I’ve taken a lot of shots at Nintendo over the years, often times under various versions of headlines that start with “Nintendo Hates You“. And those shots were well earned, given the company’s apparent policy of being as anti-fan as it possibly can be on all matters related to intellectual property. Nintendo never misses an opportunity to choose IP protectionism over embracing fan culture and the creativity of its own customers and evangelists.

But once we get away from matters of IP, Nintendo can actually be quite attentive to its fan-base. Everything about the UX for its platforms, consoles, and first-party titles show genuine care for what Nintendo fans want and like. It’s how this company has managed to remain so successful after all of these years. And that apparently extends to the latest console-war battleground, which is physical media. And on physical media, Nintendo appears to put a ton of weight on what a portion of its fans want as it plans to continue the use of physical media into the future.

Vice President and General Manager for Nintendo in Latin America Bill van Zyll spoke on the topic during a recent interview with YouTuber Coelho conducted during the Brazil Game Show. The Nintendo-focused YouTube channel asked about a number of topics related to Nintendo’s activities in the region, including localized Nintendo Directs. That’s when the question of physical games inevitably came up. Van Zyll was keen to emphasize the benefits of the format while assuring the company’s continued plans to produce physical games.

“Historically, we haven’t had a preference for a specific format,” he explains. “We take consumer preferences very much into consideration. We also have a platform that was just launched. We’ve been around for a little over a year with the Nintendo Switch 2, and it offers both digital and physical games. Therefore, we have no plans to abandon physical media. We know how much fans enjoy it.”

As Kotaku notes, consumer demographics are certainly playing a roll here. Nintendo gamers prioritize physical media games more than other console users. But in an industry that is quickly building a reputation for casting aside customer sentiment in favor of doing whatever the Copilot-created spreadsheet tells them they should do, seeing a gaming company actually take its own customers into account in this way is a good thing.

Nintendo’s heavier reliance on physical sales makes any argument for a shift towards digital sales exclusively far weaker, making the choice to continue supporting physical sales an expected response from the company. Still, as Sony continues conversations with a number of companies over their decision, it is at least reassuring for Nintendo fans that the company has no plans to follow Sony’s lead. At least for now.

There is a big enough percentage of the gaming public that likes to buy something physical, for all kinds of reasons. Ownership rights are far more robust that way (for now). Preservationists need physical media to truly do their preservation work. Treating these games and the media packaged with it as collectables is absolutely a thing.

So, those of you who want physical media games? Nintendo loves you is the only appropriate headline. I just wish that posture could infect all the other areas in which Nintendo has long treated its fans poorly.

Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president for Starlink and president of xAI, appeared recently at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey to lament the rise of space collisions as Musk and Bezos flood the night sky with low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. According to Nicolls, there’s been a decided lack of coordination among space companies as they’ve rushed LEO satellites into orbit (sans any meaningful regulatory oversight), resulting in multiple recent near-collisions:

“Once you can track this debris, and if you can track it well, these are like obstacles on a road. If you can measure them, you can predict where they’re going to be, and you can avoid them,” Nicolls said. “What you can’t avoid is other operators who maneuver without telling you where they’re going to go. We have many examples of this on Starlink, unfortunately.”

Both Bezos and Musk have only really begun to launch tens of thousands of expected LEO satellites, so the coordination problems we’re seeing now are just the very beginning.

Starlink satellites perform around 1,000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day to avoid other satellites or space debris. According to Nicolls, Starlink satellites have avoided collisions with around 650 active satellites, without only half of those satellite owners engaging in ephemeris sharing with SpaceX. Some avoid sharing this location and movement data out of fear that it will compromise competitive information.

As a result, there’s been a surge in examples where other company’s satellites got “too close for comfort”:

“Either they were not publishing their ephemeris to us, or they were not considering the ephemeris of others when they were maneuvering, and these led to conjunctions of tens of meters to hundreds of meters,” Nicolls said. “Way too close to [sic] comfort.”

If only there were… say… some sort of government bodies tasked with overseeing the rise in space junk and orbital debris, helping industry coordinate launches and navigation, and penalizing bad actors who repeatedly engage in bad behavior that can’t be deterred through industry collaboration?

U.S. regulators had historically had a hands-off approach to regulating space, though more recent incarnations of the FCC had just begun implementing some actual guidelines — like this 2022 proposal by the Biden FCC that implemented a five year limit for letting your dead satellite stick around in space. That was matched with FCC actions to finalize penalize companies that bungle de-orbits.

You’re to ignore that Elon Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government — and subsequent butchering of numerous regulatory initiatives he wasn’t empathic or smart enough to understand — will directly contribute to all manner of chaos, both terrestrial or otherwise. Musk’s cash helped contribute to gentlemen like Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, who spends most of his time taking a giant dump on the first amendment or gutting consumer protections and corporate oversight.

Nicolls also laments the lack of cooperation with China, which is increasingly difficult given the overt hostility, protectionism, and xenophobia of a Trump administration heavily propped up by Musk cash.

In addition to space junk, scientific researchers have warned for years that Elon Musk’s Starlink LEO constellations are harming research. The light pollution (Musk claimed would never happen in the first place) is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated.

The massive repeated launch and de-orbiting of LEO satellites at scale is also introducing a massive amount of burning heavy metals into the atmosphere that scientists say are actively degrading progress made on restoring the ozone layer. Thanks to Musk and his autocrats, regulators are now largely incapable of protecting the public from these growing harms as well.

Despite the apparent belief that government exists exclusively to steal peoples’ money and stifle innovation, these government agencies can and do contribute massively to the public good. Often invisibly, if they’re doing their jobs well. When they aren’t doing their jobs well it’s often because they’re being lobotomized through the kind of mindless deregulation Musk supports.

Then when companies and industries complain that there’s perhaps more anticompetitive shenanigans and market chaos than there should be — they refuse to connect the dots back to their own actions. And they’re helped by a press (notice this Ars Technica piece never even brings up Musk companies’ history of undermining government) that doesn’t have much interest in pressing the issue.

For American democracy to survive, we are going to have to do something about the current operation of our judicial system. But what is needed to fix it is more than just “packing” the Supreme Court, as many have proposed, because the problems we’re facing extend far beyond just its current personnel line-up. There are other things that could and should be done to the court system, and first. After all, expanding the Supreme Court is hardly an expedient change. Getting the desired result—more seats, filled by more preferable jurists—would require control of the White House to first change. But many of the other things we could do would likely only need a Congress committed to achieving them. We should start there, so that we can start making meaningful improvements without delay.

