“…From his basement in upstate New York, Herbert MacDonell launched modern bloodstain-pattern analysis, persuading judge after judge of its reliability. Then he trained hundreds of others.

Its path — the steady case-by-case, decision-by-decision acceptance of a new forensic science by the justice system — is one that’s rarely, if ever, been retraced. But it reveals the startling vulnerability of judges, and juries, to forensics techniques, both before, and after, they’ve been debunked.

Although the reliability of blood-spatter analysis was never proven or quantified, its steady admission by courts rarely wavered, even as the technique, along with other forensic sciences, began facing increasing scrutiny.

In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the whole discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.”

Still, judges continued allowing spatter experts to testify.

Subsequent research, funded by the Department of Justice, raised questions about experts’ methods and conclusions. But little changed.

All along, attorneys like Bankston continued challenging the admission of bloodstain-pattern analysts. But they came to learn that a forensic discipline, once unleashed in the system, cannot easily be recalled…”

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“…A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640…”

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Antitrust Issues?

PETER BRIGHT:

“…This is a company that, time and again, has tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google’s online services when used in conjunction with Google’s browser, consolidating Google’s market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage. Each time, pushback has come from the wider community, and so far, at least, the result has been industry standards that wrest control from Google’s hands. This action might already provoke doubts about the wisdom of handing effective control of the Web’s direction to Google, but at least a case could be made that, in the end, the right thing was done.

But other situations have had less satisfactory resolutions. YouTube has been a particular source of problems. Google controls a large fraction of the Web’s streaming video, and the company has, on a number of occasions, made changes to YouTube that make it worse in Edge and/or Firefox. Sometimes these changes have improved the site experience in Chrome, but even that isn’t always the case.

A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge’s fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge’s battery-life performance and took it below Chrome’s. The change didn’t improve Chrome’s performance and didn’t appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome’s battery life was actually superior to Edge’s. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail…”

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 California Drops Plan To Tax Texting.

Comment of the day. Ed Driscoll:

SACRAMENTO HAS A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF DERANGEMENT

Welcome change.

“…Since his death in August, the one-time presidential candidate has been eulogized as a statesman, a lawmaker deeply involved in U.S. policy abroad and known for his often blistering opinions on foreign affairs. McCain played a particularly outsized role in international politics under President Trump, traveling abroad to reassure jumpy allies and publicly critiquing the president’s isolationist doctrine.

Inhofe, an Army veteran who previously had served as ranking minority member of the committee when Democrats last controlled the Senate, sees his role in more narrow terms: ensure that the U.S. military is adequately resourced, and leave foreign policy to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“My job is to make sure that when we get the information from the ones who are smarter than I am as to where our threats are, my job is to make sure we have the resources to build the military to confront that,” he told Defense One in an interview. “I try not to get into debates with people on the threat that they view. What I can do is say, okay, if that threat is correct, these are the resources we need…”

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“…If Congress and the White House don’t make a deal this week to stave off a , Saturday – three days before Christmas – could be the start of the third shutdown since President Trump took office less than two years ago.

It’s a Saturday in the middle of a more than weeklong holiday season. Will you have to worry whether presents and relatives can make the journey without problems?

The U.S. Postal Service anticipates that Monday will be its busiest day online, which would allow most priority and first-class to reach its destination by Thursday before any possibility of a shutdown. If you mail later than that, know that the Postal Service is an independent agency, so it won’t be affected in any government shutdown.

Peak travel is expected to hit Thursday, according to the American Automobile Association. That’s also when Congress members want to get out of town and be finished with their work for the year.

Even if Congress can’t stop another federal shutdown, air-traffic controllers still will be on the job after midnight Friday, and customs and border agents will continue working at border crossings.

Amtrak, a government-owned corporation, also will operate as usual.

The president traditionally decides whether federal workers get a paid holiday on Christmas Eve, this year on a Monday, according to FEDweek newsletter. President George W. Bush did so in 2001 and 2007; President Barack Obama also did in 2012.

If a shutdown occurs, federal employees deemed nonessential could get that day off anyway. Back pay is never guaranteed when the government is shuttered, but Congress previously has included that provision in its debt-ceiling bills…”

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Liz Sheld:

On Friday, a judge ruled that Obamacare or the ACA is unconstitutional.

U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor agreed with a group of 20 states with Republican governors or legislatures that argued the constitutionality of the law’s individual mandate dissolved when Congress removed the tax penalty for the uninsured.

Of course, this will have to work its way through the court system, so there is no immediate change to your policy if you have purchased one. My premiums went up to $1500 monthly this year. What a great system. Thanks, Obama.

The Trump DOJ (that sounds so funny) will not appeal the decision since the administration is not looking to keep the law intact, but some of the states, led by California, will appeal.

Ed Driscoll strung this together:

Chubby Checker, 20-year-old Philadelphia entertainer who started the “Twist” dance craze that has swept the nation, shows just how it’s done with a hip-swiveling demonstration at a press reception in London, England, Dec. 14, 1961. 

