Cultural suicide in the US

 Habi Zhang gets it right in the Wall Street Journal (one of the few newspapers you can trust).

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As a Chinese doctoral student raising a young son in the U.S., I am mystified by how American elementary schools coddle students. In China, schools are run like boot camps. What do the therapeutic comforts America showers on its youth portend for a growing competition with China?

I recently registered my son in the third grade at a New Jersey public school. Hattie had recently finished two years of elementary school in Chengdu, China, where he trotted off to school each day with a backpack stuffed with thick textbooks and materials for practices and quizzes. Here he leaves for school with little in his backpack other than a required “healthy snack.”


The first day he came home with a sheet of math homework: 35 addition problems. He finished in about a minute. On the second day, he was asked to write 328 in different configurations. He first wrote down 300+20+8, following the prompt, and then 164x2, 82x4 and 656÷2.

My son is not a genius, but he started studying math at an early age. When he was 5, I taught him fractions. Two years later, I introduced him to algebra. It is a core belief in Chinese society that talent can be trained, so schools should be tough on children. Chinese students score at the top of international math and science tests.

This is not a philosophy shared by American schools. On Friday night my son came home announcing in bewilderment that he didn’t have any homework. In China students tend to receive twice as much homework on the weekend, given the two days to complete it. How will America compete with a China determined to train the best mathematicians, scientists and engineers?

Unfolding now are two Maoist cultural revolutions, one in the East and the other in the West. The former is a jingoistic nationalism enforced by party loyalties and ubiquitous secret police. The latter is an anti-Americanism enforced by progressive mobs seeking to defund the police. Both are about limiting expression, controlling thought and regulating behavior.

Xi Jinping has been cracking down on everything from finance to entertainment to whip his country through a “national rejuvenation.” China’s nationalism is explicitly anchored in Maoism, with Mr. Xi representing the new cult of personality. Meanwhile, woke America—which, consciously or not, deploys Maoist tactics—is destroying the core traditions of Western civilization with identity politics.

In both countries, control must extend to the very young to mold them in the image of the official ideology. In fall 2021 Chinese pupils returned to school with a new requirement to study “Xi Jinping Thought.” Schools must “plant the seeds of loving the party, the country, and socialism in young hearts,” a government announcement declares. Across the ocean, American pupils are taught that white America is inherently racist, regardless of individual intention or action.

Chinese education pushes the young in directions that serve the party and the state. Youth are trained to be skilled laborers ready to endure hard work and brutal competition. Such political indoctrination is taught side by side with math and science. American education is supposed to be about opening minds but appears not to fill them with much. Worse, young Americans are not prepared for the demands of being an adult.

This phenomenon started in higher education. For years attending American universities, I have been disturbed to watch colleges fabricate “anxiety” and “depression” in students who are not mentally ill. Administrators have used grossly exaggerated terms such as “trauma,” and melodramatic expressions such as “I cannot begin to imagine what you have suffered,” to turn into a catastrophe what is best described as disappointment. This creates a culture of victimization.

The absurdity peaked after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Students from elite universities claimed existential despair, finding comfort in cocoa, coloring books and therapy dogs. Classes were canceled and exams postponed, all in the name of soothing 20-somethings who need to be learning how to adapt to reality as adults.

Chinese citizens enjoy mocking the Western “snowflakes.” Less amusing is what this trend means for the U.S. as China no longer hides its enmity for America.

The Government proposes to use the FSOC to further its climate agenda - illegally

 John Cochrane illustrates the Administration's "the ends justify the means" approach to government by twisting words to purposely misinterpret the law.

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A Convenient Myth: Climate risk and the financial system. At National Review Online.

In an October 21 press release, Janet Yellen — Treasury secretary and head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), the umbrella group that unites all U.S. financial regulators — eloquently summarized a vast program to implement climate policy via financial regulation:

"FSOC is recognizing that climate change is an emerging and increasing threat to U.S. financial stability. This report puts climate change squarely at the forefront of the agenda of its member agencies and is a critical first step forward in addressing the threat of climate change."

You do not have to disagree with one iota of climate science — and I will not do so in this essay — to find this program outrageous, an affront to effective financial regulation, to effective climate policy, and to our system of government.

Of all the threats posed by a slowly warming climate, why is Ms. Yellen talking about financial stability? The answer is simple: Financial regulators are not supposed to implement each administration’s policies on non-financial matters. Financial regulators may only act if they think financial stability is at risk.

Why? Imagine that Trump returns. He declares, “Illegal immigration is an existential crisis. I can’t get Congress to do anything about it. Financial regulators: Tell banks to freeze the bank accounts of any customers who can’t prove legal status. Scour people’s accounts for payments to illegal employees. Freeze out any business that hires an illegal.” You would be shocked. The nation would be shocked. Ms. Yellen would be shocked. There is no financial risk here, we would all say. This is a vast abuse of power.

Financial regulation can only touch climate policy if there is a risk to the financial system that only coincidentally involves climate. But how could climate possibly pose a risk to the financial system?

A “risk to the financial system” does not mean that someone, somewhere, someday, might lose money on an unwise investment. A risk to the financial system means an event like 2008: a shock so big, so pervasive, and so fueled by short-term debt that it sparks a widespread run, a wave of defaults, and threatens the ability of the whole system to function. “Financial regulation” means looking at the assets and liabilities of financial institutions to mitigate such a risk. It can at best look a few years in the future.

So, if we use plain English, a “climate risk to the financial system” that “financial regulators” can contain must mean the climate might change so drastically, so abruptly, and so unexpectedly, in the next five years, that the economy tanks so terribly that financial institutions blow through the cushions of equity and long-term debt, to spark a widespread systemic crisis like 2008 or worse.

The trouble is, there is absolutely nothing in even the most extreme scientific speculations to support that possibility. Climate is the probability distribution of weather: the chance of heat and cold waves, floods, fires, and so forth. We know with great precision what the climate will be for the next five years. Nobody writing insurance in Florida is unaware of the chance of hurricanes. The chances of extreme weather are not going to change unexpectedly in even ten years. The sea level is rising. It will continue to rise, about 4 millimeters per year – 2 cm in the next five years – slowly and predictably. Risk is the unknown. This is known.

