Plausibility in science and the reality of psi phenomena

CONTEXT

There are good reasons to consider the plausibility of data when it is asserted to mean something extraordinary. An example:

Someone with a dent in their car’s fender has a bit of blood and some brown fur in the dent. The car's owner claims they hit a deer the night before. Is that evidence plausible enough to believe that the claim is probably true? Probably for most people. But what if they said they hit a Bigfoot or a furry alien? Now is the evidence enough to be plausible? Would you ask for more evidence before believing the Bigfoot or alien claim is likely true?

The same thing applies to assertions of data from paranormal or psi research. Believers in explanations for supernatural, paranormal and psi phenomena argue that existing data proves that something is there, supernatural or not. 

Psi phenomena are the aggregate of alleged parapsychological functions of the mind including extrasensory perception (ESP), precognition, and psychokinesis. Parapsychology is the study of mental phenomena which are inexplicable by orthodox scientific psychology and other knowledge. Such phenomena include telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. Psychokinesis is the supposed ability of some people to move physical objects by mental effort alone.

ABOUT PLAUSIBILITY

Steven Novella at the Neurologica blog writes:

I get e-mails, and my recent article on ESP research attracted a number of angry individuals who wanted to excoriate my closed minded “scientism”. I think people care so much about ESP and other psi and paranormal phenomena because it gets at the heart of their beliefs about reality – do we live in a purely naturalistic and mechanistic world, or do we live in a world where the supernatural exists? Further, in my experience while many people are happy to praise the virtue of faith (believing without knowing) in reality they desperately want there to be objective evidence for their beliefs. Meanwhile, I think it’s fair to say that a dedicated naturalist would find it disturbing if there really were convincing evidence that contradicts naturalism. 

Both sides have an out, as it were. Believers in a supernatural universe can always say that the supernatural by definition is not provable by science. One can only have faith. This is a rationalization that has the virtue of being true, if properly formulated and utilized. Naturalists can also say that if you have actual scientific evidence of an alleged paranormal phenomenon, then by definition it’s not paranormal. It just reflects a deeper reality and points in the direction of new science. Yeah!

Regardless of what you believe deep down about the ultimate nature of reality (and honestly, I couldn’t care less, as long as you don’t think you have the right to impose that view on others), the science is the science. Science follows methodological naturalism, and is agnostic toward the supernatural question. .... So you can have your faith, just don’t mess with science.

ESP and psi believers become apoplectic when you mention scientific plausibility. In my experience, they have to misunderstand what it is and how it is used, no matter how many times or how many ways I explain it to them, in order to maintain their position. For example, I recently had an exchange where the e-mailer responded:

Dr. Novella, your argumentation here is more reasonable, even if it still displays scientism. I’ll point to your statement, “This is especially true since they are proposing phenomena which are not consistent with the known laws of physics.” Here you’re making the known laws a determining factor for rejecting the prospect of the phenomena. The very point of the investigations is to see if something exists beyond the known laws. Again, the evidence is the authority. The known laws don’t disallow what isn’t known. You seem to think you’re making a very sound argument, all the while exhibiting pure scientism.

Of course, I said nothing of the kind, and no matter how many times I corrected this fallacy, he returned to it. The idea is that since science is trying to discover new things, that already established findings or laws don’t matter and can be comfortably ignored. “The evidence is the authority” – just like with alternative medicine. He pairs this with the straw man that plausibility is “a determining factor”.

Here is how science actually works. First of all, science builds upon itself. We have to take into consideration prior knowledge, because that affects how we interpret new information. If, to give an extreme example to illustrate the point, I make an observation that seems to contradict 1000 prior observations, do we chuck out the prior observations? What is the probability that the 1 observation is wrong vs the 1000 observations?

