Armed Citizen Rescues Woman and Child

 The Adam Nesvick incident - by Massad Ayoob at the American Handgunner.

True story.

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Situation: A man is beating a woman and child. He is armed with a bat. You are the only one effectively capable of stopping him.

Lesson: Aimed fire works at close range. Deadly force against a violent criminal attempting to disarm you is justifiable. And even the most righteous shooting can have devastating reverberations.

October 16, 2018, Clarksville, Indiana. Dusk is fading into darkness. It is early evening at the River Chase apartment complex, a pleasant neighborhood where families barbecue and children play on lawns. It is not the sort of place where one expects deadly violence to break out.

Until it does.

Brandon Haycraft, 31, lives there. He is a tormented man. His baby has died a short time before, while lying in bed next to him, and he is swamped by guilt. He has been caught up in a cycle of substance abuse. One co-worker will later describe him as “a mean drunk.”

THC is in his bloodstream now, but the marijuana hasn’t mellowed him. He has taken anti-depressants, but they aren’t helping. Neither is booze. At the moment, his blood alcohol content is 0.228%, almost three times the legally drunk limit. He has told his significant other that he’s going to die tonight one way or the other, and he might just take her with him.

His prediction is at least partly correct.

Meanwhile …

Among Brandon’s many neighbors in this peaceful area is Adam Nesvick, 37. On this seemingly normal Tuesday evening he is home alone for the moment, preparing a dinner of tacos for the rest of his family who are due to arrive at the apartment soon.

He is interrupted by the sound of loud shouting. This is a neighborhood where children commonly play outside at this hour, and at first, he thinks it’s just kids getting a little rowdy. Glancing out the window, he sees his wife’s car has just pulled up, and he goes outside to meet her.

The tableau before him is unexpected. He notices his wife is on her cell phone, and he hears her scream, “My God, he’s going to kill her!” He’ll later learn 911 dispatch is on the other end of his wife’s conversation. A neighbor cries out plaintively, “My God, isn’t someone going to do something?”

And now Adam sees the cause of the trouble. His neighbor across the street is brutally punching his girlfriend in the face as she sits on the ground, feebly trying to protect herself. Her daughter, age nine, swings what appears to be an aluminum T-ball bat into the big man’s back, trying to stop him from beating her mom.

Adam watches in horror as Brandon rips the bat away from the child and throws her some six feet away.

Adam and Brandon both weigh about 240 lbs., but Adam is five-feet-nine while Brandon stands six-feet-two and is rippled with muscle. He’s also now armed: He has the metal baseball bat. Adam realizes he can’t deal with this bare-handed.

Adam runs back inside his apartment for his gun.

He’s had a carry permit since he was 18 years old. His current carry gun is a SIG SAUER M11-A1, fully loaded with 9mm Speer Gold Dot 124-grain +P bonded hollow points. He’s left it on his desk in an IWB Comp-Tac holster, and now he pulls it from its Kydex scabbard and sprints back toward the door, the pistol in his dominant right hand.

When he emerges from the door, he can see the situation has degraded. Before, the man had been punching the downed woman in the head, brutally. Then, she had been down on her butt as he beat her; now, she is down on her back on the front lawn with the boyfriend hulking over her, holding the bat horizontally in both hands across her throat, trying to crush her larynx.

The beatdown has turned into attempted murder in progress.

Closing to a distance of about 15 feet from attacker and victim, Adam stands in the street, levels the gun at Brandon and shouts, “Get the f**k off of her! Sit the f**k down or you’ll be shot!”

The big, angry man turns to face the rescuer. He flings the bat at Adam. It lands halfway between them on the lawn, some six or seven feet from the armed citizen who is still standing in the street.

Safe for the moment, the little girl runs into her apartment, followed by her mom. Brandon sits on the steps and puts his head in his hands. Adam lowers his SIG to a ready position. The man has obeyed his commands. Adam hopes it is over.

It isn’t.

Attack

The lull in the action lasts about 30 seconds. Then Brandon rises, his muscled body tensed with rage, and screams at Adam, “You don’t know me, motherf**ker!” He starts moving toward Adam and yells, “You gonna shoot me, motherf**ker? You aren’t going to do anything with that [gun], you fat ass!”

