This guy was general counsel for the FBI?

James Baker, former GC for the FBI, is a confused man.  A contributing editor for the website Lawfare, he posted a rambling account of his spiritual conflicts in opposing our dangerous president.  Hatred, he counsels us, hasn't worked, as evidenced by the president's stubbornly steady poll numbers.  Why don't we try love?  By love, he doesn't mean something warm and fuzzy, he means full-throated bold opposition, in the tradition of Martin Luther King.  Maybe that will bring Trump's polls down at last.  Throw in some Dalai Lama, perhaps even lethal force, if spiritually appropriate.  Whatever works.

At the same time, he's troubled by damage to his beloved FBI's reputation.

One of my dearest relatives, who happens to be a supporter of the president, asked me last year, “Jimmy, is everyone at the FBI corrupt?” I was dismayed.

It's possible that Baker, whose mind apparently is more unhinged than wonderfully focused by the prospect of his own hanging, would do well to give both hate and love a pass for now and concentrate on honesty, both internal and external. Some of this swirl of love and hate might come into sharper focus for him.

Isaiah 6:8

A brief movie review of Fury, which I just got around to seeing this weekend.



This was one of the harder movies to watch that I've seen, which means that it is a good war movie. There are several war crimes executed by good men, which is an accurate depiction of the nature of war. They do right sometimes, wrong often, and they're the good guys. They die well. It is honest about the brutality and the hardness of it all, and the ways in which they can come to love it.

The hardest scene to watch, though, is of an impromptu dinner party with some German locals. Half the tank crew wants to have a moment of normality and decency; the other half is so harmed and haunted by what they've done that they can't stand it, and try to destroy it. They're sorry, but they can't, and it's because they're too hurt to pretend things can still be normal.

It isn't an art film. It's not a masterpiece. But it's honest and it's direct, and that's not nothing.

J. Roddy Walston & the Business

A young group with an interesting sound.



I liked this one better, though it's more erotic than we usually do here.

Giving or Taking?

Jared Diamond, a noted historian, says it's basically even money whether civilization will utterly collapse by 2050. What are those numbers based on?

Today, the risk that we’re facing is not of societies collapsing one by one, but because of globalization, the risk we are facing is of the collapse of the whole world.

How likely do you think that is? That the whole network of civilization would collapse?

I would estimate the chances are about 49 percent that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.... At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted. Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably. With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer. Which means that by 2050 either we’ve figured out a sustainable course, or it’ll be too late.

Well, I could say that collapse has a 50% chance of occurring: either it will, or it won't.

On the other hand, he has some surprisingly positive things to say about the role of corporations.

I see that corporations, big corporations, while some of them do horrible things, some of them also are doing wonderful things which don’t make the front page. When there was the Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska, you can bet that made the front page. When Chevron was managing its oil field in Papua New Guinea in a utterly rigorous way, better than any national park I’ve ever been in, that certainly did not make the front page because it wasn’t a good picture.

That sounds suspiciously like sanity. So maybe give him your ear, and see what you think.

Everything not mandatory is forbidden

I grew up in Houston, famous for its lack of zoning.  In most cities, that's an unthinkable heresy.  Blue-state types naturally embrace zoning as part of the cradle-to-grave involvement of government in virtually every aspect of life that otherwise might be guided by free choices between buyers and sellers, a/k/a vicious dog-eat-dog capitalism or, to troglodytes like myself, the free market.

All-powerful zoning predictable screws up market to the point that people are shocked to discover that housing prices are insane and there are an inexplicable number of homeless people whom society has failed to provide with attractive housing options.  California is the poster child for this kind of thing.  Having noticed that mandatory zoning has led to an unreasonable fraction of developable land's being set aside for single-family homes, today's activists have executed an abrupt about-face and announced that single-family zoning must be replaced by multi-family zoning in order to redress past inequities.  One might think this kind of change might be pursued locally by changing the standards of the zoning committees, but why trust them to do that when you can ask the state government to make it mandatory for all cities?  So they'll change from mandatory single-family to mandatory multi-family:  anything but let the market adjust to what buyers and sellers want to do with their land.  How would they know what's good for them?

Running Out the Guns on Abortion

Georgia's heartbeat bill was signed last week. Today the Alabama state legislature passed a law that is clearly unconstitutional under current SCOTUS jurisprudence just precisely in order to provoke a court challenge. Frankly, if I were the governor of Alabama -- the actual governor is a woman, by the way -- I would veto it in spite of all the reasons to oppose abortion. The Georgia law may not survive constitutional challenges either, but at least it aims at being a workable law: it defines the beginning of human life as the beginning of the natural heartbeat (philosophically indefensible, that, but it does track the equally wrong but actually legal standard for death as the end of the natural heartbeat). All legal protections start there.

