Republican attacks on inconvenient truth, and free and fair elections intensify

There's war going on not just in Ukraine. A huge one is going on in the US right now. The New York Times writes:

The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677 percent of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.

In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.

And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.

In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.

And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commission said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.

“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”  

“It didn’t seem to me there was any attempt to defraud,” Mr. Gruenke said [about 25 voters who gave a PO box address instead of their actual residence address]. “It would be a felony charge, and I thought that would be too heavy for what amounted to a typo or clerical error.” (emphasis added) 

In another recent article, the NYT commented on the current state of affairs in the GOP: 

The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him. .... Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.

In other words, the Republican Party has been opposed to free and fair elections for a long time. The 2020 elections made the Republican fever intensify.

A Radical Republican elite rails against 

free and fair elections in 1980 

The Georgia law includes incentives for police to crack down hard on protesters, and a requirement for permits in advance of all protests. One good way to shut protesters up is to deny permits to protest. Another is to permit protesting only in obscure places that few people will notice. Georgia Republicans really want law and order inflicted hard on non-Republicans and by God, they're gonna get it. Clerical errors now rise to the level of felonies for average voters. The standards are far more relaxed for Republican elites -- their 'mistakes' are forgivable, even their knowing criminal acts.

In Memphis TN, a woman was sentenced to six years in prison in January after registering to vote because she had a felony conviction and registering to vote was illegal for felons. That will teach her a well-deserved lesson.

The Republican Party's authoritarian attacks on democracy and civil liberties remain focused on subverting elections, limiting open free speech opposition and some other key anti-democratic tactics. America's radical right war on democracy, inconvenient truth and civil liberties is not going to stop any time soon. Most who cannot see the urgency and danger by now are unlikely to ever see it.

Something to cheer us all up

 

MIT predicted society would collapse by 2040. New data tells how we're doing

• Scientists in the 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted the fall of society.
• Using the LtG model, the fall of society will take place around 2040.
• The 2100s will be comparable to the 1900s in terms of the world’s population, industrial output, food and resources.

Scientists in the 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a method to determine when the fall of society would take place. 

That method indicated the fall will be some point near the middle in the 21st century around 2040, and so far, their projections have been on track, new analysis suggests.

In 1972, a team of researchers studied the risks of a doomsday scenario, examining limited availability of natural resources and the rising costs that would subvert the expectation of economic growth in the second decade of the 21st century.

---

Using a system dynamics model that was published by the Club of Rome — a Swiss-based global think tank that includes current and former heads of state, United Nations bureaucrats, government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders — the scientists were able to identify the upcoming limits to growth (LtG) to forecast of potential "global ecological and economic collapse coming up in the middle of the 21st Century," The Guardian reported. 

The Earth, according to LtG, has been terraformed beyond repair by greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, making the next generation to endure the "heavy legacy," a scarcity of mineral resources and a planet characterized by radioactive and heavy metal pollution.

In the '70s, the study was considered controversial and sparked debate, with some pundits misrepresenting the findings and methods, according to Vice.

However, Gaya Herrington, Director Advisory, Internal Audit & Enterprise Risk at major accounting firm KPMG, updated the LtG model in a published finding in the Yale Journal of Ecology in November 2020.

In Herrinton’s estimates, the world’s population, industrial output, food and resources will rapidly decline. The 2100s will be comparable to the 1900s, according to Vice. However, Herrington is treating her research as a personal project as a precaution to see how well the MIT model holds up.

Herrington’s study concluded that society has about another decade to change courses and avoid collapse by investing in sustainable technologies and equitable human development.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/563497-mit-predicted-society-would-collapse-by-2040

Another view:

In 1704, Isaac Newton predicted the end of the world sometime around (or after, “but not before”) the year 2060, using a strange series of mathematical calculations. Rather than study what he called the “book of nature,” he took as his source the supposed prophecies of the book of Revelation. While such predictions have always been central to Christianity, it is startling for modern people to look back and see the famed astronomer and physicist indulging them. For Newton, however, as Matthew Stanley writes at Science, “laying the foundation of modern physics and astronomy was a bit of a sideshow. He believed that his truly important work was deciphering ancient scriptures and uncovering the nature of the Christian religion.”

