News bits: Why women lost abortion rights; Blue lies; Etc.

There are multiple reasons for why the radical right managed to take away a woman's right to an abortion. It took almost 50 years to do it, but they finally got 'er done. Vehement, implacable opposition to abortion rights and political power of the radical right are the main factors. 

But another factor for loss of abortion rights is lukewarm support to outright opposition to abortion among some Democratic Party elites. The Dems have known for decades that the radical right was hell-bent on obliterating all abortions and would never back down. Despite that knowledge, the Dems did little to nothing to shore up abortion rights. A HuffPost article nicely captures the problem with the reluctant lukewarm Dems:

Biden Says He’s ‘Not Big On Abortion’ Since He's Catholic, 

But Roe ‘Got It Right’

“I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion,” Biden said during the event in Maryland, first reported by The Hill. “But guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right.”  

“I don’t understand why he cannot show the same love and support and care for people in this country who have abortions as he does for any other issue where people are impacted,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of We Testify, an abortion storytelling organization.

Sherman says she doesn't understand why Biden acts as he does with abortion. Here's why: He's a practicing Catholic. 

I'm not big on center-right Biden, but compared to any radical right Republican running against him in 2024, i.e., any declared Republican so far, he still gets my vote.

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Blue lies: An interesting NYT opinion piece considers why DJT lies so much but still gets a lot of support: 

Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency. This challenges commonplace beliefs about the American political system. How could such a deceitful and duplicitous figure win the White House in the first place and then retain the loyalty of so many voters after his endless lies were exposed?

In 2008, Kang Lee, a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, published “Lying in the Name of the Collective Good” along with three colleagues:

Lying in the name of the collective good occurs commonly. Such lies are frequently told in business, politics, sports and many other areas of human life. These lies are so common that they have acquired a specific name, the “blue lie” — purportedly originating from cases where police officers made false statements to protect the police force or to ensure the success of the government’s legal case against an accused.

In a 2017 Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” Jeremy Adam Smith argued that Lee’s work

highlights a difficult truth about our species: We are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial — compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest — in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence — and socially sanctioned deceit.

If we see Trump’s lies, Smith continued, “not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might view him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.”

There you have it, lying is a feature, not a bug! Why didn't I see that before? . . . . OMG, we're in deep doo-doo here.

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An Above the Law article with a snarky title writes about an extreme case of avoidance of an appearance of a conflict of interest by federal judge Mark Walker in Florida:

Judge In Disney's Case Against Ron DeSantis Recuses Himself Because Father's Brother's Nephew's Cousin's Former Roommate Owns 30 Shares Of Disney

Chief Judge Walker conducted a sua sponte [voluntary] hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse in the Tallahassee area to find some tangential family member with a whopping $2,700 invested in a multibillion-dollar global media conglomerate and decided this presented enough of a conflict in a case over Disney’s right to run its own firehouse in Orlando to leave the case. For the record, a third degree relative is “a first cousin, great-grandparent, great-aunt, great-uncle, great-niece, great-nephew, great-grandchild, half-aunt, or half-uncle of an individual.” I’m not even sure I have phone numbers for all my first cousins, let alone a solid grasp of their financial portfolios.

Now, compare that to Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. They get millions of dollars in perks, gifts and luxury travel from people with cases in the Supreme Court, but do not recuse themselves due to the actual, blatant conflicts of interest that all the hidden largess constitutes. Not only do these two jackasses not recuse themselves from cases where they are deeply conflicted, they arrogantly tell us their business is none of our business. In their world, we should all go to hell for having the audacity to even ask about their ethical behavior.

One has got to admire the gigantic balls on some radical right Republican elites. They have no shame or morals. None at all. For them, there simply is no such thing as corruption or a conflict of interest, actual or appearance.  . . . . OMG, we're in deep doo-doo here.

News bits: Supreme Court defends voting rights; It's the weather, not climate change?; Etc.

In what could have been a fairly rapid end of meaningful voting rights in American elections, three of the six Republicans on the Supreme court, Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett, and all three democrats decided that democracy and voting rights for citizens still counted for something more than cynical authoritarian lip service. The Christian nationalist authoritarians Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissented, showing their undeniable, blatant hostility toward democracy and voting rights. The decision came down yesterday in the Harper v. Moore case. The full opinion is here. 

The opinion by Roberts states that the Constitution “does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law.” In other words, the independent state legislature (ISL) theory is dead for now. In view of this court opinion, it is clear that radical authoritarian Republican elites have no choice but shift their tactics by obliterating state laws that protect voting rights or by going back to the Supreme Court to resolve disputes about state laws. The radicals had hoped that Moore would have cleared the way for them to kill democracy and replace it with a corrupt, single party, Christian theocratic Republican dictatorship-plutocracy. Now, radical Republican elites will have to fight it out state by state and law by law to achieve their corrupt dictatorship. 

In my opinion one thing is certain, pro-corruption radical right elites will not stop trying to set up some form of dictatorship. This decision doesn't end it for democracy. It buys democracy defenders some time to get their freaking act together.

The NYT comments on the decision:

The case concerned the “independent state legislature” theory. It is based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

Proponents of the strongest form of the theory say this means that no other organs of state government — not courts, not governors, not election administrators, not independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections.

Chief Justice Roberts rejected that position. “The Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” he wrote.

The ruling soundly dismissed the theory, one that an unusually diverse array of lawyers, judges and scholars across the ideological spectrum viewed as extreme and dangerous. Adopting the theory, they warned, could have profound consequences for nearly every aspect of federal elections, including by erasing safeguards against partisan gerrymandering and curtailing the ability to challenge voting restrictions in state courts.

But some election law specialists cautioned that Tuesday’s decision elevated the power of federal courts in the process, allowing them to second-guess at least some rulings of state courts based on state law.

“This gives the U.S. Supreme Court the ultimate say over the meaning of state law in the midst of an election dispute,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in a blog post. “This is a bad, but not awful, result.”

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A intense heat wave has engulfed parts of the Midwest and much of the Southeast. It looks set to stay nasty hot for several days more. The heat map for today looks like this:

Climate science experts point out that a heat wave is weather and a heat wave usually cannot be directly attributed to climate change. The question boils down to a matter of statistics. Reason Magazine comments:

News outlets have long cited extreme weather events as examples of how greenhouse gas emissions affect the climate. In response, experts typically would emphasize the distinction between weather and climate, warning that any given hurricane or heat wave cannot be attributed to long-term changes in average temperatures. But it turns out that climatologists and meteorologists sometimes can establish such causal relationships.

"First of all, it's important to highlight that every climate extreme weather event has multiple causes," Friederike Otto, an Oxford University climate researcher associated with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) collaboration, told MIT Technology Review in 2020. "So the question of the role of climate change will never be a yes or no question. It will always be, 'Did climate change make it more likely or less likely, or did climate change not play a role?'"

Consider the massive heat wave in June 2021 that produced record-breaking temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, including highs of 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Oregon; 108 degrees in Seattle, Washington; and 121 degrees in Lytton, British Columbia. Under pre-industrial conditions, WWA researchers found, the chance of a heat wave like that was essentially zero. "Western North American extreme heat was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change," they concluded.

Waddabout the current warm spell is Texas and elsewhere? A 2 minute NPR segment broadcast yesterday says that at the least, climate experts are not surprised by what is going on: 

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Dolphin baby-talk: Researchers accumulated 30 years of acoustical recording data of dolphins talking to teach other in Florida’s Sarasota Bay. It turns out that dolphin moms use higher pitched sound to communicate with their babies sort of like humans do. The AP writes:

A study published Monday found that female bottlenose dolphins change their tone when addressing their calves. Researchers recorded the signature whistles of 19 mother dolphins in Florida, when accompanied by their young offspring and when swimming alone or with other adults.

“They use these whistles to keep track of each other. They’re periodically saying, ‘I’m here, I’m here’,” said study co-author Laela Sayigh, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution marine biologist in Massachusetts.

When directing the signal to their calves, the mother’s whistle pitch is higher and her pitch range is greater than usual, according to the study published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“That was true for every one of the moms in the study, all 19 of them,” said biologist Peter Tyack, a study co-author from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Why people, dolphins or other creatures use baby talk isn’t certain, but scientists believe it may help offspring learn to pronounce novel sounds. Research dating back to the 1980s suggests that human infants may pay more attention to speech with a greater pitch range. Female rhesus monkeys may alter their calls to attract and hold offspring’s attention. And Zebra finches elevate their pitch and slow down their songs to address chicks, perhaps making it easier to learn birdsong.

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A WaPo opinion piece opines that taxpayers should not have to pay for religious schools. Christian nationalists are hell-bent on forcing taxpayers to pay for their religious schools and replacing secular public education with Christian fundamentalist "education." This is a case that is going to wind up before the Christian nationalist Republicans on the Supreme Court in a couple of years. The opinion comments:

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s recent decision to allow a Catholic archdiocese to operate a public school is both illegal and unconstitutional.

A charter school “shall be nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations,” Oklahoma law states.

Public schools “shall be open to all the children of the state and free from sectarian control,” the Oklahoma constitution declares.

Publicly funding a Catholic school so clearly flouts both of these provisions that the state attorney general, Republican Gentner Drummond, accused board members who voted to do so of violating their oath of office and promised to take legal action once a contract with the school is signed.

I have repeatedly pointed out that two highly cherished goals of the hyper-radical Christian nationalist (CN) wealth and power movement are to (1) sink its greedy claws into tax revenues, and (2) eliminate all, and I mean literally all, secular public schools. Secular public education is to be replaced with mandatory hyper-radical Christian fundamentalism. 

Despite the clear illegality of the Charter School Board’s decision, God's infallible command is to go ahead and break the law to try to put this case before the CN Supreme Court. Maybe the Board will back down and not go ahead. Or maybe because their goals are sacred and infallible, they will stick with this effort to try to force Christian fundamentalism down everyone's throats. The goal here is not just for Oklahoma. CN dogma is aimed at all states. Hence the sacred march to the CN Supreme Court.

News & science: The definition of a Trump supporter; Ethics: Do insects experience feelings?

Definitions count: How many Americans are DJT supporters? That depends on how one defines the concept. If it means people who voted for him in 2020, then about 47% are supporters. If it means something more than merely preferring DJT over Biden, then maybe about 37% are supporters. The NYT comments: Mr. "Trump has around a 40 percent national favorability rating. Another option: Only 35 percent said they wanted him to run for president in an NBC poll taken in April."

Apparently, the Dem Party is aware of the issue. An NBC News report comments: "Democrats warn party: The threat of Trump winning in 2024 is 'very real' -- New NBC News polling shows President Joe Biden with a relatively narrow 49% to 45 % lead over Donald Trump — which is within the survey’s margin of error."

Since voting counts more than favorability, it seems that almost half of voters could be supporters.

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This segment is long, but it seems very useful to show just a little about how complex and subtle the science of sentience and ethics is and how they are done. It has taken decades of work to get to where we are now, but we're still pretty ignorant. As humans come to understand sentience better, we can adjust to that knowledge. But we usually cannot adjust to things we know nothing about. 

A Scientific American article by Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, summarizes research that suggests that insects can experience mental states such as happiness, anxiety and pain:

Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?

15 years ago, Thomas Ings, now at Anglia Ruskin University in England, and I performed an experiment in which we asked whether bumblebees could learn about predation threat. Certain spider species called crab spiders perch on flowers to catch pollinating insects, including bees. We built a plastic spider model with a mechanism that would briefly trap a bumblebee between two sponges before releasing it. The bumblebees showed a significant change in their behavior after being attacked by the robotic spider. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they learned to avoid spider-infested flowers and meticulously scanned every flower before landing. Curiously, however, they sometimes even fled from imaginary threats, scanning and then abandoning a perfectly safe, spider-free flower. This false-alarm behavior resembled symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. Although this incidental observation did not constitute formal evidence of an emotionlike state, it did move the possibility of such states in insects into the realm of possibility.

Bumblebees can learn complex tasks by observing other bees. In one study, they learned to pull strings attached to artificial flowers out from under a plexiglass plate to access a sugar reward inside.

Other research hinted that insects might also have positive states of mind. Many plants contain bitter substances such as nicotine and caffeine to deter herbivores, but these substances are also found in low concentrations in some floral nectars. Researchers wondered whether pollinators might be deterred by such nectars, but they discovered the opposite. Bees actively seek out drugs such as nicotine and caffeine when given the choice and even self-medicate with nicotine when sick. Male fruit flies stressed by being deprived of mating opportunities prefer food containing alcohol (naturally present in fermenting fruit), and bees even show withdrawal symptoms when weaned off an alcohol-rich diet.

Why would insects consume mind-altering substances if there isn't a mind to alter? But these suggestive hints of negative and positive mind states still fell short of what was needed to demonstrate that insects are sentient.

I began to consider how one might more directly test emotionlike states in insects. So-called cognitive bias tests have been developed to evaluate the psychological welfare of animals such as rats that live in captivity. These tests are essentially versions of the proverbial glass that can be half-full or half-empty: optimistic humans might view the ambiguous glass as nearly full, whereas pessimists would judge the same glass as being nearly empty. My collaborators and I decided to develop a similar test for bees.

We trained one group of bees to associate the color blue with a sugary reward and green with no reward, and another group of bees to make the opposite association. We then presented the bees with a turquoise color, a shade intermediate between blue and green. A lucky subset of bees received a surprise sugar treat right before seeing the turquoise color; the other bees did not. The bees' response to the ambiguous stimulus depended on whether they received a treat before the test: those that got the pretest sugar approached the intermediate color faster than those that didn't.

Other work suggests that bees can experience not only optimism but also joy. Some years ago we trained bumblebees to roll tiny balls to a goal area to obtain a nectar reward—a form of object manipulation equivalent to human usage of a coin in a vending machine. In the course of these experiments, we noticed that some bees rolled the balls around even when no sugar reward was being offered. We suspected that this might be a form of play behavior.

Recently we confirmed this hunch experimentally. We connected a bumblebee colony to an arena equipped with mobile balls on one side, immobile balls on the other, and an unobstructed path through the middle that led to a feeding station containing freely available sugar solution and pollen. Bees went out of their way to return again and again to a “play area” where they rolled the mobile balls in all directions and often for extended periods without a sugar reward, even though plenty of food was provided nearby.

Bees playing with balls

All this research raised the more uncomfortable question of whether bees might also be capable of experiencing pain. Investigating this issue experimentally presents researchers with a moral dilemma: if results are positive, the research might lead to improved welfare of trillions of wild and managed insects. But it would also involve potential suffering for those animals that are tested to obtain the evidence. We decided to do an experiment with only moderately unpleasant stimuli, not injurious ones—and one in which bees could freely choose whether to experience these stimuli.

We gave bees a choice between two types of artificial flowers. Some were heated to 55 degrees Celsius (lower than your cup of coffee but still hot), and others were not. We varied the rewards given for visiting the flowers. Bees clearly avoided the heat when rewards for both flower types were equal. On its own, such a reaction could be interpreted as resulting from a simple reflex, without an “ouch-like” experience. But a hallmark of pain in humans is that it is not just an automatic, reflexlike response. Instead one may opt to grit one's teeth and bear the discomfort—for example, if a reward is at stake. It turns out that bees have just this kind of flexibility. When the rewards at the heated flowers were high, the bees chose to land on them. Apparently it was worth their while to endure the discomfort. They did not have to rely on concurrent stimuli to make this trade-off. Even when heat and reward were removed from the flowers, bees judged the advantages and disadvantages of each flower type from memory and were thus able to make comparisons of the options in their minds.

This finding alone is not a decisive proof that bees experience pain, but it is consistent with that notion, and it is only one of several indicators. Bees and other insects also form long-term memories about the conditions under which they were hurt. And they have specialized sensors that detect tissue damage and are connected to brain regions that also process and store other sensory stimuli. These creatures have the necessary neural equipment to modulate pain experiences by top-down control. That is, they are not constrained by simple reflex loops when responding to noxious stimuli but display the flexibility to modify their responses according to current circumstances, in the same way as we can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building.

Critics could argue that each of the behaviors described earlier could also be programmed into a nonconscious robot. But nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient. Although there is still no universally accepted, single experimental proof for pain experiences in any animal, common sense dictates that as we accumulate ever more pieces of evidence that insects can feel, the probability that they are indeed sentient increases.

The fact that to date there is no smoking-gun type of proof for any animal's sentience does not mean we're off the hook. On the contrary, the reasonably strong psychological, pharmacological, neurobiological and hormonal indicators of sentience that we now have for many animals, including some insects, mean that acquiring evidence in the opposite direction is in order. We should demand reasonably strong evidence of the absence of sentience before subjecting them to interventions that have the potential to cause intense distress.

Qs: 

1. Is it silly for researchers to now be concerned about minimizing pain and suffering to insects used in research? (For context, I was in a lab that relied heavily on non-human primates, rats and mice for experiments during the time when the movement for animal welfare in science had exploded onto the scene. We went from basically unconscious researchers to people acutely aware of animal pain and suffering. Animal facilities and cages were vastly upgraded. Animal crowding in cages was strictly limited. Proposed experiments were subject to cancellation by animal welfare review boards. All animal experiment protocols had to be reviewed to make sure that animal suffering was minimized to the extent possible without making the intended experiment useless.)

2. Should there be any concern for crop pests that are killed using insecticides? (The SciAm article points out that even a vegan diet can inflict pain and suffering on insects because the foods vegans eat are also eaten by bugs. How those pests are controlled can involve unnecessary pain and suffering.)

A plain and simple (or maybe not so simple) question…

One of our regular bloggers suggested paying people to vote.

Q: Should people be paid to vote?  Is that a good idea?  Make your pro/con arguments below.

News bits: AI influence in elections increases; Poll data; Supreme Court corruption

The rise of the dark side: The NYT reports about the increasing presence of AI in political campaigns worldwide:

In Toronto, a candidate in this week’s mayoral election who vows to clear homeless encampments released a set of campaign promises illustrated by artificial intelligence, including fake dystopian images of people camped out on a downtown street and a fabricated image of tents set up in a park.

In Chicago, the runner-up in the mayoral vote in April complained that a Twitter account masquerading as a news outlet had used A.I. to clone his voice in a way that suggested he condoned police brutality.

What began a few months ago as a slow drip of fund-raising emails and promotional images composed by A.I. for political campaigns has turned into a steady stream of campaign materials created by the technology, rewriting the political playbook for democratic elections around the world.

Increasingly, political consultants, election researchers and lawmakers say setting up new guardrails, such as legislation reining in synthetically generated ads, should be an urgent priority. Existing defenses, such as social media rules and services that claim to detect A.I. content, have failed to do much to slow the tide.  

As the 2024 U.S. presidential race starts to heat up, some of the campaigns are already testing the technology. The Republican National Committee released a video with artificially generated images of doomsday scenarios after President Biden announced his re-election bid, while Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida posted fake images of former President Donald J. Trump with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former health official. The Democratic Party experimented with fund-raising messages drafted by artificial intelligence in the spring — and found that they were often more effective at encouraging engagement and donations than copy written entirely by humans.

The article goes on to point out that sophisticated AI content is appearing more frequently on social networks because those sources are unwilling or unable to police it. Weak, ineffective oversight of social media content allows unlabeled AI material to do irreversible damage. Explaining fakery, lies and slanders to millions of users after they see it is too little, too late, and from what I can tell, it's probably not even possible.

So, we all know what is going to happen in the good 'ole broken US of A with its broken government and a morally rotted major political party that depends heavily on deceit, irrational manipulation and brazen crackpot conspiracy blither for its power. Nothing to regulate AI is going to happen. 

For radical right Republicans and their radical candidates, their 2024 campaigns will be loaded with AI-generated images, voices and rhetoric designed to deceive, distract, demoralize, confuse and slander democrats, democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. For both major parties, AI content will be better at fund raising, so both are disincentivized to regulate AI. We're in a race to the bottom. The two parties consolidate power and win, while the public interest and democracy lose.

And, there's this fun observation by Josh A. Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology: “If people can’t trust their eyes and ears, they may just say, ‘Who knows?’ This could foster a move from healthy skepticism that encourages good habits (like lateral reading and searching for reliable sources) to an unhealthy skepticism that it is impossible to know what is true.”

Hannah Arendt referring to the effects of

totalitarian propaganda decades before AI came on the scene

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The 2024 presidential Binden v. DJT election update: Poll data continues to indicate that the Repubs will nominate DJT. The Indictment has not hurt him yet. Playing the innocent, persecuted martyr seems to go over well with the MAGA cult. The Hill writes about polling data from April and June:

Although Biden has low approval, about 42% at present (about 43% among registered or likely voters) it seems likely he will be the Dem nominee unless something derails him or Newsome or Michelle Obama runs. These days, approval of a president below 50% seems to be the new normal.

