News chunks: Christian nationalist internal divisions; Pollution industry propaganda tactics shift

I do not engage much about what Christianity means or what a real Christian is compared to faux Christians. To me, one cannot rationally discuss or argue about things that are mostly or completely matters of faith, including religion and its dogmas. It’s completely or almost completely subjective. Newsweek writes about an example of this subjectivity from the “Jesus Gets You” TV ads that a Christian billionaire ran during the superbowl (edited lightly):

Christian Super Bowl Commercial Outrages Conservatives

Some conservatives felt like the advertisement justified certain sins.

The commercial, funded by the organization "He Gets Us" showed images of several people, including a woman outside a family planning clinic and a person attending a protest, having their feet washed, a reference to the story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet. The commercial ends with the phrase, “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.”

The images are meant to symbolize “how we should treat one another,” while the commercial is meant to call themes of “love and unity” and “love your neighbor” ahead of a deeply divided election, according to the organization in a press release, which says its goal is to “remind everyone, including ourselves, that Jesus' teachings are a warm embrace, not a cold shoulder.” 

Still, the commercial was met with an icy reception from many conservatives and religious leaders on social media.

“The ‘he gets us’ feet ad about Jesus seems to imply that Jesus was cool with all kinds of sinful behavior. He wasn’t. He didn’t go hangout with prostitutes or any other sinner because he accepted the choices they made, he did it to inspire them to change,” Robby Starbuck, a music video director and former congressional candidate, posted to X.

“The ‘He Gets Us’ commercial might seem harmless to some, but it’s obviously part of a psyop to trick Christians into thinking Jesus is fine with sin & apostasy. It’s the opposite of what our world needs right now,” pastor Ryan Visconti wrote.

Andrew T. Walker, a Southern Seminary theology professor, posted that the commercial “framed evangelism with a leftward tinge, communicating the respectability of certain sins over others in our culture.”  

“Some Christians hated the @HeGetsUs ad because they think it’s an insult to show us humbling ourselves to serve people with whom we disagree. Or they think serving = affirming sin. Reread the Sermon on the Mount. The culture war taught you to focus on fighting them, not Jesus,” posted Justin Giboney, an attorney who co-hosts The Church Politics Podcast.

See the vast difference in how Christian nationalists see their own freaking religion? Also, see how the haters view their version of Christianity through a pure politics lens? I am not going to engage with any of that bickering.

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In what seems to be a shift in dark free speech tactics by the pro-pollution economic sector, plastics companies are going on the attack by cynically shifting blame for plastics pollution from themselves to consumers. The WaPo writes:

The plastics industry would like a word with your kids

School campuses are a new battleground in an increasingly bitter brawl over plastic’s impact on the environment

Wearing a lab coat, Eve Vitale asked a chemistry class at Warren Mott High School if anyone had heard anything bad about plastics. Hands shot up. It doesn’t degrade, said one student. It hurts the environment, said another.

But “that’s not really the plastic’s fault,” said Vitale, chief executive of the Society of Plastics Engineers Foundation, a group of industry professionals. “That’s the fault of humanity.” After warning what a “mess” it would be in supermarkets and hospitals without plastics, Vitale instructed that the plastic pollution crisis could be addressed through stepped up personal responsibility, product innovation and improvements in recycling.  

School campuses are a new battleground in an increasingly bitter brawl over plastics, as groups like Vitale’s seek to improve the reputation of a material that has become infamous as an environmental menace. The efforts are partially funded by companies involved in or dependent on fossil fuel production, through donations and conference sponsorships. Plastics manufacturing involves large amounts of oil and natural gas. Some of these companies see plastics as an opportunity to continue growing as demand for gasoline and diesel dissipates amid the rise of electric vehicles.

As usual, it is always about the money and the power needed to get it. Here, the polluters seek power by polluting children’s minds with the cynical argument that plastics pollution is the consumer’s fault. The plastics makers say they have nothing to do with it. What an outrageous, cynical lie. 

Decades ago, right from the get-go, the plastics makers knew their products were an environmental disaster. Nonetheless, they told us plastics were recyclable, thereby coaxing consumers into accepting them as harmless. 

