The greatest danger of a nuclear exchange is not between the United States and Iran, the United States and China, the United States and Russia but, indeed, between India and Pakistan. According to this report at Business Insider the tensions between the two countries have been ratcheting up recently:

Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi on Friday unleashed the country’s military against rival Pakistan in response to a terror attack by Muslim separatists that killed 44 on Thursday.

“I know there is deep anger, your blood boils looking at what has happened. At this moment, there are expectations and the feelings of a strong response which is quite natural,” Modi said in a speech mourning the police forces killed and those injured.

India regularly accuses Pakistan of training and arming militants and smuggling them across the border into the Indian region of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region on the countries’ shared border.

Following the terror attack, where an explosive-laden truck plowed into a bus carrying police forces, India said it had “incontrovertible evidence” of Pakistan’s involvement in the attack. Pakistani-based Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad claimed the attack, but Pakistan quickly denied any official involvement.

“Our neighboring country thinks such terror attacks can weaken us, but their plans will not materialize,” said Modi of Pakistan.

“Security forces have been given permission to take decisions about the timing, place and nature of their response,” Modi continued.

This may prove to be the most important news story in the world today, dwarfing our own political squabbles. There are many ways and reasons for the situation to get out of hand not the least of which is the impending election in India.

Pakistan is barely a country at all. My favorite description is that it’s “a government without a country”. It has four distinct separatist movements and at least two insurgencies presently in progress. Its military and secret service have been implicated in multiple different terrorist attacks in India and Afghanistan. The entire situation is teetering on the edge of a precipice.

In a direct conflict Pakistan would not stand a chance against India and such a conflict could quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange.

It’s big news here in Chicago. CBS Chicago is reporting that there have been some serious developments in the Smollett case:

CHICAGO (CBS) — Jussie Smollett paid two brothers to stage an attack against him, directed them to buy items used in the alleged assault and actually rehearsed it with them, sources say.

Sources say at least one of the brothers bought the rope used in the incident at Smollett’s request. The sources also say the “Empire” actor paid for the rope, which was purchased at the Crafty Beaver Hardware Store in the Ravenswood neighborhood the weekend of Jan. 25.

Smollett’s legal team is punching back:

Smollett’s attorneys, Todd S. Pugh and Victor P. Henderson, released a statement Saturday about the latest allegations.

“As a victim of a hate crime who has cooperated with the police investigation, Jussie Smollett is angered and devastated by recent reports that the perpetrators are individuals he is familiar with. He has now been further victimized by claims attributed to these alleged perpetrators that Jussie played a role in his own attack. Nothing is further from the truth and anyone claiming otherwise is lying.

“One of these purported suspects was Jussie’s personal trainer who he hired to ready him physically for a music video. It is impossible to believe that this person could have played a role in the crime against Jussie or would falsely claim Jussie’s complicity.

I do not know the truth of the matter. We will need to wait for more developments.

I can only add that in Illinois making a false police report is a violation of llinois Statutes Chapter 720. Criminal Offenses § 5/26-1, is deemed “Disorderly Conduct”, and is punishable by jail time, fines, and possible civil suit. The fines are capped at $10,000.

If the charge turns out to have been a fraud, it would be deeply distressing. It would be the second time in as many weeks of a high profile charge of crimes related to bigotry turning out to have been wrong.

The situation reminds me of nothing so much as a Soviet disinformation campaign. You would be shocked at how many horrible things you probably believe the United States has done that had their origins in Soviet disinformation campaigns.

There’s an article at Science-based-Medicine on the controversies associated with cholesterol that I found interesting and wanted to commend to your attention. Unsurprisingly, it reaches the conclusion that high cholesterol is bad for you:

We have moved past diet studies for lowering cholesterol. Women are included in studies. There is a mortality benefit. Statins (and other medications) do work by lowering LDL. Statins are now generic. There are alternative to statins if you have side effects. The thing about the cholesterol controversy is that most of it has been settled.

Some issues remain. Maybe it is better to measure to non-HDL cholesterol or ApoB cholesterol instead of LDL cholesterol. But this is a subtle point, and finding a better way to measure something does not negate the underlying truth that high cholesterol increases the risk of heart disease.

There was a time when someone could be skeptical about the role of cholesterol in cardiac risk reduction. That time has now past.

but some of the other observation may (or may not) surprise you for example that diet studies are by and large terrible and that the populations in drug trials haven’t been random sample, indeed, have been very biased. I don’t think that the author addresses that issue enough. Historically, the participants in early drug trials have overwhelmingly been white middle-aged men, frequently from within single social strata.

Some other things that the author touches on but does not consider enough IMO are that we don’t know nearly enough about what is normal or about subgroups within populations.

I had to laugh when I read this article at Fortune about the prices charged by hospitals for pharmaceuticals:

A new study shows something many healthcare patients know all too well: hospitals are charging significant premiums on some of the most-used prescription drugs.

