Is the SVB Failure The Beginning of the End Game?

For more than a decade, only we here at LoS, it has seemed, correctly characterized the seemingly endless “low interest rate environment” correctly. See here. And here. And here. And here.

And since most of my readers (all three of them!) are too lazy to click the links, let me just quote from the earliest of those posts:

It’s a fundamental truth that drives the bond market:  a rising interest rate environment is terrible for bonds; a declining interest rate environment is great for bonds.  Because, as the quote above rightly points out, the face value of the bond rises or falls accordingly.  If I have a $100K bond paying 2% interest and market interest rates are 8%, who’s going to pay $100K for my bond?  If I want to sell it, I have to “discount” the price, you know, a lot.  Maybe my $100K bond would only sell for $25K.  But if the situation is the reverse, and I have a $100K bond paying 8% and market interest rates are 2%, well then so many people want my $100K bond that I can prally sell it for $150K, because where else are they going to get an 8% yield?

So the Fed has been holding off on raising rates precisely so as to avoid the SVB collapse. Now, apparently, the SVB collapse is acceptable. What has changed?

Who knows?

Eleven Years Later

We posted a lot about Casey Anthony back when her trial was going on.

In 2011.

So there’s a new documentary out that seems to conclude, as we did 11 years ago, that Casey’s father was a logical suspect in the toddler’s disappearance but wasn’t apparently investigated by law enforcement.

At all.

It’s nice to have a documentary film maker who has actually devoted some serious thought and sober reasoning to the matter. But it’s depressing to see the public and media reaction being overwhelmingly….the same as it ever was.

The inability to run with an idea contrary to your own, just to explore the possibilities, is a prerequisite to proper reasoning and a genuine exchange of thoughts. We’d like to explain more how important it is for people to do that, but we are pressed for time, as we have been for many months now.

Instead, we’ll just use this ongoing Casey Anthony reasoning train wreck to illustrate what we mean.

If you accept, just for purposes of discussion, that George Anthony accidentally killed his grand daughter while molesting her, and that he had a history of molesting Casey as well, wouldn’t that entitle Casey to some sympathy? Not only because of her traumatized childhood, but because that same trauma was involved in the death of her toddler daughter, and because she winds up being falsely accused and universally – although very unjustly – despised and villified?

Can we just for one moment consider that unarguable consequence of the premise?

And it turns out we can’t. Except here at LoS, where we reason honestly and truthfully.

Anyone who still maintains Casey Anthony’s guilt who does not, at the same time, concede the horrifying consequences if they are wrong, does not deserve to be heard on the matter.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the execrable Nancy Grace that fits that description; it’s our increasingly incoherent mainstream media and most of the general public – our fellow citizens.

Ugh.

Form, Substance, And The Supreme Soviet

We haven’t posted in a long while. We make no apologies. We’ve been busy.

Something has occurred to us recently that warrants a post or two. A theme we have visited before. Maybe a timely theme as well.

What, really, was the great 20th century quarrel between communism and “capitalism”?

Take a look at the description of the Supreme Soviet here. Does it look any different, really, that the mechanism of federal and state governments in the US? You have, basically, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The form is basically the same, only the names change.

So if there was a big difference to have a quarrel over, it certainly wasn’t the form, upon which both sides agreed.

Substance, then. But what, specifically, are we talking about there?

It probably has something to do with central “planning”, along the lines of “policy” which are decided upon by a small cabal that everyone knows and no one knows.

That’s a paradox. Wherein many a truth reside, according to our favorite thinker.

Freedom loving people begin to chafe at the “top-down” aspect of rules and regulations, of which there was an abundance in the old Soviet Union and of which there is now (and has been for some time) an abundance in the US. These top-down rules and regulations are overseen by an “administrative state”. No one would dispute that the old Soviet Union was in large part an administrative state.

No rational person would dispute that the 21st century United States is an administrative state, either. But we don’t want to admit that we are, because that winds up admitting that our narrative about the cold war – that we won it and vanquished communism – is, like so many things Soviet and 21st century US, an inversion of the truth.

The Soviet Union peacefully conquered us, in other words. The Berlin Wall came down not because of the German longing for freedom, but because it was no longer needed.

