Current Affairs – US

So, you hate Hillary Clinton?
Donald Trump?
Gary Johnson?
Limberbutt McCubbins?
(By the way, there are 95 filed candidates for POTUS with more than $100 in their campaign kitty as at today. When I hear people complaining about not having a choice for POTUS, I laugh inwardly.)
Hate.
An emotive word.
Here’s my take on hate. If you really really hate somebody or something, you have a bigger problem than the person or thing you hate.
You see, hate is one of the most mentally and emotionally taxing of the great emotions.
That person you hate? They now live in your head and heart every second that you are awake. They are impacting many of your thoughts, actions and deeds. Every time the hatee’s name is mentioned, your primitive emotions, like a person who hates snakes stumbling upon one, are stirred, and not in a good way. Your heartbeat and respiration alter, and the risk of you doing and saying dumb stuff goes up. Dumb stuff including ranting on Facebook, often by posting dumb-ass memes or bullshit which must be right, because you hate the subject of the meme.
For some people who are seriously out of control, hate takes the form of pulling out weapons and going on a shooting spree, or plotting the overthrow of the government, or murdering and brutalizing family members. Hate is the slippery slope that leads down to some of the worst possible human behavior.
So, when I read people claiming to hate other people, I worry. Most of the time I worry about the person doing the hating. That person has lost control of perspective and emotions, and is wasting energy and effort that they will never get back.
But, let’s be charitable. Let’s assume that you simply despise the person, group or thing. Isn’t that better?
Well, yes and no. They still live in your head. There’s a good chance that you won’t do dumb stuff, at least not Right Now. However, the rest of us will still have to find the dumb-ass memes and other random outbursts on social media. Yes, we get it, you despise whatever it is or whoever it is. But…so what? Are you so conceited that you think that everybody else should be at all interested in what you despise on a daily basis?
If you were merely ranting, or seeking affirmation, carry on. (In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t run around seeking affirmation. I grew up in an out-group, trying to get affirmation, and being told that I was a lower form of life for years resulted in me not caring very much about any form of affirmation, positive or negative).
If you want me to take your ranting seriously, you need to realize that, just like the huffing and puffing of “I’m offended”, I really don’t have a lot of time left in my life to listen to poorly or incompletely argued cack to support emotionally-based claims. If you hate or despise somebody or something, that’s really your problem, not mine. If you want me to understand your angst and take it seriously, then you need to drop the memes and get with the idea of logical arguments based on critical thinking.

