Saturday, September 29, 2018

As in 2004, the grief for those lost is felt by all. Sympathies to any surviving relative or friend.

September 29, 2018
By Kate Lamb

At least 384 people (click here)
have died after a magnitude-7.5 earthquake rocked the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and triggered a tsunami.

Athonius Gunawan Agung, an air traffic controller who jumped off a tower roof as it was collapsing while waving out the last flight from Palu airport on Friday night, was one of the first casualties of the disaster.

The 21-year-old broke several bones, including an arm and a leg as he jumped off the tower. His employers sent a helicopter to ferry him to another city for treatment, but he died 20 minutes before it arrived....

What occurred with the buoys? Did they help? The number dead is far, far less than the Christmas Tsunami. Can it be made to perform better? 

In this Nov. 15, 2005 file photo, (click herea buoy which is a part of a tsunami warning system developed by GITEWS (German-Indonesian Contribution for the Installation of a Tsunami Warning System) floats in on the sea as German R.V. Sonne is seen in the background during an installation simulation on Sunda straits off Java island, Indonesia. Indonesia's tsunami detection system, made up of seafloor sensors that communicate with transmitting buoys on the surface, has been rendered useless by vandals and lack of funding. Now Indonesian and U.S. scientists say they've developed a way to dispense with the expensive buoys and possibly add crucial extra minutes of warning for vulnerable coastal cities. (AP Photo/Fadlan Arman Syam, File)...

Many factors can be pointed to when assessing why there is an FBI investigation regarding Kavanaugh...

...but, the only reason Trump would consent to anything was because the Senate didn't have the votes.

Trump is far too ruthless to "give in" to the American public. He likes being "The Storm" to provide the American people with any degree of comfort. The reason there was no vote on Friday is because the full Senate would not have the votes and Senator Flake is far to moral than to let such a nominee slip through because of Senate numbers and a 51 vote majority. 

Due to Senator Flake, the American democracy was safe for yet another day. There are people in office that simply love this country and he is one of them. There are citizens that love this country and are not willing to relinquish control to a populous president on the path of a hedonistic and greed experiment.

I sincerely believe Brett Kavanaugh is an experiment in extremist conservative politics. He was honed by "W" in the White House and probably making more money than he had seen before, met a woman he took as his wife there and was assigned his first judgeship within that time period. He was produced by "W" and he is an experiment.

In a speech by "W" to a large group of women, the question came up as to why nothing can be done about Roe v. Wade, especially considering Norma McCorvey, the Roe in Roe v. Wade, had come to the light and was declaring her actions in 1969 (age 21, an age of fertility) shameful and she was now in lock step with Pro-Life. That is easy to say in 2004.

In that speech, "W" said, "Perhaps someday it will come about." Those simple words meant, someday we will see a Supreme Court that will overturn that decision. He couldn't simply say, "Because Roe v. Wade is a Landmark Decision because women have a uterus and need choices. We are after all a democracy with many religious and non-religious beliefs. Roe. v. Wade falls into one of those areas where a woman has control over her own body. It is not the place of the government in this democracy to dictate pregnancies and babies considering we have plenty all the time.

It is my opinion, "W" set out to do exactly that and found a single man with political ambitions and promoted him into a position to make it to the Supreme Court and that ambition did not fail him. He found happiness and great potential in realizing many of the justices appointed to the Supreme Court were on the extremist fringe and affiliated with The Federalist Society.

No one will ever convince me Brett Kavanaugh is not a "Designer Judge." He is. He is not qualified for the judgeship he holds now, in my opinion, because, for one the Democrats with longevity within the Senate Judiciary Committee have been decrying him for nearly a decades as too crude a practitioner of the law to advance to higher appointments. Most Americans do understand that law is the basis of judicial decisions, but, in many cases the application of the law is more nuanced. Rarely are there laws that are so specifically written that they can be carried forward in the courts without interpretation. There is a reason why the courts interpret the law.

There is a danger within the USA's democracy and it is the election of judges and the appointees that can be purely political. I sincerely believe the founders of this country, albeit Rich, White Men, never expected a new country founded in freedom and liberty would ever be at a crossroads whereby it's political parties, either one or many, would be seeking to end the democracy they held dear as an answer being founded in the yearnings of people.

I don't think the "Declaration of Independence," the "USA Constitution and its Amendments," is a particular work of genius. I think it came out of men that understood how they felt about freedom and liberty and how oppression can work against them.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...

Got it? The colonies were up against a King (oppressor) that was bleeding them dry of every penny the kingdom could get it's greedy hands on. They had had it. Children were not educated with a free education. They had sons and daughters they had pinned hopes on as well. Their feelings about their lives were absolutely no different than ours are today. They wanted their freedom on their terms and they were AT ODDS WITH their conscience. 

Got it, now?

The founders of the United States of America's Constitution and First Ten Amendments were brave. They had to turn their backs on what they considered security and move in a way they would be successful. They were absolutely the first Americans, but, they are Americans no differently than we are. We did not mutate into something different over nearly two-hundred and forty-two complete years. We are their hopes and dreams and we started with their conscience and they never burdened us with an oppressor or a god. They used the word creator because they knew spirituality and they understood the need for prayer. The choice of the word creator was for a reason.

It is not up to us to determine the fate of any American. America is about opportunity. Today we value freedom, liberty and the conscience to decide the way forward. The choice of justices that limit that way forward because they were ambitious enough to sell their souls to The Federalist Society is not our issue. We need justices that recognize Americans and not a faux agenda the founders of this great country would disapprove of with all their beings.

I am sorry, but, Brett Kavanaugh carries an agenda with him he hides as "an originalist. He in no way, neither the other Federalist Society judges, are actually following in the foot steps of the founders of this great country when they limit a woman's RIGHT TO CHOOSE. They are wrong, he is wrong and on top of that he is a sex offender since the earliest of ages and he has demonstrated he does not have the temperament to be a judge. He is not the person we need in the American judiciary and he never will be. He chose to sell himself to a powerful political organization and it is his burden to shoulder, not ours.

I am quite confident the American people, during this particular judicial hearing, were making phone calls and writing letters demanding "Due Process" for judicial nominees which would include a reopened FBI investigation of new facts that came to light. It is that process we trust and it is that process we wait to conclude. It should provide facts and interviews of people along the way. Hopefully, that will create enough insight to move forward and reclaim the decency of the Supreme Court. I just don't see Kavanaugh as an Associate Juror. These women are not lying and there is no Deep State that is going to taint the FBI report.

There is something that really bothered me as well about the interview of 
Dr. Ford by the prosecutor. She referred to "A Cognitive Interview." The prosecutor (whom I know nothing about and is not an elected official to the Senate) said it as if it was something magic. It isn't and it doesn't need a formal setting or a professional name to carry it out.

The interviewer tries to mentally reinstate the environmental and personal context of the crime for the witnesses, perhaps by asking them about their general activities and feelings on the day.  This could include sights, sounds, feelings and emotions, the weather etc.

Dr. Ford told the events previous to attending the party. That was already done.

Witnesses are asked to report the incident from different perspective, describing what they think other witnesses (or even the criminals themselves) might have seen.

Dr. Ford did that when she stated she wasn't surprised the other people "downstairs" weren't aware of the sexual assault.

Recounting the incident in a different narrative order.  Geiselman & Fisher proposed that due to the recency effect, people tend to recall more recent events more clearly than others. Witnesses should be encouraged to work backwards from the end to the beginning.

I don't recall the exact format of running her memory in reverse, but, 
Dr. Ford was tormented by her reality. She wasn't making it up and then there is the polygraph.

Witnesses are asked to report every detail, even if they think that detail is trivial. In this way, apparently unimportant detail might act as a trigger for key information about the event.

There were no other witnesses to her sexual assault. The men that were in the room would be indicting themselves if they did so.

A Cognitive Interview can assist in the reality that occurred at the time of the trauma, but, it can still occur without a formal name or setting. The prosecutor was attempting to justify her pay that day.

September 29, 2018

More than 20 million people watched (click here) Thursday's gripping testimony by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the woman who accused him of a sexual assault that allegedly occurred in the 1980s, Christine Blasey Ford, on six television networks.

Meanwhile, the political standoff continued, with broadcasters interrupting regular programming for Friday's last-minute twist: an agreement engineered by Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake for the FBI to conduct a one-week investigation of the charges.

Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she's 100 percent certain that Kavanaugh groped her drunkenly and tried to take off her clothes at a high school party. Kavanaugh, in impassioned testimony, said he's 100 percent certain that it didn't happen.

It's likely that more than the 20.4 million people reported by Nielsen on Friday watched it. The company was counting average viewership on CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. Figures weren't immediately available for other networks that showed it, including PBS, C-SPAN and the Fox Business Network. And Nielsen usually has some trouble measuring people who watch in offices.

To put that in perspective, that's an audience size similar to that for a playoff football game or the Academy Awards....