Let the pardon sales begin!

In an extraordinary development, it appears that there’s an investigation by the justice department into allegations that people have been trying to bribe pardons for themselves from Trump.

An alleged “bribery for pardon” scheme at the White House is under investigation by the justice department, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday.

The heavily redacted document does not name Donald Trump or other individuals and leaves many unanswered questions, but comes amid media reports that the US president is considering sweeping pardons before he leaves office next month.

It shows that the justice department investigation alleges that an individual offered “a substantial political contribution in exchange for a presidential pardon or reprieve of sentence”.

Two individuals acted improperly as lobbyists to secure the pardon in the “bribery-for-pardon schemes”, as the document puts it. The names are blacked out.
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Wear the damn masks!

After a dip in the numbers for the Thanksgiving weekend (numbers tend to drop during holidays, possibly because people postpone going to see doctors and hospitals may delay reporting their data), the number of hospitalizations and deaths came roaring back.

Hospitalizations topped 100,000 for the first time and the daily number of deaths reached 2,733, just slightly below the peak of 2,769 reached back on May 7th. This rise is too soon after the holidays to have been caused by all the travel and getting together for the holiday. That grim reckoning is coming in a week or two.
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Is Barr also bailing on Trump?

In a surprise move, attorney general Bill Barr has said an interview with the Associated Press that the department of justice has found no evidence of widespread fraud in the last election, at least not enough to overturn the results.

His comments are seen as a big blow to Mr Trump, who has not accepted defeat.
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“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results,” Mr Barr, who is seen as a top Trump ally, told AP News on Tuesday, referring to the assertion that ballot machines were hacked to give more votes to Mr Biden.
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Mr Barr said that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security have investigated that claim, “and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that”.
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Reacting to his comments, Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a joint statement: “With the greatest respect to the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.”

The reason that this is a surprise is not because what he is saying is untrue but that he said it at all, since it goes completely counter to what Trump has been saying. Barr has up to now seemed to have seen himself as more of Trump’s personal lawyer rather than the nation’s top law enforcement official, often going to great lengths to use the department to support some of Trump’s most extreme claims. He could have just kept quiet on the election fraud issue and need not have weighed in on this matter publicly.

So why did he, since he had to know that this would anger Trump who sees anyone who disagrees with him as disloyal? After all, Trump fired Christopher Krebs for saying that this election was the most secure ever. As Democratic senate leader Chuck Schumer wryly noted after Barr’s statement, “I guess he’s the next one to be fired.” Maybe Barr is hoping for that to happen, because like so many people who have been deeply tainted by their proximity to Trump, he is trying at the last minute to salvage something of his tattered reputation.

The fight over Biden’s administration choices begins

Joe Biden is by no means a progressive. His entire history has been in the service of the neoliberal, pro-war, pro-business consensus that defines the two major parties. While the Democratic Party platform that he ran on was more progressive than the stances he had taken before, platforms are just wish lists and often are ignored by presidents once they are elected. The most important achievement in Biden’s career may well end up being that he defeated Donald Trump. To his credit, he did not blow it. For progressives, defeating Trump was just the first battle, albeit a major one and a victory that deserves to be savored. The next battle must be to fight Biden’s administration picks who have neoliberal, anti-progressive, and pro-war stances.

Knowing Biden’s history does not mean that we should not expect more from him than his past might suggest. While he may surprise us by being more progressive, he could well turn out to be another Barack Obama who as president was more conservative, more pro-war, and more friendly to business and the financial sector than his first election campaign led us to believe. Norman Solomon writes that some progressives are already succumbing to the allure of access to top administration officials to overlook some very troubling nominees to Biden’s cabinet in the national security area.
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Protein folding problem solved?

The protein folding problem is a fascinating one. Protein are linear strings of amino acids. But they are not floppy strings. They take unique 3-D shapes and those shapes are critical for how they function. Clearly, there must be some rule or mechanism contained within the amino acid sequence that tells a protein how to bend but discovering those rules has not been easy. Now an AI algorithm, given a sequence oof amino acids, has been able to predict with considerable success the shape of that protein.
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Can America afford democracy?

In an article The Silenced Majority: Can America still afford democracy? in the December 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rana Dasgupta argues that democracy is a luxury whose existence depends on inequality between nations that enables the rich in the wealthy societies to accommodate the democratic aspirations of its own citizens.

In the past, power was in the hands of those who had property. With the rise of organized labor as a force in the rich nations, that power was reduced but as long as the people of the poorer nations could be used to subsidize the elevated living standards of those in the richer ones, then democracy could be tolerated. But when that difference between nations begins to disappear, as is happening currently, then so does democracy. He argues that the ultimate death of democracy in the US will come at the hands of the big tech companies.


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The violent style in American politics

Violence is no stranger to American life. Its gun culture results in violence on almost a routine basis, so much so that we have become numb to the regular recurrence of mass shootings by people armed with highly powerful weapons. It takes a really high death toll to make the national news these days. We have also seen periods of severe political violence in the past involving groups like the KKK and when the government put down labor movements with great force. Recently during the Trump presidency we have seen a rise in violent political rhetoric that has again occasionally spilled over into physical violence.

In an article in the November 16, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, Evan Osnos examines the style of conflict in American politics that oscillates between persuasion and force. He says that political scientist Richard Hofstadter, towards the end of his life in 1970, became absorbed about the intersection of politics and force in the US and argued that the political violence in the US tends to take a different form than in most other countries.
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TV Review: The Queen’s Gambit (No spoilers)

This seven-part miniseries on Netflix about a female chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the 1960s taking that male world by storm has been much talked about and has apparently spurred a lot of interest in chess, with increased sales of chess sets and more young women becoming interested in playing a game that is still highly dominated by men.

I watched the series and my reaction is mixed. I thought I would enjoy it a lot more than I did. The story of a young girl overcoming tremendous odds to become a success is the kind of underdog story that appeals to me. In addition, in my adolescence and up to the first couple of years in college I played the game seriously, and was even the captain of my high school chess team. But even though I could appreciate the name-dropping of the great chess players and the openings and the defenses, the series somehow failed to grip me. It started very slow, so much so that I stopped watching the first episode halfway through but came back to it to give it another chance. It picked up the pace later but towards the end I was watching it just to see how it ends.
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Curioser and curiouser

Marcus Ranum has alerted me to the fact that the Utah monolith has disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.

The tall, shiny, metal structure, now famously known as a “monolith” was discovered in Utah last week, and had prompted multiple theories about how it had come to be there ranging from TV show set leftover, to art work, to aliens.

But now, almost as mysteriously as it appeared, it has been removed by what local officials called “an unknown party”.

“[We] did not remove the structure which is considered private property,” A Bureau of Land Management spokesperson said in a statement. “The structure has received international and national attention and we received reports that a person or group removed it on the evening of 27 Nov”.
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“All that was left in its place was a message written in the dirt that said ‘bye bitch’ with a fresh pee stain right next to it,” Marino posted to instagram. “Someone had just stolen the statue, and we were the first to arrive at the scene”.

Marino said they saw a pickup truck with a large object in its bed driving in the opposite direction shortly before they got there. A Reddit user also found the structure, which many believed to be abstract art, had been formerly removed.

The object’s origins remain unknown but Bret Hutchings, the helicopter pilot who discovered it, estimated it to be between 10ft and 12ft high (about three metres).

Here’s video of what was left behind. (You can silence the annoying music.)

The structure was not buried as deep into the ground as was thought. We were told that this was pretty remote and rugged terrain. Placing the monolith there surreptitiously would not have been easy. Getting it secretly out again after all the publicity is pretty amazing.

Only aliens could have done it.