Not citizenship, though, which requires the child being born under the 14th Amendment. The earliness of the heartbeat also means that abortion may not practically be an option for most mothers, which is going to be hard for the SCOTUS to swallow. I don't think the votes are there to support repealing Roe and Casey yet -- I'd expect Roberts to defect, and Kavanaugh perhaps given his commentary in the confirmation -- but the approach is defensible. Establish that the child is a legal person, alive and entitled to an equality of rights.

The Alabama law doesn't even try to construct workable standards. The legislature was clear that its intent is to provoke, rather than to craft a law that could apply to practical cases in the world. That is not the purpose of legislation, and there definitely aren't the SCOTUS votes to win given that it defies every single aspect of the extant jurisprudence. I would think a governor would rather not take a case like that to court.

Academia as a subprime mortgage broker

Allen Farrington at Quillette, on academia:

Parkinson’s Law holds that a task will take as long as the time allotted to complete it. It seems to be a kind of social equilibrium theorem applicable to any complex organisation. Normally such organisations would simply collapse under the weight of their own bureaucratic inefficiency, but academia is different. It will never be allowed to collapse because education is a right.

* * *

Peter Thiel has given a uniquely scathing critique of the insanity of this system. . . . It is effectively a Ponzi scheme. No wonder Thiel calls college administrators subprime mortgage brokers. They get a cut on selling pieces of paper that are only as valuable as we all pretend they are.

All the local governments here just approved a county Economic Development Corporation, in the belief that a unified mouthpiece for rightthink from community leaders will attract new business and jobs. How it will achieve this goal remains murky, beyond the intention to bribe prospective employers with tax abatements, but there is much enthusiasm for "enhancing the workforce." Although it's unclear what anyone proposes to do to enhance the workforce beyond what we'd normally expect from public schools, the idea may be to create a para-academic institution in which useful knowledge is imparted to a select group of youngsters who want to learn it and can be expelled if they fail to learn or if they disrupt the classrooms too much. If that's the plan, I'll probably get on board, while regretting that we still have to fund the public schools with sky-high ad valorem taxes. Vouchers would let the parents choose the schools that produce results that suit their families, and watch the non-functioning schools die on the vine.

OK, we'll quit exposing you to wildfires

PG+E entered its second bankruptcy last year when it was threatened with $30 billion in damages from the horrific Camp Fire conflagration.  Now it's determined never to cause anyone that kind of disappointment again:

The Camp Fire in November, along with fires from the prior year, exposed PG+E to an estimated $30 billion or more in claims from blazes, hastening its January bankruptcy. Since then, the utility giant has been under pressure to better ensure that its equipment won’t spark fires. Earlier this year, PG+E said it would widen the scope of its power shutoffs to include high-transmission power lines, potentially impacting nearly 10 times the number of customers compared to an earlier plan.

Of course, there will be new kinds of disappointments.

John Adams vs. the Mob

I was eager to bring myself up to speed on America’s revolutionary history.

The most memorable story I heard during that tour was of a young John Adams, a future U.S. president, successfully defending Thomas Preston, a Captain of a redcoat British regiment who’d been accused of ordering the aforementioned massacre after British soldiers were hit with rocks and snowballs. When the administration of Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson put Preston and his men on trial, Adams agreed to serve as defence counsel, despite the fact he’d already staked out a reputation as a leading Patriot. Years later, he would declare that “the part I took in defence of [Captain] Preston and the soldiers, procured me anxiety and obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country. Judgment of death against those soldiers would have been as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of the Quakers or witches.”

Part of a piece chiding Harvard, and defending the ideal that even those accused of serious crimes deserve a proper defense. This ensures that the state exercises its power only when it has properly proven the charges, not merely when it has raised serious charges.

We could use more rather than less of that. The recent Mueller investigation was characterized by serious charges being used to justify extraordinary exercises of power (e.g., violating the attorney-client privilege of the President of the United States in order to raid his home and office, seize his documents, and read them). These accusations were rarely tested in court because of the plea bargain process, in which very easy terms were offered for a guilty plea compared with the severity of the punishments if you dared to contest the charges. A man of adequate honor might refuse to plead guilty when he was not, but perhaps not; given the ruinous cost of an extended defense to his family, even a man of high honor might choose to prefer harm to himself over harm to his family.

A lawyer might now begin to worry about offering a defense, if he might himself become the target of a prosecution or persecution thereby. We need more capability to defend those accused of serious crimes in an actual court-tested case, not a lessened capacity. This is a pillar of our liberty that is under tremendous stress.

Medicare For the Whole World, Courtesy of the US Taxpayer

You're just making things up now, Senator.

Easter Snow

A bit past Easter, but my mother said it was snowing where she was yesterday on Mother's Day.



These are the Uilleann Pipes, quite different from the great pipes usually featured here.

