesn't look like the gain has been worth the loss. Once nice thing about poverty is that it puts a lid on one's ability to get deep into certain sins. If one has to choose between putting food on the table and purchasing an inappropriate magazine, or getting an internet subscription, it limits the temptation. So, the riches that fame brought to the Duggars did come with an intrinsic cost. And it was the laptop of a political operative that first yanked Josh out of his sheltered world and introduced him to the siren call of online pornography, so the politics that catapulted them to fame also held a hidden bite. It turns out that raising your children in an extremely sheltered environment may leave them totally unprepared for handling the real world when they are set loose in it.

I grieve with the Duggars--all three generations. It looks like those seven kids are going to pretty much grow up without a daddy, or at least with a very distant one, adultery having long ceased to be a capital offense on this continent. I grieve for the missed opportunities to have done something different, with different results.  I grieve for the failed experiment in having a lifestyle worth proclaiming to the world. But I am relieved that fame and fortune have eluded me, and my family. Whatever mistakes we have made, whatever opportunities we have missed, whatever failures we have been--it all could have been worse, far worse, had fame and fortune intervened. 

I pray for Josh--that he will not be out of the reach of full repentance. And that it will reach him before his prison term begins. 

Another look at Loving v. Virginia

Today, in honor of Loving Day (which would have been celebrated yesterday, but for the modern habit of moving the observance of all holidays to Monday), The White Man will revisit the case which brought it about: Richard Perry Loving, Mildred Jeter Loving v. Virginia.
Right off the bat, there's a problem: look at the photo of the famous couple, described everywhere as being of separate races:




Note that whilst they are described as "white" and "black" respectively, it is evident that they have the same skin tone just by comparing where their bodies touch. Mildred Jeter, at the time Richard Loving impregnated her, was basically as white as he was. What she had, and he hadn't, was verified African and Native American Ancestry, in addition to the majority European ancestry that they both shared; and under the law then current in Virginia, their entire lives must needs conform to that almost invisible distinction.

This is very important: had it not been that all Virginians were already divided, first by convention and then by law, into discrete categories of Pure European and Not Pure European, there never would have been a case. Mildred's European ancestry, despite contributing the majority of her genome, counted for nothing, admixed as it was with the blood of supressed races. Thus the whole foundation of the Racial Integrity Act, which Loving v. Virginia overturned, was a distinct theology of racial purity which deliberately sought to ignore the reality of the racial mixing plainly evident just by looking at the co-defendants.  It is the height of hypocrisy that none of Mildred's European ancestors were ever prosecuted for raping their African slaves, yet her lawful husband was prosecuted for sleeping with her, with her full consent. It was a law that had no chance of surviving in a righteous nation.

Loving v. Virginia was long thought to be the culmination of Supreme Court decisions that invalidated laws meant to prevent fornication and adultery; but these were to resume under a new court after a 20-year hiatus. So rare was homosexuality in the mid-1960's, it's unlikely that anyone at the time would have been able to predict that in her own lifetime (and she only lived another four decades), Mildred Loving would be able to point out, to widespread acclaim, that by filing suit against the state that denied the validity of the one-flesh relationship she shared with her husband, she was laying the grounds for the invalidation of all laws that denied equal treatment in the eyes of the law to people of the same sex who cohabited in the same way she and Richard had.

Ironically, the eight years since Mildred Loving's death have still failed to eliminate the classification into which she is always placed, now usually referred to as "African-American," but recent months have seen the proliferation of people who are still pigeonholed by race, but left free to change their gender at will. Thus Virginia's Act could yet stand, with modern Lovings fully evading its force merely by claiming to be of the same sex. The bizarre twisting of reality gets ever worse: race is as immutable as ever, but it is sex that is now malleable to the will of the person claiming it.

