Kenneth Starr: the man vs. the picture painted by the media and the DC opposi-tion

 Jonathan Turley puts Kenneth Starr in perspective and, along the way, puts the media and Starr's DC opposition in perspective.

Think about what you heard about Starr during his life, how you and others reacted, and the possible contrast between that and JT's description - lots of lessons there.

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A Farewell to Kenneth Starr, a Great Lawyer and a Decent Man

With the passing of Kenneth Starr this week, the legal profession lost one of its most enduring and impactful figures of the last century. As someone who was able to work with Starr in litigation, I can honestly say that Starr was one of the best lawyers that I have seen in court. He not only had a brilliant legal mind but brought a sense of extraordinary clarity and precision to the law. It was that penetrating intellect that repeatedly led to his being called upon to handle some of this nation’s most intractable and controversial matters. He was often repaid with partisan hostility by the media and Congress. However, he never stooped to the level of his critics. He remained one of the most modest, respectful, and kind individuals that I have ever known.

It is easy to rattle off the list of high-ranking appointments and high-profile cases that made Ken Starr such a historic legal figure. A federal judge, Solicitor General, Independent Counsel, litigator, and academic, Starr left a legacy that few could hope to match in our profession. However, Starr was more than the collection of his resume items. Much more.

While rarely discussed in the media, the life of Ken Starr embodied the very best of the American dream. It is the story of a boy who was the youngest of three children of a Texas barber. proudly calling himself a fifth generation Texan, Starr was born. near the Red River and the Oklahoma border in the tiny town of Thalia with roughly 100 residents and not a single traffic light. The family had little money but made up for it with an abundance of faith. His father served as the local minister and Ken Starr would sell bibles door-to-door. He grew up as a typical kid going for hamburgers at Jay’s Drive-In and a movie with friends. While Starr would be declared the “most likely to succeed” at Sam Houston High School, few likely imagined that this soft-spoken class president would become a household name and one of the most important lawyers of his generation.

Starr, however, soon went down the dirt road near his home in search of a life of service different from his father. It would take him first to Harding University, a Church of Christ-affiliated school in Searcy, Arkansas and then to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. where he would get his degree in history. He would then go to Duke Law School where he continued to excel as a student. He was given a prestigious appellate clerkship on the Fifth Circuit and then served as a Supreme Court clerk to Chief Justice Warren Burger. After working in a top law firm, he was made counselor to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith.

With each position, Starr stood out for his discipline and skills as a lawyer. President Ronald Reagan appointed Starr to the D.C. Circuit where he served with distinction until he resigned to become the United States Solicitor General under George H.W. Bush. He would argue dozens of cases and was considered one of the best litigators to hold that office.

When controversies arose, Congress and the courts always seemed to call upon Starr, who always answered that call to service. That was the case when the Senate needed to investigate Sen. Bob Packwood (R., Ore.) and it was again the case when Clinton aide Vince Foster committed suicide. In each investigation, Starr’s conclusions were not welcomed by some Republicans, including in his conclusion that Foster died by his own hand.

Then there was the Clinton scandal. Starr found himself at the center of a political hurricane as he pursued possible crimes committed by Bill Clinton. The two men had a similar background as kids bon in small, poor towns in the South. Both rose to national fame due to their proven intellect and skills. However, that is where the comparisons ended. Clinton was a walking moral hazard who was notorious even as a state politician for serial adultery. Where Starr displayed a quiet but deep faith, Clinton regularly professed his faith while violating every precept of it.

Suddenly, Starr was made persona non grata by a press intent upon protecting Clinton. Even though democrats admitted that Clinton committed perjury in the Monica Lewinsky matter (and a federal judge affirmed that view), law professors like Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe insisted that perjury was not an impeachable offense. (I would testify at that same impeachment hearing on the other side). Clinton also committed acts that could have been charged as obstruction and witness tampering.

Faced with clear criminal conduct like perjury, the media instead attacked the man who helped bring that conduct to light. Major media and Democratic figures vilified Starr in grotesquely unfair hit pieces on a weekly basis.

Despite the unrelenting personal attacks, Starr remained professional and respectful through this nightmare. Starr remained firmly tethered to core principles. He once said that “Truth is a bedrock concept in morality and law.” It was his North Star and guided everything that he did; everything that he believed.

Starr loved being a lawyer. He found a profession that valued his penchant for precision and persuasion. In later years, Starr would continue to take on major cases like his roles in the Jeffrey Epstein case and in the first Trump impeachment. I did not always agree with his clients or causes but he remained one of the top litigators in the country who fought zealously for his clients. He also quietly continued his life of service in other ways, including representing indigent death row inmates. After Starr was stripped of his presidency at Baylor University after a sexual abuse scandal on the football team, he resigned his position as Chancellor and academic position. He insisted that he was not aware of the scandal until it became public. However, he declared that the university needed a clean break and “the captain goes down with the ship.” He walked away and again refused to exchange barbs in the media with critics who superficially played up the controversy as Starr’s “own sex scandal.”

Indeed, during the Clinton scandal and for the decades that followed, I never heard Starr utter a profane or mean-spirited thought. Despite years of grossly unfair treatment in the media, Starr retained his signature calm and civility.

Starr refused to allow the hate and the harassment to corrupt him or his view of others. He came too far from that dirt road in Thalia to lose his way in Washington. To the end, he was a man of faith. Not just in the religious sense, but a faith in the legal system and the transcendent power of truth. Ken Starr was not just a great lawyer; he was an even greater rarity in Washington, he was a decent man.

A nice summary of something the climate models leave out

 Here is a link to a talk by Henrik Svensmark on a mechanism that has an important impact on climate - but is left out of climate models.