Kimberley Strassel:

“…It’s clear that something has concerned the judge—who likely sees obvious parallels to the Stevens case. The media was predicting a quick ruling in the Flynn case. Instead, Judge Sullivan issued new orders Wednesday, demanding to see for himself the McCabe memo and the Flynn 302. He also ordered the special counsel to hand over by Friday any other documents relevant to the Flynn-FBI meeting.

Given his history with the FBI, the judge may also have some questions about the curious date on the Flynn 302—Aug. 22, 2017, seven months after the interview. Texts from Mr. Strzok and testimony from Mr. Comey both suggest the 302 was written long before then. Was the 302 edited in the interim? If so, by whom, and at whose direction? FBI officials initially testified to Congress that the agents did not think Mr. Flynn had lied.

Judges have the ability to reject plea deals and require a prosecutor to make a case at trial. The criminal-justice system isn’t only about holding defendants accountable; trials also provide oversight of investigators and their tactics. And judges are not obliged to follow prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations.

No one knows how Judge Sullivan will rule. His reputation is for being no-nonsense, a straight shooter, an advocate of government transparency. Whatever the outcome, he has done the nation a favor by using his Brady order to hold prosecutors to some account and allow the country a glimpse at how federal law enforcement operates. Which is the very least the country can expect…”

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Mexico Is Closing Its Border . . . With Guatemala

Racism? Hatred of the other? Immoral? This is how some democrats describe America’s attempt to close it’s border. Does it apply to Mexico?

CNN ELECTION ANALYST ON DEMS’ 2020 RACE: “I am not sure it’s the time to nominate a white man.”

I don’t understand, all the best media personalities say that: Robert O’Rourke is the early Democratic frontrunner.

Conrad Black:

“…The sudden death of the unutterable nonsense of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government, announced as it was in the hand-off to the Southern New York U.S. Attorney of the shabby fruit of Michael Cohen’s plea bargaining, has divided onlookers into three communities of opinion.

The true believers in the collusion canard are left slack-jawed, like the international Left after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: an immense fervor of faith is instantly destroyed; it is the stillness of a sudden and immense evaporation.

The professional Trump-haters, the Democratic Party assassination squads in the Congress and media, like disciplined soldiers, have swiveled with parade ground precision and resumed firing after a mere second to reload, at the equally fatuous nonsense about illegal campaign contributions. Disreputable, contemptible myth-makers and smear-jobbers though they are, they deserve credit for fanaticism, improvisation, and managing in unison to sound half plausible in the face of the crushing defeat they have suffered and the piffle and pottage they are left to moralize about.

Third, and slowest to respond, so sudden has been the change of the whole Trump-hate narrative, are those who never wavered from the requirement of real evidence of something before they would endorse the drastic act of impeaching and removing the nation’s leader. Some feel betrayed and some vindicated, but sensing no need for instant response, unlike the Trump-haters who are scrambling to try to cooper up some credibility for continuing their assault on the president, the third group is preparing with only deliberate speed to counter-attack the assassins-by-impeachment with their full and now overpowering armament of facts and law.

The Trump-haters can make a strong case that the president is an obnoxious public personality—that he is boastful, exaggerates constantly, sends out silly tweets with grade two typographical errors in them and gets into ill-tempered slanging matches with half the people with whom he comes into contact. To a great many, he is just refreshingly puncturing official self-importance.

But whatever anyone thinks of Trump, there are two points his enemies will have to face: he won the 2016 election and that can only be undone by the 2020 election, and high office-holders can only be impeached and removed from office by high crimes and misdemeanors as prescribed by the Constitution.

We may assume that the tactical battlefield commanders of the impeachment squad are now Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the incoming chairmen of the judiciary and intelligence committees. As of now, they are merely alleging criminal offenses that may not secure removal from office by the Republican Senate, but could lead to the conviction and imprisonment of the president after he has finished his term, in two or six years.

To appreciate the absurdity of this, remember that the impeachable and indictable offense the Democrats have in mind is that Michael Cohen, a lawyer in the midst of the inherently corrupt plea bargain catechism classes, trading extorted and false evidence against the president with a guarantee of immunity from perjury charges, for a lighter sentence, asserts that Trump ordered him to pay off women who claimed to have had sexual relations with him over 10 years ago for their silence, to enhance his chances of election.

To evaluate the probative quality of this evidence and the gravity of such charges, we must remember that Cohen has been charged with lying to Congress, has pleaded guilty to various acts of fraud, that the women were trying to blackmail then-candidate Trump and were breaching non-disclosure agreements, that Trump paid Cohen’s legal bills, that a person can contribute to his own campaign, and that the jurisprudence is that such payment are not campaign expenses anyway. That was the finding in the John Edwards case, where there was a child out of wedlock. Here, the facts of what actually happened between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal are disputed, and the wording of the relevant statute could just as well be interpreted as meaning that a candidate who buys mouthwash or gets a haircut or a new suit, is equally trying to enhance his likelihood of election.

Up to a point, Nadler and Schiff, egregious, obsessive Trump-haters and mud-slingers as they are, can only be accused of doing their jobs, or at least carrying out their self-assigned mission to bring down the president. Their accomplices in this foredoomed mission to self-immolation do not have the excuse of carrying out their misconceived duty. All the televised useless idiots with talking heads seem not to realize that they are now giving voice to ideas and outcomes that are so impossible and nonsensical, they are insane.

