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.

The Russian re-Sovietization plan appears to be working too well

I am one who sees the recent history of Russia as, more or less, Vladimir Putin's project to re-Sovietize Russia and (if he can get away with it) the entire region.  Particular points of interest are Putin's description of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 as a "catastrophe", his utter lack of remorse for his assistance of the Stasi in East Germany, the incredible prevalence of drug use in Russian Olympic teams, the apparent murder of dissidents and journalists with KGB methods (plutonium, Novichok, throwing from windows), and of course an expansionistic foreign policy that seeks to force neighboring nations into submission with tactics that can only be charitably described as "terroristic."   

And now, another couple of points of reference are that Russian winter crops (rye, winter wheat, etc..) are failing, just like in Soviet days, and also significantly, the Russian rate of AIDS deaths greatly exceeds that of the United States.

The latter bit may seem counterintiutive, but Mr. Putin is not in reality the traditionalist he makes himself out to be, and calls for a higher birth rate appear to be made outside the bounds of marriage.  More or less, "if you're a patriot, get those eggs fertilized by whatever means necessary", and the ugly reality is that this is a very effective way to spread disease.  It is, more or less, the same thing that the old Soviets called for in the 1920s and 1930s as formerly robust birth rates in the more prosperous Tsarist era gave way to Soviet depression.

On a side note, I would suggest that the barbarism of Russian (and formerly, Soviet) armed forces may have a lot to do with the fact that divorce rates (and the rate of absentee fathers) were sky-high.

And hopefully our government leaders will recognize the real significance of what is going on here.  It may well be that Putin will exhaust the demographics of Russia before he can get very far, but that's not something that I want to be counting on.

Update: Putin is now blaming Russian consumers and farmers for high food prices.  Apparently the five year plan to have enough meat and butter is not working out, just like the good old Soviet days.  

A lost opportunity

I am not the world's biggest fan of Meghan Trainor, though I must confess that I do in fact appreciate her love of doing more complex lyrics and harmonies than is typical in contemporary music, but it saddens me to hear of her plastic surgery troubles--apparently a face that will not move well after too much Botox, a planned breast surgery, and who knows what else?  

It reminds me of one of the songs that made her famous, All About That Bass, her natural and beautiful smile, and her insistence that her decidedly non-size-2 body was indeed beautiful.  And while I had reservations about the song's obvious feminism and "body positivity",  the overall notion that a woman could be a little bigger and still be seen as beautiful is well taken, and it's sad to see that, in a way, Ms. Trainor has "fallen off the wagon."

And so I pray for her to come back on that wagon with all of us other imperfectly beautiful people.  Plenty of room and fellowship for us all.

Maybe a second career change is in order

When "The View" lawyers forced former federal prosecutor Sunny Hostin to publicly retract things she had said because they were libelous, it was par for the course for journalists, but we could at least rejoice that she was no longer a prosecutor.  Now, she's claimed, apparently, that President-elect Trump never discussed the price of eggs as a reason to vote against Biden surrogate Kamala Harris. 

So we might note that, libel being a very real issue among journalists, that Hostin ought to be pursuing yet another set of opportunities.  Precisely what profession would be amenable to Hostin's disdain for the truth escapes me, though, so perhaps we ought to appeal to Hostin's Catholicism and remind her of Exodus 20:16.  As Thomas Sowell notes, each person is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own set of facts, and Hostin desperately needs to learn this.

That noted, a "Catholicism" that allows one to support Kamala Harris and abortion on demand--not to mention being a serial fabricator who ranks up with the worst stereotypes of President-elect Trump, but in reality--might not be the firmest bulwark for the truth.

Which leads me to a very sobering reality; Hostin previously got awards for her work prosecuting child sex crimes.  While I commend those who do so ethically, as it's a tremendously difficult and traumatic thing to do, Hostin's current situation as a fabulist par excellence suggests that a good look at her cases by a group like the Innocence Project might be wise.

Time to fire some federal bureaucrats

A Fox News article says that many federal bureaucrats are experiencing "PTSD" due to the return of Donald Trump to the White House.   Apparently those same highly skilled, highly paid federal employees are unclear on the concept that PTSD refers to post traumatic stress disorder, meaning that they cannot be experiencing PTSD due to things which have not occurred yet.

Yeah, I'm thinking that their level of thinking suggests they should "leave to pursue new opportunities".  

Um, what?

The New Zealand Navy apparently does not know what led to the sinking of their research ship on a coral reef, but they are sure it's not the captain's fault. 

