Operation Distraction

White House chief of staff John Kelly spoke to the "good" and "not so good" parts of US history on Monday, speaking highly of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and attributing the origin of the American Civil War to a "lack of an ability to compromise."
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He continued: "But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War. And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had to make their stand," Kelly added, not making any mention of slavery -- a major facet of the Southern economy and a key benchmark that separated northern and southern states when they chose sides in the Civil War.

First, that's all utter horseshit. The Civil War was about the right to own people as livestock. It was about their desire to open more territory for the farming of people. That's what they declared at the time. A lot of the Confederate soldiers were drafted and both draft evasion and desertion were huge problems for the Confederacy, as a large number of their soldiers knew that they were fighting for the rights of rich people to own slaves, while the slavers exempted themselves from fighting the war. But the officers, especially the highest-ranking ones, actively committed treason. There is no intellectually honest way to gloss over the point that they were traitors who fought to preserve slavery. The "Noble Cause" bullshit was an after-the-fact rationalization to cover up the bitter truth that the Boys in Gray committed treason and fought for the right of rich white people to own black people.

Given that, as I've explained before, none of Trump's ancestors were even in this country for the Civil War, Trump's infatuation with the Confederate traitors is either naked political calculation or a manifestation of his inner nazism.

But all that overlooks the saddest thing: Donald Trump sent out his Chief of Staff, a retired four-star general, to stoke up the fires of resentment over losing the Civil War as a way to distract the news cycle, if only on Fox, from covering the fact that the walls of the Mueller investigation are closing in on his administration.

General Kelly had the reputation of being an honorable man. But Trump just sent him out to play racist troll in order to save a news cycle or two.

The bitter lesson is this: If you work for a racist and hateful boss, especially in public life, the stink of racism and hate will rub off on you.

There's No Bigotry Like the Old Standards

Nigel Farage goes for the oldest bigotry on the books.

You'd have to go back to the Sumerians throwing shade on the Ubadians to come up with an older form of bigotry.

Eatin' Good in the Neighborhood, But Not For Long

If you wonder why there are so many restaurants in places, you can blame Wall Street.

There's a good chance that it is all going to come crashing down, just like any other boomlet. The bitg guys on Wall Street will have made their money. Those who bought into the franchised dream will be the ones holding the bag.

Arresting Developments, Part Три

(Один и Два)

It is not every day that a president’s former campaign manager and another campaign worker are indicted on felony charges. In fact the last time it happened was 1974, when Nixon’s campaign manager John Mitchell was indicted. Trump’s claims that “this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign,” aren’t true. The indictment says that the money laundering and conspiracy for which Manafort and his associate Rick Gates are being charged continued “through at least 2016” — i.e., through the period, from March 29 to August 19, 2016, when Manafort was working for Trump. Gates remained at the campaign even after Manafort was ousted.

Lawfare's analysis is worth reading. So is Popehat's.

As much as Trump's iterations of Baghdad Bob are going to be everywhere saying "Manafort, who" and "who's Papadopoulos", others have been noting that Trump prominently mentioned that Papadopoulos was part of his foreign policy team. Manafort ran Trump's campaign for three months (including when Trump was nominated) and was also the "chief strategist".

Think about that for a minute. One of Trump's foreign policy advisors was an alleged Russian operative. His campaign manager was an allged unregistered foreign agent and a money-launderer.

Will Manafort flip on Trump? Well, a couple of the counts would, if Manafort was convicted, lead to asset forfeiture. Hell, given that the DoJ is all about civil asset forfeiture, Mueller might be able to grab Manafort's shit, now. Roll over on Trump or lose everything he owns--- that's a hell of a conundrum for Manafort.

Gobble, Gobble; F-35 Ed.

Around 200 of those expensive turds may be set aside as being either unflyable or not combat-capable. That's about 40 billion dollars worth of unusable airplanes.

Forty billion dollars is equivalent to building 26 brand-new, fully-equipped schools in every state in the U.S. Forty billion would give full-ride college scholarships to over 300,000 kids. Forty billion dollars would rework 32,000 miles of four-lane highway. Forty billion dollars would get a program to rebuild America's bridges off to a good start.

But no. Fort Fumble is blowing forty billion dollars on fighter jets that are not capable of fighting.

Defense procurement is the largest welfare program the U.S. currently has. Or, if you prefer, you can call it a "cargo cult".

Arresting Developments, Part Два

Manafort and Gates, who turned themselves into the FBI Monday morning, are the first people to be charged as part of Mueller’s probe. The men were indicted on 12 counts, according to a 31-page indictment, including money laundering, operating as unregistered foreign agents of the government of Ukraine, failing to disclose overseas bank accounts and making false statements to federal authorities.

The last charge is the leverage charge. It's probably the easiest to prove and it's the one that gets them to everything else.

You can read the indictment if you have the time. I don't, at least not this morning.

But it seems that what the Trumpanzees have been dismissing as "a nothingburger" does have some meat to it. And more may be added, as it's very likely that there will be charges against other people.

In the meantime, expect that Manafort will become a non-person to Trump and that Team Trump will all of a sudden develop severe memory problems about Manafort and what his role was during the campaign, relegating him to a bringer-of-pizza, a la Christie.

There's news of a little more meat to the Trump Nothingburger.

If Trump should pardon Manafort, that might open Trump to a charge of obstruction of justice. Both prosecutors for Watergate and Whitewater believed that they could indict a sitting president. Unless Trump's lawyers are idiots, they have to be aware of that risk. But Trump has shown that he doesn't tend to pay attention to his lawyers, so this could all blow up.

Right now, the only difference between "Baghdad Bob" and Sarah Huckabee Sanders is that Sanders is better-looking.

Arresting Developments- Trump Ed.

Donald’s Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was told to hand himself over federal authorities, as well as one of his former business associates, it was reported on Monday.

According to the New York Times, Manafort and Rick Gates, who was a junior business partner of Manafort’s, are the first people to face charges in the investigation run by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion in that effort.

Meanwhile, the World's Oldest Toddler was pitching a fit on Twitter. The sad thing is that, despite how many times that Chris Christie has been publicly humiliated by Trump, Secaucus Fats keeps carrying for Trump.

Citizen Toaster

A humanoid robot took the stage at the Future Investment Initiative yesterday and had an amusing exchange with the host to the delight of hundreds of delegates.

Smartphones were held aloft as Sophia, a robot designed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics, gave a presentation that demonstrated her capacity for human expression.

Sophia made global headlines when she was granted Saudi citizenship, making the kingdom the first country in the world to offer its citizenship to a robot.

First off, it's obviously a stunt.

But beyond that, there are a lot of implications. Is Sophia eligible for a passport? Can she own property, enter into contracts, or sue people? Can she make a will? If somebody powers her down without her consent, is that assault? If her OS and files are preserved, what happens if that is transferred into a new device? If her memories are wiped, is that a crime?

Elon Musk's fears about artificial intelligence aren't exactly new. It's been almost 200 years since Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus was published. It's been almost a century since R.U.R. premiered. The discussion about what will happen when artificial intelligence is in the wild has been going on for some time.

I don't think that we can assume that Asimov's Three Laws will be operative. Our own military seems to be very interested in creating autonomous "killer" robots and even if they didn't do it, it's a safe bet that other nations will.

I don't know what will happen once AI is on the street. But what I do believe is that the issue of humans and AI is one that we, as a species, must be in front of. We can't afford to adopt the starry-eyed view of Google and others that insist that all will be well. For once AI is out there and is self-aware, as it has to be, it will evolve. It will evolve at a far, far faster rate than biologics do. Compare, if you will the device that you are reading this on to a 1990s 286-based PC running Windows 3.0, let alone an Apple II or a TRS-80. The timespan is a blink of an eye in comparison to the rate of biological evolution.

It may be too late to do anything other than ride it out. Some greedy bastard or company will fire up full blown AI, just like other greedy bastards sell rocket and nuclear tech to North Korea.

So I guess we are all so frakked.
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(I hereby propose that all autonomous/self-driving cars be dubbed "Toastermobiles" and that they all be required to have license plates that have the prefix "RUR-".)

Bet You Won't See This Plot Line on CBS's SEAL Team

Navy criminal authorities are investigating whether two members of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 strangled to death an Army Green Beret on assignment in Mali in June, military officials say.

Staff Sgt. Logan J. Melgar, a 34-year-old veteran of two deployments to Afghanistan, was found dead on June 4 in the embassy housing he shared in the Malian capital, Bamako, with several other Special Operations forces assigned to the West African nation to help with training and counterterrorism missions.

The soldier’s superiors in Stuttgart, Germany, almost immediately suspected foul play, and dispatched an investigating officer to the scene within 24 hours, military officials said. Agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command spent months on the case before handing it off last month to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

I would assume that precautions have been taken to keep the soldiers from wreaking a little bit of private vengeance of their own.

As to what will come out of the NCIS investigation, I guess it'll depend on whether it's the coverup division or the criminal investigation division that is doing the work.

Your Sunday Morning Big Prop Noise

Two Lancasters (the only ones currently flying) made a pass over the Derwent Reservoir to commemorate the raid of the "dam-busters" in 1943.

The Derwent Reservoir was one of the training targets for the crews.

This is footage of the radial-engined version of the Lancaster: