News bits: Private sector eminent domain; Voting rights remain under attack; etc.

Ruthless, cruel capitalism: Real estate investors have discovered a new form of eminent domain to force people out of their condominiums. This is important because in recent years investors have been buying an increasing portion of residential properties and then jacking prices up.

The method is fairly simple. Investors buy condos, then takes over the condo board. The board then terminates the condo legal status, changes the rules making it easier to force people out. Then the investor-backed board votes to force people out and screws them in the process by forcing them to accept a price well under market. This is brass knuckles capitalism in action. It is 100% legal. The NYT writes:

An investor-owner took over a condo board, terminated a condo declaration and is now requiring a couple to sell their condo in what one expert called “a private form of eminent domain.”

This puts the Fellmans in a situation that many condo owners are facing: a forced sale. “After that, they basically said, ‘you’re out,’” said Ms. Fellman, 50. “It’s one thing if your property’s being taken for public good. But this is strictly for a private investor’s profit. And it’s like, why does their investment have more value and power than us?”

Mr. Fellman said that the investor, the Pennsylvania-based Scully Company, never gave him a formal offer before the forced termination plan was filed. ....  Since it owned all the other units, it was able to take over majority control of the condo board, and it voted to lower the threshold of owners required to terminate down to 80 percent. Then, in February 2021, the Scully Company voted to terminate the condominium, which meant the Fellmans would be legally obligated to sell their unit to the company.

The appraiser the company hired assessed the Fellmans’ unit at $200,000. But its Zestimate — Zillow’s home value estimate tool which takes into account square footage, location and market trends, among other factors — gives the Fellmans’ condo an approximate worth of $323,500.

There you have it. Brass knuckles capitalism forced the Fellmans out of their home and screwed them by making them accept about $123,500 less than it was worth. That is unregulated capitalism in action. The consumer gets shafted, but capitalists love it. 

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Regarding the radical right Republican Supreme Court’s war on elections and voting rights: NPR writes:

The roots of the next potential U.S. Supreme Court showdown that could further weaken the Voting Rights Act's protections against racial discrimination can be traced to a handful sentences by Justice Neil Gorsuch. This is what Gorsuch wrote in a 2021 Supreme Court case called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee:

JUSTICE GORSUCH, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins, concurring. 

I join the Court’s opinion in full, but flag one thing it does not decide. Our cases have assumed—without deciding— that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 furnishes an implied cause of action under §2. See Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55, 60, and n. 8 (1980) (plurality opinion). Lower courts have treated this as an open question. E.g., Washington v. Finlay, 664 F. 2d 913, 926 (CA4 1981). Because no party argues that the plaintiffs lack a cause of action here, and because the existence (or not) of a cause of action does not go to a court’s subject-matter jurisdiction, see Reyes Mata v. Lynch, 576 U. S. 143, 150 (2015), this Court need not and does not address that issue today.

For decades, private individuals and groups, who did not represent the federal government, have filed the majority of Section 2 lawsuits that have stopped state and local governments from minimizing the political power of people of color through the redrawing of voting maps and other steps in the elections process.

But that longstanding practice may be coming to an end.

Gorsuch's paragraph of a concurring opinion, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, planted the seeds for an unusual argument that has emerged in an Arkansas redistricting case — that private individuals are not allowed to bring Section 2 lawsuits. And the case may soon find its way before the country's highest court.

This will gut another section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Republicans have hated and chafed under that law ever since it was passed. Gutting voting rights is what authoritarian Republicans mean when they talk about “election integrity.” It means elections rigged so that Republicans win and Democrats lose. 

For context, in a 2013 decision in the case Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court gutted enforcement provisions. Chief Justice Roberts claimed that the situation had changed and red states no longer cheated in elections. That case held that it is unconstitutional to use the coverage formula in Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act to determine which jurisdictions are subject to the preclearance requirement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts lied, plain and simple. That decision empowered and unleashed the current state of laws designed to subvert and win elections for Republicans in red states. 

