(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

WASHINGTON—This was a very interesting story that got buried by all the boom-boom Friday. It seems that Crown Prince Jared had a few things slip his mind when he was filling out the required paperwork for his gig as Heir Apparent to the King of the World. From The New York Times:

But Mr. Kushner did not mention dozens of contacts with foreign leaders or officials in recent months. They include a December meeting with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, and one with the head of a Russian state-owned bank, Vnesheconombank, arranged at Mr. Kislyak's behest. The omissions, which Mr. Kushner's lawyer called an error, are particularly sensitive given the congressional and F.B.I. investigations into contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. The Senate Intelligence Committee informed the White House weeks ago that, as part of its inquiry, it planned to question Mr. Kushner about the meetings he arranged with Mr. Kislyak, including the one with Sergey N. Gorkov, a graduate of Russia's spy school who now heads Vnesheconombank.

You have to love a society in which a guy can own a freaking bank if that whole espionage thing doesn't work out. And who among us hasn't forgotten about the times we met Russian spies who own banks. This is not a story to which anyone will pay attention, but it's pretty awesome, anyway.

Required reading: Jonathan Taplin has led a very interesting life. For years, he managed The Band during that quintets most gloriously productive years. He then went into movie production and as a kind of all-purpose entertainment entrepreneur and troubleshooter. Since 2004, he's taught at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. He has now produced a fascinating book entitled Move Fast and Break Things, which not only has some terrific inside stories about the end of The Band, but is a nuanced look at the downside of what is glibly tossed around as "disruption" by various cyber-messianic blowhards. Taplin is hunting big game; it is his contention that the giants of the cyberworld—from Google to Amazon—are threats to the fundamental foundations of democracy and that they also cement inequality into our systems in new and dangerous ways.

My pal John A. Farrell has produced a book on Richard Nixon that I actually was happy to read. I still think ol' RN as history's yard waste, but Farrell's great gift is to step back from the emotionalism that surrounds all things Nixon. At that remove, he doesn't minimize anything that makes his subject history's yard waste; Farrell pretty much cinches the case that Nixon committed treason in order to win the 1968 election. But he never falls into the great-but-flawed man treacle that attended most of what was written when the old bastard died. Read both of these.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Lily Of The Valley" (Panorama Brass Band): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's the Capitol as the incredibly overrated racist Woodrow Wilson slides the country into World War I. I'm surprised CNN hasn't done the slow dissolve to the waving flag yet. History is so cool.

One of the truly strange parts of the denouement of the career of criminal (and terrorist) Whitey Bulger in Boston is what happened to Stephen (Stippo) Rakes. Bulger had extorted Rakes's liquor store away from him, and Rakes was ready to testify against him in the trial that sent Whitey to federal prison until the return of the corn king. It turns out that the Feds didn't need his testimony but Rakes got murdered anyway shortly after the trial. He was poisoned. The real twist is that his killing had nothing whatsoever to do with Whitey Bulger. A guy named William Camuti is on trial presently for poisoning Rakes with an iced coffee. Camuti was into Rakes for $100,000 and found a pharmaceutical way to cancel his debt, or so say the prosecutors Stippo was not killed by Whitey. Once, you could get great odds on that.

In other crime news from the Commonwealth (God save it!), the long saga of Annie Dookhan, the State Police forensic expert who had both thumbs and her left foot on the scale for years continues to pile up billable hours on behalf of almost every defense lawyer in New England. It looks like Dookhan's shenanigans may result in more than 23,000 drug convictions being overturned. I can't tell you how happy I am that Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is ready to reignite the "War" on Drugs.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, EarthSky? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

The new study is by Matthew Baron of the University of Cambridge (@MattExtinctions on Twitter) and co-authors David B. Norman, also at University of Cambridge, and Paul M. Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London. Their study relies on the computer program TNT, which has the ability to track and organize fossil data based on the presence of specific anatomical features. With this new computer program, these scientists have restructured dinosaurs' evolutionary tree. One result is that, for example, modern birds and T-Rex may be more related to species like Triceratops than anyone realized before. The new study links Theropods and Ornithischians as common ancestors instead of "distant sister groups."

Imagine the confusion. You're a perfectly respectable T-Rex and you've been fighting—and eating Triceratops—all your life. (This always happens in Lost World movies.) Now, you find out you've been munching distant cousins. However they came to be, dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee fell instantly in love with Top Commenter Jamie Oberdick's assessment of noted investigator Trey Gowdy: Trey Gowdy looks like he fell off a documentary about 1920s Kentucky moonshine runners. I feel he should always be in black and white.

The Committee gives you a loud yeeee-haawwww , young man. And 79.54 Beckhams.

I'll be back on Monday with some big boom-boom gobshitery. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, or Jared will forget about you, too.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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