[There are some] people who claim that they have evidence for information going from the future to the past, or for information being transmitted from one brain to another without any detectable signal, and any known mechanism. The fact that these observations appear to contradict the known laws of physics is not “determinative”. But it is also not just a prior bias. It affects how rock solid [plausible] the evidence has to be before we conclude we have a genuine anomaly [inexplicable data or phenomenon] on our hands. In my opinion, this evidence (for ESP) is orders of magnitude too weak to conclude we have a genuine anomaly. The effect sizes are small, the researchers don’t have a great history for rigor, and the protocols cannot be reliably replicated. So we have relatively weak evidence being put up against rock solid laws of physics. It is not “scientism” to say that the evidence is not sufficient. And it is not scientific or logical to dismiss this dramatic lack of plausibility.

This exemplifies the ongoing disagreement between people who believe ESP and psi phenomena are real and mainstream science consensus that denies that ESP and psi are real. One of the believers, is researcher Daryl Bem. In 2011, Bem published an analysis of data from nine separate ESP experiments that showed that precognition is real. Precognition is knowing that an even will happen before it happens. 

In 2015, Bem and others published a paper that analyzed 90 experiments from 33 laboratories and found that precognition is a real phenomenon. The statistical significance from the 90 experiment analysis was vey high, even higher than the significance that physicists demanded for belief in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. For context, the FDA requires statistical significance of there being a 5% (1 chance in 20) or less chance of the data for a new drug being a statistical fluke. That is usually expressed as p ≤ 0.05 (p means probability of a fluke). The lower the p number, the smaller chance there is of data being a fluke or an anomaly. 

The significance of Bem's 90 experiment analysis was p = 1.2 × 10^-10 or p = 0.00000000012. In other words, the chance of the data being a fluke is extremely low, 1.2 in 10 billion. Despite that, mainstream science still rejects psi phenomena as real, citing the implausibility of precognition in view of the laws of the universe. Mainstream science looks for explanations that do not violate the any law of the universe. Here, the violation is knowledge of a future event flowing backward in time and being accurately sensed by the human brain-mind before the event occurs. 

An expert rejects psi phenomena

One expert on Bem's work expresses a major concern about the entire scientific enterprise in view of Bem's analysis. E.J. Wagenmakers writes:

James Randi, magician and scientific skeptic, has compared those who believe in the paranormal to “unsinkable rubber ducks”: after a particular claim has been thoroughly debunked, the ducks submerge, only to resurface again a little later to put forward similar claims. 

Several of my colleagues have browsed Bem's meta-analysis and have asked for my opinion. Surely, they say, the statistical evidence is overwhelming, regardless of whether you compute a p-value or a Bayes factor. Have you not changed your opinion? This is a legitimate question, one which I will try and answer below by showing you my review of an earlier version of the Bem et al. manuscript.

I agree with the proponents of precognition on one crucial point: their work is important and should not be ignored. In my opinion, the work on precognition shows in dramatic fashion that our current methods for quantifying empirical knowledge are insufficiently strict. If Bem and colleagues can use a meta-analysis to demonstrate the presence of precognition, what should we conclude from a meta-analysis on other, more plausible phenomena?

Disclaimer: the authors [Bem et al] have revised their manuscript since I reviewed it, and they are likely to revise their manuscript again in the future. However, my main worries call into question the validity of the enterprise as a whole.

I urge the authors to convince themselves of the absence of psi and try and replicate one of Bem's experiment in a purely confirmatory setting, with a preregistered analysis protocol. When they monitor the Bayes factor they will, as N grows large, obtain massive evidence in favor of the truth. One good, preregistered experiment is worth a thousand experiments where the results are based on cherry-picking. To indicate that cherry-picking is a problem, I have never seen a preregistered experiment that monitored the Bayes factor and ended up supporting psi. Never.

In another publication Wagenmakers writes:

Research on extra-sensory perception or psi is contentious and highly polarized. On the one hand, its proponents believe that evidence for psi is overwhelming, and they support their case with a seemingly impressive series of experiments and meta-analyses. On the other hand, psi skeptics believe that the phenomenon does not exist, and the claimed statistical support is entirely spurious. We are firmly in the camp of the skeptics. However, the main goal of this chapter is not to single out and critique individual experiments on psi. Instead, we wish to highlight the many positive consequences that psi research has had on more traditional empirical research, an influence that we hope and expect will continue in the future. 

