News chunks: Radical right irrationality; Radical right pro-corruption policy; The indictment

Mike Pence is one of the hoard of extremist radical Republicans now running for president in 2024. It is useful to know that the insulting irrationality, hypocrisy and arrogance that characterizes the apparent nominee Trump has poisoned the minds of the rest of the herd. LGBQT Nation reports about the irrational cluelessness and hypocrisy of Pence when he was faced with deep contradictions in his own extremist dogma:

GOP presidential candidate Mike Pence could hardly respond when a CNN reporter pointed out his hypocrisy on LGBTQ+ issues. Pence argued that parental rights are paramount in one instance and then argued against parental rights when it comes to gender-affirming care.

“We’re gonna protect kids from the radical gender ideology and say no chemical or surgical gender transition before you’re 18, period,” he said, getting applause from the conservative audience.

Host Dana Bash pushed back: “I just want to be clear on this because you are so adamant about parents’ rights.”

“Right, I am,” Pence responded.

“But in this particular case, parents who say, along with the doctors, that what is best for their kids, what their kids feel most comfortable with doing, is gender transition,” Bash said. “The parents should not be allowed to do that?”

Pence did not appear to have a response ready for this fairly obvious question.

“Right, look, I, I, look… The, the s- state has the obligation to see to the safety and health and well-being of the people in the state,” he said, even though Pence adamantly opposes safety measures like vaccine mandates, which do a lot more to keep people safe than focusing on transgender youth. “And I accept that. Look, yet… I, I take your point, I take your point….”

Bash insisted that she wasn’t making a point, “It’s a question,” as Pence continued to stammer.

“Well, I, I, look, this… Well we have afoot in America that is a radical gender ideology that has taken hold in our schools, that has taken hold in our universities, it is afoot across the nation….” Pence responded, trying to talk about anything other than the inconvenient fact that many parents of transgender kids support their children.

Obviously, Pence, like most other radical Republican elites has no idea of what he stands for or the pain his dogma will impose on innocents. He cannot understand his own beliefs because he is incapable of rational thought in the face of his own infallible reason-killing Christian fundamentalist dogma.

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From the Corruption Files: An important but grossly under-reported trait that's prominent among radical right Republican elites is their support for legalized opacity. Opacity shields corruption, conflicts of interest, theocracy and plutocracy. For example, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has been explicit for years that he wants all major transparency in government and campaign funding laws nullified. In Thomas' opinion, unlimited money should be able to influence government in secrecy. The Jacobin wrote:

Clarence Thomas Has Long Fought to Kill Laws 

Requiring Transparency in Political Spending

 

While refusing to disclose lavish gifts from a billionaire, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas pushed to invalidate all political spending disclosure laws in America, insisting that donors have a constitutional right to anonymously influence politics with unlimited amounts of cash.

In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its notorious Citizens United ruling, declaring that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — and therefore could be made limitlessly.

But that ruling, which unleashed billions of dollars in dark money election spending, did not go far enough for Thomas, who had previously insisted that there exists an “established right to anonymous speech.” He supported the Citizens United majority ruling, but issued a concurring opinion insisting that judges should overturn all rules that require transparency in political spending.

An “established right to anonymous speech” is the legal argument that right wing extremists are using to kill transparency. This is a key component on the path to kleptocracy.

A Des Moines Register opinion piece reports another example of the radical right's pro-corruption dogma in action:

Iowa’s new pro-corruption law is shocking and indefensible — and as Iowa’s former chief public corruption prosecutor, I know a thing or two about corruption.

That was my work from 2010 to 2017. Since 2019, I have been Iowa’s state auditor, working as Iowans’ watchdog, where my office uncovered a record amount of misspent public money in my first term.

Given Iowa’s longstanding reputation for honesty, integrity, and trust in our state’s checks and balances, it is hard to imagine our elected officials creating a system that would encourage waste, fraud, and abuse — except that’s exactly what Senate File 478 (the pro-corruption law) is about. It literally makes it legal for government officials to hide documents that show waste, fraud, or abuse from the state auditor. I can’t believe I’m not making this up.

Before the Legislature passed and the Governor signed the pro-corruption bill into law, the auditor’s office could require government entities to hand over documents during the course of our work, and Iowa’s courts could independently review any dispute about it. 

  

This new law ends all that. It allows any state agency to simply deny the auditor’s office access to information it doesn’t want to share. In those instances, a three-person panel made up of a representative from the entity being audited, a representative from the auditor’s office, and one appointed by the governor would decide whether the information is turned over. Keep in mind, representatives of almost all state agencies already serve at the pleasure of the governor. So that’s two to one. Simple as that.

