A legal analysis of the deceit and lies about the latest indictment

As we all know, America's authoritarian radical right, a/k/a/ the radicalized, morally rotted Republican Party, shamelessly lies, slanders and crackpot conspiracies on us all the time nowadays. The tidal wave of lies and deceit about the recent indictment of DJT has begun. The Popehat Report published a nice legal analysis of some lies and deceit that tyrant wannabes are spewing on us. TPR writes: 

People Are Lying To You About The Trump Indictment

National Review Is Lying, For Instance. There Will Be More. Keep An Eye Out.

This Is Complicated, Which Is Not the Same As Unprecedented

Count One, conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 371. Section 371 has two parts. It’s most commonly used to charge a conspiracy to violate some specified federal crime: for instance, conspiracy to violate money laundering statutes. But it has another clause for conspiracies “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”

Nobody’s ever been charged with this set of facts because nobody’s ever attempted to overthrow the government by fraud like this before. In that sense, this is “unprecedented.” But in other senses, that term is misleading. Each of these federal criminal laws — which are broad and flexible by design — has been used to charge a wide variety of fraud and misconduct.

Federal courts have upheld convictions under Section 371 for a very broad range of conduct designed to interfere with or obstruct government functions. More than a hundred years ago the Supreme Court said:

The statute is broad enough in its terms to include any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing, or defeating the lawful function of any department of government. Assuming, as we have, for it has not been challenged, that this statistical side of the Department of Agriculture is the exercise of a function within the purview of the Constitution, it must follow that any conspiracy which is calculated to obstruct or impair its efficiency and destroy the value of its operations and reports as fair, impartial, and reasonably accurate would be to defraud the United States by depriving it of its lawful right and duty of promulgating or diffusing the information so officially acquired in the way and at the time required by law or departmental regulation.

Passionate Partisans Are Lying To You And Will Keep Lying To You

Let’s take the editors of National Review. I’m singling them out from many people lying about the law, because they are prominent, we can expect better, and they deserve it.

First, the misleading. They say:

Finally, Smith is charging Trump with a civil-rights violation, on the theory that he sought to counteract the votes of Americans in contested states and based on a post–Civil War statute designed to punish violent intimidation and forcible attacks against blacks attempting to exercise their right to vote. What Trump did, though reprehensible, bears no relation to what the statute covers.

[That] statement is materially and intentionally misleading because it does not reveal to the National Review’s readers that the United States Department of Justice has prosecuted election fraud as a violation of Section 241 for generations and has been repeatedly upheld by the courts in doing so. The National Review describes the charge as “remarkable.” Without adding that the charge is based on a widely accepted interpretation of Section 241 [conspiracy to interfere with the exercise of constitutional or statutory rights] upheld by the courts, this argument is deceitful.

The National Review also flat-out lies. It says:

Here, it is not even clear that Smith has alleged anything that the law forbids. The indictment relates in detail Trump’s deceptions, but that doesn’t mean they constitute criminal fraud. As the Supreme Court reaffirmed just a few weeks ago, fraud in federal criminal law is a scheme to swindle victims out of money or tangible property. Mendacious rhetoric in seeking to retain political office is damnable — and, again, impeachable — but it’s not criminal fraud, although that is what Smith has charged.

But National Review is lying to you about the Supreme Court and about what’s charged here. The Special Counsel charged Trump with defrauding the United States under Section 371. The Supreme Court and lower courts have repeatedly and specifically ruled that Section 371 doesn’t require a scheme to take money or property. National Review is referring to the latest in a line of cases interpreting a completely different statute, the wire fraud statute, that includes a “money or property” requirement in its text ....

The PHR article is long and it lays out some analysis for the other other laws that DJT is accused of violating, (i) conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 1512(k), and (ii) obstructing an official proceeding under 18 U.S.C. section 1512(c) — which applies to someone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so”.  

