News bits: Biowarfare research is out of control; Deceit by brass knuckles capitalism; Etc.

A local newspaper reports that law enforcement authorities have stumbled across a big, sloppy biowarfare lab in Reedley, CA. This is beyond bizarre. It is as scary as the radicalized corrupt Republican Party and the rabid corrupt Christian nationalism movement. Yourcentralvalley.com reports: 

‘I’ve never seen anything like this’: Illegal medical lab discovered in Reedley

An investigation into a Reedley warehouse uncovered a large-scale illegal medical lab complete with bioengineered mice, infectious agents, nearly 30 refrigerators and freezers some of which were non-operational, incubators, and more leaving officials shocked and the public worried.

Local, state, and federal agencies are all involved and what prompted this investigation was a simple garden hose that was illegally attached and coming out of a wall in the back of the building.

The city then obtained several search warrants to enter the building and once inside they found something they have never seen.

“There was a special room that was built housing about 1000 white lab mice,” Zieba explained.

What they found was absolutely terrifying.

“Through their statements that they were doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support, developing the COVID test kits that they had on-site,” Prado said.

Health officials discovered nearly 1,000 lab mice, 200 of which were already dead.

Also found were thousands of vials, many of which contained biohazardous materials including human blood, and other unknown substances.

“A lot of these labels have been removed from bottles so there was only so much testing we could do on those chemicals,” Prado continued.

According to court documents officials with the Centers for Disease Control tested what they could and determined that at least 20 potentially infectious viral, bacterial, and parasitic agents were present including E. Coli, malaria, and even COVID.

NBC News reported:

An investigation found the tenant was Prestige BioTech, a company registered in Nevada and unlicensed for business in California. City officials spoke with Xiuquin Yao, who was identified as the company president, through emails included in the court documents.

Yao told officials that Prestige BioTech moved assets belonging to a defunct company, Universal Meditech Inc., to the Reedley warehouse from Fresno after UMI went under. Prestige Biotech was a creditor to UMI and identified as its successor, according to court documents.  

"The other addresses provided for identified authorized agents were either empty offices or addresses in China that could not be verified," court documents said.

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From the Crooks & Liars Files: A WaPo opinion reports about how pollution for profit companies and the federal government conspire to deceive consumers about what plastics are recyclable and what are not: 

Picture this: You finish a drink from a red Solo cup, and before throwing it out, you check the bottom of the cup to see the iconic recycling symbol. That means it can be tossed in the recycling bin, right?

Wrong. Solo cups are made of polystyrene, a plastic that is very difficult to recycle. No one can fault consumers for not knowing that. The real blame lies with the government, which has failed to properly regulate claims that plastics manufacturers put on their products

The core of the problem is that there is no recycling system in the United States; there are upward of 20,000 of them. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to say which items are actually recyclable. Without stricter standards, consumers will continue to be confused, seriously hampering the effort to divert waste from landfills.

Note: 

0% of plastic cutlery gets recycled

0% of coffee pods get recycled

0% of . . . . you get the idea

Remember: An ignorant, disinformed consumer is a profitable consumer!

Aw, ain't that adorable!

Puggsley and mom sharing a quiet moment of contentment

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Poll data: 

See, crime really does pay!

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The cost of global warming: As time passes, damage will accumulate. Researchers are publishing damage estimates. The NYT reports:

A study published in June on the effects of temperature on productivity concludes that while extreme heat harms agriculture, its impact is greater on industrial and other sectors of the economy, in part because they are more labor-intensive. It finds that heat increases absenteeism and reduces work hours, and concludes that as the planet continues to warm, those losses will increase.

The cost is high. In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure, according to data compiled by The Lancet. Another report found that in 2020, the loss of labor as a result of heat exposure cost the economy about $100 billion, a figure projected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050. 

Other research found that as the mercury reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit, productivity slumps by about 25 percent and when it goes past 100 degrees, productivity drops off by 70 percent.

Remember: The corrupt, authoritarian radical right Republican Party is anti-labor, pro-global warming and pro-pollution! Texas passed a law to ban water breaks for outdoors workers -- that's real commitment to the anti-labor cause!

Bits: US tax code subsidizes bad behavior; A lapse in science integrity; About Christian nationalism

From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: It is well known that corporations buy tax loopholes from congress and presidents. The practice is called free speech and/or freedom of assembly to petition government. I call it political and corporate corruption. There is even tax break for corporations that break laws and have to pay to settle lawsuits. Truthout writes about a current example:

Though Fox News reached an agreement with Dominion Voting Systems earlier this year to pay one of the largest media settlements in history over the outlet’s repeated lies regarding the 2020 election, the corporation may be able to soften the blow — to the tune of a $200 million tax break, reporters found earlier this year. Now, one Senate Democrat is trying to change that.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) filed a bill on Wednesday that would specifically bar large corporations from being able to take an income tax deduction from certain defamation payments. The legislation is seemingly aimed directly at barring Fox from being able to diminish the impact of its settlement payment over actions that likely had a huge impact on eroding American democracy.

The article points out that  Faux can deduct its $787 million settlement with Dominion due to a tax law that allows taxpayers to write off “ordinary and necessary” business expenses. I guess defamation is ordinary and necessary, which in this case it actually was.

However as we all know, the chance of that bill passing in congress is about 0%. Radicalized Republicans in congress are not just arrogant brass knuckles capitalists, they are deeply corrupt (and deeply authoritarian, and incredibly mendacious, and etc.). 

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A NYT opinion by a Stanford student, Theo Baker (a reporter for the Stanford student newspaper), describes data manipulation in several important research papers that Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne was the principle author of. The scandal was broken by Baker based on an allegation in an obscure science site that data had been fabricated in some of the Tessier-Lavigne papers. He won a George Polk Award for investigating the allegations of manipulated experimental data in the science papers. Baker writes:

There are many rabbit holes on the internet not worth going down. But a comment on an online science forum called PubPeer convinced me something might be at the bottom of this one. “This highly cited Science paper is riddled with problematic blot images,” it said. That anonymous 2015 observation helped spark a chain of events that led Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, to announce his resignation this month.

Dr. Tessier-Lavigne made the announcement after a university investigation found that as a neuroscientist and biotechnology executive, he had fostered an environment that led to “unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices” across labs at multiple institutions. Stanford opened the investigation in response to reporting I published last autumn in The Stanford Daily, taking a closer look at scientific papers he published from 1999 to 2012.

