AS THE CREAM RUNS OUT

More and more evidence appears indicating that the great Self-Licking Ice-Cream Cone of the SO Mania Regime is running out of cream.  (Which is not altogether good news: a Mania running out of justification but long accustomed to getting lots of public attention and public cash is going to become increasingly desperate and ‘creative’ in finding even more ‘justification’ in order to stay on the Great Government Gravy Train.)

An article in the “Baltimore Sun” paper two days ago provides a strikingly rich and dense example of how this sort of quest-for-fresh-cream is playing out. The text of the article is here {L1].

The article announces that the FBI is “moving to change the federal definition of rape” and is doing this “for the first time in 80 years”; this is a process that will go through a subcommittee of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Service and then proceed as a recommendation to the Director of the FBI who has the final say.  The FBI wants to make sure, as well, that all the police agencies in the country are on-board with the change.

That sounds rather straight-forward, UNTIL you think for a minute (the article does not help you or prompt you in this regard): if you are changing the elements of ‘rape’ as a criminal charge in Federal law, then that’s something only Congress can do, not some ‘information’ subcommittee of the FBI or even the Director of the FBI. And wouldn’t all the police agencies in the country sort of already be motivated on their own to conform to a major change in some aspect of Federal law?

After all, the only thing that such a low-grade subcommittee could possibly do is change the parameters of what constitutes ‘rape’ for reporting purposes. That would be an in-house sort of thing for the FBI, since the FBI oversees the national crime-reporting that collects data from all the police agencies in the country.

Well, as it turns out that parameter-change is precisely the scam that the advocacies are trying to push through. They are not looking to get the criminal-law elements changed, but only  the list of actions that would now be reported as ‘rape’ for statistical purposes in the Uniform Crime Reporting system.

And the list is a doozy.

It is introduced by the sly mention of the current definition of ‘rape’ in Federal criminal law being “80 years old” (as if the mere age of it indicates that it is ‘wrong’ or ‘old’ or needs to be ‘changed’ and ‘reformed’). This bit seeks to seduce readers into imagining that anything this ‘old’ must be in need of change, update, repair or reform, and that consequently that’s ‘all they want to do’ here. This is a prime example of the advocacies’ sleazily untrue claim that they only seek to ‘reform’: as I mentioned in the immediately prior Post, what they require is not a reform but rather a genuinely anti-constitutional overthrow of fundamental American legal principles, enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  

“Since 1927 rape has been defined as forcible male penile penetration of a female – which excludes cases involving oral and anal penetration, where the victims were drugged or under the influence of alcohol, and male victims”. The Federal law’s elements of the crime, therefore, distinguish it from other forms of sexual assault and abuse. (You may recall the prior Post’s recommendation to check Article 120 in the current version of the Uniform Code of Military Justice to get a grasp of just how large a laundry list of defined sexual actions is covered, in all their individual complexity and diversity.)

Essentially, the advocates (of radical women’s groups more than  any ‘sex offense advocacy’ groups) are now agitating for and demanding  that the entire diverse panoply of sexually assaultive or sexually abusive actions now be classified as ‘rape’ pure and simple.  

(This would, as best I can make out, only apply to the ‘reporting statistics’; apparently the Federal criminal elements would still be governed by the complex and diverse crimes enumerated, for example, in UCMJ Article 120; so, if you were somehow arrested on a Federal charge of sexually abusive behavior by means of oral sex,  you would not be charged in court with ‘rape’; rather, if the radical women’s advocacies get their way, your act would be ‘reported as’ rape by the police to the FBI and would count as a ‘rape’ when the FBI compiles its Uniform Crime Report, and – but of course – when the advocacies head to the Hill to brandish their ‘numbers’ in order to demand more funding.)

The ‘New York Times’ is helping to spearhead this gambit with the slyly helpful observation that the US has the most narrow definition of rape and it’s “archaic”; unlike Sweden, the article burbles, although anyone familiar with last year’s Julian Assange dust-up now knows what happens when Socialists and Feminists and SO Mania Advocates and career-savvy prosecutors and police honchos and honchettes figure they can create and surf a Mania Wave with the help of a pandering national government.

