Category Archives: Law

Business, Law, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Sextortion

10 Comments

I got two of these types of emails last night. While I have occasionally viewed a raunchy video, it was pretty clearly hinky, for numerous reasons (misspellings, fact that the password is not associated with either my email of Facebook, and I don’t even have a Messenger account, I rarely allow a webcam to see me, etc.). If it was a serious threat, they’d send a sample video.

This is a federal felony, but I find it kind of amazing that if you want to report it to the FBI, you do it by phone, instead of forwarding to an email address. The country’s in the very best of hands.

Business, Economics, Law, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Property Rights On Mars

5 Comments

I don’t know if it will be webcast, but I’m going to be giving a talk tomorrow morning in Pasadena, as part of the final plenary of the Mars Society meeting.

[Update Sunday afternoon]

I think the talk went OK. The crowd was smaller than I expected; I think that the Mars conference in DC has pulled a lot of the audience that Bob used to get for his Mars Society meetings. I called people in the audience “mutant weirdos,” and made a lawyer joke.

[Bumped]

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

That Dress, Twenty Years On

4 Comments

On the anniversary, my fellow defendant Mark Steyn remembers the last time a president was (entirely justifiably) impeached.

And as I typed this, I just realized that I forgot to commemorate the sixth anniversary of that infamous Blog Post which resulted in the never-ending lawsuit against me, CEI, National Review, and Mark (though he is now eager to go to trial having made a lot of money selling a book against the plaintiff). And it’s been over two years since our request for an en banc appeal, with no ruling from the DC Circuit.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Cohen Plea

17 Comments

OK, so Mark Levin thinks this is legal BS, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

So, if this “crime” is not a crime, why is he copping a plea? Why would his legal team agree to it (assuming they’re competent, not necessarily a good assumption when it comes to Lanny Davis).

My guess is that they have him on a lot more serious stuff, so he was advised to accept this plea down in return for testimony against the president. The prosecutors knew they could never get an actual conviction for this “crime” with a jury, but now that he’s plead, they’ll claim, “See, he wouldn’t have copped a plea if he wasn’t guilty of this ‘crime,’ and the president did it, too!”

Thus providing additional impeachment fodder should the country be nuts enough to put Democrats back in power.

But funny thing, I recall a mid-term election in which the opposing party not only talked about impeachment, but actually did it, and took a beating at the polls. If I were Republicans, I’d be running non-stop campaign ads of loony, low-IQ Maxine screaming “Impeach, impeach, impeach!”

[Afternoon update]

Thoughts on this and Manafort from Andrew McCarthy and Mollie Hemingway, via Instapundit.

[Update a while later]

From an email list:

Lanny Davis, long time Clinton lawyer and fixer, approaches Michael Cohen. He says, “You hate Trump, me and my clients hate Trump, let’s work together. You are facing 30+ years and happen to be one of the least sympathetic defendants of all the people in Trump’s orbit. I’ll work with the prosecutors, who would much rather get something on Trump than on you, to get you only 3-5 years. All you have to do is plead guilty to something that is a little shaky, but implicates Trump. Do you think you could possibly find it within your moral wheelhouse to agree to such a deal?”

Sounds about right to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

Steve Bannon: “November is a referendum on impeachment.”

Business, Economics, Education, History, Law, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Pre-Trump World

6 Comments

Was it normal, or abnormal?

One off the polling practices I find annoying is the “right track, wrong track” question, because it can be very misleading in its implications. It doesn’t provide any information as to what the respondent thinks what “track” we should be on. I have never in my adult life felt that the country was on the “right track,” and if polled I would always say it was wrong. And of course, if I said that whenn Republicans were in power, Democrats would infer that it meant that I wanted them to win, which would be stupid, because what I wanted continually was a more libertarian, constitutional government.

Anyway, I have to confess that, despite my dislike of Trump, I do feel, for the first time, that with all the regulatory rollback, and constitutionalist judicial appointees, we’re at least, finally, on the right track. But we still have along way to go down the rails. My fear is that if the Democrats get back in power, we’ll be off the rails entirely.

Business, Education, History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The First Amendment

4 Comments

…and the lesson of Robespierre:

Once we stop treating the Internet as just a medium like newsprint and start treating Internet hosting companies as publishers, we make them vulnerable to oppressors and we can be sure that some of them will not have what we see as the “public good” in mind.

This is the lesson of Robespierre: once you establish that something may be done for you, you establish that it can be done to you.

Similarly, as Barry Goldwater and others have said, a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.