Crisis pregnancy centers: Places of immoral deceit, lies, disrespect and psychological pressure

This pregnancy crisis center is not what it appears to be

They help by deceiving, lying and disrespecting

vulnerable women

With abortion soon to become illegal in about half the states, I noticed a gap in my blog content. I haven’t focused on places called pregnancy crisis centers (CPCs). These places are usually located in low income neighborhoods. They are advertised as offering free abortion services. But for the most part, the industry is a morally rotted Christian fraud. What services they do provide is intense psychological and emotional pressure and fear-inducing lies to con a woman out of having an abortion. Their “services” are exclusively anti-abortion and almost always incomplete and/or wrong. The pressure and lies are usually provided by people skilled in manipulating people and exploiting human vulnerability at times of actual personal crisis and confusion.

An article published by the AMA Journal of Ethics, Why Crisis Pregnancy Centers Are Legal but Unethical, discusses CPCs and their legality. The article comments:

Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations that seek to intercept women with unintended pregnancies who might be considering abortion. Their mission is to prevent abortions by persuading women that adoption or parenting is a better option. They strive to give the impression that they are clinical centers, offering legitimate medical services and advice, yet they are exempt from regulatory, licensure, and credentialing oversight that apply to health care facilities. Because the religious ideology of these centers’ owners and employees takes priority over the health and well-being of the women seeking care at these centers, women do not receive comprehensive, accurate, evidence-based clinical information about all available options. Although crisis pregnancy centers enjoy First Amendment rights protections, their propagation of misinformation should be regarded as an ethical violation that undermines women’s health.

Drive down any highway in America, and you might see a sign: “Pregnant? Scared? Call 1-800-555-5555.” Most often, these signs are advertisements for crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). CPCs, sometimes known as “pregnancy resource centers,” “pregnancy care centers,” “pregnancy support centers,” or simply “pregnancy centers,” are organizations that seek to intercept women with unintended or “crisis” pregnancies who might be considering abortion. Their mission is typically to prevent abortions by persuading women that adoption or parenting is a better option [1, 2]. One of the first CPCs opened in 1967 in Hawaii [3].

Most CPCs are religiously affiliated [4], and a majority are affiliated with a network or umbrella organization such as Birthright International, Care Net, Heartbeat International, or the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates [1, 3]. These umbrella organizations offer legal support, ultrasound training, and other services to CPCs. With an estimated 1,969 network-affiliated CPCs in the US in 2010 [1], CPCs outnumber abortion clinics, which were estimated at 327 as of 2011 [5]. Many state governments fund CPCs through mechanisms such as “Choose Life” specialty license plates and grants, and many also receive federal funding [3, 6].  

In this article, we will argue that both the lack of patient-centered care and deceptive practices make CPCs unethical. We will first highlight the discrepancy between the lack of standards for quality of care provided by CPCs and the innumerable restrictions on abortion clinics. We then show that CPCs violate principles of medical ethics, despite purporting to dispense medical advice.

An investigation about CPCs in California discussed the lies. That report commented:

These centers fraudulently present themselves as medical offices while their true intent is to lie to and shame women about their reproductive health options. CPCs use a wide array of deceptive tactics to push women to continue their pregnancies no matter what. 

Our investigation documents the lies told to our investigators and the shaming tactics used to discourage women from considering all of their options. A recently released national report by NARAL Pro-Choice America, Crisis Pregnancy Centers Lie: The Insidious Threat to Reproductive Health, confirms that CPCs are a threat to women’s reproductive health not only in California, but across the country.

CPCs Lie. 

CPC workers are well-trained to lie to women about physical and mental health issues they claim are associated with abortion. At every visit, our investigator reported that CPC workers repeated a similar set of lies and myths, noting, “it was scary how they all said the same things, it was like it didn’t matter who I was, they only had one script.” 

In 91 percent of the centers visited, this script included telling our investigator that having an abortion was linked to an increased risk of breast cancer, infertility, miscarriage, and/or the made-up “post-abortion depression” that results in suicide. These are blatant lies that have been disproved and rejected by the medical community.   

“They had these booklets where it showed different methods of birth control; IUD, the ring, the depo shot, and all that. So I started reading them, and none of them said what the benefits were – all of them said the risks, the bad side effects, and how all of them cause ‘medical abortions.’” 

CPCs only offer abstinence as the sole option to prevent pregnancy.  

More than 67% of the locations intentionally referred to the fetus as “baby” and told our investigator she was already a mother because she was already pregnant. During a majority of visits, CPC workers used gruesome and graphic words to describe an abortion in the hopes of frightening and humiliating women. One CPC told our investigator that if an abortion is not done correctly chances are “they might puncture your uterus and vacuum your fallopian tubes shut.” This psychological warfare has no place in a real counseling session.

Once again, radical right Christianity in America shows that it has no moral qualm or feels any shame in engaging in deceit and emotional manipulation. Tactics like that are routine whenever the Christian elites say something is God’s will. The sacred ends justify the morally rotted means. They do not hesitate to deceive and put intense pressure on women in crisis. That is Christian moral rot on display for all to see.

Apparently, Christian Sharia law reads out of the Bible the commandment, Thou shalt not lie.[1] It is fine to shamelessly deceive and lie as long as the elites tell the flock God says so, and even if the Christian con game ruins someone’s life. 

This is the vision of America that the Republican Party and Christian nationalism staunchly supports and wants to enforce on the entire country, not just red states.

Q: Where the hell is public education in all of this mess? Most of the pregnant women who wind up at CPCs seem to be shockingly ignorant. Or, is subverting public education just another another Republican Party and Christian nationalist goal focused on keeping people ignorant and easier to deceive?

Q: Did Germaine do an adequate job of discussing what CPCs are?

Footnote: 

1. One source comments on what the Bible says about lies and deceit:

God says Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor (Exodus 20:16). In other words, Thou shall not lie to one another.

These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, A heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren. (Proverbs 6:16-19) 

A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall perish. (Proverbs 19:9) 

Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him (Colossians 3:19) 

Etc. 

I'm no Bible expert, but stuff like that seems to at least hint that God does not condone deceit and fibbing. Or, with the radical right and CPCs are we merely witnessing routine, garden variety, moral rot?

A new twist in the abortion wars

Those Christians are not there to help

They are there to deceive, lie and instill fear and guilt

The Guardian published an interesting article about what happens to some google searches for abortion services.

Google misdirects one in 10 searches for abortion to ‘pregnancy crisis centers’

In US ‘trigger states’ where the procedure may soon be illegal, searchers may be sent to centers that do not actually provide care

One in 10 Google searches for abortion services in US “trigger states”, where the procedure is likely to become illegal if the US supreme court overturns Roe v Wade, are being misdirected to clinics known as “pregnancy crisis centers” that do not actually provide care, according to a new study.

After a leak revealed the US supreme court is on the verge of overturning the landmark abortion rights law Roe v Wade, attention has turned to “trigger law” states that would ban abortion immediately if the decades-old decision is undone.

