On our trip to Stockholm, WI, we ran across one of our favorite plants, which we call ‘everted lungs,’ and bought a couple.

In nearby Pepin, where we had an excellent lunch at the Harbor View Cafe (now for sale), we also encountered this interesting … gutter.

This guy needs a facelift, a new agent, and possibly a visit with the proctologist in order to see if that jet pack that must be up his ass is causing hemorrhoids.

It’s a little tempting to try to make something out of the ugly mess of The Monster From The Prehistoric Planet (1967, aka Gappa: The Triphibian Monster), but, in the end, the best thing I can say is that when the two parent monsters are searching for the baby monster stolen by the representatives of the evil tycoon, it really did seem like they were looking.

There, I said something good.

The rest of it was wretched. Possibly the worst of it was the final sentiment expressed by the woman reporter, who said she was giving up her career, staying home, and washing diapers. But the balance of this story, from special effects to dialog to acting to story, was not much better.

Yeccccccccch.

Andrew Sullivan’s first section of his weekly tri-partite column in New York is an unsettling, even frightening, meditation on how the world into which we were born and have learned to operate – that is, liberal democracy – appears to be coming apart at the seams.

Elsewhere, the strongman model is proliferating: Putin in Russia has dropped all pretense of democracy; Xi is now the first president of China for life; Erdogan in Turkey is still not done enlarging his powers; Netanyahu will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, governing on the basis of ethno-nationalism, suspicious of his own deep state, including the Mossad, and cementing a Jewish state from the river to the sea.

And in the U.S., of course, the omens are not good right now. Trump himself is resurgent in the polls — his disapproval-approval gap was -20 points last December; it’s -11 points almost six months later. On the generic ballot, the Democrats’ lead has sunk from 13 points to 6 in the last five months. The party is in shambles in Southern California, one of its key regions for regaining control of the House. Sean Trende now believes that continued GOP control of Congress is perfectly possible, even probable. Since, it seems to me, the midterms are our only real shot at checking our own strongman, this is demoralizing.

Maybe the economy’s continued steady growth is part of Trump’s polling revival, especially as it begins to reach the working class (at long last). Or maybe the outreach to North Korea has persuaded enough people that Trump is not always terribly dangerous in world affairs. Maybe it’s the tax cuts, although they have had no effect on growth so far — first quarter GDP growth was just downgraded to 2.2 percent. But the better part, I’d wager, is simply Trump’s continued salesmanship, his relentless media presence, the tribalism now endemic to our politics, and his core anti-Establishment appeal.

It’s a helpful, if somewhat terrifying reminder, that most folks operate on a What have you done for me lately? approach to, well, everything. And that works out reasonably well for car repair shops, grocery stores, and that sort of thing. Screw me over and I’ll move on to the competition, bud, be it tree services or banks.

But government is quite another thing. When the Founding Fathers were shaping the current American Constitution, they had two failed examples in their recent past: first, the English monarchy, which had inflicted taxation without representation on the Colonials, along with various other injustices, and, second, the American Confederacy, that period of time in the 1780s when the United States lacked a strong Federal government. This latter period ended in 1788 with the affirmation of the current Constitution.

They were primarily concerned with constructing a fair and just government through prevention of injustice. But how does one measure success? We are, and have always been, a country of merchants, and I think this colors our evaluative faculties to an untoward extent. At the current time, despite positive economic signs (such as a reduced unemployment rate) there is a lot of economic unhappiness. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to blame government for the tides of economic fortune, which tend to flow as they will and, while they may be influenced by government action, are rarely controllable by government action. But there the blame resides when the tide flows out, leaving communities dry and brittle.

This is where we may find ourselves with an unanswerable conundrum. Let’s take two statements:

1. A government system which does not deliver prosperity to its adherents is a system which should be modified or even discarded.
2. A government system should be judged on its ability to achieve its purposes, which in the American case is to render the would-be dictators impotent.

Which statement is false? Neither, so far as I can see for the average citizen – me included. The problem may lie with the eternal problem of incomplete information. After all, farmer or office worker, we are most familiar with our own situation. But if our entire community has become an economic casualty, such as Detroit, say, then one must look around for a fix – or something to blame. They are frequently related items, to be honest.

Flag of the Wiemar Republic
Source: Wikipedia

Now – not wanting to mention Nazis^[1], but I fear I shall – one of my favorite examples of this problem I’m talking about is the Wiemar Republic. Following the fall of the Kaiser after World War I, the Wiemar Republic replaced the traditional German monarchy. Like any nascent Republic, it had many problems, the greatest of which was the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed ruinous reparation requirements upon Germany after their surrender in the Great War. This led to the massive inflation which ruined the German economy and inflicted a sense of helplessness and fear on the German citizens.

The election of Adolph Hitler and the subsequent throttling of the Republic is often viewed as an almost incomprehensible event in the liberal democracies. In my mind, part of the problem has been the failure to personally experience the entire period of Germany, from the proud times just prior to World War I, to the economic ruin and subsequent humiliation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, to the election and general adulation of the man that would be called Der Fuhrer, and the total disaster that befell Germany in his megalomaniacal wake.

