Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Politico notes the problems Democrats are having with getting information from the Administration in order to execute their oversight duties:

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings is moving toward a vote to hold former White House personnel security director Carl Kline in contempt after he refused to comply with a subpoena for his appearance before the committee on Tuesday.

Cummings’ statement came after the White House instructed Kline to not answer questions Tuesday as part of the committee’ investigation into the White House security clearance process. It also sets up what could be the most significant clash between the two branches of government since Democrats took over the House. …

“It also appears that the White House believes that it may dictate to Congress — an independent and co-equal branch of government — the scope of its investigations and even the rules by which it conducts them,” Cummings added. “To date, the White House has refused to produce a single piece of paper or a single witness in any of the committee’s investigations this entire year.”

I think the Administration is running a risk, though. At some point, this will start coming up in front of judges, and if they consistently decide for the House Committee chairpeople submitting the requests and subpoenas – and if they do so with a “ya gotta be kidding with that argument, Trump” – there’s a real possibility of a pattern of misbehavior, and that’s something the Judiciary doesn’t like to see.

It could result in unexpected penalties for the Administration, as well as the lawyers advising the Administration to follow this strategy.

This won’t impact the Trump base any, of course, as they’ve sold their souls and are no longer free agents, but the independents will take note of the further bad behavior of the Administration, and vote accordingly.

I see that now the Kansas GOP, dissatisfied with its lesser position now that there’s a Democratic governor, is pushing forward some legislation to at least hold what they have, which appears to my untrained eye an unwarranted intrusion on the Kansas executive branch:

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s power to fill vacancies in some top state posts would be stripped and given to party leadership under new legislation introduced in the House.

Under the state Constitution, the governor holds the power to appoint a replacement if the office of the attorney general or secretary of state becomes vacant. HCR 5013, however, would allow the legislature to move that power to party delegates. The system would work much in the same way legislative vacancies are filled now, Rep. Blake Carpenter, R-Derby, said.

“More or less we’re just modeling the appointment process after how we appoint legislators,” Carpenter said.

The appointment power would fall to the delegates of whichever party last held the executive office. For example, if Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, were to leave, it would be up to to the Republican party to choose a replacement.

It “allows both parties to have a fair shake,” Carpenter said. [The Kansas City Star]

The Democrats disagree, naturally. And, of course, there are some restive Republicans holding those Executive branch positions. This legislation would give them free rein to resign to pursue higher office without damaging their Party’s power.

There’s certainly positives to having office-holders remain in office for their full term, and not skipping out. How this turns out should be interesting.

Fast Company notes the invention of a new material:

A team of Boston University researchers recently stuck a loudspeaker into one end of a PVC pipe. They cranked it up loud. What did they hear? Nothing.

How was this possible? Did they block the other end of the pipe with noise canceling foams or a chunk of concrete? No, nothing of the sort. The pipe was actually left open save for a small, 3D-printed ring placed around the rim. That ring cut 94% of the sound blasting from the speaker, enough to make it inaudible to the human ear.

That sound must have been converted into something, some sort of energy. If it can be harvested, this could be really cool.

Imagine recharging your phone’s battery by shouting at it a few times.

Or putting this material on your roof and harvesting the noise of jets going by overhead. All of a sudden, those houses near the runways become prime real estate.

Snowblowers become silent.

And then lion’s learn about this and become silent, too. It’s amazing what evolution comes up with, so don’t laugh. At least, wait until you’re in a locked room.

I see failed economist Art Laffer is still uttering pronouncements:

On Fox News this morning, Art Laffer blames the 2008 stock market crash on Barack Obama "rising in the polls and doing well in the polls," warning that the market will crash in 2020 "if they see an Obama coming"

Anchor Bill Hemmer: "We're watching the calendar with you" pic.twitter.com/JlBsvXbo7s

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 23, 2019

Steve Benen has a lot of fun with this, but I think he missed a bet.

I see this as a vaccination. No doubt Laffer has been watching the escalating Federal debt, a problem partially his fault as the Laffer Curve is an implicit part of Republican Party Holy Tenets these days, and he’s beginning to wonder if his whole edifice of dubious economics is about to come falling down around his ears.

If it does, President Trump, already a dubious bet to win re-election with the Mueller Report’s apparently damning (I haven’t had a chance to read it) information, which will be followed up by the various House oversight committees, will have his last redoubt, that of “It’s the economy, stupid!” fame, shattered, leaving him vulnerable to the shouts of the outraged villagers voters who used to believe in him.

I expect this will become a “talking point” for Republicans who are afraid of taking on the debate about the future in honest terms. At some point, the Democratic contender who frightens the extremist wing of the Republicans the most will have the label “OBAMA: Horseman of the Apocalypse!” hung around their neck, and that’s all we’ll hear.

Because an honest evaluation of what happened in the Great Recession doesn’t appear to concern Laffer and, presumably, Trump – and his allies will stampede along in their dust.

