Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
WHEELING, W.Va. (AP) — When Rosemary Ketchum gets introduced as the first openly transgender person to win elective office in West Virginia, there's often a shocked look that comes across people's faces.
(HOW did she pull it off?)
To her, it doesn't feel like magic. But in some ways, she can understand their surprise. Out of the handful of transgender officials in the U.S., only a few were elected in similarly rural, GOP-controlled states.
Ketchum answers matter-of-factly when people ask her how she got elected as an openly transgender candidate: she put her name on the ballot, knocked on doors, made phone calls to ask residents what they care about, and then trusted them to make a decision.
(Wow, what a novel approach)
“I didn’t pre-ordain or assume what they would think of me — I gave them the opportunity to think for themselves,” she said. “I didn’t walk up to a door, and say like, ‘Oh, this person has a Trump sign, they’re going to hate me.’”
Ketchum said when she’s canvassing, people aren’t talking about what bathrooms they think transgender people should be able to use, or whether kids should be reading books with LGBTQ+ characters in school. People often want to talk about repaving their road or worries about how many young people are leaving the state — one of only two states where the population declined in the 2020 census.
“That gives me more respect, frankly, for my neighbors,” Ketchum said. GOP lawmakers’ focus on books bans and bathroom access may attract attention statewide and nationally, but “it doesn’t work at a local level -- it doesn’t register,” she said.
(Is that true or just a quaint saying?)
She said many people have developed an apathy or distrust of government. But she doesn't engage with cynicism. Instead, she gives constituents her personal phone number and holds regular office hours at a local market where anyone can come by to speak with her.
Since late in 2017, it seemed that global authoritarianism has sharpened its focus on attacking democracies everywhere. The most potent authoritarian forces come from within the border of democracies. In the US it is DJT and his Republican Party. The WaPo published an article about Putin mobilizing his entire society into an aggressive military force built to attack democracies everywhere by any means possible. In essence, what Putin is doing now looks a lot to me like what Hitler did with German society to prepare for war. The WaPo writes (not paywalled):
Under Putin, a militarized new Russia rises to challenge U.S. and the West
As Vladimir Putin persists in his bloody campaign to conquer Ukraine, the Russian leader is directing an equally momentous transformation at home — re-engineering his country into a regressive, militarized society that views the West as its mortal enemy.
Putin’s inauguration on Tuesday for a fifth term will not only mark his 25-year-long grip on power but also showcase Russia’s shift into what pro-Kremlin commentators call a “revolutionary power,” set on upending the global order, making its own rules, and demanding that totalitarian autocracy be respected as a legitimate alternative to democracy in a world redivided by big powers into spheres of influence.
“Russians live in a wholly new reality,” Dmitri Trenin, a pro-Kremlin analyst, wrote in reply to questions about an essay in which he argued that Russia’s anti-Western shift was “more radical and far-reaching” than anything anticipated when Putin invaded Ukraine but also “a relatively minor element of the wider transformation which is going on in Russia’s economy, polity, society, culture, values, and spiritual and intellectual life.”
In “Russia, Remastered,” The Washington Post documents the historic scale of the changes Putin is carrying out and has accelerated with breathtaking speed during two years of brutal war even as tens of thousands of Russians have fled abroad. It is a crusade that gives Putin common cause with China’s Xi Jinping as well as some supporters of former president Donald Trump. And it raises the prospect of an enduring civilizational conflict to subvert Western democracy and — Putin has warned — even threatens a new world war.
The WaPo article cites some of the efforts Putin is employing to re-engineer Russian society. For example, he is building an ultraconservative, puritanical society indoctrinated against liberal freedoms. That movement is very hostile to gay and transgender people. Putin is also reshaping all levels of education to indoctrinate hyper-patriotism among the young. Textbooks have been rewritten to reflect Putin's propaganda and re-written history. The state now requires compulsory military lessons to be taught by soldiers called “Basics of Security and Protection of the Motherland.” That education includes training with handling Kalashnikov assault rifles, grenades and drones.
In addition to those efforts, Putin (i) is poisoning cultural life using blacklists of liberal or antiwar performers, directors, writers and artists, and (ii) abolishing women’s reproductive rights and access to abortions. Putin's anti-abortion demands are backed by constant propaganda about the need of young women to give birth often. Feminist activists and liberal female journalists are being arrested and charged with terrorism, extremism, discrediting the military and other offenses. Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center commented on Putin's preparation for war, “they need cannon fodder for the future.”
Q: Is it just me, e.g., self-delusion, or does the morally rotted, dictator DJT and his morally rotted, authoritarian Repub Party look a way too much like the morally rotted, murdering dictator-thug Putin and his murdering dictator enabling thugs and military?
At about 1:52 of this 3 minute video (produced by the Times of India) Netanyahu, defends his and Israeli government treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. In essence he refers to the holocaust of the 1940s and a current existential threat to Israel's existence. He says he will defeat Israel's “genocidal enemy” with or without foreign aid from any country and in the face of international criticism of how Israel conducts the war.
It is interesting that Netanyahu points to past history and the holocaust as part of the justification for what is happening in Gaza. One can wonder if Palestinian civilians point to history since ~1947 as justification for resisting Israel, but not justification for the Oct. 7 attacks, murders and kidnapping by Hamas. No one cannot justify the Hamas killings and kidnappings of Oct. 7.
But does the horrible wrong by Hamas justify the horrible wrong Israel is committing in Gaza? Do two horrible wrongs make a right?
An AP article reports about possible law violations by Israel's use of US weapons:
The Biden administration said Friday that Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law but that wartime conditions prevented U.S. officials from determining that for certain in specific airstrikes.
The finding of “reasonable” evidence to conclude that the U.S. ally had breached international law protecting civilians in the way it conducted its war against Hamas was the strongest statement that the Biden administration has yet made on the matter. It was released in a summary of a report being delivered to Congress on Friday.
But the caveat that the administration wasn’t able to link specific U.S. weapons to individual attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza could give the administration leeway in any future decision on whether to restrict provisions of offensive weapons to Israel.
The first-of-its-kind assessment, which was compelled by President Joe Biden’s fellow Democrats in Congress, comes after seven months of airstrikes, ground fighting and aid restrictions that have claimed the lives of nearly 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
While U.S. officials were unable to gather all the information they needed on specific strikes, the report said that given Israel’s “significant reliance” on U.S.-made weapons, it was “reasonable to assess” that they had been used by Israel’s security forces in instances “inconsistent” with its obligations under international humanitarian law “or with best practices for mitigating civilian harm.”
Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the review “only contributes to politically motivated anti-Israel sentiment” and should never have been done.
“Now is the time to stand with our ally Israel and ensure they have the tools they need,” he said in a statement.
The U.S. “treats the government of Israel as above the law,” Amanda Klasing of the Amnesty International USA rights group said in a statement.
Israel has blocked access of journalists and observers to the war, just like it has blocked the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Because of the information blockade, it is impossible to get unspun detailed information about the war. That is Israel's fault. That leads to the question, what is Israel hiding? I think it is hiding genocide. The burden of proof is solely on Israel to allow the gathering of unspun evidence by independent third parties that disproves that belief. Israel's claims of honesty in war are not credible.
My biggest worry now is that Trump, the morally rotted GOP and their demagoguery Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, will use Biden's "inadequate" response to the Gaza war to win enough votes in close states to help him win the 2024 election. After that, it is pretty clear that DJT will kill what is left of our democracy as quickly as he can. After American democracy falls, other democracies are likely to follow, leading to a worldwide collapse of democracy, which gets replaced by some form of kleptocratic authoritarianism (dictatorship, plutocracy and/or theocracy).
