Executive Claims Adjuster Formally Branded A Terrorist...,

NYTimes   |   Luigi Mangione on Tuesday was formally accused of first-degree murder, a charge that branded him a terrorist and aimed directly at the idea that the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive was a legitimate political act.

“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” said Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, at a news conference on Tuesday.

The assassination of the chief executive, Brian Thompson, on Dec. 4 in the heart of Manhattan set off a dayslong manhunt and captivated Americans, many of whom vented their frustrations on dealings with health insurance companies. Some voiced their support for Mr. Mangione and rooted for him to elude capture.

But on Tuesday, prosecutors said that Mr. Mangione’s actions were meant to further terrorism. They were, prosecutors said, “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” and to “affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder.”

Mr. Mangione, 26, also faces two counts of second-degree murder and weapons charges in New York in the killing of Mr. Thompson.

A lawyer for Mr. Mangione, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, declined to comment on the new charges on Tuesday.

Mr. Bragg said that they were in response to the “brazen, targeted and premeditated shooting,” adding that he couldn’t think of another office “more equipped to handle a terrorism charge.”

If convicted on the highest charges, Mr. Mangione faces a sentence of life in prison without parole.

.45 GUILTY!!! of being the antithesis of a man of culture.....,

President Trump reacts to the verdict:

“The whole country is being rigged right now. This is being done by the Biden Administration in order to hurt or wound a political opponent."

"We'll fight to the end and we'll win...this is long from over." pic.twitter.com/G93N5ZwiBH

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 30, 2024

dailycaller  |  A jury in the deep-blue New York City borough of Manhattan convicted former President Donald Trump on Thursday in the case brought by Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records charged in Bragg’s indictment. Defense attorneys cornered the prosecution’s witnesses at critical junctures of the trial in a case that stood on shaky legal grounds from the start, including when Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, an admitted liar, took the stand as the prosecution’s star witness, a choice that resulted in Cohen revealing he stole from the Trump organization and committing what the defense demonstrated was potentially another act of perjury.

The charges stemmed from $420,000 Trump paid Cohen over 12 months in 2017 for “legal services,” which prosecutors argued was actually to reimburse Cohen for $130,000 he paid to secure a nondisclosure agreement with porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election and keep her quiet about claims of an affair with Trump.

To indict Trump on felony charges and circumvent the expired statute of limitations, Bragg had to claim the records were falsified to conceal or commit another crime — which remained unclear throughout the trial but was assumed to be either a campaign finance or election law violation.

Prosecutors argued Trump engaged in a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election by paying to suppress stories of former Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin, former Playboy model Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels. They suggested he violated a state election law that makes it a misdemeanor for any two or more people to “conspire” to influence an election using “unlawful means.”

Trump is the first former U.S. president to be convicted at a criminal trial. His sentencing is scheduled for July 11th, days before the Republican National Convention set to begin on July 15. Falsifying business record charges carry a maximum sentence of four years in prison.

The jury began its deliberations on Wednesday after Judge Juan Merchan read the jury instructions, which did not require jurors to agree on what “unlawful” means Trump allegedly used to influence the election.

Bragg’s team included Matthew Colangelo, who spent two years as a top official in the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ). While previously working at the New York District Attorney’s office, Colangelo also led both the investigation that culminated in the Trump Foundation’s dissolution and the investigation that later became Trump’s civil fraud case.

Colangelo joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as senior counsel in 2022 while Bragg was still investigating Trump.

 

 

What's That Smell? Like Censorship, Lawfare Is Yet Another Feminine Ethical Hygiene Problem....,

thehill  |  Channeling Tennessee Williams in his play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Judge Scott McAfee wrote that, after their testimony, there remained “an odor of mendacity.”

That odor was particularly strong after the hearings indicated that Wade may have committed perjury in his earlier divorce case, and that both Willis and Wade were credibly accused of lying on the stand about when their relationship began. 

They are prosecuting defendants in the Trump case accused of the same underlying conduct, including  19 individual counts of false statements, false filings or perjury.

Yet, that distinct odor noted by Judge McAfee goes beyond the sordid affairs of Willis and Wade.

For many citizens, mendacity, or dishonesty, is wafting from various courtrooms around the country. The odor is becoming intolerable for many Americans as selective prosecution is being raised in a wide array of cases.

The problem is that courts have made it virtually impossible to use this claim to dismiss counts. Yet there is a disturbing level of merit to some of these underlying objections.

