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The thanatophiles are out in the public square again arguing that the pursuit of radical life extension is immoral. One such is University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel who denounced in his review of three new books reporting on the search by various Silicon Valley moguls for technologies and treatments that could slow or even reverse aging. Recall that Emanuel is the man who at age 57 famously declared in 2014: “Seventy-five. That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.” Why? “By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life,” he asserted. So why hanker for death? Emanuel argued:

Living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

Of course, that is exactly what aging does to us all. But if the Silicon Valley and other innovators succeed at slowing and then reversing aging, all of those losses would be eliminated. The point of aging research is not to make us older longer, but to make us younger longer. So what then Emanuel? In his book review Emanuel now declares, “One of the most disturbing aspects of this immortality mania: its utter selfishness.” Selfishness? Radical life extension would necessarily mean, he argues, less reproduction in order to keep world population in check. That would therefore end of the “possibility of creating new people with novel characteristics and perspectives. Life would become one long, boring rerun.”

Evidently, Emanuel believes that oldsters have a duty to die and get out of the way of the younger generations. If anti-aging treatments work, oldsters won’t be elderlyl and thus will not soak up social security and Medicare since they will be healthy enough to support themselves. And presumably technological progress will not halt, so it is reasonable to expect all sorts of biotech and digital enhancements that will strengthen physical bodies, sharpen mental acuity, and regulate emotional states. In other words, the perpetually young would be endowed with novel characteristics and perspectives. And in the unlikely event that Emanuel turns out to be right about eternal ennui, there is a solution: You can experience the thrill of dying simply by stopping your longevity treatments.

Emanuel is not along. For example, an article over at Wired asserts, “Silicon Valley Would Rather Cure Death Than Make Life Worth Living.” The article cites the recent data by Princeton researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton that mortality rate for poor white Americans with a high school or less education is rising. Disconnected from community and work, many now succumb to drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide: basically dying of despair.

Instead of frittering away their talents and their money on the search for immortality, Wired wants Silicon Valley titans to devote their resources to solving the social and economic dysfunctions that are shortening the lives of their less fortunate fellow Americans. Of course, some vast tech fortunes are already being spent on programs aimed at creating better lives for the poor. Ultimately, Wired is posing a false choice. Progress in one area of human endeavor does not preclude progress in other areas. It is highly likely that whatever treatments stem from research on aging will ameliorate many different illnesses including those that afflict poor Americans.

For more background see my article, Eternal Youth For All.

Immediately after the election, there was a spate of reports about Clinton voters buying newspaper and magazine subscriptions as a way to keep an eye on Trump. Now, it looks like the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction—with the elite press, amusingly, offering readers advice on how to tune out.

It all amounts to a statement about journalism today, Ira Stoll writes. The press has gotten away from its traditional job of just telling readers what the news is. Its new, self-appointed role involves advising people how they should feel about the news and how to get away from it.

But in so doing, outlets disclose a certain set of assumptions about the ideological uniformity of their readerships, argues Stoll. After all, there may have been some Americans who could have used all this advice about dealing with news-related anxiety and depression back during the Obama administration. And there are plenty of Americans out there who aren’t depressed, unhappy, anxious, or unhappy about Trump’s election and policies at all. Perhaps one way to feel less worried about the news, Stoll suggests, might just be exposure to at least the remote possibility that policy shifts in the direction of the Republican agenda might actually be good for America and its citizens.

View this article.

Have you seen the latest craze among Trump administration officials and their enablers in the Republican establishment? It’s called Pin the Blame for Ryancare on the House Freedom Caucus, and it starts right at the top:

Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 26, 2017

This assessment of the famously stubborn, 29-member group is shared by an uncounted number of the their colleagues, and even one of their own: Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), who resigned from the caucus yesterday, explaining that, “Saying no is easy, leading is hard, but that is what we were elected to do.” Also in the screw-you-guys,-I’m-going-home camp is Rep. Austin Scott (R-Georgia):

Mark Meadows betrayed Trump and America and supported Pelosi and Dems to protect Obamacare. https://t.co/zjcfmMhs9P

