John Eastman concedes that he and DJT were trying to overthrow the government

NOTE: I added material taken directly from the interview to this post so that people can see what Eastman said in his own words.

This is worth a stand alone post. Talking Points Memo published comments by John Eastman, a key architect of the 1/6 coup attempt. Eastman is a central figure in fomenting treason on 1/6. TPM writes:

John Eastman Comes Clean: Hell Yes 

We Were Trying to Overthrow the Government

I want to return to this revelatory interview with co-conspirator John Eastman, the last portion of which was published Thursday by Tom Klingenstein, the Chairman of the Trumpite Claremont Institute and then highlighted by our Josh Kovensky. There’s a lot of atmospherics in this interview, a lot of bookshelf-lined tweedy gentility mixed with complaints about OSHA regulations and Drag Queen story hours. But the central bit comes just over half way through the interview when Eastman gets into the core justification and purpose for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and overthrow the constitutional order itself. He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.

January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.

“Our Founders lay this case out,” says Eastman. “There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable. At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

The Declaration of Independence has no legal force under American law. It’s not a legal document. It’s a public explanation of a political decision: to break the colonies’ allegiance to Great Britain and form a new country. But it contains a number of claims and principles that became and remain central to American political life.

The one Eastman invokes here is the right to overthrow governments. The claim is that governments have no legitimacy or authority beyond their ability to serve the governed. Governments shouldn’t be overthrown over minor or transitory concerns. But when they become truly oppressive people have a right to get rid of them and start over.

That anyone in DJT's close circle had the guts to admit the truth is astonishing to me. I never expected anyone in the inner circle to admit obvious truth. Hell yes, it was a coup attempt. 

What justified DJT's coup attempt in Eastman's mind? Decades of lies, slanders and crackpottery about nothingburger things like OSHA regulations, Drag Queen story hours, illegal immigration, woke, the LGBQT community and transgendered people. Those grievances are what has triggered most or nearly all of America's radical right into a lethal fit of blind fear, rage, hate, bigotry and outright support for dictatorship. Radical right supporters who know better, are cynical opportunists, grifters, trolls, thugs, deranged Christian nationalist theocrats and capitalist kleptocrats.

Of course, DJT will continue to lie and deny there was any coup attempt. The radical right Republican Party will continue to officially claim that 1/6 was “legitimate free speech.” 

In my firm opinion, Eastman, DJT and the rest of the inner circle should be tried for treason. 

Other sources are starting to report on this, e.g., Newsweek. I will wait to see if this turns out to be a fake story, but at this point it seems to be real. If it is real, it seems to be important.

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Added content from part 3 of the interview: Eastman's rationale for the coup attempt in his own words. This is from part 3 of the three part interview, starting at 20:55:

Key passages from the transcript (online here) are highlighted below.

John Eastman: Before we get to 2020. Let's have a brief stop over in 2000.

Tom Klingenstein: Okay

John Eastman: Because, because the claim is that Al Gore in conceding after Bush versus Gore rather than continuing to fight, exhibited the same kind of for the good of the country statesmanship, let's put an end to this. Um, I think that, uh, attributes to both of them, a greater magnanimity than is warranted. You look at Nixon's situation and every path, every judge in Texas, every judge in Illinois, uh, were Democrats. There was no way that he was gonna be able to bring election challenges that would result in his victory.

 And so if he did challenge and loses anyway, uh, uh, then he's put the country through a lot without any, any resolution, uh, it to the, the correct judgment. Same thing with Gore. I mean, we know for a fact that his folks had looked at every path. What happens if it gets to Congress, the joint session, what happens if it gets sent to the House of Representatives and in every path he loses no matter what happens in the litigation.

 So I, I don't want to give as much magnanimity of thought to either one of them. But, but let's assume the standard version and that Nixon is magnanimous, certainly not in 1960, but also not in 2000 were the stakes about the very existential threat that the country is under as great as they are. I mean, we're not talking about, you know, handing over to John Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon who's gonna deal with the Cold War.

Um, we're, we're, we are talking about whether we are gonna, as a nation completely repudiate every one of our founding principles, uh, which is what the modern Left-wing, which is in control of the Democrat Party, believes that we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated. This is an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but but of the, uh, example that our nation properly understood provides to the world.

That's the stakes, and Trump seems to understand that in a way a lot of Republican establishment types in Washington don't.  And it's the reason he gets so much support. In the hinterland, in the flyover country. People are fed up with folks, you know, get along, go along while the country is being destroyed.

 And so I think the stakes are much bigger. And, and, and that means a stolen election that thwarts the will of the people trying to correct course and get back on a path that understands the significance and the nobility of America and the American experiment is really at stake and we ought to fight for it.

 Tom Klingenstein: I'm assuming that if the conditions that obtained in this early sixties obtained now, you might not have made…

 John Eastman: I, I may, I may have come to a different conclusion and look, our Founders lay this case out. The prudential judgment they make in the Declaration of Independence is the same one. There's actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that says, you know, a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable – Tolerable while they remain tolerable.

 But at some point, abuses become so intolerable that it's not only their right, but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government. So that's the question - have the abuses and the threat of abuses become so intolerable, uh, that we have to be willing to push back.

 Tom Klingenstein: To what degree are the differences between you and others on the fraud and the legal matters a function of a very different assessment of where we stand today.

John Eastman: So I had, I had one of my longtime friends call me and say, you know, you gotta quit with this Eastman. You know, it's all a blow over. Just write a book. You'll make a lot of money and everything will be fine. And I told them, “I said, you really don't understand the stakes of what we're dealing with, and I don't know how you can miss it, because it's just there for anybody with eyes to see.”

Tom Klingenstein: The narrative is Eastman and Trump tried to initiate a coup. Isn't that the narrative?

 John Eastman: Well, and I actually published an article saying, trying to trying to stop an illegal election is not a coup, but trying to thwart a coup. Um, but the fact that that true narrative is being censored and shut down so that the false narrative can prevail, uh, is I think part of the existential threat.

And it's not just shut down, it's, it's shut down any people that raise legitimate questions about the validity of the election.

Tom Klingenstein: And, and you are a good example in unfortunately this censoring and de-platforming comes almost as much from the Right as from the Left.   