Given the disastrous times of the Wiemar Republic, it’s more fit to ask, Why should the Germans have retained the Republic? What had it brought them? Misery, humiliation, and economic disaster. They tried to print enough money to make it through, and inflation ate them up. Today’s generous pay check was tomorrow’s pittance – literally. Economically, the Republic was a disaster – or, at least, it happened to exist at the same time as the economic disaster.

Hell, this reasoning even applied to the moral systems of the day, and just like that, the Holocaust was enabled. That, however, is a path I’m not walking today.

Returning to the economics of the situation, in reality the Treaty of Versailles was the engine that destroyed the Republic, and subsequently enabled Hitler’s rise to power and, ultimately, World War II. The French obsession with revenge, as understandable as it was, doomed a generation of Germans, French, Russian, and British men to destruction and death. And, partly, the inevitable ignorance of the average citizen, government minister, and even frightened clergymen welded the coffin of the Republic shut. It wasn’t reasonable to expect them to understand the economic tides, and they didn’t.

One of the most important functions of government is to give us a sense of how the rest of the nation is going through the collection and distribution of information. Until the last few decades, this has been a reasonably successful function, probably getting better with technology, but as I remarked, the last few decades have seen a dedicated assault upon the perceived dependability of government. Some of this is earned, as we see the occasional government scandal, such as Watergate, FBI Director Hoover, Senator McCarthy, and other men of dubious character clamber into government positions and then abuse them. Other discredit, however, is showered upon our government for less than honorable reasons. Long time readers have seen my occasional dissection of email relayed through conservative friends, full of blatant lies, half-lies, false inferences, and rotten rumors, and these are deliberately intended to discredit and destabilize the government.

This leads the average citizen to fail to give full faith and credit to those agencies that they actually pay to function in their names. Believing only in one’s own experience and opinions will lead to inevitable fallacy in a country this large. I, for example, may think the world is going swimmingly because the Twin Cities area, despite some poverty in spots, is generally doing OK. But, as I understand from reports, many urban and rural areas across the nation are struggling, or even dazed and destitute.

And so, prisoners of our own sensibilities, those communities adversely impacted by the economic tides and lacking in the experience of governments other than limited-power liberal democracies, begin to fall away from the liberal democracy model. Our imaginations are limited, despite the efforts of story-tellers; experience is far more immediate, and if the high school graduate suddenly cannot get the expected factory job that lets him own a home and have a family, well, what the hell good is a liberal democracy then? If that guy on the stage is promising to make coal King again, if he’s promising to resurrect the steel industry, hey, isn’t that an improvement?

Who says morality is worth a shit when your savings are gone and economic failure is in your nostrils? Why should I trust the good reports of “the media” when I’m already living paycheck to paycheck and the factory just closed?

In reality, standard politicians do the best they can. But fighting the economic tide is a tough chore, and it’s made doubly hard because Americans hate change imposed on them. It’s great to start a new business, but when an entire economic sector changes because of someone else, inside or outside of the nation, then we’re not so happy. Think of coal miners, steel workers, and all those other industries where jobs have “gone overseas” or just disappeared.

Even today, jobless coal miners, when faced with a chance to further their education, often choose education in the coal industry. Change, for them, is bad. Someone – or something – is to blame. Right?

And that blame is placed squarely, not just on government, but our government system. It seems like a lot of people don’t understand the blessings that a limited, liberal democracy brings to the table. And I think that’s due to our lack of experience with autocracies, monarchies, and totalitarian regimes that burden their citizens with ‘disappearances,’ assassinations, pogroms, genocide, religious wars, and all that damn rot that makes mothers quiver in their boots and curse their foolish husbands for looking for the biggest bully to lead them.

But that’s how it rolls. And it’s not entirely wrong in the naive view, because someone’s in trouble, and something has to change. And by gum maybe it’s the government’s fault, not mine, because sometimes that’s even true. If liberal democracy is not producing economic success for its citizens, then those citizens may in fact discard it.

And then take their lumps as they may.

¹For to do so would invalidate my entire post under the rules of the Web, no?

Poking into my email bag again, another fine kettle of rancid fish emerges.

It seems if you have info about the potential of crimes of the Clintons your life expectancy is in jeopardy.

WOW!

https://yournewswire.com/fbi-clinton-fast-furious-dead/

FBI Official, Who Exposed Clinton’s ‘Fast & Furious’ Cover Up, Found Dead

FBI Special Agent David Raynor, who was expected to expose the extent of Obama and Clinton corruption and malpractice in the Operation Fast and Furious cover up before a US Federal Grand Jury, has been found murdered with his own gun. He was 52.

Special Agent Raynor was “stabbed multiple times” and “shot twice with his own weapon” just one day before he was due to testify before a US Federal Grand Jury where he was widely expected to testify that Hillary Clinton acted illegally while covering up the Fast and Furious scandal to protect Obama administration crimes.

Raynor’s wife, Donna Fisher, was also found dead at the scene. An autopsy will be completed to determine the exact cause of death, according to police.

