TWIT: Re-Truth Anything But Truth

credit: A. Zyglis, Buffalo News

The infamous scofflaw, Donald Trumpillini has returned to twit 're-truths' on Twitter, thanks to  billionaire boy, Elon Musk, buying the platform.  He said banning the sociopathic liar from the Internet was "stupid" Herr Trumpillini's re-post of screed from his own platform, is anything but the truth; it is poisonous broadcasting of propaganda. Joseph Goebbels would be impressed. A shocking 38% of gullible 'Mericans who want to believe still persist in thinking the election of 2020 was stolen from their leader. As the Washington Post correctly pointed out in its editorial, perpetuation of the Big Lie is detrimental to democracy because the extremist demagogue inspires his enthralled followers for another assault on the needlessly fragile infrastructure of representative government. And the morally bankrupt GOP is his blunt instrument.

TWIT saw the Crime Boss escape being called as a witness before the January 6th Select Committee.  The Chairman, Benny Thompson, said the panel has no expectation of calling the scofflaw.  This is a mistake in US Person's and other legal pundits' opinion.  If the Committee wants to make a complete record to turnover to DOJ in order to save our democracy, Trump should be given the opportunity to explain his anti-social behavior--specifically why he was sending handwritten notes to his flying monkeys on how to conduct the coup.  This egregious example of his deep involvement in the plotting came to the surface as John Eastman, the coup legal architect, attempted to defend his claims of evidentiary privilege before a judge clearly skeptical of his assertions. Federal judge David O. Carter of Santa Ana, CA has already concluded that Eastman and Trump were probably planning a coup.  As readers have learned there is no privilege when the client is planning the most consequential crime in modern American history.

credit: A. Zyglis, Buffalo News

“How many look up to him [Hitler] with touching faith as their helper, their savior,
their deliverer from unbearable distress.”
—Louis Solmitz, Hamburg schoolteacher, 1932

Return of the Native

A fish native to the northeast but absent from a central Maine lake reached China Lake for the first time since the Revolutionary War. Alewives Alosa pseudoharengus), species of herring, have been prevented from reaching interior waters in the migration from the sea. The species is famous for invading the Great Lakes by bypassing Niagra Falls through the Welland Canal becoming abundant in Lakes Huron and Michigan to the detriment of indigenous fish like the lake trout. [photo:AP]

Maine Rivers, a conservation group, was successful working for the removal of three dams and installation of a fish ladders on three other dams that helped the fish's return. Alewives are important to the marine food chain as prey for larger fish and humans who prefer them smoked. Alewives are also popular bait fish in the lobster industry. Considered a "species of concern" by the US Marine Fisheries Service, several northeastern states have imposed moratoriums on catching the small but agile fish.

Europe Removes a Record Number of Dams

The EU made a significant contribution to biodiversity and climate resilience by removing a record 239 barriers last year.  Spain was the top remover of dams and wiers.  Removing these barriers that are obsolete or not needed will allow migrating fish to return to their historic spawning grounds as well as improve water quality by increasing natural flows.  Free flowing rivers transport sediment and nutrients that often become bogged behind structures leading to toxic algae blooms and low oxygen levels. There has been a 93% decline in migratory fish populations in Europe in the last 50 years. [before and after removal in Haut Jura France, credit UK Guardian]

Hydro power is often thought of as clean energy, but it does have adverse environmental impacts that make removal of obsolete river barriers common sense. Portugal, Montenegro, and Slovakia removed their first structures in 2021.  Finland removed a working hydropower dam on the Hiitolanjoki River, which will allow landlocked salmon to return to their spawning grounds. Dam removal is often considered a radical idea. For example conservationists in the US have been calling for the removal of dams on the Snake River to help a dwindling population of Columbia River salmon rebound. Removal of an abandoned paper mill at historic Willamette Falls has taken decades of bureaucratic wrangling and ownership disputes before work can begin on removing the eyesore and allow public access to the second largest falls by volume in the Pacific Northwest. [photo right]

The cost of removal often is a stumbling block. Spain has a law that requres a dam owner to pay for removal if it is abandoned. NGOs are stepping in to pay for projects. A new group formed two years ago in Europe, Open Rivers, provides grants for barrier removal. The program officially supports 19 small dam removals across 11 countries that will open approximately 386 kilometres of Europe’s rivers.

