Brilliance from the CIA

Here is a bit on the CIA's assessment of Iran's nuclear program: more or less, they have gone well beyond the 3% concentration of U-235 needed for civilian purposes, but there is something that is lacking.  

Now since the construction of a nuclear weapon really consists of the forming of the fissile material into two sub-critical masses, combined with a housing to hold them, a set of shaped charges to drive them together, and electronics to detonate those shaped charges, what the CIA actually told Tulsi Gabbard is, IMO, that Iran was and is very close to having at worst something of a "dirty bomb" which could make an area uninhabitable for a while.  

To me, this illustrates one of the most infuriating things about the CIA; they seem to at times confuse their role in intelligence gathering with diplomacy, and they're soft-pedaling the reality that if Iran has their electronics and explosives program in a different place, then it can all come together very quickly.  It would be very funny if so much wasn't at stake, but of course, it is.

What I fear about Trump insiders...

 ...has been brilliantly illustrated by Steve Bannon, who argues that if Senator Lindsay Graham keeps "stirring it up" regarding Russia's war of aggression and war crimes against Ukraine, he "should be arrested."   Bannon is apparently unclear on the concept of the "First Amendment" and "freedom of speech", and I dare suggest that views like Bannon's ought to be rewarded by cordially refusing to allow Bannon and others who think like him to go anywhere near the corridors of power.  Too many American boys (and girls) died for that First Amendment to give it up without a fight.

This is especially the case because Bannon is more or less protesting the destruction of a key means of war crimes for Russia.  One would figure that we would see this as a good thing, meaning that a lot more Ukrainian dity and babi (children and grandmothers) will live to see a new day.

But not, apparently, in the political area where clear signs of Putin's Stalinism go unobserved or unheeded.

Slava Ukraini, Steve! May Putin soon be inhaling sulfur!

The limitations of technology in architecture

A "pencil" style building in New York City appears, in my view, to be a great picture of the limitations of technology in architecture.  How so?

Well, the residents are noticing cracks in the concrete already, indicating that the engineers' work to support the nearly 1400' tall building is insufficient.  What strikes me is that the building is only 100 feet wide, whereas the similar-height Sears Tower (*) in Chicago is over twice that width.  The key issue here, structure-wise, is that the lateral strength/rigidity is proportional to the square of the outer dimensions.  This means that, all else the same, the Sears Tower is four times as robust as 432 Park Avenue, and the stresses on the lateral support beams that much greater on 432 Park Avenue.  It makes a difference.

A side note here is that since this is not an office building, but a residential building, what we have is a building where the inner hallway/atrium around the elevators is going to be up to 35 feet from the windows.  In contrast, at a truly big mansion, Buckingham Palace in London, the windows are only about--except for the great hall--about twenty feet from the inner hallways, I'd guess.

In other words, when you try to go too tall--I'd guess a ratio of height vs. width of 10:1 or greater--you get to a point where a wonderful apartment becomes, due to a lack of proximity to windows, an unlivable closet.  So if we're talking the "Buckingham Palace Rule", we are talking an approximate upper limit of about 500 feet tall or about 40 stories. You could get some additional room for height by using the old World Trade Center's center zone for elevators and utilities--probably up to about 700 feet or fifty stories--but all in all, you're limited if your goal is to provide liveable space.

It is worth noting as well that there are additional economic/engineering and practical reasons not to build too high.  Building 100 stories high costs about five times as much per square foot as building five stories or less, and how many people really want to be looking out from their 50th story window at....someone else's 50th story window?

* Yes, I know it's called the Willis Tower now, but like any Chicagoland native who values the past, my view is that it keeps its original name, no matter what the corporate types say.

A confession by Nike

In mid April, the news came out that Nike was sponsoring studies aiming to analyze the effects of things like puberty blockers on children and teens with gender dysphoria--more or less seeking to answer questions about whether it is fair for "trans women" (i.e. men, XY) to compete as women at various levels in sport.  So far, Nike has not answered questions about the study, and in my mind, what this does is to assure me that yes, Nike did initially sponsor the study, and they're either hoping that the storm blows over, or they're considering truncating or ending the sponsorship.  

(Thankfully, they do not appear to have provided enough money to actually fund the transition procedures, so the subjects of the study victims of the new Dr. Mengele will need to find other sources.  This should at least cut down on sample sizes and statistical power.)

Well, in that light, I encourage my "legion of readers" (ha) to help Nike to see that it is unethical to do experiments on children with permanent side effects.   How so?  Well, if you're buying Nike shoes and apparel--and this would include not just Nike, but also Converse, Cole Haan, Bauer, and Jordan--just stop, and send Nike a nice note explaining why.  Then, you can go further, and stop wearing Nike shoes and apparel.

Yes, if you have a lot of Nike shoes and apparel--I have precisely one pair of Nike shorts in my wardrobe, so it's easier for me--it means a certain amount of adjustment, but the consequence of not doing so is that young people will be hurt, and Nike will continue to think they have carte blanche to do this sort of thing.

A strange decision in Michigan

 Well, at least it's strange if you forget that Democrats have been appointing judges there for a long time.  A Michigan judge has ruled not only that a 24 hour waiting period is unconstitutional, but also that regulations preventing nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, and physician's assistants from performing prenatal infanticide is unconstitutional.

Now call me weird, but given that a surgical abortion is, after all, a surgical procedure, maybe it's important that those doing these, for the sake of the mother's safety if not the baby's, be....like....surgeons, or at least have a medical degree that qualifies them to do simple surgeries, like....an "MD" or such?

What we have here, really, is yet another admission by the pro-abortion lobby that in order to keep prenatal infanticide available, they need to either subsidize it, or reduce the cost structure so that the clinics can stay open.  

Yet another example

 ....of where Putin is trying to take Russia; his forces have put up a monument to Stalin in Melitopol, Ukraine.  His sycophants are laying flowers, but I think Hezekiah had a better idea what to do with such shrines.  I'd be glad to help venerate it that way, preferably during colonoscopy prep.

Update: and another statue of Stalin erected in a Moscow metro station.  Again, if I were Russian, I'd be very, very nervous.  For that matter, Putin's promotion of Stalin makes me very nervous as an American.  I've read enough Solzhenitsyn to know what Stalinism was about--and is, under Putin.

Also in the "how much are you consuming" category

People are looking carefully into the flavenol profile of red wine to determine why, in some cases, red wine leads to debilitating headaches.  Perhaps we might do well to look to Proverbs 23 and ask "Just how much of the stuff did you drink before you got those headaches?".  I've been enjoying red wine for many years, and in the "dosage" I favor--a glass or two at the most--I've never had a problem.  

Maybe time to rephrase RFK Jr.'s phrase again; "Make America Less Gluttonous". Even apart from questions like flavenols, alcohol, and the like, the "wine-bibber" is going to have a serious problem with the number of calories taken in--or if he's smart enough to restrict other eating, he'll have some nutritional deficiencies.

OK, this is wild

    Apparently Tyson Foods is eliminating synthetic dyes from its meat and poultry products.   Writing as an avid cook, this is weird to me, because the most appealing colors inherent in meat and poultry products are the same ones that God gave them.  Can one improve on the golden brown exterior and creamy white interior of a properly crafted Wiener Backhendl or Chicken Kyiv, or even basic chicken nuggets?  I think not!

So what's being said here, really, is that they've been using synthetic dyes to cover up for either a lack of skill, or a compromise on ingredients, that would impair the wonderful Maillard reaction in frying.  We can have huge arguments over whether synthetic dyes are a problem--my response is a firm "maybe a little one"--but it strikes me that the big problem we've got is that many food manufacturers are using them to cover up for a lack of quality ingredients and skill making the product.

I might rephrase RFK Jr.'s slogan as "make America cook again".  When you know how to cook, and know the difference the right ingredients and techniques make, your health will follow.