Note that at one point in Svensmark's research, his work was debunked by top level scientists who ran large models that suggested his line of approach was worthless. As it turned out, the models left out what was important, and Svensmark's further research found out what it was.

Some messages from all this. First, models are no better than what is built in to them. Second, empirical results that differ from model results imply that the model is wrong. Third, climate is so complex that no models exist that incorporate all the important climate effects. Fourth, the first three messages suggest that climate model results are to be taken with a grain of salt. Fifth, it is naïve (or worse) to think that climate science is "settled". Sixth, government policies based on climate alarmism is likely to needlessly hurt (or kill) people.

The coming global crisis of climate policy

 John Cochrane comments on Joseph Stemberg's column in the WSJ.

More reason not to trust Government with "solutions".

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Energy Agony

Two era-defining articles popped up in today's Wall Street Journal.

In "the coming global crisis of climate policy," Joseph Sternberg writes

...Anyone who still thinks climate change is a greater threat than climate policy to financial stability deserves to be exiled to a peat-burning yurt in the wilderness.

...the world’s central banks and other regulators are in the middle of a major push to introduce various forms of climate stress testing into their oversight. ...The fad is for quantifying, with preposterous faux-precision, the costs of reinsuring flood risks, or fire, or the depressed corporate profits of a dystopian hotter future.

Well, if you seek “climate risk” to financial stability, look around you. It has arrived, although in exactly the opposite manner to what our current crop of eco-financiers predicted....

The U.K. may be facing a wave of business bankruptcies exceeding anything witnessed during the post-2008 panic and recession...The culprit is energy prices...Matters are probably worse in Germany,...

Banks and other financial firms inevitably will find themselves right at the edge of the water if or when a tsunami of energy-price bankruptcies washes ashore.

If you've been living in that solar-heated yurt, you may not be aware that central banks and financial regulators (SEC) are moving headlong to de-fund fossil fuel investments via regulation. The fig leaf for this activity is the notion that fossil fuel companies, though funded almost entirely by common equity, pose "risks" to the financial system. (Lots on this in previous blog posts, click the "environment" tag.)

Getting transition risk wrong.

Sternberg got a detail wrong and unintentionally pulled a punch. Writing,

The Federal Reserve, Bank of England and European Central Bank, among others, want to know how global temperature variations a century hence might weigh on Citi’s or Barclays’ or Deutsche Bank’s capital and risk weightings today.

Actually, no. The "climate financial risk" stress tests aren't quite that transparently dumb, since bank balance sheets don't have risks more than 5 to 10 years out. Instead they start with the theory that extreme weather events will cause financial problems in this shorter horizon. When it's pointed out that even the IPCC says that the probability distribution of weather really isn't changing that fast, and economists point out that floods and hurricanes have never caused a financial system crash, they admit that's really not going to happen. They move on to stress test "transition risk," that governments might pass climate policies so extreme that they cause a financial meltdown. This is exactly what is just about to happen.

That observation is the really devastating one: They were supposed to stress test "transition risk." But governments did pass transition policies that threaten a really big risk to the financial system. And those were exactly the same policies that the aforementioned central banks wish to privilege as a result of these "stress tests," namely banning fossil fuels before replacements are available at scale and subsidizing electric cars, windmills and solar panels. But they got the sign exactly wrong. The transition risk to the financial system is not that governments would bankrupt oil companies. Duh, restrict supply, the price goes up, not down. The transition risk is that oil companies are swimming in profits and everyone else is going to go bust.


Does anyone know what exactly any of this will mean for the financial system? Of course not. No one has seriously bothered to “stress test” catastrophic increases in energy prices.

The unraveling of risk regulation.

Actually, the point is even deeper and more devastating. What we are seeing is the fourth grand failure in 15 years of the whole idea that regulators can monitor bank assets and thereby keep the financial system safe. The financial crisis of 2008 erupted despite plenty of bank risk regulation. Rivers of new rules were adopted, including the US Dodd-Frank act and subsidiary regulations, along with stress tests, all aimed at regulators supervising bank assets. No sooner had the barn door been closed after the departing horse, but the European debt crisis broke out. This too was fundamentally a banking crisis: Allowing Greece to fail would have imperiled too many banks, French and German as well as Greek. So much for the asset risk regulators. 12 years of heightened regulation and stress tests later, along came covid-19, threatening another wave of bankruptcies, and another perceived threat to the financial system. No stress tester ever thought about "what if there is a pandemic," despite their repeated eruption through human history. The Fed bailed out treasury markets, money market funds, individual companies, state and local governments, and even issued a Mario-Draghi-worthy "whatever it takes" to prop up the price of corporate bonds. This time nobody even had the decency to worry about containing moral hazard. And that horse having just left the barn, here we are once more facing an even larger financial crisis... that not a single stress tester had the imagination to foresee as even a possibility.

I don't fault them, they're only human. The point: the whole project of counting on armies of bureaucrats to foresee risks and safeguard bank assets is hopeless. If it's hopeless for real estate, soveriegn default, pandemic, and war (when our side has visibly invited the Trojan pipeline in), goodness gracious the idea that the same system can foresee "climate risk to the financial system" is ludicrous.

Fiscal crisis?

What next? Well, stress testing having failed once again, here comes the bailout and stimulus, which seems to be our governments' only response to anything.

European governments aren’t blind to the energy-price threat—an awareness that, perversely, creates a threat of its own. The only politically viable solution for this winter will be subsidies on a monumental scale. Hundreds of billions of dollars for households and businesses (and utilities) across the Continent already have been announced, and desperate capitals won’t stop there. This will require substantial borrowing on top of the fisc-wrecking bond issuance during the pandemic.

And also


...on top of the additional borrowing governments normally do during recessions to finance social-welfare assistance. All of this while interest rates start rising after resting for more than a decade on (or below) the floor.