In retrospect, much of the data manipulation is obvious. Although the report concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was unaware at the time of the manipulation that occurred in his labs, in papers on which he served as a principal author, images had been improperly copied and pasted or spliced; results had been duplicated and passed off as separate experiments; and in some instances — in which the report found an intention to hide the manipulation — panels had been stretched, flipped and doctored in ways that altered the published experimental data. All of this happened before he became Stanford’s president. Why, then, didn’t it come out sooner?

The answer is that people weren’t looking.

Same data presented twice in one paper, but claimed

to come from two different experiments 

Same data presented twice in one paper

That is science fraud. It might not look like much, but this was an attack on integrity in science. 

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An evangelical Christian comments on the dangers of authoritarian Christian nationalism in an interview the NYT published as an opinion piece:

There are few evangelical Christians who have gotten as much media coverage or criticism in the last decade as Russell Moore. He previously served as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, and became a prominent evangelical voice opposing a Trump presidency. Moore is currently the editor in chief of Christianity Today, which The Times’s Jane Coaston called “arguably the most influential Christian publication” in the United States. I asked Moore if he would speak to me about the evangelical movement and his new book, “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” This interview has been edited and condensed.

Interviewer: Your book delves into Christian nationalism as a component of the evangelical movement. How would you define Christian nationalism? And how has it affected evangelicalism in the United States?

Moore: Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.

Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.

It’s been hard for me to evaluate how widespread this is. Anecdotally, I know a lot of Christians, including a lot of evangelicals, and they would not be considered Christian nationalists. So I often wonder: Is this fringe?

It is affecting almost every sector of American Christianity in varying ways. It’s similar to the Prosperity Gospel of the last generation. Most American Christians wouldn’t identify themselves as Prosperity Gospel adherents. Yet many of them were adopting key pieces of that understanding of the world.

Studies have shown the way that Christian language is being used in Europe and in other places to prop up populist authoritarian movements. You can see this in the way that survey data show how white evangelicals in America are becoming much friendlier to outright authoritarianism — as seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection. I don’t think that it is merely fringe at all. Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological.

We can’t talk about the rise of Christian nationalism without bringing up Donald Trump. You said that he was morally unfit to be president and received intense backlash — even from Trump himself. Were you surprised by the severe criticism from certain Christians for your denunciation of Trump?

It didn’t surprise me that there would be overwhelming buy-in once Trump became the Republican nominee. One of the things I was worried about is that people would say: I’m not supporting him, I’m just voting for him because I think the alternative is worse. I feared, at the time, that the way that American politics works right now is inherently totalizing .... Trump has transformed evangelicalism far more than evangelism has influenced Trump.

I was surprised by the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape. When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, I was saying to people around me: “Don’t say ‘I told you so.’ We need to have empathy for Trump-supporting evangelicals who are really hurting at this revelation.” But what ended up happening is that white evangelicals made peace with “Access Hollywood,” if anything, quicker than the rest of America did.

I received a castigating email from a sweet Christian lady who had taught me Sunday school when I was a kid. And none of it argued: “You’re wrong about Trump’s moral character.” The argument was: “Get real. This is what we have to have in order to fight the enemy.” That was surprising to me. And disorienting.

That speaks for itself. Christian nationalism is deeply anti-democratic (compromise is treason to God), staunchly authoritarian and aggressive. Opponents of DJT are the enemy that needs to be fought. 

Q: Who is the enemy here, intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalism or pluralist secular democracy?

Hint - it's a trick question: From the intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalist point of view pluralist secular democracy is the enemy, but from the pluralist secular democracy point of view intolerant authoritarian Christian nationalism is the enemy. And, like it or not, there's just no way around it.

Essay on COVID's origin and video

Reporting on the lab leak hypothesis for COVID's origin are not being reported properly or at all by the MSM. The US government is lying about it. However, a lot of circumstantial evidence suggests the mostly likely possibility is the virus was man made and it leaked from a research lab in Wuhan. 

This is a review of a book that advocates for the virus arising in nature, which is the official US government story. Nicholas Wade (science editor at the New York Times from 1990 to 1996) writes in his review of the book, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, by David Quammen:

Friends in Viral Places

David Quammen fails to ask the necessary questions of his scientific sources, rendering his new book on Covid a work of advocacy, not reporting

In the three years or so since Covid-19 appeared, it has become increasingly clear, despite the protestations of virologists who do this kind of work, that the causative virus was probably the result of genetic manipulation in a lab. In other words, it is not a natural virus that spilled into humans from some wild animal host, but one that escaped from the Chinese laboratory in which it was being souped up as part of a high-risk scheme to predict future epidemics.

The case that Covid originated in a lab is not yet proven, but as circumstantial evidence goes, it’s pretty good. Few people appreciate quite how compelling this case is (see the outline below) because science journalists who work for the mainstream press have, by and large, failed to present it in full to their readers. Virologists, and through them most other researchers dependent on government grants, are not so keen to accept their community’s complicity in creating a pandemic that has caused upward of 6.5 million deaths. Driven by the position of their sources and the political leanings of their proprietors, mainstream science journalists have largely ignored each new piece of evidence pointing toward the lab-leak explanation, while uncritically overplaying the virologists’ self-serving arguments for the virus’s natural origin.

A particularly egregious example of this asymmetry is David Quammen’s Breathless. Quammen is a well-regarded and widely published writer about viruses and natural history, but he has grown too close to his sources, as many science writers do. He fails to consider the possibility that scientists can be swayed by the same monetary or careerist motives that drive lesser mortals. The lab at Wuhan, where researchers were manipulating Covid-type viruses, received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Could Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the NIH’s senior officials, have had any possible motive for suppressing their experts’ initial conclusion that the Covid virus was probably artificial? Could that explain why they apparently told no one else in government about their experts’ findings and excluded from their discussions then-CDC director Robert R. Redfield, who believed from the start that the virus was a lab escapee? Quammen does not think to raise such impolite questions.

The book showers positive epithets onto virologists who argue against the lab-leak scenario. Quammen praises as “highly respected” Edward Holmes, one of the initial group of experts who concluded that the virus was man-made but two days later changed his mind—on the basis of no known evidence but after a teleconference with Fauci and Collins on February 1, 2020. Michael Worobey is “rigorous, smart and judicious,” with a “quietly dauntless streak in him” and “steely attentiveness.” And if that weren’t enough, “his reputation is sterling and his mind is open.” This gusher of praise is Quammen’s attempt to bolster the credibility of a contentious article in which Worobey asserted that the virus must have passed naturally from animals to people in the Wuhan wet market. That argument indeed needs all the boosting it can get because no infected animal was found in the Wuhan market, and it’s impossible to exclude the likeliest explanation for Worobey’s data—namely, that the market just amplified an infection that started earlier and elsewhere, as even Chinese authorities assert.

