Senate Starts Bidens in Ukraine Investigation

The Daily Beast and other sources are announcing that the Senate is starting an investigation into the Biden's actions in the Ukraine. The DB writes:

“Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday requesting documents related to Joe Biden’s communications with Ukrainian officials. Graham’s inquiry focuses on any calls Biden may have had with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about the firing of the country’s top prosecutor, or any calls that referenced Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board. The Washington Post reports that Graham’s letter appears to begin an investigation into Trump’s widely debunked claim that Biden, who at the time was vice president, put pressure on Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor in an attempt to protect his son.”

This is an interesting move by the Senate. If there is the same level of openness about this investigation there was in the House impeachment inquiry, it should add to the amount of information the public has access to. So far, the president and State Department has refused to cooperate and thus additional evidence about the GOP alleged Biden-Ukraine conspiracy should come to light. Presumably the conspiracy will remain debunked, which should help dispel the GOP’s Biden corruption in Ukraine narrative.

The concern is that if the Senate proceedings are not made public as the House has done, then there is a significant likelihood that false information will be faked and used to smear Biden.

Debunking false conspiracies and other forms of nonsense

By now, it is clear to nearly all reasonably open-minded observers that the two sides in Washington are not going to cooperate with each other. There is too much hate and distrust for that for the time being, maybe for a very long time. One side in particular, the GOP, keeps relying on debunked conspiracies and other forms of false and misleading information to create false realities and advance their flawed, reality-detached messages.

Since the two sides won't cooperate, the next best thing to get at truth for the public is for the Senate to run its investigations and the House to run its investigations. Between the two of them, so long as the investigations aren't corrupt, the public should get the benefits of whatever information comes to light.

Honest investigations vs. dishonest investigations

If it turns out that Joe Biden did act illegally or improperly in the Ukraine, then the public needs to know that. Unfortunately, the Senate is just now starting its investigation. They can choose to drag it out and dribble out whatever damaging material there may be, or damaging false information they assert, until the election. In that scenario, the GOP can do to Biden’s 2020 campaign exactly what the Russians and Wikileaks did to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Just keep dripping out damaging material just before the election to damage Biden’s campaign as much as possible.

No doubt, the Russians are planning to attack the democratic nominee, regardless of who that turns out to be. If Biden is nominated, he could be under attack by both a dishonest GOP investigation and an illegal Russian lies and smear campaign.

Can one point the same finger of blame at the current House investigation? Are the democrats dragging their impeachment investigation out? Arguably they are not yet at that point. That investigation is focused on potentially impeachable information that became publicly known in recent months, i.e., the September 2019 release of the president’s phone call partial transcript and the whistleblower report in September of this year of improper actions by the president. The House is not pursuing anything in the Mueller report, which seems to put evidence of the president’s obstruction of justice and conspiracy with Russia off limits. If the House drags their investigation out until, say May, then an allegation of a dishonest, purely partisan investigation becomes reasonable.

By contrast with the House investigation of the president’s actions in Ukraine, the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory has been around for years. The GOP could have started this investigation while Obama was still in office. Instead of investigating Biden years ago, the GOP chose to ignore it until now. One has to ask why now?

So far, the House investigation looks to be mostly honest, but arguably significantly (but not completely) partisan. Whether the Senate investigation turns out to be honest or dishonest cannot be known now. It is fair to have some skepticism about GOP motives in waiting for years to begin an investigation the party showed no serious interest in until now. The GOP’s timing is curious, to say the least. Time will tell how the Senate chooses to conduct itself.

Sounds Like Projection & Misinformation

Human scum

The president tweeted this today: “Corrupt politician Adam Schiff’s lies are growing by the day. Keep fighting tough, Republicans, you are dealing with human scum who have taken Due Process and all of the Republican Party’s rights away from us during the most unfair hearings in American History. But we are winning big, and they will soon be on our turf.”

Human scum? Given all the felony indictments, guilty pleas and convictions that the felons the president surrounded himself with, that sounds like the president is projecting his own moral character and temperament. Psychological projection is a defence mechanism the ego uses to defend itself against unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves but attributing them to others.

Not working

Other projections from the GOP are common at present. One is the false assertion that democrats are not working but are wasting time with impeachment hearings. One of the things that constitutes working for congress is legislating and legislating in a democracy requires compromising. If there is no compromise, then it's not democracy and instead is some form of tyranny, oligarchy or single-party rule.