There is no lack of demand mysterious Keynesian economics afoot here. This is a good old fashioned shoot-self-in-foot supply shock. Borrowed or printed money cannot make a nation better off.

I have been opining that the next crisis, with trillions in bailout and stimulus might be the one in which investors finally say no more. We shall see.

Meanwhile, back in the UK; economic fallacies

U.K. Government to Cap Household Energy Prices for Two Years

The U.K. government said it would cap household energy prices over the next two years, a costly bailout aimed at staving off a deep recession and bringing down inflation, but one that could add to growing worries about the British government’s financial health.

The package, which economists say is likely to be worth more than $120 billion, ... also marks the first big act in office for new U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss...

Ms. Truss was advertised as a libertarian. I see that lasted about 10 minutes.

Perhaps the most basic principle of sound economics is, "don't transfer income by distorting prices." Don't silence the incentive. If one wishes to cushion the effect of a shock, then send people money to keep their real incomes constant, but don't subsidize the thing in short supply.

Yet the political system inexorably controls prices. Usually that means rationing, though the UK may be able to import what people demand at the controlled prices instead.

Why? There must be a question to which this is an answer. And I suspect this is it: Citizens of a democracy don't really care about the effects of energy prices on overall income distribution. What they really want is to go about their business as before. They don't want a 2,000 pound check and still have to figure out a way to save gas. They want to drive to bloody work just as before. They don't want precisely the pain of substitution that relative prices would signal. And politicians of a democracy give them what they want.

In this theory, politicians aren't dumb. They're doing what people want them to do.

"Bringing down inflation" is another economic howler. What a brilliant idea! We can just stop inflation altogether! Just require that every store charge exactly what it did a year ago, and the government will borrow or print money to make up the difference! I hope you can see the problem here. Economic principle #2 for today: Cheaper to the individual, at the point of sale, does not mean cheaper to society as a whole. You can pay at the pump or you can pay the tax man. This fallacy pervades the recent "inflation reduction act" in the US. Subsidies to solar panels, windmills, electric cars, and price caps on prescription drugs do not make them "cheaper" to society. It just changes where you pay.

"Growing worries" You bet. We create inflation by printing up money and debt and handing it out. Then, to solve the problem we... print up more money and debt and hand it out. You can see where this is heading. Another economic principle: there is always supply and demand. Politicians blame "supply" for higher prices, but the prices would not be high if people were not demanding all those expensive goods, and willing and able to fork over the money.


“Extraordinary challenges call for extraordinary measures, ensuring that the United Kingdom is never in this situation again,” Ms. Truss said.

Or ensuring that the United Kingdom is perpetually in this situation, perhaps.

The Double Standard of Justice lives on

 Here is Jonathan Turley on the double standard of justice.

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“The Clinton Standard”: How Hillary Clinton’s False Victimization Claims Reveal a Core Truth

Below is a longer version of my New York Post column on the recent claim of Hillary Clinton that she has been the subject to a long-standing and unfair “Clinton standard” while denying that there was any classified information found on her private server. In a signature move, Clinton is focusing on the actual classification of emails as opposed to the use of the unsecured server for communications with aides that revealed classified information — the reason why such unsecured servers are dangers to national security.

Here is the column:

“I can’t believe we’re still talking about this, but my emails. . .” The expression of utter incredulity was classic Clinton — she’s selling hats reading “But her emails” for $30 a pop. Hillary Clinton’s disbelief this week was shared by many critics left dumbfounded by her claim her private server contained “zero” classified documents.

But Hillary’s denial of what was found on her server exposes something far more serious than a simply false claim. It reflects establishment figures’ sense of license that they can literally rewrite history with little fear of contradiction by the media.

While calling for limits on free speech over “disinformation,” Hillary has no qualms about falsely denying what published government reports detail.

“As Trump’s problems continue to mount, the right is trying to make this about me again. There’s even a ‘Clinton Standard.’ The fact is that I had zero emails that were classified,” her but-my-emails tweet continued. “Comey admitted he was wrong after he claimed I had classified emails. Trump’s own State Department, under two different Secretaries, found I had no classified emails.”

Virtually everything about that claim is breathtakingly untrue.

Let’s quickly deal with the light lifting before getting back to the “Clinton Standard.”
“Zero emails” were “classified.”

A 2018 Department of Justice inspector general report revealed “81 email chains containing approximately 193 individual emails” were “classified from the CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET levels at the time.” Clinton is echoing her allies’ recent spin that there were only three documents with classification markings among 33,000 emails. It is utter nonsense.

The lack of classification markings in the Clinton email scandal was due in part because these were emails. There is no classification automatically stamped on text being typed out and sent within minutes by aides. While attachments and some emails can have classification markings, the whole point of using secure servers is that emails are created in the moment with inevitable slips in referencing classified material.

Nevertheless, the emails had classified information, including top-secret information tied to “Special Access Programs.” Yet some allies emphasize the inspector general also noted that in some cases there was “conscious effort to avoid sending classified information, by writing around the most sensitive material.” It failed. The emails still contained classified information.

That’s why she was reckless to use her own server: That does not mean that it warranted criminal charges or the mantra “lock her up.” Such mistakes on private servers are more vulnerable to capture by foreign intelligence services. Indeed, according to the FBI, “hostile actors gained access” to some of the information through the emails of Clinton’s associates and aides.
“Comey admitted he was wrong.”

It’s not entirely clear what Hillary is referencing here. But Comey never said there was no classified information in her emails — he said the opposite. He condemned her handling of the classified material while saying it didn’t warrant prosecution.

