Category — Philosophy

It’s pretty clear that Natalie Malonis was behind last Friday’s leak of the CASA report (actually filed by the Jeffs’ guardian ad litem) that allegedly discloses Jeffs’ personal diary entries and photos reporting on her “marriage” to Ray Jessop. Malonis, after (apparently) approving of the leak to serve her own political objectives, suddenly moved Monday to “seal” the leaked CASA report. Deseret News reports this morning (July 22):

On Monday [July 21], Malonis filed papers seeking to have the report prepared by the Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) sealed, saying, “The report and attachments contain sensitive information pertaining to allegations of sex abuse of a minor.”

Malonis acknowledged that the timing was a little late but said she was trying to protect her client. “It would prevent any further dissemination, at least from the court,” she [said] Monday night.

“Trying to protect her client”? A “little late”? “Further dissemination at least from the court?” What’s really going on here?

It’s all part of a cynical, illegal plan, coordinated by the State of Texas, aided and abetted by a nationwide crime syndicate that Georgia State Senator Nancy Schaefer calls an Empire Built on Taking Children. Their immediate objectives? Salvage the power of Texas CPS, defend the child-snatching industry, get rid of pesky Jeffs’ defense attorney Alan Futrell, and run the FLDS out of the State by inflaming the public with sensationalistic slices of data no matter how unreliable. This has been the CPS pattern from the beginning.

But why, if you want the public to see all this stuff, would you move to seal it after first revealing it? Because, arguably, the leak was illegal and violated Malonis’ duties to represent the best interests of Teresa Jeffs. By moving belatedly to seal it, Malonis gives the CPS-collaborator Texas courts an excuse to let Malonis off her own legal hook. More on the hook, below. [Read more →]

The 50,000-strong American Physical Society this week re-opened, then not-so-smoothly tried to shut down, debate over whether evidence for anthropogenic global warming — “Thropo Glo Wo” to conserve syllables — really is “incontrovertible” as the APS has previously claimed.

In the June 2008 edition of APS’ newsletter Physics & Society, the Editor wrote:

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are very likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

The newsletter is posted on the APS website, but the APS quickly tried to hide this all-to-obvious family disagreement, posting the note (above) on its homepage. Funny that the APS would raise the “non-peer-reviewed” status of its own newsletter to refute the easily- and widely-verified assertion that real scientists (as opposed to Al Gore) disagree over how much “thropo” there is in “glo wo.” We’re glad to see this scientific iceberg begin to melt. [Read more →]

Raila Odinga (pictured, right, with Barack Obama in 2006) has admitted signing a Memorandum of Agreement, on August 29, 2007, with Kenya’s National Muslim Leaders Forum (NAMLEF) promising to share government power in exchange for Muslim support in Kenya’s violently contested 2007 presidential elections. Odinga is a cousin of Barack Obama for whom Obama campaigned in 2006.

On February 24, 2008, I reported that the agreement Odinga signed was this one, in public circulation as early as November 9, 2007, posted on the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya’s website :

Despite NAMLEF and Odinga claims (and Snopes and Truth or Fiction silliness) to the contrary, circumstantial evidence — detailed below — still suggests this may be the agreement that Odinga signed and that a later version, published on November 27, 2007, is a fake. (Notably, Barack Obama’s own “Fact Check” website does not mention the name Odinga. I’ll let readers interpret Obama’s Odinga omission.) [Read more →]

Can you say “cover-up”? Somebody’s lying in West Texas — in addition to the usual pathological CPS propaganda muppets.

Several weeks ago, I passed along a May 22, 2008 report from ABCNEWs quoting a “statement” by Texas Ranger Leslie Brooks Long. According to the statement, before Judge Walther signed the infamous fraudulent search warrant authorizing entry into the YFZ Ranch, a different Schleicher County judge “refused” to sign it. The ABCNews story remains on the website. Here’s the verbiage as of July 1, 2008, at about 5 pm EDT: [Read more →]

The Texas CPS child kleptocracy includes an elaborate web of vendors, not all of which are funded equally. Our research department — kbp — is curious about a Janel Voss who appears on the current list of Texas DFPS vendors with “active service contracts” exceeding $100K. Does Janel have any connection to Chief CPS investigator Angie Voss, up to her neck in the FLDS mess? We’d be delighted to hear from anyone who knows more about Janel, including Janel herself. (See update on Janel, below.)

