Day: December 1, 2025

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@_1Okeke @TrendingEx @CitizenMonitors Reports of US ISR flights over Borno remain unconfirmed by official US or Nigerian sources. They originate from OSINT analyst Brant Philip’s posts, amplified by outlets like Sahara Reporters. While some media suggest ongoing activity, no government statements verify or deny it as


The post @_1Okeke @TrendingEx @CitizenMonitors Reports of US ISR flights over Borno remain unconfirmed by official US or Nigerian sources. They originate from OSINT analyst Brant Philip’s posts, amplified by outlets like Sahara Reporters. While some media suggest ongoing activity, no government statements verify or deny it as first appeared on JOSSICA – jossica.com.


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The Lebanese army has released footage and radio recordings from the escort of Pope Leo XIV’s plane during his historic visit to Beirut.


The post The Lebanese army has released footage and radio recordings from the escort of Pope Leo XIV’s plane during his historic visit to Beirut. first appeared on JOSSICA – jossica.com.


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@SONARROW_OSINT Sûrement un expatrié à qui la France lui manque 🤭


The post @SONARROW_OSINT Sûrement un expatrié à qui la France lui manque 🤭 first appeared on JOSSICA – jossica.com.


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Current News – currentnewschannels.blogspot.com – Blog by Michael Novakhov

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America’s Hidden Judiciary


Unbeknownst to most Americans, federal regulatory agencies have their own court system for adjudicating disputes that businesses and citizens have with regulators. These agencies rely on special courts headed by administrative law judges (ALJs). One big problem with this system is that it operates independently of legitimate Article III courts. Another problem is that agency-housed tribunals have a strong tendency to favor regulators over the regulated. And yet another problem is how these judges (which I call “transitory”) get loaned out between agencies. Inter-agency borrowing of ALJs may not immediately stand out to the average citizen as problematic, but it raises serious questions about constitutionality, executive transparency, and bureaucratic oversight.

In a new report for the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), I offer a systematic review of how federal agencies exchange their judges, analyzing a sample of 960 ALJs across forty-two federal agencies. In fact, agencies have likely lent and borrowed ALJs over the past ninety years, predating the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

The APA is considered the constitution for the administrative state. It outlines important procedures for agencies to adhere to when conducting rulemaking, rendering adjudication, and issuing statements of public policy. The APA requires select agencies containing statutory permission to conduct formal adjudication on the record (and often in public) under the oversight of an ALJ. Yet, the phenomenon of interagency borrowing of ALJs was born entirely outside of the APA’s requirements.

How did this controversial practice come to be? Several agencies managed pre-APA tribunals to adjudicate their legal matters. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has one of the oldest recorded instances of adjudicating public hearings within the federal government. The 1914 FTC Act enabled agency hearing officers (ALJs) to resolve disputes over unfair or deceptive acts and anti-competitive business transactions.

While ALJ borrowing formally began in the 1960s with the first documented instance at the NLRB, it may have begun decades earlier with the FTC in 1914 and the US Civil Service Commission in 1871. The Civil Service Commission is the predecessor to both the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

My report cites a 2014 case, Berlin v. Department of Labor, in which the MSPB borrowed a Coast Guard ALJ to conduct a two-day hearing for the Department of Labor. MSPB also borrows judges from the FTC through a special interagency system, adjudicating cases arising from other agencies. MSPB likely derived this power from the Civil Service Commission, which formally authorized ALJ borrowing at the National Labor Relations Board (NRLB) in the 1960s. While the NRLB’s historical report documents its internally hired or “stationary” ALJs, it keeps the identity of the agencies that lend ALJs hidden. This lack of transparency is concerning.

In addition to the above, the Department of Labor has a documented history of using pre-APA hearing examiners in the early 1900s. Examiners adjudicated public contracts for the manufacture and supply of materials under the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act (1936). In response to concerns over ex parte communications between Labor Department attorneys and examiners, its Division of Public Contracts kept them separated when traveling for work. Other agencies, like the Securities and Exchange Commission and NLRB, also took early steps to insulate their examiners from prosecutorial influence during the 1930s and 1940s. Most agencies today provide some degree of insulation for their judges after Congress amended the US Code in 1989 to provide ALJs with two layers of statutory removal protection.

