News bits: Authoritarianism and fertility rate; Global warming cost watch; Electric battery improvement

A WaPo commentary by several staff writers about the economic slowdown in China raises some interesting insights. A fertility rate of about 2.1 children per woman is requires to maintain a stable population. Sebastian Mallaby writes:

Demographics are destiny

The deep cause of China’s economic slowdown — and the strongest reason to believe it will be lasting — is its demographic collapse. Last year, the country’s population fell for the first time since 1961, a landmark that had not been expected until 2029 or later. .... The United Nations projects that the country’s head count will plummet from today’s 1.4 billion to below 800 million by century’s end. You have to go back to the plagues and famines of the late medieval period to find a loss of population so severe.

China is following the pattern of other high-saving, high-investment economies in Northeast Asia. Economic systems that suppress consumption and living standards eventually face a comeuppance: They create legions of stressed young couples who don’t want to make babies. Accordingly, China is one of the world’s most expensive places to raise a family, a fact that has driven fertility down to an all-time low of 1.2 children per woman.

China’s rock-bottom fertility also reflects distinctly Chinese characteristics — specifically, the authoritarianism of the Communist Party. Because of selective abortion and neglect of baby girls, China has about 30 million fewer females than males. And because China experiences steady net outward migration, it cannot fix its problem by attracting foreigners. Mobile and aspirational people tend to shun aggressively authoritarian regimes.

Thoughts that (i) young couples are burned out and don't want to make babies, and (ii) immigrants don't like dictatorship strongly suggest that China's dictators face problems they cannot fix. To stay in power, another writer suggests that the dictators can play the nationalism card and attack Taiwan. 

Until now the deal was that the Chinese people gave up their freedoms and meaningful political participation in return for an increasing standard of living. After decades of delivering on the deal, the dictator's imposed quid pro quo is now failing. That raises pressure on the dictators to deliver something. Taiwan is something.

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Articles discussing various effects of global warming are increasingly popping up. Paying some attention to a topic like the costs of global warming make sense to keep this developing story in context. The NYT writes:

Grab-N-Go, a drive-through and walk-up convenience store in New Iberia, La., has a central air-conditioning system, a window air-conditioning unit and two small, portable air-conditioners. On a recent afternoon, all of them were running. Cool air swirled through the devil-red metal box of a building.

Still, Don Vitto, the shopkeeper, was sweating anyway.

“It’s a sticky, heavy heat,” Mr. Vitto said, disgust dripping from every drawn out syllable. “You can feel it in your breathing — I know I can. I can feel the thickness in the air.”

The air has felt swampier and more suffocating. Yet, confoundingly, as moist as the air has been, a scarcity of rain and clouds has made the sun all the more blistering, leaving the earth as dry and cracked as peanut brittle.

But what has made recent months so punishing is the relentlessness of it all, as the conditions have dragged on for days on end and the volume of excessive heat warnings has broken records.

“It’s been an incredibly aggressive summer,” said Barry D. Keim, Louisiana’s state climatologist. “We normally have spells like this most summers. But this summer has been very, very persistent. The breaks are the fleeting moments, and it’s been oppressive most of the time.”

For fairness, the standard global warming denier response: This isn't caused by global warming. It's just weather. Global warming is a socialist, communist hoax. Next year will be different, just like all the other years.

Now that that propaganda is out of the way, one can rationally to consider the misery of high heat that global warming causes. Heat is starting to kill people who have to work outdoors without air conditioning. It's a quality of life thing. At worst, global warming causes the quality of life to decrease so much that it literally kills some people. That is a fact, not an opinion.

Of course global warming deniers, especially ones who mostly live and work in air conditioned workplaces will argue that you cannot put an economic value on quality of life, and therefore there is no economic value to be had. That is false. Value can be and is being assigned as the damage becomes measurable. 

An experiment I would love to do is this: Force those air-conditioned blowhards in high heat areas to live and work for 1 month in July or August without air conditioning. Then poll them to see if they still believe there is no economic damage from global warming, and instead we are merely experiencing weather. Even thought they will still deny it, they will be forced to know that global warming imposes economic costs. 

What a wonderful experiment.