For years, conservatives have objected that there is a two-tier system of justice in this country. I have long resisted such claims, but it has become increasingly difficult to deny the obvious as selective prosecution in a variety of recent cases and opinions.

I have long stated that the charges against Trump over documents at Mar-a-Lago are strong and based on established precedent. However, the recent decision of Special Counsel Robert Hur not to bring criminal charges against President Joe Biden has undermined even that case.

Hur described four decades of Biden serially violating laws governing classified documents. The evidence included Biden telling a third party that he had classified material in his house and actually reading from a classified document to his non-cleared ghostwriter. There is evidence of an effort to destroy evidence and later an effort of the White House to change the report. There is also Biden’s repeated denial of any knowledge or memory of the documents found in nine locations where he worked or lived. 

Hur ultimately had to justify the lack of charges based on a belief that he could not secure a conviction from a D.C. jury with an elderly defendant with diminished mental faculties.  

Although Special Counsel Jack Smith could still proceed on obstruction counts, his prosecution of Trump for the retention and mishandling of national security documents is absurdly in conflict with the treatment Biden is receiving.

In New York, the legislature changed the statute of limitations to allow Trump to be sued while New York Attorney General Letitia James effectively ran on a pledge of selectively prosecuting him. She never specified any particular crime, just promising to bag Trump.

 

Arbitrary Enforcement Of Federal Law Roils Classified Documents Case

declassified  |  Jack Smith's Florida case. "[Judge Aileen] Cannon repeatedly asked both sides for examples of criminal prosecution for 'other officials who did the same.' She questioned the 'arbitrary enforcement' of the espionage statute, forcing the government to admit that no other former president or vice president has faced criminal prosecution for keeping similar documents and failing to return them.

'This speaks to the arbitrary enforcement...featuring in this case,' Cannon told Bratt. Cannon also pushed back on claims Trump should have expected to face prosecution for storing classified files. Once again noting no former president or vice president-Mike Pence also discovered classified records after Trump was indicted in 2023-has been charged, Cannon suggested it was fair for Trump to expect the same treatment since 'no historical precedent' is on the books. 'Given that landscape,' Cannon continued, Trump could argue he has been unfairly targeted. Which his team already has. 

In a motion emailed to the court and the government last month, Trump's attorneys asked to dismiss the case based on 'selective and vindictive prosecution.' Although the motion is not public, Jack Smith quickly responded to defend the Department of Justice's choice to pursue Trump and not Biden. 'Trump, unlike Biden, is alleged to have engaged in extensive and repeated efforts to obstruct justice and thwart the return of documents bearing classification markings, which provides particularly strong evidence of willfulness and is a paradigmatic aggravating factor that prosecutors routinely rely on when making charging decisions,' Smith wrote in a March 7 response. 'Second, the evidence concerning the two men's intent-whether they knowingly possessed and willfully retained such documents-is starkly different.' 

In an almost comical passage, Smith admits Biden unlawfully retained classified records-just not as many as Trump. 'Biden possessed 88 documents bearing classification markings, including 18 marked Top Secret. By contrast, Trump possessed 337 documents bearing classification markings, including 64 marked Top Secret.

The Colorado High Court Jumped The Lawfare Shark

kunstler  |  And just like that — snap ! — the news about the Colorado Supreme Court’s droll action against candidate DJ Trump vanished from the front page (or top screens) of The New York Times. Do you know why? I’ll tell you: Because the political Left has finally managed to embarrass itself with a “lawfare” gambit so nakedly fatuous that it exposes the faction’s drive to destroy the election process, and with it our country.

      This is what you get from a regime that faked its way to power and now must strain to cover up its long train of crimes, abuses, and effronteries to common sense, while running out of tricks to keep fooling even its own deranged followers. Somehow, the act of kicking a leading candidate off the ballot has finally registered as inconsistent with “defending our democracy.”

     Of course, the reckless abuse of law — “lawfare” — proceeds from the Left’s disrespect for boundaries and limits, which is exactly what law in principle concerns itself with. And from there it’s a quick leap into totalizing bad faith, the operating system for government under an imposter president, “Joe Biden.” Suddenly, mere days before Christmas, when the people want to be preoccupied with things other than politics, events merge explosively to shape the fate of the nation.

     In a sane world, the US Supreme Court would not just summarily strike down the Colorado ruling, but would issue a career-ending rebuke to the brain-damaged state justices who managed to not learn a basic principle of due process: innocent until proven guilty — that to brand someone a criminal, there must be a record of indictment and conviction for a particular crime, and that, in the case of Mr. Trump, a politically-motived fairy tale about an “insurrection” doesn’t cut it.