According to the Baltimore Sun:

Authorities, who are offering a $215,000 reward for tips in Suiter’s killing, have struggled to understand what happened. The detective was shot with his own gun, which was found at the scene. Two other shots were fired from the gun, and Davis said there were signs of a brief struggle.

Special Agent Raynor’s suspicious death is the latest in a sequence of disturbing deaths in Baltimore connected to the Clinton/Obama cover up of Operation Fast and Furious.

When President Trump took power, the US Justice Department opened another investigation into Operation Fast and Furious as it pertained to the Baltimore Police Department and impaneled a US Federal Grand Jury.

One of the main witnesses was Detective Sean Suiter, an 18-year veteran of the FBI, however Detective Suiter was gunned down in November, in eerily similar circumstances to Special Agent Raynor, also one day before he could testify.

Special Agent Raynor was leading US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s investigation into the murder of Detective Sean Suiter, who he believed was silenced before he could testify that the Obama administration was criminally complicit in allowing guns to flow into the hands of criminals on the Mexican border.

These guns were involved in the murder of a US Federal Officer, among others, and is seen by investigators as the “Achilles heel of the Obama regime”, because the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is one of but a very few Obama administration crimes that has no statute of limitations as it involved the killing of a US Federal Officer.

Leaked Wikileaks emails also prove Hillary Clinton was fully knowledgeable about the crime—thus making her liable to criminal charges.

This is the sort of email that makes a lot of assertions, and it can be hard to prove they’re false. But it’s worth taking a look at them:

1. I looked through more than a dozen respectable reports on Agent Raynor, and it appears this was a tragic murder-suicide. The couple was separated, and while this was the first incident of violence, the two had been arguing over his extensive weapons collection for years. The only mention of any connection to the Fast & Furious scandal is on websites of dubious reputation, such as this one, which has the gall to actually quote a Russian source.
2. Given the general hostility of WikiLeaks to the Democratic Party, and possibly the United States, not to mention the difficulty in the common citizen in documenting the authenticity of anything released by Wikileaks, I and, I hope, anyone who has a reasonably suspicious mind will disregard any information which comes, or allegedly comes, from Wikileaks.
3. The confusing mention of Baltimore PD officer Sean Suiter indicates this is actually a mutation, as I ran across at least one article claiming Suiter, who was also murdered, was about to give testimony to the same grand jury. Same wording, same dubious websites. He was, in fact, about to give testimony, but in a police corruption trial, or so says the Baltimore Sun. Federal grand jury, yes, Fast & Furious, no.
4. The mention of Clinton, which I will return to presently, is irrational since she was Secretary of State, not the Attorney General, and, of course, Fast & Furious was a Justice Department activity. AG Eric Holder is the logical person I’d expect mentioned – IF THIS MAIL HAD ANY CONNECTION TO THE TRUTH.
5. I found no mentions of a currently active grand jury investigating the Fast & Furious scandal. Maybe I missed it.

I mentioned something about TRUTH up there, and that’s really the key. The conservative base has, by now, been conditioned to twitch whenever the Clintons are mentioned, and that’s all this is about, stirring up the base with some senseless charges of murder, pointing at Wikileaks as their best source of proof.

And a reasonable person would just laugh this silly bit of fluff off. If they have something resembling proof, honorable authors would bring it forth. Hey, the GOP is in charge of the government these days, bring it to AG Sessions – he’d love to ingratiate himself to Trump by charging Clinton with a plausible crime.

It hasn’t happened, has it? This is the sort of mail that crumbles upon the first skeptical glance, and I should hope that my readers inflicted the same upon it.

The New York Times has obtained and published a memo from President Trump’s lawyers to Special Counsel Mueller essentially arguing that, well, he’s basically above the law. Among the arguments was this:

“The president’s prime function as the chief executive ought not be hampered by requests for interview,” [Trump’s lawyers] wrote. “Having him testify demeans the office of the president before the world.”

In my opinion, quite the opposite. If we wish to walk down the rather silly path of imputing dignity to offices, then we must first remember that the office and its occupant are two different entities. They are not inseparable.

So when we investigate the occupant on reasonable suspicion of some sort of malfeasance, it improves the dignity of the office to have been willing to make the effort to investigate, and clear the occupant of wrong-doing – or not.

Their objection is nothing more than rhetorical puffery.

Sounds like a song title, doesn’t it?

Or is Giuliani really just that far out in left field? He gave an interview to HuffPo:

Giuliani said impeachment was the initial remedy for a president’s illegal behavior ― even in the extreme hypothetical case of Trump having shot former FBI Director James Comey to end the Russia investigation rather than just firing him.

“If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day,” Giuliani said. “Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him.”

Which is utter rubbish. The Constitution does not lend the President special protections for crimes committed in office, even if some believe that prosecution for some crimes should be deferred until the President leaves office. We are all equal before the law, and that means everyone. (It should even include foreign diplomats, who routinely receive passes for minor offenses.) Trump shoots Comey, he gets led away in handcuffs, no matter how much Giuliani and Trump’s other advisors huff and puff over it, and how much the Trump cult shakes its fists in anger and outrage over it.

And Giuliani knows this – or he should. That leaves me with two possible conclusions.