It is evident that even the smallest psi effects are worth millions if applied in games of chance. An online betting facility that requires the gambler to predict, say, whether a picture will appear at the left or on right of the screen should go bankrupt as soon as extraverted females [??] are allowed to predict the location of erotic pictures (we are happily prepared to invest in such a casino). If psi is demonstrably effective in generating cash, it would quickly be accepted in the pantheon of scientifically credible phenomena.

 

An economic argument 

against psi

A problem is that some people are making

money from homeopathy and tarot card readings

The rise of the Republican Supreme Court's anti-democratic, opaque shadow docket

In recent years, the radical right Republican Supreme Court has been increasingly relying on the shadow docket to advance the Republican's authoritarian anti-democracy, anti-transparency agenda. The shadow docket is a way for the court to decide issues while hiding both (i) the legal analysis behind the decision, and (ii) the judge's vote count. The shadow docket is an effective mechanism to keep the public from knowing what the court is actually doing and why.

NPR focused on a recent book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court uses stealth rulings to amass power and undermine the republic, by legal scholar University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck. NPR writes: 

Justice Samuel Alito hates the term shadow docket, and gave an hour-long speech in 2021 at Notre Dame, suggesting that journalists and politicians have seized on it to wrongly portray the court as "sneaky," "sinister," and "dangerous."

Nonetheless the term has stuck.

Professor Vladeck argues that the court has only itself to blame.

"What impelled me to write the book is that over the last six years, we've seen the shadow docket become a lot less boring because the Supreme Court, and especially the conservative majority, has been using unsigned and unexplained orders to a degree and in ways which really have no precedent in the court's history," he said in an interview with NPR.

These cases are brought to the court by a state, or a company, or a person who has lost in the lower courts, often at an early stage, and that loser is now asking the Supreme Court to block the lower court order while the case proceeds through the lower court appeals process, which typically takes many months.

Up until relatively recently, these shadow docket actions were quite rare. The statistics tell the story, statistics compiled by Vladeck. During the 16 years of the Bush and Obama administrations, the federal government, the most frequent litigant in the Supreme Court, only asked the justices for emergency relief eight times--or on average once every two years. The two administrations together got what they wanted in only four of the eight cases, and in all but one of them the court spoke with one voice, and no dissent.

But in the Trump administration, and with a newly energized conservative majority on the court, the picture changed dramatically. In just four years, the Trump Justice Department asked the court for emergency relief an astounding 41 times, and the court actually granted all or part of those requests in 28 of the cases.  

'The dirty secret'

[The court says it will fully and transparently consider a shadow docket case later when it comes before them, but that is a dirty secret lie.]

But "the dirty secret is that later never comes," he says. "By the time the border wall case," or "all kinds of other challenges to Trump policies make their way back to the Supreme Court, at the far end of the normal litigation process, President Biden is in office and those policies have been discontinued, and the cases are thrown out."

That pattern, he says, was repeated over and over again, thus allowing Trump "to carry out policies that lower courts had held to be unlawful because the Supreme Court, through unsigned and unexplained orders" said, in effect, 'Go ahead President Trump, we'll deal with this later.'"

Vladeck's point is not that the Supreme Court was necessarily wrong, but that its unexplained shadow docket rulings today are both "inscrutable, and inconsistent." The patterns that emerge, he maintains, put the court in an "exceptionally unflattering light."

"The more you look at the body of work, the more it looks like the best explanation for when the court is intervening and when it's not, is partisan politics and not neutral substantive legal principles," he contends. 

No opinions to analyze

Vladeck points to a speech Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave in 2021, in which she assured the audience that the current court "is not composed of partisan hacks" and urged people to "read the opinions." But as Vladeck observes, "What's remarkable about the shadow docket is that so often the court is handing down rulings with massive impacts in which there's no opinion to read."

The collapse of democracy in Turkey

An editorial in the WaPo by Fareed Zakaria lays out what is by now a familiar story about how modern tyrants kill both democracy and inconvenient facts and truths:

Turkey points to a global trend: Free and unfair elections

Many of us had high hopes for Turkey’s recent general election, believing that a flat-out victory for the opposition could mark a break with the worldwide trend toward illiberal democracy. But perhaps we were all misguided, seduced by the lure of free elections and trusting ultimately in the will of the people. In fact, what happened in Turkey this past weekend highlights the latest and most disturbing trend in the rise of illiberal democracy.

While incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not win outright reelection, the results were sort of a victory for him all the same. He did better than polls predicted and came out well ahead of his main opponent, leaving him highly likely to win a runoff scheduled for May 28. This is stunning, given that Turkey is a country in economic catastrophe, with sky-high inflation. The vote also took place just months after an earthquake, in which the government performed miserably.

Consider, though, the backdrop to these elections. Erdogan was up against Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the opposition candidate, a colorless bureaucrat without much charisma or eloquence. But the opposition had little alternative. The president had already eliminated from the field perhaps his most powerful potential rival, Ekrem Imamoglu, a charismatic politician from the same party as Kilicdaroglu, who was on a winning streak. In 2019, Imamoglu handily won the election for Istanbul mayor, a pivotal position that was Erdogan’s own path to power.

But on the flimsiest grounds, Erdogan’s party claimed fraud, and the electoral council ordered a fresh round of voting. Imamoglu won the second election by a larger margin. So Imamoglu was then charged with insulting public officials over the incident and was tried by a judiciary which has been widely described as packed with ruling party loyalists. Sure enough, last December, a court barred Imamoglu from politics and sentenced him to prison for almost three years. The decision is under appeal. In the meantime, though, Imamoglu has been prevented from running for the presidency.

Turkey’s political playing field is massively tilted in favor of Erdogan. The state lavishes funds on his supporters, and the country’s media is slavishly pro-government. Most of Turkey’s major media properties have been bought by business executives who are supporters of Erdogan. (The largest business group that maintained its distance from the president found itself mysteriously facing massive charges of tax fraud and ultimately sold its media holdings to a more compliant owner.)

State television, the country’s main source of broadcast news, relentlessly extols the virtues of Erdogan and his party and trumpets the achievements of the government. In April, state TV spent 32 hours on coverage of Erdogan versus 32 minutes for his opponent. Of all democracies, Turkey imprisons the most journalists. The Turkish government initiated more than 30,000 cases for the offense of “insulting the president” — in just one year (2020).

Erdogan’s government has systematically taken over ostensibly independent institutions, including courts and the body that controls elections. (If the May 28 runoff election turns out to be close and the opposition candidate comes out ahead, you can be sure that Erdogan will appeal — and that the election authorities will rule for him, just as they did in the case of the Istanbul mayoral vote.) Nongovernmental organizations face severe government investigation and scrutiny, limiting their ability to operate. The government has passed laws giving it tight control over social media and, over the election weekend, asked Twitter to block the accounts of about a dozen opposition figures. After February’s earthquake, when the government confronted intense criticism on social media for its mishandling of the disaster, it simply blocked Twitter for a while.

This is the next innovation in illiberal democracy. Elected presidents and prime ministers use their majorities to pass laws that give them sustained structural advantages over their opponents. They use government funds to shower their supporters with benefits. They file tax and regulatory cases against independent media groups, investigate journalists and NGOs, and reshape independent agencies and courts into compliant arms of the ruling party. They then hold “free” elections.