John Eastman: Let's, let's kind of distinguish the Right. We've got, uh, what our friends at the Claremont Institute like to call Conservatism Inc. The, the establishment conservatives. Uh, they're, they're very much a part of the establishment and, and what Trump and more importantly, what, what the movement that Trump got ahead of, remember it was not called the MAGA movement until Trump came along. It was the Tea Party movement. It's the same movement.  It's the same, goes back to 2008 or 2010. They don't want the federal government controlling our healthcare, you know, taking over one sixth of the nation's economy. They don't want command and control. They don't want OSHA telling me what, what kind of chair I can have in my home office.

All of, they don't want them telling me that I can't have gas stoves in my kitchen. They're tired of that. That was a tea party movement. And the Republicans were as much opposed to the Tea party, populist uprising against what was happening and coming outta Washington as the Democrats were. And Trump got ahead of that movement, and it's now called the Make America Greater Movement.

Uh, uh, uh, again, movement, but, but that's what the establishment in DC or more broadly, the northeast corridor, if you will, to bring in New York. That's, that's, that's what they wanna stop. Mm-hmm. Partly because they think they're smarter than the average American, and therefore the average American just ought to bend the knee or whatever comes out of the expert.

And this is just a fruition of that a hundred year effort.  But it's, it's, uh, it's, uh, come to a rapid conclusion. I mean, it kind of, it kind of went, there were a couple of bumps when it increased quickly, but, but you look at that curve and it's been an exponential increase in the last few years.

You're gonna let 50 year old men naked into teenage girls' showers at public pools. That's one of the, or, or drag queens doing story hours to six year olds. If I had said that 10 years ago, you would've laughed me outta the room and you, you would've said, Eastman, you're way outta the limb. You're crazy.

Tom Klingenstein: Anything more?

John Eastman: No, I, I, I would just, you know, kind of bring it all together in this way. The amount of information about illegality, I thought was clear cut. That opened the door for fraud. And I think both the statistical evidence and the anecdotal evidence, if I had about people engaging in that fraud because the door had been open to it, was significant enough to have altered the results of the election.

And then the question is gonna be, is there any legal remedy to deal with a stolen election? Um, and I put together the best legal arguments that I thought, uh, were plausible to, to, to deal with that. But I did that because I thought the stakes were high. And I thought, uh, if we do not address the illegality here, what we're gonna see is they're, I mean, they use the institutions of government to affect the outcome of that election in ways that we now know - the Twitter files, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop, those were done with collusion with agencies of the United States government, putting a big thumb on the scale of the election, and, and they did that when you know, when the incoming president was gonna be able to call him on it, and they continued to do it after the boss was their enemy.

Um, and, and if they can do it that time, when they then get a boss who's in agreement with them, then there are no longer, you know, any impediments to them preventing us from ever having a fair election again, which means there are no impediments to them blocking the consent of the governed, having control of the direction of the government, and we no longer are free people.

I mean, those are the stakes. And if those are the stakes, I, you know, what are you supposed to do? Just, just sit around and twiddle your thumb, eh? It would be too messy to do anything about this. I'll just. You know, and maybe when the alligators come for everybody else, they'll eat me last. No, that's not my nature. I'm the one out there on the rampart. If they eat me first, at least I've gone down fighting.

Qs: 

1. Did the TPM article sensationalize or distort what Eastman said? (FWIW, I think it sensationalized and distorted what Eastman said)

2. Was what Eastman supported and fomented on 1/6 as best he could, a coup attempt, an insurrection, legitimate political discourse, something else, or something unknowable?

News bits: Abnormalizing the politically abnormal; Memory enhancement method; GOP hypocrisy; Misc.

A NYT opinion by Russ Douthat makes an interesting argument about normalizing vs abnormalizing the abnormal in politics. Douthat opines: 

In the quest to escape Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics, there have been two camps: normalizers and abnormalizers.

The first group takes its cues from an argument made in these pages by the Italian-born economist Luigi Zingales just after Trump’s 2016 election. Comparing the new American president-elect to Silvio Berlusconi, the populist who bestrode Italian politics for nearly two decades, Zingales argued that Berlusconi’s successful opponents were the ones who treated him “as an ordinary opponent” and “focused on the issues, not on his character.” Attempts to mobilize against the right-wing populist on purely moral grounds or to rely on establishment solidarity to deem him somehow illegitimate only sustained Berlusconi’s influence and popularity.

The counterargument has been that you can’t just give certain forms of abnormality a pass; otherwise, you end up tolerating not just demagogy but also lawbreaking, corruption and authoritarianism. The more subtle version of the argument insists that normalizing a demagogue is also ultimately a political mistake as well as a moral one and that you can’t make the full case against a figure like Trump if you try to leave his character and corruption out of it.

Trump won in 2016 by exploiting the weak points in this abnormalizing strategy, as both his Republican primary opponents and then Hillary Clinton failed to defeat him with condemnation and quarantines, instead of reckoning with his populism’s substantive appeal.

His presidency was a more complicated business. I argued throughout, and still believe, that the normalizing strategy was the more effective one, driving Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms (when the messaging was heavily about health care and economic policy) and Joe Biden’s “let’s get back to normal” presidential bid. Meanwhile, the various impeachments, Lincoln Project fund-raising efforts, Russia investigations and screaming newspaper coverage seemed to fit Zingales’s model of establishment efforts that actually solidified Trump’s core support.

On reflection, Douthat is probably right. Vilifying and calling out DJT's corruption, lies, moral failings and anti-democracy authoritarianism and ideology (the "rot") do not faze his rank and file supporters. It just doesn't. Maybe it is best to mostly (not completely) ignore the rot and focus much more on issues, especially ones where there is supporting majority public opinion. One aspect of the rot that should not be ignored is the lies, slanders and crackpottery about issues that radical right authoritarians want to impose despite contrary majority public opinion.

That would mean that the Dems should soften their stance about some issues such as aggressive wokeness, transgenderism and some aspects of public education. 

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Researchers At U. California Irvine published a paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience that used seven different odors to significantly boost memory in a word recall test. Brain imaging at the beginning and end of the study showed apparent improvement in a brain pathway that connects two parts of the brain. That pathway normally weakens or deteriorates with age. Science Daily writes: 

Simple fragrance method produces major memory boost

The project was conducted through the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory. It involved men and women aged 60 to 85 without memory impairment. All were given a diffuser and seven cartridges, each containing a single and different natural oil. People in the enriched group received full-strength cartridges. Control group participants were given the oils in tiny amounts. Participants put a different cartridge into their diffuser each evening prior to going to bed, and it activated for two hours as they slept.

