Should Cigarettes Be Banned Completely?

Finally, marijuana is becoming legal in more States but still illegal federally. Not in Canada, but then again, Canada is always ahead of the curve.

Yet alcohol is legal despite the grief it causes and ditto for cigarettes.

This idea of banning cigarettes (or all tobacco products) is not a new one, I have heard the suggestion since I was a young lad. Usually the argument doesn't go anywhere.

So one site I found explores the question:

https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/Should-cigarettes-be-banned-Arguments-for-and-against

Some of the reasons FOR the idea:

Cigarettes are the single biggest cause of premature death on the planet.

Nicotine is extremely addictive. The withdrawal symptoms are intense and there is a high rate of people who fail to quit, or relapse. Some people end up spending their entire lives addicted.

Smokers are a heavy burden on health care services, because of the severity and wide range of ailments that cigarettes cause.

1 in 5 deaths in the U.S. each year is caused by smoking.

Secondhand smoke causes around 50,000 deaths each year in the U.S.

Some reasons AGAINST the idea:

People's civil liberties are not negotiable.

Banning cigarettes would create a huge black market that would be exploited by criminals.

Smokers pay more tax than non-smokers due to the high tax on cigarettes, banning cigarettes would mean a reduction in taxation revenue for the government.

The tobacco industry creates thousands of jobs around the world.

SO, what do YOU think?

Tales of mendacity, crackpottery and other radical right politics as usual

Boebert denies that words can cause harm

Vanity Fair writes:

Lauren Boebert Can’t Believe People Are Linking Her 

Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric to the LGBTQ+ Club Shooting

She recently said as much while…going on an anti-trans rant.

While speaking to Ross Kaminsky, a radio host at Colorado’s KOA station, Boebert called it “disgusting” to blame her for what happened over the weekend or accurately note the various ways she’s vilified LGBTQ+ people. “That is completely false,” she said, falsely. “I have never had bad rhetoric towards anyone and their personal preferences as an adult.” Then, because she’s a bigot—and not a very smart one at that—she immediately added: “What I’ve criticized is the sexualization of our children. And I’ve criticized men dressing up as caricatures of women.” .... Boebert, like many on the right, equates allowing gender-affirming medical care for trans youth with child “grooming.” She also believes that drag queens pose a threat to children just by simply existing, and we know this because she’s previously said as much:

On the subject of Drag Queen Story Hour events—during which a drag queen literally just reads stories to kids—Boebert bizarrely suggested that they operate like strip clubs, telling KOA, “We don’t need six-year-old children putting dollar bills in the thongs of grown men shaking and twerking in front of children…That is child abuse.” She added that she would continue to speak out against the “grooming” of children, a term that has been co-opted by the right to describe behavior by LGBTQ+ people they don’t like, rather than the way child molesters lure their victims.

The power of free speech to kill

The NYT writes:

A Lasting Legacy of Covid: Far-Right Platforms Spreading Health Myths

Not long after Randy Watt died of Covid-19, his daughter Danielle sat down at her computer, searching for clues as to why the smart and thoughtful man she knew had refused to get vaccinated. She pulled up Google, typed in a screen name he had used in the past and discovered a secret that stunned her.

Her father, she learned, had a hidden, virtual life on Gab, a far-right social media platform that traffics in Covid misinformation. And there was another surprise as well: As he fought the coronavirus, he told his followers that he was taking ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic infections that experts say has no benefit — and in fact can be dangerous — for patients with Covid-19.  

Around the country, countless Americans are suffering a very particular type of Covid grief — a mixture of anger, sorrow and shame that comes with losing a loved one who has consumed social media falsehoods.

Dark free speech can deceive people. Sometimes they act on their false beliefs and it kills them. It is literally that simple. 

Ye’s campaign for president is gelling nicely

The ex-president is all excited about it 

The Hill writes:

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, said he asked former President Trump to be his running mate in 2024.

The rapper, in a Twitter video posted on Thursday evening, said he mentioned a campaign during a recent meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, also tweeting a series of “Ye 24” graphics.

“I think the thing that Trump was most perturbed about, me asking him to be my vice president,” Ye said in the video in the Twitter post. “I think that was like lower on the list of things that caught him off-guard.”

Ye went on to say Trump screamed at him during the meeting about a run.

What could be better than Trump screaming at Ye? Politics can’t get much better than this. One can only wonder what things were higher on the list of Ye things that caught Trump off-guard. Enquiring minds want to know.