How ironic. Israel is now in a position to kill democracy worldwide. Since 1948, the US has been Israel's greatest defender and supporter. Key reasons for that defense and support, often to the serious detriment of US interests, is that Israel is an ally, shares our values and is a democracy. That is bullshit. Israel mostly adheres to morally rotted Trump style values. It is inherently more authoritarian than democratic. Given the record, Israel arguably is more enemy than ally.
Multiple sources are reporting about an odd defense tactic that DJT's attorneys used when Stormy Daniels was testifying. The odd tactic was to (i) allow some of the prosecutor's sex-related questions to Daniels to be asked without objection, and (ii) allow Daniels to respond to those questions without objection. On its face, Daniels' testimony were damaging to DJT.
However, I think that in reality letting Daniels off the leash was a brilliant strategy, probably enough to kill the case on appeal. The sex part of Daniels' testimony had nothing at all to do with the fraudulent documents. What DJT's attorney did was allow Daniels' testimony evidence into the trial court record. An appeals courts can now find that evidence was too objectionable (too prejudicial), creating a basis to overturn any guilty verdicts the jury might come back with. If that is true, and I think it is, the prosecutors in this case made a gigantic mistake.
I base my analysis on reporting about Daniels' testimony. The Hill reports:
New York judge scolds Trump attorney over not
objecting to Stormy Daniels testimony
Judge Juan Merchan, who oversees former President Trump’s hush money trial, scolded his defense team Thursday for not objecting more during porn actor Stormy Daniels’s most salacious testimony.
On the stand this week, Daniels went into graphic detail about her alleged sexual encounter with Trump at a 2006 golf tournament, which he denies happened. Citing those comments, Trump’s lawyers at the end of proceedings Thursday renewed their demand for a mistrial.
Merchan again denied the motion, sympathizing with the defense’s concerns but chastising Trump attorney Susan Necheles for not objecting when prosecutors asked Daniels whether Trump had used a condom during their alleged encounter.
“This is extremely prejudicial testimony,” Trump attorney Todd Blanche told the judge. “This isn’t a case about sex. This isn’t a case about whether this took place or didn’t take place. We completely deny it.”
“I agree, that shouldn’t have come out. I wish those questions hadn’t been asked, and I wish those answers hadn’t been given,” Merchan said.
“But for the life of me, I don’t know why Ms. Necheles didn’t object,” the judge continued. “Why on earth she wouldn’t object to a mention of a condom, I don’t understand.”
That judge Merchan does not understand why DJT's attorney did not object is discouraging. DJT is obviously setting up his case for an appeal if he gets convicted of anything. If nothing else, DJT's attorneys immediately made another demand for a mistrial and that should have made clear what the defense was up to. This time DJT has a damn good reason to demand a mistrial. The prosecutors blew it bigly.
Like with lots of people who should know better, Merchan truly does not understand who and what DJT really is. Far too many Americans cannot grasp the awful reality that DJT actually is. Despite the rotten apple that the prosecutors have now stupidly tossed into the apple barrel, Merchan is pressing ahead with the case. He knows there is a solid ground on which to overturn guilty verdicts, but there isn't anything he can do about it now but finish the case. The rotten apple is in the barrel.
A long article the NYT published (not paywalled) focuses on memories by people about DJT's time as president. This is sobering to say the least:
What one thing do you remember most
about Donald Trump’s presidency?
In April as part of the New York Times/Siena College survey, we called about 1,000 voters across the country and asked for their most prominent memory of the Trump years. Here’s what they said, in their own words
The 2024 election will be in part a battle over memories, perhaps more than in previous presidential races because it’s a rare rematch. And memories aren’t necessarily static — what is happening today can influence those memories.
“His honesty”
Trump supporter in 2024
“His lies”
Biden supporter
“He had the country headed in the right direction”
Trump supporter
“America was going in the wrong direction”
Biden supporter
“He was a crook”
Biden supporter
“He couldn’t be bought”
Trump supporter
“Efficient”
Trump supporter
“Incompetent”
Biden supporter
“Less division”
Trump supporter
“Divided the country”
Undecided
“He was the biggest liar ever”
Biden supporter in 2024
“His dislike for Black people”
Biden supporter
“The terrible things he did to women”
Biden supporter
“Chaos and corruption”
Biden supporter
“The disgrace he brought to this country”
Biden supporter
“His direct way of doing business”
Trump supporter
“I remember him using Twitter a lot”
Undecided
“He got things done and fulfilled campaign promises”
Trump supporter
“He saved our country and closed the border”
Trump supporter in 2024
“The wall”
Trump supporter
“Started the wall on the border”
Trump supporter
“His promise to build a wall”
Trump supporter
“He did attempt to start building the wall”
Trump supporter
“He did something about the border”
Undecided
“Putting children in cages”
Biden supporter
Because of recency bias — a tendency to focus on recent events instead of past ones — people typically feel their current problems most sharply. And they tend to have a warmer recall of past experiences, which can lead to a sense of nostalgia. Like past presidents, Mr. Trump has enjoyed a higher approval rating of his time in office in retrospect.
The Dems need to sharpen their messaging to try to address some of the false beliefs that DJT supporters hold. How to do that is unclear to me.
Palestinians imprisoned en masse without charges by Israeli forces are
subject to constant torture, amputations due to prolonged confinement,
and “revenge” beatings in an Israeli prison camp established after
October 7, a harrowing new report by CNN reveals.
Three Israeli whistleblowers
spoke of the horrific conditions imposed by Israeli soldiers at the Sde
Teiman camp, which is located in the desert, 18 miles from Gaza. There,
among other detention facilities, Palestinians are constantly
blindfolded and handcuffed with zip ties. In one facility, they are
forced to sit on the ground in painful positions; in a field hospital,
they are forced to strip down, blindfolded and are strapped to beds wearing only
diapers.
The whistleblowers described horrific, inhumane conditions in the
prisons. Sometimes, Palestinians are forced to have limbs amputated due
to injuries sustained from being handcuffed for long periods of time.
These and other medical procedures are often done without anesthesia and
by people without training, the report found. The camp — which is said
to smell of wounds left to rot by unqualified medics — has a reputation
for being “a paradise for interns.”
The soldiers incessantly dehumanize the prisoners, sources said, often
holding them for weeks or more, even if they are eventually cleared to
leave after Israeli guards find them to have no connections to Hamas in
interrogations. While imprisoned, Palestinians face severe beatings for
infractions such as speaking or moving.
The beatings “were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out
of revenge,” one whistleblower told the outlet. “It was punishment for
what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for
behavior in the camp.”
The warehouse-style room where Israeli forces detain Palestinians looks like an animal pen, CNN
said. A leaked photo obtained by the outlet shows prisoners sitting on
an extremely thin mat on the ground with their heads down, the facility
surrounded by barbed wire.
At night, troops at the prison unleash “large dogs” on the prisoners
while they are sleeping and barge into enclosures while releasing sound
grenades, a whistleblower told CNN.
At night, troops at the prison unleash “large dogs” on the prisoners
while they are sleeping and barge into enclosures while releasing sound
grenades, a whistleblower told CNN.
This account was corroborated by Mohammed al-Ran, a Palestinian who
formerly headed the surgical unit at Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital in the
north. In December, Al-Ran was arrested, blindfolded and handcuffed, and
sent to a detention camp in the desert, where prisoners were forced to
endure desert heat in the day and cold in the night. After being cleared
of links to Hamas, al-Ran was picked to be a prisoner representative to
act as a liaison between prisoners and guards.
For this, al-Ran was allowed to take off his blindfold — but this was another form of anguish, he said.
“Part of my torture was being able to see how people were being
tortured,” al-Ran said. “At first you couldn’t see. You couldn’t see the
torture, the vengeance, the oppression. When they removed my blindfold,
I could see the extent of the humiliation and abasement … I could see
the extent to which they saw us not as human beings but as animals.”
Al-Ran was released after weeks of being the prison liaison, but was
mute for a month due to the emotional trauma of the detention. When he
was about to be released, he said, another prisoner asked him to find
his wife and children when he returned to Gaza. “He asked me to tell
them that it is better for them to be martyrs,” al-Ran said. “It is
better for them to die than to be captured and held here.”
Al-Ran’s and the whistleblowers’ accounts of the prisons line up with
other reports on the conditions that Israeli troops are imposing on
Palestinian prisoners who they have arrested arbitrarily. Israeli forces have detained and imprisoned thousands of Palestinians since October.
Other reports have found that Israeli troops routinely beat and
humiliate prisoners; some Palestinians who have been released say that
Israeli officers urinated on them, refused them medication they needed,
and killed prisoners. One human rights expert said that what rights groups have seen from Israeli prisons has led them to believe that torture is a policy of these facilities.
The much longer CNN Report (which contains disturbing images and interviews) can be read here.
CNN also published the following video report covering much of what is contained in the more detailed written one. (It is ~7 minutes and contains disturbing scenes).
Note: These detainees are rounded up arbitrarily. They are not held on the basis of any evidence, and they are not charged with any crimes. Indeed, this has already been reported on by Human Rights groups and media outlets in the middle east, as CNN acknowledges. However, the details had not been confirmed by Israeli whistleblowers coming forward with photographic evidence until now. Further, CNN focuses on only one detention center. There are at least 2 other military bases that are functioning as detention camps in Israel. As the CNN report itself states:
"The Israeli military has acknowledged partially converting three different military facilities into detention camps for Palestinian detainees from Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel...These facilities are Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, as well as Anatot and Ofer military bases in the occupied West Bank."
Additionally, while some detainees are released back into Gaza after 45 days, others are incarcerated in Israel's prison system which has long been known for holding hundreds of uncharged Palestinians indefinitely. Israeli Human Rights organization B'Tselem placed the number of "administrative detainees" (those imprisoned without charges and indefinitely) at 1,310 as of Sept. 2023-- before the Hamas attack of October 7. BBC, in an article last month, stated that administrative detainees were up to 3,600--NOT including those being held in separate military facilities, such as the one described in this OP by CNN. BBC, in a harrowing article on bruises, broken bones and deaths in Israeli prisons, then stated:
"Israel
currently holds more than 9,300 security prisoners, the vast majority
of whom are Palestinians according to the Israeli rights group HaMoked,
including more than 3,600 people in administrative detention.
These figures do not include detainees from the Gaza Strip being held in separate facilities by the Israeli military. [such as the one described by CNN in this post]"
The BBC article can be found here, for those interested.
Related links/sources:
>>A Human Rights Watch report released on May 8, 2024, details the dramatic rise in the IDF's "unlawful killings of Palestinians" in the West Bank. According to the report:
"Israeli forces in 2023 killed 492 Palestinians, including 120 children,
in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA). That figure is more than twice as many as in any other year
since the UN began systematically documenting fatalities. About 300 were
killed in the nearly three months following the October 7 Hamas-led
attacks on Israel, though the increase in killings dates back to 2022.
Between January 1 and March 31, 2024, Israeli forces killed 131
Palestinians in the West Bank....
Between October 7, 2023, and March 18, 2024, Israeli forces conducted a
monthly average of 640 search-and-arrest and other operations in the
West Bank, nearly double the 340 such operations during the first nine
months of 2023, according to OCHA.
These operations resulted in the killing of 304 Palestinians, out of a
total of 409 killed by Israeli forces during this period."
An alarming proportion of the victims, according to the study are unarmed children.
>>BBC released an investigative on-the-ground report from the West Bank showing some of the violence and intimidation of both Palestinian children and adults in the West Bank. It is called "The Other War - 2024"and can be viewed (for now at least) here on youtube free.