In a new study of 34 hospital systems, Wall Street firm AllianceBernstein found that the average drug prices in a hospital are three to seven times higher than what Medicare charges for the same medication, according to Axios, which obtained a copy of the study. Academic hospitals, which provide care and also train new doctors, had the highest markups on medications. AllianceBernstein also found that generic drug prices at all the hospital systems tended to be higher than brand-name medications.

Here’s the punchline:

Within the AllianceBernstein study, an unnamed CEO at a pharmaceutical company said that prices on oncology drugs, in particular, need to remain high. If they didn’t, the person said, “every hospital in the country will go broke.”

or, in other words, the prices charged by hospitals for pharmaceuticals have no relation to costs. They’re to pay the hospital’s “burden”—the wages of hospital administrators, physicians, nurses, techicians, maintenance staff, and so on.

What amused me about this was that I learned that the way real companies, particularly big companies, set prices is not what you learned in economics class. I’d be interested in a description of what kind of micromanaging government policy would remedy this situation without addressing the underlying problem. The problem is, as succinctly stated by the CEO of the Mayo Clinic some years ago, too many people making too much money.

An article at PR Newswire supports a point I’ve been making for years:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Cost recovery for electric sector cybersecurity investments and development of resilience metrics to gauge the industry’s progress are two of several recommendations unveiled today by Vermont Law School researchers who briefed the Critical Infrastructure Committee of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) on the findings of a six-month study of electric grid security.

The study, conducted for Protect Our Power by the law school’s Institute for Energy and the Environment (IEE), recommends that state utility commissions exercise their authority to increase the flow of confidential information regarding vulnerabilities and best practices. It also identifies the diversity of regulatory approaches to cybersecurity regulation by utility commissions across the country as a concern that warrants attention and improvement.

“Addressing anticipatory threats such as cyberattacks is a challenge that we are not fully meeting,” said Mark James, assistant professor of energy law and a senior research fellow, who led the institute’s research team. “As interconnections between and within distribution systems increase, the vulnerability of the electric grid also increases. Continuous communication between utilities and their regulatory commissions is the first step to improving the depth, quality and consistency of efforts to address cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”

Resiliency of the power grid is a public good (non-rivalrous and non-exclusionary) and it is not one that individual power companies will ever pay for. They would prefer to take the risk of a catastrophic failure and face the outcome in the courts than pay the substantial amounts required to prevent the catastrophic failure in the first place. If you need an example of that look at the recent brouhaha about PGE in California.

When infrastructure bills are discussed grid resiliency rarely makes the list. It’s too invisible to make a good candidate and those it would employ are the wrong people and there are not enough of them.

The idea of paying people who are unwilling to work might have more traction than we think. We have been paying the members of Congress for years.

As might have been expected the editors of the New York Times are unhappy about President Trump’s designation of the situation at our southern border as an emergency, the better to make good on his campaign promise of building a wall without authorization or appropriations from the Congress:

In reality, the wall is not a done deal, and Mr. Trump has spent the past few months — the past two years, really — failing to convince either Congress or Mexico to pay for it. This week’s bipartisan spending bill, which contained no more wall money than the one over which Mr. Trump shut down the government in December, was a particularly humiliating defeat.

Desperate to save face, the president and his team cooked up a nonemergency emergency with the aim of seizing funds already appropriated for other purposes. Currently, the plan is to pull $2.5 billion from the military’s drug interdiction program, $3.6 billion from its construction budget and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s drug forfeiture fund. The White House plans to “backfill” the money it is taking from the Pentagon in future budgets.

The lawsuits challenging the president’s decision are already flooding the courts:

Even as he spun this as an act of strong leadership, Mr. Trump acknowledged that his declaration resolves nothing and creates a host of legal, legislative and political troubles. He predicted that the move would prompt swift legal pushback, which it did. Less than four hours after the announcement, a government watchdog group filed suit, demanding that the Department of Justice hand over “documents concerning the legal authority of the president to invoke emergency powers.” Soon after, the State of California announced its intention to sue. On Thursday, even before the announcement, Protect Democracy and the Niskanen Center announced plans to file on behalf of El Paso County and the Border Network for Human Rights. So the floodgates are open.

What drives me to the point of screaming are the bitter laments about abrogation of the rule of law. A bit late with that warning, chief.

Let’s consider the rule of law aspects of this issue a bit starting with national emergencies and ending with legal standing. There are presently thirty some-odd national emergencies presently declared in the United States and, presumably, still in progress, the oldest declared by Jimmy Carter and the most recent two declared by Donald Trump.

Of his own power the president does not have the authority to declare a national emergency and that authority cannot reasonably be inferred from the president’s constitutional authority. That authority was granted to the president by the National Emergency Act of 1977. I’ve read it. It is absurdly broad. It can be construed to give the president the authority to declare a national emergency any time he or she cares to for any reasons he or may see fit and do practically anything he or she cares to.

