Bits: The gun version of fentanyl; Theocracy rising in Israel; Global warming is a hoax?

Gun switches convert semi-automatic pistols to fully automatic machine guns.  

If a gun safety law that bans switches come into effect, it is reasonable to think that gun nuts would haul it into federal court court and eventually the radical right Republican US Supreme Court would find the ban to be an unconstitutional burden to bear arms. The new test is whether the weapon at issue was regulated according to the traditions and history of the US. By that easily cherry-pickable test, essentially all modern gun safety laws are unconstitutional burdens on citizen's right to bear arms. A NYT article comments:

The growing use of switches, which are also known as auto sears, is evident in real-time audio tracking of gunshots around the country, data shows. Audio sensors monitored by a public safety technology company, Sound Thinking, recorded 75,544 rounds of suspected automatic gunfire in 2022 in portions of 127 cities covered by its microphones, according to data compiled at the request of The New York Times. That was a 49 percent increase from the year before.

Switches come in various forms, but most are small Lego-like plastic blocks, about an inch square, that can be easily manufactured on a 3-D printer and sell for around $200.

“The gang wars and street fighting that used to be with knives, and then pistols, is now to a great extent being waged with automatic weapons,” said Andrew M. Luger, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota.

Oh great, killing technology advances. Some humans sure do know how to kill humans and enjoy it. It's probably been that way since a few centuries after the rise of modern humans, maybe sooner. Here's a fun 29 second video:

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A Taliban consisting of rabid Jewish extremist theocrats is forcing its way toward control of Israeli society. That movement looks a lot like its Christian counterpart in the US, Christian nationalism. As usual, deranged male ideologues dominate a push to move a modern society back to the Dark Ages. The NYT writes:

An ultra-Orthodox Jew walking past a sign in Bnei Brak, Israel, 

urging men to not look at women in the street

(I don't want to look at that anywhere)

The trains from Tel Aviv were packed one evening last month when Inbal Boxerman, a 40-year-old mother of two, was blocked by a wall of men as she tried to board. One of them told her that women were not allowed on — the car was for men only.

Ms. Boxerman was stunned. It was a public train operated by Israel Railways, and segregated seating is illegal in the country. The men stopping her appeared to be protesters going home from a rally supporting the governing coalition, which includes extremist religious and far-right parties pushing for more sex segregation and a return to more traditional gender roles.

“I said, ‘For real?’” said Ms. Boxerman, who works in marketing. “And my friend came up and she also said, ‘Are you for real?’ But they just laughed and said, ‘Wait for the next train — you can sit in the way back.’ And then the doors slammed shut.”

Public transportation is the latest front of a culture war in Israel over the status of women in a society that is sharply divided between a secular majority and politically powerful minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who frown on the mixing of women and men in public.  

Supporters of expanding the rabbinical courts’ jurisdiction — such as Matan Kahana, a former religious affairs minister who remains in Parliament but is not in the governing coalition — argue that as a pluralistic society, Israel should tolerate sex segregation in some arenas to accommodate the ultra-Orthodox, for whom it is a way of life.  

“I’m all for the rabbinical courts — they are a symbol of Israeli sovereignty in our own land and our eternal connection to Hebrew law,” he said on Twitter earlier this year.  

One of the first bills put forth by the coalition’s ultra-Orthodox Shas party proposed jailing women for six months if they visited the holy site of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in “inappropriate” or immodest clothing. Although the bill drew so much outrage that it was dropped, the coalition has taken other steps that worry women.

Q: What is the difference between what the Israeli Jewish Taliban and the American Christian Taliban are trying to do?

A: Religion and not much else. 

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Notice: Republican candidates running for president

The Hill reports:

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy railed against climate-conscious business policy at an Iowa State Fair appearance Saturday.

In an fireside chat with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Ramaswamy said that environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) business policies are among the “grave threats to liberty,” and said “the climate change agenda” is a “hoax.”

“They’re using our money… to implement social and environmental agendas through the backdoor. Through corporate America,” Ramaswamy said. “Using your retirement funds and your investment accounts to vote for racial equity audits or Scope 3 emissions caps that you didn’t know they were using your money to do, and that Congress would have never passed through the front door.”

That's just a quick reminder that for the most part, the radical right Republican Party is pro-pollution, pro-climate change, pro-species extinction, corrupt, morally rotted, authoritarian, anti-climate science and some other bad stuff. At this point in view of all available evidence, one can argue that those are assertions of fact, not opinion.

