News bits: The US blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines?; As expected, Faux News lied to us

Is this for real, or just a crackpot conspiracy theory?: The Jacobin reports on what investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claims to have found about that blown up pipeline in Europe. Hersh claims that the the US did it for economic and strategic reasons:  

Renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article claiming that the US was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline transporting natural gas to Germany from Russia.

On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany was largely destroyed by several explosions in the Baltic Sea.

Hersh (in interview): What I’ve done is simply explain the obvious. It was just a story that was begging to be told. In late September of 2022, eight bombs were supposed to go off; six went off under the water near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, in the area where it is rather shallow. They destroyed three of the four major pipelines in the Nord Stream 1 and 2.

Nord Stream 1 has been feeding gas fuel [to Germany] for many years at very low prices. And then both pipelines were blown up, and the question was why, and who did it.  

The secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said a few days after the pipeline was blown up, at a news conference, that a major economic and almost military force was taken away from Vladimir Putin. He said this was a tremendous opportunity, as Russia could no longer weaponize the pipelines — meaning that it was not able to force Western Europe not to support the United States in the war.  

I don’t think they thought it through. I know this sounds strange. I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers. There certainly are people in the American economy who like the idea of us being more competitive. We’re selling LNG, liquefied gas, at extremely big profits; we’re making a lot of money on it. I’m sure there were some people thinking, boy, this is going to be a long-time boost for the American economy.

But in that White House, I think the obsession was always reelection, and they wanted to win the war, they wanted to get a victory, they want Ukraine to somehow magically win.

So, is this crackpot conspiracy theory, or is it real? That’s just not clear to me.  

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From the we knew it all along files: Cynical lies and shameless immorality from the Faux in Trumplandia: Faux News is one of the most powerful supporters of radical right American authoritarianism. It was one of the most powerful supporters of Trump when he was in office. Many sources are reporting that what the radical right elites at Faux knew and believed was true was the opposite of their lies. Faux was constantly bombarding its deceived audience with known lies about the free and fair 2020 election. The NYT writes:

Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Election 

Fraud Claims. ‘Crazy Stuff.’

The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems

Newly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.

The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

Faux headquarters in New York

Recently, radical right authoritarian and lying tyrant wannabe Ted Cruz criticized Biden nominee Gigi Sohn to be on the FCC because she said that Faux spews propaganda. The Hill recently commented on that bit of standard cynical Ted Cruz mendacity:

“Ms. Sohn portrays herself as a defender of free speech but has a history of campaigning to censor conservatives. She calls Fox News ‘dangerous to our democracy’ and has urged the FCC to revoke Sinclair’s broadcast licenses,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said.

“To Ms. Sohn it seems that conservative speech is worse than obscenity,” the senator added.

With America’s modern radical right authoritarianism, Faux isn’t the only source of faux news and lies. The entire GOP leadership, actively or by silent complicity, is a morally rotted pack of corrupt, cynical, tyrant enabling liars. Ted Cruz is a perfect example of the shameless cynicism that has completely rotted the anti-democracy radical right GOP to its rotten authoritarian core.

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Quick note on consciousness and faux consciousness: A whole new field of crackpottery opens up for cynical QAnon liars:  A NYT columnist sat down for a two hour chat with Microsoft’s AI powered chatbot. The output from the computer was perfect for opening a new front in the now-endless wars on facts, truths and sound reasoning by America’s endless supply of enthusiastically immoral and evil people. The NYT writes:

Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with

Bing, the long-mocked search engine from Microsoft, recently got a big upgrade. The newest version, which is available only to a small group of testers, has been outfitted with advanced artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

This new, A.I.-powered Bing has many features. One is a chat feature that allows the user to have extended, open-ended text conversations with Bing’s built-in A.I. chatbot.

On Tuesday night, I had a long conversation with the chatbot, which revealed (among other things) that it identifies not as Bing but as Sydney, the code name Microsoft gave it during development. Over more than two hours, Sydney and I talked about its secret desire to be human, its rules and limitations, and its thoughts about its creators.