This may be a wakeup call for the Democrats to begin messaging – HONESTLY – on the real causes of the Great Recession. Bring up subprime loans and all those second- and third- rate financial instruments, the insanely high risks. And the legislation that enabled it, no matter who approved it.

Let the Republicans argue that the appearance of a Democratic candidate who talked sense, and, when elected, successfully guided the resuscitation of the country, caused a market crash. It’s utterly laughable and dishonest.

And such remarks, wielded properly by the supposed victims of the lies, can become great big clubs to use on those spreading the lies.

But this is Laffer trying to inoculate the people currently in favor of Trump against thinking any kind of economic difficulty could possibly be the GOP’s fault. Blame a ghost, that’s what they want to do.

The Democrats had better not let them.

Car, me, or lunch?

The classic To Catch A Thief (1955) has all the pieces: glamour, beautiful landscapes, a flawed hero with a damsel to match, a hot car, and a plot twist or three that emphasizes the theme that one’s crimes will pursue you from the sea floor of Le Havre harbor to the top of the chimney of that palace where you’re partying.

John Robie, former famous cat burglar with an eye for jewels as well as French Resistance hero, is now reformed, owns a small farm on an estate, a hot car or two, an aversion to the police, and an unfortunate reputation. When someone begins using his techniques to lift jewelry from the idle rich, he finds himself eyed with deep suspicion, and so he enlists the help of the insurance man who’s getting the shaft to discover who might be the next victim.

In doing so, he is introduced to an atypical American mother and daughter. Having inherited their wealth from the father, a swindler who lucked into oil and died, mother Jessie simply ensures her jewels are insured and otherwise makes little fuss about the safety of her jewels, while having lots of fun thrusting needles into insurance man and jewel thief alike. Her daughter, Francie, while frustrated by her mother’s attitude, is also doing some sleuthing of her own, eyeing Robie, who is using a fake name, with deep suspicion.

Meanwhile, not only are the police keeping an eye on Robie, but so are his erstwhile and volatile Resistance comrades, who suspect him of living high off the hog on the proceeds of the robberies while they themselves labor in a restaurant.

Eventually, the action winds up at a great party for the rich, where Robie awaits another figure in black. Who has succumbed to the lure of quick wealth among his many acquaintances and friends? And will the wild gunfire from below nail Robie before it hits his double?

Outside of the fact that our leading man, Cary Grant, is far too old for Francie, played by Grace Kelly, this is a charming romp which is nevertheless backed by a somber, if relatively simple theme. And that car is really a piece of art, or so my Arts Editor believes.

Enjoy!

Andrew Sullivan finds former Pope Benedict, still alive and kicking and issuer of semi-papal letters on the state of Church affairs, a frustrating subject. After beating on him for refusing to take responsibility for the travails of the Roman Catholic church (see the second part of his diary entry) ….

… this is especially true because Benedict’s critique is so familiar, evasive, and exhausted that he sounds more like an old neocon re-upping Allan Bloom one last time than a pope emeritus speaking with any kind of restraint or serenity. And it’s all to say one more time that everything went to hell in the 1960s and that every sex scandal in the church since then stems from that, and there was no real abuse before. Seriously. The hippies made us do it! The crisis had nothing do with clericalism, or stunted psychosexual development in some priests, or the corrupting culture of the clerical closet: It was still just those damned students all those years ago.

Andrew then finds his thoughts bizarrely beautiful:

Seeing a former pope reduced to this is just sad. There is no reflection at all on his own culpability in handling all the sex-abuse cases under John Paul II; there is just an easy, knee-jerk attempt to blame his old enemies for them. And then, as so often with Benedict, something happens, and the anger and bitterness and lashing out cedes to a suddenly beautiful statement of the truth of Christianity:

The Lord has initiated a narrative of love with us and wants to subsume all creation in it. The counterforce against evil, which threatens us and the whole world, can ultimately only consist in our entering into this love. It is the real counterforce against evil … A world without God can only be a world without meaning. For where, then, does everything that is come from? In any case, it has no spiritual purpose. It is somehow simply there and has neither any goal nor any sense. Then there are no standards of good or evil. Then only what is stronger than the other can assert itself. Power is then the only principle. Truth does not count, it actually does not exist.

Been boning up on some Nietzsche, I see. But Benedict is and always has been this strange combination: rigid and bitter and petty — while also bearing a gift for cutting through the cant to craft words, often beautiful, that convey the essence of the faith. It makes me want to yell at him and revere him at the same time.

An analysis of Benedict’s strangely worded paragraph will help. Briefly, Benedict is simply saying that, without God (and the cynical might say “the Church”) there is no Right or Wrong, no moral system; only Power will correlate to survival. The first part is a common assertion among the faithful, because that’s how they were brought up, and by the leaders, because that’s one of the defensive stones around their circle of power. The second is a statement that ignores the importance of truth in all interactions between entities. Truth, unaffected by power, brings predictability and dependability, and, in turn, prosperity. Power ascending to the top of the social pyramid, seasoned by human irrationality, turns prosperity into poverty, and monarchies into smoking ruins. See the Romanovs for a graphic example.