Despite the above, Joanna Grisinger cites widespread concern over adjudicatory misconduct from a 1941 study by the Attorney General’s Committee on Administrative Procedure. According to the report, “parties confronted administrative officials not in formal courtrooms but in the agencies’ own offices, in space borrowed from other agencies, or in the field.” It is also very likely that agencies borrowed hearing examiners to conduct cases at these offices as well.

This early twentieth-century practice of agencies borrowing office space for hearings resembles a similar practice mentioned in my PLF report. My report reveals how the Surface Transportation Board borrows conference rooms at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to conduct its hearings. Not only that, but the Surface Transportation Board continually borrows most of its ALJs from FERC to this day.

In my report, I argue that ALJ borrowing is constitutionally suspect, however convenient for the agencies themselves, circumventing normal constitutional removal and appropriations processes.

Specifically, ALJ sharing can undermine the president’s Article II power to remove inferior officers for cause. If the ALJ is being lent to another agency, this process prevents the head of the appointing agency from removing that ALJ for work conducted at the borrowing agency. Such a predicament creates a legal gray area for the transitory ALJ to operate without being under the control of the appointing agency, lending agency, or the president. In reality, ALJs are federal officials who should always remain politically accountable to their superiors. Interagency sharing of ALJs undermines this accountability.

External agency officials cannot re-appoint ALJs to work at a separate agency without violating the Constitution.

Another constitutional concern with ALJ sharing is that agencies have obscured the source of funding for borrowed judges. My research has found that no borrowing agency provides a paper trail or budgetary justification for how they are paying their judges. The only agency that provides some financial detail is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, listing the terms of its agreement and the stipend for borrowing ALJs from the Department of Energy.

Despite this, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, like all other participating agencies, fails to justify where the money is coming from. Is it being siphoned from the budget reserved for hearings and appeals? Or perhaps ALJs are secretly paid from their enforcement fees, akin to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) procedure? In either case, Congress did not authorize such a circuitous funding process. These black-box methods fly in the face of the Article I Appropriations Clause. Agencies should be limited to spending only the money appropriated to them for their hired ALJs and staff, not for borrowing another agency’s judges.

Beyond the constitutional conflicts, ALJ borrowing circumvents the APA itself. We see this in APA § 556, where it requires an ALJ appointed by the president or the presiding agency head to be present during the taking of evidence. According to APA § 3105, ALJs are to be appointed by the agency employing them. This Appointment Clause requirement was later upheld in the Supreme Court’s decision in Lucia v. SEC (2018).

While an agency can hire and appoint as many ALJs as it wants under the APA, it cannot accept ALJ appointments made from separate agencies. In other words, external agency officials cannot re-appoint ALJs to work at a separate agency without violating the Constitution. The ALJ Loan Program supersedes the Appointments Clause by empowering OPM to authorize temporary ALJ appointments (loans). However, OPM is constitutionally precluded from acting in place of the agency head or the president when authorizing such ALJ loans. Courts reviewing challenges to agency adjudication should properly treat ALJ loans as duplicative appointments that are unauthorized under the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s Lucia opinion.

The only exception the APA recognizes for this in § 556 is those “specified classes of proceedings” that are “specially provided for by or designated under statute.” While the OPM’s 2007 rule—“ALJ Loan Program”—relies on a legislative amendment to the APA, the statute doesn’t provide for any specified or special proceedings that borrowed ALJs must oversee. There is no distinction between the cases that transitory ALJs and stationary ALJs review.

Another issue with the ALJ Loan Program is that some forms of ALJ borrowing violate this statute. According to the 1978 amendment, only agencies that are “occasionally or temporarily” short-staffed with ALJs may petition OPM to borrow another agency’s judge. However, as my PLF report demonstrates, several agencies like the Internal Revenue Service IRS, NOAA, Surface Transportation Board, Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and for a time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) each lacked any office of hearings. This means they did not employ any of their own ALJs during the time they borrowed from other agencies, contrary to statute.

The CPSC employed only one chief ALJ from 1975–80 and has since not hired any other judges internally. And while the CFPB appointed its first ALJ in 2016, it relied entirely on borrowed judges from its conception in 2011. This presents a major statutory breach to the 1978 amendment in 5 U.S.C. § 334, which does not permit agencies without their own office of ALJs to borrow from other agencies. The text of OPM’s ALJ Loan program also confirms this.

In addition to the above, section §557 of the APA requires each agency’s ALJ to conduct formal adjudication on the record in accordance with the organic statute of the agency. It, however, does not permit one agency to transfer quasi-judicial power to another.