Quammen goes furthest astray in his treatment of Peter Daszak, a central and still-enigmatic figure in the story of Covid’s origins. Daszak is president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. His agency was the intermediary between Fauci and Shi Zhengli, the chief expert on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci could have given money to Shi directly but did so via Daszak, perhaps in part because domestic grants attract less regulatory scrutiny than foreign ones.

As part of the effort to squelch the lab-leak conjecture, Daszak organized a February 19, 2020, letter to the Lancet, a leading medical journal. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” wrote Daszak. “We declare no competing interests,” he and his co-signatories concluded. Of course, a gross conflict of interest did exist, one not declared to readers: Daszak funded and supervised Shi’s lab and would be held to account if that were the virus’s source.

But Quammen can’t bring himself to condemn even this ethical lapse. The best he can manage to say about the incident is, “Whether that constituted a conflict is another question.” Then comes the remarkable revelation that Quammen has known Daszak for many years and that “he is a friend of mine.” Too bad the reader is given this pertinent information only on page 294 of the book. No wonder almost everything Quammen has written until that point is an attempt to get Daszak off the hook for failing to supervise the ultra-high-risk work he was funding in alarmingly low-level safety conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I’m aware that journalists are not supposed to have friends,” Quammen writes plaintively of his relationship with Daszak. Not so—journalists just shouldn’t write about their friends if they cannot do so objectively.

Quammen interviewed many people on the natural origin side of the debate, including Shi, who has been inaccessible to most Western journalists. But he ignored serious critics of virus enhancement, known as gain-of-function research, such as Richard Ebright. Far from addressing the strongest parts of the lab-leak case, Quammen discusses only aspects of it that have never been taken seriously, such as the charge that the Covid virus was engineered from its close bat relative, a virus known as RATG13.

Readers may perceive that Quammen’s book is a work of advocacy, but many will be baffled as to what case he is attacking, because he never states it clearly—an omission his account shares with many others.

Here, briefly, is the case for the lab-leak origin.

Collins and Fauci have advocated since 2011 for the benefits of enhancing natural viruses in the lab with the hope of predicting future epidemics. From their powerful bureaucratic positions—they fund most virology research in the U.S.—they outmaneuvered critics who argued that the risks of creating novel infectious viruses were sky high and the benefits nugatory.

From 2014 onward, Fauci gave money, via Daszak, to researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to collect bat coronaviruses in the wild and to manipulate the viral genomes in the lab. The goal was to see which held the greatest potential for infecting people.

In 2018, the Wuhan researchers applied to DARPA, a Defense Department agency, for a grant to construct novel, SARS-like viruses. Their plan was to take genetic elements such as the one known as the furin cleavage site and to insert them into a specific position on viral genomes. That position, a single point on the virus’s 30,000-unit long genome, is called the S1/S2 junction of the virus’s spike gene. Many viruses have furin cleavage sites, but none of the 300 known members of the SARS-like family of coronaviruses do. This is important because viruses often swap genetic elements with other viruses of their own family, but they cannot naturally acquire elements that their family does not possess.

In 2019, a novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in the city of Wuhan, home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and launched the Covid pandemic. The virus’s most unusual feature and a cause of its infectivity is a furin cleavage site inserted at the S1/S2 junction of its spike protein, just as outlined in the Wuhan virologists’ proposal to DARPA. The genetic coding of the virus’s furin cleavage site is designated in a sequence of units common to human cells and supplied in laboratory kits, but it is very rare in coronaviruses and unknown in the SARS-like coronavirus family.

Though viruses spill over from animal hosts to people quite often, they usually leave a trail of evidence when they do so. In the case of the SARS1 epidemic of 2003, virus researchers were able to trace the host population of wild bats, the mutations in the virus as it adapted from bats to civets and then to people, and the immunological traces it left in the human population. If SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin, we should expect the same pieces of evidence to emerge. In three years, none has.

All this information, including the critical DARPA grant application, was available before Quammen’s book deadline. In telling only one side of a story that has two, he and many of his fellow science writers have failed their readers.

This video discusses rock solid proof that Fauci, Collins and the scientists that wrote March 2020 Proximal Origins paper, which wound up controlling the coverage of Covid origins for ~2 years, were lying to the public.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to PD for bringing this essay and the video to my attention.

Bits & thoughts: Rancid GOP calls for decorum; The origin of COVID and the value of truth; Etc.

From the Things Have Gotten Real Ugly Files: After recently flouting decorum by showing pornographic pictures of Hunter Biden in a House committee meeting, MTG called for decorum while a democrat was making remarks in a different committee she was also a member of. The Hill writes:

Democrat mocks Greene after call for decorum: 

‘She showed us a d‑‑‑ pic last week’

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) mocked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) call for decorum at a House subcommittee hearing Thursday, pointing to the congresswoman’s presentation of sexually explicit posters on a separate panel last week.

“Marjorie needs to remember she showed us a d‑‑‑ pic last week,” Garcia tweeted Thursday after Greene interrupted his remarks at a hearing on COVID-19 vaccine mandates to call for decorum.

The California Democrat displayed a tweet from Greene at the hearing, in which she compared vaccine and mask mandates to the yellow Star of David that Jews were required to wear by the Nazis in the lead-up to the Holocaust.

Garcia showing MTG's Tweet claiming that 

vaccines are equal to the Star of David gambit

before the Nazi mass slaughter 

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Morality: Thoughts about the origin of COVID and the value of truth

Two recent posts here about the origin of the COVIN virus has led to serious personal introspection. I've always harped on holding respect for facts, true truths and sound reasoning as high moral values for politics. I'm starting to question that in the case of COVID.

(a) Although COVID probably was man-made and accidentally leaked from a probably poorly regulated, unsafe lab in Wuhan, and (b) although it probably was made with some funding and support from the US, and (c) although the Chinese government had some murky but unhelpful role in all of it, should the American people have been told that the origin of the virus is uncertain and it might have come from either (i) a human made virus that escaped, presumably by accident, or (ii) arose naturally in nature. 