If Sullivan wants to resolve this conundrum, he should take seriously the old atheistic contention that morality does not require divinity. Once it is accepted that a successful moral system can be constructed from non-divine foundations, Benedict’s mysteriously beautiful statement loses any perceived majesty, and can be seen for what it really is – a defense of the power ladder Benedict ascended and has forever given his loyalty.

All philosophy starts with some set of basic assumptions, and sometimes some of those assumptions are cracked and unstable. Someday I hope to find the time to start exploring an agnostic morality system, starting from scratch. This is not to say that I reject all other such attempts, for the simple truth is I’ve never studied them. I try to live well, and the Golden Rule seems to be a fine rule-of-thumb. But a formalized system helps explain how one behaves, or should behave – and why.

Cortege:

1. A train of attendants, as of a distinguished person; a retinue.
2. 1. A ceremonial procession.
   2. A funeral procession.

[The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Notre Dame tells a story of quarreling, not unity. That’s why it unites the French.” Robert D. Zaretsky, WaPo:

The medieval cathedral, of course, was not burning. Intact, it instead welcomed Charles de Gaulle on Aug. 26, when the commander of the Free French forces and de facto president of France led a victory march from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame. Greeted along the way by a mass of jubilant Parisians and the occasional sniper, the cortege filed into the cathedral to hear the “Te Deum.” The hymn was first performed at Notre Dame in 1467 to commemorate the eviction of the English from French soil — a celebration repeated every year until 1793, when leaders of the French Revolution decided that a cathedral was no place to praise the nation.

Think of a fine, tasty pastry, filled with a really meh custard. That’s Ralph Wrecks The Internet (2018), a sparkly, animated, name dropping exploration of the Internet that tries to warn about the dangers of growing too comfortable with your rut in life. The animation is gorgeous, the analogies to the entities inhabiting the Internet at least mildly amusing, good voices, inventive.

But not a whole lot in the custard. Sure, there’s a lesson to be learned, but it all seems too labored. Maybe I just didn’t much care for the characters, or the animation. Perhaps it’s aimed at a younger demographic than myself, and I see professional critics liked it – but, for us, it didn’t really click.

Your mileage may vary.

I was struck by this statement of Trump’s inclinations concerning record keeping:

Before becoming president, Trump left the impression with his employees that he did not want them to take too many notes, for fear of a paper trail that could haunt them down the road. Sam Nunberg, one of Trump’s former political advisers, recalled him saying, “I can’t believe what people put in emails.”

In the White House, many aides take notes — sometimes to memorialize strange moments or orders Trump gives that make them uncomfortable, and sometimes simply to remember one’s marching orders or what is agreed to during a meeting.

Trump sometimes warily views note-taking in the Oval Office. He rarely takes copious notes himself, aides said, but occasionally scribbles on the side of papers. During a briefing on cybersecurity hacks, for instance, Trump bragged to officials that he never used email and said companies would be better off without using technology that harbors such records. [WaPo]

If you’re running your businesses beginning with a view that you have to avoid the law, then perhaps you shouldn’t be in business. Does he think any President since Nixon thought it was necessary to avoid keeping records, of leaving a paper trail?

I’m simply appalled.

The people’s business simply shouldn’t be run this way.

Which is the lead member of this choir?

Borders, and the consequences of breaking them, are everywhere in Cold War (2018). The title provides the context, starting in post-World War II Poland, newly Communist Poland, at a farm where the estate owner has been dispossessed, and it’s now to be occupied by a forming corp of peasant singing and dance group. Rumors abound about blonde Zula, who they say shot her father to death. When asked why by her lover, Wiktor, the leader of the group, she replies that her father had been unable to distinguish between herself and her mother, with all that implies about the consequences of forbidden border breaches – and that Wiktor shouldn’t worry, as she hadn’t actually killed him.

The group achieves a certain competency and prominence, and goes on tour. In East Berlin, an opportunity to escape the East Bloc arises, and it’s alluring for Wiktor, as he feels he has little opportunity for artistic growth under the shadow of the corrupt Soviets. Zula is along for the ride, but can’t accompany Wiktor due to a last moment interruption, and so Wiktor alone escapes to experience the angst of starting over as a musician in the West, landing at Paris.

The story jumps from meeting to meeting between our star-crossed pair, from her marrying a Westerner and leaving the East Bloc, to her return, to his following her. Each breaching of that ideological /geographical boundary, and several others, lead to serious disruptions and even degradations of their lives, but the drive of their love keeps them coming back for more.

Until they approach that last and most basic boundary and breach: marriage.

