DL Open Thread: Friday, April 14, 2023

In other words, he was just like Trump–without the quid pro quos.  The National Guard does as good a job of screening their applicants as do the police.

Guess Who Bought Property From Clarence Thomas.  Guess Who Didn’t Reveal It.  Time’s up.  Harlan Crow.  Clarence Thomas:

In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.

The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.

The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica.

The disclosure form Thomas filed for that year also had a space to report the identity of the buyer in any private transaction, such as a real estate deal. That space is blank.

“He needed to report his interest in the sale,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.”

Thomas did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

Why did Crow buy the property?  Not, to be clear, to evict Thomas’ mother:

In a statement, Crow said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house, where Thomas spent part of his childhood, to preserve it for posterity. “My intention is to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “I approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”

Thomas has been an ethical stain on the Supreme Court since his unwarranted ascension to the body.  It has placed the legitimacy of the Court into question.  Will Roberts do anything?  Can he?

Texas Barn Becomes–Cattle-itic Converter.  18,000 bovines perish in dairy farm explosion.  There were, of course, no regulations:

The blaze prompted calls from the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), among the oldest US animal protection groups, for federal laws to prevent barn fires which kill hundreds of thousands of farm animals each year.

There are no federal regulations protecting animals from the fires and only a few states, Texas not among them, have adopted fire protection codes for such buildings, according to an AWI statement.

Hmmm, does Delaware have such protections for their chicken houses?

I Invented “The Miracle Of Comfort Science”.  Ice Cream Is Proof-Positive.  At first, it was just one of my riffs at Trader Joe’s.  The purported science being, “That which makes you happy is good for you.”  I’ve long held that any discipline with the word ‘science’ after it isn’t really a science.  I say this as someone who had a dual major in political science. But, I digress.  Here’s what you need to know:

Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition.

The initial survey took place back in 2005, with similar results.  Harvard didn’t like that result either.  So they started touting the benefits of yogurt.  We, however, had ‘real-world’ evidence:

In 2017, the YouTuber Anthony Howard-Crow launched what Men’s Health called “a diet that would make the American Dietetic Association shit bricks”: 2,000 calories a day of ice cream plus 500 calories of protein supplements plus booze. After 100 days on the ice-cream diet, he’d lost 32 pounds and had better blood work than before he’d started pounding Irish-whiskey milkshakes. Still, the method is unlikely to take the slimming world by storm: Howard-Crow called his ice-cream bender “the most miserable dieting adventure I have ever embarked upon.”

Ah, but it worked.

If you read the entire report, you will reach the same conclusion that I did:

Comfort Science>’Nutrition Science’.

What do you want to talk about?