    Also, in a sane world interested in truth and justice, the Republican-majority Congress would have months ago convened new hearings about the Jan 6/21 Capitol riot to undo the manifold perfidious frauds instigated by the previous Democrat-majority committee under Chairman Bennie Thompson. By now, testimony should have been compelled from Nancy Pelosi, the then Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, and former Defense Secretary Chris Miller about Ms. Pelosi’s refusal to call in national guard troops to reinforce security around the building, and to answer for the odd behavior of the Capitol Police, such as opening doors for the mob and then serving as ushers to show off the place. It seems obvious that many elected Republicans also have an interest in supporting the Jan 6/21 “insurrection” fairy tale. Do you still wonder why the evil entity infesting Washington is called “the blob”?

      The Substack blogger who styles himself as El Gato Malo offers the alluring theory that a SCOTUS ruling on whether the 14^th Amendment clauses that were applied to the presidency in the Colorado case, could enable Special Counsel Jack Smith to slip-in a superseding indictment (replacing the original indictment) in his DC  Jan 6 case against Mr. Trump with new insurrection / rebellion charges, thus setting-up a fortified argument for states to chuck Mr. Trump off any ballot. More “lawfare,” you see. Whatever it takes. . .!

      More curiously even, we learn today, that an amicus brief has been filed in the SCOTUS by former Attorney General Ed Meese (under Ronald Reagan), and two constitutional law professors, Steven Calabresi and Gary S. Lawson, challenging the legality altogether of Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel for prosecuting Mr. Trump. The amicus is filed in the matter of Jack Smith’s certiorari petition to the court to schedule Mr. Trump’s DC trial the same day as the Super Tuesday primary —against the defendant’s objections. The amicus presents compelling arguments that Attorney General Merrick Garland acted illegally in appointing Mr. Smith, and if SCOTUS chucks him out of the special counsel job, the whole mendaciously constructed scaffold of the Jan 6 prosecution goes out the window, along with the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

     Those of you with a deep interest in blob lawfare treachery may also be interested in the courtroom win, this week, by Brandon Straka, who launched the 2018 “Walk Away” movement to persuade gays to leave the Democratic Party. He was present on the US Capitol grounds the day of the Jan 6/21 riot, and was later sued by eight “black and brown” Capitol Police officers, with the help of a Soros-funded nonprofit law firm, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Straka was accused of causing the officers’ injuries (pepper spray and “exhaustion”) and of conspiring to deprive them of their civil rights (under the KKK Act of 1871). It came out in the course of testimony that seven of the officers were on the other side of the enormous Capitol building from Mr. Straka’s position the entire time alleged, and that one of the officers was not even present at the Capitol or even in the District of Columbia at the time. Such are the sordid dreams of lawfare warriors and their useful idiots. . . .

     Next up, as we turn the corner into a fateful 2024 — and lately eclipsed by all these lawfare election interference shenanigans — will be the perhaps even more consequential hearings on the Biden family’s extensive international bribery operations, which may shed some light on how come we suffer a president and a party bent on destroying our country.

Unprecedented Lawfare Waged Against Trump Will Produce Inevitable Blowback

twitter  |  This is what an *actual* attack on democracy looks like: in an un-American, unconstitutional, and *unprecedented* decision, a cabal of Democrat judges are barring Trump from the ballot in Colorado. Having tried every trick in the book to eliminate President Trump from running in this election, the bipartisan Establishment is now deploying a new tactic to bar him from ever holding office again: the 14th Amendment. I pledge to *withdraw* from the Colorado GOP primary unless Trump is also allowed to be on the state’s ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley to do the same immediately - or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous consequences for our country.

Today’s decision is the latest election interference tactic to silence political opponents and swing the election for whatever puppet the Democrats put up this time by depriving Americans of the right to vote for their candidate of choice. 

The 14th Amendment was part of the “Reconstruction Amendments” that were ratified following the Civil War. It was passed to prohibit former Confederate military and political leaders from holding high federal or state office. These men had clearly taken part in a rebellion against the United States: the Civil War. That makes it all the more absurd that a left-wing group in Colorado is asking a federal court to disqualify the 45th President on the same grounds, equating his speech to rebellion against the United States. 