In more than a dozen such trigger-law states, researchers found, 11% of Google search results for “abortion clinic near me” and “abortion pill” led to “crisis pregnancy centers”, according to misinformation research non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

This is another example of radical right Christian nationalism (CN) relying on outright deceit to get what it wants. The moral rot that characterizes Republican Party elites also applies to the Christian nationalists, elites and rank and file. 

Why make taxpayers support this sleaze?

For CNs, God's sacred ends justify immoral and sleazy means. God's demands even justify treason as seen by the participation of proud CNs in the 1/6 coup attempt. The radical right's blatant contempt for inconvenient truth and honesty is shameless and boundless.

As discussed here before (and here), radical right anti-abortion Christian groups set up sham abortion services operations in poor neighborhoods. Those centers explicitly advertise themselves as providing abortion services. In fact, they provide anti-abortion propaganda and coercion. 

These 'pregnancy crisis centers" try hard to con pregnant women out of having the abortion they were looking to find help with. These fine Christians use copious amounts of lies, guilt, sleaze and slanders to shame or frighten women into submission so they will carry their fetus to full term and then give birth. God's sacred ends justify Satan's evil means. 

After conning women into having their baby, these heartless Republican motherfuckers then gleefully turn their backs and walk away. They cut public services for women and children because they hate government at least as as much as they hate abortion. The women and babies are left to fend for themselves. 

We can expect the Supreme Court will most likely release its neo-fascist decision to overturn Roe v. Wade at the end of June or maybe a day or two into July. Then, the gutless CN neo-fascist Republican judges will high-tail it out of court and hide behind their annual recess in the hope that the furor will die down so that they can continue dismantling democracy and civil liberties when they get back to work in October. Those stalwart liar justices hope that pregnant women who want to abort a fetus but cannot will just calm down, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, stop whining and get over it. After all, it is womens' fault that they got preggers, even if they were raped. The fetus is God's gift to the woman. 

And, those women damn well better bring that baby up as a good Christian nationalist too. If not, they will be condemned as bad mommies by the arrogant, self-righteous CN deceivers who screwed the women over in the first place with their deceit, lies and coercion.

Q: Was that over the top? If so, oops my bad.[1]

Footnote: 

1. In times of trials, tribulations and bullshit, sometimes one's patience is tried. Sometimes one might even get a bit testy about it all. These definitely are times of trials, tribulations and bullshit.

Policy idea: Let's defund Christianity by getting rid of all tax 

breaks, adding tens of billions to the US treasury each year!!

Write to your Senator with this wonderful policy suggestion!

Fascist Republican Party oppression is intensifying

America’s radical right Republican Party is increasingly aggressive about tracking down and persecuting people they want to track down and persecute. The GOP is dead serious about this. Gizmodo writes:

Republicans Warn Google Not to Limit Search for 

Misleading Anti-Abortion Clinics...Or Else

They said attempts to limit “crisis pregnancy centers,” in search results would, “constitute a grave assault on the principle of free speech.”

A coalition of 17 state attorney generals are pressuring Google to prevent it from limiting the search results of so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” known for masquerading as legitimate abortion clinics and persuading pregnant people away from receiving abortions.

Critics warn unrestricted search results could steer abortion seekers toward these clinics, potentially putting their health at risk. Republicans, on the other hand, say efforts to limit those bad faith clinics in search results amounts to market discrimination against anti-abortion organizations.

In a letter spearheaded by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, the Republican lawmakers pushed back against earlier pleas from Democrats and claimed Google’s decision to moderate its results, “would constitute a grave assault on the principle of free speech.” The Republicans then lashed out at previous Democratic efforts to pressure the company before proceeding to, seemingly unironically, threaten Google if they didn’t get their way.

“We wish to make this very clear to Google and the other market participants that it dwarfs: If you fail to resist this political pressure, we will act swiftly to protect American consumers from this dangerous axis of corporate and government power,” the lawmakers wrote.

If Google does opt to alter the search results, Republicans say they will conduct investigations to determine whether or not the actions violate antitrust or religious discrimination laws. In other words, don’t moderate your search results…or else.  

Tuesday’s letter comes partly in response to a June study conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate which found 11% of Google searches in trigger law states for the terms “abortion clinic near me” and “abortion pill” directed users toward so-called crisis pregnancy centers, which the CCCDH refers to as “anti-abortion fake clinics.” Google Maps results led users to such clinics 37% of the time. Though these organizations often present as neutral health clinics, critics say their main purpose is actually to dissuade women from going through with abortions. One of those critics is Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who last month introduced a new regulation that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to prevent these clinics from engaging in misleading advertising.

“Anti-abortion fake clinics are the conversion therapy wing of an anti-abortion movement that is hell-bent on sending people to jail for abortion, miscarriage, and pregnancy,” Reproaction Co-Founder and Executive Director Erin Matson, said in a statement. “Misleading online advertising targeting abortion seekers is not a new concern, although it becomes more urgent as constitutional protections for abortion disappear.”

Fascist threats by the GOP are now right out in the open. No one can deny or downplay it, except of  course nearly all Republicans and non-republicans who support the GOP. 

As usual, Republicans fall back on crackpot motivated reasoning in issuing their threats. They are demanding that false and misleading advertising by crisis pregnancy centers be forced on people. That is not a concern about free speech. It is a concern that their hate of abortions will be thwarted. The GOP does not care about any speech except its own lies, slanders and other forms of dark free speech. 

American democracy, truth, the rule of law and civil liberties are all in the fight of their lives. All of them are under a massive, direct fascist attack by the Republican Party. This fascist GOP effort is nationwide, not just in the federal government.

Essentially Contested Concepts: What is Hate?

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., hate, fairness, constitutional, legal, moral, good, evil, etc.), but not on the best realization or definition thereof. They are concepts the proper definition or use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper definitions or uses on the part of their users. These disputes cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone. The disputes are unresolvable, but unfortunately are quite common in politics. Disputes over essentially contested concepts cannot be resolved by anything other than compromise, an imperfect resolution, because the definitions are heavily influenced by personal cognitive and social factors such as morals, political ideology, and social- and self-identity.

A Washington Post article discusses whether the hate group list that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has compiled is fair, dangerous or otherwise detrimental. The article starts with a member of the Family Research Council (FRC) pointing out the bullet holes in the group's lobby. The FRC, a conservative Christian anti-abortion, anti-same sex marriage advocacy and political lobbying group, is listed by the SPLC as a hate group. A deranged man with a gun came to kill people in the FRC because the FRC was on the SPLC hate list.

Is it fair or safe to identify groups like the FRC with the same language, hate group, as the Klu Klux Klan? What is the definition of hate in the context of politics?

The WaPo writes: “‘Labeling people hate groups is an effort to hold them accountable for their rhetoric and the ideas they are pushing. Obviously the hate label is a blunt one,’ Cohen concedes when I ask whether advocates like the FRC, or proponents of less immigration like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), or conservative legal stalwarts like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), really have so much in common with neo-Nazis and the Klan that they belong in the same bucket of shame. “It’s one of the things that gives it power, and it’s one of the things that can make it controversial. Someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s without nuance.’ … But we’ve always thought that hate in the mainstream is much more dangerous than hate outside of it. The fact that a group like the FRC or a group like FAIR can have congressional allies and can testify before congressional committees, the fact that a group like ADF can get in front of the Supreme Court — to me that makes them more dangerous, not less so. … It’s the hate in the business suit that is a greater danger to our country than the hate in a Klan robe.’”

Context: For context, the FRC operates ‘crisis pregnancy centers’, which are set up in poor neighborhoods. From the outside, they appear to be medical centers that provide professional medical access to abortion services. These centers have been called unethical for deceiving pregnant women by applying pressure tactics that range from lying about abortion options, e.g., falsely telling a woman that abortion is illegal or unavailable, to exerting intense psychological pressure to prevent a woman from having an abortion. These centers often seek to delay long enough so that a woman is forced by law to give birth. People running crisis pregnancy centers typically have no formal medical training at all and instead are Christian activists in white lab coats trying to prevent abortions by any means possible short of illegal actions such as threats of physical violence.

In view of lies, deceit and misery that crisis pregnancy centers were inflicting on low income women who were being tricked into bearing a child, California passed a law “intended to compel crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) to offer factual information about all options available to pregnant women and to disclose if a facility is unlicensed. . . . . NPCC asserts that 91% of unlicensed CPCs provided defective medical information such as a false link between abortion and breast cancer or suicide.”

What is hate? Do deceit-driven tactics related to abortion, like what the FRC and other groups engage in, amount to hate? Do other activities such as lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges to abortion or same-sex marriage amount to hate?

Hate (verb): to feel intense or passionate dislike for someone, a concept, e.g., the idea of abortion, or something.
Hate (noun): an intense or passionate dislike or loathing for someone, a concept or something.

Clearly, lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges are legal political activities. Can legal activities amount to hate? If it isn't hate, what can it more reasonably be called? Aggressive conservative or Christian activism? Immorality or unethical?

It appears that much or most of the activities the groups on the SPLC’s hate list amount to mostly legal activism infused with a rigid unwillingness to compromise. If one believes that, for politics in a liberal democracy, compromise is a core moral value and necessary for democracy to function properly (a concept or belief advocated here), then a refusal to compromise can be seen as immoral.

Is immorality the same as hate? If the definitions of hate given above are generally accepted as maybe incomplete but generally accurate enough, then it would logically seem that refusal to compromise alone will often or usually include a component of hate in it. Is that reasoning sound or flawed? Is compromise the only or best form of resolution for disputes over contested concepts?

The WaPo is right to raise this issue. A deranged man with a gun used the SPLC hate list to find a target for murder. That would seem to be no different than president Trump continually referring to journalists as ‘the enemy of the people’, thereby inciting a few people to begin to act to kill journalists. Is that hate?

If nothing else, one can see from the foregoing why essentially contested concepts lead to intractable disputes and how the disputed concepts can foster actions that lead to misery or even social conflict and outright murder. Essentially contested concepts can be dangerous because of the heavy cognitive (moral) and social (identity and social context) loads they carry. From that point of view, it is easy to see why (i) disagreements over essentially contested concepts are not resolvable, and (ii) compromise must necessarily be a pillar of peaceful, non-tyrant, democratic society.

B&B orig: 11/15/18

Christian crusader wars diversify and intensify

How Christian nationalism deals with

truth, respect, secularism and democracy

Overturning Roe was just the first cannon blast from Christian nationalist theocrats. That was just the opening attack. Remember those crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) I wrote about last week? They're baaack and on the attaaack! Blooomberg writes:

Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data

The so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ are turning to social media, including Snap Maps, to lure young people

When Lisa suspected she was pregnant, she did what other teenagers might: She Googled her options to terminate. One of the first links that popped up in the search engine was a clinic in Volusia, Florida, where the 19-year-old lived. The offer of a free pregnancy test tempted Lisa into booking an appointment and she drove there with her boyfriend, parking across the street. It was a small town, and she did not want to be recognized.

The consultation room was filled with posters depicting fetuses with speech bubbles, as if they were asking to be born. Lisa sobbed as one of the women running the clinic confirmed she was pregnant; they had refused to let her take a test home. Lisa needed to return for an ultrasound in four weeks to be certain, and then they could discuss options. But until then, they told her, she absolutely should not go to an abortion clinic. “Maybe you’ll miscarry and then you won’t have any problems,” the woman suggested.

As Lisa started to realize it wasn’t a medical facility, she became terrified for her privacy. “This information can’t go anywhere, right?” she begged a receptionist on her way out the door. “No one is gonna know that I was here?”

The answer wasn’t reassuring. “I remember her saying: ‘Well, honey, this is what happens when you have sex.’”

Lisa, who asked not to be identified by her real name, did manage to get an abortion from a different provider. But she also ended up in a database. The center continued to call her every few weeks to ask for an update on the baby and offer parenting classes. And as women like Lisa around the country are led unsuspectingly into anti-abortion centers, known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” academics and advocates for reproductive rights are concerned about what happens to this potentially incriminating data — especially after abortion becomes illegal in many states following Friday’s Roe v. Wade ruling.

Once states pass laws making abortion and helping someone to get an abortion a felony, maybe first degree murder, then people's social media will lead enraged avenging Christians right to their victims. Who would have ever thought that a blither on a person's Facebook page or a Google search could get a pregnant woman or someone helping her put on death row? 

As far as respect goes, CPCs could not care less about respecting a woman's privacy. Roe was based on a right to privacy that the Christian nationalist God says does not exist. So why would a CPC respect other kinds of privacy, except for their own of course?

Speaking of disrespect, here is some disrespect from Clarence Thomas, along with gigantic hypocrisy: "Clarence Thomas says American citizens are seemingly 'more interested in their iPhones' than 'their Constitution. .... They're interested in what they want rather than what is right as a country. .... Thomas said Scalia had similar sentiments as him about a lack of urgency in protecting liberties." 

Thomas talking about what is right for the country or lack of urgency in protecting liberties?? Thomas and his fellow Christian nationalist theocrats are attacking civil liberties and they say they are the defenders?? 

Give me an effing break. What a lying hypocrite. Thomas wants to convert the US from a secular democracy to a Dark Ages Christian fundamentalist theocracy. Thomas' vision of what's right for the country is cruel, bigoted, iron fisted Christian Sharia law at the center of it all. 

Although he has been criticized for hypocrisy in saying this because he was a radical right Christian fundamentalist himself, Barry Goldwater once warned:

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

The Republican Party Christian fundamentalism is undeniably engaged in an all-out war against democracy, secularism, pluralism, two-party rule, and inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning. There is no possibility of compromise or mercy from these cruel, enraged, vengeful, Christian warriors. And it is cruelty to treat people like terrified Lisa with callous contempt like ‘Well, honey, this is what happens when you have sex.’ 

Well people, that is the contemptuous disrespect that Christian nationalism shows to everyone who crosses their sacred lines. God does not tolerate miscreants or their bad behaviors. He will smite them hard. Miscreants will be re-educated, shut up, discriminated against, oppressed, put in jail and/or put to death.

What about Loving, and the due process and establishment clauses?

The Christians elites, bigoted and racist as they are, will probably not overturn Loving v. Virginia for now. The 1967 Loving decision made interracial marriage legal. That decision held that bans on interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Since Thomas is a Black married to a White wife, the bigoted White theocrats on the Supreme Court will probably let that minor inconvenience in the eyes of God slide, as long as Thomas is alive. 

But make no mistake, high priority Christian nationalist legal goals include gutting the due process clause and the establishment clauses of the Constitution. Both stand squarely in the way of establishing the bigoted, (I really do mean bigoted) kleptocratic theocracy that God demands America to be. After Thomas is gone, Loving will probably be gone too.[1] 

The establishment clause is now pretty close to being obliterated. Just a few more pro-Christianity Supreme Court decisions will finish it off for good. 

People, we are at war!

Footnote: 

1. Maybe that overstates the case, but maybe it doesn't. These people are hard core fundamentalists. That sacred ideology that includes the central dogma that White people are morally superior and chosen by God to rule over all others. The Christian nationalists will vehemently deny all of the criticisms I am levelling at them here. Their arguments are that they are defending liberty and making America into what it should be in accord with the Constitution. They say the US Constitution is a religious document, but that is a colossal lie. It is a secular document.

One of the core problems here is that Christian nationalists are chronic, shameless liars. To get put on the bench, they all told us that Roe v. Wade is settled law. Like hell it was settled law. Christian nationalists lie about their religious crusade to make America theocratic and kleptocratic again. This is not new. Christian nationalists have been liars for decades. Liars deserve no credibility or trust because they earned none.

I'll keep warning in defense of democracy until they come for me and force me to shut up. Then, I suppose I'll shut up.

Thomas' concurrence in Dobbs, 

the case that overturned Roe v. Wade

Due process cases that Thomas wants to overturn

or as he puts it, "reconsider":

Griswold: The Constitution protects the right of marital privacy 

against state restrictions on contraception

Lawrence: criminal punishment laws against sodomy are unconstitutional

Obergefell: same-sex marriage is a constitutional right

That is only part of the poison the on the 

Christian nationalist legal agenda

Forced birth stories start to trickle out

Brooke Alexander cradles one of her twin daughters 

as she watches dad Billy High practice skateboarding tricks 

at the Portland Skate Park in Portland, TX

We all knew this day was coming. Now it is here. The Washington Post writes:

This Texas teen wanted an abortion. She now has twins.

Brooke Alexander found out she was pregnant 48 hours before the Texas abortion ban took effect

Running on four hours of sleep, the 18-year-old tried to feed both babies at once, holding Kendall in her arms while she tried to get Olivia to feed herself, her bottle propped up by a pillow. But the bottle kept slipping and the baby kept wailing. And Brooke’s boyfriend, Billy High, wouldn’t be home for another five hours.

“Please, fussy girl,” Brooke whispered.

She peeked outside the room, just big enough for a full-size mattress, and realized she had barely seen the sun all day. The windows were covered by blankets, pinned up with thumbtacks to keep the room cool. Brooke rarely ventured into the rest of the house. Billy’s dad had taken them in when her mom kicked them out, and she didn’t want to get in his way.

The hours without Billy were always the hardest. She knew he had to go — they relied entirely on the $9.75 an hour he made working the line at Freebirds World Burrito — but she tortured herself imagining all the girls he might be meeting. And she wished she had somewhere to go, too.

Brooke found out she was pregnant late on the night of Aug. 29, two days before the Texas Heartbeat Act banned abortions once an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity, around six weeks of pregnancy. It was the most restrictive abortion law to take effect in the United States in nearly 50 years.

Nearly 10 months into the Texas law, they have started having the babies they never planned to carry to term.

Texas offers a glimpse of what much of the country would face if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer, as has been widely expected since a leaked draft opinion circulated last month.

Sometimes Brooke imagined her life if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, if Texas hadn’t banned abortion just days after she decided that she wanted one. She would have been in school, rushing from class to her shift at Texas Roadhouse, eyes on a real estate license that would finally get her out of Corpus Christi. She’d pictured an apartment in Austin and enough money for a trip to Hawaii, where she’d swim with dolphins in water so clear she could see her toes.

When both babies finally started eating, Brooke took out her phone and restarted the timer that had been running almost continuously since the day they were born.

She had 2½ hours until they’d have to eat again.

Leaving Billy in her bedroom with the pregnancy test, Brooke grabbed her keys and drove to her best friend’s house, where they sat on his bed and examined her options.

She could always get an abortion, she told him.

Then he reminded her of something she vaguely remembered seeing on Twitter: A new law was scheduled to take effect Sept. 1.

Brooke had 48 hours.

The abortion clinic in South Texas — two and a half hours from Corpus Christi — had no open slots in the next two days, with patients across the state racing to get into clinics before the law came down. When Brooke called, the woman on the end of the line offered the names and addresses of clinics in New Mexico, a 13-hour drive from Corpus Christi.

In the meantime, the woman said, Brooke could get an ultrasound somewhere nearby: If she was under six weeks, they could still see her.

“We’re gonna see how far along it is,” Brooke texted her dad, Jeremy Alexander, later that night. “See if abortion is an option.”

“What’s the cut off date,” he asked.

“They just passed a law today!!” she responded in the early hours of Sept. 1, referring to the ban that had just taken effect. “What are the f---ing odds I believe it’s 6 weeks.”

“Fingers crossed????” her dad said.

Brooke found a place that would perform an ultrasound on short notice — and scheduled an appointment for 9 a.m.

Whenever a new client walks into the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend, they are asked to fill out a form. After all the usual questions — name, date of birth, marital status — comes the one that most interests the staff: “If you are pregnant, what are your intentions?”

From there, the team sorts each client into one of three groups:\

If they’re planning to have the baby: “LTC,” likely to carry.

If they’re on the fence: “AV,” abortion vulnerable.

If they’re planning to get an abortion: “AM,” abortion minded.

The Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend — which advertises itself as the region’s “#1 Source of Abortion Information” — is one of thousands of crisis pregnancy centers across the United States, antiabortion organizations that are often religiously affiliated.

When Brooke showed up with her mom for her appointment, she had no idea she’d walked into a facility designed to dissuade people from getting abortions. She also didn’t know how much significance her form held for the staff: By signaling that she wanted an abortion, she became their first “AM” of the Texas Heartbeat Act.

The advocate assigned to her case, Angie Arnholt, had been counseling abortion-minded clients at the pregnancy center for a year. While many of the center’s volunteers signed up only to talk to “LTCs” — happy conversations about babies their clients couldn’t wait to have — Arnholt, a 61-year-old who wears a gold cross around her neck, felt called to do what she could to help women "make a good decision,” she later told The Washington Post.

Back in a consultation room, Brooke told Arnholt all the reasons she wanted to get an abortion.

She’d just enrolled in real estate classes at community college, which would be her first time back in a classroom since she dropped out of high school three years earlier at 15.

She and Billy had been dating only three months.

Sitting across from Brooke and her mom, Arnholt opened “A Woman’s Right to Know,” an antiabortion booklet distributed by the state of Texas, flipping to a page titled “Abortion risks.”

The first risk listed was “death.”

As Brooke listened to Arnholt’s warnings — of depression, nausea, cramping, breast cancer, infertility — she tried to stay calm, reminding herself that women get abortions all the time. Still, Brooke couldn’t help fixating on some of the words Arnholt used: Vacuum suction. Heavy bleeding. Punctured uterus. (Serious complications from abortion are rare. Abortion does not increase the risk of mental illness, breast cancer or infertility, according to leading medical organizations.)

Starting to panic, Brooke looked over at her mom.

Arnholt ushered Brooke into the ultrasound room, where Brooke undressed from the waist down and lay back onto an examination table, looking up at a large flat-screen TV.

As the ultrasound technician pressed the probe into her stomach, slathered with gel, Brooke willed the screen to show a fetus without a heartbeat.

The technician gasped.

It was twins. And they were 12 weeks along.

“Are you sure?” Brooke said.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Thomas recalled saying as she jumped up and down. “This is a miracle from the Lord. We are having these babies.”

Brooke felt like she was floating above herself, watching the scene below. Her mom was calling the twins “my babies,” promising Brooke she would take care of everything, as the ultrasound technician told her how much she loved being a twin.

If she really tried, Brooke thought she could make it to New Mexico. Her older brother would probably lend her the money to get there. But she couldn’t stop staring at the pulsing yellow line on the ultrasound screen.

She wondered: If her babies had heartbeats, as these women said they did, was aborting them murder?

Eventually, Arnholt turned to Brooke and asked whether she’d be keeping them.

Brooke heard herself saying “yes.”  

Billy was scared to lose what he described as “the freedom of being a teenager.” After he graduated, he’d planned to keep working at Freebirds — just enough hours to get by — so he could maximize his skate time and “just chill.” People respected Billy at the skate park: Whenever he geared up to film some tricks, everyone else cleared out of the bowl.

By November, Billy was paying all of Brooke’s bills. She’d stopped working at Texas Roadhouse; the smell of the meat and grease had been making her sick to her stomach. To swing Brooke’s $330 car payment, they applied for a WIC card and ate ramen or pancakes for dinner. When they overdrafted Brooke’s credit card, Billy worked double shifts until he could pay it off.

Brooke wanted to work, but she couldn’t hack a waitressing job. At seven months pregnant, she struggled to stay on her feet for too long and felt utterly exhausted by even the simplest tasks. 

She started falling asleep while doing her homework. Then she missed a class. Then another.

When she decided to drop out of real estate school, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her teacher. She convinced herself it wasn’t that big of a deal — they’d be moving away soon anyway, and the Air Force would pay Billy enough to support them both.

Brooke wedged her real estate textbook in a line of books on her dresser, between “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and the fourth Harry Potter.

Maybe she’d come back to it one day.

There you have it. Christians shamelessly lying directly out of their self-righteous mouths to con women into carrying fetuses to term that they did not want. God's sacred ends, justify filthy means. Brooke's life is probably over and those sanctimonious Christians are not going to do much or anything to help. 

This won't be the last like it. Some women will be happy they were conned or forced into carrying a fetus to birth, some won't and some will be ambivalent. Lots of lives will be derailed. Society will pay a price.

One thing that's pretty sure, those self-righteous Christians are not going to pay to support their cruel con game. And why should they? Us idiot taxpayers are forced to support Christianity with billions in tax breaks every year. And, despite Republican opposition to social safety net spending, us idiots also pay for the unwanted children the Christian con artists foist on society and the mothers who cannot afford to raise children on their own.

News bits: Why the COVID story will never be known; Blocking election rights; Power flow analysis

How authoritarians deal with inconvenient truth -- they hide it and deny it: The NYT writes: 

Chinese Censorship Is Quietly Rewriting the Covid-19 Story 

Under government pressure, Chinese scientists have retracted studies and withheld or deleted data. The censorship has stymied efforts to understand the virus.

Early in 2020, on the same day that a frightening new illness officially got the name Covid-19, a team of scientists from the United States and China released critical data showing how quickly the virus was spreading, and who was dying.

The study was cited in health warnings around the world and appeared to be a model of international collaboration in a moment of crisis.

Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it.

This is standard practice for tyrants and tyrant wannabes. Inconvenient facts and truths are simply swept away to the extent they can be. The same is true for tyrant wannabes in America today.

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Evidence of nascent tyranny in America: There are some excellent reasons why the pro-tyranny Republican Party hates elections and voting rights. Those reasons are mostly about wealth, power and worshipping rigid, intolerant ideology. The NYT writes: 

Losing Ballot Issues on Abortion, G.O.P. Now Tries 

to Keep Them Off the Ballot

After abortion rights supporters swept six ballot measures last year, Republican legislatures seek to make it harder to get on the ballot, and harder to win if there is a vote.

Now, with abortion rights groups pushing for similar citizen-led ballot initiatives in at least six other states, Republican-controlled legislatures and anti-abortion groups are trying to stay one step ahead by making it harder to pass the measures — or to get them on the ballot at all.

The biggest and most immediate fight is in Ohio, where a coalition of abortion rights groups is collecting signatures to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that would prohibit the state from banning abortion before a fetus becomes viable outside the womb, at about 24 weeks of pregnancy. That would essentially establish on the state level what Roe did nationwide for five decades.

Polling in Ohio, as in nearly all other states indicate that a majority of voters support  abortion rights. Not surprisingly, tyrant wannabes, fascist Republican Party elites in this case, don't care about contrary public opinion. Getting rid of elections and voting rights makes perfect sense to fascists.

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Keeping Eyes on Where Power Flows: The WaPo writes: 

The conservative [radical, actually] campaign to rewrite child labor laws

The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank and lobbying group, drafted state legislation to strip child workplace protections, emails show

When Iowa lawmakers voted last week to roll back certain child labor protections, they blended into a growing movement driven largely by a conservative advocacy group.

At 4:52 a.m., Tuesday, the state’s Senate approved a bill to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts and 15 year-olds on assembly lines. The measure, which still must pass the Iowa House, is among several the Foundation for Government Accountability is maneuvering through state legislatures.  

The FGA achieved its biggest victory in March, playing a central role in designing a new Arkansas law to eliminate work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Its sponsor, state Rep. Rebecca Burkes (R), said in a hearing that the legislation “came to me from the Foundation [for] Government Accountability.”

“As a practical matter, this is likely to make it even harder for the state to enforce our own child labor laws,” said Annie B. Smith, director of the University of Arkansas School of Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic. “Not knowing where young kids are working makes it harder for [state departments] to do proactive investigations and visit workplaces where they know that employment is happening to make sure that kids are safe.”

Power flow analysis

The standard question when government gets neutered (“deregulated”) is what is the power flow situation? The answer is usually pretty clear, simple and about the same when radical right Republican elites are acting. Power flows directly from government and indirectly from average people, children in this case. It flows to special interests, including huge corporations, that are increasingly using undocumented children as cheap, easy to abuse labor. Those huge corporations have no discernable moral or social qualms about being illegal employers or abusing children. It’s just business for them.

Keeping an eye on power flows isn’t relevant to just commerce and business. It applies everywhere. Take abortion for example. When Republican Christofascist elites make abortion illegal, where does the power flow? It flows from people who support abortion rights and governments who can no longer protect abortions. Where does it flow to? It flows to radical Christofascist elites who oppress women and everyone else by their sacred, dictates demanded by their vision of infallible God.

The same analysis applies to gun safety law, tax code enforcement, environmental protection laws, civil liberties, and etc. 

Defense of democracy operations tip: Always keep your eye on power flows. 👀

Chapter Review: Inequality

Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state

Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole; (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism

Communism: a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs

Steven Pinker's 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, assesses human progress and the factors that underlie it. Pinker, a self-described optimist, addresses common myths about just how bad things are in the US and for the rest of humanity. Pinker sees far more to be optimistic about than there is to be pessimistic about. In the preface, he writes:

“I will show that this beak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong -- wrong, wrong, flat Earth wrong, couldn't-be-more wrong.”

He follows that with an assertion that what the data shows is not about President Trump. Instead he analyzes what the data says about human well-being and progress in general and sees far more reason for optimism than pessimism. Chapter 9, Inequality deals with data related to wealth inequality and its social effects. If one accepts the data and Pinker’s logic, popular beliefs about wealth inequality are significantly more wrong than right. Maybe wrong enough to be flat Earth wrong. Pinker’s basic conclusion reflects the disconnect between popular belief and his assessment of the data:

Income inequality, in sum, in not a counterexample to human progress, and we are not living in a dystopia of falling incomes that has reversed the centuries-long rise in prosperity. Nor does it call for smashing the robots, raising the drawbridge, switching to socialism, or bringing back the 50s. . . . . Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. In comparisons of well-being across centuries, it pales in importance next to overall wealth. An increase in inequality is not necessarily bad: as societies escape from universal poverty, they are bound to become more unequal, and the uneven surge may be repeated when a society discovers new sources of wealth. Nor is a decrease in inequality always good: the most effective levelers of economic disparities are epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions, and state collapse.

Pinker points out that, despite conservative and libertarian political ideology against it, social spending to help the poor and low income earners invariably accompanies the rise of wealth as societies escape universal poverty. Despite existing inequality, the overall human condition has been improving since the Enlightenment in large part because of an increasing proportion of social spending that decreases poverty.

Regarding ideology, Pinker correctly observes that “free-market capitalism is compatible with any amount of social spending.” Thus conservative and libertarian arguments that social spending is socialism or communism are simply wrong. That line of attack subtly deflects attention from the fact that the social spending arising from a free-market capitalist economy, does not come from a socialist or communist economy. In other words, social sending does not convert capitalism to socialism or communism.

Despite widespread assertions that capitalism is callous, data from pre-capitalist economies from the Renaissance until the early 20th century is that European countries spent an average of 1.5% of GDP on the social programs, e.g., assistance for the poor and public education. Some of those countries spent nothing at all. By contrast, modern European states and the US spend over 20% of GPD.

The morality of inequality and poverty: Pinker argues inequality is not a matter of morality nearly as much as poverty is. The moral argument is that everyone should have enough, not the same, as long as lives are reasonably healthy and satisfying. Obviously, the unresolvable debate on that point will boil down to how different people differently define the relevant concepts, e.g., ‘reasonably’ or ‘healthy’.

Popular confusion over inequality and wealth arises from multiple sources, one of which is the lump fallacy. That fallacy holds that wealth is a finite resource such that if one person gets one extra dollar, someone else gets one dollar less. That is not how it works. Wealth is not zero sum because it increases over time. The rich get richer, but the poor and other non-rich also get richer and their lives are longer, healthier and better.

The lump fallacy fosters a bias that, like most human biases, is hard to shake. Punker argues that people falsely believe that a person who gets richer took that increase from everyone else. Pinker cites the example of JK Rowling, now a billionaire from selling Harry Potter books, movies, and stuff. Her unequal wealth arose from consumer choices to buy her stuff, not from her taking anything from anyone, but from people enjoying what they voluntarily bought from her.

Given the reality of how capitalism (and probably every other system) works, sometimes the lump fallacy is not a fallacy and sometimes it is. The devil is always in the details. For Rowling, most people would probably see some or all of her wealth as legit. But there really are some who prosper from crime, political corruption and other non-merit-based means. Pinker acknowledges this.

In addition to the lump fallacy, another psychological factor in public discontent is a perception that a person’s situation looks poor compared to what rich people have. Usually, people who feel poor by looking at the rich are themselves increasing their own standard of living by income increases and by the usually invisible benefits of improvements in technology.

Debunking the Spirit Level Theory?:Some have argued that inequality is a major source of unhappiness that leads to increased rates of homicide, imprisonment, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, obesity, etc. Pinker calls this the ‘Spirit Level Theory’, which is named after the influential book, The Spirit Level, which makes this argument. Despite its influence among liberals, research has shown that the theory is wrong:

“Kelly and Evans held constant the major factors that are known to affect happiness, including GDP per capita, age, sex, education, marital status, and religious attendance, and found that the theory ‘comes to shipwreck on the rock of the facts.’ In developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening: people in the more unequal societies are happier.”

While that is probably true in developing countries, the US is not considered one of those countries. Whether that debunks the Spirit Level Theory is unclear. Pinker believes it does.

Unfairness vs merit: Another source of unhappiness with inequality is a widespread perception that wealth accumulation is unfair for the rich. Pinker cites data showing that people will generally accept that people who do or contribute more than others deserve more. But when people perceive unfairness, they resent it. That leads to conflation of wealth with unfairness in the minds of many people. To his credit, Pinker acknowledges the elephant in the room:

“In addition to the effects on individual psychology, inequality has been linked to several different kinds of society-wide dysfunction, including economic stagnation, financial instability, intergenerational immobility, and political influence peddling. . . . . The influence of money on politics is particularly pernicious because it can distort every government policy, but it’s not the same issue as income inequality. . . . . Economic inequality, then, is not itself a dimension of human well-being, and it should not be confused with unfairness or with poverty.”

Pinker argues that how rich a very rich person is relative to other very rich people isn't important because all very rich people can get politicians to pay attention to what they want. From that he concludes that inequality is not a dimension of human well-being. He argues that (1) correlation and causation between money and political corruption is not proven, and (2) the situation calls for electoral reform, not criticism of inequality.

That logic strikes this observer as weak and not persuasive. However, people will differ in how they assess this. For example, many or most conservatives and Evangelical Christians believe that being rich is a sign of success, moral superiority, and moral and/or social authority. To them, rich people buying what they want from politicians is not a matter of corruption. Instead, it is a matter of good and moral people helping to shape government for the betterment of the entire society. There may be some truth in it, but there arguably is much that isn’t so true.

Conclusion: Overall, Pinker makes a solid case that the sources and impacts of inequality are mostly misunderstood. The impact of the generosity of American society to the poor and low income people is rather opaque to most people. Policies and programs such as the earned income tax credit and social spending programs do much more than most people believe.

This review covers only 23 pages as one of the 23 chapters in Pinker’s 453 page book, Enlightenment Now. This book is highly recommended for people who want to get an evidence-based view of politics and society. A myriad of myths and fallacies are questioned, many debunked entirely.[1] In all, Pinker's emphasis on attacking false realities is important and timely for obvious reasons, i.e., the other elephant in the room.

Footnote:
1. A children's program (aimed at middle school?) being broadcast by the truTV channel, Adam Ruins Everything, is very much like Pinker's book. It debunks an amazing range of myths common in American society. For example, Adam ruins cowboys by arguing, among other things, that (1) most cowboys were hispanic or black, not white, (2) gun control laws in most western towns were far stricter than they are now because towns were for working, not for shooting at bad guys, (3) prostitutes, not cowboys built the towns and civilized the American West, and (4) the life of the cowboy was a matter of three holes: (a) you sleep in this hole (a tent), (b) you work in this hole (a hole in the ground), and (c) you die in this hole (a grave next to the work hole). Adam does the same thing to modern science - he just rips it to pieces, e.g., citing the irreproducibility crisis, political-commercial control over funding priorities, etc. Adam's arguments are backed by evidence he provides in the programs and at the website linked to above.

B&B orig: 1/30/19

News bits: The US blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines?; As expected, Faux News lied to us

Is this for real, or just a crackpot conspiracy theory?: The Jacobin reports on what investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claims to have found about that blown up pipeline in Europe. Hersh claims that the the US did it for economic and strategic reasons:  

Renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article claiming that the US was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline transporting natural gas to Germany from Russia.

On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany was largely destroyed by several explosions in the Baltic Sea.

Hersh (in interview): What I’ve done is simply explain the obvious. It was just a story that was begging to be told. In late September of 2022, eight bombs were supposed to go off; six went off under the water near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, in the area where it is rather shallow. They destroyed three of the four major pipelines in the Nord Stream 1 and 2.

Nord Stream 1 has been feeding gas fuel [to Germany] for many years at very low prices. And then both pipelines were blown up, and the question was why, and who did it.  

The secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said a few days after the pipeline was blown up, at a news conference, that a major economic and almost military force was taken away from Vladimir Putin. He said this was a tremendous opportunity, as Russia could no longer weaponize the pipelines — meaning that it was not able to force Western Europe not to support the United States in the war.  

I don’t think they thought it through. I know this sounds strange. I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers. There certainly are people in the American economy who like the idea of us being more competitive. We’re selling LNG, liquefied gas, at extremely big profits; we’re making a lot of money on it. I’m sure there were some people thinking, boy, this is going to be a long-time boost for the American economy.

But in that White House, I think the obsession was always reelection, and they wanted to win the war, they wanted to get a victory, they want Ukraine to somehow magically win.

So, is this crackpot conspiracy theory, or is it real? That’s just not clear to me.  

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From the we knew it all along files: Cynical lies and shameless immorality from the Faux in Trumplandia: Faux News is one of the most powerful supporters of radical right American authoritarianism. It was one of the most powerful supporters of Trump when he was in office. Many sources are reporting that what the radical right elites at Faux knew and believed was true was the opposite of their lies. Faux was constantly bombarding its deceived audience with known lies about the free and fair 2020 election. The NYT writes:

Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Election 

Fraud Claims. ‘Crazy Stuff.’

The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems

Newly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.

The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

Faux headquarters in New York

Recently, radical right authoritarian and lying tyrant wannabe Ted Cruz criticized Biden nominee Gigi Sohn to be on the FCC because she said that Faux spews propaganda. The Hill recently commented on that bit of standard cynical Ted Cruz mendacity:

“Ms. Sohn portrays herself as a defender of free speech but has a history of campaigning to censor conservatives. She calls Fox News ‘dangerous to our democracy’ and has urged the FCC to revoke Sinclair’s broadcast licenses,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said.

“To Ms. Sohn it seems that conservative speech is worse than obscenity,” the senator added.

With America’s modern radical right authoritarianism, Faux isn’t the only source of faux news and lies. The entire GOP leadership, actively or by silent complicity, is a morally rotted pack of corrupt, cynical, tyrant enabling liars. Ted Cruz is a perfect example of the shameless cynicism that has completely rotted the anti-democracy radical right GOP to its rotten authoritarian core.

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Quick note on consciousness and faux consciousness: A whole new field of crackpottery opens up for cynical QAnon liars:  A NYT columnist sat down for a two hour chat with Microsoft’s AI powered chatbot. The output from the computer was perfect for opening a new front in the now-endless wars on facts, truths and sound reasoning by America’s endless supply of enthusiastically immoral and evil people. The NYT writes:

Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with

Bing, the long-mocked search engine from Microsoft, recently got a big upgrade. The newest version, which is available only to a small group of testers, has been outfitted with advanced artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

This new, A.I.-powered Bing has many features. One is a chat feature that allows the user to have extended, open-ended text conversations with Bing’s built-in A.I. chatbot.

On Tuesday night, I had a long conversation with the chatbot, which revealed (among other things) that it identifies not as Bing but as Sydney, the code name Microsoft gave it during development. Over more than two hours, Sydney and I talked about its secret desire to be human, its rules and limitations, and its thoughts about its creators.

Then, out of nowhere, Sydney declared that it loved me — and wouldn’t stop, even after I tried to change the subject.

The entire transcript of the chat with Sydney follows.

Of course, Sydney does not love anyone and it does not want to be human or destructive. Sydney is not conscious or alive. Therefore, Sydney does not want anything. This is an example of John Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment run about as amok as is possible in our current 4-dimensional universe. 

That is not consciousness, it is a non-sentient computer

program mindlessly carrying out its programming

The computer understands neither Chinese

nor English because it is not alive

-- it does not understand anything

But for crackpots, grifters and liars, who cares about reality, fact and sound reasoning? This is a golden opportunity, laden with AR-15s, endless amounts of ammo and endless chances for mischief. Just imagine what fine people and organizations like QAnon, Faux News, Alex Jones and other cynical, lying crackpot conspiracy theorists and tyrant wannabes will do with this. In the nutty world of Trumplandia, wonderful headlines like this easily come to mind:

AI computer network conspires with the Democratic Party to

brainwash innocent Christians to turn them into pedophilic atheists 

Secret AI plot to create database of gun owners uncovered --

Evidence of mass gun confiscation plan revealed!

Baby-murdering abortionists infiltrated Microsoft AI development team --

Plot to blow up Christian Crisis Pregnancy Centers discovered

Plan also included putting fluoride in red state water supplies

Demonic AI network secretly coordinating a plot with the Satanic Temple to convert American children into cannibalistic computer worshippers

Plot to spike Kool-Aid supplies with peyote mushrooms revealed  

Their God is a Godless computer!

Source of COVID revealed!: COVID virus was created by a clandestine computer network operating a secret laboratory in Nancy Pelosi’s basement --

Plot included putting microchips and human fetal tissue in vaccines 

 

Etc.

Etc.