Qs: At this point in time, can "passionate partisans" (as TPR puts it) who knowingly deceive and lie about the indictment and/or the law be fairly called tyrant wannabes? If they are merely ignorant but wrong, does that make any difference, i.e., does the culpability and implications of dark free speech vary depending on the source and its motives?

A popehat

News bits: US restarts virus biowarfare research: Gigantic superconductor breakthrough?; Gigantic supercapacitor breakthrough?

Just when you thought it could not get any worse, it gets worse. Science.org wrote last May: 

Three years after then-President Donald Trump pressured the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend a research grant to a U.S. group studying bat coronaviruses with partners in China, the agency has restarted the award.

Critics, including several Republicans in Congress, argued this work qualified as risky “gain-of-function” (GOF) research that makes potential pandemic viruses more dangerous and should have undergone a special review. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its director at the time, Anthony Fauci, responded that the work did not fit NIH’s risky GOF definition; the bat viruses weren’t known to infect people and WIV had no intention of making them more dangerous. NIH also pointed out that the WIV chimeras were only distantly related to SARS-CoV-2.

NIH told EcoHealth in August 2022 that because WIV had not responded to requests to turn over lab notebooks and electronic records, it had terminated the subaward to WIV. But the agency also said EcoHealth could renegotiate the grant without WIV. As discussions continued, in January a federal audit found that EcoHealth had misreported nearly $90,000 in expenses, and that NIH had also erred by not justifying the grant’s April 2020 termination.

Refusal to turn over lab books constitutes science fraud on a massive scale, far worse than fabricating data in a research paper or two. In my opinion, Biden and the NIH are arrogant, incompetent, ignorant and out of control. That combination of bad could get tens of millions of Americans killed. The Chinese government will control everything that happens in China, including what real or fabricated data get turned over to the NIH. If  Biden or the NIH think they are in control, they are gullible, shockingly stupid or both. 

Searching for killer viruses in bats and bat 

guano in China!

Not to worry, what could possibly go wrong?

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Could this be for real?: A couple day ago, reports surfaced that South Korean researchers announced they had made and tested a new metallic material (LK-99) that was a superconductor at room temperature and pressure. I ignored it. The announcement was met with a solid wall of skepticism from experts. 

Nonetheless, labs rushed to try to confirm or disconfirm the asserted results. Tom's hardware writes that two separate labs are claiming they have preliminary evidence to support (but not yet confirm) the original finding: 

Superconductor Breakthrough Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing

A tentative but less nebulous step toward superconductor-fueled electronics

Humanity may be in the throes of another breakthrough that's every bit as impactful as the invention of the transistor and the advent (and eventual vindication) of quantum computing. LK-99, as it's been named, is a new compound that researchers believe will enable the fabrication of room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductors. Initially published by a Korean team last Friday, frantic work is underway throughout the research world to validate the paper's claims. For now, two separate sources have already provided preliminary confirmations that this might actually be the real thing — Chinese researchers have even posted video proof. Strap in; this is a maglev-powered, superconducting ride.

Superconductors, a wild category of compounds that can conduct electricity without any losses, have been a metaphorical goose chase for years now, with multiple research teams claiming (and then retracting) papers and announcements of its achievement. The reason is simple: Few things come close to the potential of an actual superconductor discovery in terms of what it can do for humanity's current and future technology. Imagine if your 16-core mainstream CPU (which likely requires a competent watercooling solution to avoid incinerating itself) operated without power losses — no current leakage, no electricity waste in the form of heat. Superconductors mean almost perfectly efficient computing.