Erdogan’s tactics will seem depressingly familiar to citizens in many democracies around the world. Look at India, once home to fiercely independent media. Today, it has fallen to No. 161 in a world press freedom index issued by Reporters Without Borders. Look at Hungary, where the government and pro-government businesses control almost all the country’s media, and the body overseeing the judiciary effectively became an arm of the ruling party, drawing the ire of the European Union. (The office’s first head was a godparent to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s oldest child.) Look at Mexico, where the president has tried to gut that country’s proudly independent election authority.

When elections are held in these circumstances, and international observers duly note that the ballots were properly cast and counted and then certify such elections to be genuinely competition, they are doing the world a disservice. We need a new vocabulary to describe this phenomenon. Are such elections free? Technically, yes — but they are also profoundly unfair.

Q: Is a rigged election actually free when people cannot vote for legitimate candidates they want to vote for? Is it better to call rigged elections a sham or fake election or a non-election than calling it free but unfair, or does it not matter much what the mainstream media calls rigged elections? 

Following the money that is killing democracy and civil liberties

The New Republic writes:

A few months before the midterms, with pollsters spewing red wave predictions and post-Roe conservatives planning to force raped children to give birth, a bit of political news added to progressives’ gloom. A Chicago billionaire had gifted anti-abortion Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo the largest known tranche of dark money in U.S. history: $1.6 billion. The sum is staggering; it will finance at least a generation of extreme right-wing political proselytizing. And almost no one—except for the conservative cabal that bagged the whale—had heard of him.

Leonard Leo

The gift from nonagenarian electronics magnate Barre Seid (pronounced Barry Side) is effective altruism in reverse: a fire hose of cash aimed at destroying American liberal culture through lawsuits and support for politicians challenging gay rights, unions, environmental protection, voting rights, and public education. The money will last a good long while. Philanthropic recipients usually follow a 5 percent rule: They try not to spend more than 5 percent of the endowment per year. Seid’s pile is so large that it could return an average $136 million a year, or north of $230 million on a good year, to influence U.S. law and policy. Without ever having to touch the nut. For a sense of how enormous that is, consider this. The Heritage Foundation and its affiliates spent about $86 million in 2021. Heritage is a huge, and hugely influential, conservative think tank. Leo could create two Heritage Foundations and one more sizable organization on the side—all, again, without having to dip into the principal at all.

Barre Seid

Leo, a New Jersey Roman Catholic and grandson of an Italian immigrant who worked for Brooks Brothers, hobnobs around the upper echelons of American power .... Leo is a proud “Knight of the Sovereign Order of Malta,” and his long career has been motivated by fanatical opposition to women’s rights to reproductive choice. Since Seid handed the money over in 2021, part of the pile has been funneled into black boxes like Donors Trust, a mega-donor money-washing machine. Having succeeded at subjecting American women to forced pregnancy, Leo, 57, is directing the money toward other goals: stopping “woke” culture, ending federal regulations on climate change, and limiting voting rights. Ultimately, Seid’s money will be used to shore up society’s winners—the American oligarchy, inherited trusts, CEOs, self-made billionaires, corporations—against the demands of the weak. It will be used to make the United States a tougher and, for many, a nastier country, where big money always wins, under the eye of Rambo Jesus.

All that from a man nobody knows.

Mr. 999

Steven Baer is, like Leonard Leo, a career anti-choice fanatic, but with a political style from the Roger Stone School of Ratfuckery. The Illinois fringe conservative built himself a minor national reputation by shaming enemies like Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy with salacious dirt. Even the conservative National Review finds Baer hard to stomach, calling him “the world’s most successful email harasser.”

Baer had his fetal rights epiphany as a student at Brown in the early 1980s, when he “saw photographs of piles of corpses at Auschwitz juxtaposed to photographs of piles of dead babies,” he told me, suggesting that legal abortion was equivalent to the Holocaust and abortion clinics the feminist version of Hitler’s gas chambers. He then spent much of his career raising hell and money from a wacky corner of fringe right-wing politics. 