Symbols of deceit - ~90% of plastics aren't recyclable, 

so the recycling myth is 100% a lie

I posted about this topic in 2020, citing this 5 minute NPR interview (and also here about cynical industry tactics) .

Besides shifting to blaming consumers, the industry also says part of the solution could come from “product innovation” and “improvements in recycling.” What a load of insulting crap. Improvements in recycling have been needed for decades, but we are still in the same place we always were, i.e., over 90% of plastic has never been recycled. The polluters citing unspecified product innovation is cynical, insulting, meaningless nonsense. Single use plastic is single use plastic. You use it once, toss it, can’t recycle or burn it, so it pollutes the environment. 

The situation is simple. Polluting the environment with plastic makes lots of money. Polluters want to keep polluting for money. Period. 

News bits & chunk: The latest impeachment; Regarding high drug costs; Predicting the future

The New Republic reports about why cynical, morally rotted authoritarian House Republicans impeached Mayorkas:

On Tuesday, Republican Representative French Hill announced the party’s bald-faced political motivations for impeaching Mayorkas. .... “We need to shut the border.… The president could take executive action to do it today—doesn’t need more money. It needs action, and this is what’s disappointing to people, and that’s why Mayorkas is gonna pay this public relations price by being impeached for the first time since 1876,” Hill said. Notably absent from Hill’s explanation was any description of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Mayorkas.

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We all know this, but it bears repeating. Ars Technica reports about a report about outrageous drug prices in America:

Big Pharma spends billions more on executives 

and stockholders than on R&D

Senate report points to greed and "patent thickets" as key reasons for high prices

When big pharmaceutical companies are confronted over their exorbitant pricing of prescription drugs in the US, they often retreat to two well-worn arguments: One, that the high drug prices cover costs of researching and developing new drugs, a risky and expensive endeavor, and two, that middle managers—pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), to be specific—are actually the ones price gouging Americans.

Both of these arguments faced substantial blows in a hearing Thursday held by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). In fact, pharmaceutical companies are spending billions of dollars more on lavish executive compensation, dividends, and stock buyouts than they spend on research and development (R&D) for new drugs, Sanders pointed out. “In other words, these companies are spending more to enrich their own stockholders and CEOs than they are in finding new cures and new treatments,” he said.  

A report this month by the US Department of Health and Human Services found that in 2022, US prices across all brand-name and generic drugs were nearly three times as high as prices in 33 other wealthy countries. That means that for every dollar paid in other countries for prescription drugs, Americans paid $2.78. And that gap is widening over time.  

The powerful pharmaceutical trade group PhRMA, published a blog post before the hearing saying that comparing US drug prices to prices in other countries “hurts patients.” The group argued that Americans have broader, faster access to drugs than people in other countries.

Right, comparing US drug prices to those in other countries hurts patients. Just like it is not time to discuss gun safety laws right after another school massacre with an AR-15 freshly bought by a known enraged freak who should not be allowed to own a gun. Got it. 

 

Bernie raging against the machine

(the machine ignores him, then giggles and raises prices)

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An article Vox published discusses the art and science of predicting future events. It really is a combination of art and science and most “experts” (pundits, academics, corporations, lobbyists, etc.) are so bad at it that statistical analysis of their prognostications, show they are barely better than random guessing. Just a squeak better. 

Vox writes about a group of extraordinary human prognosticator freaks calling themselves the Samotsvety group. Samotsvety was the name of a Russian rock group of 50 years ago. I posted about this prediction phenomenon before, e.g., here and here. 

People with extraordinary ability to predict future events were called Superforecasters. The Samotsvety group, a recent phenomenon, are the best of the best Superforecasters. My guess is that maybe about 1 in 10 million people have this talent, whether they know it or not. My estimate is that probably about 1 in 10,000 to 100,000 people have regular Superforecaster-level talent. These Samotsvety people are truly extraordinary. Dylan Matthews at Vox writes:

How a ragtag band of internet friends became the 

best at forecasting world events

I wanted to hang out with Samotsvety for a bit because they were the best of the best, and thus a good crew to learn from.