People in the enriched group showed a 226% [2.26-fold] increase in cognitive performance compared to the control group, as measured by a word list test commonly used to evaluate memory. Imaging revealed better integrity in the brain pathway called the left uncinate fasciculus. This pathway, which connects the medial temporal lobe to the decision-making prefrontal cortex, becomes less robust with age. Participants also reported sleeping more soundly.

Scientists have long known that the loss of olfactory capacity, or ability to smell, can predict development of nearly 70 neurological and psychiatric diseases. These include Alzheimer's and other dementias, Parkinson's, schizophrenia and alcoholism. Evidence is emerging about a link between smell loss due to COVID and ensuing cognitive decrease. Researchers have previously found that exposing people with moderate dementia to up to 40 different odors twice a day over a period of time boosted their memories and language skills, eased depression and improved their olfactory capacities. The UCI team decided to try turning this knowledge into an easy and non-invasive dementia-fighting tool.

"The reality is that over the age of 60, the olfactory sense and cognition starts to fall off a cliff," said Michael Leon, professor of neurobiology & behavior and a CNLM fellow. "But it's not realistic to think people with cognitive impairment could open, sniff and close 80 odorant bottles daily. This would be difficult even for those without dementia."

The study's first author, project scientist Cynthia Woo, said: "That's why we reduced the number of scents to just seven, exposing participants to just one each time, rather than the multiple aromas used simultaneously in previous research projects. By making it possible for people to experience the odors while sleeping, we eliminated the need to set aside time for this during waking hours every day."  

"The olfactory sense has the special privilege of being directly connected to the brain's memory circuits," said Michael Yassa, professor and James L. McGaugh Chair in the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory. The director of CNLM, he served as collaborating investigator. "All the other senses are routed first through the thalamus. Everyone has experienced how powerful aromas are in evoking recollections, even from very long ago. However, unlike with vision changes that we treat with glasses and hearing aids for hearing impairment, there has been no intervention for the loss of smell."

The research paper described the treatment protocol:

Individuals assigned to the olfactory enrichment group were provided with an odorant diffuser (Diffuser World) and 7 essential oil odorants (rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender; from The Essential Oil Company, Portland, OR) in identical glass vials that each fit into the diffuser. They were asked to turn on the diffuser when they went to bed, and the odorant was released into the air during the night for 2 h when they first went to sleep. They rotated through the different odorants each night. Individuals in the control group also were provided with an odorant diffuser, and they followed the same regimen as the olfactory enrichment participants, however they were provided with bottles that contained distilled water with an undetectable, de minimis amount of odorant added. Participants were instructed to change the odorant bottle daily before they went to bed, and they continued this regimen at home for 6 months.

The paper described the research protocol rationale like this:

While sniffing 40 odorants twice a day benefits patients with dementia, it is unlikely that they would be able to load, open, and close 80 sniff bottles each day. This problem would be expected even in older adults without dementia. Since it is important to get high levels of compliance for olfactory enrichment to obtain maximal benefits, we tested the idea that we could get enhanced neural and cognitive outcomes after minimal-effort olfactory enrichment at night.

Although memory enhancement is an elusive beast, this sounds like a plausible way to help maintain or even improve a neural pathway that normally deteriorates with age. This might actually be the real deal if this result is reproducible. Caution, this needs to be repeated at least once with more subjects to begin to confirm this astonishing result. The study had only 20 treated male and female participants, age 60–85, of good general health, with normal cognition. The control group had 23 people in it. That's a small sample size for the treated group.

But dang, I might give this a try. Even if the isn't real, there's no harm I can see in sleeping a couple of hours at night with different scents wafting around the room for a few months.

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Garden variety Republican hypocrisy: 

Barely a day after former President Donald Trump was indicted for the third time, some Senate Republicans are already trying to undermine the credibility of the federal judge who was randomly assigned to preside over his trial.

Here’s a detail they’re hoping you won’t notice: They unanimously voted to confirm her.  

Not a single Republican raised concerns about Chutkan during her nomination hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2014. In fact, only one GOP member of the committee even showed up to the hearing: Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), who was only there to rave about a separate Texas judicial nominee on the schedule. He left before Chutkan was up.

The named Republican hypocrites are Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.

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Fun but hopeless ideas

We already name hurricanes, so let's name heat waves after oil companies, their executives, e.g., the Darren Woods (Exxon-Mobil CEO) Heat Wave, etc. 

Congress needs to pass a law requiring that offices of executives or politicians in pro-pollution companies and the pro-pollution Republican Party have air conditioning set to kick in at 85ᵒ, and heat set to kick in at 55ᵒ.

Congress needs to pass a law requiring gun owners to get a license and pay an annual license tax for each gun owned and take a gun safety course every three or four years.

Congress needs to pass a law requiring the government to negotiate drug prices for Medicare, Medicaid and all government employees. It would be nice if it negotiated for the rest of us too, but that asks way too much because we are just us.

What about Kamala Harris?

Despite poor polling numbers, Kamala Harris viewed as key for Democrats in 2024

WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris’ poll numbers have stagnated at a lower level than many of her predecessors’ ratings, a daunting problem for a running mate as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway.

Professors and political experts interviewed by States Newsroom say there are several reasons why Harris’ favorability numbers sagged after she took office. She is tied to President Joe Biden and he’s not especially popular at the moment. She’s the first woman and person of color to hold the role. Assigned intractable national issues like illegal immigration, she has been heavily criticized by Republicans for not producing solutions. And like any vice president, she can’t overshadow the president.

Experts interviewed also contend that nationwide favorability polling isn’t an especially important predictor of who voters will choose when they head to the polls in 16 months. They did argue that Harris, however she may be perceived, will play a more prominent role in the campaign than other vice presidents — due in part to Biden’s age. Now 80, he would be 86 at the end of a second term.

“As in 2008, when there were concerns about John McCain’s health, people will look at the vice presidential candidate and see whether or not they’re ready for prime time,” said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. “And the problem with Sarah Palin in 2008 was that she didn’t look like she was ready for prime time. People are going to ask the same questions about Vice President Harris.”

Jonathan K. Hanson, a political science professor and statistics lecturer at the University of Michigan, also said Biden’s age might lead voters to consider Harris more critically than they have other running mates in recent history.

“If we’re really looking at Biden’s strengths and weaknesses, his age has got to be one of the biggest areas of vulnerability. We’re not used to having the president quite this old,” Hanson said.

A drop in the polls

FiveThirtyEight’s polling average showed Harris with a 52% disapproval rating and a 39% approval rating in late June.

Those numbers are much lower than in April 2021, three months after Harris was sworn in as vice president, when her average approval rating was 55%. Her disapproval rating at the time was just under 32%.

