Skip to main content

Signal and Noise

As our political discourse has degraded in my lifetime I have struggled with the overwhelming of signal (facts that are not open to dispute) by noise (loud opinion unmoored by any verification). I am accountable in my profession at all times to offer signal, and I would be justly denigrated if I did otherwise. I feel the need to carry that over, imperfect though I am, to my personal life.

This often requires that I (and others) withhold comment on issues before facts are known, and I painfully feel the rush of propaganda to fill the vacuum of legitimate commentary. Yesterday Donald Trump was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney. Until the charges were unsealed there was nothing factual to discuss beyond the truth that Trump was being indicted that day.  Somehow the media by and large seemed to spend innumerable collective hours on that vacuum of information, offering well-dressed and well-paid seers prognosticating about the future and those thought-draining video recordings of Trump traveling to the courtroom. Political events of great significance were underway in Tennessee and Wisconsin and were underreported.

Now we have some signal to discuss. The charge is that for three years on a monthly basis Trump falsified documents (claimed that payments to Michael Cohen were a legal retainer when they were compensation for Cohen's payments to an actress to not publicly claim that she had had an affair with Trump while he campaigned for the presidency). We have Cohen's testimony that this occurred, and we apparently also have forthcoming other eyewitness testimony as well as the checks for three years (thus 34 separate charges for the same category of violation).

I am not a lawyer but from what I read what elevates these charges from misdemeanors to felonies is that they were in support of another crime, election fraud.

It seems as if these are already known facts but they have to be entered into a judicial proceeding (witnesses under oath, documents verified, etc.). As the law has not been used this way (with respect to election fraud) there will be some subjective input from the judge as this proceeds. Time will tell.

Everything else, everything else is noise.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more