COTW: Margin Debt Tells the Story

 This chart from WolfStreet.com tells US what is going on in the stock markets right now:

Margin debt, which traders use to purchase stocks on credit, is in steep decline, and is a reliable indicator of market leverage.  No one knows the true extent of debt used to play the Big Casino since only margin debt is reported to FINRA, which gets the data from registered brokers.  Over the past six months it has dropped by 17%. Not even the banks and brokerages that provide the speculative capital know who much leverage is being used.  The collapse of the hedge fund Archegos Capital Management in 2021, which burnt billions in capital, proved that.  Credit Suisse, among the big Wall Street names, alone lost $5.5 billion

What the steep increases and decreases presage is market movements.  Steep increases in margin debt precede significant market sell-offs.  Traders buy more stocks on margin to get in on the rise in prices.  Margin debt declines during the sell-offs as speculators under pressure sell their holdings to satisfy margin calls.  The selling only feeds the market's decline in prices.  The second chart shows this relationship over time:

Recently as margin debt declined 17%, the NASDAQ, home to many speculative stock in tech and e-commerce, has dropped 27%.  It is just the tip of the iceberg--more unwinding to come.

Weekend Music: Up Close

US Person can count the number of times he has seen rock stars in person on one hand.  Santana at Notre Dame's ACC comes to mind even though he played to a picture of his guru on stage.   Anothere is the time he and his wife sat close to the stage in Houston, Texas to hear 'little' Stevie Wonder.  The energy of live music played by a virtuoso cannot easily be experienced elsewhere.  So, in memory of that concert here is a side from that artist:

Einstein Was Correct

 

There is war on Earth still, but despite his obvious self-destructive tendencies, Homo sapiens sapiens has managed to image Sagittarius A* through an international cooperative effort.  The Event Horizon Telescope is an interconnection of eight radio telescopes that collected data for many hours to put together a cosmic collage of the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way.  The  scientific team that capture this distant image is the same one that pictured the black hole in Messier 87 in 2019, so this picture is not the first of a black hole, but it is closer to home.

Physical proof of what was once only a theoretical object is a milestone in our species' immense journey. The achievement confirms Einstein's calculations of the black hole's size in his General Theory of Relativity--about the diameter of Mercury's orbit around our Sun. Roger Penrose, at the University of Oxford, received half of the 2020 Nobel prize for proving mathematically in 1964 that Einstein’s theory predicted the formation of black holes, even though Einstein himself didn’t think they existed. The other half of the prize went to Reinhard Genzel and Andre Ghez for the discovery of the Milky Way's black hole. Fortunately for us, the Milky's way central void  does not consume interstellar gas at a high rate and is relatively stable, unlike M87's. 

Our "gentle giant" as one scientist termed it, whirls endlessly irrespective of man's remote probing with his tools. Nothing--not even light--escapes a black hole's super-dense gravitational field. If a space explorer were to become captured like Odysseus threatened by the whirlpool of Charybdis, his vessel would spiral in to be crushed into elemental motes. Are black holes, thought to exist in the center of every galaxy, portals in space-time to other dimensions? No one knows. Emerson mused in his journal, "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly." We have learned to ask the "terrible questions", said Emerson.  Wisdom is the end of knowledge, not its beginning.

TWIT: When You Need Cover

credit:  deAdder, Washington Post

When do you need cover?  When you do something illegal, natch.  John Eastman knew that much when he told Pennsylvania  state legislators they could get "cover" for sending a fake slate of Electors to DC if they illegally manipulated the popular votes for president to make it look like the Crime Boss won their state. US Person wants to know if Eastman charges more for crooked math. “Having done that math, you’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the Legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors — perfectly within your authority to do anyway, but now bolstered by the untainted popular vote,” Eastman wrote in a Dec. 4, 2020 email to Pennsylvania Rep. Russ Diamond.  The email was obtained from the University of Colorado, where he was a visiting professor while he worked on Trumpillini's campaign.  The records were obtained by the Colorado Ethics Institute, which forwarded them to the January 6th Select Committee of the House.  A more clear indication of criminal intent to defraud the United States US Person cannot cognize.

Trumpillini got a break of sorts this week from Judge Engoron in New York, who lifted the civil contempt citation for failing to comply with a subpoena in the civil fraud investigation by the New York Attorney General.  The withdrawal came with the condition that he pay the two weeks of fines at $10,000 a day, and a proviso that he would reinstate the citation retroactively if Trump and his company did not meet the subpoena demands by May 20th. What the government giveth, it taketh away.  The DOJ is actively investigating the removal of classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, another potential criminal offense.

The Select Committee is apparently getting very serious before public hearings start in early June.  The Committee issued subpoenas to five Repugnant members of Congress who refused to testify volutarily. According to inside sources, the Committee could no longer ignore their deep involvement in Trump's autogolpe.