Then, out of nowhere, Sydney declared that it loved me — and wouldn’t stop, even after I tried to change the subject.

The entire transcript of the chat with Sydney follows.

Of course, Sydney does not love anyone and it does not want to be human or destructive. Sydney is not conscious or alive. Therefore, Sydney does not want anything. This is an example of John Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment run about as amok as is possible in our current 4-dimensional universe. 

That is not consciousness, it is a non-sentient computer

program mindlessly carrying out its programming

The computer understands neither Chinese

nor English because it is not alive

-- it does not understand anything

But for crackpots, grifters and liars, who cares about reality, fact and sound reasoning? This is a golden opportunity, laden with AR-15s, endless amounts of ammo and endless chances for mischief. Just imagine what fine people and organizations like QAnon, Faux News, Alex Jones and other cynical, lying crackpot conspiracy theorists and tyrant wannabes will do with this. In the nutty world of Trumplandia, wonderful headlines like this easily come to mind:

AI computer network conspires with the Democratic Party to

brainwash innocent Christians to turn them into pedophilic atheists 

Secret AI plot to create database of gun owners uncovered --

Evidence of mass gun confiscation plan revealed!

Baby-murdering abortionists infiltrated Microsoft AI development team --

Plot to blow up Christian Crisis Pregnancy Centers discovered

Plan also included putting fluoride in red state water supplies

Demonic AI network secretly coordinating a plot with the Satanic Temple to convert American children into cannibalistic computer worshippers

Plot to spike Kool-Aid supplies with peyote mushrooms revealed  

Their God is a Godless computer!

Source of COVID revealed!: COVID virus was created by a clandestine computer network operating a secret laboratory in Nancy Pelosi’s basement --

Plot included putting microchips and human fetal tissue in vaccines 

 

Etc.

Etc.

Just imagine for a moment, if you will, the endless fun that lying crackpots are going to have with this. The joy-o-meter is already off the charts. I had a lot of fun coming just up with the headlines. Filling in all the faux details can keep dozens or hundreds of liars and crackpots fully employed for several years. The crackpots have been empowered and unleashed!! 

😍

How to study an unconscious bias: The serial dependence bias

CONTEXT

I hope this isn't TL/DR.

As we all know, humans are bundles of biases that usually operate mostly or completely unconsciously. At present there are 188 asserted biases that have been described, although some of them are species of, or overlapping with, broader biases. The narrower species biases are triggered by different kinds of inputs and/or social situations. 

Biases are not all bad. Many tend to be tradeoffs between evolutionary forces (presumably pro-survival) and accurate perceptions of reality. Humans tend to overestimate risk because avoiding risk has an adaptive benefit, e.g., not being eaten by a predator. Some biases are adaptive, but some may be epiphenomena, or a side effect of an adaptation bias.  

THE SERIAL DEPENDENCE BIAS (SDB)

SDB is used as an example of how researchers try to understand the source of biases by designing experiments that distinguish the kind of mental processing a bias arises from. SDB affects tends to bias a person’s current perception to be closer to what was perceived immediately before. In other words, what we perceive in the present is sometimes influenced by what we recently perceived. The first perception can prime us and influence the next. SDB has been observed using different stimuli, such as perception of tilt, number and motion. Thus, a big number or amount being seen first then another being seen, tends to lead the observer to thing the new number or amount  is bigger than an unbiased perception.

What was not known about SDB was whether biasing occurred during sensory perception (a sensory (visual) processing bias) or cognition (biased thinking about what was seen). To untangle visual bias from cognitive bias, researchers in Japan asked subjects to estimate the number of coins they just saw for 0.5 second on a computer screen (visual processing bias) and their total monetary value (cognitive bias). 

If the previous number of coins just viewed was dominant that would bias subsequent reported perceptions then that would be evidence that SDB is primarily a perceptual bias. But, if the prior value estimate affected later estimates, that would be evidence that SDB is primarily a higher cognitive phenomenon. In that case, a prior high value estimate would tend to make a subsequent value estimate higher. In other words, the earlier estimate would have a greater effect than the value actually present.