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Regarding the radical right Republican Christian nationalism’s war on non-heterosexual rights and free speech: A central dogma of Christian nationalism (CN) is seething hate and condemnation of non-heterosexual people. Non-heterosexual sex is sin. An enraged, vengeful Christian God hates sex sin. The CN movement openly wants to oppress and discriminate against non-heterosexuals and other hated groups. Another dogma target is inconvenient fact, true truth and sound reasoning. LGBTQ Nation writes about a twofer that is being offered up by the radical right CN movement to whack the evil sex sinners and inconvenient free speech:

A Florida Republican introduced a bill that would make it easier for religious people to sue those who call them out as homophobic or transphobic, a bill built on a suggestion from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

State Rep. Alex Andrade (R) filed H.B. 991 on Tuesday. The bill would make it easier to sue journalists, publications, or social media users for defamation if they accuse someone of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia. The bill specifically says that publications can’t use truth as a defense when it comes to reporting on people’s anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments by citing the person’s “constitutionally protected religious expression or beliefs” or “a plaintiff’s scientific beliefs.”

Transgender Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic instructor Alejandra Caraballo called the bill “absolutely chilling.”

“If someone calls you a faggot or tranny and you say they discriminated against you, they can now sue you for at least $35k and cite their religious beliefs,” she noted on Twitter. “This would apply to the internet as well. This would empower bigots to target the LGBTQ community with impunity.”

“This applies to the internet as well so if the person is in Florida, you could be liable even if you have never stepped foot in Florida.”  

Under current law, someone suing for defamation has to prove that the defamation hurt their reputation, but H.B. 991 would make it so that statements “that the plaintiff has discriminated against another person or group because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity constitutes defamation per se.”

Is it just me, or is there an endless supply of radical right authoritarian cranks and crackpots operating in Florida? I guess this means that DeSantis is running for president in 2024. This affords another glimpse of what the radical right would do to democracy and civil liberties if the authoritarians ever get enough power. Of course, that assumes the radical right CN already does not have enough power, i.e., think of the radical right, CN Supreme Court.

Science bits: AI designs new enzymes; A neuroscience advance; Hackers hacking

This one could be a game changer: Since the 1980s humans have been tinkering with changing genes and enzymes to make them work better or differently. Directed evolution is one way to generate new enzymes. Genetic engineering has advanced to the point of being able to engineer humans. Now, artificial intelligence software is starting to design new enzymes. Sci Tech Daily writes: 

A natural language model has jumpstarted the process of protein design by creating active enzymes.

Researchers have developed an AI system that can generate artificial enzymes from scratch. In laboratory experiments, some of these enzymes demonstrated efficacy comparable to natural enzymes, even when their artificially created amino acid sequences greatly deviated from any known natural protein.

The experiment shows that natural language processing, initially created for reading and writing language text, can grasp certain fundamental concepts of biology. The AI program, known as ProGen, was developed by Salesforce Research and employs next-token prediction to construct artificial proteins from amino acid sequences.

Scientists said the new technology could become more powerful than directed evolution, the Nobel-prize-winning protein design technology, and it will energize the 50-year-old field of protein engineering by speeding the development of new proteins that can be used for almost anything from therapeutics to degrading plastic.

“The artificial designs perform much better than designs that were inspired by the evolutionary process,” said James Fraser, Ph.D., professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the UCSF School of Pharmacy, and an author of the work, which was recently published in Nature Biotechnology. 

“The language model is learning aspects of evolution, but it’s different than the normal evolutionary process,” Fraser said. “We now have the ability to tune the generation of these properties for specific effects. For example, an enzyme that’s incredibly thermostable or likes acidic environments or won’t interact with other proteins.”  

With proteins, the design choices were almost limitless. Lysozymes are small as proteins go, with up to about 300 amino acids. But with 20 possible amino acids, there are an enormous number (20^300 - twenty to the 300th power) of possible combinations. That’s greater than taking all the humans who lived throughout time, multiplied by the number of grains of sand on Earth, multiplied by the number of atoms in the universe. (🥴!)

Given the limitless possibilities, it’s remarkable that the model can so easily generate working enzymes.

This is an area of application for AI that could revolutionize medicine. It's still too early to predict the long-term impacts. Buy my gut tells me this will turn out to be a big deal within the next couple of years. This will play out pretty fast, for better or worse.

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An advance in understanding the brain: Medical Express writes:

For the first time, researchers record long-term electrical activity in a single brain cell

.... scientists need to understand how individual brain cells contribute to a larger network of brain activity and what role each cell plays in shaping behavior and overall health. Until now, it's been difficult to get a clear view of how brain cells in living animals behave over extended periods of time. 

But Jia Liu's group at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has developed an electronic implant that collected detailed information about brain activity from a single cell of interest for more than a year.

