Bits of stuff: Transformable nanoelectronics; Debt ceiling update; Regarding power and wealth

Just when a person thinks the Transformers was fiction, science nerds come along and start to 'chip' away at the fiction. Science Advances reports that some physical components in nanoelectronic chips can be intentionally physically changed. UCI News reports:   

UC Irvine physicists discover first transformable nano-scale electronic devices

The nano-scale electronic parts in devices like smartphones are solid, static objects that once designed and built cannot transform into anything else. But University of California, Irvine physicists have reported the discovery of nano-scale devices that can transform into many different shapes and sizes even though they exist in solid states.

It’s a finding that could fundamentally change the nature of electronic devices, as well as the way scientists research atomic-scale quantum materials.

The electronic devices are modifiable much like refrigerator door magnets – stuck on but can be reconfigured into any pattern you like.

If it sounds like science fiction, said Sanchez-Yamagishi, that’s because until now scientists did not think such a thing was possible.

Indeed, Sanchez-Yamagishi and his team, which also includes UCI Ph.D. student Andrew Barabas, weren’t even looking for what they ultimately discovered.

What they saw specifically was that tiny nano-scale gold wires could slide with very low friction on top of special crystals called “van der Waals materials.”

Taking advantage of these slippery interfaces, they made electronic devices made of single-atom thick sheets of a substance called graphene attached to gold wires that can be transformed into a variety of different configurations on the fly.

Because it conducts electricity so well, gold is a common part of electronic components.

It's not clear what the ramifications of this will turn out to be. That ought to become clear in a few years as people think about this and how it can be used in electronic devices. This works because the surface of van der Waals materials are low friction, sort of like teflon coating objects to make them slippery.

Moving tiny stuff around on a chip

Scale bars, 3 μm. (A and B) Optical images of ~170-nm-tall gold squares on hBN 

before and after manipulation with an AFM tip. (C) AFM height image of a 

3-μm-wide gold square on atomically flat hBN surface with contaminants 

swept aside by sliding.

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The debt ceiling will be probably be reached sometime in June or early July. House Republicans continue to demand spending cuts and deregulation of businesses or they will let the US default on its debt. Biden continues to say the debt is not negotiable and he won't negotiate. Up to this point, radial right Republicans have refused to say what they will cut or deregulate, because we all know most people probably won't like most of it. But sooner or later, the radicals will have to show their hand. The time bomb continues to tick. The NYT reports: 

Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday proposed a one-year debt ceiling increase paired with a set of spending cuts and policy changes, backing down substantially from earlier demands but making clear that Republicans would not raise the borrowing limit to avert a catastrophic debt default without conditions.

In a speech delivered from the New York Stock Exchange, Mr. McCarthy said House Republicans would vote “in the coming weeks” on a measure that would lift the debt ceiling into the next year in exchange for freezing spending at last year’s levels while enacting stricter work requirements for social programs and a host of regulatory rollbacks.

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An interesting NYT opinion by Paul Krugman comments on concentrated wealth and power, plutocracy and current political events:

Plutocratic Power and Its Perils

The rich are different from you and me: They have immensely more power. But when they try to exercise that power they can trap themselves — supporting politicians who will, if they can, create a society the rich themselves wouldn’t want to live in.

This, I’d argue, is the common theme running through four major stories that have been playing out over the past few months. They are: the relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas and the billionaire Harlan Crow; the rise and seeming decline of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign; the trials (literally) of Fox News; and the Muskopalypse at Twitter.

People on the right often insist that expressing any concern about highly concentrated wealth is “un-American.” The truth, however, is that worrying about the dangers great wealth poses for democracy is very much part of the American tradition. And our nation basically invented progressive taxation, which was traditionally seen not just as a source of revenue but also as a way to limit excessive wealth.

Theodore Roosevelt warned against “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” Woodrow Wilson declared, “If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”

How does great wealth translate into great power? Campaign finance is dominated by a tiny number of extremely rich donors. But there are several other channels of influence.

Until recently I would have said that outright corruption — direct purchase of favors from policymakers — was rare. ProPublica’s revelation that Justice Thomas enjoyed many lavish, undisclosed vacations at Crow’s expense suggests that I may have been insufficiently cynical [insufficiently realistic?].

Beyond that, there’s the revolving door: Former politicians and officials who supported the interests of the wealthy find comfortable sinecures at billionaire-supported lobbying firms, think tanks and media organizations. These organizations also help shape what military analysts call the “information space,” defining public discourse in ways that favor the interests of the superrich [the role of dark free speech].

