Faith in numbers

As I read Uncle Ken's expansive discourse on numbers it occurred to me that mathematics comes perilously close to becoming a sort of a religion.  How else to describe something that embraces the real, the natural, the irrational, the imaginary, and the infinite?  The mind boggles.

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That Mueller fellow is very cagey and seems to be building on a firm foundation.  I took a quick glance at the complete indictment of Manafort and it's a doozy, like the guy is wizard of criminal finance and money laundering on an international scale.  The scope of his past operations are what I can only call staggering, which raises another question.  If he did all that stuff before becoming involved in Trump's campaign, how is it possible that they took him on board?  There must have been some kind of interview that would have revealed what he had been doing for the last few years, and his involvement with all those Russians should have raised some red flags.  I wonder what kind of qualifications for campaign manager they were really looking for.  Maybe all they asked him was "Do you know any rich guys?"

But the real gem isn't the indictments but the guilty plea by Papadopoulos, who has been cooperating with the investigation.  He's going to get off easy and I bet that a lot of White House staffers are starting to sweat.  That guy may have been a minor player but he could have been privy to a lot of inside info.  It will be interesting to see what the next round of indictments will bring, and there will be a next round, you can bet on it.  I think loyalty and solidarity will only go so far; folks will try to cut some deals and will start to sing like birdies.  It's still a tangled web but it is starting to unravel.

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Only one sale.

That's sad but not unexpected.  Folks still piss away their dough on all sorts of silly shit and wouldn't know really good stuff if it kicked them in the keister.  If you could figure out a way to put those paintings in a phone app you could be onto something.  People love buying phone apps, and wouldn't a slide show of watercolors be a nice thing, a respite from the chaos of daily life?