House Republicans cancel inconvenient free speech; Regarding the history and traditions test

The NYT reports (not paywalled):

The Republicans who now hold the majority have used the House’s rules of decorum to impose what is essentially a gag order against talking about Mr. Trump’s hush-money payments to a porn actress or about the fact that he is a felon at all, notwithstanding that those assertions are no longer merely allegations but the basis of a jury’s guilty verdict. Doing so, they have declared, is a violation of House rules.

“When they censor any mention of Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, they are essentially trying to ban a fact,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in an interview. “I am not aware of any precedent where factual statements have been banned in our lifetime.”

The American radical right authoritarian wealth & power movement simply does not tolerate inconvenient truth. This is an example of the intolerant, closed-minded, reality-detached threat.

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Yesterday, NPR broadcast a segment about the new law in Louisiana that forces all public education classrooms to post the 10 Commandments. A question was asked about why all other religions could not also demand that their iconography also be posted in view of the equal protection clause. The response was simple: Other religions would not pass the history and traditions (HAT) test. Non-Christian iconography could be excluded without violating the equal protection clause because those religions do not pas the HAT test.

That makes no sense at all. But the current USSC could easily find sense in it. The USSC used the HAT test to obliterate abortion rights and most gun safety laws. The reason the HAT test is so poisonous is that it makes no sense and can be easily used to arrive at nearly any decision a partisan judge wants to arrive at. Why is this the case? Several reasons.

• First, the application of the HAT test in abortion and gun safety law cases was clearly irrational. The judges cherry picked bit and pieces of history they liked and ignored what was inconvenient. They also could not define what a "tradition" was. That depended various subjective things, e.g., how the issue was framed. Framing was convenient, ignoring inconvenient traditions.

• Second, Judges lack historical training and expertise. The HAT test converts legal reasoning into historical analysis. Judges are trained in law, not history. With a bit of garden variety partisan human bias that leads to flawed or selective interpretations of historical evidence. Historians have already heavily criticized both the abortion-killer and the gun safety law killer cases as partisan historical bullshit.

• Third, the HAT test ignores changing societal norms and values over time. What was historically accepted may no longer align with modern understandings or acceptance of rights and acceptable behaviors. In essence, the HAT test was intentionally invented by radical right authoritarians to ignore evolving standards that are inconvenient to radical right kleptocratic, democratic, plutocratic and Christian theocratic dogmas, e.g., the establishment clause for religion. The HAT test gives the USSC enormous power to completely reshape most or nearly all of the law and society in the name of a single, deeply flawed, hyper-partisan "historical/traditional" analysis. 

• The USSC has not laid out any clear methodology to apply the HAT test. There are no established guidelines for how to conduct proper historical analysis or what counts as sufficient historical evidence of a "tradition." The HAT test is well-suited to disguise subjective partisan "reasoning." The HAT test easily leads to covert, unguided, or ad hoc partisan analysis. For example, when there are no clear historical precedents or traditions, there is nothing to base an unbiased analysis on.

• Finally, the HAT test uses history to describe what ought to be. History has always been used to describe what happened in the past, not what should be. The test uses descriptive historical facts to find normative constitutional questions. That makes no sense because a lot of what happened in history is contested, ambiguous and/or now obsolete in view of social and technological change. Even worse, the test means that a controlling "tradition" is constitutional.  

The point of the HAT test is clear. It is a fig leaf the authoritarian American radical right wealth and power movement plans to use to kill inconvenient aspects of democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. Those inconvenient aspects include voting rights, transparency in government (a necessity for unlimited corruption), minority protections and church-state separation, especially in public education.

To drive home the point here, the NYT reports about the new Christian nationalist 10 Commandments law in Louisiana:

The crowd at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette, La., applauded Gov. Jeff Landry as he signed bill after bill this week on public education in the state, making it clear he believed God was guiding his hand.

One new law requires that transgender students be addressed by the pronouns for the gender on their birth certificates (“God gives us our mark,” he said). Another allows public schools to employ chaplains (“a great step for expanding faith in public schools”).

Then he signed into law a mandate that the Ten Commandments be hung in every public classroom, demonstrating a new willingness for Louisiana to go where other states have not. Last month, Louisiana also became the first state to classify abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances.

Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed bills this week to expand the presence of religion in the state’s public schools, which will be allowed to hire chaplains and required to post Ten Commandments in classrooms

“We don’t quit,” Mr. Landry, a Republican, said at the signing ceremony.

