Doctor! Are you not aware of the prophecy the Hybrid will destroy Galifrey?
I am totally aware and I’m not the Doctor.
Sundays on BBC if you care.
Anyway, my appreciation of Tom Lehrer (91 and quite alive) comes straight from Richard who thought he was as funny as a crutch and would sing Fight Fiercely Harvard to me, I suppose as encouragement (applied, they went another direction which is just as well as I would have hated it).
He had all the albums and I’m familiar with most of the songs although sometimes I misremember the lyrics which are tricky. It’s kind of like having an affinity for Spike Jonze, Frank Zappa, or Al Yankovic except of course Tom Lehrer is even geekier since he sings about things like obscure 19th Century Russian Mathematicians and the Periodic Table of Elements.
Now he may not be your cup of tea but as he puts it, “I could always make $3000 a year teaching.”
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Soviet Union breaks WWII Leningrad siege; Robert F. Scott reaches South Pole; Boston Strangler suspect Albert de Salvo convicted.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
The reason the Romans built their great paved highways was because they had such inconvenient footwear.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Reasons child care should be a key election issue.
The other day a correspondent asked me a good question: What important issue aren’t we talking about? My answer, after some reflection, is the state of America’s children.
Now, it’s not entirely fair to say that we’re ignoring the plight of our children. Elizabeth Warren, characteristically, has laid out a comprehensive, fully financed plan for universal child care. Bernie Sanders, also characteristically, says he’s for it but hasn’t provided details. And as far as I can tell, all the other Democratic presidential candidates support doing more for children.
But policy toward children has attracted far less media attention than the debate over “Medicare for all,” which won’t become reality anytime soon — let alone the so-called Warren-Sanders “spat.” And my guess is that even well-informed voters have little sense of the grim exceptionalism of America’s child-oriented policies, which are Dickensian compared with those of every other advanced country.
G.O.P. senators will harm Congress if they turn away from new testimony and information relevant to impeachment.
Just as President Trump’s impeachment trial is getting underway, the Senate is facing a highly charged, unusual situation. New, directly relevant information and evidence is spilling across the internet and the airwaves. Documents and statements from Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer Rudy Giuliani, implicate the president directly in efforts to obtain dirt on and investigations of the Bidens.
Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office issued a legal decision finding that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget violated the Impoundment Control Act when it withheld from obligation the portion of Ukraine assistance funds appropriated to the Department of Defense. [..]
(T)he Senate must take seriously its role in the impeachment trial of President Trump. On Tuesday, when impeachment presentations start, these troves of new information will almost certainly begin to be aired in the chamber as senators listen to the presentation of the House managers. The Senate must demand and obtain all documents and testimony of those with knowledge of the president’s actions who refused to obey lawful subpoenas issued by the House in the impeachment inquiry, like the administration members Mick Mulvaney, Robert Blair and Michael Duffey — as well as documents and other information that is directly relevant to the decision before them.
The president has shown us exactly what happens when good people do nothing.
It passed with the usual shrug by the usual handmaidens of hatred when the president of the world’s most powerful democracy threatened to commit war crimes by bombing Iranian cultural sites — the kind of barbarism practiced by the Taliban and rogue-state thugs.
After being told that he would be in violation of Geneva Convention rules that the United States had helped to create back when America was actually great, President Trump relented, but still wondered: Why not?
The warlord-in-chief had already gone out of his way to protect a Navy SEAL member who’d been accused of committing war crimes. And what kind of man did the president upend the military code of justice for? [..]
On any given day, Trump is vindictive, ignorant, narcissistic, a fraud — well, his pathologies are well known. But it’s time to apply the same word to him as the brave Navy man did to the renegade in his unit. Under Trump, the United States is a confederacy of corruption, driven by a thousand points of evil. And that evil is contagious.
We all grew up hearing an ageless warning about public morality: that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
Voters in this presidential election are more concerned with the candidates’ values than their proposals.
Donald Trump has transformed the electorate into two camps, sycophants and dissidents, both passionate, both aimed like missiles at November, both with an intent desire to destroy the competition.
This election won’t turn on the definition of “Medicare for all” or its funding mechanisms. It won’t turn on who offers free college and to whom. This election will turn on whether an individual voter sees Trump as a heroic savior or a destructive agent.
This election is about fundamental questions of American ideals: Should foreign countries be invited or welcomed to meddle in our elections? Should a president be allowed to openly obstruct justice without consequence? Should we separate immigrant children from their parents and lock them in cages? Should we have a president who has bragged about assaulting women, paid off women who claim to have been sexually involved with him and been accused by multiple women of being sexually inappropriate with them? Should America have a racist in the White House?
It is issues like these, I believe, that will most animate voters in the election. America is being forced to look itself in the mirror and figure out who it is.
And it seems to me that many of the Democratic candidates are missing that base-level moral conflict, aiming over it or wiggling around it.