Furthermore, lasting, effective reform requires strategic thinking about how the entire federal court system functions, at every level and not just the Supreme Court. It requires that all of its interdependent parts be overhauled in a sensible, sustainable way that respects, and, when necessary, restores, American legal traditions. No change should be so radical that we throw out the baby with the bathwater, as there are plenty of good things about its previous and even current function worth saving—in fact, one of the biggest issues we’re facing with the courts right now is how many of those traditions (ex: respect for precedent) are suddenly being ignored, in which case the “radical reform” is simply to reverse that trend.

It is also important that the result of any reform effort minimizes the judicial branch being a political prize for future elected officials to fight over. That it has already become one is itself a big reason why reform is now warranted. We need a judicial system that can withstand political winds and gain legitimacy from doing so. It will take some political power to remediate what our judicial system has deteriorated into in order to restore its apolitical constitutional function, but such should be a goal of the exercise.

What follows, then, is a preliminary list of steps for Congress to take to achieve this comprehensive reform. Some will of course directly zero in on the Supreme Court, including changing how it is constituted, but such a change alone won’t be enough, not even to address all the problems with the current Court. First and perhaps foremost Congress needs to take stock of the procedural rules all courts follow to ensure that litigation can from here on out unfold more predictably, especially when brought to check the power of another branch of government, which has become particularly difficult as of late.

Then there are other steps for Congress to take that focus on the administration of justice, writ large, to make this reform project sustainable, such as by realigning the appellate circuits and relocating any current Article I administrative law “judges” we might still need so that they are under the supervision of the judiciary instead of the executive. We also need to revisit how the judicial branch is managed, including by (a) restoring some sense to the process that appoints jurists to the courts in the first place, (b) ensuring that judges at every level are subject to adequate professional regulation, and (c) enabling judges’ removal, when necessary, with well-calibrated mechanisms that are neither overly aggressive nor as impotent as they have lately become. Meanwhile Congress will also need to statutorily clean up the mess the Supreme Court has made with its recent decisions, to the extent it is possible for legislation to do so.

Even more reforms than just those listed here may also prove to be necessary, but the key is that if we are going to achieve balanced and lasting change we cannot do any less than what is described here. Still, what follows also includes notes of caution for how each potential reform measure should be approached in order not to create new problems in the process of trying to address the current ones each reform is intended to address.

GENERAL APPROACH TO REFORM

Ground rules. In theory the sky is the limit, but, thinking pragmatically, particularly with respect to the need to begin this reform as soon as practically possible, it is helpful to limit the possible changes in a few ways.

No constitutional amendments. Effective court reform should not require any constitutional amendments, which take long periods of time to pass and are thus not easily modified if it turns out that one leads to undesirable consequences. They also are generally unnecessary, as there is plenty we can still do by statute. Congress has lots of power over the federal courts and has historically done plenty to regulate them. Any immediate reform should therefore continue in that vein.

No significant constitutional reinterpretations. Reforms also should not call for substantially different readings of the Constitution than we have generally accepted in the decades and centuries before now. Life tenure, for instance, is something that has long been read into the Constitution, even though it doesn’t literally call for it in so many words, which means that perhaps we could choose at some point to interpret the constitutional language we’ve premised our understanding of it on differently. But we’ve read it this way all this time for important reasons that still are applicable and so should continue to.

Also, if we change too much about our judicial system too suddenly with this reform, then we risk unstable results. Some of these long-standing interpretations, going back even to Marbury v. Madison, which itself created the modern role of the Supreme Court we’ve accepted ever since, despite it not being literally spelled out in the Constitution this way, remain useful pillars to retain and work around, at least for now. There is still plenty we can improve with them remaining in place.

No political exclusivity. Perhaps most importantly, court reform cannot be the project of the political left, or right, or any particular constituency. While as a practical matter this project will only happen when Democrats have the political power able to implement it, it is critically important not to rebuild the American judicial system in a way designed to award them their preferred political prizes. At minimum such a system would be weak and lack legitimacy to anyone not subscribing to such preferences, and preserving the legitimacy of the courts is of tantamount importance—indeed, restoring the legitimacy of the courts is the animating objective behind the entire court reform project. Reform will therefore generally require being focused on sustainable judicial principles and not specific judicial outcomes.

It will also necessarily require people from across the political spectrum to help build the strong system of justice our democracy requires. Perhaps the project should not include those who have been too eager to tear down our constitutional order, but there are plenty on the right who have sincerely advocated for sustainable legal principles who should be meaningfully included in this endeavor. Without their participation it will be difficult to produce what is needed here: a sustainable system of ordered liberty that can survive any political era and last for generations. With this project we need to create a judicial system the public can always believe truly dispenses justice, and to everyone, no matter who they are and what their politics. It requires that principle, not policy, be the guiding light, and it’s only with the contributions of all those who are so focused, regardless of their political stripes, that any resulting reform will be durable.

Common themes. For each specific proposal, a few themes are likely to emerge.

Personnel addition. One relates simply to the expansion of the number of judges we have on the bench. The unfortunate reality is that not every judge and justice currently serving in the court system is quite capable of or interested in protecting liberty and justice for all, or the constitutional system designed to deliver it. And at the moment those who lack those qualities have an outsized influence on the function of our democracy and the liberty it promises. It is therefore of basic mathematical importance to get more people on the bench who do have them.

But to suddenly “pack” the courts with jurists prone to ruling in certain ways could turn the co-equal Article III branch of government into a political prize subordinated to politics in a way we have long tried to insulate it from in order to make sure jurisprudence, and justice, are not subject to political fortune. The solution to our current problems cannot be so craven as to simply stuff the courts full of more judges whom we would currently prefer, because it would mean that subsequent generations of politicians could keep packing it with those that they preferred instead.

Still, the current situation may nevertheless provide opportunities for expanding the number of judges in ways that are anchored in their own legitimate justifications for why at this particular moment in time it is an appropriate occasion to expand the number of jurists, yet in the future such an occasion is unlikely to repeat. In other words, one running theme throughout these specific proposals is how, while pursuing some other goal with each reform, we might also create the opportunity for such new additions, but in a way applicable only now and not in the future.

Tempered statutory authority. The courts are a co-equal branch of government with Congress. Nevertheless, Congress has a lot of control over their function: for instance, it helps assure they are funded, and it provides statutes relating to their operation, not just with respect to how they run as their own interests but in terms of how they handle the litigation brought before them. These reform proposals therefore relate to Congress asserting its control over the courts in order to ensure that there is greater predictability in the jurisprudence they produce than we are currently experiencing now.

But care should be taken to not be too heavy-handed and inadvertently subordinate the courts to Congress. We would not want to, both as a general constitutional matter and also for practical reasons. Indeed, while some statutory solutions can offer precision and predictability where we currently lack them, the fuzziness of leaving certain questions to the courts—both substantive and procedural—affords the flexibility that justice may require, which we would not want to eliminate. Congress cannot anticipate everything, and our common law-rooted courts need the free hand to not only self-regulate, thereby preserving their constitutional independence, but to also be able to develop the judicial solutions justice requires, particularly in accordance with long-standing judicial tradition. The problems we are experiencing today relate more to the fact that some courts have strayed from that common law tradition, and thus there is the need to statutorily reconnect them to those existing principles and precedent, and not to further remove them.