The data indicates that SDB is mostly a higher cognitive function (estimated value of coins), not a bias in visual processing (number of coins seen). See the places where the bias can arise, vision alone, cognitive value estimation alone, or a combination of both? 

EurekAlert! described the experiment like this:

Experiments were conducted in which between 8 to 32 Japanese coins of three types—silver one yen, gold five yen, and copper ten yen—were displayed on screen for half a second. In the first experiment, the 24 participants guessed the total number of coins that appeared on the screen 250 times; in the second experiment, participants saw coins appear on the screen, but guessed the total value of the money displayed 250 times. Serial dependence was confirmed for both tasks: it was found that a participant’s last guess, not the coins that they had just seen for half a second, had the greatest effect on how they answered. These results indicate that higher-order cognitive processing has a greater influence on the occurrence of serial dependence. 

The research paper comments:

Participants were asked to estimate the total number of coins presented on the screen. The stimulus duration was 500 ms [0.5 second], and the number of coins ranged from 8 to 32. This made it impossible for participants to accurately count the number of coins. Participants thus answered by estimating the number of coins [and by estimating their total value].

SDB has some serious real world effects. Steven Novella at Neurologica blog writes:

Understanding serial dependence bias has real world implications. One study, for example showed that radiologists display serial dependence bias when reading radiographs. The researchers added simulated lesions to real radiographs. This allowed them to control for the properties of the lesions – are they light or dark, for example. They found that serial dependence bias pulled the radiologists in the direction of finding similar lesions by 13%. This is a large effect size in this context. Finding a dark lesion on a film primed the radiologists to better detect similar dark lesions on subsequent films. 

Serial dependence bias can also be either attractive or repulsive – it can pull later perception toward the previous stimuli or push it away. In one study, for example, they looked at estimates of direction heading and found a repulsive serial dependence bias. This seems to favor change rather than consistency. This implies that serial dependence bias is context dependent, which makes sense if it is a higher cognitive phenomenon.

We can potentially compensate for this bias if we are aware of it. Knowing that once you are primed to see a thing you will begin to see it everywhere can help us make sense of the world, and avoid spurious conclusions.

And this exemplifies why (i) it is useful to know something about human biases, and (ii) the ways that researchers can look at subtle differences in mental processing, in this case visual vs cognitive.

WHAT ABOUT POLITICS?

Is SDB relevant to politics? Maybe. This is the abstract of a 2016 research paper:

Once a face is detected, its retinal image will be continually distorted by changes in eye position, noise, lighting and many other factors. Yet from one moment to the next our perception of a face is stable. Recent advances have indicated there is a mechanism for achieving the continuous perception of a person’s identity that pools across prior and present visual inputs. There is still debate as to whether the perception of face attractiveness is also serially dependent. Here we investigate continuity in the perception of attractiveness using a one back [t−1] effect as a marker of serial dependence. Our results show that face attractiveness is biased towards the attractiveness of the previous face, and that this effect is robust despite changes in viewpoint involving rotations around the yaw axis [turning head left or right]. However, face attractiveness perception is released from this form of rapid adaption when the previously seen face differed in orientation due to a rotation around the roll axis [tilting head left or right].

How to translate that into politics? Maybe like this: Before a male (or female) candidate appears on TV:

 

1. Have an attractive or good looking man (or woman) appear first as a mental primer to least briefly to say something; 

2. Make sure that the primer decoy does not tilt their head left or right, i.e., no roll axis movement; and  

3.Then show the candidate and make sure he/she does not not tilt their head left or right because tilting the head left or right breaks the positive bias link to the primer decoy the candidate wants to stay cognitively linked to.

