It was my last year of grade school, and I faced all the usual crises. My family was about to move about five miles closer to the center of the city because my parents wanted me to attend a different high school than the one serving our current neighborhood. I was about to lose most of my grade school friends because only two others were switching to the same high school. And for some reason the girls, who I had recently become interested in, were not so much interested in our current hero, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn. They had eyes only for the blood sidekick Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum.
McCallum died yesterday in New York City at the age of ninety.
Right on the money. Just as planned, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx satellite dropped its sample capsule on the Utah desert where it was quickly recovered. It should contain a sample taken from the asteroid Bennu.
The NASA recovery teamtook the sample container from the OSIRIS-REx satellite to a temporary clean room on the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range.
The clean room was set up specifically for this purpose and was ready to receive the capsule. The sample container was secured and the area around it was deemed safe before the recovery process began. The team placed the 100-pound capsule into a metal cradle and wrapped it in multiple sheets of Teflon and then a tarp. The capsule was then wrapped in a harness and secured to one end of a 100-foot cable hanging from a helicopter. The helicopter transported the capsule to the temporary clean room on base.
In the clean room, the capsule will be disassembled and packaged in parts for transport to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, its permanent home. Scientists will analyze the rocks and soil from the sample for the next two years at a dedicated clean room inside Johnson Space Center. The sample will also be divided up and sent to laboratories around the globe, including OSIRIS-REx mission partners at the Canadian Space Agency and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.
On Sunday September 24, 2023, just before noon eastern time, a sample capsule containing about one pound of the asteroid Bennu should arrive in Utah. Go ahead. Back up. Read it again. Amidst all the angst of our everyday lives, which is the usual subject of this column, we have a wonder like that to contemplate.
The capsule will have come from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx was launched on September 8, 2016, flew past Earth on September 22, 2017, and rendezvoused with Bennu on December 3, 2018. It spent the next two years analyzing the surface to find a suitable site for landing.
On October 20, 2020, OSIRIS-REx touched down on Bennu and successfully collected a sample. Though some of the sample escaped when the flap that should have closed the sampler head was jammed open by larger rocks, NASA is confident that they were able to retain between 400 g and over 1 kg of sample material, more than the 60 g (2.1 oz) minimum for success.
The sample capsule will be released when the spacecraft reaches an altitude of 63,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. The capsule will then be sent spinning towards the atmosphere below and will pierce Earth’s atmosphere at 10:42 a.m. EDT, coming to rest near a military base in the Utah desert. A recovery team will board four helicopters and head out into the desert to retrieve the capsule as quickly as possible to avoid contaminating the sample with Earth’s environment. Once located and packaged for travel, the capsule will be flown via helicopter to a temporary clean room on the military range, where it will undergo initial processing and disassembly in preparation for its journey by aircraft to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the sample will be documented and distributed for analysis to scientists worldwide.
There have been previous missions that have returned samples from outer space to Earth. Between 1969 and 1971, the Apollo program carried out six missions to the surface of the moon. The astronauts brought back a total of 842 pounds of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand, and dust from the lunar surface.
NASA’s Stardust mission, launched in 1999, flew past the comet Wild 2, collecting thousands of dust particles from the comet’s coma and returning them to Earth for laboratory analysis. Japan’s Hayabusa, launched in 2003, successfully returned samples from the asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2010. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 returned samples from asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2020.
If successful, OSIRIS-REx will be the first United States spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid.
All these missions have significantly contributed to our understanding of asteroids and the early solar system. The samples returned by these missions provide valuable insights into the composition, structure, and history of asteroids, as well as clues about the formation of our solar system and the origins of life on Earth.
Bennu was chosen as the target of this study because it is a “time capsule” from the birth of the Solar System. Bennu has a very dark surface and is classified as a B-type asteroid, a sub-type of the carbonaceous C-type asteroids. Such asteroids are considered primitive, having undergone little geological change from their time of formation. In particular, Bennu was selected because of the availability of pristine carbonaceous material, a key element in organic molecules necessary for life as well as representative of matter from before the formation of Earth. Organic molecules, such as amino acids, have previously been found in meteorite and comet samples, indicating that some ingredients necessary for life can be naturally synthesized in outer space.
Which doesn’t mean we will find a place we can relocate to in our neighborhood any time soon.
This is the twenty-second year since the 9-11 attacks. An entire generation has passed. My memories of that day written two years ago can be found posted here.
In a Washington Post op-ed published on Monday night, the civilian secretaries of the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force sharply criticized Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican “who is blocking the confirmation of our most senior military officers,” as they put it. It was a most remarkable document. And one which must have been a great comfort to the military leadership in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Tuberville is an anti-choice conservative and a staunch supporter of Donald Trump. He is an Alabama dilettante who decided after a successful career as a football coach, he might like to be a United States senator. The people of Alabama, one of the least educated of the United States, agreed and sent him to Washington in 2021.
Tuberville has single-handedly placed a “blanket hold” on the appointments of all “general and flag officer nominees” in all branches of the U.S. military. He strongly opposes what he calls “Defense Department policies that ensure service members and their families have access to reproductive health” — and, more specifically, to abortion services — “no matter where they are stationed.” The gist of this policy is that service members in states where abortion is now illegal or sharply restricted may travel at government expense to jurisdictions where it is permitted, a policy Tuberville and other Republicans strongly oppose.
In the Post op-ed, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, and Army Secretary Christine Wormuth write that the policy on reproductive access is fully legal and “critical and necessary to meet our obligations to the force.” Tuberville‘s hold, they assert, is “putting our national security at risk” by preventing the Pentagon “from placing almost 300 of our most experienced and battle-tested leaders into critical posts around the world“:
Three of our five military branches — the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps — have no Senate-confirmed service chief in place. … Across the services, many generals and admirals are being forced to perform two roles simultaneously. … Each of us has seen the stress this hold is inflicting up and down the chain of command, whether in the halls of the Pentagon or at bases and outposts around the world.
Washington Post Op-Ed, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, and Army Secretary Christine Wormuth
Tuberville‘s claim that “holding up the promotions of top officers does not directly damage the military,” the three secretaries conclude, “is wrong — plain and simple.”
So, who is this guy who doesn’t mind doing the work of our foreign adversaries? He’s a Republican of course. Elected in 2021, he was the head football coach at Auburn University from 1999 to 2008. He was also the head football coach at the University of Mississippi from 1995 to 1998, Texas Tech University from 2010 to 2012, and the University of Cincinnati from 2013 to 2016. In 1976 he was awarded a B.S. in physical education from Southern Arkansas University. SAU’s ranking in the 2022-2023 edition of Best Colleges, Regional Universities South, is #94.
Adding to his unimpressive educational record, Tuberville has no military experience. And here’s the best part of the Tuberville saga, Tommy reportedly doesn’t live in Alabama! A published review of campaign finance reports and property documents related to Tuberville “indicate that his home is actually a $3 million, 4,000-square-foot beach house he has lived in for nearly two decades in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.”
If true, this would seem to make Tuberville ineligible to represent Alabama in the Senate. The Constitution itself clearly states:
Every member of the Senate shall be . . . at the time of his election, a resident of the state from which he shall be chosen.
Constitution, Article 5, section 3
I have been waiting for the Senate, which details the qualifications for Senators on its own web site, to begin an investigation. I will not hold my breath. This is just what the people of Alabama and the Republican party apparently want in a senator.
Yes, there is a way to override the hold. The Senate rules allow for a process called cloture, which can be used to end a filibuster or break a hold on a nomination or bill. Cloture requires the support of sixty senators to pass, which means that it can be difficult to achieve in a closely divided Senate. The Democrats can’t do it alone. No Republican is willing to break the hold.
It is further evidence that, whatever the original plan for the United States Senate was, it is one of the framers most failed experiments. Only an amendment to the Constitution can tame the monster the Senate has become. And that will not happen any time soon.
I was sorry to hear about the recent passing of John Warnock. I have a feeling many of you do not recognize that name. Nor will you recognize the name Charles Geschke, who was Warnock’s business partner and who died in 2021. But I am quite sure you recognize the name PDF. And the PDF is without question Warnock and Geschke’s greatest invention.
Warnock and Geschke were pioneers of the high-tech computer revolution. Like most successful entrepreneurs, they identified a problem and set out to solve it. Unlike most of the visionaries who made the west coast their home, Warnock and Geschke were quiet, unassuming, and shy.
In the 1990s, even though I was the New York based bureau chief for public television’s Nightly Business Report, I was allowed to travel to San Francisco every December and set up shop for a week at the Fairmont Hotel. We covered an annual Business Week conference titled, “The Digital Economy.” But we also spent a few days visiting the headquarters of Silicon Valley trailblazers and telling their stories.
Almost to a man, and they were almost all men in those days, they were thrilled to sit down in front of our camera to brag about their inventions. Warnock and Geschke were exceptions. They were happy to welcome us to the San Jose headquarters of Adobe, the company they founded in 1982. But they wanted us to interview their employees, the developers and product managers. It took a lot of persuasion to get the two founders in front of our camera. That was rare then and it remains rare today.
Warnock and Geschke met while working at the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox, now part of SRI International. At Xerox PARC they developed a page-description language, something designers would use to instruct Xerox’s new laser printers how to draw a page. In those days virtually every different model of printer responded to a separate set of drawing commands. Warnock and Geschke’s vision was to create a standard every printer could follow. Xerox did not agree and kept their invention for use on Xerox equipment only.
So, the two left Xerox, started their own company, and created a new language which they called Postscript. A revolutionary breakthrough in printing technology, PostScript was the first printing software that enabled users to print pages that included text, line art and digitized photos. Adobe let all content creators use Postscript without a licensing fee. But they designed, and sold to the printer manufacturers, the circuits which interpreted Postscript and generated the signals the printer needed to generate the page. Apple and the Apple LaserWriter were the first company and product to use the system. With this, modern desktop publishing and word processing programs were born. By 1987, Adobe’s PostScript had become the industry-standard printer language.
Adobe did not stop there. Adobe Illustrator was released in 1987. Photoshop in 1990. The PDF came in 1993. The Portable Document Format was designed to allow the exchange of electronic versions of pages regardless of the software or device which created them or the printer or display which regenerated them without compromising the original. As Adobe’s Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology, Bob Wulff, describes it, “PDF allows the user to view a file precisely—down to the pixel, essentially, of what the author had intended.”
Today the PDF is ubiquitous:
PDF has become the standard file format for sharing documents. Businesses, schools, governments, and individuals use it all over the world.
PDF is also used to create electronic books.
PDF is a secure file format, which makes it ideal for sharing sensitive documents.
PDF is easy to use and can be viewed on any device.
PDF has had a major impact on the way we work and collaborate. It has made it possible for people to share documents more easily and securely.
Warnock and Geschke are gone now. But Adobe’s legacy of innovation continues. It has, for example, been actively applying artificial intelligence techniques throughout its product line. That is a story for another time. And it has revolutionized its business model. Most of its products are now in a bundle, Adobe Creative Cloud, for which Adobe charges a monthly subscription. Other companies are adopting variants of this model, known as Software as a Service.
By the way, Warnock and Geschke may have been camera shy, but once I got them to agree they produced a great interview. It almost always turned out that way when I had a reluctant subject. I checked in with both men every now and then over the years. They were pioneers of the computer age. Think about them when you print on your laser printer. They will be remembered.
Donald Trump had already been processed on three criminal indictments. But in each of those he was treated with unusual care, avoiding the mug shot usually taken for anyone arrested on criminal charges. That distinction ended with the fourth indictment. Fulton County, Georgia did not give Trump an exemption from its normal process. Trump now has a mug shot, and a number, P01135809. America now has its own Jean Valjean.
The mug shot on the left above speaks for itself. I don’t understand what message Trump is trying to convey with that scowl. Perhaps you do. The photo has been distributed widely by Trump’s campaign and it is being used on coffee mugs, shirts, and hats sold to raise funds. In just a few days, more than seven million dollars has reportedly been raised. There are many reports that a large amount of these “campaign contributions” are being used to pay Trump’s legal expenses. The quote often associated with P.T. Barnum was right. There is a sucker born every minute.
In his booking record, Trump states that he is 6-foot-3 and weighs 215 pounds, almost 30 pounds lighter than his White House physical in June 2020. This has prompted a lengthy list of joking comparisons on the Internet showing various sports figures with similar measurements. We are easily amused these days.
Trump’s latest arrest came the day after eight of his so-called challengers for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 met for a so-called debate in Milwaukee. The Fox channel entertainment, which Trump skipped, had little of substance beyond the moment when six of the eight raised their hands and promised to support Trump if he was the nominee of the part even if he was a convicted felon at the time of the election. You had to be there. See the other picture above.