First, Giuliani’s gone right over the edge. Based on his behavior since being hired as Trump’s lawyer, this is not an unreasonable conclusion. He acts like a man with dementia who refuses to admit to it. He is confused, his reasoning is muddled and fallacious, he is ambivalent in the way of a man who cannot keep two thoughts in his head simultaneously. He lives on his reputation as a Mayor of New York City, not on any accomplishments since then. I think this conclusion is most likely.

Image credit: Ancient History Encyclopedia

But one cannot count out the possibility that Giuliani is deliberately making outrageous statements in hopes of making Trump yet more vulnerable to prosecution. In other words, Giuliani is trying to bring Trump down by suggesting the man desires Caesar-like powers – and, for those not up on their Roman history, I refer you to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for an illustration of the end of fools desiring absolute power. Whether or not Giuliani is wise in this approach to the abusive behaviors of Trump, it remains a distant possibility that it’s a true conclusion.

Personally, though, I agree with Norm Eisen, as reported in the same article:

Norm Eisen, the White House ethics lawyer under President Barack Obama and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the silliness of Giuliani’s claim illustrates how mistaken Trump’s lawyers are about presidential power.

“A president could not be prosecuted for murder? Really?” he said. “It is one of many absurd positions that follow from their argument. It is self-evidently wrong.”

Eisen and other legal scholars have concluded that the constitution offers no blanket protection for a president from criminal prosecution. “The foundation of America is that no person is above the law,” he said. “A president can under extreme circumstances be indicted, but we’re facing extreme circumstances.”

I don’t even think it takes extreme circumstances. We are all equal in the eyes of the Law, after all. Such was the judgment of the Founding Fathers. They saw what happened when that was not true – arbitrary evil inflicted upon the citizenry by the tyrants. There are many historical examples since then, and it’s perhaps an indictment of American sensibilities that we are not intimately familiar with them.

I fear that I failed to follow up on the trial of Officer Yanez in the death of Philando Castile, in which the officer was found not guilty, but he immediately resigned his position, or perhaps was asked to leave. This was just about a year ago.

Today, I see the City of Falcon Heights, the location of Castile’s death, is making a gesture of community spirit. From a City e-mail (I’d give a link if I could find one):

The City Council adopted a resolution on May 16 proclaiming July 6 as Restoration Day and July 7 as Unity Day. The proclamation will become a component of healing, grant respect to Philando Castile’s family, while at the same time serve to improve the quality community engagement within the City by its residents, businesses, and guests.

It set about to shift a day of tragedy and provide a redemptive focus of the two days by which all of us can benefit. The first of the two days, Restoration Day is more about taking personal action and steps to build or restore relationships. This could be in the form of meeting a neighbor, mending a strained friendship or relationship, or even actively pursuing conversation with someone that a person would not naturally interact. Think of how on Earth Day individuals set a side time as a family or neighborhood to actively steward the land.

Here we as a city will be acknowledging the importance of stewarding healthy relationships. The second day has a focus that demonstrates healing has begun, connectedness is taking place, and thus the city as a whole demonstrates a measure of cooperative growth in inclusion and engagement. This could be a day for simple parties on the block, or even citywide gatherings. These two days will be promoted through standard city communication tools that could also provide suggested topics for discussion, and activities.

If you would like to watch the action taken by the Council on the Proclamation, please visit: http://webstreaming.ctv15.org/viewer.php?streamid=3002

It’s good to see it isn’t being brushed under the rug.

It’s not just for animals. From The American Journal of Epidemiology comes a study on coal and oil power plant retirements by Joan A Casey, Deborah Karasek, Elizabeth L Ogburn, Dana E Goin, Kristina Dang, Paula A Braveman, and Rachel Morello-Frosch, and this is from the abstract:

We used California Department of Public Health birth records and Energy Information Administration data from 2001-2011 to evaluate the relationship between 8 coal and oil power plant retirements and nearby preterm births ( < 37 weeks gestational age). We conducted a difference-in-differences analysis using adjusted linear mixed models that included 57,005 births–6.5% of which were preterm–to compare the probability of preterm birth before and after power plant retirement among mothers residing within 0-5 km and 5-10 km of the 8 power plants. We found that power plant retirements were associated with a decrease in the proportion of preterm birth within 5 km (-0.019, 95% CI: -0.031, -0.008) and 5-10 km (-0.015, 95% CI: -0.024, -0.007) controlling for secular trends with mothers living 10-20 km away. For the 0-5 km area, this corresponds to a reduction in preterm birth from 7.0% to 5.1%. Subgroup analyses indicated a potentially larger association among non-Hispanic Black and Asian mothers compared to non-Hispanic White and Hispanic mothers and no differences in educational attainment. Future coal and oil power plant retirements may reduce preterm birth among nearby populations.

An immediate impact on the health of people surrounding these power plants is an important observation, and suggests that those living near these power plants bear a disproportionate share of the burden these power plants inflict on society. Not that, in the past, this was unjustifiable, for one could argue that power brought greater social goods. Today, though, with the development of cleaner power sources, defending oil and coal fired power plants has become inadvisable for those who wish to keep clean intellectual reputations.