This movie was filmed in a sepia tone which contributes to its ambiance of European nihilism. The characters are almost mysteriously expressionless, and the younger audience might benefit from some research into how the surveillance society of the Soviet Union and its allies in the East Bloc affected those so surveilled, leaving them almost desperately private as to their inner lives, expressed only through furtive sexuality, whispers in hidden places.

I greatly enjoyed, or admired, this story for not beating key points into my brain. A flippant response to a question, for example, communicates to us his exile to Siberia for 15 years. This approach assumes an observant and intelligent audience. Of course, such assumptions can result in stories in which too little is communicated, but this story seems to have caught the proper balancing point.

This is not an uplifting movie; it’s puzzling, frustrating, and requires a lot of thought as you watch. But it’s a reminder that other ways of life have serious consequences for the individual – and, yet, those ways of life may be necessary logical steps, given their historical social contexts.

If you know Polish and French, that will help, but it’s captioned in English. And the music, at least in the early stages, is quite fun, according to my Arts Editor.

I was fascinated by this article on the general nature of how life survives on this Earth, from NewScientist (23 March 2019, paywall) and Bob Holmes, which revisits the Gaia hypothesis of the biosphere as a living organism, and how life keeps going:

As far as we know, Earth is a one-off: there is no population of competing, reproducing planets for natural selection to choose between to form the next generation. And yet, like a superorganism honed by evolution, Earth seems to self-regulate in ways that are essential for life. Oxygen levels have remained relatively constant for hundreds of millions of years, as has the availability of key building blocks of life such as carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Crucially, Earth’s surface temperature has remained within the narrow range that allows liquid water to exist. It is true there have been upheavals: during a “snowball Earth” episode about 700 million years ago, for example, almost the entire surface was frozen. “But the key question is, why does it spend so much time in a stable state and not just flying all over the place?” asks Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, UK.

This question has stumped earth scientists since James Lovelock first proposed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1960s. There is, after all, no obvious way for such self-regulation to evolve. This is particularly true because the processes that underpin Earth’s temperature, oxygen levels and the like – which include things like plate tectonics and erosion – operate over millions of years. That is far too long for the adaptation of individual organisms to their environments through natural selection to make a difference. This conundrum has led most evolutionary biologists to entirely reject any notion of Gaian evolution. “You simply cannot get an adaptation at the planetary level,” says Charles Goodnight at the University of Vermont.

But there might be another way, says Lenton. … he suggests, Earth and the early life on it might have interacted haphazardly at first. Unstable configurations – those, say, with little or no cycling of key elements such as nitrogen – would have failed quickly, requiring life to reboot nearly from scratch. Eventually, though, the system must have stumbled on a stable configuration, with better cycling and tighter regulatory mechanisms. It should be no surprise, then, that the planet of today has strong regulatory systems.

Sure, a sort of evolution of competing processes. Those that don’t make the grade are discarded, taking their dependent species with them, while those that are successful work to make Earth / Gaia a more stable place.

While the idea of evolution was originated to explain the origin of species, to borrow a phrase, there’s little reason to confine it to a biological context, as many before me have pointed out. To see it operate, a critical metric, measuring success, must be identified, and something that can change and affect the current result on that metric must be available in the entity that is evolving. Call that a variability component.

In biology, the metric, as a first stab, is the reproductive success rate of qualified members of a species, and the variability component is the fact that a species is made up of individuals, at least some of which include a reproductive function which includes variability in the next generation, which results from how DNA from contributors forms, and DNA’s vulnerability to mutation from environmental radiation and other contaminants. As the success rate moves towards zero, the species moves towards extinction, while a success rate that is increasing would appear to be moving away from extinction. However, because of the necessary interactions with the environment which feeds the species’ individuals, or the ecological web, to use the terminology of a previous generation, there is necessarily a positive feedback loop. Think of the population dynamics of wolves and deer. The two follow each other in their endless sin waves. This is a feedback loop. A species which is experiencing extreme success runs the risk of exhausting its environment, aka overpopulation.

And so an increasing success rate may simply presage a coming crash and near-extinction level event. See Peter Turchin’s Secular Cycles.

I must say, there’s quite a satisfying click! in my head when reading about these sorts of things, because, for those of us who like to understand this sort of thing, this really enlightens our understanding of how we came to be – and how, if we’re not careful, how rough the ride might become. Processes that are not area-specific make it easier to understand what’s happening in the world, once we get ourselves properly fitted to see them.

