MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Back when I first came across Edward de Bono and thought he might have something worthwhile to say, I remember a section in the introduction to Practical Thinking about a transition from cause-and-effect thinking (this car goes because it has an engine and a drive-train inside which I could, in principle, hack on) to black-box thinking (this car goes because I pushed the "go" button). He was writing in 1971 about a transition he claimed had taken place in the previous decade or so.
It's a fine line between black-box thinking and cargo-cult thinking, and I wonder how much of things like the weird spirituality is that the Boomers were the first generation to enjoy technology-driven affluence that they hadn't earned by helping build it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Afghan immigrants in Europe are mostly refugees who used the people-trafficker network to arrive overland. It is conventional wisdom in Frontex that various hostile countries, including Russia and Belarus, are intentionally facilitating refugee transit in order to destabilise the EU.
That is a differently selected group than people flown out of Afghanistan because they convinced US authorities that they were collaborators at risk of Taliban reprisal, and expecting different outcomes as a result isn't foolish. I don't know enough about the behaviour of Afghan immigrants in the US to know to what extent you are getting better results than us. One guy turning out to be a disorganised Islamist killer is weak Bayesian evidence that you are not, of course.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
I think it predates the US. "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is" is used by Marshall in Marbury vs Madison as a rhetorical flourish because outside the novel context of a government limited by a written constitution it was uncontroversial. As applied to ordinary law, I don't think Coke or Blackstone would have disagreed.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
In the analogy we are using, it is the HR manager with the delegated authority to make that call unless and until overruled by a higher-up. The analogy fails here because the federal judiciary enjoys a level of respect that HR (or even corporate in-house legal) does not - a federal district judge is a lot higher up the food chain than a first-line HR manager even if they have fewer subordinates.
Like any other litigant, the government is required to obey the orders of a court with jurisdiction unless and until they are stayed or overturned. And this is a case where jurisdiction is clear - it is a district judge exercising jurisdiction over his own courtroom. This doesn't mean he is right - that is a question for the appeals court.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
It is a vexing problem. But rendering something arguably deadwood appears better than just creating out of whole cloth a power that doesn’t exist.
Not doesn't exist - shouldn't exist according to the theory of the structure of the Constitution preferred by right-wing jurists. The power does exist according to the Constitutional text and (limited) precedent interpreting it, and was used by Congress according to the statutory text.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
It also has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the attorney that submitted his case to the grand jury for indictment was properly appointed.
Or even on whether or not he is guilty on the charge he was indicted for, which is for lying to Congress about a leak. My understanding is that most of the alleged wrongdoing by Comey happened back in 2017 and the Trump administration had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for a charge where the statute of limitations had not expired. And that one was a squeaker - it looks like the administration doesn't get a do-over because the statue of limitations has already expired. I don't know the US position but in England not getting do-overs on minor procedural issues is a well-known risk of litigating close to the SoL deadline and judges are unsympathetic regardless of the political valence of the case.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
The former - the "1950's dating" and "1950's wife" stereotypes are about the young adulthood of the Silent Generation (or late GI Generation) - although I agree that the modern version of it is about the Silent Generation as seen by their Boomer kids. It was the Silent-specific nature of Gail Sheehy's description of women's mid-life crises in Passages that prompted Strauss and Howe to develop their generational model.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Apart from homicides where you get near-complete reporting, I would say surveys are more reliable than police reports. They are definitely more useful in making comparisons across time periods and social groups because the unreliability is less correlated with the variables of interest.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Doesn't affect the argument, but Big Four is for accountants (and accountant-adjacent management consultants). The equivalent for law is Biglaw, or if you want to be specific to the top tier in prestige and not just size, White-Shoe in the US and Magic Circle (or Silver Circle for the next tier down) in the UK.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
That is a shockingly bad post by Calabresi. The Constitution explicitly allows Congress to delegate the appointment of inferior officers to the Courts. Calabresi's response is that they can't have meant it because the Constitution sets up a unitary executive, and the clause allowing Congress to delegate appointment of inferior officers to the Courts can only apply to Court clerks and suchlike. [I am not a historian and don't know the reason for the clause, but my guess is that the framers expected the local district judge to be the highest federal official in the sticks, and therefore best-placed to make local interim appointments before a message could get to Washington]
But the only reason why you might think the Constitution sets up a unitary executive is the text of the Constitution and, critically, the Appointments Clause. You can't just say "if I ignore this sub-clause, the vibes of the rest of the text imply X. Because X, this sub-clause should be ignored."
