Ring doorbell company fined millions of dollars for privacy violations

Well knock me over with a feather:

The FTC today announced it would be sending refunds totaling $5.6 million to Ring customers, paid from the Amazon subsidiary's coffers.

The windfall stems from allegations made by the US watchdog that folks could have been, and were, spied upon by cybercriminals and rogue Ring workers via their Ring home security cameras.

The regulator last year accused Ring of sloppy privacy protections that allowed the aforementioned spying to occur or potentially occur.

...
 

In the most egregious case, one employee went out of his way to view "thousands of video recordings belonging to at least 81 unique female users," according to the FTC. A coworker reported this behavior to her supervisor, who it's alleged initially said this snooping wasn't that strange until he realized the rogue employee was only reviewing videos of "pretty girls."

The fines work out to $50 per effected Ring customer.  Don't spend it all in one place.

Law Enforcement takes down major ransomware site

This operation is pretty impressive:

Notorious ransomware gang LockBit's website has been taken over by law enforcement authorities, who claim they have disrupted the group's operations and will soon reveal the extent of an operation against the group.

...

But Europol has reportedly taken credit for shutting down LockBit, so perhaps Operation Cronos really has disrupted the gang’s operations.

If that's the case, this action will be welcome. LockBit is prolific and vicious: we've reported it attacking a children's hospital, Infosys, sandwich chain Subway, and many other attacks.

Reportedly there have been multiple arrests, data has been found that is expected to lead to more arrests, and multiple crypto currency accounts have been seized.  Eleven countries worked together on this which is also impressive.

We will see how much impact this has but Lockbit is one of the biggest ransomware schemes out there.  

And this isn't the only one of these takedowns in the last couple of months.  Well done.

 

President's Day - Best and Worst Presidents

It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but we're taking it today.  But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up Borepatch's annual bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.

Top Five:

#5: Calvin Coolidge

Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.

#4. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase).  He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.

#3. Grover Cleveland. 

He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now.  He continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.  This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."

#2. Ronald Reagan

He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above).  He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash.  It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.

#1. George Washington

Could have been King.  Wasn't.  Q.E.D.

Bottom Five:

#5. John Adams.

There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment.  It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2.

#4. Woodrow Wilson.

Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918.  He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy.  The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W. Bush) says all you need to know about them.

#3 Lyndon Johnson.

An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.

#2. Franklin Roosevelt.

America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle.  At least Mussolini met an honorable end.


#1. Abraham Lincoln.

There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to.  Lincoln saw to it that 10% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history.  Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit.  Needless to say, Progressives adore him.

So happy President's Day.  Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad.  Yet.

When the White Hats are actually Black Hats

Not cool, dude:

An Atlanta tech company's former COO has pleaded guilty to a 2018 incident in which he deliberately launched online attacks on two hospitals, later citing the incidents in sales pitches.

Under a plea deal he signed last week, Vikas Singla, a former business leader at network security vendor Securolytics – a provider to healthcare institutions, among others – admitted that in September 2018 he rendered the Ascom phone system of Gwinnett Medical Center inoperable.

...

After all of the events had transpired, Securolytics began emailing potential clients regarding new business opportunities, citing the publicized attacks.

 Quis custodiet ipsoes custodes, indeed.

 

DoD Education Chief of Staff arrested for human trafficing

Well this isn't good:

The chief of staff for Department of Defense Education Activity schools in the U.S. was arrested last week during a two-day human trafficking operation in Coweta County, Georgia, according to local authorities.

Stephen Hovanic, 64, of Sharpsburg, Georgia, was arrested Nov. 15 in a sting that netted 25 additional suspects on charges related to prostitution as well as drugs, weapons and warrants, according to the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office and its Police to Citizen Portal website.

Ugh.

Our institutions are being run by the insane

The Catholic Church has more compassion for suicide victims than Science Fiction fandom does.  Guess why this is. 

Really, there is Church doctrine that backs this up.  The Asperger's types running modern intellectual organizations have yet to progress to this same level of enlightenment.

