Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Friday, February 24, 2023

News bits: A near miss with nihilism and lawless shell games; Polluters captured the EPA; etc.

The extreme fragility of the rule of law under the radical right: A recent Supreme Court decision in Cruz v. Arizona just barely avoided the rule of law degenerating into an option that states could choose to follow or ignore in many situations. Justice Kagan articulated the issue like this:
Cruz loses his Simmons claims on direct appeal because the Arizona courts say point-blank Simmons has never applied in Arizona. And then he loses the next time around because the Arizona courts say Simmons always applied … I mean, tails you win, heads I lose, whatever that expression is? I mean, how—how can you run a railroad that way?
Simmons is an earlier Supreme Court decision that protected a right of criminal defendants. The state of Arizona was ignoring the rule. The Supreme Court rearticulated the rule again in a case called Lynch. The same issue was before the court in the Cruz case.

But it’s also important to recognize how close—one vote—the Supreme Court came to plunging us further into nihilism and lawless shell games.

Had the Supreme Court countenanced Arizona’s scheme, it would have enabled states to ignore Supreme Court cases that Arizona didn’t like. It would have permitted states to refuse to give effect to any Supreme Court precedent the states and Supreme Court justices didn’t like—and to deny people their rights in the process.

If that concern sounds familiar, it should. It’s basically what the Supreme Court allowed Texas to get away with on abortion in the S.B. 8 case before the court ultimately overruled Roe v. Wade last term. In 2021, the Texas legislature adopted S.B. 8, a novel abortion restriction that was designed to shut down abortion access without allowing abortion providers to challenge the law in court. In the case challenging S.B. 8, five justices (the five justices who would later overrule Roe) let Texas get away with that gambit while Roe was still standing. The five justices allowed Texas to effectively nullify a Supreme Court decision that Texas didn’t care for, and that six justices on the court didn’t care for either.  
Had the court allowed Arizona to do the same in Cruz v. Arizona—to nullify a decision that Arizona and probably a majority of justices on the court didn’t care for—it would have facilitated even more legal machinations that deprive people of their constitutional rights. Framed that way, it’s actually a little frightening that Arizona came within one vote of pushing us further toward a world of open season on any case that Republican-led states and Republican-appointed justices don’t like. (emphasis added)
What needs to be crystal clear here is it's not a time to rejoice when five of nine justices voted to protect a defendant’s constitutional rights. That is pro-democracy, a no-brainer and a vey good thing. Instead, it is time for fear because four of the nine voted to not protect a defendant’s constitutional rights. That is tyranny plain and simple. In the Texas case, five justices allowed Texas to get away with denying a constitutional right. 

One measly vote. That is precisely how close the radical right Supreme Court is to unleashing tyrannical Armageddon on both our civil liberties and the rule of law. For the radical right civil liberties and the rule of law are an unpleasant inconvenience at best. That is why I call all six of the justices radical right Republican politicians in black robes. This is more than just a “little frightening” as Slate put it. It is legitimately fully terrifying. Or, is that hyperbole?

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Fake EPA concern for pollution -- the EPA is a captured agency: 

Regulatory captureIn politics, regulatory capture (also agency capture and client politics) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a specific constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession, or ideological group. For public choice theorists, regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with high-stakes interests in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus their resources and energies to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, will ignore it altogether.


Almost half of products cleared so far under a new US federal ‘biofuels’ program are not, in fact, biofuels

The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a climate-friendly initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and the Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, one out of four people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.

In response to questions from ProPublica and the Guardian, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency’s lifetime cancer risk calculation is “a very conservative estimate with ‘high uncertainty’”, meaning the government erred on the side of caution in calculating such a high risk.

Under federal law, the EPA can’t approve new chemicals with serious health or environmental risks unless it comes up with ways to minimize the dangers. And if the EPA is unsure, the law allows the agency to order lab testing that would clarify the potential health and environmental harms. In the case of these new plastic-based fuels, the agency didn’t do either of those things. In approving the jet fuel, the EPA didn’t require any lab tests, air monitoring or controls that would reduce the release of the cancer-causing pollutants or people’s exposure to them.  
In January 2022, the EPA announced the initiative to streamline the approval of petroleum alternatives in what a press release called “part of the Biden-Harris administration’s actions to confront the climate crisis.” While the program cleared new fuels made from plants, it also signed off on fuels made from plastics even though they themselves are petroleum-based and contribute to the release of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
This is what regulatory capture does. It serves the special interests, usually at the expense of the public interest.  Two other examples of regulatory capture by special interests are the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the 2008 Wall Street financial disaster. The recent train derailment in eastern Ohio arguably is another example of regulatory capture of the Transportation Department (Pete Buttigieg) by special interests in the transportation sector, specifically railroads. 

In my opinion, the EPA is another regulatory agency that has been significantly or mostly captured by the special interests it is supposed to regulate in the name of the public interest.

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Lobbying: The Hill writes about the train derailment in eastern Ohio on Feb. 3:
But lawmakers, federal officials and union leaders are already placing the blame on rail companies, pointing to the industry’s decades-long opposition to stricter safety regulations.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg this week called for a slew of new railroad rules, including more stringent braking requirements and larger fines for railroads that violate safety regulations.

He called on Norfolk Southern to support new rail safety rules instead of mobilizing against them.

Railroads are an influential force in Congress and state legislatures, using their lobbying power to kill several regulatory proposals aimed at boosting safety.

The four largest U.S. railroads and their trade association together spent over $480 million [~$24 million/year on average] on federal lobbying over the last two decades, according to data from nonpartisan research group OpenSecrets. Norfolk Southern actually spent the least of the top railroads, shelling out $69 million over that period [~$3.5 million/year]. (emphasis added)

Note that just a few days ago Buttigieg said he was powerless to do anything about the railroad companies. After a blast of criticism for uttering that lie, he has apparently discovered that he actually does have some power.  

Thursday, February 23, 2023

News bits: Energy teleportation between two vacuums; Global democracy under attack; etc.

Energy teleportation has been discovered: Those feisty physicists are at it again. Quantum physics nerds have found a way to extract quantum energy (negative energy) form a vacuum (empty space) by entangling one vacuum with negative energy pumped into its quantum field to another space that accepts it in its quantum field. Right, this is beyond nuts. But it appears to be real and true. And, no fundamental laws of physics are broken, i.e., conservation of energy, by this means of teleporting energy from one place to another. 

Quanta Magazine writes:
While studying black holes, Masahiro Hotta came to suspect that an exotic occurrence in quantum theory — negative energy — could be the key to measuring entanglement. Black holes shrink by emitting radiation entangled with their interiors, a process that can also be viewed as the black hole swallowing dollops of negative energy. Hotta noted that negative energy and entanglement appeared to be intimately related. To strengthen his case, he set out to prove that negative energy — like entanglement — could not be created through independent actions at distinct locations.

Hotta found, to his surprise, that a simple sequence of events could, in fact, induce the quantum vacuum to go negative — giving up energy it didn’t appear to have.

Now in the past year, researchers have teleported energy across microscopic distances in two separate quantum devices, vindicating Hotta’s theory. The research leaves little room for doubt that energy teleportation is a genuine quantum phenomenon.

“This really does test it,” said Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.”

The trouble arises from the bizarre nature of the quantum vacuum, which is a peculiar type of nothing that comes dangerously close to resembling a something. The uncertainty principle forbids any quantum system from settling down into a perfectly quiet state of exactly zero energy. As a result, even the vacuum must always crackle with fluctuations in the quantum fields that fill it. These never-ending fluctuations imbue every field with some minimum amount of energy, known as the zero-point energy.