Adam is backing away from him, the pistol raised again now, and he is shouting, “Stop! Don’t do it! Stop! Stop!”
But the antagonist can move forward faster than the defender can backpedal, and is closing the distance fast, and at last there is only one thing left to do.

Shots Fired

Under the streetlights, the sky nearly dark, the green Trijicon night sights on the SIG glow like beacons. Adam Nesvick puts the front sight high on his attacker’s chest.

He fires as fast as he can hold the front sight in place. He sees blood squirt toward him from the man’s chest. Suddenly Brandon falls, pitching forward at about a 30-degree angle, and lands heavily face down in the street, motionless.

And, just that quickly, it’s over.

Immediate Aftermath

The Clarksville Police arrived quickly, some 30 seconds after the last shot had been fired. Adam’s wife Shannon had described the situation to the police before they got there, and none of the cops felt a need to take Adam at gunpoint. Per protocol, however, they patted him down, handcuffed him, and placed him in the back seat of a patrol car.

Adam said later, “I remember sitting in the back of the car praying for the soul of the man I had been forced to shoot, praying for the mom and daughter, praying for the well-being of my family, praying the police understands the situation and I actually get to go to my daughter’s wedding in four days and am not sitting in jail. While I was in the car, I noticed my left hand and arm were covered in blood spatter.”

It didn’t take the police long to sort things out. Haycraft had not survived. Nesvick’s aim for upper chest had been true. One of his four hits had pierced the man’s aorta, accounting for the blood spurt and spatter, and another had smashed the spine; that bullet, Nesvick opines, was likely the shot that finally dropped the attacker.

Immediate Aftermath

Nesvick’s first realization he wasn’t in trouble was probably when a female officer approached him while he was still handcuffed and confided, “You know you’re a hero to that woman and little girl.” Adam later told American Handgunner, “That remark helped steady my nerves and ground me.” He added, “I … was approached by the Chief of Police for our town and he said, ‘What you did was heroic, you probably saved their lives.’ He told me they had had prior dealings with the man and he was a dangerous individual.”

Says Adam, “Fast forward another hour and I’m sitting in the office area of the police station waiting to make my statement, watching the forensics officer check in the evidence … I saw them check in my gun, and there was blood on the slide. They checked in the bat, and they checked in a chunk of hair that had come from the mother, and a few other miscellaneous things.”

Adam continues, “While I was sitting there, finally in some kind of light, I noticed blood stains all over my shirt and pants. He was really close when I shot him. Anyway, I gave my statement, keeping it simple and to the point. The biggest thing I remember them pressuring me on was ‘Was it an accident? Did you inadvertently fire?’ My answer was ‘No, officer, I was scared shitless, but it was a conscious act to fire because I knew my life was in danger.’ I had my wife bring me new clothes so they could put mine in evidence, and I walked out and got in the car. The officers thanked me repeatedly for being cooperative.”

It took a while for the prosecutor to call Adam to confirm he considered Adam a hero, and he definitely wasn’t going to be charging him with anything. At this writing, no lawsuit has been filed, and the window for plaintiffs to do so will have closed by the time you read this. The prosecutor’s finding actually came sooner than that.

Wave3 News reported soon after the shooting, “‘He did approach the individual who was assaulting the lady and her child and did, at gunpoint, instruct him to leave them alone and sit down on the curb,’ said Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull. Police said the man complied for a while, but then tried to attack the neighbor and ignored warnings to stop. When he came at the neighbor, police said he shot him. ‘Based upon what we learned last night, I’m of the belief that it was self-defense, that it was justified under the law and therefore there was no arrest made in the case,’ Mull said. ‘In a case where an individual was acting violently and had just violently assaulted a child and a defenseless lady. Due to his intervention, the assault was terminated, and this individual was ultimately killed in an act of self-defense.’”

The legal side of it was, for all practical purposes, over. It had clearly been a justified homicide. But there were still the emotional and psychological elements to deal with.