Comey did backtrack later, but not on this point. He said his “mistake” was in how he described her conduct: “I should’ve worked harder to find a way to convey that it’s more than just the ordinary mistake, but it’s not criminal behavior, and find different words to describe that.”

However, she had “dozens of conversations on email about secret topics” and “I think eight about top-secret topics,” he added. “So if I’m gonna be honest, I have to say somehow it’s more than ordinary sloppiness.”

Hillary has previously referred to different accounts over the precise markings on three emails with actual classification markings. Comey did state later that the classification markings on marked emails were “confidential” rather than one marked “secret.” (Clinton claimed not to know what a “(C)” classification even meant on a document). However, once again, they dealt with marked emails not the disclosure of classified information in the course of communications on the unsecured private server.
“A Clinton Standard.”

Clinton objects that she’s held to a different standard. That’s true — but not for the reason she cites. She’s long been subject to her own standard in brushing off alleged criminal conduct. Indeed, her husband Bill Clinton, personifies a family immunity from such charges. A federal judge and even Democrats concluded that he committed perjury in his sworn statements but he was never charged. Some of those who have clamored for criminal charges against Trump and others for an array of crimes were adamant that Bill Clinton should not be impeached, let alone charged, for the federal crime.

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly avoided criminal charges even as close associates were charged. Many believe she used insider information from a friend at Tyson Foods to reap a huge windfall on cattle futures in the 1970s. No charge. Then there was Whitewater. Bill Clinton later pardoned Susan McDougal, who went to jail in connection to the fraudulent land scheme that involved both Clintons. For Hillary, no charge.

Then there were the key long-sought Whitewater documents. After the case was effectively over, they suddenly appeared. The New York Times called the documents “elusive,” as if they moved by free will. Investigators specifically sought those records, and Clinton’s team denied possession only for them to be found later outside her office. Sound familiar? No charge.

The Clinton Standard is most evident in the email scandal. Clinton’s staff unilaterally destroyed thousands of emails with BleachBit despite being aware in 2014 that Congress and the State Department were seeking the evidence. I know few clients who would have the temerity to order such a unilateral destruction. Her lawyers turned over about 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department and deleted 33,000 others, unilaterally deeming them “personal.”

For a surprisingly long period, Clinton and her staff did not fully cooperate with investigators in refusing to turn over her emails and other evidence to State and DOJ investigators, including laptops holding suspected classified information. That delayed efforts to estimate any national-security damage, but there was no raid.

The FBI cut deals with her aides to secure their cooperation, and even then more classified material was found on the laptop of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who was married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin — 49,000 emails potentially relevant to the Clinton investigation. Again, no charges.

So Hillary inadvertently hit upon one demonstrably true statement. There is a Hillary Clinton Standard, and that’s not good for anything other than hat sales.

The Armed Citizen

 

The Demand for Reckless Driving

 From Steven Landsburg's "Price Theory and Applications".

I have added a corollary after Landsburg's comment. 

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Reckless driving is another good that people choose to “consume.” For this consumption
they pay a price, partly by risking death in an accident. When that price is reduced—say,
by the installation of safety equipment in cars—we should expect the quantity of reckless
driving to increase.

This implies that safety devices like air bags could lead to either an increase or a
decrease in the number of driver deaths. With an air bag, an individual accident is less
likely to be fatal. But for exactly that reason, people will drive more recklessly and therefore
will have more accidents. Whether the number of driver deaths decreases, increases,
or remains constant depends on the size of that response; in other words, it depends on
whether the demand curve for reckless driving is steep or flat.

When Professors Steven Peterson, George Hoffer, and Edward Millner investigated
this question,4 they found that air bags had almost no effect on the number of driver
deaths; in fact, if anything, giving a driver an air bag makes him slightly more likely to die
in an accident. With the air bag, the driver chooses to engage in enough additional reckless
driving to completely offset the safety advantages of the air bag itself.

Does that mean drivers don’t benefit from air bags? No, it just means they choose to
take their benefits in a form other than safety. They get to drive faster, more aggressively,
and more recklessly with only a slight increase in their chance of being killed. The real losers
are pedestrians and other drivers, who participate in the additional accidents without
sharing the safety features of the air bag.

If you find these results difficult to believe, try this experiment. Pick ten friends and
read sentence 1 to five of them and sentence 2 to the other five:

1. “If you give a driver an air bag, he’ll drive more recklessly.”

2. “If you take away a driver’s air bag, he’ll drive more carefully.”

Chances are, the five friends who hear sentence 1 will find it implausible and the five who
hear sentence 2 will find it obvious. But the two sentences say exactly the same thing in
different words, so your friends’ instincts can’t all be right. The instinct to disbelieve sentence
1 is an interesting fact about psychology; the fact that the sentence is nevertheless
true is an interesting fact about economics.

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Corrollary: If you want to reduce reckless driving, simply make cars with a sharp spike sticking out from the center of the steering wheel - pointed at the driver.

Another example of our current cultural insanity

 Jonathan Turley is on target yet again. Here is his column.

Note that professors' behavior can be just as dysfunctional as everyone else's. The issue is which is dominant - emotion or intellect. These days, it is all to common for emotion to rule.

When trying to assess someone's credibility, I sometimes get them to talk about a controversial topic that I know something about. If their response is very wrong, I know that, probably, either they don't know what they don't know or their emotions rule their intellect. In either case, I am careful about taking their "facts" on other topics at face value.

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Cannon Fodder: Liberal Media and Pundits Unleash Torrent of Attacks on Judge Who Approved Special Master

When U.S. District Judge Judge Aileen M. Cannon issued an order for the appointment of a special master, she instantly became the latest jurist targeted by a furious mob of media and pundits. Rather than simply disagree with her order, these critics attacked Cannon personally and ethically, including lawyers and law professors. It is a familiar pattern but the fury shown in the last two days is chilling for our federal judges who have seen increasing attacks, including an alleged attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Nevertheless, legal and media figures seemed to rush to outdo each other in the most extreme statements about a judge with a distinguished background.

