Can anyone really argue with this?

 

Play Devil's advocate and give any counter argument.  

News: Clarence Thomas' moral rot: Santos & GOP rot; Trump rot; Tyranny vs. democracy update

The Lever writes:

Clarence Thomas Reversed Position After Gifts And Family Payments

The Supreme Court justice switched sides on a landmark legal doctrine, satisfying his benefactors’ conservative advocacy machine

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas changed his position on one of America’s most significant regulatory doctrines after his wife reportedly accepted secret payments from a shadowy conservative network pushing for the change. Thomas’ shift also came while he was receiving lavish gifts from a billionaire linked to other groups criticizing the same doctrine — which is now headed back to the high court.

The so-called “Chevron deference” doctrine stipulates that the executive branch — not the federal courts — has the power to interpret laws passed by Congress in certain circumstances. Conservatives for years have fought to overturn the doctrine, a move that would empower legal challenges to federal agency regulations on everything from climate policy to workplace safety to overtime pay.

Thomas wrote a landmark Supreme Court opinion upholding the doctrine in 2005, but began questioning it a decade later, before eventually renouncing his past opinion in 2020 and claiming that the doctrine itself might be unconstitutional. Now, Thomas could help overturn the doctrine in a new case the high court just agreed to hear next term.  

Groups within the conservative legal movement funded by Leonard Leo’s dark money network and affiliated with Thomas’ billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow have organized a concerted effort in recent years to overturn Chevron. That campaign unfolded as they delivered gifts and cash to Thomas and his family in the lead-up to his shift on the doctrine.  

In 2010, Crow bankrolled a dark money group led by Thomas’ wife, Ginni, that paid her $120,000. Leo was on the group’s board of directors. In 2012, Leo’s dark money network steered undisclosed consulting payments to Thomas’s wife. The Leo network has funded Republican politicians and several nonprofits pressing the Supreme Court to overturn the Chevron doctrine next term.

Thomas should recuse himself from that case, but he probably won't. In his mind, concerns about actual conflicts of interest do not apply to himself. That is deep moral rot. So is the dark money campaign by radical right brass knuckles capitalists who secretly corrupt those corruptible judges.

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The NYT writes:

Mr. Santos has already begun fighting that narrative. Though he has admitted to some lies, he pleaded not guilty in a packed courthouse on Long Island to all 13 counts, including money laundering, wire fraud, false statements and stealing public funds. Then he walked outside to reaffirm his intention to seek re-election.

“The reality is, this is a witch hunt,” Mr. Santos, 34, said, invoking another old American motif. “This is the beginning for me of the ability to address and defend myself.”

The indictment prompted a new round of calls by rank-and-file Republicans for Mr. Santos to resign or to even be expelled from Congress, but it remains far from clear if the political system will exact a price.

This reflects on deep moral rot in the Republican Party more than it does on Santos. If this was a Democrat in the House with a similar story, House Republicans would have expelled them long before now. Of the two nests of moral rot, that of the radical right, lies- and hypocrisy-riddled GOP is far worse for democracy and the rule of law than than Santos. 

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Fact checkers note that Trump's divisive, poison rhetoric at his town hall yesterday was a mass of deceit and outright lies. No surprise there. Just business as usual for the morally rotted fascist Republican Party's fornicating, morally rotted Grifter-in-Chief and tyrant wannabe. This is the human filth that GOP voters will nominate for president in 2024.

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In my opinion, the East-West global divide increasingly reflects a tyranny vs. democracy fight to the death. The widening split is reaching deep into commerce and leading to a bifurcation. Politics and commerce are deeply entwined and not separable any more, assuming they ever were. The NYT writes about China increasingly breaking away from the West in chip technology: 

‘De-Americanize’: How China Is Remaking Its Chip Business

Seven months after Washington unveiled tough curbs, Chinese companies are doubling down on homegrown supply chains and drawing billions in cash from Beijing and investors

.... U.S. trade barriers have accelerated China’s push for a more independent chip sector. Western technology and money have pulled out, but state funding is flooding in to cultivate homegrown alternatives to produce less advanced but still lucrative semiconductors. And China has not given up on making high-end chips: Manufacturers are attempting to work with older parts from abroad not blocked by the U.S. sanctions, as well as less advanced equipment at home.