I'm not sure appeals to original intent help here - the framers would have been horrified at the idea of a corps of full-time professional civilian Federal prosecutors, because they didn't want the Federal government to be creating enough civilian criminal law to support one. You should look at the words they wrote, not the vibes here. And the words are clear.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Dems basically controlled the house from FDR until Gingrich
It was a very different Democratic party though - it cheerfully included Dixiecrats, even if they voted with the Republicans on hot-button left-right issues. Part of the 1994 Gingrich landslide is about thermostatic backlash against Clinton (and Hilarycare in particular). Part of it is about generational turnover in Congress replacing older conservative Dixiecrats with younger conservative Republicans, meaning Congressional conservatives are all in the same party and can therefore now elect leadership that reflects their views. The generational turnover was particularly strong in 1994 because most of Congress had been caught up in a chickenshit cheque-kiting scandal of the type that really annoys a lot of voters.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
CW is that (holding quality of trauma care constant) murder closely tracks other violent crime, but is measured more reliably.
If the motte is that property crime disproportionately effects trans people, then it isn't connected to the bailey that the "trans day of remembrance" crowd are trying to occupy.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Very much agreed - for instance all legislators vote publicly on legislation and when electing officers such as the Speaker. But there are a lot of corner cases when it comes to internal party elections. One particularly important one is MPs electing their party leaders - which in Parliamentary democracies will usually be a de facto election of a Prime Minister or selection of a candidate Prime Minister. Almost all parties in almost all functioning Parliamentary democracies have decided to give MPs a secret ballot in the internal vote. (UK parties have a range of processes for combining the views of MPs and grassroots members when electing their leaders). Obviously MPs are expected to vote non-secretly for their party's preferred candidate for PM in the external vote.
This is why the London Labour thing was controversial - Blair made the MP ballot public even though analogous internal elections usually give MPs a secret ballot.
Something similar is supposed to happen in Congressional leadership elections in the US. The House majority caucus elects the Speaker-designate by secret ballot, and then all caucus members should vote for the chosen candidate in the recorded House vote for Speaker
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Also Litvinenko and Salisbury. Russia has attacked the UK with WMD twice - this makes "Russia is our enemy, so Russia's enemy is our friend" a much easier sell than in most other Western countries. Corbyn's apparent popularity ended with his pathetic response to Salisbury - suggesting that this attitude is bottom-up as well as top-down.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
A paralegal or wet-behind-the-ears junior associate writing under a Biglaw letterhead.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Then in 2007 it brought them back.
The key background to this is that as soon as the 2006 law passed GW Bush fired a bunch of his own Senate-confirmed US Attorneys for no obvious reason and replaced them with long-term interims. Democrats tried to run with this as a massive abuse-of-power Bushitler scandal and Republican senators saw it as an attack on their patronage. (The mos maiorum was that home-state senators from the President's party had a major role in picking US Attorneys). So if you are trying to tea-leaf-read Congress's intent (which you should only be doing if the actual statutory text is ambiguous, but on a superficial reading it appears to be) there was a bipartisan consensus against long-term interim US Attorneys.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
After nearly a decade of doing that, during which time she never once took a case to trial,
To be fair, that is a moderately impressive achievement (unless she was handing the trial work off to a trial specialist). That type of law firm avoids trials like the plague.
