News bits: Trump fatigue among supporters; Congressional Republican calls for dissolution of the Union; etc.

How Trump supporters see it: One topic of persistent, high personal interest is what supporters of American radical right authoritarianism are feeling and thinking. Most of that group, maybe about 95%, is mostly anti-democratic. Most of the group, maybe ~98%, is rigidly anti-inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning. Because of that, this group appears to be necessary to support the radical right’s push to get rid of secular democracy and install some form of plutocratic, theocratic Christian-capitalist dictatorship. What these people think and feel is critically important.

The WaPo discusses this issue and reports:

Feeling ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘fatigue,’ some GOP voters look beyond Trump

In recent focus groups of persuadable Republican primary voters from key early states, most stood by their past support for Trump, but the future was a different issue

Nearly all of the focus group participants had supported Donald Trump in 2020 and said they would vote for him again against President Biden in 2024. But things got complicated when the moderator asked for the one emotion they now felt when they saw Trump on television or computers screens.

“That’s a hard one. That’s a hard one,” said Angela, 53, from South Carolina. “Just because of the way they’ve done him.” She spoke of Trump’s opponents who had tried to hurt him both in office and since he left the White House. “It’s more of an embarrassment for him for what they put him through. I feel embarrassed for him.”

Deborah, 67, also from South Carolina, described herself as “stumped” by the question. “I was proud when he was our president, but you know, there’s so many things … the way they treated him and everything, ” she said, alluding to Trump critics.

Two people picked “pride” and “hopeful” as their emotions upon seeing Trump, but the rest pulled from the other end of their emotional range, with words like “anxious,” “neutral,” “frustrated,” “nervous,” “overwhelmed,” “fatigue,” “embarrassed,” “annoyed,” and “maddening.” Most were careful not to criticize Trump directly — they praised his presidency and had critical views of Biden — but something had shifted. They spoke of him as a victim with flaws, not as the unassailable political alpha leader that had taken the party by storm in 2016.

The important points: 

• Trump supporters mostly blame his critics for unfairly or unjustifiably criticizing him and they are getting fatigued by it, but most see little or no merit in the criticisms. 

• Some supporters see some flaws in Trump but they stand by their past support and at least implicitly see his critics’ arguments and evidence as not persuasive (motivated reasoning at work).

• Because most in this group stand by their past support and see no reasons to back away from the Republican Party, they now look for a different radical right authoritarian demagogue they can support.

This information is in complete agreement with what the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit found about why Faux News reported lies about the 2020 presidential election. When Faux reported facts and truths that were inconvenient, its audience started to migrate to Newsmax. That scared the crap out of Faux, which immediately switched from some truth to mostly comforting lies to keep its audience. Collectively, all of this is solid evidence that the minds of most radical right supporters (~95% ?) are firmly closed, badly deceived, and heavily biased toward authoritarianism. 

This is not good news.

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Breaking up the Union: The Hill reports:

Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday suggested the U.S. “separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” re-upping her suggestion of a “divorce” to solve the nation’s division.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) on Monday hit back at Rep. Greene’s calls for a “national divorce” of Republican and Democratic states, saying the lawmaker’s rhetoric is “evil.” “This rhetoric is destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil. We don’t need a divorce, we need marriage counseling. And we need elected leaders that don’t profit by tearing us apart. We can disagree without hate. Healthy conflict was critical to our nation’s founding and survival,” Cox wrote on Twitter.

At least one Republican politician thinks keeping the Union together is a good idea. One can only wonder how most see it.

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Israel inches toward dictatorship: The NYT reports on an Israeli radical right movement to limit the power of independent courts and shift that power to politicians.

Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Jerusalem for a second straight Monday as Israel’s far-right government pushed forward with a divisive plan for a judicial overhaul that critics say will weaken and politicize the country’s courts and undermine its democratic foundations. 

One bill would change the makeup of a nine-member committee that selects judges to reduce the influence of legal professionals and give representatives and appointees of the government an automatic majority. The change would effectively allow the government of the day to choose judges.

The other bill would strip the Supreme Court of its power to strike down basic laws passed by Parliament.

