Let Truth and Justice be Served -- With Amputations and Less Rejards

MSNBC reported yesterday that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) sent a letter to our new Attorney General Merrick Garland. The letter ended with a short handwritten note to Garland offering him congratulations and best regards on his new job. He's going to need some good will, given what he has to do. A whole lot of republicans are going to hate his guts, to say the least. One can already feel the flames of hate and lies starting to bubble up in the bowels of Fox News, Breitbart and all the other fascist right propaganda and lies sources.

The Whitehouse letter asks Garland to investigate several fishy incidents that occurred under the last administration. The incidents include circumstances surrounding the apparent whitewash of the FBI investigation (fake investigation?) of sexual assaults on women by Brett Kavanaugh. That is a big, important plie of sleaze to look into. Kavanaugh is probably unfit to be a Supreme Court justice, but a thorough FBI investigation would have been necessary to show that.

Whitehouse is also asking for investigations into (i) California fuel emission-agreements for antitrust violations, (ii) possible civil fraud by the fossil fuel industry, and (iii) the old Nixon-era justice department memo that says the DoJ cannot indict a sitting president. That ridiculous memo was the excuse the previously corrupted and subverted DoJ used to not prosecute the ex-president for his crimes. 

Godspeed to Whitehouse and Garland. They're going to need all the help they can get. The daggers are already being drawn and the character assassins are creeping out from under the rocks they hide under.

In other encouraging news, the New York Times reported on a declassified US intelligence assessment of the 2020 election. Not surprisingly, Russia did its best to help the ex-president get re-elected and to smear Biden. The NYT writes:

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.

The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.

“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said.

A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.

The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.  

The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Some former officials appointed by the ex-president are already disputing some of the content of the intelligence assessment. The lies are already starting to flow. It would be great if felons like Manafort are forced to spill their guts in court[1] about Russian collusion with the 2016 campaign. Let no one forget that the ex-president quietly killed the FBI collusion investigation and that is the basis the ex-president's supporters use to say there is no evidence of collusion. That deflection masks the fact that the evidence is limited because there was no investigation. That is another steaming pile of sleaze that deserves a whole lot of very bright sunshine. Now that the republican swamp creatures are driven out, the clouds are clearing and the light is getting brighter. 

Mr. Garland is going to be a very busy boy for the next four years. So let's get on with it, amputations, less rejards, skeletons in the closet and all. Inquiring minds want to know.

Skeletons in the closet, where the ex-president hid them

Footnote: 

1. My understanding is that Manafort, and all the other felons, crooks, liars, thugs and traitors the ex-president pardoned, cannot refuse to answer prosecutor's questions under oath. If they lie, they can be prosecuted for perjury. If they refuse to answer questions, they can be jailed for contempt. They have no place to run to (lies) and no rock to hide under (no 5th Amendment for them).

Species Extinctions

An article discusses the impact that humans are having on other species. As one might guess, it isn't positive. The Center for Biological Diversity writes:

We're in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction crisis. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history.

The current mass extinction differs from all others in being driven by a single species rather than a planetary or galactic physical process. When the human race — Homo sapiens sapiens — migrated out of Africa to the Middle East 90,000 years ago, to Europe and Australia 40,000 years ago, to North America 12,500 years ago, and to the Caribbean 8,000 years ago, waves of extinction soon followed. The colonization-followed-by-extinction pattern can be seen as recently as 2,000 years ago, when humans colonized Madagascar and quickly drove elephant birds, hippos, and large lemurs extinct.

The first wave of extinctions targeted large vertebrates hunted by hunter-gatherers. The second, larger wave began 10,000 years ago as the discovery of agriculture caused a population boom and a need to plow wildlife habitats, divert streams, and maintain large herds of domestic cattle. The third and largest wave began in 1800 with the harnessing of fossil fuels. With enormous, cheap energy at its disposal, the human population grew rapidly from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1930, 4 billion in 1975, and over 7.5 billion today. If the current course is not altered, we’ll reach 8 billion by 2020 and 9 to 15 billion (likely the former) by 2050.

Humans’ impact has been so profound that scientists have proposed that the Holocene era be declared over and the current epoch (beginning in about 1900) be called the Anthropocene: the age when the "global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development" dominate planetary physical, chemical, and biological conditions.

