News bits: CREW requests Thomas investigation; Trump intimidates jurors?

Washington ethics watchdog CREW has asked the DoJ and the Supreme Court to initiate formal investigations about laws that Clarence Thomas might have broken by refusing to disclose gifts and real estate transactions. CREW's 13 page letter is here. Page 10 states that criminal sanctions may apply, but the cited statute (5 USC §13106 - Failure to file or filing false reports) provides only for a civil penalty of up to $50,000. 

The penalty attaches if a person knowingly and willfully fails to file or report any information they required to report under 5 USC §13104. That would seem to let Thomas off the hook if he claims that he claims that he did not knowingly or willfully fail to file or report any required information. If that is correct, this will probably amount to a nothingburger. 

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Given the lack of laws and ethics rules that apply to Supreme Court justices, Thomas will probably not face any meaningful repercussions for anything he did or will do in the future. Some people really are above the law.

Supreme Court corruption update: New reporting by the WaPo asserts that in recent years, Thomas has received between $50,000 and $100,000 annually from a company that arose from a defunct real estate company Ginger Ltd. His 6 page reporting statement is here. At page 4 of his 2021 annual financial disclosure statement, Thomas' income from Ginger Ltd. was estimated by Thomas to be category N ($250,001 to $500,000). I'm not sure where the WaPo's annual $50,000 to $100,000 amount comes from. The new Ginger entity is listed as owned by the sister of Thomas' wife Ginni. As expected from a master of the KYMS tactic, Thomas refuses to answer any questions and apparently nothing can force him to answer.

KYMS = keep your mouth shut

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Is this juror intimidation or not? Firstpost writes:

The names of the jurors who will determine in a future civil lawsuit whether the former president defamed the author E. Jean Carroll, who also alleges Trump assaulted her, will remain a secret from Donald Trump.

Trump’s latest attempt to mandate that potential jurors supply their names, job information, and 38 other pieces of information on written questionnaires was denied by US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan on Friday.

Nothing has changed US District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s decision to seat an anonymous jury for the April 25 trial, reflecting the potential of juror harassment, as he said that the law was “abundantly clear” and that it was up to him to decide whether to utilize questionnaires.

Science based medicine and quack medicine

 The CAM (complimentary and alternative medicine) industry lobbies in Washington and congress considers what it has to say. Most CAM products are scientifically unproven. My guess is that nearly all of the reported benefits arise from placebo effects. 

A couple of weeks ago, a science based medicine expert, Steven Novella, attended roundtable discussion a US senate healthcare committee held to consider what to do, if anything. Novella, a practicing neurologist, is a well-known skeptic of pseudo science, psi research and CAM. A new sales propaganda pitch to congress is to rebrand CAM as "integrative" medicine to make it sound like science-based medicine. 

Marketing propaganda

At Science Based Medicine Novella comments about that meeting:

Alternative, No – Complementary, No – Integrative

CAM proponents use a lot of bait-and-switch or what David Gorski has dubbed “Trojan Horse” strategies to push their treatments. Interestingly, it’s mostly the same exact treatments that have been around for 50 years or more.  When we talk of CAM we are still mostly referring to homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic manipulation, energy medicine, and herbal medicine. There are branding tweaks, or new versions of these things, but the core concepts are the same. It doesn’t matter if you call them alternative, complementary, or integrative. It’s the same stuff.

The evolution of the branding, however, is to reassure those who care about things such as the standard of care in medicine that they will not be replacing proven therapies, and are offered in addition to them. First, this is never entirely true. If a CAM method is being placed somewhere in the hierarchy of treatments, then it is displacing or delaying non-CAM therapies. Also, health care is often resource limited. If a patient is availing themselves of acupuncture, that is using up their limited resources of time and health-care dollars.

 

Further, the very concept of “integrative” medicine is flawed to its core. What, exactly, are they integrating into what? Try to answer this question without just referring to euphemisms – no alternative or complementary methods, traditional, non-mainstream, etc. None of these really work, nor can they be operationally defined. If, for example, you define it as integrating non-mainstream methods into mainstream medicine, that provokes the question of why they are non-mainstream in the first place.

All of this rhetorical dancing is to avoid the obvious answer – integrative medicine is all about creating a double standard (legally, academically, professionally) so that treatments and methods that are below the line of scientific medicine can be integrated with those that are above the line. That’s it, and the laws that are pushed to promote CAM explicitly carve out this double standard.