The authoritarianism in this is clear. Autocrats and theocrats want power. Democracy gets in the way, so democracy has to be weakened. The same thing is happening in America, except here authoritarians and theocrats have taken control of the US Supreme Court. The US court is accumulating power for itself and its ideological agendas, brass knuckles capitalism and Christian nationalist theocracy. The end game is the same, theocratic dictatorship, but the strategy and tactics differ.

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Weaponizing the Ohio train derailment -- Republican hypocrisy is off the charts (as usual): The radical right led by Faux News has weaponized the train derailment in Eastern Ohio, a white conservative part of the state. The WaPo writes:

.... in certain right-wing media precincts, the [train derailment] disaster is about something else: A campaign of discrimination being waged against White people.

“East Palestine is overwhelmingly White, and it’s politically conservative,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson recently said of the roughly 4,700 residents of the disaster zone. “That shouldn’t be relevant,” he added, but “it very much is.”

It very much isn’t. But ever since the Feb. 3 disaster, Carlson and his comrades have sought to transform East Palestine’s plight into a tale about “woke” Democrats abandoning White communities in the virtuous, forgotten heartland.

What this illustrates is how the right uses race-baiting to deceive people into forgetting that Democrats are now the far more committed party when it comes to investing in such left-behind communities.

The story goes on to report that Republicans are savaging Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for failing to push for more stringent safety standards. That is true and I've recently criticized Buttigieg here for that manifestation of Democratic Party neoliberalism, which is pro-corporation and anti-consumer.

But the same complaint coming from Republicans is pure hypocrisy in the name of cynical, toxic  politics. Republicans hate safety regulations more than the neoliberal Democrats. If the president and Transportation Secretary were Republicans, there would no complaints about this from Republicans. They rarely criticize their own, especially when their own ideology is at fault. But because the Dems are in power, the GOP cynically complains about regulations that they would otherwise hate and get rid of to the maximum extent possible.

Republican lies and hypocrisy here are blatant, shameless and cynical. Unfortunately, they are effective.

More about that defamation lawsuit against Faux News

From page 149 of the Dominion lawsuit

against Faux: Comments by Tucker Carlson

At its heart, the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Faux for defamation is about profit and the capitalist mindset. Since a moderately redacted version of the 192 page lawsuit was released a few days ago, experts have had time to read and analyze the evidence and what it means. It is clear that what Faux did was done solely for profit, knowing that truth had to be sacrificed to protect profit. But one other very important point has become just as clear. A large segment of the Faux audience was leaving Faux because they could not handle truth. They simply left Faux when truth was presented to them. Faux was desperate to keep that audience to keep its revenues.

The Guardian writes:

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said Dominion Voting Systems’ brief requesting summary judgment against Fox News for defamation – and $1.6bn – is “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark” in the history of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

The case concerns Fox News’s repetition of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines.

Tribe said the filing “establishes that Fox was not only reckless” but also that producers, owners and personalities were “deliberately lying and knew they were lying about the nature of Dominion’s machines and the supposed way they could be manipulated”.

Tucker Carlson called the charges “ludicrous” and “off the rails”. Sean Hannity texted about “F’ing lunatics”. A senior network vice-president called one of the stories “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS”.

“This is the most remarkable discovery filing I’ve ever read in a commercial litigation,” said Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School lecturer, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor and litigator with clients including CBS and the Associated Press.

“A summary judgment motion by a plaintiff in this kind of case is almost unheard of. These suits usually fail because you can’t prove the company you’re suing knew they were spreading falsehoods. That you would have evidence they knew it was a lie is almost unheard of … in this case the sheer volume of all the email and text messages is staggering.”

Tribe agreed: “This is one of the first defamation cases in which it is possible to rule for the plaintiff on summary judgment. This is not a request to go to trial. There is no genuinely disputed fact. The defendants were deliberately lying in a manner that was per se libelous and they clearly knew it.”

The biggest irony revealed by the Dominion filing is that Carlson and colleagues quickly decided the greatest threat to their network was one of the only times it reported an accurate scoop: that Arizona had gone for Biden, at 11:20 pm on election night.

Four days later, another Murdoch property, the New York Post, asked Trump to stop the stolen election claim. Rupert Murdoch thanked the Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott, for making sure the editorial got wide distribution, according to the Dominion filing.

