Family and Friends

 We have heard, and read, that nowadays political differences are driving family and friends apart. Particularly if you are a diehard Trumper and someone close to you is a liberal Snowflake. Or if you are a progressive you might have zero tolerance for Trumpers. 

I mean seriously folks, they are even offering links to how to cope with family members who aren't thinking the same way you think:

My family voted for Trump. How can we talk about politics without ruining the holidays?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/391140/trump-voting-relatives-holidays-argument

How to Keep Politics From Ruining Your Holiday

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/well/family/holiday-politics-talk-harris-trump.html

Post-Election Moral Family Planning for the Upcoming Holidays

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/post-election-moral-family-planning-for-the-upcoming-holidays

Nah, I wouldn't suggest you delve into the links I just posted, I just wanted to prove a point. That we are now at the point in our discourse where different sites offer advice or suggestions on how to survive with a Family member or even a close Friend who voted differently than you did.

I would prefer NOT to prophesize, or suggest a course of action, but just speak for myself.

I DO CARE how you voted. That would go for any family or friends that might have voted for Trump.

IN THAT CASE, I would have to evaluate the nature of our relationship. If I value the love of a close family member or friend, I would still overlook how they voted. AND I WOULD NOT get into a debate about it over the Holidays. Some things are more precious than political differences.

Now I realize not everyone can be that generous. There is such a thing as A BRIDGE TOO FAR, and regardless of your feelings about this person or that person, if they voted for or supported Trump, that might be A BRIDGE TOO FAR. And NO ONE should judge you if that is how you feel. Just as NO ONE should judge you should you decide to stay close to people in your life who did vote for Trump.

For me, 'tis NOT the season for making judgments, but 'tis the season to enjoy those you are close to, put any differences aside, and you can always get back to bashing each other's heads in, in the new year.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, AND Cheers all around.

One liberal SNOWFLAKE. 

The rise of zombie laws? Maybe!

Congress passes laws that become obsolete or unworkable over time. Those laws are then basically ignored by law enforcement, presidents and congress. Congress rarely repeals obsolete, unused laws so they are like zombies that can come back to life. 

Currently, MAGA elites are pushing for reliance on a zombie law as a way to bypass Congress and impose a national abortion ban. Vanity Fair writes about two zombies that MAGA is thinking about resurrecting to bypass congress:

This time around, to avoid pesky checks and balances, Trump and his allies have revisited US history and found some truly heinous old laws to advance their right-wing agenda. These “zombie laws,” as they’re called, are provisions that haven’t been enforced or invoked for decades but are somehow still on the books.

Arguably the worst among them is the Comstock Act of 1873, a product of the Victorian-era moral panic named after anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock. It was designed to restrict the distribution of “obscenities” at the time, like pornography, contraceptives, and even some medical textbooks. The Comstock Act was never repealed. And earlier this year, during oral arguments for FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—which centered on the agency’s approval of mifepristone, an abortion medication often ordered by mail—justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito mused on the idea of bringing the law back to life. “Shouldn’t the FDA have at least considered the application of 18 USC 1461?” Alito asked, alluding to the law’s prohibition on “mailing obscene or crime-inciting matter.” He continued: “This is a prominent provision. It’s not some obscure subsection of a complicated, obscure law.”

Of course, the Comstock Act is some “obscure law,” whose enforcement, The American Prospect notes, essentially stopped in the 1930s, after federal courts clarified that it could only be applied when someone was mailing an item or drug specifically intended to be used illegally for an abortion.

“On the books” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a law that hasn’t been enforced in decades. But more to the point is the fact that the Comstock Act might allow Trump to circumvent congressional approval.

Aside from the Comstock Act, the other zombie law in contention is the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The acts, passed by a Congress in the control of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party, tightened restrictions on anti-government speech and gave the government power over immigrants deemed threats to the country.

Republicans are angling to use it again, to create a legal framework for the mass internment and deportation of immigrants—perhaps the biggest promise of Trump’s campaign. The president-elect has repeatedly said that the residence of some 11 million undocumented immigrants in America constitutes a foreign “invasion”—incidentally a precondition for the law’s enforcement. The problem, though, is that Republicans need to prove that America is genuinely at war—which it isn’t, rendering their theory completely faulty.

So, to round 'em up, box 'em up, and mail 'em back home, MAGA has to just call illegal immigration a war. That seems like a straightforward authoritarian plan, faulty or not.

The Alien and Sedition Acts made it a crime to “print, utter, or publish... any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government, Congress, or the President. Although that seems to be an unconstitutional violation of free speech, DJT and MAGA elites have been very clear that they want to shup critics up and punish them. They are filing defamation lawsuits right now to start spreading fear in the MSM. All that MAGA has to do is to convince its MAGA US supreme court that we are in a cold war with dangerous, drug dealing, illegal immigrants and therefore criticism of the US government in this perilous time is punishable by fines and jail time.

That seems like a straightforward authoritarian plan, unconstitutional or not. How likely is this plan to pass MAGA muster in the USSC? That is unclear but probably low, maybe ~10% chance of “success.” How likely is this plan to be tested by a MAGA lawsuit or two? Probably high, maybe ~90% chance.

According to Perplexity, there's a lot of room for mischief in zombie laws that are still “on the books.”

Science bits; Bird flu; Fun with OAEs; Extinctions science; Fun with AI -- getting more like brains

Baby capybara & mom

SciAm reports about bird flu:

How the U.S. Lost Control of Bird Flu, 

Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic

As the bird flu virus moved into cows and people, sluggish federal action, deference to industry and neglect for worker safety put the country at risk

Experts say they have lost faith in the government’s ability to contain the outbreak.

“We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.”

This investigation revealed key problems, including deference to the farm industry, eroded public health budgets, neglect for the safety of agriculture workers, and the sluggish pace of federal interventions.

Case in point: The U.S. Department of Agriculture this month announced a federal order to test milk nationwide. Researchers welcomed the news but said it should have happened months ago — before the virus was so entrenched.

But, not to worry, DJT has a plan to deal with another pandemic. He's gonna let its spread through the population so we all get herd immunity. See, easy peasy, fun and squeazy.

Well, all  of us who survive will get herd immunity, maybe. 👍 The dead ones will be dead. 👎

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Cosmos Magazine writes about OAEs, which have caused mass extinctions in the past:

The Ocean Anoxic Event 1a (OAE 1a) was one of the largest disruptions of the global carbon cycle and climate system in the past 200 million years.

New research published in Science Advances has determined that it was triggered 119.5 million years ago and lasted for 1.1 million years, during the Early Cretaceous Period.

“Ocean anoxic events occur in part as a consequence of climatic warming in a greenhouse world,” says Brad Sageman, senior author of the study from Northwestern University in the US.

As usual, that raised a question or two. I asked Dr. Perplexity the obvious one:

Q: How close are we to repeating something like Ocean Anoxic Event 1a (OAE 1a) due to carbon dioxide (CO2) increases and global warming?

A: .... long answer .... In summary, while we are not currently experiencing an event like OAE 1a, the current trajectory of CO2 emissions and the resulting increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations are moving us closer to conditions that could potentially trigger anoxic events in the oceans. The rate of CO2 rise is faster than what is required to meet the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C warming limit, indicating a need for more aggressive mitigation efforts to prevent such an outcome.

  

That was not a satisfying answer. In response to Q2, A2 was equally unsatisfying.

Q3: At the current rate of CO2 increase in the air, how long would it take to reach a CO2 level that could cause an OAE?

A3: Given the current atmospheric CO2 concentration of 422.5 ppm in 2024, and assuming the rate of increase remains constant at 2.84 ppm per year:

Time to reach 700 ppm ​is ≈ 98 years

However, this calculation assumes a linear increase in CO2 levels, which is an oversimplification. The actual trajectory could be influenced by various factors.

So, to be conservative let's assume things get worse faster than projected because that's what has been happening too often for comfort in the last ~20 years or thereabouts. That means we might get oceanic anoxia and a mass extinction in ~50 years. One can only wonder how close to 700 ppm humanity is willing to get. Guess we're gonna find out.

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Science magazine writes:

Climate change extinctions

We can expect, with increased certainty, that rising temperatures will lead to an increasing number of extinctions, with the highest emission scenario leading to extinction of nearly a third of the Earth’s species, especially those from particular vulnerable taxa or regions.

Climate change is expected to cause irreversible changes to biodiversity, but predicting those risks remains uncertain. I synthesized 485 studies and more than 5 million projections to produce a quantitative global assessment of climate change extinctions. With increased certainty, this meta-analysis suggests that extinctions will accelerate rapidly if global temperatures exceed 1.5°C. The highest-emission scenario would threaten approximately one-third of species, globally. Amphibians; species from mountain, island, and freshwater ecosystems; and species inhabiting South America, Australia, and New Zealand face the greatest threats. In line with predictions, climate change has contributed to an increasing proportion of observed global extinctions since 1970. Besides limiting greenhouse gases, pinpointing which species to protect first will be critical for preserving biodiversity until anthropogenic climate change is halted and reversed.

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TechExplore:

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems tend to take on human biases and amplify them, causing people who use that AI to become more biased themselves, finds a new study by UCL researchers.

Human and AI biases can consequently create a feedback loop, with small initial biases increasing the risk of human error, according to the findings published in Nature Human Behavior.

"Here, we've found that people interacting with biased AI systems can then become even more biased themselves, creating a potential snowball effect wherein minute biases in original datasets become amplified by the AI, which increases the biases of the person using the AI."

TechExplore again:

LLMs are becoming more brain-like as they advance, researchers discover

Large language models (LLMs), the most renowned of which is ChatGPT, have become increasingly better at processing and generating human language over the past few years.

Researchers at Columbia University and Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research Northwell Health recently carried out a study investigating the similarities between LLM representations on neural responses. Their findings, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, suggest that as LLMs become more advanced, they do not only perform better, but they also become more brain-like. 

"To estimate the similarity between these models and the brain, we tried to predict the recorded neural responses to words from the word embeddings. The ability to predict the brain responses from the word embeddings gives us a sense of how similar the two are."

"First, we found that as LLMs get more powerful (for example, as they get better at answering questions like ChatGPT), their embeddings become more similar to the brain's neural responses to language," said Mischler.

"More surprisingly, as LLM performance increases, their alignment with the brain's hierarchy also increases. This means that the amount and type of information extracted over successive brain regions during language processing aligns better with the information extracted by successive layers of the highest-performing LLMs than it does with low-performing LLMs."

The results gathered by this team of researchers suggest that the best performing LLMs mirror brain responses associated with language processing more closely. Moreover, their better performance appears to be due to the greater efficiency of their earlier layers.

Perplexity:

LLMs, like the human brain, develop internal representations of words known as embeddings. These embeddings capture semantic and syntactic relationships between words. As LLMs become more powerful, their embeddings increasingly resemble the neural responses recorded from the human brain when processing language.

The study found that the layers of LLMs correspond more closely to the hierarchical processing of language in the brain. In the brain, language processing involves a gradual build-up of representations from acoustic to phonetic and eventually to more abstract components. Similarly, the layers of high-performing LLMs extract information in a manner that aligns with this brain hierarchy.

The research suggests that the better performance of advanced LLMs is partly due to the greater efficiency of their earlier layers. These layers are crucial in capturing the foundational aspects of language, much like the initial stages of language processing in the brain.

Hm, something I do not understand is going on here. 😕

Commentary: Maintaining emotional control

PD's post yesterday and comments from yesterday and today about Joe Biden being shockingly unfit for office really hit a nerve with me. I irrationally lashed out at the WSJ reporting because it came from a source I consider to be kleptocratic and authoritarian, poisoned years ago by the authoritarian monster and master propagandist, Rupert Murdoch. While that is true for the WSJ editorial pages, it is not necessarily true for its news reporting, which is usually solid and trustworthy. Profound distrust sometimes leads people to irrationality. That happened to me. It was a mistake.

Despite my loss of control, I did not let that emotional reaction keep me from accepting the reporting as basically true and very important. Bottom line, Biden is a catastrophe.

I had just posted about my own rapidly growing suspicions that Joe had lost he ability to govern some years ago. Then PD's post popped up. I now believe that Joe and the Dems are significantly more corrupt and authoritarian than I did just three days ago. Getting close to the Repubs in terms of getting close to equivalence. To me, that thought is very upsetting and frightening.

These critically important comments that PD found among Biden's public statements need to be made known and understood:

"The fact that he [Trump] doesn't abide by the rules of of democracy we've established is not my concern. My job is to make the transition workable and available."

Now I believe I know why Joe put Merrick Garland in charge of the DoJ. He was put there to do what he did. Garland successfully protected DJT from federal prosecution for his crimes. That alone could be the undoing of American democracy and the rule of law.

Biden's (1) lack of concern for democracy, and (2) his stunning misunderstanding of a key aspect of his job, protecting the constitution, democracy and the rule of law, cannot be much clearer. He is even clearer about his authoritarianism than DJT. To my knowledge, I don't think that DJT was ever this explicit about his obvious hostility to democracy. At least I don't recall him ever being that explicit.

Biden's astounding comments as quoted above are reported here starting at ~5:00:

Q: Is it unreasonable to react so strongly against Joe and the Dem Party based on all the evidence in the public record, including the two sentences I quoted above?

Who's Running The Show? Presidents and power in US.

After the stunning display of oligarchical power by the richest man on earth, Elon Musk, we see how little our votes mean and how much the donor class increasingly exercises raw power in the post Citizens United age of managed democracy. But it is not yet January 20, so it is worth asking. "WHO is the boss in the Biden Admin, both now and for several of the last 4 years?" The WSJ just published a deeply sourced and  sobering report on just that question.  As the article states: 

This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations. (WSJ: 12/19/24)

Below are just a few excerpts followed by a link to the piece, which, however is behind a paywall. It's not a pretty picture, and it reveals a state of affairs very much at odds with democratic norms, and  what we all learn about US gov't and the executive branch at school. We elected Biden, but exactly who or what did we get?

How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge 

 

There have already been extensive reports on how Biden was stage managed by his handlers in the last year of his presidency. However, it is now becoming clear that from early on in the Biden administration, the president was carefully managed, and became increasingly insulated from his own cabinet including crucial decision makers like the secretary of defense Lloyd Austin, who complained he did not have enough access to Biden even though the US was navigating two major conflicts, and earlier the Afghanistan pullout. The following are excerpts from the report.

*******************

[In order] to adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they  [Biden's team including Ron Klain and other top advisors] told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

Presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed....

While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble. Biden, now 82, has long operated with a tightknit inner circle of advisers. The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it...The system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees and other high-ranking officials. It also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public. 

The strategies to protect Biden largely worked—until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words and unable to complete his thoughts on live television....

[Early on in his term, Biden's team] issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused, according to people who received the message directly from White House aides.

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

While it isn’t uncommon for politicians to want more time with the president than they get, some Democrats felt Biden was unusually hard to reach.

That’s what Rep. Adam Smith of Washington found when he tried to share his concerns with the president ahead of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Smith, a Democrat who then chaired the powerful House Armed Services Committee, was alarmed by what he viewed as overly optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for the operation.

I was begging them to set expectations low,” said Smith, who had worked extensively on the issue and harbored concerns about how the withdrawal might go. He sought to talk to Biden directly to share his insights about the region but couldn’t get on the phone with him, Smith said.

After the disastrous withdrawal, which left 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghans dead, Smith made a critical comment to the Washington Post about the administration lacking a “clear-eyed view” of the U.S.-backed Ashraf Ghani government’s durability. It was among comments that triggered an angry phone call from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who ended up getting an earful from the frustrated chairman. Shortly after, Smith got an apologetic call from Biden. It was the only phone call Biden made to Smith in his four years in office, Smith said.

“The Biden White House was more insulated than most,” Smith said. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said his interactions with the White House in the past two years were primarily focused on the reauthorization of a vital section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes broad national security surveillance powers. Biden’s senior advisers and other top administration officials worked with Himes on the issue....

But Biden wasn’t part of the conversation. “I really had no personal contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior,” said Himes, who took office in 2009. Congress extended the surveillance authority for two years instead of the administration’s goal of five years.

 

Cabinet Members:

 

Interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said.

Multiple former senior cabinet aides described a top-down dynamic in which the White House would issue decisions and expect cabinet agencies to carry them out, rather than making cabinet secretaries active participants in the policymaking process....

 

Cabinet members most often met alone or with a member of the president’s senior staff, including Brainard, the economic adviser, or National Security Adviser Sullivan. The senior adviser would then bring the issue to the president and report back, former administration officials said.

 

Traditionally, presidents have more frequent interactions with certain cabinet secretaries—often Treasury, Defense and State—than others. 

But Treasury Secretary Yellen had an arm’s length relationship with the president for much of the administration. She was part of the economics team that regularly briefed the president, but one-on-one discussions were more rare, and she typically dealt with the NEC or with the president’s advisers rather than Biden directly, according to people familiar with the interactions. 

Defense Secretary Austin also saw his close relationship with Biden grow more distant over the course of the administration, with Austin’s regular access to Biden becoming increasingly rare in the past two years, people familiar with the relationship said. 

During the first half of the administration, Austin was one of the cabinet members who would regularly attend Biden’s presidential daily briefing on a rotational basis each week. That briefing would be followed with a routine one-on-one in which Austin and Biden would meet personally behind closed doors. 

Officials familiar with these meetings said they helped cabinet members to understand the commander in chief’s intentions directly, instead of being filtered through others, such as Sullivan, the national security adviser.

But in the past two years—a period when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza demanded the president’s attention—Austin’s invitation to the briefing came less frequently, to the point where the one-on-one meeting was seldom scheduled. When the one-on-one meetings did take place, they were more typically virtual meetings, not in-person. Still, Austin could always get an unscheduled meeting with the president if he needed it.

Campaigns:

Biden’s team also insulated him on the campaign trail. In the summer of 2023, one prominent Democratic donor put together a small event for Biden’s re-election bid. The donor was shocked when a campaign official told him that attendees shouldn’t expect to have a free ranging question-and-answer session with the president. Instead, the organizer was told to send in two or three questions ahead of time that Biden would answer.

At some events, the Biden campaign printed the pre-approved questions on notecards and then gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.

Some donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of decline. Throughout his presidency—and especially later in the term—Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused on him in a far different way than when he was vice president, or how former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their presidencies, people who have witnessed their interactions said.

These aides, which include Annie Tomasini and Ashley Williams, were often with the president as he traveled and stayed within earshot or eye distance, the people said. They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage.

The president’s team of pollsters also had limited access to Biden, according to people familiar with the president’s polling. The key advisers have famously had the president’s ear in most past White Houses.

[During] the 2024 campaign, the pollsters weren’t talking to the president about their findings, and instead sent memos that went to top campaign staff.

Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.

People close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s core inner circle advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could sift through the information and present it to the president.

But this summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a tossup when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn’t getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race.

Those fears intensified on July 11, when Biden’s top advisers met behind closed doors with Democratic senators, where the advisers laid out a road map for Biden’s victory. The message from the advisers was so disconnected from public polling—which showed Trump leading Biden nationally—that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to speak to Biden directly, according to people familiar with the matter, hoping to pierce what the senators saw as a wall erected by Donilon to shield Biden from bad information. Donilon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

************ 

So, again, I ask, "Who's running the show?"

 

 

Is Joe Biden corrupt, stupid, incompetent and/or deeply insulting?

News out of AL:

Former Huntsville physician Shelinder Aggarwal, who was previously described as a “pill mill doctor” by federal investigators, was one of the 1,499 people to have their sentence reduced last week in the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history carried out by President Joe Biden.

In 2017, Aggarwal was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for illegally prescribing controlled substances and conducting health care fraud involving $9.5 million in unneeded and unused urine tests, as AL.com previously reported.

“This defendant directly contributed to the opioid epidemic that is plaguing our nation,” said 2017 FBI Special Agent in Charge Roger C. Stanton.

“He also cost taxpayers millions of dollars by fraudulently claiming government reimbursement for thousands of lab tests that he never used to treat patients. I applaud the work of my agents and our partners to shut down Aggarwal’s pill mill and hold him accountable for his actions.”

In 2012, about 80 to 145 patients a day visited Aggarwal’s clinic, according to previous investigations.

Initial patient visits typically lasted five minutes or less, and follow-ups two minutes or less.

Aggarwal did not obtain prior medical records for his patients, did not treat patients with anything other than controlled substances, often asked patients what medications they wanted and filled their requests, prescribed controlled substances to patients who he knew were using illegal drugs, and did not take appropriate measures to ensure that patients did not divert or abuse controlled substances.

In 2012, Alabama pharmacies filled about 110,013 of Aggarwal’s prescriptions for controlled substances, according to the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) for Alabama,

That would equal about 423 prescriptions per day, if he worked five days a week, and resulted in about 12.3 million pills.  

Aggarwal listed on the clemency list show he is at a halfway house in Montgomery and is set to be released on Dec. 22.

Pipe dream: Impeach Biden right now. Get him out. He is unfit for office, assuming he actually is in office.

Qs: Is it unreasonable to (1) be angry at Joe for granting clemency to a major criminal like Aggarwal, or (2) suspect that Aggarwal might have donated money to some corrupt Alabama Democratic politician who wanted to repay Aggarwal, but if not that, then why grant clemency to this psychopath goon with blood on his hands? 

Joe, anyone home?

Update: The Georgia state RICO lawsuit against DJT

Two judges on a Georgia state appeals court panel of three, has tossed Fani Willis off the prosecution for DJT for his crimes in GA. The two argued that Willis was disqualified to prosecute DJT due to an appearance of a conflict of interest, not any actual conflict of interest. The two judges had to make up new law to boot her off. No law or prior GA court decision has ever done this. The actual law requires proof of an actual appearance of interest.

I take this decision as evidence of MAGA rot spreading to and poisoning state courts, like it is doing to federal courts. What is interesting is that when MAGA politicians, judges and other elites are in situations of actual conflicts of interest, it is treated as a Democrat lie or something too trivial to pay any attention to. DJT routinely operates with huge actual conflicts of interest and it doesn't even slightly faze MAGA. MAGA eats conflicts for breakfast and forgets about it by lunch.

Willis has appealed to the GA supreme court. I do not know if MAGA has rotted that court. If so, she is gone and DJT once again likely will get off the hook for his crimes. If not, the outcome is still unpredictable. 

Law & Crime writes:

The decision by the Georgia Court of Appeals on Thursday morning to scrap Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office from the state’s felony prosecution of Donald Trump came with a strong rebuke from one of the court’s three appellate judges, who dissented on account of being “particularly troubled” with the circumstances surrounding the move.

“We have no authority to reverse the trial court’s denial of a motion to disqualify,” wrote Judge Benjamin Land in his dissent. “None.”

The dissent by judge Benjamin Land in the 32 page decision (1) lays out the difference between an appeals court and a trial court, and (2) explains why it is very bad to just make up laws as you go, as MAGA judges sometimes do, especially Republican judges on the US supreme court. 

Judge Lands's dissent in the Georgia Appeals Court argues:

Because the law does not support the result reached by the majority, I respectfully dissent. I am particularly troubled by the fact that the majority has taken what has long been a discretionary decision for the trial court to make and converted it to something else entirely. If this Court was the trier of fact and had the discretion to choose a remedy based on our own observations, assessment of the credibility of the witnesses, and weighing of the evidence, then perhaps we would be justified in reaching the result declared by the majority. But we are not trial judges, and we lack that authority. Given the unique role of the trial court and the fact that it is the court which has broad discretion to impose a remedy that fits the situation as it finds it to be, we should resist the temptation to interfere with that discretion, including its chosen remedy, just because we happen to see things differently. Doing otherwise violates well-established precedent, threatens the discretion given to trial courts, and blurs the distinction between our respective courts.

Our role as appellate judges is critically important, but it often requires restraint. We are here to ensure the law has been applied correctly and to correct harmful legal errors when we see them. It is not our job to second-guess trial judges or to substitute our judgment for theirs. We do not find the facts but instead defer to the trial court’s factual findings where there is any evidence to support them. “We review the trial court’s ruling on a motion to disqualify a prosecutor for abuse of discretion. Such an exercise of discretion is based on the trial court’s findings of fact which we must sustain if there is any evidence to support them.” (Citations and punctuation omitted.) Neuman v. State, 311 Ga. 83, 88 (3) (856 SE2d 289) (2021).

Here, the trial court expressly found that appellants failed to show that the district attorney had an actual conflict of interest, failed to show that she received any material financial benefit as a result of her relationship with Nathan Wade, failed to show that she had a personal stake in the conviction of any defendant, failed to show that her relationship with Wade involved any actual impropriety on her part, and failed to show that their relationship, including their financial arrangements, had any actual impact on the case. Because there was some evidence presented to the trial court that supported these findings, we are bound to accept them. Neuman, 311 Ga. at 88 (3). The majority does not dispute these findings. Rather, it holds, with the citation of no supporting authority and apparently for the first time in the history of our state, that the mere existence of an appearance of impropriety, in and of itself, is sufficient to reverse the trial court’s refusal to disqualify the district attorney and her entire office. As shown below, the law does not support this outcome; rather, it compels precisely the opposite.

Where, as here, a prosecutor has no actual conflict of interest and the trial court, based on the evidence presented to it, rejects the allegations of actual impropriety, we have no authority to reverse the trial court’s denial of a motion to disqualify. None. Even where there is an appearance of impropriety. Our binding precedent and the doctrine of stare decisis require our restraint and do not permit us to impose a different remedy than the one chosen by the trial court simply because we might see the matter differently and might have chosen to impose another remedy had we been the trial judge. (emphasis added)

Update: Post election analyses

Just get 'er done, damnit!

People are still trying to figure out why the election turned out as it did. My working hypothesis is that (i) anger and alienation about wokeness, (ii) Biden-caused inflation (mostly a mirage), and (iii) the border immigration mess were the top reasons for Harris losing. The Hill discusses data from a recent poll:

Our poll, the first postelection poll specifically focused on trust in government, reveals that while voters are less trusting of the government as a result of the election, they believe the government will be more effective and can get things done.

Put another way, our poll suggests that Democrats ran the wrong campaign. Whereas they ran a “values campaign,” focused on a government Americans could trust, what voters really wanted was an effective government, and on that, they preferred Donald Trump.

Indeed, we found that a plurality (39 percent) of Americans said the 2024 election results made them less trusting of the government. Similarly, a 41 percent plurality of Americans say the election makes them less confident that the government will share “fair and accurate information.”

And yet, a plurality (40 percent) of Americans believe the government will be more effective at getting things done going forward, versus 36 percent of Americans saying the government will be less effective.

Among independents, the discrepancy is even more pronounced, underscoring this voting bloc’s desire for an effective government over one that is trustworthy.

By a 13-point margin (39 percent to 26 percent), independents said they are less — rather than more — trusting of government following the election. And by a similar 11-point margin (39 percent to 28 percent), they feel less — rather than more — confident that the government will share fair and accurate information going forward.

That is a take on it that I wasn't aware of. Some people want government to do something, even if it amounts to doing bad things. I'm among the 40% plurality of Americans who believe the government will be more effective at getting things done going forward. The things I am highly confident it will get done is mounting and sustaining an all-out attack on American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. That applies especially to minorities that God and MAGA both hate and want to oppress. 

How far DJT, MAGA, the billionaire oligarchs and Christian nationalists will get in their quest for corrupt authoritarianism is the open question. I suspect they will get pretty far because there is nothing likely to stop or significantly slow them that I can see. DJT and MAGA definitely are gonna try to git 'er done come hell or high water.

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Institutional distrust

Slate writes:

A Novel Theory of Why Trust in Everything Is Declining

The evidence that residents of the United States don’t trust their institutions goes beyond election results. It’s also visible in the falling number of Americans who get news from what were once known as “mainstream” sources, and in the declining share of people who say in polls that they, uh, trust institutions.

Whose fault is this? Some influential voices toward the center of the political spectrum—Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt—blame the influence of bumbling, know-it-all leftist elites in media and politics. Silver calls it the Indigo Blob, an informal alliance of “progressive institutionalists”—educated media figures, academics, activists, and political staffers who (among other things) pushed the Democratic Party too far left on social justice and “identity politics” issues, triggering a working-class backlash over issues ranging from police reform to COVID-era shutdowns. To that list, Yglesias would add issues of “biological sex” (i.e., trans rights), while Leonhardt blames the left for Biden’s alleged lenience on border security. Broadly, they say, the self-appointed progressive “expert class” and its values are out of step with the public.

The federal judge who issued a key ruling ordering Biden to reopen the border to asylum applicants was a 77-year-old first appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan. These perceived institutional failures can’t entirely be pinned on highly educated progressives.

Americans also despise—or at least distrust—a number of groups that aren’t affiliated in the common imagination with Democrats or liberals at all. “Defunding the police” might not be popular, but only a modest 51 percent of respondents in Gallup’s trust survey this year said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police as an institution. “The medical system” clocked in at 36 percent, churches and organized religion at 32 percent, and both banks and “large technology companies” at 27 percent. “Big business” (16 percent) was one of the least popular institutions named in the poll, ....

Perhaps the answer has something to do with the first institution I mentioned: Our beloved free press. Thanks to the innovative work that tech monopolies have done in the advertising market, it’s increasingly difficult to sustain a media outlet whose business mostly involves the costly process of nonpartisan fact-gathering and reporting. That’s especially true at the local level, where newspapers often simply don’t exist anymore—but it’s also true nationally, where the country is headed in the direction of having one reportorial omnipublication (the New York Times) and a few others that are mostly for people who work in business. Concurrently, the right wing has developed its own media apparatus, while social media and streaming platforms now allow public personalities to build their own audiences directly.

All else being equal, people prefer to hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest. What this often (though not always!) rewards is pandering to simple, polemical worldviews—Everyone else is stupid, they’re all lying to you, this or that particular group is responsible for everything in the news that is upsetting—rather than uncertainty or curiosity. It’s a good time to be a person who says everything is bullshit.

Groups that feel like they’re under attack will look for their own messengers to deliver polemical responses which reject every criticism and assign blame somewhere else; this is what “stanning” is. Crucially, the political center is just as subject to these incentives as everyone else; there are centrism stans, too, who find “illiberalism” at the scene of every crime. It is a polarization-optimized discourse. And everything it touches gets a little dumber and more difficult to trust.

[Stanning in politics refers to the phenomenon where individuals exhibit an intense, often obsessive, form of support for political figures, akin to the fanatical devotion seen in celebrity fandoms. This term has evolved to describe a deeply personalized and extremely online devotion to politicians, characterized by one or more of (i) one-sided relationships with politicians, feeling a personal connection despite no real interaction, (ii) development of cult of personality where politicians are the center of a cult-like following and supporters view them as saviors or messianic figures, (iii) extreme devotion that leads to a lack of accountability with politicians not held responsible for their bad actions or corrupt policies, (iv) etc. .... In summary, stanning in politics represents a shift where political support transcends traditional voter-politician relationships into something more akin to celebrity fandom, with all its associated behaviors and implications for political engagement and accountability.]

On the other side of the partisan spectrum, the ascendant figures are free/non-thinkers like RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan who “question everything,” even things that don’t need questioning, like the polio vaccine or federal deposit insurance.

Why don’t our institutions, with the exception of the hornet eradication apparatus, work? One reason might be that polarization-optimized discourse does not tend to build consensus around measured, fair, and accurate assessments of institutional failures. It fails to create the shared sense that something scandalous is happening; even when Republicans and Democrats are both angry about the same thing, it can be for different reasons.

Having just written an entire article about the dangers of universalized single-cause explanations, though, I would be remiss in putting the blame for dysfunction and discontent entirely on the media. As a mid-level member of the Indigo Blob, I also believe the usual suspects are at fault too: money in politics and the sclerotic U.S. legislative system, the failure of regulation to check the stock market’s collective expectation of indefinite earnings growth, the concentration of wealth and rise in the relative cost of basic components of the American Dream, bad-faith right-wing propaganda, the refusal of older generations to loosen their grip on their property values and political norms, blah blah blah.

Without a system that can build consensus, though—even the kind of phony, hypocritical, ideologically bracketed consensus we used to manufacture right here at home when this country was great—all of that stuff is academic.

On reflection, I'm confused by that analysis. Not sure what the point is. In summary: Various things caused the results we got.

And that ends this incisive update about what happened and why.

Invasive rot in the USSC

The six radical right authoritarian judges that dominate the USSC, have made clear their intention to be unprincipled, making things up as they go. They are contemptuous of norms that get in the way of cementing kleptocratic authoritarianism into American law. The moral and legal rot process is well underway. It's rationally not deniable. Litigator Sherrilynn Ifill writes about a norm, adding things to the record without notice, blatantly broken by the deeply corrupt cynic Sam Alito:

I am still enough of an institutionalist that it pains me to hear Supreme Court justices embarrassing themselves on the bench. So as I listened to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito engaging with Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar during oral argument in the case challenging Tennessee’s ban on the provision of gender-affirming drugs for minors earlier this month, I couldn’t help but cringe.

Shuffling through papers that he suggested were studies from various European countries that urged caution in the provision of puberty blockers to teens, Alito engaged in a “gotcha” line of questioning, insisting that Prelogar—the meticulous and unmatched litigator who has masterfully led the solicitor general’s office under President Joe Biden—had somehow misled the court about the accumulated scientific consensus on the effectiveness of puberty blockers for teens experiencing gender dysmorphia. His derisive tone and relentless questioning were typical for Alito and not what concerned me.

It was instead the contempt that Alito showed for the rules that govern the boundaries of litigation in our system. None of the studies he referenced as the basis of his questions to Prelogar had been part of the record in the case. None had been presented before the judge who tried the case. Justice Alito appeared to have, as the saying goes, “done his own research,” which he was now injecting into the case. And this embarrassed me. [embarrassed her, scares and angers me]

What has received too little attention is how this court’s headlong rush toward achieving its [kleptocratic authoritarian] ideological aims is undermining the rules that govern our system of litigation in its wake.

Why do all these rejections of previous norms and rules of litigation matter, one might ask? What difference does it make how the court strips away rights and protections? What matters is that they do it, and that the lives of millions of Americans will be affected, surely? In my view, the way they do it matters because the conservative justices in their haste and stubborn determination are pulling down not only long-standing substantive protections for marginalized people, but also the standards that hold our system of litigation together.   

More and more, the conservative majority’s approach has put the rules and norms that govern our system of litigation in the crosshairs as much as the substantive rights of marginalized groups. (emphasis added)

That speaks for itself. Our democracy, the rule of law and our civil liberties are all under severe, direct attack. That is a fact, not an opinion.

The restructured MSM; Tales from the capitalism crypt; Public distrust rising

The American Prospect writes about the reality of the modern MSM and the critical importance of independent news media:

Democrats Lost the Propaganda War

The intra-Democratic argument over what should be done following their loss in 2024 goes on. Bernie Sanders is arguing for working-class populism. Matt Yglesias has been flogging a “Common Sense Manifesto” arguing for Bill Clinton–style triangulation.

I have my own thoughts on messaging topics. But all this is putting the cart before the horse. Democrats are missing something that is arguably a prerequisite for ideological messaging to have any effect whatsoever: a media apparatus that can get these messages in front of swing voters. The content of the message doesn’t matter if voters never hear it. An obvious place to start would be to build up straightforward reporting operations in news deserts in critical states, and to stop making traditional election broadcast ads the core focus of campaign spending.

If advocates of “popularism” like Yglesias are correct, how did Donald Trump win with such wildly unpopular proposals and behaviors?

I believe two things happened here. First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that pipes Republican messaging directly into tens of millions of homes, day in and day out, influencing people both directly and through conversations with families and neighbors.

Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment, with many consecutive days of inflammatory headlines and articles, no matter what he did. Democrats have relied on the MSM to do their messaging for them, but they did not and will not do it. As Josh Marshall writes, “Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.”

As a result, most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did. .... In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints.

A recent study by Paul Farhi and John Volk at Northwestern found an even more stark gap in the worst-off counties. Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties—where there is no local coverage of any kind—by an average of 54 percentage points.

Absent any action, Trump is likely to make this worse. His antitrust authorities are going to be far more lenient than their predecessors in the Biden administration. That ensures significant media consolidation, which if history is any guide will deprive large parts of the country even further of real news and information, in favor of hot takes and ideological scandalmongering.

This all suggests an obvious opportunity: Democratic funders could set up new local papers in strategic counties, or buy up some of the remaining husks and staff them up. ....

To drive home the importance of real news reporting in a democracy, DJT is suing a newspaper in Iowa because it published poll data just before the election that turned out to be wrong. His lawsuit alleges “brazen election interference” for a poll published shortly before the election that showed Ms. Harris leading in Iowa by three points. DJT said, “I have to do it. We have to straighten out the press.”

By straightening out the press, he means getting killing it and turning the corpse into a giant authoritarian propaganda, lies, slander and crackpottery machine, just like Putin did to Russia and the Chinese government did to China.

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When a lot of money is involved, capitalism tends to become shockingly callous to human life and the environment. Capitalism tends to be loaded with seething hate of government, business regulations and protections for consumers and workers if any of that might get in the way of profits. Profit threats have to be obliterated. Project 2025 is quite clear and explicit about these priorities. The NYT published (not paywalled) an on-point article about drug industry callousness toward human life in ruthless pursuit of profit:

Giant Companies Took Secret Payments 

to Allow Free Flow of Opioids

Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found

In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs.

The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access to prescription drugs for most Americans.

The self-congratulatory statements, however, didn’t address an important question: Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades?

One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to.

For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.

The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million people and are part of health care conglomerates that sit near the top of the Fortune 500 list.

Money talks and corpses walk, sort of.

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Gallup reports about the state of public trust in the courts. It is low.

This year marks the first time on record that judicial confidence among those approving of U.S. leadership has ever dipped below 60%, and the first time that confidence in the courts has been below 50% among both those who approve and those who disapprove of U.S. leadership, a double whammy pushing the national figure to its lowest in two decades.

Documenting the collapse of democracy

It's looking more and more like I was right about DJT and MAGA, and less and less like a hyperbolic crackpot, or whatever. Even the restrained MSM is starting to come to see the ugly vision of kleptocratic authoritarian DJT-MAGA reality that has been staring it in the face since 2016. NYT opinionologist Michelle Goldberg writes:

The Great Capitulation

At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Donald Trump described recent visits from Tim Cook, C.E.O. of Apple, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” he said. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.

Since Trump won re-election — this time with the popular vote — many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.

Following Jan. 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Trump’s account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as “the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned” Jan. 6 defendants. (It’s not clear if Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He’s pledged a million-dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration, as did the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.

After Time magazine declared Trump “Person of the Year,” the publication’s owner, the Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff, wrote on X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.” The owner of The L.A. Times, the billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.

Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Trump.

In The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer wrote of the current administration’s refusal, at least so far, to renew the humanitarian parole of immigrants from countries such as Venezuela and Haiti to possibly shield them from deportation under Trump. “For a president who considers Trump a fascist and has warned about the horrors of mass deportation, the atmosphere of Biden’s White House has struck several people I spoke with as curiously sedate,” Blitzer wrote.

One of Kamala Harris’s pollsters, Politico reported, recently warned the Democratic National Committee leadership against pearl-clutching over Trump’s transgressions, including the wildly unfit characters he’s announced for his administration. The voters, she said, “don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions.”

Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.

Clearly, the light of kleptocratic authoritarianism is dawning for those who have the guts to see it for what it is. The rest? Still either in head in sand mode, or a mood of elation at what will come, whether it bites them or helps them, or not.

Nietzschean: focused on subjective reality and individual achievement, with rejection of absolute truth.

The Rambo effect

 Wanna know why Trump is so popular? He acts like Rambo.

Abraham Lincoln, now there was a "man." Ditto Ronald Reagan. Though not as macho, JKF and Bill Clinton and Obama still oozed sex appeal. What did one term Jimmy Carter ooz? Or one term Joe Biden? Or candidate Kamala Harris? She oozed "joy." THAT is not where Americans are at. They want heroes. Even corrupt, dishonest, and dangerous ones like Trump will do.

The making of an American hero, and what his ascendance tells us about our society — and ourselves.

And that is how we all now view ourselves — as heroic in our certainty, our clarity, our superiority to our fellow passengers, whom we regard as intellectually and morally disingenuousness for failing to see things the way we do.

We are all Rambo. God bless us… and God help us.

https://medium.com/@glandrybeam/the-rambo-effect-67fb887f04d

The prospect that the nation might knowingly put back in power a man who cozies up to authoritarian leaders, tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election, and promises to be a dictator himself (if only, he says, for a day) has not only alarmed but baffled Democrats. 

That conclusion ignores a very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth: A big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader.

https://newrepublic.com/article/183866/americans-want-authoritarian-president-trump

YABBUT what about democracy, the rule of law, common decency and Mom's apple pie? Forgettaboutit.

THE LEFT needs to meet Americans where they are, and provide them with what they want..................

A FRIGGIN' RAMBO!!