News bits: Abortion & GOP dirty tricks; The dictator’s policies; GOP attacks on voting

Rolling Stone reports about radicalized, authoritarian GOP efforts to keep voters from voting about abortion. They have to do that because they know they will lose at the ballot box and because they are authoritarians who absolutely, positively do not care about or support majority opinion when it is inconvenient to them or their dogmas. RS writes:

The Dirty Tricks the GOP Is Using to Keep Abortion 

Off the Ballot in 2024

Republicans are getting killed on reproductive rights, and they're taking desperate measures to prevent their constituents from having a say next year

Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe in June of 2022, the reproductive rights movement has gone seven for seven at the ballot box, defeating efforts to restrict abortion in states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana, and enshrining protections in swing states like Michigan and Ohio. It’s hardly a wonder why Republicans are emptying their bag of dirty tricks to make sure it doesn’t work: inventing astronomical “costs,” conspiring with anti-abortion groups to change the ballot language, and fighting to ban petition collectors from public spaces, among other strategies.

In South Dakota, anti-abortion activists, with assists from GOP officials, have tried out a variety of tactics in recent months. Activists have been harassed, videotaped and repeatedly called the police on petition collectors, while local officials have sought to pass ordinances banning them from collecting signatures in public places. Most recently, the attorney general warned in a letter that he was in possession of “video and photographic evidence” that could allow opponents to challenge the signatures that have been collected so far.

“The organized opposition is more aggressive than I’ve encountered in any of these fights in the past,” says Adam Weiland, who has worked on various ballot measures in the state for years. “It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered people who don’t even want you to get on the ballot and let the voters vote. That’s the whole focus of their campaign.”  

The same stories are playing out in battleground states and Republican-controlled states around the country. (GOP tyranny tricks in Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Missouri are discussed)

This is the new normal for the radicalized, kleptocratic authoritarian Republican Party. It is ruthless, shameless, vicious and, among some other nasty things, virulently opposed to democracy, voting rights, inconvenient fact or truth, civil liberties and inconvenient majority public opinion.

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The Atlantic reports about a policy that DJT would implement if he is re-elected in 2024:

TRUMP WILL ABANDON NATO

“I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise. Long before he was a political candidate, Trump questioned the value of American alliances. Of Europeans, he once wrote that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” 

But during Trump’s time in office, the withdrawal never happened. That was because someone was always there to talk him out of it. Bolton says he did; Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and even Mike Pence are thought to have done so too.

But they didn’t change his mind. And if Trump is reelected in 2024, none of those people will be in the White House. All of them have broken with the former president, in some cases dramatically, and there isn’t another pool of Republican analysts who understand Russia and Europe, because most of them either signed statements opposing him in 2016 or criticized him after 2020. In a second term, Trump would be surrounded by people who either share his dislike of American security alliances or don’t know anything about them and don’t care. This time, the ill will that Trump has always felt toward American allies would likely manifest itself in a clear policy change. “The damage he did in his first term was reparable,” Bolton told me. “The damage in the second term would be irreparable.”

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A major unknown for the 2024 elections is how effective the pro-tyranny Republican Party will be in suppressing non-Republican votes while trying to protect Republican votes. If the election is close as it now appears it will be, a small effect might be sufficient to subvert the election and put DJT back in the White House. CBS News writes:

Eligible voters are being swept up in anti-democracy 

activists' efforts to purge voter rolls

Voters eligible to cast ballots are already being swept up in a grassroots effort to purge the nation's registration rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a CBS News investigation has found.

The undertaking, which includes the involvement of a lawyer tied to former President Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, tends to affect minority or younger voters who may be statistically more likely to vote Democrat, according to local election officials.

Georgia became ground zero for the movement after Republicans in the state pushed through a law in 2021 allowing citizens to file an unlimited number of challenges against fellow voters within their own county. In the two years since the law passed, a CBS News investigation found more than 80,000 challenges have been filed against Georgia voters — many of them by a loose network of about a dozen conservative activists.