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The Independent newspaper reports about one of those too good to be true electric battery things:

World’s first ‘superfast’ battery offers 400km range from 10 mins charge

Tesla, Toyota and VW supplier CATL says production will begin in 2023

The world’s largest battery maker has launched what it claims is the first ever “superfast charging” battery capable of delivering 400 kilometres (249 miles) of range from just a 10 minute charge.

China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited (CATL) said its new lithium-ion battery would open up a new era for electric cars and eliminate range anxiety for owners.

On a full charge, the battery holds enough charge to travel over 700 km (435 miles) without needing to recharge – roughly 60 per cent further than the average electric vehicle in 2023.

What makes this seem like it is for real is the fact that CATL says that commercial scale production will start in 2023. For those who are unaware of it, 2023 is not very far off in the future. Actually, the end of 2023 is not very far off in the future, i.e., the manufacturing plant has to be close to completed and ready for production. Maybe this is for real, ~85% chance according to my minions.

If this is for real, it will revolutionize the way people think about electric cars. The next barrier is getting enough lithium to meet skyrocketing consumer demand.

In 2022, ~14% of new car sales were all electric (~10%) or hybrid

For 2023, electric/hybrid car sales are expected to hit ~18%

A possible solar cell improvement

CONTEXT

Transpiration: the process by which plants give off water vapor through the stomata in their leaves

Stomata: any of the minute pores in the epidermis of the leaf or stem of a plant, forming a slit of variable width which allows movement of gases in and out of the intercellular spaces

Solar cell performance enhancement

Interesting Engineering writes about what seems to be a major advancement in solar panel technology. If this is for real, it is a big deal. IE writes:

Researchers have developed a leaf-inspired design that captures solar energy and generates freshwater, emulating real plant processes

Researchers from Imperial College London have invented a new leaf-like design that collects and generates photovoltaic solar energy and produces freshwater by mimicking the processes found in real plants.

Called PV-leaf [photovoltaic leaf], the innovation “uses low-cost materials and could inspire the next generation of renewable energy technologies.”

Studies have already found that PV-leaves can “generate over 10 percent more electricity compared to conventional solar panels, which lose up to 70 percent of the incoming solar energy to the environment.”

The invention also has the capacity to produce over 40 billion cubic meters of freshwater a year by 2050 if deployed with efficiency.

The artificial leaf has been designed to remove the need for pumps, fans, control units and expensive porous materials. It can also provide thermal energy, adapt to a variety of solar conditions and tolerate ambient temperatures.  

The photovoltaic leaf is capable of synergistically utilising the recovered heat to co-generate additional thermal energy and freshwater simultaneously within the same component, significantly elevating the overall solar utilisation efficiency from 13.2% to over 74.5%, along with over 1.1 L/h/m2 of clean water.

OK, 74.5% sounds too good to be true. So, more info. The press release from the Imperial College London comments:

Taking inspiration from plant leaves, the PV-leaf concept mimics the transpiration process, allowing water to move, distribute and evaporate. Natural fibers mimic leaf vein bundles while hydrogels simulate sponge cells, so a PV-leaf can effectively and affordably remove heat from solar PV cells.

Concept structure drawing:

Real leaf on the left

PV leaf on the right

 OK, that sounds possible. The researcher's paper in Nature Communications says:

Most solar energy incident (>70%) upon commercial photovoltaic panels is dissipated as heat, increasing their operating temperature, and leading to significant deterioration in electrical performance. The solar utilization efficiency of commercial photovoltaic panels is typically below 25%. .... We demonstrate experimentally that bio-inspired transpiration can remove ~590 W/m2 of heat from a photovoltaic cell, reducing the cell temperature by ~26 °C under an irradiance of 1000 W/m2**, and resulting in a relatively 13.6% increase in electrical efficiency. Furthermore, the photovoltaic leaf is capable of synergistically utilizing the recovered heat to co-generate additional thermal energy and freshwater simultaneously within the same component, significantly elevating the overall solar utilization efficiency from 13.2% to over 74.5%, along with over 1.1 L/h/m2 of clean water.

** At the latitude of Massachusetts, the solar radiation value at the Earth's surface is approximately 1000 W/m2 on a clear day at solar noon in the summer months.

