Thinking about nuclear war

A NYT opinion (not behind the paywall - I highly recommend at least scanning this valuable opinion piece) considers the risk of nuclear war and the consequences if one happens:

Today’s generation of weapons — many of which are fractions of the size of the bombs America dropped in 1945 but magnitudes more deadly than conventional ones — poses an unpredictable threat.

It hangs over battlefields in Ukraine as well as places where the next war might occur: the Persian Gulf, the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula.

This is one story of what’s at stake — if even one small nuclear weapon were used — based on modeling, research and hundreds of hours of interviews with people who have lived through an atomic detonation, dedicated their lives to studying nuclear war or are planning for its aftermath.

Nuclear war is often described as unimaginable. In fact, it’s not imagined enough.

IF IT SEEMS ALARMIST to anticipate the horrifying aftermath of a nuclear attack, consider this: The United States and Ukraine governments have been planning for this scenario for at least two years.

In the fall of 2022, a U.S. intelligence assessment put the odds at 50-50 that Russia would launch a nuclear strike to halt Ukrainian forces if they breached its defense of Crimea. Preparing for the worst, American officials rushed supplies to Europe. Ukraine has set up hundreds of radiation detectors around cities and power plants, along with more than 1,000 smaller hand-held monitors sent by the United States.

Nearly 200 hospitals in Ukraine have been identified as go-to facilities in the event of a nuclear attack. Thousands of doctors, nurses and other workers have been trained on how to respond and treat radiation exposure. And millions of potassium iodide tablets, which protect the thyroid from picking up radioactive material linked with cancer, are stockpiled around the country.

Nearly 200 hospitals in Ukraine have been identified as go-to facilities in the event of a nuclear attack. Thousands of doctors, nurses and other workers have been trained on how to respond and treat radiation exposure. And millions of potassium iodide tablets, which protect the thyroid from picking up radioactive material linked with cancer, are stockpiled around the country. 

The strategic thinking behind those weapons is that they are far less damaging than city-destroying hydrogen bombs and therefore more “usable” in warfare. The United States estimates Russia has a stockpile of up to 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads, some small enough they fit in an artillery shell. 

But the detonation of any tactical nuclear weapon would be an unprecedented test of the dogma of deterrence, a theory that has underwritten America’s military policy for the past 70 years. 

The toll of a 10-kiloton blast on a military target near a city could be thousands dead, even more wounded. Roads, tunnels and railways are impassable because of debris and destruction. It might be days before rescue workers can venture safely into affected areas.

The thousands of unburied dead, the open sewage and the fetid water are a breeding ground for disease and growth in insect populations that have a higher tolerance than humans for radiation. Flies appear en masse, laying eggs in corpses and the open burn wounds of survivors.

Radiation sickness begins with bouts of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Days or weeks after exposure, people who look fine can suddenly lose hunks of hair, become anemic and weak, and begin bleeding internally. Their immune systems can fail, rendering them helpless against the infectious diseases that start to spread: dysentery, typhoid, cholera.

The opinion is long and interactive. One needs to scroll through the images and commentary at various points. Here is what some of the scrolling looks like after a 10 kiloton nuclear weapon is used in battle. 10 kilotons is considered a small “tactical” bomb, about half the size of what obliterated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. These little fellers are easily mounted on a short range missile or artillery shells and shot at an enemy city or military installation. The big fellers, ~500 kilotons and up are a far more devastating. Here is some of the artwork that imagines what a little 10 kiloton feller can do.

CONTEXT & COMMENTARY

I spent several years working on a project to develop a drug that could treat lethal radiation exposure after a nuclear blast. Long story short: The drug worked amazingly well, but Tony Fauci killed it for reasons the research team was never told and Fauci will never reveal. He might lie about it if asked, but that is as close to truth as the public will ever get. I know a lot about (1) what will happen after a nuclear blast (true knowledge, not just guessing), and (2) the insulting, bullshit propaganda and outrageous lies our own government spews on us about it. Two points merit a mention.

