Displaying posts published in

January 2016

PUNISHING THE DEAD: MARILYN PENN

Did you know that since a will is considered a court document, anyone, regardless of connection to the deceased, can request a copy of it and for a fee, become privy to that person’s most intimate and final decisions regarding legacy and heirs? An article in the Times of Jan 30th reveals the full names of David Bowie’s beneficiaries including his widow, children, personal assistant, children’s nanny, business manager, lawyer and executor. It includes the exact amounts of these bequests so if any criminals scan the obituary pages for new marks, The Times will have facilitated their search. It further specifies the location of some of the real estate bequeathed to heirs. If the legatees had won the lottery, they would be entitled to withhold their own identities and remain private citizens in matters that concern no one but themselves. But the thoughtful act of responsibly providing for our loved ones before dying comes with the penalty of stripping us of our fundamental right to privacy.

Is this what the law intended? Historically, probating wills through the court goes back to English Common Law and was meant to insure that claimants and creditors would have knowledge of and access to the estate of the deceased. By going thru the courts, wills now become subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Since executors are paid to inform all those who are mentioned in the will, it is creditors who benefit most from its public nature. Why not change the law so that public death notices are mandatory and those who feel they have claims on the deceased should go to court to show cause for getting access to their will. If we object to our phone calls being harvested and monitored even for national security purposes, there are questions we should be asking about our current system of probate.

ISIS’s Black Flags Are Flying Across Europe

ISIS supporters attack police in Germany, security forces carried out a wide-ranging operation against domestic operatives of the Islamic State (ISIS).

NETHERLANDS – The symbol of the murderous Islamic State is waving in The Hague. ‘Death to the Jews,’ shout the demonstrators. Yet the Dutch government authorized the protests.

“Death to the Jews” chanted the crowd waving the black flags of the Islamic State, or ISIS as it used to be known. They were looking for new supporters for their cause, the creation of a worldwide caliphate answering to the man who now calls himself Ibrahim: a zealot too radical even for Al Qaeda who has stormed through Syria and Iraq carrying out mass executions, crucifying rivals, beheading enemies.

But these marchers were not in Syria or Iraq; they were in The Hague in The Netherlands. And their message was one tailored to the disaffected young descendants of Muslim immigrants in Europe.

“We are Moroccans,” went out the cry over a portable loudspeaker. “The French killed the Moroccans but they didn’t kill them all; the grandchildren of the few men left protest against the West, America and the Jews.”

Many of the demonstrators covered their faces with Palestinian scarves or balaclavas. “Anyone who doesn’t jump is a Jew,” someone shouted as the whole group started jumping in a scene that might have been ludicrous if it weren’t for the hateful message. “Death to the Jews!” the crowd shouted in Arabic.

MY SAY: BEST LINE AT THE DEBATE

Marco Rubio
“I do not believe that we have to destroy our economy in order to protect our environment. And especially what these programs are asking us to pass that will do nothing to help the environment, but will be devastating for our economy.”
Will he go as far as Rick Perry did and suggest we shut down the job killing, data falsifying, purveyor of junk science EPA?

On the Difficulties of the Movie Star By Kevin D. Williamson

One of the great scandals in the world of philanthropy is the fact that Mohandas K. Gandhi, the great apostle of nonviolence, was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which instead has gone to such figures as the murdering jihadist maniac Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, who has spent part of his subsequent time in the White House conducting an illegal war in Libya, reinvading Iraq, and assassinating the occasional U.S. citizen.

Timing is everything, of course. The unhappy fact is that Mr. Gandhi was not an especially effective advocate of nonviolence, at home or abroad, and he reached the height of his celebrity at a time when the world was nose-deep in blood from the carnage of the Second World War. During much of that time (1939–43) the Nobel committee had the good taste to forgo offering peace prizes. Mr. Gandhi outlived the peace-price moratorium, but not by much, and a young Hindu radical who didn’t get the nonviolence message assassinated him in 1948 (no peace prize that year, either) in revenge for the violence-plagued partition of India, in which at least a half a million people died.

Sometimes, it just isn’t your year.

The diversity racket — and it is a racket — depends entirely upon keeping prestigious, powerful, and, above all, wealthy institutions in a state of political agitation and moral panic. It’s Hollywood’s turn this time around, and the manufactured controversy is the lack of black nominees for the top honors at the Academy Awards.

Several high-profile black actors, including Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, announced that they would not attend this year’s Academy Awards, absenting themselves in protest. The black host of the ceremony, Chris Rock, will attend, as will the black president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs. Ice Cube, a black rapper and actor who is in the interesting position of having this year produced a well-regarded film about his own career starring his son as himself, scoffed at the controversy, with some appreciation for the fact that being a movie star is a pretty good life, regardless of whether one is celebrated at the very pinnacle of celebrity culture: “It’s like crying about not having enough icing on your cake,” Mr. Cube said. “It’s just ridiculous.”