SPECIFIC REFORM PROPOSALS

Reform #1: Statutorily address procedural rules. The most expedient, and arguably most necessary, thing for Congress to do is address the ways the courts operate. With care, of course, because in many ways the courts are self-governing, both in terms of their internal operation and the way they oversee litigation, and successfully, such as with the federal rules they adopt to govern civil, criminal, and appellate procedure, as well as the rules of evidence, and it is important to preserve their independence. (Courts nevertheless should also take the occasion to review their own rules and themselves assess whether modifications are needed, particularly in light of the many stresses that Trump Administration litigation has exposed.)

But there are several ways that Congress could and should step in. To begin with, Congress could ensure that we have, and fund, such things as cameras in the courtrooms and online case archives so that judicial documents truly become the public records they are supposed to be and the judicial system overall becomes more transparent. In recent years transparency has improved, including with Supreme Court oral arguments now being contemporaneously broadcast and more appellate hearings being streamed online, but there is more that could and should be done on this front, and PACER remains an expensive, inefficient blight on the justice system. It may also be appropriate for Congress to ensure that there is more consistency in the rules of practice across the court system, particularly when local rules create too many bespoke exceptions without adequate justification.

There are also more major changes that Congress should make. One way is by addressing the ability for the courts to act. It has always spoken legislatively on questions of court jurisdiction, and there remains the need to say more. As an example, many of the jurisprudential issues we are currently suffering from have stemmed from parties “forum shopping” and trying to get cases before courts expected to be unduly favorable, and Congress can and should shut down the ability to gain such advantage. It has also become much more difficult to bring certain challenges against unlawful government behavior. Where the courts (including, especially, the Supreme Court) have effectively shut the door to it, Congress can and should pry it open again, such as by using statute to ensure that government mischief can be effectively challenged because enough will have the standing to do it, and that it can be effectively restrained before it has had the chance to cause injury.

Another major way for Congress to make changes is with respect to the operation of the Supreme Court, which is not handling self-regulation well as of late. It has rules, but only some of them are articulated, and some, such as those governing its shadow docket, have proven to be shockingly arbitrary. The problem is in some ways tricky to address, because we cannot subordinate the Court to another branch of government, nor should we want to. Nevertheless there needs to be rules, transparent to everyone, and applicable to everyone, including the Supreme Court itself. Congress can and must ensure such rules exist, even if the Court still has a hand in writing them. Somebody needs to so that its jurisdiction can be understood, predictable, and regarded as legitimate when exercised, which it has lately not been.

Meanwhile, careful study of other procedural rules may reveal more ways Congress could improve the operation of the courts, especially to ensure that unlawful government action can be challenged in a way that produces usable remedies, whether injunctive, compensatory, or deterring. “Qualified immunity,” for instance, is a judge-made procedural doctrine at odds with the Constitution that has increasingly prevented such remedies, which Congress can statutorily negate. Naturally any proposed changes Congress makes need to be carefully calibrated to make sure they are actual improvements, but even simply addressing known areas of current dysfunction will do a lot to restore the courts to being the protectors of justice we need them to be.

Reform #2: No More Article I Judges. History has born out the wisdom of making the courts a co-equal branch of government, along with Congress and the Executive. When disputes arise, especially involving the other branches, it is important that the adjudicator be independent, and the American constitutional structure helps ensure that judicial independence because none of the other branches are the judiciary’s boss.

But there are certain types of adjudication that we have allowed to happen where there is no such independence. For example, in the case of immigration law, immigration “judges” end up having enormous power over the rights of individuals, yet without any of the structural safeguards of an independent judiciary. Despite the stakes, with people’s lives and property hanging in the balance, the due process the Constitution requires is routinely denied to many. And the problem has only gotten worse so long as the people judging their fates are increasingly beholden to the government branch employing them, namely the Executive, and its embedded xenophobia. Given the hijinks of the Trump Administration, firing any immigration “judge” attempting to maintain any pretense of independence, no matter how statutorily required, this constitutional mis-structuring of an important adjudicative body can no longer be tolerated. To the extent that we need specialized adjudication, like for immigration matters, the administrative law judges we employ to do that adjudication need to be answerable to the judiciary and not to any other branch. What we are asking them to do, apply law to facts, is what Article III judges are for.

Such a constitutional relocation would not necessarily mean, however, that immigration judges would have to be appointed to lifetime positions. The likely better analog is magistrate judges, who are not themselves Article III judges but work alongside them. These jurists handle a lot of court work, as appointed Article III judges do, but it is work subject to the supervision of those appointed Article III district court judges. From a practical standpoint they are fully empowered to handle many docket matters, but from a constitutional standpoint there is oversight by people who have been vetted by Congress and employed by the independent judiciary.

Obviously rolling any population of administrative law judge, such as immigration judges, into the judiciary will require its expansion, because all those judges will need to be supervised by district court judges and eventually appellate ones. But given the need to reinvigorate the judiciary with more jurists more principled than so many we currently have, such an expansion also provides an opportunity to put more on the bench, and for a reason that is unlikely to recur in the future on any similar scale. (In addition, Congress could also streamline immigration law to make it more reasonable and equitable, which would also perhaps lessen the need for so many immigration judges in the first place.)

Reform #3: Better manage the appointment, regulation, and removal of jurists. Putting administrative law judges under the supervision of the Article III judiciary, and, indeed, protecting the independence and authority of the Article III judiciary, requires making sure that the judiciary is populated with individuals capable of wielding the immense power we are entrusting them with. It cannot be riddled with self-serving, injudicious, intemperate, incapable and/or corrupt people and still fulfill its critical constitutional role.

Some of the infirmities currently plaguing the bench stem from Congressional dysfunction, which has rendered the appointment process a political spoil for the majority party to unilaterally seize to benefit its own political ends. While solving Congress may be beyond this particular judicial reform project, as part of a reform effort Congress could still potentially document in its rules better instructions governing how nominees should be evaluated and approved. It also could restore some sort of filibuster mechanism to help prevent giving lifetime appointments to particularly undeserving candidates—perhaps one not nearly so effortless and obstructive to employ as there has been in recent years, but one that nevertheless can provide some sort of emergency brake to prevent giving lifetime appointments to especially questionable appointees.

Once on the bench jurists also need to be subject to a certain degree of regulation in order to ensure that their jurisprudence can be trusted. Self-policing may generally be the best mechanism in order to preserve judicial independence, but any reform project should ensure that whatever mechanism the judiciary uses is sufficiently effective and also transparent, which may not always be the case.

