News bits: Republican doublespeak, etc.

Republican doublespeak in Florida:

Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps

The AP writes:

Florida lawmakers released a massive property insurance bill that would create a $1 billion reinsurance fund, seek to reduce insurance lawsuits and force more people out of the state-created insurer of last resort even if it means property owners end up paying more.

The 123-page bill was filed Friday night, less than three days before lawmakers begin a special session on insurance, property tax relief for Hurricane Ian victims and reducing tolls for frequent commuters.

“The goal we all share is for Florida to have a robust property insurance market that offers homeowners the opportunity to shop for insurance that meets their needs and budget. We also want to make certain that when damage occurs, claims are paid promptly and fairly,” Republican Senate President Kathleen Passidomo said in a news release.

What?? Republicans claim to want a property insurance market that offers affordable insurance choices by forcing people out the the state-created, lower-cost insurer of last resort? If people in Florida get screwed, and they will, they voted for it. They deserve it. This is how Republicans treat average people: → → Pull yourself up by your bootstraps you lazy bums.

Thoughts about the limits of radical right

Christian bigotry

A WaPo opinion by E.J. Dionne articulates the issue nicely:

.... there is no obvious limiting principle for when religious convictions should allow exemption from anti-discrimination laws. If this exemption applies to same-sex couples, why not, for example, to interracial couples? Or to couples from different religions? Or for couples who opt for civil rather than religious marriages? Why not to other forms of discrimination that have nothing to do with marriage?

But such questions also invite us to examine the case from a different perspective: Why do conservative Christians want this exemption in the first place?

That question is neither naive nor rhetorical. Many traditionalist Christians view homosexual relationships as sinful. I think they are wrong, but I acknowledge that this is a long-held view. Yet many of the same Christians also view adultery as a sin. Jesus was tough on divorce. “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder,” he says in Matthew’s Gospel.

But unless I am missing something, we do not see court cases from website designers or florists or bakers about refusing to do business with people in their second or third marriages. We do not see the same ferocious response to adultery as we do to same-sex relationships. Heck, conservative Christians in large numbers were happy to put aside their moral qualms and vote twice for a serial adulterer. Why the selective forgiveness? Why the call to boycott only this one perceived sin?

What we are seeing in the opposition to same-sex marriage is less about religious faith than cultural predispositions.

Given the vast, uncheckable power the radical right Christian nationalist Supreme Court has, we are probably going to start to see the limits of hate and bigotry-inspired discrimination. It will take a few years, but some clarity will probably come. Maybe the day will come when Christians are willing and empowered to shun people in their second or third marriages and serial adulterers, but with the option to not discriminate against the bad ones they choose to forgive and/or ignore. 

For context, IMO intentional discrimination like what Christian nationalists employ against the LGBQT community is bigotry.

Bigotry: Unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group

Brain science: Misinformation tends to be more

powerful than information: The illusory truth effect

A WaPo article comments:

Blame the brain.

Many of the decisions we make as individuals and as a society depend on accurate information; however, our psychological biases and predispositions make us vulnerable to falsehoods.

As a result, misinformation is more likely to be believed, remembered and later recalled — even after we learn that it was false.

“On every level, I think that misinformation has the upper hand,” said Nathan Walter, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University who studies the correction of misinformation.

No one is completely immune to falsehoods, in part because of how our cognition is built and how misinformation exploits it.

We use mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to make many of our judgments, which benefit us. But our cognitive tendencies can make us susceptible to misinformation if we are not careful.

“By default, people will believe anything they see or hear,” said Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who specializes in understanding how people respond to corrections of misinformation. In our day-to-day lives, “that makes a lot of sense because most things that we’re exposed to are true,” he said.

At the same time, the more we see something repeated, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. This “illusory truth effect” arises because we use familiarity and ease of understanding as a shorthand for truth; the more something is repeated, the more familiar and fluent it feels whether it is misinformation or fact.

“There is only typically one true version of a claim and an infinite number of ways you could falsify it, right?” said Nadia Brashier, a psychology professor at Purdue University who studies why people fall for fake news and misinformation. “So, if you hear something over and over again, probabilistically, it’s going to be the true thing.”

But these shortcuts do not work so well in our current political environment and social media, which can repeat and amplify falsehoods. One study found that even a single exposure to a fake headline made it seem truer. Politicians often repeat lies and seem to be aware of the power of the illusory truth effect, Brashier said.