It is amazing that the party of Lincoln has reached this point. It is really the party of Trump now, and little else. Republicans defended Trump when he paid hush money to a porn star. They defended him when he withheld weapons for Ukraine for political reasons. They defended him after he led a coup attempt against our democracy. They defended him after he removed top secret classified documents, stored them in the bathroom, and repeatedly lied to the authorities about it. They defended him after he pressured Georgia officials to overturn the election results in the state.
The Republican party I grew up with is long gone, dissenters Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson notwithstanding. According to a survey conducted Aug. 24, 58% of potential Republican primary voters back Trump for the GOP’s 2024 nomination.
With that statistic it seems a waste of time to talk much about this TV event. Hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, who play journalists on various Fox channels, rarely mentioned Trump during the session. They opened with a question about a song on the Billboard Hot 100 list.
Eventually, prior to November 2024, I’ll get around to explaining inflation, the issue of most concern to American voters. This is where incumbent President Joe Biden is most vulnerable. Yet it was of little concern to the eight would-be challengers or the hosts.
Addressing a soft-ball question on inflation Ron DeSantis rambled something about fighting inflation by firing Anthony Fauci. Fauci, who was director of the National Insitute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading advisor to the president on Covid, retired from public service in 2022. He also had nothing to do with inflation. This answer was par for the course for DeSantis, who refused to answer questions directly, always offering some canned talking point without substance.
Vivek Ramaswamy introduced himself by stealing a line from Barack Obama’s first presidential debate in April 2007. The thirty-eight-year-old Ramaswamy made a fortune in finance, pharmaceuticals, and biotech. He calls climate change a hoax and promotes fossil fuel as the secret to economic success. Ramaswamy wants to raise the voting age to twenty-five. He’s also called for voters to pass a civics test. “The U.S. Constitution,” Ramaswamy says, “is the strongest guarantor of freedom in human history. That is what won us the American Revolution.”
The Revolution ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783. The Constitution was signed in 1787. It went into effect after the nineth state ratified it on March 4, 1789. Ramaswamy would flunk his own test.
Mike Pence declared himself to be his own man, defending his decision to not commit treason by illegally invalidating the election of Joe Biden to be President on January 6, 2021. Pence repeatedly says Trump is not fit to be president. But he raised his hand and promised to support Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024. Go figure. Pence also pushes a national ban on abortion as a divinely inspired mission affirming the sanctity of life. Pence is also a staunch supporter of the death penalty. Go figure.
Men wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. Will Republicans vote for Nikki Haley? Can any woman be elected president? Seems like an uphill battle for 2024. Haley surprised me by blaming Republicans in Congress for spending too much. She also was the best at exposing Ramaswamy’s uninformed positions on Ukraine and foreign affairs. She was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, a president who hated the United Nations.
Was Tim Scott really there? I got that he grew up in a single-parent household. And that’s all I got.
Doug Burgum is the current governor of North Dakota. North Dakota is a state that never should have been created in the first place. If you add the populations of North Dakota and South Dakota together you will still have a state where nobody lives. Burgum thinks small-town values can solve everything from crime to foreign affairs. He doesn’t appear to have enough to do at home.
The former governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson seems like a nice guy. He’s an anti-Trumper but beyond that there’s no there there. He does want to cut the number of government workers. At least he didn’t endorse the DeSantis plan to “start slitting their throats on day one.”
And finally, there’s Chris Christie. He’s fun and entertaining. He attacked Trump like no one else dared and withstood the anger of the pro Trump crowd. He doesn’t have a chance.
Oh, I tried. I tried to write about the horrible fire in Maui. I tried to write about elite universities. I tried to write about artificial intelligence. And I tried to write about the ongoing strike of writers and actors in Hollywood.
But before I could publish, it happened again. Donald Trump. Back to the top of page one. Unavoidable.
Donald Trump and eighteen others were indicted in Georgia on Monday over their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. Prosecutors used a statute normally associated with mobstersto accuse the former president, his lawyers, and other aides of a “criminal enterprise” to keep him in power.
The nearly 100-page indictment details dozens of acts by Trump or his co-indictees to undo his defeat, including asking Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes for him to win, harassing an election worker who faced down false claims of fraud, and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electors favorable to Trump.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I love sharing with you my opinion, something I was rarely able to do in my many years with CBS, NBC, and PBS where my task was to present the unvarnished facts of events without commentary. But I still try as hard as I can to make sure my opinions are clearly opinions, and my facts are accurate. I also work to provide you with links to primary sources, which I implore you to read for yourselves. I remain shocked at how many Americans can’t be bothered reading documents or watching videos and instead adopt the viewpoint of whatever talking head they favor from whatever cable or internet source provides the echo chamber in which they hear the views they are predisposed to believe without a challenging word to raise doubts or questions.