Here we go again…
Somebody on my Facebook wall appears to be of the opinion that the only thing that can explain Hillary Clinton’s performance in last night’s debate is that she was wearing some device that magically dictated her responses (instantly, given the speed of debate exchanges) to every question from the moderator and every comment from Donald Trump. Althernatively, it was a device to prevent her from suffering seizures.
I also had to read somebody else on Facebook waving the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory trope, along with a list of some of the favorite authoritarian follower list of conspiracy theories. Before the election cycle is over I fully expect Son of Jade Helm or Daughter of Jade Helm to put in an appearance.
Look, I know it is hard for people emotionally invested in a candidate when that candidate suffers an apparent setback. Clearly you were so emotionally wrung out from the events, and from posting to Facebook, that you couldn’t have done some fairly basic online research.
But, if your first reaction to that setback is to fasten on to the latest cockanamie conspiracy theory that just popped up on the interwebs, this is not likely to demonstrate that you are smart or deep-thinking. It is far more likely to signal that you are a credulous follower desperately engaging in post-hoc rationalizations to explain why Your Guy did not do well. This type of motivated reasoning doesn’t give me a feeling that your assertions or arguments on this topic have any intellectual heft or seriousness. And if you continue to do it, you will start to look more and more like a gullible nitwit, which will probably in turn lead to me waving you goodbye on Facebook.
The internets are now the numero uno 24-carat repository and amplification device for every conspiracy theory invented in the last x hundred years (and in the time it took you to read this, somebody probably just published another one). Most of these theories truly do put the “con” into conspiracy. They rely on people suspending most of their skills in critical thinking and signing on lock stock and barrel to some weird idea of how Stuff Happened.
One thing that I discovered many years ago is that dedicated conspiracy theory adherents behave just like followers of religious cults. They brook no dissent, regard everybody who is not signed onto the theory as a dupe or sheeple, and when challenged, cycle slowly and painfully through the A to Z of motivated reasoning and post hoc rationalization techniques, usually trying to win a prize for the number of logical fallacies they can deploy along the way. In short, they are impossible to have a sensible logical discussion with, so by and large I refuse to do it. Life is too short etc. etc.
My favorite conspiracy theorist rationalization is “well of course there’s no evidence for the conspiracy – the conspirators have hidden it!”. I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to spot the logical problem hidden in that statement.
(Note for the historically inclined – Donald Rumsfeld’s quote from 2002 that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is a more subtle variant of this sort of claim. At the time Rumsfeld was using the quote to argue that even if there was no visible evidence of WMD in Iraq, that did not necessarily mean that Iraq did not have WMD. It was an attempt to neutralize all of the people pointing out the lack of evidence. However, if there is no available evidence to support a claim, then the claim becomes totally speculative and possibly hypothetical.)
The sad thing, as I keep finding, is that high intelligence and rational thinking abilities do not in any way prevent people signing on to conspiracy theories. Smart people are, in fact, the worst promulgators of conspiracy theories, not necessarily because they sign on to a lot of them, but because, when challenged, their intellect allows them to deploy a seemingly infinite number of smart-sounding rationalizations and explanations for why It Must Be True! They resemble a smart drug addict in denial, furiously rationalizing why they don’t really have a drug problem. I hear and read a lot of the same intellectual sophistry mixed with logical fallacies and the uttering of total bullshit.
In the same way that some people react to uncertainty by signing onto binary worldviews, some people react to inexplicable or utterly puzzling events by immediately concluding that there must be some conspiracy causing the event or events. The idea that no, there is no conspiracy is difficult for them to process since it implies that it is possible for Bad Stuff to happen without bad actors driving it. Sad to say, anybody who has lived in Corporate America or watched any government body for as long as I have will have seen plenty of examples of bad stuff or dumb stuff, but will also have realized that not everybody in a corporation or government is a bad guy. The world is full of cock-ups, and only a person with a vivid imagination and way too much time on their hands would be able to plausibly connect multiple cock-ups and make a cogent case that they are part of some conspiracy.
Are there conspiracies in the world? Oh yes, you bet there are. However, if you persist in seeing every event you don’t like as a conspiracy, you probably left critical judgment behind somewhere along the line. Cock-ups are much more common.

One of the constant ideas that gets floated by GOP partisans and fans of “the free market” is the privatization of Social Security. The arguments are familiar and well worn. The government should not be in the business of money management, private organizations can get investors a better rate of return, SS money was confiscated from people and they should get it back etc. etc.
I will tell you exactly what will happen if SS is privatized.
People will get those self-directed IRAs (or whatever shiny new name they acquire). They will initially marvel at their stunning rates of return, as all of the fund management companies compete for business and inflate their rates of return to attract the investors, many of whom will not be, shall we say, very sophisticated.. All will look wonderful, as they imagine a very comfortable retirement.
Then a recession will occur. Recessions always occur. They occur because as a species we always over-extend ourselves, especially if we are using somebody else’s money.
Suddenly those previously starry-eyed investors will notice their portfolio value sinking like the proverbial stone. If they are really unlucky they might find that their money management has been entrusted to a graduate of the Enron School of Creative Accounting, or the Bernard Madoff School of Creative Investing.
This will cause, as is written in the Bible, much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.
At this point, politicians will suddenly discover the virtues of government intervention, as the retirement funds are bailed out in some way by government. This is because there are more and more elderly electors out there, and older and retired people have all the time in the world to organize and make politician’s lives miserable.
The net effect will be yet another cycle of that dysfunctional game long played in Western democracies – the privatization of profit and the socialization of losses.
Think of it as another instance of the Savings and Loan fiasco, but with numbers at least 10 times bigger. Whatever the final bill turns out to be, it will be at least an order of magnitude larger than the initial estimate. Bail-outs work like that. As soon as people see the prospect of what they think is “free money” (i.e. somebody else’s money) they become extremely creative at whistling up losses and financial privations.