Moreover, even weather extremes just don’t move the economy that much. We have had many financial crises in history. Not one was sparked by an extreme weather event. Our modern, national economy is remarkably immune to weather.

It is simply not true that the economic damage of extreme weather events is either large or substantially increasing. Weather-related damages were 0.18 percent of global GDP in 2020. That’s tiny, and it’s decreasing, down from 0.26 percent in 1990. The part of it that could be described as unexpected, threatening financial reserves, is tinier still. GDP fell 10 percent during the COVID recession. Unexpected climate risks would have to be 50 times larger in the next few years to approach that level of damage. Even the most extreme weather events are local, a blip on the national economy and the assets of diversified banks.

In 1900, half a million people died in storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. By 2020, the number had declined to 14,000. So far, 5,500 people have died from climate-related disasters in 2021. There are about 35,000 car crash deaths each year in the U.S. alone, and COVID has killed 750,000 Americans.

Still, one could defend the effort. Our financial regulators completely missed the possibility that mortgage-backed securities might bring down the financial system in 2008. Despite the army of Dodd-Frank regulators and stress-testers, regulators missed the possibility that a pandemic threatened to do the same in 2020. Only another massive round of bailouts saved us from another 2008. The Fed went on to completely miss the chance that inflation might break out, while it orchestrated the printing of $3 trillion sent out to people as checks. A dispassionate, honest effort to look at out-of-the-box risks to the financial system, together with a humble attitude towards regulators’ ability to foresee them, is a good idea.

What might that effort find? What if (when?) China invades Taiwan, and the U.S. and allies blockade China? A huge global recession. What if the U.S. chooses to fight and loses? Greater catastrophe. What if the Middle East blows up, or a nuclear weapon goes off? What if we have a real pandemic, one that kills 10 percent of the people it infects as plague, cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis did? What if that pandemic comes out of a lab, this time deliberately? What about a massive financial cyberattack? What if bond investors give up on U.S. Treasury debt and force a sovereign-debt crisis? These are all unlikely. But the chance of any of these is thousands of times greater than the danger of climate change to the financial system.

And what should one do about such risks? Does it make sense for bank regulators and stress testers to demand that each bank rank the sensitivity of each loan it makes for its exposure to Chinese-invasion risk, and calibrate its portfolio accordingly? Or, as is increasingly popular, to interact these risks and model general-equilibrium effects? No. The response to out-of-the box unquantifiable risks is simply to demand that banks finance themselves with much more equity capital, which can absorb unforeseen losses without imperiling the bank and financial system.

It is patently obvious that regulators did not evenhandedly open this Pandora’s box, or consider why, of all the risks to the financial system, climate change is the only one worth talking about. Regulators want to tell banks to stop lending to fossil-fuel companies while, coincidentally, the political parts of the administration decided on the same climate policy. And given their method, to regulate bank investments against “climate risks” that they cannot even define, rather than protect the system with equity (financial adaptation!), they are clearly not interested in actually protecting the financial system against unknowable catastrophes.

Pressed, advocates will quickly admit that’s not what they mean. Instead, they say, they worry about the risk of “stranded assets,” “transition risks,” losses in fossil fuel and other legacy industries.

Will environmental regulators, legislators, presidents, prime ministers, really fly back from Glasgow and pass laws and regulations so onerous that they tank the economy and financial system? Well, they just might. But then at least one might be honest and call it “climate-policy risk!”

But even this story does not pass muster. Climate-policy advocates are turning to financial regulation precisely because presidents and legislatures, accountable to voters, are refusing to impose draconian carbon-killing policies. It has some chutzpah, too: Carbon regulations might kill the fossil-fuel industry. So we have to. . . kill the fossil-fuel industry first.

This view has resonated through financial-policy circles for the last few years, though a tiny dose of econ-101 common sense told us that if you restrict fossil-fuel supply, prices and profits go up, not down. Today’s spike in coal, natural-gas and oil prices illustrates just how competent this effort is.

We are in an energy transition. But old, dying technologies never cause crises. New ones do. The 1929 stock-market crash did not come from the horse and buggy industries; radio, movies, and cars crashed. The 1999 stock market crash did not come from the typewriter, slide rule, carbon paper, and landline-telephone industries. Tech, slightly ahead of its time, failed. Tesla, valued at $1 trillion, upwards of ten times more than GM — now there is a teetering domino! Since the tulips themselves, so-called bubbles have always come from exciting new technologies, often fueled by subsidies and cheered on by central banks and regulators, not from slowly decaying legacy industries.

And stock-price declines, whether in Tesla or Exxon, are not a financial crisis. Heaven help us if regulators expand their view that their job is to keep prices from going down. Crises come from debt. Legacy industries have very little debt. Exxon has a $200 billion total capitalization. Of that, $157 billion is common stock, $51 billion is long-term debt, and a paltry $19 billion is short-term debt. Financial regulators should give Exxon and its investors a financial-stability gold star, not hound it for a net-zero plan on stability grounds. If the Biden administration nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova, gets her wish to starve and “bankrupt” fossil-fuel companies via financial regulation, stockholders might indeed lose money. But with no appreciable debt there is no threat whatsoever to “financial stability.”

An honest, unbiased appraisal of political risk might also be interesting. Bring it on. The FTC might break you up. Labor, Justice, EEOC, EPA, might descend and close down your business and make your loans worthless. A wave of questionable product-liability-litigation losses might bankrupt you. Financial regulators might decide to starve you — now that would make a fun disclosure. Again, this is obviously not the question.

Climate risk to the financial system is a Big Lie. I don’t know how to put this politely. A little lie is a knowing untruth spouted by a devious individual. A Big Lie is a whopper, self-evidently false when parsed in standard English, passed around and around the bubbles of Davos, Glasgow, alphabet-soup financial agencies, philanthropies, and the narrative-endorsing media, until earnest do-gooders come to believe in its nonsense. Spouting it gains one the approval of the elite, and denying it quick expulsion and exclusion. A Big Lie justifies extraordinary grasps of political power.