Taken together, the measures have signaled the ambition of the governor and the Republican-led Legislature to be at the forefront of a growing national movement to create and interpret laws according to a particular conservative Christian worldview. And Mr. Landry, a Catholic who has been vocal about his faith’s influence in shaping his politics, wants to lead the charge. 

“Christian conservatives in this state have been a force for a very long time,” said Robert Hogan, a political science professor at Louisiana State University. “They view him as a champion of their cause, and this consolidates that.”

Dodie Horton, the state representative who sponsored the Louisiana bill, said that having the commandments posted would allow students to “look up and see what God says is right and what he says is wrong.” 

Ms. Horton, a Republican, is a member of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a group formed in 2020 to advance explicitly Christian values and legislation among elected officials. The group is working to adopt her bill as one of its pieces of model legislation, so that members in other states can push through similar laws.

The Christian political movement has been evident in debates across the country over transgender rights, school curriculums, in vitro fertilization and abortion. In Arizona, during the fight over an abortion ban from 1864, the speaker of the House, Ben Toma, told The New York Times in April that “all of our laws are actually based on, what, the Ten Commandments and the Book of Genesis, which are thousands of years ago.”

It is an argument that has been repeated by supporters of the Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, who contend that the commandments are a historical document as well as a religious text.

“This is all born of the leftist culture war tearing down the fabric of the country, and we are saying, ‘Enough,’” said Jason Rapert, founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and a former state senator in Arkansas. “We are going to try to rebuild the foundation of this country.”

Like it or not, and believe it or not, we are in an all-out war against an aggressive, bigoted, corrupt Christian fundamentalist theocracy. It aims to kill democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. These authoritarian radical bigots do not want to just turn the clock back to Jim Crow or even the 1800s. They want to go back in time over 2,000 years. They are dead serious about that and about controlling your lives as they see fit, whether you believe it or not.

Q: Is this is all born of the leftist culture war tearing down the fabric and foundation of the country, or is it significantly or mostly born of the bigoted, authoritarian Christian theocratic culture war tearing down the fabric and foundation of the country? 

HOW DID I MISS THIS?

 Just saw this online:

Ancestry.com entry proves Biden died in 2018 at Guantanamo Bay

A June 13 Instagram post  shows a woman navigating through the Ancestry.com website to a death notice for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. with the same birthdate as President Joe Biden. The notice says Biden died in 2018 at Guantanamo, Cuba.

“This is it y’all,” the woman in the video says. “In living color. This is proof that indeed there are actors playing parts on the world stage.”

The claim stems from a record posted March 14 to FindAGrave.com, a site related to Ancestry.com. The original post contained Biden’s correct date and place of birth but claimed he was executed for treason. The record said he died in either 2018 or 2020, depending on which archived version is examined.

The listing also claimed Biden was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but a search of the Army Cemeteries Explorer shows no entries for Biden.

(Well, of course NOT, they, whoever they are, don't want people to know Biden is buried there, otherwise the jig us up) 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/06/20/biden-death-notice-ancestry-com-fact-check/74144955007/

From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: US drug prices

A NYT article (not paywalled) discusses how American pharmaceutical drug prices are jacked up by middlemen who operate in secrecy:

The Opaque Industry Secretly Inflating Prices for Prescription Drugs

Americans are paying too much for prescription drugs.

It is a common, longstanding complaint. And the culprits seem obvious: Drug companies. Insurers. A dysfunctional federal government.

But there is another collection of powerful forces that often escape attention, because they operate in the bowels of the health care system and cloak themselves in such opacity and complexity that many people don’t even realize they exist.

They are called pharmacy benefit managers. And they are driving up drug costs for millions of people, employers and the government.

The three largest pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, act as middlemen overseeing prescriptions for more than 200 million Americans. They are owned by huge health care conglomerates — CVS Health, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group — and are hired by employers and governments.

The job of the P.B.M.s is to reduce drug costs. Instead, they frequently do the opposite. They steer patients toward pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees, a New York Times investigation found.

Most Americans get their health insurance through a government program like Medicare or through an employer, which pay for two different types of insurance for each person. One type covers visits to doctors and hospitals, and it is handled by an insurance company. The other pays for prescriptions. That is overseen by a P.B.M.

“We’re really, really good at what we do,” Jon Mahrt, president of UnitedHealth’s P.B.M., Optum Rx, said in an interview. The main lobbying group for the P.B.M.s says that in 2022 they saved their clients and patients $286 billion.

