News

Famous gay activist pleads guilty to child pornography charges

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From the San Francisco Chronicle. (H/T Robert S. McCain via First Street Journal)

Excerpt:

Veteran gay rights advocate and former San Francisco Human Rights Commission staffer Larry Brinkin pleaded guilty Tuesday to possessing child pornography.

Brinkin, 67, changed his plea in a deal with the district attorney’s office that will result in a sentencing recommendation of six months in county jail, six months of home detention, five years of probation and lifetime registration as a sex offender.

Brinkin, who worked as a senior contract compliance officer with the rights commission until his 2010 retirement, was arrested in June 2012. Authorities said e-mail attachments were found on his America Online subscriber’s account that contained images of toddlers engaged in sex acts with men.

Prosecutors originally charged him with six felony counts of possessing and distributing child pornography, but dropped all but one felony count of possession as part of the plea bargain.

Brinkin must undergo sex offender therapy and is banned from working with kids, contacting a juvenile without parental consent, and living with someone responsible for a child without disclosing his offender status.

During his 22-year tenure at the rights commission, Brinkin helped craft the city’s Equal Benefits Ordinance, which became a national model for workplace equality for gays and lesbians. When he retired, the Board of Supervisors declared the week of Feb. 1, 2010, as Larry Brinkin Week.

Brinkin, who appeared in court with his husband, has been out on $240,000 bail since September 2012. He is scheduled to return for sentencing on March 5, and to surrender into custody at a later date.

He’s going to keep his pension, though:

Knox said he did not believe Brinkin’s city pension would be affected by the plea because his conviction doesn’t fall under “moral turpitude.” Under Proposition C, approved by voters in 2008, a city employee convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude – usually theft, fraud or a breach of the public trust – cannot collect employer-funded retirement benefits.

This is the public sector after all.

Previously, I blogged about a case of two gay men who had adopted a boy from Russia for the purpose of creating child pornography using him. I’m not sure if this is the Australian connection mentioned in the article, but it would make sense. The trouble we have today is that we are so interested in talking about love, love, love, that we have no will to say anything to protect children. When it comes to the selfishness of adults, anything goes, whether it be divorce, single motherhood or anything. We just don’t care about kids, and we mask our indifference by talking about “love” and “not judging”. It’s very important to understand that there are real victims from all of this “love” and “not judging”, and it’s not as benign as it looks on the surface.

Other cases

The NY Daily News reports on another similar case, and links to CBS News and the Hartford Courant.

Excerpt:

The case of a same-sex Connecticut couple accused of repeatedly raping and abusing two of their nine adopted boys is headed for trial.

Married couple George Harasz and Douglas Wirth of Glastonbury were supposed to be sentenced Friday in Hartford Superior Court under a plea deal, but instead withdrew from their agreement with prosecutors. The men had already pleaded no contest in January to one felony count each of risk of injury to a minor — a reduction from even more serious charges related to sexual assault.

[…]Harasz and Wirth adopted nine children — three sets of male siblings — beginning in 2000, and ran a home-based dog breeding business called The Puppy Guy.

The couple was arrested in November 2011 following a police and state investigation of sex-abuse allegations. The children were removed from the home.

Police said two boys, ages 5 and 15, accused Harasz of sexually assaulting them. Harasz was initially facing first-degree sexual assault and other charges, while Wirth had been charged with third-degree sexual assault of the 15-year-old boy.

Their arrest warrants claimed the couple not only sexually and physically abused the children, but also forced them to sleep in closets.

[…]One of the victims who spoke during the court hearing said sexual assault began when he was 6.

“They took turns raping me over and over,” he said.

Now, a lot of these rape accusations turn out to be false, so we don’t really know if anyone is guilty until the trial concludes. But I’ve posted before about other trials that did conclude, so that you know that these things are in fact happening. I had blogged previously about the Duke University official who was offering his 5-year-old adopted son for sex on the Internet, not to mention the famous Jerry Sandusky case and the case where the head of a gay youth organization was running a child sex ring.

Comments are going to be strictly moderated for this post.

News

How well are Democrat economic policies working in Venezuela and Argentina?

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Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?
Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?

I have been reflecting sorrowfully on some of the outright lies spoken by the President in his recent State of the Union address. I am thinking specifically of lies that are almost universally rejected by economists across the ideological spectrum – lies so obvious that you would have to be an illiterate peasant living in a village in Venezuela or Argentina in order to believe it.

