Prosecutors and their power

But was the real-life Ms. Fairstein as scheming as the TV version? (She is played by Felicity Huffman, who was arrested in the college admissions scandal after filming was complete.)

NYT

Is the system capable of conveying unvarnished truth?

But it’s not just about 5 wrongly convicted teenagers in NYC who have lost their youth and lives. It may be about significant problems with prosecutorial misconduct.

It’s not about trade but the kind of world we want to live in.

If you watch from 12:00 on you’ll get the feeling the next global financial crisis may already be brewing in China. The 5G discussion is at 20:00. Spalding’s interview is a must watch. The words almost flood in. “I’d bet they’re asleep in New York. I’d bet they’re asleep all over America…”

“Your phone knows more about you than you could ever imagine. Where does that data go? It goes to the highest bidder.” …

“If you don’t even know who’s oppressing you, what good is a gun?” …

“You have to decouple. If you embrace China, you will lose.” …

“China’s waiting on the 2020 elections. That’s what the Communist Party has decided.”

Creating more vulnerabilities

The problem with making service providers responsible for content is it implicitly makes them responsible for political intelligence gathering and intelligence targets for hostile powers. Instead of gathering intel themselves enemy powers can just spy on the service providers.

Or worse it can create a business opportunity for social media service providers to sell political intelligence to foreign powers. Isn’t this exactly what Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing? Yet they are mere lice on the giant hound.

Crime of the Congo

I am rereading Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Crime of the Congo”, detailing little Belgium’s monumental atrocities in Africa, made famous in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It’s easy to understand in retrospect how Europe blundered into the Great War. It had lost track of reality.

Watching the way in which the media makes its own narrative today one wonders whether the seed of destruction lies not so much without as within.

Crime of the Congo, free on Kindle

AOC denounces Manafort solitary confinement

This is all the reason why elections should mean “wait your turn till the next”. Manafort’s treatment may someday apply to his prosecutors. But people in power never realize this. “Happy Days” will never end. The money will never run out. The music will keep playing. Until it stops.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sided with imprisoned former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort saying he should be released from solitary confinement — though he is not currently in solitary confinement.
“Paul Manafort is being sent to solitary confinement in my district – Rikers Island. A prison sentence is not a license for gov torture and human rights violations. That‘s what solitary confinement is. Manafort should be released, along with all people being held in solitary,” the New York Democrat said. 

Washington Examiner

AOC may have the wit to realize that the “revolution eats its own”. Madame Defarge is eventually called to mount the guillotine because by then it takes on a life of its own and must be fed … fed … fed.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” the debut film for both Fails and Talbot, is a lament for the exodus of black people from the city and the affordability crisis that is pushing out all but the rich.

NYT

People think they can manage complex systems only to discover it leads to unintended consequences. I am still waiting for a prominent historian to write a volume titled “Ooops”.

But environmentalists are constantly flying to conferences

The glaciers are melting, the coral reefs are dying, Miami Beach is slowly going under.
Quick, says a voice in your head, go see them before they disappear! You are evil, says another voice. For you are hastening their destruction.
To a lot of people who like to travel, these are morally bewildering times. Something that seemed like pure escape and adventure has become double-edged, harmful, the epitome of selfish consumption. Going someplace far away, we now know, is the biggest single action a private citizen can take to worsen climate change. One seat on a flight from New York to Los Angeles effectively adds months worth of human-generated carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

NYT

Elizabeth Warren’s Corporatism

Corporatism” is one of the most misunderstood words in the political vocabulary. American progressives use it to indicate the domination of the state by business interests, when in fact it means something closer to the opposite: the subordination of commerce and industry to political mandates.

National Review

“Corporatism” and all other systems of centralized control are ultimately dependent on the virtue of the person at the top.  It assumes a “good king”.  Therein lies its defect.  A centralized system is not sufficiently “trustless” to survive a “bad king” who statistically must come along.