Khrushchev said it a long time ago.*

Take a look at this tweet from local radio personality Bob Lonsberry. It’s about a new political body in Rochester known as the Police Accountability Board. Lonsberry makes a good point.

But he doesn’t know how good a point it is. He just reflexively sides with cops as a group.

What makes it a good observation is that this is one of the signs of a Soviet-style administrative state. There’s always some “board” or “council” or other.

We have always thought police accountability would be better addressed by letting lawyers do their thing and letting juries fix responsibility where they see fit. But this is not conducive to top-down policy making, because jury verdicts can vary widely and can be wrong, leaving policy-makers frustrated that their policies are not being uniformly administered.

In the America of the past, people in general did not care about the policy makers’ preoccupation with uniformity. Indeed, America was, at one time, characterized by its hostility to anything smacking of uniformity. Uniformity was regarded as a characteristic of repressive, and dare we say communist regimes.

See the point we are getting at?

Again, it all stems from a collapse of the legal profession and the judiciary which have, for decades now, been thoroughly dominated by an ideology that would certainly have been called un-American in a storied past, not to say communist.

The courts are no longer courts as they were once understood. They are part of an administrative apparatus implementing “policies” dictated from on high. They do not address problems that arise organically from people going about their daily lives and encountering some conflict or other, adjudicating them one by one and generating principles and case law (that used to be called “common law”) that develop organically themselves. No, they make their decisions based on “policy”. The legal conflicts of individuals are a trifle, and so intermediate appellate courts have quietly, but quite firmly become “certiorari courts” that pay serious attention to only a tiny number of the appeals that come before them. And how do they determine which cases fit into that tiny number?

“Policy”.

This kind of “policy” implementation is completely incompatible with what is now termed “populism”, which to the extent feasible has become at least a controversial word and more like a term of derision and scorn. Especially since the Trump presidency.

But here is a sobering – and of course, for that reason largely unacknowledged – truth: populism was basically the governing ideology (if it can even be called that) of the United States of America. “Policy” is communist ideology, the central committee as the basic organ of governing the proletariat.

If you want to know why people in the US and elsewhere are protesting vaccine and lock-down mandates while at the same time others are protesting police violence, and why in response to the latter we have “conviction integrity units” and “police accountability boards” while our courts continue to toss case after case against police with “immunity” doctrines and whatnot, well, we’ve just explained it to you.

It wasn’t the Soviet Union that fell in 1991. It was the vestiges of western civilization of which the morally exhausted United States of America was at that time, unfortunately, the standard bearer.

And yes, Khrushchev was right, as it turns out.

Ugh.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

*Note that this is from an article in the New York Times in 1957. But our 21st century ministry of truth deems this to be a false quote. Meaning, of course, that it’s an accurate one.

Who Could Possibly Know…

whether a $60 million pain and suffering award was “too much” and needed to be cut in half?

The Appellate Division, First Department. That’s who.

It’s a lot of money either way, of course. At least, in context it is.

But we’ll just say here what we have said before: there is no principled reason why the appellate court should adjust the jury’s award at all. There are only unprincipled reasons, such as we can’t have municipalities or insurance companies being forced to make such big payouts to the rabble.

Alas, we are once again repeating ourselves.

Ugh.

Cause And Effect

We’re in deep, deep trouble.

Don’t know how we missed this. Except, well, we’ve been busy.

Causation, in the larger sense, is a subject for philosophy, not the law. We have determined at long last, and contrary to our impression growing up and consequently through a large portion of our adulthood, that lawyers and judges as a group are intellectually ill-equipped for any nuanced and honest analysis of any topic with any degree of subtlety. This is probably because the bulk of them were intellectually framed by being political science majors in college.

The idea of “proximate cause” – primarily a negligence concept – is okay for lawyers and judges because it is a greatly simplified version of the idea of causation generally. Beyond that they dare not go.

But then they do. Thus the trouble we are in.

So in Frost we have lots of discussion about due process and deliberate lying and cheating by a police officer or police officers and the majority finds that there was causation or at least that there could be causation:

Second, defendants miss the mark in their assessment that Frost has not raised a triable issue regarding causation. As we have explained, a “prosecutor’s decision to pursue charges rather than to dismiss [a] complaint without further action[] may depend on the prosecutor’s . . . assessment[] of the strength of the case, which in turn may be critically influenced by fabricated evidence…Here, a reasonable jury could have found that Vega’s identification “critically influenced” the decision to prosecute Frost. 