What $1.6 Billion Means

Seid’s bequest is believed to be the largest dark money donation in U.S. history. Charitable nonprofits are required to disclose their major donors, but the IRS class of political recipients defined as “social welfare” groups like Leo’s Marble trust are not. “Seid’s donation seems to be one of the largest, if not the largest, single political donation ever given,” said Kathleen Enright, president of the Council on Foundations, a nonprofit association of philanthropic entities. “But to be clear, this is not a charitable contribution by any means. It is a political contribution made to support a political agenda.”

How it works is: If Warren Buffett sets up a charitable foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization under IRS rules, it must spend transparently. Political action committees engaging in candidate support also must disclose donors. But when a billionaire throws a fortune at a “social welfare,” 501(c)(4) status organization, the IRS doesn’t require donor disclosure. Beyond Leo and his coterie, nobody knows how the money is being spent, or whether Seid put any restrictions on it. If Leo’s past is precedent, the money will support cherished right-wing goals: expanded gun rights, further erasure of the wall between church and state, rollbacks of civil rights on various fronts, and federal and state judges who will rule favorably on those issues.

The NR article continues at length about the fanaticism and wealth that is a major source of wealth and power for the radical right Republican Party and American style fascism. What we are witnessing is an extremely well-funded, opaque, slow coup against democracy, civil liberties and inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. 

If the American people could understand** what is going on here, most of them would oppose it. But this fascist effort to kill American democracy operates in as much secrecy as possible, which is a lot of secrecy. It also operates behind a powerful shield of dark free speech that effectively distracts, confuses and divides the American people. Public opposition to this evil political monster is splintered and diffused into weakness.

** By now, most rank and file people who still support radical right Republicans and Libertarians are, for the most part, psychologically and/or socially incapable of understanding what is going on. Facing the reality of what they actually support and empower with their votes is simply too painful to accept. The American fascist forces depend on two things. The first is the well-funded fascist elites like Barre Seid and Leonard Leo. The second is the deceived and betrayed rank and file voters who mostly unknowingly support and empower the elites and their American fascist agenda.

News bits: Mike was proved wrong; Tucker for president?; Etc.

While the stolen 2020 election hoax was in full swing, the pillow guy Mike Lindell kept publicly saying that he had rock solid evidence the election was stolen. At one public meeting, he laid out some evidence and promised a $5 million reward to anyone who could prove the evidence was did not prove the 2020 election was stolen. Lindell referred to the challenge as as the “Prove Mike Wrong” contest. In the crowd (small group of people?) at that public event, was Trump supporter Robert Zeidman. Zeidman was a computer programmer and data analyst by profession. Zeidman collected Lindell's evidence and in a couple of hours figured out that Lindell's evidence wasn't even evidence. It was just random stuff having nothing to do with the 2020 election.

Zeidman asked Lindell's company to pay the reward. Lindell's company refused. Zeidman went into arbitration and won. Lindell's company still refused. Lindell's company then filed suit in federal court to get a declaration that the arbitration was bogus and void. Now, Zeidman has filed suit in federal court to force Lindell to pay the $5 million prize, plus interest of 10 percent a year. A NYT article comments:

“It’s not about payment, it’s wrong. They’re just doing this trying to discredit the evidence and the evidence is all there,” Lindell said in an interview Friday. “We’re taking it to court. It’s just all corrupt.” 

The controversy grew out of an offer Lindell made ahead of a “cyber symposium” he held in August 2021 in South Dakota. In public and broadcast appearances, he claimed that he had data showing that the Chinese government had interfered with the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and he said he would pay a $5 million prize to any cyber expert who could prove that the material was not from that election.  

Zeidman examined Lindell’s data and concluded that it did not substantiate Lindell’s claims of fraud and in fact had no connection to the 2020 election.

Once can certainly enjoy the crass entertainment of this bizarre fiasco that a crackpot Republican elite is entangled in. But it is very much worth considering that elite, anti-democracy crackpot Republican radicals like Lindell will wind up in powerful positions in the federal government if any Republican candidate wins the 2024 presidential election. Lindell himself likely will be empowered if Trump wins. That thought is not nearly as entertaining.