The US government and apparently also the US mainstream media agreed to say that the virus arose naturally in nature, not by any human lab research and accident. My reaction has always been to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they would.

In some conversations, I got very heavy pushback on the truth option. The reasons for supporting the natural origin lie were:

1. Truth would lead some people to refuse vaccination because the virus had been weaponized and that would raise psychological barriers to vaccination --- even though that is blatantly irrational, some crackpot conspiracies have an undeniable, irresistible appeal to millions of American adults; and  

2. If the American people had been told the truth, Trump probably would have been re-elected, because one of the factors that led to him (barely) losing the 2020 election was his gross incompetence in dealing with COVID --- he would deflect blame to Chinese involvement and the Democrats for funding the research in the first place. 

Both of those arguments against truth carry weight, especially the 2nd one. If Trump had been re-elected, the US would very likely (~97% chance?) be a full-blown dictatorship by now. Of course that is only hypothetical, but it rings true. If there was a way for Trump to deflect significant blame from his incompetence in dealing with COVID, he probably would have been re-elected.

Was the natural origin lie justified morally or otherwise? I'm not sure now. Maybe it was justifiable.

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Tyranny from the Christian nationalist Supreme Court: The Hill writes: 

Justice Samuel Alito said Congress has “no authority” to regulate the Supreme Court in an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section published Friday, pushing back against Democrats’ attempt to mandate stronger ethics rules.

“I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” Alito told the Journal. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”

This is how radical right partisan pro-tyranny politicians pretending to be judges think. Congress cannot impose any ethics or transparency rules, allowing judges to be as corrupt, bribed and sleazy as they want. They are above the ethics, morality and the law itself.

What Alito fails to acknowledge, or more likely actually believes, is that Congress does have the power to regulate the federal courts. It can expand or contract the number of judges. The court's budget can be cut. And, there is this at Article 3, Section 2, Clause 1 of the US Constitution:

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

So, congress could write a bill congress that (1) defines "good behavior" for Supreme Court judges, requiring them to be removed for ethics violations, and (2) removes appellate jurisdiction so that the judges aren't hearing their own appeals. Congress could even create a new Article 3 administrative court that only has jurisdiction over ethics reviews, which is a great idea. And, there's this regarding removing federal judges from office at Article 3, Section 1:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

That says judge's terms in office don't expire. It does not say that they can commit crimes or murder someone and still serve on the bench. The problem here is that even if a judge is convicted by a jury in a criminal court, they still get to hear their own appeal if Congress can't get 2/3rds of the Senate to agree on impeachment. Right now, Republicans in the Senate are hell-bent to justifying (on 1st Amendment free speech grounds), protecting and expanding corruption in government, not reigning it in. The constitution does not define "good behavior", but Congress could define it to exclude being found guilty of ethics violations. Of course, Republicans in congress will not allow that.

Again, we see clear, direct evidence of the authoritarianism that has completely engulfed and rotted radical right Republican elites. They hate democracy, transparency, ethics and the rule of law itself, except when it applies to other people and enemies.

News bits: If he gets re-elected in 2024; Ways AI can go wrong; About the added criminal charges

This interview conveys how insiders view what a second term would be like. In a nutshell, interviews with former DJT administration insiders say that "a second term will not be as bad as you think, it will be so much worse." (~0:55 to 2:14) Just some food for thought. 

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Scientific American writes about an interesting way that AI (artificial intelligence) can go off the rails. SciAm writes:

AI content is taking over the Internet, and text generated by “large language models” is filling hundreds of websites, including CNET and Gizmodo. But as AI developers scrape the Internet, AI-generated content may soon enter the data sets used to train new models to respond like humans. Some experts say that will inadvertently introduce errors that build up with each succeeding generation of models.

A growing body of evidence supports this idea. It suggests that a training diet of AI-generated text, even in small quantities, eventually becomes “poisonous” to the model being trained. Currently there are few obvious antidotes. “While it may not be an issue right now or in, let’s say, a few months, I believe it will become a consideration in a few years,” says Rik Sarkar, a computer scientist at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

In other words, garbage and errors that AI creates and spews into the internet can be picked up later by a subsequent iteration of AI trying to learn things from internet content. Over time AI errors build on themselves, eventually poisoning AI. Thus, an AI "prompted to write about historical English architecture, spews out gibberish about jackrabbits."

AI model collapse in later generations

Model collapse - probable events poison AI's reality

The authors of that research paper comment: "To avoid model collapse, access to genuine human-generated content is essential." This is good news, humans are not yet completely obsoleted by AI!

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His legal troubles: Everyone is reporting about the three felonies the DoJ added to the Maralagogate espionage, obstruction and sleaze incident. The felonies are one new espionage charge and two new obstruction of justice charges, summarized here.* One can imagine that DJT's legal team will howl that this is all a baseless political witch hunt and they need an added year or two to review the new charges before the trial can start next May. The DoJ has already said this should not be a grounds to further delay. I have no idea of how this will play out. 

But another source, the NYT, seems to at least imply that there's one each of espionage, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Mr. de Oliveria is new and he is accused of both obstruction and perjury.

Experts say the evidence is solid, but so what? Evidence schmevidence. What counts as real are (i) convictions upheld after all appeals, (ii) no GOP presidential pardon or a self-pardon by a 2nd term DJT in the White House, and (iii) no deal is reached that lets him off the hook with little more than a wrist slap. Everything before that is of secondary importance. 

Q: Do you think that the new words I just made up, schmevidence and Maralagogate, will make it into a dictionary as hot new words? 🤨 (that's actually important) 

A short commentary from Snowflake

 While generally Germaine and I have the same views about the direction the U.S. is heading, I tend to be a bit less hyperbolic. This morning I became hyperbolic. 

I like to think, we have the same goal, to keep the U.S. a civilized country, expose fanaticism, and expose the Right. But did that goal sway my reaction to something innocuous? 

Why am I bringing this up today? Because we ALL - whether we admit or not - can get so riled up we sometimes see something that isn't there. And today, I made a fool of myself and only when my partner reminded me I was taking something WAY TOO SERIOUSLY, did I realize I too have become a victim of certain narratives and beliefs. 

Let me explain:

This morning watched a soccer game between the U.S. women and Netherlands. Part of the FIFA Women's World Cup.

Throughout the game, the camera kept panning to the American audience. They were particularly loud and boisterous. But it was their persistent chant that got me upset. 

