Pulpachair
2yr ago
If someone had asked you five years ago whether Hunter seemed fine, you probably would have answered yes as well. He was of counsel at Boies Schiller, was co-owner of an investment company, had bounced around at various government and private lobbying posts throughout his adult life, and carried on publicly like a respectable member of a political family. But for the laptop incident, that would still be the public view of him.
Being well-connected and having sympathetic political press at your disposal is hugely beneficial for families like the Bidens. The respectability is more of an effect of people not looking too closely than actually being respectable. I would venture a guess that a deeper look at the rest of the Bidens would probably reveal more of Hunter-type behavior than you might expect.
Pulpachair
10mo ago
Also, machine politics was the norm for most of that era in any city big enough to be worth looting. The secret ballot helped make maintaining the machine more difficult.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Over a dozen democratic governors have convinced Joe Biden to take a medical test (undoubtedly a cognitive test) to see if he can continue as a candidate.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Biden has made it a point to release his physical check results each year, but does not include a cognitive exam in those results. If he agreed to a test, it's probably just another one where the report will be "is in good physical health for a man of his age," and is silent on mental acuity.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” was 1958. I’m sure there are examples of earlier stories featuring gender reassignment as well. To the extent KSR chose not to have gender modification in a transhuman milieu, I doubt it was for lack of exposure to the idea.
Not to mention that the default judgment happened not once, but twice, in both Connecticut and Austin, after some of the most hilariously incompetent lawyering by his defense counsel. They accidentally emailed Jones’s unculled phone data to plaintiffs’ counsel, which included texts showing that Jones was refusing to produce relevant information, all after years of dilatory tactics and abuse. They data dumped on the plaintiffs in the Connecticut case, including child porn that should have been culled. If you are an unsympathetic defendant, maybe don’t fuck around with testing the limits of the rules of civil procedure.
Jones is definitely an enemy of the cathedral, but he’s also a scumbag and an idiot who deserved to lose his cases. He will get out of this relatively intact after discharging the judgment debt in bankruptcy and go back to being a convenient weakman for the left to meme on.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Does it even matter? Every bit of information I've looked at in terms of spending vs. academic achievement shows basically no correlation, and sometimes a very weak inverse correlation. Utah, Colorado, and Iowa spend close to the lowest amount per student on education, but consistently rank in the top 10 for academic achievement. Arizona spends slightly more than Utah, and New York spends the most of any state, but both of them are ranked below the median (New York well below), while New Jersey has very high spend and ranks in the top 10 for achievement. Arguments about disparate spend amounts based on property taxes beg the question.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
The world does not owe you anything. You have to offer something that people want in order to get what you want from them.
Don’t be afraid to fail spectacularly. You will fail and the earlier it happens in life, the more time you have to incorporate the lessons gained from failure.
Hit the gym.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
The 25th amendment is not obligatory. There is no requirement to invoke the amendment if the president is incapacitated, only a pathway to do so. That Kamala and the cabinet have not done so thus far is bad for the nation, but good politics. You don't want to be the one to point out that Brezhnev isn't all there anymore.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
Mr. Penny’s use of force may have been justified, but it’s not going to hinge on a rap sheet which he couldn’t have seen.
Minor nitpick and only tangential to your comment. Yes, the rap sheet can’t possibly have informed the judgment of those that were on the train. For the rest of the world that wasn’t on the train, it should adjust our priors regarding the likelihood that Neely was acting erratically and threateningly enough to warrant being subdued by three grown men.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
It is always funny to me that courts continue to take the State Farm v. Campbell rule on due process for punitive damages as merely a suggestion. We will see if either award survives appeal.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
The main thing to note is that Hunter's main advantage was having the money to pay the tax debt. That is where his status and connections distinguish him. I don't know where he got that cash.
Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris loaned him the money to make the tax payment and has apparently been bankrolling his housing and travel for a few years now.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
While I agree it is unlikely, Sy Hersh isn’t exactly a random substack.
That said, this is thinly sourced, would indicate criminal behavior by multiple people in the executive branch, and an act of aggression against a warring nuclear power. I think Biden is an idiot, but I have to think the joint chiefs would have stopped this.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
A bit further back than 1997, but still after the purported demise of the machine politics era, the grand jury report for the 1982 Chicago election is informative on the different fraud strategies used to generate over 100,000 fraudulent votes in the midterms that year. The specific strategies included
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Absent voter canvassing - paid canvassers who were supposed to correct voter rolls instead used canvassing to identify voters who had died, moved, or had no intention of voting as targets for fraudulent votes.