1. The Debate
No, in case you were wondering.
Hell No.
I am not watching tonight’s Presidential debate.
There are several related reasons for this.
#1. It is not a debate.
#2 The subjects are both trivial and inappropriate
#3 the media will not scrutinize either candidate properly
You see, when I went to high school in the UK, i actually attended and participated in debates. We had a debating society that met in the library room once a month. This was a proper debate. One side had to create and present a proposition. The other side had to prepare an opposing view and present it. Then the two debaters, with a moderator sitting between them, would debate their positions, providing arguments and rebuttals. Then they would have to answer questions from the floor.
The moderator had the gavel and the last word. He could (and did) bang his gavel if the participants went off track, changed the subject, or engaged in anything approaching a personal attack.
I learned a lot about some subjects from being at those debates.
What we have tonight is not a debate in any useful sense of the term. It is two political candidates engaging in a soundbite battle over subjects that are so broad as to be almost meaningless. The moderator has no real power, he is handcuffed in advance by terms of operation set by the candidates.
Let that last statement sink in for a minute.
Have you heard the old joke about the fox that offered to look after the henhouse for the weekend, assuring the owner of the chickens that he had gone vegetarian?
Allowing the political parties to set the format, content and moderation rules for a debate is just like leaving that fox in charge. They have no interest in any pointy-head from a TV network forcing Their Guy to tell the truth or provide insight. No sirree. This is about point-scoring using soundbites. Of course, this is the reason why the major parties long ago took control of the debates away from the League Of Women Voters and put the debates out to bid to the networks. That ensures that the networks, supine as ever, will do the candidates’ bidding, and the candidates don’t want a proper debate. They do not want scrutiny. Scrutiny gets in the way of their next zinger.
If many of today’s politicians showed up in my high school and tried to debate like they speak in these debates, our moderators would have gavelled them to silence and told them to damn well stick on topic and make an argument. seriously.
So, don’t watch tonight if you want insight into policy, governance and the world. By all means watch if your only objective is either to validate your prior choices, or to see which of the candidates looks more presidential. (One of the interesting features of US electorates is how many of them seem to only care about appearances when voting for leaders). Whatever you do, don’t complain to me that you didn’t learn much. You had no right to expect that.

2. The role of Fear in modern US politics
The whole of the “Make America Great Again” idea espoused by Donald Trump and his supporters is based on the belief that the USA is not as great as it used to be.
The evidence contradicts that belief. However, given that a substantial percentage of GOP partisans appear to live in a parallel universe fuelled by in-group reinforcement and echo chambers, evidence is not something that they are likely to be paying attention to any time soon. Their views is a visceral and emotional one, largely immune to discussion and debate.
Another underlying pathology implicit in the slogan is binary thinking. America is either Great or it’s not, and right now, it’s not. This is so simplistic as to be beyond laughable. In the same way that you can be married to somebody but be all too aware of their faults, you can like a country and still know that it is not perfect. (I stay away from binary thinkers except when doing computer math, for all sorts of obvious reasons).
However, leaving aside the people signed up for “Make America Great Again”, that leaves the rest of us. This tweet is appropriate:

You're being sold a scary world because fear makes people do stupid things. DO NOT DO STUPID THINGS. https://t.co/FOPmPcWJ0U

— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 26, 2016

3. The wordview of J.D. Vance
The author of “Hillbilly Elegy” explains the existential crisis that impacts many poor working-class areas of the USA. Those areas are stuck in a pervasive mindset that the American Dream is not working for them. Many of those people are supporters of Donald Trump, who they see as being the only current candidate that talks their language and appears to understand their problems.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is noticing that when it comes to coping with people of a different (often non-religious) worldview, some Christians have a habit of wishing eternal damnation on those people:

Thanks for putting me on your list of “people who are going to hell.” I can almost smell your Christian love.

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) September 26, 2016

I know this pathology only too well. When I briefly stepped into the debate (well, that is the official title) over abortion rights last year, I soon found myself being wished all kinds of fates by Christians, steeped as they were in the conceit of deistic certitude. Those fates are generally one of:

1. You are going to Hell
2. Your God will judge you when you arrive at the gates of Heaven (Translation: You will go to Hell, you will simply be re-directed there to dash your foolish hopes for Heaven)