And it didn't use to be this way.  The Left was a powerful force in intellectual circles; so powerful, in fact, that they would kick intellectual sand in the faces of today's intellectual left.

You have to wonder how these people became so emotionally impoverished to do this.  You also have to wonder if they are proud of what they did.  Clearly, they do not listen to the great, old time Country Music. 

Go read both of the top links.  We are being ruled by intellectual and moral midgets.

A message to commeter Birdchaser

You will remember the header at the cop of the comment box: Remember your manners when you post.

You didn't.  Boy, howdy.

Your comment didn't make it through moderation because of your very disrespectful and profane attack on me.  This is my place, not yours.  I don't care that you feel really really strongly about Donald Trump.  Cathedra mea, regulae meae.

I've only banned one person in the 15 year run of this blog (my abusive ex-wife).  Congratulations - you're number two.

Go away and don't come back.  All comments from you will be nuked without being read.

Unplug your Ring cameras

And maybe your Alexa as well:

America's Federal Trade Commission has made Amazon a case study for every cautionary tale about how sloppily designed internet-of-things devices and associated services represent a risk to privacy – and made the cost of those actions, as alleged, a mere $30.8 million.

The regulator on Wednesday charged, via the US Dept of Justice, two Amazon outfits with various privacy snafus.

The e-tail giant’s Ring home security cam subsidiary was accused of “compromising its customers’ privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers’ private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections, enabling hackers to take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras, and videos.”

This report is absolutely damning.  Ring employees accessed thousands of videos - the report goes into detail about one employee looking at "Master Bedroom" camera videos of dozens of "pretty girls".

If you have any hesitation at all about unplugging (especially) internal house cameras, read the whole link.  You'll want to take a shower afterwards.

And Ring cameras in your bedroom?

[blink] [blink] [blink]

The report discusses how Amazon employees listened in on customers' children and retained the recordings in violation of the law.  Good grief.

My recommendation is to ditch all this spyware ASAP.  Ugh.

On the Internet nobody can tell if you're a dog

Politeness is a sign of dignity, not of subservience.

- Theodore Roosevelt 

But everybody can tell if you're an asshole.

Divemedic posted his stance on the vaccine: get it if you think it's right for you, don't get it if you don't think it's right for you.  A more sensible position is hard to imagine.

And then The Internet appeared in his comments section, with SumD00d telling him he was wrong (well, I think that's what he said because the comment was fairly incomprehensible; hey, it's The Internet, amirite?).

And while the comment was moderately incoherent, the attitude of the commenter was anything but.  Commenter "Hedge" is an asshole.  He may (or may not) be a dog with a keyboard but he is unmistakably an asshole with one.

Sigh.

I am very grateful indeed that the commenters here are almost always respectful and intelligent - and the commenters on the Dad Jokes are funny as hell.  I almost never need to step in to tell folks to settle down and mind their manners - maybe only 2 or 3 times in the 13 years I've been here.

People think wrong when they think that the Internet gives them anonymity.  It doesn't.  It gives pseudonymity, which is not at all the same thing.  If you post under a pseudonym (like Hedge and I both do), you still develop a reputation.  Quite frankly, you can't comment anonymously here, so anything you say in the comments here will add to (or in rare cases detract from) your reputation.

Divemedic certainly doesn't need me to fight his fights, that's not the point of this post.  I love  comments and the two way (or multiple way) discussions we have here.  But I'm not going to tolerate Internet Assholes like Hedge here.  Cathedra mea, regula meae - my place, my rules..  If you don't like it, don't stop by.  This really isn't very hard.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy. 

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom Of Life 

The Ghosts of Waco look down and smile

White House to withdraw Chipman nomination to lead ATF. 

There will be all sorts of compost once the Powers That Be go Green

Over at Miguel's place (I think it was J.Kb - hey guys, can you get a tag to show who posted what there?) we get a link to ravings at the UK Guardian about a Climate Change Final Solution:

The insane people at The Guardian published an article that sets up the historical precedent for that.

Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet
Laying waste to land scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

His empire lasted a century and a half and eventually covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface. His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green.

Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader’s bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – roughly the quantity of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption – by allowing previously populated and cultivated land to return to carbon-absorbing forest.

Killing 40 Million people for the planet.

This fiendishly clever plan of theres will indeed lead to a lower population because people like me will put .45 caliber holes in the foreheads of genocidal eco-fascists like the Guardian writers.  Think of all the compost!

Sheesh, it's like these people don't ever listen to what they say.  If they did, they might think something like "Hmm, am I sounding like a deranged, genocidal fascist?  Maybe we should focus on something incremental, like bike paths."  Instead, they'll talk themselves into my proposal, above.

And these morons probably think they're the smartest kids on the block.

And to show that this isn't a one-off, a "Black Swan", an oddball proposal - but rather a recurrent theme from the Genocidal Eco Left, here are some other genocidal Save The Planet sooper smaht plans that we've mocked here, dredged from the Borepatch archives:

Save The Planet - Starve The Children

Kill The Children For Mother Gaia

Friday Follies: KillThe Children For Mother Gaia Edition

Kill The Dog for Mother Gaia

Cut Health Care To Save Mother Gaia

Global Warming Causes Totalitarianism

Oh, and that last one is a hoot - the link there goes to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  This sort of genocidal eco fascism is entirely mainstream in western medical establishments.  It seems that there must be some sort of education plan in action, to make all this easy to get along with.  Maybe something like this ...

UPDATE 18 April 2021 11:19: Very good reply posted over at The Silicon Graybeard.

Mitt Romney is a jerk

He says he'll vote to convict Trump.  What a small, petty man.

Of course, we've known he's like that for a long, long time.

Update from ASM826: I had to go back to my old blog to find it, but here's what I thought of Mittens in October of 2012.

If Romney Needs My Vote, He’s Screwed

I got slammed in the comments, told I couldn't be reasoned with. I still like this post, still think we were better off without him.

Miami-Dade police body armor

There's a new design being issued, it seems.

pic.twitter.com/mguvDh70lZ

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) December 9, 2019

It looks like Gallagher's case isn't the only one that the Navy JAGs screwed up

Remember how the JAGs screwed up the Gallagher case?  Remember how testimony was dorked up, how the prosecution's "star" witness admitted that he was the one who did whatever "crime" was committed?  Remember the prosecution's misconduct?  Remember how they all gave themselves medals for what a bang-up job they did?  Remember how President Trump revoked all the medals and pardoned Gallagher for the single chickens**t charge they got to stick?

Well guess how their prosecution of the U.S.S Fitzgerald's CO went:

The trial would be allowed to go forward, but the judge admonished Richardson and his deputy, Moran, for violating a sacred tenet of military criminal justice: to not poison the system by making their opinions clear. By doing so, any potential jurors would know exactly what the top brass wanted.

A month later in January, the judge handed the Navy a final blow: The admiral in charge of the criminal proceedings was disqualified for improperly using his position to help the prosecution gather evidence against Benson.

The Navy’s case had collapsed, but more than three months dragged by before it finally dropped the remaining charges against Benson.

[blink] [blink]

And it gets worse, with the post clusterf**k ass covering from the Navy brass:

(The day the charges were dropped, ProPublica had informed the Navy it would be publishing a story detailing the extensive, troubling mistakes made by the Navy’s leadership in Benson’s case.)

The next day, the Navy took one more swipe at Benson, this time with a public letter of censure. The secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, wrote an admonishment that repeatedly used the same words and phrases, such as “failure” and “unworthy of trust,” basically restating the charges the Navy was unable to bring to court, without an avenue for appeal. In an email, Spencer’s spokeswoman declined to provide details about why he wrote the letter.

One last potshot from the E-ring on the way out the door.  And while I don't know if this is true or not, it sure has the ring of truth to it:

One officer said in an interview that he’d decided that he’d opt to retire before commanding a ship again.