A biomimetic transpiration (BT) layer is attached to the back of a solar PV cell in order to remove the heat generated in the cell. Natural bamboo fiber bundles are employed to mimic the vascular bundles in transporting and distributing liquid water over the cell’s surface, while hydrogel cells with large specific surface area and excellent water absorption performance are used to mimic the sponge cells in providing effective evaporation.

The capital cost of the additional transpiration components (hydrogel, fiber bundle, supporting mesh and piping) of the PV-leaf relative to a conventional standalone PV panel is estimated to be ~1.1 $/square meter, based on available bulk prices, which is only ~2% of the price of a commercial PV panel (~55 $/square meter). The payback time of the additional components is thus less than half a year. Given current predictions for the global PV capacity to reach over 22 TW [terrawatts] by 2050, and assuming that 30% of the PV panels have access to water resources [primarily sea water?] as coolant, PV-leaf designs promise to generate an additional ~650 GW [1 TW = 1,000 GW] of power globally, which is close to the current global PV installed capacity.

Ooh, that's how they did this - they attach the fake leaf to the bottom 

of existing solar cells to draw heat off by transpiration, which cools the solar 

cell, and that increases electricity output from 13.2% to 14.5% (an impressive 9.8% increase) 

Note in (c), the "root" in water - that's where the water

for transpiration and cooling of the solar cell comes from

(it can be sea water)

Cooling efficiency data

But how did they get from 13.2% to 14.5% efficiency in electricity to the claimed 74.5% efficiency in total solar energy hitting the surface of the Earth? That huge increase in efficiency is claimed to come from transpiration and the use of salt water to generate fresh water. The water used in the root can be sea water, which is about 3.5% salt. The water vapor that comes from transpiration is fresh water with 0% salt in it. 

But here a major problem jumps right out. The salt.

Where does the salt in salt water go? It stays in the fake leaf hydrogel and accumulates each day as water passes from the root into the air as water vapor. The water vapor can be captured and used as freshwater. But at the end of each day, the hydrogel needs to be soaked in more salt water to release the accumulated salt from the previous day. Doing this near the sea could be feasible on a huge scale. Whether that's the case inland away from sea water isn't clear.

The paper explains that its claim of 74.5% total energy efficiency comes from a combination of the 9.8% increase in electricity, capture of heat and production of freshwater from salt water - see (c) in the figure below.  

The researchers note that they plan to tweak the polymer composition of the hyrdogel to enhance clearing of salt from the hyrogel and work on ways to improve low-temperature water vapor condensation. It's not clear to me if the claimed 74.5% total energy capture is theoretical or actual. The paper says it's actual. If that's true, this could be something worth serious development work.

Social trends: Political violence watch

The possibility of political violence by extremists on the right and the left is increasing. From what I can tell, probably most of the radical right rank and file sincerely believe that American democracy and liberties are on the verge of falling to some form of a corrupt, Godless, radical left tyranny. According to radical right propaganda, the socialist tyranny is hell-bent on doing immoral, illegal and oppressive things like (i) confiscating guns, (ii) oppressing and replacing White people with non-White and non-heterosexual people, (iii) forcing Christians into re-education camps and brainwashing them into atheists, and (iv) etc. Many of them are willing to consider violence to defend themselves from the fake threats they have been convinced are real. Anger over the indictment of Trump has inflamed emotions on the right.

Increasing numbers of Democrats are expressing openness to violence, apparently out of anger over things like loss of abortion rights and control of the USSC by Republicans. 

Poll data from August 2022 indicated that a large majority of people said they thought violence was unacceptable for normal politics. Ipsos summarized its poll data:

Eighty-three percent also disagree that violent acts are acceptable in order to achieve their idea of a better society. Additionally, 85% of Americans do not believe it is acceptable for someone in their political party to commit violence to achieve a political goal. The poll also shows believing that political violence is unacceptable is a bipartisan notion.

Two-thirds of Americans are concerned about acts of violence committed against people in their community because of their political (66%) or religious beliefs (64%). Both a majority of Democrats (73% and 71%) and Republicans (60% and 58%) are concerned about acts of violence for political and religious beliefs, but Democrats are more likely to say they are concerned than Republicans. Eighty-two percent of Americans say that domestic terrorism is a threat to American society, with Democrats (90%) more likely to say this than Republicans (76%).