Three of his lies stand out – the minimum wage lie, the global warming lie and women pay gap lie. Each of these lies is as false as saying that the Sun goes around the Earth, or that the Earth is flat. What bothers me is not that the President spoke them, because I expect someone with no scientific background and no private sector experience to say things that are not true. But what bothers me is that the American electorate is now incapable of identifying such obvious lies.

Let’s take a look at this article from the leftist Washington Post.

Excerpt:

On aisle seven, among the diapers and fabric softener, the socialist dreams of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez looked as ragged as the toilet paper display.

Employees at the Excelsior Gama supermarket had set out a load of extra-soft six-roll packs so large that it nearly blocked the aisle. To stock the shelves with it would have been pointless. Soon word spread that the long-awaited rolls had arrived, and despite a government-imposed limit of one package per person, the checkout lines stretched all the way to the decimated dairy case in the back of the store.

[…]Pathetic, in a country with the world’s largest petroleum reserves and oil prices at nearly $95 a barrel, yet unable to supply basic goods because of its crumbling local currency and a shortage of U.S. dollars.

[…]Nearly a year after Chávez’s death of complications from cancer at age 58, his hand­picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, is struggling to contain food shortages, spiraling inflation and rampant crime.

The arrival of basic staples such as cooking oil, chicken, flour or milk brings Venezuelans running to supermarkets and touches off surreal mob scenes, even as the government imposes price caps and rationing to prevent hoarding.

Maduro squeaked past opposition candidate Henrique Capriles in April’s presidential election, and Maduro’s United Socialist Party won enough races in Dec. 8 local elections to push back against perceptions that Chávez loyalists were deserting him. Just before the vote, with television cameras rolling, he sent soldiers into an appliance store accused of price gouging and ordered huge markdowns on televisions and microwaves. Apparently it gave his party a final boost at the polls.

There’s not a dime worth of difference in terms of vision between the Democrats in the USA and the socialists in Venezuela. The same people who think that sending armed troops to nationalize industry in Venezuela are nationalizing health care in this country right now. We will eventually see the same lines for health care that form in Canada and the UK. When you tax, regulate, and even attack those who provide services and products, you get shortages. Period. And yet big government redistribution of wealth seems to be winning over low-information voters in Venezuela and in the United States.

Are Barack Obama and Cristina Kirchner very different?
Are Barack Obama and Cristina Kirchner very different?

Venezuela has 56% currency inflation right now thanks to “stimulus” spending, but that is not the only place where Democrat policies are in force. Consider this article from the leftist Guardian about Argentina, where Democrat “stimulus” spending policies have led to rising prices of consumer goods.

Excerpt:

Every morning around 8am, the stern-faced cabinet chief Jorge Capitanich stands behind a podium at the Casa Rosada presidential palace for a televised verbal blast at the perceived enemies of the “victorious decade” presided over by the current president and her husband, the late Nestor Kirchner. Without naming them, Capitanich lashes out against the “visible and invisible” politicians, labour representatives, businessmen and journalists he blames for the sudden collapse of the peso and the explosive price increases that followed the forced devaluation.

Argentina’s economic earthquake has placed a huge question mark over the political future of the stateswoman so powerful she is referred to as Queen Cristina by both the opposition press and her supporters. In the past week, Capitanich has attempted to pin the price lurch on faceless foreign speculators, whom he accuses of a “strategy of domination” to gain control of Argentina’s oil and freshwater reserves, pandering to the widespread belief here, often underlined by the president in her speeches, that “vultures” of the leading industrial countries harbour secret plans to siphon off natural reserves from this resource-rich South American nation.

Capitanich has also blamed “anti-patriotic” farmers and large retailers, allegedly in league with independent, corruption-probing journalists, of fuelling price rises by “generating psychological action of permanent destabilisation” against Fernández de Kirchner.

But critics of the government point to inept administration and populist spending by a government that considers itself to be leading a revolution against Argentina’s erstwhile oligarchy.

Just like Obama, the socialists in Argentina are always looking to blame others for the problems they cause with their own policies. The problem is never bad policies that attack job creating businesses, it’s always a lack of loyalty and patriotism. We are disloyal to our economically-illiterate elites who only want to help us, they say. Leftist economic policies can work if we just believe in the leader, they say. And many ignorant peasants believe that, even when the failure is right in front of them.

Not just in Venezuela and Argentina

Of course in America, we have a different kind of policy failure. We have Obamacare. Conservatives warned the public about it for years, but our peasants went ahead and voted for it anyway when we re-elected a know-nothing in 2012. He said that we could keep our health care plans and that we could keep our doctors. He said he would reduce the cost of health care. And we believed him. We believed him because the uneducated stand-up comedians we watched on the Comedy Channel made us believe him.

Take a look at the peasants realizing that not every piece of happy talk read from a teleprompter by a celebrity is automatically true:

Human Events explains the story behind that video.

Excerpt:

All of Barack Obama’s phony rhetoric about how wonderfully the Affordable Care Act is chugging along means less than nothing compared to the cold reality that awaited the employees of a Pennsylvania company, as a local news station captured their stunned reactions to ObamaCare price hikes in real time.

[…][They] learned they’d be facing premium hikes of over 30 percent, with higher deductibles.  Even their co-payments for doctor visits have doubled.  And the numbers hitting these good people aren’t as bad as the premiums and deductibles slamming into other ObamaCare victims around the country.  The great second wave of damage in the larger group insurance market is about to get under way.

“I don’t know how President Obama thinks he’s helping us,” one employee sighs, “because we can’t afford this, we can’t afford to pay these co-pays, to pay these deductibles on what we’re making.”

Another repeats the sarcastic but accurate observation made by ObamaCare critics since day one: “there’s nothing affordable” about the Affordable Care Act.  It is observed that average people can’t just cough up three hundred dollars a month, because that’s a big chunk of a rent check or mortgage payment.  One shell-shocked woman, looking at a $400 monthly premium increase plus a $4000 deductible, confesses she has no idea how she’s going to pay it.

[…]Needless to say, none of these people will be invited to come on stage with President Obama and talk about their ACA experiences.  They’re learning the hard way that political control of an industry means distant commissars picking winners and losers.  You can do everything right and still get socked by the biggest middle-class tax increase in history, because the imperial President and his court have decided other people need lower premiums, and you must be squeezed to pay for it.

We have a generation of people who have been educated to value rhetoric from celebrities over the Constitution and sound economics in general. We must not think that we can be as ignorant as South American peasants now and avoid the consequences of that ignorance. We need to turn off the TV and pick up the Thomas Sowell book.

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Polemics

Two famous near-death experiences: Pam Reynolds and Maria’s tennis shoe

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Dr. Mario Beuregard writes about out of body experiences and near death experiences in the leftist Salon.com, of all places.

NDE number one:

Pam was brought into the operating room at 7:15 a.m., she was given general anesthesia, and she quickly lost conscious awareness. At this point, Spetzler and his team of more than 20 physicians, nurses, and technicians went to work. They lubricated Pam’s eyes to prevent drying, and taped them shut. They attached EEG electrodes to monitor the electrical activity of her cerebral cortex. They inserted small, molded speakers into her ears and secured them with gauze and tape. The speakers would emit repeated 100-decibel clicks—approximately the noise produced by a speeding express train—eliminating outside sounds and measuring the activity of her brainstem.

At 8:40 a.m., the tray of surgical instruments was uncovered, and Robert Spetzler began cutting through Pam’s skull with a special surgical saw that produced a noise similar to a dental drill. At this moment, Pam later said, she felt herself “pop” out of her body and hover above it, watching as doctors worked on her body.

Although she no longer had use of her eyes and ears, she described her observations in terms of her senses and perceptions. “I thought the way they had my head shaved was very peculiar,” she said. “I expected them to take all of the hair, but they did not.” She also described the Midas Rex bone saw (“The saw thing that I hated the sound of looked like an electric toothbrush and it had a dent in it … ”) and the dental-drill sound it made with considerable accuracy.

Meanwhile, Spetzler was removing the outermost membrane of Pamela’s brain, cutting it open with scissors. At about the same time, a female cardiac surgeon was attempting to locate the femoral artery in Pam’s right groin. Remarkably, Pam later claimed to remember a female voice saying, “We have a problem. Her arteries are too small.” And then a male voice: “Try the other side.” Medical records confirm this conversation, yet Pam could not have heard them.

I like the second one even better than the first.

NDE number two:

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn. Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe. From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered. Nonetheless, studies conducted in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States have revealed that approximately 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors do report some recollection from the time when they were clinically dead. These studies indicate that consciousness, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be experienced during a period when the brain shows no measurable activity.

Here’s the author bio:

Mario Beauregard is associate research professor at the Departments of Psychology and Radiology and the Neuroscience Research Center at the University of Montreal. He is the coauthor of “The Spiritual Brain” and more than one hundred publications in neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry.

It’s a helpful article, and one you might want to share or tweet to get a discussion started.

In previous posts, I have listed six arguments for non-physical minds, and also blogged about peer-reviewed scientific evidence on how consciousness changes brain chemistry through mental effort.