“We all realize we’re completely going at this alone,” another officer said, “and are expendable in the eyes of those who only crave rank authority and shirk responsibility.”

Commanders still talk about how [then Chief of Naval Operations] Richardson was publicly saying safety first while privately urging commanders to be more daring and take more risks. One skipper boldly asked Richardson at a luncheon how his position squared with prosecuting commanding officers “when something goes wrong.” Richardson, said some in attendance, sidestepped the question.

Sullivan, captain of the USS Whidbey Island, said all captains accept that they are responsible for what happens aboard their ships — even if they are asleep. But, she said, it “was very shocking” to see Navy leadership decide to hold the commanders criminally accountable. “I’m willing to sacrifice my life; that’s my job. But it’s hard to do that when you don’t think the organization has your back.”

In all, Sullivan said, “The herd is spooked.”

While I can see Sullivan wanting to put this on a dysfunctional Navy bureaucracy, what we see is a dysfunctional Navy bureaucracy.  Second verse: same as the first.

Richardson is no longer CNO which looks like a very good thing.  The SecNAV is gone, too - also a good thing.  But the JAG corps needs to be nuked from orbit, and the Navy brass needs to get purged of the ass-coverers.  Holy cow, it looks like Barack Obama was successful in fundamentally changing America's Navy.

Thirty years after the Berlin Wall

The Usual Suspects® are ignoring the anniversary, but that's to be expected.  After all, pas d'enemies a gauche, n'est-ce pas?  But the cold reality of that monster regime is ever green, with explicitly socialist presidential candidates and large numbers of this Republic's youth thinking that socialism - and even communism - is the bee's knees.

I wrote this ten years ago on the 20th anniversary of the fall, hard on the heels of the Newsweek Cover story "We're all socialists now".  The Useful Idiots® are still idiots today.  They're also useful, to some.

Originally posted November 10, 2019.

The Line

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

- Cicero

I used to be a leftist, proudly "progressive."  No more. I no longer have the stomach to sleep with evil, even evil in the name of the greater good. In all of the retrospectives about the fall of the Berlin Wall this score of years ago, something is missing. Recognition of tyranny is there (mostly). Recognition of how (mostly) the once unfree populations have embraced freedom is there, too (mostly).

What's missing is any description of the depth of evil that was our enemy. Col. Jeff Cooper saw it, and wrote of it in To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak The Truth:

Starting at its western edge, The Line is composed of several strata. First comes the actual linear boundary, surveyed and marked to the centimeter. There is no fence here. Free people can walk right up to it - but they do not step across it. Death looms. Some ten paces beyond the marked boundary, to the eastward, is the outside fence. It is a single barrier some ten feet high, electrified and sown with directional mines set to fire along its inside surface. Beyond the outside fence is a band of dead ground some 100 meters in width, cleared of life and planted at random with pressure-release anti-personnel fragmentation mines. When the snow melts in winter thaws these go off erratically in the sunshine - "Lenin's serenade."

At the inner edge of the dead ground are the dogs - German shepherds chained to an overhead trolley that allows them to run parallel to the inner fence but not back into it (electrocution) nor forward away from it (explosion). ...

At intervals watchtowers loom fifty feet into the air, manned and equipped with enhanced-vision devices, cameras, weapons, and release controls for packs of killer dogs which can be set free at command behind the inner fence. ...

Behind the inner fence lies a belt of Zombie-land five kilometers deep. No one moves here except those whose duties demand it. The fields produce. Roads and roofs are mended. There is an occasional dilapidated vehicle in motion. At first glance it seems a viable countryside. On closer inspection, however, it is death-in-life. There are perhaps two lighted windows where there should be scores. Such villages in which there are lights are inside electric fences. The sickening effect grows as the sun sets. ...

With exquisite cruelty the very existence of The Line is concealed from those it contains. The east border of the 5 km Zombie zone is marked - from the east - simply as the border. Good slaves do not cross it, not because it is fearful to behold, but because they are good slaves. Bad slaves sometimes do cross it, but because they do not know what they face they usually die.

