Category Archives: Law

The Trump-Russia Investigation

It didn’t originate with Page or Papadopoulos; it originated with the Obama administration.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Civil war within the FBI? Some agents want Congress to subpoena them to get their stories out. I hope they oblige them.

[Update a few minutes later]

James Clapper: Leaker, liar, sleazeball.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Clapper just lied again about his previous lies.

The Mueller Investigation

Michael Mukasey: “It’s time to end it.”

Yes, but we also need to properly investigate what happened with the Obama administration, and see that justice is done. Though perhaps Horowitz’s report will have the whole story.

[Update a few minutes later]

(Democrat pollster for Bill Clinton during his impeachment) Mark Penn agrees. He’s been on Fox News saying this for a while.

[Update late morning]

The hunter becomes the hunted:

The current conflict in Washington, though dismaying, is at least much more comforting than the condition where everyone sings each other’s praises. The whole purpose of oversight, checks, and balances is to avoid the formation of an absorbing Markov transition — a kind of political Hotel California — which you can enter but never leave.

Avoiding a crisis depends on not crossing certain lines and concealing that fact if it has occurred. That has now gone by the board. When a system is undeniably confronted with deceitful lawlessness it is like finding the dealer was cheating at cards. Trump, by officially demanding an answer into whether the previous administration engaged in political spying, is effectively accusing them of cheating at cards. As everybody knows, once you ask this question at a table, the surface game stops and a deeper game begins. Suddenly the little cardboard rectangles don’t matter anymore.

Stay tuned.

[Afternoon update]

I suppose I shouldn’t be, but I’m kind of gobsmacked at the number of people on Twitter, many of whom purport to be journalists, claiming that the Justice Department is “independent of the executive branch.”

America The Weird

Victor Davis Hanson on the appeal of the West:

America remains the exceptional Western nation, whose influence and stature transcend the size of its economy and population, and its vast land mass of rich natural resources. Its cocktail of property rights, unfettered oil and gas development, muscular national defense, gun rights, religiosity, free-market economics, limited government, philanthropy, and great private universities is, again, unlike anything in the West.

Likewise, its excesses that arise from the marriage of free-market affluence and constitutionally protected unfettered expression, in the eyes of the world, appear often as license and indulgence. Certainly, the First and Second Amendments, the National Football League, rap music, the U.S. Marine Corps, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, or 24/7 cable news could not originate elsewhere.

The result is that America exists both as the world’s refuge and its beacon, the sole place where individuals can find a safe harbor. Only in America can the individual remain free and able to live his life under the assumption that the major decisions of his life are his own and not predicated on state approval. Only in the United States does the rags to riches story still exist, given that neither regulation, the deep state, nor an entrenched aristocracy can fully suppress entrepreneurs or aspiring capitalists.

A key goal of my Outer Space Treaty project is to extend this to the solar system. Speaking of which, Michael Listner has an analysis of the latest U.S. legislation along these lines.

Rejuvenation

This seems like a very promising approach. First dogs, then use the revenue to do clinical trials on humans. I’m holding up pretty well for my age, but I’d really like to set the clock back.

[Update a few minutes later, after reading]

I’d note that one of the “diseases of aging” listed is diabetes. I think it’s pretty clear at this point that this is mostly a problem of poor diet, based on decades of criminally terrible nutrition recommendations, and can largely be reversed by simply going keto. In fact, they’ve found that it can even be an effective treatment for Type 1 (and it was, prior to the development of insulin).

[Thursday-morning update]

New at Analog: Can we reverse aging?

[Via Gary Hudson]

[Bumped]