Jts5665

BIDEN IN DECLINE: “Joe Biden didn’t do anything wrong? A time-honored method of taking bribes is having them paid to a family member, usually in exchange for nominal or nonexistent services. It is comical to watch ‘reporters’ pretend not to understand this.”

The Department of Justice claims to support "strong encryption, which is used by billions of people every day for services such as banking, commerce, and communications." Yet the department is actively working to weaken encryption, lest fully secure communications frustrate law enforcement agencies seeking access to possibly incriminating messages—a problem it calls "going dark."

Long before the government faced the "going dark" challenge, it faced the "going mobile" challenge posed by gasoline-powered vehicles, which Attorney General William Barr thinks offers an instructive analogy. He is right, but not for the reasons he suggests. The legal treatment of automobiles actually casts doubt on the Justice Department's insistence that the world be arranged to facilitate criminal investigations.

In a 1925 case involving enforcement of alcohol prohibition, the Supreme Court announced an exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. Because illicit booze transported by motorized vehicles might be whisked away and hidden or destroyed before police could obtain judicial approval for a search, the Court said, the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless searches of automobiles as long as there is "probable cause" to believe they contain contraband.

Justice James Clark McReynolds dissented. "If an officer, upon mere suspicion of a misdemeanor, may stop one on the public highway, take articles away from him and thereafter use them as evidence to convict him of crime," he wondered, "what becomes of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments?"

Nowadays, when electronic warrants can be readily obtained in a matter of minutes, McReynolds' objection is stronger than ever. Although police can no longer plausibly claim that they do not have time to get a warrant before searching a lawfully stopped vehicle, the automobile exception that the Court carved out nearly a century ago continues to relieve them of that requirement.

In any case, notwithstanding the fact that automobiles facilitate all manner of crimes, the government has never tried to ban them for that reason. Yet that is what Barr and his allies are threatening to do with "end-to-end" encryption, which makes electronic messages indecipherable to anyone but the sender and the recipient.

Such technology is obviously useful to people who value their privacy, including journalists, lawyers, dissidents, and ordinary citizens discussing sensitive matters. It provides protection not only against the prying eyes of governments, many of which are unconstrained by concerns about civil liberties and the rule of law, but against hackers, con men, blackmailers, and other private-sector malefactors.

But because end-to-end encryption also is useful to criminals, Barr argues, it cannot be tolerated. Barr recently urged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to reconsider plans to include end-to-end encryption, which is already incorporated into the company's highly popular WhatsApp platform, in its other messaging services.

"Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content, even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes," Barr wrote in an open letter to Zuckerberg. Such privacy-protecting innovation, he said, "puts our citizens and societies at risk."

For the time being, Barr is limiting his anti-privacy efforts to exhortation. But in a speech last July, he warned that "legislative and regulatory solutions" may be necessary if tech companies are not sufficiently cooperative.

Technically savvy privacy advocates have long argued that "back doors" allowing government access to encrypted communications inevitably create vulnerabilities that bad actors can exploit. Barr disputes that claim without proposing any specific solutions to the problem, merely suggesting that it can be licked if only companies like Facebook think hard enough about the challenge.

Even if you share Barr's vague confidence, it's undeniable that the access he demands for the U.S. government will also be demanded by governments with far worse human rights records, jeopardizing people who dare to think for themselves in countries that do not respect such freedom. The compromises he seeks in the name of "security," on behalf of "the public," would make the public less secure by denying them the privacy-protecting tools they manifestly want.

© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

THE BABYLON BEE IS SAVAGE: LeBron James Says Rosa Parks’s Bus Protest ‘Could Have Waited A Week.’

James, an expert in geopolitical relations as well as the game of basketball, went on to explain that people in power stand to lose a lot of money when protesters challenge the status quo. “Civil rights demonstrations should really be limited to times that are convenient to everyone,” James told sources. “When Rosa Parks started the bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat, I guess there were some sporting events scheduled that week in downtown Montgomery that lost a lot of revenue. It wasn’t fair to them. I can’t really blame Ms. Parks though. She was just misinformed.”

“In the future, I hope people will think about how voicing their support for civil rights and freedom might impact rich and powerful people, like me,” James added.

Ouch.

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Kamala Harris’s Offices Fought Payments to Wrongly Convicted.

HARSH, BUT FAIR:

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: Whistleblowers And The Real Deep State.