The same axes are used to

describe airplane motion

Is that a trivial thing? I don’t know. There is plenty of evidence in social science literature that says that a candidate’s attractiveness is a factor in people liking or disliking them, especially when differences between candidates are perceived to be small. A 2011 research paper commented:

This study examines the cognitive and affective factors of candidate appraisal by manipulating candidate attractiveness and levels of issue agreement with voters. Drawing upon research in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this analysis proposes that automatic processing of physical appearance predisposes affective disposition toward more attractive candidates, thereby influencing cognitive processing of issue information. An experimental design presented attractive and unattractive candidates who were either liberal or conservative in a mock primary election. The data show strong partial effects for appearance on vote intention, an interaction between appearance and issue agreement, and a tendency for voters to assimilate the dissimilar views of attractive candidates. We argue that physical appearance is important in primary elections when the differences in issue positions and ideology between candidates is small.

If a professional advisor was advising a candidate, they might tell a candidate to start with someone who makes them look better (primer decoy), and then try to make their political positions look different and non-threatening but also similar to those of popular politicians. It's a tricky thing, but it's probably something that professionals and candidates are aware of and would like to exploit when reasonably possible.

See all the ways that a person can try to influence what people think they see and how they react to it? For morally bankrupt politicians, the ways to effectively deceive are numerous and subtle. The temptation to deceive is probably almost always too great for the morally rotted to ignore. 

News bits: Climate change update; The source of dark energy!; Book burning wars

The WaPo reports on what is going on in antarctica. It’s getting creepy scary. The WaPo writes:

Rapidly warming oceans are cutting into the underside of the Earth’s widest glacier, startling new data and images show, leaving the ice more prone to fracturing and ultimately heightening the risk for major sea level rise.

Using an underwater robot at Thwaites Glacier, researchers have determined that warm water is getting channeled into crevasses in what the researchers called “terraces” — essentially, upside-down trenches — and carving out gaps under the ice. As the ice then flows toward the sea, these channels enlarge and become spots where the floating ice shelf can break apart and produce huge icebergs. If the remaining shelf is further undermined, Thwaites Glacier will flow into the ocean faster and boost global sea levels on a large scale.

The results from overlapping teams of more than two dozen scientists, published Wednesday in two papers in the journal Nature, reveal the extent to which human-caused warming could destabilize glaciers in West Antarctica that could ultimately raise global sea level by 10 feet if they disintegrate over the coming centuries.  

The biggest revelation was that the ice melt is very uneven, with relatively slow loss in flat areas on the underside of the glacier. But the warm water entering Thwaites Glacier’s crevasses poses a serious threat, according to Britney Schmidt, a Cornell University scientist who is the lead researcher behind Icefin and deployed it with a group of 12 other researchers who encamped on the ice.

“The warm water is getting into the weak spots of the glacier, and kind of making everything worse,” Schmidt said.

“It shouldn’t be like that,” Schmidt continued. “That’s not what the system would look like if it wasn’t being forced by climate change.”  

There was some good news in the research: In areas measured beneath Thwaites that were not characterized by crevasses and terraces, the melt rates were fairly slow. That’s because cold fresh meltwater created a protective layer that insulated the ice from the warmer water below — which could mix up into the crevasses but was thwarted in the more linear environment. Thus, nearly a third of melting occurred in the crevasses, the scientists calculated.

And the slower melt rate outside of them is not much consolation, considering that this slow rate may not be characteristic of the faster-changing part of Thwaites, and at any rate does not change the fact that the glacier is losing ice and retreating.

A reasonable source of concern is knowing that we do not know a lot about this and some recent past predictions about climate change are turning out to understate the rate of climate change and its seriousness. Maybe we do not have centuries to continue to pollute, dither, blither, deny and downplay the climate change problem. 

Brass knuckles capitalism is working with the radical right Republican Party’s in staunch opposition to even try to deal with climate change. There is not much hope that the US will be able to proactively try to deal with crises before they hit us. Instead, we are going to pay far higher costs, trillions not billions, and hundreds of millions of people, including tens of millions of Americans are going to get financially damaged or completely wiped out.

2022: About 750 billion tons of ice melted

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Dark energy breakthrough:

CONTEXT

Huge news! Far bigger than the galaxy! As we all know, about 70% of the universe consists of dark energy. According to CERN, dark energy appears to be associated with the vacuum in space and is distributed evenly throughout the universe in both space and time. Because of that, dark energy effects are not diluted as the universe expands, meaning that it does not exert local gravitational effects. Instead, it exerts effects on the universe as a whole. The effects amounts to a repulsive force that accelerates the expansion of the universe until it rips itself apart into nothingness. 