Ye and his running mate Stump

The Republican Party’s propaganda Leviathan

closes down election time dark free speech effort

The Guardian writes:

Crime coverage on Fox News halved once US midterms were over

Just a week after elections, number of weekly segments focused on crime slashed in half on Rupert Murdoch’s flagship network

In the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, the message from Fox News was clear: violent crime is surging, cities are dangerous hellscapes and Democrats are responsible.

With the vote over, however, the rightwing news channel appeared to decide things weren’t that bad after all, and decreased its coverage of violent crime by 50% compared with the pre-election average.

One can speculate that a major dark free speech source like Faux News probably caused some people to act in accord with its anti-Democratic Party lies, slanders and crackpottery. Was Faux necessary, but not necessarily sufficient by itself, to hand control of the House over to the fascist Republican Party? Probably.

The toxic propaganda value of Faux to the Republican Party is enormous. For the 2022 elections, Faux was probably worth (i) about $1 billion in air time, and maybe (ii) 1 million votes by people who believed it the divisive lies, slanders and crackpottery Faux spewed in the months before the elections.

Faux News: A cancer on America and the world

Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement

Subtitle: Maybe the brain isn't "classical" after all.

Pretty interesting article on BigThink.  Nicely written and easy for the layperson, such as me, to understand. 😊

Key Takeaways

• Most neuroscientists believe that the brain operates in a classical manner.
• However, if brain processes rely on quantum mechanics, it could explain why our brains are so powerful.
• A team of researchers possibly witnessed entanglement in the brain, perhaps indicating that some of our brain activity, and maybe even consciousness, operates on a quantum level. 

Supercomputers can beat us at chess and perform more calculations per second than the human brain. But there are other tasks our brains perform routinely that computers simply cannot match — interpreting events and situations and using imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Our brains are amazingly powerful computers, using not just neurons but the connections between the neurons to process and interpret information.

And then there is consciousness, neuroscience’s giant question mark. What causes it? How does it arise from a jumbled mass of neurons and synapses? After all, these may be enormously complex, but we are still talking about a wet bag of molecules and electrical impulses. [Emphasis mine!] 😮

Some scientists suspect that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s enormous power, and its ability to generate consciousness. Recently, scientists at Trinity College Dublin, using a technique to test for quantum gravity, suggested that entanglement may be at work within our brains. If their results are confirmed, they could be a big step toward understanding how our brain, including consciousness, works. 

Quantum processes in the brain

Amazingly, we have seen some hints that quantum mechanisms are at work in our brains. Some of these mechanisms might help the brain process the world around it through sensory input. There are also certain isotopes in our brain whose spins change how our body and brain react. For example, xenon with a nuclear spin of 1/2 can have anesthetic properties, while xenon with no spin cannot. And various isotopes of lithium with different spins change development and parenting ability in rats.

Despite such intriguing findings, the brain is largely assumed to be a classical system. 

If quantum processes are at work in the brain, it would be difficult to observe how they work and what they do. Indeed, not knowing exactly what we are looking for makes quantum processes very difficult to find. “If the brain uses quantum computation, then those quantum operators may be different from operators known from atomic systems,” Christian Kerskens, a neuroscience researcher at Trinity and one of the authors of the paper, told Big Think. So how can one measure an unknown quantum system, especially when we do not have any equipment to measure the mysterious, unknown interactions? [Emphasis mine.  And good question, IMO.]

Lessons from quantum gravity

Quantum gravity is another example in quantum physics where we do not yet know what we are dealing with.

There are two main realms of physics. There is the physics of the tiny microscopic world — the atoms and photons, particles and waves that interact and behave very unlike the world we see around us. Then there is the realm of gravity, which governs the motion of planets and stars and keeps us humans stuck to Earth. Unifying these realms under an overarching theory is where quantum gravity comes in — it will help scientists understand the underlying forces that govern our universe. [The elusive ToE (Theory of Everything), the Holy Grail of Physics]

Since quantum gravity and quantum processes in the brain are both big unknowns, the researchers at Trinity decided to use the same method other scientists are using to try to understand quantum gravity. 

Taking entanglement to heart [the nitty gritty, feel free to go to skip point]

Using an MRI that can sense entanglement, the scientists looked to see whether proton spins in the brain could interact and become entangled through an unknown intermediary. Similar to the research for quantum gravity, the goal was to understand an unknown system. “The unknown system may interact with known systems like the proton spins [within the brain],” Kerskens explained. “If the unknown system can mediate entanglement to the known system, then, it has been shown, the unknown must be quantum.” 

The researchers scanned 40 subjects with an MRI. Then they watched what happened, and correlated the activity with the patient’s heartbeat.