Hillary’s E-mail Scandal Is Criminal; When Will She Get Her Handcuffs? By Deroy Murdock

Imagine that you own a large department store called Foggy Bottom. Your most frequent customer is a superbly connected globetrotter with some one million miles on her passport. She never uses a standard shopping basket like everyone else. Instead, she strolls in with her own gigantic, custom-made, black-leather handbag.

Quite often when this 68-year-old grandmother visits Foggy Bottom, you catch her shoplifting. Indeed, you have pried 1,340 pilfered items that magically tumbled into her black bag.

How does she get away with it? Whenever you call the police, she gives them the same excuse:

“I did not take anything marked with a price tag.”

You keep wondering, “Why don’t the cops arrest her already?”

The authorities seem to accept her unprecedented justification. But everyone believes she knows better: Just because a sweater lacks a price tag doesn’t make it free of charge.

Eventually, you learn that those price tags didn’t vanish by accident. While you tended to other patrons at Foggy Bottom, you missed members of this crafty lady’s entourage deliberately snipping price tags off the merchandise. That way, when she says, “I never walked off with anything that carried a price tag,” her flimsy rationale somehow seems marginally plausible — at least to those who want to accept it. Now, it slowly emerges, the whole thing was not a parade of pratfalls, but a conspiracy since her four-year-long crime spree began.

Having solved this mystery, at last, you call 911. You hope that law enforcement finally will haul this supercilious woman and her entire posse to jail. And yet you wonder: Will someone this powerful ever receive the equal justice she deserves?

Just Because Trump Is ‘Anti-PC’ Doesn’t Mean We Should Celebrate His Vulgarity By Jonah Goldberg

“Then there’s the fact that D.C. handles snow about as well as Bernie Sanders handles questions about the Wu Tang Clan (“Mr. Sanders, how would you describe the totality of Ghostface Killah’s oeuvre?”).

Speaking of Sanders, some wag on Twitter noted that the best thing about the run on the grocery stores in blizzard-besieged D.C. is that it gave the Beltway crowd a sense of what it will be like under a Sanders administration. I don’t want to live under a socialist president, but a silver lining would be seeing all those MSNBC hosts waiting in line for toilet paper.

D.C.’s Collective-Action Problem

Part of the problem is that there’s a tragedy of the commons endemic to D.C. during its snow freak-outs. I’m not worried that we will starve to death in our home, our corpses eventually consumed by the cats (and the cats by the dogs). My wife is Alaskan. She can make six kinds of soup from snow.

But that is precisely the way many other Washingtonians think. And so they run to the supermarkets like the kids in Red Dawn and grab enough provisions to last them until spring. That leaves sane people with a dilemma: Do you run to the store, too, not out of fear of the snow, but out of concern that the deranged masses will clear the shelves?

Irritable Trump Syndrome

And then, of course, there’s Trump.

But before I get to him, I wonder if you caught what I did above. I said I didn’t want to indulge in Acela-corridor navel-gazing, and then I proceeded to spelunk into the very kind of Beltway omphaloskepsis I condemned.

I was, loosely speaking, flirting with apophasis there. Apophasis is a rhetorical device where you bring up something while denying or condemning it. (It shouldn’t be confused with aposiopesis, which is when you . . .)

For instance, you might say, “I do not think the fact that Hillary Clinton put our national security at risk just so she could hide her illegal communications from congressional oversight, journalists, and FOIA requests should be held against her.” Or you might say, “I have no doubt that Bill Clinton is telling the truth. Though I cannot for the life of me figure out why he was pantsless at 3:00 in the morning, trying to push that goat over the fence.”

Apophasis came up on Twitter the other day because Donald Trump tweeted: “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!”

‘What Might Have Been’: The Substantive and Clarifying Trumpless Debate by Andrew McCarthy

What Rich Lowry tartly labeled “the Trumpless Debate” exposed the fracture of the Republican party’s base with a clarity that the Donald’s presence would not have allowed.

For those of us in the commentariat, the evening was a joy. It was an exhibition of substance and seriousness, a night of lively exchanges where quality candidates took shots at each other that were hard but fair. The Fox News moderators were no wallflowers, but they were clearly determined to make the night about the contestants: Questions were succinct; interruptions were reserved for moments when candidates were unresponsive or in denial over inconvenient, incontestable facts. It was a glimpse, as David French put it, at “what might have been” — without the blaring Trumpet of snark and bully bravado, it was as if Henry Gondorff had never crashed the old boys’ poker game.

But the thing is: Most people who have a stake in the Republican race are not in the commentariat. They are the people who have been ill-served by the old boys. They are no longer impressed by slick-sounding policy wonkery because they are finally on to the charade: The candidates say one thing to get elected and then do very different things once they’ve been elected.

