Co-opting DOJ

Mindy Finn, Intuition, Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa all seem to be on the same page (below).

Marcy Wheeler provides context.

Reverse Twitter timeline:

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Jeff McFadden - @homemadeguitars: Well, y'all, I am officially scared shitless. It only takes one minute to launch a nuclear weapon. It only took one minute to abandon the Kurds. It only took one minute to open a criminal investigation into the people who failed to save our country.

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Mindy Finn - @mindyfinn: This here's why it was outright dangerous to elect a dictator aspirant to the White House to start with, and why we must prepare for him to do anything, and everything, with reckless abandon to get re-elected.

Richard Engel - @RichardEngel: There is something I call the Dictator's Treadmill: once you get on, you can’t get off, because falling off means ending up in jail. It's something I often consider wherever I report. What options does the leader have, and what is he/she willing to do not to fall off?

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Matthew Miller - @matthewamiller: The AG flew to Italy twice to personally investigate a right wing conspiracy theory the Italian government has now confirmed is nonsense. What is going on at DOJ? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/world/europe/italy-trump-conspiracy-conte.html

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Glenn Kirschner - @glennkirschner2: I’m beyond troubled, Kathleen. This looks like Barr using - ok, abusing - the DOJ to assist a criminal president. This is how institutions fail. The House should consider drafting articles of impeachment for Barr. They can’t let Barr corrupt/destroy the DOJ w/out a fight.

Kathleen Chu - @KathleenChu5: Glenn. What the hell with grand jury investigation pushed by Barr into origins of Russia probe?

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Intuition - @voicebyvote: 🤔 That's strange. @sarahkendzior and @AndreaChalupa have been talking about it since DT came into power. If you wanna know what happens next, listen to @gaslitnation.

Matthew Miller - @matthewamiller: Even with Trump as president, I never thought DOJ could become politicized this badly. Incredibly dangerous moment for our country.

Giuliani’s Ukraine Team: In Search of Influence, Dirt and Money - The New York Times

Two weeks later, this is still unsettling. Giuliani’s Ukraine Team: In Search of Influence, Dirt and Money - The New York Times:

Over the past year, the two men connected Mr. Giuliani with Ukrainians who were willing to participate in efforts to push a largely unsubstantiated narrative about the Bidens.

The headline says "Dirt" - which sounds like "something unsavory but true". But that's not what these devils were after. They looked for people who were willing to say bad things about the Bidens, even if those bad things were lies.

The Death of Stalin

Inside Trump's First Pentagon Briefing - POLITICO Magazine:

Things quickly got interesting as senior leaders jockeyed for influence.

[Bolton's] comment seemed to indicate that as national security advisor he should be the integrator and therefore the de facto lead.

Mnuchin tried to wield the most influence by making sweeping, declarative statements as if he was speaking for the White House. Kudlow was also attempting to assert himself...

It was as if the treasury secretary and chief economic adviser had started their own trade war in the Pentagon.

Gathering his things, [Mattis] turned and walked out of the room and down the hall, fully expecting the others to flow out of the room behind him.

They didn’t.

BEV, ICE and Cobalt: an illuminating Twitter thread

Thanks to Robert Llewellyn for resuscitating the following Twitter thread. Unfortunately, the thread is so old that neither Thread Reader App nor Twitterrific is able to retrieve it. Twitter's web interface can still retrieve it, so I've taken the liberty of transcribing it below.

Synchronicity on Twitter: "The Dirty Secrets of #ICE - Part 1..." / Twitter:

The Dirty Secrets of #ICE - Part 1 Whenever there’s a debate about the benefits of battery electric vehicles #BEV vs internal combustion engine #ICE vehicles, one of the 1st things usually mentioned is cobalt with lurid stories such as linked here.

But when you fill your tank with petrol or diesel did you know that cobalt is used as a key ingredient?

When we figured out that sulphur in our fossil fuels was a key component to acid rain (remember acid rain?) & also contributed to serious health issues it was decided that ultra low sulphur fuels was the way to go. But the catch is that removing sulphur during the refining process is actually quite hard. You need something to act as a catalyst to aid the Desulphurisation process. So they added a metal to kick start the key reaction.

And yes, the metal they add is cobalt. Here’s the lowdown from the “Cobalt Institute” (cont) https://cobaltinstitute.org/desulphurisation.html

It’s a long and detailed article but the key information is in the first few paragraphs.

So to make low sulphur petrol & diesel, which is the global standard now, they must add cobalt during the refining process. Yes, but that cobalt doesn’t get into the final product we put into our tanks right? Right?? Wrong!!! In fact a lot is left in the final output.

Check out the list of toxins and carcinogens that make up ordinary everyday diesel exhaust emissions for instance. Yes it’s a long list of nasties but look who’s there? Yes, it’s our friend cobalt.

So when the anti-BEV lobby start shouting about cobalt in batteries, tell them about the cobalt in their fuel. At least the cobalt in the battery *stays* in the battery and can be completely recycled. The cobalt in their fuel is spewed out the exhaust for our children to breathe.

And then we should consider how Cobalt relates to EV batteries. So this from Amnesty International confirms that about 20%, at most, of the cobalt from the DRC is hand mined. The rest is machine mined.

Overall, about 60% of the world’s supply comes from the DRC. So that means only about 12%, at the very most, of the global supply of cobalt is actually hand mined. Also add that a lot of that cobalt is used for other things like high quality steel, and the fact that a lot is also used in cell phone, tablet, laptop batteries, and petrol/diesel fuel of course, and that the amount of cobalt actually in EV batteries has fallen dramatically. The chances of hand mined cobalt getting into your EV battery is next to nil.

So it’s just disingenuous & misleading to link unethically sourced cobalt solely with EVs when in reality it’s used for a lot more other applications in every part of our society. But of course it serves many parties with anti-EV interests for that false association to be made.

Some selected replies:

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simon blackmore @blackmore_s Jun 20

#FFS the #FUD they peddled about BEV's battery chemistry and they are pumping that crap into the air via exhaust fumes.

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DIYMicha @DIYMicha Jun 22

... and cobalt is an ingredient in hardened high temperature steel, used in valves and valve seats of ICE engines.

Synchronicity @Synchronicity34 Jun 22

Yes indeed, mentioned further down in the thread.

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Synchronicity @Synchronicity34 Jun 21

But the cobalt in batteries stays in the batteries and is then recycled. The cobalt in fuel is distributed though our most populous cities, day upon day, accumulating on our streets, in the air, in our children’s lungs. Which source should you be most immediately worried about?

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Synchronicity @Synchronicity34 Jun 21

Key research on the long term cumulative effects of our children ingesting heavy metal particulates such as cobalt are only just starting. I don’t think you are qualified to say whether any other issue is bigger.

Follow the Testimony

Susan B. Glasser, in The New Yorker:

Kent, Sondland, and Yovanovitch remain U.S. government officials, and could be fired. Both Kent and Yovanovitch ... have given decades of service to their country at the State Department. This is bravery of a sort that has become so rare in our public life as to be almost unimaginable.

Trump himself, in other words, was putting together a rogue foreign-policy team, run by Giuliani, the President’s private attorney, that would go outside normal N.S.C. and State Department channels to pressure Ukraine.

The ... outlines ... have been known since the start ... but the testimony by Hill and others ... shows how much the President was directly implicated... The scandal, as this week showed, is about a lot more than saying “do us a favor though” in a phone call.

Hill’s decision to appear on Monday, in defiance of White House demands, was crucial.

... there is nothing the White House can do to retract the sworn statements of its officials who are now coöperating with the impeachment probe on Capitol Hill.

Trump has been staffing his cabinet with "temporary" and "acting" officials who haven't been vetted by Congress. He has been hollowing out federal agencies and replacing career bureaucrats with people loyal to himself, rather than to our Constitution. These changes have made it easier to violate the law in secret (Giuliani and Mulvaney notwithstanding). Other changes, like the near elimination of press briefings, have made it harder to ask even informal questions about the actions of Team Trump. Its refusal to cooperate with Congressional inquiries has been a brazen attempt to avoid all accountability. Sarah Kendzior seems to have understood this administration from the start.

I studied dictatorships and authoritarian regimes the entire time I was doing my PhD.... A lot of things that Trump was doing in his campaign reminded me of things I saw in Uzbekistan, Russia, and other authoritarian states around the world.

Thank goodness the House of Representatives began to fulfill its duty re impeachment before the executive was completely gutted. Thank goodness Trump and his toadies are so inept. Where might we be now if they were actually skilled? Added bonus: Vanity Fair

A World We Built to Burn - Quinn Norton

A World We Built to Burn | emptywheel:

So here we are: Keeping the lines on will probably kill people. Turning them off will probably kill people. Our political system is facing a real-life trolley problem created by our ever-expanding technical debt. It can’t have been easy for the people making the decisions.

One of our jobs in this century is to accept that we don’t live on the planet we thought we lived on, and our societies aren’t doing what we thought they were. Even if we were able to change our politics overnight, which is probably impossible without some planetary level disaster wake up call, it would still take many decades to dig ourselves out of out technical debt, and in the mean time, we have to stay alive and try to thrive.

I can imagine you looking at the screen, saying “It shouldn’t be this way!” But it is this way. The world we thought we had, with a safe stable environment and not too many people, that is not the world we live in. That is, in short, not real. At the individual level as well as the policy level, we need to let go of that which is not real.

Framing a mesh of interrelated social, political and environmental problems as technical debt is brilliant. Finding it on emptywheel, a site that I visit for its insights into the takeover of our federal government, is surprising but welcome.