Judicial ethics, an oxymoron; The rule of law, another oxymoron

Balls & Strikes:

Court Order: It Is Unethical for Judges to Talk 

About Justice Sam Alito’s Unethical Behavior

In May 2024, the New York Times revealed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had flags affiliated with far-right extremist movements flying outside of his residences. Alito’s conduct triggered widespread demands for higher judicial ethics standards and meaningful enforcement when those standards are breached. And last week, the legal system actually meted out some discipline in relation to the incident…but not to Alito. Chief Judge Albert Diaz of the Fourth Circuit issued an order on December 10 finding that a federal judge violated ethical rules by publicly acknowledging Alito’s clear lapses in ethical judgment.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the target of the disciplinary measures was Michael Ponsor, a Senior Judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Ponsor published an essay in the New York Times over the summer titled “A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?” This was a very good question. The foolishness at issue was an upside-down American flag—a symbol adopted by proponents of overthrowing the 2020 election on the false grounds that it was “stolen” from Donald Trump—which neighbors spotted in front of Alito’s Virginia home in the days following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Two years later, people saw an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—an obscure emblem of Christian theocrats—hoisted high at Alito’s New Jersey vacation home.

When a Supreme Court justice is exposed as a conspiracy-addled, antidemocratic reactionary, it becomes a bit more difficult for the Court to maintain its reputation as an impartial administrator of equal justice for all. Yet, somehow, Alito has faced no consequences for his misconduct, while Ponsor’s discussion of that misconduct gave rise to an ethical inquiry conducted by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court’s determination that Ponsor violated ethics rules by publishing criticism of Alito shows that the judiciary is much less concerned with meeting ethical standards than it is with maintaining a myth that the standards are met.

 No wonder public trust in the US systems of courts is low. ~65% don't have much or any trust. That level of distrust was earned and is deserved. 

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At least for rich and/or powerful people and corporate people, the rule of law is fading away. The Lever:

The Biden Justice Department just handed a sweetheart deal to a global consulting firm with deep ties to the Biden administration, letting the firm off the hook for its role in helping “turbocharge” sales of the highly addictive prescription pain pill OxyContin.

The development is one of the Justice Department’s first major moves since adopting a new policy three weeks ago to go even softer on corporate crime, and will allow McKinsey & Company to defer prosecution for its extensive role in fueling the opioid epidemic that has devastated millions of American lives.

The new Justice Department policy is meant to provide leniency to corporations that cooperate with federal investigations and self-report crimes. But now McKinsey is benefiting from the new policy, even though prosecutors said that the consulting firm worked to obstruct their investigation.

The McKinsey settlement comes as federal prosecution of white-collar crimes hits historic lows, signaling that corporate malefactors can likely expect lenient treatment moving forward, no matter the extent and heinousness of their alleged crimes.

Although federal contracts with McKinsey for consulting work have shrunk recently, payments to consulting firms make up a massive portion of federal spending. The Biden administration requested more than $70 billion in federal funds for consulting work in the 2024 budget, with the Defense Department requesting nearly half of those funds, according to an analysis by antitrust expert Matt Stoller.

On Dec. 13, the Justice Department announced that McKinsey will be able to pay $650 million and enter into a five-year deferred-prosecution agreement in order to settle criminal and civil investigations into the firm’s role in helping Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin. According to prosecutors, the company was accused of “knowingly destroying records, documents, and tangible objects with the intent to impede, obstruct, and influence the investigation.” A former senior partner at McKinsey agreed to plead guilty to destroying documents and other evidence that investigators sought.  

McKinsey’s settlement comes just three weeks after a new Justice Department policy update allows corporations accused of crimes to receive lenient sentences for cooperating with investigators, even if those corporations are the target of multiple overlapping investigations and consistently break the law.

This new, fun-filled "law enforcement" policy stinks of Merrick Garland. He's the guy who successfully acted to protect DJT from federal prosecutions. Now he protects McKinsey and other major criminal operations.

America desperately needs a new political party. One that is honest, competent, transparent, pro-public interest and pro-democracy. Unfortunately, American is not going to get that hypothetical new party. We're stuck with the two odious beasts we have now.

Family and Friends

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

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

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

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

How to Keep Politics From Ruining Your Holiday

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

Post-Election Moral Family Planning for the Upcoming Holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, AND Cheers all around.

One liberal SNOWFLAKE. 

The rise of zombie laws? Maybe!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby capybara & mom

SciAm reports about bird flu:

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

Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

Time to reach 700 ppm ​is ≈ 98 years

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

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

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Science magazine writes:

Climate change extinctions

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

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

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TechExplore:

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

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

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

TechExplore again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perplexity:

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

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

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

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