The Chief Speaks: Yesterday’s editions of the Springfield Republican (and masslive.com) carried Holyoke Police Chief Manuel Fero’s response to Officer Rafael Roca’s 43-minute YouTube soliloquy accusing the department of corruption and racism. Subscribers can read it HERE. Chief Fero deals specifically with four of the allegations and refutes them. The whole (so-far) four-part episode is notable for its showcasing the future of communications in this era of Internet access. The four parts are Roca’s Internet speech itself, his being placed on administrative leave for not taking it down, the newspaper’s publishing a story on it, and the chief’s refutations in a second news story of some of Roca’s assertions. This blog mentioned the first two parts HERE.

That’s the Way the Paper Crumples: On Tuesday, atop page D1 of the New York Times’s weekly Science section a story inside was teased with the words “Why does paper crumple the way it does? ‘Geometric frustration.’ ” (The story originated with a study by several Harvard Ph.D candidates on paper crumpling. The study’s lead author, Jovana Andrejevic, a student in applied physics, and her colleagues “delved into fragmentation theory, the principles explaining how materials like rocks break into smaller pieces.” She is pictured in one of nine illustrations.) Perhaps at Harvard and MIT scholars are already tackling the physics, and chemistry, of how the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and Building 7 on Sept. 11, 2001, collapsed into their own footprints, pretty much identically, two of them reportedly having been flown into by hijacked airliners loaded with jet fuel (kerosene).

‘Centrist’ Is New Attorney General: Former federal Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland yesterday began his first full day as U.S. attorney general, having been confirmed in a 70-30 Senate vote Wednesday. He is best known as President Obama’s 2016 nominee for a Supreme Court seat whose nomination was blocked by then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The New York Times story by Kate Benner notes up top that “the former prosecutor and widely respected federal judge [has] the task of leading the Justice Department at a time when the nation faces domestic extremist threats and a reckoning over civil rights.” Near the end of Benner’s report is that as a deputy to a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Administration he “oversaw the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing which led to the conviction and execution of Timothy McVeigh”; that and his supervision of “high-profile cases” including that of Unabomber Ted Katzynski and the Atlanta Olympics bombing ”helped cement Judge Garland’s reputation as a fair-minded centrist.”

Edward Curtin Writes: This has been a good year so far for blogger/author and former sociology professor Edward Curtin (not that 2020, in which his Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies: Critical & Lyrical Essasys was published, wasn’t). Specifically, two of his 2021 entries are well worth one’s time and follow-up reading of books recommended. Chronologically, they are “JFK, Allen Dulles and Indonesia” and “Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms.” As with some of the best essays by educators who can write, each is an engaging course syllabus for a previously little explored field of study. Their topics are little explored because too often the entire spectrum of the media labor mightily to keep them that way. (One lapse was the 1982 movie “The Year of Living Dangerously,” in which viewers were introduced to the notion that there was a country called Indonesia, much less a coup there that installed someone named Suharto.) The first essay is a review of JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, by historian Greg Poulgrain (Skyhorse Publishing). Another day (or two) I may try to do justice to both of them.

Andrew Bacevch Writes: Andrew Bacevich is, among other things, a retired Boston Univeristy professor, author of 11 books, and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, whose writings, like Curtin’s, deservedly crop up on various websites. His latest is titled, on Consortium News, “The Blob Insists on Clinging to an Obsolete Past.” The Blob, in this case, is the Biden administration with its seeming determination to sanctify a 20th century way of conducting foreign policy two decades into the 21st.

— Mark Channing Miller