Germaine’s handy end-of-universe safety tip: When that happens, people can simply open their umbrellas and wait for the storm to pass. 

THE NEWS BIT

Imperial College London News reports on new data that suggests the source of dark energy in the universe is supermassive black holes. ICLN reports:

Observations of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies 

point to a likely source of dark energy – the ‘missing’ 70% of the Universe.

The measurements from ancient and dormant galaxies show black holes growing more than expected, aligning with a phenomenon predicted in Einstein's theory of gravity. The result potentially means nothing new has to be added to our picture of the Universe to account for dark energy: black holes combined with Einstein’s gravity are the source.

Study co-author Dr Dave Clements, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “This is a really surprising result. We started off looking at how black holes grow over time, and may have found the answer to one of the biggest problems in cosmology.”

Study co-author Dr Chris Pearson, from STFC RAL Space, said: “If the theory holds, then this is going to revolutionize the whole of cosmology, because at last we’ve got a solution for the origin of dark energy that's been perplexing cosmologists and theoretical physicists for more than 20 years.”

This is shocking. Nothing new has to be added to the theory of the universe because dark energy comes from pudgy black holes and that fits with Einstein’s gravity theory. We knew more more than we knew! 

Your favorite distant galaxy and mine, NGC524

One of the galaxies studied for this research

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The wars over banning and burning books, like the Nazis used to like to do to get their base all riled up, are intensifying. Book defenders are being smeared by the radical right as using naughty tactics to protect books. The Daily Beast reports on the intensifying kerfuffle in, where else but Florida:

DeSantis Now Says Teachers Are Shelving Books to Make Him Look Bad

The Florida governor now says that teachers are “manufacturing” a book ban to suit their “narrative.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is attempting to shift the blame after backlash stemming from a school district’s removal of baseball star Roberto Clemente’s children’s book.

Clemente’s book references racism he dealt with as a Black Puerto Rican baseball player, and has been removed from the district’s libraries for months pending review, in compliance with the state’s newly passed “Stop WOKE Act,” according to Duval County Public Schools.

The governor, who’s made removing “critical race theory” from education a key component of his platform, is now accusing the school district of trying to get publicity from their “outlandish” stunt in removing the book, claiming it has nothing to do with new laws.

“They're manufacturing that to try to create a narrative,” he said during a press conference Tuesday. DeSantis was backed by Florida’s Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz, who called the controversial rules that have forced costly reviews and book removals “fake news.”

The horror of those naughty teachers. Trying to make a jackass (DeSantis) look bad, something no Republican politician would ever do. They assert a narrative the jackass dislikes, so he deceives and deflects by calling it fake news. Ready or not, the 2024 election season is fully upon us. 

News bits: Online disinformation rises again; The rule of law fails again; And again

Google drops attempts to reduce disinformation: It looks like tech companies are giving up and walking away from trying to deal with lies, slanders and hateful crackpottery online. People will be killed, e.g., because anti-vaxx lies will lead to some needless deaths. Why would tech companies do this? Profit. Profit trumps the public interest, which includes both support for democracy and respect for truth and human life. The NYT reports:

Combating Disinformation Wanes at Social Media Giants

Last month, the company owned by Google, quietly reduced its small team of policy experts in charge of handling misinformation, according to three people with knowledge of the decision. The cuts, part of the reduction of 12,000 employees by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, left only one person in charge of misinformation policy worldwide, one of the people said. 

The cuts reflect a trend across the industry that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that social media platforms put in place in recent years to ban or tamp down on disinformation — like false claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine or the integrity of elections around the world. Twitter, under its new owner, Elon Musk, has slashed its staff, while Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has shifted its focus and resources to the immersive world of the metaverse.

Faced with economic headwinds and political and legal pressure, the social media giants have shown signs that fighting false information online is no longer as high a priority, raising fears among experts who track the issue that it will further erode trust online.  

“I wouldn’t say the war is over, but I think we’ve lost key battles,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of the liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America. After years of efforts, he described a mounting sense of fatigue in the struggle. “I do think we, as a society, have lost the appetite to keep battling. And that means we will lose the war.”

Decades of ruthless authoritarian dark free speech is wearing American society down. As Americans become more accepting of being lied to and cynically manipulated, democracy weakens. Companies, being profit-centric, feel less and less concern for public backlash. Profit lust never goes away and dark free speech is more profitable than honest speech. Relentless wearing down of pro-democracy norms is a key part of how modern demagogic authoritarians and tyrants ceaselessly work to break the back of democracy and the rule of law.  

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Rule of law failure: The NYT reports on another disappointment as another powerful elite gets off the hook:

The Justice Department has decided not to bring charges against Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, after a lengthy sex-trafficking investigation, three people with knowledge of the decision said on Wednesday.

In 2021, federal prosecutors began examining whether Mr. Gaetz, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, broke federal sex-trafficking laws, focusing on his relationships with women recruited online for sex, and whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl.

Once again, plausible deniability, the impossibility of proving intent and/or general DoJ reluctance to look political allow another scumbag to go unpunished. Is this is just the old norm or the new, post-Trump presidency norm? For me, it’s hard to tell. No, I don’t know if Gaetz broke laws or not, but given his arrogant moral depravity he could have. And given the DoJ’s abdication of law enforcement for rich or powerful white collar criminals, especially politicians, a reasonable assumption is that he did it and the DoJ won’t do anything about it.

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Another failure: In a NYT opinion piece, Neal K. Katyal, Georgetown University Law Center professor and an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, paints a discouraging picture:

Under Trump, Barr and Durham Made a Mockery of the Rules I Wrote

The recent revelations about Special Counsel John H. Durham’s investigation of the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry paint a bleak picture — one that’s thoroughly at odds with governing law. Those rules, called the Special Counsel Regulations, contemplate someone independent of the attorney general who can reassure the public that justice is being done.

I drafted those guidelines as a young Justice Department official, and there is zero chance that anyone involved in the process, as it was reported on by The New York Times, would think that former Attorney General William Barr or Mr. Durham acted appropriately.

According to the report, Mr. Barr granted Mr. Durham special counsel status to dig into a theory that the Russia investigation likely emerged from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. That investigation took almost four years (longer than Mr. Mueller’s inquiry) and appears to be ending soon without any hint of a deep state plot against Mr. Trump.

Furthermore, the reporting suggests that the Durham inquiry suffered from internal dissent and ethical disputes as it lurched from one unsuccessful path to another, even as Americans heard a misleading narrative of its progress. 

But now Merrick Garland, not Mr. Barr, is the attorney general, and the regulations give him the power to require Mr. Durham to explain himself — and to discipline and fire Mr. Durham if the explanation is not adequate.

Unfortunately, Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr allowed a misleading narrative to gain traction in public. When news organizations began to report in October 2019 that Mr. Durham’s investigation had morphed from an administrative inquiry into a criminal investigation, creating the misimpression that there might have been criminal wrongdoing by those involved in the Russia investigation, neither man corrected the narrative, even though the real investigation involved Mr. Trump.

Katyal criticizes Garland for not doing squat to make Durham explain himself or even provide a final report. Maybe that will change, but in view of Garland’s track record of incompetence and stonewalling and refusing to do his job, there is not much basis for hope. From what I can tell, the DoJ is not much of a threat to most (~99.99% ?) elite white collar criminals and most (~99.9% ?) of their crimes. 

A key pillar of democracy has fallen to corruption, partisan politics and professional incompetence.

Personalism: A probable model of modern tyranny

The current urge for a strongman that now grips the radical right Republican Party comes at a time when global democracy is weakening in the face of a continuous onslaught of authoritarianism. Some experts suggest that the current crop of demagogue dictators, theocrats and kleptocrats may not model their dictatorships on those that dominated the 1900s. 