• Humans annually absorb 42 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial net primary productivity, 30 percent of its marine net primary productivity, and 50 percent of its fresh water.
• Forty percent of the planet’s land is devoted to human food production, up from 7 percent in 1700.
• Fifty percent of the planet’s land mass has been transformed for human use.

Large animal extinctions are not mostly due to hunting any more. Instead, those extinctions mostly arise from loss of habitat and human-caused climate change. Assuming there is a will to act, those are things we can actually do something about. 

Seeking and finding…

 

Apologies if I embarrass him, but today I am reminded of some words of inspiration from a blog friend, back on November, 28^th of last year.  I saved a copy of it to my desktop because, every now and then, I can use some inspiration, words of wisdom, like this.  Thanks again, Peter. 🙂

 

Thanks for appreciating it and passing it along.

Alabama GOP to give Trump framed resolution calling him one of the ‘greatest’ presidents in history

 The Alabama Republican Party on Saturday will present former President Donald Trump with a framed copy of a resolution, passed unanimously by the party, that declares him "one of the greatest and most effective" presidents in U.S. history.

"The resolution, basically, it just talks about the greatness of Donald J. Trump, how he made America great again and I hope other states will follow suit," Perry Hooper Jr., a former state representative and a member of the state party’s executive committee, told Fox News in an interview.

Hooper will present a framed copy of the resolution to Trump at a reception at Mar-a-Lago, Florida on Saturday evening.

The resolution, which passed unanimously in the party, calls Trump "one of the greatest and most effective presidents in the 245-year history of this Republic" and lists his achievements in office.

"It’s just recognizing him for all the great things he has done for America for bringing back American manufacturing, cutting taxes, creating best economy ever, building up our military," Hooper said.

Hooper said he was speaking not only for the party, but for many Americans who voted for the 45th president in 2020.

"We love him in Alabama, America loves him and he got 75 million votes for a reason and I'm speaking basically for 75 million people in America," he said.

https://www.scribd.com/document/498609678/Alabama-GOP-Resolution#from_embed

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alabama-gop-trump-resolution-greatest-presidents-in-history

Global Warming Update: The Cold Blob Commeth

Note: City locations are incorrect in all the images

The New York Times reports on the weakening of the Gulf Stream Ocean current and what effects on climate that is likely to cause. Warm water off the West African coast crosses to Brazil and then moves north through the Gulf of Mexico and then up the east coast of the US and on up to Canada. The amount of water involved is huge. The current flow from Canada to Europe is slowing due to the ice melt in Greenland. That ice melt is producing a vast cold blob in the North Atlantic that is slowing the flow to Europe. Concerns by climate experts about the slowing of the Gulf Stream have been voiced for at least the last 15 years. A 2005 research paper provides some context for the concern:

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation carries warm upper waters into far-northern latitudes and returns cold deep waters southward across the Equator. Its heat transport makes a substantial contribution to the moderate climate of maritime and continental Europe, and any slowdown in the overturning circulation would have profound implications for climate change. A transatlantic section along latitude 25° N has been used as a baseline for estimating the overturning circulation and associated heat transport. Here we analyze a new 25° N transatlantic section and compare it with four previous sections taken over the past five decades. The comparison suggests that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has slowed by about 30 per cent between 1957 and 2004. (emphasis added)

The NYT writes:

IT’S ONE OF THE MIGHTIEST RIVERS you will never see, carrying some 30 times more water than all the world’s freshwater rivers combined. In the North Atlantic, one arm of the Gulf Stream breaks toward Iceland, transporting vast amounts of warmth far northward, by one estimate supplying Scandinavia with heat equivalent to 78,000 times its current energy use. Without this current — a heat pump on a planetary scale — scientists believe that great swaths of the world might look quite different.

Now, a spate of studies, including one published last week[1], suggests this northern portion of the Gulf Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing. Pushing the bounds of oceanography, scientists have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the Atlantic to better understand the complex network of currents that the Gulf Stream belongs to, not only at the surface, but hundreds of feet deep.

“We’re all wishing it’s not true,” Peter de Menocal, a paleoceanographer and president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said of the changing ocean currents. “Because if that happens, it’s just a monstrous change.”

The consequences could include faster sea level rise along parts of the Eastern United States and parts of Europe, stronger hurricanes barreling into the Southeastern United States, and perhaps most ominously, reduced rainfall across the Sahel, a semi-arid swath of land running the width of Africa that is already a geopolitical tinderbox.

