And the steady drip, drip, drip continues...

Texas Senate Passes Bill Requiring 10 Commandments in Every Classroom

Link here.

The legislature also passed a bill forcing schools to set aside time for students to pray and study religious texts.

____________________________

____________________________

Well, to me, this is indoctrination of the most presumptuous kind; pushing a particular religion, Christianity, on the masses of such a culturally diverse country as the U.S.

Children are in their formative years when in school.  Such religious imposition is an attempt to formulate their/a lifelong outlook on life, as it relates to religious beliefs.  It’s shutting their “freethinking/critical thinking box” up tight!  I, for one, don’t like it. 

If a child eventually comes to their own personal philosophies on life, or is indoctrinated with them at home, that’s one thing.  (I do believe parents/caretakers have their right to impose their beliefs on their kids, though I might not agree with those beliefs one tiny bit.)  But to impose such religious beliefs on the masses is quite another, IMO.

And you?  What do you think of this bill that now moves to the Texas state House of Representatives for passage?  Good, bad, indifferent, other?

Science: Droplets of Primordial Soup, the nearly perfect liquid at the time of the big bang

A Scientific American article writes about recreating a Primordial Soup (PS) that existed for less than one microsecond beginning at about 10 microseconds after the big bang. Counterintuitively, it turns out that the PS is an almost perfect liquid where the ingredients flow freely. 

This has never been observed by humans in nature before. The PS, also known as quark-gluon plasma, is made of quarks and gluons, not Susan. Quarks and gluons are what protons and neutrons are made of, which, along with electrons, is what atoms are made of. Physicists make PS by smashing heavy atom nuclei (electrons stripped off) into each other in huge atom smashers. 

PS from atom smashers exists for a very short period of time, far less than one second. PS has not existed in the universe since about 10 microseconds after the big bang. This is probably about the closest to re-creating conditions in the universe that existed near to the instant the big bang commenced.  

The main goal of this research is to better understand the strong force, which is what holds protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei and subatomic particles in protons and neutrons. The strong force is the strongest of the four known forces. It is 100 times stronger than the electromagnetic force (which binds electrons into atoms), 10,000 times stronger than the weak force (which governs radioactive decay), and a hundred million million million million million million (10^39) times stronger than gravity.

SciAm writes:

3 minute video about PS

A technician installing cables on the new sPHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Inside sPHENIX's cylindrical interior, atomic nuclei will collide to make droplets of a plasma that existed at the beginning of the cosmos.

Inside [the] proton you'll find a simple triad of three fundamental particles called quarks—two up quarks and one down quark. But the reality inside a proton is so much more complex that physicists are still trying to figure out its inner structure and how its constituents combine to produce its mass, spin and other properties.

The three quarks in the basic picture of the interior of a proton are merely the “valence quarks”—buoys bobbing on top of a roiling sea of quarks and antiquarks (their antimatter counterparts), as well as the sticky “gluon” particles that hold them together. The total number of quarks and gluons inside a proton is always changing. Quark-antiquark pairs are constantly popping in and out of existence, and gluons tend to split and multiply, especially when a proton gains speed. It's basically pure chaos. The strong force—the most powerful of the four fundamental forces of nature—keeps this mess confined to the insides of protons and neutrons. Except when it doesn't.

PS research is a window into the strong force, the least understood of all nature's forces. This force is described by a theory called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is so complicated that scientists can almost never use it to calculate anything directly.

Scientists predicted quark-gluon plasma long before they discovered it—although they expected it to take a very different form. .... Physicists expected that quarks and gluons, when freed from nuclei, would take the form of a uniformly expanding gaseous substance. “Usually fluids turn to gas as they get hotter,” says Berndt Mueller, a physicist at Duke University. It was a reasonable assumption: quarks and gluons aren't released from nuclei until they reach temperatures of trillions of degrees.

Instead of an expanding gas, the quark-gluon plasma looked like a liquid—a nearly perfect one, with almost no viscosity. In a gas, particles act individually; in a liquid, particles move cohesively. The stronger the interactions among particles—the more they can pull one another along—the “better” the liquid is at being a liquid. The RHIC observations showed that quark-gluon plasma exhibited less resistance to flow than any substance ever known. This, Mueller says, “was very much unexpected.”

In 2010 RHIC [Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider] researchers announced the first measurement of the quark-gluon plasma's temperature. It was a scorching four trillion degrees Celsius, far hotter than any other matter ever created by humans, and about 250,000 times hotter than the middle of the sun.

One of the biggest open questions about quark-gluon plasma is when, exactly, the quarks and gluons break out of their confinement. “Where is the boundary between usual matter and quark-gluon plasma?” physicist Haiyan Gao asks. “Where is the so-called critical point where the nuclear matter and the quark-gluon plasma coexist?”

Answering these questions could help with a larger goal: understanding the strong force, the most confusing of nature's fundamental forces. .... “You can write down the theory essentially in two lines, but actually solving it has not been really achieved,” theoretical physicist Bjoern Schenke says. “The process of confinement—how gluons and quarks are being trapped in the proton, for example—has not been solved.”

