Borodin puppets and plates
Trying to stand WAY back from the details of "news".

We have two competing witch-hunts underway.

The RUSSIAN_HACKING hunt started a year ago and spawned dozens of long-running "investigations", which continue to lead nowhere. Flynn and Manafort may be indicted for the usual nonsense about "lying to FBI", which means that FBI thinks they're white Christians.

The sexual harassment hunt started a month ago, and continues to bring down important media demons. We still don't know why the blackmail, which had been perfectly effective for DECADES, suddenly popped. We just hear names and names and names.

Whenever you see a loud flashy puppet show with no apparent purpose, you can be sure something meaningful and purposeful is happening behind the stage. Major tectonic plates are grinding and shifting. This is the American version of the old Soviet Borodin effect.

Are these two shows related? Or do they hide distinct and separate private quakes?

= = = = =

Back in '47, Ripley told how the Lancashire witch hunts of the 1600s ended. I can't find an online reference to the names given in Ripley's story, so I'll just summarize. True or not, it's an excellent fable.

An unlicensed healer named Margaret Saunders had been curing people for many years. She used a talisman containing mysterious letters, and chanted mysterious words while invoking the gods of healing. One day she failed to cure a baby of the ague, as happens sometimes with any licensed or unlicensed doctor. The dead baby's father cried Witch! and brought Saunders to trial.

The persecutor tried repeatedly to force Margaret to admit that the talisman came from Satan. She refused but wouldn't say how or where she got it. After the jury condemned her to death for witchcraft, the judge decided to interrogate Saunders because her story seemed familiar. It turned out that the judge and Saunders had met 30 years earlier, when Saunders was the daughter of an innkeeper and the judge was a young law student. Saunders had a baby who was ill. The law student couldn't pay his lodging bill. He wrote some random Greek letters on a piece of parchment and persuaded Margaret that it was a magic talisman with curative powers. She used it and her baby got well. The lodging bill was forgiven.

After that, she found that she could cure other kids with the talisman.

When the judge told the full story in court, Saunders was freed and the hunting fever was cured.

Broad moral: in natural processes like healing, "facts" and "evidence" are secondary. Trust and confidence are primary. Saunders was able to cure because she had faith in the talisman that had worked for her, even though the talisman was created as a cynical and arrogant fraud. Her faith induced a corresponding field of faith in the people who trusted her.

Specific moral: We can map this story onto the RUSSIAN_MEDDLING hunt nicely. Satan maps to Russia, the talisman maps to the DNC emails, and the witch is Assange. The witch refuses to say where he got the talisman, so the persecutors are free to claim the talisman is from RUSSIAN_INTERFERENCE. If the witch could admit that the talisman came from a cynical and venial human source (I still think it was Podesta himself) the fever would break.
  ¶ 4:51 AM