Despite all that, however, there’s only so much you can achieve in America, imperfect and gerrymandered as our democracy may be, unless you can win over large numbers of voters who don’t support a pro-billionaire economic agenda.

It’s a simplification, but I think fundamentally true, to say that the U.S. right has won many elections, despite an inherently unpopular economic agenda, by appealing to intolerance — racism, homophobia and these days anti-“wokeness.” Yet there’s a risk in that strategy: Plutocrats who imagine that the forces of intolerance are working for them can wake up and discover that it’s the other way around.

But some of those donors are now bailing, because it looks increasingly as if DeSantis’s intolerance and conspiracy theorizing weren’t a political show — they’re who he really is. And the big money was looking for a charlatan, not a genuine fanatic.

Among the forces pushing a DeSantis candidacy has been Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Fox was essentially founded to carry out the right-wing strategy of pushing plutocratic policy while winning over working-class whites with intolerance and conspiracy theories.

And does anyone doubt that if the Republican primary goes the way it seems to be heading, Fox will soon be back in Trump’s corner?

Rupert Murdoch’s organization, then, has effectively been taken hostage by the very forces he helped conjure up.

But Elon Musk’s story is, if anything, even sadder. As Kara Swisher recently noted for Time magazine, he’s become “the world’s richest online troll.” The crazy he helped foment hasn’t taken over his organization — it has taken over his mind.

I still believe that the concentration of wealth at the top is undermining democracy. But it isn’t a simple story of plutocratic rule. It is, instead, a story in which the attempts of the superrich to get what they want have unleashed forces that may destroy America as we know it. And it’s terrifying.

Q: Is Krugman's assessment unreasonably cynical, mostly wrong or mostly right?

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A WaPo opinion by Perry Bacon comments on Biden's ineffective responses to increasing radical right aggression:

An increasingly radical Republican Party is using its power, particularly at the state level and on the judiciary, to attack women seeking reproductive care, transgender Americans, Black politicians and activists, unions, colleges and professors, Democratic-led cities, public libraries, and a vast array of other people, groups and institutions with liberal values.

And President Biden is doing little about this right-wing assault.

The result is a one-sided conflict. Republican officials are acting like they’re in a war, while Biden and many powerful Democratic officials not only don’t defend their own side but also largely refuse to acknowledge the fight.

Watch closely, and you can see a pattern: When Republican officials do something outrageous, the Biden White House follows a three-step playbook. First comes a written statement from Biden condemning the Republican action. That’s often followed by public criticism from Vice President Harris or White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Biden will occasionally have a phone call or virtual meeting on the issue, such as his recent conversation with the Tennessee lawmakers expelled by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.

Then it’s on to the next speech or event. The president seems to be trying to do just enough to avoid being criticized for doing nothing. Biden is, at times, literally phoning in his response to growing Republican extremism.  

So why is he doing so little?

First of all, the president seems to be conflict-averse. When he ran the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, Biden didn’t investigate allegations of sexual harassment against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas as hard as he could have.  

Second, while Biden has moved left in recent years, I am not sure he is fully comfortable with strongly defending, say, abortion rights or the right to gender-affirming care. These are not positions Biden has held for much of his life.  

Third, Biden is deeply entrenched in the center-left establishment wing of the Democratic Party, which has spent much of the past seven years trying to duck a full-on confrontation with Trumpism.  

So instead of Biden giving speeches at factories that no one remembers 12 hours later, he could show up in states like Kentucky and Tennessee to stand with Democrats struggling against ultra-right-wing legislators. He could also defend Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and other prosecutors against Republican attempts to undermine their investigations, forcefully criticize GOP-appointed judges who are writing Trumpism into law, and speak out for honest teaching about race and sexual identity.

In my opinion, that criticism of Biden and the Democratic Party is spot on. Both are undeniably failing to reasonably at least try to vigorously defend democracy. Backing down from confrontation has failed.

Since Biden is a staunch Catholic, he probably is quite uncomfortable with abortion and gender fluidity. He really does seem to be conflict- and Trumpism-averse, e.g., no DoJ prosecution of Trump's crimes. Those Democratic Party and leadership failures could wind up being catastrophic for democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. But, those failures could be wonderful for corrupt plutocrats and radical Christian theocrats. Maybe Biden and the Dem Party are grudgingly OK with that compared to where secularism and democracy has taken America.

News bits: Americans' concerns; The political donor class; Secrecy shields megasleaze

Poll data obtained in January lists public policy priorities. 

