May 22, 2018 in 3,147 words

An actual sinkhole has opened on the White House lawn. It’s growing.

_{^{DRAIN THE SWAMP}}

Construction on the US White House began in 1792. It has been almost continuously occupied by US presidents since 1800, barring a few years after the British set it on fire in 1814.

But that doesn’t mean that the present-day building is free of hazards—there are mice, cockroaches, and ants. And as of this past weekend, a sinkhole has been growing on the north lawn, Voice of America reporter Steve Herman observed, just near the press briefing room.

This week I’ve been observing a sinkhole on the @WhiteHouse North Lawn, just outside the press briefing room, growing larger by the day. pic.twitter.com/BsFUtxFqpB

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) May 22, 2018

“It was noticeably bigger between Sunday and Monday,” Herman said. “It’s more than a foot long right now,” he said. A second sinkhole has opened up right next to it, he said.

Often described as a “swamp” of corruption, parts of the city of Washington, DC, are also literally built on a swamp. …

_{Melania’s escape tunnel must be collapsing.}

Trump’s Business Schemes Warrant Their Own Investigation

_{The many signs of flagrant corruption that surround the president and his associates demand a separate probe.}

Roughly one year ago, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was charged with investigating any links or coordination “between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” as well as any “matters” or “federal crimes” that “may arise directly from the investigation.”

That probe now divides the right.

Conservatives like David French believe that the facts continue to justify its existence. As he noted last week in National Review, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have now confirmed that Russia attempted to aid Trump in the 2016 election, that Donald Trump Jr. “received a direct and unambiguous invitation to collude with Russia,” and that “he took the meeting.” What’s more, members of his campaign team, including Paul Manafort, George Papadopolous, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn, all interacted with Russia in ways that, at the very least, cry out for further inquiry. That demands a thorough probe that sets all relevant facts before the public.

In contrast, populist-right entertainers like Tucker Carlson, who hold themselves to lesser standards of intellectual honesty, say that the special-counsel investigation is a “witch hunt” created by a deep-state cabal of usurpers. And when the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York raided Michael Cohen’s office, talk-show host Sean Hannity complained, “Mueller basically back-doored his way into every single Trump business deal.”

That last talking point is striking. …

Democrats’ New Midterm Approach: It’s the Corruption, Stupid

_{A new strategy attacks both Trump’s economic heists and the influence peddlers swarming the White House.}

_{President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen departs federal court in Manhattan, April 16, 2018.}

Democrats are debating how to best approach the 2018 midterms. Some argue that they must laser-focus on Donald Trump and the unique threat to the country he represents. Others say attacking Trump is not enough, that candidates must highlight a tangible economic agenda to rally voters.

But there’s a way to unite these themes, and it runs through Michael Cohen’s bank account.

Cohen, you recall, reeled in millions of dollars from the likes of AT&T, Novartis, and Korea Aerospace Industries, allegedly providing them with “insight” into his client, President Donald Trump. The money went into the same account out of which Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her affair with Trump. Cohen, who has no special policy insights that anyone can discern, wasn’t a registered lobbyist, so the payoffs were conducted in secret until Daniels’s lawyer found out about them. The scandal amplified the worst of Washington’s pay-to-play, off-the-books influence industry, so nobody could deny its sleaziness.

This is the fundamental story of the Trump era. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer puts it, there is only one Trump scandal, and that is corruption. Democrats are faced with hard choices every day on whether to highlight Trump’s colluding with Russian interests, Saudi and Emirati interests, or Chinese interests. They have to think about whether to lead with China’s $500 million loan to the Trump Organization’s hotel business, Paul Ryan’s $24.6 million check from an anonymous Super PAC donor, or Mick Mulvaney’s open solicitation of campaign donations for access.

It’s genuinely hard, but there is an approach that synthesizes the anti-Trump strategy and the economic strategy. …

Impeaching Trump: could a liberal fantasy become a nightmare?

_{The process presents a constitutional and political dilemma, and a brilliant new book unpacks just how risky it is.}

_{‘Will attempting impeachment save the republic from a dangerous president? Or just unleash a tit-for-tat that results in more polarization?’}

Should members of Congress impeach Donald Trump? The billionaire Tom Steyer thinks so. He stars in TV ads calling for impeachment and has set up a “Need to Impeach” campaign to build national support for removing the president. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, doesn’t think so. She says talking about impeachment is “a gift to Republicans”. The former Senate majority leader Harry Reid also doesn’t think so. “I’ve been through impeachment,” he said, “and they’re not pleasant.”

So who is right?

In their terrific, accessible, and thoughtful new book, To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe and the constitutional lawyer Joshua Matz do better than offering a simple yes or no: they give us a framework for thinking about the question. Tribe and Matz argue that too many people think of impeachment as a mechanical process: if there are “high crimes and misdemeanors”, then there must be impeachment. They disagree. Instead, they argue that anyone thinking about impeachment needs to consider three critical questions: “Is removal permissible?”, “Is removal likely to succeed?”, and “Is removal worth the price the nation will pay?”.

The virtue of this framework is that it is both legal and prudential, and the book provides a helpful guide to impeachment on both counts. Tribe and Matz shine in making constitutional law accessible, and they show both that impeachable offenses extend beyond criminal activities and that not all illegal actions are impeachable. They also explain step-by-step how the process works, from impeachment by the House of Representatives to a trial in the Senate, with the chief justice of the supreme court presiding. Along the way, they point out amusing anecdotes. For example, Chief Justice Rehnquist remarked of his limited duties during the trial of Bill Clinton: “I did nothing in particular, and I did it very well.” …

5 Real People Who Have The World’s Worst Superpowers

Occasionally, someone hits the genetic lottery and they become superhumanly good at things like running, memorizing, or not dying from frostbite. However, “extraordinary” doesn’t always mean “awesome.” Sometimes being genetically special results in a lifetime of bad juju, ranging from the merely annoying to the downright deadly. Forget Jubilee, these people would make the worst real X-Men.

5. Super Hearing, But Only For Yourself

Stephen Mabbutt is one of very few people to suffer from the hilarious last name “Mabbutt.” Oh, and he suffers from superior canal dehiscence syndrome, which might be even worse. This incredible power manifested when Stephen was in his 50s. At first it was nothing but a dull pain in the side of his head, then slowly, his hearing started to fade … until it came back with a vengeance. We don’t mean to imply he could hear quiet sounds over vast distances. That might actually be useful. He could only hear himself — just super, super loud.

The worst part about this syndrome, aside from everything, is being able to hear “all the interior sounds of the body very loudly,” according to expert Dr. Martin Burton. At its worst, Mabbutt could hear the sounds of his own eyeballs moving around in his head, which is something that only happens to the rest of us when we are extremely high.

_{Awesome if you want to know what your gallbladder is up to 24 hours a day, less great if you ever need a moment of quiet.}

After depleting a small warehouse’s worth of antibiotics and nasal sprays, Mabbutt finally found Dr. Burton, who recognized the affliction and cured his inner microphone with a surgery to seal off the defective bone. Now Stephen lives a boring life like anybody else, and the only time he can hear his spleen screaming is on Arby’s Night, as God intended. …

Rudy Giuliani won deal for OxyContin maker to continue sales of drug behind opioid deaths

_{The US government secured a criminal conviction against Purdue Pharma in the mid-2000s but failed to curb sales of the drug after Giuliani reached a deal to avoid a bar on Purdue doing business.}

_{Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma is facing a wave of civil lawsuits as New York, Texas and five other states have joined a growing number actions against the company.}

The US government missed the opportunity to curb sales of the drug that kickstarted the opioid epidemic when it secured the only criminal conviction against the maker of OxyContin a decade ago.

Purdue Pharma hired Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now Donald Trump’s lawyer, to head off a federal investigation in the mid-2000s into the company’s marketing of the powerful prescription painkiller at the centre of an epidemic estimated to have claimed at least 300,000 lives.

While Giuliani was not able to prevent the criminal conviction over Purdue’s fraudulent claims for OxyContin’s safety and effectiveness, he was able to reach a deal to avoid a bar on Purdue doing business with the federal government which would have killed a large part of the multibillion-dollar market for the drug.

The former New York mayor also secured an agreement that greatly restricted further prosecution of the pharmaceutical company and kept its senior executives out of prison.

The US attorney who led the investigation, John Brownlee, has defended the compromise but also expressed surprise that Purdue did not face stronger action from federal regulators and further criminal investigation given its central role in the rise of the epidemic. …

Why the pharmaceutical industry is giving up the search for an Alzheimer’s cure

_{AGING GONE AWRY}

_{A healthy brain (left) next to a brain with Alzheimer’s disease.}

Thanks to modern healthcare and improved living standards, life expectancy is predicted to surpass 80 years in most parts of the world by 2050. That’s the positive.

The negative is that will push the number of people in the world over the age of 60 to more than 2 billion, which in turn will make age-related health issues a tremendous global burden for which we’re deeply unprepared.

There will be many knock-on effects on the world’s health-care and social welfare systems, but we’ve also made significant progress on many of the illnesses more likely to afflict the elderly, including cancer and heart disease. One we have not done much for also happens to be one of the most tragic forms of aging gone awry: dementia, the umbrella term for the symptoms some older adults experience as they’re slowly robbed of their sense of self and cognitive abilities.

Dementia isn’t a disease itself, but is caused by many. In 60% to 80% of dementia cases, the cause is Alzheimer’s disease. In the US, where older adults are on the verge of outnumbering children for the first time ever, a new case of Alzheimer’s is now diagnosed every 66 seconds. This year, the total cost of caring for all of the people in the US with this disease is expected to reach $1 trillion—higher than it’s ever been before. And yet despite what has obviously become a crisis, there hasn’t been a new treatment for Alzheimer’s in over a decade. …

Planet Nine, Show Thyself

_{Astronomers have found tantalizing new evidence that strengthens the case for a ninth planet beyond Neptune—but some still doubt its existence.}

In 2016, when astronomers made the case for a ninth planet, orbiting far beyond Neptune, that could explain a strange clustering of objects in the outer reaches of our solar system, they were hopeful it would be found in less than five years.

The search is more than two years in now. “Planet Nine,” thought to be 10 times the mass of Earth, has yet to show itself, but the planet hunters have just found a new clue.

Astronomers have discovered an object beyond Neptune with quite a different orbit compared to the rest of the solar system, according to a paper recently published on ArXiv. Nearly all of the inhabitants of our system orbit on the same plane, giving it the appearance of a pancake. This new object, known by the license plate–esque name 2015 BP₅₁₉, is highly tilted. Its orbit juts out 54 degrees above the plane of the solar system. Which makes it quite remarkable.

To figure how the object achieved this orbit, Juliette Becker, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, and her colleagues ran simulations of the solar system backward and forward, over millions and millions of years. Nothing seemed to work until they added the hypothetical ninth planet. As they ran the clock, Planet Nine and its gravity swayed 2015 BP₅₁₉ into its tilted journey around the sun.

“People who want to think that Planet Nine is real will definitely take this as evidence of Planet Nine,” says Becker, the lead author of the new paper. “People who are less sympathetic to the Planet Nine hypothesis will probably—you know, it’s only one object for now. One object never proves anything.” …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Santa Fe High School senior Wesley Hill was in first period when his teacher told the class there was an active shooter on campus and ordered them to hide. Less than 30 minutes later, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis was in custody as ten students lay dead and at least ten others injured.

For the next 72 hours Wesley documented for VICE News what it’s like when it happens at your school and in your town.

Like the students in Parkland, Florida, Wesley and his friends say they never really thought this would happen at their school, but unlike the Parkland attack, this shooting has not become a rallying cry for gun control.

This is Texas, after all. And Santa Fe, with a population of 13,000, is the definition of small-town Texas.

“The first person that reached out to me when they saw I was on the news was March For Our Lives Houston,” Wesley said. “I straight up told them right then and there that they’re reaching out to the wrong people. I said this is Santa Fe. This is not a city. this is a small town, country town. I said you’re not gonna take our guns away.”

“We don’t need gun control,” Wesley’s friend Toby Fulmer added. “What we need is someone doing better background checks on the people who are buying the guns. Maybe do some mental stable checks. But people who say we need gun control are, I’m not gonna call them idiots, but they are idiots.”

Fulmer added, “We’re a tight-knit community. Mostly everybody here hunts, shoots, they do some kind of something with guns. And if you take that away? What are we gonna do?”

Wesley’s mother, Tiffany Hill, also thinks more guns and better parenting is the answer. “Arm the teachers. It doesn’t have to be every single teacher in every single classroom. It doesn’t,” she said. “But, you know, if we’re going to ask these teachers to parent our children, then we need to ask them to protect those same children.”

One thing the students in Santa Fe and the students in Parkland do have in common: A tragedy has made their community known for something it doesn’t want to be known for.

“You know the crazy thing was nobody knew where Santa Fe was,” Wesley said. “I tell people I’m from Santa Fe and they looked at me — New Mexico? No, Texas people, Texas. There is a Santa Fe in Texas. I liked being under the radar in a small town where nobody knew where it was at.”

THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.

Trump’s aides, worried anything they say around him could be made public, have coined the nickname ‘leaker in chief.’

THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.

Seth takes a closer look at the investigation of Trump’s campaign widening to include more countries and the president spinning a wild conspiracy theory about the FBI spying on him.

THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.

So I decided to try a pool noodle for Max since his girlfriend Wuk likes them. Some types of foam I do not let Max have because he will try to eat it. (Always get to know what your bird is safe with. Just because one Bird can play with it doesn’t mean it’s safe for yours) well Max played some but decided it was something to eat. Needless to say the noodle is not allowed now.

A lonely widower finds new meaning in a bird—and, perhaps, a message from the other side. Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/ind…

“Cucli” was directed by Xavier Marrades. It is part of The Atlantic Selects, an online showcase of short documentaries from independent creators, curated by The Atlantic.

FINALLY . . .

FOLLOW-UP: No, Octopuses Don’t Come From Outer Space

_{Scientists are dubious of a new paper that suggests frozen octopi eggs rode a meteor to Earth 540 million years ago.}

Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.

I want to believe the conclusions of a new paper that says octopuses are actually space aliens whose frozen eggs first came to Earth aboard an icy meteor. I want to believe that humans, too, are aliens — the final descendants of an extraterrestrial virus that crashed to Earth 540 million years ago and sent evolution spiraling into wild new directions. I want to believe that the universe is one giant biosphere, tossing the same building blocks of life from planet to planet in a never-ending game of cosmic hot potato.

I want to believe these things because they are cool and fascinating — but I probably shouldn’t. Because right now, there is still almost no evidence for any of this. And researchers not involved with this study have serious reservations about its conclusion. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]

Still, that did not stop a team of 33 authors from publishing a recent peer-reviewed paper that hypothesized all of these things and more. The paper, published March 13 in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, had a simple if unusual thesis: The Cambrian explosion — that sudden burst of biodiversity during which most modern animal groups first appeared in the fossil record some 540 million years ago — was the direct result of an extraterrestrial virus that crashed to Earth in a meteor impact. …

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?}