Why repeat this Big Lie? Well, it’s obvious. Many people in our government and surrounding policy elites want to expand a particular kind of climate policy. That policy centers on stopping fossil-fuel development and use, before alternatives are available at scale, and subsidizing a particular kind of “green” projects. Windmills, solar panels, electric cars, rail, yes. Nuclear, carbon capture and storage — which would permit fossil-fuel burning — natural gas, hydrogen, geothermal, hydropower, innovation, zoning and land-use reform, adaptation, no. It focuses on domestic policies, hoping our “leadership” will inspire the elephants in the room (China, India, Africa) to fall in line and deny their populations the benefits of fossil-fuel led growth, and Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia deny theirs the profits of supplying that demand.

The trouble: This policy is falling apart quickly. Well-informed critics such as Steve Koonin and Bjorn Lomborg have completely undermined its distortion of the science, even that found in official IPCC and U.S. government reports. Democratically elected legislatures and accountable administrations refuse to quickly implement this policy. Even the Biden administration, which on day one canceled the Keystone pipeline, quickly turned around to ask OPEC and the Russians to turn on the spigots when voters noticed gas prices rising. The climate parts of the grand infrastructure and reconciliation bills are falling apart, leaving only a few hundred billion ineffective dollars to be thrown down corporate-welfare ratholes. The November elections made it pretty clear that 2022 will be the end of legislating this policy. Glasgow is ending with a whimper, with many countries refusing even to end fossil-fuel subsidies. Corporations will make bland “net-zero” (whatever “net” means) promises which they can quickly reverse in 2024. Europeans are facing spiking energy prices, restive gilets jaunes, and a skeptical eastern bloc.

What to do? Well, turn to financial regulation. What they can’t accomplish by accountable, democratic methods, they can accomplish by unleashing the awesome power of financial regulators to impose these policies, by denying funding to fossil-fuel companies and their customers, and freezing them out of the financial or payments system as we do to pot farmers, by demanding “disclosures.” The European Central Bank (ECB) is already printing money to buy “green” bonds, declaring them to be “undervalued.”

It is a particularly effective idea, because once thousands of pages of regulations are written, once the right people are appointed with all the protections of office, once the Twitter mob has silenced dissenters in the financial-regulatory community, once private businesses have gotten the message how to please regulators and hired hundreds of thousands of climate-disclosure compliance officers, the effort will be immune to the whims of pesky voters.

What’s wrong with this? The climate is in crisis, you say, the voters are morons, legislatures and politicians won’t move: Use whatever tools we have.

The minor issue: Financial regulators have a competence deficit. Environmental regulators are not doing a great job of scientific, technocratic, cost-benefit-metered climate policy. Climate policy is not a great certainty, waiting only for more activism. That central bankers will figure out what to deny, what to subsidize, and how to rate banks on their climate investments is a fantasy. The same crew that missed mortgages, pandemic, and inflation is going to figure out what businesses to subsidize, what to freeze, all to change global temperatures 100 years from now?

Most of all, it is blatantly illegal. In a democracy, independent agencies have broad but limited powers. Financial regulators are limited to financial risks. Securities regulators are supposed to enforce the “fiduciary rule” that asset managers must invest only on financial basis, not to please either the managers’ or politicians’ preferences. And there are great reasons for this limitation. If the Fed starts buying “green bonds,” the next Trump can force it to start buying “build the wall” bonds.

So what to do? Invent a fantasy: “Climate risk.” Dress it up in big technical sounding words like the rest of finance, to give it the aura of technocratic competence.

What they mean is not climate risk to the financial system, but the financial system’s risk to the climate, by financing the “wrong” investments. But they’re not allowed to regulate that. Hence the Big Lie: We looked for risks, and guess what, climate came out on top!

They are so brazen, so unafraid of legal or political pushback, that they no longer even hide it. Read the second half of Ms. Yellen’s eloquent summary quote: “This report puts climate change squarely at the forefront of the agenda of its member agencies and is a critical first step forward in addressing the threat of climate change.”

Guilty as charged! Climate change is not supposed to be at the forefront of all U.S. financial regulators’ agenda. It’s not supposed to be on their agenda anywhere!

When the Biden administration says that climate would be a “whole of government” approach, I answer equally: Guilty as charged! “Whole of government” is blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. Will the judiciary be next? Our government is limited, with checks and balances.

Mark Carney, a former governor of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada likewise pronounced,

“These seemingly arcane but essential changes to the plumbing of finance can move and are moving climate changes from the fringes to the forefront and transforming the financial system in the process.”

Guilty as charged.

Narrowly, this approach throws what remains of central-bank and financial-regulatory independence under the bus. Central banks and financial regulators become just another agency implementing the decisions of the party in power. “That’s where the money is,” said the bank robber Willie Sutton, and we have long put this particular piggy bank off limits. And this is only the beginning of politicized central banks and financial regulations. The social and governance part of ESG investing and disclosures comes next. The regional Feds seem to think their main mandates are to cure racism and inequality, worthy aspirations but also completely beyond their competence or mandate, for the same reasons. The same regulatory tools are waiting.

Most of all, it is profoundly un-democratic. Reflect: The whole point is to bend financial regulators to this climate policy precisely because elected officials will not do it, and in advance of elections that will surely put a larger brake on the movement. In this way, it is a soft version of the “eco-authoritarian” movement. These are people who, like Greta Thunberg, take apocalyptic climate rhetoric seriously and pursue it to its logical conclusion. If indeed the climate is in a “crisis,” “emergency,” “catastrophe” — I can’t keep up with the word of the day — if indeed we are at a “tipping point;” if the planet will soon be “uninhabitable,” then we surely cannot wait for slow politicians and thick-headed voters to come to their senses. Seize power, keep it, and shove it down their uncomprehending throats.

Now the financial climate movement doesn’t take its own rhetoric that seriously. It aims for a benevolent climate aristocracy, not yet authoritarian, and it knows most of the hysteria is hogwash. But the whole point is to enshrine this brand of climate policy where voters cannot get at it.