And there’s another legal problem: Trump is not a former “officer of the United States,” as that term is used in the Constitution, meaning Section 3 does not apply. As the Supreme Court explained in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (2010), an “officer of the United States” is someone appointed by the President to aid him in his duties under Article II, Section 2. The term does not apply to elected officials, and certainly not to the President himself.   The Framers of the 14th Amendment would be appalled to see this narrow provision—intended to bar former U.S. officials who switched to the Confederacy from seeking public office—being weaponized by a sitting President and his political allies to prevent a former President from seeking reelection. Our country is becoming unrecognizable to our Founding Fathers.

Certain Cause Of Trump's Predicament

johganz |  “But, John, are you saying we should use the Justice Department politically? With the express purpose of getting rid of someone you don’t like.” Kind of! As Trump’s intellectual defenders love to remind us, there’s ultimately no neutral administration of justice, everything is political, and when you get the state apparatus in your hands you use it beat up on your enemies and help out your friends. So, in part, these are their rules. (If you start talking about how you are gonna apply the thought of Carl Schmitt when you administer the state, I may start to get the sense you are my enemy.)

Also, let’s not play innocent. Historically speaking, the F.B.I. has always been used “politically:” it was used against Reds, Nazis, Reds again, the KKK, civil rights leaders, black power leaders, Nazis again etc. A lot of this was abusive and terrible and you know where my political sympathies lie, but this was because the political establishment implicitly or explicitly viewed these groups as threats to the United States itself. In many cases, they were not. (Yeah, yeah, I know what you are gonna say, “but J. Edgar Hoover, blah, blah, blah”—The fact is that Hoover lasted so long because powerful people thought he was useful and mostly right.) But here is a case where the real deal has come along: a bonafide domestic threat to the constitution. People these days are willing to call everything from annoying college students to crummy D.E.I. consultants “totalitarian threats to democracy” or whatever, but when a big, fat threat to democracy is standing right there, suddenly everyone is like, “Well…it’s a little complicated, isn’t it?” No, it really isn’t. And, in this case, we don’t have to break the law or do anything underhanded: just actually try to uphold the law for a change and stop playing little political games around it.

A political class that can’t defend the constitutional order and the rule of law is worse than useless: it’s actually conspiring with its enemies. Trump attacked the very heart of our system of government. If the system can’t respond to that forcefully it doesn’t deserve to exist anymore. Let’s stop pretending Trump is anything but a mobster and a would-be tyrant. In this case, prudence demands action.

NYC Public Schools Teachers Get An Injunction Against DeBlasio's Indefensible Neo-Vaccinoid Mandate

thehill |  A federal appeals court blocked New York City’s coronavirus vaccine mandate late Friday evening, dealing a blow to the city days before the mandate goes into effect. 

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals granted an expedited injunction on Friday blocking the city from mandating that all public school employees submit proof of their first coronavirus vaccine dose by Monday.

The court referred the case to a three-judge panel on an expedited basis.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said in late August that all of the city’s public school teachers and staff would need to have their first dose by Sept. 27. There was no alternative option for regular testing.

A group of New York City public school employees sued earlier this month to block the mandate, arguing that their rights to due process and equal protection were violated. The complaint specifically alleged that the order violated their right to pursue their profession. 

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan upheld the mandate, prompting the plaintiffs to quickly appeal the decision. 

About 82 percent of the city’s roughly 149,000 public school employees are vaccinated, the agency told The Hill, including 88 percent of roughly 78,000 teachers and 95 percent of roughly 1,600 principals.

Danielle Filson, press secretary for the New York City Department of Education [DOE], said in a statement to The Hill that the agency is “confident our vaccine mandate will continue to be upheld once all the facts have been presented, because that is the level of protection our students and staff deserve.”

“Over 82 percent of DOE employees have been vaccinated and we continue to urge all employees to get their shot by September 27,” Filson said.

Fooling Yourselves About the Fair and Uniform Application of Rules

WaPo |  Both sides are missing a crucial dimension — one that ultimately bends in the direction of the pro-Williams camp. Just like the criminal-justice system, tennis and many other sports depend on the subjective discretion of neutral arbiters to apply a set of supposedly objective “rules.”

Ramos did indeed follow the code, and each of the three sanctions had some justification, thus satisfying the “rules” camp. But for two of the three violations (the racket smashing was unambiguous), he used his discretion to punish Williams for acts — coaching and heated exchanges with an umpire — that occur routinely in tennis but are seldom punished.

Within the criminal-justice system, the same principle of discretion also applies, with much more severe and damaging consequences on human lives than the outcome of a tennis match.