On those dangerous food dyes?

Apparently the studies that "linked" red dye #3 to some cancers were done at a dosage of about 200 times tha maximum likely dosage of .25mg/kG of body weight.  OK, let's parse this out.  At my body weight of close to 100kG, we are talking about a maximum dose of 25mG.  In terms of what they were feeding the lab rats, we're talking about 5 grams per day, suggesting a scene of Democrats chugging bottles of food dyes because Trump wanted to ban them.  

It really suggests that we need a revival of instruction about hormesis, the tendency of many chemicals to be harmless or even slightly beneficial at low doses, despite being poisons in high doses.  I am again no fan of foods with a lot of red dye, but the comparison here is basically getting all of one's nutrition from foods with this dye, and then ignoring the fact that what's really dangerous is all the sugar in them.

Make incarceration great again?

Regarding President Trump's proposal to re-open Alcatraz as a supermax prison, supplanting the current supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, the question that comes to mind is "Why?".  Yes, "why?", and that's because Alcatraz is built in an earthquake zone with intensive exposure to salt air--which means that it's far more expensive to keep buildings operational there than it is elsewhere.  At the time it was closed in 1963, it was over three times as expensive to operate as similar prisons, and proximity to San Francisco makes it especially problematic if people escape.  In contrast, Florence is about 40 miles from the nearest good sized city, Colorado Springs.

I get that "The Rock" holds an outsized image in our country due to the former residency of Al Capone and other gangsters, but re-opening it would open a large gash in budgets that is simply not necessary.   

An inadvertent confession from Putin

He would presumably like us to forget that his job in East Germany--a job that got him rapid-fire promotions at a young age--was to support the Stasi, a secret police essentially the same as the Gestapo, but with a hammer and sickle instead of a swastika.  He would like us to forget that he characterized the re-unification of Germany as "colonization", and that he's been having his Russian Red Army fly the hammer and sickle, and that he installed statues of Lenin in some cities in Ukraine.

Now, for their victory day celebrations, he's having the airport in Volgograd carry its former name: Stalingrad.   In related news, Putin is claiming that he's fighting Naziism and anti-semitism while....Russia has concluded a defense treaty with Iran.  Iran, of course, is aiming to destroy Israel and the United States, and is a major publisher of Farsi and Arabic translations of a book called Mein Kampf, as well as versions of Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

If you doubt that Putin is 100% in favor of Communism and anti-semitism, and that his government is in great need of de-Nazification and de-Communization, read the above again.  Do not listen to what he says; watch what he does.  It should be no more acceptable to honor Stalin than it is to honor Hitler, and Putin has crossed that line, and many others.

Why the food dye bans are problematic

I should start this by noting that I'm not a guy who uses or injests a lot of food dyes.  I outgrew Froot Loops and other "radioactive" cereals in my childhood, don't drink Kool-Aid or alcopops or bug juice, and usually pass on brightly decorated cakes that appear to be from Wal-Mart or the like.  Maybe a bit on birthday cakes--and I guess with six kids, three sons-in-law, and a grandchild, I eat a bit of that--but all in all, I'm probably in the bottom quintile for use of food dyes.

However, I am bothered by the Trump administration's attempt to ban a bunch of them.  The reason is simple; it does not appear that they've done the necessary scientific and regulatory work to establish that there is indeed a statistically significant risk.  Now for food dyes, that's no big deal--OK, no Froot Loops, and Kool-Aid needs to use beet juice for its color.  Whatever, and kids might learn to eat real food without garish colors being added to the mix.  In itself, probably a net win.

What is significant is that the broader perspective that chemicals can be banned without a serious look at whether or not they pose a hazard, and that means we're talking about pesticides (including mosquito repellent), herbicides, fertilizers, and a lot more.  It would nationalize and worsen one of California's nastiest laws, Proposition 65, whereby if a chemical causes cancer in any concentration, no matter how ludicrous that concentration is in real life, it will be labeled with "may cause cancer."  In this case, however, it goes well beyond Proposition 65 in actually banning those chemicals from use.