MSNBC host Joy Reid hosted a frenzy of condemnations of this “corrupt” judge. Reid said that Cannon is little more than an extension of Trump like other possession stolen by the former president.

As always, MSNBC regular (and columnist for Above the Law and The Nation) Elie Mystal struggled to outdo a panel assembled to attack this jurist:


“She’s biased and corrupt. Like, I don’t know what to tell everybody anymore. Like, I’ve been saying this since he took office. When you allow Republicans to control the courts you get nothing. Trump judges do not believe in the rule of law, they do not believe in precedent, they do not believe in facts, they do not believe in logic—they just believe in whatever’s going to help Donald Trump, and they’ve proven it again and again and again.”

Mystal recently criticized Biden’s controversial MAGA speech because it did not go far enough: in his view all Republicans are white supremacists, not just MAGA Republicans. Now he is claiming that all Trump appointees (even those who have ruled against Trump) “do not believe in the rule of law…do not believe in facts…do not believe in logic.”

MSNBC clearly wants Mystal’s brand of commentary. It recently declined to even express discomfort with launching a racist attack on Georgia’s senatorial candidate Herschel Walker. Mystal previously caused uproars for claims from accusing a senator of wanting to murder Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to his continued attacks on a high school student even after he was cleared of a false race-based story. He has called the Constitution “trash” and previously stated that white, non-college-educated voters supported Republicans because they care about “using their guns on Black people and getting away with it.” He has also lashed out at “white society” and explained how he strived to maintain a “whiteness free” life in the pandemic.

Mystal, however, has competition on this occasion from AEI’s Neil Ornstein who suggested that Judge Cannon is now engaged in obstruction by simply ordering a third-party review. The over-wrought response to this order is par for the course over the last six years.

Lawyers like former top Obama official Neal Katyal, said that Judge Cannon’s decision appeared designed to “protect their guy” or at the very least, “delay justice.” In other words, Cannon was acting as a political operatives rather than a judge.

Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe declared that an order to appoint a special master to review the documents is analogous to the Dred Scott decision as an abuse of judicial power. Tribe recently said that Trump could clearly be charged with the attempted murder of former Vice President Michael Pence. However, this is both legally and historically unintelligible. Tribe wrote:

“Cannon’s order will go down as part of the judicial anticannon — the body of decisions, like Dred Scott or Korematsu, that lawyers use for generations to teach students how NOT to wield the judicial power.”

Unpack that for a moment. Tribe is analogizing the appointment of a special master to assist the court to a decision declaring former slaves as outside the protection of the Constitution and the definition of a “citizen.” Likewise, he believes it is similar to a decision, Korematsu, where Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps in World War II. One can reasonably disagree with Judge Cannon’s order, but it is designed as a check on government power and abuse. Yet, Tribe believes it is akin to a decision allowing the government carte blanche to imprison Americans based on race or nationality.

Judge Cannon faced with a breathtakingly broad search that appears to have seized attorney-client material and personal material, including passports and personal medical information. She is allowed to conduct in camera inspections of such documents but elected to appoint a special master to conduct such reviews. While the Justice Department claimed that such an appointment would endanger national security, Judge Cannon correctly rejected that unsupportable claim. The documents will remain under secure controls of the government and the national security investigation will continue unabated.

As I have discussed, there are good-faith objections to the order and it may be curtailed or even overturned on appeal. However, while rare at this stage, special masters are routinely appointed to assist judges in creating a record for further orders. Moreover, the investigation can go forward without the use of the documents in establishing what was known about the contents of the boxes and whether there were acts of concealment.

The attacks on Judge Cannon follow a familiar pattern. It is not enough to disagree with a judge. You must attack the jurists as unethical or corrupt — and standout in your rhetoric. Notably, some of these same experts denounced Trump for attacking jurists as “Obama judges” or ideologues when they ruled against him. Now it appears perfectly acceptable in dealing with Trump appointees. At the time I criticized Trump repeatedly for such attacks. However, Democrats quickly adopted the same rhetoric that they once denounced. Now Judge Cannon is fair game for legal experts to impugn her integrity and ethics.

Just for the record, Judge Cannon has an inspiring and impressive background. She was born in Cali, Columbia and her mother fled the dictatorship of Fidel Castro. Yet, she would graduate from Duke University in 2003 and the University of Michigan in 2007 with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude (and Order of the Coif). She worked at the Justice Department as a prosecutor as well as a leading law firm as well as serving as an appellate judicial clerk.

The Demand For Murder

 From Steven Landsburg's Price Theory and Applications book.

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Example: The Demand for Murder

Many economists have applied the successful techniques of econometrics to the study of

demand curves for a variety of interesting “goods” that were previously viewed as outside
the realm of economic analysis. Consider, for example, the demand curve for murder.

Murder is an activity that some people choose to engage in for a variety of reasons. We
can view murder as a “good” for these people, and the commission of murder as the act
of consuming that good. The price of consuming the good is paid in many forms. One of
these forms is the risk of capital punishment.

This means that we can draw a demand curve for murder, plotting the probability of
capital punishment on the vertical axis and the quantity of murders committed on the horizontal
axis. We can ask how steep this demand curve is, which is the same thing as asking
whether a small increase in the probability of capital punishment will lead to a small or a
large decrease in the number of murders committed. In other words, measuring the slope of
this demand curve is the same thing as measuring the deterrent effect of capital punishment.

Now, on the one hand, the deterrent effect of capital punishment is something about
which there is much discussion and much interest. On the other hand, the slope of a
demand curve is something that economists know how to measure.