Researcher Sinéad Griffin from the U.S.'s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab pored over the original paper, taking advantage of the supercomputing capabilities within the Department of Energy to simulate the LK-99 material. This complex-yet-simple concoction results from combining the minerals lanarkite (Pb₂SO₅) and copper phosphide (Cu₃P), which are then baked within a 4-day, multi-step, small batch, solid-state synthesis process.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab results support LK-99 as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. Simulations published 1 hour ago on arxiv support LK-99 as the holy grail of modern material science and applied physics. [Note: this is computer simulated data, not making and testing the material like the Chinese group claims to have done]

As a result of the simulations, the researcher published an analysis letter in pre-print form to Arxiv, where she confirmed that the resulting material should manifest the superconduction pathways for electrons to travel through unimpeded and without any resistance. Interestingly, she noticed that these superconducting pathways only form in very specific areas of the compound, namely the highest-energy areas of the resulting crystal lattice.

Maybe this will turn out to be a true breakthrough of gigantic proportions. I still doubt it, but now that some preliminary supporting evidence is dribbling out, it's worth mentioning. Even if this is confirmed, it will take time (~2 years?) to figure out how to efficiently make LK-99 before it can have a major impact. That assumes it can ever be made efficiently, which is currently unknown. The current method is extremely inefficient. 

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Could this be for real?: Boffins at MIT have published a shocker of a paper describing a low cost supercapacitor that could utterly revolutionize energy storage. Right now, existing battery technology is puny compared to needs for greatly boosting the usefulness of intermittent power from wind and solar. Supercapacitors are akin to batteries but work in a different way. The new capacitor is made out of cement, water and disordered microporous carbon black. I can't find an online price for disordered microporous carbon black per ton or kilogram. The Register writes:

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim to have found a novel new way to store energy using nothing but cement, a bit of water, and powdered carbon black – a crystalline form of the element.

The materials can be cleverly combined to create supercapacitors, which could in turn be used to build power-storing foundations of houses, roadways that could wirelessly charge vehicles, and serve as the foundation of wind turbines and other renewable energy systems – all while holding a surprising amount of energy, the team claims.

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 45 cubic meters of the carbon-black-doped cement could have enough capacity to store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy – roughly the amount an average household uses in a day. A block of cement that size would measure about 3.5 meters per side and, depending on the size of the house, the block could theoretically store all the energy an off-grid home using renewables would need.

"You have the most-used man-made material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material – the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it," said MIT Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Admir Masic.

"You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that's when things get really interesting," Masic added.

The capacity of a capacitor or supercapacitor is largely determined by the surface area of its plates, and the MIT researchers explained that the material they've explored has an exceptionally high internal surface area thanks to the way the carbon black and water interact.

"The hydration reactions of cement in the presence of carbon generate a fractal-like electron-conducting carbon network that permeates the load-bearing cement-based matrix," the authors note. In essence, a block of this carbon-rich cement has highly-conductive carbon black wires running through it which drastically increase the surface area, and thus storage capacity.

Masic said that as the mixture cures, water is absorbed into the cement. Carbon black, which is highly hydrophobic, can't be dispersed in the same way, thus "the carbon black is self-assembling into a connected conductive wire."

In their paper, the researchers assert that this technology is immediately available, versatile, low cost and scalable to huge structures like concrete highways, bridges, buildings. Structures with high energy storage capacity, high-rate energy charge/discharge capabilities and structural strength can be built right now. This applies to residential and industrial applications including self-sufficient energy buildings and self-charging roads for electric vehicles, to intermittent energy storage for wind turbines and tidal power stations. 

So, if a house is built on a concrete slab that is made as a giant capacitor, it could be used to store excess daytime power from solar panels on the roof and then power the house during the night. Or, a concrete highway could be made as a gigantic miles-long capacitor that stores extra wind or solar power and then uses that power to recharge electric cars or trucks, presumably by radio waves or maybe long-range induction, as they drive down the highway.

Strange as this is, this one feels like it's for real, right now. 

