Internet Scofflaw

When Indians complained about the British interfering with suttee (the Indian practice of burning widows alive on their husbands’ funeral pyre), General Charles Napier (1782-1853) told them:

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. . . Let us all act according to national customs.

Great Britain used to bring civilization to the far corners of the globe. Now they can’t even bring it to their own country:

The sexual abuse of about 1,400 children at the hands of Asian men went unreported for 16 years because staff feared they would be seen as racist, a report said today.

Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, the council commissioned review into child protection revealed. And shockingly, more than a third of the cases were already known to agencies.

But according to the report’s author: ‘several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist’. . .

In two cases, fathers had tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused – only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene.

This went on for sixteen years with the full knowledge of the authorities, who would rather allow thousands of children to be raped than called racist.

And that fear seems to persist even in the wake of this horror. Even in a story that centers around the horrifying consequences of hyper-sensitivity to racism, this BBC story can’t bring itself to say precisely what the authorities were being hyper-sensitive about. The story has no photographs of the perpetrators, it never uses the word “Pakistani” or even “Middle Eastern”, and it only even uses the word “Asian” (60% of the world’s population) as part of a quotation.

Oh, and by the way:

No council employees will face disciplinary action in a town where 1,400 children suffered sexual exploitation in a 16-year period, the local authority’s chief executive has said.

Glenn Reynolds adds:

Perhaps they need to consider the possibility that there are worse things than being thought racist. Of course, if that idea were to spread, a powerful tool of social control would vanish.

Alas, over sixteen years every one of them must have considered that possibility at some point. And rejected it.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds adds again:

The legal system is, ultimately, an ancient bargain: Renounce your mob violence and blood feuds and we will provide you with justice. It could be argued that such a default as this calls the whole bargain into question, and justifies self-help along ancient lines.

Hugo Chavez is dead, but his policies that have ruined Venezuela live on. Rampant inflation leads to price controls, which lead to shortages, which lead to rationing, which leads to draconian rationing. Chavez’s heir is determined to carry “Bolivarian” economics to the bitter end:

Venezuela’s food shortage is so bad the country is mandating that people scan their fingerprints at grocery stores in order to keep people from buying too much of a single item.

President Nicolas Maduro says a mandatory fingerprinting system is being implemented at grocery stores to combat food shortages. He calls it an “anti-fraud system” like the fingerprint scan the country uses for voting.

UPDATE (9/2): Is the phrase “critics said” really necessary here?

Critics said the new system is tantamount to rationing and constitutes a breach of privacy.

Joe Biden has something to hide:

Vice President Joe Biden’s office stonewalled a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for his travel expenses, according to Ronald Kessler’s new tell-all book on the Secret Service, The First Family Detail.

Kessler, a former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post investigative reporter, filed a FOIA request in April 2013 with the Air Force for the details and costs of Biden’s personal trips. . . According to Kessler, Biden’s then-deputy counsel Jessica Hertz took over the FOIA case from the Air Force and ordered it not to release the 95 pages of documents it had compiled in response to Kessler’s request.

They had already compiled the records, and Biden’s counsel ordered them covered up. Why would he cover up his travel expenses? Here’s why:

The records were eventually released to Kessler by an Air Force officer who “was outraged that Biden’s office would taint the Air Force by politicizing its FOIA process.”

The records show Biden’s trips—which include multiple daily flights between Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, Delaware—cost taxpayers nearly $1 million between January 2009 and March 2013. This does not include crew costs or the cost of ferrying Biden between the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory and Andrews Air Force Base.

“Every three or four weeks when it’s warm, Biden gets up there on Saturday and then will fly back on Air Force Two,” a Secret Service agent told Kessler. “While Air Force Two is sitting on the tarmac at Andrews, he goes up and plays golf with the president at Andrews Air Force Base, gets back on the plane, and flies back to Delaware. . .”

An Air Force source also told Kessler that Biden regularly schedules single events in Arizona so he can fly there on the public dime to play golf.

This is a guy who poses (laughably, but determinedly) as the common man, a man who takes the train between Delaware and DC. In fact, he takes his personal Air Force plane every day, and likes to jaunt about the country to play golf.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving can be bought off.