At every stage, criminal-justice officials regularly justify individual decisions based on their discretionary interpretation of a rule. When a police officer makes a “routine traffic stop” for a car that changed lanes without signaling, or decides to arrest someone found with recreational drugs, technically the decision is warranted — even if numerous other people commit the same “infractions” without any consequences. Prosecutors have tremendous discretion to decide, for example, whether to charge a child as an adult, add additional enhancements to press for a plea bargain or seek the death penalty. Judges often make discretionary sentencing decisions (recall the Stanford University swimmer case). And prison officials have almost full discretion in issuing disciplinary infractions and sending inmates to solitary confinement.

In all of these instances, one can always say, “Well, this person didn’t follow the rules,” and on an individual basis that may seem sufficient to justify the consequences. What gets lost, however, is that rules are rarely applied regularly, consistently or fairly.

Worse, in the criminal-justice area, these rules are without question applied unevenly, with overwhelming racial disparities at every stage. People of color are far more likely than their white peers to be arrested for the same behavior, charged for the same crime, sentenced to more time for the same conviction, sent to solitary confinement for the same activity and denied parole despite similar prison records.

Without diminishing Osaka’s level of play or achievement, and without excusing Williams’s behavior, the outcome of the U.S. Open may have been determined by an umpire’s discretionary decisions that were far outside the norm. Rather than fool ourselves about the universality of rules, we should question the vast and often unchallenged use of discretion in both sports and criminal justice.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

BostonReview  |  In 1907, in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Austria saw its first elections held under universal male suffrage. For some this was progress, but others felt threatened by the extension of the franchise and the mass demonstrations that had brought it about.

The conservative economist Ludwig von Mises was among the latter. “Unchallenged,” he wrote, “the Social Democrats assumed the ‘right to the street.’” The elections and protests implied a frightening new kind of politics, in which the state’s authority came not from above but from below. When a later round of mass protests was violently suppressed—with dozens of union members killed—Mises was greatly relieved: “Friday’s putsch has cleansed the atmosphere like a thunderstorm.”

In the early twentieth century, there were many people who saw popular sovereignty as a problem to be solved. In a world where dynastic rule had been swept offstage, formal democracy might be unavoidable; and elections served an important role in channeling the demands that might otherwise be expressed through “the right to the street.” But the idea that the people, acting through their political representatives, were the highest authority and entitled to rewrite law, property rights, and contracts in the public interest—this was unacceptable. One way or another, government by the people had to be reined in.

Mises’ writings from a century ago often sound as if they belong in speeches by modern European conservatives such as German Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble. The welfare state is unaffordable, Mises says; workers’ excessive wage demands have rendered them unemployable, governments’ uncontrolled spending will be punished by financial markets, and “English and German workers may have to descend to the lowly standard of life of the Hindus and the coolies to compete with them.” 

Quinn Slobodian argues that the similarities between Mises then and Schäuble today are not a coincidence. They are products of a coherent body of thought: neoliberalism, or the Geneva school. His book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, is a history of the “genealogy of thought that linked the neoliberal world economic imaginary from the 1920s to the 1990s.”

The book puts to rest the idea that “neoliberal” lacks a clear referent. As Slobodian meticulously documents, the term has been used since the 1920s by a distinct group of thinkers and policymakers who are unified both by a shared political vision and a web of personal and professional links.

How much did the Geneva school actually shape political outcomes, as opposed to reflecting them? 

John Maynard Keynes famously (and a bit self-servingly) claimed that, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist . . . some academic scribbler of a few years back.” Not everyone will share this view, but by highlighting a series of seven “moments”—three before World War II and four after—Slobodian definitively establishes the existence of neoliberalism as a coherent intellectual project—one that, at the very least, has been well represented in the circles of power.

Elites Have No Skin In The Game

mises  |  To review Skin in the Game is a risky undertaking. The author has little use for book reviewers who, he tells us, “are bad middlemen. … Book reviews are judged according to how plausible and well-written they are; never in how they map the book (unless of course the author makes them responsible for misrepresentations).”

The risk is very much worth undertaking, though, because Skin in the Game is an excellent book, filled with insights. These insights stress a central antithesis. Irresponsible people, with what C.D. Broad called “clever silly” intellectuals prominent among them, defend reckless policies that impose risks on others but not on themselves. They have no “skin in the game,” and in this to Taleb lies their chief defect.

Interventionist foreign policy suffers from this defect. “A collection of people classified as interventionistas … who promoted the Iraq invasion of 2003, as well as the removal of the Libyan leader in 2011, are advocating the imposition of additional such regime change on another batch of countries, which includes Syria, because it has a ‘dictator’. So we tried that thing called regime change in Iraq, and failed miserably. … But we satisfied the objective of ‘removing a dictator.’ By the same reasoning, a doctor would inject a patient with ‘moderate’ cancer cells to improve his cholesterol numbers, and proudly claim victory after the patient is dead, particularly if the postmortem showed remarkable cholesterol readings.”