You know, that's perilously close, in my view, to flat out admitting that the captain was steering the ship and ignored the charts that clearly said that at low tide, there was no chance that ship was going to make it across that particular reef, along with "ignoring the $100 depth finder that pretty much every fisherman in Minnesota owns that would have told her it was getting really shallow."  And it's also very close to admitting "Well, her navigation scores weren't up to par, but we gave her the nod because, like Karine Jean-Pierre, she's a homosexual female."

Honestly, would it kill people in New Zealand to say "we're going to hold off on assigning, or denying, blame until the investigation is complete."?  What they're saying by doing otherwise is really incriminating.

More on trans athletes and DSD

One of the key questions regarding the participation of trans and "intersex" athletes, the latter being predominantly 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency, in women's sport is the question of what happens to the sport overall.  

A key issue here is that if you map out athletic performance by sex, what we'll find is that it takes far fewer "two sigma" athletes to find a "three sigma" athlete or "four sigma athlete" than it does to find a "five sigma" or "six sigma" athlete among a population of four sigma athletes.  To use a current example, if Olympic boxing does not reinstate sex testing--the famous "cheek swab" endorsed by Olympic athletes like Nancy Hogshead--national sports authorities are going to seek out trans and DSD males (XY) and make them into Olympic "womens'" boxers and such.

If--as is the case--a top high school male athlete (2 sigma) performs at about the same level as a top female Olympic athlete (say 3.6 sigma), we would have to find only about 17 top male high school athletes to find a D1 male athlete ability (3 sigma), and only about 100 top male high school athletes to get an athlete with Olympic male abilities.

The upshot of this is that as national sports authorities realize they can win by sorting through trans and DSD males to find top "female" Olympians, it won't likely take long before they find someone who's performing like a top college athlete (sort through 850 people) or Olympian (sort through 5000 people) among the DSD and trans males.  

Put bluntly, it doesn't take sorting through that many DSD or trans athletes to find someone who will box not like Imane Khelif versus Angela Carini, but rather Sugar Ray Leonard.  

A lesson for life

        In reading the book of Jeremiah, specifically chapters 27-29 this morning, I noticed that one could almost boil down his message to "You can do this the easy way, or you can do it the hard way, but the outcome will be your exile in Babylon."  It strikes me as applicable in any number of areas; there are times when you can do things the easy way, or the hard way, but the end result--aside from the trouble of going through the process--will be about the same.

On Harris and the filibuster

Further cementing her position as a "lawyer where nobody can quite figure out how she passed the bar", Vice President Kamala Harris has endorsed an end of the filibuster "just for abortion rights."  She figures she can get 50 Senators plus a Vice President to vote for a federal law protecting abortion.

Beyond the reality that ending the filibuster in any number of areas increases the temptation to do so in others--making things easy is a genuine temptation for any legislator--you have the reality that the reversal of Roe is a return of abortion law to the states, and hence a federal law that would override state laws prohibiting certain aspects of abortion would run into the exact same Constitutional issue that led to the overturning of Roe.  It is the 10th Amendment, noting that powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved by the states.

Really, by the logic Harris uses, the federal government could produce a law that would legalize all murder.  Hopefully we have jurists who are ethical and smart enough to stand against these stands of Harris that ought to have kept her off the bar. 

Say what?

Gun control groups, including the Brady Center, Giffords, and others, are apparently making the claim  in a Supreme Court case involving the state of Tennessee that somehow, making children transgender will reduce gun violence.

This, in a case involving the state that had Audrey Hale, transgender youth, shoot up an elementary school--and four months prior to the law taking effect?   Seems there is a wee little problem with their logic, to put it mildly.  Tennessee did indeed have a school shooting by someone who considered herself transgender in a time when reassignment procedures were legal in Tennessee.  (OK, she was 28, too, so she still had access to these procedures if she'd wanted them...)

I guess there probably is some reality to the notion that if you castrate a lot of boys, sooner or later you're bound to drop testosterone in one boy that will decide not to shoot up his school because of reduced aggression, but with about 40 school shootings per year, you're talking about castrating 50,000 young men for every school shooting prevented.  Seems like just a bit of overkill!

Plus, those who watch the "trans mafia" realize that some pretty vicious aggression from trans advocates is quite routine.  I'm not quite sure we can assume--as our ancestors in the 19th century did--that removal of male attributes will reduce male aggression.

More on the stinky weasels

Apparently Wolverine cheater-in-chief Connor "Did I really promise not to lie, cheat or steal at Navy?" Stallions has produced a documentary telling "his side" of the story, in which he's not apologetic at all, and just as the NCAA has served a notice of level 1 allegations with a side dish of "repeat offender" for their recruiting violations.

