A few months ago, I asked him to be on my advisory board for my new company. He thanked me for the offer, but told me he had to decline because there was a potential conflict of interest. But today he announced that he is going to be heading up a much more important advisory council. I think it’s a great choice.
Global Heating
Our children will never know what snow in Yosemite in mid-May looks like.
This has been an unusually wet winter, even in southern California. We got quite a bit of rain here early Sunday morning, with more showers expected in the next couple days and this weekend (Memorial Day!). The new growth, including in the burn areas up the coast north of Malibue, is tremendous. It’s still green, and will be into June or July, but it’s going to make a lot of fuel when the rains stop in late summer and fall. If every winter was like this one, we would no longer be living in a desert. That’s the kind of climate change I could definitely get behind. But we’d still be stuck with our crazy voters and government.
Moon Dust
Electron Crystallography
An interesting breakthrough. I wonder where it might lead?
Good Cop, Bad Cop
John Bolton is exactly what Trump’s Iranian policy needs.
It was feckless of the Bush administration to allow them to wage war on us in Iraq with no consequences. And of course, the Obama administration viewed them as allies.
The Great Migration Into Space
Thoughts on Musk and Bezos from Peter Diamandis.
More thoughts, on science fiction versus science fact, from The Economist‘s Oliver Morton.
Mitt Romney
…is the new John McCain.
What make him think that anyone needed a new John McCain? Hasn’t he noticed that it took someone other than him or John McCain to defeat the Democrats? Or maybe neither of them really cared about defeating the Democrats?
[Update a while later]
Justin Amash has proven to be quite a disappointment to this libertarian.
One more thing, J-Am, where are your libertarian principles regarding illegal surveillance on American citizens? On Illegal FISA warrants, national security letters, human intelligence assets being placed around a political campaign by the unelected political bureaucracy? The jack-booted fedgov strong-arming people to plead to process crimes? U cool with that bro, because TRUMP?
I’d like to see someone confront him along those lines.
Canadian Universities
Ottawa is imposing “social justice” on all of them.
The Steele Dossier
The “verified” document that wasn’t.
Someone’s (more than one someone) got a lot of ‘splaining to do.
[Update Monday morning]
How the FBI broke its own rules:
In the fall of 1975, FBI agent John Connolly met with Bulger in the agent’s car on an abandoned Boston street corner. What would follow was the FBI’s greatest scandal involving a confidential informant subverting the vast powers of the government in order to target his enemies. This stain on the history of the Department of Justice should have led to effective reforms but instead it only foreshadowed more of the same.
Well, to be fair, it was politically convenient to do the same thing with Steele.
[Update a while later]
Spy versus spy versus spy: How Comey, Clapper, and Brennan are turning on each other.
I hope they all rot in jail.
[Late-morning update]
Trey Gowdy says that there is a potential game changer if certain transcripts are released.
And thoughts on a tale of two coups:
The fact that the losers in this election appear to have attempted to undermine the winners is an extremely bad precedent because it leads to the winners deciding to take it out on the losers next time around and that in turn leads to people not relinquishing power short of being turfed out with violence – see Venezuela and any number of Latin American, Central Asian and African dictatorships. In fact allowing the losers to come up with one way after another to try and delegitimise an election they lost is bad on its own because the ability to “throw the bums out” is a key feature of democracy. If voters can’t trust that their votes will be respected they are likely to resort to other methods of expressing their displeasure with the current set of rulers and that is something that these rulers may come to regret. The good news is that the New AG seems to be doing his job and turning over any number of stones that various parties would have preferred remained unexamined.
Let’s hope.
Etruscan
What did it sound like?
I’m always a little skeptical that they can be sure of things like this.