He analyses a series of lies by Mrs Clinton relating to her off-site storage of classified information on not one, but many insecure devices, and then quotes the law:
"... the simple admission that she did not turn in all of her work-related documents – for whatever reason -- was an open admission that she was in violation of U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 101, Section 2071, Paragraph a: which in fact is a felony. And of course, if you’re running for President, a felony looks bad on the resume."
"(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."
But that crack about a résumé is wide of the mark. What Mr Whittle should have quoted is the next paragraph (emphasis mine):
"(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States."
So, if this is proved against Mrs Clinton, no application is needed or wanted.
I'm not American and if I were I should have a hard time choosing between Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump, for different reasons. However, in my view Trump is a symptom and Clinton part of the malaise. The USA and the UK, as well as other Western countries, are in a systemic crisis foreseen long ago by the late Sir James Goldsmith:
The theatre of the Presidential candidates' debate may make good emo-TV, but the underlying issue of untrammelled "free trade" and its socio-economic effects has its own narrative, irrespective of the Godzilla-versus-x franchise. It seems from reports of last night's set-to that Mrs Clinton is for it and Mr Trump, like President Coolidge's preacher re sin, is "agin' it".
It's still possible, of course, that the egregious Mr Trump could win the national vote and lose the Presidency, thanks to the workings of the Electoral College - he wouldn't be the first.
Time for the real democracy that you and I love so much. Perhaps, if we little Brits could have a referendum on EU membership, Americans could have one on TPP, TiSA and all the rest? After all, the EU is just a scale model of globalism. And then, like us, you could have the fun of watching whoever takes the leadership try to get out of the plebiscite's result - or be thwarted and subverted in attempts to honour it.
I was getting ready to go down the Ecuadorian Embassy behind Harrod's and ask for asylum - move over, Julian Assange - but June 23rd took me by surprise. In Churchill's words after Alamein: "We have victory - a remarkable and definite victory. A bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers."
Cling on to hope, and remember it's not about them, it's about you.
As we waited for a traffic light on upper Broadway, I saw a sporting extra headlined with the score of the game. The green sheet was more real than the afternoon itself--succinct, condensed and clear:
PRINCETON CONQUERS YALE 10-3
SEVENTY THOUSAND WATCH TIGER TRIM
BULLDOG
DEVLIN SCORES ON YALE FUMBLE
There it was--not like the afternoon, muddled, uncertain, patchy and scrappy to the end, but nicely mounted now in the setting of the past:
PRINCETON, 10; YALE, 3
Achievement was a curious thing, I thought. Dolly was largely responsible for that. I wondered if all things that screamed in the headlines were simply arbitrary accents. As if people should ask, "What does it look like?"
"It looks most like a cat."
"Well, then, let's call it a cat."
My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis--a molding of the confusion of life into form.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Bowl (1928)
An unusually long quote but the context is important - an American football game - muddled, uncertain, patchy and scrappy to the end, but nicely mounted now in the setting of the past. And here again is the conclusion Fitzgerald's character draws from all the tidying up so that everything is nicely mounted.
My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis--a molding of the confusion of life into form.
Not particularly easy to generalise as an insight into the essentially artificial nature of achievement because there are obvious caveats. Eliminating hunger globally would be more than a mere placing of emphasis. So expanding Fitzgerald’s observation to wider achievements is not so easy. As well as the caveats it requires a kind of lateral cynicism, a willingness and even a desire to step away from the social clamour and focus on the artificial aspects of achievement. Perhaps it is also easy to see such an attitude as overdone, as envy or misanthropy taken too far.
And yet... and yet all achievement is a placing of emphasis because it must be. We have to define what counts as achievement and what does not, even if we are eliminating hunger or aiming to cure cancer. We have to emphasise the necessary qualities of achievement before it counts as achievement, even if that emphasis is perfectly obvious to the entire world.
Staying with sporting achievement - suppose the rules of soccer were to be changed. Smaller or bigger pitches, a different number of players, changes to the scoring, kick-ins instead of throw-ins, no offside rule. Whatever we do we have to say how the game is to be won or lost, we have to define the achievement of winning by a placing of emphasis. As we all know the emphasis on winning has become so overblown that even the idea of football as a sporting contest seems naive. The emphasis has shifted.
A more tricky example might be Jeremy Corbyn winning the general election for Labour in 2020. That would certainly be a remarkable achievement by conventional standards, yet the man probably doesn’t expect to win. His notion of achievement may be centred around a different placing of emphasis, shifting the Labour party towards the more totalitarian politics he and his supporters favour.
The internet is a remarkable achievement by conventional standards, but again we could step aside so that this too becomes a placing of emphasis. The power of almost instant global communication is emphasised over a range of more sedate alternatives such as talking, doing and taking part. This does not imply that the internet is a malign influence. It merely reminds us that popular emphasis is merely that – emphasis - and that one achievement often precludes another.
That's a very good question. In the late fifties and early sixties many of the British musicians who were part of the 'beat boom' were greatly influenced by America's blues singers and soul singers and this influenced the way the music developed. Some of the more pompous music journalists at the time were scornful of these 'white' boys trying to sing in the style of their idols saying that they were not 'authentic' whatever that means.
In response to such silly journalism and possibly agreeing with them, you never quite know with Vivian Stanshall, The Bonzo Dog Band recorded a song called "Can blue men sing the whites?"
Very whimsical and very British, of course.
But there are indeed not a few 'blue' men and women who really can sing blues or R&B with great feeling and 'soul' At least three of these singers here earned the respect of, and were fully endorsed by, the very singers they were trying to emulate!
Joe Cocker - Ray Charles said Cocker had one of the best voices he had ever heard.
Ottillie Patterson
Christine Perfect
Bonnie Bramlett was from 1963 to 1966 an 'Ikette', a backing singer for Ike and Tina Turner. She wrote this song with Leon Russell. It was originally recorded as 'Groupie' (with rather more explicit lyrics)
Miller Anderson
And three from Sir George Ivan "Van" Morrison, OBE
One of the pleasures of modern language is the invention of particularly apt, powerfully descriptive phrases such as ‘virtue signalling’. This seems to be a recent one. According to Google Trends it first appeared as a blip in 2009 then rose from obscurity in 2015. In spite of claims by James Bartholomew it probably originated within signalling theory. Google Ngram Viewer isn’t aware of it at all.
Virtue signalling is the expression or promotion of viewpoints that are especially valued within a social group, especially when this is done primarily to enhance the social standing of the speaker. For example, expressing a hatred of the conservative newspaper Daily Mail might be an example of virtue signalling on the British left. The term is chiefly used by commentators to criticize the platitudinous and empty or superficial support of socially progressive views on social media, but has also been used to describe analogous behaviour in other groups, such as pro-gun rights grandstanding among the American right, and by signalling theorists to discuss conspicuous piety among the religious faithful as well as agnostics and atheists.
A real stonker of a phrase, it is extraordinarily powerful as a concise term for vast swathes of unedifying human behaviour. Yet the idea of signalling is hardly new - Strindberg saw it in art.
...for my art was incapable of expressing a single idea; at the most it could represent the body in a position expressing an emotion accompanying a thought—or, in other words, express a thought at third hand. It is like signalling, meaningless to all who cannot read the signals. I only see a red flag, but the soldier sees the word of command: Advance!
August Strindberg – The Red Room (1879)
In which case and given that it is now so obvious that virtue signalling is a vital aspect of human behaviour, what prevented us from describing it in such a powerfully accessible way before? Perhaps it is because, as we well know, forceful phrases soon become overused, lose their vigour and slip off into the land of cliché.
Which would be handy for those who rely on virtue signalling because it cuts so deeply into the social fabric. It exposes the manipulative mechanisms of power, the screen behind which personal interests hide.
Celebrity culture, mainstream journalism, drama, political allegiances, the EU, the UN, major charities, environmental drama, major sporting events and international businesses all lean heavily on virtue signalling. They cannot say so or folk might expect some genuine virtues instead of being caught up in the nonsense themselves. We can’t have that can we?
I don't support Mr Corbyn. I don't even vote Labour, yet, though I may if this sort of thing carries on. It's all a bit like Trump: the Establishment is in hysteria at the appearance of a not-business-as-usual candidate.
"Secret... wipe out... plot... savage new purge... stranglehold..."
Oddly, the side article by Simon Walters about Mark Sandell's "Hard-Left plot" to unseat MP Peter Kyle is not available online, as far as I can see.
Now if the Middle East millions killed and made homeless with the help of Mr Blair and Mr Cameron are a success story for centrists, it is difficult to imagine what extremism must be like. Elsewhere (page 27) is a whinge by John Woodcock MP, who complains of being on a "hit list" but who voted for airstrikes in Syria - perhaps he should moderate his language so that real "hitting" can be seen in a true light.
And Dan Hodges! The picture editor had the nerve to repeat the photo online, but here's the truly awful eye-catcher in the print edition (p. 39):
Mr Hodges has his own wordmark; "Incendiary. Incisive. In the corridors of power". Some modern journalists are so far up themselves that they can see through their own back teeth. Incendiary, yes. Insane, perhaps, if he cannot tell the difference between a wet Labour MP and Ivan Denisovich; or between Stalin, as is implied here, and Hitler, as below.
Let's now turn to a nasty, desperate, unjustifiable piece of innuendo, a touchstone for MSM discussion of radical Labour. On the same double page as the first article there is a smear: A heard B say something nasty about Holocaust ovens to C, and although it has nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn, it is made to sort of appear that it does:
Hard copy - Mail On Sunday 18.09.2016, pp 12-13
Note:
The remark was made not at a Labour meeting, but at the Proms!