Thoughts on our two-tiered justice system and how a demagogue using dark free speech leverages it

There are compelling reasons why the special, kid-gloves treatment of DJT should never have been accorded to him by Bill Barr, Joe Biden or Merrick Garland. The reasons and why they are central are summarized here:

SNOWFLAKE comments:  More and more Americans feel that justice is not equal in the U.S. And is politically driven. I don't feel that way but I can't speak for those who DO feel that way. For those folks, the thinking is that if a former President can be persecuted and prosecuted this many times then no American citizen is safe for an overzealous FBI and DOJ. To them, this also reeks of "revenge". And there is no convincing them that it isn't revenge. NO ONE here is considering the psychological impact or the human factor in all of this.

Thoughts about America's two-tiered system of justice - personal opinion: All of that is true. It's definitely time to explain what psychology (cognitive biology and social behavior) is going on here and how it is being driven and to what ends.

In my opinion, the overriding common theme here is blind, emotional cult irrationality for roughly 40% of the American people, confusion for ~15%, and ~45% somewhat more rationality and somewhat less emotion.

Recent poll data

So, considering how the human mind works there absolutely is something to this. You're freaking right, but there's two levels of messy here. Eventually, the two messes wind up contradicting themselves. The roots of this are in sophisticated authoritarian radical right propaganda (ARRP). Never, ever loose sight of the power of dark free speech.

Here's the first mess:
More and more Americans feel that justice is not equal in the U.S. They are right about that and that it is politically driven, but not for the reasons the cult and the confused believe. They have been bamboozled. Where the most of the cult and the confused get it catastrophically wrong is they fall for the ARRP. Yes justice is unequal, but in a way that is essentially the opposite of how the AARP posits it.

In actuality, we have a two-tiered justice system. It favors the rich, powerful and elite, especially for people on the radical right. Most of the rest of us get more or less 2nd tier justice which is generally less forgiving and less restrained, especially for out-groups that local justice discriminates against. The 2nd tier varies by location and local culture and politics.

Trump is the perfect example of a defendant who gets the luxury of 1st tier justice. He has been pampered and treated with far more deference than the average 2nd tier defendant. If Trump was one of those average traitors in the coup attempt, his ass would have been in jail long ago. But because he was an elite, I doubt that Garland and the DoJ would have ever indicted him but for all the freaking evidence of treason that gushed out of the 1/6 Committee.

Garland and Biden were both clear that they did not want to appear political. By acting that way and doling nothing, they heavily politicized justice in favor of Trump. The scales were and still are tipped heavily in his favor. Biden, Garland and the DoJ never even indicted Trump for the four or 5 obstruction of justice felonies that the Mueller Report laid out in great detail. Hundreds of former federal prosecutors publicly said that they would not hesitate to prosecute Trump for those felonies based on the evidence that Mueller laid out in his report.[1] All of those Trump felonies have gone unpunished and Trump never will be punished because the statute of limitations has run.

If it was you or me who committed the same acts of obstruction that Mueller documented, our sorry asses would be in the slammer by now. The law can't get much more political than that.

That's the 1st mess.

Here's the amazing 2nd mess, and this is where ARRP takes mass deceit to a deep cognitive biology and social behavior level:
ARRP tells people that if multiple politically corrupted prosecutions can happen to Trump, it can happen to them. The prosecutions of Trump have been political because they have been for a 1st tier criminal and traitor who has got and still gets vast advantages in the justice system. So yes, how the justice system treated Trump has been undeniably political, but just political in his favor.

With one major caveat, people worried about multiple politically corrupted prosecutions are exactly right, but for a reason that is the opposite of what ARRP has led them to falsely believe. The caveat is this: If and only if the radical right authoritarians take power and overthrow democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties, then everyone including the cult and the confused will bed subject to multiple politically corrupted prosecutions.

Almost the whole point of authoritarianism is to establish the rule of the thug, not the rule of law. Once the thug (plutocrat, theocrat, tyrant, kleptocrat) is in power, the thug rules as he/she/they want. If anyone, including anyone in the cult or among the confused, steps too far out of line, they will be subjected to as many politically corrupted prosecutions as the thug feels like inflicting on the miscreants.