Defending democracy or protecting elections not a listed priority. However, the 4th priority is reducing the influence of money in politics. 

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A WaPo opinion describes how political donor class money circumvents laws to influence politics:

But [public concern about the influence of money in politics] not stopping America’s megadonors. In fact, wealthy contributors have been increasingly pumping cash into the political system — circumventing campaign finance laws in doing so.

Overall, political spending has ballooned in recent years:

One big reason for this has been an innovation known as “joint fundraising committees.” Both parties use them. And their influence is growing.

Here’s how they work: Election laws try to limit the influence of any one rich person by capping how much the individual can donate to a given candidate. In 2020, individuals could give no more than $5,600 directly to Joe Biden or Donald Trump. That’s a tidy sum, but it’s not enough to curry favor with Biden, who amassed more than a billion dollars in the 2020 election, or Trump, whose haul surpassed $800 million.

Joint fundraising committees render such limits meaningless. They allow presidential candidates to bring their campaign, their national party and state parties into a single fundraising entity. Donors can give a limited amount to each group, but -- thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC — they can hit the contribution limit for as many groups as they want.

The result: The maximum donation to these mega-committees is not $5,600. It’s the combined maximum for each participating group.

This is how two donors were able to cut $817,800 checks to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee run by the former president in 2020. Multiple donors gave $730,600 to the Biden Victory Fund. Both campaigns amassed hundreds of millions of dollars this way.

.... in practice, much of the money flows to the national party. .... state-level Republican parties sent 90 percent of their cut of the Trump Victory Fund to the Republican National Committee. In 2020, they sent 96 percent to the RNC. Meanwhile, Democratic state parties sent three-quarters of their haul from the Hillary Victory Fund to the DNC in 2016. In 2020, state parties gave about a quarter of their take to the DNC.

Given the amount of money involved, it seems unlikely that either party has a serious interest in reducing the influence of money in politics. Public opinion can go pound sand.

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The rule of law crashes and burns again?: Reports are coming out that the defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Faux News could wind up in a settlement. If that happens, the most likely outcome (~97% chance?) is a Faux payment of an undisclosed amount to Dominion, a secrecy agreement and Faux either (i) proudly claiming that it admits no wrongdoing, or (ii) invoking KYMS to avoid FIMS. The Guardian reports:

The trial in the closely watched $1.6bn defamation lawsuit between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox will begin a day later than scheduled, the judge overseeing the case announced on Sunday evening, hours before opening arguments were set to begin on Monday and amid reports of settlement talks.

The Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported on Sunday that Fox had made a late push to settle the case out of court. Reuters also reported that the delay was due to settlement talks, according to a source familiar with the situation, as did the Washington Post, citing two sources.

KYMS = keep your mouth shut 

FIMS = foot in mouth syndrome

About a week ago, Faux settled another defamation lawsuit brought by a rich person that Faux slandered. On April 10, CNN reported:

Fox News has settled a defamation lawsuit from a Venezuelan businessman who had accused the network of making false claims about him and the 2020 election, attorneys for the man and Fox News said Saturday in a court filing.

The details of the settlement were not made public.

“This matter has been resolved amicably by both sides,” a Fox News spokesperson said Sunday, declining further comment.

Following the 2020 election, former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs had accused the businessman, Majed Khalil, of playing a key role in supposedly rigging the election against Donald Trump.

In a tweet calling the 2020 election a “cyber Pearl Harbor,” Dobbs named Khalil as one of four people he wanted his audience to “get familiar with” for committing supposed election fraud.

That's probably how the Dominion lawsuit will fizzle out if there is a settlement. As usual, the public will be kept in the dark and fed bullshit about it. Faux will proudly claim it did nothing wrong but settled just to be done with it. In fact, Faux will have settled to make it go away, leave loyal Faux viewer's feng shui calm and comfortable, profits coming in and lies and slanders going out. For liars and anti-democracy authoritarians and fascists, it's a win-win. For democracy supporters and inconvenient truth, it's a lose-lose. 

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From the shocked but clueless commentator files: Juan Williams, a friend of Clarence Thomas is shocked, shocked mind you: An opinion The Hill published comments:

I consider Clarence Thomas a friend, and I’m shocked by recent reports

The smell of financial corruption around Thomas is now stronger than the longstanding fear that his votes on the high court are dictated by his hatred of the liberals who put him through painful nomination hearing dominated by Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment.

The smell of financial favors is also now stronger than puzzlement about Thomas’s unyielding loyalty to a hardline Republican agenda that made former President Trump call Thomas his favorite justice.

