Monthly Archives: August 2017

Another Cynical Mueller Leak

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Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining what role, if any, former national security adviser Mike Flynn may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, according to people familiar with the matter.

It’s becoming increasingly crystalline that, whatever purpose Special Counsel Robert Mueller has in his “investigation,” it’s a dishonest one.  That’s the only reason that occurs to me for his careful string of “leaks” to the public, of which this is only the latest.

Investigators working for Mr Mueller have been conducting interviews and collecting information as they seek to determine whether Mr Flynn was involved in Mr Smith’s effort, and if his son, Michael G Flynn, and the consulting firm Flynn Intel Group had a role, the people said.

There’s just no reason for these leaks to be occurring, and they could not be, in their number or in the length of the ongoing stream of them, without Mueller’s active approval.

And this especially potentially damaging leak:

US officials with knowledge of the intelligence said investigators also have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr Flynn via an intermediary.

While it’s easy enough for thinking persons to speculate that such intelligence agency reports exist, the fact of their existence is likely classified.  While it’s easy enough, also, for thinking persons to draw conclusions of their own consistent with what these leaked intel reports appear to claim, the reports’ contents and conclusions, even in general terms, likely are classified, also.  How is this sort of information being leaked?  Why is Mueller allowing it?

Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel, declined to comment.

Of course he did.  If Mueller or any of his team spoke on the record, they’d be unable to release as much “information” regarding this ongoing investigation.

My New Book Is Out

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Titled A Conservative’s View of the Conduct of Just Wars, it’s available in Kindle format here.  It presents this Conservative’s view of the proper conduct of a just war: when it’s appropriate to join one, how it should be fought once joined (regardless of how or why it was joined), and importantly, what should be done with the nation that unjustly attacked.

Since St Augustine of Hippo’s exegeses of the early 5th century, Western thinkers have attempted to define Just War in their recognition that war is a part of the human condition. Through this, they hoped to limit the onset and scope of war and its damage to those innocently caught in it.

Many Just War theories center on the idea that human lives are God’s to take. Thus, war as a human endeavor begins inherently immoral and unjust, and it’s the war fighters’ responsibility to make the case that their war—this war, this time—is just and then to fight it justly.  My argument proceeds from that point.

Unfortunately, Just War arguments generally stop short of war’s true completion. The war is entered, it’s fought, it’s won or lost. But then…what? Just War theories until very recently haven’t asked that question, much less essayed an answer.

Is that all there is, though? Is a conflict over just because the enemy has been utterly defeated or a peace treaty signed? No, the conflict simply slides into a post-war recovery effort by the victor which may or may not include the loser.

In truth, peace by itself cannot be a just end of war; mere restoration of quietude is not a proper goal of victory. Nor can mere victory be the goal of war. True victory, victory in a just war must entail the restoration or creation of justice and freedom—of both, since neither can exist without the other.

Given justice in entering the war, the defender then must fight to a conclusion that not only redresses the wrong inflicted by the war’s attacker but also maximizes the probability that the aggressor will not—cannot—aggress again for a reasonably foreseeable future. Notice the implication: this requires the defender to fight to total, unconditioned victory.

This is an Example

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…what the Left wants to destroy; surprisingly, it from HuffPost.  The money excerpt is via Grim’s Hall.

Senator William Mahone was one of the most maligned political leaders in post-Civil War America. He was also one of the most capable. Compared to the Roman traitor Cataline (by Virginia Democrats), to Moses (by African American congressman John Mercer Langston), and to Napoleon (by himself), Mahone organized and led the most successful interracial political alliance in the post-emancipation South. Mahone’s Readjuster Party, an independent coalition of black and white Republicans and white Democrats that was named for its policy of downwardly “readjusting” Virginia’s state debt, governed the state from 1879 to 1883.

During this period, a Readjuster governor occupied the statehouse, two Readjusters represented Virginia in the United States Senate, and Readjusters represented six of Virginia’s ten congressional districts. Under Mahone’s leadership, his coalition controlled the state legislature and the courts, and held and distributed the state’s many coveted federal offices. A black-majority party, the Readjusters legitimated and promoted African American citizenship and political power by supporting black suffrage, office-holding, and jury service. To a degree previously unseen in Virginia, and unmatched anywhere else in the nineteenth-century South, the Readjusters became an institutional force for the protection and advancement of black rights and interests….

The Readjusters lost power in 1883 through a Democratic campaign of violence, electoral fraud, and appeals to white solidarity. While Democrats suppressed progressive politics in the state, other groups of elite white Virginians worked fast to eradicate the memory of Virginia’s experiment in interracial democracy.

All because Mahone also was a slaveholder, and oh, by the way, a secessionist.  Secessionist.  The Civil War was about the legitimacy of slavery, to be sure.  It was, though, also very much about States’ rights under the 10th Amendment, particularly the right to leave the Union, to go out from a government with which it no longer could agree in any material form.

This is a critical part of our history that has been very nearly purged from our schools and our national story by the Left; this is what the Left hopes to achieve by its drive to purge the Confederate flag and monuments to the South’s Civil War luminaries—good and bad—from the remainder of our history and our national story.

No mind.  Mahone’s slaveholder status must be the only consideration.  The good he did after the war for blacks—nearly all ex-slaves—and for his Virginia must be ignored.  That good doesn’t matter. Nor does the good done by those Evil Ones Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, even George Washington—they were slaveholders.  That they birthed a nation dedicated to all men being equal, the concept of self-rule by personally responsible citizens, even the freedom to engage in…purging…our national story just doesn’t matter.  That’s a trivium.

The VA Fails Again

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This time it’s the Marion, IL, Veterans Administration clinic.

