News bits: Regarding hyperpartisanship in the courts; Rocky exoplanet's magnetic field; Etc.

 Federal courts are supposed to be neutral arbiters of the law, but that pretense is fading fast. A current example is anti-abortion Christofascist judges adopting the propaganda framing and biased language of rabid anti-abortion activists to justify their illegal, authoritarian moral imperatives based on flat out lies and crackpot partisan reasoning. The NYT writes:

Judge’s Ruling Against Abortion Pill Is Filled With Activists’ Language

The preliminary ruling from Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk adopts the terminology of anti-abortion groups, such as “chemical abortion,” “abortionist” and “unborn human”

Here’s a look at the ruling.

The ruling calls medication abortion “chemical abortion,” refers to abortion providers as “abortionists” and describes a fetus or embryo as an “unborn human” or “unborn child.”

This is crackpot nonsense based on a lie

(the drug is safe and does not stress doctors)

By law, only people who can show they have suffered an actual or imminent injury from something — not one that is merely speculative — have “standing” to sue. In this case, the plaintiffs challenging the F.D.A.’s approval of mifepristone more than two decades ago are doctors who oppose abortion and do not prescribe the drug. They contended that they have standing because other doctors might prescribe the drug to women who might then experience complications ....

Note the partisan propaganda: 

A fetus is aborted, not a child

Medication abortion is used in early pregnancies, typically before gestation at 12 weeks, and the tissue that passes out of a patient’s body is often in the form of blood clots. Patients cite varying reasons for having abortions, but several studies and surveys have suggested that patients often feel relief and experience fewer mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts after terminating pregnancies they felt unprepared or unable to handle.

The article continues like this by citing five more examples of the hyperpartisanship that exemplifies how some Republican judges do their job. This news bit is here to mainly to (i) exemplify the fact that the radical right rhetoric and tactics are based mostly on ill will and bad faith (lies, divisive propaganda, etc.), and (ii) the open contempt for secular law and sound reasoning that authoritarian theocrats hold.

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Earth-like magnetic field detected on a rocky planet like Earth: Without its magnetic field to shield Earth from solar wind that would blow our atmosphere away, humans would not exist. When Mars lost its magnetic field after its iron core cooled and solidified, the Sun blew its atmosphere away. Scientists routinely search for rocky planets with their own magnetic fields. Live Science writes:

Strange radio signals detected from Earth-like planet 

could be a magnetic field necessary for life

Earth's magnetic field protects life on our blue planet — and astronomers just found evidence of a magnetic field on a rocky exoplanet 12 light-years away

Recent observations from the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescopes in New Mexico revealed evidence of a magnetic field on the rocky exoplanet YZ Ceti b, which orbits a star about 12 light-years away from Earth. This is the first possible detection of a magnetic field on a planet beyond our solar system, according to a study published April 3 in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

YZ Ceti b, however, isn’t a habitable planet. To detect the radio waves from a small, far-away exoplanet’s magnetic field, astronomers had to look towards a particularly extreme example. YZ Ceti b is quite close to its star — far too close to be a pleasant temperature for life — and it’s also orbiting at such a pace that one of its years is only two Earth days long.

This is so close in that the planet “plows” through material sloughing off of the star, according to the researchers. The planet’s magnetic field pushes electrically charged plasma back toward the star, which then interacts with the star’s own magnetic field, emitting bright flashes of energy.

Essentially, the radio waves the team observed were an aurora on the star, likely created by the interactions with the planet, the team said.

Visualization of solar wind interacting with 

Earth’s magnetic field during a solar storm

(solar wind is a real thing, not to be ignored)

New Mexico's Very Large Array hunts 

for signs of extraterrestrial life

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Why repeating narratives and stories is useful - The abortion example: The Independent writes: 

A Republican congressman from Texas dodged questions about a federal court decision to revoke a more than 20-year-old approval for a commonly used abortion drug, instead suggesting that “women have a whole lot of other issues than just abortion” and the US should “talk about the other things that are happening in this world.”

These remarks from US Rep Tony Gonzalez on CNN’s State of the Union on 9 April followed a ruling from a federal judge in his home state to revoke the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a widely used drug for medication abortions and miscarriage treatment.

Mr Gonzalez said he supports “states’ rights,” but he stumbled when asked how that accounts for a federal court ruling that will have a dramatic impact to abortion access across the country if it goes into effect.

“Isn’t a federal judge saying on a national level that a pill cannot be administered the opposite of states’ rights?” CNN’s Dana Bash asked him.

He replied that “states started this” but “now the federal government is coming in and dictating theirs”. In the federal court case, the opposite is true: ....  

Mr Gonzalez, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, suggested that members of Congress could “defund FDA programs that don’t make sense” if President Joe Biden’s administration challenges the ruling.

Yes, we can all see why Christofascists like Gonzalez wants to change the subject to “the other things that are happening in this world.” By other things, the radical right means all the horrible, evil things that liberal and socialist tyrants, Joe Biden, his son and other opponents of Christofascism are doing to us. That's why Faux News sounds about the same day after day after day. The radical right does not want to talk about the horrors of what it is doing to us, e.g., defunding whatever bit of government God and/or capitalist plutocrats hate.

Once again, the mendacity, bad faith and ill will that dominates the radical right is clear and undeniable. 

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From the PPF (Psychological Projection Files): Projecting onto opponents what one does oneself is a topic that had exploded in popularity among elite fascist politicians and propagandists since the rise of T**** in 2016. Projection of bad acts and/or intent onto opposition is now a standard tactic to cover what fascist elites want to do themselves, or already are doing. 

Using the tactic against the opposition usually involves cherry-pickling good fact and true truth, while ignoring or denying inconvenient fact and true truth. For example, Faux News accuses Dominion Voting Systems of cherry-picking in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Faux. 

I should have been giving this topic more exposure. The WaPo writes:

Unpacking the flawed science cited in the Texas abortion pill ruling

A Texas judge’s decision to invalidate federal approval of a key abortion drug cites research based on anonymous blog posts, cherry picks statistics that exaggerate the negative physical and psychological effects of mifepristone, and ignores hundreds of scientific studies attesting to the medication’s safety.

Kacsmaryk wrote in his decision that “the lack of restrictions resulted in many deaths and many more severe or life-threatening adverse reactions” and accused the Food and Drug Administration of acquiescing to “the pressure to increase access to chemical abortion at the expense of women’s safety.”

The ruling is the first time a court has suspended a medication’s approval after rejecting the assessment of a human drug by the FDA, considered among the world’s most stringent regulators. The agency says that between 2000, when the drug was approved, and last June, it received reports linking mifepristone to 28 deaths out of the 5.6 million who have used the drug. And in those 28 deaths, the agency said information gaps made it impossible to directly attribute the cause to mifepristone; in some cases, the deaths involved overdoses and coexisting medical conditions.

“The political game has nothing to do with the scientific process,” [one expert medical doctor] said.

Because individual studies often produce conflicting results, the medical community has long relied on a systematic approach known as evidence-based medicine, drawing on accumulated evidence from clinical research to inform their care of patients.

One study by James Studnicki, director of data analytics at the Lozier Institute, found that more than a quarter of women on Medicaid who had used abortion pills between 1999 and 2015 visited an emergency room within 30 days. Critics say the study is flawed because it did not specify the services people received at the ER. Medicaid patients are more likely to visit emergency rooms for routine medical care because they often lack primary care providers. 

One [study] concluded that 77 percent of women who had a “chemical abortion” reported a “negative change.” “Thirty-eight percent of women reported issues with anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts because of the chemical abortion,” Kacsmaryk wrote. 

Both statistics, according to the footnotes in his ruling, came from a study based on several dozen anonymous blog posts from abortionchangesyou.com. The website is run by the Institute of Reproductive Grief Care.

Once again, the bad faith and ill will that dominates Christofascist elites like the cherry-picking, inconvenient fact and truth-ignoring judge Kacsmaryk had to rely on to get at the decision God wanted. This is how Christian Sharia law works.