Both of those numbers began moving in the opposite directions in June 2021, before leveling off about a year later.

Gillespie said there are numerous factors contributing to Harris’ low poll numbers, including that one of the key roles for a vice president is to stay in the background.

“Politically speaking, if she were to be taking a lead role on lots of key issues, there is the chance that she would end up overshadowing President Biden and that could cause friction within their own relationship,” Gillespie said. “But then in particular, given President Biden’s age, it would actually help to fuel the narrative that he’s really not fit for office.”

Another reason Harris’ poll numbers are lower than many of her predecessors, Gillespie said, is because she is the first woman of color to become a vice president and because Biden’s poll numbers are underwater.

Harris’ poll numbers are lower than those of the four vice presidents who came before her, according to an analysis of prior polling by the Los Angeles Times.

Biden began his presidency in January 2021 with a 54.7% average approval rating, but that quickly began trending downward, according to FiveThirtyEight.

By September 2021, Biden’s approval rating had dipped below his disapproval rating. He currently holds a 54.3% disapproval rating and a 40.5% average approval rating, according to FiveThirtyEight.

The Biden-Harris campaign did not offer on-the-record comments for this article.

Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said there are multiple factors affecting Harris’ poll numbers and the public’s perception of her role. She agreed with the other experts that one is Harris’ standing as the first woman and first person of color to be a vice president.

“A challenge of being a first is that the scrutiny on you is usually much higher and the expectations for you are unset, there’s no precedent,” Dittmar said.

Tricky assignments

Harris, who gets a fraction of the news coverage of the president or congressional leaders, has been handed some of the more politically polarizing assignments during the first few years of the Biden administration, from addressing the main drivers of undocumented migration to being a leading voice on reproductive rights following the fall of Roe v. Wade.

During the first year of the Biden administration, Harris was tasked with trying to address the long-running and complex issues within a few Central American countries that lead thousands of people to migrate to the United States each year.

Harris’ first international trip as vice president in June 2021 was to Guatemala before she traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border later that month, following weeks of criticism from Republicans.

Those GOP lawmakers have repeatedly rebuked Harris for what they call a “crisis” at the Southern border and laid the blame for undocumented immigration at her feet.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer, Harris became one of the administration’s leading voices on reproductive rights and abortion access.

But abortion access is an area where Democrats feel they can motivate their base and the swing voters that often decide presidential contests. And while Biden has spoken out in support of reproductive rights consistently since the Supreme Court’s decision last summer, in late June he distanced himself somewhat.

“I happen to be a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion,” Biden said. “But guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right.”

Harris has spoken about dozens of other issues as well, including in recent days on the cost of child care, access to transportation for people with disabilities, artificial intelligence and renewable energy.

Some voters, Gillespie said, might have had unrealistic expectations about what Harris could accomplish as vice president, leading them to become frustrated with her job performance.

“I think it’s an important question to look at how much the public actually knows about what her issue portfolio is,” Gillespie said. “And then there is the other issue of whether or not Vice President Harris was potentially set up to fail.”

“There is the perception that by announcing that she would be handling these issues, that that was just inviting criticism when she was inevitably not going to be able to solve those problems in a short period of time, because these are entrenched long-term issues,” Gillespie added.

Bully pulpit and more 

Harris told NPR in an interview released this month that she views her role as vice president as similar to the role of Americans who “love” the country and believe in its promises, but who also “understand we have some work yet to do to fully achieve that promise.”

“I think about my role as vice president of the United States and what that means both in terms of the bully pulpit that I have and the responsibility that comes with that to hopefully inform folks of things I might be aware of, but also to elevate public discourse and hopefully cut through the misinformation,” Harris said during the NPR interview.

Harris has traveled throughout the country on behalf of the administration this year, including to purple states like Arizona where she spoke with Native American communities, Pennsylvania for an event with the Service Employees International Union, Virginia to speak about gun violence and Georgia to discuss climate change.

Harris has also attended several Democratic fundraising events.

And in mid-July she matched the record for the most tie-breaking votes a vice president has cast in the Senate.

“When it’s mattered most, Vice President Harris has provided the decisive vote on some of the most historic bills of modern times, from the American Rescue Plan to the Inflation Reduction Act, to so many federal judges who now preside and provide balance on the federal bench,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat said. “She’s carried out her duties with supreme excellence.”

Dittmar from the Center for American Women and Politics said it’s clear that many voters are evaluating Harris “in a different way than the white men who’ve come before her.”

Public perception or favorability of Harris could also be affected by how she’s been deployed by the White House, Dittmar said.

“She tends to do more of her work behind the scenes and in things that are just covered less,” Dittmar said. “So when I see she has low favorables, it leads me to believe that in the absence of information of what she is actually doing, people are going to rely on other information put out there about her.”

Even then, Dittmar said, polls won’t give an indication of whether Biden will win reelection with Harris as his running mate.

“I’m always like a broken record about this, I don’t think that favorability tells us much,” Dittmar said.

Polling has also been broadly criticized for inaccurate numbers heading into the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research wrote in a report that the “2020 polls featured polling error of an unusual magnitude: It was the highest in 40 years for the national popular vote and the highest in at least 20 years for state-level estimates of the vote in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial contests.”

“Among polls conducted in the final two weeks, the average error on the margin in either direction was 4.5 points for national popular vote polls and 5.1 points for state-level presidential polls,” the report said.

A president above the fray

Kathryn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said that vice presidents often take a leading role criticizing opponents during a reelection campaign because presidents tend to follow the “Rose Garden” strategy.

That includes the president appearing above the fray, she said, while trying to project as a natural for a second term in office.

In addition to that, vice presidents, she said, often act like lightning rods, drawing volatile issues away from the president.

But Tenpas said national polling numbers aren’t particularly important because the campaign will likely focus on specific areas of the country that could decide presidential elections.

“I would contend that her national polling numbers are not super relevant when it comes to campaigning because they probably want to focus on certain counties within those swing states,” Tenpas said.

The University of Michigan’s Hanson said Biden’s somewhat low approval rating could affect Harris.

But, he added, because Harris is the first woman and first person of color to hold the role of vice president, that creates other dynamics.

Media attention on previous vice presidents, all of whom have been white men, didn’t focus on their race or ethnic background in the way it’s factored into Harris’ public image as a politician, he said.

Those vice presidents, he said, would talk about policy or other aspects of their background.