My staff sergeant guide on this occasion told me of a case he witnessed. A young woman, apparently driven to desperation, dared to cross the eastern 5 km line and lead her small child west towards liberty. As she approached the inner fence, the orcs in the watchtower loosed the dogs.

"I stood there with a rifle in my hands, but I was not allowed to shoot." He said, "I hear those screams every day. The mother's were louder than the child's. They were long and very high. They drowned out the growling of the dogs.

"For a while."

The worker's paradise was not above selling its slaves to the west:

Between 1964 and 1989, 33,755 political prisoners were ransomed. A further 2,087 prisoners were released to the West under an amnesty in 1972. Another 215,000 people, including 2,000 children cut off from their parents, were allowed to leave East Germany to rejoin their families. In exchange, West Germany paid over 3.4 billion DM – nearly $2.3 billion at 1990 prices – in goods and hard currency.^[117] Those ransomed were valued on a sliding scale, ranging from around 1,875 DM for a worker to around 11,250 DM for a doctor. The justification, according to East Germany, was that this was compensation for the money invested by the state in the prisoner's training. For a while, payments were made in kind using goods that were in short supply in East Germany, such as oranges, bananas, coffee and medical drugs. The average prisoner was worth around 4,000 DM worth of goods.^[118] The scheme was highly controversial in the West. Freikauf was denounced by many as human trafficking but was defended by others as an "act of pure humanitarianism";^[119] the West German government budgeted money for Freikauf under the euphemistic heading of "support of special aid measures of an all-German character.

I'm thankfully not the only one to notice this strange amnesia, and judge. And to find today's leftist intellectuals to be wanting:

The first person shot dead at the Berlin Wall was 24 year old Gunter Litfin, as he tried to swim across the Spree River on August 24, 1961. A year later, East German guards shot 17 year old Peter Fechter as he tried to scale the wall, and left him to bleed to death in that barren and desolate area of open land east of the Wall.
The last person known to be killed at the Wall was 20 year old bartender Chris Gueffroy, shot ten times for good measure on February 5, 1989. 
...
I find it obscene that [New Zealand] National Radio broadcasters Geoff Robinson and Lloyd Scott this morning recalled the Berlin Wall, its twenty-eight years of bloodshed and the 1200 slaughtered East Germans, with wistful nostalgia. They even appeared to excuse the East German secret police, the Stasi, as people just doing their jobs.

Not just judged to be morally void, but intellectually as well:

In 1922 Ludwig Von Mises explained that socialism would eat itself and the people whom it enslaved – that it couldn’t plan, it couldn’t produce, that it couldn’t calculate -- that it was and always would be both morally depraved and economically unsustainable. Sixty-seven years later he was proven emphatically correct when the illusion that was socialist Eastern Europe collapsed, and the symbol of its totalitarian state was torn down.

The barest minimum qualification for an intellectual is to examine and test your first premises. To reject them, if they do not model the world effectively. Philosophers all the way back to Plato would hold today's left in contempt, with their hope that some how, this time it will be different.


Here's a different way of saying the same thing:



Such a strange forgetfulness by the Moral Titans of the left: chattel slavery, Schießbefehl ("Order to fire" - shoot to kill), thousands of dead, the souls of millions crushed. For their own good, of course. The People must be protected from the people.

So strange that the left cannot take this moment to reflect on actual evil, and to condemn it without mistakes were made and for a noble cause excuses, without clinging to that most slippery word "but". They believe - and I generally concur - that they are good people, motivated to do good. But they flinch from examining the actual truth. They are behind their own mental Iron Curtain, trapped by an unexamined world view. Behind their own, intellectually-imposed Line. 

The east border of the 5 km Zombie zone is marked - from the east - simply as the border. Good slaves do not cross it, not because it is fearful to behold, but because they are good slaves.

