News bits: Clarence Thomas is corrupt; Eric Trump is a liar; etc.

ProPublica just dropped a nasty into Clarence Thomas' punchbowl. For years Thomas has received gifts apparently worth millions of dollars and not reported it. We can all rest assured that Thomas will dismiss this as a mere minor oversight, a tiny tempest in a teapot and a partisan socialist witch hunt packed full of slanderous lies. ProPublica writes:

IN LATE JUNE 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.

If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.  

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.  

[As would be 100% expected] Thomas did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

In a statement, Crow acknowledged that he’d extended “hospitality” to the Thomases “over the years,” but said that Thomas never asked for any of it and it was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.” 

Through his largesse, Crow has gained a unique form of access, spending days in private with one of the most powerful people in the country. By accepting the trips, Thomas has broken long-standing norms for judges’ conduct, ethics experts and four current or retired federal judges said.

“It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. When she was on the bench, Gertner said, she was so cautious about appearances that she wouldn’t mention her title when making dinner reservations: “It was a question of not wanting to use the office for anything other than what it was intended.”

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties, said Thomas “seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations.”  

In his statement, Crow said that he and his wife have never discussed a pending or lower court case with Thomas. “We have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue,” he added.  

“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.” [What an effing liar!]

That is about as corrupt, morally disgusting and insulting as it can get for a Supreme Court justice. Thomas and Crow never once discussed a pending or lower court case with Thomas? Yeah, sure. 

This corrupt sleaze is just more to add to a mountain of evidence showing that America’s radical right elites are corrupt authoritarians (full-blown fascists, IMFO), are in open contempt for the rule of law and are immoral grifters and liars, both by endless lies of commission (I like Walmart parking lots) and endless lies of omission. Lies of omission here apply both to Thomas’ “oversight” in not reporting his gifts and to his refusal to answer questions in accordance with standard and effective radical right KYMS propaganda tactic.

KYMS = keep your mouth shut

Yes, good government types wring their hands and despair over the demise of any shred of respect for ethics and real or apparent conflicts of interest. But by now, the radical right has gutted ethics and normalized conflicts of interest as merely business as usual.

Maybe someone will call for impeachment of Thomas, but we all know what a useless farce impeachments are.

Ugh, I gotta take a shower to get the slime off.

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In other radical right sleaze news, Eric Trump lied about the T**** supporter crowd size in both New York and Florida. The thug claimed ‘tens and tens of thousands’ came out to support his father, but that was gross exaggeration. One snarker commented that Eric was not good with maths or big numbers. He really intended to say ‘tens and tens of thousands’ came out to support his father.

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From The Chatbots Are Fun Files: This artificial intelligence thing looks like it is going to be an endless source of mischief and misery for some, but lots of entertainment for the public. The WaPo writes:

ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal 

and named a real law prof as the accused

The AI chatbot can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even citing a fake Washington Post article as evidence

One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.

The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.

No doubt that the Republican Party is going to unleash its chatbots after intensive training on slandering liberals, socialism, and Democrats, and attacking everything woke, and inconvenient truth and history.

Q: Is it just me, or have the wheels come off the cart? It feels like a surprisingly bumpy ride.

Time for physics: The 1801 double slit experiment revisited

Physics: The 1801 double slit experiment revisited in 2023

As we all recall from high school physics, in 1801 Thomas Young proved the dual wave-particle nature of light. He shot a beam of light into two narrow slits in a piece of metal and saw an interference pattern. Later, the same thing was observed with electrons, then whole atoms and later still with whole molecules. Light and those other things had both wave and particle properties.  

The old-fashioned double slit experiment

Simulation of light wave hitting the double slit

(9 sec. video)

And, as we all know, the double slit experiments like this were a way to use 3-dimensional space to demonstrate the dual wave-particle nature of light and matter, at least on a small scale. Now, using the same material that is in cell phone screens, indium tin oxide (ITO), physics nerds have been able to do a double slit experiment where the slits are in time, not space. The image below helps to visualize what is going on.