Of course marketers, ideologues, politicians, propagandists, liars, grifters, demagogues, tyrants and kleptocrats all know about the power of the illusory truth effect. They do not just seem to be aware. They are practiced experts. 

Advances in deepfake technology: Posting photos of yourself poses a risk

ARS Technica writes:

AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease

AI tech makes it trivial to generate harmful fake photos from a few social media pictures

If you're one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it.

If you haven't been paying attention to the rapid progress in AI image generators recently, seeing what we've pulled off above might be very alarming. Basically, computer scientists have figured out how to generate new photorealistic images of anything you can imagine by teaching AI using real photos, and the technology has accelerated rapidly over the past year.

By some counts, over 4 billion people use social media worldwide. If any of them have uploaded a handful of public photos online, they are susceptible to this kind of attack from a sufficiently motivated person. Whether it will actually happen or not is wildly variable from person to person, but everyone should know that this is possible from now on.  

Right now, you can try to take all your photos offline. Maybe that's a good idea. But for some people, like politicians or public figures, it's not feasible. And in other cases, friends may have published photos of you in group settings that are outside of your control.

If there are photos of yourself on the internet, don't antagonize people with computer skills. They can make your life unpleasant or miserable if they are motivated to do so.

Evidence of paranormal phenomena?

Professor Ian Stevenson

Scientific American writes:

If you’re anything like me, with eyes that roll over to the back of your head whenever you hear words like “reincarnation” or “parapsychology,” if you suffer great paroxysms of despair for human intelligence whenever you catch a glimpse of that dandelion-colored cover of Heaven Is For Real or other such books, and become angry when hearing about an overly Botoxed charlatan telling a poor grieving mother how her daughter’s spirit is standing behind her, then keep reading, because you’re precisely the type of person who should be aware of the late Professor Ian Stevenson’s research on children’s memories of previous lives.

Stevenson, who died in 2007, was a psychiatrist by training—and a prominent one at that. In 1957, at the still academically tender age of 38, he’d been named Chair of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After arriving in Charlottesville, however, his hobbyhorse in the paranormal began turning into a full-grown steed. As you can imagine, investigating apparitions and reincarnation is not something the college administrators were expecting of the head of their mental health program. But in 1968, Chester Carlson, the wealthy inventor of the Xerox copying process who’d been introduced to Stevenson’s interests in reincarnation by his spiritualist wife, dropped dead of a heart attack in a Manhattan movie theatre, leaving a million dollars to UVA on the condition it be used to fund Stevenson’s paranormal investigations. That money enabled Stevenson to devote himself full-time to studying the minds of the dead, and over the next four decades, Stevenson’s discoveries as a parapsychologist served to sway more than a few skeptics and to lead his blushing acolytes to compare him to the likes of Darwin and Galileo.

Stevenson’s main claim to fame was his meticulous studies of children’s memories of previous lives. Here’s one of thousands of cases. In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, coworkers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way.

This Sri Lankan case is one of Stevenson’s approximately 3000 such “past life” case reports from all over the world, and these accounts are in an entirely different kind of parapsychological ballpark than tales featuring a middle-aged divorcée in a tie-dyed tunic who claims to be the reincarnation of Pocahantas. More often than not, Stevenson could identify an actual figure that once lived based solely on the statements given by the child. Some cases were much stronger than others, but I must say, when you actually read them firsthand, many are exceedingly difficult to explain away by rational, non-paranormal means. Much of this is due to Stevenson’s own exhaustive efforts to disconfirm the paranormal account. “We can strive toward objectivity by exposing as fully as possible all observations that tend to weaken our preferred interpretation of the data,” he wrote. “If adversaries fire at us, let them use ammunition that we have given them.” And if truth be told, he excelled at debunking the debunkers.

I’d be happy to say it’s all complete and utter nonsense—a moldering cesspool of irredeemable, anti-scientific drivel. The trouble is, it’s not entirely apparent to me that it is. So why aren’t scientists taking Stevenson’s data more seriously? The data don’t “fit” our working model of materialistic brain science, surely. But does our refusal to even look at his findings, let alone to debate them, come down to our fear of being wrong? “The wish not to believe,” Stevenson once said, “can influence as strongly as the wish to believe.”

