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.

Slate writes:

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 capture: In 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.

The Guardian writes:

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.  

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

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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Many wonderful new books are being created:

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

News bits: Prostitution research; etc.

Researchers report a positive effect of legalized prostitution on rape:

Liberalizing prostitution leads to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibiting it leads to a significant increase. The results are stronger when rape is less severely underreported and when it is more difficult for men to obtain sex via marriage or partnership. We also provide the first evidence for the asymmetric effect of prostitution regulation on rape rates: the magnitude of prostitution prohibition is much larger than that of prostitution liberalization.

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Esquire writes about one of the Republican Party's nutbag crackpots in congress, of which there are many:

Marjorie Taylor Greene's "National Divorce" Riff Is Weapons-Grade Trolling

This year may see her take her final form as a being of pure grievance, existing online as a pulsing ball of energy.

MTG is a radical right Republican Party elite who is a self-serving grifter-blowhard. 'Nuff said.

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Radical right Republican crackpottery in Idaho is going to get some folks killed:

Bonkers Republican bill in Idaho would make mRNA-based vaccination a crime

It's unclear if the two lawmakers know what messenger RNA is exactly.

Two Republican lawmakers in Idaho have introduced a bill that would make it a misdemeanor for anyone in the state to administer mRNA-based vaccines—namely the lifesaving and remarkably safe COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. If passed as written, it would also preemptively ban the use of countless other mRNA vaccines that are now in development, such as shots for RSV, a variety of cancers, HIV, flu, Nipah virus, and cystic fibrosis, among others.

We all well remember Germaine's award winning blog post from Jan. 2021 about the little nipper called the Nipah virus. It comes to humans from bat urine and feces in food that people eat. The death rate of infection is generally ~40-75%, but it might sometimes be worse. Can't wait for the little nipper to visit the proudly, patriotically unvaccinated Idaho Republican state legislature. My condolences in advance to all the innocents that get killed. The innocents will just be unavoidable collateral damage in the radical right Republican onslaught against any and all science, facts, true truth and sound reasoning they perceive as inconvenient to their authoritarian anti-democracy agenda.

A 2020 research paper commented:

Recently, in 2018, a NiV outbreak was recorded in the Kozhikode district of Kerala, a South Indian state where the index patient was reported to have contracted NiV from fruit-eating bats. However, no clinical or statistical evidence was available to prove the incidence, though the spread was mostly through nosocomial infection. All the outbreaks have recorded high rates of fatality including the 91% mortality rate during the recent Kerala outbreak [10].

The feisty little Nipah

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Multiple sources are reporting that Democrats in congress are in a snit over Republicans giving 1/6 coup attempt security videos to Faux News' Liar-in-Chief, Tucker Carlson:

Kevin McCarthy offers his first sacrifice to the MAGA cult

His gift to Tucker Carlson is one of many capitulations to the far-right extremists in the party for Kevin McCarthy

Last week, America received proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Fox News is a dishonest institution that spread Donald Trump's Big Lie knowing full well that he did not win the election.  

.... House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he saw fit to give unfettered access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection to none other than Tucker Carlson.  

These tapes have been closely guarded by the Capitol Police ever since the event and have been turned over to the January 6 Committee and Justice Department prosecutors, as well as defense lawyers, but no one in the media has been given access — until now: ....

Tucker probably planes to use the footage out of context to foment rage and hate. If someone(s) gets killed, he can always happily blame it on Joe and Hunter Biden and that pesky laptop. Most of the base will probably love it. Lest we forget, NPR reported this in Sept. 2020:

Now comes the claim that you can't expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson's mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson's critics. It's being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News's own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.

Just read U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil's opinion, leaning heavily on the arguments of Fox's lawyers: The "'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.' "

She wrote: "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."

Vyskocil, an appointee of President Trump's, added, "Whether the Court frames Mr. Carlson's statements as 'exaggeration,' 'non-literal commentary,' or simply bloviating for his audience, the conclusion remains the same — the statements are not actionable." (emphasis added)

There we have it. Lots of exaggeration, non-literal commentary and bloviation. That is evidence under oath in a court of law, not just public opinion. Carlson argued, and the judge agreed. Tucker is a professional bloviator that no one should believe. Of course, millions of Americans believe him and his divisive, rage-fomenting deceit. Some act on their false beliefs and hurt others. For Faux and its deceived and betrayed audience, collateral human and democracy damage is just for-profit business as usual. MAGA!!

News bits: Trump fatigue among supporters; Congressional Republican calls for dissolution of the Union; etc.

How Trump supporters see it: One topic of persistent, high personal interest is what supporters of American radical right authoritarianism are feeling and thinking. Most of that group, maybe about 95%, is mostly anti-democratic. Most of the group, maybe ~98%, is rigidly anti-inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning. Because of that, this group appears to be necessary to support the radical right’s push to get rid of secular democracy and install some form of plutocratic, theocratic Christian-capitalist dictatorship. What these people think and feel is critically important.

The WaPo discusses this issue and reports:

Feeling ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘fatigue,’ some GOP voters look beyond Trump

In recent focus groups of persuadable Republican primary voters from key early states, most stood by their past support for Trump, but the future was a different issue

Nearly all of the focus group participants had supported Donald Trump in 2020 and said they would vote for him again against President Biden in 2024. But things got complicated when the moderator asked for the one emotion they now felt when they saw Trump on television or computers screens.