The rules for the requisite “good behavior” required by the Constitution also need to be applicable to any Article III jurist, including those sitting on the Supreme Court, whose self-policing efforts have been particularly insufficient as of late. Financial and political conflicts need to be treated with a seriousness that has often been lacking and require, at minimum, mandatory disqualification from adjudicating certain matters, if not from the bench entirely, depending on their nature.

There also should be specific rules to ensure that jurists are not unduly profiting from their position. As it is, their positions already grant them an unusual amount of power and influence; their status should not also be providing them with any more significant enrichment than their salary already does during active service, although it may be fair to raise salary levels above where they are now in exchange for constraining judges’ ability to otherwise profit from their privileged position. A program allowing for leaves of absence or sabbaticals could also be considered; Court expansion could help open the door to such a program, because expansion might create a pool of justices that are rotated through to man smaller panels that actually sit to hear cases during a term. Ultimately we do want the best and the brightest on the bench, which means the job cannot come at too much of a cost to the individual serving in it. At the same time, however, with these jobs come inordinate power, and so the dignity and neutrality of these positions need to be preserved by all who serve in them.

Meanwhile, as for the incorrigible jurist, there needs to be a greater willingness, and perhaps even statutory obligation, for Congress to remove them. It should be a well-calibrated reflex to do so, one that is not so easy to employ that it obviates the independence we insulate each jurist’s jurisprudence with through life tenure. The political unpopularity of some or even all of a judge’s decisions should generally not be enough to warrant impeachment. But at the same time there has grown to be an almost obstinate refusal to ever employ the constitutionally-rooted, if not also constitutionally-required, impeachment remedy when certain jurists struggle to consistently deliver jurisprudence that can withstand its own independent scrutiny or otherwise engage in behavior that creates significant doubt as to their neutrality or competence. That Congressional inhibition is of particular concern now, given the rash of unqualified judges recently appointed.

Still, not every Trump-appointed jurist is necessarily removable; indeed, some conservative judges have well-proven their politically-independent capabilities, even if some of their decisions are unpopular, and there may even some liberal ones whose service is worthy of further scrutiny as well. We also need a mechanism to address judicial incapacity, so that justice is not held hostage to a life appointment unable to be trusted to dispense it, but at the same time these affected jurists are still human beings, including those whose incapacity may only be temporary, and we need to make sure their personal tragedy does not become a political cudgel that can be used to reshape the bench.

Reform #4: Realign the appellate circuits. Before addressing Supreme Court reform, it is important to first address realigning the appellate circuits, for a few reasons. One is that the Supreme Court is not responsible for all of the poor jurisprudence recently produced; some of it was produced by the Courts of Appeals, so there is as much reason—if not more—to expand the number of fillable seats on those courts as the Supreme Court, especially because they have jurisdiction to hear nearly all cases at some point but the Supreme Court weighs in only on a small subset.
Another reason is that realigning which appellate court gets to hear which cases has been long overdue simply as a matter of population growth and other logistical strains on the current circuit divisions. And then a bonus reason is that this realignment can ultimately provide a justifying anchor for any changes in the composition of the Supreme Court to tie into—although even without this added benefit circuit realignment should happen anyway.

There are currently thirteen “circuits,” or separate Courts of Appeals. Twelve are geographic, and then there is the specialized Federal Circuit that primarily handles patent-related matters, along with a few other esoteric subjects. The first way that realignment should happen is geographically, namely by splitting up the Ninth Circuit. Completely redrawing circuit boundaries would probably be ill-advised, as it would destabilize too much precedent, but splitting a circuit is not unprecedented: it’s where the Eleventh Circuit came from, so we know how to handle it. And from time to time people have proposed it for the Ninth—although usually for ideological reasons to lessen its influence, and sometimes in very strange ways geographically (splitting a state, as some have suggested with California, would wreck the stability of any state law that gets swept up into federal litigation and thus should not be allowed to happen in any circuit realignment), although those calls have generally quieted as of late.

At this point, however, the Ninth Circuit should be split just for practical reasons, largely because it is disproportionately huge, covering the entire West Coast of the United States plus Alaska, the Pacific Islands (including Hawaii and Guam), and the interior states of Idaho, Montana, and Arizona. And there is really only one way to do it geographically: California, Nevada, and Arizona in one circuit, and the states to the north in the other. (As for the islands, in terms of population it would make sense for them to join the northern states—that circuit will be a lot smaller, although still commensurate with the First Circuit’s population—but court access is an important consideration and it may be more feasible for litigants to get to California than Seattle, in which case they should be included with the former.)

Such a split would leave thirteen geographic circuits, for a total of fourteen. But there is one other step that should be taken in the realignment project: dissolving the Federal Circuit, which should happen for several reasons. The most important one is that we have by now learned that having an appellate court with specialized jurisdiction does not really make sense. It isn’t needed: patents are not so special, which we know because we let regular district courts litigate them first anyway and the same Supreme Court adjudicates them later. Plus, with regard to its other specialized subject matter, the D.C. Circuit has already shown itself capable of adjudicating any other creature of administrative law.

Furthermore, the Federal Circuit’s specialization tends to make its precedent unusually insular in how it develops, and its exclusive jurisdiction promotes forum shopping thanks to bootstrapped claims that would ordinarily be heard in other circuits. In sum, the Federal Circuit is an experiment that has proven itself unnecessary if not actually harmful, but dissolving it now also helps with some of the other logistics of larger judicial reform. For one thing it will keep the circuits at thirteen, even with the Ninth Circuit split, which will be a helpful target for Supreme Court seat expansion to be tied to. For another, there is also a need to expand the seats on the remaining geographic circuits—especially that of the Fifth and Eighth, which continually raise internal governance and quality issues with their jurisprudence.

Congress could of course simply expand the number of judges on each court, but it would likely be politically more justifiable to do if there were some other rationale associated with the increase in the number of appellate seats available to be filled. Some expansion can of course be justified just by population growth and caseloads; some could also be justified by the increased supervisory workload resulting from rolling Article I judges into Article III. If the Ninth splits there may also need to be some seats added for each half. But one easy way to get more judges on other circuits is from redistributing the ones currently serving on the now-dissolved Federal Circuit. Such transfers should be constitutional, as it wouldn’t displace life tenure; after all, the judges would still have Article III jobs, and at the same judicial level. Congress should also always have the right to dissolve any court it had the power to create, and reallocating the judges means there won’t be an issue with extinguishing a lifetime appointment early.