Except they will. We still do live in democracies, and when the power starts going off, the pesky voters will return. The peasants can still rise up and throw out today’s self-proclaimed elites. Brexit ought to be a warning to the ECB.

Why should we care?

I care about independent central banks and financial regulators. I care about effective financial regulation. If firms are asked to “disclose” nonsense, and regulators demand fictitious net-zero disclosures, firms will do as asked. But then the whole regulatory system will be full of nonsense. Politicized central banks playing climate czar will not foresee it, forestall it, and will deal with it chaotically.

Central banks and regulators have already become far too politicized and their activities have expanded past their mandates. Under Dodd-Frank regulations, there are over 100 Fed employees in each big bank signing off on all major deals. Why not add, “Hey, make those a bit greener?” The Fed bought $2.5 trillion of mortgages to funnel money to housing. How can they say no to green bonds? The ECB is already buying sovereign and “green” bonds. We looked for “underpriced” bonds and guess what, we just happened to find windmills. It will be hard to say no to more.

I care about climate. [And the environment more broadly, which is getting forgotten in climate hysteria. You will not save the elephants by putting solar panels on your roof.] I want robust, effective, cost-benefit-tested, long-lasting climate policy, based on actual science. Today’s enthusiasms will fade like corn ethanol and switchgrass. Even this policy will not last. Around 2022, the congressional inquiries into just what is happening here will start, undermining the whole project even if it was good climate policy. To address a hundred-year problem, you need policy with a solid, bipartisan electoral constituency, not one shoved down voters’ throats while they aren’t paying attention, based on a Big Lie.

I care about democracy, rule of law, political stability, limited-purpose, technically competent, and effective institutions. Climate is not the kind of problem that requires us to abandon our form of government, and accept the chaos that will occur as new politicians use the expanded tools to implement their unpopular agendas.

To the central banker who responded to me, “But the climate is a crisis, we must do something,” I say, first of all, “who appointed you Queen?” Then I say, when they come calling, say no. That’s what independent central banks are supposed to do: say no. It does not matter if you agree or not with the policy, say no. Follow rules, laws, norms and traditions, so you can say no when Trump’s immigration policy comes along, or whatever else will surely follow.

Of course, nobody became the toast of Davos by saying no. Nobody moved on to be prime minister or other political success by getting right the mark-to-market rules of derivative contracts, or forcing banks to issue a faintly reasonable amount of equity. If you feel the need for greater meaning in your life, quit your job, join EPA, the agencies implementing the EU green deal, or the Sierra Club. Advocate on your time off. But central banks and financial regulators must not be bent to this cause — and thus not to the next cause that comes along.

To voters, commentators, politicians in the U.S.: Don’t be blindsided by technical gobbledygook. Financial regulators barely know what they’re doing about actually regulating finance, and have absolutely no idea when they’re making up buzzwords like “climate-risk disclosure.” Stand up to this infamy.

In practical terms, many of the heads of these organizations are being appointed now. There will soon be four open seats on the Federal Reserve Board. Forget about money, interest rates and inflation. One question matters about the Fed: Whether the awesome power of financial regulation will be unleashed to enforce this administration’s climate policy, with social, governance, and racial agenda all rejected by voters soon to follow, and then whatever else politicians demand after that.

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Apology: Regular readers will notice some recycling of ideas. I do mull things over in different ways in different venues. I hope clearer expression makes it worth while.

Update: Christina Parajon Skinner has a Law Review article explaining financial regulators' very limited legal authority to take on climate change, a short oped (the Hill) and a Duke Law Journal article on central bank activism. A lot is going on in this area. I highlight her work because I know very little about the legal issues, and she does.

Rupert Darwall at Real Clear Energy has a superb detailed essay on climate risk nonsense.

Climate Change and the risk to Financial Stability by Tailrisk Economics, Ian Harrison principal is also superb. Harrison and his team have read underlying documents, in their eye-glazing detail. And they write in clear, crisp, technobabble-free English.

The latter two are frankly better than my essay. Clear, well written, and well informed.

The FBI’s sad decline to untrustworthy

 Here is Victor Hanson's perspective on the FBI at Townhall.com.

VH is on target.

A Special Counsel is needed to clean up the FBI by prosecuting anyone, inside or outside the FBI, that broke the law.

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The Washington, D.C.-based Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost all credibility as a disinterested investigatory agency. Now we learn from a whistleblower that the agency was allegedly investigating moms and dads worried about the teaching of critical race theory in their kids' schools.

In truth, since 2015, the FBI has been constantly in the news - and mostly in a negative and constitutionally disturbing light.

The fired former Director James Comey injected himself into the 2016 political race by constantly editorializing on his ongoing investigation of candidate Hillary Clinton's email leaks.

In a bizarre twist, the public learned later that Comey had allowed Hillary Clinton's own private computer contractor - CrowdStrike - to run the investigation of the hack. The private firm was allowed to keep possession of pertinent hard drives central to the investigation. How odd that CrowdStrike's point man was Shawn Henry, a former high-ranking FBI employee.

During the Robert Mueller special investigation, the FBI implausibly claimed it had no idea how requested information on FBI cell phones had mysteriously disappeared.

It was also under Comey's directorship that the FBI submitted inaccurate requests for warrants to a FISA court. Elements of one affidavit to surveil Trump supporter Carter Page were forged by FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who later pleaded guilty to a felony.

The FBI hired the disreputable ex-British spy Christopher Steele as a contractor, while he was peddling his fantasy - the Clinton-bought dossier - to Obama government officials and the media.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker was reportedly the subject of a federal investigation. He allegedly conducted prominent meetings both with media outlets that later leaked lurid tales from the Steele dossier. He also met repeatedly with the now-indicted Perkins Coe attorney Michael Sussman.

Comey himself, through third-party intermediaries, leaked to the media his own confidential memos detailing private meetings with President Trump. His assurances both to Congress and to Trump that the president was not the current subject of FBI investigations were either misleading or outright lies.

In sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Comey on some 245 occasions claimed he could not remember or had no knowledge of key elements of his own "Russian Collusion" investigation.