Biden vs. AOC

I'm not inclined to be mean to the young lady from Brooklyn, or the Bronx, or whichever part of NYC she's supposedly from; I can't be bothered to remember much about them anyway, though I know from visiting that the Bronx is in the north and Brooklyn is in the south. Still, she's a celebrity of a sort within the party, so when she decides to go hard against the presumptive nominee it's interesting.

Labor

How does a government act when it genuinely wants its existing labor force to thrive?  From a Claremont article about Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:

“[W]e want a Hungarian Hungary and a European Europe,” he said. So he sought alternatives to Muslim migration that would allow him to keep Hungary’s full-employment economy from stoking inflation. He has stepped up efforts at reintegrating into the economy the backward but considerably more fecund Roma minority. He has lowered the minimum school-leaving age from 18 to 16. He has remobilized retired people. He has pushed the unemployed onto workfare.

And he has made it possible for the German factories that are the backbone of Hungary’s manufacturing economy to ask for up to 400 hours of paid overtime from their workers annually. So short of labor is Hungary that two strikes in January 2019—one in the 4,000-strong Mercedes plant in Kecskemét, one at the vast Audi plant in Györ, with 13,000 employees—ended with 20% and 18% raises for workers, respectively. In the past year Hungary has (very discreetly) offered residence to Venezuelan refugees of Hungarian background. And Orbán has drawn up a plan offering a $30,000 loan to first-time mothers that gets written off when the mother bears a third child, and grants every woman who raises four children an exemption from income tax for the rest of her life.

Beautiful, Warlike Music

The 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie transcends its genre at times, and in several ways, but never more than in the beauty of the score.



Someone made a good decision in hiring a real composer to write a real composition. It raises the movie -- sometimes good, often clever, sometimes silly -- fully into the realm of art.

Glenn Reynolds is Right

The Sage of Knoxville:

BETTER THAT THEY SHOULD BE VICTIMS? Students who tackle shooters die as heroes. Some experts worry ‘we’re setting our kids up to be martyrs.’ “”We’re asking children to make executive decisions, life-and-death decisions.” We’re not asking them to. Life is forcing them to. And this isn’t unusual, but rather — since these “children” are teenagers — the norm for human existence. You could join the Roman legions at 14.

It is?

@Comey: "Reasonable," "totally normal step" to plant undercover sources in a political campaign.

Was that supposed to be reassuring, hoss?

Heresy

A response to the Defend/Defeat piece that Google hated so much.

I welcome the determination of Williams and the Claremont Institute to protect the nation against the deleterious ideas and illiberal political aims of the purveyors of identity politics and political correctness. But I worry that the Claremont campaign proceeds from a flawed understanding of the ideas Williams hope to defeat and misconstrues the imperatives of prudence arising from the regime he wishes to preserve.

It is a theoretical and rhetorical error, I believe, to liken multiculturalism to slavery and communism.... the ideas that Williams groups under the multiculturalism label present an incoherent cluster of demands for power by resentful members of the elite which masquerade as a quest for social justice by the disadvantaged.

That's OK, because the bulk of Americans are now too badly educated to recognize incoherence. They're ripe for the picking.

Big if True

The claims in this piece are explosive.

[Concerns that the Steele memorandum had many false claims] were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.

Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.

It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele’s “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” and the FBI has determined him to be “reliable” and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump....

[Kavalec] quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”

Kavalec, two days later and well before the FISA warrant was issued, forwarded her typed summary to other government officials. The State Department has redacted the names and agencies of everyone she alerted. It is unlikely that her concerns failed to reach the FBI.

Emphasis added.

John Kerry and the Logan Act

Way back in 2004, when this blog was still young, I wrote a piece on John Kerry breaking the Logan Act. At that time I didn't realize that the Logan Act was a dead letter, nor that John Kerry's entire career was built on Logan Act violations and, indeed, outright treason in Paris when he met with the North Vietnamese to negotiate, while a serving naval officer, without the permission of his chain of command. Even then I knew Kerry wouldn't be prosecuted for it.

Sally Q. Yates apparently knew something else, because she used the Logan Act to go after Michael Flynn and George Papadapolous. The Mueller report scuttles the law, though, making clear that it is a baseless and probably unconstitutional law that has never been enforced in 200 years.

Today President Trump stated that John Kerry should probably be prosecuted, because he's actively working to prevent diplomatic engagement between the United States and Iran. Well, he won't be. The man has made his whole life out of this particular sort of perfidy. In just this way he rose to Senator, Secretary of State, and almost -- very nearly -- President of the United States. Treason prospers.

Death Prayers

Raven's suggestion of last week that we should have prayers for dying well got me to thinking of good examples. Our culture is not rich with them. One example that came to mind was the 1999 film 13th Warrior. Ironically, perhaps, both of the prayers are not Christian; both are nevertheless excellent.



Both are also too long. These are prayers to say when you have time. But an abbreviated version might do well.