Inside RHIC's tunnels “stochastic cooling kickers” push the particles within the rings closer together to correct for their tendency to spread out as they travel. This ensures that as many particles as possible will collide inside the detectors.

News bits: Judicial rot deepens; A pillow guy Snippet; Etc.

James Ho, former clerk for Clarence Thomas is now a radical right federal judge. He was nominated by the fascist Trump and approved by fascist Republican Senators. Ho defends Thomas' blatant corruption. Above the Law writes:

Judge Ho Blows Off Clarence Thomas Taking $500K In Vacations Because 

Some Other Judges Own Stocks So... You Know... Something Something.

There are bad arguments and then there's whatever Judge Ho was trying to do here

While many conservatives have kept their heads down while Justice Thomas suffers the slings and arrows of the outrageous consequences of his own ethical lapses, his former clerk decided to take a turn justifying half-a-million dollars in gifted vacations and having a right-wing donor house a jurist’s mother rent-free while failing to disclose it for years despite the incredibly explicit language of the statute.

It’s not an easy fact pattern to square with, you know, the law. But where there’s a will, there’s an incredibly disingenuous way:

“Citizens deserve a government they can believe in. So I warmly welcome any good faith discussion about how to strengthen ethics in government,” Ho said in prepared remarks. “But we should apply the highest ethical standards, not hypocritical double standards.”

What the fuck does that even mean?

Because even if there were double standards at play here, he’s saying that taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in value and failing to comply with basic financial disclosure laws is not covered by “the highest ethical standards” somehow? Any “hypocritical double standards” could only implicate others, never absolve Thomas — at least without invoking the “well, Jamie’s mom let’s her do it” doctrine. And I don’t think that was recognized by the Framers.  

Ho pointed to a Wall Street Journal report that found more than 130 federal judges heard cases in which they or a family member owned stock in one of the involved companies, saying the report “did not accuse all of those judges of actual corruption. .... That’s an important distinction to draw. Because there’s a big difference between actual corruption and the appearance of corruption.”

That report determined that a whole bunch of judges failed to recuse themselves when a financial conflict existed.  

Ho said Thomas wasn’t the only justice to take trips that were sponsored by individuals or organizations that don’t have interests pending before the court, but that hasn’t been enough to trigger recusal.

One, it probably should be. Two, Judge Ho knows other justices took trips… because they disclosed them. Maybe transparency cures these breaches and maybe it doesn’t, but there’s not even an attempt out of this guy to justify concealing this. As an advocacy for Thomas, Ho’s remarks amount to a non-sequitur.

So once again the bad faith and ill will that America's fascist radical right routinely operates with is on public display. Here Ho is trying to excuse the appearance of conflicts to distract from actual conflicts and corruption that Thomas operates without concern or moral qualm. We can look forward to the next Republican president nominating Ho for the Supreme Court. 

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Pillow guy snippet: The WaPo reports:

Mike Lindell’s firm told to pay $5 million in ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ 

election-fraud challenge

MyPillow founder and prominent election denier Mike Lindell made a bold offer ahead of a “cyber symposium” he held in August 2021 in South Dakota: He claimed he had data showing Chinese interference and said he would pay $5 million to anyone who could prove the material was not from the previous year’s U.S. election.

He called the challenge “Prove Mike Wrong.”

On Wednesday, a private arbitration panel ruled that someone did.

The panel said Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert and 63-year-old Trump voter from Nevada, was entitled to the $5 million payout.

Zeidman had examined Lindell’s data and concluded that not only did it not prove voter fraud, it also had no connection to the 2020 election. He was the only expert who submitted a claim, arbitration records show.

He turned to the arbitrators after Lindell Management, which created the contest, refused to pay him.

In their 23-page decision, the arbitrators said Zeidman proved that Lindell’s material “unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.” They directed Lindell’s firm to pay Zeidman within 30 days.

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

The NYT writes about what the fascists are planning for 2025 with a fascist Republican in the White House:

Heritage Foundation Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Administration

No matter the Republican, the effort has set a goal of up to 20,000 potential officials in a database akin to a right-wing LinkedIn

“In 2016, the conservative movement was not prepared to flood the zone with conservative personnel,” Dr. Roberts said. “On Jan. 20, 2025, things will be very different. This database will prepare an army of vetted, trained staff to begin dismantling the administrative state from Day 1.”  

In late 2020, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would establish a new employment category for federal workers, called “Schedule F.” Barely anyone noticed because the order was developed in strict secrecy over more than a year and issued only two weeks before the 2020 election.

Key officials involved with the federal civil service immediately grasped the significance of Schedule F and its potential to create a new federal work force in which loyalty to Mr. Trump was the highest criteria, they said.  

Mr. Trump’s staff estimated that Schedule F would give the president the power to terminate and replace as many as 50,000 career government officials who served in roles that influenced federal policy.

President Biden rescinded the Schedule F order on his third day in office, but over the past two years, several of Mr. Trump’s confidants, including his former budget director Russell T. Vought, have been working on a plan to re-enact the order and gut the federal civil service in a second Trump administration.