We need not enter into a hypothetical discussion about what a prosecutor might or might not do if we understand that deliberate lying and cheating by a government actor corrupts the process itself, the very thing that we call “due process” and the very thing that a criminal defendant is constitutionally entitled to.

This winds up being another excuse to cabin or limit the Mooney line of cases by requiring a showing of “causation” tied to some specific act by a government actor that is more concrete than simply recognizing that the corruption of the process due to government dishonesty is sufficient by itself to amount to a fatal constitutional infirmity.

This is a much simpler way of looking at it, but it’s also more subtle, and for that reason lawyers and judges are bound to screw it up.

Indeed, this intellectual deficiency is demonstrated not only by the majority opinion but also by Judge Kearse in dissent:

But this recognition of the actual pretrial focus of Frost’s claimed deprivation of liberty highlights my doctrinal difficulty with the majority’s reinstatement of Frost’s so-called fair-trial claim…The manufacture of false evidence, in and of itself, . . . does not impair anyone’s liberty, and therefore does not impair anyone’s constitutional right.”

Well, this is the issue, isn’t it?

Our position that this latter assertion is wrong; that is, that the manufacture of false evidence, in and of itself, does constitute a deprivation of due process simpliciter, by corrupting the process itself, whether or not anyone’s “liberty” is impaired by imprisonment or pre-trial detention or whatnot.

What is most worrisome about Frost, though, is that it’s attracting the attention of the SCOTUS, having received a “Response requested” and now a relist. This may be just reflexively favoring the government as the SCOTUS is wont to do (the government is the Petitioner). But maybe not, too.

We will be keeping our eyes on this one.

Ugh.

“Meticulous Rebuke”

We take it that Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate would generally not approve of District Court judges issuing “rebukes” to the SCOTUS. But she loves this one.

We at LoS are quite struck by this passage:

In order to block the law, [District Court Judge] Pitman crafted an injunction to “halt existing S.B. lawsuits and prevent new suits from being maintained by the state judiciary.” He forbade state judges and clerks from “accepting or docketing” these cases, and, for good measure, barred “private individuals who act on behalf of the state” from filing them. Finally, he ordered Texas to “publish this preliminary injunction on all of its public-facing court websites with a visible, easy-to-understand instruction to the public that S.B. 8 lawsuits will not be accepted by Texas courts.”

When you are being “meticulous” you “craft” injunctions, because you are being so, so careful to follow “the law”.

Lithwick can’t really believe this drivel.

Judge Pitman is actually enjoining state court judges from doing their jobs under state law.

Will the SCOTUS sign off on this sweeping assertion of the power of federal courts over state courts?

If this were a habeas case, the decision would have already been reversed. But habeas cases are about some poor and likely innocent schmuck who is slated (no pun intended) to be executed, or is rotting away in some state prison. No one cares about that, certainly not our Very Important federal judges who have other more Very Important matters to attend to.

Again, as we have pointed out before (and we have actually re-read that one recently with a certain amount of surprise – and yet satisfaction – that it seems to say what it says pretty well), there is only one area of the law where the federal courts, and the SCOTUS in particular, have any “federalism” concerns: habeas corpus. Because that’s the little guy against the big guy and we crush the little guy, who is constantly wasting our time. We like Big, Important Ideological Questions like Abortion because they Matter in some Hegelian World-Historical sense, whereas the plight of the innocent imprisoned or executed are lesser concerns consigned to lesser levels of government, whose job it is to return, again and again, to the Augean Stables.

Judge Pitman’s decision is one part lawlessness and two parts effete snobbery. And Slate applauds.

Ugh.

Hyper-technical

Read the SCOTUS blog article on Brown v. Davenport – upon which we have opined before – and see if you can figure out just what the issue is here.

The best thing to say about it, at this point, is that the case should never have been a cert grant and the SCOTUS should probably DIG it. What need is there to have a rule about an issue that will almost never occur? The SCOTUS does not exist to answer absurdly technical and practically hypothetical questions. In the exceedingly rare event where a non-death penalty habeas grant occurs by some District Court or Court of Appeals, SCOTUS should just leave it alone.