Over the past 25 years, Professor Isaac Ehrlich has repeatedly measured the slope of
the demand curve for murder, using essentially the same techniques that economists use
to measure the slope of the demand curves for shoes, coffee, and other consumer goods.
His results have been striking. The demand curve for murder appears to be remarkably
flat; that is, a small increase in the price of murder leads to a large decrease in the quantity
of murders committed. In fact, Ehrlich estimates that over the period 1935–1969 (a period
in which executions were more common than they are today, making the statistical tests
more reliable), one additional execution in the United States would have prevented, on
average, about eight murders per year.3

This is a remarkable example of an application of economics to a positive question:
“What is the deterrent effect of capital punishment?” It is emphatically not an answer to
the related normative question: “Is capital punishment a good thing?” It is entirely possible
to believe Ehrlich’s results and still oppose capital punishment on ethical grounds;
in fact, Ehrlich himself opposes capital punishment. However, knowing the answer to the
positive question is undoubtedly helpful in thinking about the normative one. The size of
the deterrent effect of the death penalty will certainly affect our assessment of its desirability,
even though our assessment depends on many other things as well.

The sad story of the decline of a once great college by woke and cancel cul-ture faculty and administrators

 Here is Jonathan Turley on some history of Oberlin College vs Gibson's Bakery.

A once great college has been all but destroyed by woke and cancel culture faculty and administrators.

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The long and vengeful campaign of Oberlin College against a small family-owned grocery has come to an end at the cost of a breathtaking $36 million for defamation. The Ohio Supreme Court had rejected what should be Oberlin College’s final appeal of a verdict in favor of Gibson’s Bakery. The bakery has been the target of an unrelenting attack by the school after it had the temerity to fight a false charge of racism in a shoplifting case involving Oberlin students who later pleaded guilty to criminal charges. Oberlin President Carmen Twillie Ambar and the Board burned through millions in litigation costs above the damages rather than admit that the college was wrong in the targeting of this grocery. That money could have been used for scholarships and other worthy purposes. Instead, Amber and the Board will simply ask alumni to foot the bill for a legal effort that seems to become little more than a revenge fetish.

Starting in 2017, I have written a long line of columns on the lawsuit against Oberlin College in this case where the college not only joined the mob but helped lead the mob against Gibson’s Bakery. Even after a massive award by the jury, Ambar continued to refuse to apologize for the shameful and costly conduct of her administration. (Ambar became president in 2017 shortly after the incident).

This controversy began with a shoplifting case. In 2016, an African American student named Jonathan Aladin was caught trying to steal a bottle of wine from Gibson’s Bakery, which was established in 1885 and has been closely tied to the college for over a century. When the grandson of the owner tried to stop Aladin, a fight ensued and police were called. Aladin and two other students, Cecilia Whettstone and Endia Lawrence, were arrested. Students, professors, and administrators held protests, charging that the bakery was racist and profiled the three students.

Oberlin maintained in court filings that the son and grandson of the owners of Gibson’s Bakery “violently and unreasonably attacked” an unarmed student, but that is not how the police viewed it. Aladin was charged with robbery, which is a second degree felony, and Whettstone and Lawrence were charged with first degree misdemeanor assault. Police rejected claims of a racial motive and noted that, over a period of five years, 40 adults were arrested for shoplifting at Gibson’s Bakery, but only six were African American. It also is not how the court viewed it. When prosecutors cut a plea deal to reduce the charge to attempted theft, a local judge refused. He said the plea deal appeared to be the result of a permanent “economic sanction”by the college in which the victim had little choice but to relent. Ultimately, all three students pleaded guilty.

The merits of the case did not seem to bother Oberlin officials or student protesters. Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo reportedly joined the massive protests and even handed out a flier denouncing the bakery as a racist business. When some people contacted Oberlin to object that the students admitted guilt, special assistant to the president for community and government relations Tita Reed wrote that it did not change a “damn thing” for her. Reed also reportedly participated in the campus protests.

Other faculty members encouraged students who denounced the bakery. The chairman of Africana studies posted, “Very proud of our students!” Oberlin barred purchases from the bakery, pending its investigation into whether this was “a pattern and not an isolated incident.” Raimondo also pressured Bon Appetit, a major contractor with the college, to cease business with the bakery. Reed even suggested that “once charges are dropped, orders will resume” and added that she was “baffled by their combined audacity and arrogance to assume the position of victim.”

The jury in June 2019 awarded the Gibsons $44 million in compensatory and punitive damages. A judge later reduced the award to $25 million. That was upheld and the appellate court also upheld an award of $6.2 million payment in attorney fees. Now interest has pushed the reduced award back up to roughly $36 million but you then have to add the attorney fees and the college’s own towering legal costs. That is likely to put the total back to near the original $44 million award.

It takes considerable work to burn over $40 million on such a case. Yet, time and again President Ambar and the college threw more money into a losing hand like a bad gambler at Vegas while refusing to apologize for the college’s reprehensible record in the case.

As the grocery recently warned that it might have to shutdown due to the lack of funds and drain of litigation, the college fought to pay the damages.

The Ohio Supreme Court finally ended this farce by refusing to hear a new appeal on jurisdictional grounds. It voted 4-3 to end further litigation.

In a statement, Oberlin College expressed disappointment but not an apology:

“Oberlin is disappointed that the Ohio Supreme Court has chosen not to hear our appeal of the Gibson’s Bakery judgment against the college. The issues raised by this case have been challenging, not only for the parties involved, but for the entire Oberlin community. We remain committed to strengthening the partnership between the College, the City of Oberlin and its residents, and the downtown business community. We will continue in that important work while remaining focused on our core educational mission.”