At present, congressional GOP members refuse to compromise and when there is legislation, the GOP Senate ignores it instead of opening up communications on compromises. In fact, while democrats have done their job the GOP is proud of not doing its job. For example, Senate majority leader McConnell openly calls himself the ‘grim reaper’ who will kill any House legislation he dislikes. As of about six months ago, the Grim Reaper had killed over 100 pieces of legislation the House had passed. Legislation requires compromise when the House and Senate are controlled by different parties.

It goes without saying that when circumstances demand it, the House needs to hold an impeachment inquiry. That is working under House rules, despite GOP allegations of single party unfairness and refusal to compromise. The Senate will deal with impeachment in its own way according to its own rules. Legislation requires compromise when the House and Senate are controlled by different parties. Impeachment does not require compromise between the parties.

Lies

The president’s tweet quoted above accuses Adam Schiff of lying. In view of the president’s staggering public record of making over 13,000 false and misleading statements as of October 9, 2019, he is arguably projecting once again. No other president in recent history has come close to this level of blatant contempt for truth and disrespect for people who do value honesty. With a track record like that, the president has earned and deserves no trust from anyone. That some people choose to trust him despite a record of chronic lying is their own choice made for their own reasons.

Some House GOP members are advancing a debunked narrative that the Ukraine, not Russia, interfered with the 2016 election to help the president win the Electoral College vote. In her opening statement this morning, Fiona Hill, former White House Russia expert testified that this narrative is false and harmful to US interests and to the Ukraine. Her written speech on this point reads as follows:

“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.

The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.

The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned. Our highly professional and expert career foreign service is being undermined.

..... 

I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist.” (emphasis added)

In view of existing evidence, the false GOP Ukraine interference narrative is at least misinformation and lies at worst.

Have Humans Hit Peak Intelligence?

An article at Neurologica blog by Steven Novella discusses an article at The Conversation that considers the interesting question of whether humans are at or near the limits of what the human mind can comprehend. What prompts the inquiry is an apparent slowing in the rate of advances in knowledge. One issue increasing complexity in technology is needed to push the edge of knowledge forward. Another concern comes from decades of failure in trying to solve some problems that science revealed in the last century.

That raises the question of whether the human mind is at or near the limits of its capacity to comprehend reality to the extent technology can make reality apparent to human senses. For example, we still cannot make sense of some aspects of quantum mechanics (duality and apparent non-locality). The article at Neurologica asks if that roadblock is akin to trying to teach a cat to understand calculus. Maybe the cat brain-mind is simply not equipped to comprehend calculus.

The Conversation article posits the problem like this:

“Will science ever be able to provide all the answers? Human brains are the product of blind and unguided evolution. They were designed to solve practical problems impinging on our survival and reproduction, not to unravel the fabric of the universe. This realization has led some philosophers to embrace a curious form of pessimism, arguing there are bound to be things we will never understand. Human science will therefore one day hit a hard limit – and may already have done so.”

The Novella article responds:

“We are having to work harder and harder for progressively smaller returns. Rather than hitting a wall, I agree that we will likely just wade into the molasses. We will keep pushing deeper and deeper into fundamental theories about how the universe works, but progress will become slower and slower. While I think it is reasonable to conclude that this is likely the long term trend of scientific discovery, I don’t think we are in a position to determine where we are in that arc. You cannot see a pattern when you are in the middle of it. .... But more predictably, we are also developing artificial intelligence. Whatever you think about the current state and the rate of progress of this endeavor, we are steadily developing more and more intelligent machines, and eventually we will very likely develop general AI with capabilities beyond humans.”

Complexity is an issue that the Novella article addresses. Because complexity in both technology and society is increasing, it is possible that at some point in time we will not be able to effectively manage it. That could lead to some sort of spontaneous or semi-managed breakdown and reset of civilization. Novella writes:

“Think of our legal system, our medical system, any bloated piece of software, and of course biological systems. At some point there may be a revolution and cleansing, wipe the slate clean and start fresh. That is the long-term pattern of human history. No state lasts forever. The cleansing does not always have to be a revolution, however, it can be a managed reformation.”

Has peak intelligence been hit in some areas of the law?

Mention of our legal system is interesting. My own experience with federal courts led me to conclude about a decade ago that the trial courts and the supreme court were no longer able to deal rationally or competently with complex legal battles over intellectual property. Supreme court holdings were blowing certain areas of law to pieces on irrational grounds. Generalist attorney-judges, usually liberal arts majors, simply could not understand technical complexity, especially in areas of biomedical research, chemistry and molecular biology. The solution appeared to be to create a separate supreme court[1] for intellectual property and technology-based disputes with the judges composed of chemists, engineers and biomedical and other technical experts. In other words, science had advanced past the capacity of the law to keep up.