Tear it down.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

27 years ago at Ruby Ridge

Alex emails to point us to an excellent retrospective on the anniversary of Ruby Ridge.  There's a lot there that I hadn't known - the Fed.Gov paid out almost $4M to the survivors of the siege, that "Cadillac" Deval Patrick found no government wrongdoing (this was before he was Governor of Massachusetts), and that the Agents involved in the shootings all got commendations.

[spit]

And Lon Horiuchi's whereabouts is currently unknown, although he seems to no longer be the marketing face of H-S Precision firearms.  The ghost of Vicki Weaver whispers to us that we should not forget her, or Horiuchi, or H-S Precision.  In that spirit, allow me to roll this out from many years back:

No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.

- Dr. Sam Johnston 

Mr. Horiuchi is well advised to get used to it.

If you've never heard this story, go read Alex's post and check out the Resistance Library they have there which has much food for thought.  Also think about the Deep State, and how long it's been around.  Remember, Ruby Ridge happened under the Presidency of George H.W. Bush.  Of course, we've known for a while that he's a dirty commie, and the Deep State runs deeper than anyone talks about.

Snerk

Why I let my NRA membership lapse

Yeah, Insty and Uncle both linked to his post on the NRA's troubles, but it's a really good one.  His invoking of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is spot on, and you should read the whole thing.

What I would add is that it's rare that you see the Iron Law expressed in, well, graft as blatantly as Wayne LaPierre and Company have done.  Millions and millions of our dollars have gone to enrich the inner circle, not to advance the Second Amendment.

It was 2014 when I let my membership lapse, because the only thing I heard from the NRA was Wayne asking for money.  Where were they on rolling back restrictive gun control laws?  A lot of the time they were out front on new restrictions - remember Wayne LaPierre muttering about "Mental Health restrictions" a long time before the new hotness that is "Red Flag" laws started getting passed?  I do, and believe that the post I just linked was the first time I invited him to die screaming in a crotch fire.

So the only thing that I'd add to Lawrence's excellent post is that we really won't miss the NRA when its gone.  Yes, it's sad that Wayne drove it into the ground, yes, it's a crying shame what they did to a once great organization.  But here we are.  Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

I'll drive an electric car when the police drive them

A lot of people resist the idea of "smart gun" technology that the Police won't use, you should be suspicious of electric cars (coming soon in a Green New Deal near you!) if the Police don't drive them:

RIVERSIDE — A probationer who led Riverside police officers on a dangerous, high-speed pursuit in a luxury electric sports car was arrested after the plug-in car’s batteries died Sunday night, Feb. 17. The pursuit, which wound its way from Riverside’s Eastside neighborhood into Orange County, ended in a felony stop on the 91 Freeway.

The owner had an app on his phone that let him track the car's location in real time.  He relayed this info to the Police, who kept the thief on the run until the car's battery died.  Of course, the bad guy looks pretty much like what you'd expect:

Now it's great that the thief was caught but the point is that a lot of folks want to mandate the use of electric vehicles without really giving much thought for what people need or want.  If these cars are such a great idea, why aren't Police cruisers battery powered?

The scandal isn't just in the Catholic Church - it's also in the Media

Peter describes the Catholic Church's situation in Pennsylvania, cutting through the fog of words to the heart of the crimes:

The reality of that abuse in the hearts and minds and souls of the victims is simply indescribable.  I invite all of you to try to put yourselves in the shoes of a child as he or she (in the context of the Catholic crisis, usually he) is stripped naked, fondled, abused, raped . . . and then told, by the perpetrators - those he's been taught by his parents are spiritual authorities - that it's his fault, or that he mustn't talk about it, or that God will be angry if he doesn't allow future abuses.  That reality is so ghastly, in the mind of a child, as to defy description. [Peter's emphasis]

There is a reason that this is a crime.

I was living in the People's Republic of Massachusetts in 2002 when a similar scandal broke, and I'm struck by the difference in media coverage between then and now.  16 years ago, the coverage was almost hysterical, and went on for months.  Today, it looks like this will have dropped from the headlines by the end of the week.  That's something to make you go "hmmmm".