• The comment in the article, millions of potassium iodide (KI) tablets, which protect the thyroid from picking up radioactive material linked with cancer, is an example of the insulting, bullshit propaganda and outrageous lies our own government spews on us about protecting people after a nuclear blast. It is about 97% a lie. Most people do not die years later from thyroid cancers that KI tabs might be able to reduce. They die from acute, lethal radiation exposure within a few days and weeks. KI does absolutely nothing to deal with that. I do mean literally nothing. People die from immune system collapse and massive infections, not cancer years later.

• The comment in the article, it might be days before rescue workers can venture safely into affected areas, is another example of the insulting, bullshit propaganda and outrageous lies our own government spews on us. Official US policy for first responders is this: Do not go into the zone where radiation is high. First responders are required to sit outside and wait for survivors to walk or crawl out of the kill zone. When they get out, there is not a fucking thing that can be done other than to let them die more comfortably than if they had died alone in the kill zone. That assumes that pain killers have not run out before a survivor crawls out. One reason there is not a fucking thing that can be done is because Tony Fauci killed the one and only mass use drug known so far that would save lives if it had been accepted by Fauci and deployed to the US Strategic National Stockpile.

If it sounds like I dislike Fauci, it is because I hate his guts. I hate him for killing a useful radiation drug for no reason, and for his years-later lies about the origin of COVID. His bloody fingerprints are all over both unhappy events.

Katherine Stewart on DJT

Katherine Stewart is a one of the writers who got me to understand the depth and scope of the profound threat that American Christian nationalism poses to democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law and honest governance. Her 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, was an eye opener for me. I wrote several reviews, e.g., here (book review), here (chapter review), here (chapter review) and here (chapter review). A Salon article reports about a recent discussion with Stewart:

“Better than Jesus”: How far will the cult of Trump go?

MAGA has “been persuaded,” Katherine Stewart tells Salon, “that Trump is the savior who will face down the demons”

Salon commentary: Donald Trump is a human chaos engine. It is a function of both his personality and his politics. He has shown himself to be what mental health professionals describe as “hypomanic”: He has what appears to be an endless amount of energy.

Trump is an instinctive authoritarian and a demagogue. Although he has no real ideology beyond amassing raw corrupt power for his own purposes, Trump’s political project is fascist. He hates democracy, the rule of law, and any other restraints on his behavior and goal of being America’s first dictator. Such political strongmen and their movements use chaos, confusion, and destruction as one of their primary weapons to exhaust any resistance to them. As he has shown throughout the last eight years (at least), Donald Trump is a master of this strategy.

In all, it has been very difficult for the American people, the news media, and the country’s responsible political elites to stop Donald Trump and the larger neofascist movement precisely because he and they are launching so many attacks simultaneously on the country’s democracy, institutions, political culture and collective sense of reason – and reality itself.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday to hear Trump’s absurd case about Jan. 6, where he is arguing that while president, he had some type of immunity from the law like a king or emperor who can order his political rivals killed by the military or accept money for political favors, being the most recent example.

Trump’s delusions of grandeur have been escalating as he continues to proclaim that he is some type of messiah-prophet, chosen by “god” and “Jesus Christ” to lead the MAGA movement in an epic End Times battle of good and evil against President Biden and the Democrats and “the left” to “save America” by winning the 2024 election. Trump is now also claiming that he is a “proud” Christian who is being persecuted – basically like Jesus Christ – by the courts and others who are daring to hold him accountable for his decades-long public crime spree.

None of this is normal despite how the mainstream news media as an institution, the other “guardians of democracy”, and too many everyday Americans have come to accept that it somehow is.