This might seem, to the rational mind, rather too much of a muchness. Why effectively falsify your most primary official crime-reporting statistics?

And the answer to that profoundly sane and useful question is: because there has been major fall-off in the number of rapes and therefore the Great Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone is running out of cream.

Not that the women’s advocacies are saying so up front.

Instead you must wade through muck such as this: “In order for the public to combat violence in our communities, we need to know where it exists and what it looks like” – this from an advocate somebody who would like to be seen as simply trying to “spur reform” and “has taken a leading role in the push to update the FBI’s definition”. [italics mine]

This is not ‘updating’ and it most surely is not ‘reform’. This is a sly, deliberate and desperate attempt to increase the numbers by fiddling with the definition. Which has been a hallmark of SO Mania matters from the get-go, with advocates for the Mania and pandering legislators forever screwing with definitions in order to jazz up (or ‘sex up’, you should pardon the expression) the scare quotient.

And you notice that the women’s advocates didn’t go to Congress and simply demand that the Federal criminal law elements be changed; apparently their ability to get Congress to frik and frak this and that element of American law, society, or culture upon demand isn’t what it used to be.

So what they will settle for is the appearance of hugely increased amounts of their marquis bread&butter  outrage – rape – while also trying to spin this whole thing to the public as just another in the long long long list of long overdue ‘reforms, updates, and changes’ which their advocacy has heroically and wisely introduced into American law, culture, and society over the past three or four decades.

I think not.

Notice too that while they claim to be ‘updating’ the rape matter, they also have moved another marker by claiming to be focused on “violence” – which, of course, they need to “combat”, which thus demonstrates also just how the militarization of domestic law and law enforcement through what I call the ‘weaponizing’ of sex is an absolutely basic objective of this type of agenda.

Long before the FBI and other agencies were smashing down doors looking for ‘terrorists’ they were authorized to go looking for SOs. (And, never forget, Congress, in even the earliest and most basic of the SO Mania Regime Enabling Laws, specifically exempted all law enforcement agents from liability if they got too zealous in their ‘well-intentioned’ pursuit or apprehension of an actual or suspected or possible or potential or probable or otherwise SO.)

The Baltimore Police Commissioner, one Frederick Bealefield, was on hand (apparently for the press conference which handed out the ‘talking points’ which formed the uncritical basis of this Baltimore paper’s article here) and declared himself piously “in support of the change”.

What would this “change” conceivably accomplish? The Commish cheeribly bleats that: “Revising the definition of rape would result in a higher and more accurate number of rapes that are reported nationwide each year”. [italics mine] So it’s about screwing with the definition to get the numbers higher, since they appear to be falling off.

But it gets even more interesting.

Apparently Baltimore’s police, along with a bunch of other US cities (including Philadelphia, which you may recall from previous Posts seemed so oddly interested in fanning the Catholic priest-abuse sub-Mania), have been increasingly classifying allegations of rape as “unfounded” (whether this is the result of police courage or realism or ‘insensitivity’ is a matter the advocates prefer that you not think about).

The Commish goes on: “As we in Baltimore know all too well, the accurate and complete reporting of sexual assault is critically important to build victim confidence and trust, as well as to understand the nature of the problem nationwide.” 

BUT then how are you going to understand any problem by screwing with the definition?

And clearly, the scam here is to conflate ‘rape’ with all instances of any sort of ‘sexual assault’ (or ‘abuse’, I bet) AND THEN on top of that, call them all ‘rape’.

How on earth is this going to enhance public understanding? Or elite understanding? Or anybody’s understanding?

I would answer that the ‘understanding’ thing is sleazy and manipulative agitprop claptrap (dutifully mouthed by the Commish – see below) designed not to inform nor to stimulate public thinking but rather to stampede the public with another round of deceptively inflated outrage-claims.

Because what they are going for here is for the FBI to ‘officially’ consider ALL sex offenses to be ‘rape’. ‘Rape law’ and ‘sex law’ will now be one; all sex will be rape – just like the feminist tracts of the 60s and 70s claimed.

The Commish also becomes the carrier-pigeon for a whole bunch of other classic victimist Mania tropes. So for example, if you don’t immediately ‘believe’ the (self-declared) ‘victim’ as soon as she tells her story, or even if you try to ask some questions to see if indeed this is a false report, then you are wrecking the victim’s “confidence” and “trust”.

But if by this time the nation’s police are starting to realistically reflect the fact that some – and maybe a whole lot – of false reports could spring up in such richly-manured legal and procedural earth as the advocacies and their political enablers were providing in the Mania … if the police are starting to wise-up or have the courage to actually do their jobs instead of play the dummy role the advocacies insist that they play, is this a bad thing?

And how many of the ‘false reports’ are ‘underreported’? Might we multiply that number by a factor of ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million?

Continuing with the sleaze, the article – doubtlessly parroting the PR handout  - reports that the FBI statistics released this month indicate that there were 84, 767 “sexual assaults” nationwide last year, “5 percent fewer than in 2009”.

As I have noted with the effect of the 2^nd John Jay Report this past May in regard to the Catholic priest-abuse ‘crisis’ (the Report declares the crisis phase to be over and the numbers of allegations declining), declining numbers are the nightmare bane of any advanced-level advocacy, which depends on high numbers for cash from the government or from contributions, for status, and – not to put too fine a point on it – for a job.

But the slyly constructed comeback to unpleasant facts is: the facts don’t matter because the numbers are “under-reported”. But you can’t know that any more than you can know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or how many angels are in a ‘legion’.

And again, notice that suddenly they are talking about “sexual assaults” and not about “rape”; and the SO community needs no tutoring in how broad and basic the definitional net of ‘sexual assault’ has always been since the Mania began.

As the women’s law advocate unwittingly admits (or else she figures people are so dumb they won’t listen too carefully or think too much): “We know that data drives the allocation of resources … the undercounting of serious sex crimes that has been taking place for the last 80 years probably means that the resources law enforcement should have to fight sex crimes is not adequate”.

Say what?

Note the same scam here that exists in the Rome Statute’s 2002 inclusion of sex-crimes as crimes-against-humanity in its category of war-crimes and crimes-against-humanity: is “serious” going to be defined by the act itself OR by the effects it is claimed to create in the alleged victim? Because if ‘seriousness’ is going to be defined (according to Correct victimist and Mania doctrine) by the claims of the alleged victim as to how her life was somehow largely or totally derailed, then any sex involvement can (or must) be “serious” and the advocacies can then carry on their ‘war’ against just about all sex. Which should keep the cream flowing, and advocacy jobs and ‘purpose’ and ‘mission’ and ‘war’ rolling on until the Second Coming. (Or until the government cash completely dries up.)

And it will all be ‘violence’ and all ‘serious’ and all ‘rape’.

You are now trying to define any sexual assault as a “serious sex crime” (why doesn’t she use the word “rape”?). You are trying to blame the country, the government, the public, and no doubt the patriarchy for not doing this whackulently inadvisable thing, and for  not-doing it 80 years ago. (What principled and conscientious jurist or cop or attorney or legislator would have made such conflations and assumptions 80 years ago?).

You are looking for more government cash. Who isn’t as the intensifying realization that the government and the country are really really running out of cash sets urgent alarm bells jangling in the brains and boardrooms of every organized advocacy in the Beltway (lobbyists are paid by the corporations that hire them; advocacies are paid by the government with public money).

You are slyly calling for huge amounts of government cash ‘for law enforcement’ although you know damned well that major chunks of those funds are going to get siphoned off to pay your salary and fund your advocacy gambits.

And yet you are already making charges that those same under-funded and overworked law-enforcement agents are ‘insensitively’ dismissing too many claims of rape as ‘unfounded’ and you have brought in the (much more politically reachable) Feds to beat up on the local cops.*

Why? Because there just can’t be that many false allegations of ‘rape’ and that many deliberately lying ‘victims’.  Feminist and advocacy Theory simply doesn’t allow for it, so the cops out on the front lines must be screwing things up. There can’t be that many females taking advantage of the (huge and glaring) loopholes in rape-law and sex-law in a time of Mania in order to get themselves off some personal hook or put somebody they’re mad at on some awful legal hook. That’s not the way the Theory says that it will work. Yah. Right.

