☕️ MONGOOSE LOVE ☙ Thursday, March 20, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Florida edges toward major tax reform; DC judge denies USIP’s TRO; DOGE moves at war speed; AI judges are cold, humans are mushy; and JFK files may be Trump’s greatest chess move ever; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup includes: Florida and other states keep moving slowly toward ending property taxes or at least major tax reforms; good legal news as DC judge denies Institute for Peace requested TRO; DOGE teams delivering shock and awe at the non-Peaceful speed of war; AI study finds artificial judges coldly even-handed and human judges have bleeding hearts; and the JFK files disclosure is looking a lot like another Trump chess move —possibly his greatest move yet— aimed at accomplishing President Kennedy’s last wish.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Were this any other year, I’d have ignored this slow-burning story. But 2025 is becoming a year where anything seems possible, and the story keeps cropping back up. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran its latest article under the headline, “Florida Explores Ditching Property Tax as Home Prices Soar.”

The Journal reported that Florida lawmakers have filed dozens of bills, from proposals to end property taxes altogether to less ambitious tweaks that would provide at least some welcome relief to Sunshine State homeowners. The underlying problem, like during any inflationary period, is that wages (the ‘price’ of labor) haven’t kept up with the prices of everything else.

So, as estimated home prices soared, local governments eagerly amped up their tax appraisals, and now their bloated budgets are fatter than deer ticks. Florida cities are swimming in tax receipts and, predictably, they are funding every kind of lunatic social program you can think of.

The deplorable result is that, for many Floridians, their property taxes are starting to compete with their mortgage payments. It’s hitting everyone. Some clients with beachfront properties, for example, now pay annual property taxes in six figures, for unremarkable homes built over 50 years ago.

Enter Governor DeSantis. The world’s best Governor took up the cause last year. He’s been relentlessly calling for a constitutional amendment to nix property tax. Now several states, including Wyoming, Kansas and Montana, are currently considering significant property-tax bills.

But it’s not clear all voters think would be is a good idea. In November, North Dakota voters crushed a ballot measure that would have eliminated their property taxes.

Of course, North Dakotan property taxes are nowhere near as bad as Florida’s. You Dakotans haven’t felt the pain yet. The Journal reported that, in Florida, property tax receipts have doubled over the last ten years. Which means we are now paying twice as much, and I can assure you, it feels that way.

The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits taking private property for public use without just compensation. But courts covered for local governments by playing semantic games, deeming property taxes a “tax” and not a “taking.” Now, local governments can confiscate people’s property in slow motion, by degrees and increments, in a long series of razor cuts, through perpetual property taxation— free from legal consequences of calling the process a “taking.”

Think about it this way. If the government outright seized 1% of your home each year and sold that partial interest to Blackrock, that would clearly be an unconstitutional taking. Whereas if they just demand 1% of the property value in cash every year, but seize the entire thing if you can’t pay, the courts say well, that is completely different.

If it did happen, what would be a better way for local governments to pay for services? Well, how about a sales tax on property sales? I know that sounds horrible, but if you only had to pay once, instead of forever, it might be worth it. And even though the tax would prominently appear in annoying bold typeface at the bottom of every sales contract, you probably wouldn’t even really pay for it, since sellers would have to adjust property prices downwards to accommodate the built-in cost of the tax.

In that sense, both buyers and sellers would share in the initial tax burden, and people would actually own their homes instead of renting them from the county commission.

Anyway, I’m a lawyer, not a tax expert. A sales tax is just one idea. But ending property taxes would restore true property ownership, free us from being de facto tenants of the government, encourage local governments to run efficiently instead of sitting back and leeching off property owners, and the sales tax idea would make local taxation far more transparent and honest.

It’s already a totally bonkers year, let’s just go for it and end property taxes once and for all. Who’s with me?

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In legal news, the Washington Post ran a more encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Judge denies request by U.S. Institute of Peace to stop DOGE takeover.” The case related to the Moose story that I reported earlier this week, the one where the 78-year-old president of the so-called Institute for Peace barricaded himself in his office and gorged on Domino’s stuffed-crust pizza deliveries until the police escorted him out.

After being unceremoniously ejected from his Cold War-era offices, Moose and his dark legions of progressive lawfare lawyers sued, of course, seeking a TRO reinstating Moose and ejecting DOGE instead.

USIP’s lawyer complained to the judge that DOGE is “moving with lightning speed.” He added dejectedly that, if DOGE staffers continue at this rate, they will soon “reduce this organization to rubble.” Well, hopefully.

Judge Beryl Howell (Obama appointee) was, as they say, not amused by DOGE’s heavy-handed tactics, especially in recruiting the FBI and the DC police department to help the cost-cutting team scrape off USIP’s bureaucratic crustaceans. “I’m very offended by how DOGE has operated at the institute,” Judge Howell sniped from the bench.

But in the end, the seasoned jurist properly found there was no sufficient reason to grant the TRO. “My concern about how this has gone down cannot sway me in my consideration of factors of the TRO.” Specifically, she said that the plaintiffs — ousted USIP board members who sued in their official capacities — “did not show they would be irreparably harmed if they were not reinstated and DOGE staffers were allowed to remain in the institute’s offices.”

She piled on, saying there was also “confusion in the complaint on a number of levels.” It’s a bad sign for your entire case when the judge calls your complaint “confused.” It’s even worse when she refers to layers of confusion.

It was great to see an Obama judge even-handedly applying the law, but one hidden nugget quickly became the most interesting part of the story. We learned more about the unprecedented warp speed at which the Trump team is running. the Journal reported, “A cybersecurity expert” —meaning, a hacker— “had driven from Georgia to DC in the middle of the night at DOGE’s request to help DOGE staffers access the institute’s computer systems.”

DOGE called in a hacker in the middle of the night! That, friends, is not the speed of government. It’s not really even the speed of business. This is something completely different.

This is the speed of war.

You can’t fight entrenched administrative power with press conferences and think tank reports. You can only fight it by showing up in the middle of the night, locking the doors, and hacking the systems. What we are seeing is political shock and awe.

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In the intersection of law and artificial intelligence, the Washington Post ran a simultaneously fascinating and challenging story headlined, “A provocative experiment pits AI against federal judges.” I bet you can guess which team won.

In 2015, Harvard ran a judicial experiment. Thirty-five federal judges participated in a workshop. They were asked to review a 1990’s appellate case about Balkan war crimes. They each had one hour to decide whether to reverse the trial judge’s decision to convict the defendant.

The researchers slightly tweaked each judge’s package, in two ways. First, they varied the emotional resonance: sometimes the defendant was described as a villain, and sometimes described sympathetically, such as by saying he’d expressed “deep regret at all bloodshed in this tragic war.”

Second, the packets flipped the legal strength. Some packets included prior cases suggesting the defendant’s conviction was legally flawed, while other packets included legal precedent hinting that the conviction was valid.

The all-too-predictable result was most judges based their decisions on the bleeding-heart, emotional factors— and not the law. The legal precedents didn’t seem to matter at all. Instead, the judges’ decisions were strongly correlated with whether the defendant was shown sympathetically— even though the judges wrote that their decisions were solely based on the law.

That was the 2015 study (published in 2016). But this week, Eric A. Posner and Shivam Saran at the University of Chicago Law School released a new paper in which they repeated the 2015 experiment, but this time used they Chat GPT to evaluate the cases.

Unsurprisingly, they found the exact opposite of the 2015 study. Chat GPT’s likelihood of overturning the conviction was “unaffected by whether the defendant is portrayed as sympathetic or unsympathetic.” Rather, “GPT follows precedent more consistently, demonstrating a higher likelihood of affirming when the precedent supports affirmation and a lower likelihood when precedent supports reversal.”

Chat GPT was completely unpersuaded by the emotional factors. In the 2015 study, almost all the human judges who got “sympathetic defendant” packets reversed the conviction. But GPT didn’t take the bait. It affirmed the conviction in all 25 cases.

Posner and Saran wrote that the artificial judge “is a true formalist: it neither refers to nor bases its rulings on sympathy and avoids policy considerations” when explaining its decisions.

The researchers didn’t just leave it there. They pressed onward. They specifically asked GPT to re-evaluate the cases, this time accounting for human elements.

But it didn’t work. “While AI often acknowledges the defendant’s sympathetic traits,” they wrote, “it ultimately disregards them as irrelevant to the outcome of the case.”

The 2015 study helps us better understand the epidemic of bleeding-heart judges issuing TROs to stop unsympathetic President Trump from firing sympathetically portrayed federal employees or from deporting sympathetic seeming gang members. Just saying.

👨‍⚖️ AI judges remain theoretical. For better or worse, human judges won’t be easily replaced. As the article correctly noted, “human judges are in the Constitution, and they aren’t going anywhere.” Not without a Constitutional amendment.

But —and this is a big but— we’ve already blurred the lines. We have non-constitutional administrative law ‘judges.’ We have ‘magistrates’ assigned to adjudicate trifling matters like speeding tickets and Mar-a-Lago search warrants. Could those extra-constitutional magistrates legally be replaced with AI ‘judges?’

Short of replacing them, it’s easy to imagine a day coming soon when even proper constitutional judges could be required to at least respond to contemporaneous AI evaluations of their legal cases. In other words, artificial second opinions. The Minority Report.

Would that be a good thing, as the op-ed seemed to suggest? Or would it be one more Orwellian step down the road to handing our fates over to robotic overlords?

Requiring a second AI take on judicial decisions might be a good thing. But it also inches us closer toward a dystopic future where AI doesn’t just assist, but overrules human judgment. And once AI starts deciding cases, it’s a short jump to AI writing the laws or even deciding who gets prosecuted in the first place.

Removing the bleeding heart might not be the best idea. AI judges might technically apply the law correctly— but without common sense. Imagine an AI judge ruling that a speeding ticket stands even though the driver was rushing a pregnant Chic-fil-A server to the hospital. After all, emergency exceptions are not excused by precedent.

As for me, I really don’t know how I feel. I’m decidedly pro-human, for very selfish reasons. But — reluctantly — I could also see a role, perhaps an inevitable role, for incorporating some AI into judging. After all, judges make mistakes. They can be biased. Appellate courts are also made up of humans, and naturally — human-ly — would prefer less work in reviewing flawed lower-court decisions.

At bottom, nobody cares what I think. AI’s unstoppable momentum continues crushing the field. AI judges, or at least AI assistant judges, are probably inevitable. If the human jurists want to hold this future off for as long as possible, then they need to start making better decisions.

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It was perfectly understandable that the rancorous chatter over the newly disclosed JFK files continued all day yesterday. But out of the clamor, a new possibility began to emerge; the possibility that the real goal of the disclosures wasn’t to identify JFK’s killer, but to finish what the beloved 1960’s president started— scattering the intelligence agencies to the wind. (Hat tip to Clandestine, the independent researcher who first broke the Ukraine biolabs story.)

The CIA fired up Operation Mongoose in 1961, right after its failed Bay of Pigs invasion. We’ll get that porky dictator! Aimed at destabilizing Cuba, the program included sabotage, economic warfare, assassination attempts, psyops, political subversion, covert paramilitary operations, and fantastically illegal false flags.

By 1963, disgusted by Mongoose, President Kennedy had firmly decided to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” And then, he was dead. Never mind!

We knew some details, thanks to a previous 1999 partial declassification. Some of the CIA’s proposed false flag operations, for example, included plans to stage fake terrorist attacks on American civilians and other military targets, including in Florida, to be blamed on Cuban nationalists.

Kennedy was outraged by the suggestions and ultimately removed CIA Chief Allan Dulles, who designed Operation Mongoose, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who’d signed off on it.

This week’s newly disclosed, unredacted JFK files included a batch of new, never-before-seen documents related to Operation Mongoose. One document that understandably caught Clandestine’s attention included details about biological attacks. The document was titled, “Minutes of the Meeting of the Special Group on Mongoose 6 Sep 1962.”

Starting in paragraph number 4, a “General Carter” mentioned “agricultural sabotage.” Let’s just soak in the awful ramifications of that banal term, agricultural sabotage, which can only mean starving civilians to death to further military-political objectives. In case anyone needs to hear it, starving innocent civilians is not okay. In terms progressives can understand, we didn’t vote for that.

Paragraph four also noted General Carter’s objection, which were “the disastrous results if something went wrong, particularly if there were obvious attribution to the U.S.” Meaning, he was worried somebody would find out what they did. But, General Carter reassured the room, “it would be possible to accomplish this purpose of agricultural sabotage— by methods more subtle than those indicated in the paper.”

A “Mr. Bundy” (presumably, not the serial killer Ted Bundy, but who knows) chimed in. Bundy “said that he had no worries about any such sabotage, which could clearly be” blamed on somebody else, like the Cubans. Mr. Bundy cautioned that America should avoid obvious things like chemical releases. That is, “unless they could be completely covered up.”

General Carter brought up a brilliant and very specific idea. “He mentioned specifically the possibility of producing crop failures by the introduction of biological agents which would appear to be of national origin.”

Wait, what??

They should have called it “Operation Not Our Fault.” Instead of debating the morality of forced starvation through covert biological warfare, they were only worried about the optics.

I feel inclined to pen a fulsome and very sarcastic essay about Cold War era biological operations, which previously were only the fodder of kooky anti-CIA conspiracy theories. (Now confirmed, of course, as fact.) I have many questions. Where would the “biological agents” come from? Who was developing them? How much of this was — and is — going on? Who are these insane Stanley Kubrick-style cartoon villains working for CIA and dreaming up this kind of uncontrolled evil? Why have they lied about it all these years?

Does anybody who works for the government ever get in trouble for lying?

And … starvation of noncombatant civilians through covert biological attacks? What. On. Earth.

And of course … was covid a “biological agent” designed as a “subtle” way to “accomplish the purpose” of killing civilians? Was it supposed to happen in a way that “could be completely covered up?” Was covid designed to “appear to be of national origin” from China?

I pause, unable to withhold this comment, to note that destroying people’s crops is not clever. It’s not high-tech. It’s not spycraft. It’s not progress through peaceful means. It doesn’t take highly-skilled experts and supertrained spooks to dream up nightmarish ideas like this.

Rather, it only requires merciless brutality and ruthless amorality.

No wonder Kennedy wanted to scatter the intelligence agencies to the wind. It’s too bad he became the accidental victim of a rogue, lone gunman who used to be on CIA’s payroll and totally worked alone. ALL ALONE, never forget. (Coincidentally, just like Trump assassin Thomas Crooks. Just saying.)

But for today, let’s set all that aside. Let’s consider just the contemporaneous ramifications. Could this kind of quietly explosive material be the real reason for the releases? Could there be a much bigger goal than just exposing one dark secret (that can never be exposed)? Could all these unredacted CIA breadcrumbs —and the frightful fury arising from them— cause an inevitable collapse of the intelligence agencies?

Will Kennedy finally achieve his revenge— from beyond the grave?

Short of destroying them, could President Trump be disciplining the intelligence agencies, by slowly slipping out their secrets, one by one, starting with the oldest and therefore least objectionable ones? I mean, why should Operation Mongoose remain classified? The Soviet Union is a historical footnote. Cuba is no geopolitical threat. It’s a cruise-ship comedian’s punchline.

If Trump is using these disclosures to initiate the intelligence agencies’ controlled demolition, it would be the longest, slowest burn of political payback in history—JFK’s revenge served not just cold, but cryogenically frozen and thawed out decades later for maximum effect.

The intelligence agencies built their Babylonic Tower of Power from bricks of secrecy. Trump is weaponizing their own secrets against them. If I’m right, it would be the most karmically delicious reversal in modern history.

Who’s the mongoose now? President Trump is the mongoose.

“And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.” — John 3:19-20.

Have a terrific Thursday! Like a SpaceX rescue ship, C&C will touch back down here tomorrow morning with a brand new payload of essential news and commentary.

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