But later that day, as Fox executives realized they were losing viewers, the tide began to shift.

“Getting creamed by CNN!” Murdoch messaged Scott.

In a message to his producer, Carlson sounded terrified: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”

And so on 8 November Maria Bartiromo featured the Trump adviser Sidney Powell and said: “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”

That alternate reality would be repeated for months. Perhaps most devastating of all is Dominion’s account of what happened on 12 November, after the reporter Jaqui Heinrich “correctly factchecked [a Trump] tweet, pointing out that top election infrastructure officials said that there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Carlson was incensed. He messaged Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously what the fuck? Actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”

Hannity complained to Scott, who said Heinrich had “serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted”.

Faux executive: The North Koreans do a more 

nuanced news show than Lou Dobbs

That’s really bad

(page 152 of the lawsuit)

What about the Faux audience?

As its audience was abandoning Faux, executives and show hosts were aware of it. That scared them. They believed that lost audience meant lost revenue. But what is puzzling is that Faux does not make much money from ads. Over 90% of its profit comes from cable subscriptions, not eyeballs on the screen or ads. The NYT wrote in 2021: 

Fox News still makes up the vast majority of Fox Corporation’s profits. The cable division that houses the news network generated $899 million in pretax income, accounting for 95 percent of the company’s total pretax profit.

Even if viewers rejected Faux for telling the truth, they would still be stuck paying for Faux on cable TV. Few people would bother to try to unbundle Faux from their cable subscriptions. Even if they tried, they would fail. We’re all stuck either with paying Faux or dropping our cable subscriptions.

The Faux audience does not want to hear

about a peaceful transition of power

(page 155 of the lawsuit)

Although Faux viewers will vehemently deny it, they cannot handle inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. The psychological discomfort is more than they are willing to accept. And it is not just Faux that is intolerant. America’s entire radical right seems to be the same way. That's why I’ve been banned or blocked at 9 out of 9 radical right politics websites. This isn’t just about Faux. It is about public support for radical right authoritarianism grounded in some combination of brass knuckles capitalism and Christian nationalist fundamentalism. Both are staunchly anti-democratic.

So, are most of those temporarily disgruntled Faux viewers good, decent Americans who have been bamboozled and betrayed? Or, are most of them mostly something else? If something else what?

About all those embarrassing internal Faux messages

One final thought. Are the people who work at Faux stupid for putting all of their thoughts in writing? Or, are they just arrogant jackasses who believed they were above the law and merely in cynical pursuit of profit, based on lies being sold as truth?

I bet that Faux has a shiny new, but unwritten, internal rule about putting things in writing. The new rule is this: 

Never, ever, put in writing something 

you do not want anyone outside the company to see.

If it has to be said, say it verbally.

That is a rule I always tried to adhere to in my professional career. No one had to tell me that. Common sense made it painfully obvious. When I had bad things to say, I preferred to say it in person. Failing that, I used the phone and hoped the line wasn’t tapped. Failing that, I usually said nothing to anyone.

News bits: Climate change causes inflation; Capitalism vs. labor; etc.

Climate change is a source of inflation: Various news sources are beginning to report on climate change being a factor in inflation for some products. The NYT writes:

How Climate Change Is Making Tampons (and Lots of Other Stuff) More Expensive

When the Agriculture Department finished its calculations last month, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and other products.

In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74 percent of their planted crops — nearly six million acres — because of heat and parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change.

That crash has helped to push up the price of tampons in the United States 13 percent over the past year. The price of cloth diapers spiked 21 percent. Cotton balls climbed 9 percent and gauze bandages increased by 8 percent. All of that was well above the country’s overall inflation rate of 6.5 percent in 2022, according to data provided by the market research firms NielsenIQ and The NPD Group.  

“Climate change is a secret driver of inflation,” said Nicole Corbett, a vice president at NielsenIQ. “As extreme weather continues to impact crops and production capacity, the cost of necessities will continue to rise.”

Halfway around the world in Pakistan, the world’s sixth-largest producer of upland cotton, severe flooding, made worse by climate change, destroyed half that country’s cotton crop.