Ugh.

The Toppling Of A Mayor

Politics ain’t beanbag. We get that.

She knocked off Tom Richards, who was an odd choice for Rochester mayor, speaking demographically. But he was not odd in one important respect: the shadowy powers that be held him in high regard.

Lovely did not truck with the powers that be and that has consequences, especially if you are vulnerable to attack, and Lovely was, and is. An indictment will sink most any political career. And they’re easy to get. And so the powers that be eventually got one, and now there’s a plea deal, and that’s that.

This is a sad chapter in Rochester politics. Sad because Warren became such a disappointment, but then her enemies were always close. Many of them worked “for” her. There’s a swamp in DC? Surely.

The Lovely Warren episode demonstrates that there is also a swamp in Rochester.

The Election Of The President

At some point someone has to say something. Might as well be us.

There’s a website characterized as “far right” on Widipedia called “The Gateway Pundit” (“GP”)

GP reports that there was a “rally” yesterday in Georgia presided over by former President Trump that featured a “massive crowd”. Is this true? GP says it is true. Regular media outlets such as CNN do not mention it, so presumably they don’t deny it.

As we’ve said many times, we don’t even like Trump. We think it’s unfortunate he ever was POTUS. And now we’d like him to just fade into history, like a lot of people prefer, and like most presidents before him promptly did once someone else takes over the helm.

But…..

A former president conducting “rallies” where thousands of people appear is, unquestionably, a news worthy event. So it’s bizarre that it’s not being reported on by the mainstream media (“MSM”). People should get some information about such rallies, such as….what is this rally about? Is it about a 2024 run by Trump? Is it about challenging the validity and legitimacy of the 2020 election? Both? Neither?

We suspect the cause for a rally would have to be the latter – that is, challenging the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Why not simply report this?

The MSM apparently holds the position that challenging the results of the 2020 election is somehow out of the bounds of civil discourse. Is this an arguable position?

No.

Take a look at Title 52 of the U.S. Code, Chapter 207. Records of federal presidential elections are to be retained for 22 months. Willful concealment or destruction of such records is a misdemeanor, which is surprising considering all the things that are federal felonies.

Why would there be a law providing that records of elections must be retained for 22 months? Obviously, so that in that period they can be inspected. Why would anyone want to inspect them? Because they are disputing the legitimacy of the election outcome. Is this, arguably, a threat to democracy?

No. That is not even arguable. Yet this is the predominant MSM position, upon which they are basing their coverage, or lack thereof, of those who are making such disputes.

Once again, it occurs to us that Trump is not the threat to the Republic that all the press shrieking has alluded to ever since he was elected. Indeed, the Republic by all appearances has already survived the Trumpian menace, which was never as important as it was made to seem.

But an incoherent, shrieking and ultimately untrustworthy press is a threat to the Republic, which is why the press was singled out for protection in the 1st amendment in the first place. Much of the press complains about “conspiracy theories” that run rampant and unchecked on social media, but the often wild speculations – and particularly their popularity – are the natural result of a loss of confidence in our regular news reporting. The MSM complains about it, in other words, but they brought it on themselves.

And the rest of us.

Just as the legal profession has failed and caused the collapse of the third branch of government, so has the journalism profession failed the so-called 4th branch.

How’s the third branch doing these days? A bit over-defensive, it seems:

“If Roe is overruled,” the law clerk wrote, “the public will understand that the Court’s reversal is explainable solely by reason of changes in the composition of the Court.” Thus, he concluded: “The damage to the public understanding of the Court’s decisions as neutral expositions of the law … would be incalculable…”

By the way, when those two pillars of civil society (i.e., the third and fourth branches of government) have fallen the government has already collapsed. The rest is just watching it pan out. It’s not something that is going to happen – it has already happened.

Those are our thoughts this morning. Ugh.

Open Letter To Don McClean

Last verse of the immortal “American Pie”:

I met a girl who sang the blues

And I asked her for some happy news

But she just smiled and turned away

And I went down to the sacred store

where I’d heard the music, years before

But the man there

said the music

wouldn’t play

And in the streets the children screamed

the lovers cried and the poets dreamed

But not a word was spoken

the church bells all were broken

And the three men I admire most

the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost

They caught the last train for the coast.