A laser pulses to cause the ITO layer to cycle between 

being reflective for a short time and then transparent  

In the time or temporal double slit variant, a light beam hits a very thin layer of ITO, which can very rapidly go from transparent to reflective opaque when pulsed with light. The changes are driven by oscillating super short laser light pulses that flip the ITO layer from cycles of opaque to transparent in about 10 femtoseconds (fs). One fs is 10x(-15) or 1⁄1 000 000 000 000 000 of a second, i.e., (i) one quadrillionth, or (ii) one millionth of one billionth of a second. In essence, what the nerds did was build and successfully operate the machinery for a temporal double-slit-diffraction experiment. That demonstrated the feasibility of time-modulating materials to control light.

Chief temporal double slit experiment nerd 

Romain Tirole at the Imperial College London

messing around with his experiment stuff

This research is translated from physics to English in this short summary article and this article that Vice published. The Vice article comments:

To the team’s astonishment, the results of the experiment revealed more oscillations than predicted by existing theories, as well as far sharper observations, which points to “unexpected physics” in the findings, according to the study.

“When we measured the spectra, we were very surprised by how clear they showed up on the detectors,” Tirole said. “How visible these oscillations are depends on how fast we can switch our metasurface on and off [and] this means that the speed at which our metamaterial changes is much faster than what was previously thought and accepted. This is exciting as it implies that new physical mechanisms are still to be uncovered and exploited.”

“In our experiment we show that this wonder material has an even faster switching speed, 10-100 times faster than previously thought, which enables a much stronger control of light,” he also noted.  

The breakthrough paves the way toward new research into the enigmatic properties of light, and the many emerging technologies that rely on optical phenomena. Tirole and his colleagues are especially eager to try to repeat the experiment with a time crystal, a very strange quantum system that has revolutionized many fields in physics.

“A double slit experiment is the first brick on the road to more complex temporal modulations, such as the much sought time-crystal where the optical properties are temporally modulated in a periodic fashion,” Tirole concluded. “This could have very important applications for light amplification, light control, for example for computation, and maybe even quantum computation with light.”

This new line of research could turn out to be a very big deal. Once physics nerds get a whiff of possible things like unexpected physics, new physical mechanisms and the capacity to fiddle with very strange quantum systems, they are relentless. My sense of this is that if the complexity of such short time manipulation becomes easier, this line of inquiry ought to bear some important fruit within ~ 3 years. That's pretty quick compared to the pace of research into brains, consciousness and the like.

News chunks: About the WI Supreme Court race; Analyzing the indictment

The NYT writes about the bitterness and brute partisan incivility that dominates the radical right. The NYT writes:

The result means that in the next year, the court is likely to reverse the state’s abortion ban and end the use of gerrymandered legislative maps drawn by Republicans. .... With more than 95 percent of votes counted by Wednesday morning, Judge Protasiewicz [the Democrat] led by 11 percentage points, a huge margin in the narrowly divided state.

Justice Kelly [the Republican], 59, evinced the bitterness of the campaign with a testy concession speech that acknowledged his defeat and portended doom for the state. He called his rival’s campaign “truly beneath contempt” and decried “the rancid slanders that were launched against me.”

“I wish that I’d be able to concede to a worthy opponent, but I do not have a worthy opponent. .... I wish Wisconsin the best of luck, because I think it’s going to need it.”

What slander? Apparently this:

In the Protasiewicz [advertisement], the narrator says Kelly as an attorney defended child sex predators who posed as ministers to prey on vulnerable young girls by luring them to locations they believed to be safe. The narrator adds, “And Dan Kelly defended those monsters. Do you want someone like that on the Supreme Court?”

Kelly said the ad falsely suggested he represented the defendants through trial. Online court records show Kelly became an attorney in the four cases cited in the ad between early February 1998 and early March of that year. He withdrew as an attorney on Aug. 26, 1998, and the case went to trial that December.  

“There is no intelligence behind it, there is no reasoning and there are no facts, and yet she says it anyway,” Kelly said, adding the spot slanders all attorneys who have handled a defense issue.

Protasiewicz spokesperson Sam Roecker fired back that Kelly’s “entire record is a sham,” dismissing him as an “extreme, right-wing politician who is desperate to hide his record of corruption on the bench and taking radical positions on abortion, Social Security, and more.”

So, is that a legally actionable slander(s) or not? If it is, Kelly should sue Protasiewicz for defamation. Given how bitterly hateful he is, In my opinion he is obligated to sue her or be a hypocrite liar for failing to vindicate the rule of law.