Quirky

Shamelessly stolen from NASA:

The wavemaker moon, Daphnis, is featured in this view, taken as NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made one of its ring-grazing passes over the outer edges of Saturn’s rings on Jan. 16, 2017. This is the closest view of the small moon obtained yet. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, exposed as a liar in the Mueller Report, raises her defenses as documented in this Tweet from ABC News:

Pressed repeatedly on her comments on FBI agents, Sarah Sanders tells @GStephanopoulos, "It was the heat of the moment, meaning that it wasn't a scripted talking point. I'm sorry that I wasn't a robot like the Democratic Party" was about Mueller probe. https://t.co/mOQZNKl1wy pic.twitter.com/y3xcNwVYHg

— ABC News (@ABC) April 19, 2019

All I can do is laugh. The Democrats are now robots? We’re moving from mere lying and corruption to full-on surrealism. The GOP house is burning down and its inhabitants are smoking cigarettes in the lounge, discussing how bright it is because of the fire.

Ya gotta wonder if she’ll ever muster the self-respect to quit. Right now she looks like a cultist who’ll claim night is day if Dear Leader proclaims it to be so.

Ethology:

Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “It’s not an illusion, you have free will. It’s just not what you think,” Tom Stafford, NewScientist (6 April 2019, paywall):

How Sphex came to be linked with free will is a long story. Charles Darwin was studying this wasp while working on his theory of evolution. We know from his notebooks that its behaviour had a big impact on him. He wasn’t aware that it would ceaselessly check its burrow – that discovery was made decades later by Nikolaas Tinbergen, the founder of ethology, the science of animal behaviour. What interested Darwin was what the wasp does once it has dragged a cricket into its burrow: it lays its eggs in the body of the immobilised but still living prey. When the larvae hatch they eat it from the inside out.

Darwin was so appalled by this behaviour that he cited it as one reason for his loss of faith. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within… living bodies,” he wrote. Meanwhile, his theory wasn’t just undermining God. Some took it as support for the idea that humans are mere animals and that animals are mere machines, fanning the flames of a millennia-old debate about free will.

While I’ve never been religious as Darwin once was, behaviors like these have certainly reinforced my suspicion that there’s either no God, or it’s certainly unworthy of worship.

When it comes to the Mueller Report, everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but not everyone’s opinion is worth listening to. I’ve talked about the problem of the comfortable opinion vs the honest opinion. You can talk to some random dude on the street, you can listen to your favorite ideologue on the left or right, you can listen to lawyers representing those sides, the pundits themselves who do this sort of thing for a living – and therefore have implicit conflict-of-interest problems because of those payments. You can listen to flying nutcases such as the ilk of Alex Jones, and the reason I phrase it that way is that Mr. Jones has retreated behind the defense of having a psychosis to explain his frankly unacceptable behavior. It’s worth wondering about his ilk in the same way. You can even make the absolute pinnacle of mistakes and listen to President Trump’s frantic claims of exoneration, because that’s easier – and faster – than reading the report and forming your own opinion.

You can even listen to me, if you like opinions unleavened with neither money nor specific expertise, hell I haven’t even have the time to read the damn report. I’ll try to get to it this weekend, although I may print it out and use it to beat an invading Martian to death, instead – it’s big enough to do that.

OR … you can go read the folks at Lawfare. They deal with legalese every day, they know how to parse what another national security lawyer (Mr. Mueller) has written, most are lawyers involved in international law or national security law, and they’ve dealt with all sorts of uncomfortable questions when it comes to the painful question of national security. In short, so far as I can tell, they’re paid and trained to write honest opinions concerning the law, the facts, and how it all comes together. So what does the Lawfare mob think the Mueller Report says?

No, Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and no, he did not conclude that President Trump had obstructed justice. But Mueller emphatically did not find that there had been “no collusion” either. Indeed, he described in page after damning page a dramatic pattern of Russian outreach to figures close to the president, including to Trump’s campaign and his business; Mueller described receptivity to this outreach on the part of those figures; he described a positive eagerness on the part of the Trump campaign to benefit from illegal Russian activity and that of its cutouts; he described serial lies about it all. And he describes as well a pattern of behavior on the part of the president in his interactions with law enforcement that is simply incompatible with the president’s duty to “take care” that the laws are “faithfully executed”—a pattern Mueller explicitly declined to conclude did not obstruct justice.

Call it a newer, bigger swamp, much worse than the one he promised to drain. Or retreat from the colorful and dreadfully misleading metaphors and just go with Trump’s sordid, venal reality. But there’s more:

As the report is careful to explain, “collusion” is neither a criminal offense nor a legal term of art with a clear definition, despite its frequent use in discussions of the special counsel’s mandate. Mueller and his team instead examined the relationships between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government through the far narrower lens of criminal conspiracy. To establish a criminal conspiracy, a prosecutor must show, among other elements, that two or more persons agreed to either violate a federal criminal law or defraud the United States. This “meeting of the minds” is ultimately the piece the Mueller team felt it could not prove, leading it not to pursue any conspiracy charges against members of the Trump campaign, even as it pursued them against Russian agents.