The scientists’ concern stems from their understanding of thousands of years of the prehistoric climate record. In the past, a great weakening or even shutdown of this arm of the Gulf Stream seems to have triggered rapid changes in temperatures and precipitation patterns around the North Atlantic and beyond.

The northern arm of the Gulf Stream is but one tentacle of a larger, ocean-spanning tangle of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have strong evidence from ice and sediment cores that the AMOC has weakened and shut down before in the past 13,000 years. As a result, mean temperatures in parts of Europe may have rapidly dropped to about 15 degrees Celsius below today’s averages, ushering in arctic like conditions. Parts of northern Africa and northern South America became much drier. Rainfall may even have declined as far away as what is now China. And some of these changes may have occurred in a matter of decades, maybe less.

The AMOC is thus a poster child for the idea of climatic “tipping points” — of hard-to-predict thresholds in Earth’s climate system that, once crossed, have rapid, cascading effects far beyond the corner of the globe where they occur. “It’s a switch,” said Dr. de Menocal, and one that can be thrown quickly.

 

Some people still deny climate change is associated with polluting human activity. That is a shocking false belief that ranks up there with the false belief some people still have that the ex-president won the 2020 election. The seeds of human self-delusion and self-annihilation are firmly rooted in the evolution of the human mind. 

Footnote: 

1. That research paper comments:

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—one of Earth’s major ocean circulation systems—redistributes heat on our planet and has a major impact on climate. Here, we compare a variety of published proxy records to reconstruct the evolution of the AMOC since about AD 400. A fairly consistent picture of the AMOC emerges: after a long and relatively stable period, there was an initial weakening starting in the nineteenth century, followed by a second, more rapid, decline in the mid-twentieth century, leading to the weakest state of the AMOC occurring in recent decades.

In this article, using several different and largely independent proxy indicators of the AMOC evolution over the past 100 to nearly 2,000 years, we provide strong evidence that the AMOC decline in the twentieth century is unprecedented and that over the past decades, the AMOC is in its weakest state in over a millennium.

Does the Biological Source of Lying Affect Its Morality?

Oxytocin

Oxytocin is a natural hormone that promotes bonding, e.g., mother-baby bonding, and pro-social behavior by humans. A series of research papers have also described the hormone as a biological source that correlates with lying. The hormone correlates with lying to both help group members and self-serving lying. 

A 2014 paper that found oxytocin-associated lying for group benefit raised the question of the morality of lies arising from a biological source. In an interview, the authors commented: "Our results suggest people are willing to bend ethical rules to help the people close to us, like our team or family. This raises an interesting, although perhaps more philosophical, question: Are all lies immoral? Together, these findings fit a functional perspective on morality revealing dishonesty to be plastic and rooted in evolved neurobiological circuitries, and align with work showing that oxytocin shifts the decision-maker's focus from self to group interests. The results highlight the role of bonding and cooperation in shaping dishonesty, providing insight into when and why collaboration turns into corruption." 

A 2020 research paper indicated that oxytocin also correlates with self-serving lying, thus apparently disconnecting the bonding-social component of oxytocin from a tendency to lie for the group. That research found that administering oxytocin to subjects correlates with increased self-serving lying when repeated opportunities to lie are presented. That paper also generated preliminary results suggesting that the effects of oxytocin administration could be influenced by oxytocin receptor gene differences. That affords a possible basis to argue that lying is influenced to some detectable extent by one or more genes.

Other research indicates that the hormone testosterone appears to exert opposite effects compared to oxytocin. For example, testosterone administration correlated with reduced self-serving lying in males in the absence of a social justification (social group). Administration of testosterone has also been found to have opposing effects on social cognitive functions compared to oxytocin.

Testosterone

This kind of research into the biological basis of arguably immoral behavior will continue to increase in sophistication. Confounding factors such as social vs individual contexts and numbers of opportunities to lie will be identified. It is thus possible that in the next 15-20 years or so, important biological and cognitive sources of immoral behavior will be identified and characterized to some socially useful extent. 

But what then? It is unlikely that society will treat immoral behavior much differently, unless society itself changes. If cause and effect relationships can convincingly be shown, does knowledge of what causes immoral behavior justify it? At present, most experts seem to believe that human have little or no conscious free will. Whatever free will we have arises unconsciously. If so, then people arguably cannot help but do immoral things.