Reform #5: Reconstitute SCOTUS. America cannot continue as a constitutional democracy without significant changes to the current composition of the Supreme Court. It is currently controlled by a block of six jurists of, at best, dubious analytical skill, if not more dogmatic motivations. Even if they don’t all intend to reshape our constitutional order—and at least some have made it clear that they do—their gormless naïveté as to the effects of their jurisprudence, as well as lack of respect for precedent and an actual record, have invited injurious contortion after injurious contortion to the American rule of law. At minimum the personnel math needs to be changed in order to wrest control from that block. Which could, potentially, be subtractive, as several justices have behaved in a way that could warrant impeachment. But impeachment is politically more difficult to attain given the supermajority needed to effectuate it than a more additive strategy of just adding seats, which only takes a majority.

The question then is what to expand the Court to. Some have proposed expanding it to a very large, rotating pool of judges, who could be sat per term or per case, but although such a proposal has merit—it would, for example, mute the power any one individual judge could wield, and make the appointment less of a political prize for the President to win—it might require amending, or at least significantly reinterpreting the Constitution, which is a more fraught process and best avoided unless absolutely necessary. The same problem holds for proposals recommending, for example,eighteen year terms, which would also have the advantage of ensuring that every president would be able to appoint some as they came up, which would hopefully somehow dull the inclination to install particularly dogmatic jurists. The problem, however, is that proposals like these are so different from the status quo that it might not be possible to expediently or constitutionally implement them.

But one way to work around the block of six is to make sure that there are four more justices capable of overruling them, which would bring the composition of the Court up to thirteen. Thirteen also has its own, independent justification, because that’s how many appellate circuits there are (and ideally would be), and, already each circuit is effectively supervised by a sitting justice, and such circuits are not currently equitably allocated. Making the number of circuits and justices match is a reasonable policy to pursue on its own merits, even if there were not a more exigent reason also prompting the expansion. But because there is this independent reason to have thirteen justices, it would presumably deter later political attempts to keep trying to pack the Court with even more justices, when there would not be a similar justification.

Reform #6: Rehabilitate Precedent. Reforming the Supreme Court is one thing; cleaning up the mess it’s made is another.

It won’t all be possible. For instance, the people on death row it allowed to die are already dead (at least most of them). For so much the Court has done, no matter how insupportably, there is simply no undo button.

Nevertheless, we can address the staying power of its recent decisions and wipe much of it away. While we generally can’t undo a particular decision—it has already had its immediate practical effect, and there are some constitutional issues with Congress attempting to trump a particular determination—we could still statutorily limit a decision to its facts and rob it of any precedential value, thus causing any court encountering any similar legal question to have to consider it afresh, instead of being bound by the earlier decision that ordinarily would effectively operate as the law of the land.

That operation has generally presumed that the decision itself followed prior precedent, reflected the actual record, and complied with the Court’s own procedural rules. Yet in so many instances, the Court has produced decisions that have deviated from all such practices. It is bad enough that such decisions were able to have immediate effect, but they certainly should not be able to reverberate into the future as statements of law. And given that Congress is the legislative branch and entitled to write the law of the land, it should have the power to ensure these decisions of doubtful legitimacy do not.

It wouldn’t be unprecedented to treat decisions this way; it would be similar to what some courts themselves do to certain decisions by “unpublishing” them and thus rendering them unsuitable to be relied upon in future matters. The only difference is that it would be Congress rendering them unusable and not the Court itself. Still, while doing so should be within its legislative purview it’s a legislative power that should be used modestly. For one thing, displacing precedent strains the rule of law, even if it is bad precedent. Indeed, one of the problems the Supreme Court has presented us with is a lack of respect for precedent, which has left the public unsure about what the law actually is since it cannot count on any particular precedent to still be controlling. We would want to be careful not to exacerbate the same problem we are trying to fix in the course of trying to fix it, but the exercise itself is essentially one designed not to replace precedent but to restore the precedent that the Court displaced, yet without the analytical care ordinarily needed to do so.

Furthermore, not everything the Court has recently done is necessarily bad. We therefore wouldn’t want Congress to automatically nullify everything the Court has recently done. Instead only a selection of cases should be subject to such treatment. A committee could be formed, perhaps of lawyers, retired judges, and academics, who could review the Court’s recent decisions—perhaps going back to the Gorsuch appointment, when the conventional operation of the Court was diverted via Senatorial appointment hijinks—to make recommendations for which decisions are most suspect and thus deserving of this legislative dulling.

It is of course a big deal for Congress to supersede a fellow government branch. But it is also a big deal when the Court has superseded Congress. And what is being called for here is not to trump a particular legal conclusion the Court has reached in any particular case but to play its constitutional role in making clear what the law actually is in places where the Court has muddled it.

It’s essential to understand that this isn’t about protecting the integrity of elections from people who don’t have the right to vote. This is a suppression effort meant to intimidate people who do have the legal right to vote by making it seem like it might be better to sit out the mid-terms than be accosted by federal officers just because they don’t seem white enough to vote.

A lot of noise has been made for several years now by Donald Trump about “rigged” or “stolen” elections. Despite winning two of the last three presidential elections, Trump insists the system is out to get him. He says no one should trust the system unless it elects him, and even when it does, it’s still a rigged system because it forced him to serve two non-consecutive terms.

Propelled by the administration’s overriding animus against anyone liberal and/or non-white, Trump has been claiming the nation is drowning in illegal votes cast by migrants who don’t have the legal right to vote. The administration has funneled time and money into generating evidence of these obviously false claims. And there’s been no return on this investment. For example, it only took a couple of weeks for the DOJ’s claims of illegal voters in Nevada to drop from 16,000 to 285 to zero.

California is a favorite target of Trump’s. And so California is seeing similar efforts to make a case that simply can’t be made. But that hasn’t stopped the DOJ and DHS from touting supposedly alarming numbers that are actually anything but, as the administration looks for ways to arrest people who are actually in this country legally, but don’t fit the demographic Trump caters to.

Here’s the latest on Trump’s new wave of futile aggressions, as reported by the Associated Press:

Federal authorities charged more than two dozen foreign nationals Monday in California as part of a statewide sweep targeting people who officials say have illegally registered or voted in U.S. elections.

[…]

The Justice Department said the 28 people who were charged as part of a sweep dubbed Operation Protect the Vote are lawful permanent residents — but not U.S. citizens who are permitted to legally vote. They are charged with crimes including making false statements on a naturalization application and submitting fraudulent voter registrations.

28 voters? Oh my. I mean, this might mean something if a sweep was performed in some one horse town (to use obsolete vernacular) where the newly installed mayor had won by a suddenly suspicious 27 votes. But we’re talking about California, which has (as of last October) [squints at official report] 23,092,098 registered voters. That’s a percentage I’m not even going to do the math on because surely anyone knows that this means there are likely 23,092,070 people legally allowed to vote in California.

What this fact does tell us is that the administration is willing to spend hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of federal dollars to seek out and arrest people who could never have swayed an election and who, in most cases, probably were just unclear on the rules, especially after many states decided to fold in voter registration with the state ID/drivers license process.