“That’s a hard one. That’s a hard one,” said Angela, 53, from South Carolina. “Just because of the way they’ve done him.” She spoke of Trump’s opponents who had tried to hurt him both in office and since he left the White House. “It’s more of an embarrassment for him for what they put him through. I feel embarrassed for him.”

Deborah, 67, also from South Carolina, described herself as “stumped” by the question. “I was proud when he was our president, but you know, there’s so many things … the way they treated him and everything, ” she said, alluding to Trump critics.

Two people picked “pride” and “hopeful” as their emotions upon seeing Trump, but the rest pulled from the other end of their emotional range, with words like “anxious,” “neutral,” “frustrated,” “nervous,” “overwhelmed,” “fatigue,” “embarrassed,” “annoyed,” and “maddening.” Most were careful not to criticize Trump directly — they praised his presidency and had critical views of Biden — but something had shifted. They spoke of him as a victim with flaws, not as the unassailable political alpha leader that had taken the party by storm in 2016.

The important points: 

• Trump supporters mostly blame his critics for unfairly or unjustifiably criticizing him and they are getting fatigued by it, but most see little or no merit in the criticisms. 

• Some supporters see some flaws in Trump but they stand by their past support and at least implicitly see his critics’ arguments and evidence as not persuasive (motivated reasoning at work).

• Because most in this group stand by their past support and see no reasons to back away from the Republican Party, they now look for a different radical right authoritarian demagogue they can support.

This information is in complete agreement with what the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit found about why Faux News reported lies about the 2020 presidential election. When Faux reported facts and truths that were inconvenient, its audience started to migrate to Newsmax. That scared the crap out of Faux, which immediately switched from some truth to mostly comforting lies to keep its audience. Collectively, all of this is solid evidence that the minds of most radical right supporters (~95% ?) are firmly closed, badly deceived, and heavily biased toward authoritarianism. 

This is not good news.

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Breaking up the Union: The Hill reports:

Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday suggested the U.S. “separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” re-upping her suggestion of a “divorce” to solve the nation’s division.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) on Monday hit back at Rep. Greene’s calls for a “national divorce” of Republican and Democratic states, saying the lawmaker’s rhetoric is “evil.” “This rhetoric is destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil. We don’t need a divorce, we need marriage counseling. And we need elected leaders that don’t profit by tearing us apart. We can disagree without hate. Healthy conflict was critical to our nation’s founding and survival,” Cox wrote on Twitter.

At least one Republican politician thinks keeping the Union together is a good idea. One can only wonder how most see it.

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Israel inches toward dictatorship: The NYT reports on an Israeli radical right movement to limit the power of independent courts and shift that power to politicians.

Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Jerusalem for a second straight Monday as Israel’s far-right government pushed forward with a divisive plan for a judicial overhaul that critics say will weaken and politicize the country’s courts and undermine its democratic foundations. 

One bill would change the makeup of a nine-member committee that selects judges to reduce the influence of legal professionals and give representatives and appointees of the government an automatic majority. The change would effectively allow the government of the day to choose judges.

The other bill would strip the Supreme Court of its power to strike down basic laws passed by Parliament.

The authoritarianism in this is clear. Autocrats and theocrats want power. Democracy gets in the way, so democracy has to be weakened. The same thing is happening in America, except here authoritarians and theocrats have taken control of the US Supreme Court. The US court is accumulating power for itself and its ideological agendas, brass knuckles capitalism and Christian nationalist theocracy. The end game is the same, theocratic dictatorship, but the strategy and tactics differ.

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Weaponizing the Ohio train derailment -- Republican hypocrisy is off the charts (as usual): The radical right led by Faux News has weaponized the train derailment in Eastern Ohio, a white conservative part of the state. The WaPo writes:

.... in certain right-wing media precincts, the [train derailment] disaster is about something else: A campaign of discrimination being waged against White people.

“East Palestine is overwhelmingly White, and it’s politically conservative,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson recently said of the roughly 4,700 residents of the disaster zone. “That shouldn’t be relevant,” he added, but “it very much is.”

It very much isn’t. But ever since the Feb. 3 disaster, Carlson and his comrades have sought to transform East Palestine’s plight into a tale about “woke” Democrats abandoning White communities in the virtuous, forgotten heartland.

What this illustrates is how the right uses race-baiting to deceive people into forgetting that Democrats are now the far more committed party when it comes to investing in such left-behind communities.

The story goes on to report that Republicans are savaging Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for failing to push for more stringent safety standards. That is true and I've recently criticized Buttigieg here for that manifestation of Democratic Party neoliberalism, which is pro-corporation and anti-consumer.

But the same complaint coming from Republicans is pure hypocrisy in the name of cynical, toxic  politics. Republicans hate safety regulations more than the neoliberal Democrats. If the president and Transportation Secretary were Republicans, there would no complaints about this from Republicans. They rarely criticize their own, especially when their own ideology is at fault. But because the Dems are in power, the GOP cynically complains about regulations that they would otherwise hate and get rid of to the maximum extent possible.

Republican lies and hypocrisy here are blatant, shameless and cynical. Unfortunately, they are effective.