If I were a born Buckeye who became a Spartan by the grace of God (which I am) who wanted to get the Wolverines banned from football altogether for a few years, I don't know what I would do differently.  

Now let's do some math

With regards to the suspected condition of Caster Semenya and other Olympic athletes whose...crotches appear female, but their athletic performance appears to be male...one of the likely causes is something called "5 alpha reductase 2 deficiency".    Interestingly, the list of "intersex" conditions does not list a prevalence, but the other comments about it being a recessive genetic trait, and actual names given to the condition in the Dominican Republic, Turkey, and Papua New Guinea suggest that what's going on is good old fashioned inbreeding--cue "Dueling Banjos", I guess.  

And knowing a touch about what leads to inbreeding--poverty and social isolation--one would infer that as sports opportunities (and wealth) increase, the conditions for this syndrome will decrease.  So for the sake of young people being born, the world's increasing wealth is a boon.

But if we assume that about one in one hundred thousand live births has this, we would infer that worldwide, there are about 40,000 people with this condition, of which about 5000 are of the ages that would translate to Olympic athletic opportunities.  If we assume that 90% of those afflicted never get a chance to participate, we find that maybe 500 would be athletes, of which maybe 2% (two sigma) would be at the level of "good high school male".  This seems to correspond reasonably well with the few athletes that are clearly "male presenting sort of as female".

The thing that scares me, though, is the thought that some people with this disorder would find themselves at the three sigma (0.135%, D1 athlete) or four sigma (Olympic men's level, 0.003%) ability level, and in any sport that involves contact or combat, the size and strength disparity would go from "dangerous" to "lethal"--think Imane Khalif being replaced by Canelo Alvarez.

As far as I can tell, there is a marginal chance of an occasional D1 level athlete, but the Olympic man presenting as sort of female will be a black swan event unless there is a large mutation that greatly increases the number of people with this disorder, or something like that.  

So I would infer that the big hazard in Olympic sport is not intersex conditions, but rather "trans" athletes using the maximum allowance available for available testosterone.  That said, I still think it's time to bring back the cheek swab and take drug testing seriously.  Crazier things have happened than an XY 5 alpha reductase 2 deficient Canelo Alvarez, after all, and we shouldn't be expecting women athletes to die because we're unwilling to act on the fact that XY is, statistically speaking, bigger and stronger than XX.

Now there's some progress

Former Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh has been banned from NCAA coaching for four years,  and his attorney is reduced to insulting the NCAA instead of addressing the allegations.  This is really bad news for the stinky weasel football program.  For comparison's sake, when Michigan basketball boosters were found to have wrongly made large loans to Michigan players, the program was required to vacate all of its wins in which those players participated, but head coach Steve Fisher (who ought to have noticed his star players were living large and asked some questions) was not penalized.  Yes, I personally think that was a mistake.  Players shouldn't need to have monastic vows of poverty, but when they're spending thousands on tattoos, strippers, and the like, I'd have to argue that that NIL money is getting out of hand and preventing them from doing what they're there to do--"study".

I'm hoping that Michigan gets to give up all of its wins--and again, that "national championship"--along with five scholarships for the next five years.  And, again, that the NCAA follows the NFL and finally allows signals to be sent in via radio to the QB and middle linebacker.

Stretch goal is what Harbaugh himself noted in 2007 when he was coaching Stanford; admit that too many college athletes are taking cream puff courses to maintain eligibility, and remind coaches and athletes alike that they are primarily there to learn, not play sportsball.  It's long past time to end creampuff coursework for athletes.

Time to take some data

I saw the coverage of the women's boxing fight between Imane Khelif and Janjaem Suwannapheng, and most of the coverage on the starboard side was more or less "why are they allowing this man to beat this woman?"  I took a look at some of the pictures, and while Suwannapheng is a little bit more feminine-looking than Khelif is, and I understand that "secondary feminine characteristics" can be somewhat more subtle in southeast asian women than among others, I still have to say.....I'm not quite sure what a swab DNA test would find.

More or less, it's already extremely unlikely that those with 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency would, absent performance advantages due to male genetics, score the three top spots in the 2016 800 meter race, or two of 72 women's spots in the boxing competition in 2024.  If it's three or more of those 72 spots in boxing, the odds go from minute to infinitessimal, and we have to wonder what happens to women's sport if we don't fence it off with the cheek swab test they used until 2000.

It's less significant than allowing trans athletes in--that simultaneously allows perverts in to the locker rooms, and exposes women to the effects of full male strength--but if the difference between those with this intersex condition and elite women is even 2% in speed and somewhat more in brute strength, we are talking about lost medals for XX women in all events, and needless injuries or worse in contact and combat sports.