Qs: Are those assertions fact or are they still in the realm of contested opinion? What additional evidence would be needed to move one, some or all of them from opinion to fact?  

Why some people are willing to believe conspiracy theories

 WASHINGTON — People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

The results of the study paint a nuanced picture of what drives conspiracy theorists, according to lead author Shauna Bowes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Emory University.

“Conspiracy theorists are not all likely to be simple-minded, mentally unwell folks—a portrait which is routinely painted in popular culture,” said Bowes. “Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment.”

The research was published online in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

Previous research on what drives conspiracy theorists had mostly looked separately at personality and motivation, according to Bowes. The current study aimed to examine these factors together to arrive at a more unified account of why people believe in conspiracy theories.

To do so, the researchers analyzed data from 170 studies involving over 158,000 participants, mainly from the United States, the United Kingdom and Poland. They focused on studies that measured participants’ motivations or personality traits associated with conspiratorial thinking.

The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.

Even though many conspiracy theories seem to provide clarity or a supposed secret truth about confusing events, a need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivators to endorse conspiracy theories. Instead, the researchers found some evidence that people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships. For instance, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe in events-based conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the U.S. government planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, rather than an abstract theory that, in general, governments plan to harm their citizens to retain power.

“These results largely map onto a recent theoretical framework advancing that social identity motives may give rise to being drawn to the content of a conspiracy theory, whereas people who are motivated by a desire to feel unique are more likely to believe in general conspiracy theories about how the world works,” according to Bowes.

The researchers also found that people with certain personality traits, such as a sense of antagonism toward others and high levels of paranoia, were more prone to believe conspiracy theories. Those who strongly believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to be insecure, paranoid, emotionally volatile, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, egocentric and eccentric.

The Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism) had a much weaker relationship with conspiratorial thinking, though the researchers said that does not mean that general personality traits are irrelevant to a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.

Bowes said that future research should be conducted with an awareness that conspiratorial thinking is complicated, and that there are important and diverse variables that should be explored in the relations among conspiratorial thinking, motivation and personality to understand the overall psychology behind conspiratorial ideas.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/06/why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories

Science bits: Pressures on adolescents; Increasing male sex drive! 😮; Making mosquitos deaf

A social science research paper, The Perils of Not Being Attractive or Athletic: Pathways to Adolescent Adjustment Difficulties Through Escalating Unpopularity, considers factors that appear to lead some children into unpleasant feelings and situations:

Adolescents who lack traits valued by peers are at risk for adjustment difficulties but the mechanisms responsible for deteriorating well-being have yet to be identified. The present study examines processes whereby low athleticism and low attractiveness give rise to adolescent adjustment difficulties. .... The results indicated that the possession of stigmatized traits predicted escalating unpopularity, which, in turn, predicted increasing adjustment difficulties. Similar indirect associations did not emerge with rejection as a mediator, underscoring the unique role of power and prominence (and the lack thereof) in socioemotional development. The findings underscore the adjustment risks and interpersonal challenges that confront children and adolescents who lack traits valued by peers.

I suppose this is not a surprise. What is surprising is that, if this paper is a good indicator, this line of research is a lot less advanced than I imagined. This is puzzling.

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Researchers have found two clusters of neurons in the brain of mice that mediate male sex drive. The Messenger writes: 

A Discovery in Mice Brains Could Solve Sexual Disorders in Men

The study found that stimulating a neural circuit makes mice try to mate with whatever is nearby—including inanimate objects

A neural connection in mice may hold the key to helping men struggling with sexual disorders like libidos that are too high—or too low.

While different parts of the brain have long been known to play a role in sexual behavior, Stanford Medicine scientists have found a single circuit involving two different neural clusters that they say plays an integral role in the mating behavior of male mice.

“The circuit seems to be the central component of male sexual behavior that also elicits desire and also leads to reward or pleasure-type behavior,” said Professor Nirao Shah, the study’s lead author.

The two clusters are POATacr1, a region in the preoptic hypothalamus (a portion of the brain known to be involved in sexual behavior, as well as bodily functions like temperature regulation) and BNSTprTac1, which is in the amygdala (the part of the brain that regulates emotions and plays a role in recognizing potential mates).

By stimulating the connection between POATacr1 cells and BNSTprTac1 cells, the researchers found that the mice would try to mate with whatever was nearby—including other male mice or even inanimate objects. They found this was the case even if the mice had just ejaculated; normally, male mice have a refractory period that lasts five days after mating, but in the experiment, that period was shortened to a single second.  