They count among their fans Jason Matheny, now CEO of the RAND Corporation, a think tank that’s long worked on developing better predictive methods. Before he was at RAND, Matheny funded foundational work on forecasting as an official at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a government organization that invests in technologies that might help the US intelligence community. “I’ve admired their work,” Matheny said of Samotsvety. “Not only their impressive accuracy, but also their commitment to scoring their own accuracy” — meaning they grade themselves so they can know when they fail and need to do better. That, he said, “is really rare institutionally.”

A common measure of forecasting ability is the relative Brier score, a number that aggregates the result of every prediction for which an outcome is now known, and then compares each forecaster to the median forecaster. A score of 0 means you’re average; a positive score means worse than average while negative means better than average. In 2021, the last full year Samotsvety participated, their score in the Infer tournament was -2.43, compared to -1.039 for the next-best team. They were more than twice as good as the nearest competition.

The literature on superforecasting, from Tetlock, Mellers, and others, finds some commonalities between good predictors. One is a tendency to think in numbers. Quantitative reasoning sharpens thinking in this context. “Somewhat likely,” “pretty unlikely,” “I’d be surprised.” These kinds of phrases, on their own, convey some useful information about someone’s confidence in a prediction, but they’re impossible to compare to each other — is “pretty unlikely” more or less doubtful than “I’d be surprised”? Numbers, by contrast, are easy to compare, and they provide a means of accountability. Unsurprisingly, many great forecasters, in Samotsvety and elsewhere, have backgrounds in computer science, economics, math, and other quantitative disciplines.

That leads to another commonality: practice. Forecasting is a lot like any other skill — you get better with practice — so good forecasters forecast a lot, and that in turn makes them better at it. They also update their forecasts a lot. The [China invades] Taiwan numbers I heard from the team at the start of our meeting? They weren’t the same by the end. Part of practicing is adjusting and tweaking constantly.

The article is quite long and discusses all of this and more in greater detail. 

So what?

I post this as just a reminder about how error-prone, most (~99.99% ?) self-professed pundits, opinionators, experts, cable news blowhards, demagogues, kleptocrats, blind, raging ideologues, preachers, politicians and the like are telling us when they bloviate and tell us they know what their ideas will do for our own good in the future. They are usually wrong, often lying, often ignorant or misinformed. That is why it is so rare for such people to track their own success and failure rate. They know they are mostly full of crap or simply bullshitting. They will never track their own professional performance, much less make it public. In fact, our media and political systems tend to reward blowhards who are confident in their usually over-simplified and/or distorted simplified, nuance-free narratives. They are rewarded not because they are right, but because they seem credible, attract attention and/or are convincing. 

And they want us to trust them? Pfft.

Science: Biomarkers for dementia and other diseases; Climate change cognitive biology

Researchers at the University of Warwick (Coventry, UK) and Fudan U. (Shanghai, China) have found that abnormal blood plasma levels of four specific proteins out of the 1,463 normally found predicted disease up to 15 years in advance of diagnosis of all forms of dementia. The researchers used AI (artificial intelligence) to analyze plasma proteins from 52,645 normal patients who had blood plasma frozen in 2006 to 2012 and then analyzed 10-15 years later. The AI picked out several proteins that had previously been linked with dementia in small studies to be accurately predictive of dementia. 

The AI analysis in this massive study combined two kinds of data, (1) patient demographics (age, sex, education, genetics) with (2) observation of abnormal plasma levels of either of two proteins alone GFAP (glial fibrillary acidic protein) or GDF15 (growth/differentiation factor 15) and found a tight correlation. Based on the data used in the study, the AI analysis was 89.1% accurate in predicting dementia from all causes, 87.2% accurate in predicting Alzheimer's Disease and 91.2% in predicting vascular dementia.  

The research in published in Nature Aging on Feb.12 (behind a paywall) and Nature Communications here (free access).

If this research is repeated and confirmed, the results from this research are good enough to use a simple blood test for GFAP and/or GDF15 for widespread routine screening to identify patients highly likely to develop dementia years later. Once this this test for dementia is independently confirmed, it would be a major breakthrough that should not take years to integrate into mainstream medicine.