“But of course, when the nominee is a woman, or when a woman of color, then those features enter very prominently into the news coverage, and it kind of activates, you know, prejudices that voters have,” Hanson said. “So to the extent that there was prejudice against a Black woman or a woman of color, or, in this case, a person of mixed ethnic background, those prejudices can manifest themselves, depending on who is reading that story.”

Moving Harris to the forefront and trying to reassure voters that she could step into the role of president, should anything happen to Biden, might be a crucial benchmark for the 2024 Biden-Harris campaign, he said.

“I think it’s fair to say Republicans so far have had the upper hand as being pretty successful as trading in an image of incompetence, or that voters just don’t have very warm feelings or very positive feelings towards Harris,” Hanson said.

“So Democrats, of course, will want to flip that narrative and I think there is a possibility … that her relative youth and intelligence will be selling points and assets that will reassure voters that if something were to happen to Biden that she’s ready,” Hanson added. “But that’s going to have to be the result of an intentional campaign to create that perception.”

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/07/17/despite-poor-polling-numbers-kamala-harris-viewed-as-key-for-democrats-in-2024/

A kazillion questions popped into my head when reading the above but I will narrow my questions down to just a few.

There is a reason why I highlighted that last three paragraphs in red. Another example where the Democrats have failed in their messaging and allowed the Republicans to frame the narrative around Kamala Harris. Why have the Democrats NOT done a better job of highlighting her accomplishments and contributions? Why is THIS one of the few articles I could find that has done so?

A lot of commentary in the article above about Harris being a woman of color and how that plays into her lack of popularity. First, do you buy that? Or is that just an excuse? My question is, did Biden originally pick Harris primarily because she IS a woman of color over considerations of her qualifications? 

Consider: Biden also appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the SCOTUS, but she was eminently qualified. Was Kamala, on the other hand, the most qualified choice for VP at the time? 

Next, regardless of how pundits view her performance, or view her either as an asset or liability to Biden's campaign, the bigger question will be - how much of a factor WILL her presence be on the 2024 election? A lot or not much at all?

Finally, is questioning her abilities or even questioning if she was the right choice "racist?" If we questioned the abilities of any other VP we wouldn't be accused of that. So how much is any criticism of her stifled by accusations of racism? Reverse that, and we can ask - HOW MUCH of the criticism leveled at her by the Republicans IS because of her gender and race? 

Deliberate control of information & knowledge in Wikipedia's "Origin of Covid" page

 

I use Wikipedia with some regularity, and often include links to it when I leave comments on certain topics. However, I have noticed that the more politically significant and controversial the topic, the less likely it is that entries are fair, accurate and balanced. I first noticed this when reading biographies of contemporary politcians. I rarely edit Wiki, but one of the then-Dem candidates in a local primary had a bio that contained what I knew to be untruths. I was able to start a discussion page on this, and some of the untruths were removed after a I presented evidence. It wasn't as easy as I'd imagined, but far from impossible to edit as the open source model is intended to work. Since then, I've seen other cases like this in pages related not only to politicians, but also contemporary topics of political significance   One clear example of which I became aware recently is the origin of Covid 19. Type "wiki origin of covid" into your google search bar, and immediately you will see the following in enlarged print, with some clauses highlighted:

"Most scientists agree that, as with many other pandemics in human history, the virus is likely derived from a bat-borne virus transmitted to humans in a natural setting. Many other explanations, including several conspiracy theories, have been proposed." (Google search result)

 

Below the authoritative quote is a link to the Wikipedia page, "Origin of Covid-19," from which it comes.  The concluding sentence  of the opening paragraph of that page reads thus:

"Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence. [followed by a supposedly corroborating footnote #15]"

A few questions:

1) Which scientists and politicians have "speculated" that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory?

2) What arguments and evidence did they adduce?

3) Are the arguments and evidence any less well supported than the Wuhan Meat Market/Natural Spillover explanation embraced in the article as *the* "scientific consensus?" 

Perhaps most importantly:

4) WHO are the sources for the conclusion that lab-leaks can be ruled out as "non-scientific" or "conspiracy theory?"

If we start with the last question, the WHO question, we will be led to discover the other answers.  So what is the source corresponding to footnote #15 which states "[lab-leak theory] is not supported by evidence."??

That footnote directs readers to a 2021 Cell article titled The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review. The lead author is Eddie Holmes, whose role in establishing the natural spillover as the "only" valid explanation has been discussed previously on this blog, including in an OP from earlier this week by Germaine which includes interview footage of Holmes interspersed with the contents of his own contradictory leaked Slack messages to the other scientists with whom he co-wrote the decisive article Proximate Origins of Covid 19 (PO)  that has come under fire by a rather large group of international scientists, several of whom have testified in Oversight Hearings on the topic. But it doesn't stop there. Having combed through many of the journal articles referenced by "the authorities" (gov't agencies like the NIH and MSM science journalists) the list of co-authors for A Critical Review (2021) includes a familiar cast of characters in the literature. 

All of the authors of PO are listed as co-authors in A Critical Review with the exception of Ian Lipkin, who stopped claiming that lab leak scenarios were all but impossible in 2021. The PO co-author said in a statement to the Washington Post in 2021:

“If they’ve got hundreds of bat samples that are coming in, and some of them aren’t characterized, how would they know whether this virus was or wasn’t in this lab? They wouldn’t.”

 Statements like that one by Lipkin provide one reason that his name is seldom invoked by his PO co-authors to debunk lab leak scenarios. Another, darker reason, is the fact that at Ian Lipkin failed to disclose the fact that he worked for the NIH-funded company, EcoHealth Alliance,  at the heart of the debate from 2012-2014, and co-authored at least 10 research paper with the group between 2011-2021. As US Right To Know journalist, Emily Kopp documented, at least one of these papers was on novel Coranaviruses that "EcoHealth and its partners sampled around the world." Between his distancing himself from conclusion of PO, and the fact that he failed to disclose conflict of interests, it's small wonder that his old establishment friends seldom bring him up. But, though PO is cited as evidence on the Wiki page, the ethical breach of Dr. Lipkin is not discussed, nor is the conflict of interest of  its lead-author, Kristian Andersen, who was awaiting an $8 mil. grant from the NIH while writing PO. The grant came through a few months after the March PO publication in August, 2020.