USA! USA! USA!

Why should this bother me? Every nation supports it's players. Why did this effect me? Then I realized why.

This USA chant has been termed as something you hear at Trump rallies. It's something that is now been associated with the American Conservative. It's akin to saying "Don't mess with us." And who has fed that narrative?

You guessed it! THE LEFT MEDIA!

Chanting “U.S.A, U.S.A!” is fine; what matters is the context, the intent behind the chant.

So it’s not so great if the idea of raising one’s voice in a group display is to try to put another group of Americans in its place by implying – solely because of race, ethnicity, heritage or skin color – that they’re not real Americans or “not American enough.” Whatever that means.

That is when the chanting can become really offensive. Patriotism is one thing, racial or ethnic putdowns are another. In recent years, we’ve seen far too many examples of the latter.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/26/opinion/navarrette-usa-chanting/index.html

Though dated, I also found this story:

OK Conference fans asked to stop chanting USA during sporting events, and here's why:

It’s not that the OK Conference wants to stifle patriotism, Haskins said. In fact, he said fans are encouraged to chant USA after the National Anthem has been played.

However, Haskins said there have been reports that fans have been using USA as a disguise to taunt opposing teams, players and spectators.

https://www.mlive.com/highschoolsports/article/ok-conference-fans-asked-to-stop-chanting-usa-during-sporting-events-and-heres-why/

Then there is this bit of tripe:

The People Chanting “U-S-A” Loathe America, and Everything It’s Supposed to Stand For

https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/donald-trump/the-people-chanting-u-s-a-loathe-america-and-every

That article is about the idiots who stormed the Capitol chanting USA USA. Yet the title of the article seems to imply that chanting USA USA is only done by loathsome people for loathsome reasons. If you only read the headline, you would come to that conclusion, wouldn't you?

So, were the American fans mocking the Dutch? Or just being supportive of their team? Did I over-react? 

Another way of asking this: Have WE been programmed to believe that chanting USA USA is done only in a hyper-patriotic fashion and suggest a put down of those who are NOT American or those who are NOT America enough? Has the left leaning media made the chant something NOT to be proud of? 

Or has the chant been SO misused that we now get riled up when we hear it chanted?

Bits: Congressional GOP pro-global warming policy; Hot tub temp ocean; Plastic pollution

In 1996, the gun industry got Republicans and some Democrats in congress to vote for a law that banned research on public health impacts of gun ownership and violence. The research ban was triggered by a 1993 research paper that showed gun ownership was a risk factor for domestic homicide. The NRA went nuts after that paper. The research ban is still partly in effect today. The gin violence research ban was devastatingly effective. 

In a replay of that wildly successful research ban tactic, the pro-carbon pollution energy sector has bought some corrupt Republicans government-hater ideologues in congress to employ the same tactic. Corrupted, pay-to-play Republicans are quietly inserting language in spending bills that prevent the American government from combating or even researching climate change. The Lever writes:

As scientists warn of a mass extinction and ecological tipping points, congressional Republicans are helping their fossil fuel industry donors by quietly inserting provisions into annual spending bills designed to bar the American government from combating and researching climate change, according to the fine print of legislative text reviewed by The Lever. Some provisions also require the leasing of federal lands and waters for oil and gas development, while potentially limiting such leases for wind power.

In all, Republican leaders have added at least a dozen such environmental provisions to four annual government spending bills as property damage and death tolls mount from historic heat waves, floods, and wildfires.

By adding the provisions to annual must-pass spending bills, Republicans who control the U.S. House are attempting to force Senate Democrats to choose between either accepting them or blocking the spending bills and shutting down the government.

One of the most aggressive Republican climate provisions moving through Texas Republican Rep. Kay Granger’s House Appropriations Committee panel is buried in legislation funding the government’s science agencies. As waters around South Florida set records for the hottest ocean temperatures ever recorded, a line in the bill would bar the Biden administration from spending any money on “climate change fisheries research.”  

The subcommittee that originally authored the fisheries legislation is headed by Republican Rep. Hal Rogers, who hails from the coal-rich state of Kentucky and whose top career campaign contributors include donors from the mining and fossil fuel industries.

Rogers has raised more than half a million dollars from the mining industry over the course of his career, and $390,000 from the oil and gas industry, according to data from OpenSecrets. In the 2019-2020 cycle, Rogers’s campaign paid $66,000 to his wife Cynthia.  

The GOP legislation also moves to defund a separate Biden order from April 2022 that sought to enhance the federal government’s forest stewardship and promote “climate-smart stewardship of mature and old-growth forests.”

The radicalized Republican Party, authoritarian, corrupt, mendacious, morally rotted, pro-pollution, pro-climate change and pro-species extinction.

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From the Global Warming Is Not A Hoax Files: The AP writes:

The water temperature around the tip of Florida has hit triple digits — hot tub levels — two days in a row. Meteorologists say it could be the hottest seawater ever measured, although some questions about the reading remain.

Scientists are already seeing devastating effects from prolonged hot water surrounding Florida — coral bleaching and even the death of some corals in what had been one of the Florida Keys’ most resilient reefs. Climate change has set temperature records across the globe this month.

The warmer water is also fuel for hurricanes.

Scientists were careful to say there is some uncertainty with the reading. But the buoy at Manatee Bay hit 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit (38.4 degrees Celsius) Monday evening, according to National Weather Service meteorologist George Rizzuto. The night before, that buoy showed an online reading of 100.2 F (37.9 C).

“This is a hot tub. I like my hot tub around 100, 101, (37.8, 38.3 C). That’s what was recorded yesterday,” said Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters.

The consequences for sea corals are serious. NOAA researcher Andrew Ibarra, who took his kayak out to the area, “found that the entire reef was bleached out. Every single coral colony was exhibiting some form of paling, partial bleaching or full out bleaching.”

Some coral even had died, he said. This comes on top of bleaching seen last week by the University of Miami, when NOAA increased the alert level for coral earlier this month.

A dead coral at Cheeca Rocks off the coast of 

Islamorada, Fla., on July 23, 2023

Q: Which is the actual hoax here, global warming or the corrupted, radicalized Republican Party?

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Social psychology and plastic pollution: The conversation writes: 

Decades of public messages about recycling in the US 

have crowded out more sustainable ways to manage waste

You’ve just finished a cup of coffee at your favorite cafe. Now you’re facing a trash bin, a recycling bin and a compost bin. What’s the most planet-friendly thing to do with your cup?