Backing up to the Racial Integrity Act, we see that it was specifically written to criminalize relationships such as that of the Lovings, which under common law had never been illegal:

"This bill aims at correcting a condition which only the more thoughtful people of Virginia know the existence of.
 It is estimated that there are in the State from 10,000 to 20,000, possibly more, near white people, who are known to possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.
 In the past it has been possible for these people to declare themselves as white, or even to have the Court so declare them. Then they have demanded the admittance of their children in the white schools, and in not a few cases have intermarried with white people.
 In many counties they exist as distinct colonies holding themselves aloof from Negroes, but not being admitted by the white people as of their race.
 In any large gathering or school of colored people, especially in the cities, many will be observed who are scarcely distinguishable as colored.
 These persons, however, are not white in reality, nor by the new definition of this law, that a white person is one with no trace of the blood of another race, except that a person with one-sixteenth of the American Indian, if there is no other race mixture, may be classed as white. "

It is obvious on its face that this law was designed to reserve special rights and privileges to those with no discernible trace of non-European heritage (a loophole having been inserted to allow white people to claim descent from the famous princess Pocahontas).  This approach had already been roundly condemned by Justice White in his McLaughlin v. Florida decision earlier in the decade:

"That a general evil will be partially corrected may at times, and without more, serve to justify the limited application of a criminal law; but legislative discretion to employ the piecemeal approach stops short of permitting a State to narrow statutory coverage to focus on a racial group."

It is quite ironic that the Racial Integrity Act, a product of the American Eugenics Movement, is now so roundly condemned by everyone from Supreme Court Justices on down, whilst the other major achievement of that movement--the suppression of the black race by sterilization and abortion--is still celebrated as a major victory for women, its crowning victory, Roe v. Wade, having been handed down by the same court that overruled the decision of Pace v. Alabama.

Under the Racial Integrity Act, the sanctity of Mildred Loving's bedroom could be invaded by officers hoping to catch her in the act of sleeping with her husband. Under Obergefell v. Hodges, which cited Loving v. Virginia as precedent, the sanctity of her daughter's bathroom stall can now be invaded by any sexual predator claiming to share her gender.

This, we are told, is progress.

One more thing: Obergefell v. Hodges effectively replaced 'race' with 'gender' in evaluating whether any law since Loving v. Virginia can be held to provide equal treatment under the law. Just imagine all the implications of doing this to Associate Justice Potter Stewart's concurring opinion, in which he stated that "it is simply not possible for a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor."

The first result of this ruling being applied in such manner is that no state will be able to continue regulating the depiction nor the exhibition of any part of the human mammary gland (nor will Facebook, or eventually any other interactive website). Better get used to it; it's coming.

And it will be hailed as progress.

Myron on Mennonite Modesty

I've written earlier on the Mennonite Modesty Mishap and Misplaced Mennonite Modesty. Myron Horst (aka Hurst) is writing a book about Mennonite modesty. Yesterday he posted a long comment to a blog, excerpting his book, which I reproduce here as I found it, without comment.
--------------------------------------
    Myron Horst April 16, 2015 

    Thank you for addressing the subject of "modesty". I'm sorry you had to be affected by this wrong teaching. It is something that your parents were deceived about and that I was also deceived about. I am going to share several excerpts on modesty from the book I am writing about the Amish and Mennonites. While it addresses these groups, it applies to ATI, Patriarchy, Vision Forum, and other "dresses only" groups.

    The Bondage of the Term “Modest”
    The modesty doctrine of the Great Amish and Conservative Mennonite Dress Experiment has been a complete failure in protecting girls from sexual abuse. There is not a major difference in the sexual abuse rate between conservative, modestly dressed girls and girls who dress according to what the dress experiment calls the immodest dress of the world. If anything, the dress experiment “modest” dress is actually more “immodest” because the regulation dress and everything that goes with it makes girls more vulnerable to sexual abuse than the “immodestly” dressed girls in the rest of society.

    “Modesty” is not a concrete, clearly defined concept, but is open to a wide range of opinions about what is modest and what is not. Total nudity in public is a God-given shame that a person, Christian or non-Christian, usually tries to avoid. One of the places God tells us about the shame of nudity is in Revelation 3:18: “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.” But beyond nudity, a person’s conscience of how much of the body must be covered in order to be modest tends to defined by those who one is influenced by. There is a very wide range of opinions among professing Christians about what is modest and appropriate and what is not.