The FBI’s Unit Chief for the Uniform Crime Report says that any change would be “an unfunded directive” – meaning that states and cities aren’t going to get any money to start screwing with their reports and procedure in order to give the Feds something that the Feds can then give to an Administration desperately seeking to pander to any demand of any ‘base’ on the run-up to what looks like a tough re-election campaign. Sooooo ... there's not a lot of loose cash around the Beltway, and the pols are getting even more nervous about having their names attached to the Mania, so the feministical Maniacs are going for the bureaucrats and for definition-diddling that doesn't require cash or any heavy-lifting from Congresspersons who are beginning to act like Reich biggies in late 1944 (i.e. they'd rather not be involved and are eying the exits as tactfully yet urgently as they can).

And the feminists – so long the gray eminences behind the Mania Regime, with their half-sisters, the victimists – are playing the Administration’s and the Democrats’ anxieties for all they’re worth.

Helpfully, the article notes that “officials say they expect sexual assault numbers to jump across the country if changes are adopted”. The article rather unhelpfully doesn’t give any context: are the city and local cops worried that this new round of definition-screwing is simply going to saddle them with huge amounts more of these mushy ‘reports’ and cases? I don’t think any of the cops are going to be happy at all. And who doesn't remember that once some Reagan-era apparatchiks redefined ketchup as a vegetable, then healthy-lunch numbers in schools across the country suddenly 'jumped'?

The Feds, of course, will be happy if the Administration is happy.

And yet too the advocacies have already put the local cops on the hot-seat, suddenly claiming that large numbers of females  - termed ‘victims’ even though no proof of that status has yet been found – seeking  to get one of these things off the ground have been “pressured to recant” by local detectives.

There are soooo many possibilities as to why that might be, none of which the article nor the feminists who handed the reporter his PR talking-points consider worth going into. Are there really so many more attempts to make a false-report of rape and the local cops are simply working up the courage to label them accurately as such? Are there really many reports which are initially called – by the ‘victim’ – rape that when described to the detectives actually contain only the elements necessary for sexual assault? And are the detectives then trying to get the ‘victim’ to change the claim from ‘rape’ to some form of sexual assault (perhaps in order to give her claim a better chance in court?) Or have the advocates simply pulled a couple two-three handy horror-stories out of the hat and are trying to pass them off as standing for (pick one: hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, other) of such instances where the local police did not simply leap up, buy her a latte, and send the SWAT team forthwith to her boyfriend’s last known address?

I don’t want to make light of things but it’s really hard reading this type of stuff and not getting a sense of outrage myself at how shamelessly and deliberately and ruthlessly We are all being dissed by advocates who think all Citizens are lumps and that everybody should jump through their hoops, and fund them with tax money on top of it. These advocates are ‘partying like it’s 1999’, as used to be said of financial hotshots and CEOs in the early ‘00s, and still think the Mania is in its salad days of the 1990s.

Verrry ominously, the Baltimore Commish (whose city was one of the many attacked by the advocates) bent over backward to abase his department and his officers: the “problems” that the advocates went to the Feds and complained about “developed over time and were rooted in officers’ lack of understanding of the complexities of sex-crime investigations”.  Also that since the advocacies started up this new round of outrage, all the cops in that unit were re-assigned and a bunch of new ones brought in.

But if police have been under the Mania gun for at least 20 years then are We to imagine that the Mania hasn’t gotten around to training them in Correct Mania procedure? It can’t be.

It’s more probable that even though they had been given the Correct Mania Protocols at the outset of the Mania, the cops on the front lines were discovering that these sex-crime ‘reports’ were wayyyy too mushy and that there was too-big a possibility that in the end the whole ‘report’ would turn out to be false.

And of course the cops on the front line probably know now what their newly-enraged advocate-enemies can’t allow anybody to figure out: that “the complexities of sex crimes investigations” is a treacherous and outrageously deceitful advocacy code phrase for the frakkeries you have to commit as a government agent or law enforcement officer in order to bridge with your own career the awesome abyss between a) what genuine Constitutional criminal procedure calls for (which includes reaching truth and accuracy as to the report), b) what is required in order to pretend that the advocacy Protocol ‘reforms’ are just minor adjustments rather than blatantly anti-Constitutional and truly Alien corruptions, and c) what is necessary to get some decent police work done with the resources on hand and the level of promise the case does or doesn’t provide.