The NYT article goes on to point out that huge areas of the US are verging on a return to 1930s dust bowl conditions that drove millions of people to move out of drought-stricken areas. Since then, the Southwestern cotton crop depended on water pumped from the huge Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies eight western states from Wyoming to Texas. But now the Ogallala is in decline partly because of climate change. The 2018 National Climate Assessment, now asserts that “major portions of the Ogallala Aquifer should now be considered a nonrenewable resource.” 

An abandoned farm in west Texas

Dust bowl days return

Restating the obvious, the radical right Republican Party and the carbon energy sector continue to deny, distort, downplay, and oppose federal and private sector efforts to deal with climate change. The GOP and Exxon-Mobil say it’s a hoax and not something that aversely affects people’s lives. If there are any bad impacts, The GOP blames Biden, Obama, Hillary and liberals generally, all of whom should be locked up. 

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Capitalism hates organized labor: This is something I've seen in person. A labor union starts talking to employees. Management instantly freaks out and calls a meeting of all managers. The CEO bashes the union, scares the crap out of everyone, and tells the management team to fight like hell and fire anyone who seems to be sympathetic to a union appeal. I was in the room at the time. It was and still is illegal to fire employees for union organizing activities. But the law just doesn’t matter very much. Common Dreams writes:

A federal judge issued a nationwide order late Friday barring Starbucks from firing union organizers—a ruling that affirmed a long-established law which workers say the coffee chain has violated hundreds of times since unionizing efforts were first launched in Buffalo, New York in 2021.

U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith ruled in Michigan that former shift supervisor Hannah Whitbeck must be reinstated in her position, which she was fired from in April 2022.

Whitbeck and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Detroit Regional Director Elizabeth Kerwin argued that the former worker had been fired because of her involvement in union organizing at the store where she worked in Ann Arbor—one of 366 Starbucks stores across the U.S. where employees have organized to create bargaining units. Nearly 300 stores have won union elections so far.

Starbucks Workers United, the employees’ union, has accused the company of firing more than 200 employees in illegal retaliation for organizing.

Lots of big companies, probably most, break laws many times when labor unions try to organize. Capitalism hates organized labor for two obvious reasons, wealth and power. Capitalism routinely causes elites to breaks laws to keep wealth and power concentrated with the elites.

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From the deep distrust files: The NYT writes about what deep distrust of government can lead people to do: 

Many in East Palestine, Skeptical of Official Tests, Seek Out Their Own

The moves reflect residents’ deep-seated mistrust of government screenings of toxic chemicals and fears of long-term effects from the train derailment

When a team came by the morning of Valentine’s Day to test the air quality in Maggie Guglielmo’s store a few blocks from where a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed this month, the smell was undeniable.

“The air monitoring team left within 10 minutes due to the unpleasant/overwhelming odor,” the team of government and private environmental experts wrote in its report, describing a “super glue/pool/fruity-like odor.” But there was no detection of significant amounts of vinyl chloride, a colorless gas carried by the train, or other toxic chemicals.

Reflecting the fundamental mistrust residents have in the railroad company Norfolk Southern and the government, Ms. Guglielmo is one of several people who live in the region who are seeking independent tests or are looking for ways to conduct their own.

Fomenting distrust of the government has been a core goal of radical right propaganda for decades. The problem is serious. It is made worse by a government and corporations that routinely deceive, lie and betray the public. There are good reasons for skepticism. Neoliberal and brass knuckles capitalist ideologies are undeniably compatible with deceiving and betraying the public. Unfortunately, deep distrust of government is a democracy killer. Demagogic tyrants and opportunists rush in to fill the void that distrust creates. It’s a lose-lose situation for citizens and democracy, but a win-win for the other guys and tyranny. Ronald Reagan, 1986, fomenting distrust:

The most terrifying words in the English language are: 

I’m from the government and I’m here to help.

Actually, the most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the tyrants and capitalists and I’m here to help.

News bits: Regarding that defamation lawsuit against Faux; Koch bros authoritarianism; etc.

