Category Archives: Legal – General

A fork in the road for Dell?

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michael-dell Remember back when Micheal Dell and Austin-based Dell, Inc. were among the early beneficiaries of what Larry Ribstein brilliantly coined as the Apple Rule of the criminalization-of-business lottery?

Well, as Dellís stock closed down yet again yesterday at $12.06 a share ñ far from the lofty $40 a share price of five years ago ñ this 24/7 Wall Street post makes clear that Dell was quite fortunate to have the benefit of the Apple Rule:

Some of the troubling behavior at Dell, which added up is an extraordinary amount for any large company, occurred when Michael Dell was CEO. All of it happened when he was the firmís chairman. Dell can argue that his is a huge company. He cannot know what all 94,000 of his workers are doing at any one time. That is almost certainly true. But a companyís values are established at the top and that behavior is s a by-product of corporate culture.

I submit that there is no rational basis for criminalizing Jeff Skillingís conduct as chief executive officer of Enron and not doing the same in regard to Michael Dellís. Or Tim Geithnerís for that matter.

Michael Dell is not a criminal. But neither is Jeff Skilling and he remains locked up in a Colorado prison.

To File or Not to File, That is BP’s Question

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bp_logo1 Ever since the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout in late April, friends in my line of work and I have been debating whether British Petroleum is going to file a chapter 11 case to reorganize while dealing with the huge and still-to-be determined liabilities arising from the catastrophe.

As the spill spiraled out of control, my sense was that the question about a BP bankruptcy filing was not whether the company would file, but rather ìwhenî and ìwhere.î Just dealing with the tens of thousands of claims that will be asserted against BP in hundreds of courts across the U.S. cries out for centralized bankruptcy processing from a logistical standpoint, if nothing else.

But from a purely financial standpoint, the question of whether BP will need to file is a closer call. As Joe Schaefer outlines here, BP is a hugely profitable, hard-asset based company that is ñ at least on paper — capable of weathering this financial firestorm outside of bankruptcy protection, particularly if the relief well is successful and restores investor confidence in BPís capacity to deal with the liabilities. 

On the other hand, as Craig Pirrong reminds us (related NY Times article here), BPís financial situation is perilous and could deteriorate with Enronesque speed if the markets lose trust in BPís capacity to perform on its contractual obligations. Those CDS spreads are indeed ominous.

Stay tuned.

How important is knowing your Father?

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pandas_zoom2 Maybe pretty darn important, according to University of Texas researchers Karen Clark, Elizabeth Marquardt and Norval D. Glenn:

Each year, an estimated 30,000-60,000 children are born in this country via artificial insemination, but the number is only an educated guess. Neither the fertility industry nor any other entity is required to report on these statistics. The practice is not regulated, and the childrenís health and well-being are not tracked.

In adoption, prospective parents go through a painstaking, systematic review, including home visits and detailed questions about their relationship, finances, even their sex life. With donor conception, the state requires absolutely none of that, and the effects of such a system on the people conceived this way have been largely unknown.

We set out to change that. We teamed up .   .   . to design and field a survey with a sample drawn from more than 1 million American households.

Our study, released this month by the Commission on Parenthoodís Future, focused on how young-adult donor offspring ó and comparison samples of young adults who were raised by adoptive or biological parents ó make sense of their identities and family experiences, how they approach reproductive technologies more generally and how they are faring on key outcomes. The study of 18- to 45-year-olds includes 485 who were conceived via sperm donation, 562 adopted as infants and 563 raised by their biological parents.

The results are surprising. While adoption is often the center of controversy, it turns out that sperm donation raises a host of different but equally complex issues.

Two-thirds of adult donor offspring agree with the statement ìMy sperm donor is half of who I am.î Nearly half are disturbed that money was involved in their conception. About two-thirds affirm the right of donor offspring to know the truth about their origins.

Regardless of socioeconomic status, donor offspring are twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report problems with the law before age 25. They are more than twice as likely to report having struggled with substance abuse. And they are about 1.5 times as likely to report depression or other mental health problems.

