News bits: Regarding US aid to Gaza; More on Gaza; Regarding TTKP election subversion laws

 Various sources are reporting about the US sending aid to starving Palestinians by air drops. The Hill writes:

President Biden said Friday that the United States will begin airdrops of humanitarian aid into Gaza amid negotiations for a temporary cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

“Innocent people got caught in a terrible war, unable to feed their families, and you saw the response when they tried to get aid. And we need to do more, and the United States will do more,” Biden said.

“The truth is, aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough now. It’s nowhere nearly enough. Innocent lives are on the line and children’s lives are on the line,” he added.

The airdrops are seen as a way for the U.S. to get aid into the area while officials continue efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas to allow for food, medicine, water and other supplies to get into Gaza, and for hostages to be released.

White House spokesperson John Kirby called it “extremely difficult” to effectively conduct airdrops in such a crowded area. The materials need to land somewhere accessible to aid organizations while also arriving in an area with high concentrations of people in need, he said.  

The president had initially suggested a cease-fire could take hold as early as next Monday, but more recently indicated that timeline was unlikely. He acknowledged talks would be complicated after more than 100 Palestinians were killed at a food distribution site in Gaza when Israeli troops opened fire.

This pisses me off a lot. The situation is outrageous and insulting. If it is “extremely difficult” to do air drops, then Biden should force Israel to send in aid by trucks. Israel refuses. Instead of sending in aid Israel opened fire on starving Palestinians seeking what little food there is, but Biden the US still supports Israel, Netanyahu and war crimes. What does that say about Biden?

And as expected, the cease-fire that Biden recently promised would be very soon, turned out to be a lie. Israel itself blocked aid and killed civilians seeking food. All Biden says is that slaughter will “complicate” and delay a cease-fire. More lies. No condemnation of Israel from Biden. Just more unconditional US support. 

This outrage might be a necessary factor in what could cost (i) Biden the White House in the elections, and (ii) the US its democracy, the rule of law and individual civil liberties. 

Q: Am I being too critical of Biden and unconditional US support of Israel and Netanyahu? Or are my criticisms anti-Semitic, racist, bigoted and/or otherwise unwarranted or unjustifiable? 

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A NYT analysis summarizes the Gaza humanitarian and cease-fire the situations:

The disaster that unfolded Thursday marked a new low in the Gaza Strip’s unfolding calamity. Local authorities said more than 100 people were killed and more than 700 others injured, accusing Israeli forces of opening fire on a crowd of people in devastated Gaza City waiting for humanitarian aid. An IDF official acknowledged that IDF troops on one end of the convoy fired at members of the crowd who were approaching in, what they called, a threatening manner but said many Palestinians died in a stampede as they sought to reach trucks carrying vital aid.  

The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine — a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known.

Hopes are dimming for an imminent diplomatic breakthrough that could see Hamas free its remaining hostages and hostilities cease. This week, it emerged that the Biden administration may even be contemplating airdropping aid into Gaza, given the delays and difficulties in supplying vital food and other goods over land crossings. Some analysts couldn’t help but consider the irony of the United States dropping supplies onto a population that’s seeking respite from months of Israeli attacks with U.S.-made munitions. Such measures would “mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior U.S. officials whose policies are contributing to the ongoing atrocities and risk of famine in Gaza,” said Scott Paul, Oxfam’s humanitarian director, in a statement. (emphasis added)

A number of top U.N. officials voiced their alarm Thursday. “I am appalled at the reported killing and injury of hundreds of people during a transfer of aid supplies west of Gaza City today,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s lead humanitarian officer, said. “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”

Another NYT article reports:

Three U.S. Air Force cargo planes airdropped 66 pallets over southwest Gaza, according to a U.S. official. Aid groups say such airdrops do little to ease hunger and suffering in the enclave.

US aid pallets falling on Gaza yesterday

International aid groups are criticizing a Biden administration plan to airdrop food to desperately hungry Gazans, saying that such a move would be ineffective and would distract from more meaningful measures like pushing Israel to lift its partial siege of Gaza.

“Airdrops do not and cannot substitute for humanitarian access,” the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based aid organization, said in a statement on Saturday. “Airdrops are not the solution to relieve this suffering, and distract time and effort from proven solutions to help at scale.”

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One major wild card in the 2024 elections is what detectable effect, if any TTKP (Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party) voter suppression and election rigging laws will have on red state election results. If the presidential election turns out to be as close as I think it will, this could easily be a necessary factor in putting DJT back in the white House and ending democracy, most civil liberties and the rule of law. The NYT writes about one analysis of voting data available so far:

Racial Turnout Gap Has Widened With a Weakened 

Voting Rights Act, Study Finds

The Black share of the electorate had been on the rise for decades, but in some counties, a Supreme Court decision in 2013 changed that, according to a new analysis

When the Supreme Court knocked down a core part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. argued that some of the law’s protections against racial discrimination were no longer necessary.

He wrote that the once-troubling turnout gap between white and Black voters in areas with histories of discrimination at the polls had largely disappeared, and that “the conditions that originally justified” the civil rights law’s attention to these places, mostly in the South, no longer existed.

But a new, yearslong study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank focused on democracy and voting rights issues, suggests otherwise.

Before the decision, counties with a history of racial discrimination at the polls were required to obtain permission from the Justice Department before changing voting laws or procedures. This was known as “preclearance” under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and it was the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that effectively killed this part of the law.

Since that decision, the gap in turnout rates between white and nonwhite voters “grew almost twice as quickly in formerly covered jurisdictions as in other parts of the country with similar demographic and socioeconomic profiles,” the Brennan study found.

According to the group’s report, the turnout gap between Black and white voters in those former Section 5 counties has grown by 11 percentage points since the Shelby decision, between 2012 and 2022. The study relied on nearly one billion voter files to estimate that, had the decision never occurred, the white-Black turnout gap would have nevertheless grown, but by just six percentage points.

Though that difference may appear small, the study’s authors contend that such gaps are “potentially huge” in modern politics: Since 2012, at least 62 elections for Senate, governor and president in states with Section 5 counties were decided by under five percentage points.  

“By the 2022 midterms, the Shelby County effect cost hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters of color in the formerly covered counties in each federal general election,” Mr. Crayton said. “And we know that even a fraction of that number can make a difference in an election or in awarding a state’s electoral votes.”

So, if DJT gets back in office, the hostility our cynical TTKP USSC has for democracy and elections could easily be a necessary factor in re-electing a kleptocratic dictator who goes on to kill our democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law, at least for the foreseeable future.

Once can reasonably expect the TTKP to either employ the effective, standard KYMS propaganda tactic and/or attack this study as flawed, partisan bias, a pack of lies, etc. It will probably be mostly KYMS at first that will transition to attack once TTKP dark free speech experts come up with the most effective way to undermine its credibility.

KYMS: Keep Your Mouth Shut

Commentary on the DJT immunity case

Various sources are talking about their analyses of the slow decision the USSC made to hear DJT's crackpot immunity claims. Ruth Marcus opines for the WaPo (not behind paywall): 

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s audacious claim of presidential immunity from prosecution — with oral argument a leisurely seven weeks off — all but guarantees one of two terrible outcomes. Either the former president’s trial on charges of attempting to subvert the 2020 election, a trial that was supposed to start next week, will now not take place until after the 2024 election, or it will be held in the final months before Election Day. The justices are not entirely responsible for this mess, but they have just made a bad situation far worse than it needed to be.

My beef isn’t with the court’s decision to hear the case — it’s with the outrageously lethargic timing. It would have been far better for the court to have taken up the issue back in December, when special counsel Jack Smith urged the justices to leapfrog the federal appeals court. Now, two and a half months have gone by. It took the justices two weeks after Trump sought their intervention to announce that they would hear the case. Worse, they set oral argument for the week of April 22, a delay that means a decision could easily take until May or even linger until the term finishes at the end of June.