Comey's replacement, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, was fired for leaking sensitive information to the media. He then lied on at least three occasions about his role to federal attorneys and his own FBI investigators.

McCabe is now a paid CNN consultant who often has offered misleading information on the Russian collusion hoax that he helped promulgate.

Former FBI director and special counsel Robert Mueller conducted a 22-month, $40 million wild goose chase after some mythical "Russian Collusion" plot. When called before Congress, Mueller claimed he had little or no knowledge about Fusion GPS or the Steele Dossier - the twin sources that birthed the entire collusion hoax.

FBI lawyer Lisa Page was removed from Mueller's investigation, along with her paramour FBI investigator Peter Strzok. Both misused FBI communications, revealing their pro-Clinton biases during their investigations of "Russian collusion," while hiding their own unprofessional relationship.

Mueller himself staggered their firings and delayed explanations about why they were let go from his investigation team.

When the FBI arrested pro-Trump activist Roger Stone, it did so with a huge quasi-swat team - to the tipped-off and lurking CNN reporters.

The FBI repeated such politicized performance art recently when they stormed the home of Project Veritas director James O'Keefe. The agency confiscated his electronic devices on the grounds that he had knowledge of the contents of the allegedly lurid missing diary of Joe Biden's daughter. The FBI - an apparent retrieval service of lost Biden family embarrassments - also did not disclose that it had possession of Hunter Biden's laptop at a time when the media was erroneously declaring the computer inauthentic.

O'Keefe was accosted in the pre-morning hours by a crowd of FBI agents, wielding a battering ram, who pushed him out of his home in his underwear.

The time and location of the FBI raid, as in the Stone case, were leaked to the media that cheered the raid shortly after it was conducted. A federal judge recently stopped the FBI's ongoing monitoring of O'Keefe's communications.

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins recently detailed other FBI lapses such as downplaying evidence that former Olympic gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar was a known and chronic molester of teenage gymnasts.

The agency also extended its witch hunt against the innocent researcher wrongly accused of involvement in the anthrax attacks of 2001.

One could add to such misadventures the mysterious leadership roles of at least 12 FBI informants in the harebrained kidnapping scheme of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

We can also cite the agency's inability to follow up on clear information about the dangers posed by criminals as diverse as the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

For its own moral and practical survival, the FBI should be given one last chance at redemption by moving to the nation's heartland - perhaps Kansas - far away from the political and media tentacles that have so deeply squeezed and corrupted it.

American Citizenship and its Decline

 Here is a link to a worthwhile free online course at Hillsdale College - taught by Victor Davis Hanson.

Great for you and your children.

Let's get this Country back.

Who says it’s a free country (2021-11-17)?

 John Stossel, at townhall.com, provides another example of your Government at work.

Certificates of Need are unnecessary.  A free market provides evidence of need or not - you either succeed or fail.

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"Why does Louisiana have the right to stop me from doing what I love to do?" asks Ursula Newell-Davis in my new video.

Newell-Davis has helped people. She's a social worker who's worked with kids with special needs for 20 years. She's really good at it.

"She helped teach me how to talk to people," says Kamal, who never had friends before.

His mother adds, "She explained to me things that I didn't understand about my kids."

Newell-Davis helped many families like hers. Her clients are ecstatic about her work.

Now she wants to help more kids by starting her own business focusing on "respite" work. "Respite" means acting as backup to a primary caregiver. They fill in for a few hours or days to give a parent a break.

"Someone that can go in and teach their child a different skill," Newell-Davis says.

She has a college degree, a master's degree and a social work license. But Louisiana bureaucrats won't let her do respite work unless she can prove "there is a need for an additional HCBS provider in the geographic location for which the application is submitted" and "the probability of serious, adverse consequences to recipients' ability to access health care if the provider is not allowed to be licensed."

What!? Why?

"Louisiana wants to limit how many agencies they have to regulate," says Newell-Davis. "That makes it easy for the state."

Easy for the state? Yes, that's the actual reason.

Anastasia Boden of the Pacific Legal Foundation is helping Newell-Davis sue Louisiana, trying to get the law declared unconstitutional.

"Louisiana gives you no clue about how to prove you're needed," says Boden. Even if they did, "That would be difficult for even the best entrepreneurs."

I thought about my career and said, "I couldn't prove that I'm needed."

"The only way to find out is to open up your doors and try!" replies Boden.

But Newell-Davis isn't allowed to try.

She gave regulators what they demanded. She paid their $200 fee, rented office space and explained why her work is needed. She wrote many pages about rising youth crime and how respite care could help these kids.

But Louisiana said that wasn't good enough."

In fact, Louisiana turns down most applicants.

This is crazy. Special needs kids need more help, not less.

The government's excuse: "Regulating is a resource-intensive process." Rejecting applicants helps "limit the burden on regulators."

Streamlining the application process would be a better solution.

About the Rittenhouse case

 Jonathan Turley gets it right on his blog.

The Rittenhouse prosecutors don't have a case.  They overcharged and their own witnesses and videos show that only legal self defense occurred.  Those of us who know something about these matters believe it is clear cut legal self defense

Unfortunately, most of the media has not told the truth about the facts and if Rittenhouse is acquitted their audience will believe there has been a miscarriage of justice, which the same media will reinforce.  This is is likely to lead to widespread rioting with great property destruction and, worse, deaths.

The fake media and various rabble rousers who exploit the situation will be partially to blame for what happens.  However, I do not equate being to blame with legally responsible - in the end it is those who commit the crimes who should be held responsible, legally.

Here is JT's blog entry.

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Rittenhouse Goes To Jury After Case Collapses in Court

Below is my column in USA Today on the collapse of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial due to a series of prosecutorial blunders. What is worrisome is the highly slanted coverage over the last year, particularly during the trial itself. Many in the media have not focused on the countervailing facts in the case.

Today the jury will get the case following closing arguments and jury instructions. One issue to watch is how Judge Bruce Schroeder handles the gun count, which is based on what I believe is a flawed legal interpretation by the prosecution.