Thomas’s one-sided rulings on guns, abortion and race have long provoked critics who suggest he is motivated by something other than the facts, legal precedent, and fair application of a 236-year-old Constitution to life in contemporary America.

But even with this partial awakening by Williams, he still frames it favorably for Thomas. Williams spins it by saying that Thomas merely failed to appreciate the “limiting influence on his thinking” that came from cavorting with far-right players, e.g., the Nazi billionaire Harlan Crow. 

Limiting influence? How about corrupting influence? 

What is wrong with radical right people? They are cognitively broken. Even when they occasionally see inconvenient truth, they cannot accept it. To assuage their cognitive dissonance, they frame inconvenient reality to soften the blow to their fragile egos. That's wuss to say the least.

A criticism and sharp warning: Democrats are failing to defend democracy

PD wrote a long pointed reply in response to one of my comments. 

My comment: If it is inaccurate to say the Dems managed to pass improvements to the ECA over GOP opposition, what is it accurate to say?

PD's response: It's accurate to say that the *bipartisan* Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 was introduced by Republican Senator Susan Collins and co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, and that it was signed into law by Joe Biden. It's accurate to say that the Bill was the product of concerned Republicans and Democrats all of whom were motivated by the concern that electoral subversion after 1/6 and Trump's attempt to steal the election could easily recur if at least these minimal steps were taken. That it could not have been passed without the critical input of Republicans against the Trump-Maga wing of the Republican Party, which was purging these very Republicans. Therefore, it was a now or never legislative act which, again, not only required Republican buy in (before the anti-Trump Republicans would be purged and the bill would be impossible to pass after 2022), but that it was drafted, negotiated, and passed all on a *bi-partisan* (not "Democratic") basis despite the objections of most of the Trump-loyalists in the GOP ( not the GOP as such, as, for example, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell voted for it and promoted it as did the often Trump-friendly Rand Paul who mad a statement praising the bill, thus giving other Repubs some cover to do likewise).

From a WaPo article at the time:

A *bipartisan* bill that would change how members of Congress could object to electoral votes — Congress’s response to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — passed the House on Friday as part of a sweeping spending bill to fund the government.

The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act [was] sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and passed by the Senate as part of the funding package....[and that Joe Biden stated that] “*Bipartisan* members of Congress passed the Electoral Count Act and took long overdue steps to protect the integrity of our elections,” [adding that] “This is *critical bipartisan action* that will help ensure that the will of the people is preserved.”

In a joint statement Thursday, Collins and Manchin welcomed the bill’s passage and noted that it was the result of *nearly a year of bipartisan negotiations.*“Our bipartisan group worked tirelessly to draft this legislation that fixes the flaws of the archaic and ambiguous Electoral Count Act of 1887 and establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for President and Vice President,” the two said. [all emph added] 

The emphasis here on * bipartisanship* (as with the 1/6 committee itself) is unmistakable. To frame it as one party "managing to do something despite the other party's objections" is not accurate. Concerned legislators across the ideological spectrum from the likes of Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Ben Sasse, Rob Portman, Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul and other Republicans made this positive, but inadequate, last minute passage of the bill in the omnibus package possible. If it hadn't been done THEN, it could not have been done at all because of the crucial input and voting of Republicans willing to take the risk despite Trump's threats and intimidation. That's because most-- though not all-- of these critical Republicans either retired or were replaced by Trump picks in the midterms.

It's sort of like calling 1/6 a Democratic rather than a bi-partisan committee. That would be quite inaccurate, esp. since Cheney's work was probably the most rigorous and uncompromising of all despite her awful far Right Wing politics. Meanwhile, many of the most vocal critics of Trump in the Democratic Party (for example, AOC, and other "progressives") played no role in either the 1/6 Committee's gathering and presenting of evidence, or the drafting or the promotion of ECA Reforms.

To make my point, I typed the following statement into the Google search bar: "Progressive Democrats urge passage of Electoral College Reform Act" and none of the returns I saw included references to well known, influential progressive Democrats. 

Rather than hunting for articles that make this point (you requested some corroborative articles) it is precisely the *absence* of articles about the loudest critics of Trump who failed even to mention and promote this legislation in all their tweets, media interviews, PR statements etc.-- it is this conspicuous inaction on doing what is possible to prevent electoral subversion that supports my claim that Dems had 3 years and have been "all talk and no action" on the pro-democracy front. The same is true of banning the dangerous far right militias that have coordinated with Trump (Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Oath Keepers and the like-- even Canada banned most of them).

I've heard more about Ukraine from "progressives" (sorry, I don't think these politicians represent what I would call "progress" in concrete action to prevent electoral subversion) in connection with the cause of democracy than I have heard from them regarding the John Eastman memo playboook revealing unacceptable loopholes in our system. I don't think it's right to say the majority of Dems, and ironically even those most critical of Trump as a would-be-dictator on which I agree, have done due diligence here. They've complained in the limelight about Trumpism and MAGA, sure. But workhorses they have not been.

I think there's a lot of phoniness and pious virtue signalling going on these days on the so-called Left Wing of the Dem Party. I hear much more about frankly vague ideas about fighting social inequities than I see realistic attempts at legislating to get much of anything done that's not pie in the sky non-starter stuff like "Green New Deal" which has a snowball's chance in Hell given the composition of both chambers in this country. They should be grown up enough to swallow that reality, and get busy with what Bismarck aptly called the "politics of the possible." I'm an idealist at heart, but a realist in practice. I think we've fallen into a sad state in which messaging has become more important than governing for many poltiticians whether they virtue signal as loyal Trumpists (to their base that's a virtue) or as quasi-socialist progressive Dems who will usher in all the things they're "supposed" to stand for (clean energy, a hundred splendid social programs that don't stand a chance of even getting a vote on the floor, much less passing). This is not the time for utopian idealism but for minimalism. We need to save the bare minimum bottom line status quo ante of a flawed democracy with plutocratic features. That's what we had before Trump. We may lose even that admittedly shabby state of affairs and decline precipitously into counter-democratic conditions. 

All of this is much more basic than, and is presupposed by loftier goals such as a Green New Deal with all kinds of government programs based on progressive taxation that nobody will support right now. I too want to see some of those measures (not exactly as advertised by the progs, but yes, an end to regressive taxation, corporate tax evasion via loopholes and offshore accounts, universal healthcare for real, et al.). But right now about half the country supports politicians who won't even defend the Affordable Care Act that, frankly, their own voters now rely on even if they don't think about it as "Obamacare." So, in such a divided and confused age where so many voters are lost and spun by the pols, social media propaganda, disinfo and misinfo, and all the rest-- where many people who think they know what is in their interest believe in conspiracies, and tell pollsters they are prepared to use violence against the government if necessary to "protect their liberties"--in such an age we need clear-headed, balanced realists who understand the "art of the possible" and are ready and willing to roll up their sleaves and do things like that minimal ECA reform as unglamorous as it may be. It won't get you more Twitter followers (or Mastadon now or whatever); it won't make college students love you; it won't rile up Trump haters that are glued to MSNBC, it won't be written up by progressive op-ed journalists in the frankly mainstream, corporate media like NYT and WaPo who deep down support the status quo and bottom line. It won't make you famous. But it MIGHT (if enough people get busy negotiating with anyone who will get anything constructive done) prevent the MAGA lunatics from gaining total control of the system. Right now, that's my focus. Not pie in the sky. Just holding back the intruders at the gates who have already crashed the (Republican) party, as it were. It's getting quite late for this. Like some others, I was active in the Trump resistance (remember Indivisible in 2016 and 2017?). Somewhere along the way, the progressives who started that movement have lapsed into rhetoric over realism; talk over substantive policy; language over legislation. That's why I say, it's LESS important (not totally unimportant) what we call the dangerous Trumpian insurgency than what we DO to fight it back. 

The next election may be the last opportunity to turn things around for a long while, maybe even for good. If Biden (as expected) runs again and trots out the fear mongering about MAGA without having done anything about it after all that melodramatic speechifying last fall, it will fall flat. It won't be enough to motivate voters to show up and get engaged. We need ANTI-MAGA LEADERSHIP and instead all I read each day is about American Exceptionalism, fighting autocracy in Russia, preparing to fight the Chinese over Taiwan (that's suicidal), while Europe falls apart and the majority of countries in the world do not see Russia and China as existential threats, but valued suppliers of goods and business partners. They were rightly against Putin's invasion, but not for an embargo on a state they rely on for affordable energy, goods, foodstuffs etc. And Biden spends most of his time shoring up NATO, asking Europe to endure much higher energy prices for LNG we now chiefly supply them with for more $ than before, and scolding the "neutral" and developing countries who don't want to it or agree. All of that bombastic talk of America as the Leader of the Free World could end in one second if Republicans get the executive branch. Biden acts like we are a strong united democracy ready to take on Russia and China, while keeping the global economy sound and preventing our own internal demise all at the same time. It's not so. A house divided cannot stand. Our politicians all across the specturm of both parties have (in different ways of course) become detached from basic realities where the rubber hits the road. The wheels are coming off the vehicle called America, and there's less than a year to sell some reasonable ideas about the future to voters. Ukraine and China are NOT going to be the main issues. But inflation resulting from Putin's invasion AND our economic response to it in attempting an embargo the world beyond Europe doesn't really want (I speak of Brazil, India, Israel, the Gulf States, much of Asia outside S. Korea and Japan, South Africa and most of the countries in Africa, Latin America etc.) Even Macron in France said, defending good trade relations with China, "Europe must not be a vassal of the US." Right now our media is having a field day criticizing him for that. But he's stating something that resonates with many in the world on that point. It reminds me of an incisive remark made by outgoing Angela Merkel a few years ago when Biden swept into power saying "America's back now." She replied, "Really? For how long?"