In Inside Climate News, Sabrina Shankman comments on further problems:

In a separate article published last week in the American Heart Association’s journal Hypertension, [Noel Mueller, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University] examined what can happen when the pollution source is not eliminated.

In a study that looked at 1,293 mothers and their children in the Boston area, Mueller and his coauthors found that babies who were exposed to higher levels of particulate matter during the third trimester were significantly more likely to have high blood pressure in childhood.

Particulate matter can come from cars and the burning of coal, oil and biomass.

Casey, the author of the California study, said the findings from the two studies are related. “We know that preterm birth isn’t the end of the outcomes for a child that is born early,” she said.

Walter Einenkel of The Daily Kos, from whom I picked up the original pointer to this information, sees studies such as these as indicative of a bigger problem down the road:

The Trump administration’s insistence in attacking all of the clean air policies across our country is not simply craven because of its naked greed, it’s the beginnings of a public health crisis that the Republican Party is not interested in handling on any level. The importance of the study showing these health benefits in California is that Trump’s EPA has targeted the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy as the battleground for so much of its environmental rollbacks.

Returning to this long dormant thread on civil asset forfeiture, or as I described it,

… forfeiture is nothing more than judging a suspect to be guilty without trial …

WaPo has a disheartening statistic for me:

In 2017, federal authorities seized more than $2 billion in assets from people, a net loss similar in size to annual losses from residential burglaries in the United States.

Their accompanying chart is even more depressing – $2 billion is a local minima.

There’s not a lot more to add on this thread, outside of the ridiculous numbers involved. The numbers either indicate we’re in the midst of a massive crime wave, despite FBI statistics to the contrary, or those elements of government with access to civil asset forfeiture are abusing it.

One more note from the article, which covers an incident in which a man by the name of Kazazi lost $58,000 to U. S. Customs:

The first thing the Kazazis noticed was that the dollar amount listed was $770 less than the amount that Kazazi said he took with him. The family said that the cash was all in $100 bills, making it impossible for it to add up to $57,330.

[Wesley Hottot, the Kazazi family’s attorney,] said that these types of “errors” are common in forfeiture cases and that it is “always in the same direction” — government receipts coming up a few hundred or a few thousand dollars short of what defendants say they had.

Does the few criminals this helps to convict outweigh the government corruption it encourages? Better yet, these additions to the federal and state treasuries, small as they may seem, are a means to reduce taxes. In an era in which taxation is such a keyword, is it really wise to use such a morally dubious and unprincipled approach to the problem of raising funds for public purposes?

Shouldn’t we simply raise the proper taxes and be honest about paying for that which benefits us?

I do believe I’ll be writing my Senators and Representative.

As I read this morning about how NAFTA re-negotiations may be crashing over a Mike Pence-delivered ultimatum of a five year sunset provision on the agreement, I started mumbling about how this entire Administration is continually pulling shit out of its ass. I have no idea why this ultimatum was presented, and nor does WaPo. This being a few days ago, maybe the Administration just as quickly dropped it when Trudeau refused it.

President Trump wanders about the stage of the Presidency, making vague pronouncements and judgments which, in hind-sight, turn out to be so much bullshit. Ever think about comparing that to President Obama? If President Obama had wanted to renegotiate NAFTA, I think anyone who paid attention would realize that Obama would have been giving speeches which laid out, section & clause, his objections to the treaty and why, and how he’d prefer to fix them in such a way to benefit both the United States and Mexico and Canada. After all, this was public business and deserved a workmanlike approach to the matter.

His specificity was a reassurance.

In comparison, Trump is a bombast, a braggart, a grasping fool. One of the verbal flags of his personality is his dependence on absolutes in his verbs – worst treaty ever I believe he used in describing the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal). He never deals in specifics, it’s all in vague absolutes, and therefore he’s difficult to evaluate on specific matters – until one steps back and asks whether he’s believable.

No doubt, in his career as a real-estate developer he could be relatively successful using this style because the various groups he dealt with didn’t intercommunicate as a rule – a rule broken during legal proceedings, wherein rumor has it Trump’s inclination towards lies tends to catch up with him.

But in the national spotlight, everyone talks to everyone else. Fact-checking occurs and is broadcast. I tend to see supporters of Trump as the self-deluded, those desperate to return to a time colored rose by their regretful peering into the past. The facts are out there, staring us in the face, but we have to be willing to open our eyes and see them for what they are.

To borrow one of Andrew Sullivan’s favorite quotes:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
– George Orwell

Aggrandizement:

an increase in power or importance:
He gives a lot of money to charity, but personal aggrandizement/self-aggrandizement is his motive. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “John Brennan: I will speak out until integrity returns to the White House,” former CIA Director John Brennan, WaPo:

The esteem with which I held the presidency was dealt a serious blow when Donald Trump took office. Almost immediately, I began to see a startling aberration from the remarkable, though human, presidents I had served. Mr. Trump’s lifelong preoccupation with aggrandizing himself seemed to intensify in office, and he quickly leveraged his 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. address and his Twitter handle to burnish his brand and misrepresent reality.