At any rate, Lipkin's reservations about the mainstream theory he helped to establish are not mentioned in Wikipedia's page. They are also left out of the paper Wiki cites in para 1which is supposedly fair and balanced, i.e. "A Critical Review." So we have Kristian Andersen (lead author of PO who testified last month that he "changed his mind from lab leak theory to natural spillover" in days based on "the scientific method." We have Robert Garry, another outspoken co-author whose Slack messages also reveal that in private he worried intensely about lab leak scenarios, like his colleague Kristian Andersen,  both before, during and after the Nature Medicine publishied PO.  The 2 scientists appeared together last month testifying before Congress. Both lied.

We NOW know (thanks to massive leaks of private messages discussed in several posts here) that Andersen and Garry (and the others)  bluntly contradict the conclusions of their own paper.Both continue to claim that their beliefs changed rapidly due to "the scientific process," even within a few short days. In the past, both spoke of "new evidence" they had discovered; but the "evidence" falls far short of justifying the conclusion of the article. Robert Garry was interviewed 9 months ago (BEFORE we had all the hundreds of messages he refers to throughout the interview). One email he wrote, though, had already been leaked. Written 2 days prior to the article, the email  bluntly states,  "I just can't figure out how this gets accomplished in nature" (referring to the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 occurring without engineering). In the interview, he dances around questions asked, and among other things cites (dubious) evidence that was (mis)-used in 2020 to make the case. This "evidence" involved the hypothesis that pangolins were the intermediate host of the virus that became SARS2-CoV-2 because they have a particular receptor cite that might have helped to explain the jump from bats to humans. Garry, in 2022, brings that "evidence" up, and correctly, the interviewer states, "that proves nothing." At the time, it would not have been possible to quote Kristian Andersen (Garry's senior colleague) saying in a private message of that time period leaked last month the same exact thing:

"[T]he more sequences we see from Pangolins (and we have been analyzing/discussing these very carefully), the less likely it seems that they're the intermediate hosts. Unfortunately, none of this helps refute a lab leak origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do), and not dismissed out of hand as another "conspiracy theory."

If that were not enough to make one skeptical of the claim that "pangolins were definitive evidence," there were biological and zoological reviews of such claims that pangolins concluding they were NOT  intermediate hosts. Here is one example from Oct., 2020-- 2 years prior to the interview with Garry below. Keep these things in mind as you watch Robert Garry talk about what was then a single leaked email in the following video interview. Garry swings  desperately from one rebuttal to another, citing"pangolins" as evidence, and even making the absurd claim (in light of all the other messages we now have) that he was "just playing devil's advocate" in that email. Since he and his colleagues from the PO paper, which was overseen by Fauci and Collins and WHO's Jeremy Ferrar in UK, are all listed as authors for the definitive paper cited in the opening paragraph of Wikipedia's article, it is more than fair to ask HOW these experts defend their own scientific authority on this topic. 

It is worth emphasizing that though Garry (above) says that Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Ferrar (all of whom were conferencing with the authors, providing feedback, advising revisions and word-choice substitutions as we now know from released texts) were "agnostic" and encouraged the writers to follow the evidence wherever it led. They were, in his words, completely
"hands off" on the writing of the exceedingly influential article. We now know this is tragically wrong. They are on the record in their own leaked private words,  and speak for themselves in the many transcripts. They also speak through Eddie Holmes who made final revisions to the paper without consulting "lead author" Kristian Andersen-- a major no-no in science. In order to explain such an unusual and anti-scientific maneuver, Holmes apologized in a message to Andersen emphasizing the role of  "pressure from the 'higher-ups.'

 

There is also damning circumstantial evidence of corruption and graft. Lead author, K Andersen, was -- at the time of writing PO-- applying for a grant from the NIH. Not only did he not announce a conflict of interests, but after the paper was published, his laboratory received an $8.9 million NIH grant in August of 2020.When Anthony Fauci cited the paper from  the podium of the White House, he claimed that the it showed that the data were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human,” all but completely ruling out lab origins. Kristian Andersen, in a euphoric mood, then tweeted, "We RUUUUUUUULE! That's tenure secured, right there." Remarkably, Andersen has only doubled down since, testifying under oath that his "change of mind" was "just a text book case of the scientific method." Garry was at his side concurring during that congressional hearing last month.

Investigative journalist, Emily Kopp of US Right To Know, and Biosafety Now!'s Dana Parrish both criticized Wikipedia for making the Origins of Covid-19 page all but impossible to edit, even by credentialed scientists who do not agree with the unscientific conclusion. Parrish claims that Wikipedia (it's "arbitration committee for contentious topics")  has given authority to virologist, James Duehr (Mt. Sinai/Icahan ) to control edits on that page.  This is his user page on Wikipedia as "Shibbolethink:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shibbolethink  and this is his academic page: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Duehr  The Wiki editing page is locked for almost all users, regardless of scientific background or affiliation. It is guarded by the strict protocols of "Contentious Topics," preventing changes or revisions (Dana Parish: Twitter, August 2).  No changes can be made without the express approval of the "Wikipedia Arbitration Committee" (see links at end of OP). James  Duehr, according to Parish, has been entrusted with overseeing the page. He has also spent a lot of time on Reddit trying to establish natural spillover as the official account of Covid 19 origins: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95 /covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/    This is not open and transparent science, but evidence of a "mission" to cement into place an "official narrative" despite all the mounting counter-evidence. As Matt Ridley and Alina Chan write in the Wall St. Journal, Eddie Holmes-- who put the finishing touches on the paper without even consulting any other authors-- told the others how "happy" the "higher-ups" were with the results. They write:

"Shortly before their paper went public, evolutionary biologist and virologist Edward Holmes of Sydney University reported to his fellow authors that “Jeremy Farrar and Francis Collins are very happy” with the final draft. Two of the authors wrote in private messages that they had rushed their paper out under pressure from unidentified “higher-ups.” The role of these senior scientists went unacknowledged in the paper."(WSJ: 7/26/23)

In my research of this manufactured consensus, I found a small and recurring list of named authors and co-authors whose papers more often cite their *other papers* than any new laboratory or forensic evidence. The circularity is dizzying. In the Wikipedia page's short section on "Laboratory Incidents," we are told that all such theory is "highly contraversial" and lacks evidence. They make the very strong (but untrue) claim that:

"Available evidence suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was originally harbored by bats, and spread to humans from infected wild animals, functioning as an intermediate host, at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019."

