Summations Only

Cool. I always thought Otto wouldn’t have much approved of being quoted as saying that too, despite its very profound truth....

The first applies to the republican obsession with diverting the discussion to Biden:

quote:

---

What Joe Biden Actually Did in Ukraine

​

When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2014, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. pressed President Barack Obama to take decisive action, and fast, to make Moscow pay in blood and money for its aggression. The president, a Biden aide recalled, was having none of it.

​

Mr. Biden worked Mr. Obama during their weekly private lunches, imploring him to increase lethal aid, backing a push to ship FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Kiev. The president flatly rejected the idea and dispatched him to the region as an emissary, cautioning him about not overpromising to the Ukrainian government, Mr. Biden would later write in a memoir.

​

So, Mr. Biden threw himself into what seemed like standard-issue vice-presidential stuff: prodding Ukraine’s leaders to tackle the rampant corruption that made their country a risky bet for international lenders and pushing reform of Ukraine’s cronyism-ridden energy industry.

​

You have to be whiter than snow, or the whole world will abandon you, Mr. Biden told the country’s newly elected president, Petro O. Poroshenko, during an early 2014 phone call, according to former administration officials.

​

Mr. Giuliani has claimed, without evidence, that Mr. Biden’s push to oust Mr. Shokin was an attempt to block scrutiny of his son’s actions. In fact, Mr. Biden was just one of many officials calling for Mr. Shokin to go. Good-government activists were protesting his actions in the streets, as were eurozone power players like Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, along with Ms. Nuland and Senate Republicans.

​

Mr. Biden’s advisers say that he and his son had informally agreed years earlier not to discuss anything pertaining to the younger Mr. Biden’s business activities, as a way to insulate them both.

​

Bob Bauer, former Obama White House counsel and Biden adviser, said that even pressuring Hunter Biden to quit the board would have constituted a breach of that firewall, and suggested that was one of the reasons the vice president chose not to do it. The independent activities of an adult child simply don’t create a ‘conflict of interest’ for the parent who is a public official, he said. And as a matter of sound ethical practice, it is important for officials in this position to maintain that distance: to be able to show that, in doing their jobs, they could not have been affected by discussions or involvement with their adult children relating to private business matters. Their posture has to be, ‘Whatever you decide to do, I am going to do what I have to do.’

​

Mr. Biden has said he first learned of his son’s activities in Ukraine when the story broke in 2014. He told his son, I hope you know what you are doing, according to Hunter Biden’s account of their discussion in The New Yorker earlier this year.

​

If that settled matters between father and son, Hunter Biden’s activities struck many of the officials working on Ukraine policy as an unnecessary distraction, or worse. Mr. Biden’s own aides were so worried about the optics, they enlisted State Department officials to gather facts to determine how to handle the story, according to people who worked with his office.

​

Yet few, if any, had raised the issue with Mr. Biden directly when it first arose. Most viewed the revelation unseemly, but not illegal or a violation of ethics rules as simply not worth risking a scolding from Mr. Biden, who had reacted angrily when Mr. Obama’s aides raised the issue of his son’s lobbying during the 2008 campaign. One person who briefly discussed the matter with Mr. Biden said he was anguished by his son’s personal problems and unsure how to help him recover.

---

Hunter Biden is a red herring non-issue, only brought up to muddy the impeachment process (repubicans, it sems, do not have any other defense)and

quote:

---

The Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Begins A New Phase This Week: What You Need To Know

​

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants are turning a new page in their impeachment inquiry this week based on a principle familiar to classics scholars: repetitio mater studiorum.

​

"Repetition is the mother of all learning."

​

For news audiences, key details about the Ukraine affair have been told, so far, twice: First, in leaked and preliminary accounts of what witnesses told investigators behind closed doors, and then in the full transcripts released last week of their depositions.

​

This week, some witnesses will tell their stories for a third time, in open hearings scheduled before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

​

On Wednesday, lawmakers are scheduled to hear testimony from two diplomats, William Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

​

On Friday, the committee is scheduled to hear from the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her mission to Kyiv this spring in an important early stage of the Ukraine affair.

​

Pelosi, Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and others believe they've now established the broad facts of the case, having confirmed and reconfirmed them from a number of witnesses.

​

Now they want some of the key actors to tell their stories once more in open testimony to try to shape public opinion.

---

More at link.Enjoy

If one is to win at trial, such as might take place before the Senate, then it helps to frame events in the proper terms. Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) made several things absolutely clear yesterday on Meet the Press, among them that quid pro quo is the incorrect term for what took place. A quid pro quo is a mutually agreed upon exchange, and there was absolutely no quid pro quo. Trump has been right about this all along.What Trump did is more accurately described as extortion, which is using threats to force some action, often paying money, but it could be anything of value. Trump held the threat of withholding military aid over Ukraine's head in order to force them into a publicly announced investigation of his political rival for his own political advantage in the 2020 election.--Percy

That's the obvious one that everyone has focused on.He was also asking a foreign government for assistance in his election, which is a crime according to federal election law. He has also blatantly done this with Russia and China. On TV. Trump is very good at revising the conversation by near truths.Enjoy

Such a kind way of saying he is lying through his fucking teeth.

As quoted at Hullabaloo:

quote:

---

A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study’s conclusions. E.P.A. officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently...

​

The measure would make it more difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to public health regulations already in place.

---

Original source E.P.A. to Limit Science Used to Write Public Health Rules - The New York Times

Wasn't sure where else to post this. Volodymyr Zelensky earned a law degree and is listed as a "Ukrainian actor, comedian, screenwriter, film producer, director, economist and politician who is currently the 6th President of Ukraine since May 2019."Before actually becoming President he played a school teacher reluctantly catapulted into the office of the President on a TV series, (English title: "Servant of the People"):

quote:

---

The show tells the story of Vasyl Petrovych Holoborodko (Volodymyr Zelensky), a thirty-something high school history teacher who unexpectedly wins election to the presidency of Ukraine, after a viral video filmed by one of his students shows him angrily ranting against government corruption in Ukraine.

---

The show is currently being carried by Netflix in the USA: Watch Servant of the People | NetflixEdited by dwise1, : Minor grammatical correction

Earlier today I added my thoughts to the comments section of the NYT article you linked to. The article isn't very clear about what it means to make the raw data available. If it means making public the actual names of people along with their information then that would have a chilling effect and this is awful.But if anonymity is maintained (e.g., by referring to "patient 237" and such) then I'm in favor of it. Science is very complicated and involved today, and the more the raw data is reviewed and analyzed the more accurate the science should be.Part of the article said that the law would require the EPA to expend a great deal of effort on redactions, but it wasn't specific about what was being redacted. If the redacted material includes people's identities, meaning personal identification data is being passed around, then that greatly increases the possibility that the information could become public and this is, again, awful. It's also inconsistent with the right's paranoid attitudes about maintaining privacy and keeping the government out of their business.Speaking of scientific transparency, I watched a NYT video last night titled Guilty by Machine about breathalyzers. It was one episode of a weekly program called Weekly produced by the NYT that airs on Sunday nights on FX and is also available on Hulu. The companies who make breathalyzers don't want to reveal much about their technology for competitive reasons, and they're SLAPP happy. The programmers who analyzed one of the machine's code were legally not allowed to talk about their results or conclusions, and when the reporter produced a copy of their report one of the programmers said that he was legally required to request that they destroy it. The reporter said she wasn't going to destroy it, and that was followed by a segment where she described the report's content. Which was, of course, damning.Making matters worse, the police don't maintain the machines very well or provide adequate training. When pressed the companies say that their machines offer an approximation that can be affected by a host of variables, but the police and legal system have transformed breathalyzer results into gospel.I only offer this as an example of a scientific area that should have a lot more transparency.--Percy

Determining the validity of breathalyzers is incredibly simple. Because you can measure the results by having a controlled group ingesting different amounts of alcohol, some with no alcohol, and seeing the results based on the amounts consumed along with their respective alcohol content. It doesn't get more measurable than that in order to determine how accurate it is.Now, polygraph machines.... that's a different story. That's junk science through and through.

"So, after work, whatcha say we go out and calibrate a breathalyzer?"Moose

That's exactly what the RCMP do when they train their members to use breathalyzers.Edited by ringo, : Splling.

Lost in the shuffle: China signs defence agreement with South Korea as US angers Seoul with demand for $5bn troop payment

quote:

---

The defence ministers of South Korea and China have agreed to develop their security ties to ensure stability in north-east Asia, the latest indication that Washington’s long-standing alliances in the region are fraying.

​

On the sidelines of regional security talks in Bangkok on Sunday, Jeong Kyeong-doo, the South Korean minister of defence, and his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, agreed to set up more military hotlines and to push ahead with a visit by Mr Jeong to China next year to foster bilateral exchanges and cooperation in defence, South Korea’s defence ministry said.

​

Seoul’s announcement coincided with growing resentment at the $5 billion (3.9bn) annual fee that Washington is demanding to keep 28,500 US troops in South Korea...

​

Daniel Pinkston, a professor of international relations at the Seoul campus of Troy University, was more blunt in his assessment.

​

It’s just extortion, he told The Telegraph. It’s little more than a mob boss going around and demanding protection money. The numbers that the US is demanding are politically impossible for Seoul and Tokyo to swallow and that is just fuelling resentment."

---

Trump's the best friend Russia and China ever had. Think of whar he could do if he was on our side!

quote:

---

Christopher Ruddy (born January 28, 1965) is the CEO of Newsmax Media, which publishes Newsmax.com and broadcasts the Newsmax TV network. A personal friend and staunch supporter of President Donald Trump...

---

The audio available hereI was disappointed in how weakly (at best) the HARDtalk host refuted some of the usual BS Trump talking points. Mainly, Ruddy's assertion that VP Bidden was wrong for calling for the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor that was investigating corruption, when indeed there was very widespread call for the removal because of the prosecutor's lack of investigating corruption. Not a peep out of the HARDtalk host refuting that.Moose

Yeah, that was pretty weak. That wasn’t the regular Hardtalk host - I forget his name, but I have a feeling he would have challenged the fallacies and lies better.Percy

Hardtalk usually seems to give a pretty thorough grilling to the political guests, regardless of where the guest falls on the political spectrum. I had been wanting to hear a Trumpista get challenged, but this one was a dud. Bad time to put in the 2nd string host.This wasn't a real Hardtalk.MooseEdited by Minnemooseus, : Fairly substantial revision.