    Jesus has not defined what is modest or what is immodest. Mennonite churches have attempted to regulate modesty, feeling that the Bible alone is inadequate on the subject and that husbands and fathers cannot be trusted to regulate it in their own home. Modesty is a concept that is drilled into conservative Mennonite women. They are made to feel guilty and responsible if a man were to look at them in any way sexually. Jesus on the other hand, puts the responsibility on a man for his lust.

    Part of the failure of the Conservative Dress Experiment is because it is based in part on Old Testament Law. Among the Amish and conservative Mennonites, the women have been required to wear dresses, based upon the church’s interpretation of one command that was handpicked out of the Old Covenant Law (even though Christians are no longer under the Old Covenant Law). “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” Deuteronomy 22:5...

    What is ironic about Amish and conservative Mennonite “modest” women’s dresses is that in addition to not preventing men from lusting after girls and women, the dresses with their open bottom hem are an open door that allows easy access for perverts and sexual molesters to quickly do their wicked deeds without fully undressing their victim. Is a dress safe? Is a cape dress really modest with its double layer at the top and an open door at the bottom? Can a dress really be labeled as modest for a young girl to wear? Little girls have great difficulty keeping their dresses down and end up showing their underwear at times. It is young girls and teens that are the ones most likely to be sexually abused.

    A friend of ours, who did not grow up in a Mennonite home, told us that she was taught growing up that dresses were immodest. When I first heard it, I was surprised because it was the opposite of what I had been taught growing up. In reality, dresses are actually more “immodest” than pants. On the internet there are a number of testimonies of women who have been sexually abused who feel very uncomfortable wearing dresses. Addressing the question about why women don’t wear dresses anymore, is this answer: “Some women may have had bad experiences with wearing skirts or dresses, since a lot of them may have been sexually assaulted in the past (direct or indirect), a skirt or dress does invite molesters to unlawfully play down there.”
    http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110913162555AAfIs6J
    Myron Horst April 16, 2015 
    continued:
    ...Trudy Metzger says this about the blame and responsibility that the conservative church puts on the women and girls:
    “Boys wore normal clothes and acted like nothing happened when they violated us. We were stuck in homemade dresses, giving males easy access, and still the bulk of responsibility fell on us. When they violated us, it was because we must have behaved in a sensual manner, dressed inappropriately, or perhaps flirted with them. They couldn’t help their sex drive and if only we would behave right and dress right, we would protect them.

    “How ironic. In a male-dominant culture, where men were portrayed to be the godly leaders, the strong ones, they were not required to be men at all. All they had to do was cry, “she asked for it” and the onus was on us. And even if they didn’t cry it, that was a given. There was nothing of teaching young men and boys to honor, respect, love and protect a woman. Nothing of saying, ‘if you find her naked, be man enough to cover her and protect her’.”
    http://trudymetzger.com/2012/07/11/sexual-abuse-violence-introduction/

    Trudy’s words, “if you find her naked, be man enough to cover her and protect her”, gives new meaning to what Jesus said in Matthew 25:41-46 when you look at it in the context of sexual abuse, “Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”

    It is a Christian man’s responsibility to protect those who are least able to protect themselves – children - from sexual abuse. If a man exposes a child’s nakedness and sexually abuses the child, he saw or felt their nakedness and did not cloth them. He has Jesus to answer to. Jesus views the sexual abuse of a child as the same as an attack on Him – “I was… naked and ye clothed ME not”. Jesus knows what the sexual abuser has done, even if the church doesn’t. This can be a real comfort for anyone who has been sexually abused. Even if no one else has stood up for you (the victim) Jesus has. He has felt your pain and defilement, and the perpetrator WILL suffer the consequences – everlasting punishment unless he/she repents.