Many of us would opt for the recycling bin – but that’s often the wrong choice. In order to hold liquids, most paper coffee cups are made with a thin plastic lining, which makes separating these materials and recycling them difficult.  

In fact, the most sustainable option isn’t available at the trash bin. It happens earlier, before you’re handed a disposable cup in the first place.

In our research on waste behavior, sustainability, engineering design and decision making, we examine what U.S. residents understand about the efficacy of different waste management strategies and which of those strategies they prefer. In two nationwide surveys in the U.S. that we conducted in October 2019 and March 2022, we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse in favor of recycling. We call this tendency recycling bias and reduction neglect.  

Producing and disposing of goods is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and a public health threat, especially for vulnerable communities that receive large quantities of waste. New research suggests that even when plastic does get recycled, it produces staggering amounts of microplastic pollution.

No big deal, right? All congress has to do is pass a non-trivial tax on disposable single use plastic items, like hot beverage cups and demand will decrease. Or, just pass a carbon tax law.

Oh, no wait. Can't do that. The radicalized, authoritarian, corrupt, mendacious, morally rotted Republican Party will block anything the government tries to do. Never mind. The problem is not solvable, right? Right.

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A NYT opinion pience comments about Mussolini style fascism rising again in Italy:

Ahead of Italy’s election last fall, Giorgia Meloni was widely depicted as a menace. By this summer, everything — her youthful admiration for Benito Mussolini, her party’s links to neofascists, her often extreme rhetoric — had been forgiven. Praised for her practicality and support for Ukraine, Ms. Meloni has established herself as a reliable Western partner, central to Group of 7 meetings and NATO summits alike. A visit to Washington, which takes place on Thursday, seals her status as a valued member of the international community.

But the comforting tale of a populist firebrand turned pragmatist overlooks something important: what’s been happening in Italy. Ms. Meloni’s administration has spent its first months accusing minorities of undermining the triad of God, nation and family, with dire practical consequences for migrants, nongovernmental organizations and same-sex parents. Efforts to weaken anti-torture legislation, stack the public broadcaster with loyalists and rewrite Italy’s postwar constitution to increase executive power are similarly troubling. Ms. Meloni’s government isn’t just nativist but has a harsh authoritarian streak, too.  

For Italy, this is bad enough. But much of its significance lies beyond its borders, showing how the far right can break down historic barriers with the center right. Allies of Ms. Meloni are already in power in Poland, also newly legitimized by their support for Ukraine. In Sweden, a center-right coalition relies on the nativist Sweden Democrats’ support to govern. In Finland, the anti-immigrant Finns Party went one better and joined the government. Though these parties, like many of their European counterparts, once rejected membership of NATO and the European Union, today they seek a place in the main Euro-Atlantic institutions, transforming them from within. In this project, Ms. Meloni is leading the way.

Once again, voters vote for dictatorship, bigotry and inconvenient truth. European democracy and NATO could both rot from within, just like democracy is rotting from within here in the US. Once those authoritarians get enough power and control, they will turn on democracy, secularism, pluralism and respect for truth, the law and fair elections. They will probably wind up supporting Russia in the long run.

That's like what America's radicalized, intolerant, authoritarian Republican Party has done. That applies to most Republican elites and most of the rank and file. They too will probably wind up eventually supporting Russian dictatorship, bigotry and brutality. And the corruption that usually accompanies dictatorships.

Bits: The face of collapsing civil rights; Ocean current collapse imminent; Fighting for civil rights

Keeping eyes on the flow of power: As radical right Christian nationalist extremists and brass knuckles capitalists gain and exert more power in government, commerce and society, America is witnessing a slow collapse of civil liberties for average people. Accompanying that, there is a subtle expansion for wealthy and/or powerful elites. Power is flowing from the people and secular pluralist government to the elites and authoritarian government and political forces, e.g., the radical right, authoritarian Republican Party. Law and Crime reports about a current example in Alabama:

White Alabama mayor says even if he did have a ‘secret meeting’ to keep Black mayor out of office, it’s not ‘so egregious’ as to be a civil rights violation

Patrick Braxton, along with James Ballard, Barbara Patrick, Janice Quarles, and Wanda Scott, sued the city of Newbern, Alabama and alleged that despite being legally entitled to take office, they were prevented from doing so when white residents “refused to accept” the results of a 2020 election. They argue that Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, Newbern’s white former mayor, conspired with his council, other government officials, and a local bank, to illegally install himself as mayor even after Braxton fairly and legally won the election.

That is how radical right authoritarian White people see civil liberties. Even if a Black person is elected, White elites openly subverting the election does not violate anyone's civil rights, including voters or the disenfranchised politician. 

In the 2024 elections,, one can reasonably expect this kind of poisoned reasoning to crop up from the radical right with increasing frequency and ferocity. American democracy is under an undeniable, direct attack by the radical right Republican Party, White Christian nationalist extremists, brass knuckles capitalists and other supporters of tyranny.

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The WaPo reports:

The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.

Scientists have long seen the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, as one of the planet’s most vulnerable “tipping elements” — meaning the system could undergo an abrupt and irreversible change, with dramatic consequences for the rest of the globe. Under Earth’s current climate, this aquatic conveyor belt transports warm, salty water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, and then sends colder water back south along the ocean floor. But as rising global temperatures melt Arctic ice, the resulting influx of cold freshwater has thrown a wrench in the system — and could shut it down entirely.

The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around the middle of this century. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on either side of the Atlantic.  

The new study adds to a growing body of evidence that this crucial ocean system is in peril. Since 2004, observations from a network of ocean buoys has showed the AMOC getting weaker — though the limited time frame of that data set makes it hard to establish a trend. Scientists have also analyzed multiple “proxy” indicators of the current’s strength, including microscopic organisms and tiny sediments from the seafloor, to show the system is in its weakest state in more than 1,000 years.

The article goes on to point out that the time estimate for catastrophic collapse is uncertain, a point that climate science deniers make as they dismiss this as alarmism, a Chinese hoax and/or socialism. Of course since there is uncertainty, then the current collapse could happen sooner than ~2050, maybe ~2035 for example. Climate science deniers use uncertainty to dismiss the threat. 

In the minds of climate science and global warming deniers, all uncertainty points to things being definitely significantly better, never possibly worse. The asymmetry in how global warming deniers deal with uncertainty is a blatant logic flaw. It evinces the bad faith, ill-will and malice that dominates their thinking and motives. 