Bottom of Form

The heartbeat is not just the motion of an organ within our body. Rather, the heart, like many other parts of our body, is engaged in two-way communication with the brain — the organs both send each other signals. We see this when the heart reacts to various phenomena such as pain, attention, and motivation. Additionally, the heartbeat can be tied to short-term memory and aging. 

As the heart beats, it generates a signal called the heartbeat potential, or HEP. With each peak of the HEP, the researchers saw a corresponding spike in the NMR signal, which corresponds to the interactions among proton spins. This signal could be a result of entanglement, and witnessing it might indicate there was indeed a non-classical intermediary.  

“The HEP is an electrophysiological event, like alpha or beta waves,” Kerskens explains. “The HEP is tied to consciousness because it depends on awareness.” Similarly, the signal indicating entanglement was only present during conscious awareness, which was illustrated when two subjects fell asleep during the MRI. When they did, this signal faded and disappeared. 

[→ Skip point]

Seeing entanglement in the brain may show that the brain is not classical, as previously thought, but rather a powerful quantum system. If the results can be confirmed, they could provide some indication that the brain uses quantum processes. This could begin to shed light on how our brain performs the powerful computations it does, and how it manages consciousness. 

All this seems to throw a bit of a monkey-wrench into the idea of our believed “free will,” IMO.  What do you think? 

-Do you believe we have free will? 

-Is (our) consciousness just a "stubborn/persistent illusion" (a la Einstein, re: time's past, present and future)??

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/brain-consciousness-quantum-entanglement/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weeklynewsletter

Updates: Democracy and the law, the state of US democracy

Legal cases against Trump inch forward

Multiple sources are reporting that the last few days have been uniformly bad for Trump in five separate lawsuits. The Daily Beast writes:

In a matter of hours Tuesday, former President Donald Trump suffered humiliating defeats in courtrooms across the country that put him on track to have his personal taxes exposed, see his company dismantled, face a trial for an alleged rape, and confront the unencumbered power of the Department of Justice.  

In the midst of this maelstrom of legal trouble, the real estate mogul’s longtime personal accountant completely disavowed the company’s financial shenanigans, saying if he’d known the way executives were dodging taxes for years, he would have died of shock. “I probably would've had a heart attack,” Donald Bender testified in Manhattan criminal court, where the Trump Organization is defending itself at trial against the District Attorney’s Office.

What needs to be kept in mind is how successful Trump has been in gaming both the legal and business systems and getting away with it. Trump is second to none in breaking laws and contracts and getting away with it. 

He is equally expert at delay and stonewall tactics where patience, time and/or money simply run out for people in court trying to nail the bastard. Above the Law comments on this point:

Keeping it local, the fun picked up in the courtroom of New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, where Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba appears to have long since exhausted the court’s patience. And filing yet another motion to dismiss on the eve of the scheduling conference characterizing the detailed complaint filed by Attorney General Letitia James as “clumsily attempting to recharacterize decades of business transactions between highly sophisticated parties, only to succeed in establishing that she cannot plead a claim” did not help.

At one point, Habba suggested to Insider that Trump would actually take the stand in his own defense here. To which we would just note that the former president and his children litigated for years on end to avoid being deposed behind closed doors. And when they ran out of road, they largely took the Fifth. So … make of that one what you will.

Lat September, the ethics-focused CREW updated the list of 56 credible crime allegations since 2015. All 56 remain unindicted and unpunished. CREW wrote:

Trump’s staggering record of uncharged crimes

As of November 2022, Donald Trump has been credibly accused of committing at least 56 criminal offenses since he launched his campaign for president in 2015. That total only reflects allegations relating to his time in or running for office and omits, for instance, Trump’s criminal exposure for fraudulent business dealings.

A detailed table that CREW put together shows crimes that still can or cannot be prosecuted. All of Trump’s delays have served him very well. Nine of the 56 alleged crimes appear to be not prosecutable due to the statute of limitations having run. When in red, the column “likely deadline to file charges” indicates that the listed crime cannot be prosecuted because too much time has passed. That shows just how useless the rule of law and the court system is for rich and powerful elites. Some of the table of alleged crimes is shown below.

One can reasonably believe that many laws are either (i) intentionally written by rich and powerful people to preferentially protect rich and powerful people, or (ii) apply to everyone equally in theory but are enforced and prosecuted unequally. The US really does have a two-tiered system of law, an easier one for the elites and a much nastier one for the rest of us. Sociologist Brooke Harrington, tax advisor to wealthy people, once commented on this: 

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”

Former president President Richard Nixon once expressed a similar sentiment when musing about himself:  

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

Maybe Trump did not have as nearly a bad a time in court the last few days as much of the reporting on it suggests. Every day that goes by where a crime is remains unindicted is another little win for the criminal. Every day not spent in jail is another little win.