Over three hundred years later, we still have plenty of religious doomsayers predicting the end of the world with Bible codes. But in recent times, their ranks have seemingly been joined by scientists whose only professed aim is interpreting data from climate research and sustainability estimates given population growth and dwindling resources. The scientific predictions do not draw on ancient texts or theology, nor involve final battles between good and evil. Though there may be plagues and other horrible reckonings, these are predictably causal outcomes of over-production and consumption rather than divine wrath. Yet by some strange fluke, the science has arrived at the same apocalyptic date as Newton, plus or minus a decade or two.

The “end of the world” in these scenarios means the end of modern life as we know it: the collapse of industrialized societies, large-scale agricultural production, supply chains, stable climates, nation states…. Since the late sixties, an elite society of wealthy industrialists and scientists known as the Club of Rome (a frequent player in many conspiracy theories) has foreseen these disasters in the early 21st century. One of the sources of their vision is a computer program developed at MIT by computing pioneer and systems theorist Jay Forrester, whose model of global sustainability, one of the first of its kind, predicted civilizational collapse in 2040. “What the computer envisioned in the 1970s has by and large been coming true,” claims Paul Ratner at Big Think.

Those predictions include population growth and pollution levels, “worsening quality of life,” and “dwindling natural resources.” In the video at the top, see Australia’s ABC explain the computer’s calculations, “an electronic guided tour of our global behavior since 1900, and where that behavior will lead us,” says the presenter. The graph spans the years 1900 to 2060. “Quality of life” begins to sharply decline after 1940, and by 2020, the model predicts, the metric contracts to turn-of-the-century levels, meeting the sharp increase of the “Zed Curve” that charts pollution levels. (ABC revisited this reporting in 1999 with Club of Rome member Keith Suter.)

You can probably guess the rest—or you can read all about it in the 1972 Club of Rome-published report Limits to Growth, which drew wide popular attention to Jay Forrester’s books Urban Dynamics (1969) and World Dynamics (1971). Forrester, a figure of Newtonian stature in the worlds of computer science and management and systems theory—though not, like Newton, a Biblical prophecy enthusiast—more or less endorsed his conclusions to the end of his life in 2016. In one of his last interviews, at the age of 98, he told the MIT Technology Review, “I think the books stand all right.” But he also cautioned against acting without systematic thinking in the face of the globally interrelated issues the Club of Rome ominously calls “the problematic”:

Time after time … you’ll find people are reacting to a problem, they think they know what to do, and they don’t realize that what they’re doing is making a problem. This is a vicious [cycle], because as things get worse, there is more incentive to do things, and it gets worse and worse.

Where this vague warning is supposed to leave us is uncertain. If the current course is dire, “unsystematic” solutions may be worse? This theory also seems to leave powerfully vested human agents (like Exxon’s executives) wholly unaccountable for the coming collapse. Limits to Growth—scoffed at and disparagingly called “neo-Malthusian” by a host of libertarian critics—stands on far surer evidentiary footing than Newton’s weird predictions, and its climate forecasts, notes Christian Parenti, “were alarmingly prescient.” But for all this doom and gloom it’s worth bearing in mind that models of the future are not, in fact, the future. There are hard times ahead, but no theory, no matter how sophisticated, can account for every variable.

https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/m-i-t-computer-program-predicts-in-1973-that-civilization-will-end-by-2040.html

Maybe time to reassess the timeline with the world on the brink of a nuclear war? Whatcha think?

How tyrants deal with opposition

For context, a reference point

“You’re up there, you’ve got half the room going totally crazy — wild, they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country. And you have the other side — even on positive news, really positive news like that — they were like death. And un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, ‘treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not! I mean they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.” -- Our scumbag Republican ex-president calling Democrats treasonous and un-American because they did not applaud when he said things they did not like or agree with, including his lies, in his misstatement of the union address to congress. Also note the blatant logic flaw that Republican propaganda uses to further divide society: → If you don't applaud to the scumbag's lies and sleaze, you don't love your country.