“We think this circuit does underlie male sexual behavior. I think there are going to be other components to the circuit naturally,” he said. “For example, we don't know which specific sensory neurons sense the external cues in the world. But what we've identified seems to be a central essential set of components.”

I always suspected that POATacr1 and BNSTprTac1 were the culprits. I need to buy some stock in male escort companies. Their stock is going to shoot through the roof, so to speak.

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Malaria researchers have found that if male mosquitos cannot hear females in flight, they cannot locate mating partners and the population collapses. The authors write:

The acoustic detection of mating partners in swarms by malaria mosquitoes constitutes a superb example of the adaptation of a sensory organ -the mosquito ear- to a transient change in the sensory ecology. Malaria mosquito swarms are brief and transitory aggregations of up to a thousand mosquitoes that take place every sunset. Within the swarm, mosquitoes are exposed to an acoustically challenging, noisy environment. It is against this noisy acoustic backdrop that male mosquitoes identify and locate the flight tones of their female mating partners. 

Using transcriptomics, we identify a complex network of candidate neuromodulators regulating mosquito hearing in the species Anopheles gambiae. Among them, octopamine stands out as an auditory modulator during swarm time. In-depth analysis of octopamine auditory function shows that it affects the mosquito ear on multiple levels: it modulates the tuning and stiffness of the flagellar sound receiver and controls the erection of antennal fibrillae. We show that two α- and β-adrenergic-like octopamine receptors drive octopamine’s auditory roles and demonstrate that the octopaminergic auditory control system can be targeted by insecticides. Our findings highlight octopamine as key for mosquito hearing and mating partner detection and as a potential novel target for mosquito control. 

In other words, researchers are now looking for insecticides that targets mosquito hearing. Instead of the typical poisons that are often or usually environmental toxins, it is possible that new insecticides might be less toxic, or maybe even non-toxic to most other animals. 

A radical right legal analysis drives stake into DJT's heart -- but is it credible?

After a years of research and analysis, two law professors who are aligned with the authoritarian, radical right Federalist Society (FS) are publishing a paper in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. The legal analysis concludes that DJT is ineligible to hold elected office unless congress grants him amnesty. The paper will be released next year (the abstract is here). The legal analysis conclude that DJT is ineligible to hold office in light of his role in the 1/6 coup attempt. The NYT comments on the paper: 

Two law professors active in the Federalist Society wrote that the original meaning of the 14th Amendment makes Donald Trump ineligible to hold government office

Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.

The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

“When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”

He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.” 
There is, the article said, “abundant evidence” that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, trying to alter vote counts by fraud and intimidation, encouraging bogus slates of competing electors, pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution, calling for the march on the Capitol and remaining silent for hours during the attack itself. 

“It is unquestionably fair to say that Trump ‘engaged in’ the Jan. 6 insurrection through both his actions and his inaction,” the article said.

What reasonable minds can think when trust is lost

Necessary context is this: Dogma and tactics of the powerful FS organization are aggressive, radical right, morally corrupt (including deeply mendacious and opaque), authoritarian, theocratic and plutocratic. The FS apparently is mostly responsible for selection of all six of the radical plutocratic, Christian nationalist Republican judges now sitting bench at the USSC. Its power, influence and bigoted authoritarianism should not be underestimated, no matter how hard the FS denies this. How one can rationally see this is as follows: 

1. The radical right FS has concluded that DJT not only cannot win the election in 2024, he is seriously damaging the FS agenda to kill secular democracy and replace it with some form of a corrupt plutocratic-theocratic dictatorship

2. Because of that fear, it called on its loyal law experts to gin up an argument that tries to stop DJT from seriously damaging the corrupt, authoritarian FS agenda, and "conservatism" (authoritarian radicalism) generally, by running for the presidency in 2024

3. But if the FS had decided that DJT was helpful to its tyranny & corruption agenda, it would have ginned up an argument that tries to empower DJT to advance the tyranny agenda

Even if the analysis the two law experts adduced is correct, one can reasonably believe their intent is cynical, corrupt and anti-democratic. That is because the group they support and align with, the FS, is cynical, corrupt and anti-democratic authoritarian. Maybe the legal analysis here is right, but it is right only in service to corruption, tyranny and bad government. 

Maybe this analysis is designed not to have any impact on DJT, but instead is intended to rehabilitate the crappy image the FS has earned for itself. That strikes me as the most plausible explanation.

Qs: Is that analysis too cynical and over the top, or is it plausible? Does the opinion even matter one way or another, e.g., in view of how transactional, cynical, immoral and unprincipled Republicans in congress are?