Open-ended question about news reports for another Friday

Question: Of all the world news reported over the last week, which, if any, cause you to worry the most? 

Law news chunk: Supreme Court takes up a critically important case

One of the radical right's cherished government hating goals has been to attack the fundamental legitimacy of much of the power that federal agencies have to implement laws that congress writes and passes. Many or most of their laws are incoherent and/or ambiguous. Congress chooses incoherence and ambiguity to hide from accountability in elections. Congressional cowardice and moral depravity forces federal agencies to try to understand what congress intended its slop to mean and write regulations accordingly. 

According to government-hater propaganda myths, the power to write regulations is the alleged evil power of the deep state. Those evil, unelected, socialist, atheist bureaucrat pedophiles are the ones forcing us into tyranny and depravity, not those valiant patriots in congress. Unfortunately, moral cowardice has been a bipartisan thing, but it's usually not seriously bothersome to most congressional Democrats. On the other hand, most Republicans in congress hate government and the power it has to defend the Constitution and the public interest. Thus, they hate the system they participated in building and using to advance their own personal careers.

Yeah, I know. That is incoherent hypocrisy. But like it or not, there is no law that says that politics has to be coherent or non-hypocritical. 

The government-hater propaganda is a sham. The propaganda is almost pure hypocrisy, lies and deceit. This lawsuit strikes at the heart of an actually functioning government that is trying to obey the Constitution and serve the public interest. 

The Hill writes about a case the radical right Republican Supreme Court has just agreed to hear and decide, apparently still in this term which ends at the end of June or early in July. This case could turn out to be a true government killer. The Hill writes:

The justices this week agreed to take up a case that asks them to overrule a 39-year-old precedent that gives federal agencies deference in rulemaking that Congress hasn’t clearly authorized.

That decision could have wide-ranging impacts that scale back the executive branch’s authority to implement certain environment, employment, drug and other regulations when the justices decide whether to overrule the court’s 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, known as the Chevron deference.

[The Chevron defense] involves a two-part test to determine if a federal agency’s rule is authorized. First, a court determines whether Congress “has directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter.”

If Congress was ambiguous or silent, the court must defer to the agency and uphold its action if it was “based on a permissible construction of the statute.”

“I would think it’s the most significant federal case of this era,” said Mona Dajani, global head of renewables, energy & infrastructure at Shearman and Sterling.

“And I would even argue it’s bigger than Dobbs and Bruen. Some people will say Roe, I mean, so that’s how major this is,” she added, referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions on abortion and gun rights.

The test has become a bedrock of administrative law, and judges have cited it in more than 10,000 subsequent decisions, according to research by Columbia Law School professor Thomas Merrill.  

Unlike other federal courts, the Supreme Court chooses which cases it hears. The court’s move to hear the dispute — which required at least four justices to agree to do so — has given legal observers the strongest indication yet that Chevron may be at its deathbed, given past alarm bells voiced by some of the court’s conservatives.  

In a dissent from the court’s 2020 refusal to take up a separate regulatory case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the deference gives agencies “unconstitutional power.”

At present, most of the experts the Hill quotes in that article think that the Republicans will most likely vote to limit the scope of the Chevron Defense instead of obliterating it completely. But, that is what most experts thought about abortion and the Dobbs case and those experts were wrong.

Weakening Chevron will give companies more freedom to escape from federal regulations. The cause of gutting federal agency rule making power is a cherished dream of radical right, brass knuckles capitalist elites in the Republican Party. One can easily see why.

That said, since the goal is to limit power of the federal government, most Christian nationalist (CN) Republican elites are probably neutral to, or approving of, this effort. This attack on Chevron kills secularism that is usually reflected in federal regulations. CN elites want God's sacred law to govern the Constitution and federal rules, not human law. 

News bits: GOP attacks on no-fault divorce; DJT’s defamation lawsuit fails at trial court level

Rolling Stone writes:

The Next Front in the GOP’s War on Women: No-Fault Divorce

STEVEN CROWDER, THE right-wing podcaster, is getting a divorce. “No, this was not my choice,” Crowder told his online audience last week. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore — and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.”

Crowder’s emphasis on “the state of Texas” makes it sound like the Lone Star State is an outlier, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws on the books — laws that allow either party to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct in court.

It was a hard-fought journey to get there. It took more than four decades to end fault-based divorce in America: California was the first state to eliminate it, in 1969; New York didn’t come around until 2010. (And there are caveats: Mississippi and South Dakota still only allow no-fault divorce if both parties agree to dissolve the marriage, for example.)

Researchers who tracked the emergence of no-fault divorce laws state by state over that period found that reform led to dramatic drops in the rates of female suicide and domestic violence, as well as decreases in spousal homicide of women. The decreases, one researcher explained, were “not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left.”

Today, more than two-thirds of all heterosexual divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women.