The “deep state”—if we are to use the term—is better defined as consisting of career civil servants, who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows. As government grows, so do the challenges of supervising a bureaucracy swelling in both size and power. Emboldened by employment rules that make it all but impossible to fire career employees, this internal civil “resistance” has proved willing to take ever more outrageous actions against the president and his policies, using the tools of both traditional and social media.

Government-employed resisters received a call to action within weeks of the new administration. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became acting attorney general on Mr. Trump’s inauguration and Loretta Lynch’s resignation. A week later, the president signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries. Ms. Yates instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the order in court on the grounds that she was not convinced it was “consistent” with the department’s “responsibilities” or even “lawful.” She decreed: “For as long as I am Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order.”

Mr. Trump fired her that day, but he shouldn’t have had to. Her obligation was to defend the executive order, or to resign if she felt she couldn’t. Nobody elected Sally Yates.

The Yates memo was the first official act of the internal resistance—not only a precedent but a rallying cry. Subordinates fawningly praised her in emails obtained by Judicial Watch. “You are my new hero,” wrote one federal prosecutor. Another department colleague emailed: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law.” Andrew Weissmann—a career department lawyer, then head of the Criminal Fraud Division and later on the staff of special counsel Robert Mueller—wrote: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.” Ms. Yates set an example to rebels throughout the government: If she can defy the president, why can’t I?

That mentality fed the stream of leaks that has flowed ever since.

The civil service laws aren’t working. Time to return to the spoils system, where “bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility” was less of a thing.

Partly because they've created a society where they have most of it by their flawed definition.

Privilege comes from the Latin meaning "Private Law." So in a literal sense, unless there are laws to some effect, favoring or harming others, there is no privilege. For example, if there was a dedicated driving lane for those of a certain class, that would be privilege. I'd also be part of it and sneer at you inferior drivers, because honestly, that really should be a thing.

Actor, Action, Patient, Agent:

The ACTOR acts out.  The ACTION affects the PATIENT, for positive or negative. An AGENT is anyone capable of acting.  In a hypothetical extreme privilege society, the PATIENT has no AGENCY and cannot fight the ACTION.  Slavery in the antebellum South is a good example of this. Slaves had very little agency whatsoever, and when they did, it was usually through their owner by proxy with no personal say in the matter.

But that's not the world we live in now.  The law officially applies to everyone equally. Now, enforcement varies, and it usually works to the advantage of the wealthy and celebrities of ANY DEMOGRAPHIC.

But if, let's say, a cop and a judge decide to charge and sentence two people differently, based on race, religion, political affiliation.  The PATIENTS of these ACTIONS don't have much AGENCY to change the ACTORS' intentions. Possibly a better lawyer or publicity can change things, but there's no official strata, no, "Hey, you can't do that to me, I have this card that says ___" (Well, sometimes politicians and cops have such a card. Foreign diplomats do to an extent.  But it's exceptionally rare for anyone else.)

"They treated you better, YOU HAVE PRIVILEGE!"

No, I fucking don't. And by claiming so, YOU have just diverted the ACT from the ACTOR to me, one of the PATIENTS.  "You got treated better! You are evil!" Wrong. The ACTORS did the wrongdoing. You and I are both PATIENTS.  You are literally arguing that if you get punched in the face and I don't, that it's because I'm the bad guy, not the asshole who's punching people.

Stop with the bullshit claims of PRIVILEGE for the patients of the action, and go after the fucking ACTORS. Because every time you accuse someone else of "privilege" for actions totally beyond their control, you piss them off and make it even harder to go after the ACTORS who cause the problems.

SUCKING UP TO CHINESE DICTATORS IS NOT A GOOD LOOK: Blizzard’s Hong Kong Screw-Up Is Officially an International Incident. “The company’s communities are in chaos and US senators are taking notice, following the suspension of a pro ‘Hearthstone’ player who declared support for Hong Kong’s protest movement.”

Plus: “Activision Blizzard is less than a month from Blizzcon, an annual convention it puts on to showcase new games and celebrate its fans. Some fans are talking about boycotting the convention, others are planning to stage a protest.”

NINA TEICHOLZ: The latest flip-flop on red meat uses best science in place of best guesses.

To be honest, I’m not so sure the guesses were even “best.” By the way, I recommend her book, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. Along with Gary Taubes, she’s been ahead of the curve, and the conventional wisdom is just starting to catch up.