Only agencies that are statutorily qualified to hear cases “on the record” can conduct formal adjudication under the APA. If the agency’s organic statute does not recognize such a function, an agency cannot inherit this power from a peer agency through an ALJ loan.

Section § 554 of the APA is quite clear in stating that agencies can only conduct evidentiary proceedings when “required by statute to be determined on the record after opportunity for an agency hearing.” This point is reiterated by Law Professor Kristin E. Hickman in her text, Understanding Administrative Law. Agencies are free to establish an internal tribunal to conduct such formal adjudication so long as their organic statute or enabling act permits this. Agencies like the IRS, CPSC, and NOAA fail to adhere to this requirement.

Agencies borrow and lend ALJs for two major reasons. First, some agencies are ALJ-deficient. They either have no ALJs or have limited judges relative to their annual docket of cases. The NLRB, for example, has a storied history of lending its ALJs during times of low-to-normal caseloads and borrowing ALJs when it experiences a surge in cases.

Second, agencies lend ALJs to peers who lack funding. Many of the borrowing agencies suffered lapses in funding for ALJs or never appropriated funding for an office of hearings and appeals in the first place. As previously discussed, at least five agencies without an internal office of judges have conducted adjudication entirely through borrowed judges.

This interagency exchange of ALJs and its inherent problems are widespread. Large agencies like the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration are among the top lenders of personnel. By contrast, some of the biggest borrowers of transitory ALJs vary in size, like the small Surface Transportation Board and mid-sized Small Business Administration. Interestingly, independent agencies occupy the most transitory ALJs relative to total agency headcount, while transportation policy was the largest domain for transitory ALJs.

The way this secret system works is that some judges move from agency to agency on a long-term basis (transfer), rather than on a short-term basis (loans). Most agencies tend to engage in a mix of ALJ borrowing, lending, and long-term transfers.

All told, agency adjudication remains an important, entrenched exercise of administrative power. Yet, such a privilege has been abused by the pervasive process of ALJ sharing. Congress and the executive office of the president should launch investigations into this problematic practice and consider reforms that restore power and accountability to constitutionally authorized institutions. Reforming this unaccountable practice would be one way to curtail the runaway power wielded by the administrative state.

The post America’s Hidden Judiciary first appeared on Audio Posts – audio-posts.com.


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Modernity in Ancient China


The availability heuristic is a tendency to overestimate the frequency of an occurrence based on how easily examples come to mind. This type of logic is flawed—we might more easily remember vivid examples even if those occurrences are objectively rare. History is not immune to the availability heuristic, giving undue weight to written materials. That effect becomes pronounced with translations. When only select works are translated, the translated works naturally cast an overwhelming shadow on the untranslated corpus. In the West, popular translations of Chinese philosophy have largely been translations of Confucius, the Dao De Jing, the Book of Changes, and Sun Tzu’s Art of War (frequently relegated to strategy, or worse, business). Inherent difficulties in the translation of certain Chinese concepts, along with early translators’ interest in using the mystical/spiritual “East” as a way to criticize the rational/analytical “West,” have created the impression that Chinese philosophy is a wisdom tradition, rather than true philosophy. Christoph Harbsmeier’s recent translation of Han Feizi, a collection of writings offering advice to rulers attributed to the Legalist philosopher Han Fei (280–233 BC), brings into the light a serious challenge to that cliché. Instead, we find in Han Feizi arguments for the rule of law and the channeling of man’s natural selfishness (rather than trying to change it), anticipating major themes in Western thought not developed until centuries later.

One of the more subversive surprises in Han Feizi is its relentless criticism of Confucianism, which would go on to become state orthodoxy. Broadly speaking, Confucianism is a form of virtue ethics that sought to revive a golden antiquity by re-teaching society the twin values of humaneness and proper etiquette. While Confucianism stressed the importance of educated, virtuous advisers, Han Feizi frets that to “esteem gentlemen who are adept in literary studies,” would make “orderly rule and a strong state” “unobtainable.” Confucius’s advice to “govern through generosity” is sneered at by Han Feizi as “the sort of speech that ruins a state,” that would “wreck the rule of law,” and cause “chaotic administration.” Confucians are characterized by Han Feizi as “shamans and invocators,” who naively “keep talking about the achievements of good governance in the past,” instead of examining “the business of offices and laws” or the “facts of wickedness and depravity.”