>>Meanwhile, as I write, Israel's newspaper of note, Haaretz, says that 300,000 people have evacuated Rafah ahead of the Israeli invasion there. They are being told to go to Mawasi, a thin and barren strip of coastal land with a few makeshift tents. There is no food or medical help there. Nor is there room for all those fleeing. The Rafah crossing-- vital to humanitarian aid getting in-- has been closed by Israel, as airstrikes and ground operations increase.
MoveOn is gathering signatures to asking Trump judge Aileen Cannon to be removed from the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case, Trump v. U.S. As discussed here yesterday, Cannon halted the case, claiming she has too much work to do. Cannon's decision protects DJT from prosecution until after the 2024 elections. And if he wins, it protects him forever.
I signed the petition. If you are interested, you can sign at this link. I recommend signing, even if it has no impact.
The caltrops are scattered in the path of a Russian convoy, blowing out their tires and leaving them more vulnerable. Once disabled, the vehicles are finished off using low-cost quadcopter explosive-laden drones or artillery.
However, unlike in the past, specialist drones were used to deploy the caltrops under the cover of the night—a simple yet very effective tactic. Once scattered, wheeled vehicles have their tires blown out, making them sitting ducks.
Even if not destroyed outright, the loss of multiple, or all, tires seriously hampers the movement of Russian personnel and materiel until recovery or repairs are carried out.
This 1 minute video shows the kind of damage that caltrops are inflicting on Russian vehicles. Maybe the Russians will start dropping their own caltrops to stop Ukrainian vehicles.
Nature News reports that scientists using artificial intelligence for data analysis have mapped 1 cubic millimeter (0.000061 cubic inch) of human cerebral cortex tissue at nanometer scale resolution (1 nm = 0.000000094 inch) (neuron cell body size is ~4-100 micrometers in diameter, 0.00016 to 0.0039 inch). The research paper is entitled, A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution (peta = 1 x 10^15):
Rendering based on electron-microscope data, showing
the positions of neurons in a fragment of the brain cortex --
neuron color indicates cell body size
Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science and is available online, reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other.
The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimeter, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes (1,400 terabytes) of image data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?”
The brain fragment was taken from a 45-year-old woman when she underwent surgery to treat her epilepsy. It came from the cortex, a part of the brain involved in learning, problem-solving and processing sensory signals. The sample was immersed in preservatives and stained with heavy metals to make the cells easier to see. Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues then cut the sample into around 5,000 slices — each just 34 nanometers thick (0.0000013 inch) — that could be imaged using electron microscopes.
Jain’s team then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D. “I remember this moment, going into the map and looking at one individual synapse from this woman’s brain, and then zooming out into these other millions of pixels,” says Jain. “It felt sort of spiritual.”
A single neuron (white) shown with 5,600 of the axons (blue) that connect to it
The synapses that make these connections are shown in green
A range of histological features in 1 mm3 of human brain were rendered, including neuropil (A) and its segmentation (B) at nanometer resolution, annotated synapses (C), excitatory neurons (D), inhibitory neurons (E), astrocytes (F), oligodendrocytes (G), myelin (H), and blood vessels (I). A previously unrecognized neuronal class (J) and multisynaptic connections (K) were also identified.
Rendering showing cortex neuron layers
When examining the model in detail, the researchers discovered unconventional neurons, including some that made up to 50 connections with each other. “In general, you would find a couple of connections at most between two neurons,” says Jain. Elsewhere, the model showed neurons with tendrils that formed knots around themselves. “Nobody had seen anything like this before,” Jain adds.
The team also found pairs of neurons that were near-perfect mirror images of each other. “We found two groups that would send their dendrites in two different directions, and sometimes there was a kind of mirror symmetry,” Jain says. It is unclear what role these features have in the brain.
Proofreaders needed
The map is so large that most of it has yet to be manually checked, and it could still contain errors created by the process of stitching so many images together. “Hundreds of cells have been ‘proofread’, but that’s obviously a few per cent of the 50,000 cells in there,” says Jain. He hopes that others will help to proofread parts of the map they are interested in. The team plans to produce similar maps of brain samples from other people — but a map of the entire brain is unlikely in the next few decades, he says.
