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

We're all in a madhouse, as you may have noticed. From Vanity Fair:

This should come as something of a relief to the Chinese, who were flummoxed by Trump’s initial claims. “Regarding the phone call in the weekend, I am not aware of that,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters last week. “I can tell you clearly that I haven’t heard of such a thing.” And it may indicate why the president was so hesitant to offer any detail on said calls, instead telling reporters, “We have had calls at the highest level, but I don’t want to talk about that.” Could it be that Trump was genuinely confused about communications coming from China? Sure. Could it also be that he’s desperate for a win after virtually an entire presidency of failures? Seems likely!

Per CNN, Trump is increasingly aware that he’s done little to entice voters in 2020—and failed to follow through on many of his promises in 2016. For example, instead of beating China into submission through the art of the deal, he’s sparked an international trade war that is actively hurting consumers. Obamacare still exists. And he has yet to build a wall at the southern border and make Mexico pay for it. His response to the wall issue has reportedly been to assure aides he’ll pardon them should they break the law in the process of building the thing—something he’s urged them to do as quickly as possible.

Rick Perry is leaving the Cabinet. But, with all that's going on, the conservative takeover of the federal judiciary continues apace, and that's all that seems to matter to any Republican of any influence. This week, the Republican Senate majority confirmed four more judges, bringing the administration*'s total to 154 in less than three years. All of them were deemed "unqualified" by the American Bar Association. The Senate Judiciary Committee forwarded the nomination of Justin Walker, who's never tried a case in his life, but now he's on the verge of becoming district judge for the rest of his life. He's 37. I would like to be the first to wish any Democratic president elected next year all the luck in the world.

But at least the federal judiciary is better off (somewhat) than, say, the Commission on Presidential Scholars, to which the president* nominated this guy named George Mentz, who is an expert in how the Illuminati control the world. From the Denver Post:

Mentz’s books include “The Illuminati Secret Laws of Money,” “The Illuminati Handbook,” “50 Laws of Power of the Illuminati,” and “100 Secrets and Habits of the Illuminati for Life Success.” Nearly all of his works are about money and often center on mindfulness secrets to achieving wealth. “If you conceive of your desire, you can then imagine that your goal will take place with belief, and then you will be able (to) retrieve the opportunity from the world’s storehouse of riches,” he wrote in a 2013 book, “Abundance Bible & the Secret Powers of Manifesting Wealth Health and Peace of Mind.”

As a lifelong member of the Illuminati, I resent this deeply.

Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour/Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree/ All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy." -- The Aeneid.

Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

On Friday, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who finally, after long years, has discovered that she has no fcks left to give, warned the country to beware that the Russians seem to be "grooming" a Democratic candidate—cough Tulsi Gabbard cough—for the purposes of ratfcking the 2020 election. She also stated flatly her belief that Jill Stein had been a Russian asset in 2016, a position reinforced by the now-famous photo of Stein's sharing a table with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Gabbard, however, leapt to the electric Twitter machine to wax wroth. From CNN:

Clinton never names Gabbard, but there are only five women running for President—Gabbard, California Sen. Kamala Harris, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and author Marianne Williamson—and none of the other woman have been accused of being boosted by Russia. "They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far," Clinton said.

Gabbard responded on Twitter Friday afternoon to Clinton's comments. "Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain," she tweeted."From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation," she added. "We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose...It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly."

Gabbard's continued presence in the Democratic field is preposterous. She's polling in the lowest of the low single digits. Her positions on a number of issues have no constituency within the Democratic Party, and very little of one in the general electorate. HRC, on the other hand, no matter what you may think of her, got more votes for president than any Democratic candidate in American history. If she wants to continue to step out on issues within in the party, she's more than entitled to do so. In any case, if there's one person qualified to judge the effectiveness of foreign-influenced straw candidates, it's Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Snake Drive" (Tav Falco's Panther Burns): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, being launched in 1959, is a whale ship called...wait for it...Soviet Ukraine. This ship was the heart of a massive killing spree that destroyed 180,000 whales in the year 1959-1960. It was awful work and more than a few crewmen went crazy. From psmag.com:

One former whaler, writing years later in a Moscow newspaper, claimed that five or six Soviet crewmen died on the Southern Hemisphere expeditions each year, and that a comparable number went mad. A scientist working aboard a factory ship in the Antarctic on a later voyage described seeing a deckhand lose his footing on a blubber-slicked deck and catch his legs in a coil of whale intestine as it slid overboard. By the time his mates were able to retrieve him from the water he had succumbed to hypothermia. He was buried at sea, lowered into the water with a pair of harpoons to weight down his body.



History, while bloody, is so cool.

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

Now, fossilized traces of blood vessels in the skulls of big-bodied dinosaurs reveal how different dinos avoided heatstroke. Long-necked sauropods may have panted to stay cool, for example, while heavily armored ankylosaurs relied on elaborate nasal passages.Ankylosaurs had thick clusters of blood vessels, representing cooling regions, primarily in their noses. Sauropods had blood vessels clusters in their giant nostrils and mouths, suggesting they used panting to stay cool. And fierce, large theropods like T. rex and Allosaurus may have used their sinuses. An extra air cavity connected to their jaw muscles was also rich in blood vessels, the team found. Opening and closing their jaws would have pumped air in and out of the sinus like a bellows.



Dino, dino, crazy dino, keep cooool, dino. You lived then to make us happy now.

I'll be back on Monday with whatever impeachable offenses happen over the weekend. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and don't worry about the Illuminati. I got this.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

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

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io