Instead of lawyers, some areas of law arguably need scientists, not just generalist lawyers, to judge in the midst of staggering complexity. Arguably, the law at least in certain technology areas is beyond a level it can always deal with competently.

Footnote:
1. Since the 1980's, a single appeals court, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), has dealt with all patent cases from all states. The CAFC is unique among appeals courts because it has jurisdiction based completely on subject matter instead of geographic location. That court was created because the other federal appeal circuits dealing with patents were hopelessly messed up about not only the law itself, which deals with a couple of intractably complex concepts based on personal judgment, e.g., obviousness, but also increasingly complex technology. The CAFC was one of several congressional attempts to make patent law more coherent and rational and thus predictable. In recent years the supreme court, in its majestic ignorance, has intervened and set patent law back to the incomprehensible, unpredictable black magic of the early 1950s in certain technology areas.

For @#$% sake, choose another word

By Jim Cosgrove
https://www.kansascity.com/living/family/article97041052.html

Consider the F-word. Yup, that F-word. The granddaddy of all curse words. The exhaustingly exploited F-bomb.

Yes, I’ve used it. You’ve probably used it, too. And if you haven’t, you’ve thought about using it.

That emotionally charged word has become a topic of interesting conversation in our house now that school has started.

“I hear that word all the time from the boys in my class,” our younger daughter said.

“Yeah, me too,” said our sixth-grader. “Third grade was about the time I started to hear it.”

While they might hear it more often on the playground and in the cafeteria, it’s not like they haven’t heard it before at sporting events or from strangers walking down the street.

I’m not particularly offended by the F-word. It’s just annoying, like a linguistic gnat. Its overuse renders it meaningless. Like when it’s used to describe something awesome and something heinous. How can it be both?

It starts creeping into the lexicon of kids who want to feel cool and empowered, like they’re getting away with something. And it pretty much continues to be used by those same kids when they’re adults and for the same reasons.

A few years ago, I attended a presentation at work by a well-respected and talented video producer. About 15 minutes into his talk, he dropped an F-bomb, then he paused, and with a mischievous grin said, “It’s cool if I use that here, right?” He had the self-satisfied look of a 10-year-old who just got away with passing gas at Thanksgiving dinner.

Despite some squirming and uncomfortable laughter from most of the nearly 100 people in the audience, not one of us was willing to admit to being “uncool.” Apparently he took this as an expletive-approving green light.

I started counting how many times he used the F-word and finally gave up after a dozen or so. I soon lost interest in the presentation, because his videos, although impressive, were completely upstaged by his lack of class and his disrespect for a professional environment. Maybe some people found his cavalier attitude refreshing and endearing. I guess I’m just not that cool.

From a grammatical standpoint, I must admit that the F-word has impressive versatility. Although it emerged primarily as a verb, its variations can be used as a noun, adjective, adverb, interjection and an effective intensifier. There aren’t many words with that kind of range.

But aside from that, it’s a lazy choice. And I find it boring when comedians use it excessively. The most creative and funny people don’t have to lean on obscenities and shock to get a laugh.

I can appreciate that the F-word has its place when, say, a hammer falls on your toe. And I have to laugh in conversation with my Irish friends who were weaned on the word and can’t help using it in every other sentence. And it’s pretty funny when Grandma drops a cuss word at a family gathering and grabs everyone’s attention.

As a parent and a lover of language and civility, my appeal to habitual F-bombers is to simply show some respect. We’ve taught our girls that a person’s choice of words is often an indication of how they’ll treat others. If people use disrespectful language, they’ll likely be disrespectful in other ways.

Words have power. They carry energy, vibrations and resonance. The F-word has especially low vibration. That’s why it’s a popular choice in negative energy situations of anger and aggression.

Most people avoid lobbing these word grenades around children or their own moms. So why would we not extend the same respect to friends, co-workers and strangers — or to an audience we were being paid to address?

If you want to grab attention with your language, then consider a creative challenge to try something new. Check out a thesaurus. You’ll find thousands of interesting words in there.

Some personal observations by Snowflake:

The F word might be the granddaddy of all curse words, but the C word is far more offensive - just saying.

Otherwise, I would say people who over-use the F word have a F......in' lack of imagination - just saying