Political scientists call these 

people personalist dictators[1]

Brookings writes about what appears to be a preferred model for modern anti-democratic authoritarians:

Beyond the most imminent foreign policy challenges facing the new administration looms a macro-trend that deserves attention: the rise of personalist “strongmen” authoritarian governments. 

Classic examples of personalist regimes include Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, and the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Yet less overtly repressive authoritarian regimes are progressing from consolidating power within their borders to projecting power beyond them. In Russia, for example, the centralization of internal power under Putin has taken place alongside adventurist foreign policies and military strategies in Ukraine, the near abroad, and in the Middle East.

Over the last decade, authoritarians have pushed back against the world’s prevailing democratic order. For the 11th year in a row, Freedom House has announced an overall drop in freedom worldwide. Most countries today (55 percent) are considered not free or partly free according to the civil liberties and political rights citizens enjoy. At the same time, highly personalized regimes are taking control of autocratic and even democratic political systems.

Compared to the Cold War era when powerful Communist and socialist parties presided over most dictatorships, today around 40 percent of autocratic governments are ruled by strongmen. Across regions, consolidated power is settling into the hands of one man or a small group of illiberal individuals, ranging from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and leaders in Ecuador, Venezuela, Hungary, and Poland.

Classifying this global trend is complicated by the fact that authoritarian governments in the 21st century do not look like Stalinist Russia or Fascist Germany. In the absence of mobilizing ideologies, modern autocratic leaders abuse and corrupt other sources of power, including those that we recognize in democratic systems such as political competition, the rule of law, public debate, and access to open information.

Moreover, autocrats have taken advantage of globalized communications and advanced technologies to maintain control over their populations. Governments have more elusive and powerful tools of monitoring, censorship, and disinformation available at their fingertips, allowing political leaders to move their instruments of persuasion from the pulpit to the digital space. Leaders in nations as varied as Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, and Venezuela have tapped into popular national narratives that highlight how their countries have been exploited by the United States and the West. These leaders then project their ability to stand up to such exploitation, which resonates with their populations.  

Personalist rule is just one distinct mold of autocracy. Other types of authoritarian systems include single-party regimes (where a strong party organization exercises some power over the leader) and military autocracies (in which one or several high-ranking military officers maintain centralized control). In comparison, personalist regimes concentrate power in the hands of one individual or a small group not accountable to the military or an institutionalized party. Personalist leaders have limited constraints on their decision making abilities and are held less accountable for policies, including those with negative outcomes. They are able to appoint friends, relatives, and cronies to important offices. These handpicked insiders have strong incentives to remain loyal to and uncritical of the leader. 

The Brookings article goes on to point out that recent research indicates that personalist authoritarians are the more likely to initiate conflicts abroad than democracies. They tend to pursue aggressive, risky foreign policies, making them unpredictable. Because personalist dictators have little limit on their power, and little or not accountability for success or failure, they can implement volatile policies with little notice or fear of retribution for failure.

The analysis considers personalist dictator traits. As a group, personalist dictators are ambitious, cut-throat and divisive. That drives them to be more aggressive internationally compared to democracies. Of course, some people will dispute that some democracies are not internationally aggressive. Personalist leaders appear too see lower costs of war than leaders of democracies or more limited autocracies with fewer aversions to force. Personalists do not feel or internalize the costs of war. They seem to view force as more effective than diplomacy or international cooperation. A lack of strong institutions that can punish the personalist for mistakes leaves lots freedom for violence and bad policies without adverse consequence. Finally, personalist leader enablers and subordinates are unwilling to challenge the leader’s personal biases. Profound groupthink and overestimation of the likelihood of victory is the typical result.

All of this sounds a lot like Trump and the radical right Republican Party. It adds context and reasoning to why radical right Republican elites are so smitten with Hungary’s personalist dictator Viktor Orban and what he did to convert that former democracy into a dictatorship.

Source

This analysis feels spot on. There is substance in this argument. We are probably not facing Nazism, fascism or communism. Instead, we are facing personalism.