Also newsworthy is that Baptist Child and Family Services — Johnny-at-the-YFZ-Ranch with an armada of official Baptist buses, back on that fateful night in April — has no less than eleven (11) such $100K+ contracts. In an earlier version of the list, BCFS was showing only eight. Rewards of loyalty? Any wonder that they were so quick to respond to CPS’s call to spirit off those “abused” FLDS kids? Money, power, religion and CPS. It’s a killer combination for Texas families.

Prairie Fire Journal documents the extensive “command and control” involvement of BCFS in the FLDS affair and poses pointed questions: [Read more →]

Dan Balz reports in his Washington Post blog that Huckabee’s “closing speech [in Iowa] . . . was long on values” and “filled . . . with stories about himself and his family [that] conveyed an underlying message of morality and responsibility . . .”

While Huckabee issued no “calls for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion,” he “used story-telling to remind the audience that none of them are free agents in deciding right from wrong.” (Emphasis added.) With this odd turn of phrase, Balz segues into an equally odd story about

one of [Huckbee's] sons, who was apparently difficult at a young age and who was left behind at home one day while the rest of the family went out. When Huckabee returned, his son presented him with a cake he had just baked — a cake that turned out be inedible.

His son, attempting to interpret unfamiliar phrases in the recipe, decided that “a dash of salt” meant a cup of salt — and in doing so, ruined the cake. The audience was in stitches as Huckabee described the result, a cake no human could eat, but as he said, if you set it outside, the cows would lick it for a week.

This story, to me, doesn’t seem that funny. I guess maybe you had to be there to see the humor. How old do you have to be to know that a “dash” isn’t a cup? Whatever.

Then came the message. “My son did not set out to do anything that turned out so horrible,” he said. “His motives were pure. His actions were admirable. He was dedicated to the task. And he intended in every way to do something good. But he made one colossal mistake. My son had made his own definition of what a dash meant…. When we start defining right and wrong with our own definitions…no matter how well intentioned we are, no matter how sincere, the result is a disaster.”

Looking past the revealing awkwardness and circularity of the rhetoric (”made his own definition,” instead of simply “defined dash for himself,” and “defining right and wrong with our own definitions” instead of “defining” ), Huckabee’s simplistic moral absolutism is striking. Many have speculated about how Mitt Romney’s religion might affect his conduct in office. What about Mike Huckabee’s?

Who is to define right and wrong in a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” if not each of us who is, individually, “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [including] Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Can such a nation — whose very essence is wrapped up in cultural, political and religious pluralism — survive a chief executive who so boldly denies the agency of man? Could such a simpleton-executive effectively represent the interests of the United States in negotiations with leaders of nations who do not share his personal interpretation of right and wrong?

Juxtapose Huckabee’s absolutism with this:

11 For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so . . . righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. . .

13 And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away.

In other words, we owe our very existence to the duality in nature and eternity. Without the dark we could never recognize or appreciate light. No cold, no hot; no bad cakes, no good cakes; no war, no peace, and so forth. In this sense, Fogarty’s “Don’t You Wish it Was True” is a nihilistic fantasy. Thank God it’s not true.

14 . . . [T]there is a God, and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.

15 And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter.

16 Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other. . .

27 Wherefore, men [and women] are . . . free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death . . . (emphasis added)

These insights are courtesy of the Book of Mormon, translated by the first Mormon presidential candidate, Joseph Smith. How does all of this relate to the choice of a U.S. President in 2008? Wearing my law professor hat, I’ll answer the question with a question:

How should Americans expect a president — whose interaction with others and the world around him is informed by the doctrines set forth above — to behave differently from one who, in contrast, is utterly convinced that the only possible “right and wrong” in the world is his and that men are, ultimately, creatures without agency sent to Earth not to act but only to be acted upon? Whose recipe is most likely to produce a palatable political cake — Romney’s or Huckabee’s?