OH, THIS’LL WORK: Blizzard accused of disabling authentication to stop users deleting accounts during boycott. “Over the weekend, video game publisher Blizzard banned professional Hearthstone player Ng Wai ‘blitzchung’ Chung from the 2019 Hearthstone Grandmasters Official Competition after he showed support for the Hong Kong protests in an interview. The move was seen as an example of yet another US company bending the knee to China and led to heavy criticism and a mass boycott. Now Blizzard users who are attempting to participate in the boycott by closing their accounts are reporting that Blizzard has disabled all authentication and is preventing them from deleting their accounts.”

KEEP THIS UP AND PEOPLE WILL START TO THINK THAT ACADEMIA IS A RACKET: The rise of “coercive citation.”

Eric A. Fong’s manuscript had been conditionally accepted. The editor said Fong needed to ensure it conformed with the journal’s style and to shorten it to meet the word limit. That was easy enough. But the third condition gave Fong pause.

He’d cited only one source from the journal he’d submitted the article to. The editor wrote in an email that that was “unacceptable,” and told him to “please add at least five more.”

Adding citations to articles in the same journal, as the editor had requested, would inflate the journal’s impact factor, which often dictates a journal’s importance. It’s a phenomenon some scholars call “coercive citation,” but Fong, then an assistant professor of management at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, had never heard that term.

Sad!

INSIDE JOB: Byron York: Whistleblower had ‘professional’ tie to 2020 Democratic candidate.

Related: End Impeachment Secrecy. Not a chance. They’ve learned from the Kavanaugh experience not to tell stories that can be checked.

BUT PLASTIC-STRAW BANS LET BUSYBODIES FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES: International researchers estimate that as much as 73 percent of the garbage in the Atlantic Ocean originates from Chinese merchant vessels, Canada’s National Post reported on Tuesday.

The United Kingdom's Labour Party has committed itself to abolishing private schools if it wins the next election. A measure approved at the party's latest annual conference says "the ongoing existence of private schools is incompatible with Labour's pledge to promote social justice." The measure promised to confiscate private schools' property, land and other assets and redistribute them "democratically and fairly across the country's educational institutions."

SEEMS EMINENTLY FAIR: Lawmaker Wants To Make Gun-Free Zones Liable If Someone Hurt: Bills would remove governmental immunity, make private zone owners responsible for security. If you make it impossible for people to defend themselves, you should be made fully responsible for their safety.

ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW: “A very large number of Americans don’t have high levels of trust and respect for the government, and they’re generally OK with Trump being the junkyard dog who digs it all out,” CNBC* discovers, to explain “why Trump’s poll numbers are defying the impeachment mess.”

As David Frum puts it in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse: 

Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.

And from last month: Andrew Klavan: ‘Watergate’ Doesn’t Mean What the Press Thinks It Means.

* Yes, that CNBC.

HOUSTON ROCKETS GM DARYL MOREY ISSUES APOLOGY FOR CONTROVERSIAL* TWEET ABOUT HONG KONG, WILL NOT BE DISCIPLINED BY THE NBA:

Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey issued an apology on Sunday for a tweet sent out regarding the Hong Kong protests.  Morey’s job appears to be safe, according to multiple reports, and he will not be disciplined by the league for his words, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic. The now-deleted message read simply “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” but has led to significant repercussions for the Rockets in China.

Tencent, the NBA‘s exclusive digital partner in China, has suspended business relations with the Rockets, and is offering fans who purchased a year-long “team pass” to watch Rockets games the chance to switch it to a different team. A number of other Chinese companies have pulled sponsorship deals with the Rockets as well. Morey issued the following statement on Twitter:

Read the whole thing. I suspect Morey’s eyes were blinking S-O-S while he typed his forced apology.

And as Clay Travis tweets in response, “This NBA-Hong Kong-China mess is fascinating. The NBA is super woke when it comes to things like made up US transgender bathroom disputes, but bent the knee to China when Daryl Morey came out in support of democracy & upset communists. Shows you how hypocritical the league is.”

* The headline is from CBS, where supporting freedom and democracy is always a controversial move.

At Disney-ABC-ESPN, Morey’s pro-Hong Kong statement isn’t just controversial — it’s “offensive:”

While, the above screen capture shows 75 retweets, it doesn’t show the amount of comments in response — they’re over 700 as of the time of this post being written, which is quite a ratio.

UPDATE: Enough of a ratio that Shelbourne deleted the above tweet, and tried to explain her wording — but didn’t apologize for the sentiment.

Clay Travis adds, “Think about this for a minute, Adam Silver banned the use of the word ‘owner’ in the NBA because he said it was racially insensitive & then apologized to Chinese communists because one of his executives had the gall to say he supported democracy.”

More round-up at Twitchy: ‘This is a hostage video:’ Houston Rockets GM apologizes to Communist China for his ‘stand with Hong Kong’ tweet.

THE BABYLON BEE IS SAVAGE: Free Speech Is Killing Us: Oped By Kim Jong Un.

The press office for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, has been trying to get media outlets within the state to remove two stories posted online because they object to the source.

Earlier this month, writer Derek Draplin reported that Polis had established a new office—the Office of the Future of Work—to research the state's changing economy and workforce and make policy recommendations to the governor's office. Draplin published the article in The Center Square, a nonprofit media outlet.

The factually accurate story (read it here) quotes Polis praising the creation of the office, as well as a Colorado GOP spokesperson mocking the creation of yet another regulatory bureaucracy with "undefined goals, broad powers, and a name straight from the brain of George Orwell."

The Center Square offers its state coverage up for free reprints by other media outlets as long as they are appropriately credited. This is not an unusual arrangement; as advertising revenue bleeds away from local newspapers to the internet, small newspapers don't have the manpower to cover many state or national stories on their own anymore.

But when two small Colorado newspapers, the Kiowa County Press in Eads, and the Chronicle-News in Trinidad, published the story, they heard from Conor Cahill, Polis' spokesman, who asked them to take the articles down.

Cahill did not challenge any of the facts presented in the story. He, instead, objected to them having run news stories from The Center Square because he does not see them as an objective source of information. The Center Square is a product of the Franklin News Foundation, which offers state-level journalism and opinion pieces focused on fiscal responsibility and transparency. It used to be known as Watchdog.org but relaunched earlier this year under the new brand.

Cahill's argument is that donors to Franklin News Foundation may come from libertarian or conservative backgrounds, and the fact that writer Draplin is also an editor at The Daily Caller, a right-leaning outlet, apparently taints everything The Center Square writes, even if the story is completely accurate. After the editors refused Cahill's request and The Center Square reported what had happened, The Denver Post and even the Associated Press picked up the story. In an email to The Denver Post, Cahill explains his justification for reaching out to these newspapers:

"When we looked into this group and discovered that it was not an objective wire service, but instead a branded website funded by the Koch Brothers' political organization, we were alarmed that it was being reprinted by reputable news outlets in the state. The people of Colorado deserve quality, objective news they can trust so they can make their own informed decisions. Newspapers can publish whatever they want to, anywhere they want, at their own prerogative, but the public is served best when articles by partisan organizations are placed in the opinion section or branded accordingly."

When reached for comment by Reason, Cahill simply sent back the same quote.

What's alarming here is that, again, he provides no evidence that anything written in the very brief news story is inaccurate, just written by a group that gets funding from people with an agenda might not match that of the governor's office. Cahill is also implying that an organization with a political bent cannot also produce fact-based journalism. This would come as news to publications like Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and, well, Reason.

And without question, it's most certainly not the place of the governor's press office—whose role is to push forward Polis' agenda to the media—to be weighing in on what "objective" journalism is. That's especially true since Cahill, upon repeated request, cannot actually point to anything in The Center Square's piece that is factually inaccurate.

Cahill should maybe take a break from attempting to "work the refs" at his state's smallest media outlets and read up on the Streisand Effect. Because of his attempts to control what local newspapers publish, the news story actually got even more coverage than it would have otherwise.

CLAUDIA ROSETT REPORTING FROM HONG KONG: Fueling Hong Kong’s Fury, Carrie Lam Invokes Emergency Powers, Ban Masks. “Having invoked emergency powers, Lam is now in a position to do almost anything. As the New York Times sums it up: ‘Under the emergency powers, Mrs. Lam has a wide discretion to create new criminal laws and amend existing laws — all without going through the legislative process.’ Newspapers can be censored or shuttered, web sites closed down, property seized, searches carried out galore, and so forth.”

Read the whole thing.

NOT YET, BUT MAYBE: Is This The End Of The Lithium-Ion Battery?

