OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.
Archive for 2023
August 4, 2023
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Probing the origin and evolution of water-rich asteroids.
MODERN WARFARE: Ukrainian sea drones damaged a Russian warship.
IT CAN’T BE A FRINGE BELIEF IF THAT MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE IT: 69% of Republicans now believe Biden’s 2020 win was illegitimate: New poll released before Trump’s January 6 arraignment shows GOP supporters believe there WAS widespread fraud.
And, regardless of actual fraud, if your electoral system is that untrusted, it’s time to make it more clearly trustworthy. The failure — more like refusal — to do that is producing a constitutional crisis in this country.
MATHEMATICS IS THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE: Scientists Uncover a Surprising Link Between Pure Mathematics and Genetics.
BOOK OF THE DAY: The Survival Medicine Handbook: The Essential Guide for When Help is NOT on the Way. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)
HEADLINES FROM 1898: New drug shows promise as nonaddictive treatment for pain.
DISPATCHES FROM FUN CITY: ‘Full-on riot’ breaks out during Twitch influencer Kai Cenat’s PS5 giveaway in NYC’s Union Square.
IT WAS 23 YEARS AGO TODAY I DIED: That’s literally the truth. My sweet wife reminded me of it this afternoon. I’d forgotten the date, but not the incredible moment when I woke up.
THIS IS TRUE, I’VE CONSULTED WITH SOME PUBLIC DEFENDERS MAKING SECOND AMENDMENT ARGUMENTS: After Bruen, Anti-Gun Activists Are Fighting Against Public Defenders and Their Clients.
THE OBAMA FACTOR: David Samuels Interviews MLK Biographer David Garrow on Barack Obama.
In a normal country, the exhaustive report issued in April 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which uncovered no evidence that the 2016 election had been decided by Russian actions, let alone that Trump was a Russian agent, might have been a cue for the Obamas to go home, to Chicago, or Hawaii, or Martha’s Vineyard. The moment of crisis was over. Russiagate turned out to have been a politically motivated hoax, just as Trump had long insisted.
But while the attention of Republicans in Washington turned to questioning the FBI, more careful observers could not fail to notice that the FBI had hardly acted alone. After all, Russiagate had not originated with the Bureau, but with the Clinton campaign, which having failed to get even sympathetic mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to bite on its fantastical allegations, was reduced to handing off the story to campaign press apparatchiks like Slate’s Franklin Foer and Mother Jones’ David Corn. The fact that the story only got bigger after Clinton lost the election was due to Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who in November and December of 2016 helped elevate Russiagate from a failed Clinton campaign ploy to a priority of the American national security apparatus, using a hand-picked team of CIA analysts under his direct control to validate his thesis. If Brennan was the instrument, the person who signed the executive order that turned Brennan’s thesis into a time bomb under Trump’s desk was Barack Obama.
The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. The whispers about Biden’s cognitive decline, which began during his bizarre COVID-sheltered basement campaign, were mostly dismissed as partisan attacks on a politician who had always been gaffe-ridden. Yet as President Biden continued to fall off bicycles, misremember basic names and facts, and mix long and increasingly weird passages of Dada-edque nonsense with autobiographical whoppers during his public appearances, it became hard not to wonder how poor the president’s capacities really were and who was actually making decisions in a White House staffed top to bottom with core Obama loyalists. When Obama turned up at the White House, staffers and the press crowded around him, leaving President Biden talking to the drapes—which is not a metaphor but a real thing that happened.
That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE:
FLASHBACK
Barack Obama in November 2020: "If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman [to be POTUS], and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines… pic.twitter.com/Tp6iUCXshF
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 3, 2023
UPDATE: As of now, it’s the article of the year. But to ask why it wasn’t written in 2008 is to answer the question:
(Updated and bumped.)
MATT MARGOLIS: Jack Smith May Have Doomed His Case Against Trump.
IT’S USUALLY WHEN PEOPLE CAN’T KEEP THEIR BOOGER-HOOK OFF THE BANG BUTTON: What Causes Accidental Discharges?
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Forget Cocaine Bear, We’re Looking for Cocaine Sharks. “This week we have the best dog person in the world, cocaine sharks, and Colorado Man doing his best impersonation of Florida Man — right down to the gator.”
“STOLEN ELECTION” TALK: “Isn’t it a “fraught topic” for Democrats too?! This is the sharpest example of concern trolling I’ve ever seen. It’s going to “hurt Republicans” if Trump uses the opportunity of the criminal trial to break open the question of the legitimacy of the 2020 election?”
SENATE JUDICIARY GOP STIRS: They’ve been rather quiet in recent weeks – excepting Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) – as the House Judiciary and House Oversight and Accountability committees peeled back layer after layer of the Biden Bribery Scandal. But today, every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee signed a letter to Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) demanding a hearing be scheduled ASAP.
Purpose of the hearing is to give Attorney General Merrick Garland and U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss an opportunity under oath and in public to “clarify” whether or not Weiss had authority to file any charge in any federal court he concluded to be justified by the evidence in the Hunter Biden tax evasion case.
No response from Durbin, but it’s difficult to see how he can avoid inviting Garland and Weiss, then convening the requested hearing. More to come.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA to send trio of autonomous rovers to the moon.
KRUISER: I’m Endorsing ‘Generic Republican’ for President in 2024. “Full disclosure: I don’t think I’ve ever been this devoted to a presidential candidate.”
GOVERNMENT: Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: The Great Baby Formula Shortage of 2022.
With domestic supply chains snarled, it would have made sense for American grocery stores to turn to foreign producers for replacement supplies of baby formula. Unfortunately, there are “absurdly high” tariffs on imported formula, explains Gabriella Beaumont-Smith, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
“There are these distribution channels that are basically not established” because the tariffs make it too costly, she says. “And we’re talking about baby formula. This is a necessity and we shouldn’t be taxing it that high or at all.”
It took last year’s crisis for Congress to consider lifting those tariffs—and only on a temporary basis. The dairy lobby and other special interests like the isolated, and fragile, American market for baby formula just the way it is.
Much more at the link.
HMM: What if Trump Stops Playing Along? “It’s time for former — and possibly future — President Trump to grab that branch that’s sticking out halfway down and refuse to fall any further.”
THEY’RE NOT SAYING IT’S ALIENS: AI Built To Hunt Extraterrestrial Intelligence Just Detected 8 New Promising Signals. “The team used the algorithm to analyze 480 hours of observations of 820 stars taken by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The algorithm identified almost 3 million distinctive patterns, which were then further filtered down to just 20,515. Upon visual inspection, the team identified eight promising signals of interest.”