The Comey indictment paperwork screwup is one of the all-time great amateur hour screwups and the Lowering the Bar and/or Above the Law accounts of it are going to be coffee/keyboard risks. If Trump were more personally involved I would say it is an example of his scofflaw attitude and calculated contempt for procedural regularity and cast aspersions that he was trying to lose on a technicality deliberately in order to avoid losing on the merits, but in this case I think it is just that Halligan is incompetent and either she didn't bother to find a competent junior career AUSA to help her with the paperwork or the whole thing is so outrageous to the culture of career prosecutors that she couldn't.
The lawyer who was selected for hotness has a fool for a client.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Corvos probably knows more than me, but there is an extensive history of arguments about whether internal elections in left groups, and particularly in militant unions, should be by secret ballot. Some of it is good-faith arguments the scope of the principle that people voting in a representative capacity don't get a secret ballot because they are accountable to the people they are representing. Some of it is the hard left favoring public votes as a loyalty oath with democratic-sounding characteristics (cf elections in people's democracies).
The announcement that Labour MPs representing London constituencies would not get a secret ballot in the 2000 Mayoral selection was the point at which it became obvious to people paying attention that the selection was rigged and that Ken Livingstone would run as, and probably win as, an independent.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Apologies. I was trying to distinguish between conservatives who are idiots and conservatives who are not - the "idiotarian" in "right-idiotarian" is restrictive and not descriptive. I don't think idiocy is necessarily tied to any flavour of politics, although empirically right-populism and socialism attract somewhat more idiots than liberalism and religiously-based social conservatism.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
If you are talking about the e-mail server case, the official reason why she wasn't prosecuted (and presumably the real reason why Trump didn't try to prosecute her after taking office) was the difficulty of proving that it was deliberate.
The private server was supposed to be for unclassified e-mail only (including SBU material and material subject to mandatory record retention laws that should have been held on official government servers). Hillary used the proper secure systems for most of her classified comms. Over the four years she was Secretary of State, there were a few hundred e-mails on the server that should have been classified Confidential, including a single-digit number that actually had been classified Confidential and marked as such, a few dozen that should have been classified Secret (none of which actually were) and two that should have been classified Top Secret.
It isn't clear if mishandling Confidential information is a crime or not. (The criminal laws relate to the actual threat to national security, not to the level of protective marking, and most Confidential information is not that sensitive). And it is pretty hard to prove that the mishandling of Secret and Top Secret material was "willful" if it involves a small number of e-mails which should have been marked classified but were not.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Also the types of Christian conservatism pushed by actual God-fearing Christians (including Mormons) tend to be an antidote against some of the nuttier online stuff. The stereotypical right-idiotarian ticks the "Christian" box on the census but attends church at most three times a year.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Yes, the Baby Boom happened. But... that was it. TFR peaked in 1960, collapsed, and remained collapsed. You want that back, you probably need to win a non-nuclear WWIII -- and that condition is probably necessary but not sufficient.
The Baby Boom happened in Germany and Japan as well. It isn't obvious what caused it, but it wasn't winning WW2.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
successfully changing the result of an election
They didn't even successfully suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story - the failed cover-up attracted far more attention than the story would have done organically. Nor would honest reporting of the laptop have changed the result of the election - if it had been reported honestly the story would have broken in the summer, and it would have become clear that it was basically a nothingburger ("Hunter Biden is a corrupt failson" was already priced in after the Burisma story and the first Trump impeachment) well before polling day.
"We might have won if an October surprise based on a strategically timed leak of an ongoing criminal investigation had gone off perfectly" doesn't constitute a claim of a stolen election.
No - of course it doesn't. I don't even think it is always a distinction with a difference - given the total ineffectiveness of disorganised political violence I assume anyone engaging in it is batshit until proven otherwise.
I was wondering if your Afghan refugees (who are weakly selected) behave better than European Afghan refugees (who are not selected at all) - the point I was making is that you really need statistics to settle this question rather than dualling anecdotes.
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