What that means is clear and undeniable. The fascists intend to get rid of business regulations and most federal regulatory agencies, gut consumer protections, kill democracy and civil liberties including voting rights, severely reduce domestic safety net spending, reduce taxes on the wealthy, and open the floodgates for state and federal tax dollars to flow into the coffers of big corporations and Christian churches, organizations and businesses. 

The only question is whether the fascists can pull it off. If Trump is re-elected, he won't care about professionals who are competent. Competence is not relevant to him. He cares about thugs who are loyal. 

What the GOP wants to do to American democracy is exactly the same as what Viktor Orban did to democracy in Hungary, i.e., kill it and replace it with dictatorship and single party rule. That is what a new and improved Schedule F will do to democracy and the federal government.

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

From the People Shooting People For No Reason Files: The AP writes:

A North Carolina man accused of shooting and wounding a 6-year-old girl and her parents after children went to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into his yard was arrested in Florida Thursday afternoon, authorities said.

The violence was the latest in a string of recent shootings sparked by seemingly trivial circumstances.

Robert Louis Singletary, 24, was arrested in the Tampa area by Hillsborough County deputies, according to online jail records.  

A 6-year-old girl, Kinsley White, was grazed by a bullet in the left cheek and was treated at a hospital and released, she and her family said. Her father, Jamie White, who had run to her aid, was shot in the back. He remained hospitalized Thursday with serious wounds, including liver damage, according to Kinsley’s grandfather and neighbor, Carl Hilderbrand. The girl’s mother, Ashley Hilderbrand, was grazed in the elbow. Authorities say Singletary also shot at another man but missed.

From the Democrats Failing to Defend Democracy Files

A WaPo opinion by Jennifer Rubin comments:

Senate Democrats need to play hardball

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) seems spectacularly ill-suited for an era when democracy is at risk, when Republicans observe no rules of decorum and when the federal judiciary’s credibility is crumbling.

Far too restrained and deferential, Durbin has refused to alter practices such as the “blue slip,” which allows home-state senators to nix the president’s judicial nominees, although he has beseeched Republicans not to abuse the practice. Durbin also hasn’t yet conducted hearings on the disastrous effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and related abortion bans, nor has he held hearings on a mandatory ethics code for judges — although he has promised hearings on revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas’s failure to disclose luxurious travel gifts and real estate sales. Then again, Senate Democrats as a whole haven’t pushed Durbin, so one cannot blame him alone for his timidity.

Caroline Fredrickson and Alan Neff recently wrote about blue slips for Just Security:

“The blue slip is an opaque — and inherently obstructionist — Senate tradition that allows a single Senator in any State to block a presidential nominee to the District Courts in their electoral patch merely by withholding their consent to consideration of the nominee in Committee. Like the filibuster, the blue slip allows Senators to halt Senate action without ever having to explain themselves to their Senate colleagues, their constituents, or the public, even if it means more criminal and civil cases languish unresolved on federal trial-court dockets for longer periods.”

Durbin could end this practice at any time, removing another abuse of minority-party power in the Senate. It’s one that has been spectacularly abused by Republicans, who have pushed through grossly unqualified, unfit nominees nominated by Republican presidents and yet nixed perfectly acceptable judges nominated by Democratic presidents.

In January, Durbin wrote a letter to colleagues essentially begging them to be more bipartisan and cooperative. (This Republican Party?) “Democratic Senators returned 130 blue slips for President Trump’s district court nominees. This enabled 84 district court nominees to be confirmed — nearly 50 percent of all district court confirmations under President Trump,” he wrote. However, “To date, my Republican colleagues have returned only 10 blue slips on district court nominees.”

Nothing changed, unsurprisingly.

Last week, Carl Hulse wrote for the New York Times:

Then last week, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Republican of Mississippi, served notice to the Judiciary Committee that she would not allow the nomination of Scott Colom, a candidate for a court vacancy in the state, to move forward, citing his past political support from the left, among other reasons. Her stance endangered the confirmation of Mr. Colom, a popular Black Democratic state prosecutor who had the backing of Roger Wicker, the other Republican senator from the state, as well as leading Mississippi Republicans including two former governors, Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant.

Durbin had previously promised he would respect blue slips unless the decision to withhold the blue slip was based not on the nominee’s qualifications but on race, gender or sexual orientation. Apparently, this didn’t qualify in his eyes.  

Committee Democrats can, if they choose, push Durbin to end the blue slip practice. They also could demand a hearing on Supreme Court ethics, on book banning, and on the effects of Dobbs and abortion bans. They might even hold hearings on corruption in the prior administration or on domestic terrorism. They could hold hearings on nationwide injunctions and single judge divisions, which allowed for Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s abysmal ruling on the abortion drug mifepristone.

This is what the fall of democracy, inconvenient truth and civil liberties looks like when their defenders do not fight as hard as they can. One can reasonably ask the question, which side is the Democratic Party on? Arguably, it's quietly on the side of the corrupt authoritarians or it's on no side at all.