This, folks is the SOP for many Christians. Their tactics for modifying behavior or keeping people in line are the old standbys of fear, guilt and shame.
My reaction to these exhortations is one of total amusement.
I don’t believe in the existence of an omnipotent deity. Nor do I believe in an afterlife.
So the idea that my fate after death is to be consigned to either Heaven or Hell, to me seems utterly devoid of intellectual heft, reason or weight. It also speaks to a fundamental conceit that many Christians suffer from; namely, that anybody else should be interested in their thoughts on my ultimate fate at the end of my life. I wouldn’t presume to speculate to their face on what I think should happen to them, because their life is their life and it’s none of my business.
The result is that my first instinct when anybody utters either of those threats to me is to engage in humour. Since the concepts they are using in an attempt to shame me are ridiculous to me, ridicule for me is a perfectly valid response.
To (1) I usually respond along the lines of “that’s OK, i hear that the parties are better in Hell”.
To (2), I usually post this link to a Tom and Jerry cartoon, which, in that very unique Tom and Jerry way, nicely satirizes the whole pathology of “if you don’t behave you won’t go to Heaven” that many children hear from their religious parents while growing up.

The other important thing to note is that invariably both of the above supposedly-threatening ideas usually get deployed in lieu of anything resembling a cogent argument. They are regarded as some magic talisman that will Shock and Awe me. They need to try a damn sight harder at actually making an argument. Then perhaps they wouldn’t need to resort to this sort of bizarrely amusing behavior.

While the media and politicians mostly appear to be fixated on the threat to the USA posed by Muslim and other foreign terrorists, seditious anti-government movements continue to operate largely under the radar inside the USA. These movements, often with their roots in Christian extremism (including “end of days” sects), and featuring elements of white supremacist and anti-Jewish animus, plus the usual dose of New World Order conspiracy theorizing, have periodically bubbled to the surface, usually when a group tried some blatantly illegal action and collided with law enforcement.
Although the normal tendency is to assign these groups to the bin marked “Sovereign Citizens”, in reality the various groups have no coherent or common ideology or objectives, although they are bound together by certain beliefs, such as the illegitimacy of the Federal government and its organizations. Beyond that, the mosaic of groups is fragmented and splintered and many of the groups appear to heartily despise each other. Like pseudo-revolutionary groups the world over, they spend a lot of energy engaging in ideological purity tests, and complaining that other groups are insufficiently “pure” or authentic.
The recent standoffs at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada and the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon are merely part of a continuing pattern of behavior by many of the groups, who, while not sharing much in the way of an ideology, do share a deep dislike of all forms of government oversight.
None of these groups have anything approaching a proper financial support system. Many of their members run websites which pump out recycled articles culled from conspiracy echo chambers, interspersed with not-very-well-disguised pleas to “Send Money”. The groups are almost entirely controlled by men, and one of the more amusing and ironic features of many of the groups is the number of men who, it appears, are on some form of government support (military pensions, disability benefits, Social Security), while spending a lot of time online and in person railing against the evils of government.
Another interesting feature of these groups, in reality, is their continual reliance on a small number of members who are, to be blunt, scamsters and grifters. Many of these individuals are selling do-it-yourself kits that claim, if properly used, to permit the user to avoid just about every modern obligation to an industrialized society, such as vehicle licensing, property and income taxes, and the need to obey reasonable requests from law enforcement. At some point, many of the grifters collide with law enforcement.
When you look into the backgrounds of many of the most vocal leaders of the groups, there is a commonality of experience. Many of them have suffered a bad experience with the governmental or legal system, often involving family breakups (messy divorces, child support issues) or tax and property issues leading to foreclosure, which led them to conclude that they were screwed over, and now they believe that the right solution is to blow that system up (sometimes literally).
Some of the members and leaders have many skeletons in their closets, to the extent that some of them even change their names to try and avoid their past.
Another dimension to several of the groups, including the Bundy family, is the exploitation of long-standing resentments in many of the Western States concerning the high percentage of land in those states owned by the Federal government. The original movement, known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, has been re-cast with a new collection of players, some of whom are decidedly uninterested in resolution of disputes by peaceful means.
This is not a rag-tag collection of “dress-up” uber-patriots, merely exercising their Constitutional rights. Some of these people are seriously dangerous. They have killed law enforcement officers on a whim, and have engaged in stand-offs with local and Federal law enforcement. Those standoffs and collisions are still happening, and law enforcement is bearing the brunt of the collisions, with a number of LEOs shot in the line of duty by people whose philosophy regards them as unavoidable collateral damage of the New American Revolution.
If these groups were comprised of individuals with darker skin hues whose first language was not English, I would expect that they would almost constantly be in the news as a clear and present danger to the USA, and a number of their members would already be in jail or dead. However, because they present themselves as upstanding, God Fearing Real Americans, they have succeeded in building a base of support among people who don’t know any better, and some people who damn well should know better. In addition, they take advantage of the US legal system’s high tolerance level for defendants trying bullshit moves. Members of these groups have a long history of filing bogus vexatious and meaningless legal documents in local, state and federal courts. The laws passed in the last 15 years across the USA to make it a felony to file false liens were passed because filing bogus liens against lawyers, police and judges became a favorite tactic of group members when prosecuted.
There is even a term for it – paper terrorism. Individuals and groups, when prosecuted for criminal acts, attempt to counter with a flurry of pseudo-legal gibberish, voluminous filings advancing legal ideas that have no basis in settled law, and stalling tactics, all specifically designed to gum up the court system.
Here is an excellent example of the sort of tactics that a Canadian defendant attempted to foist upon a court, explained in detail and with humour by the presiding judge.
Right now, the defendants in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge trial are filing an average of one frivolous motion a day each in a continuing attempt to have their charges dismissed. In the UK, where I grew up, they would already have been declared vexatious litigants and forbidden to file any more motions without advance approval.
This document is a useful overview of several threads of these groups. It is a good introduction to the origins of several of the ideological and religious value systems that support many of the groups.
Be careful. These are not play-actors. Some of these people are seriously motivated and potentially dangerous.