"This research solves a fundamental issue—the challenge of creating a brain-electronic interface that does not disturb brain function or degrade over time," says Liu.

"Maybe one day it's cold and gray outside, and you feel unhappy and in a bad mood. Another day, it's sunny and you're on the beach and you're in a great mood. How those representations change in the brain cannot be studied by current technology because we haven't been able to stably track activity from the same neuron," he says. "This research completely overcomes that limitation. It's the beginning of a new era of neuroscience."

The researchers intend to transmit brain activity in real time from the brain to an artificial neural network in a computer for analysis. Researchers will look at how the mesh nanoelectronic sensors can be used to study phenomena such as "neural representation", which is how the brain generates images we perceive via vision.

This is a significant advance in brain-machine interface technology. At some point, computers and brains will be communicating. That could lead to major knowledge advances in hard to study areas such as consciousness, sentience, and the will to live. 

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Technology is a two-edged sword: As is usual these days, morally rotted people rush in and misuse new technology that was designed to be helpful and good. Mashable writes:

Scammers are spoofing ChatGPT to spread malware

No new product can be called successful online until the scammers show up

ChatGPT has blown up in just a few months' time, becoming the fastest growing app of all time.

So, of course, hackers are already weaponizing the popularity of OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot in order to scam internet users.

Cybersecurity researchers have already uncovered hundreds of recently registered(Opens in a new tab) domains utilizing the term "ChatGPT." While not all of these domains will be weaponized for nefarious purposes, some of them already are being used in that way.  

.... as first reported by Bleeping Computer, one such website "chat-gpt-pc.online" attempted
to convince visitors to its page that ChatGPT was offered as a downloadable local application for Windows. Alvieri found that this download would inject users with the RedLine information-stealing malware. Essentially, this malware steals stored information in users' applications, such as their web browser. For example, if a user has Google Chrome store their passwords or credit card information, this malware can pull the data and send it to the hacker. 

Sigh, this is why we have so many bad things these days. 

A very comprehensive look at biased news outlets....

 To quote the author:

COMMENTARY

I spent an incredible amount of time on this article. By far the most I’ve ever done for a single piece.

The constant anger, arguments, and contempt we see in our everyday lives spurred me on to gather and analyze this dataset.

And yet, I find myself now with even more questions than I was able to answer in creating this article.

• How can we stop such bias from infecting the national discourse?
• Where is the line between allowing propaganda to permeate freely versus free speech? Is this an absolute argument, or can we somehow find a line to discern the truth from fiction?
• Can we please stop listening to tinfoil hat-wearing maniacs?

As you can see from some of the data above, there are many sites that are clearly spreading false information, opinion, and extremism.

This does not bring us together.

It leads to us doubting our neighbors, our friends, our parents, and other important people in our lives.

Eternal distrust.

You can’t believe what you hear.

Every man for himself.

It seems that many people these days, mistakenly in my opinion, search for sources based on what they already want to hear.

They look for articles to confirm their suspicions. Their thoughts and feelings.

Right or left, it doesn’t matter. If you search on Google for something to back up your feeling on a subject (regardless of truth) — you will find it.

There’s an article for everything now.

Opinions being added to the news cycle has corrupted the impartiality of it.

This is not how we come together as a world, as a nation.

We must be better than this.

It’s my belief that many of these websites, their owners, and their anchors are one of the largest absolute causes of anger in the world today.

Be better, people.

I’ll close off by stating my most nagging thought after conducting this extensive exercise — I couldn’t wait to clear my browser cookies fast enough.

J.J. Pryor

https://threwthelookingglass.com/how-biased-is-news/

Talk about dissecting what is and isn't trustworthy news. The above link is very comprehensive and a time consuming read. I love the thoroughness though. 

The article starts out with a challenge:

“I challenge anybody to show me an example of bias in Fox News Channel.”

Challenge accepted.

You will have to read the rest of the analysis at your leisure. 😏

News bits: About breaking American up; GOP demagoguery

Does the GOP reject democracy?: The New Republic writes:

Our political divides seem more intractable now than at any other time in living memory.

In this grim hour, the nation naturally turns to one of its leading political thinkers: Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her proposed solution is simple. “We need a national divorce,” she wrote on Twitter on February 20. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the [Democrats’] traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
Greene’s vision is not just about realizing conservative policy ideas—it is an authoritarian rejection of democratic government itself.