To draw a picture of what the impact might be, typical maize/corn yields a century ago were about 40 bushels per acre, whereas today's combination of hybrids, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides have yields up around 200 bushels per acre.  So if RFK Jr.'s approach to food dyes is applied broadly, we have a situation where we could seriously crimp the amount of food available to feed us, and with no overall health benefits.

A bit of how it ought to be

Jay Leno comments on how he is enjoying caring for his wife, who is suffering from dementia.   That is, to a degree, how things ought to be when one makes marriage vows, and reminds me of when the head of Columbia Bible College, John McQuilkin, resigned to care for his wife.  

It is also some tough work, really.  Now I know that theoretically, Leno can buy a lot of help, but even with help, it's tough for a man to care for someone with dementia who often does not know who he is, even if the sufferer is of the "happy drunk" category and not the "mean drunk" type.  (or woman, for that matter)  Well done, Mr. Leno.

About those "evil" seed oils

In reading this article about the economic consequences of eliminating seed oils from the diets of Americans,  one thing stuck out for me; the average consumption of seed oils per capita in our country is 58 pounds.  Doing a little bit of math, this means that the average American uses 72 grams of seed oils per day with a total caloric value of nearly 650 calories.

Now thankfully, Americans waste a lot of their food, but if the average waste of 30-40% holds, this still means that the average American is getting the first 400-450 calories of their diet from seed oils.  This does not include fats in meats, fish, poultry, dairy, or other foods, and it is in addition to the ~17 teaspoons (about 250-300 calories) of added sugar in our diet.  If we assume an actual caloric need of 1800-2000 calories per day, what this means is that approximately the first 650-700 calories of our diet is added sugars and fats, and any other dietary fats are in excess of the USDA recommendation of about 20% of overall calories.

We might infer that, yes, there is some truth to RFK Jr.'s claim that seed oils are killing us, but the first reason is not that there's anything intrinsically unhealthy about them.  It is, rather, that we are eating so darned much of them and supercharging obesity and heart disease.

Just askin'

A man says his wife is the worst "backseat driver".   Perhaps just a turn of phrase, and the husband needs to find his inner Petruchio, but the instant question I had is "Why is his wife in the back seat instead of beside him?  That might have something to do with her mood while traveling."

Whatever the facts of the matter, sounds like they have much bigger problems than I can either diagnose or solve here, so my prayers are with them.

A brilliant illustration of why hasty deportations are a bad thing

I realize this is satire, but this "truthy" blurb from the Babylon Bee illustrates why we don't just want to deport illegal immigrant criminals without punishing them first.  When we deport people before they serve a rightfully earned prison term (or execution), they are then free to escape prison in their home country (far less secure than our prison) and....come right back here.

Yes, it costs money to prosecute and incarcerate them, but given that failure to do so will indeed cost lives and a lot of property, it's worth it.

Here's a Hobson's choice for you

A DOJ lawyer has been suspended by Attorney General Bondi for failing to "zealously advocate" for the positions of leadership.  OK, fair as far as it goes, but what the prosecutor was being asked to do was cover up the fact that critical evidence required by the court was being withheld by the DOJ.

So the lawyer had the choice between being suspended or fired, and being prosecuted himself for obstruction of justice and contempt of court.  Pam Bondi seriously needs to consider what she's asking the DOJ to do, because it could destroy all federal prosecutions if she's not careful.

And yes, arguably the DOJ was doing it the other way during the Obama and Biden administrations, and arguably even during the first Trump administration.  However, that doesn't make it right or smart.

How not to do things

As a rule, I like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but I think in his recent criticism of Randy Fine, he goes over the top.   

Now to be fair, there are reasons that I would favor someone else over Fine.  Fine has apparently made statements supporting increased gun control, opposing immigration enforcement, and even seems to have hinted at sanctuary cities.  

But that said, DeSantis said instead "he's a squish", and he did so the day after Fine won the election.  Pro tip; you might get a bit further if you simply noted policy differences, and did so in a timely manner, rather than going after him when he's about to be sworn in.  My take is that if I were Randy Fine, and DeSantis were going to ask me for favors, I'd have to be persuaded to do so.

And it's not just DeSantis; this is just a good, recent example of the phenomenon I'm seeing far too much lately; politicians are using ad hominem (fallacious) attacks instead of legitimate policy differences to differentiate themselves from others.  The end result is that too many of us are at each others' throats when we really ought to be having a good, full throated debate.

The leaders and ....what?

Former Michigan offensive coordinator Matt Weiss is now being indicted for allegedly stealing the personal pictures of about 3000 mostly female athletes, and for getting into the medical records for about 150,000 more NCAA athletes.  

We might joke that it is a good thing that Michigan was stealing signs from their opponents, because obviously Weiss probably didn't have much time to actually run Michigan's offense with all those pictures he was looking at, and perhaps their bowl losses those years had something to do with Weiss's lack of preparation as well.

On a darker side, somehow it seems odd that the database Weiss accessed actually had the social media accounts and private pictures of those students.  I ran a little in college, and if my coach had insisted on seeing all the private pictures I had, we would have had a talk, especially if those pictures had included some that I didn't want my parents to see.  (thankfully, my college life was a little more boring than that of some athletes...)

Perhaps more instructively, 150,000 records is about 80% of the 190,000 student-athletes at the D1 level, and another level of investigation is whether Weiss was using those medical records to screen athletes for possible recruitment.  If so, it would be yet another level of cheating by Michigan, and one that would have to have some technical assistance for Weiss--it would be a big deal.  It would, along with the sign stealing getting three coaches fired and two more censured, indicative of a pervasive cheating culture in Ann Arbor.

Update: here's the list of devices seized from Weiss, about half a dozen computers and phones, and a large number of external storage devices, too.  Suffice it to say that the guy seems to have had a library going, and this could get a LOT uglier.

On the light side....

My daughter came back from a Florida spring break trip looking a little bit like Rachel Zegler (absent the dark brown/raven hair), and now that she's peeling, she looks a little more like Snow White, sad to say.  

(seriously, Disney, if you want to jettison pretty much everything about the original movie, just give it a new name...) 

Just thinking....

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has noted the cases of Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, and Rachel Morin as reasons for the mass deportation of Venezuelan illegal immigrants.  

Now apart from the legality of deportation, let's think about the wisdom of deportation.  Miller is telling us, more or less, that his approach to illegal immigrants who rape and murder is to....deport them to a country where they know the language, and where they have a better chance of escaping?

No, sir, I'm all in favor of keeping them in our prisons, where we can make sure they can't cause problems until their hair falls out or turns gray.  So if this is indeed a major part of our deportation drive, let's think about what we're doing here.  No sane person wants these guys to escape from a Salvadoran prison to again come north and rape again.

Happy Spring!

 

Like I've said before

Trans advocates demand admission to a womens' only banja (Slavic version of sauna) event in San Francisco, one frequented by Orthodox Jews--who of course do not want to be seen naked by any male but their husbands and (intermittently) their doctors.  So the trans advocates respect their own culture, but apparently not anyone else's.

However, it gets worse.  Apparently one of the trans advocates who made the scene is on Megan's List for a sexual assault "by force or fear"; in other words, for the level of sexual assault most of us instinctively think of (and fear), forcible rape.

This is, like it or not, how far out there the progressive left is; not content with ignoring the right of women to decide which males they're willing to see naked, or be seen naked by, they're proceeding to ignore the right of women not to be placed into situations where sexual assault is likely.

Just thinking

Contemplate puberty suppression, cross sex hormones, and reassignment surgeries in light of the fact that low testosterone levels in males are correlated with depression.  So we might wonder whether these "therapies" really amount to "jumping from the frying pan into the fire".