The tough U.S. restrictions stemmed from alarm over what officials in Washington viewed as the threat posed by China’s use of its technology companies to upgrade its military arsenal. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, recently characterized the sentiment as part of a “new consensus” in Washington that decades of economic integration with China was not wholly successful, adding that the new controls were “carefully tailored” to go after China’s most cutting-edge semiconductors.

Science: Weighing empty space

Scientific American writes about a fascinating developing experiment called Archimedes to measure the weight of empty space. This is a really cool experiment. Knowing empty space weight will help explain why the universe is expanding as it is and what its ultimate fate is likely to be. SciAm writes: 

A vacuum is not completely empty. .... nature can “borrow” energy for extremely short amounts of time. These changes in energy, known as vacuum fluctuations, often take the form of virtual particles, which can appear out of nowhere and disappear again immediately.

Researchers can calculate the energy of the vacuum in two ways. From a cosmological perspective, they can use Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity to calculate how much energy is needed to explain the fact that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. They can also work from the bottom up, using quantum field theory to predict the value based on the masses of all the “virtual particles” that can briefly arise and then disappear in “empty” space (more on this later). These two methods produce numbers that differ by more than 120 orders of magnitude (1 followed by 120 zeros). It's an embarrassingly absurd discrepancy that has important implications for our understanding of the expansion of the universe—and even its ultimate fate. To figure out where the error lies, scientists are hauling a two-meter-tall cylindrical vacuum chamber and other equipment down into an old Sardinian mine where they will attempt to create their own vacuum and weigh the nothing inside.

Vacuum fluctuations have to respect some rules. A single electrical charge, for example, cannot suddenly appear where there was none (this would violate the law of charge conservation). This means that only electrically neutral particles such as photons can pop out of the vacuum by themselves. Electrically charged particles have to emerge paired with their antiparticle matches. .... The result is that the vacuum is continuously filled with a stream of short-lived particles buzzing around.

Even if we can't capture these virtual particles in detectors, their presence is measurable. One example is the Casimir effect, predicted by Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir in 1948. According to his calculations, two opposing metal plates should attract each other in a vacuum, even without taking into account the slight gravitational pull they exert on each other. The reason? Virtual particles. 

.... many physicists are convinced virtual particles interact with gravity just as ordinary particles do. .... To verify that virtual particles interact with gravity like normal matter, the Archimedes team members want to use the Casimir effect to weigh virtual particles with a simple beam balance. 

The weight of virtual particles in the vacuum

causes one balance beam to tilt slightly and misalign the

light beam, giving rise to different light intensity that

reaches the light detector

 

Small, slow temperature changes will be used to induce electrical

property changes in one of the disks compared to the other disk 

The Casimir effect will arise inside the superconducting 

disk, causing its buoyancy to increase or decrease compared to the other disk 

The disks have a diameter of about 10 centimeters (3.9 in) and are several millimeters thick

SciAm describes it like this: As the conductivity changes in the first sample [disk], it acts like the classic two-plate [Casimir] setup, and the number of possible virtual particles within it varies. Thus, the buoyancy force periodically increases and decreases on the first weight. This variation should cause the balance to oscillate at regular intervals, like a seesaw with two children sitting on it.

If I understand this right, when one disk is superconducting and the other isn't, the number of virtual particles inside each disk will differ. If those virtual particles interact with gravity as predicted, that difference should be detectable as a tiny weight change in the superconducting disk. The tiny weight change will tilt the balance beam up or down. That tilt will be observed as a change in light intensity that is detected by the light detector.

