Russian Nerve Gas Is a Menace to the World

Theresa May has visited Salisbury after the "brazen" nerve agent attack on a Russian ex-spy and his daughter.  The prime minister was briefed by public health experts, as the pair remain critically ill in hospital.  Mrs May has said Russia is "culpable" for the attack and that she is expelling 23 Russian diplomats - but Moscow denies all involvement.  France, Germany, the US and UK said in a joint statement Russian involvement was "the only plausible explanation".  Mrs May added: "This happened in the UK, but it could have happened anywhere and we are taking a united stance against it."   President Trump has finally come out against what the Russian’s did, but his protestations over it are very weak. 

CIVIL LIBERTIES IN UNITED STATES REMAIN IN PERIL 

President Donald Trump’s nominations of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA and Mike Pompeo to be America’s top diplomat are the latest indications of steadily eroding human rights standards in the United States and the rollback of the rule of law that has characterized U.S. counterterrorism policies since Sept. 11, 2001.

Haspel, a CIA operative who oversaw the torture of terrorism suspects at a secret prison in Thailand and then helped destroy tapes of the interrogations, and Pompeo, who has made statements in support of torture and mass surveillance, are both expected to be confirmed by the Senate with little fanfare.

After all, when Pompeo was nominated for his current post of CIA Director his confirmation sailed through the Senate on a vote of 66-32. This, despite what Human Rights Watch’s Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno called “dangerously ambiguous” responses to questions about torture and mass surveillance.

“Pompeo’s failure to unequivocally disavow torture and mass surveillance, coupled with his record of advocacy for surveillance of Americans and past endorsement of the shuttered CIA torture program, make clear that he should not be running the CIA,” Sanchez Moreno said in January 2017.

Shortly following Pompeo’s confirmation, his deputy director at the CIA was named as Gina Haspel, who “played a direct role in the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition program,’ under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel,” the New York Times reported last year.

She also ran the CIA’s first black site prison and oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In addition, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes violated both multiple court orders as well the demands of the 9/11 Commission and the advice of White House lawyers, as Glenn Greenwald has reported.

Despite these serious misgivings, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he is not currently urging Democrats to oppose Pompeo’s nomination to be Secretary of State or Haspel’s nomination to lead the CIA. So much for the #Resistance.

The Democratic acquiescence follows a long pattern of tolerating human rights abuses and normalizing torture. When President Barack Obama declared that he wanted to “look forward, not backward,” and to close the chapter on the CIA’s torture practices under the Bush administration without allowing any prosecutions for crimes that were committed, he ensured torture would remain a “policy option” for future presidents, in the words of Human Rights Watch.

NIBBLING AROUND THE EDGES IN SCIENCE

Ground breaking was done on the Star Wars Lucas museum yesterday in Exposition Park.  The museum had been scheduled to be erected either in Chicago or else in San Francisco but it ended up here.  I guess they have a lot of extra parking lot space here.  I wonder if there is any actual science in any of these exhibits.  I used to be a believer in "hyperspace" but I'm not anymore.  

 I have come to the point reading the book “A Brief History of Time” where I am pretty much stuck.  I can’t relate to the Black Holes chapter.  I am thinking “More understanding; fewer words”.   There is a lot of verbiage without imparting understanding to the reader.  People who read my stuff might think it’s been a little inconsistent over the years but I think I do a better job with understandable mental imigry.  You need to take the reader into your world and get the reader to see “things” as you see them.  I don’t believe that Steven Hawking does this.   But the book buying public loves his stuff.

I just read a thing explaining Hawking’s relation to and study of Black Holes, that was more clearly written than his book was.  The article contended that Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in 1915.  I had always heard the opposite.  Now there is some emission from black holes called “Hawking radiation” that are actually twin positive and negative mass particles and in some the one goes off into space.  Either that or the masses cancel each other out and the black hole shrinks, which is something I have never heard of before.

Trump plans to get rid of Jeff Sessions according to multiple sources and also plans to get rid of Mac Masters as national security secretary and he’s going to put the Bush hawk, John Boulton in the spot.   One person says “there is (still) going to be a major housecleaning in the Trump administration.  Trump already has another AG picked out to replace Sessions and Trump will get him to fire Special Prosecutor Mueller.  

• Toys R Us filed for liquidation in US Bankruptcy Court early Thursday.
• That marks the likely end of the chain, which was a source of joy for children around the world.
• Many are quick to blame the end of the retailer onAmazon, but that doesn't tell the whole story.
• The retailer was saddled with an enormous debt burden after it was taken private in 2005, and it never really recovered.

Toys-R-Us is closing all of their stores both in England and in the United States.  The company is going out of business.  They have bitten the dust just like Blockbuster Video and Tower Records did.  The economic times are changing.  Supermarkets are going out of business one by one.  Twenty years ago things made a lot more sense.   I think they should bring back cassette tapes.  Sometimes you feel like you’ve just lived too long.  There comes a time when older people should start thinking about their “next life” be it in heaven or reincarnation or something.  You always hear how older people “find happiness” after the middle age crisis in their lives.  I don’t see that myself.  One good thing is that these high school students today haven’t been raised on all these Western movies either in the theater or on TV.  They haven’t been marinated in a culture that embraces “A good man with a gun”.  Now they are passing laws saying there should be no smoking on any state beach or any park or for that matter in your own car if there are children under eighteen in the car with you.