Mr. Mueller has obtained a flurry of subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify before a grand jury, lawyers and witnesses say, sometimes before his prosecutors have taken the customary first step of interviewing them.

Being compelled to show up in front of a court before being interviewed? Oh my, I have heard that is unpossible in anglosaxon jurisdictions. I do hope they flee that country and camp out in an embassy somewhere else. </snark>

With the snark out of the way, here is the parts I think is relevant.

Tactics:
With a Picked Lock and a Threatened Indictment, Mueller's Inquiry Sets a Tone - The New York Times

"They are setting a tone. It's important early on to strike terror in the hearts of people in Washington, or else you will be rolled," said Solomon L. Wisenberg, who was deputy independent counsel in the investigation that led to the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 1999. "You want people saying to themselves, `Man, I had better tell these guys the truth.'"

With a Picked Lock and a Threatened Indictment, Mueller's Inquiry Sets a Tone - The New York Times

"They seem to be pursuing this more aggressively, taking a much harder line, than you'd expect to see in a typical white-collar case," said Jimmy Gurulé, a Notre Dame law professor and former federal prosecutor. "This is more consistent with how you'd go after an organized crime syndicate."

Scope:
With a Picked Lock and a Threatened Indictment, Mueller's Inquiry Sets a Tone - The New York Times

[Mueller] appears to be taking a broad view of his mandate: examining not just the Russian disruption campaign and whether any of Mr. Trump's associates assisted in the effort, but also any financial entanglements with Russians going back several years. He is also investigating whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice when he fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director.

While Trump showed clearly that he is willing to pardon just about anyone by pardoning Arpaio, the probability that Mueller will find some dirt through emails and bank accounts is extremely high even if Trump associates doesn't cast blame on their current or former boss. You don't get stinking rich by obeying the law.

Anyone who is remotely interesting is many things all at once. And they know, from an early age, that people will try to stop them being interesting.

The tedious only ever want you to be one thing. It starts early in life. They tell you to only like boy stuff or girl stuff. If you're a boy you have to like sport and cars and guns. If you're a girl you have to like dollshouses and pink dresses and princesses. Then when you're a teenager they ask you to chose again. You can be a goth, or you can be indie, or you can be into rugby (these are all categories from my youth, which are presumably completely out of date now, but the basic mechanism will be the same).

This goes on throughout your life, from the way you do work, to the people you date, to your posture, to your politics, to your hobbies. You are asked to be one thing, easily definable. Anthing else is confusing and upsets those with simple minds.

This is what Brexit is, in terms of national identity. It is the demand to be only one thing. Put aside all the technicalities and you'll find this sentiment at its heart.

Boris has decided that, if you do not support brexit, then you are against Britain.

keep to the Fen Causeway

A new study has revealed evidence linking a Heian aristocrat to the creation of sixteen readings for the 生 kanji.

Researchers discovered that the sadistic nobleman gained pleasure from other people's grief and wore all black because he believed it had a slimming effect.

The readings include `sho', `sei', `i'(kiru), `u'(mareru), `o'(u), `ha'(eru), `ki', `nama', `na'(ru), `mu'(su), and a few others that are not used in normal life.

"This recently unearthed depiction of the Heian aristocrat illustrates his method of sitting on a block of tatami while pondering the most outrageous reading combinations," writes one researcher.

The Rising Wasabi ~ The Onion

Is there really no way to embed videos any more? Is this yet another example of Google being evil?

New Statesman - James Hawes - What Britain needs to understand about the profound and ancient divisions in Germany

On 24 September, Angela Merkel will be re-elected chancellor of Germany and that, we might think, will be that. With Merkel and France's Emmanuel Macron in control of the European project, populism will surely be vanquished and the old Franco-German core of the EU restored. Yet things are changing, and if western Europe wants Germany to keep singing "Ode to Joy" as enthusiastically as "Deutschlandlied", it will have some work to do. Our Brexit negotiators need to see how important this is to Macron, to other European leaders and, above all, to thinking Germans.

For we may all soon miss the old, self-effacing Germany. Despite having such economic power, it always seemed to have no greater wish than to exist as part of a larger whole. Konrad Adenauer, its first postwar chancellor and founding father, made Westbindung ("binding to the West") the heart of West German politics. Adenauer came from the deeply Catholic Rhineland, "amid the vineyards" as he put it, "where Germany's windows are open to the West". His instinctive cultural sympathy was with France, but he knew that West Germany's existence depended on keeping America in Europe. France he courted out of profound conviction, the US out of clear-eyed necessity, and he was worried that after him this twin course might be abandoned. His demands for reassurance during his final year in office led to John F Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech of 1963. Every West German knew about that, and about the Berlin Airlift: these became locations of national memory from which West Germany triangulated its sense of self.