There is no other plausible way to interpret this other than to conclude that support for secrecy and corruption is an important policy goal of the radical right extremists who now control the Republican Party.

Q: Is there another plausible interpretation of this other than to conclude that radical Republican elites support secrecy because they are corrupt, e.g., (i) is this merely an aberration from a tiny minority of radical elites, or (ii) does most of the rank and file support secrecy in government and believe that corruption will not happen, or they do not care if corruption happens? 

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From the Spin Dictator Files: Everyone is reporting that Trump has been indicted for several crimes.  The WaPo comments about what he is likely to be charged with:

A seven-count indictment has been filed in federal court naming the former president as a criminal defendant, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a case that has yet to be unsealed. The charges include willful retention of national defense secrets, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, which carry the potential of years in prison if Trump is found guilty.

It's possible, maybe likely, that Trump's support will increase and the GOP will nominate him as the Republican candidate for president. The ongoing criminal trial would then probably be the dominant issue in the 2024 election. Trump definitely will continue to claim innocent victimhood and play the martyrdom card as hard as he can, even after he is convicted, assuming he ever is convicted. If he is convicted of any crimes or if he loses the 2024 election, Trump will very likely try to foment another armed coup attempt, while viciously demagoguing the prosecution as an evil, socialist witch hunt of a poor innocent patriot. 

A plausible or maybe likely sequence of events: Indictment → Trump dithers, delays and demagogues as as much  as possible → the public further divides and the emotional temperature goes up while rationality goes down → the 2024 elections are held → the court convicts or acquits → ??? at this point there's multiple plausible paths

Regardless of the path ahead, it is reasonable to predict that the political and social situation in the US will probably further deteriorate and democracy and the rule of law will continue to erode until at least some time after the 2024 elections. 

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From the Demagoguery Files: Elite GOP demagogues have fired up an enraged attack on the Doj and Merrick Garland for indicting Trump. The Hill reports about the blatant lies, slanders and hypocrisy the GOP is deploying:

Republican senators, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, are warning the indictment brought by the Department of Justice against former President Donald Trump raises serious conflict-of-interest issues for Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The senators, who mostly spoke to The Hill in the hours before Trump himself broke the news of his indictment, cited Trump’s status as the leading Republican candidate for president and the fact that federal investigators have also seized classified documents that President Biden kept in his personal possession after leaving the Obama administration.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned Thursday evening the prosecution of Trump “will do enormous damage to the rule of law.”

“Indicting Donald Trump is the culmination of what Merrick Garland has been pushing for since he became Attorney General. The weaponization of our Department of Justice against enemies of the Biden admin. will do enormous damage to the rule or law & have a lasting impact,” he tweeted after Trump himself announced he would be indicted.

Accusing Garland of conflicts of interest and political motivation to get Trump is pure lie, slander and hypocrisy. Extremist Republicans operate without concern for conflicts. Garland never wanted to prosecute Trump for anything -- circumstances, including Trump's own arrogance and stupidity, forced the prosecution on Garland and what little is left of the rule of law for elites like Trump. 

News bits: Christian nationalism invades rental property management; House chaos; Etc.

This letter from a property manager, Link Llewellyn, requests tenants at Llewellyn Properties in Columbus Ohio to refrain from any overt signage or any other communication anywhere in or on the rental properties in opposition to or support of Pride Month. Why does he request this? Because (i) he is a Catholic, (ii) June is the month that Catholics reflect on the love of Christ "for all human beings without exception", (iii) the bible says that pride is the root of the human sin that rejects His love, and (iv) promoting Pride Month conflicts with Link's religious beliefs and allegedly with Apostolic Magisterium (AM) teachings.

This attack on the LGBQT community feels like it very likely was written by a Catholic lawyer, not by Link. This kind of Christian attack reflects the increasing intrusion of aggressive fundamentalist Christian theocratic dogma in all aspects of life, not just government. 

Here, Link asserts that his personal and AM's version of Catholic religious beliefs stand above the beliefs of others. Not only can people not speak to support Pride Month, they cannot speak to oppose it either. Link's personal religious beliefs trump free speech in commerce. This reflects the Supreme Court's decisions in recent years that are elevating religious belief and practice above all other rights and liberties as it keeps pushing the US toward an anti-democratic theocracy-dictatorship.

There is subtle insidiousness in this letter's Christian aggression. Link quotes the bible three times in support of his arguments (see the footnotes). Link does not care what non-Christians and non-religious people believe or would like to say. That is irrelevant. Here all that counts is what Link says his Christian God approve and disapproves of by way of the Apostolic Magisterium** and Link's religious beliefs. This is Christian Sharia theocracy speaking loud, clear and undeniable. 

