Search the Community

No one knows at the moment how the impeachment process will end up, though OL members will generally have in memory the Nixon and Clinton impeachment efforts for use in comparing and contrasting. At the present moment, nose-counting wonks have counted noses, providing spreadsheets of current House members who have indicated they support an impeachment inquiry. There is enough to agree articles of impeachment at last count -- if the process gets that far (see also the Politico breakdown of impeachment-supporters). I'll add in links to extant discussion in varied front-page threads and beef up a rough timeline [over the next couple of days]. The so-called whistleblower's "whistleblow" has been allowed to emerge in slightly redacted form -- Dated August 12, 2019: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6430376-Whistleblower-Complaint.html -- this is what is being examined in the House right now. Previously ... I'll ask that folks who may join in commentary here keep the personal insults to a minimum, if possible. Refer to the OL Posting Guidelines, please. Keys to understanding what may come down the pike is ... what has come down the pike already. In other words, a list of names of interest from roughly 2014 until now. Ukraine is at the nexus of the foreign-policy muddle between the United States and Russia. Names and entities to keep track and/or place on a timeline range from (presidents) Yanukovych, Poroschenko, Zelenskyy to prosecutors-general Yarema, Shokin, Sevruk, Lutsenko. For a reminder of what Ukrainian corruption looks like, the palatial estate of former president Yanukovych, who fled the country during the showdown known as "Euromaidan." At the risk of alienating a few readers, I'll be referring to a few 'mistrusted' writers and outlets who have cobbled together various timelines and constellations of events. interpretations and spin. Any timeline will be necessarily limited, but the simpler ones can be double-checked for factual, 'on the record' events. There are a lot of factors to be accounted for, suggestions entertained and claims tested. The most expansive timelines will come after the first spate of tell-all books whose "pitches" will be landing on editors' desks this week. An objectivist hierarchy of conceptual knowledge is more like a database than a list or timeline, maybe. This is kind of a first wrong stab at how various states could be tied to a index/timeline. Open question: how do you best organize 'what you know' or 'what is claimed' about the last five years of Ukrainian-USA-Russia-EU events? Foreign policy and corruption Russian interests, actions, explanations Associated timeline of events Date Ukraine President Ukraine Prosecutor Person of interest Cases adjudicated, abandoned, avoided (in US and Ukraine Trump -- campaign actors / Ukraine policy Trump administration Ukraine policy Cases of international significance. Meetings, contact, employment, associated suspicions 2012-2017 Manafort-Ukraine Manafort FARA

"Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. • Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. • Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. • Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us." The author of the book is Donald A Barclay, librarian, who gave an interview to Publisher's Weekly last September. This excerpt mirrors a part of the preface, which I will dictate and post below. Dude sounds like a dang Objectivist here, if a plodder ... -- cross-linking here to a dedicated Front Porch topic thread "Fake News," and to a "fake news" OL-internal-search page of this blog, "Friends and Foes." There are at this moment 732 items in the "Fake News" phrase search returns of the whole of the Objectivist Living community. The subtitle to Barclay's book is "How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age."

Probing the Mueller Probe and the Obama Administration Here's a transcript and video of Rush Limbaugh today. Limbaugh: Comey, Clapper, Others "Very, Very Nervous" Of Durham's Investigation Of Russia Probe (Sorry, you gotta go there to see the video.) There's a lot to say, but I just want to highlight one main point for the opening post of this thread. I learned today from that Rush segment that Mueller let four innocent men--that he knew were innocent--languish in jail for decades in order to protect the reputation of the FBI (he didn't want people to know Whitey Bulger was an FBI informant, seeing that Bulger was continuing to commit crimes). Two of the innocent men died in jail. The other two and their families got rich from damages the state had to pay. But a man who can do what Mueller did, keep innocents incarcerated, is the man the Dems used to take down President Trump. That he failed speaks volumes about Trump's legal squeaky-cleanliness, not to mention Mueller's depraved indifference to the pain and suffering of innocents caused by a legal abomination he was part of. The man who took down the obscenity of having four innocent men incarcerated and top law enforcement people like Mueller knowing about it was John Durham. This is the same John Durham that AG Bill Barr just appointed to look into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. (Did I hear a gulp somewhere? ) I have no doubt that when Barr, Durnham & Co. finish probing the Trump-Russian probe and some elitist assholes duly go to jail, they will look into the flawed investigations of Hillary Clinton's email misbehavior and related issues. Bad times coming for the Dems. Good times coming for good old fashioned American justice where nobody is above the law, not even elitists from the former Obama administration. Michael

Over in the active Incel thread, there are a few misunderstandings ... here, for example, Michael notes the superiority of his position with regard to assessing the probability that Adam Schiff is a "Ruling Class Pedophile." Investigating the claims is like pulling teeth.