They like Trump precisely because of the wrench he has thrown in the works. He makes the pols and the press feel as powerless as the pols and the press have made them feel. He doesn’t care about the Beltway’s rules; Trump plays by his own and invites them, vicariously, to play along.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. An Interview with Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates

The U.S. Has No Global Strategy…The former defense secretary on U.S. gains forfeited in Iraq, America’s rudderless foreign policy and the ‘completely unrealistic’ Donald Trump.
Many Americans probably had misgivings when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011, but even the most pessimistic must be surprised at how quickly things went south.

Turn on the TV news: Western Iraq, including the Sunni triangle that the U.S. once worked so hard to pacify, is in the hands of a terrorist group, Islamic State, radiating attacks as far as Paris, Jakarta and San Bernardino, Calif.

The battlefield where the U.S. spent most of its blood has become swept up into the chaos of next-door Syria. Refugees from the region are destabilizing Europe. Proxy forces, shadowy groups and national armies representing half a dozen countries are fighting on the ground and in the air. The world seems one incident away from World War III in the vacuum U.S. troops left behind—as when NATO member Turkey recently shot down a Russian jet.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates occasionally meets veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars in his travels. What their effort bought seldom comes up. “We don’t really talk about where we are today,” he says. “You have to assume it’s very painful for a Marine who lost a buddy in Fallujah to see an outfit like ISIS in charge of Fallujah again. Was the sacrifice worth it?”

Mr. Gates, along with President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, was a prosecutor of the troop surge, a decision unpopular even in the Pentagon to double down on the Iraq war in 2006. His 2014 memoir, “Duty,” which a New York Times reviewer called “one of the best Washington memoirs ever,” makes clear that the suffering of U.S. troops weighed more and more heavily on him as he served under President Bush and then re-upped under President Obama.

Today, if the mess in Iraq comes up, he tells those who served there, “You accomplished your mission. It was the Iraqis that squandered our victory.”

But Mr. Gates also believes the outcome could have been different if the U.S. had kept troops in place. Islamic State wouldn’t have spread its influence across the border from Syria. More important than firepower, he says, was having a four-star representative of the U.S. military present who could “bring Sunni and Kurdish and Shia leaders together, make them talk to each other. When that process disappeared, all the external brakes on Maliki”—Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom Mr. Gates blames for the unraveling—“disappeared.”

British Woman Convicted of Joining Islamic State Mother traveled to Syria with infant son, spent three months living with the militant group By Alexis Flynn

A U.K. court on Friday convicted the first British woman of joining Islamic State, 26-year-old Tareena Shakil, who traveled to Syria with her infant son and spent three months living with the militant group.

A jury, who heard that Ms. Shakil had once declared her wish “to be a martyr,” found her guilty of belonging to a terrorist organization and encouraging support for a proscribed group.

Ms. Shakil will be sentenced on Monday.

The case provides a rare account of how a Western woman came to be involved in Islamic State amid what authorities have said is a concerning surge in the number of females traveling from Europe to Syria and Iraq. It also sheds a light on the dilemma for authorities on how to treat such women when they return home: as victim or terrorist.

Ms. Shakil, of Burton-upon-Trent, a town in the English Midlands, was arrested by counterterrorist police shortly after her plane touched down at Heathrow airport last February. She told officers

But investigators weren’t convinced. Prosecutors told the court how a raft of evidence showed Ms. Shakil had self-radicalized even before leaving the country, and that her trip to Syria was the final stage in her plan to become a jihadist bride. In the weeks leading up to her departure, Ms. Shakil had become an ever more vocal online supporter of Islamic State online, said prosecutors. Farewell notes left for her family showed she had no intention of returning home, prosecutors said.

State Department: 22 of Hillary Clinton’s Emails Considered Too Classified to Release First emails to be entirely withheld from public; more than 1,300 have been redacted By Byron Tau

The State Department said it would launch its own investigation into whether top-secret information on Hillary Clinton’s personal email server was classified at the time it was sent or received—a dramatic reversal that comes just days before the Democratic presidential front-runner faces the first nominating contest in Iowa.

Department spokesman John Kirby said 22 documents containing highly classified information will be excluded entirely from the release of Mrs. Clinton’s archive. So far, more than 1,300 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails have been redacted, with portions blocked out, due to the presence of classified information, but this is the first example of emails being entirely withheld from public release.

Friday’s announcement is the first time State Department officials have said they have concerns about the classification level of some of the information contained on Mrs. Clinton’s server. Officials have previously said the redactions in the roughly 43,000 pages of her emails so far released were made for information that was classified only after the fact.

The Clinton campaign said the emails in question probably originated on the department’s unclassified system before they were ever shared with Mrs. Clinton.

Locked in a tight primary battle with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton now faces the possibility of another investigation, led by the department she ran, into whether she compromised sensitive or classified national-security information.