The same thing holds for women whose estrogen is suppressed; depression is often a result.  This might explain  why study after study does not show significant mental health benefits to transgender therapies, and we might ask as well whether the analysis is being done on a one sided basis, where we would look only for signs that there is an improvement, or whether it is done on a two sided basis, where we would ask whether the therapies could even make things worse.

Or, really, whether we might see statistical "tails" on both sides.  Really, it's yet another place where the current mania towards "all or nothing" thinking may be doing immeasurable harm to those with gender dysphoria.

Scary reality

On one side of the aisle, we have ordinarily thinking people like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance failing to rebuke Trump for his risible lies about Ukraine, and bullying of the same.  On the other side of the aisle, we have Senate Democrats voting unanimously to reject reserving women's sports for those with two X chromosomes, ignoring the fact that when "trans women" are admitted, one gets needless injuries of women, women lose opportunities, perverts on Megan's List gain admission to women's spaces to commit sexual assault, and fans won't be interested in watching "men in drag" beat up on women.

In other words, we've got a situation where, for the sake of political power, a lot of people are refusing to state obvious facts.  It could be a rough ride going forward.

And it gets worse

 It appears that the rare earths that President Trump wanted an "agreement" (extortion) for in Ukraine exist mostly in the pages of a Soviet era evaluation that really didn't examine extractability at reasonable cost (which makes sense, it was Communists after all), and four of the six deposits are actually in areas controlled by Russia, while the remaining two are perilously close to the war zone.  Geologists who have been there note that there is no clear evidence that the deposits can actually be developed.

So the supposed basis for peace is, put gently, a chimera, technologically, and a likely albatross around Ukraine's neck.  Chalk it up as yet another example of Trump acting in haste, whereupon the world will get to repent at leisure.

I pulled the lever for Trump because I felt that it was a less disastrous choice than Harris, and I stand by that, but the scales are a lot closer to balanced today than they were last November.

Not an auspicious sign

Talks between Russia and the United States regarding the resolution of the war in Ukraine (and Russia) not only exclude Ukraine, but are also being facilitated by the same guy believed to have ordered the hit on Jamal Kashoggi in a country with one of the most repressive regimes in the world.  Worse yet, rumors are going around that the price for peace will be a huge portion of Ukraine's mineral wealth.

The ugly reality here is that not only do we seem to be kowtowing to neo-Soviet dictators, but we appear to be doing so in the same basic way that the Versailles Treaty paved the way for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.  At the very best, an impoverished and humiliated Ukraine becomes susceptible to the very totalitarianism that we theoretically want to avoid, and could very likely become a Russian puppet state.

I hope I'm wrong, but I would hope that we would have the basic maturity to realize that sometimes we have to pay a price for freedom, and nations like Russia (Iran's biggest sponsor) are not likely to leave us alone if only we withdraw from Europe.  To that effect, Putin's minions have already been talking about taking Alaska back.  Their ambitions do not stop in the Donbas, or with the Dnipro.  They likely cross the Bering Strait and extend to the Vistula, Elbe, and even the Rhine in Europe--if not further.

Bloat, or flat out edema?

The University of Michigan, already infamous for its approach to football, apparently has 1100 DEI employees.  To put things in perspective, the "school" has 8426 academic staff at their flagship campus in Ann Arbor, but nearly 25,000 administrative staff.  In comparison, my alma mater had 5703 instructors in 2023, but only 7365 administrative staff.

Suffice it to say that easy student loans and grants have created a world where too many "leeches" are sucking the financial lifeblood from financially vulnerable students.