Here’s the rub. The Congress does not itself have the authority to enact such a law let alone delegate such powers to the president. You will search the Constitution in vain for that power among the Congress’s enumerated powers and it cannot reasonably be inferred from any of those actual powers. Depending on their state constitutions, the legislatures of the states may have the legal authority to allow their governors to declare state-level emergencies but that’s irrelevant to the issue of national emergencies.

The common law is pretty clear on this issue, too. “Emergency powers” cannot be construed in as broad a manner as the National Emergency Act does.

There are several clear remedies available. The Congress can repeal the National Emergency Act which would be my preference. If a case brought by an individual with proper legal standing were to make it through the courts, in theory the Supreme Court could declare the National Emergency Act unconstitutional which would be a fine outcome as well. If they were to reject the Congress’s ability to delegate its constitutional authority to the executive, that would be good, too. The likelihood of their of those outcomes is practically nonexistent.

To have legal standing one of three conditions must be met:

1. The party must be directly adversely affected.
2. If not directly adversely affected, the case must have some relation to the party’s situation.
3. The law must give the party automatic standing.

I do not believe any of those conditions applies to any of the organizations that have filed suit to date. Indeed, it’s difficult for me to see what organization or individual would have standing. That is not to say that some court some where might not see legal standing for some one some how. But this post is about the rule of law not about the court’s ability to torture the law into arriving at a desired outcome. That’s not remotely the rule of law.

So, Congress, do your danged job. Repeal the National Emergency Act and start doing your own danged job. If anything less happens, let’s not whine about abrogation of the rule of law, shall we? What we’re seeing is the juridification of differences of opinion on policy.

Update

The editors of the Washington Post are no happier:

The emergency for Mr. Trump is purely political, impelled by expectations inflated by his campaign promises to build a border wall and force Mexico to pay. Having conflated a political crisis with a national one, Mr. Trump chooses to dodge, dissemble and lie. A self-respecting Congress would not let stand this manufactured emergency.

which approaches my position.

Shame on you, Congress. You created this debacle. Now fix it.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal point out that two wrongs don’t make a right:

Democrats cheered on Barack Obama’s legal abuses on immigration and so much more, and now many Republicans are cheering President Trump’s declaration of a border emergency to build his wall. Constitutional conservatives should be wary of both.

President Obama unilaterally expanded the rules for asylum and immigration, an abuse of authority. I thought the Congress should have acted to remedy that as well.

I am glad to see that at least one person sees the problem with high-speed rail in the United States as I see it. That person is Jake Bacharach at HmmDaily:

American infrastructure is this costly because of immense, endemic, universal public-private corruption—systems of both direct and financialized graft at every stage of infrastructure development, from the planning to the ribbon-cutting to the use of deferred maintenance to ransack public transportation budgets for cash, year after year, after which the responsible authorities claim that fixing the century-old signals is just too damn pricey. This system of legal fraud begins with the bevies of project consultants, continues through ludicrous private contractor and labor costs, and continues when, years later, high-paid administrative fixers and new armies of consultants and contractors arrive to fix what broke because it was never maintained. It is a system of tolerated kleptocracy that may be the only thing that America still does better than anyone else in the world. It is baked into every assumption about building for the public benefit.

That isn’t true only of high-speed rail. It’s true of education, health care, the military, and every other action of government at any level in the United States. It will be true of a “Green New Deal” is such a thing were to be embarked upon. It is why we pay more for just about anything than anyone else in the world. Can we fix these things? Yes, we can. Will we? The smart money says “No”.

A recent report from a pair of scholars at the University of Illinois, Chicago, found that Chicago is the most corrupt city in the United States:

During 2017, the latest years for which figures from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) are available, there were 25 public corruption convictions in the Northern District of Illinois, which includes all of Chicago and the northern third of Illinois. This is down from 30 in 2016 and down from an average of 33.6 per year over the last 10 years. There were a total of 34 cases of public corruption convictions in all of Illinois, proving that public corruption is not just a big city problem.

Statistics compiled by the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section show that from 1976 through 2017, a total of 1,731 individuals were convicted of public corruption in the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago). In the same time period, the Central District of California (Los Angeles) convicted 1,534; the Southern District of New York (Manhattan), 1,327; Florida Southern (Miami) 1,165; and the District of Columbia (Washington), 1,159. These five districts, Chicago, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Miami and Washington D.C. led all of the 93 federal judicial districts for the 47-year period since 1976.

The complete report can be found here (docx).

The same report found that Illinoisis the third most corrupt state but that’s misleading since they’re including Washington, DC as a state. Among actual states Illinois’s only real competition is Louisiana, a distinction of sorts since Louisiana is notoriously corrupt.

However, make no mistake Los Angeles, New York, and Miami are highly corrupt as well. Size and corruption go hand in hand.

It also bears mentioning that many of the candidates presently running to be Chicago’s next mayor have connections to the corrupt Illinois Democratic establishment and in all likelihood one of them will ultimately be elected. Short version: little future improvement is likely.