This is really interesting in a couple of respects. The sensitivity of the balance beam is incredible. It was not possible to build such an instrument until after giant gravity wave detectors were built and started operating in 2015.[1] To detect what empty space weighs, Archimedes has to be about 10 times more sensitive than gravity wave detectors. Archimedes is designed to measure a force of about 10(-16) newton, which is akin to trying to weigh the DNA in a single cell.[2] Once fully assembled, the whole apparatus will be about three meters high, wide and deep and will weigh several tons. It will operate at near the temperature of liquid nitrogen (-320.4°F), which causes one of two weights hanging from the balance beam to become a superconductor when cooled down enough.

The instrument will be installed in an abandoned mine in Sardinia, a seismically stable, sparsely populated area of the Mediterranean. Geologically, Sardinia is one of the quietest places in Europe. Human-caused vibrations are low. Being underground insulates the instrument from vibrations that are more pronounced at the surface. The need for designing extremely sensitive instruments for precision measurements of gravitational waves was needed to pave the way for the even more sensitive instrument this experiment calls for. The area where Archimedes will be set up is 110 meters (361 ft) below ground in a chamber like this. 

Q: Is this experiment totally cool or what? 

Footnotes: 

1. Several years ago after gushing about detecting gravity waves being a whole new way to see the universe, sort of like a new wavelength of light, I recall someone commenting that it would be of little practical use. My response was wait and see. This experiment is one practical use, i.e., the design of an instrument that can measure vanishingly small weight.

2. My experience in doing biological research let to an intuitive understanding of and comfort with small sizes, weights and volumes. I learned how easily small things could be detected and sometimes have surprisingly large effects. I literally routinely measured out small weights and volumes to do my research. Adding 1 microliter of a reagent by hand to a 50 microliter (the volume of 1 drop of water) reaction volume was standard practice for me for years. There are 20 drops per milliliter and ~29 mL per fluid ounce. I bet that most of those old 50 microliter reactions I used to run all the time have shrunk to ~5 microliter and are usually prepared by machines.

The SciAm article says that the weight of the virtual particles to be weighed is tiny. That weight is about the same as the DNA weight in one cell. From the point of view of the average person that is a vanishingly small weight. But from my point of view, I'm surprised at how much weight that is. Human DNA consists of ~3 billion base pairs with each base pair consisting of about 70 atoms. Remember, the virtual particle weight equivalent of those tens of billions of atoms in DNA arise inside a solid thin disk hanging inside a vacuum. That disk is about 3.9 inches in diameter (~1.95  inch radius) and about 0.1 inch thick.

Show your work for full credit:

How much virtual particles in the universe weigh

The volume of a disk or cylinder is V=πr²h. According to the cylinder volume calculator we all know, love and use all the time: The volume of the disk in Archimedes = πr²h = π×1.95²×0.1 = 0.38025π = 1.1945906065275 inches³

The disk in Archimedes has a volume of about 1.19 cubic inches with a virtual particle weight more than as much as DNA weight a single human cell. Remember, what Archimedes is detecting is not all the virtual particles in the disk. It is only detecting the change in virtual particle weight as one disk becomes superconducting when cooled down enough. 

For context, our convenient volume of the Earth calculator says that the Earth has a volume of about 6.61²⁵ cubic inches or 66,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic inches. Obviously, the volume of space, i.e., the universe, is a lot bigger than Earth. The universe is much bigger than ginormous. Compared to the universe, the Earth is less than a dust particle in a big room full of air.

Therefore → then an arithmetic miracle occurs → the weight of virtual particles in the universe must be millions of trillions of quadrillions of gigatons. Probably a lot more than even that.

See why this little experiment is a big deal? Little pipsqueak things can add up. A billion tons here and a gigaton there and pretty soon, one is talking about something that could be seriously influencing the entire freaking universe. 