Personal Aftermath

It is common for defensive gun usages to happen at or near one’s home. Often, family members are present, and it’s a traumatic thing for them to experience. You’ll recall Adam’s wife, Shannon, was outside the house and in fact the first to call 911. She told American Handgunner, “When Adam stepped out with the firearm, I told 911, ‘My husband has a firearm, he has a permit, he’s trying to get the guy to sit down.’ I heard the dispatcher say ‘Weapon involved’ or ‘Weapon on scene.’ My husband walked over to the curb and had the husband sit down. I saw the woman and girl run into the house. A car blocked my view of Brandon, I couldn’t see if he was sitting or lying. In 30 seconds, I saw the man jump up and come rapidly toward my husband and when they got about 10 feet apart, my husband started backing up. He was telling my husband, ‘You aren’t going to do anything with that, you fat ass.’ He began to lunge at Adam, and Adam fired. I thought it was three shots. He collapsed. I saw blood squirting everywhere.”

Altered perceptions are extremely common in these incidents. Far more often than not, auditory exclusion or auditory muting will occur. Adam Nesvick was no exception. He told AH, “I had auditory exclusion so bad I didn’t hear everything he said as he came at me while I was screaming ‘Don’t do it!’ When I fired, I remember hearing muffled gunshots. I heard little pops, but I was deaf as a post for three days later.”

Another extremely common phenomenon is tunnel vison. Adam told us, “When the woman and the little girl went into the house and he got up, I realized ‘Oh, my God, this is going to happen, I’m probably going to have to shoot,’ and I hyper-focused on him from then on.”

When multiple shots are fired, relatively few participants remember the round count correctly. This was true here as well. Adam and Shannon each thought Adam had fired three shots, while one eyewitness insisted five shots were fired. All were incorrect: Evidence incontrovertibly proved Adam had unleashed four rounds.

After you’ve been in an incident like this, people treat you differently. Dr. Walter Gorski, the great police psychologist who is credited with defining “post shooting trauma” as something separate and distinct from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) referred to it as Mark of Cain syndrome. Sometimes, you are excoriated as a murderer. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you may be treated like a hero. The latter of course is better, but can still leave you wondering whether people still see you as the good neighbor, the good professional, the good worker at your job; instead, they see you as “He Who Killed,” and it changes the way they treat you, which in turn can change the way you feel about yourself.

Little kids had always seemed to play outdoors in their neighborhood; after the shooting, not so much. The mom and daughter whom Adam had rescued spent a couple of days in the hospital, refused to look at Adam or Shannon after coming home, and soon moved away. Other neighbors started moving away too.

That said, though, Adam reports, “No one really dumped on us. One of the little kids, who was a friend of the little girl who used the bat to try to get Brandon to stop beating her mom, saw us on the street and gave us a big thumbs up. Brandon’s best friend told me, ‘I’m sorry he died, but you did what you had to do.’ The apartment complex gave us a $50 gift certificate to go to dinner on them.”

Sleep disturbance is a virtually universal experience among those who’ve had to kill to survive. “I didn’t sleep for three days afterward,” Adam told us. “This eventually went away. I had flashbacks for a long time and still do occasionally, but not as bad or as vivid. Shannon had really bad flashbacks. We were comfortable talking about it, and that got us through a lot. Shannon got counseling. I got help from friends who had been through similar things, maybe more help than I would have gotten from a psychologist.”

In 2020, the Nesvicks moved to another state. “I thought getting away was the best thing, not being in the place every day where I had shot someone,” Adam explained.

The police gave him his gun back a month later. He was deeply touched to note the cops had not only wiped the blood spatter off the SIG but had cleaned and oiled it too.

His SIG went away. It carried too many unpleasant memories. Today Adam carries a CZ P10C.

A Great Neck high school student exposes her school's intellectual corruption

 Sahar Tartak is on target at the Wall Street Journal about how illiberal are some of the Liberals in Great Neck, NY.

Having lived in Great Neck for many years, gone to the best schools, and taught at the university level,, I can vouch for the attitudes and behavior she describes as reflecting the tendencies of many of the educators I have encountered.

But it's not only Great Neck. Freedom and truth are undervalued by the Woke, cancel, and Progressive ideologues everywhere. They are the threat.