While Mueller could be represented to the malicious and the credulous as possibly having or being in the process of obtaining real evidence of cooperation by the Trump campaign with the Russian government to affect and falsify the results of the U.S. presidential election, at least the offense being alleged and which they sought to prove, would be, if it had happened, a very serious matter that would have justified the removal of the president. This was what Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and all its immense army of media jabbering puppets claimed. It was obvious at every stage to any serious person that this was extremely unlikely, but if it had actually happened, the alarms and accusations would have been justified and vindicated, and skeptics like me would have had to recant.

When that phantasmagorically impossible mission failed, without missing a newscast the president’s enemies opened fire with the new theory. This is that a confessed criminal and accused liar could prove that the president committed crimes when he paid his legal bills, including, with or without his specific knowledge, inducements to two women not to violate agreements to keep private their own contested recollections of innocuous sexual encounters with the president ten years before the election.

The theory further holds that these supposedly criminal violations of election financing laws could cause a two-thirds majority of the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate to remove the president from office, or at the least, that a prosecutor who patiently waited until the president left office could then send him to prison for this conduct.

I was even astounded at the reaction of the Trump-haters who had been citing the Steele dossier as incontrovertible evidence of his “treason” (Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, and many others), when they had to deal with the fact that it was a smear-job commissioned and paid for and shopped to the media by the Clinton campaign. Without breaking their strides, they called this inconvenient fact “a talking point” (Washington Post), and altered the dossier’s status to “campaign information,” (Hillary Clinton).

This latest display of sangfroid is even more remarkable and ethically disturbing. All of them knew that the Russian collusion claim was defamatory fiction, and no one with an IQ in double figures or higher could believe that the election finance crime theory generated by putting the screws to a low-life like Cohen could seriously inconvenience the president. The Democrats are now on suicide watch. It is not too late to recognize that however much they may hate Trump, and however objectionable he may be to some reasonable people, he is the president and only the voters or a medical catastrophe or the passage of his constitutional term will remove him. That is as it should be.

The country noticed that the same James Comey whose bias didn’t affect his judgment, didn’t remember 245 times in his testimony last week, and then told a New York audience of the absolute necessity of defeating Trump at the next election. If the Democrats use their new majority in the House to send this campaign-finance clunker for a Senate trial, as they shut down the existing investigations into the Justice department and Clinton campaign (which will be taken up by the Senate), they will destroy themselves. That, too, is as it should be.

The disappearance of most currently visible Democratic federal politicians and opinionated journalists would be a welcome national enema. But the self-destruction of a great political party would be a gruesome and destabilizing event. Somewhere in there must be some trace of the political DNA that from Alfred E. Smith to Hubert H. Humphrey, and intermittently since then, rendered magnificent and irreplaceable service to the nation and the world.

As Christmas approaches, the thoughts of Democrats should be of resurrecting themselves, not of crucifying an enemy so maddeningly invulnerable to their murderous rage…”

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Interesting Analysis

Jerry Weinberger:

“…Americans on the political left think that climate change is a big deal than do those on the right, and since the Left is typically more secular and the Right more religious, we see a spiritual paradox: on the environment, those on the left are the true (if pagan) believers, while those on the right are the dogmatic “atheists” (the whole climate thing is just an exaggerated crisis cooked up by liberal elites and the fake media).

Conservative skepticism notwithstanding, though, climate-change ideologues have more or less shaped public debate on the issue—successfully branding their opposition as “climate deniers.” And by now, nearly 50 years after the first Earth Day, a broad-ranging and increasingly draconian ecological consciousness has become pervasive in American life, extending far beyond climate issues. Go to the supermarket, for example, or look inside your pantry. You’ll find that hundreds of items in bags and cans have certifications of “Non-GMO.” That means that they contain no genetically modified organisms. In recent years, more than 27,000 products have been so certified (by the Non-GMO Project), with the purpose of putting our minds at ease that what we’re about to eat is not genetically modified and will not sicken or kill us or make us sprout a third arm. Non-GMO fanatics and millions of consumers call these forbidden fruits “Frankenfood.” Never mind that nobody has been proved to have been harmed or killed by GMOs. (That can’t be said for organic spinach or bean sprouts.) And never mind that for 25 years, almost all corn, cotton, and soybeans grown in the United States have been genetically modified, with nobody sickened or dead or sporting an extra limb. So why the intransigence of the activists and the gullibility of so many consumers?

The issue here is not the inevitable one of managing risk and rewards in modern life. It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder whether plants genetically modified to withstand the herbicide Roundup, say, might cause more of the poison to be used and thus entail some cost or harm. The giveaway term is the reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The real issue, that is, is not primarily technical or scientific; it’s moral and spiritual. With genetic engineering, in this view, we’re trying to play God and invariably upsetting the natural order of things. Put differently, and in the terms of the radical ecologist David Graber, we’re the fallen human parasite going after holy Mother Nature…”

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