The next election is right around the corner.

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Questions:

1. Is that criticism of the Democrats defense of democracy at least mostly correct or not?

2. What can or should average people do, if they are concerned about the collapse of our flawed democracy into some form of an authoritarian autocracy-plutocracy-theocracy?

News bits: CREW requests Thomas investigation; Trump intimidates jurors?

Washington ethics watchdog CREW has asked the DoJ and the Supreme Court to initiate formal investigations about laws that Clarence Thomas might have broken by refusing to disclose gifts and real estate transactions. CREW's 13 page letter is here. Page 10 states that criminal sanctions may apply, but the cited statute (5 USC §13106 - Failure to file or filing false reports) provides only for a civil penalty of up to $50,000. 

The penalty attaches if a person knowingly and willfully fails to file or report any information they required to report under 5 USC §13104. That would seem to let Thomas off the hook if he claims that he claims that he did not knowingly or willfully fail to file or report any required information. If that is correct, this will probably amount to a nothingburger. 

Page 1

Page 10

Given the lack of laws and ethics rules that apply to Supreme Court justices, Thomas will probably not face any meaningful repercussions for anything he did or will do in the future. Some people really are above the law.

Supreme Court corruption update: New reporting by the WaPo asserts that in recent years, Thomas has received between $50,000 and $100,000 annually from a company that arose from a defunct real estate company Ginger Ltd. His 6 page reporting statement is here. At page 4 of his 2021 annual financial disclosure statement, Thomas' income from Ginger Ltd. was estimated by Thomas to be category N ($250,001 to $500,000). I'm not sure where the WaPo's annual $50,000 to $100,000 amount comes from. The new Ginger entity is listed as owned by the sister of Thomas' wife Ginni. As expected from a master of the KYMS tactic, Thomas refuses to answer any questions and apparently nothing can force him to answer.

KYMS = keep your mouth shut

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Is this juror intimidation or not? Firstpost writes:

The names of the jurors who will determine in a future civil lawsuit whether the former president defamed the author E. Jean Carroll, who also alleges Trump assaulted her, will remain a secret from Donald Trump.

Trump’s latest attempt to mandate that potential jurors supply their names, job information, and 38 other pieces of information on written questionnaires was denied by US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan on Friday.

Nothing has changed US District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s decision to seat an anonymous jury for the April 25 trial, reflecting the potential of juror harassment, as he said that the law was “abundantly clear” and that it was up to him to decide whether to utilize questionnaires.

Science based medicine and quack medicine

 The CAM (complimentary and alternative medicine) industry lobbies in Washington and congress considers what it has to say. Most CAM products are scientifically unproven. My guess is that nearly all of the reported benefits arise from placebo effects. 

A couple of weeks ago, a science based medicine expert, Steven Novella, attended roundtable discussion a US senate healthcare committee held to consider what to do, if anything. Novella, a practicing neurologist, is a well-known skeptic of pseudo science, psi research and CAM. A new sales propaganda pitch to congress is to rebrand CAM as "integrative" medicine to make it sound like science-based medicine. 

Marketing propaganda

At Science Based Medicine Novella comments about that meeting:

Alternative, No – Complementary, No – Integrative

CAM proponents use a lot of bait-and-switch or what David Gorski has dubbed “Trojan Horse” strategies to push their treatments. Interestingly, it’s mostly the same exact treatments that have been around for 50 years or more.  When we talk of CAM we are still mostly referring to homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic manipulation, energy medicine, and herbal medicine. There are branding tweaks, or new versions of these things, but the core concepts are the same. It doesn’t matter if you call them alternative, complementary, or integrative. It’s the same stuff.