To which, but of course, the Correct Mania comeback is that ‘the victim’ trumps all of the foregoing.

To which, most sensitively and respectfully, I must just say No.

Additionally, the Baltimore Commish actually brought “women’s’ groups” in “to help reform the investigations” (code for: take the victim’s word for it, ask her no questions, and use your badge and gun to go get the guy she has accused forthwith – and  on the way back stop off and get her a latte, on your own dime.)

The number of major US cities that the advocates claim are guilty of all this not-Correct police procedure suggests strongly to me that many police departments have simply come to their own conclusion that the Mania Protocols are unworkable and probably dangerous and will siphon off wayyy too many police-hours for little return.

This is not a matter (shades of Ronald Reagan’s old game-plan!) of it being forty-years-ago-all-over-again. These major cities are not hold-outs from the pre-Mania era decades ago. Rather, these cities (and I bet there are lots more of various sizes) have simply drawn the conclusions they have drawn on the basis of actually trying to implement the advocacy Theory (erected into Mania law and procedure by pandering politicians) and finding that the Theory doesn’t work and that the advocacy claims can be trusted even less than the substantial chunk of self-declared victim claims.

As has always been their gameplan, the national feministical advocacies have gone to the federal government, over everybody else’s head, and forced those hapless and desperate pols (who are in such a desperate situation now partly because they caved in to the advocacies’ demands decades ago in the first place) to make all the bad local grown-ups do what they want done.

How long is this going to go on?

The article concludes with this feminist advocate saying “We need a paradigm shift away from focusing on the victims and what they’ve done wrong, and instead looking at the serial nature of the offenders”.

But a) the Correct thing to do (if I recall the Memo correctly) had been that you did focus on the victim … but clearly that “focus” was intended as a code-word to mean ‘you accepted everything the victim said’ and you did not apply the false-reporting statutes to the victim even if you discovered that you had indeed been given a false-report and you did not raise an eyebrow if she showed up a month or a week later with a fresh ‘report’.

And b) HOW in the American Legal Universe can the police conduct a criminal investigation if they are forbidden by the government from robustly investigating all possibilities as to what’s driving the case and what really happened and what’s really going on … ?

And on what grounds is every accused sex-assaulter a “serial offender” - which, by amazing coincidence, was precisely the neat conclusion that the radical feminist tracts loved to make back in the day: men are biologically equipped to seek sex and all sex is rape so therefore all men are incorrigible rapists by their very nature. (See? It's logic and science! Wheeeeee!)

And so once again, I propose to you that it is becoming increasingly obvious that  i) feminist rape-law ‘reform’ is not reform but rather is the corruption and overthrow of utterly fundamental Western jurisprudential and constitutional principles and procedures and that all such ‘reforms’ come from an Alien and incompatible legal Universe; and that ii) the intensifying lack of government cash is hugely agitating the long-phat organized advocacies, who are responding by trying to re-incite the salad-days of the Mania with ‘fresh reports’ of outrages; and that iii) the declining numbers of the genuinely serious crimes are also agitating the advocacies, who may have ‘successed themselves out of business’ , so they are now trying to diddle with definitions in order to drive up numbers to prove that they still need to be taken seriously and kept on the taxpayers’ payroll;  and that iv) they are finding at least some responses from politicians increasingly caught between the Scylla of having no funds to dole out and the Charybdis of desperately needing to placate every ‘base’ that makes a demand; and that v) the advocacies are now so alarmed that they are willing to turn on the police themselves in order to come up with ‘fresh outrages’.

NOTES

*It’s curious that whereas in the early days of the Civil Rights movement the Feds were brought in as the clean-and-decent guys who would slap-down the rabidly misguided local cops of the Jim Crow South, yet today in the age of Identity Politics it is the Feds who are the tools of the pandering Beltway, coming in to enforce whackulent Politically Correct Theory, ‘valorized’ by Beltway pols and bureaucrats, against realistic and hard-pressed local cops just trying to hold things together in an increasingly fractalized and dissolving society and culture.