Public records reveal a local Republican Party activist in Virginia who attended a March strategy session, then filed a slate of 43 voter challenges in August, ahead of the November election. Activists have also recently filed challenges in Washington state and Michigan, where a public records request revealed a GOP official conducted a "field investigation," going to dozens of homes to check if voters were registered to the correct address.

Gail Lee is one of scores of Georgia volunteers who scours the rolls, looking for voters registered at P.O. boxes, those who appear in the rolls multiple times, or those who list birthdays so old that the voter may be deceased. She then compiles a dossier on each challenged voter and sends it to the county election board.

"I believe it's what God wants me to do," Lee said. "He knows what's right and what's wrong and there's things that need to be fixed in the voter rolls."

 

Gail Lee knows the 2020 election was stolen 

and Biden is illegitimate, so she works God’s 

will to purge the evil from voter rolls

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Headlines ’n bits:

Liz Cheney warns that Trump won't leave office if he's elected to a second term and says voting for him ‘may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in’ -- “There's no question. Absolutely. He’s already done it once. ... He's already attempted to seize power, and he was stopped, thankfully, and for the good of the nation and the republic. But he said he will do it again. He’s expressed no remorse for what he did.”

Fox News interrupts Trump speech to fact-check his “many untruths” -- “The 2020 election was not rigged. It was not stolen,” said anchor Arthel Neville (this is strange)

“Can’t even bring themselves to denounce neo-Nazis”: Texas GOP's internal war over Hitler apologists -- Texas Republicans called it “Marxist” to bar members from associating with Holocaust deniers. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan declared that this was no “casual misstep” but a sign “of the moral, political rot that has been festering in a certain segment of our party.” (moral rot?? MAGA!! to that)

‘Donald Trump will never leave office voluntarily’: Rep. Schiff on the threat of a second Trump term -- Congressman Adam Schiff discusses Donald Trump calling President Biden the “destroyer” of democracy despite his own efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the new warnings of Trump’s threat to democracy.

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Are we all too hard on each other?

No, not us here; our cozy little niche of more or less “like-thinkers.”  I’m talking about the human species in general.

We fight hard against the notion of seeing things from the other’s point of view/perspective.  We’ve debated such-and-such in our own minds and cemented it in, to be used as an arsenal against opponents as we see fit.  Boom… for us, case close.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of “second-guessing,” once that cement hardens.

Let’s take, for example, a human focal point of contention, religion. 

There was a wonderful, thought-provoking segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today.  Here’s the link and I hope you can access it.

Link here.

The above link gets especially interesting at the 5:55 to 8:42 mark.  But I think the whole segment is worth the listen, if you have time.  And I think Tim Alberta sees the situation very clearly.

Tim remarks, “Christian Nationalists feel that our country is about to collapse.” … “They believe that if America falls, then God Himself is defeated.”

Isn’t that sentiment true for the CNs?  They really see it as a fight between Good and Evil.  Between God and Satan.  And our country hangs in the balance.

Question: Do we not owe it to humanity to try harder to understand and appreciate the mindsets of those with whom we disagree?  Is it a case of a “you first” demand?

Take time to think about it in earnest, then discuss.  I.e., no emotional “lashing out,” please.

News bits: Christian nationalism vs atheism; China does social media; The X hellscape

Psypost reports about another group that God commands Christian nationalists (CNs) to hate and oppress, atheists:

New research has uncovered a significant connection between the belief in Christian nationalism and negative attitudes toward atheists in the United States. Intriguingly, this connection tends to be weaker among Black Americans who live in states with higher levels of Christian nationalism. The findings, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, provide insights into the complex relationship between race and ideology in shaping societal attitudes.

“Despite being one of the fastest-growing groups in the U.S. religious landscape, atheists are still confronted with more negative prejudice than many other religious groups,” said study author Fanhao Nie, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) who is also an affiliated faculty member at UML’s Center for Asian American Studies.

“This is particularly the case in an era when Christian nationalism, an ideology that integrates Christian identity with American identity, has been building more boundaries and instilling more distrust in an already highly divided society.”  

To measure attitudes towards atheists, the survey asked participants to respond to statements that reflected opinions on atheists’ moral standing, their impact on personal freedoms, and their perceived threat to physical safety. Similar questions were asked about other religious minorities, such as Jews and Muslims.

The key independent variable, Christian nationalism, was measured through a series of statements about the role of Christianity in U.S. governance and society (e.g., “The federal government should declare the United States as a Christian nation,” “The federal government should advocate Christian values”). Participants’ level of agreement with these statements helped gauge their inclination towards Christian nationalism.  

On average, the respondents exhibited a moderate level of prejudice against atheists, much more than against Jews but slightly less than against Muslims.

It’s interesting that social science includes a peer-reviewed journal to study religion. It was established in 1961. It's not a surprise that CNs, basically anti-democracy theocrats, tend to hold negative attitudes toward atheists and other groups that God has decided need to be disrespected and oppressed. After all, God can’t be wrong, right?

It will also be no surprise when the day comes that a powerful CN elite with a bee in his bonnet about Godless atheists** comes along and rises to prominence. Then, that enraged monster can foment a higher degree of hate against atheists in his effort to make CNs hate atheists as much as Muslims, or preferably hate them more. That’s an prominent aspect of religion. Different elites can pick and choose who or what they hate and attack. Hating and attacking in the name of God is fun, easy and guilt-free. It’s also authoritarian theocratic.

** Godless atheists = without any morality at best, more likely evil 

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NPR reports about authoritarian nations that use social media to constantly attack the US and other democracies and enemy nations everywhere:

China is stepping up efforts to manipulate people in other countries on social media, becoming the third most common source of foreign influence operations, behind Russia and Iran, according to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

Meta has taken down five Chinese networks of fake accounts in 2023, the most of any country this year, the company said in a new report published on Thursday. That's a significant increase from 2019, when Meta first removed a campaign based in China, although the country's efforts over the years haven't gained much traction.

Most recently, Meta took down two China-based operations in the third quarter of this year. One was a network of around 4,800 Facebook accounts impersonating Americans and posting about domestic politics and U.S.-China relations.

With a slew of elections on tap in 2024, including in the U.S., Taiwan, India and the European Union, Chinese operations may pivot to target discussions of relations with China in those places. That will add to expected operations by Russia and Iran.  

“Much of their content appears to have been copy-pasted from mainstream U.S. news outlets and altered to question U.S. democracy," an expert said. "In addition, soon after the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, we saw these websites begin portraying the war as proof of American decline. At least one website claimed that Ukraine supplied Hamas with weapons. Other websites in the cluster focused on politics and migration in France and Germany.”

Presumably, the X hellscape does not care about foreign dictatorships attacking democracies or poisoning their societies with lies, slanders and crackpottery. That’s because Elon Musk is a free speech absolutist. He believes the more speech, the better. For a smart guy, he is either amazingly stupid about free speech, or more likely he’s a cynical fascist sympathetic to dictatorship.

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Speaking of Elon Musk and his X leads on to wonder what that unfettered free speech hellscape is up to these days. NPR reports about one toxic slice of the overcooked X beast:

Civilian deaths are being dismissed as ‘crisis actors’ in Gaza and Israel

On one side of the split-screen video, a young man lies injured in a hospital bed. A red banner across the top of the frame reads “Yesterday.” On the other side, under a green banner reading “Today,” a similar-looking man walks through rubble in Gaza.

“I'm now walking in a neighborhood where there were houses. There are no houses anymore,” he says.

The post on X claims the side-by-side videos show the same person. It accuses him of faking his injuries, only to be “miraculously healed” and walking around just a day later.

But the videos actually show two different people, according to fact checks from multiple media outlets. One is a Palestinian teenager who lost his leg this summer during an Israeli raid in the West Bank. That video was originally posted to TikTok in August.

The other is a Palestinian social media influencer in Gaza who has been documenting the conflict since October.

The conflation of the two individuals is a prime example of a crisis actor trope: the false claim that, for propaganda purposes, people are pretending to be victims of tragedies — in this case of Israel's war in Gaza, which Palestinian health officials say has killed more than 14,000 people.

Bravo Elon. Well done! Keep up the hellscapery.

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Speaking of Elon Musk, X and disinformation, the WaPo published a disturbing article about disinformation research:

A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.

Last year, the school’s dean told her that he was winding down her main project and that she should stop fundraising for it. This year, the school eliminated her position. The surprise dismissal alarmed fellow researchers elsewhere, who saw Donovan as a pioneer in an increasingly critical area of great sensitivity to the powerful and well-connected tech giants.

Donovan has remained silent about what happened until now, filing a 248-page legal statement obtained by The Washington Post that traces her problems to her acquisition of a trove of explosive documents known as the Facebook Papers and championing their importance before an audience of Harvard donors that included Facebook’s former top communications executive.

Harvard disputes Donovan’s core claims, telling The Post that she was a staff employee and that it had not been able to find a faculty sponsor to oversee her work, as university policy requires. It also denies that she was fired, saying she “was offered the chance to continue as a part-time adjunct lecturer, and she chose not to do so.”

Why on Earth would Harvard terminate critically important research into the one thing, disinformation (dark free speech), that poses the greatest, most urgent threat to American democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law?

Money.

It’s always money. Money, money, money. Lots of it. Corrupt, authoritarian tech giants like X and Facebook make money by promoting and spreading disinformation. To protect that money, the tech giants (and the poisonous Republican Party) are now attacking disinformation research as quietly as they can. 

If one thinks that Mark Zuckerberg is significantly different from Elon Musk, one would be mistaken. Zuckerberg is just much better with fig leaf technology. He pretends to honesty and niceness. Musk just doesn’t give a rat’s ass, as exemplified by his recent public statement about things that irritate him (of which there are an awful lot), go fuck yourself.

Ivy League Q: It was recently pointed out to me that a lot of the nastiness, corruption and rising authoritarianism in both politics and commerce is coming from ivy league school graduates or attendees, including their elite law schools. I think that is true. Are elite ivy league schools more kleptocratic authoritarian than honest (transparent) democratic?  (I suspect they are because there's just so damn much more of a money reward for kleptocratic authoritarianism compared to honest democracy)

Zuckerberg being honest (😮) in the 

early days of Facebook (1984)

News bits: A military pulse check; Deadly fake history influences the USSC; Underwater computer farm

Military.com writes:

An annual Pentagon report on extremism within the ranks reveals that 78 service members were suspected of advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. government and another 44 were suspected of engaging or supporting terrorism.

The report released Thursday by the Defense Department inspector general revealed that in fiscal 2023 there were 183 allegations of extremism across all the branches of military, broken down not only into efforts to overthrow the government and terrorism but also advocating for widespread discrimination or violence to achieve political goals.

The statistics indicate the military continues to grapple with extremism following its public denunciations and a stand-down across the services ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in 2021. Furthermore, the numbers do not make it clear whether the military's approach is working. In 2021, the year the data was first released to Congress, there were 270 allegations of extremist activities. In 2022, that figure dropped to 146 before rebounding over the past year.

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Politico writes about the lies the morally bankrupt authoritarian radical right is employing at the USSC to give it cover for its radical authoritarian decisions:

‘Plain historical falsehoods’: How amicus briefs 

bolstered Supreme Court conservatives

A POLITICO review indicates most conservative briefs in high-profile cases have links to a small cadre of activists aligned with Leonard Leo

Princeton Professor Robert P. George, a leader of the conservative legal movement and confidant of the judicial activist and Donald Trump ally Leonard Leo, made the case for overturning Roe v. Wade in an amicus brief a year before the Supreme Court issued its watershed ruling.