I know, I know. This all sounds like crackpot QAnon-level conspiracy theory. The thing is however, essentially all the evidence points to exactly this narrative. Just listen to the special interests (including the GOP), dogmas (Christian nationalism, brass knuckles capitalism, single party GOP rule), rhetoric that are driving the radical right and ARRP. ARRP is intentionally designed to make power flow from the government and its commitment to the rule of law and civil liberties to radical elites and their interests.

Just look at the power flow. Ignore everything and everyone else. Strip it all away, and then ask yourself, where will power flow if the radical right authoritarians get their way? That is the core question here in my firm opinion.

 

SNOWFLAKE Comments: People lack focus. If you have ONE trial - people's minds will be focused on that ONE trial and all of the evidence that stems from that ONE trial. If you have multiple trials, especially "silly" ones like the hush money charge, people start to lose interest, become unfocused, start thinking this is all just too much and start thinking this really does look like a witch hunt. If you have too many trials it diffuses them all instead of focusing the public on the evidence of ONE trial. Human nature and all that.

Response to comments: All of that is true. Human nature and all that. One can call it psychology. I call it cognitive biology and social behavior.

Where does the concept of silly trial for hush money prosecution come from? ARRP. Why do people become unfocused and start thinking this is all just too much? ARRP.

I repeat, one cannot deny or understate the power of dark free speech in getting American politics and society to where it is now.

As far as the appearance of a witch hunt goes, what else can be done other than multiple prosecutions for multiple crimes that occur at different times? Trump is a serial criminal. In my opinion, because Trump is a 1st tier elite, his prosecutions were delayed and that is what makes this look like it is politicized. Hell yes, it is politicized because Trump is a 1st tier elite criminal defendant. Biden, Garland and the DoJ treated him like a 1st tier elite because that is what he is. How can that not be seen as political?

Where does the appearance of witch hunt come from? Not wanting to flog a dead horse unnecessarily, but it's ARRP again.

Footnote: 

1. Here's part of that open letter, which was signed by over former 400 federal prosecutors:

We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system: as line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country.

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming.

That is solid evidence of (i) a two-tiered system, and (ii) it has heavily favored Trump.  

News bits: News burnout increases; House witch hunt is failing; A new recyclable plastic; Etc.

A WaPo article discusses poll data showing a new trend in news avoidance. To growing numbers of Americans, the news is too aggravating, discouraging and/or threatening. People feel helpless, except by avoiding news reporting. The WaPo writes:

[S]omething changed during the pandemic. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was the news itself.

“It was so upsetting,” says Claudia Caplan, a retired advertising executive who is now a graduate student of history at New York University. “So frightening, so apocalyptic.”

And so Caplan began to turn away.

The troublesome trend is spelled out in research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. For years, the Oxford-based think tank has been asking people around the world about their news-consumption habits. In its latest survey, 38 percent of U.S. respondents say they sometimes or often avoid news, including 41 percent of women and 34 percent of men.

At the same time, the proportion of people who are “extremely” or “very interested” in the news continued to sink. In the United States, this group was in the minority (49 percent) for the first time in the survey’s short history, down from 67 percent in 2015. 

And much of it, people say, drives feelings of depression, anger, anxiety or helplessness.  

Carolyn Cohen, a retired school teacher, cites a number of topics that provoke feelings of helplessness: gun violence, climate change and climate-change denial, and President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election results.

“What can I do about it?” she says. “Nothing you do gives any control,” other than laying the newspaper aside, turning off the TV and going for a walk.

The article mentions the Ukraine war as one topic where there is significant avoidance of news (32% of people) because the situation is so bad. I'm one of those people. I wrote to Biden months ago urging him to make peace talks the highest priority for Ukraine because Russia was going to pulverize the country, which it is now doing. The boilerplate "response" I got back was just propaganda drivel. It inspired a feeling of hopelessness. The letter was OK for recycling but nothing else. But worse than that, even more people, over 40%, avoid national and social justice news.