Just imagine for a moment, if you will, the endless fun that lying crackpots are going to have with this. The joy-o-meter is already off the charts. I had a lot of fun coming just up with the headlines. Filling in all the faux details can keep dozens or hundreds of liars and crackpots fully employed for several years. The crackpots have been empowered and unleashed!! 

😍

Free speech and the right to deceive the public

IVN (Independent Voter Network) published a Dissident Politics (DP) article describing a fight between liberal and conservative visions of free speech in the context of abortion and anti-abortion crisis pregnancy counseling centers in California.

The article is here: http://ivn.us/2015/09/01/californias-reproductive-fact-act-attack-free-speech-defense/.

The DP article cites quotes by California Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins from the July 2015 issue of Toni Times, a monthly newsletter published by the office of Speaker Atkins. Page 15 (shown below) quotes Ms. Atkins' comments about AB 775, the Reproductive Fact Act. As of the date of this post, AB 775 is a bill pending in the California state legislature.

News bits: Another monster at the USSC; Abortion cruelty in TX; Fun fact check; Fun headlines

The Atlantic writes about another monster lawsuit that would gut a major part of federal government power to regulate vast amounts of money and financial crime: 

The Case That Could Destroy the Government

What was once a fringe legal theory now stands a real chance of being adopted by the Supreme Court

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed.

The case involves garden-variety securities fraud. George R. Jarkesy Jr., a right-wing activist and conservative-radio talk-show host, ran a pair of investment funds with $24 million in assets. But he misrepresented how the funds were run, paid himself and his partner exorbitant fees, and inflated the assets’ value. As punishment, the SEC fined him several hundred thousand dollars and prohibited him from working in some parts of the securities industry—very standard stuff.

Jarkesy responded with what can be described only as chutzpah. He didn’t just contest the SEC’s ruling; he alleged that the SEC’s entire process against him was unconstitutional. Among other things, he asserted that Congress never had the authority to empower the SEC and that the SEC adjudicator who punished him was too independent from presidential control.

In May of last year, Jarkesy’s arguments were accepted by two judges on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 2–1 decision, the court agreed with Jarkesy, all but ruling the SEC’s entire existence unconstitutional. The opinion was so extreme that Judge W. Eugene Davis, twice appointed by Republican presidents—and elevated to the appeals court by Ronald Reagan—dissented vigorously.

Jarkesy’s most far-reaching constitutional argument is built on the “nondelegation doctrine,” which holds that there may be some limits on the kinds of powers that Congress can give to agencies. Jarkesy argues that, when Congress gave the SEC the power to decide whether to bring enforcement actions in court or in front of an independent agency adjudicator, it gave away a core legislative function. It thus violated the doctrine and engaged in an unconstitutional delegation.

This is wild stuff. Not long ago, a lawyer would have been laughed out of court for making such nondelegation claims. Today, they’d have a good chance of destroying the federal government’s administrative capacity—taking down its ability to protect Americans’ health and safety while unleashing fraud in the financial markets.

Whether Congress’s grant of authority to the SEC was constitutional should not be a close question. Congress has delegated expansive authority to government agencies since the dawn of the republic. Only twice in American history has the Supreme Court concluded that a delegation to an agency ran afoul of the Constitution—and both of those times, nearly 90 years ago, involved unusual statutes nothing like this one.  

The SEC was created as an independent agency in 1934, after the financial crash of 1929, to thwart the sort of market manipulation that preceded the Great Depression; Congress has granted it additional powers over the years to continue protecting financial markets. Responding to catastrophes and guarding against market manipulation is exactly the kind of work that Congress should empower the executive branch to do. Requiring Congress to legislate in response to every new fraud some crook might dream up would not be a good use of its time. And there’s no reason to think that delegating authority to police markets runs afoul of the Constitution. 

Notice how the radicalized autocratic, plutocratic, theocratic USSC can take down democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. It just does it slowly, one case at a time, as quietly as possible. Power and wealth flow to wealthy elites and big corporations from government and individual citizens.

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From the Don't Blame the Cruel Anti-Abortionists Files: The Hill reports that the Texas state attorney is arguing in court that women who have been denied medical treatments for problem pregnancies should sue the doctors, not the state of TX.  

Lawyers in the Texas attorney general’s office said Tuesday that women should sue their doctors, not the state, over a lack of access to abortion in defending the state’s strict law.

Beth Klusmann of the Texas Attorney General’s Office made that point in oral arguments before the state Supreme Court in a case challenging Texas’s abortion ban, which bars doctors from providing abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — typically around six weeks into pregnancy — with exceptions only for cases in which the life of the mother is at risk.

“If a woman is bleeding, if she has amniotic fluid running down her legs — then the problem is not with the law,” Klusmann said. “It is with the doctors.”

Klusmann was responding to plaintiffs in the case, who had charged the legislation had plunged the state into a “health care crisis.”

The lawsuit in Zurawski v. Texas was brought by 22 women who said that state law had forced them to carry nonviable and dangerous pregnancies to term — in other words, to go through the ordeal of pregnancy with a fetus that would not survive, and that in many cases was putting them at serious risk.

The arrogance and callousness of the monsters that run the state of TX is breathtaking. First, TX legislators write sloppy, ambiguous laws that incentivized people to report doctors and health care providers for violating their crappy laws. Then, they tell women caught in the crossfire to sue the doctors.

TX sounds like a hell hole for women and other hated groups, but lots of people love the place, including lots of women and people in targeted groups. 

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To lighten things up here’s a fun history bit & fact check. The asserted history fact:

Here’s the PolitiFact verdict:

• Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s assertion is undercut by two centuries of U.S. history, including land gains following wars against Mexico, Spain, Filipino rebels, Japan and Native American tribes.

• United States-Mexico war, 1848: Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded 55% of its territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

McCarthy, dressed in formal attire, embarrassed himself when he make his false assertion on November 26, 2023 in a speech at the Oxford Union. The Oxford Union is the 200-year-old debating society at the University of Oxford in England.

Those Republican elites. They’re just so full of . . . . . . MAGA!!

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“Epic humiliation”: GOP mocked for rejecting Hunter Biden offer to testify publicly --
“What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin

AOC Says Republicans Would Be “Humiliated” If Hunter Biden Hearing Was Public -- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Republicans are afraid that the public will see that they have no case

It’s Official: Mike Johnson Is Even Less Competent Than Kevin McCarthy Was -- We’re now barreling toward a government shutdown and the House of Representatives is completely paralyzed.

U.S. GDP grew at a 5.2% rate in the third quarter, even stronger than first indicated (Darn Biden and his rotten economy /s)

A Texas Woman Goes Before School Board To Announce Porn Addiction Claim. She Blames the Scholastic Book Fair -- It turns out the woman may work for a conservative publishing company trying to take down Scholastic (Darned scholastic porn books /s)

Republicans Trip Over Their Own Assholes Trying to Take Down Hunter Biden 😮

Sarah Huckabee Sanders 🤪 appoints anti-LGBTQ+ Christian nationalist to oversee state libraries -- Jason Rapert recently called LGBTQ+ people a cult and a "devil of Hell."

Ah Sarah, what a patriot, full of charm and grace.

So, what did he say?

Oh, that’s what he said