Who is Rick Gates?

In this post, I'll keep ongoing notes on Rick Gates, whose indictment by the Mueller investigation was unsealed today.

Monday afternoon, Allegra Kirkland of Talking Points Memo gave us an introduction:

Manafort’s business partner [Rick Gates] remained a key player in Trumpworld long after Manafort himself was forced out of the campaign over concerns about his work abroad. Gates coordinated behind-the-scenes preparations for Trump’s inauguration and served on a pro-Trump super PAC in the early months of 2017.

And as the Miami Herald reported Monday, a domestic entity listed in the indictment as one of the corporations Manafort and Gates used to hide foreign earnings even accepted a total of $70,000 from the Republican National Committee for “political strategy services” it provided in coordination with the Trump campaign, suggesting the line between Gates’ work for the campaign and his illicit dealings wasn’t quite so bright.

Greed giving us a nice paper trail.

Andrew Sullivan on the Trump Abyss

Late Friday, while the Astros were beating the Dodgers in Game 2, CNN first reported that an indictment had been made, but was sealed, by the Mueller team. We don't know who was indicted, or for what.

Andrew Sullivan, a Republican many democrats are happy to read, wrote earlier Friday in the New York Magazine on the Trump Abyss.

After spending many paragraphs reminding us just how grim things are, and how rock solid his 35 %-base support is, Sullivan offers these potential ways out:

1. a recession? this adheres to the "it's the economy, stupid" Clinton/Carville rules, but the responsibility for a recession is vague and diffuse
2. a catastrophe, like nuclear conflict with North Korea. no silver lining there.
3. a "massive and impregnable" revelation from Mueller's investigation
4. "massive mobilization of the anti-Trump majority at the polls next year"

The 2018 mid-term election offers the best hope.

We have to turn the mid-terms into a presidential election. Sane Republicans need to vote for the Democrat. Leftists have to put aside their divisive identity politics. Liberals need to coalesce around a simple strategy - not impeaching but checking Trump decisively.
We have close to 60 percent of the country with us. We have to mobilize every single one. Or the abyss will open wider.

By the way, Let's Go, Astros!

Take care of your goldfish

In the October 16 NYT Trilobites blog, we learned, what some of us have long suspected, fish get depressed. "The trigger for most domestic fish depression is likely lack of stimulation," reported Heather Murphy. Fish are naturally curious, Murphy quotes Dr. Victoria Braithwaite who recommends adding new objects to your fish tank, or moving them around.

Since at least in 2008, it has been common knowledge that low levels of anti-depressants are making their way out of our bodies, through the waste stream, and into the ocean (and back into our supply of drinking water). Fairly contained bodies of water, like Puget Sound, don't get flushed thoroughly. Here's a recent summary from 2016 on Vice (and abstract for the underlying research.)

For my Bay Area friends: Drugs in Water.

Here's a poem from five years ago about barnacles and the gasping ssri sea.

If you recall Darwin made his name in barnacles before publishing On the Origin of Species. His friend and mentor, Joseph Hooker, told Darwin that he and his fellow scientists would have little confidence in any speculation about the possibility of species evolving if it came from someone who had not done the real, nitty-gritty taxonomic work of describing some group in detail. Darwin replied to Hooker: “How painfully (to me) true is your remark.” He chose barnacles; he'd collected many in his travels. (Source: Naming Nature.)

In 1854, after 8 years of studying barnacles, Darwin wrote, "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a sailor in a slow moving ship."

Just do what you can do. Take care of your goldfish.

Unadulterated

Unadulterated

Outside the Krol hearing

a witness sits

in a holding room,
the door cracked open

so he could breathe.

A paper cup

stained red by worried lips

desiccates under fluorescent light.

White hair buzzing, she flares

gray over me.

You have no place here

so help me god!

As if god or some judge
could ever stop her.

The maroon smeared across the linoleum
must be coffee.

This is a rewrite of Periodic Evaluation. The previous title didn't do much, and I've referenced Krol hearing directly,which while more arcane, is google-able and precise. The new title is also probably too cryptic, but I like the word. There are 4 ways in which the "she" is unadulterated:
1. No lipstick, no hair color ... her natural self
2. Yes, institutionalized, she is taking her meds, but they aren't really changing anything.
3. Allusion to adultery.
4. Like meds, neither god nor the judge is changing anything.

I've tried to clarify the pronouns, and that it was the "she" talking. There are 2 things I worry about in this rewrite: have a lost any immediacy or surprise or velocity? And can the reader see her barging in--the shock, the surprise of her entering the supposedly safe conference room. I've tried many ways to make this more clear, but haven't found one I like.

Rewrite of Bordeaux poem

Rampage

The glass tapers so the wine avoids the tongue
and worms down the throat into the brain’s meaty pit.
In the browning edge the waitress says something I miss.
The glass breaks like an egg. A few drops bleed
into the table’s grain. Disappear. I hold the glass still
aloft so she could see. A peony slumped on the asphalt
defeated by the morning dew. A crumpled bird that smacked
a window. Is wine contained like yoke in a broken belly?
My palm is wet. Red drains down my wrist, pastes jeans
to my leg. Dig out the shard. Make blood run like wine.

Link to previous version. I tried to fix some problems. 1. Old title did very very little--making sure the reader knew the wine was red and that the glass was more tapered than, say, a burgundy glass. 2. "More glasses would survive" was trite, and symptomatic of the shock I was in (Jack) at the time. It undercut the point of the poem which was my prayer for rage.

More on songbirds, from Annie Dillard

Nature is vaster than we will ever perceive.

"Our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds.

"[Their] show would play to an empty house, as do falling stars which fall in the daytime.

"That is why I take walks."

From pages 72, 73 of the 1982 edition of Teaching a Stone to Talk.

"When Women Were Birds"

From Terry Tempest Williams, pg 205 of When Women Were Birds,

Once upon a time
when women were birds
there was the simple understanding
that to sing at dawn
and to sing at dusk
was to heal the world with joy.

TTW cites the hermit thrush; the song sparrow.

Eve took the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and is no longer a bird. On pg 89, TTW writes "What I came to appreciate was how the transgression of Eve was an act of courage that led us out of the garden into the wilderness."

The garden is filled with mosquitoes, thorns, predators and prey. We are predators. A wasp stings; poison ivy burns. Biting the apple is revelation. A garden more clearly perceived is a wild place.

TTW concludes "there is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside, not as a secret, but as a prayer. "  The sacred is that which must be kept private.

Pg 92, "The world begins with yes."