— Rep. Austin Scott (@AustinScottGA08) March 25, 2017

As the debacle was taking shape Friday, you saw a lot of such with-us-or-against-us talk:

Which @HouseGOP members will vote w/ @NancyPelosi today to keep Obamacare? Hard to believe any, but there are some who are…well, confused

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) March 24, 2017

And it wasn’t just on talk-radio Twitter. The Wall Street Journal, in a withering post-debacle editorial, asserted that the Freedom Caucus “sabotaged”…its “best chance to reform government”:

[T]he result of their rule-or-ruin strategy will now be the ObamaCare status quo, and Mark Meadows (North Carolina), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Louie Gohmert (Texas) and the rest own all of its problems. Please spare everyone your future grievances about rising health spending or an ever-larger government.

The grand prize for cynicism goes to Senator Rand Paul, who campaigned against the bill while offering an alternative that hasn’t a prayer of passing.

Now, there are plenty of contrary takes (see Conn Carroll, Justin Amash, and Reihan Salam, for starters). But the betting money is that both the Trump administration and the GOP establishment it now sits atop will seek actively to marginalize the rebels and instead find common governing cause with centrist Democrats, particularly in the United States Senate. If true, this scenario would produce one of the greatest cognitive dissonances in modern political history, while setting the administration up for even more humiliation during its honeymoon phase. Trump the above-the-fray outsider is collaborating with dealmaking career insiders to sideline one of the only principled Beltway blocs, even before showing any ability to woo Democrats over to Trump’s anti-conservative agenda. It’s all shaping up to be a godawful mess.

In a terrific New York Times Magazine article over the weekend, Robert Draper captured the quick devolution of Planet Trump’s attitudes toward the House Freedom Caucus, and by extrapolation its Senate allies such as Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz:

Early this year, [House Majority Leader Kevin] McCarthy predicted to me that the new president would quickly subjugate the Freedom Caucus. “Trump is strong in their districts,” McCarthy told me. “There’s not a place for them to survive in this world.”

When we spoke on the morning of March 7, Trump assured me that he would not bully the Obamacare-replacement bill’s loudest Republican critics, like the Freedom Caucus chairman, Representative Mark Meadows, on Twitter: “No, I don’t think I’ll have to,” he said. “Mark Meadows is a great guy and a friend of mine. I don’t think he’d ever disappoint me, or the party. I think he’s great. No, I would never call him out on Twitter. Some of the others, too. I don’t think we’ll need to….”

But on March 21, in a meeting with the Freedom Caucus about the bill, Trump called out Meadows by name, saying, “I’m going to come after you, but I know I won’t have to, because I know you’ll vote ‘yes.’ ” Meadows remained a “no”

The Draper piece makes clear that many of Trump’s post-Ryancare priorities will involve such deviations from modern conservative orthodoxy as raising tariffs, spending billions on infrastructure, and abandoning even the rhetorical pretense of taking on the fiscal unsustainability of old-age entitlements.

When I spoke with Trump, I ventured that, based on available evidence, it seemed as though conservatives probably shouldn’t hold their breath for the next four years expecting entitlement reform. Trump’s reply was immediate. “I think you’re right,” he said. In fact, Trump seemed much less animated by the subject of budget cuts than the subject of spending increases. “We’re also going to prime the pump,” he said. “You know what I mean by ‘prime the pump’? In order to get this” — the economy — “going, and going big league, and having the jobs coming in and the taxes that will be cut very substantially and the regulations that’ll be going, we’re going to have to prime the pump to some extent. In other words: Spend money to make a lot more money in the future. And that’ll happen.” A clearer elucidation of Keynesian liberalism could not have been delivered by Obama. […]

When I asked Trump if he was a fan of the border-adjustment tax, he replied: “I am. I’m the king of that.”

And to woo Democrats his way, Draper reported, Trump has offered preliminary support for expanding gun background checks, mandating greater benefits to miners, financing high-speed rail projects, and using the federal contracting process to punish companies that outsource jobs. Two bookended quotes from senior advisor Steve Bannon preview the new Trumpian bipartisanship:

“I think the Democrats are fundamentally afflicted with the inability to discuss and have an adult conversation about economics and jobs, because they’re too consumed by identity politics. And then the Republicans, it’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government — which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world.” […]

“The thing you need to know about Trump,” Bannon said, “is he doesn’t care about the Republican Party and he doesn’t care about the Democratic Party. He just wants to put some wins on the board for the country.”

But there are three serious structural obstacles to Trump effectively trading two dozen House libertarian-leaners for a half-dozen centrist Democrats in the Senate:

1) The administration needs the House Freedom Caucus to pass stuff like corporate tax reform, let alone the unpalatably steep agency cuts that Trump’s proposed budget relies on to maintain last year’s federal spending levels. (Reality check from Draper: “as a top House Republican staff member told me, ‘even the cabinet secretaries at the E.P.A. and Interior are saying these cuts aren’t going to happen. They’re going to protect their grant programs, their payments to states, their Superfunds. So how do you cut 31 percent of the E.P.A. out of the 5 percent that isn’t protected? And a bill that cuts all money for the N.E.A. will not pass. For Republicans in the West’ — states whose vast rural areas benefit disproportionately from N.E.A. grants — ‘that’s a re-election killer. The campaign commercials write themselves.'”)

2) There is no evidence yet that Democrats will collaborate with a president their base despises. Gallup’s latest poll shows Trump with just a 36 percent national approval rating, lower than either Barack Obama or Bill Clinton ever had. And his approval rating among Democrats has been hovering in the high single digits.

3) The same Ryancare bill whose Republican opponents Trumpworld wants to punish for disloyalty was almost hysterically unpopular, far more widely loathed than even the Obamacare mess it sought to supplant. There’s every reason to believe the HFC helped the Republican Party dodge a bullet, while also saving the country from a bad piece of legislation. As such, it’s within the realm of plausibility that the Freedom Caucus stands to gain, not lose, political support from outside Capitol Hill.

Which leads to the greatest dissonance of all. For more than a year now, House Freedom Caucus pal (though not a member—he’s too independent for that!) Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) has been telling a good and I think largely true shaggy dog story about how he thought his Tea Party-affiliated voters were attracted to limited-government notions, until he went to Iowa to campaign for Rand Paul and instead encountered a tsunami of TP support for Donald Trump. “I realized,” he said, “they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

And how had the Paul/Massie/Lee/Cruz/Justin Amash class, and the movement they sprang out of, earned that crazy rep in the first place? By tackling head-on the sellout policies and corrupted personnel decisions of the GOP establishment. They were draining the swamp even before Donald Trump was getting into the birth-certificate forensics business. When I interviewed Massie and Amash in January 2016, just before their preferred candidate Rand Paul dropped out of the presidential race, both acknowledged that Trump was more successfully attracting voters who were disappointed that too many Tea Party picks had gone native in Washington. “They have sent some people here to Congress who said all the right things, they ran as Tea Party candidates, then they got up here and they voted for the omnibus bill, or voting for Speaker Boehner on their first day after pledging they wouldn’t vote for him,” Massie said. “And so what they’re looking for is somebody’s that’s not going to be controlled when they get here.”

Trump may still be beyond the control of mere mortals, but ever since bending the party apparatus to his will in July 2016, along the way discovering that the “principles” of such fiscal conservatives as Mike Pence are about as malleable as tin foil, he has created a paradox that borders on the delicious: The very establishment he once railed against for being power-hungry sellouts have now sold themselves out to Donald Trump in order to retain power. And now both sides have joined up in trying to stamp out the last remaining principled deviants, who show little outward sign of giving a rip. If you plan on well and truly killing the Tea Party, it turns out, you’re gonna need a bigger stake.

Massachusetts prosecutors will move in mid-April to vacate nearly all of the roughly 24,000 drug convictions tainted by a single corrupt forensic lab chemist, The Boston Globe reported Saturday, marking the denouement of one of the largest drug lab scandals in U.S. history.

A Massachusetts prosecutor told the state’s Supreme Judicial Court last week that D.A.’s would seek to keep fewer than 1,000 of the 24,000 convictions tainted by drug lab chemist Annie Dookahn, who pled guilty in 2012 to falsifying test results in favor of law enforcement and tampering with evidence over a nine-year period starting in 2003.

“Without putting numbers on it, it’s in the ballpark that the court was looking for,” Robert J. Bender, a Middlesex County assistant district attorney, said during a March 16 hearing, according to Globe. “Hundreds of cases, not thousands of cases.”

Since Dookhan was convicted, the Massachusetts criminal justice system has been reeling under the number of so-called “Dookhan defendants” and how to ensure justice for all of them. Dookhan managed to taint an estimated one in six drug cases in Massachusetts between 2003 and 2012.

As I reported in January, the court declined to vacate the cases en masse, but ordered prosecutors to review and clear as many of the cases as they could:

The Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union was pressing the state’s high court to vacate the convictions en masse, arguing it would take 48 years to assign public defenders to each of the 24,483 defendants potentially harmed by the Dookhan’s dirty work.

The court declined to take such sweeping action, instead ordering state prosecutors to dismiss all cases within 90 days it would not or could not reprosecute if given a new trial. In addition, it ordered clear notifications to be sent to remaining defendants informing them of their right to challenge their convictions.

In a statement, Matt Segal, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts said Wednesday’s ruling “is a major victory for justice, fairness, and tens of thousands of people in the Commonwealth who were wrongfully convicted of drug offenses.”

“The court has called on prosecutors to dismiss the drug charges against most of the Dookhan defendants and to provide meaningful notice to the remaining defendants, all by fixed deadlines,” Segal said. “It is now time for the DAs to step up and finally allow Massachusetts to turn the page on the worst drug lab scandal in our nation’s history, especially because the Amherst drug lab scandal involving chemist Sonja Farak has called into question thousands more drug convictions.”

The list of cases is due from county prosecutors on April 18.

Dookhan’s case is among the largest, but far from the only forensics scandal that potentially ruined the lives of thousands of criminal defendants. Just last month in Florida, the Orange County State Attorney’s Office sent letters to 2,600 area defense attorneys, notifying them that their clients’ cases may have been compromised by the work of a fingerprint expert.

In theory, no one should be surprised that it was health care that opened the first big crack in the Trumptime GOP. It’s been obvious for ages that the Republicans didn’t have any kind of consensus on how to fulfill their promise of replacing the Affordable Care Act. If you put that first on the legislative agenda, of course it’s where the splits are going to start showing.

Yet it still feels weird. There are issues—immigration, foreign policy—where the Republicans have clear public divisions. Health care has not traditionally been one of those topics. Like abortion, it brought the party together: Everyone could join hands and damn Obamacare. So the GOP hasn’t just been fractured by something big; it’s been fractured by something that seemed central to its self-identity.

The longer the spotlight lingers on health care, the stranger the ensuing debate is going to seem. Already this month we’ve had one prominent Republican (and Trump crony), Newsmax chief Christopher Ruddy, calling for a Medicaid expansion plan that sure sounds a lot like the public option. Now, I certainly wouldn’t bet on that becoming the next big Republican proposal. (I wouldn’t bet on the next big Republican proposal having much to do with health care at all.) But I won’t be surprised if we see that idea or others like it getting more traction within the party. A sizable chunk of the base is already open to such notions. (In a Gallup poll last May, 41 percent of Republicans said they’d favor replacing the Affordable Care Act with a federally funded system.) There are ways to frame the proposal that might make it seem like less of an odd fit with the party’s pro-market rhetoric. (Ruddy’s column takes care to point out that the status quo isn’t a free market. He’s right about that, though his solution isn’t exactly a free market either.) And it’s not as though the party has never embraced a health entitlement before. The last Republican president gave us Medicare Part D, and the last Republican presidential nominee accused Obama of cutting Medicare.

A lot of Republicans will hate the idea, of course. But my point here isn’t that I think the GOP is about to move to the left of Obama on health policy. It’s that the continents are drifting, and you really don’t know where everyone will be standing in a few years. Washington may be dominated by one political party right now, but there’s a bunch of parties within that party and we’re just starting to see the battles between them.

Related: “The meaning of ‘fundamentally conservative’ and ‘fundamentally liberal’ is extremely unstable.”