But more recent poll data indicates an uptick in acceptance of violence to achieve political goals. The Chicago Project on Security and Threats commented about its recent poll data:

From April 6, 2023 to June 26, 2023, Americans agreeing that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency” increased from 4.5% to 7%, or the equivalent of an estimated shift from 12 million to 18 million American adults. 

Trump is viewed as a far greater threat to democracy than Biden, by a difference of 52% vs 33%. Although lower, the level for Biden is still notably high. .... Far more Republicans than Democrats now believe that the 2024 election is already rigged against their party, by a difference of 27% to 11%.

Public support for the use of force to coerce members of the US Congress grew from 9 percent in January 2023 to 17 percent as of June 26, 2023, effectively doubling. While increasing across the political spectrum, the rise was sharpest among Democrats where it grew by about 2.5 times. This growing anger parallels the Republican rise to power and proceedings in the House of Representatives.

Radical, expressly violent support to restore the federal right to abortion grew from 8 percent in January 2023 to 12 percent as of June 26, 2023, a modest but significant rise beyond the margin of survey error. The increase was sharpest among Democrats, doubling over the past 6 months from 8 to 16 percent. This likely indicates growing anger over the Republican controlled supreme court.   

As of June 26, 2023, 7 percent of the American public – which equates to an estimated 18 million adults – supports violence to restore Trump to the presidency, while another 15% or 30 million adults are ambivalent.

Deep distrust of democracy is associated with statistically significant 

increase with support for political violence by about a factor of two

Deep distrust includes belief in Satan

worshipping pedophiles running the US government

 

An article in The Hill exemplifies the normalization and acceptance of violence by radical right extremists:

Grand jurors who voted to indict former President Trump in Georgia earlier this week are facing threats and a profusion of racist comments online. The jurors’ names were listed publicly within the indictment, as required under Georgia law.

“Everyone on that jury should be hung,” one user wrote on a right-wing online forum. On a different far-right site, the purported addresses of all 23 grand jurors tapped to serve in Trump’s case were posted in full. “MAGAs posting the grand jurors addresses online,” a Truth Social user wrote. “I see a swift bullet to the head if, and when, somebody shows up at their homes.”

The threats were not only made on far-right platforms but also surfaced on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Awful nice car you have there…hate to see something happen to it,” one user wrote on X early Wednesday morning, referencing the grand jury foreperson by name.

Considering the odds of civil war

At this point one should ask if the left and radical right are about equal in their probability of actually engaging in widespread violence. There's just no way to know that with good certainty. In my opinion, the radical right is about 10 times more likely to engage than the left. Why? Because for years most radical right leaders and influencers have been knowingly using apocalyptic, terror and rage-inciting dark free speech to normalize and morally justify the idea of political violence. By contrast, most leaders and influencers on the left continue to reject violence and rely on far softer rhetoric and propaganda. In my firm opinion, that is a major, core difference between the two sides.

Odds of an actual shooting war? There's no way to know with reasonable certainty either. Presently my estimate is that there is maybe about a 5% chance the radical right will try to start a civil war if DJT loses the election in 2024. IMO, the left is at about a 0.5% chance if DJT is re-elected. One factor is how well DJT and the radical right propaganda Leviathan can foment willingness of the deceived and betrayed radical rank and file to go to a shooting war against fellow Americans. They support a corrupt, fornicating traitor-dictator. They simply cannot see or accept that hyper-inconvenient truth. Many of them sincerely believe DJT is God-sent to save America from Satan worshipping pedophiles. Insane crackpottery like that is what can foment a civil war.

News bits: Radical right violence watch; A flawed GOP analysis?

The NYT reports about a threat of violence related to we all know who and what:

A Texas woman has been charged with threatening to kill Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge in Washington who is overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

The woman, Abigail Jo Shry, of Alvin, Texas, called Judge Chutkan’s chambers on Aug. 5, two days after Mr. Trump was arraigned on the election interference charges, and left a voice mail message attacking the judge, who is Black, with a racial slur, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday.

In the message, Ms. Shry told Judge Chutkan, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch,” according to the complaint. She added, “You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.”

NBC News reports:

The purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants on state racketeering charges this week have been posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News has learned.

NBC News is choosing not to name the website featuring the addresses to avoid further spreading the information.