Separately, it is encouraging that the Democratic candidate won by such a large margin for Wisconsin. Maybe public opinion is starting to shift against the radical right and its cruel authoritarian, theocratic agenda.

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Legal analysis of the indictment has started: Analysis of the indictment and the charges against T**** are beginning. According to a NYT analysis published today, the case against the dictator wannabe is reasonably strong. I was led to believe the case was weak, but that might not be true. The NYT writes in an opinion piece by a former Manhattan chief assistant district attorney and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution:

For weeks, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has come under heavy fire for pursuing a case against Donald Trump. Potential charges were described as being developed under a novel legal theory. And criticism has come not only from Mr. Trump and his allies, as expected, but also from many who are usually no friends of the former president but who feared it would be a weak case.

With the release of the indictment and accompanying statement of facts, we can now say that there’s nothing novel or weak about this case. The charge of creating false financial records is constantly brought by Mr. Bragg and other New York D.A.s. In particular, the creation of phony documentation to cover up campaign finance violations has been repeatedly prosecuted in New York. That is exactly what Mr. Trump stands accused of.  

First, a note about the Manhattan D.A.’s office that will prosecute this case: It is hardly a typical local cog in the judicial system. In fact, it is unique. Its jurisdiction is the financial capital of the world. That means the office routinely prosecutes complex white-collar cases with crime scenes that involve the likes of the BNP Paribas international banking scandal. Big cases involving powerful, high-profile individuals have been handled by the office for decades.  

While the particulars of Mr. Trump’s case are unique, his behavior is not. Candidates and others have often attempted to skirt the disclosure and dollar limit requirements of campaign finance regulations and falsified records to hide it. Contrary to the protestations of Mr. Trump and his allies, New York prosecutors regularly charge felony violations of the books and records statute — and win convictions — when the crimes covered up were campaign finance violations, resulting in false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity.

The [New York] statute says that a person is guilty of falsifying business records when, “with intent to defraud,” the individual commits certain acts. .... New York appellate courts have held in a long series of cases that intent to defraud includes circumstances in which a defendant acts “for the purpose of frustrating the state’s power” to “faithfully carry out its own law.” To the extent Mr. Trump was covering up campaign contributions that violated New York law, that seems to be exactly what he did.

It’s also worth noting that Mr. Trump was a federal candidate, whereas the other New York cases involved state ones. But court after court across the country has recognized that state authorities can enforce state law in cases relating to federal candidates. 

The 34 felony books and records counts in the Trump indictment turn on the misstatement of the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels arranged by Michael Cohen in the waning days of the 2016 election and the repayment of that amount by Mr. Trump to Mr. Cohen, ostensibly as legal expenses. There are 11 counts for false invoices, 11 for false checks and check stubs and 12 for false general ledger entries. This allegedly violated the false records statute when various entries were made in business documents describing those repayments as legal fees.  

No doubt, radical right legal analyses will come out and completely reject any argument that the case against T**** is even valid, much less strong. 

Worth noting here is the last sentence in the quoted opinion, i.e., the violation of law happened when T**** labeled the disputed documents as “legal fees.” So once again, the weakness in the legal case against T**** is front and center, i.e., how to prove criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt. He will argue the money spent was intended to be for legitimate legal fees, not for illegal payoffs. All it will take for him to avoid legal liability is to create a “reasonable doubt” in the mind of just one juror. 

Concern about proving intent is what leads me to have little faith in the rule of law when it is applied to rich and/or powerful elites who commit white collar crimes. Even if the case against the criminal is strong, the law itself is inherently weak because proving intent is usually nearly impossible. 

What I don’t fully understand is to what extent, if any, the NY law weakens the situation for the accused criminal by reducing the burden of proof the prosecution has to meet. The NY law requires proof of intent “for the purpose of frustrating the state’s power” to “faithfully carry out its own law.” 

I assume, maybe mistakenly, that the same burden of proof of intent applies. But if so, then I misunderstand what the opinion piece is arguing.

The NYT opinion also points out something that I suspect the radical right will vehemently reject, no matter how blatantly false the radical's arguments are. The opinion says:

Whatever happens next, one thing is clear: Mr. Trump cannot persuasively argue he is being singled out for some unprecedented theory of prosecution. He is being treated as any other New Yorker would be with similar evidence against him. .... The indictment is therefore anything but political.