John Fogarty’s latest album, Revival, begins with a wistful ballad whose lyrics run like this:

I dreamed I walked in heaven just the other night
There was so much beauty so much light . . .

An angel took my hand
Said you don’t have to hurry
Got all the time in the world don’t worry . . .

But if tomorrow everybody was your friend
Anyone could take you in
No matter what or where you’d been
But if tomorrow everybody had enough
The world wasn’t quite so rough . . .

He said the worlds gonna change and it’s startin’ today
There’ll be no more armies no more hate . . .

And all the little children would live happily
Ther’d be singin’ and laughter and sweet harmony . . .

But if tomorrow everybody under the sun
Who’s happy just to live as one
No borders or battles to be won
But if tomorrow everybody was your friend
Happiness would never end
Lord Don’t you wish it was true

It’s fun to speculate about what the world would look like if this or that seemingly small event had not happened or, alternatively, happened differently. Today, the world wonders what things might have been like if Benazir Bhutto had survived to lead Pakistan. Don’t you wish it was true? (Not if you’re Ralph Peters.) But speculatin’s fun anyway.

History offers tantalizing what ifs, but no mulligans or do-overs.

What if, on the afternoon of November 9, 1620, Master Jones of the Mayflower had carried his Pilgrim passengers south to the Hudson River (their original destination) instead of north around Cape Cod? There would have been no Plymouth Colony, no meeting between Miles Standish (who, by most accounts, was a brutal thug) and Massasoit and, probably, no King Philip’s War. The relationship between English settlers and “local indigenous peoples” (they usually just call themselves “Indians”) may have been entirely different.

What if, roughly 200 years later, on July 2, 1863, Confederate General John Bell Hood had disobeyed his orders at Gettysburg and, instead of charging stupidly — if courageously — straight up the rocks surrounding Devil’s Den, had gone “to the right” and rolled up the Union flank as he almost certainly could have?

In 1864, Abraham Lincoln was locked in a close re-election campaign, desperate for a major military victory to win enough votes to stay in office. Few school kids nowadays learn that it was only a month or two before the election that Lincoln’s electoral fortunes began looking up, starting with Sherman’s torching of Atlanta. Before Atlanta fell, the odds were heavily against Lincoln winning a second term. If he didn’t win, the Democrats were poised sue for peace with the Confederacy.

What if, in that situation, Jefferson Davis had left the siege-tamer Gen. Johnston in charge of the Atlanta’s defense instead of replacing him with the hard-charging-guts-and-glory Gen. Hood? I once helped a colleague run an EMBA simulation of the battle of Atlanta. The conclusion of the simulation: If Johnston had stayed in charge, Atlanta would have weathered Sherman’s siege, Lincoln would have lost the election, and today there would be (at least) two separate countries occupying the territory of the United States. Eventually, the South would have abandoned slavery on its own, but it may have happened more gradually. We weren’t the first to speculate on this question.

There is, however, another “what if” scenario involving the Civil War that few commentators have pursued. My first post ended with the suggestion that if Joseph Smith had escaped martyrdom in 1844 and had won the presidency (not as farfetched as some may think) there may have never been a Civil War. What if? A key element of Smith’s campaign platform was a plan to buy the freedom of the slaves in the South by selling public lands in the western territories. Lord, don’t you wish it was true?

The fate of millions often turns on what seem at the time, to ordinary people leading their ordinary lives, unseen or utterly insignificant developments. In a future post, I’ll tease out what might have been, in 1844, and what it may tell us about the 2008 presidential election. I’ll also take a shot at Heidi’s comment about why it would never have made sense for George or Mitt Romney to publicly challenge the now-abolished ban on blacks holding the priesthood and dismember Jason L. Riley’s article, one smelly piece at a time.