Geology and the Mueller Report

Let's start with My Favorite Mueller Memes. It's a tie. Here they are:



...and...



I read a great piece in Mediaite today, via Instapundit, about what the press will and will not learn from the release of the long-awaited Mueller report last weekend. In short, the press will learn nothing; they're too invested in a conspiracy theory of their own making, according to Caleb Howe, author of that very worthwhile opinion piece. Howe points out that conspiracy theorists, confronted with a reality that fails to conform to their expectations, don't reexamine the core of their theory; instead, they construct new side-theories to explain why reality is being so uncooperative. Both of these memes speak to this behavior. The top one, I admit, assumes a degree of self-examination that I doubt is present among the collusion faithful; but the message of both is that suddenly, after hagiography after hagiography holding up Mueller as the Savior of Our Republic, his report is now being recast as either compromised by Trump administration pressure or a secret message to Congress urging them to go forth and seek impeachment, or dismissed as unimportant and readily ignored.

So that's where we are, according to the collusion faithful (and is there any other kind of collusion supporter? Have you heard of anyone's mind's having been changed by the release of the Mueller report?). The conspiracy to hide evidence that the President of the United States is a Russian puppet, this poor benighted group must believe, goes all the way to the top.

Howe's close examination of "Russiagate" press failures - he's generous there; it's tempting to call it press collusion to produce a desired result, the unseating of Trump if possible but at least the turning of Congress - would be tremendously useful to media outlets whose credibility has been battered by their own behavior. And it will be ignored. I would love to see the press act as the gadflies they believe themselves to be - if they could embrace their own sense of "journalistic ethics" and bring themselves to gad about both sides instead of just one, that is; but I don't hold out a lot of hope.

In geology, there's a concept called "unconformity." An unconformity is the evidence in strata (rock or soil) of a gap in time, evidence that something no longer present used to be there. There are three primary types of unconformities, each indicative of a different set of events:

• Angular unconformities occur when strata, layers of rock, are tilted or deformed by tectonic action - say by the uplift of a mountain range. Then erosion and more deposition of strata happen, leaving horizontal layers lying on top of tilted layers. It's easy to spot.
• Nonconformities occur when there's a flat surface between igneous or metamorphic rocks and overlying sedimentary rocks. The sequence of events is like this: igneous (formed by crystallization of magma, like basalt or granite) or metamorphic (formed by the "reprocessing" of previously existing rock by heat and pressure at depth, like slate and marble) rocks are uplifted by tectonics, forming a mountain range. Erosion happens over millions of years, leaving them more or less flat. Then deposition happens, such as silt deposited by a river on a floodplain, and the deposited sediment becomes rock, shale in our floodplain example, after more millions of years. This too is pretty easy to spot; when you see layers of sandstone, shale, or the like lying on top of granite with a nice flat surface between them, you're looking at a nonconformity.
• Disconformities are the tough ones: flat layers of sedimentary rock over flat layers of sedimentary rock, but nevertheless with "lost time" in between. In the field, they often have to be inferred from subtle evidence, such as a rusty color at the top of one layer that indicates that that layer was once exposed to air, or evidence of ancient soils such as trace fossils of roots, or an improper sequence of rock types (just trust me on this; I'm happy to go into detail if there's interest). Maybe you can use fossils to infer a gap in time if you know a lot about fossils and you're lucky enough to find one that has a known extinction timeframe in the lower layer followed by one that has a known, and later, appearance timeframe in the upper layer. But these guys are hard to spot.

What kind of unconformity does the Mueller report represent? The objective reader (if there are any) and the reader who took at face value President Trump's repeated statements that neither he nor anyone on his team colluded with Russia will see it as either an angular unconformity - that is, the Democrats will now pivot to the interesting position that the President "obstructed justice" somehow though there was no underlying crime to obstruct justice over - or as a nonconformity - they'll pivot instead to the less interesting position that they'd better look for something completely different to impeach him over. The shaken collusion fan will see it as a disconformity - something happened, they just know it did, but the evidence is so subtle that it'll require a lot of lab work to prove. (And the true believer will deny that there's any gap between pre-Mueller and post-Mueller.)

But certainly the end of the Mueller investigation represents a boundary between two unlike things. There's no question in my mind that it will not represent an end to Democrat public figures' speculation about Trump's putative crimes; I think, instead, it will represent the beginning of those Democrats' speculations taking place in an atmosphere in which ordinary Americans won't believe them uncritically any more. Even those ordinary Americans who bought the collusion story are going to be a little more wary now. I hope.

Because as Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone surprisingly points out,

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.