Here is the column:

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse increasingly seems like a legal version of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. By only touching discrete parts of the animal, the men describe vastly different animals. In coverage of this trial, one would think that there were parallel trials occurring in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

One consensus however is emerging: Things are not going well for the prosecution.

But the reason for this developing failure depends greatly on what media you are watching other than the trial itself. It is either the product of systemic errors or systemic racism.

Rittenhouse is facing six charges that range from first-degree homicide to a misdemeanor of being a minor in possession of a dangerous weapon. At this stage, the prosecution may celebrate even a misdemeanor conviction.
Prosecution’s bumpy start, and finish

The prosecution stumbled out of the gate in the trial. Gaige Grosskreutz was the third person to be shot by Rittenhouse. Grosskreutz admitted under cross-examination that Rittenhouse did not shoot him when he had his hands up after their confrontation. He admitted that it was only after he pointed his handgun at Rittenhouse and moved toward him that Rittenhouse fired.

Likewise, a prosecution witness, Ryan Balch, testified that one of the other people shot, Joseph Rosenbaum, said that he intended to kill Kyle Rittenhouse. Other witnesses described Rosenbaum as “belligerent” or “hyperaggressive.”

Later, the prosecution called Richard McGinniss, a journalist with The Daily Caller who was reporting from Kenosha that night. He was near Rittenhouse when Joseph Rosenbaum was shot. The prosecutor told McGinniss, “I mean you have no idea what Mr. Rosenbaum was ever thinking at any point of his life. You have never been inside his head, you never met him before.”

McGinnis said, “I never exchanged words with him, if that’s what your question is.”

The prosecutor then pressed McGinnis on how he had no idea what Rosenbaum was thinking because it “is complete guesswork, isn’t it?”

That is when McGinnis delivered a haymaker, noting, “Well he said (expletive) you, and then he reached for the weapon.”

The prosecution’s own medical expert, Dr. Doug Kelly, appeared to confirm that the forensic evidence of soot injuries on Rosenbaum’s hand could be consistent with Rosenbaum trying to grab the barrel of Rittenhouse’s rifle when the gun was fired.

It got worse from there, including a glaring constitutional violation by the prosecution when Binger began his cross examination of Rittenhouse by commenting on his decision to remain silent.

The judge correctly tore into the prosecutor. Any first-year law student knows that you cannot comment on the silence of a Mirandized defendant after an arrest under the Fifth Amendment – let alone ignore a court order.
Biased media viewers

Even without the unforced errors by the prosecution, this was always a difficult case. Wisconsin has a strong self-defense standard. After a defendant claims to have acted to repel a threat, the burden is on the prosecution to rebut that claim beyond a reasonable doubt.

Instead, the prosecution prompted its own witnesses to create layers of doubt in the case. In doing so, it seems to have reduced the range of possibilities to somewhere between a hung jury and outright acquittal on the major charges.

The problem is that many people may be unaware that the case is collapsing due to such evidentiary or tactical failures. Any hung jury or acquittal will come as a shock, and the level of outrage is likely to be greater. This case began with violent rioting in Kenosha, and the news coverage is fueling the danger of renewed violence.

It is even worse in that some coverage has dismissed the trial as an exhibition of raw racism. Some have criticized Judge Bruce Schroeder after he enforced long-standing constitutional principles and defended the core constitutional right of the defendant against self-incrimination.

MSNBC host Tiffany Cross advocated for Schroeder’s removal and called on columnist Elie Mystal to discuss the matter. Mystal, who stated earlier this month that white, non-college-educated voters supported Republicans in the 2021 races in part because they care about “using their guns on Black people and getting away with it,” not surprisingly, has written that this trial is a sham.
One man – not society – is on trial

MSNBC’s host Joy Reid also attacked the trial and suggested that Rittenhouse’s emotional breakdown on the stand was fraudulent. Her guest, MSNBC legal analyst and Georgetown law professor Paul Butler, concurred and called it “the greatest performance of (his) life.”

Butler declared Rittenhouse “was well-prepared by his defense attorneys to disrupt his image as a trigger-happy vigilante who went on a shooting rampage at a Black Lives Matter protest.”

Butler, who has written that Black jurors should use “jury nullification” to refuse to convict Black defendants in drug cases, insisted in a previous appearance that an acquittal would fuel future violence by white people.

Reid added Wednesday, “If you want to know why critical race theory exists, the actual law school theory that emphasizes that supposedly colorblind laws in America often still have racially discriminatory outcomes, then look no further than the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.”

However, Rittenhouse is not to be judged for society’s historical racism, and such history does not change the underlying facts.

Either Grosskreutz (who is white) was pointing the gun at Rittenhouse’s head or he was not. Either Rosenbaum (who was white) was grabbing the barrel of Rittenhouse’s gun or he was not. Such facts do not change through CRT translations.

Many in the media rightly criticized those who encouraged riots on Jan. 6 with unsupported claims of electoral fraud. However, some of the same media figures offer distorted accounts of this trial. The narrative can overwhelm the facts.

Moreover, if left uninformed of the real legal deficiencies in the case, that narrative is likely to control the response to any failure to convict.

These protests are part of a larger debate on racism in our country. However, this trial is about the actions of one individual – not society – in 2020. Those actions are increasingly favoring acquittal on the most serious charges.

Your Government at work – Matthew Johnson, et al. v. Governor of New Jersey, et al.

 From the New Civil Liberties Alliance.  Please contribute.

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CASE SUMMARY

NCLA filed the complaint against Governor Murphy in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, challenging Executive Order No. 128. The order, which violates federal constitutional law, state constitutional law, state contract law and state landlord-tenant law, purports to allow tenants to use their security deposits to offset rent or back rent. Regardless of the governor’s good intentions, the order unlawfully singles out residential landlords and cancels the major security measure they use to protect their property.

NCLA represents Mr. Johnson, the owner of a small rental property in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Like many other New Jersey landlords, he has fallen victim to the governor’s unconstitutional order and risks losing the security deposit for which he rightfully contracted. Without a security deposit to insure against damage caused to the property during the tenancy, he will be forced to cover the cost of such damage out of his own pocket, or he could be forced to bring a costly and time-consuming small-claims action against his tenant. If Mr. Johnson should try to adhere to the terms of the voluntarily signed leasehold contract, under the new rules, he would be subject to criminal penalties.

Your Government at work – Todd Hennis v. The United States of America

 From the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

I recommend joining the NCLA.  It defends civil liberties and has no agenda - unlike the ACLU.

Here is the case summary.

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On the morning of August 5, 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dug away tons of rock and debris that blocked the portal of the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado. By breaching the closed portal of the mine, without taking proper precautions or obtaining the owner’s permission, EPA triggered a massive blowout that released over 3,000,000 gallons of acid mine drainage and 880,000 pounds of heavy metals onto the private property below and into the waterways downstream (including the Animas River). It took the form of a bright, yellow-orange toxic sludge, and the pollution lingers to this day.

Easily one of the largest environmental catastrophes EPA ever created, the incident became known as “the yellow river seen round the world.” NCLA filed a lawsuit, Todd Hennis v. The United States of America, in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, challenging the government’s physical invasion, occupancy, use, taking, and contamination of Mr. Hennis’s property.

In conducting its catastrophic failure at the Gold King Mine, EPA, the very agency entrusted to protect the environment, violated its own directives, protocols, and procedures, while also ignoring well-understood risks of a flooded mine under pressure. For essentially every decision they made that day, the EPA employees erred. Shortly after EPA caused the Gold King Mine blowout, NCLA’s client, Todd Hennis, verbally authorized the government to temporarily use a portion of his property for an emergency staging area for equipment and supplies, recognizing that time was of the essence to mitigate the environmental disaster of EPA’s own making.

Rather than thank Mr. Hennis for his quick cooperation and compensate him for the use of his land, EPA took advantage of him. Without so much as a phone call or email to Mr. Hennis, EPA constructed a $2.3 million dollar water treatment facility on a concrete slab on Hennis’s property. Worse yet, EPA has repeatedly refused—across three presidential administrations—to pay him anything for the privilege. Mr. Hennis never granted EPA permission to construct a water treatment facility on his property, nor did he authorize EPA to occupy, use, and pollute his property indefinitely. Yet that is exactly what the agency has done.

Since November 2015, EPA has continuously treated the discharge of acid mine drainage from the Gold King Mine at its water treatment plant, thereby taking Mr. Hennis’s property without just compensation. EPA’s water treatment operations also involve the storage of mine waste, solids, and other contaminants on Mr. Hennis’s property, again without paying to do so. The government has thus seized his real property in violation of his most basic Fifth Amendment constitutional rights.

Was Rittenhouse’s Possession of the AR-15 Unlawful?

 Here is Jonathan Turley on his blog.

People who know something about guns and self defense and have watched all the videos of the shootings would consider Rittenhouse's self defense claim as legitimate.  Now, JT offers an analysis of one of the remaining charges.

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In covering the motions hearing last week in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, I noted a surprising comment from Judge Bruce Schroeder that he had “spent hours” with the Wisconsin gun law and could not state with certainty what it means in this case. The statement could effectively knock out the misdemeanor gun possession count — the one count that could still be in play for the jury after the prosecution’s case on the more serious offense appeared to collapse in court. A close examination of that provision reveals ample reason to question not just its meaning but its application to this case.

The unlawful possession of the gun has been a prominent fact cited not only by the prosecutors but the press.

At trial, however, prosecutor Thomas Binger at points seemed to be learning the governing law from Rittenhouse. For example, he pressed Rittenhouse on why he did not just purchase a handgun rather than an AR-15. Rittenhouse replied he could not possess a hand gun at his age. Binger then asked in apparent disbelief that the law allowed him to have an AR-15 but not a handgun and Rittenhouse said yes. Binger then moved on after seemingly drawing out a point for the defense.

The exchange was all the more baffling because it drew attention to the fact that one of Binger’s alleged “victims” was an adult named Gaige Grosskreutz who also decided to bring a handgun to the protests and pointed his 9mm at the head of Rittenhouse when he was shot in the arm.

However, the most damaging moment came outside of the presence of the jury when the judge drilled down on the law. He told the prosecutors “I have been wrestling with this statute with, I’d hate to count the hours I’ve put into it, I’m still trying to figure out what it says, what’s prohibited. I have a legal education.” He added that he failed to understand how an “ordinary citizen” could understand what is illegal.

It is hard to understand how the count could be given to the jury without a clear understanding of what it means. It is also hard to instruct a jury on an ambiguous statute. Criminal laws are supposed to be interpreted narrowly. It is called the “rule of lenity” and has been around in the English system for centuries. For example, in 1547, the court was faced with a law making it a felony to steal “Horses, Geldings or Mares.” Given the use of plural nouns, the court ruled that it did not apply to stealing just one horse.

The problem with the Wisconsin statute is not a problem of pluralization but definition. It is not clear that the statute actually bars possession by Rittenhouse. Indeed, it may come down to the length of Rittenhouse’s weapon and the prosecutors never bothered to measure it and place it into evidence.

In Wisconsin, minors cannot possess short-barreled rifles under Section 941.28. Putting aside the failure to put evidence into the record to claim such a short length, it does not appear to be the case here. Rittenhouse used a Smith & Wesson MP-15 with an advertised barrel length of 16 inches and the overall length is 36.9 inches. That is not a short barrel.

Then there is the rest of the statute and ultimately the word “and.” Under Section 948.60(2)(a) (“Possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18”), “[a]ny person under 18 years of age who possesses or goes armed with a dangerous weapon is guilty of a Class A misdemeanor.” That makes Rittenhouse guilty, right?

Well, you then have to look at the subsection (c), which states that “This section applies only to a person under 18 years of age who possesses or is armed with a rifle or a shotgun if the person is in violation of s. 941.28 or is not in compliance with ss. 29.304 and 29.593.”

Since there is no evidence that Rittenhouse violated Section 941.28, he presumably must be in violation of both sections 29.304 and 29.593.. The defense conceded Rittenhouse was in violation of Section 29.593, which requires certification for weapons. However, he is not in violation of section 29.304, entitled “Restrictions on hunting and use of firearms by persons under 16 years of age.” As the title indicates, the section makes it illegal for persons under 16 to use firearms. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time and the prosecution has not challenged that fact.