** Wikipedia: "The magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church is the church's authority or office to give authentic interpretation of the word of God, "whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition". According to the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, the task of interpretation is vested uniquely in the Pope and the bishops." 

What is the interpretation of the word of God? That's clear as mud. The bible is often rationally incomprehensible and loaded with self-contradiction. Therefore, interpretation and tradition are whatever the pope or bishops say it is. 

Remember the Dobbs Supreme Court decision that killed Roe v. Wade and abortion rights? Its reasoning was based on (i) abortion not being explicitly allowed in the Constitution, and (ii) a new test the radical Christian theocrats on the court dreamed up. The new test looked to see if abortion was "deeply rooted" in the history and traditions of the American people. The justices did not define what "deeply rooted", "traditions" or "history" meant, e.g., a "tradition" can be practiced among a small group or family, and "history" includes biblical and more ancient times. The Christian theocrats on the court just told us what their cherry-picked version history and traditions were and abortion was not "deeply rooted". From that, they concluded there is no right to an abortion in the Constitution. It was just like the Apostolic Magisterium interpreting the bible. It is fun, easy and always leads to comfortable conclusions that accord with the controlling dogma. THAT IS THEOCRACY. IT IS NOT DEMOCRACY.

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From the House of Representatives Chaos Files: Now that extremist Republicans have settled in, chaos and slop have descended on the House. The NYT writes about some chaos:

House Is Paralyzed as Far-Right Rebels 

Continue Mutiny Against McCarthy

Members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus refused to surrender control of the floor, forcing G.O.P. leaders to scrap votes for the week and leaving the speaker facing what he conceded was “chaos”

Mr. McCarthy, who enraged ultraconservative Republicans by striking a compromise with President Biden to suspend the debt limit, has yet to face a bid to depose him, as some hard-right members have threatened. But the rebellion has left him, at least for now, as speaker in name only, deprived of a governing majority.

“House Leadership couldn’t Hold the Line,” Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a leader of the rebellion, tweeted on Wednesday. “Now we Hold the Floor.”

Great! Jackass Republican extremists like Gaetz hold the floor. The House is broken. MAGA!!

The WaPo comments on the chaos:

A two-day stalemate between hard-right Republicans and GOP leaders has effectively frozen the House from considering any legislation for the foreseeable future, as both groups failed to find a resolution to the standoff that would allow the majority to vote on bills.

Just past 6 p.m. Wednesday, after GOP leaders gave up on resolving the impasse this week and canceled the remaining votes for the week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) addressed reporters and explained that part of the ongoing frustration is the hard-line faction’s inability to articulate their demands.

“This is the difficult thing,” he said. “Some of these members, they don’t know what to ask for.”

Great! Jackass Republican extremists like Gaetz don't know what they want. The House is broken. MAGA!!

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From the cruel kleptocracy files: The innate human urge to be corrupt and a kleptocrat is a major aspect of the human condition. The urge is always there. Kleptocrats are almost always authoritarian, brutal and shockingly heartless. While in power, they do not care if their people live or die a miserable death, e.g., by starvation. Kleptocrats always go after two things, wealth and power. The WaPo writes about the human misery that kleptocratic Ethiopian central and regional government has caused:

USAID cuts food aid supporting millions of Ethiopians 

amid charges of massive government theft

The U.S. government is suspending food aid to Ethiopia after an investigation uncovered a widespread scheme to steal donated food, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) said Thursday, a move that will affect millions of the world’s poorest people. Leaked documents given to donors and shared with The Washington Post indicate that the scheme was coordinated by elements within both the federal and regional governments.

“Extensive monitoring indicates this diversion of donor-funded food assistance is a coordinated and criminal scheme, which has prevented life-saving assistance from reaching the most vulnerable,” said a report by the Humanitarian Resilience Development Donor Group, an organization of donors briefed by USAID. “The scheme appears to be orchestrated by federal and regional Government of Ethiopia (GoE) entities, with military units across the country benefiting from humanitarian assistance.”  

An aid worker with knowledge of the program said it appeared that local officials responsible for creating lists of beneficiaries had inflated the number of households in need and prevented food from reaching hungry families.

In my opinion, the most important reason the US never had a ghost of a chance of making any meaningful difference in Afghanistan was due to the fact that it was an entrenched kleptocracy. Corruption among Afghan elites sabotaged literally everything the US tried to do. Sometimes, the US government itself knowingly fed cash and arms to known local kleptocrats. In view of its staggering governmental arrogance and incompetence, the US was doomed to failure from the moment the first aircraft hit the first building in the 9/11 attacks. 