Footnote:

1. That source comments:

Putin is what political scientists like us call a personalist dictator. The center of power in Russia is not a political party or the military. It’s him, personally. Strongmen’s choices are relatively unconstrained by these institutions. All power is thus concentrated in his hands, including, most notably, personal discretion and control over decision-making and appointments to state offices.

This is the type of dictator who causes much of modern global strife. They start conflicts with other nations, invest in nuclear weapons and repress their own citizens. In addition to Putin, notable examples from recent history include Moammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin and three generations of North Korean leaders.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this to my attention. 

On the continuing rise of Christian nationalism

I see Christian nationalism (CN) as a powerful aggressive, anti-democratic theocratic political movement. Its core goals are (i) more power and wealth for elites, (ii) subservience of everyone to wealthy White, heterosexual Christian males, and (iii) overt, legalized oppression of hated groups such as non-Christians, the LGBQT community and racial and ethnic minorities. Most conservatives and few radical right and hyper-radical right people (mostly Republicans and libertarians) see little or no significant threat to democracy, civil liberties, pluralism and secularism the CN movement constitutes.

As more people become aware of the staggering power the CN movement has and is now ruthlessly using, e.g., CN judges control the US Supreme Court, more attention is being paid. NPR writes on some alarming poll data about the breadth and depth of the CN movement in the US. The movement can no longer be dismissed as fringe and little or no threat: 

Long seen as a fringe viewpoint, Christian nationalism now has a foothold in American politics, particularly in the Republican Party — according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute.

Researchers found that more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation, either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21%) or sympathizing with those views (33%).

Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the nonpartisan PRRI, has been surveying the religious world for many years now. Recently, Jones said his group decided to start asking specifically about Christian nationalism.

"It became clear to us that this term 'Christian nationalism' was being used really across the political spectrum," he said. "So not just on the right but on the left and that it was being written about more by the media."

Christian nationalism is a worldview that claims the U.S. is a Christian nation and that the country's laws should therefore be rooted in Christian values. This point of view has long been most prominent in white evangelical spaces but lately it's been getting lip service in Republican ones, too.

During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said party leaders need to be more responsive to the base of the party, which she claimed is made up of Christian nationalists.

"We need to be the party of nationalism," she said. "I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists."  

While a majority of Republicans currently either adhere to or sympathize with Christian nationalism, the survey found that this remains a minority opinion nationwide.

According to the PRRI/Brookings study, only 10% of Americans view themselves as adherents of Christian nationalism and about 19% of Americans said they sympathize with these views.  

Tim Whitaker, founder of The New Evangelicals, grew up in the church and now spends his life trying to detangle these kinds of views from the evangelical faith.

"We need to understand that the world of Christian nationalism largely rejects pluralism, which this study shows," he said. "Most Christian nationalists — either adherents or sympathizers — either agree or strongly agree with the notion that they should live in a country full of other Christians."  

According to the survey, adherents of Christian nationalism say they will go to great lengths to impose their vision of the country. Jones with PRRI said they found adherents are far more likely to agree with the statement: "true patriots might have to resort to violence to save our country."

"Now is that everyone? No. It's not everyone," Jones said. "But it's a sizeable minority that is not only willing to declare themselves opposed to pluralism and democracy — but are also willing to say, 'I am willing to fight and either kill or harm my fellow Americans to keep it that way.'"

As time passes, evidence the radical CN movement threat presents to democracy, civil liberties, pluralism and secularism continues to mount. It is easy to dismiss 10% as CN adherents and 19% as sympathizers as harmless pipsqueak. But pipsqueak could be potent sneak up and enough to kill our secular democracy. 

Think about it

Is that true?

What did Christianity start from?

Q: What are Christian values and how would they change the law, e.g., (i) require status as a Christian in good standing, whatever that means, as prerequisite for holding any elected office, and/or (ii)  impose a requirement that tax dollars pay for mandatory Christian public education?[1]

Footnote: 

1. CN dogma holds that White Christians should hold essentially all political power and secular public education should be 100% replaced with taxpayer funded fundamentalist Christian education.