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A WaPo opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin discussed a phone interview with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) regarding the corruption of the Supreme Court. Central to the opinion was analysis of Sam Alito's defense of his own blatant corruption in situations just like what Clarence Thomas claims are not corrupt. The weakness of Alito's defense of himself is arrogant and deeply insulting. Alito really thinks we are stupid. The opinion opines: 

The senator ticked off the problems with Alito’s argument: factual omissions (e.g., the standard for exempt gifts does not include transportation); Alito’s lame effort to turn an airplane into a “facility” to jam it into an exempt-gift category (“It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Whitehouse said); Alito’s plea that he couldn’t possibly have known Singer had a financial stake ($2 billion) in the outcome of a case before the court (although it was widely reported in the media); and the insistence that yet another billionaire was a “friend,” which somehow absolved him from his obligation to report gifts of “hospitality.” And, Whitehouse argued, it strains credulity that Alito (like Justice Clarence Thomas) could be confused about reporting requirements when there is a Financial Disclosure Committee expressly set up to help judges navigate these issues.

All in all, the poorly reasoned argument amounted to what Whitehouse called “a painful exhibit for an actual ethics code.” A bill he co-authored with Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), set to be marked up after July 4, would confirm that the code of ethics applicable to all judges applies to the high court, set up a process for screening ethics complaints and allow chief judges of the circuit to advise on how their circuits handle similar matters. This is “not remotely unconstitutional,” he noted. Whitehouse wryly remarked that the last thing the justices want is a comparison to circuit courts’ conduct. “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is to lay a straight stick alongside it,” he said.

Whitehouse has long maintained that the court’s unprincipled, outcome-oriented and partisan decision-making is very much linked to the ethics problems. “The ethics problem is not just relevant to expensive gifts and fancy vacations,” he told me. The ethics issues “don’t occur in a vacuum,” he said. They point to “a bigger enterprise whose purpose is to capture the court.”

It is good to see pro-corruption arguments side-by-side with facts that show the arguments to be false. Whitehouse makes a good argument that Supreme Court corruption does not occur in a vacuum, but reflects the bigger authoritarian radical right effort to capture the Supreme Court. An obvious question is whether the authoritarian effort already has captured the court. Look to me like it has.

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Defense against the dark arts in Australia: ABC News reports on a draft bill that would punish online misinformation, including accidental misinformation:

Online platforms spreading misinformation could face millions of dollars in penalties under new proposed government legislation that bolsters the power of Australia's media watchdog.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would be armed with the ability to require digital platforms to keep certain records about matters regarding misinformation and disinformation and turn them over when requested.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said this would "essentially mean that the regulator is able to look under the hood of what the platforms are doing and what measures they are taking to ensure compliance".

According to the draft bill, misinformation is defined as unintentionally false, misleading or deceptive content.

That bit about fining accidental misinformation seems a bit of an overreach, but in general something like this is what it will take to address deceit and misinformation online. Companies will not do it on their own. 

Neuroscience bit: Getting closer to understanding the mind?

We're still trying to figure it out, but

maybe we're finally closing in on 

some serious understanding

Explanation in non-science language

A fascinating article in Sci Tech Daily discusses a proposed mechanism to explain how the brain-mind works. They call their proposed mechanism cytoelectric coupling. Translated into American, what they mean by that is that neurons in close proximity to each other in the brain, or in neural pathways, (and spinal cord and maybe some other brain cells too?), are linked by small electric fields. The coupling of cells gives rise to coordinated weak electrical field pulses in the brain. The weak field pulses apparently have little to do with neurons talking to each other via chemicals released into synapses, which is a different form of communication between neurons. What is happening is that structures in and near neurons change as nearby weak electrical fields pass through. The electrical fields manifest as waves of electricity that constantly pulse through at least parts of the brain where neurons are linked in neural pathways.

The big deal here is that although neuroscientists have been aware of weak electrical fields potentially affecting cells close to each other, there has never been proof that the fields cause specific changes in nearby neurons and those changes are a manifestation of the working of the conscious or sentient human mind. 

