Categories
Accountability crime and punishment government transparency Popular responsibility

Five for Ferguson

Ferguson, Michael Brown, body camera, police, lapel camera, rights, accountability, abuse

Michael Brown is dead. No video can bring him back.

As the world remembers, Brown was the unarmed 18-year-old black man killed in a violent 2014 altercation with Officer Darren Wilson, who is white — making Ferguson, Missouri, famous.

Or rather, infamous.

With little information, folks quickly picked sides. Some claimed Brown was gunned down in cold blood with his hands up, yelling, “Don’t shoot.” After seeing footage from a convenience store surveillance camera, which showed Brown seeming to strong-arm an employee and steal cigarillos* mere minutes before the fatal police encounter, others placed the blame on Brown.

Subsequent rioting left dozens injured, seventeen businesses torched and millions in property damage. Meanwhile, President Obama’s Department of Justice found Officer Wilson’s actions justified.

However, had Wilson been equipped with a lapel camera, that footage would have enhanced finding justice. Moreover, the knowledge that the public could see the truth of what happened might have prevented the riots and recriminations.

More information is better.

That’s why the best news of all is this: on April 4, three weeks from today, the people of Ferguson will vote on The Public Video Recording Accountability Amendment to Ferguson’s City Charter. The charter amendment mandates that officers wear lapel cameras while on duty and sets sensible rules for allowing maximum public access.

The campaign needs your help to alert Ferguson voters about the election by mailing information on the ballot measure. For instance, studies demonstrate that not only do police behave better when wearing cameras, but so do the citizens with whom they interact.

Would you give five dollars for Ferguson?

Please help bring a better day for justice and transparency.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Over the weekend, more video surfaced from the convenience store as part of a documentary entitled, “Stranger Fruit,” which suggested Michael Brown had made a drug deal at the store, and not stolen anything. A St. Louis County prosecutor disputed the filmmaker’s interpretation, and released more footage.

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Thought

Mary Wollstonecraft

Men . . . submit every where to oppression, when they have only to lift up their heads to throw off the yoke; yet, instead of asserting their birthright, they quietly lick the dust and say, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Women, I argue from analogy, are degraded by the same propensity to enjoy the present moment; and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindicaton of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter 4.
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Today

Gold

On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, ending the long practice of bimetallism by placing the United States Treasury — and banking and currency — on the gold standard.

Categories
Accountability folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Almost Right

Politifact, Snopes, facts, fact check, bias, propaganda, lie, truth, interpretation, analysis

The popular fact-checking sites, such as Snopes and Politifact, cannot stick to the facts.

When Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) predicted that a recent repeal of “three regulations” would save “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs,” Politifact rated the statement “Half True,” on the grounds that, well, not all experts agreed.

In 2015, objecting to a reported low figure for the Clinton Foundation’s grants to other groups that actually did things, PunditFact gave a “Mostly false” judgment despite admitting that the statement was “technically true.”

NBC engaged in a similar move, admitting to the technical truth of a claim about unemployment, but said it was “extremely misleading.”

Snopes found reasons to tag a “Mixture” rating onto the simple fact that Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub mass murderer, was a registered Democrat. He was*.

The funny thing is, these sites are “Almost Right”: fact checking isn’t enough.

Facts can be true, but deceptively used.

Unfortunately, these “fact-checkers” repeatedly fail to clearly distinguish matters of fact from matters of context. They could offer a double analysis and double rating: True/False for the factual; Clear/Caution, to cover interpretations and implications.

Why don’t they?

Perhaps for the same reason the CIA is planning a Meme Warfare Center — to provide a “full spectrum meme generation, analysis, quality control/assurance and organic transmission apparatus”** — instead of a Center for the Analysis of Popular Argument: the idea is not to increase knowledge.

It is to maximize influence.

Which leaves us on meme patrol, ever vigilant.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* What Snopes did was speculate that the terrorist perhaps changed his mind after initially registering a decade before the shooting.

** I wrote more about this in Sunday’s Townhall column (from which this Common Sense foray is adapted; see relevant links here), and first broached the goofy/ominous CIA proposal with Saturday’s featured video.

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Thought

Edmond About

Man is a divine creature, because he is the final product of the creation, because Nature has formed nothing more intelligent and more capable of improvement than he. Each of us enters at birth into the heritage of a sovereignty which renders his person inviolable. In principle, if not in fact, we are all equal, because we all share the same august character. We are all free-born in this sense, that no one has a title to subject another to his will by force.

Edmond About, Handbook of Social Economy; or, The Worker’s A B C, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., translated from the final French edition, 1873), p. 3.

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Today

1862

On March 13, 1862, the U.S. federal government forbade all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.

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links

Townhall: Deep State, Shallow Media, and Meme Warfare

We like to think we have the facts on our side. When we are confused, or do not know what to do, we seek facts. The Fourth Estate says that it is ideally situated to find those facts for us, and disseminate them.

But, as we all know now, “Fake News” is a real problem. Sometimes untruths are deliberately spread. Other times it is the result of error. But, whether a factoid be true or not, it remains a “meme,” replicable in our many heads often regardless of truth value.

But if you wonder if you are paranoid for thinking that the media’s established fact-checkers are pointing at your head and shooting … memes … well, you aren’t paranoid enough: the government shoots too.

Click over to Townhall. Then come back here. For memes about memes about memes:

Categories
Today

Two Criminals

Disgraced New Yorkers

On March 12, 2009, financier Bernard Madoff pled guilty to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in U. S. history. One year earlier to the day, in the same city, New York, the state’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned a mere two days after reports had surfaced that he was listed as a client in a high-end escort/call-girl prostitution ring. The cause of freedom is advanced with every criminal nabbed and every hypocritical illiberal politician disgraced.

Categories
Thought

Mary Wollstonecraft

Surely there can be but one rule of right, if morality has an eternal foundation, and whoever sacrifices virtue, strictly so called, to present convenience, or whose duty is to act in such a manner, lives only for the passing day, and cannot be an accountable creature.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindicaton of the Rights of Woman (1792).
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video

The Deep State Exposed

The latest WikiLeaks exposure has now presented us with a fuller picture of our government than we had before. The trendy term for this, right now, is “the Deep State.” But we are talking, here, merely about the secret wing of the administrative state that has been building up for over a century, conceived by Progressives (scornful of the Constitution) and fed by Republicans and Democrats.

Here is a fairly thorough overview of what is in #Vault7 by a famous British YouTuber:

https://youtu.be/D6BdaoyJe-Q