It seems that education is a two-edge sword. It imparts knowledge which benefits everyone. However, history suggests that a by product all too often is an elitist view that leads to a desire for control of others' behavior and a lack of common sense about what policies actually help people. The widespread past adulation among many Elites of socialism and communism and a lack of appreciation for the damage that government interference in the economy can do and often does are examples.

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I was educated in the school district ranked by Niche.com as America’s third-best. Immigrants from around the world come to Great Neck, N.Y., to raise their children. My best friend’s father was at the Tiananmen Square massacre. My classmates left behind their families in El Salvador. My mother escaped revolutionary Iran, and my grandfather escaped the Nazis.

Lately, though, the area’s diverse and liberal-minded residents may have reason to think their local school officials aren’t as open-minded as they thought. In 2021 Great Neck North High School directed the student government to give $375 of student funds to a “racial equity” group to speak to the student body about “systemic racism.” I was the student government’s treasurer, and I felt we didn’t know enough about the organization and its mission to disburse the funds. So I refused to sign the check.

In response, the teachers who advise the student government berated, bullied and insulted me at our next meeting, which took place over Zoom for my parents to overhear. They began by announcing that my social studies teacher would be present. Together, the three adults told me that the principal himself found my stance “appalling.” I had made them and the school “look bad,” they told me. One teacher said the situation gave her “hives.”

When I suggested that students might not need or want a lecture on systemic racism, my social-studies teacher asked whether I’d also oppose a Holocaust survivor’s presentation.

I objected to that comparison, but she cut me off: “If you’re not on board with systemic racism, I have trouble with that, girlfriend.”

When I didn’t back down, she made a bizarre accusation: “The fact that you think slavery is debatable . . .”

I logged off Zoom and started crying. My parents comforted me, and I decided I wasn’t going to sign that check.

That’s when I noticed how illiberal my liberal high school had become. I once expressed disagreement with the narrative of the “1619 Project,” and that same social-studies teacher snapped that I was opposed to hearing other perspectives. I had signed up for her class because it was described as “discussion-based,” but certain discussion seemed forbidden.

Later, a friend showed me a lesson from his English class—a Google Slides presentation urging that students pledge to work “relentlessly” in the “lifelong process” of “antiracism.” According to these slides, America is a place where racism is “no better today than it was 200 years ago.” I disagreed but didn’t mind the debate. Yet this wasn’t about debate: Immigrant children were being told to “pledge” to defend a view many of them don’t hold.

I doubt students could have comfortably objected in class. The lesson pre-empted criticism by imputing to them “white fragility,” which means they “close off self-reflection,” “trivialize the reality of racism,” and “protect a limited worldview.” The adult presenting this accusatory material was a teacher who had the power to grade them and affect their prospects of getting into college.

When parents caught wind of this presentation, their group chats exploded: “I feel like I live under a rock.” “I did not realize the extent of this at all.” “If you too are troubled by this, join us at the upcoming school board meeting.”

I decided to tell the school board about my treatment at the hands of teachers and school officials. I was nervous but I made my case. The response, to my shock, was a standing ovation. I also received many expressions of support from fed-up parents, from teachers who silently abhorred their one-sided “professional development” courses, and from students who had been punished by administrators for questioning the orthodoxy of systemic racism. (One of those students had been sent to the principal’s office for refusing to sign an “antihate” pledge.)

That experience prompted me and a few like-minded others to look into our school’s curriculums. What we found was an arsenal of lopsidedly race-obsessed lesson plans. One was about the American Psychological Association’s “Apology to People of Color” for its role in “Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism.” Another was titled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” My favorite: “A Critical Race Theory Approach to The Great Gatsby.”

The schools in our district had always followed the guidelines of New York state’s comprehensive social-studies curriculum, which included teaching about the pervasiveness and evils of slavery, mistreatment of Native Americans, discrimination against Chinese immigrants and so on. What we discovered was something else—partisanship and race essentialism, mixed in with administrative intimidation and bullying that our officials refused to address.

District officials responded in the way school officials often do when criticized. They ignored us for as long as possible, then delayed taking action for as long as possible, clearly hoping everybody would forget the controversy and move on. They didn’t respond to my father’s freedom-of-information request until the day before a contentious school-board election. The board then promised to further investigate the curriculums, but we never heard anything after that. My school brought in a member of the state Education Department’s Board of Regents, to discuss curriculums, but that resulted in nothing.