Cancer genus (left), dementia genus (right)

Vertical axis: proteins

Horizontal axis: Groups of diseases and specific kinds of disease 

in the group, e.g., genus = circulatory system disorders, 

species = hypertension, heart failure, etc. 

The two figures above from the research article suggests a couple of interesting things. First, this kind of complex AI-driven analysis can be used to predict other kinds of diseases, cancers in the first figure, all kinds of diseases in the second. The point is that AI can comb through gigantic piles of biological data from tens of thousands of people and pick out meaningful bits of information among all the noise of normal, messy biology. I'm not sure humans alone can do that, but if they can, it is much slower going than what AI can do.

Second, age, sex, education and genetics constituted the demographic data this research was based on. Future research can include additional factors for each individual patient, e.g, income, race, etc., to see what other individual factors might increase the predictive accuracy of the blood test. The database this research was based on included a lot more demographic factors than the four listed, but AI just picked those four out of the data obtained from patients when they initially donated blood. This research should point to other data that could be obtained from healthy donors for future rounds of analysis to look for even more accurate predictive tests for all kinds of diseases.

The Communications paper comments reflects those possibilities:

Developing a single-domain assay to identify individuals at high risk of future events is a priority for multi-disease and mortality prevention. By training a neural network, we developed a disease/mortality-specific proteomic risk score (ProRS) based on 1461 Olink plasma proteins measured in 52,006 UK Biobank participants. This integrative score markedly stratified the risk for 45 common conditions, including infectious, hematological, endocrine, psychiatric, neurological, sensory, circulatory, respiratory, digestive, cutaneous, musculoskeletal, and genitourinary diseases, cancers, and mortality. The discriminations witnessed high accuracies achieved by ProRS for 10 endpoints (e.g., cancer, dementia, and death), with C-indexes exceeding 0.80 [exceeding 80% accuracy]. .... Our models were internally validated in the UK Biobank; thus, further independent external validations are necessary to confirm our findings before application in clinical settings.

Molecular medicine is getting to be very interesting. 

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Nature Climate Change published a research paper, Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action, about human paralysis in the face of climate change. The paper summarizes the frustrating situation:

Mitigating climate change necessitates global cooperation, yet global data on individuals’ willingness to act remain scarce. In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action. Countries facing heightened vulnerability to climate change show a particularly high willingness to contribute. Despite these encouraging statistics, we document that the world is in a state of pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act. This perception gap, combined with individuals showing conditionally cooperative behavior, poses challenges to further climate action. Therefore, raising awareness about the broad global support for climate action becomes critically important in promoting a unified response to climate change.

The world’s climate is a global common good and protecting it requires the cooperative effort of individuals across the globe. Consequently, the ‘human factor’ is critical and renders the behavioral science perspective on climate change indispensable for effective climate action. Despite its importance, limited knowledge exists regarding the willingness of the global population to cooperate and act against climate change. To fill this gap, we designed and conducted a globally representative survey in 125 countries, with the aim of examining the potential for successful global climate action. The central question we seek to answer is to what extent are individuals around the globe willing to contribute to the common good, and how do people perceive other people’s willingness to contribute (WTC)?

I interpret this to support my belief that there exists (1) world wide dark free speech, coupled with successful political corruption schemes by interests and entities (human and corporate) that profit from pollution and more climate change, and (2) those have been majors factor that have poisoned the collective human mind about climate change. Those are the single most important factors in contributing to our collective ignorance and paralysis.

The data is summarized below.

We have to (1) learn and trust each other or face very bad climate consequences, and (2) understand who the deadly enemies are here, e.g., the staunchly pro-pollution, radical authoritarian Republican Party, oil, gas and coal Cos. like Exxon-Mobil, the plastics and chemical industries, pro-pollution lobbyists, etc., and call them out for their moral and actual crimes (including legalization of formerly illegal polluting activity).

Senate passes a $95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel

 

but fate in the House is uncertain

https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-aid-congress-senate-5fdcf8cb1964681dcce0f4fe7b9a0f86

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate early Tuesday passed a $95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, pushing ahead after months of difficult negotiations and amid growing political divisions in the Republican Party over the role of the United States abroad.

