Anticipatory thread for the heavily-redacted, ultimately disappointing Mueller Report, as well as the Barr shitshow surrounding it.

I explained Milli Vanilli to my youthful exercise coach this morning. No, they weren't just lip-syncing. No, they hadn't even sung the songs on the album. Just a couple of beautiful guys with long, swinging hair and some fly dance moves. The real singers weren't very good-looking, you see.

It's one of those things that I haven't thought about since the internet arose, which clearly could never be conceived of anymore. Not quite on par with FDR minimizing his paralysis, but still very lodged in its time.

(But really. Did they think they could keep up the lies indefinitely?!)

(Have there been other musical lip sync acts that never really got outed?!)

Not really another Notre Dame thread; I just thought this last paragraph, in a story of an academic who had painstakingly mapped the cathedral before dying young of cancer, was just so good.

A cathedral calls us to consider time beyond the boundaries of one life, enclosing us in a grand view of what humanity can do that humans cannot. Andrew Tallon will not reappear among the living, but the work he put into recording stone and wood as it was built by countless hands over time may restore that creation--and embed the man into the place he venerated.

I've never been, but I get that this is really a tragedy, especially for those who have experienced a connection to the cathedral.

Mossy Chassy writes: FBI proactive counterterrorism.
1. Whatever its other virtues, this must be the most expensive mental health program in the history of the world.
2. Had the same program, over the same period, been directed instead against spree shooters, how many Americans would still be alive?

Heebie's take: Mo's not kidding:

German explained to me that during his 12 years working for the FBI prior to 9/11, in order to launch an investigation agents needed to clearly demonstrate that the individuals they were targeting were either connected to a specific terrorist organization or explicitly planning criminal activity. Since then, the bar for initiating a sting has gotten much lower. "So many of these cases, there's no direct association between subject and any actual terrorist group," he said. Their only hypothetical tie to extremists is the FBI, which "portrays itself as the terrorist group." Further, German expressed concern about how reliant the FBI has become on undercover operations, which by their very nature present individuals with opportunities they might otherwise have never had to carry out heinous crimes. The agency largely targets what he called "low-hanging fruit": young men who are poor, asocial, and often mentally ill. "That they would prey on those kinds of individuals to make a terrorism case out of it," he noted, wincingly, "it doesn't provide any security benefit to the country."

Conversely, we could have been offering thoughts and prayers against the Taliban for the past 18 years, and left it at that. (Contrapositively, I suppose.)