Aluminum-based batteries would be cheaper to make, because aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust after oxygen and silicon. Aluminum is also light-weight and could be ideal for use in batteries.

Yet, for years scientists have stumbled in the research about aluminum batteries because they have yet to crack the code of what materials to use for the anode and cathode of the battery so that it could enable efficient energy storage with enough energy content.

Now scientists from Sweden and Slovenia say they have found a way to have efficient aluminum batteries with lower environmental impact and lower production costs.

Researchers from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology and the National Institute of Chemistry in Slovenia came up with a new concept for an aluminum battery design that promises twice the energy density compared to previous aluminum battery versions.

Compared to the lithium-ion batteries today, the new concept could lead to “markedly lower production costs” of aluminum batteries, the scientists say.

Faster, please. And more power, too.

SOME LADY IN GYM CLOTHES NEEDS TO TOSS A HAMMER AT THEM: Controversy as Apple removes Hong Kong protest app, saying it is ‘illegal.’ A friend on Facebook comments: “Remember back when Apple and Tim Cook made a big show of refusing to help the FBI unlock a terrorist’s iPhone? Remember what a friend of liberty it was then? Remember how willing it was to defy the state? Remember Apple, the principled defender of rights? Well.”

Flashback: Silicon Valley has gone from liberating to creepy.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, which marks the occasion when the Communist Party seized power in the world's most populous nation. The regime established then remains in power today, and is holding a massive celebration. But today is more properly an occasion for mourning. It is an appropriate time to remember the horrific injustices of the government that committed the biggest mass murder in the history of the world, and numerous other injustices and atrocities.

Though it gets nowhere near the level of attention it deserves, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was in fact the biggest mass murder in all of human history. I discussed its enormous scale here:

Historian Frank Dikötter, author of the important book Mao's Great Famine recently published an article in History Today, summarizing what happened:

"Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people's communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party's every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected."

A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation…."

The basic facts of the Great Leap Forward have long been known to scholars. Dikötter's work is noteworthy for demonstrating that the number of victims may have been even greater than previously thought, and that the mass murder was more clearly intentional on Mao's part, and included large numbers of victims who were executed or tortured, as opposed to "merely" starved to death. Even the previously standard estimates of 30 million or more, would still make this the greatest mass murder in history.

 

What happened in the Great Leap Forward was similar to what occurred in the Soviet Union and other communist regimes when agriculture was collectivized. But the death toll in China was much higher than anywhere else.

While the Great Leap Forward was the biggest atrocity committed by the PRC, it was far from the only one. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 also took millions of lives. And there was no shortage of other instances of official repression and mass murder during the Mao era, ranging from the brutal conquest and occupation of Tibet (which persists to this day) to numerous purges.

After Mao died in 1976, the regime liberalized much of the economy and eased up on repression. The resulting economic growth was impressive and helped lift millions out of poverty. But it is important to recognize that most of this progress was the result of the government's ending some of its own previous oppressive policies. For example, much of the economic growth occurred because rural Chinese were freed from being forcibly confined to collective farms, and allowed to move (relatively) freely to other parts of the country, where there were better opportunities.

Post-1976 China is far less awful than it was under Mao's rule, and the regime no longer adheres to many of the tenets of communist ideology, which has largely been supplanted by nationalism. But severe oppression nonetheless persists. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 is only the most famous example. The regime has also forcibly displaced tens of millions of people for various "development" projects, including over 1 million forced out of their homes just to build the facilities for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The cruel "one child" policy for a long time imposed  state control over one of the most intimate aspects of private family life.  in addition to its inherent injustice, the that policy have created serious social and economic problems that the regime will find it hard to overcome, including a serious gender imbalance in the population, and a rapidly aging work force.

And, of course, the government continues to be a one-party dictatorship, with severe limitations on freedom of expression. I got a first-hand view of some of this when I was a visiting professor at a Chinese university in 2014.

Sadly, under the rule of President Xi Jinping, the government has become much more repressive over the last few years. It has established massive detention camps in which hundreds of thousands of members of the Muslim Uighur minority have been confined for purposes of "reeducation." The regime's increasingly intolerant nationalism is bad news for other minorities, as well. Even the tiny community of Kaifeng Jews has been targeted for harassment and persecution.

There has also been a crackdown on real and imagined dissent even among Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group. The closure of the Unirule Institute—a  widely respected think tank critical of regime policy—is just one of many examples. I gave a talk at Unirule's offices in Beijing back in 2014—something that sadly would no longer be possible today. China is also trying to repress the liberal democratic protest movement in Hong Kong, in a dramatic confrontation that has captured the attention of the world.

The horrific history of the PRC is notable for exemplifying the evils of both of the ideologies that have caused enormous harm around the world over the last century: communism and nationalism. The regime's gradual transition from the former to the latter, while still being a brutal dictatorship, is a textbook example of how the two have many common flaws.

The unspeakable death toll created by the PRC doesn't necessarily prove it has been the very worst government in history. The numbers are so high in part because the Communist Party ruled over such a large population, and stayed in power for many years. If the likes of Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot had ruled over a comparably large population over a similar length of time, it is entirely possible they would have equaled or even surpassed Mao Zedong's dubious record. It is also possible to argue that genocide—mass murder inflicted based on race, religion, or ethnicity—is qualitatively worse than mass murder whose victims are chosen because they are "class enemies" or political dissidents, or just obstacles to the implementation of the regime's ideology. I don't buy this theory myself, but I can understand the sentiment behind it.

But even if the PRC is "merely" one of a handful of contenders for the title of worst regime in human history, rather than the clear winner of that dubious title, its awful record is still worthy of mourning. And such remembrance should be combined with a determination to learn its lessons, and use them to prevent the repetition of similar horrors.

FASTER, PLEASE: ‘Revolution’ in prostate cancer care as off-label breast cancer drug doubles survival.

UNRAVELING: Hong Kong Police Shoot a Protester With a Live Bullet for the First Time. “It was almost certain to further inflame protesters who have accused the police of employing overly aggressive tactics in the streets. Calls for an independent inquiry into the police’s behavior are among the key demands that protesters have issued to the Hong Kong government.”

Much more coverage from Michael Yon.

JIM GERAGHTY: Hunter Biden: The Most Comprehensive Timeline.

Late Summer 2006: Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, purchase the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.

The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws:

According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.

Both James and Hunter Biden have denied to Politico that James had ever made these comments.

Up until that time, Hunter Biden had been employed as a consultant to the Delaware bank MBNA, with a $100,000-a-year retainer, according to the New York Times. The bank hired him fresh out of law school and in less than two years promoted him to senior vice president.

From there, things get really complicated.

HAPPY 118TH BIRTHDAY TO PHYSICIST ENRICO FERMI:  In 1942, he conducted the first human-made, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at Stagg Field on the campus of the University of Chicago.  It was the Manhattan Project’s first major step toward creating the atomic bomb.

You might want to ask why they did this in the middle of the country’s second largest city.  Why not a lonely desert somewhere?  The answer is that those in charge trusted Fermi’s calculations, which indicated that it would be safe.  I’m … uh … glad he was right.

HOOVER DAM: On this day in 1935, Hoover Dam was officially dedicated.  At the time, it was the most expensive public works project in American history. Today it continues to supply power for over a million homes (and reliable water too). I am told my house in San Diego is usually one of them.

Just starting on this epic undertaking required building a railroad from Las Vegas to the site, constructing an entire town—Boulder City—to house the workers, and temporarily diverting the Colorado River through four diversion tunnels. All of this had to be done in a place where summer temperatures frequently top 110 degrees.

Among the many thousands of workers were the so-called “high scalers”—some of whom had been circus acrobats.  Their job was to climb down the canyon walls on ropes and remove all loose rock in preparation for building the actual dam. Jackhammers and dynamite were their tools.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation web site tells this story:

Perhaps the most famous feat any of the high scalers ever performed was a daring midair rescue. Burl R. Rutledge, a Bureau of Reclamation engineer, fell from the canyon rim. Twenty-five feet below, high scaler Oliver Cowan heard Rutledge slip. Without a moment’s hesitation, he swung himself out and seized Rutledge’s leg. A few seconds later, high scaler Arnold Parks swung over and pinned Rutledge’s body to the canyon wall. The scalers held Rutledge until a line was dropped and secured around him and the shaken engineer was pulled, unharmed, to safety.

I know I’ll forget by tomorrow, because it’s the 21^st century and it’s hard not to take electrical power for granted. But today at least I’m going to try to remember all those who worked on the dam—including the hundred or so who died—when I flip on a switch and a light comes on.  It’s a tribute to how lucky I am that I am likely to forget even before lunchtime.