The vote came after a small group of Republicans opposed to the $60 billion for Ukraine held the Senate floor through the night, using the final hours of debate to argue that the U.S. should focus on its own problems before sending more money overseas. But 22 Republicans voted with nearly all Democrats to pass the package 70-29, with supporters arguing that abandoning Ukraine could embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin and threaten national security across the globe.

Yet the package faces a deeply uncertain future in the House, where hardline Republicans aligned with former President Donald Trump — the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, and a critic of support for Ukraine — oppose the legislation.

Speaker Mike Johnson cast new doubt on the package in a statement Monday evening, making clear that it could be weeks or months before Congress sends the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk — if at all.

Hello Mr. Trump, how should we in the House vote on this bill?

Seeing is not necessarily believing… or is it?

(Long read but I hope you give it a chance.  You might enjoy it!  Switching gears to something lite-r and kind of scienc-y.  I know science is welcomed here on this blog also.  So, here goes…)

Optical illusions are strange phenomena, as we all know.  Stare at the center of the following image for a few seconds.  It doesn’t move.  

Now look away from the center.  It moves again.

Optical illusions can make you believe something is true (“true”… that’s an interesting concept 😉) when maybe it isn’t.  I.e., our eye-brain coordination can be (let’s call it) “faulty” like that.  Here’s another good one:

Okay, all that was to just get you into the right mood/frame of mind.  Now for the kicker.  If you really want to get deep into it, everything you see is just a figment of your imagination, a result of faulty eye-brain coordination, an optical illusion.  

Yes, it gets worse.  Much worse.  I’m talking about the Mother of All Optical Illusions.  I’m talking about existence itself. 😮

In “reality,” it’s all just a bunch of particles and forces, wafting through space, coming together to form “visible images” and “solid matter.”  Let’s take a closer look (really close!):

“Questions, comments, war stories,” as one of my professors used to say?

* * *

Actually, I have a question for all our brainiacs here, and we have plenty.  We know who you are and you know who you are, so don’t try to hide yourself or feign humility. We're onto you. 😉

I want to know:

Q: Why do these fundamental particles and forces come together to form particular macroscopic objects?  IOW, why do we have individual entities in our reality?  That’s a burning question for me. Shouldn't it be for all of us??

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  We have, for example, chairs because carpenters (or machines) build chairs.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  You’re “too far up” the entities chain with that.  Back up. Why do some particles form seeds, that form into trees, that form into wood, that we then form into chairs… that Carpenter Jack built)?  (Okay, a little comedy relief).  But back to my point…

So, to rephrase, I want to know what causes atoms and forces to form into particular macroscopic things (like wood, flowers, clouds, hair strands, what have you?)[1]  Is it chemically induced/dictated (my suspicion)?  Help!

(by PrimalSoup)

Important Footnote: 

1. I’m not talking about things replicating (procreating) themselves; in particular organic things.  I’m also not talking about things evolving into other things.  That’s already way too far up the “process” chain.  I’m talking about the original/fundamental “coming together” process to form a particular individual thing/entity.  Particles and forces forming things, and what causes that.

The MSM reflects on the Hur report and itself: Regrets are surfacing

In a WaPo opinion (here not behind paywall) this morning Jennifer Rubin writes, citing, among other things, the Just Security analysis of the Hur report that I posted about yesterday:

Hur’s political hatchet job. Garland’s blunder. Media complicity.

Special counsel Robert K. Hur had a single task: Determine if President Biden illegally retained sensitive documents after his vice presidency. The answer should not have taken nearly 13 months or a more than 300-page report. Hur also should have avoided trashing “the fundamental ethos of a prosecutor to avoid gratuitous smears,” as former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen told me.

It was Hur’s gratuitous smear about Biden’s age and memory — most egregiously, his far-fetched allegation that Biden could not recall the date of his son Beau’s death — that transformed a snide report into a political screed. Speculating about how a jury might have perceived the president years after the incidents took place was entirely irrelevant because the lack of evidence meant there would be no case.   