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LGBQ nation writes about a lawsuit to have force a Florida school district to treat the Bible the same as all other banned books:

Lawyer demands school district ban the Bible after it banned 

other books for being sexually explicit

"The District must hold religious texts to the same standards it holds all other library books," the attorney wrote

A watchdog nonprofit seeking to protect the separation of church and state is demanding the Bible be banned from a Florida school district after the superintendent banned five other books due to “sexually explicit content.”

Christopher Line, a staff attorney for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), sent an email to Leon County Schools superintendent Rocky Hanna requesting that “the District either ban the bible based on the criterion of ‘sexually explicit content’ it has used to ban these books, or cease banning books and return the banned books to school shelves.”

Unfortunately, radicalized, increasingly theocratic courts can dream up some excuse to keep the bible available, with other banned books remaining banned.

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Patriotism poll data:

Pride in national identity is lowest among those 18-34, and illustrates the fracture between young Americans and older generations at a time of deep partisanship in the United States.

Overall, 39% of U.S. adults say they are "extremely proud" to be American in the most recent poll.

Well, maybe the unhappy young 'uns will vote and help toss Republicans out of power in 2024. Then they will have something to be proud of. We'll see.

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Normalized Republican politician mendacity: The WaPo writes about whoppers that Alabama's radical right extremist Senator, Tommy Tuberville, is telling the public:

“My father, Charles Tuberville, made the D-Day landing at Normandy as a tank commander with the 101st infantry. He served with honor during World War II, earning five Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.”  

“He lied about his age at 16, joined the Army.”

.... an examination of army histories, newspaper reports and other materials calls into question many of the claims put forth by Tuberville, who sits on both the Senate Armed Services and Veterans’ Affairs committees ....

Charles Tuberville, who was born in 1925, turned 16 five months before the United States entered World War II because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His draft registration card (front and back) shows he submitted it on July 16, 1943 — his 18th birthday.

[The tank commander claim] is dubious. Charles Tuberville’s tombstone lists his highest rank as “TEC 5” or technician fifth grade, an Army rank at the time that indicated technical skills but not combat leadership. According to a 1944 Army memo, TEC 5 jobs were limited to armorer, cook, tank driver, light truck driver or tank mechanic. Tuberville would have needed to be a sergeant to be a tank commander. 

[The 5 Bronze Stars claim] is false. The Bronze Star, the eighth-highest military award, is earned when a soldier “distinguished himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service” in combat with an armed enemy of the United States. .... None of the hundreds of pages of after-action reports on the 746th Tank Battalion, from June 1944 to August 1945, lists Tuberville as a recipient of the Bronze Star even as the reports meticulously list scores of soldiers who were either recommended for an award or received one.

Egads & bejeezus! The Republican Party is corrupt, authoritarian and morally rotted to all the way to its rotten core. What is it about Republican politicians that makes them feel a need to lie so blatantly? Whatever it is, the lying doesn't seem to cost them many or any Republican votes, so making up blatantly false things is a cost free way to virtue signal to the cult. 

Chunks: Self-healing technology; Israel's bitter fight over democracy, separation of power and reasonableness

Alright, listen up peeps. Something is very wrong and creepy here. A few days ago tech sites were gushing about metals that self-heal microfractures. The idea is to try to eventually make metals that do not fail under years of heavy stress. That was cited as relevant to bridges, airplanes, skyscrapers, big trucks, ships, gerbil cages and anything else where tons of metal is put under a lot of recurring heavy stress.

OK, maybe not gerbil cages.

Now today another blast about self-healing technology came out about self-healing of tiny stress damage from high energy proton irradiation. Something very strange is afoot. Techspot writes about a recent paper in the journal Advanced Energy Materials entitled Effect of Hole Transport Materials and Their Dopants on the Stability and Recoverability of Perovskite Solar Cells on Very Thin Substrates after 7 MeV Proton Irradiation: 

Scientists develop self-healing solar panels that can 

reverse the effects of radiation damage

Scientists from the University of Sydney in Australia have developed a solar panel with self-healing capabilities that could drastically extend the life of satellites in orbit. The panel utilizes perovskite, a calcium titanium oxide mineral that has been hailed by some as a "miracle material" due to its unique properties.

Satellites have relied on solar panels for decades to convert sunlight into electricity using photovoltaic cells, but damage from certain types of radiation can cause them to lose up to 10 percent of their efficiency annually.

At that rate, it isn't long before they're rendered useless and turn into space junk.

The scientists discovered that radiation damage can be reversed in perovskite solar cells when heat is applied in a vacuum. Simulated testing here on Earth demonstrated that degraded solar panels can recover 100 percent of their original efficiency when warmed up, and it just so happens that the Sun is a perfect space heater.

The earlier reporting a few days ago about self healing metals included this blast of technology from Science Daily:

'Stunning' discovery: Metals can heal themselves

Microscopic cracks vanish in experiments, revealing possibility of self-healing machines

Researchers announce the first observation of a self-healing metal. If harnessed, the newly discovered phenomenon could someday lead to engines, bridges and airplanes that reverse damage caused by wear and tear, making them safer and longer-lasting.

Scientists for the first time have witnessed pieces of metal crack, then fuse back together without any human intervention, overturning fundamental scientific theories in the process. If the newly discovered phenomenon can be harnessed, it could usher in an engineering revolution -- one in which self-healing engines, bridges and airplanes could reverse damage caused by wear and tear, making them safer and longer-lasting.

The research team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University described their findings today in the journal Nature.

"This was absolutely stunning to watch first-hand," said Sandia materials scientist Brad Boyce.

"What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale," Boyce said.

Fatigue damage is one way machines wear out and eventually break. Repeated stress or motion causes microscopic cracks to form. Over time, these cracks grow and spread until -- snap! The whole device breaks, or in the scientific lingo, it fails.

The fissure Boyce and his team saw disappear was one of these tiny but consequential fractures -- measured in nanometers.

In 2013, Michael Demkowicz -- then an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of materials science and engineering, now a full professor at Texas A&M -- began chipping away at conventional materials theory. He published a new theory, based on findings in computer simulations, that under certain conditions metal should be able to weld shut cracks formed by wear and tear.

The discovery that his theory was true came inadvertently at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a Department of Energy user facility jointly operated by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.

"We certainly weren't looking for it," Boyce said.