Katherine Stewart: There’s a disconnect between the reality and the narrative framing that sticks to everything. For example, we continue to get horse race coverage that tells us about Trump’s “big win” in South Carolina as if this were just another normal election cycle. On the other hand, the combination of Trump’s legal jeopardy and his increasingly unhinged, overtly fascist rhetoric is indisputable evidence that what we are facing is anything but normal.

As for Trump’s claims about being a prophet or some type of messiah, I think we have here a convergence between what appears to be Trump’s mental disorder and the needs of a base that has been primed for fascism. The only surprising thing about Trump’s claims is he has not yet said he is better than Jesus. That is sure to come!

It is what it is, and anybody who has been watching this unfortunate man for the past decades knows exactly what I’m talking about. It’s just sad. The more pressing problem is that fascism so often works through the cult of the leader. The leader is always one who suffers on behalf of the victim majority, but who nonetheless triumphs against the evil cosmopolitan elite. And Trump seems to understand this instinctively, which is why he insists that, in his legal struggles against a supposedly corrupt system of justice, he is standing up for the little guy.

We can’t know the extent to which Trump believes his own lies. The more important point is that majorities of Republican voters believe him when he speaks. In last summer’s CBS News-YouGov survey, Trump supporters – astonishingly –tend to trust him more than they trust their family and friends, conservative media, or even their own religious leaders. We cannot overstate the role of conspiracism and disinformation in bringing us to the point we are in right now. Many MAGA voters have been drawn into a fear-filled, fact-free world.  

They continue to believe the Big Lie that the 2020 was stolen; they think Trump was the greatest president ever; they say that his indictments are just political persecution from a “weaponized” system of justice; and they have been persuaded that a global cabal is trying to strip away from them everything they hold dear – and that Trump is the savior who will face down the demons and set the world aright.

Unfortunately, a cynical faction of affluent supporters don’t believe a word Trump says, but they support him anyway because they are under the impression that he will deliver economic policies that benefit them. I think of this as the tragedy of unenlightened self-interest – or the stupidity of greed.

That speaks for itself. 

DJT & corrupt dictatorship vs. the elites & corrupt theocracy and plutocracy

That last paragraph I highlighted gets at how I analyze the situation. In my opinion, the USSC will quite likely decide that DJT can be tried for his crimes because he is not immune. There is about an 85% chance of that in my opinion. Those elites that Stewart refer to are not stupid. They are very intelligent, brutal, and devoid of empathy and morals. By now, they see the threat that the deranged, unpredictable, equally immoral and brutal DJT will be if he gets back in power. 

Most American radical right authoritarian elites, including those instrumental in selecting USSC judges, are inherently Christian nationalist (usually wealthy), plutocratic capitalist (usually wealthy), or both. The sympathies of the wealthy judges aligns a lot more with the corrupt Christian theocrats and corrupt plutocrats than with the unpredictable, corrupt dictator that DJT is. 

If the USSC decides that DJT is immune from prosecution, that will be the last line of defense they have against DJT coming after them and their power one day. From that point of view, the theocratic, plutocratic USSC has no choice but to throw DJT under the bus and allow him to eventually be prosecuted. 

Of course a serious criticism of that analysis is that the USSC took the case at all. If the USSC had simply declined to hear the case, that would very likely have been the end of the DJT threat. What they did protects the dictator. That is baffling to me. Why did they do this? It make no sense to me. So, there is about a 15% chance the USSC will decide DJT is immune from prosecution. That would help shift the balance of power toward dictatorship, seemingly leaving theocracy and plutocracy less advantaged than they are now.

News bits 'n chunk: How millionaires do things; How DJT does things; USSC epiphanies commence

The WaPo reports about the fun things millionaires do, or don’t do:

Thousands of millionaires haven’t filed tax returns 

for years, IRS says

About 125,000 notices will be sent to high-income earners, including 25,000 people with income more than $1 million, the tax agency said

Thousands of high-income earners have not filed tax returns for several years, but the cash-strapped Internal Revenue Service did nothing to get them to pay what they owe.

