People of a certain age will remember the name “Donald Segretti.”

In the 1972 re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon, this youthful campaign aide made the phrase “dirty tricks” part of the American political lexicon.

Segretti’s mischief included sending embarrassing letters under the names of Nixon’s political rivals.

Although his dirty tricks had little or no effect on the election’s outcome, Segretti served four and a half months in prison.

With Segretti’s four and a half months as a baseline, the 51-plus dirty tricksters who conspired successfully to get Joe Biden elected president in 2020 would seem to deserve no less.

Confident to a fault about the Democrat control of the media, 51 intel officials signed on to the most flagrant disinformation campaign in anyone’s memory.

A very interesting study appeared last week by two researchers looking into the pandemic policy response around the world. They are Drs. Eran Bendavid and Chirag Patel of Stanford and Harvard, respectively.

Their ambition was quite straightforward. They wanted to examine the effects of government policy on the virus.

In this ambition, after all, researchers have access to an unprecedented amount of information. We have global data on strategies and stringencies. We have global data on infections and mortality.

We can look at it all according to the timeline. We have precise dating of stay-at-home orders, business closures, meeting bans, masking, and every other physical intervention you can imagine.

The researchers merely wanted to track what worked and what did not, as a way of informing future responses to viral outbreaks so that public health can learn lessons and do better next time.

They presumed from the outset they would discover that at least some mitigation tactics achieved the aim.

Technology is about to accelerate because Chevron deference is over and regulators can't just make up laws anymore. So, countless new startups just became feasible. This is often spoken about in the abstract, so let's do three examples and two visuals.

THREE EXAMPLES:

1) Genomics. Did Congress explicitly give FDA authority to regulate genetic tests in a bill like Kefauver-Harris (1962) or PDUFA (1992)? No, it did not.

But in the early 2010s, FDA attacked 23andMe and forced them to take personal genomic tests offline.

Implicitly, this was under Chevron.

2) Nuclear power. Did Congress explicitly give EPA and NRC the authority to implement ALARA? No, it did not.

But these agencies came up with this "as low as reasonably achievable" standard, forcing nuclear energy to become as expensive as other energy sources by spending all the cost-savings on "safety."

Implicitly, this was under Chevron, too.

3) Cryptocurrency. You guessed it. Did Congress explicitly give the SEC authority to regulate crypto? No, it did not.

Cryptocurrencies didn't exist when the 1933 and 1934 acts were written. However, the SEC says it has regulatory authority over crypto, even when Congress is deliberating on bills to the contrary.

Implicitly, that claim of SEC authority too was under Chevron.

In other words: if a regulator can't point to the law that gives them the power, they may not have the power. And you might be able to win in a court of law.

The U.S. State Department said that recent remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting he would supply North Korea with weapons are “incredibly concerning.”

Earlier this week, in a visit to North Korea, Mr. Putin suggested that weapons supplies to the isolated, communist country would be a similar response to the West arming Ukraine in the midst of the two-year-long war with Russia.

The Russian leader also warned South Korea against supplying arms to Ukraine.

In comments at a news briefing on Thursday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked about the Russian president’s comments about possible arms supplies to Pyongyang. “It’s incredibly concerning,” he said in response.

“It would destabilize the Korean Peninsula, of course, and potentially ... depending on the type of weapons they provide, might violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that Russia itself has supported,” he added.

The spokesman said the United States “will continue to work with our allies in the region” such as “South Korea, Japan, others ... to respond to the threat posed by North Korea.”