But those savings appear to be largely a mirage, a product of a system where prices have been artificially inflated so that major P.B.M.s and drug companies can boost their profits while taking credit for reducing prices.

• P.B.M.s sometimes push patients toward drugs with higher out-of-pocket costs, shunning cheaper alternatives.

• They often charge employers and government programs like Medicare multiple times the wholesale price of a drug, keeping most of the difference for themselves. That overcharging goes far beyond the markups that pharmacies, like other retailers, typically tack on when they sell products.

• The largest P.B.M.s recently established subsidiaries that harvest billions of dollars in fees from drug companies, money that flows straight to their bottom line and does nothing to reduce health care costs.

• The P.B.M.s, which are responsible for paying pharmacies on behalf of employers, are driving independent drugstores out of business by not paying them enough to cover their costs. Small pharmacies have little choice but to accept these lowball rates because the largest P.B.M.s control an overwhelming majority of prescriptions. The disappearance of local pharmacies limits health care access for poorer communities but ultimately enriches the P.B.M.s’ parent companies, which own drugstores or mail-order pharmacies.

• P.B.M.s sometimes delay or even prevent patients from getting their prescriptions. In the worst cases, patients suffer serious health consequences.

Many patients learn about the existence of P.B.M.s only when they have a problem getting medications and spend hours navigating a byzantine system of approvals and restrictions.

So when PBM spokesman Jon Mahr says, “We’re really, really good at what we do,” he is spot on correct. That is absolutely true. His job is to help screw the American people out of every last penny to squeeze every last penny of profit out of health care. He is really good at what he does, i.e., he lies to us in pursuit of profit.

The radical, authoritarian Republican Project 2025 wants to reduce regulations on all businesses, including PBMs. Why? Because there is so damn much money to be made for the giant "human" corporations and the Republicans who open the floodgates of profit for those "people." 

It is all about the Benjamins, not human health or the public interest.

Disinformation and misinformation kills people

Although we all know this, it bears repeating. People acting on the basis of false beliefs sometimes get themselves or others killed. That happens in reality, not theory. The Harvard Misinformation Review writes:

Attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines may have “spilled over” 

to other, unrelated vaccines along party lines in the United States

This study used data from pre- and post-COVID surveys to examine vaccine attitudes in the United States. We found evidence consistent with an ideological “spillover” effect: Liberals’ attitudes became more positive towards non-COVID vaccines (flu, MMR, HPV, chickenpox) and conservatives’ attitudes became more negative. These spillover effects are perplexing because the COVID-19 vaccines were developed more rapidly than the others and (some of them) were the first to use mRNA technology on a mass scale to achieve immunization. Hence, there were reasons to isolate one’s attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines rather than generalize them. This exacerbates current vaccine communication challenges.

ESSAY SUMMARY 

• We compared political conservatives in the United States to liberals, measuring the degree to which their attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines extend to other, unrelated vaccines.

• Conservatives had far more negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines compared to liberals, but also had more negative attitudes towards the influenza, MMR, HPV, and chickenpox vaccines.

• We used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to classify participants in a pre-pandemic survey into clusters of “likely liberals” and “likely conservatives.”

• This led to tentative results suggesting that conservatives in the United States spread their negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines (flu, HPV, MMR, chickenpox).

• Liberals in the United States appeared to exhibit the opposite trend, generalizing their positive attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines (flu, HPV, MMR, chickenpox).

US law requires vaccines to be safe and effective for a vaccine's approved medical use. Period. 

In the case of liberals, believing that all common, major vaccines are safe and effective is rational and supported by a lot of empirical evidence. In the case of conservatives, neither rationality nor evidence supports their false belief. This is an example of blind, reality-denying loyalty to toxic MAGA cult disinformation. 

That false belief gets some innocent people indefensibly killed. Period.

About fentanyl & related synthetic opioids

For years, there has been reporting about about how bad the problem of fentanyl and related synthetic (man-made, not natural) opioids is. Supplies of precursors to make fentanyl in Mexico and the US come from China. The US asked China to crack down on the precursors and it agreed. Then US-China relations went to hell. Despite the agreement, China still supports the fentanyl disaster in the US by supplying precursors. China uses supplies of fentanyl and related synthetic opioids to inflict as much damage on American society and economy as it can. The cost in human life in the US is of no concern to the Chinese government. The WaPo reports (not paywalled):

Despite fentanyl crackdown, Chinese sellers are open for business

A booming online marketplace in shipping small but potent packages of the chemicals used in the production of fentanyl from China to Mexico remains largely unhindered

 

When President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to revive a joint crackdown on illegal drug trafficking in November, it sent a brief shock wave through the vast network of Chinese suppliers fueling the production of fentanyl.

