Democrats messaging seems to be gearing up; It's overdue

The Daily Beast writes: 

Democrats Are Ready for GOP to Make Hunter Biden the New Benghazi

It’s not Hunter Biden’s scalp they want. Rather, the House GOP caucus is poised to launch a two-year crusade to tarnish President Joe Biden’s character—and lower his poll numbers—just like they did with Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi hearings prior to her 2016 candidacy.

But things are different this time around—Democrats aren’t going to assume that voters can see through the partisan bluster, and are mounting a war room operation outside the White House. The Congressional Integrity Project (CIP)(a pointed moniker, to be sure) will try to fend off the Republican barrage, and go on the offensive in the information war.

“This is a battle over narratives, and we believe we can win that war,” says [Leslie Dach, senior adviser to the CIP]. “They’re (the GOP) saying it in plain English, they’re trying to hurt Joe Biden. It’s the Trump playbook of personal attacks.”

Kentucky Republican Jim Comer, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, didn’t waste any time saying the quiet part out loud. Once the razor-thin GOP majority was confirmed, he said at a press conference, “I want to be clear, this is an investigation of Joe Biden, that is where the committee will focus in this next Congress.” 

Hunter Biden provides the cover for an investigation into “whether the president is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars,” said Comer.

That kind of admission cost Kevin McCarthy the speakership in 2015 when he told Fox News that the House Select Committee on Benghazi was created to lower Hillary Clinton’s polls. His forthrightness was widely seen as a gaffe. Until McCarthy let the truth slip, Republicans insisted the long-running investigation had nothing to do with politics. Rep. Jim Jordan (one of the most bombastic GOP members) had his moment more recently when he said Trump would be the candidate again, “and we need to make sure that he wins.” 

“I think the American people see the hypocrisy, but we’ll be showing it to them,” says Dach, who oversaw the Democrats’ successful messaging on health care that is credited with winning the House in 2018 and 2020. “There’s a simple story to tell, and you have to tell it every day.”  

Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he left at a Delaware computer shop and never returned to retrieve, has become the centerpiece of conspiracy theories about how he was ripping off the taxpayers and trading on his father’s name. The details are murky but like Hillary and Benghazi, it is a scandal that keeps on giving. The difference is that this time around, Democrats won’t be on their heels playing defense. They’re preparing to punch back.

Well, it’s about time. Finally. The Democrats are waking up to the critical importance of ramping up the intensity and aggressiveness of their messaging game. The comment by Dach that “I think the American people see the hypocrisy” indicates to me the Democrats are still are not fully aware of the situation. But at least they understand some critically important things to do, namely, (1) showing and telling Americans the hypocrisy, lies and slanders, and (2) telling it every day over and over and over. 

Golly, maybe the Democrats have finally graduated from the minor league messaging to the majors. 

Hunter’s laptop

The Republican smear machine strikes

News bits: White supremacists at dinner & whatnot

Trump’s dinner party that went awry

NBC News writes:

‘F---ing nightmare’: Trump team does damage control after 

he dines with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes

The former president's campaign claims he didn't know anything about Fuentes, who joined the rapper under fire for his antisemitic remarks

Former President Donald Trump distanced himself Friday from a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, claiming he didn’t know the identity of the far-right activist who was unexpectedly brought along with the rapper.

“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about,” Trump said Friday in a statement on his Truth Social platform.

One can wonder, is Trump lying about not knowing who was at his own dinner party? There was this WaPo article entitled Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years.

Yeah, he’s lying. MAGA!!

Election fraud squads are laying goose eggs

while twiddling thumbs

The AP writes:

State-level law enforcement units created after the 2020 presidential election to investigate voter fraud are looking into scattered complaints more than two weeks after the midterms but have provided no indication of systemic problems.

That’s just what election experts had expected and led critics to suggest that the new units were more about politics than rooting out widespread abuses. Most election-related fraud cases already are investigated and prosecuted at the local level.

Florida, Georgia and Virginia created special state-level units after the 2020 election, all pushed by Republican governors, attorneys general or legislatures.

“I am not aware of any significant detection of fraud on Election Day, but that’s not surprising,” said Paul Smith, senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center. “The whole concept of voter impersonation fraud is such a horribly exaggerated problem. It doesn’t change the outcome of the election, it’s a felony, you risk getting put in jail and you have a high possibility of getting caught. It’s a rare phenomena.”

From the shameless irrationality & hypocrisy files:

Election deniers flip flop and now decry voter suppression

Democracy Docket writes in an opinion piece:

In “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe wrote that “a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.” After this year’s midterm elections, I would add that a voting rights advocate is an election denier who lost a close election.

Ever since she lost her election for Arizona governor, Kari Lake has become deeply concerned with, of all things, voter suppression. Over the weekend, her campaign tweeted: “The appropriate amount of voter suppression is 0%.”

Left with no other option, Lake finds herself in the awkward position of blaming her loss on an unusual culprit for election deniers: voter suppression.

If you didn’t know better, you might think Lake was a champion of access to voting, supporter of funding for election officials and advocate for same day voter registration. She is none of those.

To the contrary, Lake has spent the last two years trafficking in election denying lies, bringing litigation to undermine voting rights and encouraging Arizona and other states to restrict, rather than expand, voting access. Though she now criticizes the state for its slow pace of counting ballots, she sued last summer to ban the use of electronic voting machines in Arizona and require that voters fill out paper ballots that are hand counted. Such a hand count would take weeks, if not longer, to complete.