That changes now, the tax agency announced Thursday. The IRS will send notices to thousands of people who made more than $400,000 and did not file returns in at least one year from 2017 to 2022, the first step to collecting any tax owed.  

Few of the 125,000 missing returns will lead to criminal tax evasion cases. Eventually, the IRS said, it will send letters to non-filers at all income levels.

One can expect members of the TTKP in congress to rise up in screaming, sanctimonious moral outrage at this tyrannical horror the IRS has unleashed on poor, innocent, patriotic millionaire tax cheats. But, as usual, the law will be lenient with the rick and powerful. There will be no criminal charges for cheating the US government out of taxes owed, while us idiot honest taxpayers keep paying honestly. If there is any moral outrage here, honest taxpayers are entitled to feel it. My guess, the IRS will never collect. Once the TTKP gets back in power, that will be the end of it. 

On the other hand, those lower income tax cheats are probably gonna get whacked. In my opinion, they all should get whacked.

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party

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Politico reports about a threat DJT made to lobbyists if they do not vote (for him):

Donald Trump’s campaign wants Republican lobbyists in D.C. to know: If they don’t vote in this Sunday’s primary, they won’t get access should the former president end up back in the White House. “If you don’t bother voting, don’t bother calling,” said one Trump campaign official, who was granted anonymity to speak about campaign strategy.

The ultimatum constitutes a blunt threat toward the influence-peddling community, one that is highly unusual for a presidential campaign but fits the more publicly hardball model that Trump has often applied to governance.

Under D.C. law, campaigns are unable to know which candidates individual voters cast ballots for. But campaigns can access voter rolls from the District of Columbia’s Board of Elections to see who voted in the primary and who didn’t.

If he gets back in power, DJT will conduct all of his everything he does the same way. The rule is simple: support me or I will crush you. That smells exactly like kleptocratic dictatorship to me.

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Real understanding and fear of the TTKP USSC is finally starting

to sink in, but is it it too little and/or too late?

Those are the questions du jour. A Politico opinion comments:

Why Is Trump Getting Special Treatment From the Supreme Court?

The justices are handling Trump’s case far differently than most criminal defendants

To understand how truly remarkable it is that the Supreme Court has agreed to consider former President Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, it is necessary to have some sense of how the court treats other criminal defendants.

In that light, the court’s extraordinary and improper solicitude for Trump, the person who selected three sitting justices, is all too readily apparent. And the upshot is Trump may now succeed in delaying his federal trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election until after voters go to the polls in November.

In recent years, the Roberts Court has shown greater and greater impatience with criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment — even if the outcome would be cruel, needlessly painful or simply unjustified. The effect of this new hostility to delay is most sharply felt in the death penalty context. But a general hostility to foot-dragging in criminal cases is a through line in the court’s docket.

Justice Neil Gorsuch set the tone for this approach in 2019, when he complained that legal challenges to the death penalty were often used to stall or even derail execution. Courts, said Gorsuch, should “police carefully against attempts” to use constitutional challenges as tools to interpose unjustified delay.” In particular, he warned, “last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”  

Outside the capital punishment cases, the Supreme Court has added more and more constraints upon prisoners’ ability to challenge constitutional errors. Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas in particular have urged that the longstanding right to challenge state court convictions in federal court be effectively gutted. The effect of their proposal would be to streamline even further the criminal justice process — shutting down almost all efforts to raise objections before they had even started.

All this makes the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Trump’s appeal for absolute immunity from all criminal charges even more unusual, and troubling.

Yeah, notice the elites vs rabble difference? TDJ gets kid gloves. Regular people get iron fisted. But arrogant radical authoritarians like Gorsuch have no qualms about a two-tiered justice system. He and the rest of the corrupt authoritarian TTKP crowd simply deny it even exists. They blithely go on their merry way destroying democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law to make way for the real agenda, a lot more wealth and power for the elites and an iron fist in the face for the rabble.