The evolution of the branding, however, is to reassure those who care about things such as the standard of care in medicine that they will not be replacing proven therapies, and are offered in addition to them. First, this is never entirely true. If a CAM method is being placed somewhere in the hierarchy of treatments, then it is displacing or delaying non-CAM therapies. Also, health care is often resource limited. If a patient is availing themselves of acupuncture, that is using up their limited resources of time and health-care dollars.

 

Further, the very concept of “integrative” medicine is flawed to its core. What, exactly, are they integrating into what? Try to answer this question without just referring to euphemisms – no alternative or complementary methods, traditional, non-mainstream, etc. None of these really work, nor can they be operationally defined. If, for example, you define it as integrating non-mainstream methods into mainstream medicine, that provokes the question of why they are non-mainstream in the first place.

All of this rhetorical dancing is to avoid the obvious answer – integrative medicine is all about creating a double standard (legally, academically, professionally) so that treatments and methods that are below the line of scientific medicine can be integrated with those that are above the line. That’s it, and the laws that are pushed to promote CAM explicitly carve out this double standard.

Integrative medicine is preventive medicine/health promotion

This is the most annoying aspect of the CAM propaganda – the retconning* CAM into preventive medicine. This is nothing short of gaslighting. The first piece of this strategy is to slander mainstream medicine by saying it is not about disease prevention, only disease intervention.

None of the CAM modalities I listed above have any preventive value (or arguably, any value).

But this line is rhetorically very powerful. If they can slip in this equivalency, then they have already won. To further support this approach CAM proponents are very liberal in defining what is CAM. They would love to include all nutrition and exercise – but again, this is anti-historical gaslighting.  

Appeal to anecdote**

I almost always hear the phrase, “I have seen it work in my practice” from CAM proponents justifying their non-science based interventions. Of course, this is anecdotal, it means close to nothing. Anecdotal evidence leads us to the conclusions we want to be true (quoting Barry Beyerstein), not the truth. Legions of patients swore by all kinds of nonsensical treatments throughout history, that we now know to be nothing but snake oil.  

The appeal to anecdote can also sometime be camouflaged with euphemisms. We see this treatment working individually, even if it cannot be demonstrated with group level data. Translation – this treatment does not work when studied scientifically, so I am going to refer to anecdotes instead.

* Retcon (retroactive continuity): changing an existing fictional narrative by introducing new information that recontextualizes previously established events, characters, etc.; a literary or rhetorical device or propaganda where asserted facts in a fictional narrative, e.g., a sales pitch, or work are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former; a form of gaslighting

** Appeal too anecdote (argument from anecdote): an informal logic fallacy, where anecdotal evidence is presented as an argument without other contributory evidence or reasoning. This type of argument is considered as an informal logical fallacy as it is unpersuasive – since the anecdote could be made up, misconstrued or be a statistical outlier which is insignificant when further evidence is considered

More marketing propaganda

News bits: Cancelling abortion on the internet; White supremacists reject bad data; Bits about Stormfront

  Wired writes:

Texas Could Push Tech Platforms to Censor Posts About Abortion

If passed, the proposed law would also require internet service providers to block websites that discuss access to abortion

State lawmakers in Texas are considering a bill introduced last month that would make it illegal to provide information on how to access abortion. The bill would also require internet service providers to block websites offering content like that in Robin Marty’s book*, allow prosecution of abortion pill “distribution networks,” and permit anyone to sue a person who shared anything about how to access a medical abortion. The proposal borrows from a Texas law passed in 2021 that offers a cash bounty to citizens who sue a person who helped facilitate access to abortion care.

* The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America: The Complete Guide to Abortion Legality, Access, and Practical Support

It sure seems like red state legislatures are in full-blown crazy-go-nuts fascist mode these days.

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When the data is bad, bad people reject it: Stat News wrote in 2017:

White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. 

Some don’t like what they find

It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

Some of America's radical right is so irrational and incoherent its surprising those people can get dressed in the morning. In stead of kicking the racists out of the Nazi Stormfront neo-fascist social club, they reject the genetic testing as false and keep the impure blood in the racist's tea and cookies party. 

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Understanding extremism: Racism

The bit about Stormfront rejecting the validity of genetic testing raised the question, what is Stormfront. 

Wikipedia comments about Stormfront: Stormfront is a neo-Nazi Internet forum, and the Web's first major racial hate site. The site is focused on propagating white nationalism, Nazism, antisemitism (especially anti-semitic conspiracy theories) and islamophobia, as well as anti-feminism, homophobia, transphobia, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy.