Questions: What planet to these radical right Republican freaks live on? How stupid do they think we are?

Answers: Not Earth, and shockingly stupid.

America's creeping Christian theocracy

Key points are these:

• The radical right, theocratic Christian nationalist (RRTCN) movement holds religious freedom above all other rights

• The RRTCN movement intends to completely eliminate all vestiges of what little is left of the separation of the state from a hyper-aggressive church that wants to control tax revenues as much as possible

• The RRTCN movement employs ruthless but superb dark free speech tactics; for example, it portrays trivial and minor burdens on religious freedom, e.g., legalizing same-sex marriage and having to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, as horrendous persecution that prevents innocent people from being religious as they desire

• The RRTCN movement is open about its intent to use the superior rights of religious freedom to discriminate against and oppress non-White people, non-heterosexual people, women and non-Christian religions and people 

• The RRTCN movement already has enormously extended the scope of the religious freedom concept from human beings to legal entities like businesses and corporations, thereby enabling religious business owners and executives to oppress and discriminate against unworthy people in the name of their religious freedom

This article summarizes some of how the radical right Supreme Court is quietly but relentlessly forcing most of those key points to integrate into American society, government and business. MSNBC writes:

While [the Supreme Court] claims to be a nonpartisan, neutral arbiter of the law, its conservative majority was deliberately cultivated to expand religious freedom for conservative Christians at the expense of the rights of those deemed less worthy of protection.

The possible revelation of the Hobby Lobby decision — in which the court held that private corporations can demand religious exemptions from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer health plans cover contraceptives — is the second Supreme Court leak in the news this year. The other involved an even greater victory for the religious right: the unsolved mystery of who leaked a draft of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the right to an abortion. Both rulings were penned by Alito.

The Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores already had been the subject of an intense public relations strategy to portray the contraception coverage requirement as a dire threat to the religious freedom of pious business owners. Even before the litigation, the store was a beloved brand in the Bible Belt and beyond. Its billionaire founder, David Green, was long a respected figure and a major donor in the evangelical world. Even without Schenck’s help, Hobby Lobby had already become a poster child for a burgeoning campaign to convince the court to enlarge religious freedom rights for conservative Christians.

When, in 2012, evangelical and Catholic activists attacked the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the notion of corporate religious rights was a novel legal theory. But when the court held oral arguments two years later, it was immediately clear that a majority of the court had embraced this theory. What changed? Hobby Lobby became a landmark Supreme Court decision owing to a well-funded network of lawyers and activists, and their shared ideologies with the justices who were selected for their positions on issues most important to conservative religious groups.

Before landing at the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby won its case in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in an opinion authored by future Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose nomination was heralded by advocates for this newly expanded religious freedom. The company was represented by Kyle Duncan, a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. That organization’s board members include Leonard Leo, the dark money-backed activist whose list of suggested judicial nominees was adopted by then-President Donald Trump — who nominated Duncan to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In recent decades, activists on the right have successfully eroded church-state separation with increasing speed. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, decided earlier this year, the court sided with a high school football coach demanding to pray with players on the field after games. These lawyers and activists have opened the door for religious business owners to refuse to serve LGBTQ people, such as 2018’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court ruled for a baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. That door could open wider in the upcoming 303 Creative v. Elenis, which concerns a web designer’s claims that a nondiscrimination law violates her free speech rights. Leo has been open about his hostility to Supreme Court precedent legalizing contraception and same-sex marriage. In a concurrence in Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas echoed that hostility, even criticizing the 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that made anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional.

Hobby Lobby was a key inflection point in an ongoing and largely successful right-wing campaign to undermine the separation of church and state and expand recognized religious rights of conservative Christians who claim that abortion, contraception and LGBTQ rights infringe on their religious freedom. Alito’s dinner with Schenck’s emissaries is a symptom of cozy relationships, but the wider activism that shaped the court is a far more significant threat to the court’s willingness to protect the rights of all Americans. Requiring the justices to adhere to a judicial code of conduct to curb conflicts of interest and appearances of partiality would be a welcome reform. But fixing the undemocratic ailments of the Supreme Court will require much more.

In my opinion, the US is well on its way to becoming a Christofascist theocracy. We are not all that far off of that cherished goal of CN elites. What the rank and file knows or is thinking is hard to tell, but most appear to be oblivious to most or all of what is going on here. Mostly clueless seems an apt label.

The RRTCN movement via a series of Supreme Court decisions has neutered the establishment clause.[1] That had been the main obstacle in fusing the Christian church with the federal government. With that gone, nothing but time stands in the way of the radical Republicans who dominate the Supreme Court from converting America from a democratic country with secular law to a kleptocratic Christian theocracy with Christian Sharia law. 

I see no way to stop this Christofascist anti-democratic, anti-secular movement from destroying America as we know it. The RRTCN movement controls the Supreme Court. The clear intent and sacred dogma is to remake the US mostly into some cruel theocratic beast straight out of some time(s) in the past, maybe the Dark Ages, and/or maybe the 1700s or 1800s.

Q: Unreasonable hyperbole or plausible possibility? 

Footnote: 
1. Wikipedia: 

In United States law, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, together with that Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, form the constitutional right of freedom of religion. The relevant constitutional text is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

The Establishment Clause acts as a double security, prohibiting both religious abuse of government and political control of religion.

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