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The Hill writes:

A political action committee to get former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to run for president is making its launch with an ad that praises him for mocking “woke nonsense” — and is aiming to pull the GOP presidential field to the right.

The Draft Tucker PAC, a hybrid PAC that filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission in late April shortly after Carlson was ousted from Fox News, debuted an ad on Thursday evening that is set for an initial weeklong ad on the conservative Newsmax cable channel next week.

“Republicans need a new leader, and Tucker Carlson is ready to lead,” the ad says. “No one in America is more articulate and pins down leftists in both parties better than Tucker.”

And there are still millions of American adults who believe the Republican Party is merely conservative and reasonable, while vehemently arguing the Democratic Party is radical, socialist, tyrannical and/or pro-pedophilia/cannibalism. 

Of all the Republican contenders other than Trump, Tucker probably has the best chance of winning the GOP nomination. What a hopelessly screwed up political party. We are in deep trouble to say the least.

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The Daily Beast writes about a clever Republican disinformation lie that most of the radical right rank and file has probably internalized and will continue to believe:

Fox News Stoked Outrage Over Migrants Displacing Homeless Vets 

It Was a Hoax

Fox News and the rest of right-wing media went wild for a week over a now-debunked story about New York hotels booting homeless vets to accommodate asylum seekers

After right-wing tabloid The New York Post published the sensational report last Friday, Fox News and Newsmax ran wild with it, devoting dozens of segments (and countless online articles) to the indignation of “people who served our country and need a little boost” getting displaced by “illegals,” all while “these hotels are selling their soul for a check.”

Turns out, however, the whole story was made up.

There we have it. Shameless elite fascist Republican propagandists lie. And lie. And lie.

Fascist Republican dark free speech, it's what's for breakfast. And lunch, supper and snacks. All day, every day. 

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From the Yawn Files: A news article headline says that former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb is predicting that Trump will end up in jail as the slower than glacial Mar-a-Lago probe continues. 

Yawn. Nap time. That's white noise click bait. When Trump goes to jail, then there will be some news fit to print.

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Vanity Fair writes: Ted Cruz Launches Investigation Into Bud Light for Ad Featuring Transgender Influencer, Because No, He Doesn’t Have Anything Better to Do.

It's good to see elite fascist Republican politicians working diligently to solve America's serious, urgent problems. You know, problems like the existence of transgender children and adults who need to be cruelly harassed and oppressed. That will MAGA.

News bits

Bit 1 - Crackpots on parade

Current Affairs, the magazine of politics and culture, writes about the Democrat Kennedy in the 2024 race for president: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a Lying Crank Posing as a Progressive Alternative to Biden -- The only ‘herd immunity’ we need is against abysmal candidates like RFK Jr. He has spent decades as a professional liar and is not the kind of person who should be anywhere near power.

That seems to at least imply that Current Affairs won't be endorsing RFK Jr. in the 2024 elections. RFK Jr. is an anti-vaxx crackpot.

Bit 2 - Republicans undermine democracy and the courts

An opinion piece in Salon opines: 

Republicans prep with a new talking point: 

Jury verdicts don't count 

John Durham's report cements the new GOP line of attack on democracy: Rejecting the legitimacy of jury trials 

When E. Jean Carroll won her defamation and sexual abuse lawsuit against Donald Trump earlier this month, Republicans knew exactly who they wanted to blame. No, not Trump's defense attorney, who called no witnesses and offered no evidence in his client's defense. No, not Trump, who keeps undermining his weak denials of the crime by bragging about how guys like him "historically" and "fortunately" get away with sexual assault. No, they blamed the jury.

"That jury's a joke," huffed Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., echoed the same claim, grousing about "a New York jury," as if it's preposterous to try a case in the same jurisdiction where the crime actually happened. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., also took a swipe about the "New York jury."

Fascist Republican Party attacks on democracy continue . . . . . . .