Faux derangement syndrome or just the profit motive?: This is a snippet from the 192 page Dominion lawsuit at pages 118-119:

If any doubt existed about what [Sydney] Powell would say in the interview, certainly none existed by the time the pre-taped interview aired. No such doubt ever existed, though, because Powell sent Bartiromo an email prior to the interview with the subject line Election Fraud Info which Bartiromo forwarded to Grossberg with information from a woman claiming Dominion's software flips votes from Trump to Biden and tying Dominion to a conspiracy theory involving Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein. Ex.154 . In the same email, Powell's singular source explained that Roger Ailes (who, as previously noted, had died years ago) huddles every day with Rupert Murdoch about airing anti-Trump material, and that Justice Scalia was killed in a human hunting expedition. Id.at FNN001_00000010 . Powell's source also explained that she gets her information from experiencing something like time-travel in a semi-conscious state, "allowing her to see what others don't see, and hear what others don't hear, and she received messages from the wind. Id.at FNN001_00000011. Bartiromo read this email at the time: she responded to Powell saying she had shared this very imp[ortant] info with Eric Trump. Ex.259. Powell provided Bartiromo with no other evidence for her claims about Dominion. Ex.98,Bartiromo 147:6-15. At her deposition, Bartiromo admitted that this email is not evidence for Powell's claims [really?? seems like solid evidence to me!!], and indeed was nonsense and inherently unreliable. 133:25-134 :13 ,141:21-24 . Grossberg likewise conceded that this isn't something that I would use right now as reportable for air, no. Ex.121,Grossberg 148:15-17. And Clark ,the executive directly responsible for the show, admitted that this is not sufficient to make the severe allegation that Dominion Voting machines rigged the election and flipped votes, and if he had known that this was the sole support for the crazy theories, he would not have allowed that claim to be aired. Ex.106, Clark 209:21-210:17,213:3-11. (emphasis added)

This is from pages 29-30:

G. This Dominion shit is going to give me a fucking aneurysm. 

By November 12, Dominion became a focal point of discussion within multiple shows at Fox. Spurred by the November 8 Bartiromo broadcast, the wild Dominion allegations entered the mainstream. That day, Ingraham's producer Tommy Firth texted Ron Mitchell, one of the Fox executives responsible for overseeing Ingraham's show. Firth bluntly captured the dilemma: This dominion shit is going to give me a fucking aneurysm --many times as I've told Laura bs, she sees shit posters and trump tweeting about it-- [redacted]. (emphasis in original) 

I would love to see what was redacted. I bet it’s juicy good stuff. Shit posters and Trump in the same breath. I like it.

In recent days, various sources have reported that Faux aired garbage based on things like messages from the wind. That changed to lies and crackpottery because early Faux reporting that there was no widespread election fraud was causing its audience to flee to OAN and other even more crackpot and lies-based “news” sources. That scared the hell out of Faux executives who believed the fleeing audience would destroy the image of its brand. In other words, it was all about profit and nothing but profit. Truth did not matter to Faux. Neither did the health of democracy. Only profit mattered.

I cannot overstate the fact that for the most part, capitalism does not inherently care about anything or anyone other than wealthy or powerful people. That includes democracy, truth, human life, the environment and modern civilization. The exceptions do not disprove the rule.

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Radical right authoritarianism: There is a heck of a lot of lies, deceit and money behind the radical right anti-democracy, pro-tyranny/plutocracy/theocracy political movement currently centered in the Republican Party. The Guardian writes: 

Koch brothers’ advocacy group courts far-right Republicans it vowed to thwart

Americans for Prosperity Action recently invited two politicians who tried vigorously to overturn the 2020 presidential election

Americans for Prosperity Action, founded by Republican megadonors Charles Koch and David Koch, who died in 2019, would be seeking to “turn the page on the past”, it said, in remarks that were covered extensively, and favorably, in the US media.

But it didn’t take much to expose the hypocrisy of AFP Action’s commitment to move away from Maga politicians who, it said, “go against core American principles”.

Present at the network’s meeting in Palm Springs were two of the reactionary and far-right Republicans AFP Action claims it is trying to thwart.

In Eric Schmitt, a Missouri senator, and Andrew Ogles, a congressman from Tennessee, AFP Action had invited two newly elected men who tried vigorously to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and seem to have little interest in turning the page on history.  

Schmitt, who has invoked the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, has already backed Trump for 2024, while Ogles, a culture warrior whose campaign pitch was that the US needs to “go back to honoring God and country”, giddily accepted Trump’s endorsement last year.