This claim is backed by footnotes which direct readers to 2 "landmark origins studies published side by side in Science in July of 2022." The first one [which is discussed below] is  Michael Worobey's "The Huanan Seafoodo Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic"aand the second is The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2. The lead author of the latter is Jonathan Pekar , currently a Ph.D candidate at UCSD. It is striking that both papers list as co-authors all but one author of Proximal Origins, and several from A Critical Review (which also included all but one PO authors). (Ian Lipkin who no longer rules out lab leaks is the odd man out in all 3 articles). Specifically, the paper claiming definitively that the Meat Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the pandemic lists such familiar names as Robert Garry (interviewed in the above video) Eddie Holmes (PO and Critical Review author), Andrew Rambaut (co-author of PO and Critical Review), Kristian Andersen (lead PO author, co-author of Critical Review),  and Jonathan Pekar (the grad student credited as lead author of the other "landmark origins studies" footnoted).

A short list of the VIPs on that appear in the great majority of cited papers Wiki uses to disqualify "lab incidents"  would thus include ALL the  PO authors, Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut (but not, as mentioned Lipkin who changed his mind). It also includes scientists with whom those authors were closely affiliated including EcoHealth president, Peter Daszak, Jeremy Farrar, Angela Rasmussen, Michael Worobey, Susan Weiss and several others who have written "dispassionately" and served as primary sources for the media since 2020.

 

The Worobey study  claiming the Wuhan Market was definitely the "epicenter" of the outbreak was flawed, and has been criticized both by scientists and in a Washington Post editorial pointing out that there is no evidence provided there. The epidemiological mapping Worobey et al. relied upon drew on only  ~6% of the early Wuhan cases. Unscientifically, Worobey stated, "we assumed that the locations of the others would be the same." The Washington Post issued an editorial which harshly criticized the study . Worobey told WaPo:

 

"There's probably at least 10 times more cases that we haven't sampled because only something like 6 percent end up in the hospital. We fully expect the cases that we don't sample to come from exactly the same geographic distribution as the ones we do sample." (WaPo: 11/27/23)

That is not logical or scientific. Why would one expect that? Further, a geoscientist, Daniel A. Walker  showed that the map had been incorrectly interpreted in the study, and also by those who used it for further extrapolations. Nevertheless, it is still cited as "proof" of something for which no proof exists-- the origins of Covid-19, whether natural or research-related. 

The short list of VIPs who had a had in writing nearly all the 'authoritative' Origins studies in the Wiki article (and MSM) goes on.

Peter Dasziak who is president of the group that did the NIH funded research, and principal investigator, went on to play a major role in the World Health Organization 2022 "investigation of origins in China," along with Jeremy Farrar (a "higher-up" on the conference call over the PO article, and later the WHO 's Chief Scientist  . From government (Fauci, Collins on the conference call) to WHO (Jeremy Ferrar) to NIH-funded Wuhan experiments researcher (Peter Daszak of EcoHealth) to ex-employees of EcoHealth (Ian Lipkin) to scientists like MichaelWorobey, who (after Biden called for a new investigation into origins) provided psuedoscientific "evidence" in favor of natural spillover, to scientists in the same circles as the above,  such as Angela Rasmussen and Susan Weiss, whose names appear on several of the related journal articles in Science, as well as being heavily quoted by MSM articles. In short, what  we have here is a rather small, powerful special interest constellation which has taken advantage of its power to wall itself off from dissenting scientists and public health experts, establishing and (to this day)maintaining  the MSM "orthodox" narrative that consigns lab-based theories to the "fringe/conspiracy" category-- even when the national intelligence of this country is split on the question of origins,  and there are ongoing oversight hearings in Congress investigating the whole matter of the roles of Fauci, Collins and their leaked messages and communications with the authors of PO. 

 

A fair question would be, "Who did the Wikipedia cite in the "Lab Incidents" section of the article, or for that matter ANY section of it? The answer is exactly zero. Although they continue to update the page (I noted the inclusion of a NYT article penned 2 weeks ago by an EcoHealth ally David Quammen-- discussed last week in another post here. But so far, such eminent scientists (epidemiologists, virologists, molecular biologists etc.) as Raina MacIntyre, Richard Ebright, Bryce Nickels, Justin Kinney (featured last week here in a video interview from Australian TV) , Andre Goffinet, David Relman,  Michael Lipsitch and other leading specialists are not quoted or even mentioned at all. The group, Biosafety Now! (which includes some of those scientists)  and their ongoing petition to have PO retracted, and call for a new forensic investigation to restore public faith in science and implement regulations for dangerous Gain of Function research with potential pandemics is not mentioned either. The congressional testimony of Ebright on GoF studies in Wuhan given this past March is not mentioned either. All the evidence is tilted to the side of the virologists who carried out the work in question, and those in government who funded that work. This is scandalous.

I can't conclude from this that all, many or most other articles in Wiki involving large vested interests and political/state interests are also subject to epistemic manipulation. But the manufacture of consensus in this case provides-- at the very least-- a good reason to further research the topic of Wikipedia's treatment of  topics which are both consequential and controversial in such areas as science, politics and biographies, among others. We have learned, through the Covid-related leaks, that MSM and our own gov't cannot necessarily be trusted in the vital area of Public Health and safety. Perhaps it is not shocking, then, to learn that the most widely used encyclopedia in the world has been equally partial in the Origins of Covid area. Though most academics do not use Wiki for citations, I've seen some that do. Certainly it is regarded as some kind of epistemic guardrail to settle disputes online everyday. It is, therefore, important to study the editorial process very carefully now, and with great attention to just who can and cannot open discussions and make substantive changes. How much deliberate knowledge-distortion does or does not occur on this cite? As a user and contributor to Wikipedia, and a concerned citizen, I would like to know the answer to that question.

Here is the Talk/Discussion page for the Origins article which establishes the page as a "Contentious Topic" subject to oversight and control  by the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee

Q.Do any readers here have experience with related issues on Wikipedia? What do you make of all this?

For the science and technology advocates…

 

Here’s an interesting study I found on another blogsite.  

File under: “Keep in the back of my mind for future reference.”

Link here.

"The study highlights the importance of spin in the processes of life. Understanding and controlling spin could have a big impact on how living things work and might also help improve medical imaging and create new ways to treat illnesses."

"This discovery challenges long-held assumptions and opens up exciting possibilities for advancements in biotechnology and quantum biology."

News bits: 4-Dimensional metamaterial discovered; About the indictment - Civil war?; Brain-machine interface advance

Researchers in the Structured Materials and Dynamics Lab at the University of Missouri College of Engineering have made a strange 3-dimensional material that has a "synthetic" fourth dimension property related to the behavior of energy waves on its surface.

Energy wave simulation

This synthetic 4D metamaterial can trap and control energy waves on its solid surface. STD writes:

Everyday life involves the three dimensions or 3D — along an X, Y, and Z axis, or up and down, left and right, and forward and back. But, in recent years scientists like Guoliang Huang, the Huber and Helen Croft Chair in Engineering at the University of Missouri, have explored a “fourth dimension” (4D), or synthetic dimension, as an extension of our current physical reality.

Recently, Huang together with a team of scientists in the Structured Materials and Dynamics Lab at the MU College of Engineering, achieved a significant breakthrough. They successfully created a new synthetic metamaterial with 4D capabilities. This includes the ability to control energy waves on the surface of a solid material. These energy waves, referred to as mechanical surface waves, are fundamental to how vibrations travel along the surface of solid materials.

2D rendering of the 3D metamaterial with the 

energy-trapping synthetic 4D property

While the team’s discovery, at this stage, is simply a building block for other scientists to take and adapt as needed, the material also has the potential to be scaled up for larger applications related to civil engineering, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and national defense uses.

“Conventional materials are limited to only three dimensions with an X, Y, and Z axis,” Huang said. “But now we are building materials in the synthetic dimension, or 4D, which allows us to manipulate the energy wave path to go exactly where we want it to go as it travels from one corner of a material to another.”

This groundbreaking discovery, called ‘topological pumping,’ could potentially lead to advancements in quantum mechanics and quantum computing. This is due to the development of higher dimension quantum-mechanical effects it might allow.

The work builds upon previous research conducted by Huang and his colleagues. Their earlier studies demonstrated how a passive metamaterial could control the path of sound waves as they travel from one corner of a material to another.

[This research] is supported by grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office.

Notice the US military funding this. We can only speculate what exciting new killing machines they have in mind. I do not have a feel for what civilian or military impacts this could wind up having in the coming years. It feels potentially important to very important. Time will tell.

The published research paper is here.

Personal anecdote: Years ago, I spoke with a weapons designer engineer working as a civilian contractor for the US military. I think he worked for either General Atomics or Cubic Corp. He indicated that his research team really needed to know if space (or space-time, can't remember which) was smooth or chunky for them to further proceed developing a groovy new weapon he could not talk about. From what I understand now, space (space-time?) is both smooth and chunky. I guess that's sort of like light is both a wave and a particle. Anyway, the point is this, do not underestimate the ingenuity and money the US military has at its disposal for finding new ways to kill people, the rationale being: If we don't do it, they will. 

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To me, it is starting to feel like DJT's legal defense will partly rely on publicly trying to incite a civil war. Multiple sources are reporting that DJT's defense attorney, John Lauro, went on Faux news and Newsmax yesterday and made statements that confirm some key the allegations in the indictment against DJT. The affirmed allegations relate to DJT trying to delay the electoral vote count. That is weird to say the least. 

And, Lauro continues to concede damaging facts that are already in the public record. He responded to Newsweek late yesterday or this morning with these comments:

"Unfortunately, some of the legal commentary is not focused on the actual facts of the case. But instead is based on an erroneous understanding of what happened. Sadly, that leads to a lot of public misinformation, which is to be expected in this highly charged political environment. My comments were consistent with the facts that are already in the public record, and by no means constitute any admission."

How is it possible that Lauro's comments that appear to confirm that DJT broke the law? Two possibilities come to mind, both of which are possible, probably likely, at the same time. One is that although the alleged facts are actually true, what DJT did was not illegal because he had no intent to break any law and was innocently acting on advice of his (crackpot) attorneys like John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani and/or the Kraken (Sidney Powell). The other, scarier, possibility is that DJT is appealing to his cult by signaling to them something like, "Hey! Just look at the little things the Biden-weaponized DoJ is coming after me for. There was no law broken there because I never intended to break any law. If the American people do not rise up and defend democracy and the rule of law, we will be engulfed in socialist tyranny, corruption and moral depravity. Stand with me to protect America!! KAGA!! (keep America great again)"

Lauro said his comments by no means constituted any admission. Well, he undeniably admitted some damaging facts alleged against DJT. What he can say his own words constituted no admission that those facts alone amounted DJT breaking any law because he did not have the requisite criminal intent.

Maybe by conceding and embracing undeniable damaging facts, DJT is using Lauro to position public opinion and the jury pool in DC to make DJT look innocent in his actions because he had no criminal intent. If the evidence does not convince every person on the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that DJT knew what he was doing was illegal, the case against him collapses and he will be acquitted. If that analysis is correct, DJT has decided to rely on threat of public violence up to and including civil war because he believes he is going to lose in court. Maybe inciting civil war is DJT's plan B if he loses in court.

Lauro might be right to say that public opinion is too heated. This video from MSNBC is foaming at the mouth and over the top about how damaging Lauro's admission is. Did Lauro sucker punch MSNBC and the pundits? Lauro is no fool. DJT is a master of manipulation public opinion and creating plausible deniability. At present, plausible deniability seems to be DJT's best defense in court. Fomenting a civil war is just the back-up plan.

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One area of science I try to follow somewhat is BMI (brain-machine interface) research. Due to the complexity of merging machines with living tissue, this is a slow moving area of research. One area of BMI research relates to treating paralyzed people and people who have lost a limb. Medical Express writes about treatment of a paralyzed patient: 

For the first time researchers restore feeling and lasting 

movement in man living with quadriplegia

In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, bioelectronic medicine researchers, engineers and surgeons at Northwell Health's The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research have successfully implanted microchips into the brain of a man living with paralysis, and have developed artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to re-link his brain to his body and spinal cord.

This double neural bypass forms an electronic bridge that allows information to flow once again between the man's paralyzed body and brain to restore movement and sensations in his hand with lasting gains in his arm and wrist outside of the laboratory. The research team unveiled the trial participant's groundbreaking progress four months after a 15-hour open-brain surgery that took place on March 9 at North Shore University Hospital (NSUH).

"This is the first time the brain, body and spinal cord have been linked together electronically in a paralyzed human to restore lasting movement and sensation," said Chad Bouton, professor in the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine at the Feinstein Institutes, vice president of advanced engineering at Northwell Health, developer of the technology and principal investigator of the clinical trial.  

"When the study participant thinks about moving his arm or hand, we 'supercharge' his spinal cord and stimulate his brain and muscles to help rebuild connections, provide sensory feedback, and promote recovery. This type of thought-driven therapy is a game-changer. Our goal is to use this technology one day to give people living with paralysis the ability to live fuller, more independent lives."

See, microchips are people. It's not a crackpot QAnon conspiracy.