What did we get? Just look at the Dark Ages thugs and thieves who run Afghanistan now. They look very much like the Dark Ages thugs and thieves who run Ethiopia now. Iraq looks to be about the same.

Bummer.

How extremist right wing elites see liberals and liberalism

The topic of what America's extremist, radical right and its Republican Party see and think is of high personal interest. It's also of high importance for American democracy and civil liberties. The NYT published a review by Jennifer Szalai of a new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Regime Change was written extremist right elite academic Patrick J. Deneen (political science, U. Notre Dame) who also published the book, Why Liberalism Failed, in 2018. 

This guy speaks for America's extremist radical right elites. He is one of them. Szalai writes:

In 2018, he published “Why Liberalism Failed,” a scathing and sweeping critique that was attentively discussed by the very people (establishment politicians, Ivy League academics, mainstream journalists) he depicted as too ruthless and arrogant to care about the problems ravaging the country: ecological degradation, economic devastation, social isolation, deaths of despair. .... Multiple articles in this newspaper parsed his argument, precisely because it voiced some of the discontent that had helped propel Donald J. Trump into the highest office.

Yet if Deneen’s new book, “Regime Change,” is any indication, he and his fellow social conservatives are feeling as persecuted as ever. Never mind that the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade last year, and statewide bans on abortions are proceeding apace. Or that red-state lawmakers are removing books on the barest pretext that they might offend conservative sensibilities. In “Regime Change,” Deneen .... depicts the current dispensation as not just inadequate but unbearable — so much so that he deigns to go beyond theorizing to propose what he would like to do about it.

In the introduction, he gives a hint at what’s to come: “What is needed — and what most ordinary people instinctively seek — is stability, order, continuity and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word for it, is a conservatism that conserves.”

The confidence (and condescension) is breathtaking, but it turns out that Deneen doesn’t believe that “ordinary people” are up to the task of effecting the necessary change. They have been too degraded by an “invasive progressive tyranny” to yield anything other than a populist movement that is “untutored and ill led,” he writes, alluding to Trump. After spending 150 pages disparaging the “elite,” Deneen goes on, in the last third of the book, to try to reclaim the word for a “self-conscious aristoi” who would dispense with all the liberal niceties about equality and freedom and instead serve as the vanguard of a muscular “aristopopulism.”

The desired result, he says, would be a “mixed regime” or “mixed constitution.” Scholars have already discerned some traces of a mixed constitution in the American system’s separation of powers, but Deneen envisions something more radical (and less liberal) than “checks and balances.” He wants a “blending,” or “melding,” of the conservative elite with the (non-liberal) populace, their interests and sensibilities fusing into “one thing.” As much as he tries to dance around how such a profound transformation might come about .... he eventually admits what he believes it would take: “The raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism.”

He gets misty-eyed reminiscing about the “quiet leadership” provided by “small-town doctors” and a Hollywood that produced movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It all sounds gentle and quaint except when Deneen erupts in demands for an “overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class.”

Deneen offers a vague reassurance that the “raw assertion of political power” would somehow be wielded in a “peaceful but vigorous” way, proposing that the number of representatives in the House be expanded to a truly wild 6,000 and pointing to autocratic Hungary’s efforts “to increase family formation and birth rates” as exemplary. He also offers a vague reassurance that the postliberal future will not revive the prejudice and bigotry of the past. .... one way to make reading this book less of a slog would be to create a drinking game out of these labored attempts to cover his flank [ass].

But Deenen’s fellow social conservatives can take heart that at least some prejudices — or “customs” — would remain, as Deneen decries what he calls an “effort to displace ‘traditional’ forms of marriage, family and sexual identity based in nature.” .... Deneen’s worldview is unrelentingly zero-sum. He says he seeks nothing less than the “renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”

And what if you don’t want to live in this regime — one that rejects “democratic pluralism” and sounds suspiciously like a theocracy? Well, that’s too bad for you. “The common good is always either served or undermined by a political order,” Deneen declares toward the end of his book. “There is no neutrality on the matter.” He wants to recreate “the authoritative claims of the village,” but on a national or even international scale — sidestepping the uncomfortable fact that such grand projects have had, to put it mildly, a troubling historical record. He calls on postliberals to aim big, “embracing, fostering and protecting not only the nation but that which is both smaller and larger than the nation.”

Underneath all the gemütlich [cozy, comforting] verbs lurks a suggestion that some readers may find chilling: a vision of the “common good” so obvious to Deneen that it’s not up for debate or discussion.

Once again, we clearly see an aggressive, authoritarian Christian theocratic ideology that underpins America's radical right vision of the common good. The common good is to be imposed by force of law, or just plain brute force. It is to be run for our own good by an elite aristocratic Christian Taliban. After all, us bamboozled common people don't know what we want or what the common good really is. 

The extremist radical right sits somewhere

in the lower right quadrant,

maybe close to national socialism?

News bits: An advance in local realism theory; Etc.

The Quantum Physics Lady describes the concept of local realism like this: Local realism is a quick way of saying two principles: 1) Principle of locality: the cause of a physical change must be local. That is, a thing is changed only if it is touched, and 2) Principle of realism: Properties of objects are real and exist in our physical universe independent of our minds. 

ars Technica writes about an advance in our understanding of local realism:

Qubits 30 meters apart used to confirm Einstein was wrong 

about quantum [spooky action at a distance] 

This experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe work -- it's not even the first to do so with qubits.

But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made. And it did so by cooling a 30-meter-long aluminum wire to just a few milliKelvin [almost absolute zero].

The quantum network is a bit 

bulkier than Ethernet

If quantum mechanics were right, then a pair of entangled objects would behave as a single quantum system no matter how far apart the objects were. Altering the state of one of them should instantly alter the state of the second, with the change seemingly occurring faster than light could possibly travel between the two objects. This, Einstein argued, almost certainly had to be wrong.

Getting rid of one of the major loopholes in these measurements is where things get difficult. You need to show that the correlation in the measurements could not have been mediated by information traveling at the speed of light. Since measurements require a bit of time to take place, that means you have to separate the two qubits by enough distance to allow the measurement to complete before light can travel between them. Based on how long the measurements take, the research team behind the new work, working at ETH Zürich, calculated 30 meters would be sufficient.

While that's barely down the hall in a typical lab building, 30 meters is extremely challenging because of the entanglement process, which involves using low-energy microwave photons, which are easily lost in a sea of environmental noise. In practice, this means that anything involved with these photons has to be kept at the same milliKelvin temperatures as the qubits themselves. So the entire 30 meters of aluminum wire that acts as a microwave waveguide needs to be chilled down to a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

In practice, this meant giving the entire assembly built to keep the wire cool access to the liquid helium refrigeration systems that housed the qubits at each end—and building a separate refrigeration system at the center point of the 30-meter tube. The system also needed flexible internal connections and exterior supports because the whole thing contracts significantly as it cools down.

Still, it all worked impressively well. Because of the performance of the qubits, the researchers could perform over a million individual trials in only 20 minutes. The resulting correlations ended up being above the limit set by Bell's equations by a staggering 22 standard deviations. Put in different terms, the p value of the result was below 10-108.

Separating entangled qubits by 30 meters allows proof that when one is disturbed, the other is changed and the change happens faster than light could travel the 30 meters between the qubits. This is confirming proof that quantum information can travel faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles/second. Einstein hated that idea. He argued that information could only travel at the speed of light. Einstein was wrong. 

Is this for real or is it just vaporware?

Remember that wonderful post I did at Snowflake's Forum about the Higgs boson and statistical power needed for physicists to believe something was real? Yes, we all remember it. The threshold for belief is 5-sigma (5σ) significance p value or greater. 5σ significance amounts to a one chance in 3.5 million that a result is a fluke.

Here, the significance of the data is far greater than that needed to prove that Higgs or other things or phenomena were real. This amounts to far more than 1 million σ significance. In other words this is rock solid proof that information can travel faster than light. Poor Einstein - we can only hope his quantum entangled fee-fees don't get hurt.

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Thoughts about spooky action at a distance, theism and pantheism: Now that we know that information can travel faster than light and the Principle of Locality has been debunked, what are the implications, if any? One can argue that since information in one part of the universe can theoretically be instantly known anywhere else, then could that be a basis for omniscience, i.e., a God(s) or universal sentience? 

Omniscience means knowing everything there is to know. Does that at least imply that all knowledge could be everywhere all at once and maybe God is the universe, and therefore we are God too? Its not clear to me what the implications are. 