The day

the music died.

Question: is this referring to the suppression of the traditional latin mass?

It’s hard for us to imagine it could be referring to anything else.

Finally

Someone, other than us, points out that the SCOTUS really shouldn’t be getting a pass.

Although it isn’t just SCOTUS favoritism to the police that poses a threat to the Republic, as it were. As if we had anything even remotely resembling a Republic or a democracy at this point here in the USA.

SCOTUS is just relentlessly establishmentarian across the board. Somehow, with all the federal government overreach since the 1930’s, SCOTUS finally decides to put its foot down so that people – including children – can be evicted and made homeless. It’s not that we even disagree with the principle here at LoS. It’s that principle has nothing to do with it.

The threat of homelessness is an essential ingredient of the status quo, the “status quo” being more or less a modern version of serfdom. We went over this a couple of years ago, to the usual effect – which is to say none.

We have lost our capacity for self-government. Or, it’s been taken from us. Maybe it was never all it was cracked up to be anyway.

The Feds

Apropos our last post: here’s a clue.

Based solely on federal prosecutions and convictions, the “most corrupt” governments are in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Which just happen to be the three largest cities in the United States.

We are not sure what to make of this little foray into “most corrupt” statistics. It doesn’t seem to take into account the fact that the three most prominent New York State political figures of the last generation – Sheldon Silver, Joe Bruno and Elliot Spitzer – all wound up in serious criminal trouble and two of them wound up in federal prison.

Beyond that, is this conclusion:

Tracking the worst by city–Chicago is still the most corrupt for political corruption convictions followed by Los Angeles then NY’s Southern District for Manhattan.

simply a function of raw numbers, such that the largest places will have the largest numbers? We don’t know.

But we are also pondering the idea that the feds are more active where their efforts will draw more media attention, and that means big cities. The flip side of this coin is that they ignore squalid little backwaters like Mount Morris, New York.

Maybe. We’re not sure this morning.

Prosecutorial Discretion

Turley makes a good point this morning. At least that’s what we think. We put up a little comment there. Now we’re going to comment over here. Where we live.

In obscurity. But never mind that for now.

To us it seems the feds often don’t really have any principles at all about who and what they prosecute.

For instance, they seem to have a large number of little noticed prosecutions for tax fraud, money laundering, welfare fraud, food stamp fraud. Our impression is that these are training events for junior prosecutors. Nobody much cares about them except the Defendants and their families.

There are occasional large drug crime prosecutions, of course, but like every other kind of crime such prosecutions are normally carried out by state officials under state laws. Why the feds get involved in this or that case is often a mystery.

There’s a notion we have only recently become aware of (because while it is a prevalent notion, it is also never – or almost never – explicitly stated, and we expect a manly straightforwardness around here at LoS), that the federal government is simply more important and higher status than the state governments. It’s a surprising notion, not least because it is un-American and contrary to the entire scheme of the constitution.

But we digress.

We chronicled another strange prosecutor decision here. This wasn’t the feds, but the mindset is the same. And like the feds, once they put you into the “perp” box they normally “succeed” in convicting and imprisoning you.

Prosecutor discretion is an important safeguard in the system. When it’s driven not so much by a sense of justice and mercy but by career concerns – or as Turley points out this morning, political concerns – it becomes perverted. And dangerous.

Is that what goes on with the feds – that is, career and political concerns over everything else?

We think sometimes the answer to that is yes. It gives us no pleasure to say so. But there it is.

Ugh.

Collectivism

Just a little musing here this morning.

We were thinking back, in world-historical terms, and reminding ourselves of our now long ago educational experience as an undergrad, where for a time we were infatuated with the ideas of GWF Hegel.

Hegel was not a communist – he predated communism – but some of his ideas were preludes, as it were.

For example, communism is known for its “dialectical materialism”. Hegel wasn’t a reductionist/materialist at all, but damned if he didn’t virtually invent this notion of “dialectic”: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, doncha know.

But not being a materialist, there was this spiritual gloss over the whole thing, and it had a name: weltgeist. Literally, “world ghost”.