Khalid Hattar, now an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Chris Barr, who now works for the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, were running the experiment at Sandia when the discovery was made. They only meant to evaluate how cracks formed and spread through a nanoscale piece of platinum using a specialized electron microscope technique they had developed to repeatedly pull on the ends of the metal 200 times per second.

Surprisingly, about 40 minutes into the experiment, the damage reversed course. One end of the crack fused back together as if it was retracing its steps, leaving no trace of the former injury. Over time, the crack regrew along a different direction.

Another, more restrained and professional tech source commented:

We're all gonna die!!!

Scientists observe metal repairing itself for the first time. Could Terminator robots be on the horizon? 

But for those worrying about the rise of real-life Terminator robots — don't: The newly discovered mechanism only works on a few metals and on incredibly small scales — at least, for now.

Alright people, what the heck is going on here? Somebody do something! 

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An Israeli-style variation of what is happening in the US is also going on in attacks on Israel's democracy right now. The reasoning and goals are about the same, authoritarians fight for bigoted dictatorship and democrats oppose both. The countries, languages and cultures are different, but the underlying and rhetorical tactics are quite similar. At this point, the fight in Israel is dark free speech and corrupt, bigoted dictatorship vs secular democracy.

The NYT writes: 

Israeli lawmakers on Monday approved the contentious plan of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrict the influence of the Supreme Court, defying a wide array of opposition movements that have threatened to shut down large parts of the country with protests.

The plan limits the ways in which the Supreme Court can overturn government decisions, part of a deeply divisive judicial overhaul that has led to perhaps Israel’s gravest domestic crisis since its founding 75 years ago. 

The dispute is part of a wider ideological and cultural standoff between Mr. Netanyahu’s government and its supporters, who want to make Israel into a more religious and nationalist state, and their opponents, who hold a more secular and pluralist vision of the country.

The governing coalition says the court has too much leeway to intervene in political decisions and that it undermines Israeli democracy by giving unelected judges too much power over elected lawmakers.

The coalition says the court has too often acted against right-wing interests — for instance by preventing some construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank or striking down certain privileges granted to ultra-Orthodox Jews, like exemption from military service.  

To limit the court’s influence, the government seeks to stop its judges from using the concept of “reasonableness” to countermand decisions by lawmakers and ministers.

Reasonableness is a legal standard used by many judicial systems, including Australia, Britain and Canada. A decision is deemed unreasonable if a court rules that it was made without considering all relevant factors or without giving relevant weight to each factor, or by giving irrelevant factors too much weight.

The government and its backers say that reasonableness is too vague a concept, and one never codified in Israeli law. The court angered the government this year when some of its judges used the tool to bar Aryeh Deri, a veteran ultra-Orthodox politician  [and the leader of an ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party], from serving in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet. They said it was unreasonable to appoint Mr. Deri because he had recently been convicted of tax fraud.

This looks very much like a Jewish version of Christian nationalism in the US forcing radical theocracy down the throats of secular people who oppose it. That is the epitome of anti-democracy and pro-authoritarianism. 

As we all know by now, the concept of reasonableness is an essentially contested concept. Israel's corrupt far right theocrats and secular grifters like Netanyahu think it is reasonable to install a convicted tax fraud criminal as a government minister in Netanyahu's morally rotted authoritarian coalition.  

Maybe I am seeing things, but Israel's corrupt far right authoritarians and Zionist theocrats look a lot like America's corrupt far right authoritarians and Christian theocrats. And from what I can tell, both of those look uncomfortably similar to corrupt far right authoritarians and Hindu theocrats in India. Of course, the corrupt far right authoritarians and Islamic theocrats in some places, e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia put all of those theocrats to shame in terms of their corruption, brutality and anti-secular malice. So on the bright side(?), things could be a lot worse if global radical religionism overwhelms secular democracies.

But in Israel, at least some of the public is fighting back to try to save democracy. The NYT writes about public resistance to the fall of democracy:

The Israeli Medical Association, which represents 97 percent of Israel’s doctors, announced it would strike on Tuesday in much of the country in protest of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to enact the first part of his coalition’s divisive judicial overhaul. Members around the country will handle only emergencies and critical care for the day. The union exempted Jerusalem.

For Moti Havlin, a 31-year-old Jerusalem real estate developer who voted for Prime Minister Netanyahu, the anti-reform camp is “trying to burn down the country.” He accused pilots and other military reservists of conducting “a military coup” after they said they would stop volunteering for duty to protest passage of the judicial overhaul.

Havlin accused the demonstrators of clinging to the Supreme Court as a “time capsule” of liberal secularism. “The struggle is over whether we’ll have popular sovereignty — democracy — or if we’ll keep being ruled by judges and Air Force pilots,” Havlin said.

Jerusalem Monday night

Israel’s Supreme Court will soon face a challenging question: whether to review the first part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, which aims to rein in the power of the court itself.

Opponents of the law have already vowed to petition the court to take on the case. If the justices agree, it could open the door to a serious crisis among the country’s branches of government.

Israeli police said three protesters demonstrating against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul in central Israel were injured after a car drove into a crowd. Police said they had arrested the car’s owner.

Responding to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks about restarting negotiations with the opposition over future judicial changes, Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of the opposition, said it was an empty offer because the hard-line members of the prime minister's coalition have rejected any compromise. “This extremist and messianic government cannot tear our democracy to shreds at noon, and in the evening send Netanyahu to say that he offers negotiations,” Lapid said. “We won’t give up. The struggle has just begun.”

Two New Yorkers are behind a once-obscure, libertarian and conservative think tank in Jerusalem that became a chief architect of the judicial overhaul plan now dividing Israel. Read more about them here.

Before the Israeli Parliament passed the new judicial law, a group of protesters beating drums and chanting “Democracy” evaded police barriers around the Knesset by entering through the rose garden.

A giant screen showed the proceedings in the chamber, and as the vote started on the third and final reading of the bill, which limits the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn decisions made by government ministers, the crowd shouted, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

People fighting to save democracy in Israel

America's authoritarian far right accomplished the judicial reform it wanted by installing six radical authoritarian, pro-theocracy Christian nationalist judges on the US Supreme Court. Israel does not have a  constitution and the authoritarian radical theocrats there have to knock down norms that used to restrain authoritarian extremism, just like the Republican Party authoritarians did to the US. There are powerful forces in Israeli society that support extreme Zionist theocracy and a toxic accompanying racism.