The bigger issue here cannot be ignored. America's radial right knows full well that the constant stream of demagoguery, lies, slanders, hate and bigotry will lead to a significant number of people to turn away from the unpleasantness. That hate, lies and slanders all the time strategy aims for two seemingly contradictory goals. Whip up the base on your side, while burning everyone else out to get them to disengage out of feelings of hopelessness or discouragement. Some of those who disengage will also disengage from voting. That's how demagogues and tyrants rise to power in a democracy. That's what is going on here.

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From the Biden Witch Hunt Files: The Independent reports:

House Oversight chair admits GOP can’t back up Biden bribery accusations

Republicans still haven’t produced evidence of any illegal behavior by President Joe Biden

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee on Monday said he and his colleagues still lack evidence proving that President Joe Biden took bribes while he was vice president during the Obama administration, despite months of investigation into his son, Hunter Biden.

Representative James Comer made the embarrassing admission during an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s eponymous nightly programme alongside Representative Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Asked whether he would be able to prove the outrageous claim about the president, Mr Comer hesitated.

Pressed further by Hannity, he finally replied: “I sure hope so. And I do believe that there’s a lot of smoke and when there’s smoke, there’s fire”.

Remember this rule of law rule of thumb for political witch hunts: When there’s smoke, there’s fire. MAGA!! 

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Recyclable plastic precursor made by bacteria:  Berkeley Lab news reports:

Making Renewable, Infinitely Recyclable Plastics Using Bacteria

Scientists engineered microbes to make the ingredients for recyclable plastics – replacing finite, polluting petrochemicals with sustainable alternatives. The new approach shows that renewable, recyclable plastics are not only possible, but also outperform those from petrochemicals

Unlike traditional plastics, PDK [poly(diketoenamine)] can be repeatedly deconstructed into pristine building blocks and formed into new products with no loss in quality. PDKs initially used building blocks derived from petrochemicals, but those ingredients can be redesigned and produced with microbes instead. Now, after four years of effort, collaborators have manipulated E. coli to turn sugars from plants into some of the starting materials – a molecule known as triacetic acid lactone, or bioTAL – and produced a PDK with roughly 80% bio-content.

[Planned] improvements would include speeding up the rate at which microbes convert sugars to bioTAL, using bacteria that can transform a wider variety of plant-derived sugars and other compounds, and powering the facility with renewable energy.

GIF showing PDK plastic breaking 

down in an acidic solution, leaving the bioTAL

precursor available for reuse

Here, genetically engineered bacteria make bioTAL from sugar and that is used to make PDK plastic. Additional research is needed to decrease the production cost of bioTAL and expand the range of plant sugars that can be used to fuel the bacteria. If the US had a carbon tax in place, this lower-pollution plastic would be significantly more competitive. It will take a couple of years of more research and development before this impact of this can be assessed. 

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Did he commit a crime?: The Hill reports recent poll data:

According to most of that group, he didn't commit serious crimes. 13% are still unsure!!

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Jellyfish!!: The NYT writes:

505-Million-Year-Old Jellyfish Fossils May Be the Oldest Ever Found

[Jean-Bernard Caron, a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto] and other scientists recently described a cache of jellyfish fossils from the Cambrian period that found an improbable pathway to preservation. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the scientists posit that these 505-million-year-old animals are among the oldest swimming jellyfish known to science.

“These new fossils represent the most compelling evidence of Cambrian jellyfish to date,” said David Gold, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the new study.

A 505 million year-old jellyfish fossil

A life reconstruction of a group of Burgessomedusa phasmiformis

swimming in the Cambrian sea

Trump indicted for role in Jan. 6. Finally!!

At long last, Donald Trump was criminally indicted today for his role in Jan. 6. A Washington grand jury voted to prosecute him on 4 counts: 1) conspiracy to defraud the government 2) conspiracy against the right to vote, 3) conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and 4) obstruction of an official proceeding. 

The indictment announced by the Justice Dept  also references six unnamed co-conspirators. Any guesses? It follows an investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith that stretched an 8 month period, and included interviews of many prominent figures in Trump's sphere at the time, including VP Pence, over Trump's efforts to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6. 

Predictably, Trump called the indictment "fake" and lashed out at Jack Smith for "election interference," a reference to the 2024 election. "Why did they wait so long?", he asked. He's got a point for once. They should have done this 2 1/2 years ago! Better late than never, though it will doubtless cause chaos during the upcoming the election cycle, as will other pending Trump cases. Indeed, he may soon face yet another criminal prosecution in Georgia over alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election result there.

The US is in for a bumpy ride in 2024 if Trump, as expected, clinches the Republican nomination. But one thing at a time. For now, I (like many readers here, I'm sure)  plan to fully enjoy the rest of the evening! Cheers!

News bits: The 1 mile rule protects Texas polluters; More Covid cover-up; Cooling a Tortoise in Phoenix

From the Republicans Just Making Shit Up Files: The Texas Tribune reports:

The “1-mile rule”: Texas’ unwritten, arbitrary policy protects 

big polluters from citizen complaints

It’s not found anywhere in state law or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s rules, but for years the agency has denied citizens the ability to challenge air pollution permits because they live more than a mile away

On a rugged stretch of the Gulf Coast in Texas, environmental groups called foul in 2020 when an oil company sought pollution permits to expand its export terminal beside Lavaca Bay.

Led by a coalition of local shrimpers and oystermen, the groups produced an analysis alleging that the company, Max Midstream, underrepresented expected emissions in order to avoid a more rigorous permitting process and stricter pollution control requirements.

In its response, Max Midstream did not respond to those allegations. Instead, it cited what it characterized as the “quintessential one-mile test” by Texas’ environmental regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, to claim that the groups and citizens involved had no right to bring forth a challenge because they lived more than 1 mile from the Seahawk Oil Terminal.

“The well-established Commission precedent has been repeated again and again,” the lawyers wrote. “Based on the quintessential one-mile test relied upon by the Commission for decades, none of the Hearing Requests can be granted.”

The TCEQ agreed, rejecting all hearing requests and issued the permit as initially proposed.  

But the agency says the 1-mile test cited by the company’s lawyers doesn’t exist.

“The Commission has never adopted a one-mile policy,” said TCEQ spokesperson Laura Lopez. “Instead, the Commission applies all factors set out in statute and rules.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality? Wrong name. It's really the Texas Commission on Degrading Environmental Quality and Lying About It. The radicalized corrupt Republican Party, it's America's fun-filled pro-pollution, pro-global warming, pro-deceit, pro-lies, anti-environment party.

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More evidence of a cover-up about the origin of COVID: This 14 minute video comes from an Australian point of view. The Australian scientist who dismissed the possibility that the COVID virus was man-made and leaked from the lab in Wuhan says comments between scientists in the recently released documents (i) are being taken out of context and new information was coming in, (ii) there is no proof of a man-made origin, and (iii) allegations of a man-made origin is a crackpot conspiracy theory, not a valid science theory. The reporter in the video points out that there is no proof of a natural origin, but that is taken as a scientifically valid possibility. Also, the allegation of taking comments out of context strikes me as clearly false. 

Evidence available now make it crystal clear that (i) the leading scientists knew the man-made and lab leak hypothesis was valid, and (ii) they clearly wanted to suppress that possibility in the March 2020 proximal origin paper. We have been and still are being lied to by those anti-lab leak theory scientists. Those are the true conspiracy theory crackpots here. That is true even if it turns out that we can eventually prove that the COVID virus arose naturally. Scientists could neither prove nor disprove either of the two possibilities at that time in 2020. That remains true to this day in 2023. 