The grand jurors' purported addresses were spotted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan research group founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It’s becoming all too commonplace to see everyday citizens performing necessary functions for our democracy being targeted with violent threats by Trump-supporting extremists," Jones said. "The lack of political leadership on the right to denounce these threats — which serve to inspire real-world political violence — is shameful.” [IMFO, Jones frames this wrong -- lack of radical right political leadership in defense of democracy is intentional; GOP elites support violence by silent complicity or otherwise, but they do not condemn it] 

Tuesday — after Trump posted on his social media website that authorities were going "after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!" — Advance Democracy said Trump supporters were "using the term ‘rigger’ in lieu of a racial slur" in posts.

Notice the overt racism the poisoned ones are expressing? 

Qs: A peanut gallery denizen asks: How the fuck does this racist dude still have bail? He's openly encouraging supporters to threaten and attack witnesses, jurors and judges. What the actual fuck? 

Darn good questions. Our two-tiered system of justice, one for elites, the other for the rest of us, keeps the violent dictator beast out on bail. 

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An NYT article used recent poll data to analyze the groups that make up the authoritarian radical right Republican Party (ARRRP). Much of the analysis makes little sense to me in terns of the big picture, i.e., actual voting behavior. The NYT writes:

The last New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 37 percent of Republicans count as part of Mr. Trump’s loyal base.

The Moderate Establishment (14%). Highly educated, affluent, socially moderate or even liberal and often outright Never Trump.

The Traditional Conservatives (26%). Old-fashioned economic and social conservatives who oppose abortion and prefer corporate tax cuts to new tariffs. They don’t love Mr. Trump, but they do support him.

The Right Wing (26%). They watch Fox News and Newsmax. They’re “very conservative.” They’re disproportionately evangelical. They believe America is on the brink of catastrophe. And they love Mr. Trump more than any other group.

The Blue Collar Populists (12%). They’re mostly Northern, socially moderate, economic populists who hold deeply conservative views on race and immigration. Not only do they back Mr. Trump, but he himself probably counted as one a decade ago.

The Libertarian Conservatives (14%). These disproportionately Western and Midwestern conservatives value freedom and small government. They’re relatively socially moderate and isolationist. Other than the establishment, it’s Mr. Trump’s worst group.

The Newcomers (8%). They don’t look like Republicans. They’re young, diverse and moderate. But these disaffected voters like Democrats and the “woke” left even less.

Mr. Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party is founded on an alliance between the Right Wing and Blue Collar Populists, two groups that combine to represent nearly 40 percent of Republicans — and about two-thirds of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base of seemingly unshakable support.  

The Blue Collar Populists and the Right Wing don’t always agree. In particular, they split on the issues of the religious right, like same-sex marriage and abortion. But these two groups are big Trump supporters. They mostly agree with him on his defining issues and they share his deeply pessimistic, even cataclysmic view of the direction of the country, including fear of the declining white share of the population.

Susan Collins is an establishment moderate?

Really!!??

Rick Perry is a traditional conservative?

Really!!??

What makes little sense is that despite various group differences, ARRRP voters vote for ARRRP candidates, not Democrats. Decades of divisive, mendacious, slandering ARRRP dark free speech has poisoned the minds of the party's voters. So despite their alleged dislike of DJT, they nonetheless vote for him. Also missing, is the usual MSM failure to understand how radicalized the entire GOP has become. Susan Collins is no moderate. She voted to confirm all three of DJT's radical right Christian nationalist, brass knuckles capitalist, pro-dictatorship USSC nominees. That is not moderate. That is radical right, even if she did vote to impeach DJT in his 2nd impeachment trial (she voted to acquit him in the 1st trial, which is radical right extremism). 

Take Rick Perry allegedly being a traditional conservative. That is nonsense. Traditional conservatives are pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties. Perry does not stand against the pro-tyranny, anti-civil liberties GOP. He is a GOP elite and the GOP stands for corruption and tyranny. As usual, the MSM either fails to understand what it is dealing with mostly because it is incompetent, or it has been subverted and corrupted by corporate ownership, or more likely some combination of both. The 4th estate continues to fail the American people.