In 1971 Kirby Williams went to Vietnam as a US Army draftee and worked as a finance clerk. In 2010 he went to a Veterans Affairs clinic in southern Illinois where a radiologist took a scan of his kidneys.

Unfortunately, the radiologist missed a 2- to 3-centimeter mass in one of his kidneys, and by last December that mass had grown to between 7 and 8 centimeters. Now the 66-year-old has, at most, two to five years to live.

Williams isn’t the only victim.

Within weeks…of starting at the VA [in March of 2016!], he [Dr L Anthony Leskosky, a board-certified radiologist] noticed patients previously diagnosed as healthy had radiology scans from years prior documenting grave conditions. These conditions, such as cancers, aortic aneurysms, bleeding ulcers and obstructions in their small bowel and colon—if left untreated—could cause patients tremendous pain or even premature death.

“In radiology, we compare current scans to old studies, so I was pulling up the last two years of the scans. That’s when I noticed the radiologists had called their previous exams ‘normal,’ but I would see a mass on the older scans, and then on my scan, I would see the mass had enlarged, and in some cases become a spreading cancer. Usually that is not survivable,” Leskosky said.

As many as four to five times a day, Leskosky said, he found serious errors in prior readings….

Leskosky whistleblew on this and too many other such incompetencies, and the VA’s answer was to fire him rather than correct the problem.

That’s damning enough, but read the whole article.

President Donald Trump touts improvements in the VA, and there have been some.  However, they’re too little, too small, and too late, and the VA’s destructiveness continues.  The Veterans Administration must be disbanded and its budget sent to our veterans as vouchers with which they can seek medical care with doctors of their choosing at medical facilities of their choosing.  And get actual treatment.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Brain Burp

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[Because this is a family blog.]

I had this one this morning while out on one of my walks.  It concerns a free market economy, bankruptcy, the bankrupt company’s employees, and what we ought to do about those employees.

In an ideal world’s free market, then, here is my gaseous expulsion.  It comes against the backdrop of my long-held disdain for the citizens of one State being forced to send their tax dollars to another State via the mechanism of Federal transfer payments in order to indemnify the recipient against its own foolish spending.  That backdrop also includes James Madison’s remark, on the occasion of Congress’ considering money transfers to Haitians after a devastating earthquake

that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

However, our prosperity has grown to the point that our free market imperatives need not remain so cold, and it is in our society’s interests to help the dislocated—employees who’ve lost their jobs due to their employer’s bankruptcy, in the present case—get back on their feet and resume being productive members of their communities and the nation.

Thus: I say, regarding companies faced with bankruptcy, that if the participants in our free market economy—private citizens and their businesses—do not think a company worth saving, then the Federal government should accept that judgment and not intervene to bail out that company: the company, regardless of its size, should be allowed to fail.  I think the same tack should be taken by State governments, but that’s for the citizens of each State to decide.  In the event, Federal monies supporting bailouts should not go to those States that choose to do them.

Against that, I propose assistance to the employees of the bankrupt in the form of a Bankruptcy Jobs Retraining Program, which would operate along the following lines.

Employees below a certain level in the bankrupt company (the idea being, after all, to help the employees, not the “managers,” even if it was market events and not strictly management failure that generated the conditions leading to bankruptcy) would get a job retraining stipend.  It’s important to specify, too, that the stipend would not be an education stipend, but only a job (re)training stipend.  The stipend would have the following parameters:

  • expire after a specified number of days elapsed in training
  • be issued as a loan to the retrainee, with payments—principle and interest—due monthly. If the retrainee gets a job within a specified time after graduation and holds it for a continuous year (with “continuous” defined by the nature of the job: some, like construction, tend toward seasonality), the loan would be converted to a grant with no loan payments due.  Disposition of the loan in the event of the retrainee not working for a continuous year should include at a minimum these possibilities: the retrainee would make payments from the day of graduation, payments would simply accrue and not be due until failure to get a job or on leaving the job for any cause before the first year was up, retrainees aging out of the training program without graduation
  • could not be used more than once in any specified interval (for instance, a 10-year period). A lifetime cap seems infeasible because the (retrained) employee has no control over market events or management failures that might drive his new employer bankrupt
  • a retraining expense amount, not a living expense amount

The issuance of the stipend would be managed by two or three private enterprises that are independent of the Federal government and independent of each other.  These Stipend Issuers would be funded by no-strings grants from the government, and they would be solely responsible for dispensing the funds.

Stipend Issuers would develop market indices that identify and track the most employer-needed jobs that have the shortest labor supply—the largest job gap—independently of geography.  The Job Gap Indexes would rank the gaps, and the Stipend Issuers would pay the largest stipend to retrainees training for those jobs with the largest gap and that have the most expensive training.  Whether the expense and gap should be measured at a national level or regionally is a question to be settled in open debate.

Job Gap Indexes shouldn’t be that hard to develop.  Lots of investors and investment companies and other entities (e.g., The Wall Street Journal) already are quite skilled at developing indexes for assessing/tracking investment markets; a Job Gap index is not that different.

Retraining could be done anywhere, independently of where the retrained-to job is located.  A San Francisco resident, retraining for a job type where the largest gap is in New York, for instance, would be able to take the retraining program in San Francisco.

From that, Stipend Issuers would be authorized to commit a small per centage of their Federal Retraining Grants to relocation assistance, with the proviso that this diversion would be for assistance, not for the total cost of moving.

Since unions are, by their own definition, in the business of helping their membership, union members would see their stipends reduced by the total amount of union dues (including the portion the union claims was earmarked for political activities) paid by the union member retrainee in the twelve months prior to the employing company filing for bankruptcy.