Hotta’s publication was met with crickets. Machines that exploit the zero-point energy of the vacuum are a mainstay of science fiction, and his procedure rankled physicists tired of fielding crackpot proposals for such devices. But Hotta felt certain he was onto something, and he continued to develop his idea and promote it in talks. He received further encouragement from William Unruh, who had gained prominence for discovering another odd vacuum behavior.

“This kind of stuff is almost second nature to me,” Unruh said, “that you can do strange things with quantum mechanics.”

The quantum computer used to test the 
negative energy teleporter concept
You can do strange things with quantum mechanics! 

The first practical application of this has been used to cool a carbon atom (named Bob) in a quantum computer by transferring negative energy from Bob to another nearby carbon atom (named Alice). This was done to make qubits, Bobs, in a quantum computer super cold by teleporting negative energy from Bob (cooling Bob down), thereby warming up Alice outside the computer. Cold qubits are reliable qubits, the colder the better. We all want lots of cold Bobs and warm Alices. Right? Right.

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Democracy in Mexico is under attack: The worldwide authoritarian attack on democracies continues. The tactics are always similar. In addition to the usual constant blasts of polarizing dark free speech (deceit, lies, slanders, etc.), tyrants, plutocrats, theocrats and kleptocrats quietly work to undermine and weaken pro-democracy institutions. The NYT writes about the onslaught in Mexico:
Mexican lawmakers passed sweeping measures overhauling the nation’s electoral agency on Wednesday, dealing a blow to the institution that oversees voting and that helped push the country away from one-party rule two decades ago.

The changes, which will cut the electoral agency’s staff, diminish its autonomy and limit its ability to punish politicians for breaking electoral laws, are the most significant in a series of moves by the Mexican president to undermine the country’s fragile institutions — part of a pattern of challenges to democratic norms across the Western Hemisphere.  
Now, another test looms: The Supreme Court, which has increasingly become a target of the president’s ire, is expected to hear a challenge to the measures in the coming months.

If the changes stand, electoral officials say it will become difficult to carry out free and fair elections — including in a crucial presidential contest next year.
Given human history, we appear to be at the end of a golden period for secular democracy, free and fair elections and civil liberties. Memory of the brutality and overreach of the authoritarian tyrants in the 20th century is being attacked and distorted by extremists worldwide. Radical propaganda is that the tyrants were (i) great patriots and nationalists, (ii) not nearly as murderous or corrupt as their historical narratives assert, and (iii) fighting against tyranny by evil outsiders, usually immigrants, non-heterosexuals, Jews and/or non-religious people. Democracy is now under a constant dark free speech and poison policy attack. This will not go away for the foreseeable future.

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Tyrants need to rewrite history: The NYT writes:
In Sharing Video With Fox Host, McCarthy Hits Rewind on Jan. 6

In granting exclusive access to Jan. 6 Capitol surveillance footage to a cable news host bent on rewriting the history of the attack, the speaker effectively outsourced a politically toxic re-litigation of the riot

The most conservative Republican members of Congress — many of whom have worked to downplay or deny the reality of the Jan. 6 attack — have been pushing Mr. McCarthy for weeks to release the video after he promised to do so during his campaign for speaker.

That is where Mr. Carlson comes in.

“I promised,” Mr. McCarthy said on Wednesday in a brief phone interview in which he defended his decision to grant Mr. Carlson exclusive access to the more than 40,000 hours of security footage. “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”

Still, the sunshine Mr. McCarthy referred to will, for now, be filtered through a very specific prism — that of Mr. Carlson, a hero of the hard right who has insinuated without evidence that the Jan. 6 attack was a “false flag” operation carried out by the government.  
“By handpicking Tucker Carlson, Speaker McCarthy laid bare that this sham is simply about pandering to MAGA election deniers, not the truth,” Mr. Schumer wrote. “Tucker Carlson has no fidelity to the truth or facts and has used his platform to promote the Big Lie, distort reality and espouse bogus conspiracy theories about Jan. 6.”
The reason I've been pounding heavily on Faux News and Tucker Carlson lately is the obvious urgent need for radical right anti-democracy authoritarians to rewrite inconvenient history. Tyrants, kleptocrats and theocrats do that all the time. The 1/6 Republican coup attempt is a critical bit of history that needs to be rewritten. It need to become a touching story about valiant patriots fighting to defend democracy, liberty and truth. At present, the 1/6 narrative is an extremely inconvenient story of violence and treason in defense of kleptocratic tyranny and aggressive, bigoted Christian theocracy.

Make no mistake, Faux and Tucker will spin the 1/6 coup attempt into a completely different event compared to what it actually was. When the House 1/6 Committee released information in the days before before the radical right took control, those Democrats understood what was coming. They released information to the public to blunt the torrent of lies that McCarthy and his cadre of radical right thugs are salivating to poison the internet and airwaves with.

Prepare for a gigantic onslaught of divisive, polarizing, pro-tyranny deceit, lies, slanders and crackpottery in the coming months. We will be lied to a lot. How many of us will be deceived and manipulated is the open question. 

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Faux news is brass knuckles capitalist, not pro-democracy, pro-truth or pro-honest governance, and the law is usually on its side: A WaPo analysis of the Dominion lawsuit indicates that Faux should lose the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems filed against the company. What is extraordinary is that Faux might actually lose, and maybe might even have to pay the asked for $1.6 billion in damages. The WaPo writes:
Under New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that has guided libel and defamation claims for nearly 60 years, a plaintiff like Dominion must show that a defendant like Fox published false statements with “actual malice” — meaning that it was done “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Based on the messages revealed last week, “I think that Dominion both will and should prevail,” said Laurence Tribe, a former Harvard law professor. “If anything, the landmark this case is likely to establish will help show that New York Times v. Sullivan” is not an impossible legal hurdle to clear, as some critics have claimed.  
Fox’s attempt to defend itself with Sullivan notably clashes with efforts by some prominent conservatives to undo the ruling. Trump has said numerous times it should be easier for people to claim libel against the news media. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has backed state legislation to do just that. Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have also suggested the Sullivan standard should be revisited.

The “actual malice” standard makes it hard to win defamation lawsuits because of the difficulty in demonstrating a reporter or publisher‘s state of mind before publication. It places the burden on the plaintiff to prove that the reporter was not simply just wrong, but knew it and proceeded regardless.
Sullivan doles not impose an impossible legal hurdle for plaintiffs like Dominion to meet. But it is darn close to impossible. If the arrogant asses at Faux had controlled themselves and not put the truth into writing, Dominion would have had no chance to win this lawsuit. Without those text messages, Dominion would have no viable case, even though it was obvious that Faux was lying about Dominion. In its defense, Faux cites Sullivan and says what it did was protected free speech within the scope of the court’s 1964 holding.

If this case gets accepted by our radical right Supreme Court, it could decide to overturn Sullivan and come up with a new standard that lets Faux off the hook. Some radical right elites want that outcome. Or, it could say it leaves Sullivan alone but what Faux did was not defamation. The Republican radicals could even say the circumstances were extraordinary and circumstances created an exception to Sullivan, with future lawsuits to be decided on a case-by-case basis. That last possibility would be very tempting because it allows the court to shield friends and punish enemies one at a time while pretending to be non-partisan.

I do not know how this will play out. We will not know until the radical right Supreme Court either rejects the case or accepts it and decides.


Everything means audience and profits, 
not democracy or truth


Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Who is Vivek Ramaswamy ?

 Donald Trump, move over, there is a new anti-Woke warrior on the horizon:

Vivek Ramaswamy announces he will run for president

The "anti-woke" entrepreneur has thrown his hat into the 2024 race. 



Vivek Ramaswamy, the multi-millionaire biotech entrepreneur and self-described intellectual godfather of the anti-woke movement, announced on Tuesday that he is running for president.