We all know that both T**** and radical Republicans will claim this is a purely political witch hunt by socialist, deep state pedophile tyrants and the evil groomer George Soros. How do we know that? Because they have already made such allegations. And, radical right media such as Faux News will reinforce those lies every day from now until the elections in Nov. 2024.

Brains, machines, consciousness, free will and whatnot

My interest in brains, consciousness and free will goes back some years now. One area of research I loosely follow is BMI technology, brain-machine interface tech. If humans are to ever get off the polluted, grossly overpopulated rock called Earth, BMI will probably be heavily involved. Progress in BMI tech is slow (or I am aging too fast), but noticeably progressing. Neuroscience News writes:

A Sensor That Might Someday Enable Mind-Controlled Robots

It sounds like something from science fiction: Don a specialized, electronic headband and control a robot using your mind. But now, recent research published in ACS [American Chemical Society] Applied Nano Materials has taken a step toward making this a reality.

By designing a special, 3D-patterned structure that doesn’t rely on sticky conductive gels, the team has created “dry” sensors that can measure the brain’s electrical activity, even amidst hair and the bumps and curves of the head.

Physicians monitor electrical signals from the brain with electroencephalography (EEG), in which specialized electrodes are either implanted into or placed on the surface of the head. EEG helps diagnose neurological disorders, but it can also be incorporated into “brain-machine interfaces,” which use brain waves to control an external device, such as a prosthetic limb, robot or even a video game.

Most non-invasive versions involve the use of “wet” sensors, which are stuck onto the head with a gloopy gel that can irritate the scalp and sometimes trigger allergic reactions.

As an alternative, researchers have been developing “dry” sensors that don’t require gels, but thus far none have worked as well as the gold-standard wet variety.

Although nanomaterials like graphene could be a suitable option, their flat and typically flaky nature make them incompatible with the uneven curves of the human head, particularly over long periods. So, Francesca Iacopi and colleagues wanted to create a 3D, graphene-based sensor based on polycrystalline graphene that could accurately monitor brain activity without any stickiness.

Sick 'em Bowser!! Attack!! 

The team created several 3D graphene-coated structures with different shapes and patterns, each around 10 µm thick. Of the shapes tested, a hexagonal pattern worked the best on the curvy, hairy surface of the occipital region — the spot at the base of the head where the brain’s visual cortex is located.

The team incorporated eight of these sensors into an elastic headband, which held them against the back of the head. When combined with an augmented reality headset displaying visual cues, the electrodes could detect which cue was being viewed, then work with a computer to interpret the signals into commands that controlled the motion of a four-legged robot — completely hands-free.

Though the new electrodes didn’t yet work quite as well as the wet sensors, the researchers say that this work represents a first step toward developing robust, easily implemented dry sensors to help expand the applications of brain-machine interfaces.

I've posted several times here about increasingly sophisticated BMI tech capable of reading minds and transferring thoughts from one human or animal mind to another human, animal or machine via machines and communications technology including the internet. 

This is about the branch of BMI tech that deals with human minds directing machines to do things based on thoughts alone. The day will come when machines, with or without sensors of external signals, will be able to talk back to human minds, maybe also to animal minds. Artificial intelligence software will facilitate the increasing sophistication of the communications. AI is increasingly able to figure out what all those electrical signals in the brain are in terms of thinking. It will improve over time.

Image from the research paper showing the electrodes

Decaying Democracies: Update on India

Modi's overwhelming victory in 2019 secured his Hindu Nationalist Party, BJP,  an outright majority for the second time in a row-- something quite rare in India. Modi, at that time, had turned the elections into a referendum on himself (as strongmen politicians tend to do) with his face featured prominently in most of the local candidates' campaigns. But how has Modi and his BJP used its power since that resounding victory? What is the state of democracy in India now? Here are a few policy changes and trends worth noting since 2019.