Most, maybe ~85%, of the so-called moderate establishment and the allegedly traditional conservatives probably didn't vote for Biden or voted for DJT. If it were otherwise, the 2016 and 2020 elections probably could not have been as close as they were. Something about the NYT analysis feels seriously wrong. I think the main problems are that the NYT misunderstands voting behavior and indefensible definitions of groups. 

Q: What counts more in a democracy, party loyalty and actual voting behavior, or complaints about the party candidates by a group within the party?

EGADS.......... Are Americans stupid?

 Catchy thread title, wouldn't you agree?

I admit, I am stealing this question from another forum (no, not saying which one) where the simple question was asked: Are Americans stupid?

The reference was to those who still support Trump. So it was a biased question. I rather ask it in the GENERAL.

I find it difficult to say "a country" is stupid. Is Russia stupid because of Putin? Canada because of Trudeau? 

BUT that is the general text we so often read when a country votes a corrupt leader or has elements within that supports a corrupt leader?

Does that make the country stupid? Some actually would say yes. In response to the above question on that other forum, 65.2% said the country is stupid if they continue to support Trump. THE COUNTRY is stupid? Imagine how that must feel to those Americans who don't support him being called stupid because there are stupid people that do support him.

BUT, there is more than the Trump phenomenon. How many Americans (vs people from other countries) refused to take a Covid vaccine? Or claimed they were harmful? How many Americans still believe in angels? The answer is 69%. Yup, 69%.

Are Americans stupid? Or is this just a disingenuous characterization because so many Americans act stupid? 

What say you?

News bits: Collapsing church-state separation; An advance in mind reading; Drug price gouging

Vox writes about the collapse of church-state separation:

The Supreme Court is taking a wrecking ball to the wall between church and state

The Court’s Republican majority has ground the Constitution’s establishment clause down to a nub

Last June, a previously obscure Oklahoma state board voted to allow two Roman Catholic dioceses to operate a charter school in that state. Lawyers from several civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, responded just over a month later with a lawsuit alleging that this state-funded religious school violates the state constitution.

This challenge to the religious charter school, known as St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, should be a slam-dunk — at least assuming that the allegations in the lawsuit are correct.

Charter schools are public entities funded by state tax revenue. Among other things, the complaint points to a provision of the Oklahoma Constitution which provides that public education funds may not be “used for any other purpose than the support and maintenance of common schools for the equal benefit of all the people of the State.” And several school policies described in the complaint indicate that St. Isidore does not intend to operate for the equal benefit of all students.

According to the lawsuit, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, one of the two dioceses that plans to operate this school, has a policy of expelling students who “intentionally or knowingly” express “disagreement with Catholic faith and morals.” This includes a rule that “‘advocating for, or expressing same-sex attractions ... is not permitted’ for students,” and also a rule providing that a student who “reject[s] his or her own body” by beginning a gender transition “will be ‘choosing not to remain enrolled.’”

Yet the most striking thing about this legal complaint is what it does not say. The lawsuit states explicitly that “the plaintiffs’ claims for relief are brought solely under the state constitution, state statutes, and state regulations.” It does not even mention the federal Constitution’s First Amendment, with its prohibition on laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Before a series of recent Supreme Court decisions carved up this establishment clause, a lawyer challenging government funding of religion almost certainly would have raised some claim under this clause.  

This establishment clause was long understood to require strict separation of church and state — and specifically to forbid using public funds to pay for religious instruction. As the Supreme Court said in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”  

But those days are long past. Indeed, under the current Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin (2022), it’s not even clear that Oklahoma may refuse to fund charter schools that are operated by a church, that seek to train students in that church’s values, and that actively discriminate against individuals the church deems sinful.

Like with some other parts of the US Constitution that the radical right Christian nationalist (CN) extremists on the USSC hate, they now have simply gutted the legal vitality of the Establishment Clause. With that part of the Constitution now obliterated by radical Christian fundamentalists (they hate secularism and secular public education), the wall protecting the state from the church has been demolished. 

And by the state, I particularly mean taxpayer dollars and civil liberties. The most important CN goal is to establish a Christian Sharia theocracy to allow the elites to own and control as much wealth and power as the American people will tolerate. A prime tactic to get wealth and power is to sink CN claws into tax revenue streams. The CN movement want us to force us pay for their efforts to gain control over us and to cut back our civil liberties, with power flowing from the people to Christian Taliban elites. That is just like the CN political movement's success in imposing forced birth laws on millions of women in CN-dominated red states. That is an undeniable, direct attack on a core civil liberty. 