While the college could always try a federal appeal, it would just add more litigation costs while little hope for a change in the case or the verdict beyond further accruing interest.

The handling of this matter by Oberlin is nothing short of reprehensible in not only the treatment of this grocery (which was founded in the 1800s) but in the wasting of the assets and reputation of the college. Yet, not a single official appears to have been disciplined for this costly campaign. With tuition at $30,000 a year, the ultimate cost of this litigation would cover free tuition for a year for half of the college. (The total enrollment is only 2,600 students).

Yet, over $40 million somehow became little more than the price of vanity of a college to refuse to admit its original error and to apologize for its conduct. It was a complete failure of leadership by the president, the board, and the college. No one seemed willing to take the responsibility to say “enough” and stop the burning of added costs year after year. So the college continued to gush money as it racked up losses in court.

They have frittered away the assets and reputation of a school with a wonderful history and stellar academic reputation . . . all to pursue a small grocery like Captain Ahab and his whale. Indeed, the final filing should just quote Melville to capture the blind rage needed to sustain this ill-conceived effort: “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

Climate change perspective – a failure of rationality.

 In the fifth article in their series "

The Sun-Climate Effect: The Winter Gatekeeper Hypothesis (V). A role for the sun in climate change", Javier Vinos and Andy May go beyond the science to discuss the behavior of scientists and how much of it has become unscientific. They also discuss what the dogmatic segment of the field have left out and why it makes their conclusions problematic.

Summing up: the climate alarmists lack the knowledge and data to justify their alarmism.

Here is a link to their fifth article.

Here are some excerpts.

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5.1 Introduction

The 1990s discovery of multidecadal variability (see Part IV) showed that the science of climate change is very immature. The answer to what was causing the observed warming was provided before the proper questions were asked. Once the answer was announced, questions were no longer welcome. Michael Mann said of a skeptical Judith Curry: “I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility” (Mann 2008). But as Peter Medawar (1979) stated, “the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.” Scientists’ opinions do not constitute science, and a scientific consensus is nothing more than a collective opinion based on group-thinking. When doubting a scientific consensus (“just like you’re supposed to doubt,” as Feynman said) becomes unwelcome, the collective opinion becomes dogma, and dogma is clearly not science.

Lennart Bengtsson, former director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, winner of the Descartes Prize and a WMO prize for groundbreaking research put it succinctly after agreeing to participate in a skeptical organization headed by Nigel Lawson, a member of the House of Lords and former Chancellor of the Exchequer:

“I had not [been] expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expected anything similar in such an originally peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently, it has been transformed in recent years” (von Storch 2014).

This is the effect that dogmas have on scientists, normal scientific research becomes impossible by introducing a strong group-bias against questioning the dogma.

Once dogmas are established, they tend to evade scientific scrutiny. Stuart Firestein, when reviewing the main mistaken scientific consensuses of the past in his 2012 book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science, wonders if

“… is there any reason, really, to think that our modern science may not suffer from similar blunders? In fact, the more successful the fact, the more worrisome it may be. Really successful facts have a tendency to become impregnable to revision.” Stuart Firestein (2012)

The main dogma of climate change science is stated in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as:

“It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period (Figure SPM.3)”(IPCC 2014).

However, there is no evidence confirming this dogma. It is based on computer model results that were programmed with the same assumptions that emerge from them, in a clear case of circular reasoning. An example of such assumptions is that the only accepted effect of solar variability on climate is the change in total solar irradiance (TSI). None of the solar effects described in Part II are included because they are not accepted, and even if they were accepted, we would not know how to program them. We don’t know how they happen or how they affect climate. Such is the hubris of modern climate theory supporters that they believe we understand how climate changes well enough to make reliable projections 75 years into the future.

Fig. 5.1. The main dogma of climate change science is shown in Figure SPM.3 from AR5. The fifth IPCC report, claims that observed 1951-2010 warming was due to anthropogenic causes, without contribution from natural forcings, despite low volcanic activity and high solar activity; and without any contribution from multidecadal oscillations, despite the 1976-2000 period of warming coinciding with an AMO upswing.

In Part III we showed the importance of meridional transport (MT) and the latitudinal temperature gradient (LTG) in both the global and regional climate. They determine the amount of energy directed toward the poles. In Part IV we showed that changes in MT cause climate regime shifts, and that these shifts alter the energy budget of the climate system. This evidence refutes the dogma, revealing that changes in MT constitute a climate forcing not accounted for in Fig. 5.1. In Part II we reviewed the evidence that changes in solar activity affect the polar vortex, ENSO, Earth’s rotation rate, and planetary wave atmospheric propagation properties, resulting in dynamical spatiotemporal changes in atmospheric circulation, temperature, and precipitation that correspond with substantial climate changes of the past as recorded by paleoclimatological evidence. Each and every one of the climatological factors affected by solar activity points to an effect of the variable sun on MT. Through changes in MT, changes in solar activity constitute one of the main causes of climate change, further refuting the climate dogma.

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5.6 The Cycle-length/Climate-effect paradox

One of the main objections to a more substantive role on climate change by the sun is that the 11-year solar cycle does not appear to have a great effect on climate. Modern climate analysis using satellite data since 1979 have covered almost four full solar cycles, and it is clear that the changes observed, although significant, are modest (Lean 2017; see Fig. 2.2). And no change is clear between cycles, much less a trend in any climate variable that would correlate to the trend in solar activity.