Here’s the DOJ pretending it has done literally anything with these expended resources:

“This causes real damage to real elections and real damage to American citizens,” Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, said during a news conference in Los Angeles.

No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything to anything. It’s such a small percentage you’d have to drastically alter a spreadsheet’s numerical display to reflect the percentage of “illegal” voters. If there’s anything doing “real damage” to elections and American citizens, it’s the administration that definitely plans to use these 28 arrests to justify federal interference in the election process.

Most people — especially those who love Trump and believe any fucking thing that falls out of his mouth — likely expected there to be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “illegal” voters in California. The DOJ manages to come up with twenty-eight.

Even if you want to believe California’s rookie illegal voting numbers are just symptomatic of a larger problem, you’re going to look just as stupid as the DOJ itself.

The Justice Department said Monday it has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting and illegal registration offenses over the last seven weeks. 

So, a little under six people per state. And that’s across the United States, which has [checks the stats] nearly 230 million registered voters. All this is proving is that the DOJ is just an extension of Trump’s id and that it has no problem spending millions to lock a few hundred people up for the often-accidental “crime” of mistakenly registering to vote. In most of these cases, there’s no evidence any of those who “illegally” registered to vote actually cast any votes.

And yet, the DOJ and DHS are treating this like a high-level crime worth expending all the resources they can throw at it. DHS officers performing quasi-raids to round up these “worst of the worst” criminals. I would hope the government knows exactly how ridiculous it looks.

Esmeralda Muñoz, 70, said her family was furious that agents showed up to their home in full tactical gear with guns drawn to arrest her husband before dawn.

“It’s a show for them,” she said, calling it a “shame” that government officials arrived with camera crews and news helicopters.

She’s not lying. The DHS itself posted footage of this “raid.” (More coverage here if you’d rather not click thru to X.com.)

But the real punchline comes in the next paragraph:

Omar Muñoz is a legal permanent resident, she said, and they didn’t realize that he was registered to vote. When they do talk about politics, Esmeralda said Omar has been a vociferous supporter of Trump.

lol lmao even…

Bet that changes. An administration stocked with bigoted death cult nihilists is reaping the whirlwind. It starts with gas prices and ends with Trump locking up his own supporters because he only likes the ones who are white. The GOP is nearing a midterm that will likely flip the House and has no succession plan in place other than “whoever can weather the most face-eatings from the leopards in their party.”

And as much as I want to laugh loudly and (ultimately) hollowly, it doesn’t really matter whether or not the DOJ arrests 10 people or 10,000 people. The real reason for this show of force is to keep non-white people from voting, even if they — like Omar Munoz — are Trump supporters.

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Ofcom’s media relations people know how to email me. I have ten press releases from them this year. They emailed me when they launched investigations of or took actions on X/Grok, Telegram, Pornhub, and Sanctioned Suicide. But when they recently published their required report on how the Online Safety Act is going… suddenly they’ve lost my email?

Now, it’s no secret that I’ve mostly been a critic of the Online Safety Act, but I’m open to being proven wrong. Unfortunately, Ofcom’s latest report seems to support many of my criticisms of the law, and perhaps that’s why they didn’t feel it was worth letting me know about it. Even the opening lines of the announcement make it clear they’re only releasing this report because they have to.

Ofcom is required by the Online Safety Act 2023 to review and report on content harmful to children online.

This is our first report under section 63 of the Act, which places a duty on Ofcom to produce and publish a statutory report on content that is harmful to children at least every three years following the passage of the Act.

Yeah, that’s the bureaucratic equivalent of “mom made me do this, but I don’t want to.”

The press release includes four bullet points, which play down how bad the report actually is. Everything about the report is basically “none of this is actually working” and Ofcom’s response and recommendations are basically “double down harder, declare more information harmful to kids, and allow us to take more enforcement actions.”

• In our advice, we recommend that it is appropriate to add body stigma content and depression content, currently identified by Ofcom as kinds of non-designated content, to the category of priority content that is harmful to children. If the Secretary of State takes our recommendation forward, this will ensure that protections for children against these kinds of content are enshrined in the Act.
• At this time, we do not recommend any other changes to the categories of primary priority or priority content that is harmful to children in the Act. We are not recommending changes where we found that the available evidence supports the current categorisation or where proposed legislation is likely to address concerns.
• Most children in the UK say they have encountered at least one piece of harmful content online in a four-week period. According to our evidence, at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties came into force in July 2025. This finding is concerning and shows that further progress is needed to protect children online.
• Exposure to harmful content can have serious impacts on children’s mental and physical wellbeing. Children continue to report that encountering harmful content negatively impacts their wellbeing. There is no new evidence indicating a change to the severity of harm experienced by children as a result of encountering harmful content.

But the actual numbers in the report (not included in the press release) are pretty bleak for those who believe that widespread identity and age verification, combined with potential liability for “harmful” content will do anything to protect children at all. The numbers suggest basically zero improvement in kids’ exposure to content deemed “harmful.”

The report looks at the access that kids have to various categories of supposedly “harmful” content before and after the OSA’s “child safety duties” went into effect. This is the UK’s version of the infamous “duty of care” concept that has become popular around the globe (including the US). As we’ve warned in the past, the “duty of care” sounds reasonable, but it really serves no useful purpose other than as a hammer to batter companies after kids inevitably find their way to content adults deem harmful.

We’ve also mentioned that this is effectively engaging in a global experiment on children without any actual evidence that it works. For all the talk of social media companies “experimenting on children,” the duty of care legislation does the same.

And the details from this report suggest the duty of care… has had a statistically meaningless impact on kids encountering harmful content online. In short if you looked at the data from before and after and asked if the government had put in place a massive new law to “protect the children online” you would not be able to place when (or if) it happened, because the data shows effectively no impact.

But it is limiting adult access to information.

The story is the same on basically every category of “harmful” content. Kids still see it.

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to suicide content and self-harm content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to eating disorder content on user-touser services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to abuse and hate content on user-touser services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to bullying content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to violent content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to harmful substances content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to dangerous stunts and challenges content on user-to-user services did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025….

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to depression content on user-to-user services did not change significantly between December 2025 and April 2026, with around a quarter of children reporting being exposed to depression content….

Ofcom data shows that children’s reported exposure to body stigma content on user-touser services did not change significantly between December 2025 and April 2026….

And so forth…

The one area they claim has seen some success is that “highly effective age assurance” on adult content sites has been successful in stopping kids from accessing those sites:

Highly effective age assurance is helping to prevent children from accessing pornography services. As of July 2026, the majority of the most popular pornography services in the UK had age checks in place.

That said, the data shows no meaningful drop in kids’ overall exposure to porn, since most of it appears to come via social media and forum sites, so just like all the other areas of content, we’re talking about “did not change significantly.”