Integrative medicine is preventive medicine/health promotion

This is the most annoying aspect of the CAM propaganda – the retconning* CAM into preventive medicine. This is nothing short of gaslighting. The first piece of this strategy is to slander mainstream medicine by saying it is not about disease prevention, only disease intervention.

None of the CAM modalities I listed above have any preventive value (or arguably, any value).

But this line is rhetorically very powerful. If they can slip in this equivalency, then they have already won. To further support this approach CAM proponents are very liberal in defining what is CAM. They would love to include all nutrition and exercise – but again, this is anti-historical gaslighting.  

Appeal to anecdote**

I almost always hear the phrase, “I have seen it work in my practice” from CAM proponents justifying their non-science based interventions. Of course, this is anecdotal, it means close to nothing. Anecdotal evidence leads us to the conclusions we want to be true (quoting Barry Beyerstein), not the truth. Legions of patients swore by all kinds of nonsensical treatments throughout history, that we now know to be nothing but snake oil.  

The appeal to anecdote can also sometime be camouflaged with euphemisms. We see this treatment working individually, even if it cannot be demonstrated with group level data. Translation – this treatment does not work when studied scientifically, so I am going to refer to anecdotes instead.

* Retcon (retroactive continuity): changing an existing fictional narrative by introducing new information that recontextualizes previously established events, characters, etc.; a literary or rhetorical device or propaganda where asserted facts in a fictional narrative, e.g., a sales pitch, or work are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former; a form of gaslighting

** Appeal too anecdote (argument from anecdote): an informal logic fallacy, where anecdotal evidence is presented as an argument without other contributory evidence or reasoning. This type of argument is considered as an informal logical fallacy as it is unpersuasive – since the anecdote could be made up, misconstrued or be a statistical outlier which is insignificant when further evidence is considered

More marketing propaganda

News bits: Cancelling abortion on the internet; White supremacists reject bad data; Bits about Stormfront

  Wired writes:

Texas Could Push Tech Platforms to Censor Posts About Abortion

If passed, the proposed law would also require internet service providers to block websites that discuss access to abortion

State lawmakers in Texas are considering a bill introduced last month that would make it illegal to provide information on how to access abortion. The bill would also require internet service providers to block websites offering content like that in Robin Marty’s book*, allow prosecution of abortion pill “distribution networks,” and permit anyone to sue a person who shared anything about how to access a medical abortion. The proposal borrows from a Texas law passed in 2021 that offers a cash bounty to citizens who sue a person who helped facilitate access to abortion care.

* The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America: The Complete Guide to Abortion Legality, Access, and Practical Support

It sure seems like red state legislatures are in full-blown crazy-go-nuts fascist mode these days.

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When the data is bad, bad people reject it: Stat News wrote in 2017:

White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. 

Some don’t like what they find

It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

Some of America's radical right is so irrational and incoherent its surprising those people can get dressed in the morning. In stead of kicking the racists out of the Nazi Stormfront neo-fascist social club, they reject the genetic testing as false and keep the impure blood in the racist's tea and cookies party. 

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Understanding extremism: Racism

The bit about Stormfront rejecting the validity of genetic testing raised the question, what is Stormfront. 

Wikipedia comments about Stormfront: Stormfront is a neo-Nazi Internet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site. The site is focused on propagating white nationalism, Nazism, antisemitism (especially anti-semitic conspiracy theories) and islamophobia, as well as anti-feminism, homophobia, transphobia, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy.

Stormfront was founded online in 1995 by former Alabama Klan boss and long-time white supremacist Don Black. The Stormfront website claims to have millions of posts. Some of it's rhetoric is more sophisticated than I imagined. Some is what I imagined. The top of the homepage says this:

The truth is "hate" to those who hate the truth!

We are a community of racial realists and idealists. Black, Hispanic, Asian and Jewish Nationalists openly support their racial interests, with American taxpayers even required to support the Jewish ethnostate of Israel. We are White Nationalists who support true diversity and a homeland for all peoples, including ours. We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!