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party

In addition to Politico going woke about the TTKP USSC, The Nation seems to have woke up too:

The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped

The court is fundamentally antidemocratic—and the only way to limit the damage it can do is to reduce its power, budget, and lack of accountability

When Republican politicians try to take away abortion rights, they often lose. They lose special elections and ballot initiatives and maybe even presidential elections as punishment for their Christofascist overreach. But when the Supreme Court takes away these rights, nothing happens.

When elected officials take bribes or engage in corruption, they often lose; they get primaried or kicked off committees and sometimes face charges. But when Supreme Court justices engage in public corruption or take bribes, nothing happens.

When Donald Trump commits crimes… he generally gets away with it; still, people do, at least, try to hold him accountable, and he sometimes gets charged or impeached or made to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. But when the Supreme Court helps Trump get away with his crimes, or at least helps him delay his reckoning until after the election—as it did earlier this week when it agreed to hear his claims for immunity from federal prosecution—nothing happens.

The Supreme Court must be made to pay a price—a political, institutional, professional price—for its ongoing political thuggery lightly disguised as jurisprudence. Its members will never stop acting like the only nine Americans who matter until we stop them from doing that. And the only way to stop them is to limit their power, their budgets, and their unearned belief in their own supremacy.

These people—and I’m including both the conservatives and the liberals here—act like they’re untouchable because that is how everybody else treats them.

The court’s greatest institutional accomplice is the media, which largely insists on covering the nine law shamans as they wish to be covered, instead of as the unelected, unaccountable poison that enfeebles the rest of American democracy. Just the other day, The Washington Post ran an entire column on whether it’s “fair” to point out which party appointed the judges and justices who rule us. The column was inspired by a judge—who wished to remain anonymous, because these people are rank cowards—who was annoyed at being referred to as a Reagan-appointed judge, and complained to one of their media friends.

The Supreme Court moans and complains about its press coverage all the time, with justices like Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett complaining with increasing intensity in recent years. It is insane to me that these people think they are entitled both to rule with supremacy and to receive favorable press, especially considering that the vast majority of the time the press does exactly what they want. The Supreme Court justices answer no questions they don’t want to be asked, sit for no interviews unless they are promoting a book, and do no public events other than ones where entire topics are predetermined as off-limits.  

Count me in the camp of American feminist activist Jane Addams, who said, “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” The votes of nine people matter less to me than the votes of 330 million. If everybody were allowed to vote, if everybody’s votes counted equally, if the county weren’t gerrymandered into an antidemocratic pretzel, the people and not the court would be the final arbiter of our problems.  

I came to this conclusion relatively late in life. You see, I am a liberal. Conservatives are more authoritarian-curious by nature, but I’ve found that liberals are the most eager to treat the antidemocratic Supreme Court as if it wears a laurel crown. That’s because liberals believe that some of our most cherished ideals about human rights and human dignity can be achieved only through a powerful high court with unquestionable authority. That’s the mistake I have been guilty of in the past.

Well, that is refreshing! The author, Elie Mystal, figured it out, more or less (Authoritarian-curious? How about authoritarian?). 

But I am conflicted, does she deserve a gold star and an Attaboy! for finally seeing what has been obvious for years, or does she deserve a Well duh! What took you so long, you maroon? The well duh award feels more appropriate than a gold starred attaboy.

Q: As a whole, is whatever level of wokeness about the authoritarian TTKP threat the MSM has achieved too little and/or too late, or, is it too early to draw firm conclusions?

Post script: Even if it is too little and too late, that will not stop me from opposing the tyranny and kleptocracy the TTKP and DJT stand for. I will oppose until they come and forcibly shut me up, or I drop dead or go silent from natural causes. There is no room for fatalism. Stiff upper lip and all that. As long as there is freedom to oppose, I damn well am going to oppose.

Did the MSM earn it?

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.