Until recent years, most scientists believed that quantum effects were incompatible with life on Earth which operates at high temperatures ranging from slightly below to well above the freezing point of water. But in recent years, quantum biology, including quantum neurobiology have become active branches and sub-branches of science. Some quantum effects in plants and animals have been detected, but this area of research is in its infancy. Despite quantum effects and the fall of the Locality Principle, it is clear that humans are not omniscient and not full-blown Gods. This 2022 paper makes clear the primitive state of the art:

The question of whether quantum phenomena at the microscale in the brain play any role in influencing or even determining behavior at the human macroscale of experience is a controversial one1,2. Some researchers have proposed that quantum models of decision making fit experimental data better than classical models1,3, without suggesting physical causality from the microscale to the to the macroscale as possible explanation for this finding1,4. This avenue of research is labelled “quantum cognition”, and it is interested in applying principles and methods from quantum physics to the study of cognition as an abstract system, without concerning itself with the viability of the physical instantiation of the proposed quantum models in the brain. There are also several other claims about the possible existence of quantum phenomena in the brain that allegedly serve as the physical correlate of consciousness5,6,7, collectively referred to as the “quantum brain” hypothesis, but none of them has earned widespread acclaim.

At this point, I'm not sure what to make of this. Maybe more research or deeper thinking will lead to better insight. 

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A WaPo article describes some strange goings on in congress. What it means isn't clear. The WaPo writes:

FBI had reviewed, closed inquiry into Biden claims at center of Hill fight

Republican lawmaker James Comer said he will still seek to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress after viewing document in question

The FBI and Justice Department under then-Attorney General William P. Barr reviewed allegations from a confidential informant about Joe Biden and his family, and they determined there were no grounds for further investigative steps, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and other people familiar with the investigation.

After the two lawmakers reviewed the document in a secure area on Capitol Hill on Monday, Comer announced that House Republicans would still pursue holding FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in contempt of Congress.

“Americans have lost trust in the FBI’s ability to enforce the law impartially and demand answers, transparency and accountability,” Comer told reporters. 

.... the allegation in the document came to the FBI through the Pittsburgh field office, where Barr had created a channel for allegations involving Ukraine. That included materials Rudy Giuliani — who was then President Donald Trump’s personal attorney — had gathered from Ukrainian sources claiming to have damaging information about Biden and his family.

The allegation contained in the document was reviewed by the FBI at the time and was found to not be supported by facts, and the investigation was subsequently dropped with the Trump Justice Department’s sign-off, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

Comer and Raskin offered disparate accounts of their meeting with the FBI. Comer in a written statement said FBI officials told the lawmakers “that the unclassified, FBI-generated record has not been disproven.” Raskin said in a statement that DOJ officials signed off on closing the assessment of the information, “having found no evidence” to corroborate the allegations.

The FBI did not confirm Comer’s account of the meeting, but called his pursuit of a contempt vote “unwarranted.”

Although Comer says that Americans have lost trust in the FBI’s impartially, transparency and accountability, this suggests that an partisan extremist Republican lie. The Biden inquiry is no basis for concern. A far more important basis for concern was the FBI shafting Hillary close to the 2016 election, costing her precious votes. At the same time, the FBI was shielding Trump from its onging investigation into his possible criminal activities. If Americans lose trust in the FBI, what the FBI did to hurt Hillary and to help Trump in 2016 is a very good reason for loss of trust.

Apparently, the FBI under Barr and Trump looked at the allegations of crimes by one or more Bidens and decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Joe or Hunter at the time. If that is the case, it seems that most or all the basis for claiming Joe is a criminal was never real from the beginning. Confusingly, a recent Vox article asserts that criminal charges against Hunter are still possible:

There are four possible charges in the mix, according to CNN. Two of these are misdemeanor charges about Hunter’s failure to file taxes, and a third is a felony tax evasion charge that would allege he over-reported business expenses. The fourth potential charge is about a false statement on a federal form Hunter filled out when buying a gun in 2018 (he claimed he was not a drug user).

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The New York Intelligencer magazine writes about projected voting behavior of Millennials:

That millennials voted more Democratic in Biden’s first midterm than they had in 2016 appeared to indicate that aging effects were essentially nil: Millennials were becoming no more conservative (and, perhaps, even a bit more liberal) as they got older. Which would suggest that generational replacement is poised to devastate the conservative movement.

Alas, the New York Times analyst Nate Cohn warns that the “emerging Democratic majority” on the horizon may be a mirage. Contrary to some recent reports, Cohn said millennials have in fact been moving right as they’ve aged; this reality has just been disguised by the changing composition of the millennial electorate. The millennial voting bloc of 2022 is not the same as that of 2008, as “six additional years of even more heavily Democratic millennials became eligible to vote” after Barack Obama’s initial election.

In their youth, older millennials (i.e., those born between 1981 and 1989) had produced the largest age gap in the modern history of U.S. elections: In 2008, voters under 30 were 16 points more Democratic than those over 30.

