Commentary on the DJT immunity case

Various sources are talking about their analyses of the slow decision the USSC made to hear DJT's crackpot immunity claims. Ruth Marcus opines for the WaPo (not behind paywall): 

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s audacious claim of presidential immunity from prosecution — with oral argument a leisurely seven weeks off — all but guarantees one of two terrible outcomes. Either the former president’s trial on charges of attempting to subvert the 2020 election, a trial that was supposed to start next week, will now not take place until after the 2024 election, or it will be held in the final months before Election Day. The justices are not entirely responsible for this mess, but they have just made a bad situation far worse than it needed to be.

My beef isn’t with the court’s decision to hear the case — it’s with the outrageously lethargic timing. It would have been far better for the court to have taken up the issue back in December, when special counsel Jack Smith urged the justices to leapfrog the federal appeals court. Now, two and a half months have gone by. It took the justices two weeks after Trump sought their intervention to announce that they would hear the case. Worse, they set oral argument for the week of April 22, a delay that means a decision could easily take until May or even linger until the term finishes at the end of June.

Worst of all, especially given this timetable, the justices could have allowed trial preparations to go forward while the case was briefed, argued and decided. That would have prevented Trump from accomplishing what has been his aim all along: to use the immunity claim as a ploy to delay his trial until after the election.

Instead, the court engaged in a weird procedural dodge. It didn’t do what Trump’s lawyers had asked and grant a stay of the appeals court ruling against him. Instead, it issued an unusual order to the appeals court that ends up having the same effect — without having to satisfy the stringent standards that are supposed to apply when a stay is sought.

That analysis fits with the criticism that the court for pulled off a partisan move to protect DJT by delaying. Marcus makes the point that, after dithering for weeks, the USSC side-stepped the usual process for granting a stay. The court’s action here looks like partisan USSC moral rot to protect DJT.

Science: Regarding the origin of life on Earth

The WaPo writes (not behind paywall) about another step in the quest to understand how life evolved out of non-life on Earth. This is an interesting discovery of the spontaneous creation of an important complex molecule (pantetheine) that scientists did not believe would exist if life had not evolved. 

The new lab experiment focused on the origins of another primary metabolite: coenzyme A, which sits at the heart of metabolism across all domains of life (as one of its many functions). For instance, the compound plays a vital role in releasing energy from carbohydrates, fats and proteins in organisms that require oxygen, but it also serves metabolic functions in lifeforms that don’t need oxygen, like many bacteria.

Specifically, Powner and his team were looking to re-create a particular fragment of the coenzyme A molecule called pantetheine. Pantetheine is the functional arm of coenzyme A, often getting transferred and enabling other chemical reactions in our body to occur. This limb is called a co-factor and acts as an “on” switch — without it, the coenzyme would be unusable.

CoA (coenzyme A)

“All of our metabolic processes rely on a small subset of these co-factors,” said biologist Aaron Goldman, who was not involved in the study. “This has led researchers to argue that these co-factors, themselves, may have predated larger, more complex enzymes during the origin and early evolution of life.”

Some researchers, Goldman said, have proposed that early lifeforms could have used pantetheine to store energy before the evolution of the larger, more complex energy currency that cells use today.

If this is the case, the mystery stood: Where did pantetheine come from?

The compound is such an odd duckling that scientists previously proposed it was too intricate to make from basic molecules. Others have tried to create pantetheine and failed, thinking that it wasn’t even present at life’s origins. Many scientists thought biology would have created a simple version of it, which would have evolved to become more complicated over time — like building a shack and later turning it into a mansion.

The team took to the lab. They focused on primarily using materials that could have been abundant on early Earth, like hydrogen cyanide and water. The first few steps of the reaction each took about a day, but the final step lasted 60 days, which was the longest reaction that Powner’s lab has ever done. The team finally shut off the reaction “partly because we got bored,” he said. But the result was a lot of pantetheine.

Pantetheine

The experts did not think this could

form without life to create it

The experts were wrong

I see this as a major advance in explaining how life could arise on Earth from non-life. It took time. After just 60 days of waiting and finally getting impatient, the scientists stopped the experiment. They looked and found spontaneous synthesis of the complex molecule pantetheine from simple building blocks and water. 60 days is nothing. Think in terms of 600 million years. 

I can now much more clearly envision how life arose from non-life on Earth. Stable climate, lots of water and millions of years for chemical reactions. This is more evidence suggesting that is how life arose here. Not from God, but from chemistry under the right conditions for a heck of a long time.

Just passing along some neuroscience, FWIW

Article link.

Dendrites are the traffic lights of our nervous system. If an action potential is significant enough, it can be passed on to other nerves, which can block or pass on the message.

This is the logical underpinnings of our brain – ripples of voltage that can be communicated collectively in two forms: either an AND message (if x and y are triggered, the message is passed on); or an OR message (if x or y is triggered, the message is passed on).

In addition to the logical AND and OR-type functions, these individual neurons could act as 'exclusive' OR (XOR) intersections, which only permit a signal when another signal is graded in a particular fashion.

"Traditionally, the XOR operation has been thought to require a network solution," the researchers wrote.

Exactly how this new logic tool squeezed into a single nerve cell translates into higher functions is a question for future researchers to answer.

 Now I don't know what all this means exactly, but it sounds important. 👍

Vicious satire about DJT, the TTPK and the border “crisis”

This video was posted in a recent comment here. I went back and forth about whether to post it alone or at all. On the one hand it treats rank and file (R&F) TTKP voters with demeaning, brutal insults, e.g., racist, ignorant, gullible, stupid, disinformed. On the other hand, it directly calls out and nails the brutal, insulting, bad faith, cynical rhetoric that DJT and his elite TTKP defenders, supporters and enablers operate with to trap the minds of the loyal R&F. 

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party

One thing is clear from this vicious screed. This video, more than anything I have seen so far, makes clear (at least to me) that there is a huge gulf in understanding between most of the TTKP R&F and the elites who run it in “bad faith.” That is what tipped me to post this. The end of the speech, is a chant of exactly what is on the elite’s minds and what really motivates them to embrace authoritarianism: 

WEALTH & POWER!!  WEALTH & POWER!! WEALTH & POWER!!  

I assume that most of the TTKP R&F, maybe about 75%, have been deceived, manipulated and betrayed by dark free speech the corrupt authoritarian elites constantly spew. That is where the gulf in mindsets lies. Those elites have used decades of cynical, divisive dark free speech to prey on the innate base instincts that most people have but had kept in check before kleptocratic authoritarianism rose to take control of the TTKP and its mendacious (morally rotted), authoritarian messaging Leviathan.