Daily Bread for 3.24.18

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 7:12 PM, for 12h 23m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 48.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1965, the Ranger 9 probe reaches the moon:

Ranger 9 was a Lunar probe, launched in 1965 by NASA. It was designed to achieve a lunar impact trajectory and to transmit high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface during the final minutes of flight up to impact. The spacecraft carried six television vidicon cameras – two wide-angle (channel F, cameras A and B) and four narrow-angle (channel P) – to accomplish these objectives. The cameras were arranged in two separate chains, or channels, each self-contained with separate power supplies, timers, and transmitters so as to afford the greatest reliability and probability of obtaining high-quality television pictures. These images were broadcast live on television to millions of viewers across the United States.[1] No other experiments were carried on the spacecraft.[2]

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Steven Erlanger and Gerry Mullany report ‘The Whole World Should Be Concerned’: U.S. Allies React to Bolton’s Appointment:

BRUSSELS — John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser seems to many around the world to represent President Trump unbound, and they are trying to puzzle out what exactly that means.

A fiercely intelligent man with deeply conservative, nationalistic and aggressive views about American foreign policy, Mr. Bolton may bring more consistency and predictability to President Trump’s foreign policy, many suggest. But others worry that his hawkish views on Iran and North Korea, among others, may goad Mr. Trump into seeking military solutions to diplomatic problems.

But some also wonder whether Mr. Bolton, who has played the outsider even when serving as a senior American diplomat in the State Department and at the United Nations, will be able to adjust to a high-pressure job where he must be less public, less strident and more of a mediator of differing policy views.

And it is an open question whether he will be able to manage his relationship with Mr. Trump, who seems to tire quickly of anyone outside his own family who tries to guide or restrict his behavior, his public statements or his instincts.

➤ Michael Kranish and Karen DeYoung report Kushner Companies confirms meeting with Qatar on financing:

Jared Kushner’s father met with Qatar’s finance minister three months after President Trump’s inauguration, a New York City session at which funding for a financially troubled real estate project was discussed, the company acknowledged Sunday.

However, Charles Kushner said he turned down possible funding to avoid questions of a conflict of interest for his son, who had run the family company until he became Trump’s senior adviser. The elder Kushner said that the Qataris had asked for the meeting, and that he told them he couldn’t accept sovereign funds.

“I was invited to a meeting,” he said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Before the meeting, Kushner Companies had decided that it was not going to accept sovereign wealth fund investments. We informed the Qatar representatives of our decision and they agreed. Even if they were there ready to wire the money, we would not have taken it.”

The company said Kushner agreed to the meeting as a courtesy.

A spokesman for the Qatari Embassy in Washington said his government had no comment.

➤ Eric Levitz reports Ben Carson Might Be Next on Trump’s Chopping Block:

When Ben Carson first took the reins of American public housing — a system plagued by a $49 billion repairs backlog, in which entire complexes regularly lack heat and hot water in the winter — his greatest concern was that its tenants might be too comfortable in their lodgings. “Compassion,” Carson argued, meant not giving people “a comfortable setting that would make somebody want to say: ‘I’ll just stay here. They will take care of me.’”

But Carson took a decidedly different view of the value of creature comforts when it came to his own accommodations – opting to spend $31,000 on a dining-room set for his office, even though he was only authorized to spend $5,000. When news of this profligacy first broke, the Housing secretary said that he was unaware that “the table had been purchased” — but nonetheless felt the price was not “too steep,” and thus, he did “not intend to return it.” Days later, he claimed that as soon as he learned of the table’s exorbitant cost, he tried to cancel the purchase. Then, he pinned responsibility for the entire affair on his wife — until internal emails revealed that Carson had personally participated in the selection of the table. The Housing secretary proceeded to insist that he’d spent $31,000 of taxpayer money on a piece of furniture for the sake of “safety” — according to Carson, the office’s existing furniture had caused people to be “stuck by nails, and a chair had collapsed with someone sitting in it.”

Finally, during an appearance before the Senate Thursday, Carson “took responsibility” for the ordeal — while stipulating that he believed Jesus would have approved of his response to the episode, as it had been modeled on Christ’s advice in his Sermon on the Mount, which Carson summarized as “don’t worry about what people are saying about you, and do the right thing.”

(One would have to be utterly self-serving – or utterly dense – to think that the Sermon on the Mount applies to the purchase of federal office furniture. For that matter, there’s no worthy exegisis of Christ’s words that merely  reduces to Caron’s description of them. It’s like summarizing War and Peace as ‘a bunch of Europeans were fighting and stuff.’ )

➤ Anne Applebaum writes First Russia unleashed a nerve agent. Now it’s unleashing its lie machine:

Maybe he was a drug addict; maybe he was suicidal. Maybe his British handlers decided to get rid of him; maybe it was his mother-in-law. Ever since Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, was poisoned in a provincial English town, Russian state media and Russian officials have worked overtime to provide explanations.

The British government identified the poison as Novichok, a substance made only in Russia. A spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry spokesman parried the claim by insisting that the Czechs, the Slovaks and the Swedes had it, too. And, of course, the British themselves.

One Russian journalist opined that the assassination attempt was a rival’s ploy to undermine Russian President Vladi­mir Putin; another blamed a Ukraine attempt “to frame Russia.” The Russian foreign minister declared the whole story was an attempt to “distract from Brexit.”

…

The conspiracy theories came so thick and fast that some had to be retracted. One Russian scientist admitted that the Soviet Union had created Novichok; the interview was removed from the Internet because it contradicted the foreign ministry spokesman, who claims Novichok never existed. So far, the British foreign office has tallied 21 separate explanations for the assassination attempt, with more presumably on the way.

No one was surprised by this barrage of contradictory claims: This was exactly how the Russian media and Russian authorities responded after Russian-backed troops in eastern Ukraine shot down a Malaysian passenger plane in 2014, killing everyone on board. Those explanations were just as varied and far-fetched (the Ukrainians were trying to shoot down Putin and missed; the plane took off from Amsterdam with dead bodies on board), and they had the same aim: to pollute the conversation and make the truth seem unknowable.

➤ Ponder The Weird World of Competitive Dog Grooming:

For competitive groomers, dogs are more than pets—they’re living canvases. These dedicated hobbyists spend months sculpting, coiffing, and dyeing their canines into vibrant works of art, ranging from recreations of Michael Jackson to Disney characters to lions. Rebecca Stern’s whimsical short documentary Well Groomed follows creative groomers as they intricately style their dogs to compete for Best in Show. But this is no Christopher Guest movie; Stern’s film is earnest proof of creativity’s variegated forms.

“It was surprising to find out how vast the world of competitive dog grooming is,” Stern told The Atlantic. “Like a lot of people, I’d only really seen the Westminster Dog Show and had assumed the breeding was what made the coats that shiny. I was so wrong. A lot goes into dog grooming, and there’s an entire world of people passionate about making our furry friends look their best. In fact, they’ve staked their livelihoods on it.”

For more information, including Well Groomed’s future as a feature film, visit the website.

(It seems reasonable, by contrast, to contend that dogs need only be groomed more simply for them to be clean and happy.)