    The guilt that conservatives have placed on women in the area of modesty, and the hypocrisy by which women are judged are paralleled by the conservatives in Jesus’ day. The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman that they claimed they had caught in the very act of adultery. What is conspicuously missing is the man who should also have been caught in the very act of adultery if it really was adultery. The woman was being tried for committing a sin, but not the man. Many sexually abused women in Amish and Mennonite groups can identify with this woman. They feel like they too are the ones that were tried by their Amish or Mennonite church leaders, and the men who sexually abused them are not. “And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” (John 8:3-11)

    The conservatives, the Pharisees, treated the woman as if she had committed adultery all by herself. It is similar to the way Amish and Mennonite women are treated in the modesty issue. Modesty is treated as if a woman could commit adultery all by herself by dressing “immodestly”. Women are judged for dressing “immodestly” without proof that a man has looked on them and committed adultery with them in his heart.

    Knowing how the Pharisees made up rules and went to extremes in expanding God’s commands, I have to wonder if the adultery that the conservative Pharisees were accusing the woman of committing was a manmade “sin” that they called adultery and was not sin at all, similar to the Amish and Mennonite manmade sin of “immodesty” that they hang over women’s heads. Several clues that it probably was not the true sin of adultery are that there was no man involved, and Jesus did not condemn or rebuke her for what she had done. Whatever the case, there is a strong parallel between the way the Pharisees judged this woman and the way many Amish and conservative Mennonites judge women in the areas of modesty and sexual abuse.

    (there is much more that could be said but I will stop there)

Germanwings Flight 9525: The Religious Connection

Inasmuch as I have become a source for research on air disasters, I'm compelled to write about the most recent no-survivors air transport crash. As soon as I heard that the plane descended smoothly into the side of the Alps in clear weather, my only response was, "Islamic pilot." I listened over the next few days to hear the name of the pilot, but when it was finally released, along with the information that the pilot had been locked out of the cockpit (an ironic unintended consequence to post-911 security), the name was not Islamic after all. It appears that mental illness, not religious duty, led the copilot to commit mass suicide.

Indeed, there could be an element of mental illness in all recent mass suicide air disasters. Carrying a parachute could have saved a life in many of these cases, but banning passengers from using cell phones aloft has, in another unintended consequence, limited what can be learned from them.

Apparently the main reason for limiting the use of electronic equipment aboard a cruising airliner is due to their potential drain on the plane's wifi bandwidth--as if a simple cell phone or laptop would be capable of doing such a thing.

Getting back to copilot Andreas Lubitz:  It turns out that his outwardly happy life wasn't so happy after all: his girlfriend, whom he intended to marry, had broken off the relationship. This makes this tragedy another unintended consequence of the decriminalization of adultery: adulterers no longer face the death penalty--but, if they are pilots, their passengers face death all the same.

Zero Tolerance: Another Case of Unintended Consequences

It's yet another sign that America is descending into chaos, a would-be West Point Graduate was expelled from school for shooting spit wads, under Spotsylvania High's "Zero Tolerance Policy."

What these social architects don't seem to realise is that when the punishment is way disproportionate to the crime, it doesn't deter crime, but only encourages even greater crime the next time. As the old English saying goes, "In for a penny, in for a pound." Another way of putting it, more chillingly, is "The first you have to pay for. All the rest are free."

The Return of Debtors Prison

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)
Inmate Anthony McCoy was told to remove the jewelry from his teeth before heading to jail, but he said it was cemented to his teeth and couldn't be removed.

McCoy ended up spitting out blood and teeth after a sheriff's lieutenant reached into his mouth and yanked out the grill, according to McCoy's attorney David Raybin.

Raybin says the enamel on his client's front four teeth were ripped off and he was denied proper medical treatment afterward.

McCoy was arrested in November and brought to the jail for not paying child support.

Lawyers in Nashville have worked out a settlement of $95,000, which is schedule d to go before Nashville's Metropolitan Council on Tuesday evening.

The sheriff's lieutenant was demoted and suspended.

While I've heard of women being assessed child support, I've never yet known of one hauled off to jail in handcuffs for not paying it. But this is becoming an increasing problem for men, who can end up spending years behind bars for not bearing the costs of their children's mothers' independent lifestyles. The men who voted for Female Suffrage in 1919 could not have foreseen that their grandsons would be locked away in debtors prison just because their granddaughters had the vote. But all changes to the status quo have consequences that are not only unintended, but usually unforeseen.

Now that a jailer's job is more or less mob enforcement, it's no longer a surprise that a jailer should act like a mob enforcer. And there's one thing the article doesn't mention--another unforeseen consequence of Female Suffrage.

The jailer that assaulted Anthony McCoy was a woman.

MLK shares responsibility for eight deaths

Eight people are dead in Virginia, mostly because of Monday being Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Unintended consequences.

"Speight is jailed on one count of murder and likely to face more charges in the Tuesday morning rampage that killed all eight at the quiet country homestead he shared with 37-year-old Lauralee, her 38-year-old husband Dwayne Sipe and their children, Morgan Dobyns and Joshua Sipe.

Relatives and people who knew Speight say he had a history of mental breakdowns and may have become fixated on the notion that his sister wanted to oust him from the house passed down to them by their grandparents and mother. The family lawyer, however, says her intention was exactly the opposite: She planned to deed the property solely to him.

Lynchburg attorney Harry Devening, who handled legal matters for the family, said Speight had an apparent learning disability and history of mental problems, and "ran away" from his sister's Georgia home for several days during a breakdown in 2007, about a year after his mother died.

Giglio said Dwayne Sipe found him in a motel room along a highway. Even then the family had no reason to suspect Speight might turn violent. Giglio said he last spoke to Dwayne Sipe the Saturday before the shootings and everything seemed fine.

Devening said Lauralee Sipe perceived no problems either, signing a deed late last week to put the family property in Speight's name. She planned to record it at the courthouse immediately, he said, but both Friday and Monday were state holidays."

The Law Killeth--and killeth--and killeth again.

The White Man has not been in any mood lately to blog about political matters. Nearly every day another e-mail arrives, duly certified as being from an unmonitored e-mail account at The White House. The thief sending the emails tries very hard to convince me that his plans to steal from me are all in my own best interests, but I remain unconvinced. As does he; soon it will be a crime not to gamble over my health. Sigh.

But at any rate, my keyboard has not yet been muzzled, and I take to cyberspace today to comment on yet another dead child, found strapped in a car on a hot day. Hardly a week goes by in the hot summer months without another such report, despite the fact that in some states it is now a crime to leave an infant strapped in an unmoving car. Of course it was already a crime to leave an infant unstrapped in a moving car, and that is the point of this blog.

All laws have consequences, and the consequences of a law are never fully foreseen at the time it is implemented. No one suspected that children would die in unmoving cars as a result of it being a crime to allow them to get hurt in a moving car, but that is what it appears has happened.

It is not easy to strap a child into an approved car seat; it's much easier to hold him on your lap. But the fact is, it's just plain safer for a child to be strapped in a car seat while the car is moving at a high rate of speed down the road. Just for safety's sake, most parents would want their infant securely buckled in while out on the open road.

But ah, the law doesn't allow parents to use their own judgment in such matters. A 5-minute stop-and-go drive to the grocery store 10 blocks away may necessitate spending another 5 minutes just buckling all the children in. And in many families' case, the laws now stipulate that every one of their children needs his own car seat--thus requiring a van for what in most countries of the world a compact car would more than suffice. Stopping at the store adds another 2-3 minutes unbuckling them all, then another 5 minutes getting them back in to go home.

Is it any wonder, then, that many parents prefer to leave their sleeping children strapped in the car while they run into the store quickly to buy something? I certainly do. And thus as an inevitable result of more and more draconian car seat laws (especially the one making it a crime to put an infant in the front seat where he could be killed by the mandatory air bag)--coupled with the wide availability of vehicular air conditioning and a paranoia over car theft--duly imprisoned infants continue to roast to death in their parents' cars.

Yet another unintended consequence from yet another series of laws "in our best interests." Sigh.

Unintended Consequences and the Marriage Amendment--2004 and 2008

In 2004, as we recall, the Presidential Election was a close one. In the end, it came down to Ohio's 20 electoral votes, which George W. Bush won by a margin of 118,775 popular votes out of over 5.6 million cast. According to the New York Times, this is how it happened:

"Proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in many of the 11 states where the measures appeared on the ballot on Tuesday, political analysts say, providing crucial assistance to Republican candidates including President Bush in Ohio and Senator Jim Bunning in Kentucky.