Stormfront was founded online in 1995 by former Alabama Klan boss and long-time white supremacist Don Black. The Stormfront website claims to have millions of posts. Some of it's rhetoric is more sophisticated than I imagined. Some is what I imagined. The top of the homepage says this:

The truth is "hate" to those who hate the truth!

We are a community of racial realists and idealists. Black, Hispanic, Asian and Jewish Nationalists openly support their racial interests, with American taxpayers even required to support the Jewish ethnostate of Israel. We are White Nationalists who support true diversity and a homeland for all peoples, including ours. We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!

At the Stormfront science forum, how some of the racists deal with White racial superiority came as a surprise. There was some understanding of biology mixed in with racism:

Re: Bad Arguments Used By White Nationalists

Responder 1:

"Whites are superior in every sense"
That's completely spurious and counter-productive: While Whites have undoubtedly produced a great body of knowledge and achieved tremendous prowess in many fields, we are not 'superior' in every sense. Remember that each race developed under unique circumstances, thus the races developed different relative strenghths and weaknesses.

"Other races are sub-human"
Nonsense. This is a corollary to my previous statement: You wouldn't call a brown bear a "sub-bear" and polar bears the "master bears", despite their obvious phenotypic differences. Each is suited to its particular environment --problems only arise when they are no longer in their ideal environment.

We must remember what we are fighting for --cultural preservation and sovereignty. We must not confound this with irrational hatred of those who differ from us.

Responder 2 responding to Responder 1:

Well, that would be relevant had one bear made an accomplishment over the other. However, with humans this rationale is not applicable, or acceptable. The belief of White superiority should not be up for discussion because it is fact. The White race has made an unparalleled amount of development from ancient times to modern times. We have invented present and early systems of thought, technology, science, society, government, and so on. Without the White race the world, meaning Asia in particular, would have stayed completely stagnant in all of these fields.

Although Asians would have presented minor advancements, you and I both know that without White generosity, their current state of development would be about two thousand years behind and without any significant progression. Why is this? Well, this is due to the fact that Asians do not possess a broad scope of cognitive/mental ability in comparison to that of Whites. As a result, before White intervention, they did not advance through technology, science, etc because of that inability. Haven’t you ever wondered why Japan is the most technologically advanced nation in Asia? Well, it’s because of America. All of the other Asian nations are far behind, and in correlation to this, those nations have not been exposed to Western culture as vividly.

As for the Africans, well, I didn’t include them in my previous statement because it’s fairly obvious that Africans are inferior to Whites in every sense of the meaning. They have invented nothing in their history and consequently have failed to progress past the Age of Stone – about six thousand or more years behind that of us White men. Therefore, the only contender to Whites for racial superiority is Asians, but it has been made clear that they are not as broadly evolved in all fields of survival and intelligence. As a result, Whites are superior.

Responder 2

(note the cheerful avatar)

Responder 3:

Arguments referring to the brains of negroes vs brains of Whites shouldn't be used. Although I personally don't doubt them, they're virtually impossible to prove, and will only make you look silly.

Responder 4 responding to Responder 2:

One cannot use current levels of technology as a valid basis for comprehensive racial capabilities. Using this kind logic, we can argue that in the year 1400 AD, white Europeans were clearly inferior to East Asians since most of the new technologies being invented around that time came from the orient and those asian societies were the most advanced on earth. And in the year 200 AD, both the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire were equally advanced with almost no technology exchanges, so the two races were equal 1800 years ago? You must face the fact that biologically, entire races do not evolve new features overnight. Thus a great deal of the differences between societies are justifiably based on chance occurances and culture in general. And please don't quote Murray's work on human acheivements on me, because I've read it. His statistical models were based on the frequency of names of great visionaries, explorers, and inventors who lived from the ancient times up to 1950. But the frequency tables were developed from available text written after 1950 to present. He was basically counting the number of occurrences of each famous person in all published text written in the last 50 years, ranking the list of people by this metric and then grouping it by race. Now you tell me....given the fact that we live in age where Western Civilization is holding a dominant (though arguably declining) position versus the rest of the world, who will publish more books? Western nations, the semi-industrialized Asians, or the non-industrialized Africans? .... The point of contention that I'm alluding to is that it is extremely dangerous to correlate whiteness with innate superiority. Being white is not an assurance that one is strong or capable or even average. It is up to individuals and cultures alike to strive for and to maintain a dominant civilization.