Drug suppliers hit pause on international orders, as local Chinese officials conducted site inspections and began circulating fresh reminders of regulations. Beijing sent a warning notice to its pharmaceutical industry and shut down 25 Chinese companies selling fentanyl precursors — the chemical building blocks of a drug that accounts for the majority of more than 70,000 synthetic opioid overdose deaths a year in the United States.

But seven months later, those same sellers say it’s business as usual.

The three people — two salespeople for Chinese chemical companies and a Chinese reseller based in Mexico — described resuming sales this year after making minor adjustments to avoid scrutiny, including tweaking customs labeling on packages and pivoting to alternative compounds that have virtually identical applications.

“Possibly in the future there is some impact, but it’s not a problem right now,” said one Hubei-based salesperson for a chemical company that produces 1-Boc-4-AP — a fentanyl precursor — and the sedative xylazine. The person claimed the company had resumed sales of both compounds to Mexico in January after a six-week pause that started around the time of the Xi-Biden meeting.

“Like water flowing around rocks … if there is a demand there is a way,” the person said.

Water flowing around rocks

The CDC reported that for 2017, the economic cost of opioid use was about $1 trillion:

In the 39 jurisdictions studied, combined costs of opioid use disorder and fatal opioid overdose varied from $985 million in Wyoming to $72,583 million in Ohio. Per capita combined costs varied from $1,204 in Hawaii to $7,247 in West Virginia. States with high per capita combined costs were located mainly in the Ohio Valley and New England.

A congressional analysis for 2020 indicated that the total cost had increased significantly compared to the 2017 analysis:

Today, in Recognition of National recovery Month, the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC)—led by Chairman Don Beyer (D-VA)—released a new analysis that finds the opioid epidemic cost the United States a record of nearly $1.5 trillion in 2020. This is up 37% from 2017, when the CDC last measured the cost.

After the pandemic disrupted the U.S. health care system, reducing access to substance abuse treatment and exacerbating social and economic stress that can worsen addiction, opioid use increased. Data show the highest numbers of fatal opioid overdoses ever reported in 2020 and 2021—69,061 and 80,926 fatalities, respectively—and opioids are now the main driver of drug overdose deaths.

A 2024 Congressional Research Services report commented:

DEA alleges that PRC-based chemical companies advertise and sell online fentanyl precursor chemicals, including some that are not internationally controlled and are correspondingly legal to export out of China. PRC firms also sell other synthetic drugs of concern, including xylazine and nitazenes. PRC companies ship such items to Mexico or directly to the United States, including via the U.S. Postal Service and express consignment services, “carefully packaged to deceive customs inspectors.” According to DEA, customers, often associated with Mexico-based transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), may pay for the chemicals and drugs in cryptocurrencies, making it harder for DEA “to follow the money.” They also pay using U.S. and PRC payment services or bank transfers. DEA alleges that the TCOs use largely PRC-sourced chemicals to synthesize fentanyl substances in clandestine laboratories, and often mix xylazine and nitazenes into fentanyl-related products, making the substances “even deadlier,” before distributing them across North America.  

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that synthetic opioids (primarily fentanyl-related substances) may have resulted in more than 78,000 U.S. overdose deaths between September 2022 and August 2023.

A trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon, the US goes bankrupt. The human life cost? Meh, just the cost of inept government? Who is mostly responsible for this disaster? China? Mexico? The US? All three about equally? No one, because the markets should be left free and wild to run butt naked in pursuit of profit and free, wild markets always solve all problems far more effectively than any government ever could? Should fentanyl be legalized and the industry taxed, leaving markets free & wild to run butt naked?

So many good questions, so many bad answers. 

Fentanyl victim

Lethal doses

Note the speck of carfentanil

Blog note: COVID

A couple of days ago I felt crappy. 🤒 I tested twice for COVID. Was positive twice. Still feel crappy. My blogging might be limited for the next couple of days or until the crappiness significantly lifts.

A couple of days ago the fed govt stopped monitoring new cases of COVID. Now we are flying blind in the pandemic. Yes, it is still a pandemic. So far in 2024, ~24,000 people have died of COVID in the US. This isn't over and it won't be for a long time.