If Rittenhouse were convicted on that count, it could face a serious challenge on appeal. Indeed, it is curious is why Schroeder would even submit the count to the jury if it is uncontested that Rittenhouse was 17. If that is the correct interpretation of the statute, there would be no way for a jury to reasonably convict Rittenhouse. It is akin to giving the jury a criminal count based on his use of force as a police officer when there is no evidence that he was a police officer.

The defense also offered legislative history to support the narrower interpretation but the prosecution opposed such reliance on material beyond of the language itself. However, that language is difficult to square with the charge and the evidence in this case.

Rittenhouse is obviously facing other counts. However, on that count, the question comes down to the “and.” To paraphrase Johnnie Cochran from the O.J. Simpson trial, if that clause “doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Nuclear power deniers are wrong

 Andrew Fillat and Henry Miller get it right at the Wall Street Journal.

I am a mix of amused and frustrated when discussions of nuclear power turn to the long half lives of some nuclear waste.  Someone invariably makes a big deal about long half lives - as if that is the whole story.  One waste product is Plutonium 239, which has a half life of about 24,000 years.  That does sound devastating.  But half life is not the whole story.

To illustrate the tradeoff that is left out, how would  you feel about ingesting large amounts of a substance with a half life of, say, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years?  Well, just about everything you eat has a substantial component with a half life about that.  In fact, you are made up of atoms that contain protons, which are thought to have a half life of about that.  So, next time you hear a nuclear power denier confidently focusing on just half life - there is a reasonable probability that he is not aware of enough of the facts to be credible.

Another thing you might point out to deniers is that, other things equal, the longer the half life, the less intense is the radiation.  The half life is the time it takes for half of the substance to decay and emit radiation.  So doubling the half life means that, roughly, the radiation is half as intense.

So, which is better, other things equal - a short half life or a long half life.  If you now opt for the latter, you have again left out something important.  If the half life is very short and there is a way to contain the radiation then a short half life may be preferable.  Suppose the half life is a day.  That may mean a huge radiation intensity, but it is over quickly.  Conversely, what would be the harm if a long or short half life waste product was distributed evenly over the earth?  The radiation intensity would be negligible.

My message is this.  There are tradeoffs that few of us know enough to evaluate, particularly those who ridicule nuclear power with unwarranted confidence.

Here is the link.

Here are some excerpts.

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Politics seems to have become inimical to critical thinking, and nowhere is this more obvious than climate change. Politicians peddle apocalypse and demand that Americans accept skyrocketing gasoline and home heating costs, rolling blackouts and brownouts, endless subsidies for uneconomic vehicles and power generation, and on and on.

Wishful thinking and flawed assumptions are the order of the day. Climate models assume that humans will fail to adapt to changing conditions, instead allowing floodwaters to rise unabated, wildfires to burn, and farms to fail. The U.S. contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions is substantial but falling. By 2025, it could be 14% to 18% below 2005 levels. The U.S. should not put on a self-destructive show for the rest of the world.

Either for ideology or profit, climate activists promote wind and solar solutions despite the enormous carbon footprint to manufacture them, their intermittent energy production, and the monstrous cost and pollution required to manufacture and dispose of batteries for green backup. But the single greatest sin is the demonization of nuclear power, including the shutdown of existing nuclear plants that remain serviceable. Moreover, significant advances in nuclear power plant design that have improved efficiency and safety have been ignored.

Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear-engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that over the life cycle of power plants, which includes construction, mining, transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste, the greenhouse-gas emissions for nuclear power are 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and one-fourth of solar. Nuclear also requires 1/2,000th as much land as wind and around 1/400th as much as solar. For any given power output, the amount of raw material used to build a nuclear plant is a small fraction of an equivalent solar or wind farm. Although nuclear waste is obviously more difficult to dispose of, its volume is 1/10,000th that of solar and 1/500th of wind. This includes abandoned infrastructure and all the toxic substances that end up in landfills. One person’s lifetime use of nuclear power would produce about a half-ounce of waste. Even including the Chernobyl disaster, human mortality from coal is 2,000 to 3,000 times that of nuclear, while oil claims 400 times as many lives.

Although the federal government tends to resist nuclear power, many nuclear technologies are being investigated and funded by private capital including molten-salt reactors, liquid-metal reactors, advanced small modular reactors, microreactors and much more. More than 70 development projects are under way in the U.S., with many designs intended to create assembly-line construction facilities to simplify and standardize testing, licensing and installations. One appealing approach is to replace large-scale facilities with many smaller but safer, cheaper and more-manageable ones. The $10 billion 10-year planning and implementation cycle for a large nuclear plant can be cut in half with a small modular reactor and another half with a microreactor.

We could deploy SMRs today if we could surmount the negative propaganda about the nuclear industry. Microreactors could generate between 1 and 20 megawatts of power (enough to provide electricity to 500 to 20,000 homes) while needing to refuel only once every five to 10 years. They are air-cooled, capable of being shut down rapidly with no risk of radioactive release and occupy small spaces.

If we can get past the political hurdles, microreactors can be used in diverse applications such as charging stations for electrical vehicles and propulsion for large commercial ships. They could also power data centers, large factories, desalination plants and more. Heat generation is essential for many manufacturing processes, and microreactors can provide that directly without burning fossil fuels. It is worth noting that the U.S. Navy has employed shipboard nuclear reactors for more than 50 years with no significant problems or mishaps.

Nuclear power is cheap, efficient, extremely reliable and nearly carbon-free. New designs, including smaller reactors, drastically reduce the risk of large-scale radioactive contamination.

We need to stop wasting trillions of dollars on strategies that punish American citizens and businesses while China and India increase their greenhouse-gas emissions. The U.S. could set an example for the world with the ultimate infrastructure project: building and deploying advanced nuclear-power plants that painlessly accelerate our decarbonization. Sacrifice isn’t always the path to progress.