The alleged offender was not a Labour politician or wonk, but Dr Leslie Jones, the deputy editor of a right-wing magazine called The Quarterly Review
The alleged victim was Henrietta Foster, a BBC journalist, who is not Jewish, not related to Michael Foster (of whom more below) and not involved in the Foster-related Twitterspit/spat with Mr Bright. However she had appeared in a film, questioning the son of a Nazi, and is writing a book about Hungarian Jews. At a previous reception, she had previously told Dr Jones to "**** off" - because the latter had voted to leave the EU!
The alleged witness was Martin Bright, a former Observer journalist and former worker for Tony Blair's Faith Foundation, therefore dubbed in the headline as "Blair aide", i.e. not.
Michael Foster - not involved in the incident - is or was a donor to the Labour Party, is Jewish, and compared Jeremy Corbyn's leadership group to the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), because (so I understand) Mr Foster supports the State of Israel and wishes it to continue in the Middle East; I also understand that Jewishness and "Zionism" are not the same thing and that there are Jews who are also not "Zionists" [for example, please see the True Torah Jews website, run by Orthodox Jews]
On an unrelated matter, Mr Bright criticised the suspension of Mr Foster from the Labour Party some days ago and some people said supposedly nasty things to the former on Twitter, such as (a) Mr Foster encourages anti-Semitic sentiment by his actions [? support for Israel and/or intemperate language classing non-Zionists as Nazis] and (b) the suspension was a good decision and Mr Corbyn should also remove other activists for Mr Foster's chosen cause. Looking closely at the "tweets", I cannot see anything actionable in terms of anti-Semitism, but perhaps I do not see things as a lawyer can. Also, though the tweeters are described as "Corbynista", the article does not show that they are members of the Labour Party, Labour voters or indeed that they are Corbyn supporters rather than false-flag trolls. Not, of course that the twittling has anything to do with this particular bit of nonsense, anyway.
So, a person who is politically on the opposite side from Labour is abominably rude to another person who was previously abominably rude to himself because of a completely unrelated issue, and is overheard by a third person who was not, pace the headline, politically a "Blair aide" but an ex-worker for one the ex-PM's private organisations. The offensive exchange was not to do with a suspended Labour Party donor or political differences over the State of Israel. Mr Corbyn and his Parliamentary colleagues and co-workers were not involved in any way.
But by golly the link had to be made, even if it didn't exist. The fake tear-out visual says "Corbyn purges top Jewish donor over MoS article... and reignites race row". It is a moot question whether Jews are a race or a religion; also, exactly what either has to do with a political/nationalist issue called "Zionism"; but this tangential scrap is used to complete a papier-mâché parody of Mr Corbyn and his leadership of the Labour Party.
I assume drink had been taken on all sides, but I begin to wonder about the reporter and editor also!
The article is piffle, and so utterly misleading as to remind one of the term "doublethink". Not surprising, when you consider that the MoS' editor is Geordie Greig, a Scot who campaigned in the MoS for the independence of Scotland and against independence for the UK, and continues to do so now. A bovinely stubborn and logically incoherent Mr Greig; an oxymoron, perhaps.
In the oo-er-perhaps-we-need-to-amend-it-a-bit online avatar of the same article, the body text and tear-out are the same, but the headline is changed, and bullet points added. In an egregious (e-Greig-ious?) piece of weaselspeak, the word "separate" is newly introduced in order to admit in passing that two connected things are not connected:
Holocaust film-maker is told to 'get back in the oven' by literary magazine editor as witness reveals separate anti-Semitic abuse by Corbynistas
Dr Leslie Jones, editor of the Quarterly Review Magazine, launched rant
She told BBC's Henrietta Foster to 'get back in oven' at Proms reception
Witness Martin Bright said he has been targeted with anti-Semitic abuse
He criticised Labour Party for suspending Jewish donor Michael Foster
Online, there is also a lovely photograph of the fashionably tieless and unshaven Mr Bright, adding nothing to the core matter but contributing to that all-important visual miasma of victimhood and social justice, for those who find words difficult to read and interpret.
And, presumably realizing that they may be open to a counterattack because of their possibly libellous implications of anti-semitism (a hate crime) against Mr Corbyn, the editors have now included a video clip of Mr Corbyn condemning it. This is the Youtube link, though it seems it's the same as the one accessed through the Mail:
The MoS: for the deranged, by the deranged. I wouldn't get it at all, except for the column by Peter Hitchens who, by the way, though he supports Israel and does not support Mr Corbyn, respects him. I think the MoS would sometimes like to get rid of Mr Hitchens, too - it did for a while, last year:
Milo's sweetly preening video here rejoices in Trump's humiliation of the biased and manipulative mainstream media. As he says (2:19), "Here's what no journalist in America seems to understand: everyone hates you!"