Stevenson’s magnum opus, published in 1997, was a 2,268-page, two-volume work called Reincarnation and Biology. Many of his subjects had unusual birthmarks and birth defects, such as finger deformities, underdeveloped ears, or being born without a lower leg. There were scar-like, hypopigmented birthmarks and port-wine stains, and some awfully strange-looking moles in areas where you almost never find moles, like on the soles of the feet. Reincarnation and Biology contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos.

Stevenson, an expert on psychosomatic medicine, suspected strong emotions are (somehow) related to a child’s retention of past-life memories. Traumatic deaths, he thought, leave an emotional imprint. Indeed, most of the children he studied claimed that they had met a violent end previously. There was also a gap of a few years between lives; reincarnation is never immediate. And for the most part, souls seemed to stay local. That's to say, the “previous personality” often lived in a distant village, but not quite so far away as to require a passport. Oftentimes, Stevenson observed, the child had habits and fears linked to the nature of death. Those who said they’d drowned in a previous life had an unusually intense fear of water; those who were stabbed displayed a crippling knife phobia, and so on. There were even three cases of children who’d reacted violently when they’d unexpectedly crossed paths with their own “murderers.” It’s bizarre to picture preschoolers lunging for the throats of adult strangers. Nonetheless, it made sense to Stevenson, since in his view, the children were attacking those who’d gotten away with their murders.

Interestingly, and contrary to most religious notions of reincarnation, there was zero evidence of karma. On the whole, it appeared to be a fairly mechanical soul-rebirthing process, not a moralistic one. What those mechanisms involve, exactly, is anyone’s guess—even Stevenson’s. But he didn’t see grandiose theorizing as part of his job. His job, rather, was simply to gather all the anomalous data, investigate them carefully, and rule out, using every possible method available to him, the rational explanations. And to many, he was successful at doing just that. Towards the end of her own storied life, the physicist Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf—...., surmised that Stevenson’s work had established that “the statistical probability that reincarnation does in fact occur is so overwhelming … that cumulatively the evidence is not inferior to that for most if not all branches of science.” Stevenson himself was convinced that, once the precise mechanisms underlying his observations were known, it would bring about “a conceptual revolution that will make the Copernican revolution seem trivial in comparison.” It’s hard to argue with that, assuming it ever does happen.

What is a rational person to make of evidence like this? Stevenson does not sound like a crackpot, unless defines people who do paranormal research as crackpots. He did the only thing he could do within the limits of modern science. He collected the data and verified as much of it as he could. He was honest about bits of data, e.g., false assertions of fact, that could be construed to be weak or anomalous. Then he found that he could not explain all the data by known science, anomalous or not. So, he just left all of it to others to explain.

The consensus knee jerk reaction probably is to reject the data because current science cannot explain it. Stevenson was probably right when he commented that the wish not to believe something can influence as strongly as the wish to believe. I sure don’t know how to explain this.

News bits: Sleazery in and out of court, whistleblower punishment, etc.

Lawyers spitting venom at each other

Department of Justice lawyers apparently finally ran out of patience with the sandbagging and lying that Trump’s sleazebag lawyers and propagandists routinely engage in. The DiJ has asked the judge to hold Trump’s sleazebag attorneys in contempt of court. That prompted this poison dart from one of the sleazebags:

The request came after months of mounting frustration from the Justice Department with Trump’s team — frustration that spiked in June after the former president’s lawyers provided assurances that a diligent search had been conducted for classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club and residence. But the FBI amassed evidence suggesting — and later confirmed through a court-authorized search — that many more remained.  

Trump is under investigation for three potential crimes: mishandling classified documents, obstruction and destruction of government records.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the former president’s lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent.” He added: “This is a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Sleazebag Cheung should be jailed for (i) lying about being cooperative and transparent, and (ii) referring to a legitimate investigation as a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen. Unfortunately, given how sleazy the courts allow people to be, one can be pretty sure sleazer Cheung won't face any punishment for his current blast of lies. After all, he spewed that venom outside of court, and there's far more leeway for sleazery outside court than inside. Well, at least that's how is supposed to be.

Whack the whistleblower

The NYT writes:

It was a big deal that Reality Winner’s probation officer let her travel from Texas to her sister’s house in North Carolina over Thanksgiving. She is, after all, a traitor, in the eyes of the law.

Ms. Winner was arrested in 2017 for leaking to journalists a classified intelligence report on Russian hacks into U.S. election infrastructure and has been confined ever since — in a Georgia county jail, a federal prison, a halfway house and, most recently, in a probation so strict that she often feels strangled.