Children are still encountering pornographic content on social media, messaging and gaming services. The proportion of children reporting exposure to this content did not change significantly over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties in the Act came into force in July 2025.

Bizarrely, the report doesn’t show any data, charts, or tables about the (lack of) changes in exposure to this content. The report doesn’t have any footnotes (as far as I can tell) with links to the data. Nor does the page announcing the report. They do, however, say that it’s from the Children’s Online Safety Tracker tool, and after searching through their website, I finally found some links to the raw data.

Having spent some time going through the data, I think about the only thing you can conclusively say is that… the Online Safety Act duty of care has had basically zero impact so far. In some cases the access to the content went up a tiny bit. In some cases it went down a tiny bit. There are three data sets: Wave 1, a baseline taken before the duty of care went into effect in July 2025. Then there’s Wave 2, at the end of 2025, looking at the impact about six months in. And now we have Wave 3 from earlier this spring, representing about nine months in.

And what we see is… basically nothing. There’s no noticeable change outside of statistical noise as of yet:

• By way of disclosure, I’ll note that I used Claude to help me make this chart based on the spreadsheets from Ofcom. I independently verified the numbers against Ofcom’s spreadsheets.

As you’ll see, the only category with a statistically significant change at any point was… bullying. Which went up (not down) significantly between Wave 1 (pre-duty) and Wave 2. But by Wave 3 it had fallen back down to within the insignificant zone, but still above the pre-duty number.

So the scorecard looks like this: The duty of care went into effect, companies put in place all sorts of intrusive age verification tools… and nothing happened. Kids still come across the same amount of questionable content.

Now, perhaps you can argue that nine months of data is not enough. But you would think that if this law was so important and a duty of care was so important, we should see some indication of a change in kids’ exposure to harmful content? Somewhere? Somehow?

But that doesn’t mean the law did nothing at all. Adults did have to deal with some of the fallout of the law, including smaller forums and sites deciding that they needed to shut down, rather than deal with compliance costs and risks of the law. Also, many more people have needed to put their private data at risk by needing to upload identification or other personal data to get access to sites.

All this to “protect the children” when the current data suggests… no real change to kids’ access to this content.

Perhaps someone should be asking why governments like the UK are running these experiments without any willingness to admit that maybe it does more harm than good?

Earlier this month we noted how Meta’s launch of its cutesy agentic AI software Muse arrived with all sorts of major privacy and security screw ups, despite the company’s repeated, breathless claims that privacy and security were at the forefront of the company’s thinking during development.

Like most AI agents, Muse is supposed to help automate simple to moderately complicated daily tasks.

But the app launched with multiple ugly zero-day flaws, one of which let an attacker covertly spy on Mac users. Other flaws were reportedly glossed over and downplayed by a company more interested in rushing to market than ensuring its software actually worked. One person even found you could trick Muse into giving you device root access on the device it’s installed on simply by pretending to be a Muse agent yourself.

Giving Meta (a company with abysmal ethical and privacy standards) massively expanded access to all sorts of personal accounts is just foundationally insane. That was quickly reflected by the people who found the app was accessing people’s private messages without approval, and often ignored all permissions and uploaded them to the cloud – even if you specifically tell it not to.

Outlets like Wired found that Muse consistently creates detailed profiles of all your friends, family, colleagues, “collaborators,” and people you “follow.” Which is “fun” and “cute” when you consider Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s enthusiastic collaboration with corrupt, surveillance-obsessed authoritarians.

And now Ars Technica has found that Muse can reveal all manner of sensitive personal information when users share conversations through Web links. Like many services, Muse lets users share images, content, searches, and chats with other people via unique URLs. Those URLs generally have long-sequences of text that aren’t supposed to be easily guessed.

But researchers from Claroc found that Meta’s implementation of this feature made it possible for folks to decipher shared content details via a passive DNS search:

“Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It’s this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.”

According to the Claroc researchers, some of the data they were able to easily access included:

• a candidate’s notes preparing for a confidential executive-search call with a frontier AI lab, naming the lab’s internal contact and the meeting time
• a national marketing company’s internal revenue review, marked for its CEO
• a small-business owner’s loan application, with the amount requested
• a to-do list that included a bank fraud alert, with a partial account number and a transaction amount and time
• a real-estate investor’s internal performance report, with two property addresses and exact return, income and mortgage figures
• a workplace’s full-year staff vacation calendar, listing dozens of employees against the week each one would be away

Meta has suspended the feature while they figure out why they screwed up. Again, this is despite Meta claiming repeatedly in pre-release blog posts that Muse was built with a heavy focus on privacy and security. And again, this is all made possible because Meta doesn’t have to worry about any meaningful accountability in a country too corrupt to pass modern privacy laws, regulate the data broker ecosystem, or hold corporations legally accountable for literally anything.

This is just the orchestra getting warmed up as a parade of half-cooked agentic AI agents rush to market, and people who don’t really understand the scope of what they signed up for connect all sorts of sensitive accounts with Mark Zuckerberg or other sketchy industry titans. Hopefully at least a few market entries can differentiate themselves by not being an ethically dubious pit of public interest malfeasance.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Canadian YouTuber who was visited by the cops after building a Flock-like camera to track cop cars:

If the cops are doing nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide.

In second place, it’s a comment about Malcolm Gladwell’s strange strawman assertion that people say the bad behavior of police is caused by there being too many of them:

No, the police are badly behaved because they rarely face repercussions.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Kinetic Gothic and another comment about the Canadian YouTuber:

I was particularly amused by their concerns this could be used to locate their homes, since unlike most of us, cops do have the option to -not- drive home in the vehicles they patrol the town in.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about the impossibility of perfect content moderation:

I dunno, I’ve also done and overseen moderation work on that kind of scale, and I would be deeply hesitant to say we always get things correct. I’ve dealt with enough community blowback over the years — sometimes stuff I thought was justified; sometimes stuff I thought was exaggerated; sometimes stuff I thought was invented out of whole cloth — to know not only do errors happen but that people can have very different opinions over what those errors were and what ‘the right way’ to do things would have been.

Facebook is a titanic entity with enormous resources to throw at the problem, but the problem with moderation of any sort is that the need for it scales faster than the supply. The flood of output from slop engines is only making the issue worse, especially if you’re somebody like YT or FB, where there’s lots of perceived value in shouting over everyone else.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Trump hiding the IRS report on his Big Beautiful Bill:

Hey now, be fair to the IRS, they might actually be having trouble figuring this shit out. I mean haven’t they been cut down to like six guys and a beat-up old Tandy 1000 at this point?

In second place, it’s MrWilson with an idea for the Canadian YouTuber and his camera:

Just tell the cops that you’re setting up a service to track all the Canadian girlfriends that Americans have claimed existed. I bet even Canadian cops think tracking girlfriends, fictional or otherwise, with mass surveillance camera networks is fine.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about Brendan Carr threatening journalists for covering polls Trump doesn’t like:

I’m sure Mr. Carr has security footage of Antifa vandals cutting a 350-foot long slice in the polls with a box cutter and then pouring fertilizer into them. He’s just not releasing it yet.