Under the Obama administration, “FOIA Denial Officer” is an actual job title.

(Via Instapundit.)

A leaked document from the campaign of Michelle Nunn, the Democrat running for Senate from Georgia, is frank about their plans to win by cobbling together a coalition of various minorities.

According to my skim of the document, it almost completely ignores issues and policy positions. The only three ways that issues come up at all are (1) in the context of groups of people to appeal to or at least to neutralize (that is, farmers, gun owners, and small business owners), and (2) a schedule of when to decide what Nunn believes on various issues (too bad for “rural issues”, which somehow comes in #22 on a list of 21 issues on page 62), and (3) Obamacare’s cancellation notices, which (page 141) are totally not at all a bad thing.

It’s been clear for some time that the Democratic party has nothing to offer the people at large, and is merely a coalition of tribes, but it’s striking to see it all written out so frankly.

The latest from the “most transparent administration in history”:

A key ObamaCare official involved in the rocky rollout of Healthcare.gov likely deleted some of her emails that are now being sought as part of an investigation into the problems by a House committee, Fox News confirmed Thursday.

The Department of Health and Human Services informed House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa in a letter Thursday that some of the emails belonging to Marilyn Tavenner, who leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, may not be “retrievable.” . . .

[T]he department believes that was due to sloppy records-keeping not an attempt to conceal information.

Of course. It’s never an attempt to conceal information. This administration’s good record has earned the benefit of the doubt.

John Kerry says that children in Africa are starving, and Africa should refrain from developing new farmland. No joke:

During the Africa Summit “Resilience and Food Security in a Changing Climate” panel, Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience that “8,000 children die every day” and in sub-Sahara Africa, one in four suffer from chronic hunger.

Then a few minutes later, he stressed how creating new farms would cause too much carbon pollution so they need to discourage more farm land.

He was for food before he was against it.

His argument was that we should improve yield from existing farms, rather than create new farms, as if agriculture was an either-or proposition. At some point idiots become functionally indistinguishable from monsters, and Kerry is well past that point.

What gets me about every internet censorship story is how they always deny using political criteria to block websites, when that is quite obviously exactly what they are doing. As just the latest example:

I also spent some time on the phone with Hyatt representatives. Well, most of that time was on hold, actually, but I did eventually get two bright, human voices. Both of them assured me no political line was being enforced.

Oh good. Your criteria blocks Drudge, Instapundit, and Power Line, while allowing Daily Kos and Talking Point Memos, but since you say it’s not political, we won’t worry about it.

The Washington Post reports:

Over the past 2-1/2 years, the Obama administration has published hundreds of rules — on how wheelchairs should be stowed aboard U.S. aircraft, how foreign trade zones should be regulated, how voting assistance should be provided for U.S. citizens overseas and so on.

There’s a problem, however: Technically speaking, these and about 1,800 other regulations shouldn’t be in effect, because they weren’t reported to Congress as required. Yet there is little that lawmakers or the courts can do about it. . .

Under a 1996 statute, most federal rules are supposed to be reported to the House and Senate in paper form and to the Government Accountability Office electronically. But since the start of 2012, that hasn’t happened for many of the regulations put out by the Obama administration, either because of bureaucratic oversight or because they were considered too minor to be reported. . .

But there’s another catch: Congress also barred such rules from judicial review. Two federal appeals courts and two district courts have upheld this principle even when the regulation in question was not submitted to Congress as required. Since Congress cannot pass a resolution of disapproval for a rule until it receives it, this means neither lawmakers nor the courts can step in and demand that agencies submit the required paperwork.

(Via Instapundit.)

Apparently, so believes Alison Grimes, Democrat running for Senate in Kentucky:

Democratic Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes says Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system prevents Hamas terrorists from tunneling into Israel.

Grimes was asked about foreign policy and the conflict between the Israelis and Hamas during a recent interview with the Lexington Herald Leader. . . “The Iron Dome has been a big reason why Israel has been able to withstand the terrorists that have tried to tunnel their way in,” Grimes was quoted as saying.

(Via Hot Air.)