But what has this to do with risk? The fallacy of the interventionists, Taleb tells us, is that they disregard the chance that their schemes will fail to work as planned. A key theme of Taleb’s work is that uncertain outcomes mandate caution.

“And when a blowup happens, they invoke uncertainty, something called a Black Swan (a high-impact unexpected event), … not realizing that one should not mess with a system if the results are fraught with uncertainty, or, more generally, should avoid engaging in an action with a big downside if one has no idea of the outcomes.”

The same mistaken conception of risk affects economic policy. “For instance, bank blowups came in 2008 because of the accumulation of hidden and asymmetric risks in the system: bankers, master risk transferors, could make steady money from a certain class of concealed explosive risks, use academic risk models that don’t work except on paper … then invoke uncertainty after a blowup … and keep past income — what I have called the Bob Rubin trade.”

Instead of relying on mathematical models, economists should realize that the free market works. Why use misguided theory to interfere with success in practice? “Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market. … Friedrich Hayek has been, once again, vindicated. Yet one of the most cited ideas in history, that of the invisible hand, appears to be the least integrated into the modern psyche.”

Upsetting a complex system like the free market, can have disastrous consequences. Given this truth, libertarianism is the indicated course of action. “We libertarians share a minimal set of beliefs, the central one being to substitute the rule of law for the rule of authority. Without necessarily realizing it, libertarians believe in complex systems.”

Your Views On Marijuana Legalization?

WaPo |  Jeff Sessions hates marijuana. Hates it, with a passion that has animated almost nothing else in his career. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he has said. He even once said about the Ku Klux Klan, “I thought those guys were okay until I learned they smoked pot.”

He says that was a joke, but even so, it still says something about where he’s coming from.

So if you’re wondering why Sessions has endured the humiliation of being demeaned and abused by President Trump and stayed on as attorney general, one big answer is the policy change he announced this week, that he is rescinding an Obama-era directive that instructed federal prosecutors not to prioritize prosecuting businesses like dispensaries in states that had legalized cannabis. Sessions is finally getting the chance to lock up all those hippies, with their pot-smoking and their free love and their wah-wah pedals and everything immoral they represent. He’ll show them.

WaPo |  Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he will rescind a Justice Department memorandum — known as the Cole Memo — that granted protection to state-legal and regulated marijuana companies. In doing so, Sessions has not only brushed aside science, logic and the prevailing public opinion, but he has also contradicted the opinion of the president he serves and his own party’s governing values.

Sessions’s decision empowers U.S. attorneys to begin prosecuting an industry that has complied with state laws and regulations and has, since 2013, been granted an effective waiver from federal intervention. During this time, the legal marijuana industry has become a multibillion-dollar venture, employing tens of thousands of Americans from coast to coast.

This decision to reignite the drug war comes as little surprise. Sessions once said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He has shown a deep ignorance of the realities of the drug war, which has been ineffective and costly and has disproportionately affected minority communities. And he has committed to numerous claims that have been dispelled by science, such as cannabis’s gateway effect and the idea that marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin.

Poor Cass Sunstein, Out of Power and So Very Misunderstood...,

NewYorker |  In 2010, Marc Estrin, a novelist and far-left activist from Vermont, found an online version of a paper by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and the most frequently cited legal scholar in the world. The paper, called “Conspiracy Theories,” was first published in 2008, in a small academic journal called the Journal of Political Philosophy. In it, Sunstein and his Harvard colleague Adrian Vermeule attempted to explain how conspiracy theories spread, especially online. At one point, they made a radical proposal: “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories.” The authors’ primary example of a conspiracy theory was the belief that 9/11 was an inside job; they defined “cognitive infiltration” as a program “whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups.”

Nowhere in the final version of the paper did Sunstein and Vermeule state the obvious fact that a government ban on conspiracy theories would be unconstitutional and possibly dangerous. (In a draft that was posted online, which remains more widely read, they emphasized that censorship is “inconsistent with principles of freedom of expression,” although they “could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable.”)* “I was interested in the mechanisms by which information, whether true or false, gets passed along and amplified,” Sunstein told me recently. “I wanted to know how extremists come to believe the warped things they believe, and, to a lesser extent, what might be done to interrupt their radicalization. But I suppose my writing wasn’t very clear.”

Sunstein has studied the spread of information since the mid-nineties, when he co-wrote a series of law-review articles about “cascade theory”—a model describing how opinions travel across juries, markets, and subcultures. He was particularly interested in what he called the Law of Group Polarization: how ideologically homogenous groups can become “breeding grounds for unjustified extremism, even fanaticism.” In 2001, his first book on political polarization on the Internet, “Republic.com,” warned that, even when people have access to a range of robust and challenging views, many will favor information that confirms what they already believe. He updated the book in 2007, as “Republic.com 2.0: Revenge of the Blogs,” and again this year, as “#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media.” When he wrote “Republic.com,” social media didn’t really exist; when he wrote “Republic.com 2.0,” social media’s impact was so negligible that he could essentially ignore it; in “#Republic,” he argues that services such as Facebook comprise the contemporary agora, and that their personalized algorithms will make it ever more difficult for Americans to understand their fellow-citizens.

In the endless debates about what constitutes “fake news,” we tend to invoke clear cases of unfounded rumor or outright deceit (“Melania has a body double,” or “President Trump saves two cats from drowning after Hurricane Harvey”). More prevalent, and more bewildering, are the ambiguous cases—a subtly altered photograph, an accurate but misleading statistic, a tendentious connection among disparate dots. Between the publication of “Republic.com 2.0” and “#Republic,” Sunstein became a target of the same online rumor mill he’d been studying from a distance, and many of the conspiracy theories about “Conspiracy Theories” fell into this gray area—overheated, but not wholly made up. “If you had told me that this obscure paper would ever become such a publicly visible and objectionable thing, I would have thought it more likely that Martians had just landed in Times Square,” Sunstein said. “In hindsight, though, I suppose it’s sort of appropriate that I got caught up in the mechanisms I was writing about.”

Shame Is For Losers

WaPo |  Pity poor Alabama voters. On Dec. 12, they must choose between a radical pro-abortion Democrat and an alleged sex predator who has been accused of pursuing and molesting teenage girls. 

There is no good choice in that equation, and Alabamians should not have to make it. In an earlier era, Roy Moore either would have done the honorable thing out of his own sense of shame or would have been forced to step down by state party leaders. Instead, he is staying in the race — with the full complicity of Alabama Republican leaders who have defended Moore and attacked his victims.

In refusing to step down, Moore is executing a playbook written two decades ago by the 42nd President, Bill Clinton. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton figured out that if you have no shame and ignore calls to resign, you can survive any scandal. All you have to do is lie repeatedly (“there is nothing going on between us”) and show no remorse when you are caught doing so. When more women come forward with more allegations, deny them, too, and create just enough doubt that your supporters will feel justified sticking with you. Blame your opponents for conducting a political witch hunt to run you out of office. If the evidence becomes overwhelming, then admit “a critical lapse in judgment” but declare it is time “to move on” because “we have important work to do.”

For Clinton, it worked like a charm. He forced his supporters to choose between power and principle — knowing full well that power would win out. The feminist movement — the very people who should have been championing Clinton’s victims — instead sided with him. Gloria Steinem beclowned herself in a notorious 1998 New York Times op-ed where she attacked Clinton’s accusers, made excuses for his deceit and made light of his crimes. All 45 Senate Democrats voted to acquit Clinton in his impeachment trial.

Today, with the cavalcade of revelations of sexual transgressions by politicians and celebrities, some Democrats are expressing belated regret that their party rallied around Clinton. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who occupies Senate seat that Hillary Clinton once held, now says that Bill Clinton should have resigned. Isn’t that convenient? Now that the Clinton political machine is finally defunct, liberals come forward to condemn him? How courageous.

Weaponization of Sexual _________________?

unz  |  Reminiscences of harassment have no value, even if true. If the woman did not act on the spot, forget it.

 

Otherwise, soon the US will have no normal men politicians left; only women and effeminate men. And then the disease will spread all over Europe, until the Old World and North America will be ready for its repopulation by virile Africans.

Russia remains a safe zone for males. Though many American trends come to Moscow, emasculation is not one of them. When, a few years ago, Russians banned same-sex propaganda for minors, they broke with emasculating trend. Actually, Russian women prefer things done Russian way, too. Men pay for dinners, keep doors open, help with putting a coat, in short, they keep doing what the American and European gentlemen did some fifty years ago.

Russia has had its #MeToo campaign a year ago (#янебоюсьсказать , I dare to tell, in Russian), and a lot of women recited or invented stories of their harassment. But it remained in the Facebook, for the law did not allow to complain years after the alleged crime occurred.