Finally, it’s another anonymous comment about Malcolm Gladwell, this time with a simple retort to the description of him as “one of America’s foremost thinkers”:

[Citation Needed]

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week in 2016

• Hillary Clinton’s Staff Recognize She Doesn’t Understand Encryption And Is Supporting ‘The Impossible’
• FBI Facial Recognition Expert Helps Denver PD Arrest Wrong Man Twice For The Same Crime
• Appeals Court Affirms NSA Surveillance Can Be Used To Investigate Domestic Criminal Suspects
• CNN Tells Viewers It’s Illegal For Them To Read Wikileaks Document Dumps. CNN Is Wrong
• Arrested Backpage Execs Ask Kamala Harris To Drop Bogus Case She Herself Has Admitted She Has No Authority To Bring
• Team Prenda Loses Big Again: Told To Pay Over $650k For Bogus Defamation Lawsuit

This Week in 2011

• British Historian On Porn And Internet Censorship: North Korea Is Right — The Internet Is Our Enemy
• Warner Bros. Buys Story That Was Written In The Reddit Comments; Then Tells Author To Stop Redditing
• Bill Gates Called To Testify In Antitrust Trial Over Windows 95; No This Isn’t An Old Post
• Google Realizing That Its Real Names Policy Is Excessive
• UK Parliament Recommends Websites Be Liable For Anonymous Comments If They Won’t Reveal Identities
• Who Gets The Copyright On The Photo Of A Beaten Gaddafi, Captured Off A Cameraphone

This Week in 2006

• On The Corner of Hollywood and Wall
• Why YouTube Could Make Things Difficult For Google
• No, I Don’t Think Anyone Believes Boycottwalmart.com Is Actually A Wal-Mart Site
• Universal Music Finally Sues Video Sites… Just Not YouTube
• Internet Addiction Not Quite An Addiction…
• Without Copyright Extension, The Beatles Will Never Have Incentive To Write Another Song

In all of our coverage of the disastrous tenure RFK Jr. has had as Secretary of HHS, we have not yet discussed a bonkers study the CDC planned to fund in Guinea-Bissau. This hepatitis B “vaccine trial” was supposed to already have been kicked off, but it has been suspended since January instead because of the plainly unethical methodology for the trial, combined with the understanding that the two researchers employed to run it are virulent anti-vaxxers.

The trial was suspended in January after its unethical design came to light and drew international outcry. Although the trial is still halted, staff of the CDC director’s office told the agency’s budget office in late September to set aside $1.6 million to fund the trial, according to a report by Rolling Stone. The money was to be pulled from funding for the CDC’s global health security programs, which might otherwise go toward efforts like combating the Ebola outbreak currently raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

If the trial moves forward, it would be funded by the US but run by Danish researchers, who have separately been accused of misconduct. In December, the CDC announced the award of an unsolicited grant for $1.6 million to a research group at the University of Southern Denmark, led by married couple Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby. The pair have produced numerous studies that have been promoted by anti-vaccine advocates, drawing concern and criticism from researchers. Stabell Benn and Aaby are currently under investigation by Danish authorities over allegations of “falsification” and “scientific misconduct” related to previous vaccine research.

So, what makes the design of the trial unethical, beyond the notion that the two researchers are known bad-actors on the topic of vaccines? Well, let’s start with the fact that this trial is not designed to study the efficacy of the hepatitis B vaccine at all. We already have plenty of data on that that suggests the vaccine is safe and effective overall. No, this study is designed specifically to find harmful outcomes from the vaccine. To do that kind of study, the researchers planned to enroll 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau in the trial and give half of them the vaccine and withhold it from the other half to study the health outcomes of the children.

In case that didn’t land properly: The study is designed to knowingly expose 7,000 children to hepatitis B, which can have immensely deleterious long-term health outcomes if exposed.

But wait, you might say. Are these children that would otherwise have ready access to the hep B vaccine? The answer is, in large part, no they would not. The government in Guinea-Bissau is born of a recent coup and it’s ability to deliver on basic government services has been wanting, to say the least. But that does not, in any way, make this trial more ethical.

Stabell Benn and Aaby have argued that the trial is not unethical because newborns in Guinea-Bissau are currently not routinely given a dose of hepatitis B vaccine at birth. But outside experts point to ethical guidelines, such as the Declaration of Helsinki, which requires trials to provide the “best proven intervention”—which is a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine—regardless of whatever the current standard is in the country hosting the trial. Placebos may only be used when there is no proven intervention or there is “compelling and scientifically sound methodological reasons” to withhold a proven intervention.

In a scathing rebuke in February, the World Health Organization laid out a bullet-point list of “why withholding the vaccine is unethical.” The WHO notes that the entire premise of the trial is based on “hypothetical safety outcomes without sufficient credible evidence,” which don’t justify putting newborns at risk. The agency also blasted Stabell Benn and Aaby’s defense of the trial, saying: “Resource constraints cannot be used to justify withholding proven care in a research study involving people. Ethical obligations require minimizing risk and ensuring a prospect of benefit for participants.”

RFK Jr. has a pattern building of this sort of thing. Emails released show that he almost certainly lied in congressional hearings about his adventures in Samoa in 2019, after which the country experienced a tragic outbreak of measles that claimed over 83 deaths. Brown people are fit for experiments designed to boost Kennedy’s ego, it seems.

The CDC recently planned to grant even more taxpayer money to Stabell Benn and Aaby, but they’ve now run into an even bigger problem that worldwide condemnation: a police raid by the government of the study’s offices.

Police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers on Monday, seizing doses of hepatitis B vaccine intended for a vaccine trial for newborns. International health experts have called the trial “unethical,” but anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has attempted to fund it with US taxpayer dollars.

Now it appears that officials in Guinea-Bissau have opened an investigation into Aaby and Stabell Benn’s work. In a Facebook post Monday, translated from Portuguese, the judicial police announced they carried out a “search operation at the facilities of the Bandim Health Project in Bissau, which culminated in the seizure of a batch of hepatitis B vaccines intended for vaccination of children in the country.”

I’ll just say that I hope the government there has access to enough quality scientists to do a very thorough investigation as to what precisely is in the hep B vaccines that were intended for use in this study. I’d be very curious to know just what is in them. Call it a hunch.

But, regardless, it should horrify us all that our own tax money is being used to fund this kind of unethical study. The trolley problem is famous for a reason, after all, and the idea is not generally to want to purposefully put yourself at the switch in that problem. That’s precisely what these “researchers” intended to do, all to go looking for any evidence for a conclusion they reached long ago.