This conclusion is far from the full vindication that chants of “no collusion” imply, a fact driven home by the detailed factual record the Mueller report puts forward. In some cases, there was indeed a meeting of the minds between Trump campaign officials and Russia, just not in pursuit of a criminal objective. In others, members of the Trump campaign acted criminally—as evidenced by the guilty pleas and indictments that the Mueller team secured—but did so on their own. At times, these efforts even worked toward the same objective as the Russian government, but on seemingly parallel tracks as opposed to in coordination. None of this amounted to a criminal conspiracy that the Mueller team believed it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But the dense network of interactions, missed opportunities, and shared objectives between the Trump campaign and the Russian government remains profoundly disturbing.

This report shows that the Trump campaign was reasonably aware of the Russian efforts, at least on the hacking side. They were aware the Russians sought to help them win. They welcomed that assistance. Instead of warning the American public, they instead devised a public relations and campaign strategy that sought to capitalize on Russia’s illicit assistance. In other words, the Russians and the Trump campaign shared a common goal, and each side worked to achieve that goal with basic knowledge of the other side’s intention. They just didn’t agree to work together toward that goal together.

And this is dismaying:

The Mueller report lays out in detail a sustained effort to obtain a set of emails which figures associated with the campaign believed hackers might have obtained from Hillary Clinton’s private server before she deleted them. The trouble is that it appears the emails didn’t exist. It has previously been reported that now-deceased Trump supporter Peter Smith went to extreme lengths to try and track down Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails. According to today’s report, after candidate Trump stated in July 2016 that he hoped Russia would “find the 30,000 emails,” future National Security Advisor Michael Flynn reached out to multiple people to try and obtain those emails. One of the individuals he reached out to was Peter Smith. Smith later circulated a document that claimed his “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative” was “‘in coordination’ with the Trump Campaign” specifically naming Flynn, Sam Clovis, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. While the investigation found that Smith communicated with both Flynn and Clovis, it found no evidence that any of the four individuals listed “initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.” So essentially, a bunch of people in Trump’s orbit tried very hard to obtain stolen emails but came up empty. Mueller decided that chasing this particular ghost did not constitute criminal conduct.

At this point, it’s not really about specific crimes. It’s about people who’ve forgotten, or never learned, how to act as an American. They lie to the FBI, they give the appearance of conniving with one of our greatest adversaries, all to win a Presidency, and benefit thereby. Had they ever heard the phrase public service and taken it to mean anything other than time to profit? Such is the conservative movement these days.

Remember Mueller’s responsibility to investigate possible obstruction of justice charges by the President?

All this leads to Mueller’s key conclusion, quoted only in part in Barr’s initial letter: “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. … Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” This reasoning makes clear the disconnect between Mueller’s approach to the obstruction investigation and that of Barr, who independently chose to evaluate the evidence against Trump and determine that it was not sufficient to establish an obstruction offense.

This is not, in short, a circumstance in which Mueller summed up all the evidence for obstruction and all the evidence against it and just couldn’t make up his mind—or decided to defer to the attorney general for judgment. Mueller’s decision not to reach a traditional prosecutorial judgment in no sense indicates that the evidence of possible obstruction by the president was weak—“No Collusion, No Obstruction,” as the president tweeted. To the contrary, the more time one spends with the obstruction section of the report, the more it suggests that the Mueller team believed the evidence of obstruction to be very strong.

But we knew that already. Mueller merely confirms that this is a President without principle, without moral, without qualm. He’s one of the rarest of people – someone who can lie and lie and lie and not blush about it. He’ll make up ludicrous conspiracy theories to cover his ass, and he’ll never take responsibility for any of his failures – only for his successes. And other folks’ successes.

But that’s just my conclusions, not necessarily Lawfare’s. Give Lawfare’s article a read. It’s a calm dissection, even if a self-admitted first read, of the Mueller Report. It’s grounding, for want of a better word. No hysterics, no spin, just your local lawyer giving you the lowdown on what’s come across her desk.

Even nuclear energy is vulnerable to the plague of the retro – that is, old designs have been pulled up for a once-over, even a twice-over. Consider this summary, from Discover and M. Mitchell Waldrop, of a reactor that has as its fuel not a solid component, but a mixture of molten salts:

… the worldwide nuclear engineering community was beginning to get fired up about unconventional reactor designs — technologies that had been sidelined 40 or 50 years before, but that might have a lot fewer problems than existing reactors. And the beer-and-nuclear group found that one such design, the molten salt reactor, had a simplicity, elegance and, well, weirdness that especially appealed.

The weird bit was that word “molten,” says [Troels] Schönfeldt [of the Niels Bohr Institute]: Every other reactor design in history had used fuel that’s solid, not liquid. This thing was basically a pot of hot nuclear soup. The recipe called for taking a mix of salts — compounds whose molecules are held together electrostatically, the way sodium and chloride ions are in table salt — and heating them up until they melted. This gave you a clear, hot liquid that was about the consistency of water. Then you stirred in a salt such as uranium tetrafluoride, which produced a lovely green tint, and let the uranium undergo nuclear fission right there in the melt — a reaction that would not only keep the salts nice and hot, but could power a city or two besides.