Finally, the media — which made a spectacle of itself hollering at and interrupting Biden in his news conference after the report was released — certainly amplified the GOP talking point. Many outlets failed to explain that there was insufficient evidence of willfulness. For days, headlines focused on the memory smear rather than on Biden’s exoneration. Worse, Sunday news shows misreported the report.

Rubin also rips Merrick Garland for gross incompetence in allowing Hur to smear Biden.

Other MSM sources are now starting to voice similar regrets about how they mishandled the Hur report and allowed him to smear Biden.

Michael Tomasky writing for The New Republic makes important points about the MSM and propaganda that are not raised enough:

The Only Mental Acuity I’m Questioning These Days 

Is the Mainstream Media’s

We’re at a fateful crossroads here. On one road, the Avenue of Responsible Sobriety traveled by the Times and the Post and most of the mainstream media, lies legitimate and necessary dialogue about whether any octogenarian, and this one specifically, is fit to be president. But the other road, the Mad Max Hellscape Expressway, has been taken over by the right-wing media, whose interest is not legitimate dialogue but the utter destruction of the octogenarian in question.

This is not a level playing field, folks. Where these roads meet, the souped-up Hummers of the Hellscape Expressway will overrun the dainty Priuses of Responsibility Avenue.

What’s the greater potential for havoc and destruction of our way of life—the things Biden forgets, or the things Trump remembers? 

I have written what I’m about to write here probably 20 times in the last couple years, and I’ll write it 20 more or 200 more until I see people starting to get the point. In terms of how the American political media works, we have recently crossed a dark Rubicon. We now live in a world, which I believe we entered after January 6, 2021, in which the right-wing media sets the national agenda. The mainstream media follows.

Going way back in time, we had only a mainstream media—the Times and the Post and the Associated Press and the major networks. In the 1970s, after the famous Powell Memo, wealthy conservatives began funding their own media. For most of the last 50 years, even as the right-wing media grew, it remained clear that the mainstream media set the agenda—that is, it determined what we all talked about every day.

But recently, that flipped. This transformation has been in process for several years, but I date it to January 6 for two reasons. First, before that, the right-wing media didn’t have all-consuming power when it came to crunch time. They could not, for example, elect Donald Trump. There was still enough of a shred of news-gathering honesty at Fox News that it called Arizona for Joe Biden. Second, January 6 was a moment of choosing for the American right. Conservative politicians and the right-wing media could have woken up on January 7 and decided that enough was enough, and they were captaining their MAGA-ized spaceship back down to planet Earth.

But we’ve seen how both of those matters sorted themselves out. Fox forced out the two people who made that Arizona call. You think this November Fox will be in the vanguard—it was the first network to give Arizona to Biden—of calling a purple state for the Democrat? It’s inconceivable. And on the second matter, with a few notable exceptions, virtually the whole party now embraces the January 6 “uprising” (or is too cowardly to say otherwise).

The right-wing media has followed suit, giving us a sprawling and enormously powerful messaging apparatus—Fox, Newsmax, One America, all those Sinclair radio and TV stations, Christian radio, most newspapers out there around the country, the majority of prominent opinion journals, most of largest social media personalities, and more—that now sings from the same hymnal. They did before, but January 6 provided that extra kick; the grain alcohol in the punch. It gave these outlets a sense of mission that wasn’t quite so fully and recognizably there before.

Again we see that the DFS (dark free speech) Hummers of the Hellscape Expressway is central to the rise and radicalization of American radical right authoritarianism. Its power and deadly influence are simply undeniable. The weakness of the MSM armed with facts, truths and sound reasoning is just as clear.

If conservative politicians and the right-wing media had woke up on January 7 and decided to pilot their MAGA-ized DFS spaceship back down to planet Earth, I guarantee our democracy, civil liberties and rule of law would not be in such grave danger.

But here we are. Like it or not, DFS is more powerful than facts and truth. The onus is on the truth speakers to do a lot better job than they have been with the constraints they operate under. That should have included not letting the morally rotted authoritarian liar Hur smear Biden.