Please read the indictment, here. And listen to the whole one-hour recording of Trump’s phone call on January 2, 2021, with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, here. Do the work. Then you can decide what it means.
“The indictment alleges that rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office brought the case, said at a late-night news conference. Willis’ investigation stretched over two and a half years.
The Georgia case is significantly different from the two cases previously filed in federal court by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Willis’s expansive detailing of events and use of laws (“RICO“) usually employed to go after mob bosses, will allow Fulton County prosecutors to tell the jury a story of a wide conspiracy to reverse election results in multiple states and build a compelling narrative of Trump’s actions in concert with numerous accomplices. But the logistics of putting Trump on trial along with eighteen other people, each of whom may file pretrial motions, in a racketeering indictment so complex and multilayered could result in many pre-trial motions and delay. Even so, Willis has asked the court to schedule a trial in March.
There are many interesting legal issues raised in this indictment. And whether I like it or not we will probably consider several of them in the months ahead. But first I expect you to do your homework.
For now, some quick observations. Trump’s defense, and those of many of his co-indictees, center around the idea that all he was doing was exercising his first amendment right to speak freely and criticize the election results. Another defense is that Georgia, in this indictment, and the federal government in the two indictments it has filed, is criminalizing conduct which is not criminal.
That’s where the “RICO” business comes in. RICO stands for the “Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations” Act. It was a groundbreaking piece of legislation passed in the United States in 1970 with the goal of financially crippling the Mafia. The act provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. More than thirty states, including Georgia, have passed state RICO statutes based on the federal law.
Willis explained that “overt acts are not necessarily crimes under Georgia law in isolation but are alleged to be acts taken in furtherance of the conspiracy. Many occurred in Georgia, and some occurred in other jurisdictions and are included because the grand jury believes they were part of the illegal effort to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.”
The Georgia charges have the potential to accomplish something that the federal indictment does not, holding people other than Trump accountable for what happened. The other eighteen defendants, accused of being members of a criminal enterprise, include lawyers, political operatives, state Republican Party officials, and even a Justice Department official. The indictment charges Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who served as Trump’s personal attorney after the election, Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, and several other Trump advisers, including lawyers John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Kenneth Chesebro. Some of these are believed to be unindicted and unnamed co-conspirators in the federal cases.
The Georgia indictment reads like a story, a tale the public should find easy to understand. The recorded telephone call speaks for itself and has been available for the public to hear for more than a year. The indictment specifically accuses Trump with making false statements and writings for a series of claims he made to Raffensperger and other state election officials, including that up to 300,000 ballots “were dropped mysteriously into the rolls” in the 2020 election, that more than 4,500 people voted who weren’t on registration lists and that a Fulton County election worker, Ruby Freeman, was a “professional vote scammer.”
Giuliani, meanwhile, is charged with making false statements for allegedly lying to lawmakers by claiming that more than 96,000 mail-in ballots were counted in Georgia despite there being no record of them having been returned to a county elections office, and that a voting machine in Michigan wrongly recorded 6,000 votes for Biden that were in fact cast for Trump.
Another defendant, Stephen Cliffgard Lee, is alleged to have traveled to Ruby pFreeman’s home “with intent to influence her testimony.” Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss testified to Congress last year about how Trump and his allies acquired surveillance footage from November 2020 to accuse both women of committing voter fraud, allegations that were quickly debunked yet spread widely across conservative media. Both women, who are Black, faced death threats.
Trump has personally used his social media platform to attack Willis and other prosecutors, describing them as “vicious, horrible people” and “mentally sick.” He has referred to Willis, who is Black, as the “racist DA from Atlanta.” His 2024 campaign included her in a recent video attacking prosecutors investigating Trump. Willis has raised concerns about security as her investigation has progressed, citing Trump’s “alarming” rhetoric and the racist threats she and her staff have received. Trump has also attacked the judges. He may be put on notice at his arraignment that further inflammatory posts could lead to his imprisonment pending trial.
And unlike the federal courts, where cameras are forbidden, the Georgia courts are generally open to cameras and live coverage of the trial in Georgia is likely. That will put the spotlight, usually reserved for Trump, on prosecutors and the legal process. The public proceedings may be just what the country needs.
Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings 