Weekend link dump for May 21

Meet Zuul crurivastator, the first dinosaur to be named after a “Ghostbusters” character.

Why don’t women’s basketball fans follow their favorite players from college to the pros?

“How Unprecedented Is James Comey’s Firing?”

“The possibility that a lawyer’s small compromise of principle may put him on a steep slippery slope to a much larger personal compromise is present in every presidential administration. But the danger must be heightened in an administration led by a norm-defiant President who disrespects legal institutions and is disloyal to senior subordinates.”

How to understand James Comey.

Congrats to Beth Mowins for becoming the first woman in 30 years to do play-by-play for an NFL broadcast. And kudos to ESPN for being a leader in cracking this glass ceiling.

“None of these new shows will be ‘spinning off’ from GOT in the traditional sense. We are not talking Joey or AfterMASH or even Frazier or Lou Grant, where characters from one show continue on to another. So all of you who were hoping for the further adventures of Hot Pie are doomed to disappointment.”

“Reprioritizing idleness — and deprioritizing work — isn’t some retrograde, Luddite vision of the future. It could be critical to human flourishing as we approach the limits of human productivity. Rather than make-work programs or trying to slow automation, a better way to handle the declining economic value of work might be to stop recoiling in horror from idleness and start distributing its benefits more widely.”

“President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.” But her emails!

“It’s kind of ridiculous how they are preparing to deal with Trump. It’s like they’re preparing to deal with a child — someone with a short attention span and mood who has no knowledge of NATO, no interest in in-depth policy issues, nothing. They’re freaking out.” Who knew this could be so complicated?

“Donald Trump is not incapable of keeping secrets when it serves him to do so. He has guarded years of his tax returns more closely than any president in the modern era. But when the security of the United States, the lives of Western intelligence assets, the trust of U.S. allies, and the fight against ISIS are at stake, he appears to be less adept.”

“People have been saying for months that establishment Republicans had decided that they’d let Trump do almost literally anything as long as he agreed to sign a big tax cut and help repeal Obamacare. And now McConnell, faced with the ultimate consequence of this moral desertion, is happy to say it out loud.”

“Instead, Trump is president, and last week he was yukking it up with the Russian foreign minister, spilling a little classified information and endangering America’s international intelligence cooperation throughout the region, if not the entire world.”

“The Russian visit should have been a full blown scandal in its own right, but it had too much competition.”

“There has to be trust for this sort of arrangement. I cannot speak for Israel’s entire security apparatus, but I would not trust a partner who shared intelligence without coordinating it with us first.”

“In private, three administration officials conceded that they could not publicly articulate their most compelling — and honest — defense of the president: that Mr. Trump, a hasty and indifferent reader of printed briefing materials, simply did not possess the interest or knowledge of the granular details of intelligence gathering to leak specific sources and methods of intelligence gathering that would do harm to United States allies.”

RIP, Chris Cornell, frontman for Soundgarden and Audioslave.

Alex Jones backs down like the weenie he is.

“Perhaps the most fraught part of the trip is a speech Trump is scheduled to give in Riyadh, in which he will address the world’s Muslims with a discussion of Islam. What could possibly go wrong?”

“According to Reuters, National Security Council officials have resorted to repeating Trump’s name throughout his briefing materials in an effort to make sure he reads them.”

“The only way this seems plausible to me is if Pence were somehow so clean, so far from the center of the action, that the Trump crew knew not to tell Pence these things. That clearly seems to be the story Pence’s aides are trying to tell – possibly to insulate him from Trump’s ubiquitous corruption and lying and allow a smooth transition to a Pence presidency. But again, it doesn’t add up.”

“Still, how could Pence claim in March that he’d just learned about Flynn’s questionable lobbying when it was widely reported in the months after the election, and Representative Elijah Cummings even wrote Pence a letter on November 18 bringing the matter to his attention?”

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