But solar activity also displays longer cycles. Solar cycles receive the name of important solar researchers. The 11-yr Schwabe cycle, the 22-yr Hale cycle, the 100-yr Feynman cycle, the 200-yr de Vries cycle, the 1000-yr Eddy cycle, and the 2500-yr Bray cycle have all been described in the scientific literature as having a climatic effect (see Vinós 2022, and references within). The 100-yr Feynman cycle is responsible for two 11-yr cycles with low activity in the early 1800s (cycles 5 & 6, 1798–1823), the early 1900s (cycles 14 & 15, 1902-1923) and the early 2000s (cycles 24 & 25, since 2008 and until c. 2030). The 200-yr de Vries cycle is responsible for the spacing of the Wolf, Spörer, and Maunder grand minima during the LIA. The 1000-yr Eddy cycle is responsible for the main climatic periods for the past 2000 years, the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages cold period (also known as the Late Antiquity Little Ice Age), the Medieval Warm Period, the LIA, and the Modern warm period that started c. 1850, with some anthropogenic contribution during the past seven decades.

From paleoclimatic studies the longer the solar cycle, the more profound its climatic effect. The biggest effect comes from the 2500-yr Bray cycle, the longest clearly discernible cycle in solar and climatic studies. This cycle, presented in Part II (Sect. 2.2), and Fig. 2.1, not only established the biological subdivisions of the Holocene (the Boreal, Atlantic, Sub-Boreal, and Sub-Atlantic periods), but also caused great periodic fluctuations in human populations of the past. As Bevan et al. (2017) say:

“We demonstrate multiple instances of human population downturn over the Holocene that coincide with periodic episodes of reduced solar activity and climate reorganization. … This evidence collectively suggests quasi-periodic solar forcing of atmospheric and oceanic circulation with wider climatic consequences.”

Those periodic episodes of human population downturn correspond in great part to the 2500-yr Bray cycle, as can be appreciated in Fig. 2.1 or in their figure 3. One can only imagine the kind of climatic effect of the 2500-yr Bray cycle to cause such downturns in human population.

It appears paradoxical that solar variability has almost no effect on the short term (the 11-year cycle), but a huge effect on the long term (the 2500-yr cycle). The WGK-h also provides an explanation for this cycle-length/climate-effect paradox. As shown in Fig. 5.3, solar activity is not the only modulator of MT. At least the QBO, ENSO, the stadium-wave oscillation, and volcanic eruptions act as modulators of MT, and therefore the effect on a particular year can be the opposite of what solar activity alone could dictate. On top of that during an average activity 11-yr solar cycle close to half of the years act in one direction and close to the other half in the opposite direction. The result is a moderate effect where causality is unclear.

The effect of the QBO and ENSO tends toward an average of nearly zero in a few years, and the multidecadal oscillation in a few decades. The longer the solar cycle the longer the period with low solar activity at its troughs. As we have seen, the biggest climatic effect is produced by continuous periods of decades when most of the years display low solar activity. The small increment in the large amount of energy that the planet loses at each winter pole during low solar years is cumulative, as with the increased energy retained by the rise in CO2. Progressively the planet loses more energy that it gains, and cools down. The longer the cycle, the longer the downturn, and the more profound the cooling. The areas in the MT main paths, particularly the North Atlantic region (including Europe and North America) cool first, longer, and more profoundly, but the energy drain affects the entire planet. And although the Arctic region initially warms due to a larger influx of energy from the enhanced MT, it eventually cools too, as the entire planet gets colder.

Climate is therefore not very sensitive to solar activity until several consecutive 11-yr cycles of consistently low or high solar activity cause the effect to raise above background noise. And then only if the multidecadal stadium-wave oscillation is not acting on MT in the opposite direction. Solar activity and the stadium-wave cooperated during the 1976–1997 climate phase to produce accelerated warming through a strong reduction in MT, that resulted in a long period of global wind stilling (McVicar & Roderik 2010; Zeng et al. 2019) for which no explanation has been provided until now. Since 1998 MT has increased, producing Arctic warming and a pause in global warming. The concatenation of two consecutive low solar activity cycles since 2008 and the approaching shift in the stadium-wave towards an AMO cooling phase, signaled by the recent cooling of the North Atlantic warming hole (46°N–62°N & 46°W–20°W; Latif et al. 2022), spells trouble for the CO2-hypothesis of climate change. The CO2 hypothesis projects accelerating warming for as long as atmospheric CO2 keeps rising. But natural climate change is cyclical, and the modern theory of climate change does not understand that.

In this part of the series, we have seen how changes in solar activity produce changes in climate by modulating the MT of energy towards the poles in a seasonally dependent manner. The result is that the Modern Solar Maximum has significantly contributed to modern global warming, and the current extended solar minimum is at least partially responsible for the ongoing reduced rate of global warming. But the sun’s role as a modulator of poleward energy transport cannot be deduced from first principles. The stratospheric ozone response to UV changes affects MT via the Charney-Drazin criterion, the Holton-Tan effect, and stratospheric-tropospheric coupling. All these atmospheric phenomena derive from observations, not theory. The IPCC considers that solar variability slightly affects climate through small changes in total incoming energy. The top-down mechanism acts through small UV changes that involve even less energy. The change in UV energy, transferred to stratospheric ozone, is partly converted to changes in wind speed. The energy to alter stratospheric circulation dynamics and, through coupling, tropospheric circulation is provided by atmospheric waves generated in the troposphere, not by incoming radiation from the sun. The WGK-h proposes that the energy that alters the climate as a response to solar changes is energy already in the climate system. Under low solar activity this energy is directed to the poles and radiated to space, cooling the planet, and under high activity it remains within the climate system longer, warming the planet. This unexpected energy bypass, that cannot be deduced from theory, is what made the solar-climate question unsolvable for so long. In the last part we will review the evidence that MT is the true climate control knob, and how it can explain the climate changes that have taken place on the planet from the early Eocene hothouse, 52 million years ago, to the present icehouse.