This is a truly amazing accomplishment. Other groups are working to map an entire mouse brain, but that will probably take several years. As time passes, maybe some improvements in data gathering protocols will speed up the mapping process.
The WaPo writes about blatant political corruption right out in the open:
What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked
them to steer $1 billion to his campaign
As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Yet oil giants will see an even greater windfall — helped by new offshore drilling, speedier permits and other relaxed regulations — in a second Trump administration, the former president told the executives over the dinner of chopped steak at Mar-a-Lago.
There it is, right out in the open. Pay Trump $1 billion and he will pay them back in spades, the environment and public opinion be damned. Trump kleptocracy cannot be denied or justified. This is what the pro-corruption, anti-environment Citizens United USSC decision has led us to.
The WaPo reports that Barron Trump is going to play hardball politics, making him fair game for criticism:
Barron Trump makes political debut as
Florida delegate for GOP convention
Donald Trump’s son Barron, 18 and about to graduate high school, was named as a delegate at large for the GOP national convention in Milwaukee
Former president Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump, is making his political debut: The 18-year-old has been named to the slate of Republican Party delegates that will represent Florida at the party’s national convention this summer.
Barron Trump, who was only 10 when his father was inaugurated as president in 2017, has largely been shielded from the political limelight. His selection — along with three of Trump’s other children — reflects the latest expansion of the clan’s takeover of the party.
The WaPo reports that some senior Republican Party leaders will refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election: Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results -- One possible vice-presidential candidate, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), repeatedly declined to say whether he will accept the outcome -- The question has become something of a litmus test, particularly among the long list of possible running mates for Trump, whose relationship with his first vice president, Mike Pence, ruptured because Pence resisted Trump’s pressure to overturn the 2020 election. In a vivid recent example, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) was pressed at least six times in a TV interview Sunday on whether he would accept this November’s results. He repeatedly declined to do so, only saying he was looking forward to Trump being president again.
The Hill reports that judge Aileen Cannon has gone all-in on stopping the Mar-a-Lago case against DJT to protect him:
Senate Democrats are venting their fury over Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to cancel the start date of former President Trump’s federal trial in Florida for mishandling classified documents, accusing the Trump appointee of “deliberately slow-walking” the case.
Cannon, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, asserted in a five-page order that too many pretrial issues remain unresolved to schedule a later date to hear arguments from federal prosecutors and Trump’s defense.
The judge’s decision cancels Trump’s May 20 trial date, postponing it indefinitely.
Democrats are close to giving up hope that the 40 felony charges accusing Trump of mishandling classified documents, obstructing justice and making false statements will reach a verdict before Election Day.
And they fear he will immediately kill the case if he defeats President Biden in November and returns to the Oval Office.
“Justice deferred is often justice denied. It is profoundly frustrating that the judge is managing this case in a way that is making it highly unlikely that it will be resolved in a timely fashion,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Judiciary Committee.
Well, that kills one of the four cases against DJT. Trump's strategy to stop the prosecution here was brilliant. His attorneys filed lots of motions and complaints, many of them frivolous, giving loose cannon Aileen an excuse to stop the case so she has time to deeply consider all the lunacy that Trump has loaded the case with.
The USSC will probably effectively kill prosecution in DJT's immunity case by forcing the lower courts to reconsider everything. That pushes that case out far past the Nov. elections. Meanwhile, in Georgia, Republican legislators are moving to fire Fani Willis in the Georgia state election racketeering and fraud trial against DJT. It is starting to look like that case will either die forever, or be pushed back until after the Nov. elections.
Things are looking grim for democracy and the rule of law. Only the New York fraud case is viable at this point. Trump and authoritarianism are winning. The democracy and the rule of law are losing. We and our democracy just might be royally screwed.
Once again, the ramifications of of Merrick Garland's staggering incompetence for failure to act are coming into focus. If things turn out horribly, Garland arguably will have been the key factor that killed our democracy and the rule of law.