Before this paper, it was unknown if the weak electrical fields existed simply because small pulses of electricity travel through neurons to synapses where most or all the interneuron communicating was believed to happen. The bulk of what constitutes the working of the mind was believed to be in the chemicals traversing synapses between linked neurons. Until now, there was no basis to believe there was a cause and effect relationship between intracellular structure changes and the weak electric field pulses. 

Thus there are two different forms of communication between neurons, one at synapses and the other between precisely positioned neurons and their weak electrical fields. Presumably, both together are responsible for how the human mind thinks and perceives inputs from sensory organs and neurons.

Science language explanation

STD writes:

“Cytoelectric Coupling”: A Groundbreaking 

Hypothesis on How Our Brains Function

Brain waves act as carriers of information. A recently proposed “Cytoelectric Coupling” hypothesis suggests that these wavering electric fields contribute to the optimization of the brain network’s efficiency and robustness. They do this by influencing the physical configuration of the brain’s molecular framework. [translation: changing the structures in and around neurons]

In order to carry out its multifaceted functions, which include thought, the brain operates on various levels. Information like objectives or visuals is depicted through synchronized electrical activity among neuronal networks. Simultaneously, a combination of proteins and other biochemicals within and surrounding each neuron physically execute the mechanics required for participation in these networks.

“The information the brain is processing has a role in fine-tuning the network down to the molecular level,” said Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, who co-authored the paper in Progress in Neurobiology with Associate Professor Dimitris Pinotsis of MIT and City —University of London, and Professor Gene Fridman of Johns Hopkins.[1]

“The brain adapts to a changing world,” Pinotsis said. “Its proteins and molecules change too. They can have electric charges and need to catch up with neurons that process, store, and transmit information using electric signals. Interacting with the neurons’ electric fields seems necessary.”

A major focus of Miller’s lab is studying how higher-level cognitive functions such as working memory can rapidly, flexibly, and yet reliably emerge from the activity of millions of individual neurons. Neurons are capable of dynamically forming circuits by creating and removing connections, called synapses, as well as strengthening or weakening those junctions. But, that merely forms a “roadmap” around which information could flow, Miller said.

The specific neural circuits that collectively represent one thought or another, Miller has found, are coordinated by rhythmic activity, more colloquially known as “brain waves” of different frequencies.

Fast “gamma” rhythms help transmit images from our vision (e.g. a muffin), while slower “beta” waves might carry our deeper thoughts about that image, (e.g. “too many calories”). Properly timed, bursts of these waves can carry predictions, enable writing in, holding onto, and reading out information in working memory, Miller’s lab has shown.

If the brain carries information in electric fields and those electric fields are capable of configuring neurons and other elements in the brain that form a network, then the brain is likely to use this capability. The brain can use fields to ensure the network does what it is supposed to do, the authors suggest.

“Cytoelectric Coupling connects information at the meso‐ and macroscopic level down to the microscopic level of proteins that are the molecular basis of memory,” the authors wrote in the paper.

The article lays out the logic inspiring Cytoelectic Coupling. “We’re offering a hypothesis that anybody can test,” Miller said.

Q: Is this very cool brain-mind stuff or what?

Footnote: 

1. The abstract of the paper:

We propose and present converging evidence for the Cytoelectric Coupling Hypothesis: Electric fields generated by neurons are causal down to the level of the cytoskeleton. This could be achieved via electrodiffusion and mechanotransduction and exchanges between electrical, potential and chemical energy. Ephaptic coupling organizes neural activity, forming neural ensembles at the macroscale level. This information propagates to the neuron level, affecting spiking, and down to molecular level to stabilize the cytoskeleton, “tuning” it to process information more efficiently.

Translation into non-science: 

Electric fields generated by neurons are causal down to the level of the cytoskeleton = electric fields cause specific changes in structures in neurons and that is part of what constitutes thinking and the human mind

Ephaptic coupling = the spreading of impulses along and across adjacent axons such that action potential propagating along one axon fires up an adjacent axon, i.e., a lot of stuff goes on outside of synapses; the electrical fields, if strong enough and/or positioned precisely, are able to influence the electrical excitability of neighboring neurons near-instantaneously (near speed of light)

Neural ensembles = neural pathways; a population of nervous system cells (or cultured neurons) involved in a particular neural computation

Ephaptic coupling between neurons  

in an olfactory bulb (smell sensor)

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Larry Motuz for bringing the STD paper to my attention.