Worst of all, especially given this timetable, the justices could have allowed trial preparations to go forward while the case was briefed, argued and decided. That would have prevented Trump from accomplishing what has been his aim all along: to use the immunity claim as a ploy to delay his trial until after the election.

Instead, the court engaged in a weird procedural dodge. It didn’t do what Trump’s lawyers had asked and grant a stay of the appeals court ruling against him. Instead, it issued an unusual order to the appeals court that ends up having the same effect — without having to satisfy the stringent standards that are supposed to apply when a stay is sought.

That analysis fits with the criticism that the court for pulled off a partisan move to protect DJT by delaying. Marcus makes the point that, after dithering for weeks, the USSC side-stepped the usual process for granting a stay. The court’s action here looks like partisan USSC moral rot to protect DJT.

Science: Regarding the origin of life on Earth

The WaPo writes (not behind paywall) about another step in the quest to understand how life evolved out of non-life on Earth. This is an interesting discovery of the spontaneous creation of an important complex molecule (pantetheine) that scientists did not believe would exist if life had not evolved. 

The new lab experiment focused on the origins of another primary metabolite: coenzyme A, which sits at the heart of metabolism across all domains of life (as one of its many functions). For instance, the compound plays a vital role in releasing energy from carbohydrates, fats and proteins in organisms that require oxygen, but it also serves metabolic functions in lifeforms that don’t need oxygen, like many bacteria.

Specifically, Powner and his team were looking to re-create a particular fragment of the coenzyme A molecule called pantetheine. Pantetheine is the functional arm of coenzyme A, often getting transferred and enabling other chemical reactions in our body to occur. This limb is called a co-factor and acts as an “on” switch — without it, the coenzyme would be unusable.

CoA (coenzyme A)

“All of our metabolic processes rely on a small subset of these co-factors,” said biologist Aaron Goldman, who was not involved in the study. “This has led researchers to argue that these co-factors, themselves, may have predated larger, more complex enzymes during the origin and early evolution of life.”

Some researchers, Goldman said, have proposed that early lifeforms could have used pantetheine to store energy before the evolution of the larger, more complex energy currency that cells use today.

If this is the case, the mystery stood: Where did pantetheine come from?

The compound is such an odd duckling that scientists previously proposed it was too intricate to make from basic molecules. Others have tried to create pantetheine and failed, thinking that it wasn’t even present at life’s origins. Many scientists thought biology would have created a simple version of it, which would have evolved to become more complicated over time — like building a shack and later turning it into a mansion.

The team took to the lab. They focused on primarily using materials that could have been abundant on early Earth, like hydrogen cyanide and water. The first few steps of the reaction each took about a day, but the final step lasted 60 days, which was the longest reaction that Powner’s lab has ever done. The team finally shut off the reaction “partly because we got bored,” he said. But the result was a lot of pantetheine.

Pantetheine

The experts did not think this could

form without life to create it

The experts were wrong

I see this as a major advance in explaining how life could arise on Earth from non-life. It took time. After just 60 days of waiting and finally getting impatient, the scientists stopped the experiment. They looked and found spontaneous synthesis of the complex molecule pantetheine from simple building blocks and water. 60 days is nothing. Think in terms of 600 million years. 

I can now much more clearly envision how life arose from non-life on Earth. Stable climate, lots of water and millions of years for chemical reactions. This is more evidence suggesting that is how life arose here. Not from God, but from chemistry under the right conditions for a heck of a long time.

Just passing along some neuroscience, FWIW

Article link.

Dendrites are the traffic lights of our nervous system. If an action potential is significant enough, it can be passed on to other nerves, which can block or pass on the message.

This is the logical underpinnings of our brain – ripples of voltage that can be communicated collectively in two forms: either an AND message (if x and y are triggered, the message is passed on); or an OR message (if x or y is triggered, the message is passed on).

In addition to the logical AND and OR-type functions, these individual neurons could act as 'exclusive' OR (XOR) intersections, which only permit a signal when another signal is graded in a particular fashion.