What was, or is, the weltgeist? Sort of a “spirit of the age” kind of thing. But Hegel imbued it with a personality, an independent identity, and it became in his mind and the minds of his followers a spirit that moved things and determined events in the world. Its methodology? Why, the dialectic, of course!

It can be thought provoking to view certain historical events through this prism, and particularly this: those periods where we make the transition from one century to the next.

Which brings us to the title of this post.

As the world transitioned from the 19th century to the 20th we were reaching a crescendo of a certain weltgeist that might be termed the industrialization and collectivization trend, which in turn produced mass armed conflict that we called the “Great War” at the time, until there was another one a decade or so later, whereupon we called both of them “World Wars”. Weltkriegs, Hegel might have said.

As we may have said elsewhere, there was then push back against the collectivist trend – kind of a decentralizing trend, we probably opined – in which we figured the internet was a prominent piece. A profoundly decentralizing medium, we think we put it at the time.

So now we a roughly at the point in time in the 21st century where the world had just put the Great War behind itself, and lo what do we have? A Great Pandemic, and some sort of “Great Reset” in the offing. And the internet, which we had originally described as a profoundly decentralizing medium – well, we might have been mistaken about that. Because there is a powerful trend afoot now to exert a rather profound centralizing effect on the world wide web, where it seems to be more of a collective hive mind than a free-for-all.

So the point this morning is this: the centralization weltgeist of the 19th to 20th century transition that led to the collectivist phenomena of world wars is duplicated in the centralization weltgeist of the 21st century transition that has led to the phenomena of one continual, collectivist public health “emergency” in which all are compelled to participate, much as men were drafted to fight the collectivist wars of the 20th century.

And this outlook somewhat explains the sort of natural ideological division that surrounds the pandemic. The people who reflexively or instinctively approve of the collectivist action on the pandemic do so because they are, basically, collectivists more than anything else and in the first place. And the people who reflexively or instinctively recoil at the same phenomenon are more individualists.

So that is our morning musing on the state of things in the world. It’s all about Hegel. And collectivism. And the weltgeist.

And, you know, religion. But that part will have to wait.

Fiat Justitia..

ruat caelum.

“Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

Being a judge can be a very easy job, or a very difficult one, but when it’s difficult it’s not difficult in the usual way. That is, it’s not difficult due to arduousness, or long hours. No, being a judge can be difficult when it requires moral courage, one of the four cardinal virtues of antiquity.

The Latin adage is interesting from that standpoint. Most cases are routine – by definition, we guess – and the judge doesn’t really do any of the work; rather, he reviews the work of others and his job is to make the decision. But sometimes the case is not routine – again, by definition – and what this means in practice is that the party who would be normally expected to prevail (government, bank, insurance company) should lose.

The operative word being should.

Unsurprisingly, the party that is normally expected to prevail – well – expects to prevail. When those expectations are unfulfilled “the heavens fall”. That’s the idea, anyway.

Here’s an account of a judge who did his duty in just the way we are pondering this morning. Note that he did not go on to the usual conceptions of judicial greatness, becoming a federal appeals court judge or a United States Supreme Court Justice. Indeed, knowing full well that his decision in the Scottsboro Boys case would cost him the position he had, he made his decision anyway. He lived out the rest of his life in obscurity in rural Alabama as a farmer.

We hear nothing about Judge James Edwin Horton, just as we hear nothing about John Edland. Even as we can’t avoid hearing about Kim Kardashian.

We need to do better, in terms of the cardinal virtues, obviously. Especially the virtue of courage.

Today is Memorial Day, and we here in the US observe and commemorate the ultimate sacrifices of those servicemen who lost their lives in the military service of their country. We ourselves are a military veteran of the US Navy and we do take the observance seriously.

But this is a lawyers blog, and we put up this post this morning to make this connection: our war dead made their sacrifice for a country that promises justice. When lawyers and judges fail – or indeed often refuse – to do the hard work and (in particular for judges) make the hard decisions that cause the heavens to fall we dishonor and make futile their sacrifice. That is a terrible sin.

So this morning our request is that our colleagues on the bench and in the bar rededicate themselves to do justice though the heavens fall, to do their duty without fear or favor, as they swore they would at the beginning of their careers. And by doing so honor the sacrifices of the fallen, who died defending the civilization that depends upon lawyers and judges making the hard decisions when called upon.

Amen.