I graduated last spring, but no one has moved on. Students and parents across the country are finally asking tough questions about anti-American curriculums. Immigrants like my mother and grandfather found refuge in America because for all its problems, it’s a wonderful place full of generous and open-minded people. The nation’s schools have a duty to teach students that basic truth.

More on the DOJ’s and FBI’s double standard of justice

Here is Jonathan Turley on the FBI.

Clearly, the DOJ and the FBI have been politicized for some time. But that is not the worst part - which is that many voters' views on equal justice before the law are driven by the same partisanship.

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Durham: The FBI Had Danchenko on Payroll as An Informant During the Russian Collusion Investigation

Yesterday, a filing by Special Counsel John Durham revealed that Igor Danchenko, who worked as a key contributor to the discredited Steele dossier funded by the Clinton campaign, was later put on the FBI payroll as an informant. The disclosure rocked Washington and raised additional questions of the FBI’s eagerness to pursue any allegations against Donald Trump despite being warned that the dossier appeared to be a vehicle for Russian disinformation.


Danchenko is facing with five counts of lying to the bureau during that relationship. His trial is scheduled for next month in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

The filing states that “In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI. The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020.”

The news shocked many of us who have closely followed the Russian collusion controversy for years. The FBI showed a zeal to investigate Trump and his campaign that seemed to border on the blind obsessive. It was not simply with the Steele dossier. On the baseless Alfa Bank allegations (also pushed by Clinton campaign through friends at the FBI) the supervisory agent for the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe, Joe Pientka, sent a note to FBI special agent Curtis Heide, stating: “People on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server.” Pientka then messaged Heide: “Did you guys open a case? Reach out and put tools on?”That description of the apparent eagerness of then-FBI Director James Comey and others only magnifies concern over the bureau’s alleged bias or predisposition on the Trump investigation. It was the same eagerness that led the FBI to pursue the Russian investigation for years despite being warned early by American intelligence that the Steele dossier contained not just unsupported allegations but possible Russian disinformation.

Indeed, Danchenko’s possible connections to Russian intelligence have been raised as a matter of concern. Indeed, the filing states “During his January 2017 interview with the FBI, the defendant initially denied having any contact with Russian intelligence or security services but later — as noted by the agents, contradicted himself and stated that he had contact with two individuals who he believed to be connected to those services.”

What is particularly concerning is that the FBI also had former British spy Christopher Steele, on its payroll. Steele then assembled his dossier under the funding of the Clinton campaign which repeatedly denied such funding to the media. This money was funneled through the law firm of Perkins Coie and the campaign’s general counsel, Marc Elias. (The Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for violating election rules in hiding that funding).

So the FBI cut off Steele as a paid source after he allegedly worked with the media to spread these unproven claims. It then turned around and hired his principle source for the dossier.

The filing also states that Danchenko discussed an interest in obtaining classified information for possible sale to the Russians.

“As has been publicly reported, the defendant was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011. In late 2008, while the defendant was employed by a prominent think tank in Washington, D.C., the defendant engaged two fellow employees about whether one of the employees might be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money.

According to one employee (‘Employee-1’), the defendant believed that he (Employee-1) might be in a position to enter the incoming Obama administration and have access to classified information. During this exchange, the defendant informed Employee-1 that he had access to people who would be willing to pay money in exchange for classified information. Employee-1 passed this information to a U.S. government contact, and the information was subsequently passed to the FBI.

Based on this information, the FBI initiated a ‘preliminary investigation’ into the defendant. The FBI converted its investigation into a ‘full investigation’ after learning that the defendant (1) had been identified as an associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects and (2) had previous contact with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers.”

The “prominent think tank” appears to be the Brookings Institution. I have previously written about the prominent role of Brookings in spreading the Russian collusion claims and hiring an array of people who played critical roles in these investigations. That also included former FBI general counsel James Baker. For some, it seemed like not just friends but “friends with benefits.” It seems that everyone in this scandal was six degrees from Brookings.

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. 

-------------------------------------

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.

---------------------------------------

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.

----------------------------------------

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.