As a group, the donor offspring in our study are suffering more than those who were adopted: hurting more, feeling more confused and feeling more isolated from their families. (And our study found that the adoptees on average are struggling more than those raised by their biological parents.)

Some feel like a ìfreak of natureî or a ìlab experiment.î Others speak of the searching for their biological father in crowds, wondering if a man who resembles them could be ìthe one.î Still others speak of complicated emotional journeys and lost or damaged relationships with their families when they grow up.

Life is complicated.

Visiting a prison cell

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jail The troubling U.S. incarceration rate and the dubious governmental policy of overcriminalization have been frequent topics on this blog. The toll of the overcriminalization policy on citizens and their families is incalculable.

Part of the problem in modifying this destructive policy is that the constituency of current and former prisoners and their families is not powerful politically. But another aspect of the problem is that most well-meaning citizens who could make a difference on this issue politically have never experienced the hell that is most prisons in the United States. Itís human nature to avoid addressing even an important issue that one has never had to confront personally.

Thatís why this A Public Defender post is important ñ it provides penetrating insight into the destructive nature of our governmentís overcriminalization policy:

I sat in a prison cell yesterday.  .   .   .

There was a bed ñ a small bed ñ that was the length of the room. At the foot of the bed a metal toilet, with no cover. Just beyond that the heavy metal door, with a slit for a window. The door was maybe 3 feet wide, if that. At the head of the bed, if you were laying on your right side, youíd be about half a foot away from an ugly metal desk with holes that pretended to be drawers. This could not have been more than a foot long. The bed was flush with one wall. The desk with the opposite.

The bed looked hard, cold and dirty. And thatís it. This particular cell happened to have a window at the head of the bed. A window looking out onto nothing. Any future inhabitant of this particular cell would have it good. It was a single. Across the narrow passageway from this cell was another, identical in every respect except two: it was a double cell and there was no window. (Hereís a post I wrote a while ago about a different take on prisons in a foreign country.) [.  .  .]

I willed myself to stand there, though, for a minute. To look around at the bare walls, the bare desk, the dirty toilet and imagine someone ìlivingî there.

I even briefly closed my eyes and tried to picture myself there, day in and day out, for months, which turned into years, which turned into decades.

Would I survive? How does anyone? Would I give up and stop bathing, shaving, eating? Would I maintain my sanity or would I quickly decompensate? How long would it be before Iíd want to kill myself? [.  .  .]

People in cells are lucky, though. The next portion of the tour took me to the dorm-style housing. Which is nothing like any dorm youíve ever lived in. Imagine instead the makeshift MASH hospitals, or perhaps the busiest train station in your neighborhood at rush hour, except instead of standing, people are milling about a hundred bunk beds on that tiny platform.

There is no privacy, there is no solitude, there is no being left alone. You are part of a large crowd. You are in someoneís face and they are in yours. You are a collective. Day in and day out. You share your bedroom with 125 other people.

Leaving the prison, I asked my colleague: cell or dorm? Thereís no debate. Cell. Iíd rather lose my sanity by myself.

A truly civilized society would find a better way.

Are you an Asker or a Guesser?

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arguing According to Andrea Donderi, as described here by The Guardianís Oliver Burkeman, it depends on the culture in which you were raised:

We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures.

In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything ñ a favour, a pay riseñ fully realising the answer may be no.

In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yesÖ A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."

Neither’s "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no.  .   .   .

This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too. Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it’s a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they’re diehard Askers.

Applying this to legal education, my sense is that law schools try to develop Askers into trial lawyers, while the die-hard Guessers among law students probably gravitate toward non-litigation areas. Off hand, I cannot recall in my experience a particularly effective litigator who was anything other than an Asker. On the other hand, I know a number of good deal lawyers who are Guessers. What do you think?

Is the wild ride of Landry’s investors finally over?

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Landrys Rst Owning an interest in Houston-based Landryís Restaurants, Inc. over the past several years has not been for the faint-hearted.

But maybe ñ just maybe ñ the patience of long-term holders of Landryís stock is finally going to be rewarded.

This story began back in July of 2007 when Landryís announced that it was delinquent in its regulatory filings with the SEC and that it was in need of refinancing over $400 million in debt in a rapidly deteriorating debt market. Shortly thereafter, the company sued some of its bondholders for declaring the company in technical default under their bonds, but the company quickly settled that litigation on not particularly good terms.

A few months later, Landry’s announced in January 2008 that its CEO and major shareholder (39%), Tilman Fertitta, had made an offer to take the company private by buying the other 61% of the company’s stock for $23.50 share, which worked to be a $1.3 billion deal, including debt.

Given the circumstances, that offer sounded pretty good, particularly given that the proposed purchase price was a 40% premium over the $16.67 share price at the time of the offer.

Unfortunately, a flurry of shareholder lawsuits followed Fertitta’s bid. By early March, 2008, it was apparent that Fertitta’s bid was so speculative that he hadn’t even lined up financing for it.

So, in April of 2008, Fertitta lowered his offer to $21 per share because of "tighter credit markets", and Landry’s board announced in June of that year that it had accepted that price.

But by the fall of 2008, the financial crisis on Wall Street had roiled credit markets even further and Hurricane Ike caused considerable damage to several Landry’s properties.

So, in October of 2008, Fertitta lowered his offer to $13.50 per share.

Then, in mid January of 2009, Landry’s announced that it was terminating the proposed deal with Fertitta. The reason was a bit convoluted, but the gist of it was that Landry’s contended that the SEC was requiring the company to issue a proxy statement disclosing information about a confidential commitment letter from the lead lenders on the buyout deal.

Amidst all this, Landry’s stock was tanking, closing at under $5 per share.

Meanwhile, while the take-private bids languished and the company’s stock plummeted to historic lows, Fertitta continued to buy more Landry’s stock so that he now controls somewhere in the neighborhood of 55% of the company’s shares.

Yes, that’s right. Despite Fertittaís series of unsuccessful take-private offers over the previous couple of years, Landry’s board failed to obtain a standstill agreement from Fertitta that would have prevented him from taking a majority equity position while Landry’s stock price was tanking.

So, given all that, could Fertitta and the Landry’s directors screw things up any worse?

How about proposing yet another deal in which Fertitta would buyout Landry’s other shareholders in return for giving them an equity stake in a publicly-owned spin-off (Saltgrass Steakhouse) in a brutally competitive niche of the restaurant market?

After shareholders and the markets widely panned that spinoff proposal, Landry’s board tentatively approved an offer from Fertitta to buy the balance of Landry’s shares for $14.75 per share. Compared to the spinoff proposal, Fertitta’s cash offer looked relatively good.

There was just one small problem with Fertitta’s proposal. Under Delaware corporate law, Fertitta had to agree that his proposal was subject to a requirement that a majority of the Landry’s shares that Fertitta did not control have to approve the deal.

Enter William Ackman and his Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund. Pershing Square bought up a bunch of Landry’s shares and announced that it opposed Fertitta’s buyout offer.

So, assuming your head isnít still spinning from all that, whatís the latest with Landryís?

Yesterday, the Landryís board accepted a $24-a-share takeover offer by Fertitta ($.50 more than his January 2008 offer back when he owned only 39% of the company), which makes for about $1.4 billion deal.

In addition, Landryís has the right to shop Fertittaís offer for 45-days in an effort to obtain a higher offer and doesnít have to pay Fertitta a break-up fee if such a higher offer is obtained. Of course, no one other than Fertitta has shown any interest in acquiring Landryís, but thatís a nice touch, anyway.

The deal has a couple of contingencies, including court approval of a partial settlement of Delaware class action litigation against Fertitta and certain company directors.

Likewise, the deal must be approved by a majority of shareholders not affiliated with Fertitta, namely Ackman and Pershing Capital. But given the pricing of the deal ñ and the profit that Pershing Capital looks to make on its investment ñ such approval would appear to have been lined up already. So, Landryís investors may finally receive a decent payoff for their wild ride over the past three years.

As the past three years have shown, Landryís investors shouldnít count their chickens before this deal hatches. But if it does, you can count on one thing about Landryís.

The days of Landryís as a publicly-owned company are over. For good.

Update: Steve Davidoff doesn’t think that Pershing Capital will necessarily play ball with Fertitta’s bid. With the paucity of bidders for Landry’s, it seems unlikely to me that Pershing Capital would take the risk of opposing the deal. But you never know in the wild world of Landry’s.

So much for the presumption of innocence

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Allen Stanford This post from late last year noted this self-righteous NY Times Magazine piece  in which Andrew Meier decried the Russian government’s unjust prosecution and treatment of former Yukos chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Meanwhile, the Times and most of the rest of the mainstream media have largely ignored the United States Government’s unconscionable treatment of R. Allen Stanford, who is still awaiting trial in downtown Houston’s Federal Detention Center. Stanford’s current legal team — which includes Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz — has filed another motion seeking Stanford’s release, this time on Constitutional grounds.

The deprivation of due process and other Constitutional arguments contained in Stanford’s latest motion are interesting, but what is even more compelling is the description of what the government has done to Stanford while he is presumed to be innocent of the charges asserted against him:

Mr. Stanford, a man who is presumed to be innocent, is being, and has been, subjected to substantial and undeniable punishment long before the trial of his case has even begun. He has been physically assaulted; he has suffered significant medical injury and psychological debilitation; he was held in solitary confinement two separate times for a total of 40 days; he has been subjected to 335 days of pretrial incarceration as of May 18, 2010; and before his scheduled trial concludes, he will predictably serve another nonspeculative 439 days.

Pivotally, he has, and will continue to have his constitutional rights compromised, including his fundamental right to assist counsel in the preparation of his defense, to personally review even a small fraction of the evidence that is material to his prosecution, to locate exculpatory evidence, and to have his core cognitive faculties undiminished by unnecessary conditions of confinement in a high-security prison which, in a myriad of ways .   .  . have prevented and will prevent him from preparing for trial.  .  .  . [T]he conditions of confinement to which Mr. Stanford has been subjected have been and continue to be manifestly punitive. [.  .  .]

On June 18, 2009, when Mr. Stanford surrendered to authorities, he was a healthy 59 year-old man, with no substantial physical or mental health issues. Now, nearly one year in detention later, Mr. Stanford’s pretrial incarceration has reduced him to a wreck of a man: he has suffered potentially life-impairing illnesses; he has been so savagely beaten that he has lost all feeling in the right side of his face and has lost near field vision in his right eye. The major injuries from his assault while in prison required reconstructive surgery under general anesthesia and was performed while he was under restraint.

Rather than placed in medical isolation or the general population to recover, immediately post-operation, Mr. Stanford was placed in the maximum security Special Housing Unit (“SHU”) area of the prison where he remained detained in solitary confinement for roughly 23 days, and denied all outside human contact with the exception of his attorneys; extreme measures which are generally reserved for only the most violent of convicted criminals.

Mr. Stanford has experienced, according to the Declarations attached hereto, a precipitate, severe, and ongoing deterioration of his mental and emotional health caused by the conditions of his confinement. Mr. Stanford has, moreover, been denied his Sixth Amendment right to counsel, to assist counsel in the preparation of his defense, and has been for the entire 335 days of his ongoing critical pretrial period deprived of the requisite confidentiality of his discussions with his attorneys by enforced institutional review of every document which his attorneys wished to discuss with him during their meetings.

Trial of this case is not scheduled to begin until January 24, 2011, and is expected to last six months, bringing the total, non-speculative, duration of pretrial detention to a minimum of 774 days; well over two full years without a determination that he is guilty of any crime.

And just to make sure that Stanford will never be of any meaningful assistance to his defense counsel, get a load of the routine that Stanford faces each day of his expected six-month trial if he continues to be incarcerated during the trial:

Mr. Stanford’s inability to assist counsel during trial will be magnified by the reality of the system for bringing detained defendants to court, which forces defendants to undergo procedures which result in elapsed time of 14-17 hours between wake-up in the morning and return to cell in the evening. The physically and mentally exhausting and degrading procedures which Mr. Stanford would be forced to endure day in and day out during the six month trial if he remains incarcerated — procedures which leave insufficient time for sleep and virtually no time for additional preparation — are roughly as follows:

The inmates are awakened at around 4:00 to 4:30 AM. A body search is done before leaving the cell.

They are then taken to a receiving area where they have to strip naked, go through another body search, and then given a set of green clothes.

The inmates are then placed in a concrete holding cell where they may sit for 2 to 3 hours. GEO guards come into the holding cell where they shackle the inmates’ hands to a chain around their waist and shackle the ankles.

After they are shackled, the inmates are taken down to the first floor and placed in a van. After about a 30 minute wait, they are driven to the U.S. Marshal’s office at the Federal Courthouse.

The inmates are then searched by the U.S. Marshals and placed in a steel cell where they wait until they are called and taken to their hearing. Mr. Stanford stated that he goes to the hearing with his shackles in place.

After the hearing, the inmates are taken back to the steel holding cell and they remain there until everyone is done with their hearing.

By the time all the hearings are done it can be anywhere from 5:00 to 7:00 PM. At that time, the inmates are taken to the van and driven back to the FDC.

At the FDC, the inmates strip naked, undergo a body search, and change back into their regular jail garb.

The inmates remain in the holding cell while a counselor spends 5 minutes with each inmate asking what happened at their hearing, whether they feel suicidal, etc. After everyone is interviewed, the inmates are taken back to their cells somewhere around 7:00 to 9:30 PM.

For years, we watched as an out-of-control federal task force – egged on by a vacuous media members – rode roughshod over local citizens’ Constitutional protections. Now, before our eyes, the presumption of innocence has been eviscerated in the Stanford case with nary a peep of protest other than from Stanford’
s attorneys and a few bloggers.

"When the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat? .  .  .[D]o you really thing you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

The shameful state of the Incarceration Nation

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mentally ill prisoners The troubling U.S. incarceration rate ñ a direct result of the governmental policy of overcriminalization ñ has been a frequent topic on this blog (here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here and here).

In this post from last fall, Scott Henson notes that Kings College in London now has available here its latest "World Prison Population List" that reflects that the United States remains a world leader in incarceration rate by a large margin:

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, 756 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Russia (629), Rwanda (604), St Kitts & Nevis (588), Cuba (c.531), U.S. Virgin Is. (512), British Virgin Is. (488), Palau (478), Belarus (468), Belize (455), Bahamas (422), Georgia (415), American Samoa (410), Grenada (408) and Anguilla (401).

Americaís dubious drug prohibition policy is one of the reasons for the high incarceration rate. However, as this Houston Politics/Chronicle blog post notes, this National Sheriffsí Association survey (H/T Doug Berman) reports that the United States imprisons many more mentally ill citizens than treating them in hospitals. This press release on the survey summarizes the sad story:

Americans with severe mental illnesses are three times more likely to be in jail or prison than in a psychiatric hospital, according to "More Mentally Ill Persons Are in Jails and Prisons Than Hospitals: A Survey of the States," a new report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs’ Association.

"America’s jails and prisons have once again become our mental hospitals," said James Pavle, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit dedicated to removing barriers to timely and effective treatment of severe mental illnesses. "With minimal exception, incarceration has replaced hospitalization for thousands of individuals in every single state."

The odds of a seriously mentally ill individual being imprisoned rather than hospitalized are 3.2 to 1, state data shows. The report compares statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Bureau of Justice Statistics collected during 2004 and 2005, respectively. The report also found a very strong correlation between those states that have more mentally ill persons in jails and prisons and those states that are spending less money on mental health services.

Severely mentally ill individuals suffering from diseases of the brain, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, often do not receive the treatment they need in a hospital or outpatient setting. The consequences can be devastating ñ homelessness, victimization, incarceration, repeated hospitalization, and death.

"The present situation, whereby individuals with serious mental illnesses are being put into jails and prisons rather than into hospitals, is a disgrace to American medicine and to common decency and fairness," said study author E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., a research psychiatrist and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center. "If societies are judged by how they treat their most disabled members, our society will be judged harshly indeed."

Recent studies suggest that at least 16 percent of inmates in jails and prisons have a serious mental illness. According to author and National Sheriffs’ Association Executive Director Aaron Kennard, "Jails and prisons are not designed for treating patients, and law enforcement officials are not trained to be mental health professionals."

Ratios of imprisonment versus hospitalization vary from state to state, as the report indicates. On the low end, North Dakota has an equal number of mentally ill individuals in hospitals as in jails or prisons. By contrast, Arizona and Nevada have 10 times as many mentally ill individuals in prisons and jails than in hospitals.

Among the study’s recommended solutions are for states to adopt effective assisted outpatient treatment laws to keep individuals with untreated brain disorders out of the criminal justice system and in treatment. Assisted outpatient treatment is a viable alternative to inpatient hospitalization because it allows courts to order certain individuals with brain disorders to comply with treatment while living in the community. Studies show assisted outpatient treatment drastically reduces hospitalization, homelessness, arrest, and incarceration among people with severe psychiatric disorders, while increasing adherence to treatment and overall quality of life.  .   .   .

More evidence of the myth of American exceptionalism?

Next Victim of the Criminalization-of-Business Lottery?

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Although it really shouldn’t have surprised anyone, the big business news at the end of last week was the the Department of Justice had opened up a criminal probe of Goldman Sachs well before the filing of the SEC’s lawsuit a couple of weeks ago.

Craig Pirrong provides his typically lucid perspective toward the news, while the Epicurean Dealmaker insightfully notes a dynamic involved in the growing cascade against Goldman Sachs that should concern us all. Interestingly, that dynamic is the same one that was involved in the prosecution to death of former Enron chairman, Ken Lay.

Frankly, after almost a decade of misdirected prosecutions of businesspeople, it’s confounding that many citizens believe that a prosecution of Goldman Sachs would serve any useful public interest.

It is indisputable that government cannot possibly discover or prosecute all business fraud. But government policies that purport to prevent fraud by prosecuting simply prompt private parties to be less careful in detecting or avoiding fraud in the first place.

Moreover, the utter randomness of the criminalization-of-business policy undermines the public’s respect for the rule of law. For example, who can possibly keep up with all the rules that government has invoked in determining whether an important businessperson gets prosecuted for a supposed business crime?

First, there was the Apple Rule, which was quickly followed by the Dell Rule.

Then there was the Buffett Rule, closely followed by the GM Rule.

And who could forget the Geithner Rule?

Frankly, the rule of law has been replaced by what Larry Ribstein has coined the criminalization-of-business lottery where winning or losing becomes random.

For instance, the owners of Long Term Capital Management may have been the earliest winners in the most recent era. On the other hand, Jamie Olis may have been the earliest big loser.

Martha Stewart lost, but at least never lost her business enterprise. Frank Quattrone also lost, but then he won, although I suspect that he believes that he lost overall.

Subsequently, Theodore Sihpol won while Bill Fuhs and his family lost a year of his life before he won, too. But he and his family will never get that year back.

And no one lost bigger than Jeff Skilling.

Meanwhile, although mainstream media darlings Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett won, several of Buffett’s associates did not fare as well. Neither did Greg Reyes.

And who knows about those Lehman Brothers executives — they may be winners, after all? I mean, everyone was doing it, right? But you never know for sure.

Finally, who possibly can justify what Bill Furst has been through?

Just as with a gambling lottery, there is no rhyme or reason as to who wins or loses in the criminalization-of-business lottery.

But in this lottery — which does little or nothing to deter the true business criminals of the world — the losers and their families give up much more than merely money.

A truly civil society would find a better way.

A real bad mix

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witch-hunt11 Regular readers of this blog know about the human carnage that results from abuse of the governmentís prosecutorial power.

Also, the immense damage that overly-broad application of child predator laws is inflicting on many citizens has been a frequent topic on this blog.

But, as Bill Anderson has been chronicling over the past month in regard to the Tonya Craft case, when both of these dynamics are involved in a particular case, the results are so troubling that they seem surreal.

We like to think that we have evolved to a point at which witch hunts are no longer possible. But the truth is that we are still quite capable of mounting them.

As Ayn Rand observed about those who abuse state power to further their supposedly altruistic goals:

"[T]he truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends."

"The truth is that those horrors are their ends."