"The amendments, which define marriage as between only a man and a woman, passed overwhelmingly in all 11 states, clearly receiving support from Democrats and independents as well as Republicans. Only in Oregon and Michigan did the amendment receive less than 60 percent of the vote.

"But the ballot measures also appear to have acted like magnets for thousands of socially conservative voters in rural and suburban communities who might not otherwise have voted, even in this heated campaign, political analysts said. And in tight races, those voters - who historically have leaned heavily Republican - may have tipped the balance.

"In Ohio, for instance, political analysts credit the ballot measure with increasing turnout in Republican bastions in the south and west, while also pushing swing voters in the Appalachian region of the southeast toward Mr. Bush. The president's extra-strong showing in those areas compensated for an extraordinarily large Democratic turnout in Cleveland and in Columbus, propelling him to a 136,000-vote victory." --Nov. 4, 2004

I might add that Ohio's 60,000 Amish voters, who aren't even supposed to vote in state or national elections, were given special dispensation by their bishops to go to the polls in support of the 2004 marriage amendment. Once they got in the curtained-off voting booths, though, who knows what may have happened. Certain it is that Bush campaigned pretty hard in predominately Amish areas of the South and West, and there was plenty of parking for buggies at his rallies.

Fast forward to 2008. Again voter turnout was significant, but this time the effect worked in reverse. There were 'marriage initiatives' on the ballot in only three states this time. In Arizona, Florida and California various forms of constitutional amendments were voted on where marriage was defined as 'between a man and a woman'.

In each case, the amendments passed. In California and Florida these measures got about 52% of the vote--the same margin by which Barack Hussein Obama carried the popular vote nationwide.

In Arizona, the amendment needed 60% of the vote to pass--and it got it.

When pollsters analyzed the data they found something very interesting.

On average, whites voted AGAINST the measures 51% to 49%. This margin is significant because Whites make up the overwhelming majority both of the voting base and of actual voters. No Democratic candidate since 1964 has carried a majority of the White vote, but the pro-homosexual marriage lobby carried it this time.

Here is where it gets interesting. Blacks voted FOR the amendments 79% to 21%. There were record turnouts in the Black community, due to Senator Obama running for President--and they voted for him 96% to 4%. Pollsters agree the Black vote was THE factor in the victories, both of Obama and the marriage amendments. Without the large Black turnout voting overwhelmingly for the amendments that define marriage as between a man and a woman, these amendments would have failed.

Let that sink in for a moment.

It was Black voters who put Obama in the White House, against the wishes of the White majority. But those same Black Voters passed the marriage amendments in their states, against the wishes of the White majority. The Democrats took the White House because they fielded a Black candidate, but the pro-marriage amendment supporters also won because there was a Black candidate on the same ballot.

Black voters overwhelmingly chose Obama the person, but overwhelmingly rejected his liberal platform. Unfortunately for them, they won't be able to choose one over the other once he gets a chance to nominate Supreme Court Justices who will make the amendment by referendum process obsolete.

And by the way--even with Obama carrying Ohio this time, he got fewer votes there than John Kerry got in 2004. Despite record turnout nationwide, almost half a million FEWER people voted in Ohio this election. The NY Times was right--people voted AGAINST Kerry because they were already there to vote FOR a definition of marriage. If the marriage amendment hadn't been on the Ohio ballot in 2004, no one would have had the option of voting for a Black President in 2008.

Some interesting consequences of instant unemployment

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"Instant Unemployment" isn't a very suitable way of describing the impetus behind the Interesting Consequences I'm about to discuss. But this being a blog, not a journal article, the term will suffice. As we shall see shortly, "Unemployment by Edict" would be a more descriptive term.

I begin with the army of stonemasons assembled by Herod the Great, King of Judea, Galilee, Idumea, and Perea, to renovate the Second Temple in Jerusalem. This task stretched on for more than a mortal lifetime, thus involving several generations of sponsors, overseers, and workers. In short, an entire industry emerged focused on beautifying the Temple. Inevitably, this work finally came to an end, and abruptly so, when the Temple was totally destroyed in 70 CE. Instant unemployment ensued for every stonemason formerly on the government payroll. What was the result?