I was lucky enough to take some pictures of a beautiful butterfly while in Stockholm, WI.

I also put the last two pictures up on iNaturalist, just in case it’s some species someone’s never seen. I know virtually nothing about butterflies.

No doubt this will enrage some of our neighbors:

Yep, that’s momma squirrel with her tykes.

Most Americans know the name of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, but do they know that of his elder brother, Edwin Thomas Booth? The latter is the subject of the biographical Prince of Players (1955), and tells the story, no doubt somewhat fictionalized, of one of the finest Shakespearean actors of his era, starting with his youth, when his father was also a noted Shakespearean actor, dissolute, drunken, and perhaps a bit mad. One night, when his father could not fulfill his contract with a theater, Edwin goes on and succeeds magnificently.

From there on in, he works the little venues, even labor camps, building a reputation, moving on to bigger and bigger venues until his is a name that comes to mind whenever anyone mentions a Shakespearean production. But lurking in the background are two curses. The first is the same as his father’s, a predilection to angst and drink, the deep black hole in everyone’s lives. This is stayed when he meets the love of his life, Mary Devlin, who gives him purpose.

The second? The Mason-Dixon line, the line dividing the slave-holding South from the abolitionist North. His brother, John, is forever the second fiddle to Edwin, and while John is popular in the South, Edwin is popular in the South, and then in the North, and finally England. This grinds away at John as the Civil War commences, slowly embittering him.

Mary, sadly, contracts tuberculosis, the slow fatality of which leads Edwin back to the edge of drunken madness. Sometimes unable to go on the stage, his manager is frantic and writes to Mary, whose attempt to come to her husband’s aid ends badly. Upon her eventual death, Edwin is bereft. And then?

Of course. The assassination of the President, part theater itself, and the subsequent death of John. So is the family of Booth cursed.

In the consequent crescendo, the name ‘Booth’ becomes a curse, and when Edwin returns to the stage, he’s met with riot and rage. But when the rest of the company retreats, under fire from the traditional rotten vegetable cannonade, from their staging of Hamlet, Edwin sits in a chair on the stage, silently suffering the slings and arrows of an unjust fate, until, won over by his steely resolve, they gradually transform from the enraged beast to the adoring audience.

Sorry about the purple prose.

Having been released in 1955, Prince of Players has a different, flatter pacing than do today’s crop of movies, but don’t let that throw you. It’s a peek into the life of a family once at the center of the American experience, for the theater is as much a place of learning as it is of entertainment, and the Booths were, in that sense, supreme, if inadvertent, teachers. The great hole of madness around which they revolved not only threatened them, but the nation, changing it in ways never to be corrected.

It’s worth a look.

And, finally, there’s the House On The Rock pictures which fit in no category or I don’t recognize.

That’s it, folks!

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com is enthusiastic about a new brand of organic underwear being put out by Marc Skid:

Why organic? Cotton is one of the most polluting crops in the world, accounting for nearly a quarter of agricultural insecticide use. Opting for organic supports much cleaner, safer production, both for the Earth and the farmers who raise it. From the Marc Skid website:

“Organic cotton is grown free of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants. It’s also free of GMOs – contaminants so dangerous Peru bans them – and is always hand picked to minimize environmental impact and maximize quality.”

There’s a lot of good things here, but one element I don’t see considered here – and perhaps it’s covered elsewhere – is the question of scalability. Later on, Katherine notes the folks at Marc Skid want to influence the big boys:

[Company founder Dan Barry] believes that small companies play a crucial role in influencing bigger companies to rethink their production models. When the small ones are successful, the big ones see it’s feasible, and that’s when the real change can occur. He hopes that Marc Skid can be a model for the industry.

OK, assume they’re successful at convincing the big boys to shift over to organic cotton. What then? Remember the ongoing palm oil debacle? What are the unforeseen consequences of attempting to do the right thing in this case? Like most folks, I’m not sure the environmentalists are correctly considering the consequences of the success of a tactic, no matter how well-intentioned, in a world over-crowded with consumers.

And that’s what I mean by scalability. Success may result in Peru becoming one big cotton plantation – and dozens of little Aral Seas. For those readers not up on the Aral Sea, it has been drained and despoiled because of Soviet addiction to the “white gold” – cotton.

I don’t know if this would happen. I just worry when the question is not addressed by the advocates of a solution.

The New York Times reports on the passage of a “right to try” law, which is a law which permits terminal patients to bypass the FDA mandated testing process and try unapproved drugs for their conditions directly from the suppliers:

A program known as compassionate use, or expanded access, has been in place since the 1970s. It allows patients with a serious disease or condition to obtain experimental medicines; the Food and Drug Administration says it authorizes 99 percent of the requests for expanded access that it receives.

The new national law — like similar laws in more than three dozen states — allows patients and doctors to ask drug companies directly for access to the experimental drugs, rather than wait for approval by the agency.

Yet these laws “do not ensure that manufacturers will provide the drug or that insurance companies will cover the cost,” according to a policy report from Rice University. Obtaining the medicines from manufacturers can be more cumbersome than going through the Food and Drug Administration’s existing program, the report found.