But between the 2012 and 2020 elections, these millennials became more likely to vote Republican (and this was especially true of those born before 1985):

If voters continue to vote for extremist anti-democracy ideologues, which now dominate the Republican Party leadership, America could lose its democracy and citizens, especially non-heterosexuals, women, non-Whites and non-Christians could lose most of their civil liberties. 

It's no longer rational to deny that America's extremist right really has normalized and empowered what used to be considered fringe Christian fundamentalism and capitalist extremism in the Republican Party. The extremists now dominate. Their propaganda asserts that extremism is merely moderate, while the actual center-right, e.g., Biden and the Democratic Party, are extremist socialist tyrants and pedophiles. And tens of millions of Americans believe it, or at least act like they believe it.

The use of whataboutisms

 Criticize Jan. 6 - and you get "whatabout" BLM riots.

Criticize Trump - and you get "whatabout" Joe Biden sniffing hair or Hunter Biden's laptop.

Whataboutism is an argumentative tactic where a person or group responds to an accusation or difficult question by deflection. Instead of addressing the point made, they counter it with “but what about X?”.

https://flaglerlive.com/176623/whataboutism-explained/

But let's be honest, we all do it, sometimes subconsciously. Criticize Biden, "whatabout" Trump, or those Christian Fascists, etc. 

So, first question: CAN IT BE a useful tool. Example - to point out hypocrisy? You say this about my guy but your guy does the same thing or worse. Or is there NO excuse for using whataboutisms?

Despite useful advice on how to counter whataboutisms, they usually don't work, or so I've found, but nevertheless, some suggestions found here:

https://www.careelite.de/en/whataboutism/

Finally, how about the "ok, let's talk about that" method? If you are talking Trump, and someone tries to whatabout mentioning Joe Biden, say to them "ok, what about Joe Biden? Can you point to something that Joe Biden did that equals what we are talking about concerning Trump?" Or will THAT just lead to a circular argument?  My guy is worse than yours.

That leads to my 2nd question: When confronted with a whataboutism, how do YOU handle it? 

Whatabout you post a meme that is in English? 

News bits: A glimpse of extremist Republican governance; Tweaking the Standard Model of the universe; Etc.

We get a glimpse of extremist Republican legislators and governors in Texas governing. It is ugly. A  NYT opinion opines: 

Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, is expected to sign a bill in the next few days that would make it immeasurably more difficult for cities in the state to govern themselves. The bill would strip cities of the ability to set standards for local workplaces, to ensure civil rights, and to improve their environments, trampling on the rights of voters who elected local officials to do just that.

The bill, recently approved by the Texas House and Senate, would nullify any city ordinance or regulation that conflicts with existing state policy in those crucial areas, and would give private citizens or businesses the right to sue and seek damages if they believe there is a discrepancy between city and state. That means no city could prohibit discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. employees, as several Texas cities have done. No city could adopt new rules to limit predatory payday-lending practices. No city could restrict overgrown lots, or unsafe festivals, or inadequate waste storage. Cities would even be banned from enacting local worker protections, including requiring water breaks for laborers in the Texas heat, as Dallas, Austin and other cities have done following multiple deaths and injuries.

Business lobbyists and Republican legislators who have pushed the bill said its purpose was to rid the state of a patchwork of conflicting regulations.  

Already the state won’t let cities ban discrimination against low-income renters, and it prohibits them from cutting their police budgets. Dozens of other bills have been introduced to restrict election reforms by Texas cities and counties, including one that would let an official, most likely a Republican, overturn election results in a single place: largely Democratic Harris County, which includes Houston.

Common extremist Republican priorities are on display here:

1. support for discrimination against LGBTQ employees and LGBTQ people generally

2. support for predatory lending

3. opposition to and preventing dissenting local control and power

4. opposition to and intolerance of democracy and free and fair elections

Power flows to authoritarian Republican politicians and the rapacious business community. That is core GOP anti-democracy ideology.

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Poking a little hole in the Standard Model?: The Standard Model of the universe occasionally gets tweaked when an observation that violates the model pops up. Unexplained things need to be explained.  