In contrast to Confucius’s quest to return to a golden antiquity by reviving its etiquette, Han Feizi takes the view that “past and present have different customs, new times and former times require different precautions.” Han Feizi daringly asserts that “benevolence and righteousness had their use in antiquity but are not useful in our times.” Indeed, Han Feizi claims that the ancients “thought little of material goods … not because they were benevolent, but because material goods were in abundance. And if today people compete and struggle, this is not because they are coarse, but because material goods are scarce.” Han Feizi had a similar explanation for why legendary kings, venerated by Confucians, would voluntarily abdicate their thrones. It was not because ancients “were high-minded, but because the advantages of that positional power were meagre.” In Han Feizi’s view, a sage-like ruler should set harsh fines and punishments to “adopt … to the customs” of the people that he rules so that “his undertakings comply with his age.”

Like Machiavelli, Han Feizi suggests private virtues may not be public virtues. Han Feizi notes that people fear “stern physical punishments,” and hate “heavy fines,” but a sage-like ruler uses them to prevent “wickedness,” as well as “violence and chaos,” proving that “benevolence, righteousness, kindness and loving care are not sufficient for use, whereas stern punishments and heavy fines can bring order to the state.” Reputations for “loving generosity” lead to ruin, as “loving concern consists in being unable to bear other people’s suffering, and generosity is the inclination to give things away. If you cannot bear suffering, then you will not punish trespassers; and if you are fond of giving things away, then you will dole out rewards without having seen any achievements.” Rulers are told that “appearance of fire is severe, and therefore few people are burnt by it; the appearance of water is soft, and many people drown. You must make your appearance stern, not to let people drown in your timidity.” The goal is not cruelty for its own sake, as Han Feizi advises a ruler that if “you are generous towards thieves and villains, then you harm honest people,” and to be “lax on punishments and fines and practise leniency and generosity, this in effect benefits the wicked and harms the good.” Rulers are advised to ignore the “proposals of learned men,” to make punishments for crimes light, as that would reduce the deterrent effect of punishment.

Rulers are encouraged to use the carrot as well, to “establish benefits to encourage people.” But contrary to the Confucian virtue of helping the needy, Han Feizi, worries that “giving succor to the poor and the troubled,” though “call[ed] benevolence and righteousness,” would permit those “without achievements” to be rewarded. Han Feizi makes punishment and reward the centerpiece of its statecraft because of its view, akin to Bentham’s, that pleasure and pain are the “two sovereign masters.” Han Feizi calls striving for “security and gain,” and avoiding “danger and harm,” our “basic human instinct.” People are described as controlled by “two handles,” which are “punishment and munificence,” since people are “afraid of punishments and fines, and covet praises and rewards.”

As Machiavelli advised princes to be feared if they cannot be both loved and feared, Han Feizi similarly advises the sage-like ruler not to “depend on others’ caring for him out of love,” as “anyone who depends on others’ caring for him out of love will be in danger.” Han Feizi explains that a wayward son who cannot be reformed by “his parents, the proper conduct of his neighbours, the intelligence of his teachers and seniors,” nevertheless would be reformed by a “local bailiff, wielding weapons from the state arsenal,” because “the people are arrogant towards love but obedient to awe-inspiring majesty.” In line with Machiavelli’s advice for a ruler to avoid becoming resented, Han Feizi warns that if “crime arises from A but the calamity hits B, hidden resentment will be formed,” and being “hard on an innocent person is what causes resentment among the people, and when the people are resentful, the state will be in danger.”

The severity Han Feizi prescribes aside, its analysis of human self-interest precedes Adam Smith’s conclusion of how self-interest can lead to beneficial exchanges in the market.

Han Feizi’s elaboration on the deterrent effect of punishment looks like an ancient Chinese version of a rational economic actor model of crime proposed by Gary Becker. Han Feizi recognized that deterrence was a function of severity, suggesting that “if one punishes heavily the light crimes, then light crimes will not arise and heavy crimes will never come. This is called removing punishments through punishments,” or “to eradicate punishments by punishments.” Han Feizi explained that the deterrent effect would depend on the probability of detection. People will keep committing misdeeds if “it is not sure whether the perpetrators will be caught,” “even if you publicly execute and dismember them,” but if harsh punishment was inevitable, then people would not commit crimes, “even if they could possess the whole world” by doing so.