Republicans across the country are now reconsidering no-fault divorce. There isn’t a huge mystery behind the campaign: Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, making it more difficult to leave an unhappy marriage is about control. Crowder’s home state could be the first to eliminate it, if the Texas GOP gets its way. Last year, the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce: “We urge the Legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.” 

The MJ article points out that similar proposals are being worked on by the Republican Party of Louisiana, while the Nebraska GOP has affirmed its belief that no-fault divorce should only be available to couples without children. At the 2016 Republican National Convention in 2016 delegates considered adding language declaring, “Children are made to be loved by both natural parents united in marriage. Legal structures such as No Fault Divorce, which divides families and empowers the state, should be replaced by a Fault-based Divorce.” 

So, do no fault divorce laws divide families or allow one spouse to get away from the other? What if one spouse wants to get out of a marriage for no particular reason? 

This is another front on the radical right's war on secularism, equality and civil liberties. Core Christian nationalism dogma, not fringe crackpottery, holds that in God's eyes wealthy White heterosexual men are superior, chosen by him to rule, and must be obeyed by everyone else.  

The MJ article suggests that the evidence indicates that Crowder’s position may have been worse if Texas still had fault-based divorce. Shortly after he announced he and his wife had separated, a 2021 video emerged of him berating his eight months pregnant wife. Her failure was to do “wifely things.” One can only wonder what was behind those failures to do wifely things. 

Also worth considering is this: The judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, who recently ruled to block access to birth control and mifepristone has repeatedly criticized the idea that the “sexual revolution” ushered in “permissive contraception policies,” abortion and no-fault divorce. These Christofascists are dead serious about controlling private lives as much as God demands.

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Trial court rejects Trumps' defamation lawsuit against the NYT: The NYT writes:

Former President Donald J. Trump, who had sued The Times, three of its reporters and his niece over an investigation into his tax returns, was ordered to pay The Times’s legal expenses.

When Mr. Trump filed the lawsuit in 2021, he accused the paper and three of its reporters of conspiring in an “insidious plot” with his estranged niece, Mary L. Trump, to improperly obtain his confidential tax records for a series of stories published in 2018.

“Courts have long recognized that reporters are entitled to engage in legal and ordinary news-gathering activities without fear of tort liability — as these actions are at the very core of protected first amendment activity,” Justice Reed wrote.

The judge also ordered Mr. Trump to pay legal expenses and associated costs for The Times and its reporters, Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner.  

The Times’s reporters “went well beyond the conventional news-gathering techniques permitted by the First Amendment,” Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said, and added: “All journalists must be held accountable when they commit civil wrongs.”

As usual, the fascist DJT attacks and undermines the courts and rule of law by making statements like his corrupted lawyer made. One can only wonder exactly what was beyond protected conventional news-gathering techniques. Just asking embarrassing questions? As usual, one is left to wonder. reading the party’s filings and/or the court ruling would be necessary to know what civil law(s) DJT alleged the NYT was breaking. That’s worth a blog post.

It is unusual for a court to order the losing side to pay costs. Maybe that signals the judge’s belief the case was nuts to begin with. If DJT appeals this ruling, he probably would lose all appeals including to the US Supreme Court. But, if the Supreme Court does agree to hear his appeal, that would signal the radical right Republican court is seriously considering changing the law to make it easier for people like DJT to win defamation lawsuits. 

Some radical right elites have wanted this to change defamation law for decades. Others do not because they understand that it would be a to edged sword, making radical right slander and smear propaganda more dangerous, unless the court could devise a rule that favors anti-democratic speech, corruption and/or authoritarianism. The anti-democratic goal for changing the law is to shut the press up by intimidation and threat defamation liability. Corruption and authoritarianism both virulently hate a free press, even the seriously weakened press we have today. For evidence, consider the tyranny models Russia and China.

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Federal debt Armageddon watch: This issue is heating up. Time is running out before the fascist Republican Party in congress pushes the federal government into defaulting on its (our) debt. The WaPo points out that there are few days in June when congress is in session and the president is in D.C. Presumably, those are the days most likely to result in some kind of resolution to avoid default.

Q: Should the debt ceiling be used to coerce policy changes and the radical right Republican House demands, or should it be a separate matter, or should it not be possible for congress to allow a default under the 14th Amend., Sec. 4 as some experts have argued?

Although it probably is dangerous, the Constitution should govern, not partisan politics, which is at least as dangerous. 

14th Amendment, Section 4: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

News bits: What Carlson was thinking on 1/6; Anti-climate change propaganda tactics

I've avoided posting about a lot of the noise surrounding Tucker Carlson in the wake of his firing by Faux Lies Corp. But what the NYT reports today is, in my opinion, revealing about how most of America's radical right feels about the left.

Tucker Carlson’s Text to a Producer

 

For years, Mr. Carlson espoused views on his show that amplified the ideology of white nationalism. But the text message revealed more about his views on racial superiority.

According to the NYT article, that text is a significant part of why Faux fired Tucker.

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Propaganda tactics to deceive, disinform and divide the public do not change much over time. The Guardian writes about what the American beef industry is doing to disinform Americans in its effort to deflect public attention away from its climate impacts: 

Inside big beef’s climate messaging machine: 

confuse, defend and downplay

The US beef industry is creating an army of influencers and citizen activists to help amplify a message that will be key to its future success: that you shouldn’t be too worried about the growing attention around the environmental impacts of its production.

It definitely does not want you to read scientific papers showing wealthy nations must reduce meat consumption to keep below the average global temperature rise of 2C, a threshold to stop systems collapse, mass extinctions, fatal heat waves, drought and famine, water shortages and flooded cities.

I know about these industry priorities as I am one of more than 21,000 graduates of a free, by-admission-only, online training course created by the US beef industry called the Masters of Beef Advocacy (MBA) program.

In addition, the average steer consumes several metric tons of forage and feed in its life, which means they need a lot of room to roam. But there’s not enough native grasslands on earth to feed all the cows that humans want to eat. So raising cattle often means cutting down forests or displacing other ecosystems to make room for bovines and their food.

“Since at least 2006 … the industry has been borrowing tactics from the fossil fuel playbook,” Jennifer Jacquet wrote in a 2021 Washington Post op-ed [entitled The meat industry is doing exactly what Big Oil does to fight climate action]. “While meat and dairy producers have not claimed that climate change is a liberal hoax, as oil and gas producers did starting in the 1990s, companies have been downplaying the industry’s environmental footprint and undermining climate policy.”

These deceive, divide and persuade tactics go way back in time. One can trace disinformation and spin tactics back to the 1920s, when the master propagandist Edward Bernays wrote his little masterpiece on the art of persuasion, Crystallizing Public Opinion. Bernays coined the phrase public relations to disguise the fact that this kind of persuasion was special interest propaganda intended to deceive and persuade. In other words, it was and still is dark free speech designed to persuade by deceit and irrational emotional manipulation, not honest speech designed to persuade on the merits.

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A federal judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has granted The Satanic Temple's (TST) lawsuit to use public school facilities for an after school satanic club. The grant is based on free speech grounds. The public's response to the TST application to use school facilities included death threats and moral outrage that scared school administrators into blocking TST's attempt to establish a club there. 

The judge's 37 page ruling includes this:

MEMORANDUM OPINION 

GALLAGHER, J.                                                                                                         May 1, 2023 

I. OVERVIEW

When confronted with a challenge to free speech, the government’s first instinct must be to forward expression rather than quash it. Particularly when the content is controversial or inconvenient.1 Nothing less is consistent with the expressed purpose of American government to secure the core, innate rights of its people.


Here, although The Satanic Temple, Inc.’s objectors may challenge the sanctity of this controversially named organization, the sanctity of the First Amendment’s protections must prevail. Indeed, it is the First Amendment that enumerates our freedoms to practice religion and express our viewpoints on religion and all the topics we consider sacred. Though the “First Amendment is often inconvenient” depending on one’s perspective, or responsibilities, this inconvenience “does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.” Int’l Soc’y for Krishna Consciousness v. Lee, 505 U.S. 672, 701 (1992) (Kennedy, J., concurring). “Even in the school setting, a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint is not enough to justify the suppression of speech.” Child Evangelism Fellowship of N.J. v. Stafford Twp. Sch. Dist., 386 F.3d 514, 528 (3d Cir. 2004) (quoting Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393, U.S. 503, 509 (1969)) (emphasis added, internal quotations omitted).

V. CONCLUSION 

For the foregoing reasons, TST’s Motion for Temporary Restraining Order And/Or Preliminary Injunction [ECF No. 19] is GRANTED IN PART and DENIED IN PART as follows: Plaintiff’s Motion to require Defendant to permit the After School Satan Club to meet at the times and on the days previously approved by Defendant is GRANTED. Defendant is ORDERED to permit the After School Satan Club to meet on the three dates and at the location previously stipulated to by the parties at ECF No. 23. Plaintiff’s Motion to require Defendant to distribute After School Satan Club permission slips for students to take home is DENIED. An appropriate order follows.

BY THE COURT: 

/s/ John M. Gallagher   

JOHN M. GALLAGHER 

United States District Court Judge

Was Abraham Lincoln Black?

 Inside The Curious Question Of The Great Emancipator’s Race

During Lincoln’s presidency from 1860 to 1865, some suggested that Lincoln had — in their view — an unnaturally close bond with African-Americans. They printed political cartoons, passed around pamphlets, and even dubbed Lincoln “Abraham Africanus I.”

Was Abraham Lincoln Black? Here’s The Evidence

Those who believe that Abraham Lincoln was Black point to two factors: his appearance and his unknown family history.

For starters, Lincoln described himself as having a “dark complexion” and “coarse black hair.” His own father, Lincoln said, had a “swarthy” complexion, “black” hair,” and “brown” eyes. For some contemporaries, this was enough to confirm that Lincoln was black.

British journalist Edward Dicey also noted Lincoln’s “uncombed and uncombable lank dark hair, that stands out in every direction at once… and a few irregular blotches of black bristly hair in the place where beard and whiskers ought to grow.”

Dicey went on to describe Lincoln’s “nose and ears, which have been taken by mistake from a head of twice the size.”

And American writer Nathanial Hawthorne offered up a similar description, noting, “[Lincoln’s] hair was black, still unmixed with gray, stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither brush nor comb.”

Hawthorne added, “His complexion is dark and sallow… he has thick black eyebrows and an impending brow; his nose is large, and the lines about his mouth are strongly defined.”

But beyond these superficialities, Lincoln came from a somewhat unknown background. His law partner, good friend, and biographer, William Herndon, noted that: “There was something about his origin he never cared to dwell upon.”

Lincoln was especially reticent to discuss his mother, Nancy, which led historian and author J.A. Rogers to speculate that Lincoln “was the illegitimate son of a Negro by Nancy Hanks.”

But if Lincoln was Black, he could be one of several “white” U.S. presidents who may have had multiracial roots. Historians like Rogers have argued that Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Warren G. Harding, Dwight Eisenhower, and Calvin Coolidge could have been Black.

(And here we all thought Obama was our first black President) 

Science chunks: Advances in AI mind reading; A warning about AI

The NYT writes about current state of the art in AI (artificial intelligence software) reading human minds. When I mentioned the existence of mind reading research to a small group of people a few weeks ago, the universal reaction was that I was full of baloney and/or fibbing because such a thing is impossible. They flat out denied that mind reading could ever be possible. They were wrong and not otherwise convincible. The NYT writes:

A.I. Is Getting Better at Mind-Reading

In a recent experiment, researchers used large language models to translate brain activity into words

Person's thoughts ---------------------- AI translating thoughts

On Monday, scientists from the University of Texas, Austin, made another step in [toward mind reading by machines]. In a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers described an A.I. that could translate the private thoughts of human subjects by analyzing fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] scans, which measure the flow of blood to different regions in the brain.

Scientists recorded M.R.I. data from three participants as they listened to 16 hours of narrative stories to train the model to map between brain activity and semantic features that captured the meanings of certain phrases and the associated brain response. .... The researchers used a large language model to match patterns in brain activity to the words and phrases that the participants had heard.

Already, researchers have developed language-decoding methods to pick up the attempted speech of people who have lost the ability to speak, and to allow paralyzed people to write while just thinking of writing. But the new language decoder is one of the first to not rely on implants. In the study, it was able to turn a person’s imagined speech into actual speech and, when subjects were shown silent films, it could generate relatively accurate descriptions of what was happening onscreen.

Large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Bard are trained on vast amounts of writing to predict the next word in a sentence or phrase. In the process, the models create maps indicating how words relate to one another. A few years ago, Dr. Huth noticed that particular pieces of these maps — so-called context embeddings, which capture the semantic features, or meanings, of phrases — could be used to predict how the brain lights up in response to language.

In a basic sense, said Shinji Nishimoto, a neuroscientist at Osaka University who was not involved in the research, “brain activity is a kind of encrypted signal, and language models provide ways to decipher it.”  

In their study, Dr. Huth and his colleagues effectively reversed the process, using another A.I. to translate the participant’s fMRI images into words and phrases. The researchers tested the decoder by having the participants listen to new recordings, then seeing how closely the translation matched the actual transcript.

Almost every word was out of place in the decoded script, but the meaning of the passage was regularly preserved. Essentially, the decoders were paraphrasing.

Original transcript: “I got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead only finding darkness.” 

Decoded from brain activity: “I just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass I stood on my toes and peered out I didn’t see anything and looked up again I saw nothing.”

What might be an inherent limit to how well AI can translate thoughts? Maybe diversity in how human brains think about various concepts (discussed here a couple of days ago). Science seems to be getting fairly close, e.g., within ~20 years, to a knowledge point where fundamental barriers to deciphering minds will apparently exist or not.  

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The NYT writes about an expert warning about the potential for AI software to hurt people:

AI expert Dr. Geoffrey Hinton

‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm.

Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.

On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr. Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough.

As Larry Motuz commented a day or two ago, humans go where Angels fear. That seems to be about right. As a species, humans sometimes (not always) charge ahead with things and then either try to react to and soften adverse consequences or just let the bad stuff just play itself out.

Dave: Oops!