Roe, George claimed, had been decided based on “plain historical falsehoods.” For instance, for centuries dating to English common law, he asserted, abortion has been considered a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes.”

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito used the same quote from Henry de Bracton, the medieval English jurist, that George cited in his amicus brief to help demonstrate that “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime.”

George, however, is not a historian. Major organizations representing historians strongly disagree with him.

That this questionable assertion is now enshrined in the court’s ruling is “a flawed and troubling precedent,” the Organization of American Historians, which represents 6,000 history scholars and experts, and the American Historical Association, the largest membership association of professional historians in the world, said in a statement. It is also a prime example of how a tight circle of conservative legal activists have built a highly effective thought chamber around the court’s conservative flank over the past decade.

A POLITICO review of tax filings, financial statements and other public documents found that Leo and his network of nonprofit groups are either directly or indirectly connected to a majority of amicus briefs filed on behalf of conservative parties in seven of the highest-profile rulings the court has issued over the past two years.

The picture that emerges is of an exceedingly small universe of mostly Christian conservative activists developing and disseminating theories to change the nation’s legal and cultural landscape. .... Adam Kennedy, Leo’s spokesperson, said Leo has “no comment at this time.”

“There’s no real vetting process for who can file these amicus briefs,” said Allison Orr Larsen, a constitutional law expert at William and Mary Law School, and the justices often “accept these historical narratives at face value.” While it’s impossible to gauge the precise impact, “what I can prove is they’re being used by the court,” she says.  

Since Leo’s handpicked justices solidified the court’s conservative supermajority in 2020, they are agreeing to hear cases advanced by his allies and ruling in favor of many of his Christian conservative priorities.  

While POLITICO’s analysis relies heavily on annual forms filed to the IRS, its approximations may underrepresent Leo’s influence over opinions presented to the court. That’s because the IRS does not require nonprofit groups to list members of advisory boards, and groups filing as churches don’t have to disclose their leadership. Leo’s organizations also route tens of millions of dollars through anonymous donor-advised funds like DonorsTrust, making it unclear where it is going.

So there we have it. The six authoritarian, Christian Republican radicals don't bother to vet the information they are fed in amicus briefs. And now, the authoritarian radical right has sunk to the level of lying about history to get court decisions that they and their God or corporate sponsors want. This is beyond an outrageous insult. It is an evil, direct attack on American democracy, civil liberties and the secular rule of law.

Leo and Gorsuch (top)

Leo and Kavanaugh (bottom)

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China is building a 732,000 sq ft data processing center about 155 ft underwater on the seabed off the coast of Hainan island south of China. The point is to save energy and water to power and cool the data processing. Techradar reports:

'A mini data center village under the sea' — China sinks tens of thousands of powerful servers in seawater as it grapples with demand for more power

The data center, which comprises 100 units spanning 68,000 square meters in size, will be constructed over five years at the bottom of the sea off the coast of Sanya, a coastal city on the island of Hainan in southern China, according to China Central Television (CCTV).

Each data storage weighs 1,300 tons and processes more than four million HD images in 30 seconds, with the performance equivalent to stitching together the processing power of 60,000 of the best conventional desktop PCs together.

The data center will save roughly 122 million kWh of electricity as well as roughly 105,000 tons of freshwater each year. This is because the freezing seawater acts as a natural cooling element, which can reduce the cost of using water as a coolant on a land-based facility.

Once completed, the data center will be between 40 and 60% more energy efficient than land-based data centers, according to general manager of the UDC Hainan pilot development project.

Hm, 100 units at 1,300 tons per unit is 130,000 tons of computer stuff.