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

Hey, gang. What say we stage a criminal enterprise right here!!!

From CNN:

During President Donald Trump's visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago, where he told border agents to block asylum seekers from entering the US contrary to US law, the President also told the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, that if he were sent to jail as a result of blocking those migrants from entering the US, the President would grant him a pardon, senior administration officials tell CNN. Two officials briefed on the exchange say the President told McAleenan, since named the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that he "would pardon him if he ever went to jail for denying US entry to migrants," as one of the officials paraphrased.



The administration* replied just as a cabal of innocent people would.



A DHS spokesman told CNN, "At no time has the President indicated, asked, directed or pressured the Acting Secretary to do anything illegal. Nor would the Acting Secretary take actions that are not in accordance with our responsibility to enforce the law."



Ah, legalspeak, an English dialect made up of word-sounding objects fashioned into a sentence-like construction.

Not to be too much of an old fud or anything but, if the president* said this, no matter whether McAleenan stuffed his socks in his ears so he wouldn't hear the offer or not, he committed an impeachable offense. In fact, he committed two of them. The first one was ordering a member of the Executive branch to commit a crime. The second was promising that the employee would be pardoned if he did. And this is just something that happened to come to light on an average Friday in April. Things are breaking, one after another, and pretty soon, there won't be anything left. The government is losing the ability to defend itself against this guy.

Our president visits the border at Calexico. SAUL LOEB Getty Images

Tom Pickering, who was the UN ambassador under Poppy Bush, doesn't think much of the way foreign policy is being conducted these days. From RawStory:

After World War II and during the Cold War, America’s allies could predict and rely on its moves — but that stability is “seemingly now all disappearing,” the seasoned diplomat added, noting that allied nations are “having a problem now of ‘once burned twice shy.'” “Americans at one time elected somebody who did all these things… that have not helped promote American leadership in the world,” Pickering concluded. “Can we ever trust the US again to stay on track?”

I'm not generally an advocate of the whole one-essential-country chest-thumping thing, but Pickering's point is larger than that. He's saying that, whatever you may think of the United States as a world leader, the world is worse off if the United States is a bumbling, inconstant clown show. That's hard to argue with.

Pickering is none-too-pleased. Vitaliy Belousov AP

The big science news of the week was the first photo of a black hole. An astrophysicist named Katie Bouman has been credited with the research that produced the image. Of course, because this is 2019 and every brick-brained misogynist moron has an opinion that he thinks the world needs to hear, Bouman has had the flying monkeys descend on her. From the Washington Post:

On the ugliest corners of the Internet, however, this sudden fame for a young woman in a male-dominated field couldn’t stand. A corrective was quickly found in Andrew Chael, another member of the Event Horizon Telescope team, who, not coincidentally, is white and male. On Reddit and Twitter, memes quickly went viral contrasting Bouman with Chael, who — per the viral images — was actually responsible for “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!” The implication was clear: Bouman, pushed by an agenda-driven media, was getting all the attention. But Chael had done all the real work.

Burn the Internet to the ground.

Luckily for civilized society, Chael is nobody's hobby-horse.

Not only are the claims in the meme flat-out incorrect, but Chael — as an openly gay man — is also part of an underrepresented demographic in his field. “While I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life,” he tweeted.

No kidding. Salt the earth.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Funky Liza" (New Orleans Nightcrawlers): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: As the Stanley Cup playoffs begin, here are some frogmen playing hockey underwater in 1967. Basically, this looks completely insane, a kind of submerged water polo, but "the Snorkel Set," as the upper-crusty narrator puts it, seems to be enjoying itself. History is so cool.

In my local grocery store, which I cannot patronize at the moment because its workers are on strike for decent wages and benefits, they have this six-foot robot that wanders around the store in case somebody spills something. This is very spooky and unnerving, but it's something I'm getting used to. But, I'm sorry, brilliant Chinese engineers but...no. Just no. I will not be getting used to this critter. Not used to it at all.

The Moros intrepidus on the move. JORGE GONZALEZ

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

Lindsay Zanno, Head of Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and a biology professor at North Carolina State University, led a team that uncovered pieces of one of T-Rex's predecessors, a much smaller, quicker tyrannosaur she named Moros intrepidus, or “harbinger of doom.” Host Frank Stasio talks with Lindsay Zanno about the discovery and the process of piecing together new species and new theories about how dinosaurs evolved.



"That's what's so great about this story for us is that we found this animal in 2012. We found just a few of its leg bones together on the side of the hill. And that process that the public doesn't get to see, about how we got from that discovery moment to figuring out that we had a tiny tyrannosaur, was really long. It was about six years. So it took about two years for conservators at the museum to piece together all the tiny little pieces and reconstruct with this leg looked like. And then several years for me to go through the anatomy and try and figure out what the heck we had actually found, because turning up a tiny tyrannosaurus is not something that you do every day."...There's a hypothesis behind where we go and why we go there and what we're looking for. But there's also an element of discovery. We find all kinds of other cool things while we're looking to answer that one question, that we never could have expected.



It's certainly not something that I do every day. But finding other cool things is just another way that dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.



The Committee noted that the manager of the shebeen made a loose comparison between the president*, his aides, and wolverines. And The Committee was certain that somebody would rise to the defense of wolverines, and Top Commenter Sandra Weingart leaped to comply.



Wolverines are much more pro-social than Stephen Miller. The males even bond with their adult offspring. https://defenders.org/wolverine/basic-facts

Education is a very important part of the mission around the shebeen and, in payment for her Gulo gulo TED talk, she is awarded 91.12 Beckhams.

I'll be back on Monday to discuss whatever laws are casually broken over this weekend. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, and try to find cool things by accident. It's one of the ways to get through this.

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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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