April 2018 Archives

Roger Simon says that modern journalists depend more on leaks than on investigative ability.

After all, this was the Golden Age of Journalism. That was what should have been emphasized. Look how Donald Trump was being so bravely exposed.

What a crock! It's the Golden Age of Leaking, not Journalism. The fantastic success of Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate has brought us to that. Blame "Deep Throat." A journalist is now someone who answers the phone from a leaker, takes down what he or she says, and spits out the innuendos and lies to win a Pulitzer. You don't have to be Hemingway to do that. You just have to have a decent digital rolodex and be a good kiss-ass.

The article doesn't explain why, but Finland has decided to continue but not expand its experiment with a Universal Basic Income (UBI). In an era of increasing automation and artificial intelligence, many futurists think that mass unemployability and some form of UBI are inevitable.

Currently 2,000 unemployed Finns are receiving a flat monthly payment of €560 (£490; $685) as basic income.

"The eagerness of the government is evaporating. They rejected extra funding [for it]," said Olli Kangas, one of the experiment's designers.

Some see basic income as a way to get unemployed people into temporary jobs.

The argument is that, if paid universally, basic income would provide a guaranteed safety net. That would help to address insecurities associated with the "gig" economy, where workers do not have staff contracts.

Supporters say basic income would boost mobility in the labour market as people would still have an income between jobs.

Find a job that is unlikely to be automated, and stay employed as long as you can. Invest in equity and own the robots.

Last month I wrote about government Democrats scrambling to hire Andrew McCabe after he was fired from the FBI for-cause, and I warned them that they might regret embracing the former acting FBI director after his perfidy became more widely known. Obviously I was right.

Comey has declared that McCabe is simply not telling the truth when he said that Comey knew of his leaking information to the media. Indeed, he said that he ordered the investigation into finding the culprit. McCabe's lawyer Michael Bromwich has insisted that people should not buy Comey's "white knight" account and that he is offering a false narrative.In the meantime, McCabe is lashing out at this accusers, including the career officials of the Inspector General's office who took the unprecedented step of calling for the former acting FBI Director to be fired. Bromwich says that McCabe will now sue the Trump administration for defamation and wrongful termination. Good luck with that. The Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General's office is composed of career officials who decided that McCabe should be fired. The IG found that McCabe leaked the information for his own personal interest and not the public interest. That hardly seems like a compelling basis for either wrongful termination or defamation unless Bromwich knows some major fact that that is not public.

In the meantime, after raising over $500,000 on GoFundMe (a campaign that I criticized as being premature), Bromwich has announced that he is going back for more donations. The last campaign ended just before the IG disclosed that McCabe lied not once but four times -- and before Comey himself effectively called McCabe a liar. Indeed, Comey is invested in showing McCabe is a liar since he previously testified under oath that he never leaked or approved a leak as director.

I defended James Comey almost a year ago, but that was clearly a mistake considering the motivations he has explained in his book.

We must have the worst political class in American history.

Former deep-stater Jack Goldsmith describes how the intelligence community is damaging American and itself by flailing wildly against President Trump. Before I even begin the quote, it's worth mentioning that there is so far no public evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign or administration illegally conspired with Russia.

Even if it turns out that Flynn and others close to Trump were in the bag for the Russians, many people will for a long time view the anti-Trump leaks as political abuse of intelligence to harm political enemies.

This perception will be deepened by the Trump administration's relentless and often false attacks on the integrity of the intelligence community, including its false suggestion that the original collection that incidentally captured Flynn's communications, as opposed to the leaks of such information, was illegitimate.

The Flynn and related leaks didn't just violate the law - they violated a core commitment the intelligence community made in after the era of Hoover not to politicize, or appear to politicize, the use of surveillance tools or the fruits of their use.

Can it Happen Here? review: urgent studies in rise of authoritarian America
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The whole intelligence collection system - which has an importance that far transcends its undoubtedly large importance in this discrete context - is vulnerable here for the simple reason that the intermixture of politics with intelligence collection is the intelligence system's Achilles' heel.

However bad you think Trump is, he manages to bring out even worse from his opponents.

As civilization gets more complex, we should expect to see a proliferation of unintended consequences. The human mind simply can't foresee the consequences for its actions, and most of the time unintended consequences are bad. Wariness of unintended consequences should be a strong motivation for limited, simplified government.

... the problem facing the U.S. was that deaths from so-called semi-synthetic opioids, such as oxycodone (the drug in OxyContin) and hydrocodone, ballooned to more than 10,000 in 2010 -- up from fewer than 3,000 a decade before, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The part of the plan to get addicts off OxyContin worked reasonably well, at least initially. Many addicts no longer abused the reformulated medication.

But it didn't necessarily result in a happily-ever-after scenario.

Instead, the junkies quickly switched to heroin, according to the NBER research.

"The reformulation did not generate a reduction in combined heroin and opioid mortality -- each prevented opioid death was replaced with a heroin death," states an April-dated paper titled "How the Reformulation of Oxycontin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic."

"We attribute the recent quadrupling of heroin death rates to the August 2010 reformulation of an oft-abused prescription opioid, OxyContin," continues the report, authored by William Evans and Ethan Lieber, both from the University of Notre Dame, and Patrick Power from Boston University.

Good intentions aren't enough, and something doing nothing is the best course of action.

Alan Dershowitz is right: if the shoe were on the other foot, civil libertarians would be going ballistic.

Alan Dershowitz reacted to a federal raid on the office of President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

Dershowitz said it is a "dangerous day today for lawyer-client relations." ...

"If this were Hillary Clinton [having her lawyer's office raided], the ACLU would be on every TV station in America jumping up and down," he said. "The deafening silence of the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer-client confidentiality is really appalling."

Don't forget: Hillary's lawyers were also her accomplices in mishandling classified information and then covering it up, and the DOJ allowed them to hide behind bogus attorney-client privilege.

As we have previously observed, the Justice Department barred the FBI from questioning Mills about the process of selecting which e-mails were disclosed and which destroyed. This was absurd. It prevented investigation of the core of the case. Mills was an actor in the facts under investigation and was not, in any event, eligible to function as Clinton's lawyer. The fact that she may have learned some additional information about Clinton's e-mail set-up after leaving the State Department is irrelevant; she could not be Clinton's lawyer for these purposes, and her communications about the e-mail vetting process were not privileged.

RELATED: If Hillary Is Corrupt, Congress Should Impeach Her

More significantly, however, are the indications that the Clinton team was engaged in a fraud and crime -- perhaps several crimes arising out of the overarching scheme to 1) hoard Clinton's e-mails; 2) shield thousands of them from lawfully required disclosure to Congress, the courts, and the public; and 3) destroy thousands of them notwithstanding (a) a congressional subpoena; (b) their known relevance to several investigations and court proceedings; and (c) their patent status as government records.

Read the whole article, but the point should be pretty obvious. If a prosecutor is determined to find a crime to pin on someone, he'll do it. If he's determined to not find a crime, he can look very busy while doing that.

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law. https://t.co/XILUvIFLOW

— Mayor of London (@MayorofLondon) April 8, 2018

Knives have been essential tools since our Stone Age ancestors banged rocks together to sharpen them. Somehow Boy and Girl Scouts have managed to carry knives for a century without stabbing anyone.

Maybe London's problem isn't knives, but people who want to stab each other.