Still, Ms. Winner viewed the trip with the wariness of an underdog conditioned to expect any small kindnesses to turn against her.

“It wasn’t my idea,” she said flatly by phone. “I preferred not to go.”

Oh, and another thing, she said pointedly: She went during Thanksgiving but for her niece’s birthday.

“I hate Thanksgiving,” she said. “I hate the food. I hate the vibe.”

This side of Ms. Winner becomes familiar after a while: the cranky prison yard impulse to let everyone know just how much she doesn’t care and can’t be hurt. It poorly camouflages the battered idealist who, despite disillusionment and harsh punishment, appears bent on finding some way to make herself useful on a grand scale. She never had much money, education or connections, but in her own way, she has repeatedly tried to save the country — first as a military linguist guiding foreign drone attacks and later by warning the public that Donald Trump was lying about Russia.  

She still isn’t allowed to talk about her military service or the contents of her leak, leaving me to puzzle over why a young woman who still guards the secrets of the terrorism wars would risk everything to expose a five-page National Security Agency file on efforts to hack voter registration systems.

Ms. Winner mailed the report anonymously to The Intercept, where a reporter took the ill-advised step of giving a copy to the N.S.A. for verification. The authorities almost immediately zeroed in on her. She was charged under the Espionage Act, the same laws used to prosecute the Rosenbergs, Aldrich Ames and pretty much any other 20th-century spy you can name. The act has long been criticized for lumping together leaks motivated by public interest and, say, peddling nuclear secrets to a foreign government. Ms. Winner is considered a prime example of its downside.

She pleaded guilty and was given 63 months in prison, the longest federal sentence ever for the unauthorized release of materials to the media. (The former C.I.A. director David Petraeus got off with probation and a fine for sharing eight notebooks full of highly classified information with his biographer, who was also his mistress.)

There is just so much wrong with this. If Winner got 63 months in the slammer, why didn't Petraeus get 63 years? She was a low level person working to inform the American people of grievous lies by Trump, while Petraeus was a military general and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency working to make money for himself. She was selfless and altruistic, while he was selfish and sleazebag. Petraeus betrayed us, Winner did not. Again, these observations by Brooke Harrington about rich and powerful people rings absolutely true:

“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.”

The whacked whistleblower

Electoral reform looks set to die in the Senate

The Hill writes:

Fizzling voting rights push angers Black lawmakers

The move by House Democratic leaders to fast-track a defense policy bill without tackling voting rights has ruffled some members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who saw the must-pass Pentagon package as their last best chance to address election protections for several years to come.

The critics are grumbling that party leaders simply haven’t been aggressive enough in efforts to force the Senate to adopt the various voting rights bills passed by the House this Congress. Some are also suggesting that leadership has taken their support for granted.

“It seems like the Black caucus has always supported leadership in what it’s tried to do, but leadership of this caucus hasn’t returned the favor, always,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), a member of both the Black caucus and the liberal “squad.” He added, “And so now we’re in a precarious position where voting rights will continue to be under attack — state to state — will continue to be gutted.”

At issue was the fate of legislation — named after the civil rights icon and late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) — to restore those parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act nullified by the Supreme Court in 2013. House Democrats had passed the bill this Congress, but it was blocked in the Senate, where GOP support is needed to overcome the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold.

In time, the Democrat’s failure to protect voting rights could easily turn out to be catastrophic. Maybe so catastrophic that America turns into a some form of a kleptocratic, White Christian theocratic dictatorship with permanent Republican Party rule. The Republican Party undeniably intends to neuter elections and non-Republican voters as much as they possibly can. Evidence of that intent includes (1) all the laws state Republican legislatures have passed since the 2020 elections, and  (2) the fact that the radical right Republican Supreme Court significantly nullified election protections in 2013. 

But who knows, maybe somehow the Senate will snatch this from the jaws of massive defeat and turn it into a win. But if that is going to happen, Schumer better get it done real soon. Time is almost out. Given vehement radical right Republican Party opposition to protecting elections and voter’s rights, things don’t look good for Team Democracy. Team Kleptocracy-Theocracy-Tyranny has got to be feeling pretty good about its prospects right now.

Sinema leaving Democratic Party, will register as independent

 HOT OFF THE PRESSES!