If, in inviting two politicians who appear to embody the essence of Trumpism, AFP Action exposed a separation between what it says and what does, then it should come as no surprise.

This has been standard Koch bros. (estimated net worth $68 billion) lies and deceit tactics for decades. The monster claims it is pro-democracy and pro-tolerance, but it constantly supports anti-democratic authoritarianism, intolerance and overt racism. And, as usual, us dumb ass taxpayers support the Koch monster’s attempt to destroy democracy, install tyranny and enslave and defraud the masses. This is beyond disgusting.

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Republicans try to cancel inconvenient free speech:  The Guardian writes:

Republicans take aim at risque jokes and romance novels with anti-sex bills

Bills are part of religious right’s post-Roe strategy, with most prevalent ones relating to age verification of sex-related websites

A wave of proposed legislation pushed by Republicans across the US at the state level is aimed at outlawing aspects of sexuality that could have a huge impact on Americans’ private lives and businesses.

The bills are part of a post-Roe nationwide strategy by the religious wing of the Republican party, now that federal abortion rights have fallen. They range from banning all businesses that sell sex-related goods to anti-drag queen bills. Tyler Dees, an Arkansas state senator who wrote an anti-porn bill said: “I would love to outlaw it all,” referring to porn.

The most prevalent bills relate to age verification of sex-related websites. Seventeen states drafted porn age-verification bills, many inspired by Louisiana’s law that went into effect in January. Louisiana’s law requires websites featuring 33.33% or more pornographic content to check government-issued ID to verify users are 18 and older. Websites that don’t comply face civil penalties. Parents can sue the site if kids access it.  

“These laws are really not about controlling minors’ access to violent pornography … In the conservative world view, pornography is information about LGBTQ identity, abortion, gay marriage,” said Bronstein.

It will be interesting to see how this strain of oppression plays out. The threat to democracy, free speech and civil liberties from the authoritarian, theocratic radical right Republican Party is far from quashed. Those people want to get rid of democracy and civil liberties, and install a corrupt, Christian and capitalist tyranny.

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The 5th Circuit mocks liberty: The 5th Circuit federal appeals court has been more heavily poisoned by radical right Republican judges than any other federal appeals court. Here criminal defendant Percy Taylor sued Louisiana officials for keeping him in jail for two years beyond his scheduled release date. 

The 5th circuit kicked him hard in the nuts and told him to f*#@ off. Why? Because he failed to properly brief whether the delay, over two years, was “objectively unreasonable.” The court put it clearly and simply:

Percy Taylor was detained beyond the expiration of his sentence. After his release, he sought redress for this violation of his rights by bringing a lawsuit against various Louisiana officials under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and Louisiana state law. The district court dismissed most of Taylor’s claims, but allowed a supervisory liability claim against Department Secretary James LeBlanc to proceed by denying qualified immunity. Now Secretary LeBlanc appeals the denial of qualified immunity arguing, inter alia, that his conduct wasn’t objectively unreasonable in light of clearly established law.

The right to timely release is clearly established. But Taylor failed to adequately brief—and has thus forfeited—any meritorious argument that Secretary LeBlanc’s behavior was objectively unreasonable in light of that right. Accordingly, we must reverse.

This is how radical right Trumper dispense justice when they are in power. They are tyrants, plain and simple. What Louisiana did was arguably objectively unreasonable to most everyone except Trumpers. The question is, did that need to be briefed? Was that such an egregious error that there was no remedy for two years of lost life? According to Trumpers it sure is.

Science bits: AI-driven physics; Male birth control

AI-driven physics: This is about using AI (artificial intelligence) to find fundamental variables that control phenomena. This one is really interesting and fun. It is ripe for conspiracy theory crackpots,  grifters and liars to have tons 'o fun with in fun places like Trumplandia and Crackpotlandia. Instead of being useful only for mischief, scientists can use it too for actual research. Interesting Engineering writes:

In physics news, researchers at Columbia University in the City of New York may have discovered a new realm of physics. They did this using a new AI program, and their findings may prove revolutionary for the future of physics and our understanding of the universe.