Greene’s call, however, is not a cure for the disease in our body politic but a symptom of it. Every call for the United States to break apart or divide itself based on the political factions of the moment are built on a fantasy. In that fantasy, the proponents get to live in a world where everything they want comes true, and the perceived opponents finally get the self-inflicted comeuppance that they and their ideas deserve. Greene’s vision is not just about realizing conservative policy ideas—it is an authoritarian rejection of democratic government itself.

Greene said that she thought the two sides of American politics had reached the point of “irreconcilable differences” on a variety of topics. “I’ll speak for the right and say, we are absolutely disgusted and fed up with the left cramming and forcing their ways on us and our children with no respect for our religion/faith, traditional values, and economic & government policy beliefs,” Greene explained.  

“Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools,” Greene added, almost as an afterthought. “I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so why not.”  

After a national divorce, Greene claimed, red states would be able to ban transgender people from everyday life, use fossil fuels whenever possible, throw out ESG (environmental, social, and governance) requirements for businesses, treat police officers as “heroes” instead of “racists,” secure the border, and hold in-person elections without voter fraud. Blue states could abolish the police, let dead people vote, and eliminate guns and private property.

So exactly what are the all bad things the left has crammed and forced on the right? Forced birth laws? Nope. Those come from the right. Severe restrictions on religious freedoms or tax subsidies for religion? Nope. Free and fair elections? Yes, but the right is getting rid of that. Civil liberties? Arguably, but the radical right is getting rid of those too. Severe limits on gun ownership? Nope, not according to majority public opinion. Medicare and social security? Yes, but it seems that most of the right likes those things too. Antifa communist training schools and let dead people vote? Those lies are QAnon-level crackpottery. Abolish the police? No blue state has done that. Another radical right lie. Critical race theory? Nope, for the most part. 

Does the radical right respect values and economic & government policy beliefs of the left? Hell no. The right insults and slanders liberals. The radical right calls liberal values and beliefs socialist tyranny, pedophilia, evil and etc. This is more evidence of how far into deranged anti-democratic authoritarianism and anti-inconvenient truth the GOP has degenerated into.

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Republican elites demagogue Democrats: The Hill writes:

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) attacked Democrats ahead of a potential 2024 White House bid, accusing the party on Sunday of “working on a blueprint on how to ruin America.”

“The left is trying to sell a drug of victimhood and the narcotic of despair,” Scott said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

“The left today seems to be working on a blueprint on how to ruin America.”  

Scott on Sunday, however, argued that pointing at the failures of the Democratic Party shouldn’t be considered negative.

“Why is that negative to point out the fact that under Joe Biden’s leadership, we’ve had the highest inflation in 40 years?” the senator asked.

Right, Biden alone caused global inflation. Things like the war in Ukraine, climate change, corporate price gouging and past Republican policies have nothing to do with it. That’s standard radical right GOP lies- and slanders-laden demagoguery. 

And, the radical right, including Scott, do not play the victimhood card? What a blatant hypocrite. Republicans whine about their victimhood all the time.

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More radical right Republican demagoguery: The Hill Writes:

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) slammed President Biden for his approach toward relations with China on Sunday, accusing him of attempting to appease Beijing.

“All that Biden does is pacify China,” Scott told John Catsimatidis on WABC’s “Cats Roundtable,” adding, “I don’t know what it is, but this is a guy who won’t stand up to dictators around the world.”

This shameless hypocrisy comes from Rick Scott. Scott never criticized Trump for his open support of dictatorship, including the murdering dictators in Russia and North Korea. He does not criticize Republicans in congress who want to stop supporting Ukraine and allowing the Russian dictator to murder everyone he wants. Scott does not criticize nationwide authoritarian Republican laws that subvert free and fair elections. Scott should criticize himself because he and other Republican Senators endorse the killing of Hungarian democracy by Viktor Orban:

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida insisted that “everybody’s got different views” on Hungary’s leadership and pivoted to criticizing American democracy. He said he had a Hungarian friend who’s considering moving back to his home country if the US “keeps going down this path of systemic socialism.”

Systemic socialism? What is that? Whatever it is, we can trust Scott to keep it a well-guarded secret. It’s the popular KYMS rhetorical tactic at work. 

KYMS = keep your mouth shut

 

Yup, everybody’s got different views, 

but hypocrisy is still hypocrisy and 

that sometimes includes different views