Death by DoJ

Steyn sniffs out a distinctly fishy odor.

As longtime readers and listeners and viewers well know, I never utter the words "Department of Justice" without prefacing it with the adjectives "dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt". If I were running for president, my platform would include a pledge to break it up: as currently constituted, its tentacles include the FBI (currently "investigating" the Trump near-assassination - yeah, sure) and the Bureau of Prisons (the fellows charged with ensuring that the security cameras aren't working and the guards are asleep when high-value prisoners get the urge to turn suicidal).

But what they call "Main Justice" is the core racket. As my friend Conrad Black, one of its victims, put it over a decade ago:

Those who do exercise their constitutional right to a defense receive three times as severe a sentence as those who plead guilty; 95 percent of cases are won by prosecutors, 90 percent of those without trial.

Those last two numbers have ticked up even higher in the years since, but that first one is important too: if you insist on your "constitutional" (ha!) right to a defence and it pans out as the ninetysomething stats suggest, you'll be gaoled for thirty years instead of ten. They'll punish you for having the temerity to insist on being tried and convicted according to due process.

In June, in the Northern District of California, something rather unusual happened: the defendants actually beat the rap. They were two British subjects - Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, respectively the founder and finance honcho of a UK company called Autonomy. In 2018 the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt US Department of Justice had indicted the pair for "conspiracy" and "fraud" over the company's sale to Hewlett Packard - and, after some protracted Julian Assange-like extradition jousting, the two were put on a 'plane to America and placed under house arrest.

And then on June 6th a San Francisco jury found Lynch and Chamberlain not guilty of all charges. On July 28th, back in Britain, Mr Lynch gave his first interview about his ordeal:

Cleared UK tech tycoon feared he would die in US jail if convicted

Less than a month later, he is dead. To celebrate his acquittal, he took a party of friends and family (including his trial attorney Christopher Morvillo) on a Mediterranean cruise, and on Monday his luxury yacht sank off Sicily.

Must be pretty sad for his co-defendant, right?

Well, no. Because he's dead too. On Saturday Stephen Robinson went for his morning run in Cambridgeshire and, six miles into it, was hit by a car. He was pronounced dead on Monday - the same day Mike Lynch died.

In The Spectator, Conrad Black's former underling (and my former overling) Charles Moore writes:

Mike Lynch and I were due to have lunch next month. When we last communicated, he was buoyant after vindicating his innocence in the Californian courts. Now he is the victim of a horror out of classical myth, almost of Charybdis itself, and with him his dear daughter Hannah. How can his poor wife, Angela, who survived the shipwreck, bear such losses? Mike's yacht Bayesian was named after Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century Presbyterian minister whose theorem Mike admired. According to Wikipedia, the theorem 'gives a mathematical rule for inverting conditional probabilities, allowing us to find the probability of a cause given its effect'. What on earth is the probable cause of this brilliant man's fate, with its triumphs and its weird tragedy?

Charles is right. Charybdis, you'll recall (if anybody still does, given the state of western education), was a sea-monster who belched out giant whirlpools of water off the coast of Sicily. Which is precisely what happened to Lynch's yacht. Off the coast of Sicily. If you incline less mythologically and more scientifically, and you're pondering the Bayesian probabilities of what happened to the Bayesian, the headline of the BBC's not terribly helpful "explainer" will read a little ironic:

Bayesian sinking: The key questions for investigators

It was, per the Beeb's "experts", a "black swan" event. According to the lead invesigator in Italy, Salvo Cocina, "they were in the wrong place at the wrong time" - although he also noted that another vessel, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, was in the same place at the same time, and emerged unscathed. As Steyn Clubber Nigel Sherratt comments:

The loss of 'Bayesian' is indeed a mystery. A waterspout off Sicily should be no real danger to a 184 foot fully crewed, well founded and managed modern yacht at anchor. It's hardly Sir Robin alone on Suhaili against the Southern Ocean. 'Sir Robert Baden Powell' a smaller (albeit still 138 foot) gaff topsail schooner anchored nearby came through with no problems and helped with rescue efforts. Superstitious sailors might think that naming a yacht 'Bayesian' was tempting fate…

Meanwhile, back in Cambridgeshire, with the English constabulary's usual flair for le mot non-juste, Stephen Chamberlain's demise was characterised as follows:

Death of tycoon's ex-partner not 'untoward' - police

"Untoward", huh? It is a somewhat flexible word, and my dictionaries to hand define it variously as unseemly, unexpected, unfortunate, improper and/or inconvenient. Indeed, the death of Mr Chamberlain is not "inconvenient", although it seems odd that the Cambridgeshire constabulary would announce it as such in public. Between 2013 and 2022, thirty-eight pedestrians died on the county's roads, which is under four per year - and none in this particular neck of the woods.

So the US Department of Justice lost the case, but two months later, and on the same day, both defendants are dead anyway, along with one of their victorious lawyers. "In the course of forty-eight hours, I can't process what has happened," says their surviving attorney, Gary Lindberg, "but both of our clients, as well as Chris and his wife, are gone.”

Mr Lynch was fifty-nine, Mr Chamberlain fifty-two. They fought the DOJ, and the DOJ won.

The filthy bastards almost always do—one way or another, by hook or by crook. As time marches ever on and the Deep State ogres continue to commit such outrages without facing any consequences great or small, the outrages will become more brazen, more abhorrent, more flagrant, more…well, more outrageous, in fact. Look for this shocking predation to go right on, the blood-soaked litany of criminality, oppression, abuse, and brutality not just lengthening but steadily worsening—unless and until it is forcefully brought to a screeching, smoking halt by an infuriated citizenry who, at long last, finally decides that they will no longer stand for being preyed upon by their own fiendish government.

I keep on saying it, and it keeps on being true: Our flaccid non-response to ever more heinous and intolerable acts, has cozened our would-be Lords and/or Masters into assuming that they need not fear those they torment. They must be taught—vigorously, vehemently, and indelibly—that this assumption is gravely erroneous. A proper fear of We The People MUST be re-instilled in Ruling Class hearts, minds, and bodies, and that right soon.

A 180-degree corrective un-fucking of basic terminology, concepts, and standards warped by shitlibs over lo, these many years desperately needs to be undertaken, the results pounded into the thick skulls of national office-seekers, scuttling bureau-rats, and FederalGovCo agency heads and miscellaneous appointees like nails into a floor joist. To wit: Contempt must be converted to Respect, Entitlement to Merit, Rule to Governance, Indulgence to Forbearance. The quintessentially-American construct of the Public Servant itself must be re-imagined, re-invigorated, and re-considered. The instinctual ProPol triple-A trifecta of Acquisitiveness, Advancement, and Aggrandizement must be mocked, shamed, and shunned.

There must be neither exaltation of nor reflexive deference to so-called “Elites” or “Experts” in government; likewise, federally-funded “scientists” must be regarded as the bought-and-paid-for FederalGovCo yes-men, shills, and baglappers they are. Ideally, the evolutionary wrong-turn known as the Career Politician, of which lowly, misbegotten sub-caste Pedaux Jaux Bribem is the Platonic ideal—ie, a parasitic excrescence who has never in his life done so much as one (1) day’s honest work in a productive private-sector job, be it ever so humble, and rejects any such self-abnegation as utterly beneath his (putative) dignity—would be rubbished as unworthy of a free people, as the Founders repeatedly warned us it of right ought to be. Alas, I fear we’ve come way too far down that dark, dismal road to reverse course any time soon.