There were some Germans for whom this was too much. Anti-Americanism was ingrained among West Germany's hard left, the early Green Party and the tiny hard right. But even Germans who were suspicious of America had no fear of tying themselves closer to Europe. On the contrary, that was exactly what they wanted. The standard explanation of this is guilt. West Germans, in this argument, felt so remorseful about the horrors of the Second World War that they wanted to make amends. This idea fitted with others' belief that Germany did indeed have much to feel guilty about.

If you're curious as to what a basket of deplorables looks like in real life, perhaps you should head over to Berkeley next week, where Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and friends will gather for a "festival of free expression" at the University of California campus. Maybe they'll oblige by arriving in a hot air balloon, to render the metaphor entirely literal.

The fact is, they may not arrive at all: Yiannopoulos, who is helping stage the series of events, has made a point of selecting "everyone who has been prevented from speaking at Berkeley in the last 12 months". But "prevented" should be taken with a pinch of salt. Anti-immigrant firebrand Coulter, for example, decided of her own accord to cancel an appearance in April after the authorities allocated her a time slot designed to minimise the likelihood of a disturbance. "It's a sad day for free speech," she lamented, apparently without irony. This time around, the university administration has complained that deadlines for booking venues have been missed and fees remain unpaid. Yiannopoulos calls it a "coordinated bureaucratic mission to silence conservative voices". Is it possible that the organisers would like nothing more than for Berkeley to insist on reasonable measures to ensure order, before flouncing off and crying censorship? Surely not.
[....]
As far as I can see, the direction of travel is not towards a greater number of limits on behaviour, but simply to different ones. And, though there is certainly much to argue about in the detail, these limits seem in general to be more enlightened - less about controlling people, and more about protecting them - than those of the past. The reactionary right paints this shift as a kind of tyranny: the policing of thought, an attempt to curtail hitherto unfettered freedom. But they would do, wouldn't they, because it is their moral code that is gradually being dismantled.

Italians approve of May's speech venue, but not content

The fourth round of Brexit negotiations has been postponed until next week. Officially this was by common accord; but actually, on British demand without much explanation. [...]Only one out of many Italian TV programmes - RaiNews21 - broadcast May's speech, without the Q&A, and with a close-up on May with a backdrop reading "Shared History Shared Challenges Shared Future".

So congratulations, AfD is the strongest opposition party. Oh wait, the SPD is still there: they have immediately decided not to join another government. So it looks like Jamaica (CDU/FDP/Green). Weird times and the republic of Germany as we know it is over.

_{Schengen is toast!}

It's not just a three-party coalition but actually four: CDU/CSU/FDP/Greens. First, they need to get buy-in from the CSU who suffered a ten points loss in Bavaria and have to fight a state election next year. The analysis by CSU chief Seehofer is unequivocal: they left a hole open in the "right flank" and need to close it. That of course will clash with the more lefty Greens. Mix into that the FDP who stylize themselves as fresh and don't want to be sucked dry again either (bad memories from 2009-2013) and would like to play opposition. This constellation will put the government on the hot seat. With no clear successor visible for Merkel in the CDU, I can see a rather ugly end for her chancelorship.

In the TV shows you could almost see the CDU and FDP personnel begging the SPD guys to think about continuing the government. But nope. Things are very bad but this is a very satisfying FU.

_{Schengen is toast!}

There is no better way to describe the atmosphere of the Kowloon Walled City than with the words of Leung Ping-kwan, a well-known Hong Kong poet, novelist, essayist, scholar, important cultural figure of the city, and recipient of the Hong Kong Medal of Honor. In his book City of Darkness, he wrote the following: "Here, prostitutes installed themselves on one side of the street while a priest preached and handed out powdered milk to the poor on the other; social workers gave guidance while drug addicts squatted under the stairs getting high; what were children's games centers by day became strip-show venues by night. It was a very complex place, difficult to generalize about, a place that seemed frightening but where most people continued to lead normal lives. A place just like the rest of Hong Kong." Leung Ping-kwan - City of Darkness, p. 120