President Trump’s prediction:

“We will be saving — I don’t even want to say thousands, because I think it’s going to be much more, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands. We’re going to be saving tremendous numbers of lives.”

The commentary of the blind anti-government ideologue. And the same article supplies a quote from an advocate:

“It’s impossible to tell how many people will be helped by the federal right-to-try law,” said Christina Sandefur, the executive vice president of the Goldwater Institute, the conservative group that spearheaded the effort.

But “if it saves one person, it’s worth it,” she said, adding, “For the patients who are turned away from clinical trials and who are unable to navigate the complex expanded access process, right to try will give them a last chance — and the right to hope.”

Which is naive thinking. Perhaps one life is saved, while another 99 die prematurely, even with their already terminal conditions, and in agony. Would she still stick with her statement? The problem is: she won’t know about the 99.

We’re potentially in a big ol’ social experiment here, and it’s important that we be prepared. Toward this end, we should be collecting data – who and how many people are applying for these unproven drugs? What are the outcomes? How does the fact that this is a transitional process affect the outcome, and how can we compare that to a scenario in which the FDA is little more than a rubber stamp?

In other words, if we’re going to walk down this path, let’s get as much information on how it works out as compared to historical FDA process of having to meet safety and efficacy targets before it can be administered to the general patient population. If I’m a sober citizen of this country, I don’t need to have a few effing anecdotes about how it helped your brother Jose survive his cancer – I don’t even know if Jose exists, I don’t know if had an unpredictable remission, a mis-diagnosis, or if he’s just a figment of someone’s malignant imagination.

No fucking anecdotes. Got it?

Good research studies are the order of the day, no matter how much that might turn the stomachs of the advocates. It’s the only way to find out if the old FDA way of doing things is good, or if letting the desperate plead for drugs of unknown quality is the better way to go.

If you set store by honoring those who fell in defense of the nation with something tangible, submariners can be a difficult lot, much like the whalers of old. However, Eternal Reefs may be what you’re looking for:

The “On Eternal Patrol Memorial Reef” will be the first-ever undersea memorial to honor the United States submarines and their crews that made the ultimate sacrifice and never returned from duty. Imagine 66 reef balls, one for each US-manned submarine lost since 1900 and a single reef ball honoring those lost in non-sinking incidents, forming a patriotic reef off the coast of Sarasota, Florida. It will forever pay tribute to those “On Eternal Patrol” and replenish the precious marine environment in which they served.

It’s crossed my mind more than once that humanity really should clean up after itself, even to the extent of raising wrecks and salvaging the hulks. Of course, this couldn’t possibly be done with current technologies, and some wrecks are actually beneficial, on balance, at their final locations.

Memorializing the lost submariners in this way sure seems appropriate. If you’re so inclined, they’ll accept donations.

Interregnum:

1. an interval of time between the close of a sovereign’s reign and the accession of his or her normal or legitimate successor.
2. any period during which a state has no ruler or only a temporary executive.
3. any period of freedom from the usual authority. [Dictionary.com]

Heard on Dr. Who last night. We’re hopping around seasons these days, since I neglected Dr. Who in my childhood.

Looming through the gloom of House On The Rock was certain bits of machinery, some of which we never did really make out.

Deborah MacKenzie in NewScientist (19 May 2018, paywall) meditates briefly on the damage done to democracy by President Trump’s decision to abrogate the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) and then reports on the technology under development which would permit the detection of cheating by any nation that is being monitored:

Load monitors being developed at Oak Ridge would let the IAEA measure how fast uranium enters and leaves the enrichment process, says [Robert Goldston at Princeton University]. Tools being developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, automatically measure the mass in cylinders of material entering and leaving the plant. Together, these could keep tabs on all the uranium passing through enrichment. Cameras with pattern recognition focused on pipework and detectors watching for unusual neutrons, gamma rays or chemical release could also reveal illicit changes to the enrichment process.

All this can be made tamper-proof using technologies the IAEA has already developed for monitoring plants that store or reprocess spent nuclear fuel, ranging from paint or welds that reveal when monitoring equipment has been opened, to backup electrical power that cannot be unplugged. Data would be sent securely to the IAEA. Anything unusual could trigger an “unannounced access” inspection.

Although the technology isn’t quite ready yet, the 2031 JCPOA deadline would give the IAEA time to put a stringent monitoring regime based on these devices in place, says Goldston. But if the deal collapses, Iran will at best go back to the infrequent monitoring that allowed it to work on a bomb before – and will have little incentive to trust international promises again.

Along with the damage done to our reputation by President Trump’s moronic decision, he has also lost an opportunity. These technologies would greatly increase our chances of detecting cheating, yes? With them in place, if Iran did cheat, we could have caught them at it, broadcast it to the world, and thereby damage their government system’s reputation.

Another opportunity thrown to the winds by an idiot who flapped his mouth and thereby wrecks his nation, and his staff, who are far too immature and self-important to be aware of how this could have worked out.

HuffPo reports on a state-level politician’s analysis of the school shooting phenomenon:

Does anyone know what kind of porn Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) is watching?