A little violation may have popped up. This needs to be verified before we know for sure there is a violation. Using our friend, the giant atom smasher, physicists have created a Na-39 (sodium) atom that has more neutrons in it that the Standard Model can account for. The paper's abstract:

The new isotope $39\mathrm{Na}$, the most neutron-rich sodium nucleus observed so far, was discovered at the RIKEN Nishina Center Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory using the projectile fragmentation of an intense $48\mathrm{Ca}$ [calcium] beam at $345\mathrm{MeV}/\text{nucleon}$ on a beryllium target. Projectile fragments were separated and identified in flight with the large-acceptance two-stage separator BigRIPS. Nine $39\mathrm{Na}$ events [atoms] have been unambiguously observed in this work and clearly establish the particle stability of $39\mathrm{Na}$. Furthermore, the lack of observation of $35,36\mathrm{Ne}$ [neon] isotopes in this experiment significantly improves the overall confidence that $34\mathrm{Ne}$ is the neutron dripline nucleus of neon. These results provide new key information to understand nuclear binding and nuclear structure under extremely neutron-rich conditions. The newly established stability of $39\mathrm{Na}$ has a significant impact on nuclear models and theories predicting the neutron dripline and also provides a key to understanding the nuclear shell property of $39\mathrm{Na}$ at the neutron number $N=28$, which is normally a magic number.

The nuclear dripline refers to the boundary beyond which atomic nuclei can emit a proton or neutron. On other words, if there are too many protons or neutrons, the atom can emit one or more of them to make the atom more stable. Such unstable atoms leak protons or neutrons sort of like a faucet leaks water drops. 

For example, lithium-11, has four more neutrons than its heaviest stable isotope, but it has such weakly bound neutrons that it is called a halo nucleus. The least tightly-bound neutron orbits the nucleus as if it were an electron, but with a much smaller orbital radius than an electron has. An orbiting neutron is just plain nuts, right? This is really interesting stuff.

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From the Why Democracy Falls to Authoritarianism Files: Recent research suggests another factor that leads some people who claim to support democracy to support authoritarianism is fear of the opposition. A nature human behavior article comments:  

Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding

Around the world, citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish. Here we present evidence that this behavior is driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first. In an observational study (N = 1,973), we find that US partisans are willing to subvert democratic norms to the extent that they believe opposing partisans are willing to do the same. In experimental studies (N = 2,543, N = 1,848), we revealed to partisans that their opponents are more committed to democratic norms than they think. As a result, the partisans became more committed to upholding democratic norms themselves and less willing to vote for candidates who break these norms. These findings suggest that aspiring autocrats may instigate democratic backsliding by accusing their opponents of subverting democracy and that we can foster democratic stability by informing partisans about the other side’s commitment to democracy.

Around the world, antidemocratic leaders are convincing their supporters to vote away their political rights. While 78% of the world’s population reports wanting to live in a representative democracy, democracies continue to erode, with 70% of the population living in autocracies. Citizens in Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary strongly endorsed democracy while casting votes for authoritarian leaders Chávez, Erdoğan and Orbán, respectively. In fact, in Venezuela, citizens who claimed to support democracy the most were no more likely to vote for a democratic candidate.  

The puzzle deepens when one considers that the modal form of autocratization today is democratic backsliding, in which democracies die a slow death, leaving years for a democracy-loving public to hold their representatives accountable. Why, then, is democracy slipping away from so many citizens across various regions, cultures and socio-economic conditions?  

In the US context, Donald Trump spread misinformation about Democrats subverting democracy from the start. Early in his 2016 campaign, his website stated, “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging this Election!”. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he repeated, “This is a rigged election”. These accusations continued through the 2020 election, and Fox News amplified this message, repeatedly proclaiming the existence of “an all-out effort to depress and suppress the pro-Trump vote”.

Once again the power of dark free speech to attack and kill democracy is on display in the research data. Authoritarian Republicans, including most Christian nationalist elites and brass knuckles capitalist elites, openly support laws that are intended to suppress non-Republican votes and/or to subvert inconvenient election results. Republicans have firmly convinced most of its rank and file that Democrats want to impose a corrupt, atheistic, socialist tyranny on America. That sounds a lot like aspiring corrupt Republican autocrats instigating democratic backsliding by accusing their Democratic Party opponents of subverting democracy. 

Lest we forget, despite their deflections and vehement denials most Republican Party elites in congress and/or state governments include these authoritarian policies among their high priority goals:

1. Opposed amending the Electoral Count Act, which tried to prevent another 1/6 coup attempt 

2. Support limiting voting rights and/or subverting elections where a Democrat wins

3. Support limiting abortion rights

4. Supported, justified and normalized the corruption, disrespectful vulgarity, crimes and treason of Trump

5. Oppose efforts to accept or deal with climate change despite overwhelming contrary public opinion

6. Persecution and oppression of the LGBQT community

What corresponding horrors do most Democratic Party elites support?

1. Amending the Electoral Count Act 

2. Defense of voting rights and opposition to subverting elections regardless of who won

3. Abortion rights

4. Punishment of the corruption, disrespectful vulgarity, crimes and treason of Trump

5. Efforts to deal reasonably with climate change in accord with overwhelming public support

6. The LGBQT community