Our story starts with Lord Kelvin, one of the great old school physicists. You can read about his career from John Walker’s old Saturday Night Science. Actually, at the point he enters this story I don’t think Kelvin had made lord yet; he was just some bloke named Thompson. This Thompson fellow was playing around with magnets and electricity and that sort of thing. What he discovered is that you can change the resistance of a wire with a magnetic field. And furthermore that that change in resistance depends on the angle between the wire and the magnetic field.

Let’s take that a little more slowly. Change in resistance when you’re in a magnetic field? Okay, I can buy that; there’s all this nonsense about wires and magnets and whatnot that I’ve been blathering about up until this point. Angle? The resistance in your wire will vary a great deal whether it’s parallel or antiparallel to the magnetic field on your disk. (Antiparallel means parallel, but facing the other direction. The northbound lane on a highway is antiparallel to the southbound lane.) If your wire is running current right-to-left and your magnetic field is pointed left-to-right then your wire’s resistance is at it’s highest because of your antiparallel configuration.

Explanation here.

View original artwork here.

We always want what we can’t have. Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Mick Jagger understood that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Most literature is based on this concept, and religions are designed to deal with it. This longing for things you don’t have could also be described as an endless effort to improve your life, which is not such a bad thing. Which is fortunate, because this is simply human nature. It can be temporarily suppressed, but not extinguished. Even temporarily suppressing it often requires powerful drugs. Accepting the way things are is simply not the way we’re wired. Humans are restless.

On the other hand, humans also crave security. You would think that this would tend to balance our dangerous restlessness with the safety which comes with the desire for stability. You would be wrong. Our desire for security often leads us into the protective arms of strongmen, tyrants, and/or powerful centralized governments which offer to protect us from the big bad world, in exchange for some of our money and freedom. This secure protective cocoon is where the conflict starts.

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Powerline has been running a series called What We Have Learned So Far, in which developments in the Russia collusion story are updated as new reporting or pronouncements are made. The latest update nails down the knowing falsity in the FISA application: The people who asked the FISA court for surveillance authorization on Carter Page knew (and did not disclose to the court) the source of the allegations and the likelihood that they were politically driven fabrications. They also knew if they revealed this to the court no authorization would be forthcoming and the investigation would be deprived of a key opportunity to develop adverse information on Trump.

While certainly violations of DOJ guidelines and potential crimes were committed by one or more of the people involved in the investigation, does this mean that the FBI was corrupt, and the loss of public confidence is justified? For purposes of my comment let me define how I use the term “corrupt”: Corrupt means the unjustified use of government power for personal benefit (financial or ideological) that was knowingly and intentionally in conflict with the public trust. This is a pretty high bar. It allows for bad things to happen simply because someone was deluded or mistaken and bent rules in an honest (if crazed) belief that an individual was a danger to the public in some fashion. This doesn’t mean that the person is excused and cannot be held accountable, but it does go to the question of whether to lose confidence in an institution when persons within that institution do bad things.