Whatever it is, the 67-year-old Black, who is running for governor of Tennessee, said it’s a “big part” of what is driving the spike in school shootings.

During a meeting last week with local pastors, Black raised the issue of gun violence in schools and why it keeps happening.

“Pornography,” she said.

“It’s available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store. Yeah, you have to reach up to get it, but there’s pornography there,” she continued. “All of this is available without parental guidance. I think that is a big part of the root cause.”

No reasons given. So does this mean the streets are full, I mean absolutely packed, with potential school shooters? If she’s saying that, then she’d better ask what will happen when that porn is removed from the Internet and 95% of young unmarried men (I’m less certain of the percentage of unmarried women watch porn) become frustrated and enraged.

More shootings?

Just for fun, I pulled up the FBI stats on violent crime in the United States.

Via Wikipedia

Hey, look. Violent crime starts to go down as the Web becomes popular – and we all know that porn is one of the biggest components of Web traffic, and always has been.

Now, this is all very specious reasoning on my part as well as her’s. Correlations are often just coincidences, and I’d have to see more data before I’d believe my own assertions about porn and crime.

But still, perhaps the good Representative should sit down and think about that for a bit. At least, with guns we know they’re a favored weapon of the whacked out. Not to mention people like me, the terminally clumsy.

Excuse me, we’re looking for someone willing to explore the story a little deeper.

Aardman Productions has done better work in the past, and I fear the entire problem will be laid at the scriptwriters’ feet in the case of Early Man (2018). If you want the executive summary, my Arts Editor laid it out most directly: I don’t care for any of these characters.

Let’s take another Aardman creation as a comparison, the venerable Chicken Run (2000). Their plots are basically the same – a group of creatures face doom unless they can cleverly find a way out of their dilemma. For the chickens in Chicken Run, they are prisoners on a chicken farm, a farm that executes non-producers and, in the course of the story, is about to be converted into a chicken pie production facility, leaving our heroes to be the filling.

Similarly, the primitive cave-men protagonists of Early Man face the loss of their Garden of Eden-like valley at the hands of a group of Bronze-Age aggressors, who want their valley for their mining operation. They have invented avariciousness and a hierarchical society, unlike the more socialistic and equable cave-men, and the cave-dwellers teeter on the edge of extinction.

Both stories have the leader intent on saving their group, but here is where the stories begin to diverge in terms of efficacy. Ginger, the heroine of Chicken Run, is fiercely loyal and intent on saving her band of chickens, even when those seem to be running around as if their heads had been chopped off. The storytellers illustrate her drive to succeed, her willingness to leap any obstacle, to literally jump up and dust herself off after every set-back, no matter how many times she is imprisoned in ‘solitary.’

Her counterpart in Early Man is Dug, a young member of the band who dreams big – he wants to move up from hunting rabbits to taking down a mammoth. But, well, that’s just about it. He’s not the leader of the group, and his best friend is a fairly smart hog. We’re given little reason to admire or even bond with the little guy, outside of the fact that he’s, well, little.

Each story also has its outside element that brings salvation. Rocky Rhodes of Chicken Run is an American rooster, driven to escape the circus in which he performs by being shot out of a cannon, and when he does escape by being blown into the chicken farm, he’s willing to do nearly anything to gain the freedom of the world, including lying, cheating his suppliers – and abandoning the chicken flock that has befriended and saved him. In short, he’s fully fleshed out, a character with a drive and goals of his own, and half the fun of Chicken Run is watching as the needs of the flock, and the idea of justice, of doing the right thing, slowly bends that primeval drive into something useful and communal, rather than self-centered and narcissistic.

Rocky’s counterpart in Early Man is the Bronze Age villager woman Goona, who brings her special skills to the aid of the cavemen. But is she driven? Well, sort of. She wants fame, but she’s not really all that driven. She hasn’t the charisma and attitude of Rocky Rhodes. She’s more or less just a wrench where the plot needed a wrench, not the living, breathing creature that brings a sense of Where is this going? to the story.

And, of course, there’s the doom staring each group in the face. In Chicken Run, this is brought starkly home through an execution scene as a non-producing chicken is beheaded and eaten. In Early Man, though, there’s a far more diffuse threat of being enslaved and made to work in the mines that produce the material for the bronze coins. But little work is done to bring home just how dreadful this might be. There are no mine scenes, there are no cavemen dead from working the mines, there’s nothing visceral to make the skin crawl. It’s more or less a statement from the bad guys.

There are quite a few other parallels, from the big plot mechanisms, to the little bits of cleverness to get over obstacles, to the substantial silliness that all Aardman movies feature, and of course the stop-action and animation is virtually flawless and sometimes admiration-worthy. But in the end, the story fails in Early Man because there’s no willingness to drive the plot points home into the granite of our souls. We have no real attachment to Dug or any of the other cavemen. We don’t have any inkling how bad being a miner might be – heck, maybe they’ll turn into dwarves and re-emerge in Lord Of The Rings, wouldn’t that be fun, eh?

I could see an audience member saying that, and that’s the problem with this movie. That’s actually a plausible plot turn in Early Man. And that’s just not a good sign.