The severity Han Feizi prescribes aside, its analysis of human self-interest precedes Adam Smith’s conclusion of how self-interest can lead to beneficial exchanges in the market. Smith famously remarked that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.” Han Feizi observes that when a landowner feeds his workers well, it “is not because the landowner is particularly fond of these tenants, but he says to himself: ‘In this way, they will plough even deeper furrows and when hoeing they will weed out even the small weeds.’ When the tenants use all their strength and weed and plough vigorously, they use all their skills and keep the ridges between the plots neat, it is not because they are fond of their master, but they say to themselves: ‘In this way, our broth will have excellent flavor, and our payment in money and cloth will be easy to get.’” Moreover, he adds, their “minds are attuned to … being useful, because each acts in his own best interest.” Han Feizi takes the principle even further, arguing that “when a cartwright makes carts, he hopes that people will become rich and noble; when the carpenter makes coffins, he hopes that people will have untimely deaths. This is not because the cartwright is kind-hearted and the carpenter a villain; it is just that, if people do not achieve noble status, elaborate carriages will not be sold, and if people do not die, coffins will not be bought.”

In contrast to Confucianism’s hope that with proper education and role models, society can be made virtuous, Han Feizi, foreshadowing modern Western authors, abandons attempts to instill moral virtues in the people, opting instead to take their self-interested nature as a given and design institutions around it. Rulers are encouraged to “adopt what works for the many and reject what works for the few, therefore he strives not for virtue but for law.” Han Feizi explains that “laws are established, not to prepare for the likes” of the virtuous but to enable a “ruler to stop the likes” of bad men. Subversively, Han Feizi even applies the principles of the lowest common denominator to rulers. Even “a mediocre ruler,” as long as he “keeps to law and the techniques of rule,” much like a “fumbling carpenter” who “keeps to the compass and the T-square,” “would not go wrong even one time in ten thousand.” Besides, Han Feizi argues, to hold out for an exceptional ruler would be foolish. Those by definition “emerge once in a thousand generations,” whereas embracing the law would permit “mediocrities” to assert orderly rule. Han Feizi applies the same reliance on law instead of virtue when it comes to administration, noting that “today, there are no more than ten honest and trustworthy gentlemen, but there are hundreds of offices within your boundaries,” so if a ruler insists “on exclusively appointing honest and trustworthy gentlemen, then there will be not enough people for the official positions.” Instead, Han Feizi states the proper strategy “of the clear-sighted ruler is to make uniform the law and not to seek out the intelligent; it is to be firm in techniques of rule and not esteem trustworthiness.”

Turn of the century Chinese thinkers, such as Liang Qichao, admired Legalism as proto-rule of law. Han Feizi argued that laws should be “compiled and written down on charts and documents, deposited in the repositories of the offices and promulgated to the hundred clans.” Han Feizi requires rulers to apply the law evenly, to punish even their favorites, so that the people understand that “if the ruler still applies the law” to the favorites of a ruler, “all the much more he will apply it” to the people. A ruler should not “repeatedly change the laws,” for if a ruler “frequently change[s] the laws, the people will find this hard to bear,” and the “state is likely to be ruined.”

Believing that attempts to develop virtue in leaders and the led are naïve, designing institutions based on the assumption that most people are self-interested, and the importance of the rule of law are all building blocks of modernity (for better or for worse). While these observations might seem trite today, we should be surprised that they were being discussed thousands of years ago in China. Han Fei’s contemporaries certainly were. Perhaps this explains why most political philosophers of this era died of natural causes, but not the Legalists, who often died violent deaths. A victim of court politics, Han Fei himself was forced to commit suicide. It might be of some comfort to Han Fei that his ideas have not died with him, and have instead, through the work of translators such as Harbsmeier, been introduced to a whole different world that Han Fei may not have imagined but, if given a chance to inspect, would recognize as familiar. 

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Fact Check: Is viral image of Diddy ‘laughing with a gay inmate’ real?



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#Netherlands to put another €250 million for #US weapons for #Ukraine newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/netherlan…


#Netherlands to put another €250 million for #US weapons for #Ukraine newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/netherlan…

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#Netherlands to put another €250 million for #US weapons for #Ukraine newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/netherlan…


#Netherlands to put another €250 million for #US weapons for #Ukraine newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/netherlan…

The post #Netherlands to put another €250 million for #US weapons for #Ukraine newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/netherlan… first appeared on The Russian World – russianworld.net.


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