Brighton Beach is in Putin’s sights.
Incommunicado
We went up to the the California central coast for the weekend. Likely light blogging until Sunday night or Monday.
The Individual Mandate
…seems to be pretty pointless.
Why Russia Invaded Ukraine
…because the West is weak.
And that’s just the way the Democrats, from Madeleine NotSobright to Barack Obama, seem to like it.
Hey, Barack? The 1930s called. They want the UK's foreign policy back. http://t.co/4oUqVKMKxt
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 20, 2014
[Update a couple minutes later]
Putin was changing the map while Europe was fixing the climate.
What fools.
Also, when weak nations provoke stronger ones. Because part of strength is the will to use what power you have.
[Update mid-afternoon]
“It’s like they’re living on another planet.”
As he notes, if Obama’s unwilling to take on the Sierra Club, who should believe that he’ll take on Putin?
[Bumped]
[Late afternoon update]
The real Cold Warriors understood that crushing the Evil Empire of Communism required us to take into account the interests of Russia as a nation. The elder statesmen who won the Cold War, including Henry Kissinger (whose opening to China flanked the Soviet Union), are trying in vain to inject a note of sanity into the clown show that passes for American foreign policy on both sides of the aisle. The Republican mainstream mistook Tahrir Square for Lexington Common, and then mistook Maidan for Tahrir Square. If only we were rougher and tougher, it is claimed, Crimea would be free today. That is just plain stupid; there is no possible state of the world in which Crimea would not be Russian. We had some ability to influence the terms under which it would be Russian, and we chose the worst possible course of action, namely open hostility combined with impotent posturing.
We have an elite that lives in its own virtual-reality world circumscribed by a failed ideology, unable to learn from its past mistakes (or even to admit that they were mistakes) and condemned to repeat the same blunders again and again. They posture at Putin the way a small boy stands up to the zoo lion behind cage bars. The lion, though, is not entirely without alternatives, as the alarming case of Iran should make clear.
It’s folly on every front.
The Obama Scandal Bracket
Jon Gabriel has filled it out.
The “Selling Space” Debate
Jeff Foust has six takeaways.
Falcon Heavy
SpaceX has it on their flight schedule for this year.
Faster, please.
British Accents
…of yore.
I’ve always wondered how anyone can think they know what an accent from before Edison would have sounded like. How do we know that Romans would have spoken the Latin of the modern Church?
[Update a few minutes later]
That second video on the how Shakespeare would have been performed in the day is quite interesting.
Aircraft Cockpits
Can they be too secure?
They can be, and are.
Our lessons from 911 and approaches to aircraft security have been wrong headed for over 12.5 years. @PopMech
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 20, 2014
Our Criminal Justice System
…has become a crime:
The combination of vague and pervasive criminal laws — the federal government literally doesn’t know how many federal criminal laws there are — and prosecutorial discretion, plus easy overcharging and coercive plea-bargaining, means that where criminal law is concerned we don’t really have a judicial system as most people imagine it. Instead, we have a criminal justice bureaucracy that assesses guilt and imposes penalties with only modest supervision from the judiciary, and with very little actual accountability. (When a South Carolina judge suggested earlier this year that prosecutors should follow the law, prosecutors revolted.)
In a recent Columbia Law Review essay, I suggest some remedies to this problem: First, prosecutors should have “skin in the game” — if someone’s charged with 100 crimes but convicted of only one, the state should have to pay 99% of his legal fees. This would discourage overcharging. (So would judicial oversight, but we’ve seen little enough of that.) Second, plea-bargain offers should be disclosed at trial, so that judges and juries can understand just how serious the state really thinks the offense is. Empowering juries and grand juries (a standard joke is that any competent prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich) would also provide more supervision. And finally, I think that prosecutors should be stripped of their absolute immunity to suit — an immunity created by judicial activism, not by statute — and should be subject to civil damages for misconduct such as withholding evidence.
It’s a travesty. They should take the whole federal criminal code and throw it out, and start over.