There is a story that is not being told here.  Eric Raymond went into this way back in 2002 in The Elephant In The Bath-House:

That there is a pattern in the national media of political correctness and spin on behalf of preferred `victim’ groups isn’t news, nor is the fact that homosexuals are among those groups. But get this: Richard Berke, the Washington editor of the New York Times recently said “literally three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals”. There you have it in plain English; gays run the “newspaper of record”. Berke made these comments before a gay advocacy group — not merely admitting but outright asserting, as a matter of pride, that the Times engages in gay-friendly spin control. And it has already been well established by statistical content studies that the national media tend to follow where they’re led by the Times and a handful of other prestige newspapers, all broadly similar in editorial policy.

If you want to read more about Richard Burke, here's a place to start.  It may be that I remember much more intense news coverage then because I lived at ground zero.  The Boston Globe was all over this story, but perhaps it was considered a local story by the editorial board at the Times.  Pretty clearly, this is going on today.  But there's very likely a reason that the editorial board wants this to go away:

Gay men, or at least the sort of university-educated gay men who wind up determining what’s on the front page of the New York Times and spiking stories like the Dirkhising murder, know these facts. How surprising would it be if they interpreted most victims’ charges of abuse as a product of retrospective false consciousness, implanted in them by a homophobic and gay-oppressing culture? By suppressing the homosexual identification of most of the accused priests, gays in the media can protect their own sexual and political interests while believing — perhaps quite sincerely — that they are quietly aiding the cause of freedom.

Media bias most clearly manifests itself not in slanted reporting, but rather in what is never reported at all.  The murder of Jesse Dirkhising wasn't reported at all, while the murder of Matthew Shepard was front page news for weeks.  But Raymond dissects the politically correct spin and cuts to the heart of the matter, reaching the same conclusion that Peter does:

The trouble with this comforting lullaby is that, even if NAMBLA is right, coercion matters a lot. As Ms. Eberstadt reports, the pederastically and pedophilically abused often become broken, dysfunctional people. They show up in disproportionate numbers in drug and alcohol rehab. They have a high rate of involvement in violent crime. Worse, they end to become abusers themselves,perpetuating the damage across generations. 

... 

It may turn out that the consequences of sympathizing with NAMBLA are almost equally ugly. If a climate of `enlightened’ tolerance for consensual pederasty and pedophilia tends to increase the rate at which boys are abused, that is a very serious consequence for which gay liberationists will not (and should not) soon be forgiven. The homosexual gatekeepers at the Times may be making themselves accessories before and after the fact to some truly hideous crimes.

And this is where we come back to the priestly-abuse scandal. Because a theme that keeps recurring in histories of the worst abusers is that they were trained in seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with gay-liberationist subculture. Reading accounts of students at one notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not been an important enabler of priestly abuse.

This has been known for decades.  None of this is a surprise to anyone who has remotely been paying attention, whether that "anyone" is a Bishop or on the NYT Editorial Board.  And Raymond now circled back to where Peter stands:

Now it’s time to abandon the catch-all term abuse and speak plainly the name of the crime: sexual coercion and rape.

Speaking plainly is the foundation of communication, and anyone who will not speak plainly presumably does not want to communicate.  The same words and spin are being used today as were used back in 2002.  The fog of words never allows the expression child rape because that would be a strong wind of clarity, blowing away the fog of political correctness.

Let me say again: None of this is a surprise to anyone who has remotely been paying attention, whether that "anyone" is a Bishop or on the NYT Editorial Board.

I agree 100% with Peter that the enablers in the Catholic hierarchy need to go.  But the Media that airbrushes these crimes from the newspaper is as complicit in the crimes as the Bishop who quietly reassigned a priest to a different parish.  Both did it for what they perceived as a higher purpose, and both are just one more flagstone laid on the road to some other child's personal Hell.

I encourage you to read both Peter's and Raymond's articles in full.  The institutional rot goes deep.