After 2 weeks of finding replies and Tweets all over Twitter from users with the word “deplorable” in their screen names, I have concluded that I can, reliably and at no cost to my online experience, issue the Block command for them. Without fail, they are obnoxious, partisan, bloviating asshats, a total waste of internet bandwidth.
It is also clear that a number of the accounts are sock-puppet accounts for Donald Trump. They have been created in the last couple of months, have next to no followers, and some of them issue the same tweets at almost the same dates and times.

Jim Wright points out a pervasive media double standard when reporting on social unrest.

White people be like: it's not a riot, yo. It's a celebration! https://t.co/GQYw7u1b2e

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) September 25, 2016

LOOK: Tennessee fans are burning couches in celebration of beating Florida https://t.co/CgJn8hIY9v pic.twitter.com/6Xqiv2v9oN

— CBS Sports CFB (@CBSSportsCFB) September 25, 2016

One of the more interesting features of this election cycle is the apparent resurgence of racism in the USA. The GOP candidate, Donald Trump, has been actively supported and endorsed by a variety of white supremacist and racist leaders, including David Duke, and has not exactly done a lot of pushing back against that support.
Within my online universe, which includes both Facebook and Twitter, I see a lot more overtly racist comments and accounts. Not only are a significant number of self-identified Donald Trump supporters on Twitter openly espousing racist ideas, a lot of anti-Semitic folks appear to have showed up also.
Of course, we have people attempting to claim that this is somehow Obama’s fault. My view of that claim is that it is nothing more than an intellectually risible combination of dislike of the POTUS coupled with an attempt to rationalize the reality that an African-American POTUS, by virtue of his two terms of office, has drawn attention to unresolved issues with race in US society. We also have the growing realization that police actions in many parts of the USA disproportionately target black and immigrant people. Barack Obama did not go to Ferguson and ignite civil strife. The police lit the match under that tinderbox. I find the attempt to blame President Obama to be below unserious.
Nativism, xenophobia and racism are currently enjoying a resurgence throughout the Western world. The end of the Industrialized Era in these societies is leading to a societal crisis for indigenous blue-collar workers, whose jobs have already mostly disappeared to a combination of offshoring, ending of extractive industries, and automation. Many of those people are struggling to even stay alive, never mind thrive, and the Gospel of individual self-reliance that people tend to preach here in the USA does not exactly help.
Whenever people feel they are in a crisis, it is SOP for them to blame outsiders, and immigrants and anybody who looks different are the #1 target. They also have a tendency to be seduced by strong-sounding demagogues pretending to be “different” and offering grandiose simple solutions. The history of 20th Century Europe will tell us what can happen if enough angry people decide to vote for demagogues offering those simple solutions. If that happens here in the USA, it won’t be pretty, and racial and ethnic strife is certain.
My other complementary take on the hand-wringing about the resurgence of racism is that legislation against racism, which was passed in the UK at around the same time as the US Civil Rights legislation, did not eliminate racism, contrary to the hopes of social progressives. It simply made it socially unacceptable in most communities and social situations. So racists rapidly learned to only talk about their own racist worldviews in private among trusted family and friends, while listening carefully to others for “tells” and “dog whistles” indicating support for their worldview. Hence the rise of political “dog whistles” to signal tacit approval of the idea of discriminating on the basis of race.
So I tend to think that there is no major resurgence as such. All that is happening is that the collection of various types of individuals who normally keep very quiet about their racism have been emboldened in this election season to start not only talking about it, but in some cases revelling in it. The shallow end of the Twitter pool is currently awash with those kinds of people.
I might also add that my experience of contact with people in the UK who were racists and/or religious bigots, and particularly looking at Northern Ireland, is that once people become cognitively wedded to a worldview containing racism as one of its components, it is unlikely that they will modify that part of their worldview. Sadly, it may be the reality that only death ultimately removes those worldviews from active circulation.