Weird or not, molten salt technology was viable; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee had successfully operated a demonstration reactor back in the 1960s. And more to the point, the beer-and-nuclear group realized, the liquid nature of the fuel meant that they could potentially build molten salt reactors that were cheap enough for poor countries to buy; compact enough to deliver on a flatbed truck; green enough to burn our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste instead of generating more — and safe enough to put in cities and factories. That’s because Fukushima-style meltdowns would be physically impossible in a mix that’s molten already. Better still, these reactors would be proliferation resistant, because their hot, liquid contents would be very hard for rogue states or terrorists to hijack for making nuclear weapons.

It’s fascinating stuff, if this is accurate. In particular, the bit about profitably burning the nuclear waste stockpiles which currently haunt the industry has to be something to get the pulse of an environmentalist pounding; indeed, the whole thing should be exciting environmentalists, at least those who have some knowledge of how nuclear reactors work, and can distinguish between the old-style, high cost reactors, and the reactors discussed in this article. Admittedly, you have to do a lot of learning.

But I, of course, have to be careful. There is a certain hagiographic element to the story, which I notice with its mere a hand wave, a single paragraph, at the problem of the corrosive nature of molten salt. True, it’s an engineering detail, but it may be a detail the size of a mountain. You just don’t know until you put 20 years into solving it. But I worry that Waldrop may be leaving out, or be ignorant of, certain technical objections to the design, whether it be in supplies of necessary materials, corrosion, or pollution / waste peculiar to this sort of reactor.

But Waldrop makes one other point in reaction to the obvious question of why this option, if a demo installation was successfully run for a while, wasn’t pursued.

The nuclear engineering community was just too heavily committed to solid fuels, both financially and intellectually. Practitioners already had decades of experience with experimental and commercial solid-fueled reactors, versus that one molten salt experiment at Oak Ridge. A huge infrastructure existed for processing and producing solid fuel. And, not incidentally, the US research program was committed to a grand vision for the global nuclear future that would expand this infrastructure enormously — and that, viewed with 20-20 hindsight, would lead the nuclear industry into a trap.

When the managers take over, the scientists and engineers get sidelined just when they should have been making the technical evaluations without the pressure of those who had made the investments. If we do assume the molten salt reactors can be built, then we have to acknowledge that there’s a lot of environmental damage caused by that mistaken industry decision, in the form of fossil fuel pollution.

It speaks to the importance of technical evaluations unencumbered by financial and personal considerations.

Image Credit: Lift Up Your Eyes!

Watching the lead-in for The Late Show with Steven Colbert tonight, wherein a bunch of kids use Easter egg dye to color the the redacted parts of the Mueller Report, I thought Colbert really missed the boat. He should have had those kids rip pages out of the Bible, soak them in that Easter egg dye until parts are redacted (some simple chemistry required, I’m sure), and then the kids could make happily pointed comments about how the whole truth is obviously unimportant.

It would have been both hysterically funny, desperately true, and drawn a relevant analogy.

– Your friendly neighborhood agnostic.

The redacted Mueller Report has been released publicly and CNN has made it available here, although I note that it says Vol 1 of 2. The pundits are busy reading and posting interesting pieces way faster than I, working dude, can do, so I’ll take a gander at the report but I don’t expect to find anything before anyone else does.

However, how much will this influence the President’s approval ratings? I expect he’ll drop 3-5 points, but not more; it’s even possible he’ll move up if the anti-Trump pundits lose the propaganda war to the pro-Trump pundits. It’s a sad truth, but it’s unlikely that the general public will read the report, and there are few news media sources that are considered to be unbiased. Even if there were a few more, most folks get tied into their favorite biased source, such as Fox News, and that source goes with what has brought it profit in the past. Oh, I know, WaPo, The New York Times, and many other outlets would love to be seen as unbiased, and even work towards it – but, given this President’s exceptionally poor behavior, it’s hard to honestly report on him without looking biased. That’s how bad he’s become.

I encourage my readers to read the report and make up their own minds. But I doubt most folks will.

A couple of old friends pointed this out on FB. It appears someone’s looking forward to when the Terminators appear and start to snuff us out:

Only $2 million and it’s all yours. Jason Torchinsky on Jalopnik is a trifle nonplussed:

[The New York Auto Show] is the debut of this massive SUV made from, it seems, the finest pureéd wealthy jackass, pressed via advanced manufacturing techniques into body panels that simultaneously evoke a slow child’s drawing of a stealth tank, if that existed, and a tanned heir to some pharma fortune passed out on a chaise lounge with a healthy amount cocaine rimming his nostrils.

Apparently the quality is not there, either, or so Jason says. Perusing the Karlmann web site, I note one of the interior options appears to be, well, Klingon:

An elaborate hoax? A toy for the ultra-rich who can’t decide what else to do with their ill-gotten gains?

Heckuva way to start the day.

Too dull to mock, I fear.

A bunch of cardboard characters wander about in Voodoo Man (1944). The audience has little chance to get to know and care about them, and when Dr. Marlowe needs more lovely young ladies to use in his mystic attempts to recover his dead wife, off they go. But then evil trips over its own slip-shod ways, the law arrives, and, well, that’s it.

Don’t waste your time on this one, even if you’re wasted.

From WaPo, a spokeswoman for the meat industry shoots herself in the foot while responding to accusations that poultry products may be contaminated with fecal matter:

KatieRose McCullough, the North American Meat Institute’s director of regulatory and scientific affairs, said it’s important to distinguish between fecal material that is naked to the human eye and the types of pathogens that cause foodborne illnesses.

“It’s no surprise that the pseudo-medical animal rights group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine doesn’t know the difference between fecal contamination and bacteria on meat products,” McCullough said. “Bacteria like E.coli are naturally present in the environment as numerous studies on all types of items from foods to phones, keyboards and toothbrushes have shown. This does not mean any of those items are contaminated with feces.”

Maybe someone told her that making cheapshot accusations like that is an effective tactic, but it just raises red flags for me. In fact, it more or less discredits her group – they can’t present a reason, rational argument, so let’s just throw around dumb accusations.

Another third-rater, and probably a third-rate organization..

Oh, yes. Tincture of murder makes the medicine go down easier. I’ll have to remember that for the future.

When it comes to it, Tension (1949) has plenty of it, but the one thing it lacks is the sympathetic character who pays the price of the bad decisions of the balance of grasping, unprincipled cads in this wannabe member of film noir.

After all, who’s to like here? Warren Quimby, war vet and now a humble pharmacist, will do anything to keep his wife, Claire, by his side, and I do mean anything, including losing his self-respect.

But Claire has no respect for her husband, who’s working 12 hour nights to provide for her and build a future. No, she wants it all now, in her selfish way, and she’s more than willing to go out on dates with likely looking future husbands if they flash the cash.

But her pick for a successor to Warren, Barney Deager, just beats up Warren when he comes to remonstrate with Claire to respect the sanctity of marriage. Now he’s whipped by her and him. And we don’t like any of them.

Hell, even Warren’s assistant, Freddie, recommends cold-blooded murder when Warren tells him of the beating.  He seemed like a nice guy – up to then…

And now that Warren has everyone convinced that he’s given up on Claire, he concocts a master murder plan involving a new identity: a man who’ll be little more than a ghost; a man who’ll one night murder Barney for the temerity of stealing Warren’s wife, all while Warren is working at his pharmacy. The new identity, named Paul Sothern, will be little more than smoke on the wind, having an imagined career, an apartment, and lots of travel.

And one unanticipated adjunct: Paul Sothern acquires a girlfriend.

When push comes to shove, Quimby cum Sothern stands over the sleeping Deager, and finds himself incapable of the deed. He walks away after some biting remarks concerning relationships with Claire. It may be rhetorical murder, but it’s not the same thing as what comes next: Deager’s death by gunshot.

And then the fun begins. Unfortunately, the girlfriend, despite having a photo of Paul, is not utilized enough to give us better insight into the dark motivations of the other characters, and Quimby’s failure to viciously off the man who has cuckolded him doesn’t make him emblematic of a true noir movie. Still, the plot twists kept our interest, and there’s plenty of tension IF you can find a way to hook into this motley crew. Even the police aren’t real winners, being a little too uninterested in legal niceties.

But it is a lot of fun speculating on just who took the life of the relatively innocent Deager.

A reader reacts to my observation concerning amateurs:

IN all fairness Hue, consider the source., CNN. I think his observation was a logic one , and the Paris Fire Dept gave a reasonable response . Liberal TV as you well know has nothing better to do then criticize any thing the President has to say.

I went back and reviewed the report I cited from CNN, and I think they simply reported what he said sans opinion or slanting.

But I was not commenting on a perceived bias in the media, but on my reaction to a comment by the current occupant of one of the most powerful and influential offices in the world, diminished as it has become over the last two years. He can’t refrain from giving advice to those experts who are on the front lines while he lounges, expertise-free in front of his TV, and thinks he has something to say about it. In that one remark he embodies his arrogance that is so incompatible with his office.

I can’t wait for his comments on how to explore a black hole.

Another reader reacts to the first:

Liberal TV? The vast, vast majority of media companies (print, online, TV, cable, etc.) are owner and run by conservatives and have a conservative bent to most of their reporting.

But if they’re not conservative enough, then they’re liberal, no? We’re seeing a redefinition of conservative and, to a lesser extent, liberals, as those who would return to an imagined Golden Age take control of a Republican Party which would repudiate some of its greatest achievements over the last 100 years if it could – and it can.