--Modi escalated tensions with Pakistan over Kashmir, where India and Pakistan had exchanged airstrikes during the 2019 BJP campaign. The decades long conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir has, under Modi, heated up and come to represent his Hindu Nationalism and anti-Islamic worldview. Once re-elected, Modi unilaterally revoked Kashmir's semi-autonomous status and imposed a media/internet blackout on Kashmir doubling down on his strongman approach to the state. Scrapping the constitutional article that gave Kashmir-- a Muslim-majority state--  it's semi-autonomous status provoked Pakistan to threaten war in one of the world's hottest nuclear flashpoints. Modi then addressed the nation in a speech declaring that the regions in question in Kashmir will now be considered "Indian union territory," which means the Indian gov't will exert much more control over the everyday lives of denizens of the region. In preparation for violence, after the announcement,  India sent thousands of troops there, closed schools down, cut internet service, and placed some of the area's political leaders and journalists under house arrest. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/world/asia/india-pakistan-kashmir-jammu.html  All of this was cause for mass celebration among nationalists who belong to India's 80% Hindu Majority-- nationalists with a "Hindu First" agenda.

--A few months later, in December of 2019,  new citizenship laws were passed which fast track immigration for asylum seekers from neighboring countries AS LONG AS THEY ARE NOT MUSLIMS. The "anti-Muslim Bill," as it is called, has further inflamed Muslim/Hindu relations. Details on it are available here .

-- More recently, upping the ante, Modi threw his weight behind The Kashmir Files, a  2022 Hindu Nationalist Bollywood movie that falsely alleges that in the 1990s, 4,000 Kashmiri Pandits (Hindu Brahmins ) were killed by Muslims who live in the Muslim-majority region. "All of you should watch it," said Modi at a parliamentary meeting last year, adding, "The film has shown the truth which has been suppressed for years." https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/modi-india-hindu-nationalism-film-industry-bollywood-kashmir-files/  The opening credits of the film includes the disclaimer, "This film does not claim accurateness [sic]" https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/13/the-dangerous-truth-of-the-kashmiri-files

-- A 2022 report on press freedoms in India by the World Press Freedom Index ranked india 150th out of 180 nations-- an 8 notch decline from the preceding year which was already abysmally low. According to the report, India is "one of the most dangerous countries for the media [characterized by] police violence, ambushes by political activists and deadly reprisals by criminal groups or corrupt local officials.” The report goes on to state:

"Supporters of Hindutva, the ideology that spawned the Hindu far right, wage all-out online attacks on any views that conflict with their thinking. Terrifying coordinated campaigns of hatred and calls for murder are conducted on social media, campaigns that are often even more violent when they target women journalists, whose personal data may be posted online as an additional incitement to violence.  The situation is also still very worrisome in Kashmir, where reporters are often harassed by police and paramilitaries, with some being subjected to so-called “provisional” detention for several years." (Source: https://rsf.org/en/country/india  )

 

"The world's biggest democracy," is fast morphing into some kind of religious ethno-state. The bad news is, Modi and the BJP remain incredibly popular in India. The democratic backslide into fake populist movements that thinly conceal outright authoritarian trends is a global plague. From time to time, it's worth comparing our situation in the US to those in other key nodes of the new authoritarianism. After all, CPAC has gone international in the past year alone, setting up confrences and chapters in both Hungary and Brazil. Steve Bannon and others from Trump's circle advise and/or meet with politicians ranging from Bolsinaro to France's Marine Le Pen to Italy's formerly pro-Mussolini PM, Giorgia Meloni. I believe we are seeing an increasingly coordinated international movement which targets Liberal Democracy not only at the domestic but also the global level. While there's a lot that could be improved regarding the "liberal international order" (or what's left of it) and many nominal democracies of the world, I shudder to imagine a world in which these bigoted new authoritarians replace flawed democracies one after the other. In the future, I'll try to do intermittent updates on other trouble spots like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil and other countries facing the threat of new authoritarianism disguised as patriotic populism.

 

A tad early in the day............ oh but what the heck..............

 PREDICTIONS

I know for the most part we are a pretty serious crowd here, nevertheless, whether your predictions are sagacious and wise, or whether they are satirical or irreverent, make your predictions.......

Will Trump show up or will he pull a fast one?

Will he be quiet or will he rage against Judge Juan Merchan?

Will there be a small crowd, a large crowd or .......... a violent crowd......... outside of the courthouse?

Will the judge issue a gag order? Will Trump obey it? 

Already the judge has ruled no cameras in the courtroom, doesn't that take away from our enjoyment of the event?

Will there be felony charges? 

Will MTG say something.................. smart? 

Will there be mass riots? Storming of government buildings? An armed insurrection?

Or will this be just another nothingburger while we await the more serious charges for other crimes?