News bits: Analysis: Corrupting the Supreme Court is a political goal?; Etc.

Lever News proposes interesting rationale for why the modern Supreme Court is so resistant to ethics and transparency:  

Here’s The Real Goal Of Supreme Court Corruption

The prospect of luxury gifts and outside cash is designed to halt the historical trend of GOP appointees becoming more liberal

As the Founders noted, judges are given lifetime appointments for the explicit purpose of preserving an “independent spirit” that allows them to change their views without fear of consequences. And in fact, data suggests that in the past, many conservative justices have become more liberal as they age.

In light of that, the money and gifts flowing to conservative justices can be seen not merely as cheap influence-peddling schemes to secure specific rulings in individual cases. It can also be seen as a grand plan to deter the ideological freedom that lifetime appointments afford.

In short, the largesse from billionaires and Leo — who helped assemble the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority as President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser — creates personal financial incentives for justices to remain doctrinaire ideologues and resist any deviation from the conservative line, even if they might once in a while have an inkling to dissent.

No doubt, preventing this so-called “ideological drift” is exactly the point, as Five To Four’s Michael Liroff noted in a recent episode of Lever Live. From Earl Warren to William Brennan to John Paul Stevens to David Souter, the Republican Supreme Court appointees who ended up becoming liberals haunt the psyche of the right’s judicial activists. It is this dynamic that conservative puppet masters most want to prevent, because it has not been an anomaly. 

In 2015, FiveThirtyEight parsed the data and quantified a big trend in its headline: “Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older.”

As you can see in the chart documenting the trend over nearly a century, many Republican nominees given the political freedom of a lifetime appointment have become more liberal in their rulings as they age.

That is an interesting, plausible explanation for why it is now so important to corrupt Supreme Court justices. It could explain why the justices themselves resist transparency and adopting any ethics rules at all. If they are properly groomed and play the radical right game well enough, they know they will probably be amply rewarded. 

Clarence Thomas has publicly stated that the pay for that Supreme Court justices get isn't worth it. He claims to be staying there for reasons of principle. Corruption can be seen as a principle that is worth staying for, at least for him. And, Sotomayor has also recently been caught in conflicts she refused to recuse herself from. At least $1 million  was involved in that little embarrassment, assuming she or any of them can be embarrassed by any level of corruption.

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The jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation probably won't faze him personally financially (he has to pay only $5 million), or politically, at least in the short run. The NYT comments: "After an indictment in Manhattan, Donald Trump’s supporters fell in line behind him."

Will there be serious political ramifications over time? My guess is no, but that remains to be seen. After all, now he gets to play the innocent, falsely accused, wrongly found liable, patriotic pussy grabbing, fornicating martyr. His base will eat that red meat up with gusto. 

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A post I put up a couple of days ago about reframing the federal debt issue in terms of seeing the 14th Amendment as controlling, About the federal debt time bomb: Reframing the issue. According to the NYT, Biden appears to be seriously considering it. He should. If he is right, then the debt ceiling goes away as an increasingly contentious issue. If not, the can just got kicked down the road for a year or maybe two as the case goes to the Supreme Court for a final decision.

The constitutional language of the 14th Amendment, Sec. 4 at issue is simple and clear. It reads in relevant part: 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. 

Because the radical right Republicans hate government and domestic spending programs, the authoritarian Republican court would desperately like to decide against Biden if he chooses this path. The question is what reasonable rationale could they possibly dream up in the face of such constitutional clarity and simplicity? They would have to make up a whopper of nonsense or somehow apply one of their existing bogus legal theories to arrive at their preferred destination of gutting government and civil liberties and calling it "constitutional."

But fear not, this radical right court with it's extreme lack of principle and morality, is fully up to the daunting task of shafting democracy and civil liberties, even if it commits unspeakable travesty on the constitution.

Radical right legal "reasoning"

It gets 'em wherever they want to go, 

just like "reasoning" the Bible 

Various bits: About radical right tactics; Etc.

An opinion piece by Naomi Oreskes in Scientific American comments on social security (SS). For context, Oreskes is hated by the radical right and big corporations. She is a science history professor at Harvard and an outspoken myth buster and lies attacker. Among other targets, she publicly attacks radical right climate science myths and the public relations (propaganda) lies and deceit campaigns that pro-pollution giants like Exxon-Mobil spew onto the public. Oreskes writes about why the radical right hates the SS program:

False ‘Facts’ about Science and Social Security Share Origins

Fake claims that Social Security is broken and that climate action isn’t urgent all come from flawed free-market ideology

Whether they work on climate change, evolution, vaccine safety, or any of a host of other issues, scientists frequently face resistance from people offering “alternative facts.” How did we come to live in a world where so many people feel vaguely supported opinions are just as valid as evidence-based scientific research—where people can't tell the difference between opinion and fact?

Part of the answer involves the long-standing efforts of the tobacco industry to deny evidence about tobacco's harms and of the fossil-fuel industry to confound understanding about climate change. These campaigns have undermined confidence in the idea that large amounts of scientific evidence produce a more accurate view of the world than do a few dissenting thoughts.

But there's another source for these doubts: the attack of conservative politicians on the U.S. Social Security program, which gives financial security to senior citizens. Republicans in Congress have recently threatened drastic cuts to Social Security and even privatization. Their ostensible reason is the need to balance the federal budget. “The numbers can't work” without big cuts to Social Security, former Republican finance committee aide Chris Campbell has declared. In fact, Social Security isn't a drain on the federal budget; it pays for itself through a dedicated payroll tax.

Why do conservatives keep attacking a successful program that pays for itself? Because of its success. Social Security is “big government” that works. Its accomplishments refute the conservative refrain that federal programs are costly failures and that the government should just leave things to the free market.

Some people like Oreskes claim that SS pays for itself (citing the US government itself), while others say it does not. Regardless, one can think that if congress had not sabotaged SS by plundering it, the program would be closer to paying for itself than it is now. But that's not why I posted this.

I posted this to point out that I am not alone in stridently arguing that the radical right Republican Party virulently hates successful government, especially domestic spending safety net programs. That hate leads the GOP in congress and the White House to sabotage success so they can howl that government never works. Then they argue that the programs they broke need to be eliminated and replaced by the always better free markets and private sector actors. 

As usual, keep your eyes on the intended flow of power by attacking domestic spending. Power flows away from government and the protections that affords to citizens. That power flows to corporations, and private sector interests who are then free to exercise that new power over citizens.

That is why I call the radical right Republican Party, radical right Christian nationalism and radical brass knuckles capitalism authoritarian or fascist. More power and wealth for elites and special interests and less democracy and civil liberties for average citizens is what all three stand for.  

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Meanwhile, at the Westminster dog show:

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Christofascism in Texas update: A WaPo opinion opines:

.... Republicans in the Texas legislature [are] advancing a bill requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state.

Texas is growing more purple with each passing year, which is exactly why the Republican-dominated legislature is reasserting the right’s political and cultural power with ever more radically conservative laws. Part of that effort is a series of bills meant to impose not just religion but Christianity into public schools.

One bill would allow schools to mandate “a period of prayer and Bible reading on each school day.” Another says school personnel must be allowed to “engage in religious speech or prayer while on duty.” Yet another would allow schools to replace school counselors with “chaplains” — no training or certification required. The centerpiece is the bill requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments, which has already passed the state Senate.

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A slew of increasingly agitated articles about the impending debt default are appearing. It looks like a lot of folks are getting scared. An article The Hill published today captures some of the growing anxiety: 

Financial markets brace for default as Biden, Republicans dig in on debt limit

The partisan standoff over the debt limit, which hardened over the weekend when 43 Senate Republicans said they would not support a clean debt-limit increase, sets the stage for severe turbulence in the financial markets, experts warn.