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Fraudulent use of absentee registration - precinct captains and canvassers would convince residents to sign up for absentee ballots, then fill out the ballots themselves voting party line
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Paying drunks, homeless and aliens to vote
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Manually altering the vote counts
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Harvesting ballots from nursing homes
Of those methods, manually altering the vote counts is more difficult now. The other methods are no more difficult or much, much easier to pull off. In the 41 years since then, we have expanded the mail-in vote to be broad enough to cover everyone. Ballot harvesting is now explicitly legal in quite a few jurisdictions with minimum verifications in place to ensure that the ballots are actually cast by the person on the registration card. In jurisdictions where it is illegal, there is an awful lot of wink and nod non-enforcement.
Much of the opportunity for fraud is now outsourced to GOTV organizations tied to both the local and national parties. They conduct the registration drives, canvassing, and harvesting with a degree of separation from the party proper so that when an employee is caught being "inadequately supervised" it doesn't implicate the party.
While I assume that both parties engage in fraud to the extent they can get away with it, I would expect that Democrats benefit from it more simply due to the parties' positions on whether greater voter fraud protections are needed. I think it's unlikely but not impossible that the 2020 presidential election was within the margin of fraud.
Pulpachair
5mo ago
A 179 or 180 is more than a 30% chance of admission. Stanford median LSAT score is 173 and median gpa is 3.8. They love 180s to counteract some of the legacy 165 scores. I’m not sure what the methodology is, but lsd.law/rankings says you’re guaranteed to get into Harvard Law with a 3.5 gpa and 179 LSAT.
Even if you don’t shoot for a top-10 school, you can turn a high LSAT into a full scholarship at a top-25 school. Some of the biglaw firms have HQs outside the Acela corridor, and they tend to recruit from well-regarded regional schools. E.g. some of the big Chicago firms prefer Northwestern or Michigan over Ivy League. Vanderbilt and UGA grads generally don’t have problems finding work in firms based in the southeast. You are also much more likely to make the network connections to conservative judges if you aren’t in Massachusetts or NY.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
When election corruption was a little more blatant in Chicago in the second half of the twentieth century, it wasn’t all of Cook county that engaged in corruption. It was a dozen polling locations where the entire polling apparatus was safely within the Daley machine. Still enough to shore up mayoral and statewide Democrat vote totals, but narrow and focused enough that it wouldn’t disrupt all of the races.
Widespread, persistent election fraud is almost certainly not an actual occurrence. To the extent fraud is occurring, I would guess that it is following the Chicago model and focused on small partisan strongholds with the objective of keeping the graft dollars flowing.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Is this where we pretend that Trump didn't get the 2nd most votes in the history of the country, improving on his previous total by 11,000,000 votes?
Trump is remarkably good at motivating Republican voters. I would argue that the only thing he is better at is motivating Democrat voters, thus no longer being president.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
I don’t believe Buttigieg’s paternity leave was kept from the White House, it just wasn’t announced to the public.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
Obama cancelled offshore drilling and pushed green tech too and yet oil production doubled under him.
Mostly in spite of his policies. 2010-2014 was the technologically-driven shale boom period, followed by the crash in 2014-15. The leases that facilitated this expansion were created under Bush who was a wee bit more energy industry friendly than Obama/Biden.
US oil production continued to expand under Trump, though more slowly than it did during the Shale boom and peaked in late 2019-2020 before COVID nearly bankrupted 1/3 of the US regional producers by briefly making oil prices go negative. It has taken three years for US production to get back to 95% of the peak production because it isn't just like turning on a spigot again.
Prices are slowly normalizing, but are still historically high, even adjusting for inflation. This makes very little sense to me because U.S. demand has fallen almost 10% from 2019 and almost 20% from 2005 despite returning to high production rates. I'll have to look into what is going on with global production in that time period, but that data is harder to track down and less reliable.
I have no idea. As I argued in previous posts I think regulatory decisions are probably less impactful than the broader global markets, and investments in new productive capacity remains low for that exact reason. So a lot of the future probably hinges on stuff like the Ukraine War and the decisions made by OPEC. Still, coupled with the fact that Biden tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to depress prices, I think this largely confirms that Biden was certainly not driven by a desire to crush oil production and keep prices high for Americans. Like most Presidents, he wants voters to be happy with him.
This analysis seems apt to me, with the exception of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve publicity stunts. Tapping the reserves to increase supply temporarily to help lower prices was nothing more than a headline generator, and was a poor decision strategically. It's selling cheap gas now to buy expensive gas in the future.
I do appreciate that the messaging from the Biden administration has moved away from "Evil Oil Companies™" to focusing pretty much exclusively on culture warring in the runup to the election. I don't think campaigning against big oil is a winning strategy when prices are still 50% higher than they were under the last Republican administration.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
“It is inescapable not to observe the racial dynamics here,” said Crump. “If the roles were reversed,” he continued, “how much outraged would there be in America?”
Wait, Ben Crump again?
Family attorney Ben Crump said in a statement, “While this is certainly a step in the right direction, we will continue to fight for Ralph while he works towards a full recovery.”
I am constantly amazed that Ben Crump is instantly the attorney of record in every single one of these cases. Somewhere out there, there has to be a bar association curious about how an out of state attorney becomes the family attorney of so many high profile cases without violating that jurisdiction's version of ABA 7.3.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
Thanks for this post. It made me stop and think about why I'm so pessimistic on the economy, and I think that my pessimism is, at best, only partially warranted. Here are my thoughts on why I think pessimism is still warranted, though not as doomy as previously.
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Trust in elite institutions is deservedly low. The pandemic blew up any notion that global institutions were remotely concerned about the public weal when the well-being of PMC/Blue Tribe is at stake. The media and public watchdog groups are all-in on team Blue, so my expectation is that any information that looks bad for Blue will be suppressed if possible, excused if not possible. Any information that trends well for team Blue will be given more weight than it is actually due. If there are black swans out there right now, we're intentionally trying not to notice them.
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The pandemic flipped the switch on remote work being preferable for many jobs. For the industries I'm privy to, this largely meant divesting from expensive investments in blue cities and seeking out qualified employees in lower cost markets. This was a substantial increase in the earning potential in more depressed parts of the country at the cost of eliminating a lot of jobs in more expensive cities. So, it's a net increase in wages across the country, but still incredibly disruptive to the workforce left behind in the big cities.
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This is less analytical, but still real. The housing crisis took place in 2006-2007 when a wave of ARMs kicked in defaults went through the roof. The smartest banks, with the help of the rating agencies, did everything they could to delay the crash in order to divest from the toxic assets before the crash landed, which ended up putting off the crash until mid-2008.
We blew up the economy from 2020-2021, deficit financing massively distortionary unemployment benefits for almost 18 months, losing track of hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent loans, and, thus far, we haven't really paid much of a price. Sure, the inflation figures and supply chain disruptions in the aftermath are annoying, but my gut says that the piper is yet to be paid, and the longer we put it off, the worse it will be.
Consider the current residential real estate market. The high interest rates are keeping people from selling their current homes due to being unable to afford to afford a new 8.7% mortgage payment under current market rates. That means there is a constantly increasing backlog of inventory that is just waiting for a drop in interest rates in order to sell. Once that rate drop comes, a glut of new inventory will drive prices down. Much of the median increase in net worth is driven by the inflated real estate market, and that will suddenly evaporate while the current highs in consumer debt will remain, and people who are buying currently will be underwater. My cynical side expects to see this in early 2025.
I really hope that you're right and I'm wrong.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
You’re not wrong, but wasn’t this also the case for the Trump impeachments and the Jan 6 committee? The first Trump impeachment started in December 2019 when COVID was first acknowledged in China and continued while it spread in Italy. The second impeachment came during some of the most strenuous arguments about continued lockdowns. Objecting to a political hit because of the “state of the world” is special pleading unless all political hits are off-limits forever and ever.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
I would venture that he's denying victim status to the two people Rittenhouse killed and the third he wounded - Rittenhouse being the victim. From the conservative perspective, they were aggressors who happened to aggress someone holding a loaded weapon.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel,_Inc._v._MCA_Records,_Inc. is always a fun read.
Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corp., Inc., 147 F. Supp. 2d 668 - Dist. Court, SD Texas 2001 is a treat in the sense that you can still see the ring marks where the judge backhanded the attorneys:
Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact—complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words—to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions. With Big Chief tablet readied, thick black pencil in hand, and a devil-may-care laugh in the face of death, life on the razor's edge sense of exhilaration, the Court begins.
Pulpachair
11mo ago
Potentially, but I would expect that widespread gun ownership would help dissuade the vast majority of potential muggers (a far more common form of gun violence) while very slightly increasing the risk of political assassinations.
I suspect that there is a very low, static baseline likelihood of a political assassination in a stable society - aka crazy will find a way. Japan has very low gun ownership levels, but that didn’t save Shinzo Abe from being killed with a homemade zip gun.
Fwiw, there is no conservative lawyer army. At best a division. Political donations by attorneys go 10:1 to Democrats. Law school professorships and biglaw very much reflect this. The 9% of non-left attorneys trend libertarian more than conservative.
The upshot is that if you somehow navigate the scylla/charybdis of top law schools and biglaw with your politics intact, and can land a clerkship with a conservative justice, you can probably turn that into a federal judicial appointment because there just isn’t that much competition.
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