Albert Einstein's famous equation E=MC2 comprises three main variables; mass, energy, and velocity. But, the researchers behind the new study pondered whether such variables could be discovered automatically. If they could, it should significantly improve the process of scientific discovery.

To test if this would be possible, researchers at Columbia Engineering developed a new AI algorithm to attempt to find a way. The program's purpose was to use a video camera to monitor physical processes before attempting to identify the smallest possible collection of fundamental variables that might adequately capture the dynamics being observed.

The study was published on July 25, 2022, in Nature Computational Science.

The researchers fed films of physical systems for which they lacked the explicit solution after testing a number of other physical systems with known solutions. In the first videos, a local "air dancer" could be seen swaying in front of a used car sale. Eight variables were returned by the program after several hours of analysis. Additionally, a Lava lamp video also generated eight suggested variables. The program then outputted twenty-four variables after being fed a video clip of flames from a holiday fireplace loop.

"I always wondered, if we ever met an intelligent alien race, would they have discovered the same physics laws as we have, or might they describe the universe in a different way?” said Lipson. “Perhaps some phenomena seem enigmatically complex because we are trying to understand them using the wrong set of variables.” Every time the AI restarted, the total number of variables remained constant, but the individual variables changed.

This line of research could wind up fundamentally changing physics as we know it. Right now, the researchers are having a hard time translating the AI analysis results into human language, which is necessary to understand the variables the AI finds. This kind of AI can be applied to complicated phenomena in many fields including cosmology and biology. At present, theoretical knowledge is falling behind the vast amounts of data being generated. Depending on how it plays out, this research could wind up winning a Nobel Prize for someone or two or three someones.

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Male birth control: Boys are such weenies, wuss & numbnuts. The BBC writes: 

The weird reasons there still isn’t a male contraceptive pill

Many side-effects deemed unacceptable in the male pill have been plaguing women for decades. Is there a double standard?

Though a safe, effective male pill would have the potential to finally unburden women of the responsibility for contraception, and prevent millions of unwanted pregnancies every year, some men found the idea of an invisible orgasm distinctly unappealing. For a proportion of men, the so-called "clean sheets" pill was seen as emasculating. The method eventually lost its funding, and researchers went back to the drawing board (more on this later).

Today the male contraceptive pill is still yet to materialise. This week, research in mice identified a promising new target – a molecular switch that can stun sperm for two hours, rendering its taker temporarily infertile. But though the protein has been hailed as a game-changer, it still has a long way to go before it is approved for use in humans.

In fact, finding effective drugs has never been the problem.

Over the last half century, numerous possible methods for male birth control have been proposed, including some that have made it to clinical trials in humans. However, each one has eventually met a brick wall – even those that are safe and effective have been written off due to undesirable side effects. Several male pills have been rejected on the grounds that they lead to symptoms that are extremely common among women taking female versions.

Which brings us to the next reason male contraceptive pills are held to a higher set of standards – both in terms of acceptable side effects, and safety more generally: to state the medically obvious, men (except transgender men) can't get pregnant.

Naturally men don't face these risks [pregnancy and childbirth] if they choose to have unprotected sex, so the safety standards for any contraceptives they might take have a higher bar to get across.

However, a number of non-hormonal contraceptive options for men have also been proposed, including a vaccine that targets a protein involved in sperm maturation and a kind of temporary vasectomy, reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance (RISUG).

RISUG involves injecting a synthetic polymer into the tube that carries sperm out of the testes – the vas deferens – to block the exit of sperm. It was originally developed as a way to sterilise water pipes, but later adapted to be safe inside the human body. It's currently undergoing Phase III clinical trials – the final stage of testing before a treatment is approved – in India.

Men just can’t psychologically handle being messed with. And, as usual, the profit motive is also at work. Drug companies can’t make as much profit selling male contraceptives as they can selling to women. Once again, capitalism shows it cares only about profit. Everything else, including possible extinction of the human species, is just a public relations problem. 

One can also imagine that forced birthers are not enthusiastic about male contraception. They already hate female contraception. Male contraception would add to the long list of things they have to hate. Who needs more stuff to hate?