Interestingly enough, the destruction of the Second Temple was the direct impetus, through the instant unemployment it engendered, for the explosive growth of a whole new industry, and the cultural artifact it produced: The Ossuary. These hand-carved boxes of stone, into which the bones of deceased Judeans were placed for permanent burial, had begun to be used by the rich and famous as work on the temple began to wind down during the earthly lifetime of Jesus, but they became an integral part of the local culture as long as the previously government-employed stonemasons were forced to practice their craft in the private sector.

Another act of the Roman imperium resulted, perhaps not so directly, in yet another cultural artifact. In 392 CE, the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II put an empire-wide ban on the production of all artifacts of pagan culture, including the Egyptian mummy portraits associated with the worship of Isis and Serapis. An entire industry, thus instantly unemployed, turned their creative attention to theologically approved art forms, resulting eventually in the icons which to this day form an integral part of the rites of Eastern Orthodoxy throughout its various patriarchates.

Closer to home, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution resulted both in Prohibition, and in the enabling legislation--which produced an army of Treasury Agents whose sole duties involved the arrest of those producing and selling alcoholic beverages. With the repeal of Prohibition in the Twenty-First Amendment, instant unemployment was about to ensue. This, however, being the Roosevelt administration, something surely would be done to keep them on the federal payroll. The result? The first piece of federal Gun Control legislation, the impetus behind the addition of "Firearms" to the name of the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco. Treasury agents would henceforth arrest those who produced and sold guns, and the handgun as an artifact of mainstream American culture was now on its way to eventual oblivion.

Three examples of instant unemployment by government edict: the first two pushed artisans from the public into the private sector, resulting in the emergence of a new cultural artifact; the third was tampered with in such a way as to retain on the government payroll men who had made no contribution to the physical culture of their nation; a retention which continues to lead towards the extinction of part of that physical culture.

An unintended consequence?

This post was thoroughly edited in March 2015.

Another unintended consequence of overregulation

Today, Charles Roberts strode into an elementary school building brandishing an arsenal of weapons. He ordered the students against the wall and began singling out the ones he intended to kill.

What's unusual about this scenario is that it was a 1-room Amish school. What did Roberts have against the Amish? Nothing, as it turned out. He chose this particular school because, unlike the public schools across the country in the wake of Columbine, it wasn't locked or guarded.

Amish aren't likely to start locking down their school buildings just because a loony decided to make them an easy target--any more than they'll give up horses just because somebody gets killed by a runaway buggy.

But stand by for some officious meddling by those who think they can legislate away bad behavior. They'll compound their original (useless) regulations with something new targeting the Amish themselves, thus making them suffer twice from this crime.

But it won't work. Note that most of the school shootings this week were at public schools.


Posted 10/2/2006

Appendix:
I have to report that in the three days since writing this post I did in fact discover the existence of an Amish group that gave up their buggies due to a high accident rate. Too many of their members were dying in auto-buggy crashes, and they gave up this part of their heritage. But even more troubling is news of how easily small private country schools (many of which are not Amish) were affected by this event: already school entry doors are being locked for fear of this happening again.

This fear of 'copycat crimes' is logically fallacious. The odds of any one country school being targeted by a pedophilic assassin are remote. So it happened once; yeah, it may happen again. But whenever a barn is burned down by lightning, must every other barn owner in the country immediately be required to carry fire insurance? Yet the odds of an Amish boy being struck by lightning, or his barn burning down, are far greater than his sister's chances of being raped or murdered in the classroom.

IF Amish children continue to be targeted because they meet behind unlocked doors, THEN it may be time for the Amish to review their historic stance of non-resistence. Certainly the Plain People in Haiti have a level of comfort with deadbolts and padlocks. But until life in Pennsylvania becomes as precarious as life in Haiti, over-reaction is the greatest danger--as is the loss of freedom that inevitably comes with it.