Acquitting obviously guilty criminals is a shameful American tradition — but beware the righteous blowback
Donald Trump is scared. The Senate trial following his impeachment for a blackmail and campaign cheating scheme starts next week, and it’s driving him to distraction. He was supposed to host a lame event at the White House on Thursday to bolster fake concerns that white evangelicals are being oppressed, but blew off pandering to his strongest supporters for an hour, likely because he couldn’t pry himself away from news coverage of the impeachment trial’s kickoff. After ending the event swiftly, Trump then tweeted angrily, “I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!”
(As with most things the president says, this was untrue — he was impeached weeks ago, in December.)
Trump’s cold sweats are significant, because everyone who has been following this case knows that the Senate will acquit him. Not because he’s innocent — no one who has actually consulted the evidence is foolish enough to believe that — but because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republicans who control the Senate decided long ago that they would cover up for their shamelessly corrupt president no matter what he does. With such an assured outcome, Trump’s fears seem overblown and silly, even for someone crippled by sociopathic narcissism and its accompanying paranoia.
But it’s also true that high-profile travesties of justice, such as the one Senate Republicans are currently preparing to commit, can often provoke major political backlash. Getting a jury to acquit the obviously guilty can, as history shows, cause a public that’s already outraged about the crime to get even more furious. That, I suspect, is what Trump is sweating.
You know, just yesterday I was at my Therapist’s and she remarked that I seemed to be weathering the SAD Season. We meet more frequently during this time and I have fewer life events to report on because outside the Holidays what happens? Coincidently February is fraught and March is madness.
So this session we talked about death because she doesn’t have a couch thus Oedipal conflicts are out of the question (First, it’s a Shrink Joke and a pretty funny and insightful one about the differences between Behavioral, which she practices, and Freudian which I’m familiar with because Clio. Second, she knows a lot about me because that $200 for 45 minutes is all about me. I’ve been seeing her for 6 or 7 years and as far as I’m concerned it’s a Therapeutic and Professional relationship, not like Lucifer at all except I am also evil to the core, and I couldn’t even tell you if she owns a pet. I could find out if I was interested of course and I think I’d select the Poirot talking technique instead of the Holmes observational, all I know about her is she doesn’t watch movies or TV since I have to explain all my references and she’s a Packers fan like me and keeps a sticker on her desk.).
Of course one gets reflective, another topic of discussion, because you have to write new dates on your checks and also because 2020.
Eight years ago, President Vladimir Putin decreed that Russia must become a leading scientific power. That meant at least five top-100 Russian universities by 2020, and a dramatic increase in the number of global citations of Russian scientific papers.
Now a group at the center of Putin’s aspirations, the Russian Academy of Sciences, has dropped a bombshell into the plans. A commission set up by the academy has led to the retraction of at least 869 Russian scientific articles, mainly for plagiarism.
“This is the largest retraction in Russian scientific history. Never before have hundreds of papers been retracted,” said Andrei Zayakin, scientific secretary of the RAS Commission for Countering the Falsification of Scientific Research. “Before two years ago, there might have been single cases, but not even dozens.”
…
Russia’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education fueled the problem. In 2018, Science and Higher Education Minister Mikhail Kotyukov said Russia had to double its publication of research articles. Universities offered contracts and promotions to those who published more papers and sidelined those who failed to.
“You have got this Potemkin village where universities try to report as many papers as possible, but nobody really reads those papers,” said Anna Kuleshova, ethics council chairwoman at the Russian Association of Scientific Editors and Publishers, the country’s largest scientific publishing organization.
The problem goes much deeper, according to scientists working to rescue Russia’s declining international research reputation. Dozens of university rectors have defended or supervised dubious degrees and papers involving plagiarism and falsified data, they claim.
A statute of limitations makes it impossible to rescind degrees awarded before 2010.
Phew! Good to know my Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Novosibirsk is still cool.
The RAS Commission last year called for the retraction of 2,528 research articles in 541 Russian journals that were either plagiarized, duplicates of other articles or involved unclear authorship. By Jan. 6, 263 journals had agreed to retract 869 papers. The commission expects that further retractions will be made in coming months.
Many of the examples involved Russian scientists plagiarizing from other scientific articles while others involved the same scientists publishing more than one paper with substantially the same data. In other cases, a new name may be added to the same research.
Zayakin, a physician, said “publication mills” sprang up as a result of pressure on researchers to publish or lose either their jobs or funding.
“One important driver was the formal approach of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education to university faculty staff who were supposed to publish a certain number of scientific papers regardless of quality,” he said.
…
“Doctoral theses were being bought and sold for many years,” he said.
Well, yeah. I think I came out ahead but I had to launder all my Rubles through Deutsche Bank and a Trump Org Condo. It was a hot market, you bought, you sold, you paid off people named Lev and Igor… business.
In 2018, Dissernet used anti-plagiarism technology and found that 7,251 Russian degrees had been awarded for plagiarized or dubious work in the previous four years, including 529 medical degrees. Most were in economics, teaching and the law.
Another advocate for change, Mikhail Gelfand, professor of bioinformatics and genetics at Moscow State University, said Russian funding and university rankings was based on the number of papers published, so that money and jobs flowed to the unscrupulous and ill-qualified: “Some people are forced to publish, despite the fact they have no time for meaningful research or funding. The teaching load is Russian universities is huge.”
And unlike the U.S. how?
Dissernet has campaigned to revoke plagiarized and faked degrees with limited success. From December 2013 to December 2019, 368 degrees were revoked.
Last year, it examined the heads of 676 Russian higher education institutions and found that 112 had committed violations of academic ethics, including 61 whose degrees involved plagiarism.
Vladimir Filippov, chairman of the Higher Attestation Commission, which coordinates and validates the awards of degrees, said in a 2017 interview with the government-backed newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta that the number awarded had halved between 2012 and 2017 from around 24,000 to less than 13,000.
“The main reasons for the decline are stricter requirements toward papers and the improvement of reputation, responsibility and transparency at all stages of attestation,” he said. Zayakin said the drop showed how many flawed degrees were being issued in the past.
In an article last year, he cited the case of a young scientist from Buryatia in Siberia, who plagiarized a thesis by Svetlana Mikhailova of the East Siberian State University of Technology and Management in 2015.
According to Zayakin, the Siberian student used Mikhailova’s work in six research papers that he published under his name, with six co-authors, including the head of a university — a finding upheld in 2018 by the Supreme Court of Buryatia.
Kuleshova said plagiarism was so rife that it had become normal, and that many people hold dubious academic qualifications.
“Before, they were on sale in the Metro. Anyone could buy one on any corner. Now it’s become a bit more difficult. It’s become more expensive, so you can get them, but they will cost about 100,000 rubles,” she said, around $1,600. “There are many professions where this has become the norm. There are so many pseudo-experts who are not real experts.”
In 2016, Dissernet reported that 1 in 9 members of the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, had dubious degrees. A year earlier, it exposed Duma’s then-chairman, Sergei Naryshkin, now the director of foreign intelligence, for plagiarizing more than half of the pages in his economics doctorate.
Naryshkin just shrugged off the accusations and never lost his degree.
And unlike the U.S. how?
Like digby and Atrios a lot of what I do is highlight content for your consideration (assuming the dozens of readers I imagine). It is a different skill but the same Asimov used to claim his oeuvres (mostly edited with wrappers).
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Benjamin Franklin born; Soviet and Polish forces liberate Warsaw; Eisenhower farewell address; Japan earthquake; Al Capone is born;Muhammad Ali born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom – and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.
The first article of impeachment charges him with abuse of power for pressuring Ukraine to assist him in his re-election campaign by damaging Democratic rivals.
Using the powers of his high office, President Trump solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States Presidential election. He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that included soliciting the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage. President Trump also sought to pressure the Government of Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning official United States Government acts of significant value to Ukraine on its public announcement of the investigations. President Trump engaged in this scheme or course of conduct for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit. In so doing, President Trump used the powers of the Presidency in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process. He thus ignored and injured the interests of the Nation.
President Trump engaged in this scheme or course of conduct through the following means:
(1) President Trump — acting both directly and through his agents within and outside the United States Government — corruptly solicited the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into —
(A) a political opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.; and
(B) a discredited theory promoted by Russia alleging that Ukraine — rather than Russia — interfered in the 2016 United States Presidential election.
(2) With the same corrupt motives, President Trump — acting both directly and through his agents within and outside the United States Government — conditioned two official acts on the public announcements that he had requested
(A) the release of $391 million of United States taxpayer funds that Congress had appropriated on a bipartisan basis for the purpose of providing vital military and security assistance to Ukraine to oppose Russian aggression and which President Trump had ordered suspended; and
(B) a head of state meeting at the White House, which the President of Ukraine sought to demonstrate continued United States support for the Government of Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
Today the Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s independent auditor, released its finding that Donald Trump broke the law by withholding the $214 million worth of equipment, training and other support to help Ukraine in its battle against Russian-backed forces.
While the Ukraine scandal has revealed a variety of abuses of power, there is one particular way in which Trump and his administration might have broken the law, when on his orders the administration withheld military aid to Ukraine that had been appropriated by Congress in what we now know is an attempt to coerce Ukraine into announcing an “investigation” that would smear Joe Biden.
The Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s independent auditor, released a judgment saying Trump did in fact break that law when through the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) he withheld the aid from Ukraine in the summer of 2019:
Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law. OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA). The withholding was not a programmatic delay. Therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the ICA.
To clarify some of the bureaucratese, a “programmatic delay” refers to a finite set of practical reasons the executive branch can use to justify temporarily withholding aid that Congress has appropriated. When that happens, the executive branch is required by the law to write an explanation to Congress; the Trump administration didn’t do that either.
If the Senate Republicans refuse to remove this man from office, and bar him from ever holding another elected office, they are putting their stamp of approval on this and any other president in the future, to break the law for his/her own gain and ignore the Constitutional oath of office.
Have you ever read Roald Dahl’s story? It’s unsettling in that Hans Christian Andersen kind of way actually and a frequent target of censors who think it not suitable fare for children. I like them roasted but can’t finish a whole one anymore.
Meanwhile-
Oh, you want a closer look-
How about a South African perspective?
Ok, these are just screamingly funny.
It’s the Andy Yang Show!
He’s offering me $1000 a month for my vote. How about you Bloomberg? Steyer?
Hey, what do I always say? I can screw that up for you just as badly at half the price!
Synchronicity. I was just talking with TMC about Asbestos and Serpentine Rock (for the uninitiate Serpentine forms a substantial amount of the bedrock of New York City because it’s tough and laughs at Glaciers, it’s also loaded with Asbestos and requires special precautions when working with it, Asbestosis and Mesothelioma are not good ways to die).
The metaphor is that it takes some doing to get those wriggly creepy crawlies back in it. If I was looking for something punny I might reference the Diet of Worms (it’s a Cathedral in Germany not noom, get over it) which was a conference held to form a response to Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation.
Anyway, Part One of the Lev Parnas interview dropped last night. Want to see it?
Well, that’s 20 minutes anyway. MSNBC is once again making things difficult so I may revisit if I find a better and more stable source.
Not that I care what Joe and Mika think about anything, but this is what it is.
“President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” Parnas said. “He was aware of all of my movements. I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president.”
Trump has claimed that he doesn’t know who Parnas or his associate, Igor Fruman, are, despite appearing in multiple pictures with him. There was already good reason to assume this was false, but Parnas has not directly rebutted the dubious claim on the record.
“It was not about corruption,” Parnas said of the Ukraine scheme. “It was all about Burisma, all about Biden, about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.”
This claim completely undercuts the Republicans’ key defenses of the president against impeachment. They say he was legitimately pursuing an anti-corruption policy in Ukraine by asking for investigations of his political enemies. That was hard to believe on its own, but now Parnas is flatly contradicting it.
Parnas said it was clear to the Ukrainians he was acting as Trump’s emissary.
“Did anybody in the U.S. government or Mr. Giuliani actually convey to officials in Ukraine that you were there as a representative of President Trump?” Maddow asked.
“Yes,” said Parnas. “Absolutely. Absolutely. Everyone.”
Guiliani told Maddow that this “never” happened and called Parnas a “sad situation.”
He said he made explicit to Ukrainian officials that Trump’s support and financial support — not just military aid — was dependent on an announcement of the investigations the president wanted.
“It wasn’t just military aid,” Parnas said. “It was all aid. Basically their relationships would be sour. That we would stop giving them any kind of aid.”
Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to Ukraine was canceled explicitly to induce the country to announce the investigations, Parnas said.
Parnas said that the cancellation of Pence’s trip confirmed to the Ukrainians that he was a legitimate representative of the president. He also said that Pence was “in the loop” about the reason the trip was canceled, but he didn’t explicit say how he knew this. He just indicated the top players were all aware of the plot.
Pence’s later trip to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was arranged to get the country to announce the investigations Trump wanted, Parnas said. However, Pence has denied trying to get Zelensky to conduct the investigations.
Attorney General Bill Barr was “on the team.”
Barr has also tried to distance himself entirely from the Ukraine scandal. But Parnas claimed that “Barr had to know about everything” regarding the plan to push Ukraine to investigate the Biden and the 2016 presidential election. He acknowledged, though, that he didn’t speak to Barr directly.
Maddow pointed out that, in his infamous July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump specifically brought up Barr as being involved. Parnas said that didn’t surprise him, because Barr was “on the team.” The Justice Department, responding to Maddow’s request for comment on the allegations, said simply: “100 percent false.”
Parnas also fingered Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) in the scheme, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee that investigated the Ukraine matter.
Parnas said he was introduced to, and worked through, Nunes aide Derek Harvey, but he was working on Nunes’ behalf.
“Does it strike you as unusual or inappropriate that Devin Nunes would be one of the lead investigators?” Maddow asked.
“I was in shock when I was watching the hearings and when I saw Devin Nunes sitting up there,” Parnas said. “Because they were involved in getting all this stuff on Biden.”
Yeah, the blockbuster is that Lev Parnas implicates Pence, Nunes, and Barr up to their eyeballs and he has the receipts and they don’t have even spurious claims of immunity.