“And I know a lot of people were very disappointed, but they knew the real answer. You know, when the Democrats go behind the scenes and they go into a room backstage and they sit and they talk, they laugh because they know it's all a big scam, a big hoax [referring to Russian interference in the 2016 election]. And it's called politics, but this is dirty politics and this is actually treason." "And I know a lot of people were very disappointed, but they knew the real answer. You know, when the Democrats go behind the scenes and they go into a room backstage and they sit and they talk, they laugh because they know it's all a big scam, a big hoax. And it's called politics, but this is dirty politics and this is actually treason.” -- Our scumbag Republican ex-president calling Democrats traitors for playing dirty politics, which is standard Republican politician practice, without one shred of evidence of actual treason.  

“The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!” -- Our scumbag Republican ex-president calling some Republicans in congress human scum because they allegedly opposed him.

What the tyrant Putin is doing

The New York Times writes: 

President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday referred to pro-Western Russians as “scum and traitors” who needed to be removed from society, describing the war in Ukraine as part of an existential clash with the United States and setting the stage for an ever fiercer crackdown at home and even more aggression abroad.

Comparing the West to Nazi Germany, the Russian leader laced his speech with derision for the “political beau monde” in Europe and the United States, and for the “slave-like” Russians who supported it. It was a far more hard-line message than one delivered earlier in the day by Mr. Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who said that Russia saw “a certain hope that a compromise can be reached” with Ukraine to end the war.

“The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths,” Mr. Putin said. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”

The beginnings of a new crackdown quickly emerged.

Self-purification of society as executed by Putin and his thugs. That is creepy. Scary for the people to be purified, presumably by force.

But come to think of it, that is sort of what American Christian nationalists want to do to American society by force of law. And, a form of self-purification (ideological cleansing) is what the Republican Party has already done to itself via years of RINO hunts, leading to inbred social mental defects.[1] And, that is also what major online pro-Republican politics sites have done in the form of blocking inconvenient facts and dissenting opinions and arguments.

Question: Notice any similarity between Putin and the ex-president and the Republican Party? 

Footnote: 

1. For example:

See, the famous scientist Walker points out that since the apes 

are still here, evolution is a Democratic Party hoax 

😵‍💫

Venue shopping in federal court lawsuits

Republican (Trump) Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk: 

Being transgendered is a delusion, 'yall!

Christian nationalist response: A Major Win For Religious Freedom: 

Matthew Kacsmaryk Confirmed As U.S. District Judge in Texas

The New Republic writes about the well-known practice of venue or judge shopping for filing federal lawsuits. The practice is bipartisan, but the article focuses on the federal judicial district the Republicans favor to block what Democrats try to do. This is more evidence that claim the rule of law is blind is a myth. Some of the examples the article describe are clear reflections of fundamentalist Christian nationalism dogma influencing secular law. 

The law isn't always blind. It can be clearly political and religious partisan. TNR writes:

There are 94 federal judicial districts in America, but one has become the primary venue of choice for Republicans looking to challenge President Biden’s every move: the Northern District of Texas.

It’s no secret why the party turns to this particular district in search of a favorable ruling. All but two of its 18 judges were appointed by Republican presidents, and a Democratic president hasn’t appointed one in the district since 1999. Almost every major Biden administration initiative runs a similar gauntlet: A coalition of Republican state attorneys general files a legal challenge in the Northern District, a Republican-appointed judge grants a preliminary injunction blocking the policy from going into effect, the majority-Republican-appointed Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds the order, and the majority-Republican-appointed Supreme Court usually declines to intervene.

This practice is known as judge-shopping, and two Northern District judges in particular sit atop Republicans’ wish list: Judge Reed O’Connor, the George W. Bush appointee who gutted the Indian Child Welfare Act and tried to overturn the Affordable Care Act, and Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who blocked the Biden administration’s efforts to end the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program for asylum applicants on the Southern border.

“Some district courts have carefully divided their caseloads to avoid the possibility of judge-shopping—ensuring that no judge hears more than 10–15 percent of the cases filed in any specific division,” Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, wrote in January. “But others haven’t. Of the seven divisions in the Western District of Texas, four have exactly one judge hearing every single case. And five of the seven divisions in the Northern District of Texas have one judge hearing all or most cases—including the Wichita Falls division, where O’Connor hears more than 85 percent of civil cases.”

Of the 20 lawsuits filed against the Biden administration by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, 13 were filed in district court divisions with only a single judge, all of whom were Trump appointees. Last September, for instance, Paxton filed a legal challenge to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidance for gender identity and workplace discrimination in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District. By filing there, he effectively ensured that it would be heard by Kacsmaryk, who staunchly opposed anti-discrimination protections for gay and transgender Americans in his pre-judicial career. Kacsmaryk came under intense criticism during his confirmation process for previously describing homosexuality as “disordered” and signed a letter in 2016 that described being transgender as “a delusion.” (emphasis added)

Simple procedural changes would effectively address the venue shopping problem. Federal court rules could require that each case have no more than a 50 percent chance of being assigned to a specific judge. Congress could pass a law to require that patent law cases, which are heavily venue shopped to one judge in Texas who publicly advertised himself as friendly to patent trolls[1], should only be filed where the parties have substantial local connections. The fixes are easy but they probably won't happen any time soon. That is because (i) the law is too often aware and partisan, not neutral and blind, and (ii) American law and government are broken and cannot competently function any longer.

Two points are worth remembering:

• The law is not always blind --- sometimes it is blatantly political and partisan
• Fundamentalist Christian nationalist dogma is hell-bent on de-secularizing American law, government and society and forcing aggressive, vengeful Christian Sharia law on all Americans and institutions, i.e., Christian nationalism is not warm and fuzzy, it is enraged and itchin' to fix what God says is busted with sinful America and sinful Americans 

Footnote: 

1. A patent troll is a patent owner who makes money by suing people who infringe on his patents, not by making, using or selling what the patent claims. This practice has been criticized as abuse of the patent system, which is intended to protect commercial uses for claimed subject matter. In essence, patent trolls have commercialized the practice of suing people to make money, instead of using the patent to protect the commercial activity it claims. Obviously, if a federal judge advertises themself as friendly to patent trolls, that is the judge the trolls want to file their lawsuit with. 

For context, all patent lawsuits must be filed in federal courts. Patent law is a matter of federal law and states do not play a significant role. 

Zelensky's speech to Congress

At ~20:22 to 22:42 of this 26:39 video, Ukrainian president Zelensky showed a video of Putin's attacks on Ukraine. The images are heart wrenching.

Watching it is quite upsetting. Zelensky desperately pleaded for desperately needed help. After Zelensky's speech, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) responded with emotion in a 1:24 video that C-Span broadcast this morning. 

Sasse's reaction is mostly raw emotion and barely controlled commentary from a sitting US Senator. This is the kind of natural human response that can lead to an intended or accidental nuclear exchange and destruction of civilization. Billions of people would die.

Given all the misery, pain, heartbreak and blood that got humans paid to get to this point, blowing it all to smithereens would be a shame. Who wants mankind to go back to some kind of Mad Max post-apocalyptic hell on Earth? Self-annihilation would be disrespectful of the human struggle for civilization, to say the least.

A thought about Russian opposition in Russia: Try to support them

This one is from the One Cannot Afford to Ignore Allies files. A commenter here, Doug1943, posted this yesterday:

What would be desirable is if we could prevent the entire Russian people being driven into a nationalist, hail-our-glorious Leader frenzy. There are brave Russians who are trying to prevent this. (I lived there for a few months in 1985, returned several times after that, both before and after the fall of Communism, and made several Russian friends. Every single one of them loathes Putin. But right now, the mood is running against them.)

How can we help Russians now? The worst possible thing is for Russia to be intellectually isolated, for them to feel everyone despises them. Already we're hearing crap like "Russians are natural robots, don't you know where the word 'Slav' comes from?" etc.

So we need to make links. Not to scold them, not to urge them to go to prison by demonstrating -- that's their choice, not ours -- but to say, "We want you to be part of the democratic civilized world." And, ideally, according to me, to acknowledge that NATO expansion -- which we promised Mr Gorbachev would not happen -- has played a role in this horrible affair.