1. Politicians not paying attention to experts? Surely not…
The British government is facing awkward questions now that it has emerged that the brand new airport built on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena is likely to be unusable in its current location because of excessive wind shear.
It emerged that the Meteorlogical Office in the UK had warned the government that this was likely to be the case; however, nobody thought to ask them until airport construction was already in progress…
In the meantime the airport may end up as a white elephant even worse than the billion-plus Cuidad Real Airport in Spain. At least that airport was actually opened, although not enough people used it to prevent the operating company from going bankrupt.

2. Accomplishments
One of the new nonsense memes circulating on the internets is one claiming that Hillary Clinton has no accomplishments.
Accomplishments.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
What I think the people who post these memes are really saying is that they do not think that Hillary Clinton has done anything for them. This is probably true. However, that does not mean that she has no accomplishments. Most people would regard being elected to the US Senate and becoming the US Secretary Of State as accomplishments, so trying to post a meme contradicting that really shows that the posters are, on this topic at least, profoundly unserious. Most likely they dislike Hillary Clinton for whatever reasons, and the meme is just another juvenile internet slam. Yawn.

3. Racism, Facebook hacking and personal responsibility
I work in IT, where corporations are expected to be responsible for securing their own data and the data of their clients against attack or theft. If my employer allows an unauthorized third party to hack into its network and steal information, or make unauthorized updates to data, that’s on us. We can blame the hackers, but in reality we should have prevented the hack in the first place. Certainly the third parties filing lawsuits will not be chasing the hackers. They will file against us, because it was our responsibility to secure data and we failed to exercise that responsibility.
Which brings us to the interesting story of Patsy Capshaw Skipper, the interim Mayor of Midland City Alabama. On August 25th Ms Skipper lost the Mayoral election to an opponent who is black. Shortly afterwards, her Facebook page showed a woman by the name of Patsy Capshaw Skipper moaning “The Nigger won” when asked about the election result.
Perhaps rather predictably, when this was noticed, Skipper deleted the messsage thread and then claimed that her Facebook account had been hacked.
Here’s the bad news Patsy. Even if your account was hacked, this is on you. It’s up to you to ensure that malicious people don’t hack your Facebook. Facebook is one of your windows to the wider world. Anything on your Facebook page, as you can see now, is viewed by the world as your property, a representation of you. Thanks to this reality, a lot of people in the world now think of you as a mean-spirited racist little chickenshit. No, blaming hackers doesn’t get you off the hook. It’s up to you to protect your online accounts. Not Facebook, or God, or the tooth fairy.
After all, you belong to the political party that constantly bloviates about “personal responsibility”.

4. There are reasons why I am occasionally contemptuous of Christian churches. Here is one of them
This church in Colorado apparently thought it was OK to not report felony sexual abuse of a 12 year old by a Church official because they determined that Biblical counselling would suffice.
OK.
I would like to see every person involved in that decision hauled into court. This would include the father of the 12 year old girl, who clearly has no interest in obeying the law, having the church obey the law, and who appears to regard his daughter as church property, a sexual chattel to be abused on request by church leaders.
Seriously. This is basically a conspiracy to cover up felonies.