 

We all know who these little dudes are

Toxic Democratic Party neoliberalism is on display

When it comes to capitalism, the Democrats often look too much like the Republicans. Capitalism trumps the public interest. The Lever (high fact accuracy, solid left bias) reports on a Biden administration effort to protect Norfolk Southern railroad’s effort to shield itself from lawsuits. The Lever writes:

Biden DOJ Backing Norfolk Southern’s Bid To Block Lawsuits

The company whose train derailed in Ohio is asking the Supreme Court to kill a suit by a sick rail worker — and help the firm block future lawsuits

A looming Supreme Court decision could end up making it easier for the railroad giant whose train derailed in Ohio this month to block lawsuits, including from victims of the disaster.

In the case against Norfolk Southern, the Biden administration is siding with the railroad in its conflict with a cancer-stricken former rail worker. A high court ruling for Norfolk Southern could create a national precedent limiting where workers and consumers can bring cases against corporations.

In its fight against the lawsuit, Norfolk Southern is asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling, overturn Pennsylvania’s law, and restrict where corporations can be sued, upending centuries of precedent.

If the court rules in favor of Norfolk Southern, it could overturn plaintiff-friendly laws on the books in states including Pennsylvania, New York, and Georgia that give workers and consumers more leeway to choose where they take corporations to court — an advantage national corporations already enjoy, as they often require customers and employees to agree to file litigation in specific locales whose laws make it harder to hold companies accountable.  

Limiting lawsuits is exactly what the American Association of Railroads (AAR), the industry’s primary lobbying group, wants. The organization filed a brief on the side of Norfolk Southern in the case, arguing that a ruling in favor of the plaintiff would open up railroads to more litigation.

It is also apparently what the Biden administration wants — the Justice Department filed its own brief in favor of Norfolk Southern.  

Pennsylvania has what’s known as a “consent-by-registration” statute — something states have had on the books since the early 19th century — which stipulates that when corporations register to do business in the state, they are also consenting to be governed by that state’s courts. Norfolk Southern asserts that being forced to defend the case in Pennsylvania would pose an undue burden, thereby violating its constitutional right to due process.  

Corporate lobbying groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Trucking Association have weighed in on the case on behalf of Norfolk Southern. Many have warned that a ruling in favor of the former railroad worker could allow people to sue corporations in whatever venue they’d like — a practice known as “forum shopping.”

Once again, we see the toxic side of Democratic Party, pro-corporation, anti-consumer neoliberal ideology at work. As the article notes, corporations can force consumers to go to court in states with laws stacked in favor of the corporation. That is forum shopping in the extreme. But corporations scream and howl in self-righteous indignation about consumers having forum shopping rights in some states. The law is stacked against consumers. Most Democrats in power, or at least Biden, apparently like it that way. 

Note that Biden is from Delaware, one of the most pro-corporate (therefore anti-consumer) states in the country. That’s why tens of thousands of corporations incorporate there to get shielding from staunchly pro-corporation Delaware laws. 

Here is a second example of the anti-consumer neoliberalism that poisons the Democratic Party. The Lever writes:

Buttigieg Pretends He’s Powerless To Reduce Derailment Risks

Facing pressure to act, America’s chief rail regulator now insists he is “constrained.” He’s not.

Facing pressure from lawmakers in his own party after a spate of train derailments, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has now resorted to falsely suggesting that he does not have power to compel the rail industry to upgrade its safety equipment and procedures.

In a Twitter thread posted more than a week after Norfolk Southern’s fiery train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Buttigieg indicated that he cannot reinstate an Obama-enacted, Trump-repealed law requiring some trains carrying hazardous materials to replace their Civil War-era braking systems with new Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brake technology.

.... nothing prevents Buttigieg from using his existing rulemaking authority to expand the definition of a “high-hazard flammable train” to cover trains like the one in Ohio.

Under the existing limited definition, the Ohio train — which was carrying five tanker cars of vinyl chloride, a Class 2 flammable gas and known carcinogen — was exempted from the classification’s more stringent safety regulations.

Meanwhile, Buttigieg’s agency is currently considering a separate rule that would weaken brake testing standards.

As far as consumers are concerned, with friends like the Democratic Party, who need enemies like the radical right Republican Party? Or, is that assessment over the top because, e.g., Dems are not as bad as Repubs?