I have some ideas for making this happen. It involves some minimal searching, then cutting and pasting, ending up with a harvest of Russian email addresses. (When I last checked with a friend in Moscow, email was still working.)

Anyone interested in working with me on this should let me know.

Also: At a minimum, if you use the Chrome or Firefox browsers, get the 'Snowflake' (sic) add-on. It turns your computer into a relay point that allows Russian users of the TOR browser to evade censorship. It takes about two minutes to do, is free, and puts no load on your own computer.

The Tor browser is used by some people to evade government surveillance. The Chinese government has banned it. The Tor browser isolates each website you visit so third-party trackers and ads can't follow you. Any cookies automatically clear when you're done browsing. So will your browsing history. It prevents someone watching your connection from knowing what websites you visit. All anyone monitoring your browsing habits can see is that you're using Tor. It tries make all users look the same, making it difficult for you to be fingerprinted based on your browser and device information. Your traffic is relayed and encrypted three times as it passes over the Tor network. The network is comprised of thousands of volunteer-run servers known as Tor relays.

The Tor Project, a 501(c)(3) US nonprofit. Its goal is to advance human rights and defend privacy online through free software and open networks.

A screen shot of the add-on Snowflake for Firefox:

Snowflake is a WebRTC pluggable transport for Tor. Enabling this extension 

turns your browser into a proxy that connects 

Tor users in censored regions to the Tor network.

Fighting the global war for information and truth on the internet --

the Tor Snowflake system

ZDNet wrote this about Snowflake for Firefox and Chrome in 2019:

Tor Snowflake turns your browser into a proxy for users in censored countries

The extensions are not meant to be installed by users living in oppressive countries that block access to the Tor network. They're meant for those living in free countries, where governments don't block Tor access.

Users who want to help those living under oppressive regimes can install the Tor Snowflake extensions -- for Chrome or Firefox.

The two extensions effectively transform a user's browser into a proxy, allowing users in oppressive countries to connect through the extension (and the user's computer) to the Tor network.

We would be the Snowflake proxies resisting 

demagogues and tyrants

The Tor network is a collection of servers that encrypt and bounce traffic between each other, to anonymize a user's real location.

This network has multiple types of servers. There are Tor "guard" servers that serve as entry points to the Tor network. There are Tor "relays" that bounce the traffic inside the network and help anonymize the user's location. And then there are Tor "exit" servers, through which Tor traffic reconnects to the regular internet.

Due to their nature, the IP addresses of Tor guard servers are public, listed on the Tor website, so Tor clients (usually the Tor Browser) can read the list and connect to the Tor network through a safe server.

Over the years, countries have realized that they can block access to these servers, and effectively block a user from accessing Tor.

The Tor Project fought back by developing another type of Tor server, called a Tor bridge. These are Tor guard servers that don't have their IP addresses listed publicly.  

However, Tor bridges aren't a foolproof solution. Oppressive regimes have realized they can also request access to Tor bridges as well, and compile a list of IP addresses to block alongside the regular Tor guards.

Tor Snowflake is the Tor Project's reaction to governments that have managed to block Tor bridges.

Tor Snowflake helps the Tor Project create a constantly moving mesh of proxies that no government could ever block.  

The only downside to Tor Snowflake is the fact that another user's traffic now flows through your browser, taking up your bandwidth. Users on metered connections are advised against activating Snowflake, as this will incur additional costs.

Doug makes an important point by arguing that we should not blindly attack the Russian people. That can turn potential allies and neutrals into enemies. 

There is another point important lurking in the room. America and liberal democracies and civil liberties the world over are in a fight to the death with demagogic tyranny and anti-democratic radicalism. Democracy and freedom are under deadly attacks both from within the US (the Republican Party, Christian nationalism, laissez-faire capitalism) and from the outside (China, Russia, etc.). Allies everywhere are precious and need to be supported when possible.

IMHO, it is time to pick a side and fight for it as best one can.

Question for Doug: Would you please elaborate some on your ideas to help Russian allies trapped in Russia?