News bits: Collapsing church-state separation; An advance in mind reading; Drug price gouging

Vox writes about the collapse of church-state separation:

The Supreme Court is taking a wrecking ball to the wall between church and state

The Court’s Republican majority has ground the Constitution’s establishment clause down to a nub

Last June, a previously obscure Oklahoma state board voted to allow two Roman Catholic dioceses to operate a charter school in that state. Lawyers from several civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, responded just over a month later with a lawsuit alleging that this state-funded religious school violates the state constitution.

This challenge to the religious charter school, known as St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, should be a slam-dunk — at least assuming that the allegations in the lawsuit are correct.

Charter schools are public entities funded by state tax revenue. Among other things, the complaint points to a provision of the Oklahoma Constitution which provides that public education funds may not be “used for any other purpose than the support and maintenance of common schools for the equal benefit of all the people of the State.” And several school policies described in the complaint indicate that St. Isidore does not intend to operate for the equal benefit of all students.

According to the lawsuit, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, one of the two dioceses that plans to operate this school, has a policy of expelling students who “intentionally or knowingly” express “disagreement with Catholic faith and morals.” This includes a rule that “‘advocating for, or expressing same-sex attractions ... is not permitted’ for students,” and also a rule providing that a student who “reject[s] his or her own body” by beginning a gender transition “will be ‘choosing not to remain enrolled.’”

Yet the most striking thing about this legal complaint is what it does not say. The lawsuit states explicitly that “the plaintiffs’ claims for relief are brought solely under the state constitution, state statutes, and state regulations.” It does not even mention the federal Constitution’s First Amendment, with its prohibition on laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Before a series of recent Supreme Court decisions carved up this establishment clause, a lawyer challenging government funding of religion almost certainly would have raised some claim under this clause.  

This establishment clause was long understood to require strict separation of church and state — and specifically to forbid using public funds to pay for religious instruction. As the Supreme Court said in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”  

But those days are long past. Indeed, under the current Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin (2022), it’s not even clear that Oklahoma may refuse to fund charter schools that are operated by a church, that seek to train students in that church’s values, and that actively discriminate against individuals the church deems sinful.

Like with some other parts of the US Constitution that the radical right Christian nationalist (CN) extremists on the USSC hate, they now have simply gutted the legal vitality of the Establishment Clause. With that part of the Constitution now obliterated by radical Christian fundamentalists (they hate secularism and secular public education), the wall protecting the state from the church has been demolished. 

And by the state, I particularly mean taxpayer dollars and civil liberties. The most important CN goal is to establish a Christian Sharia theocracy to allow the elites to own and control as much wealth and power as the American people will tolerate. A prime tactic to get wealth and power is to sink CN claws into tax revenue streams. The CN movement want us to force us pay for their efforts to gain control over us and to cut back our civil liberties, with power flowing from the people to Christian Taliban elites. That is just like the CN political movement's success in imposing forced birth laws on millions of women in CN-dominated red states. That is an undeniable, direct attack on a core civil liberty. 

Now that the USSC has obliterated the Establishment Clause, we can expect radical right state legislatures to repeal existing state laws that protect tax dollars from profoundly greedy, corrupt CN elites. The CN wealth and power movement is winning its war against secularism. Its claws are sinking deep into tax revenue streams. 

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An incremental advance in machines reading minds: Berkeley News reports on the first time that recordings of electrical activity in the auditory cortex of the brain have been fed into an artificial intelligence program and that was used to recreate the music that people listened to. BN writes:

Brain recordings capture musicality of speech — with help from Pink Floyd

Neuroscientists decode song from brain recordings, revealing areas dealing with rhythm and vocals

Neuroscientists recorded electrical activity from areas of the brain (yellow and red dots) as patients listened to the Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1.” Using artificial intelligence software, they were able to reconstruct the song from the brain recordings. This is the first time a song has been reconstructed from intracranial electroencephalography recordings.

As the chords of Pink Floyd's “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” filled the hospital suite, neuroscientists at Albany Medical Center diligently recorded the activity of electrodes placed on the brains of patients being prepared for epilepsy surgery.

The goal? To capture the electrical activity of brain regions tuned to attributes of the music — tone, rhythm, harmony and words — to see if they could reconstruct what the patient was hearing.

More than a decade later, after detailed analysis of data from 29 such patients by neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, the answer is clearly yes.

The phrase "All in all it was just a brick in the wall" comes through recognizably in the reconstructed song, its rhythms intact, and the words muddy, but decipherable. This is the first time researchers have reconstructed a recognizable song from brain recordings.  

Because these intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings can be made only from the surface of the brain — as close as you can get to the auditory centers — no one will be eavesdropping on the songs in your head anytime soon.

But for people who have trouble communicating, whether because of stroke or paralysis, such recordings from electrodes on the brain surface could help reproduce the musicality of speech that's missing from today's robot-like reconstructions.

The article includes two 16 second audio clips, one of the original sone, the second is what the AI reconstruction sounds like. It's so strange. The published research paper is here.

A head X-ray of one participant in the experiment shows the placement of electrodes over the frontal (top) and temporal (bottom) regions of the brain. These electrodes were placed on the surface of the brain to locate the origin points of epileptic seizures. While waiting for days in their hospital rooms, patients volunteered for other brain studies, including one attempting to pinpoint the brain regions that respond to music.

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism (BNC) Files: An ars technica article discusses drug price gouging:

Drug makers have tripled the prices of top Medicare drugs

The top 25 costliest drugs for Medicare Part D plans earned their lofty rankings largely through exorbitant price hikes—increases that, on average, more than tripled their list prices since they entered the market, according to a new analysis by AARP.

For nearly all the drugs, the price hikes far outstripped the rate of inflation, with increases ranging from 20 percent to 739 percent during the drugs' lifetimes on the market.

Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest.

The drug in the analysis with the largest lifetime price increase was Lantus, a Sanofi-made, long-acting insulin for diabetes. Since its introduction in 2000, Sanofi has hiked the list price 739 percent, the analysis found. The general inflation rate during that period was 71 percent. 

In a blog post on Friday, PhRMA called the AARP's analysis on drug price increases a "flawed report to spin a misleading narrative." The group pointed to insurers and pharmacy benefit managers for their role in increasing costs for seniors.

There is nothing misleading about drug price gouging by the drug industry.  It is no surprise that the drug industry immediately attacked the analysis. 

When faced with inconvenient fact and truth, attacking it is what nearly all companies do when their revenue streams and/or profit margins are brought into question. That's exactly what lying cigarette makers did for decades and still do today to deceive the public about the reality and dangers of smoking cigarettes and second hand cigarette smoke. That's what the lying oil and coal industries did for decades and still do today to deceive the public about the reality and dangers of global warming and greenhouse gas pollution. 

With BNC, those with pricing power charge whatever the market will bear and their power can enforce. This has nothing to do with making the world or democracy better or people happy or healthy. Most of the time for big companies, the only moral value there is for BNC is maximum profit. Everything else, including patients who cannot afford medicine die or global warming kills people, is secondary.