The state US US democracy

One commentator cautions against getting too complacent in view of the results so far from the 2022 elections. The Guardian writes:

‘The US can still become a fascist country’: 

Frances Fox Piven’s midterms postmortem

The 90-year-old sociologist on ‘vengeance politics’, cruelty and climate change as she looks back on half a century of activism

“I don’t think this fight over elemental democracy is over, by any means,” she said. “The United States was well on the road to becoming a fascist country – and it still can become a fascist country.”

All the main elements are now in place, she said, for America to take a turn to the dark side. “There is the crazy mob, Maga; an elite that is oblivious to what is required for political stability; and a grab-it-and-run mentality that is very strong, very dangerous. I was very frightened about what would happen in the election, and it could still happen.”

“There’s going to be a lot of vengeance politics, a lot of efforts to get back at Joe Biden, idiot stuff. And that will rile up a lot of people. The Maga mob is not a majority of the American population by any stretch of the imagination, but the fascist mob don’t have to be the majority to set in motion the kinds of policies that crush democracy.”

That speaks for itself.

Update on low-carbon energy generation and storage technology

This is actually some pretty good news, assuming the US can get past it’s political problem called the corrupted, pro-pollution, pro-climate change Republican Party. Steve Novella at Neurologica blog writes:

“Renewable” includes wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal and biomass. Low carbon includes all these plus nuclear, which is not technically renewable because it burns fuel. “Intermittent” sources are wind and solar, because we cannot control when the sun shines or when the wind blows. One of the biggest communication errors I encounter is confusing “renewable” with “intermittent”, so I want to keep these terms clear.

There is no controversy over the fact that above 30% or so of wind and solar penetration the cost of new capacity goes up. This is because intermittent sources require overcapacity and grid storage to work at higher percentages. This is a geometric progression, with the inflection point being somewhere around 30%. This is not a limit or ceiling, it is an inflection point. The curve really starts to turn up at around 60%.

The other big variable is grid storage. With sufficient grid storage, well distributed, we can have 100% wind and solar. We don’t currently have such grid storage, so again we are betting on a future capacity we don’t currently have. Grid storage also needs to be able to shift energy production to demand over hours, days, and even seasons (for solar).

Again, the question is, what is the probability that a 100% renewable scheme (which would need to include about 80% wind and solar) will succeed, meaning that we have sufficient grid updates and grid storage? And if it does not succeed, what is our plan B? The default plan B is to burn fossil fuel, and that will cost us our climate goals. This is why I have found compelling the arguments of experts who say we need to maintain, at least, our nuclear capacity, and perhaps even expand it a bit, to reduce the probability that we will need to burn fossil fuels to make up for any shortfall in a 100% renewable scheme. This further means we need to develop nuclear capacity now, because it will be too late in 20 years.

Pumped hydro has always been one of the best grid storage options, and today is responsible for 99% of grid storage power. The idea is to pump water from a lower reservoir to an upper reservoir when the grid has excess energy, and then to flow the water from the upper to the lower through turbines to generate electricity when needed. This has a round trip energy efficiency of about 80%, which is pretty good as grid storage goes. Only lithium-ion batteries are better, at around 92%.

Attention, however, has shifted to closed-loop pumped hydro. These installations are not connected to a river, and cannot be used as a source of hydroelectric power. They solely serve the function of grid storage. They can be built wherever there are two reservoirs of water that are close enough and have a sufficient difference in altitude (called the head). If, for example, the reservoirs have a head of 300 meters and are 1km apart, that is a good location for a closed loop system. There are other geological details of importance. The two reservoirs are connected by tunnels or pipes, so it matters how much rock will need to be drilled.

A recent analysis of the global potential for closed-loop pumped hydro finds 616,000 potential sites around the world. They also conclude that we only need 0.1% of these sites to develop sufficient pumped hydro grid storage to support wind and solar energy. This means we can pick the best 0.1% of sites to develop. They also argue that prior analyses of the potential of pumped hydro did not include the potential for closed loop, non-river systems.

An analysis of potential sites in the US includes an interesting discussion. First, this also finds great untapped potential, 35 terawatt-hours of capacity. But they also point out that such calculations are extremely sensitive to technical assumptions about the suitability and cost of developing specific sites.

A closed-loop pumped hydropower

energy storage diagram

Update on democracy vs. tyranny, etc.