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has announced that she will leave the Democratic Party and officially register as an independent.

“I’ve registered as an Arizona independent. I know some people might be a little bit surprised by this, but actually, I think it makes a lot of sense,” Sinema said in an interview Thursday with CNN’s Jake Tapper in her Senate office.

“I’ve never fit neatly into any party box. I’ve never really tried. I don’t want to,” she added. “Removing myself from the partisan structure — not only is it true to who I am and how I operate, I also think it’ll provide a place of belonging for many folks across the state and the country, who also are tired of the partisanship.”

The announcement from Sinema comes just days after Democrats solidified a 51-49 majority in the upper chamber with Sen. Raphael Warnock’s win in Georgia.

Sinema declined to say that she will caucus with Democrats like independent Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Angus King (Maine), but the Arizona senator said she plans to continue in her committee assignments.

“When I come to work each day, it’ll be the same,” Sinema said. “I’m going to still come to work and hopefully serve on the same committees I’ve been serving on and continue to work well with my colleagues at both political parties.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3768328-sinema-leaving-democratic-party-will-register-as-independent/

How should the Dems handle this? Be upset, and alienate her? Or treat her respectfully so she will be more inclined to vote on their agenda? Is she being true to herself or being a traitor? 

Discrimination wars: What happens when powerful Republicans feel discrimination they hate

It is clear that radical right Christian nationalists want to discriminate against people and groups they hate and want to oppress. But here is the flip side of how powerful radical right Christian nationalists see it when discrimination goes against their chosen people and ideologies, even when it is false.

The context here is this: Sen Tom Cotton, a potential radical right Republican Christian nationalist criticizes Kroger for firing two Christian employees for refusing to wear rainbow gay pride flag logos. In essence Cotton tells Kroger to go pound sand because Republican s will not help Kroger with a massive merger that Democrats oppose.

Think about it. This is how the discrimination wars are going to play out. If powerful Republican politicians and elites see discrimination they dislike, they are going to punish people and interests the believe are responsible and deserving of regulations by Democrats. Whether the merger is in the public interest or not is beside the point for congressional Republicans. The only thing that counts is if a company toes the rigidly ideological and extremist Republican Party line.

For context, Kroger denies that the logo had nothing to do with gay rights or support for gays. It was just a bit of advertising it wanted employees to wear to help boost good will and sales. There was nothing religious or pro-gay about it. Marketing research suggested the heart logo, which was not a rainbow. Only Sky writes:

Kroger to pay $180K for firing Christians who wouldn’t wear heart symbol

The two Christian employees falsely claimed the heart symbol promoted the LGBTQ community. (It didn’t.)

It was just a multi-colored heart symbolizing their corporate values.

The facts don’t matter, though, because the Christians in question, Trudy Rickerd and Brenda Lawson, claim (wrongly) that they were being told to support LGBTQ rights (which they were not).

This is not the gay pride logo

This is Kroger's marketing ploy

This is the usual gay pride logo

See the difference?

Sometimes this is a variant gay pride logo

See the difference?

This is how irrational and enraged congressional Republican are. They believe lies and then punish the innocent for their false beliefs. The question here is not what Kroger did to two employees, it is whether its proposed merger would be anti-competitive and illegal under anti-trust law. The two things are different, but that makes zero difference to foaming at the mouth, radical right Christian nationalist Republicans with power. They want power and wealth. They will not hesitate one second to kill democracy, inconvenient truth and anything else that gets in their delusional enraged way.

One question that pops right up is why did Kroger pay $180K? Probably because public relations and profit trump inconvenient facts, true truth and sound reasoning. That's probably why. 

Again for the hundredth or thousandth time here, the business of business is profit, not what is right or wrong, good or bad, moral or immoral, or democratic or tyrannical. And the business of radical right Republican Christian nationalists is accumulating power and wealth, not governing in the public interest or in defense of democracy, truth, the rule of law, the environment, or civil liberties.

A NASA gay pride logo

See the difference?

The Satanic Temple's gay pride logo

See the difference?

A slew of gay pride logos

See the difference in every single one?

None are Kroger's marketing ploy

I've said it before dozens of times and say it again, inconvenient facts, truth and sound reasoning are irrelevant to radical right, Christian nationalist and/or brass knuckles Republican elites. Their eyes are on the prize. The Prize? More power and wealth for themselves. Much more. And, at our expense.