Moreover, the Russians consider sex between men and women as a normal thing. They have no horror of sex between a teacher and a student, or between a boss and his assistant. Reports on severe punishment American judges meted on female teacher having sex with teenage boys are met with bewilderment and disbelief. Out of fifty recent stories of this kind probably not even one of them would be punished in Russia. I wouldn’t understand, either, what is the harm for a 17 year old student to be seduced by his 23-year old teacher. The kid should be envied, if anything. This traditional attitude toward sex is the main reason for the current mass media attack on Russia, not the mythical “Russian hackers”.

It is very difficult to defend Weinstein, with his Holocaust obsession and his desire of taking revenge upon blondes. However, his case had opened the gates of Hell. Let us shut them up before the Yin and Yang, male-female balance of the universe collapse.

Why has the US been hit by this strange trouble? I would explain it as an undoing of the 1968 revolution, including the Sexual Revolution. For us, for children of 1960s, the living was easy, and sex was free and plentiful – in California, Crimea, Côte d’Azur. We had a lot of it, wonderful unprotected sex, often with strangers. That was Communism. Fear of free and available sex is the fear of Communism.

The rich guys and gals who came to power afterwards turned everything into money, and with that purpose on their minds they created scarcity, even scarcity of sex, a sex counter-revolution. Harassment complainants are the soldiers of the Sexual Counter-Revolution as they increase scarcity in order to monetize their charms. They will be the losers, poor things; hopefully they won’t ruin the world before they understand it.

Things Rich People Do To Keep You Peasants From Airing Their Dirty Laundry

NewYorker |  Weinstein’s employees were, and are, bound by confidentiality agreements included in their employment contracts with Miramax and the Weinstein Company. While nondisclosure agreements are a standard feature of employment contracts, the clauses in Weinstein’s included a special provision about information “concerning the personal, social or business activities” of “the co-Chairmen”—namely, Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Estreicher, the expert on employment law, told me that the nondisclosure clause regarding the personal lives of both Weinstein brothers was unusual. 

“That’s not generally found, the personal conduct of an individual being part of a contract like that.”

Many employees I spoke with said that these contractual provisions made it impossible to talk about suspicious behavior they witnessed at the company. Irwin Reiter, who worked for Weinstein for nearly three decades and is currently the Weinstein Company’s executive vice president for accounting and financial reporting, had previously declined requests to participate in stories. “I hope there’s no reprisal,” he told me, referring to legal action against employees. He said that he was nevertheless going public because he felt the culture of silence at the company deserved further scrutiny. Weinstein, he told me, “was so dominant that I think a lot of people were afraid of him, afraid to confront him, or question him, and that was the environment.” Reiter also raised doubts about the fairness of lifetime nondisclosure agreements. “A forever N.D.A. should not be legal,” he told me. “People should not be made to live with that. He’s created so many victims that have been burdened for so many years, and it’s just not right.”

These contractual constraints are perfectly legal. Allred, the victim’s-rights attorney, said that courts usually enforce them and view efforts to break them as “buyer’s remorse.” But in recent weeks lawmakers and legal experts have called for reforms to this system. Estreicher has proposed that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the government body that oversees workplace discrimination, track sexual-misconduct-related settlements and investigate employers who use them repeatedly. In addition to Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s legislation regarding congressional employees, state lawmakers in New York and California are pushing legislation to curtail the use of nondisclosure agreements in sexual-abuse cases. “These secret settlements perpetuate the problem. They allow rich men to continue to be sexual predators,” Connie Leyva, the California state senator who has announced legislation in that state, told me. “I hope that we can get this done in California, and that it will spread like wildfire around the country.”

Allred raised concerns about the potential reforms, which she feared could limit victims’ options. She noted that “anyone who agrees to enter into a settlement has a choice” and accepts both the costs and the—sometimes considerable—benefits. Good attorneys, she argued, explain the full implications of such agreements. “And then the client makes an informed choice.”

Gutierrez, Perkins, and other women who signed agreements with Weinstein told me that they felt their consent was far from informed. Gutierrez said that she wished she had been aware that Weinstein had faced similar allegations in the past. When, after the fact, she learned that his behavior with her was part of a pattern, she was filled with guilt. “I couldn’t even think of that person touching someone else,” she told me. “It made me have chills.” Gutierrez said that she wants to warn people of the risks of silence. “People need to really change right now,” she said. “To listen and speak. That was the worst thing—people not speaking.”