The stolen election poison spreads to Brazil

Yahoo! News writes:

More than three weeks after losing a reelection bid, President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday blamed a software bug and demanded the electoral authority annul votes cast on most of Brazil’s nation’s electronic voting machines, though independent experts say the bug doesn't affect the reliability of results.

Such an action would leave Bolsonaro with 51% of the remaining valid votes — and a reelection victory, ....

Liberal Party leader Valdemar Costa and an auditor hired by the party told reporters in Brasilia that their evaluation found all machines dating from before 2020 — nearly 280,000 of them, or about 59% of the total used in the Oct. 30 runoff — lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs.

Neither explained how that might have affected election results, but said they were asking the electoral authority to invalidate all votes cast on those machines.

Any glitch in a storm will do in the never-ending war of tyranny and kleptocracy against democracy.

A defeat is an actual victory?

The NYT writes:

In Blow to Trump, Supreme Court Permits House to Obtain His Tax Returns

The Supreme Court cleared the way on Tuesday for a House committee to obtain former President Donald J. Trump’s tax returns, refusing his request to block their release after a yearslong fight.

Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, who requested the files as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement that his panel would “now conduct the oversight that we’ve sought for the last three and a half years.”

Mr. Trump has used the slow pace of litigation to run out the clock on various oversight and investigative efforts. His stonewalling and legal challenges have succeeded in keeping the House from obtaining his tax returns for nearly four years, but that strategy appears to have fallen just short. The House would almost certainly have dropped the request for Mr. Trump’s tax returns in January, when Republicans take control of the chamber.

WaPo writes:

It was unclear when the Treasury Department will turn over the documents — a spokesman said only that the department would comply — but time is not on the side of Democrats who run the committee, who will cede control to Republicans in January as a result of the recent midterm elections.

The radical right Republican Supreme Court did it's best to protect Trump. The open question is who well did it do it’s job. There isn’t much time for the House to do much investigating. The pace of House investigations has been slower than glacial. Once McCarthy takes over in January as House speaker, that will likely (~90% chance?) be the end of House investigations of Trump, his corrupt cronies and assorted fellow traitors. The next ~6-8 weeks will reveal just how much or little the Democratic House can do with this new information, assuming they get it before McCarthy takes control.  

It’s raining impeachments! 

The Hill writes:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that GOP lawmakers will consider impeachment next year if he does not step down.

“If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate, every order, every action and every failure will determine whether we can begin impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said at a press conference in El Paso, Texas, on Tuesday.

Over the last few weeks, multiple commentators from multiple sources have noted the Republican explicit lust for revenge and witch hunts. They generally also comment that the Republican Party no longer governs or has any detailed policy agenda. In stead of governing, the GOP is going to exercise power and generally continue is anti-government, anti-democracy agenda to accumulate more wealth and power for elites at the expense of everyone and everything else, including the environment. 

Since they do not control the White House or Senate, House Republicans will just have to be content with vilifying and slandering Democrats, looking for Hunter Biden’s laptop and tax returns and investigating and impeaching any Democrat they target for impeachment. In other words, two more precious years are going to be wasted.

Why the Georgia Senate race is fairly important

Huffpost writes:

Two years into his presidency, Joe Biden has already broken records with the number of federal judges he’s gotten confirmed and with the diversity of his court picks. And as Democrats prepare to control the Senate for another two years, Biden is on track to make his impact on the courts a defining piece of his legacy.

It’s only going to get easier for him if Democrats win in Georgia’s Senate runoff on Dec. 6.

The Senate has been tied at 50-50, along party lines, for the entire time that Biden has been president. That’s meant that Democrats and Republicans have had equal representation on the Judiciary Committee, where GOP members have been intentionally delaying the confirmation process for a number of Biden’s court picks.

All those GOP members have to do is unanimously vote no on a nominee, causing a tie within the committee, and it keeps that nominee stuck there. Whenever they do this, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has to file a so-called discharge petition to force that nominee out of the committee and onto the Senate floor for a confirmation vote.

Every discharge petition adds four hours of wait time on the Senate floor. That’s on top of the delays that come with filing a petition at all. To date, Republicans have forced Schumer to use a discharge petition for five of Biden’s court picks who went on to be confirmed. Among them: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

There are currently four other judicial nominees — two appeals court picks and two district court picks — who are still stuck in the Judiciary Committee and need discharge petitions to get out.

Democrats are already set to have 50 seats in the new Senate. If Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) defeats his GOP challenger, Herschel Walker, in the coming weeks, Democrats will have 51 seats. That would mean no more power sharing on committees, no more votes tied along party lines in the Judiciary Committee and no more discharge petitions. 

 

The Republican Party: It’s a waste of oxygen.