“We are in the middle of a national identity crisis,” he declared in an online video launching his campaign, offering that the current political climate constituted a form of “psychological slavery.”

Speaking straight to the camera, with an American flag draped in the background and a flag pin on his lapel, Ramaswamy framed his campaign as a broad counteroffensive to what he called the “woke left” — describing it as a threat to open speech, the free exchanging of ideas and American exceptionalism itself.

Ramaswamy is the third high-profile candidate to declare for the presidency in 2024. Though he filed forms with the FEC declaring he would be running on the Republican side of the aisle, his announcement video made no mention of the party itself — an indication that he hopes to frame his candidacy as outside the conventional political framework.

He has already done barnstorming in early nominating states, including Iowa, where he was well received even as some of the state’s political bigwigs professed to not having familiarity with the planks on which he was running.

Ramaswamy made his fortune in biotech investing, but he is best known for his appearances on Fox News and for the New York Times bestselling book he has written.

While his chances of securing the nomination are certainly long, Ramaswamy’s entry into the contest was greeted with a traditional flare from opposition Democrats. Shortly after he appeared on Fox News to elaborate on his decision to run, the Democratic National Committee sent out a statement.

“As Vivek Ramaswamy uses Tucker Carlson’s show to announce his campaign for president, one thing is clear: The race for the MAGA base is getting messier and more crowded by the day,” it read. “Over the next few months, Republicans are guaranteed to take exceedingly extreme positions on everything from banning abortion to cutting Social Security and Medicare and we look forward to continuing to ensure every American knows just how extreme the MAGA agenda is.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/21/vivek-ramaswamy-president-2024-00083903




Science bits: The Turing test & machine consciousness; AI book authorship; etc.

In Oct. of 1950, the science journal Mind published a paper by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing. Experts consider the Turing test to be a behavioral test for consciousness.[1] His paper remains relevant to modern thinking about whether a computer running sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence) software can think. In that paper, Turing wrote:
I PROPOSE to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think’. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words ‘machine’ and ‘think’ are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, ‘Can machines think?’ is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game’. It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A’. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair? Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be

‘My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.’
We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’
From what I can tell of Turing's paper, it looks to me like it was one of the sources of philosopher John Searle's 1980 thought experiment called the Chinese Room experiment. That experiment led me to think that computers and software cannot think or be sentient. 

Maybe in the future, computer technology can come to mimic the workings of the human mind very closely, making it impossible to distinguish a human from a machine. There is research moving in this direction
A synaptic transistor is an electrical device that can learn in ways similar to a neural synapse. It optimizes its own properties for the functions it has carried out in the past. The device mimics the behavior of the property of neurons called spike-timing-dependent plasticity, or STDP.
 But even if computers running AI reach indistinguishability from humans, would that amount to thinking or consciousness? Knowing that would depend on a much better understanding of how humans think or are conscious. 

These are encouraging, fascinating days in science. Too bad it's not the same for politics. 

Footnote: 
1. One expert described it like this in 2017: The best known behavioral test for consciousness is the Turing test, which was put forward by Alan Turing in 1950 as an answer to the question “Can machines think?” Instead of defining what he meant by “machines” and “think,” he chose to limit the machines to digital computers and operationalized thinking as the ability to answer questions in a particular context well enough that the interrogator could not reliably discriminate between the answers given by a computer and a human (via teleprinter) after 5 min of questioning.

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ChatGPT-written books are flooding Amazon as people turn to AI for quick publishing
  • There were over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store as of mid-February listing ChatGPT as an author, but there is no requirement to disclose the use of AI
  • Some worry that without more transparency, the technology could put a lot of authors out of work by flooding the market with low-quality books

Good 'ole AI, it's making our lives better faster. Or maybe not. Authors can claim they wrote what AI wrote. Is that copyright infringement, or just hooliganism?

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China's Mars rover my have gone kaput. Bummer. China isn't spilling the beans.

NASA Images Confirm China's Mars Rover Hasn't Moved in Months