"Traditionally, the XOR operation has been thought to require a network solution," the researchers wrote.

Exactly how this new logic tool squeezed into a single nerve cell translates into higher functions is a question for future researchers to answer.

 Now I don't know what all this means exactly, but it sounds important. 👍

Vicious satire about DJT, the TTPK and the border “crisis”

This video was posted in a recent comment here. I went back and forth about whether to post it alone or at all. On the one hand it treats rank and file (R&F) TTKP voters with demeaning, brutal insults, e.g., racist, ignorant, gullible, stupid, disinformed. On the other hand, it directly calls out and nails the brutal, insulting, bad faith, cynical rhetoric that DJT and his elite TTKP defenders, supporters and enablers operate with to trap the minds of the loyal R&F. 

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party

One thing is clear from this vicious screed. This video, more than anything I have seen so far, makes clear (at least to me) that there is a huge gulf in understanding between most of the TTKP R&F and the elites who run it in “bad faith.” That is what tipped me to post this. The end of the speech, is a chant of exactly what is on the elite’s minds and what really motivates them to embrace authoritarianism: 

WEALTH & POWER!!  WEALTH & POWER!! WEALTH & POWER!!  

I assume that most of the TTKP R&F, maybe about 75%, have been deceived, manipulated and betrayed by dark free speech the corrupt authoritarian elites constantly spew. That is where the gulf in mindsets lies. Those elites have used decades of cynical, divisive dark free speech to prey on the innate base instincts that most people have but had kept in check before kleptocratic authoritarianism rose to take control of the TTKP and its mendacious (morally rotted), authoritarian messaging Leviathan.

Radical right lies about immigration

A major false argument that TTKP politicians and the American authoritarian radical right propaganda Leviathan, e.gf., Faux News, constantly assert is that immigrants cause crime. The messages are (1) we are not safe in our homes or on the streets, and to dehumanize the culprits, (2) filthy, savage (non-White, non-European) immigrants are to blame. This will be a major issue in the Nov. 2024 elections. If DJT wins, this will be one of the issues necessary to put him back in the White House. The WaPo writes (not behind a paywall):

Never mind that violent crime rates, especially for homicide in large cities, have fallen sharply during Biden’s presidency, after a surge during the pandemic. Trump, as he often did during his presidency, is using anecdotal evidence to make an emotional case against undocumented immigrants.

Trump is drawing on a long history of anti-immigrant rhetoric.

A 2020 study, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed 200,000 congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential communications on immigration since 1880, when a wave of Chinese immigrants led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred Chinese laborers. When lawmakers spoke about immigration, their speeches were twice as likely as their speeches on other topics to mention words related to crime.

Moreover, the study found “stark differences” in how lawmakers discussed European and non-European groups, with “more implicitly dehumanizing metaphors” used to describe Chinese, Mexicans and other non-Europeans. “There is also a striking similarity in the use of explicit frames, with a greater emphasis on ‘crime,’ ‘labor,’ and ‘legality’ for the non-Europeans and less on ‘family,’ ‘contributions,’ ‘victims,’ and ‘culture,’” the study said.

Since the late 1970s, the study found a significant shift in the way Republicans talk about immigration; it is now as negative as it was in the 1920s, an era of strict immigration quotas. As for Trump, he was the first president whose immigration language was more negative than that of the average member of his own party.

But here’s the rub: There is little evidence that immigrants — or even undocumented immigrants — cause more crime. Still, there is enough ambiguity in the data — or so little hard data — that it’s difficult to point to conclusive findings that would change opinions.

There is strong evidence that all immigrants — in the United States legally or otherwise — are more law-abiding than native-born American citizens. Most immigrants are motivated to do well in their new country, especially if they bring skills that can enhance local economies, and so there is little incentive to break the law.

So when the TTKP falsely claims immigrants cause lots of crime, rest assured they are lying and slandering as usual. We will hear this slanderous lie over and over and over before the elections. Afterwards, the volume of the lie will quiet down a lot.

TTKP: the Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party