Throw the book at them

The University of Michigan is making what I consider to be a rather absurd claim; that somehow the rest of the coaching staff didn't know about Connor Stallions' sign stealing scheme.  Let's go through the evidence:

• Michigan's win percentage went up 25% during the scheme, and then down 30% when it was exposed.
• The major losses during the scheme were relatively un-scoutable bowl games.
• In contract talks, former stinky weasels coach Jim Harbaugh insisted on protection from NCAA investigations.
• Harbaugh has been banned from the NCAA for four years for refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
• Current Michigan coach Sherrone Moore has already been sanctioned for his role.
• Several coaches' computers and phones showed evidence of the scheme.  Three have been fired, and the defensive coordinator moved to the NFL.
• Are we to seriously believe that Harbaugh, Moore, Jesse Minter, and other Michigan coaches missed the fact that they were amazingly more likely to be in the right defense in 2021-3 than they were in 2019 and before?  (2020 was a forgiveable lost season for them)
• Are we to believe that nobody in the coaching staff never slipped up as they applied their knowledge of offensive signs when calling the plays defensively during the game?

Now the NCAA has telegraphed their unwillingness to seriously punish the stinky weasels already by saying they won a national championship "fair and square", but the bulk of the evidence suggests that Michigan needs to give up their wins from 2021-3, as well as about six scholarships per year for the next four years.

Interesting confession

After pardoning President Nixon for crimes related to Watergate to avoid an endless set of investigations and prosecutions, President Ford carried a card in his pocket noting a Supreme Court decision that said that the man who accepts a pardon implicitly admits guilt.

In that light, it's very interesting that basically Biden's whole extended family is getting pardons, and it suggests that we might do well to continue investigating to see exactly how bad the breaches of national security have been. And yes, Dr. Fauci, I'm looking at you, too.  I don't know if it's technically a breach of criminal law to do gain of function research with the Chinese, but certainly it's a breach of moral law and basic common sense.   

Grounds for disbarment

Judge Juan Merchan has decided to "punish" President Trump with an "unconditional discharge" for his, um, "crimes".  What this means is no fines and no jail time, and what that means is that at the root of things, Merchan does not believe that Trump really did anything that was that harmful to the country.

Which is exactly what any sane person would have thought when the charges were introduced; more or less, expired misdemeanor charges become a...felony...through unspecified other felonies not mentioned in the jury verdict, most likely federal election charges not under the jurisdiction of state courts to begin with...when untold numbers of New York businessmen hide payments to their mistresses and other embarrassing expenses in precisely the same way, and the city/state of course did not, of course, dig up unspecified felonies to prosecute these men, let alone prosecute them for this during the period specified by the statute of limitations.

It is extremely unlikely that this remedy will be applied in New York, where their "Supreme Court" has already signed off on this travesty, but in a sane legal world, this would be grounds for disbarment for everyone involved, including Merchan.  The ugly fact of the matter is that the costs of defense for this proceeding likely go to the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and what this means is that to prosecute a legally tenuous case involving misdemeanors, the prosecution has committed multiple felonies (it is a felony to steal more than $1000 from a person, no?) against President Trump.

I am no fan of adultery or hush money, and have my misgivings about President Trump, but if we want justice in this country, I can think of at least 17 lawyers who need to be disbarred, if not imprisoned: Juan Merchan, Alvin Bragg, and Bragg's entire team, especially Michael Colangelo.  In general, those who "make the process the punishment" need to be reminded, harshly, that they are indeed imposing penalties on men without a conviction.  It is not a game.

Moreover, Colangelo, and the people who almost certainly paid him off to join Bragg's team (which was a huge demotion for him), also need to be prosecuted for public corruption.  This would likely include Joseph Robinette Biden, Alvin Bragg, and Merrick Garland, among others.  Somebody had to promise Colangelo a nice payoff for going from a prime DOJ spot to a relatively "podunk" post in Gotham City.

An interesting experiment not intended

I saw on "Powerline" today how the rate of traffic tickets issued in San Francisco has plummeted in the past decade.  For reference, here is the graph, and the crazy thing is that while the rate of issuing tickets has dropped by a factor of 30 or so, the vehicular death rate is about the same in the same time period.  

Now perhaps San Francisco imposes a degree of traffic sanity found  in not too many other places with large hills and lots of stoplights, but I do have to wonder if this is an indication that if it's public safety we're looking for, we need to take Officer Friendly off traffic patrol and have him start investigating serious crimes like rape--or replace him with someone who can.