The yield on Treasury bonds maturing next month spiked last week, signaling that investors are already preparing for the possibility that President Biden and Republican leaders in Congress won’t reach a deal before the Treasury Department runs out of money next month.

Hm. Severe turbulence. That doesn't sound good. ☔ 

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Al Jazeera opines on the state of American democracy:

Republicans are pushing American democracy to its breaking point

They are working within the boundaries of the democratic system in order to tear it down

In this state [Tennessee] and elsewhere around the country, Republicans have been pressure-testing the strength and limits of democracy, seeing where they can violate and erode the rules and norms of democracy in order to gain and hold office and push through conservative laws and policies.

The ACLU says since 2021, 10 states have enacted anti-critical race theory laws that attack “our First Amendment rights to read, learn, and discuss vital topics in schools”, with over two dozen additional anti-CRT laws proposed in 2022 alone.  

In addition to suppressing vital civil rights, Republican governors and state legislators are also actively engaged in efforts to undermine the power of voters, efforts that Brennan Center fellow Zachary Roth calls “legislative anti-democracy”. These moves have included heightened efforts at gerrymandering; reconfiguring the way Electoral College votes are allocated to favor Republican candidates; making direct democracy, such as ballot initiatives, more difficult to achieve; and using state laws to negate or undermine more liberal local municipalities.

Even Al Jazeera doesn't get it, even when it writes about it. What radical right Republican elites are doing isn't conservative or conservatism. It is radical right authoritarianism. Plutocratic-autocratic fascism and Christofascism in my opinion.

By continuing to call radical right authoritarianism conservative, the stunningly clueless media normalizes what cannot be normalized in a democracy. It can be normalized in a tyranny or theocracy, but not a democracy. The Republican Party is normalizing tyranny and the stupid media abets it.

About the federal debt time bomb: Reframing the issue

The NYT published an opinion by well-known constitutional scholar, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe. The opinion opines:

Why I Changed My Mind on the Debt Limit

Over the years, Congress has raised the debt ceiling scores of times, most recently two years ago, when it set the cap at $31.4 trillion. We hit that amount on Jan. 19 and are being told that the “extraordinary measures” Treasury has available to get around it are about to run out. When that happens, all hell will break loose.

The question isn’t whether the president can tear up the debt limit statute to ensure that the Treasury Department can continue paying bills submitted by veterans’ hospitals or military contractors or even pension funds that purchased government bonds.

The question isn’t whether the president can in effect become a one-person Supreme Court, striking down laws passed by Congress.

The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding.

There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no.

And there is only one person with the power to give Congress that answer: the president of the United States. As a practical matter, what that means is this: Mr. Biden must tell Congress in no uncertain terms — and as soon as possible, before it’s too late to avert a financial crisis — that the United States will pay all its bills as they come due, even if the Treasury Department must borrow more than Congress has said it can. 

The president should remind Congress and the nation, “I’m bound by my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts for the first time in our entire history.” Above all, the president should say with clarity, “My duty faithfully to execute the laws extends to all the spending laws Congress has enacted, laws that bind whoever sits in this office — laws that Congress enacted without worrying about the statute capping the amount we can borrow.”

That analysis feels right to me. Why? Because the 14th A., Sec. 4 reads in relevant part as follows: 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. Clearly, Congress does not have the power to force the US into default.

Unless the Republicans have subverted the Constitution, and maybe they have, the Constitution stands above the laws that Congress passes. In other words, Congress can pass laws that are unconstitutional and the Supreme Court is supposed to fix that. But here, Congress passed spending laws that are not being challenged as unconstitutional by Republicans. Instead the radical right authoritarians say they are willing to ignore spending laws and allow a default in clear violation of the 14th A., Sec. 4. 

Q: Does Tribe get the analysis right here, or is there some sneaky trick or flaw in the logic and/or language of the Constitution?