I’m of mixed minds regarding yesterday’s SCOTUS decision regarding racial gerrymandering. For a complete rundown of the decision see Amy Howe’s post at SCOTUSBlog.

As I see it there are two distinct but interrelated matter—the policy issue and the legal issue. As Ms. Howe’s post should make clear most of the commentary including the dissents by three Supreme Court justices are on the policy issue. I am more concerned about the legal concerns in the decision. If anyone can point me to a good, dispassionate discussion of those, I would greatly appreciate it.

There’s a clear problem: roughly a third of Louisiana’s voting age population is black. All else equal one might expect roughly a third of Louisianas’s Congressional representatives to be black, too. That would be two representatives. Sometimes one, sometimes three, but generally two.

Now consider the proposed map of districts at the top of this post which the SCOTUS decision declared unconstitutional. The proposed 6th district is rather obviously ferociously gerrymandered. At the current scale, congressional districts are too coarse to reflect underlying demographic realities without distortion; increasing granularity reduces the need for those distortions. My preferred solution to the problem would be for Congress to double the number of Congressional representatives. Since the size of Congress was fixed in 1929 by the Permanent Apportionment Act, an act of Congress would be sufficient to change that. Let’s engage in a thought experiment and imagine doubling the size of the House. Louisiana’s Congressional districts would increase from six to twelve. That would allow one majority black district around New Orleans, one majority black district around Baton Rouge, one majority black district around Shreveport, and, possibly one additional majority black district, much less gerrymandered than the proposed Sixth District.

In other words, the problem that’s being addressed isn’t simply racism or partisanship. It’s racism and partisanship and the lack of granularity in Congressional districts. The point isn’t that increasing the number of districts would eliminate gerrymandering or resolve the legal tensions in voting-rights law. It’s that it would change the incentives. With smaller, more numerous districts, the payoff from any single act of line-drawing is reduced, and the need for extreme, long-distance stitching of populations, whether for partisan or racial purposes, is correspondingly diminished.

I wanted to call attention to this piece by Paul D. Thacker at RealClearInvestigations. In the piece Mr. Thacker explores researcher Paul Baric’s loss of NIH grants, suspension, and an alleged cover-up surrounding his role in the development of SARS-CoV-2. Here’s a snippet:

Since the pandemic’s outbreak six years ago, a slew of emails and documents released by Congress and through public records requests cast a dark shadow on the NIH and the virologists it funded, with nearly two-thirds of Americans now believing the virus came from a laboratory in China. Although the question of whether the virus that causes COVID-19 originated in a lab or in the wild is still a subject of debate, there is no doubt that scientists at the highest level worked to dismiss the lab-leak theory and shut down their connections to the work in Wuhan. Efforts by Collins and Fauci to delegitimize dissenting voices have been reported, but the central role played by Baric has been obscured. The UNC researcher’s work on coronaviruses and his connection to the Wuhan lab are now receiving renewed attention after RealClearInvestigations learned that the federal government has quietly removed Baric from all his NIH grants. RCI has also learned that UNC placed Baric on leave. UNC has also refused to cooperate with NIH officials as they have attempted to gather more facts and emails about Baric’s coronavirus research, which evidence leads them to believe led to the coronavirus pandemic.

I don’t see that this reveals as much as its author seems to think it does. There is a sizeable gap between being interested in gain-of-function and novel coronaviruses and actually developing them. The article relies heavily on stacking implications: each individually ambiguous fact is presented in a way that encourages the reader to infer a conclusion that none of the facts independently establish.

As I see it the case Mr. Thacker builds would be dismissed in criminal court since it doesn’t meet the standard of “guilty beyond reasonable doubt” and, while it might survive early dismissal in a civil case where the standard is “preponderance of the evidence”, whether that case would be decided in favor of the plaintiffs remains to be seen. While the article strengthens the case that a lab origin was prematurely and self-interestedly stigmatized and that U.S.-funded coronavirus research deserves much more scrutiny, it does not prove that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered or that Dr. Baric, UNC, EcoHealth, or WIV created the pandemic virus.

I continue to believe as I have for some time that we do not know the origins of the virus and the sole prospective way of identifying it for sure is in the discovery phase of a civil suit if such a thing were allowed to go through, a very long shot.

The fifth and final season of the French police series HPI has dropped at Hulu. The series has been remade in the States as HIP. In the French series Morgane is a 38 year old single mother—brilliant, beautiful, sexy and a complete screw-up in her personal life. I’ve watched a couple of episodes of the final season and it is every bit as good as the previous four.

There really is no comparison between the French series and the American—the French series is that much better. I don’t quite know what it is but the French are not afraid to mock just about anyone—Morgane, the police (particularly the higher-ranking officers). I tried to watch an episode of the American version but it just took everyone too seriously.

What struck me about the media reactions to the security breach at the White House correspondents’ dinner was how rote the media responses have been. They reminded me of the obituaries of elderly public figures, obviously written years before and taken from the file when needed.

The outlets that oppose Trump blame it on Trump. Those that support him blame it on those who oppose him. There are kernels of truth in both of those positions but mere kernels. What is most notable is the utter lack of self-awareness.

Consider the Washington Post report by Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck and Joe Heim. Superficially, it’s a dispassionate analysis. Pragmatically, it criticizes the Trump Administration members for attending the dinner and for inadequate security at the dinner. It was not officially a National Security Event.

White House correspondents’ dinners have never been officially deemed national security events. Unlike, for example, the State of the Union message they are private events and private events are rarely if ever designated as national security events. That is adequate to explain the security posture. In other words the report is another way of saying it’s Trump’s fault.

Rep. Ro Khanna has called for a federal commission on violence. That, too, is a completely predictable reaction to the events.

A particularly unhelpful response was the one offered by President Obama, that we do not fully understand the prospective assassin’s motives for his actions. We do not fully understand John Wilkes Booth’s motives for assassinating President Lincoln and that was over 150 years ago. How often do we fully understand anything?

We do have the “gunman’s” manifesto. The manifesto is sufficient to establish a political motive consistent with widely circulating rhetoric. We do not need omniscience to act on that. The motives expressed in his manifesto were not unlike those expressed on the placards being carried by those protesting President Trump’s appearance at the dinner outside, including “Death to kings” and “Death to them all”.

My advice is stand down. Reduce the temperature. I have been warning about the risks of this for some time. The cognitive changes wrought by post-literacy encourage more agonistic modes of expression. Those are to be expected given the shift from linear, text-based reasoning to image-driven, affective cognition, something I have dubbed “visualcy”. In a country of more than 330 million people highly agonistic modes of expression inevitably motivate some to take violent action.

An alternative title for this post might have been “Round up the usual suspects”.

I was astonished at this report by Rick Pearson in the Chicago Tribune. 34% of the Chicagoans polled approved of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s performance? Where have they been?

That calls into question the methodology of the poll. Were members of the CTU overrepresented? That would explain it.

In a post at Persuasion self-described “climate activist” Quico Toro asks whether it’s possible to “stabilize the climate” without immiserating billions of people? In making his argument he displays a chart which should give us pause:

He then lurches uncontrollably, as John McLaughlin used to say, into the position I’ve argued for decades: to whatever extent carbon emissions are a problem their effects can only be mitigated not ended.

In musing over his post I want to provide one correction and some observations. My correction is that the earth’s climate has never been stable and cannot be stabilized without killing everything on the plant. If Mr. Toro is using “stabilized” as shorthand, he doesn’t explain it. I assume he is. If “stabilize” means holding key climate variables within a bounded range then the question becomes one of cost and distribution not absolute possibility.

But since no source is provided, the reader is left in the position of being asked to accept the conclusion without being able to evaluate the evidence. Fortunately, this particular point does not depend on his graphic. It is already well-established that as countries industrialize and improve living standards, their energy use and therefore carbon emissions tend to rise.

From that, several implications follow. First, it is not realistic to suppose that the “rich countries”, viz. the United States, Canada, and the European Union, can solve whatever problem carbon emissions produce simply by eliminating their own emissions. Even complete decarbonization on their part would be insufficient without similar changes elsewhere. Second, among poorer countries, those that have most successfully improved the condition of their populations are generally those with higher emissions. Development and emissions, at least under current technological constraints, go together.

A genuine solution, therefore, must align with the incentives facing developing countries rather than working against them. One possibility would be the development of inexpensive technologies for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into products with real economic value, products that poorer countries could produce and sell. The basic technology for extracting carbon dioxide already exists. The challenge is to make it inexpensive and to tie it to a viable market. Do that and even the poorest countries would have a reason to adopt it.

I find this news deeply distressing. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been indicted by a grand jury for money laundering, making false statements, and conspiracy:

A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division filed two forfeiture actions to recover alleged proceeds of the organization’s fraud scheme. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated this case with assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups – even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

This is not a rumor or a partisan talking point; it is a formal indictment returned by a grand jury. That makes it serious. But it is still unproven—and that uncertainty is precisely what makes the situation so troubling. The reason I find it distressing is that no matter how it is interpreted there is very little good news here. As I see it there are three prospective explanations:

1. The SPLC’s side—they were engaging in investigation and paying informants.

Even if this were an informant model, it raises difficult questions about moral hazard and indirect enablement. Money is fungible, and the line between infiltration and subsidization is not as clean as one might wish. Furthermore, citizens in a polity have an obligation to report crimes. That applies to journalists and NGOs as well. If they knew that crimes were to be committed and, worse, paid some of those doing the planning for those crimes, they were accomplices before the fact.