Fauci, Collins, Anderson and all the other crackpot anti-lab leak theory scientists should be ashamed and fired. But, odds of that happening in the next 2 years are low, maybe about 0.1%. 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this video to my attention.

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Phenix has now experienced over 30 straight days of temp at or over 110ᵒ F. At the Phoenix zoo:

But it's not global warming. It's a Chinese hoax. It's Hunter Biden's laptop. Joe Biden should be impeached. Benghazi!! Etc.

Phoenix billboard, July 18th

Meanwhile in the ocean off the Florida coast:

Bleached, dying corals on Looe Key

The NYT writes: Phoenix just logged its hottest month on record — and the hottest month ever observed in a U.S. city. Phoenix’s average temperature for July was a blistering 102.7 degrees, taking into account average daytime highs of 114.7 degrees and overnight lows of 90.8. Phoenix had 17 days that hit 115 degrees or greater. The previous record was 7 days set in August of 2020.

Those darned Chinese hoaxes. They're probably in cahoots with the darned Democrats, darn it.

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A major Christian nationalist (CN) breakthrough: A NYT opinion discusses an impending blow to secular democracy, secular education and church-state separation. This new threat attacks all three with what could be a lethal blow in the long run. The opinion is by Rachel Laser, president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

Something deeply un-American is underway in the state of Oklahoma.

In June, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the nation’s first religious public charter school. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa were given permission to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in August 2024.

That’s right, a religious public school, funded by the state’s taxpayers. Proponents hope this model will spread to the dozens of other states that allow charter schools. Seven percent of public school students in the country attended charter schools as of the fall of 2021, and that number continues to grow. That’s why Christian nationalist groups see charter schools as fertile ground for their full-on assault on the separation of church and state in public education.

In just the past year, significant progress has been made in infusing Christianity into public schools. Texas, for example, now allows public schools to replace certified school counselors with religious chaplains and came close to requiring every classroom to display the Ten Commandments. New laws in Idaho and Kentucky could allow teachers and other public school employees to pray in front of — and even with — students. Missouri and Louisiana authorized public schools to teach Bible classes. West Virginia nearly passed a bill that would allow public schools to teach intelligent design creationism. Accompanying these laws are increasingly successful efforts to ban books and lessons about race, sexual orientation, gender identity and even menstruation in public schools.  

The establishment of a school that claims to be simultaneously public and religious — what has been a legal oxymoron in the United States since its founding — violates one of the foundational principles of American constitutional tradition: the separation of church and state. It also threatens religious freedom and undermines public education.

The United States Supreme Court has emboldened Christian nationalists by holding twice in the past three years that if a state funds private secular schools, it must also fund private religious schools. But charter schools are taxpayer-financed public schools — not private schools.  

That is why the organization I head, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, together with the A.C.L.U., the Education Law Center and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filed a lawsuit on Monday in state district court in Oklahoma to prevent the school from operating as a charter school.

To be clear, the CN wealth and power movement wants to get rid of all secular public education and replace it with radical Christian fundamentalist "education." That is core CN dogma. This move in Oklahoma is a critical step necessary in that transformation of secular America into Christian Sharia America run by a wealthy White male Christian Taliban.

No, none of that is not hyperbole. It is fact. The open question is whether the authoritarian CN movement can mostly or completely accomplish the secular democracy to Christian fundamentalist theocracy goal. We can only hope that this critically important lawsuit succeeds. If the Republican CN Supreme Court upholds the forced use of tax dollars to pay for religious education, this cancer will spread nation wide. It could kill secular democracy, but it will kill church-state separation.

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Meanwhile, rank and file Republicans are getting their act together and thinking deeply about things as they prepare their lemming run for edge of the cliff in 2024:

That is a glimpse of the reality that some or most of the radical right rank and file sees and believes is real and rational.