Now that the USSC has obliterated the Establishment Clause, we can expect radical right state legislatures to repeal existing state laws that protect tax dollars from profoundly greedy, corrupt CN elites. The CN wealth and power movement is winning its war against secularism. Its claws are sinking deep into tax revenue streams. 

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An incremental advance in machines reading minds: Berkeley News reports on the first time that recordings of electrical activity in the auditory cortex of the brain have been fed into an artificial intelligence program and that was used to recreate the music that people listened to. BN writes:

Brain recordings capture musicality of speech — with help from Pink Floyd

Neuroscientists decode song from brain recordings, revealing areas dealing with rhythm and vocals

Neuroscientists recorded electrical activity from areas of the brain (yellow and red dots) as patients listened to the Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1.” Using artificial intelligence software, they were able to reconstruct the song from the brain recordings. This is the first time a song has been reconstructed from intracranial electroencephalography recordings.

As the chords of Pink Floyd's “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” filled the hospital suite, neuroscientists at Albany Medical Center diligently recorded the activity of electrodes placed on the brains of patients being prepared for epilepsy surgery.

The goal? To capture the electrical activity of brain regions tuned to attributes of the music — tone, rhythm, harmony and words — to see if they could reconstruct what the patient was hearing.

More than a decade later, after detailed analysis of data from 29 such patients by neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, the answer is clearly yes.

The phrase "All in all it was just a brick in the wall" comes through recognizably in the reconstructed song, its rhythms intact, and the words muddy, but decipherable. This is the first time researchers have reconstructed a recognizable song from brain recordings.  

Because these intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings can be made only from the surface of the brain — as close as you can get to the auditory centers — no one will be eavesdropping on the songs in your head anytime soon.

But for people who have trouble communicating, whether because of stroke or paralysis, such recordings from electrodes on the brain surface could help reproduce the musicality of speech that's missing from today's robot-like reconstructions.

The article includes two 16 second audio clips, one of the original sone, the second is what the AI reconstruction sounds like. It's so strange. The published research paper is here.

A head X-ray of one participant in the experiment shows the placement of electrodes over the frontal (top) and temporal (bottom) regions of the brain. These electrodes were placed on the surface of the brain to locate the origin points of epileptic seizures. While waiting for days in their hospital rooms, patients volunteered for other brain studies, including one attempting to pinpoint the brain regions that respond to music.

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism (BNC) Files: An ars technica article discusses drug price gouging:

Drug makers have tripled the prices of top Medicare drugs

The top 25 costliest drugs for Medicare Part D plans earned their lofty rankings largely through exorbitant price hikes—increases that, on average, more than tripled their list prices since they entered the market, according to a new analysis by AARP.

For nearly all the drugs, the price hikes far outstripped the rate of inflation, with increases ranging from 20 percent to 739 percent during the drugs' lifetimes on the market.

Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest.

The drug in the analysis with the largest lifetime price increase was Lantus, a Sanofi-made, long-acting insulin for diabetes. Since its introduction in 2000, Sanofi has hiked the list price 739 percent, the analysis found. The general inflation rate during that period was 71 percent. 

In a blog post on Friday, PhRMA called the AARP's analysis on drug price increases a "flawed report to spin a misleading narrative." The group pointed to insurers and pharmacy benefit managers for their role in increasing costs for seniors.

There is nothing misleading about drug price gouging by the drug industry.  It is no surprise that the drug industry immediately attacked the analysis. 

When faced with inconvenient fact and truth, attacking it is what nearly all companies do when their revenue streams and/or profit margins are brought into question. That's exactly what lying cigarette makers did for decades and still do today to deceive the public about the reality and dangers of smoking cigarettes and second hand cigarette smoke. That's what the lying oil and coal industries did for decades and still do today to deceive the public about the reality and dangers of global warming and greenhouse gas pollution. 

With BNC, those with pricing power charge whatever the market will bear and their power can enforce. This has nothing to do with making the world or democracy better or people happy or healthy. Most of the time for big companies, the only moral value there is for BNC is maximum profit. Everything else, including patients who cannot afford medicine die or global warming kills people, is secondary.