2. The DOJ’s explanation—the SPLC were committing crimes to have more to complain about.

According to the indictment starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC’s direction. Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.

“Donors gave their money believing they were supporting the fight against violent extremism,” said Acting United States Attorney Kevin Davidson. “As alleged, the SPLC instead diverted a portion of those funds to benefit individuals and groups they claimed to oppose. That kind of deception undermines public trust and social cohesion.”

Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups…

Those groups included the Ku Klux Klan, the American NAZI Party, and Aryan Nation.

Long-lived organizations like the SPLC are subject to a temptation to drift from mission completion to mission maintenance. Has the SPLC fallen to that temptation?

3. The DOJ is engaging in a partisan hit job.

The SPLC, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and many others have made precisely that claim against the DOJ.

Every single one of those explanations would be horrid. Whichever explanation proves correct, something important has already been damaged.

That’s how David Ignatius describes the negotiations between the United States and Iran in his most recent Washington Post column. Mr. Ignatius seems vexed by what’s happening:

Given the stakes, you’d think that Trump would want de-escalation. But that’s not the way he operates. He likes disorder and destabilization — and seems ready to keep extending the state of uncertainty. He seems to think that creating and tolerating instability is his secret power. But with his extension he may have moved toward a more stable negotiation platform. The financial markets have been so convinced that Trump will make a deal in the end that they’ve been discounting the trash talk, reciprocal blockades and negotiating delays. Tuesday’s events make that look like a wise bet, but we’ll see.

As I see it there are several possible explanations for how things have progressed or, more accurately, failed to progress.

The first is the one that President Trump offered: he’s giving the Iranians time to agree among themselves. That reflects a reality that neither the Administration nor Mr. Ignatius have fully come to terms with: Iran does not speak with a single voice. Just as a start there are the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), and the secular civilian authorities. The IRGC appears to benefit from sanctions and may even be gaining power as a consequence of the Israeli and American attacks against Iran. The clerical leadership prioritizes regime survival and ideological legitimacy. The civilian technocrats may want economic normalization.

With whom has the Administration been negotiating? Based on public reporting, the Administration appears to be negotiating primarily with civilian authorities. But there is little evidence those can bind the other power centers, and equally little evidence that those centers can reliably agree among themselves.

The second explanation is that this is another example of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

The third, which Mr. Ignatius seems to lean into, is that this is simply the president’s way.

I suspect there are elements of truth in all of those explanations but, again, the simple reality is that even if you got all of Iran’s competing factions into a room, agreement, even if achieved, would be slow to form, fragile in substance, and uncertain in execution because it would rest on actors who cannot fully bind one another..

Ignatius gestures at an important point but doesn’t develop it: “bargaining” does not mean the same thing in Tehran as it does in Washington. Iranian negotiating practice places greater emphasis on patience, positional strength, and the avoidance of visible concession, and often proceeds through indirect signaling and extended back-and-forth rather than linear problem-solving. If you combine that with the fact that Iran does not speak with a single voice, the expectation of a single, clean, comprehensive deal begins to look less like a delayed outcome and more like a bad assumption.

My reaction to the editors’ of the Washington Post’s complaint about “Luigi Mangione copycats” was that, if a legal system were specifically designed not to deter would-be criminals, it could not achieve that objective much better than our present system.

To act as a deterrent a criminal justice system must be timely and sure not severe. Ours fails on all counts. In many jurisdictions, clearance rates for serious crimes remain low, and repeat arrests before adjudication are common. In practice many criminals are either never arrested or arrested and released dozens or even hundreds of times without ever being tried much less convicted. According to Pew Research only 2% of federal criminal defendants go to trial and most have been arrested before. Once arrested weeks, months, or even years may elapse before a trial and, even if a conviction results, the crime may have been pled down to something much more minor than the original charge.

There are modern systems, Japan’s for example, where the probability of apprehension and resolution is high, and that appears to have deterrent effects. The point isn’t to import their system wholesale but to note what they get right: certainty.

Luigi Mangione was arrested in December 2024. He should have been tried and, if the evidence against him supported it, convicted more than a year ago. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees a right to a speedy trial. That should cut both ways. Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys should be able to prolong the process indefinitely.