At the Stormfront science forum, how some of the racists deal with White racial superiority came as a surprise. There was some understanding of biology mixed in with racism:

Re: Bad Arguments Used By White Nationalists

Responder 1:

"Whites are superior in every sense"
That's completely spurious and counter-productive: While Whites have undoubtedly produced a great body of knowledge and achieved tremendous prowess in many fields, we are not 'superior' in every sense. Remember that each race developed under unique circumstances, thus the races developed different relative strenghths and weaknesses.

"Other races are sub-human"
Nonsense. This is a corollary to my previous statement: You wouldn't call a brown bear a "sub-bear" and polar bears the "master bears", despite their obvious phenotypic differences. Each is suited to its particular environment --problems only arise when they are no longer in their ideal environment.

We must remember what we are fighting for --cultural preservation and sovereignty. We must not confound this with irrational hatred of those who differ from us.

Responder 2 responding to Responder 1:

Well, that would be relevant had one bear made an accomplishment over the other. However, with humans this rationale is not applicable, or acceptable. The belief of White superiority should not be up for discussion because it is fact. The White race has made an unparalleled amount of development from ancient times to modern times. We have invented present and early systems of thought, technology, science, society, government, and so on. Without the White race the world, meaning Asia in particular, would have stayed completely stagnant in all of these fields.

Although Asians would have presented minor advancements, you and I both know that without White generosity, their current state of development would be about two thousand years behind and without any significant progression. Why is this? Well, this is due to the fact that Asians do not possess a broad scope of cognitive/mental ability in comparison to that of Whites. As a result, before White intervention, they did not advance through technology, science, etc because of that inability. Haven’t you ever wondered why Japan is the most technologically advanced nation in Asia? Well, it’s because of America. All of the other Asian nations are far behind, and in correlation to this, those nations have not been exposed to Western culture as vividly.

As for the Africans, well, I didn’t include them in my previous statement because it’s fairly obvious that Africans are inferior to Whites in every sense of the meaning. They have invented nothing in their history and consequently have failed to progress past the Age of Stone – about six thousand or more years behind that of us White men. Therefore, the only contender to Whites for racial superiority is Asians, but it has been made clear that they are not as broadly evolved in all fields of survival and intelligence. As a result, Whites are superior.

Responder 2

(note the cheerful avatar)

Responder 3:

Arguments referring to the brains of negroes vs brains of Whites shouldn't be used. Although I personally don't doubt them, they're virtually impossible to prove, and will only make you look silly.

Responder 4 responding to Responder 2:

One cannot use current levels of technology as a valid basis for comprehensive racial capabilities. Using this kind logic, we can argue that in the year 1400 AD, white Europeans were clearly inferior to East Asians since most of the new technologies being invented around that time came from the orient and those asian societies were the most advanced on earth. And in the year 200 AD, both the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire were equally advanced with almost no technology exchanges, so the two races were equal 1800 years ago? You must face the fact that biologically, entire races do not evolve new features overnight. Thus a great deal of the differences between societies are justifiably based on chance occurances and culture in general. And please don't quote Murray's work on human acheivements on me, because I've read it. His statistical models were based on the frequency of names of great visionaries, explorers, and inventors who lived from the ancient times up to 1950. But the frequency tables were developed from available text written after 1950 to present. He was basically counting the number of occurrences of each famous person in all published text written in the last 50 years, ranking the list of people by this metric and then grouping it by race. Now you tell me....given the fact that we live in age where Western Civilization is holding a dominant (though arguably declining) position versus the rest of the world, who will publish more books? Western nations, the semi-industrialized Asians, or the non-industrialized Africans? .... The point of contention that I'm alluding to is that it is extremely dangerous to correlate whiteness with innate superiority. Being white is not an assurance that one is strong or capable or even average. It is up to individuals and cultures alike to strive for and to maintain a dominant civilization. 

THIS JUST IN as of LAST NIGHT!

 

Trump Claims ‘Hundreds’ of Thieves Have Been ‘Carrying Refrigerators’ Away from Department Stores Across America

Yesterday 6:25 PM

Former President Donald Trump addressed the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum in Indianapolis on Friday. The president spent a good deal of the speech describing America as crime-infested and a place where “gangs of hundreds of young” people regularly “attack” department stores and walk out with “big stuff” like refrigerators and air conditioners.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-claims-hundreds-of-thieves-have-been-carrying-refrigerators-away-from-department-stores-across-america/ar-AA19SuxL?li=BBnbfcL

Before you all go ridiculing Trump, we have evidence that it is true: