News bits: Tina Turner

Tina Turner died. She was 83. Total bummer. 

1973

This woman was alive

1990

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A NYT opinion opines on controlling plastic in oceans. The bottom lines are (1) international cooperation will be needed, and (2) as long as brass knuckles Republicans retain enough power in the federal government, the US will not cooperate with anyone and will continue to pollute as usual. The article opines:

As the world’s population expands and more people rise out of poverty and into more consumer-oriented lifestyles, demand for plastic-packaged goods will inevitably grow. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts plastic use will nearly triple by 2060 at the current rate, with most of the growth occurring outside Europe and the United States. Economist Impact and the Nippon Foundation’s Back to Blue Initiative modeled policy scenarios for reducing plastic production by 2050 — none of them resulted in a production rate lower than what we see today.

America's Republican Party. Pro-pollution, fascist, anti-civil liberties, anti-democracy.

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House Democrats obliterate a needed pro-democracy norm: We live in a time when adults who act like spoiled, less than average intelligence children are in power and pushing the country into American fascism. The Hill writes:

Democrats erupt in laughter after Greene calls for decorum in House

Democrats erupted in laughter on the House floor Wednesday when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who was presiding over the chamber — called for decorum.

The heckling came as House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) was delivering floor remarks about the debt ceiling, which has been the subject of high-stakes negotiations between GOP lawmakers and the White House.

As Scalise was urging the Senate and White House to take action on raising the borrowing limit — referencing the bill House Republicans passed last month — a lawmaker yelled out in the chamber.

“We are in fact the only body in this town who has actually taken steps to address the debt ceiling and the spending problem in Washington. I would encourage the Senate to take up the bill, I would encourage the president to get engaged and address this problem, but we already have, the votes are on the board —” Scalise said before pausing to react to the yelling.

It is unclear which lawmaker shouted and what they said.

“Order,” Greene said from the dais, pounding her gavel.

“I ask that the House be in order and there be some decorum on the other side,” Scalise said.

After a roughly 15-second pause, Greene called for decorum in the chamber.

“The members are reminded to abide by decorum of the House,” she said.

Democrats in the chamber then erupted in laughter. Some members — including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) — stood from their seats and started shouting.

Republicans must have loved that. They won't forget this. In the unlikely event that the Dems ever regain control of the House, Republicans being the spoiled rotten adult-children they are will do the same at times and circumstances of their choosing. The Dems should publicly apologize and say they will never do that again. This might lead the House into an occasional (frequent?) shitfest of uncontrolled hate and childish temper tantrum. One thing is for sure, House Republicans won't rise above this because mentally they are not actual adults.

Between explicit Republican Party theocratic fascism and Democratic Party stupid this country is in desperately grave trouble.

This post brought to you by Tina performing Nutbush!

Follow-up from yesterday’s “When you get prayed for” OP…

Fellow blogger, Ellabulldog, is making the claim that pantheism is atheism.

• Do you agree?

• Who/What entity is the ultimate authority on those definitions: Webster, community (the existing folkways and mores), your/the church, fellow pantheists/atheists, the Pope or other religion figureheads, the self, other?

• In truth (whatever that is), are these two categories of “religion” (i.e., “theisms”) merely ECCs (meaning essentially contested concepts, in the eye-of-the-beholder)?

• How do you define these two (disparate?) philosophies?  Go into as much detail as you can.

News bits: A debt limit wild card?; Etc.

The Hill write about a court case filed by National Association of Government Employees that claims (1) the debt ceiling law is unconstitutional, and (2) the law should be suspended. This lawsuit has nothing to do with the bickering between Hose Republicans and Biden over the debt limit. This is an independent attempt to get existing law nullified. The Hill writes:

A federal judge late this month will hear arguments involving the debt limit law and whether it is unconstitutional and should be suspended.

The hearing, set for May 31 at 2 p.m. before U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns, will come hours ahead of when the Biden administration warns the federal government could run out of funds to pay its obligations.

The National Association of Government Employees (NAGE) earlier this month sued over the law that sets the nation’s debt limit, arguing it presents separation-of-powers issues. Yellen and President Biden were named as defendants.

If the limit is reached, NAGE contends Biden would be forced to take over Congress’s spending authority by deciding which payments to prioritize over others. It also would effectively amount to a line-item veto, the union argues, which the Supreme Court has previously rejected.

This strikes me as strange. The union did not argue invalidity of existing debt ceiling law on the basis of the 14th Amendment. How much legal traction the separation of power argument might have is not clear to me. Maybe the union had to rely on this argument because it did not have standing to sue for invalidity on the basis of the 14th A.

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The Catholic church and its sex and inconvenient truth problem: Hundreds of Catholic clergy in Illinois sexually abused thousands of children, AG finds . . . . investigators found that 451 clergy sexually abused nearly 2,000 children since 1950 — far more than the 103 individuals the church had named when the state review began in 2018.

I thought that you must not lie was something in the Bible that could not be ignored. Guess I was mistaken. Too bad there wasn't a commandment that said you most not rape. Of course, that would have been ignored too. Those feisty priests and their libidos. That feisty church and its lies.

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Christian nationalists rise up to defend hate speech and lies: Religion News Service reports: "The National Religious Broadcasters, an association of Christian media outlets, has joined a lawsuit seeking to block a California law that requires social media companies to publish their policies on removing hate speech from their platforms. .... Under the law, companies must disclose in detail how they remove content, including hate speech, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign political interference. They are also required to submit terms of service reports to the state attorney general by Jan. 1, 2024. Fines for noncompliance were set at up to $15,000 per violation per day."

The propaganda spin is blatant and shameless. Here, Christian Taliban theocrats claim that publishing policies on removing hate speech and disinformation is suppressing free speech. That can easily be seen as an implicit admission that Christian nationalist media relies heavily on hate speech and disinformation to spread the infinite love of Jesus on the flock and America. 

Views From the Moderate Democrat About 2024

 Back in 2016, many on the left were looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton based on her long time in the Beltway, her perceived self-dealing, and an air she exuded that she deserved the title of the presidency, as opposed to someone with the character to be worthy of that title.

When Donald Trump came on the scene, he was something different and gave many Americans the chance to try something outside the box. After four years, however, it became apparent to the left that whatever character flaws Clinton had were minor in comparison to the complete lack of morality of Trump as leader of the United States.

For the left in 2020, it was "anyone but Trump," and the turnout in that election from the left put on full display the danger that was perceived in a second Donald Trump term.

As we approach 2024, many on the left are starting to make it known by commenting on articles pertaining to the upcoming election how they plan to cast their vote. Both parties should take note of the leanings of the moderate voters.

In a recent call to donors, Florida governor Ron DeSantis made the comment that there are three viable options for 2024, but only two are electable—himself and Joe Biden. Based on that story, many moderates from the left had some things to say in response to his belief:

I'm going to do the Republicans voters a big favor. Speaking as a person that voted for Joe Biden last election. I'm really not thrilled with voting the same way, but if all the right has to offer is Trump and DeSantis, I'm voting Joe Biden. The Republicans have to get a candidate that speaks to more of the voting public than these two extremists you have now. As a Democrat, I'm not against voting for Republican, but there is no way I'm going to vote for Trump or DeSantis or someone like Ted Cruz , Pence or Nikki—it has to be someone with some common sense that's running on a policy to help Americans not divide America. I want to hear conversation about the border, about inflation, about what we're going to do about gas prices and less conversation about transgenders and gay people and drag queens which can come after an individual is voted in the office. But running on these policies means nothing to me or my bank account and I'm going to vote for the person that personally makes my life better.

 In response to this thought, a few others chimed in:

That makes no sense. The kind of Republican you're speaking of has no shot in today's Republican primary. Thirty years of Fox News and conservative media has filled them with hate/anger and radicalized them to varying degrees. If you speak of Democrats as fellow Americans that need to be challenged but worked with, they think you're a RINO and drum you out of the party. They only want someone extreme who thinks of Democrats as an enemy to be destroyed. Give it up, that Republican party is dead and never coming back. The remaining common sense Republicans who want to work together just haven't been drummed out yet, but they will.

 Another moderate Democrat sees things in a similar manner:

I'm along the same thinking. I would have crossed over for Kasich in 2016, but any Republican that stands up to Trump's base gets forced out of the party or has zero chance to secure the nomination. The kind of Republican that has the backbone to stand up for what is right instead of pandering to the far-right is just very rare in today's GOP. Until the scourge of Trumpism is gone, it's all blue, all day.

 

The Path to the Nomination

The problem that DeSantis faces is that in order to win the nomination from the GOP, he believes he has to pander to Trump's base and "out-Trump" Trump himself. This is looking like a major miscalculation—the reason people liked DeSantis in the first place was that he appeared more normal than Trump.

Instead, what he has done is show people that he is cut from the same mold as Trump and would be an eerily similar version of what people voted out of office in 2020. His campaign slogan might as well be "Trumpism that is popular in Florida."

His extreme positions as governor on education, the LGBQT+ community, and abortion have alienated many moderates and independents already, as seen in this comment:

DeSantis shouldn't count himself. He has burnt himself with many moderate Republicans, Independents, Black people, LGBT people and the teachers in K-12 and colleges/universities as well as the businesspeople. His name already is tarred.

Others are beginning to come up with monikers for how they see Ron DeSantis and not many are flattering.

Neither Deranged Donald nor the Florida Fuehrer will be allowed anywhere near our White House.

Ron DeExtremist is doing a great job alienating potential voters and making even more political adversaries.

DeFascist has a snowballs chance just like Trump.

DeSantis' Leadership Style

After a term in office, the DeSantis leadership style might be popular with Floridians, but others are not as enamored by him:

DeSantis is running on a more extreme platform than Trump. He just behaves less loudly, less flamboyantly and watches his speech more carefully. Pretty much the same as Trump at the core but probably more authoritarian as he seems obsessed with one subject—while Florida has multiple issues to focus on—and wants to want to run Florida as his own "personal kingdom." Being less raucous doesn't make a politician less tyrannical.

The fact that Disney is eating his lunch in the political arena, and the fact that he can't handle the reality and keeps trying more petty retaliation, is turning off many voters. His misstep in talking about Ukraine was also noted by voters, including those from his own party that are clearly on the side of democracy as it pertains to foreign nations, as stated in this comment:

DeSantis can't even handle a certain district in his state, yet alone the entire nation and our foreign allies.

Further setting back DeSantis is the view that he's anti-open market by not only Democrats, but also many Republicans.

Yeah, because I want a president that saves our economy by … driving away business that is too woke? Didn’t realize only evangelicals had green money. Guess those woke bucks don’t count.

And one user wrote his own manifesto to describe the DeSantis leadership style and how many Americans view him:

DeSantis seems to have a much higher opinion of himself than the vast majority Americans. DeSantis is an extreme-right fascist/white Christian nationalist candidate trying to woo the MAGA crowd but the MAGA extremists are split with many remaining loyal to Trump (like MTG, Lindsey Graham and JD Vance). And if the GOP doesn't back Trump, he'll probably run as a 3rd party candidate to make matters even worse for DeSantis. DeSantis' ratings have done nothing but go down, he's already past his prime and his recent more extreme actions have not made him into someone that can win a general election. Like all wannabe dictators, DeSantis lives in a bubble, doesn't listen, just pontificates and thinks bullying minorities and business with a white Christian nationalists ideology of hate, fear-mongering and division is somehow a winning strategy.

 

Beyond the Person: GOP Party Issue

Many users have gone beyond the individual candidates to note what the current form of the GOP stands for and that it's a major turnoff. The Republican party panders so far right in attacking vulnerable Americans—like the transgender community—that they are seen as extreme:

Biden will beat Trump or DeSantis by 10-12 Million Votes. Most independents are done with the MAGA extremism. Not to mention their extreme assault on Women’s Healthcare.

The further the party goes to enact abortion restrictions, including Florida's six-week abortion ban, the more they alienate half of the voting population in the country. The recent election in Wisconsin for the State Supreme Court highlighted how the issue has motivated younger voters that don't want their rights taken away, giving the Democratic candidate a whopping 10-point victory margin.

And the House of Representatives is doing the party no favors by putting some very extreme politicians into a very public spotlight. At this point, many Americans think that Marjorie Taylor Greene is the typical Republican because of how much airtime she and her extremist positions get on television. People recognize her as fully committed to Trumpism.

An Election Over Before It's Even Begun

The Republican party is using the same attacks against Biden and Harris we saw in 2020—Biden's age and Harris' capability as successor should that age become a factor. Biden's age is more of a concern, but when the left looks across the aisle and sees the 78-year-old option, one with very clear mental deficiencies, it's not really a defining issue. That is the one thing DeSantis will have an advantage on if he should garner the nomination.

However, that one advantage will not be enough to overlook the baggage of being linked to the MAGA following that has turned off the vast majority of the Democratic party and around two-thirds of Independents.

DeSantis could slide into the nomination should Trump develop health issues or end up in jail from one of his numerous upcoming convictions. But the path DeSantis is going down is the same one we saw in 2022 where GOP candidates pandered to the extreme Trump base to get the nomination and then tried to unsuccessfully tack back to the middle in the general election.

The Trumpist label doomed all of those candidates, yet DeSantis has decided that that's his best strategy for 2024.

Based on what happened in 2020 and in 2022, this election could very well be over before it even begins—much of the electorate has seen enough of the candidates to know exactly who they don't want in the Oval Office.

BY

 JOC

Would you vote for DeSantis over Biden?

•  Yes
•  No
•  I'd vote third party

https://soapboxie.com/us-politics/views-from-the-moderate-democrat-about

When you get “prayed for”…

Hmm.  What does it mean when someone prays for you, and you don’t feel you are in need of any prayers?  How would you take it?  Case in point:

• A gesture of good will in their eyes? (Definitely)
• A request to their God (and that they want/need to inform me about) that He will help me/force me to see the(ir) light (see religion their way)? (Definitely)
• An (overt) hint-hint wink-wink that I’m “messed up?” (Definitely)
• A disrespect/diminishing of who I am, and have come to be, religiously/spiritually? (Definitely, but they don’t see it)

Seriously, I do not need prayers.  I already have a wonderful life and nothing is missing in it.  To pray for more something, anything, isn’t that kinda, well, selfish?

Q: So, what do you think about those who pray for you?  Do you ever get prayed for?  Do you pray for others?  Explain to me this prayer phenomenon, including the psychology of praying.

*Note- For the record, I just answered, “Thanks for thinking of me,” and let it go.  I don’t want to rock their boat.  But they just don’t see how such a statement can be rather insulting. 🤷‍♀️

(by Primal “a Pantheist*” Soup)

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*pantheism

noun

pan·​the·​ism ˈpan(t)-thē-ˌi-zəm 

My definition:

: a doctrine that equates the “notion of God” with the processes, fundamental forces and Laws of Physics within our universe.  Existence itself is representative of the “God Notion/Process.”

Plausibility in science and the reality of psi phenomena

CONTEXT

There are good reasons to consider the plausibility of data when it is asserted to mean something extraordinary. An example:

Someone with a dent in their car’s fender has a bit of blood and some brown fur in the dent. The car's owner claims they hit a deer the night before. Is that evidence plausible enough to believe that the claim is probably true? Probably for most people. But what if they said they hit a Bigfoot or a furry alien? Now is the evidence enough to be plausible? Would you ask for more evidence before believing the Bigfoot or alien claim is likely true?

The same thing applies to assertions of data from paranormal or psi research. Believers in explanations for supernatural, paranormal and psi phenomena argue that existing data proves that something is there, supernatural or not. 

Psi phenomena are the aggregate of alleged parapsychological functions of the mind including extrasensory perception (ESP), precognition, and psychokinesis. Parapsychology is the study of mental phenomena which are inexplicable by orthodox scientific psychology and other knowledge. Such phenomena include telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. Psychokinesis is the supposed ability of some people to move physical objects by mental effort alone.

ABOUT PLAUSIBILITY

Steven Novella at the Neurologica blog writes:

I get e-mails, and my recent article on ESP research attracted a number of angry individuals who wanted to excoriate my closed minded “scientism”. I think people care so much about ESP and other psi and paranormal phenomena because it gets at the heart of their beliefs about reality – do we live in a purely naturalistic and mechanistic world, or do we live in a world where the supernatural exists? Further, in my experience while many people are happy to praise the virtue of faith (believing without knowing) in reality they desperately want there to be objective evidence for their beliefs. Meanwhile, I think it’s fair to say that a dedicated naturalist would find it disturbing if there really were convincing evidence that contradicts naturalism. 

Both sides have an out, as it were. Believers in a supernatural universe can always say that the supernatural by definition is not provable by science. One can only have faith. This is a rationalization that has the virtue of being true, if properly formulated and utilized. Naturalists can also say that if you have actual scientific evidence of an alleged paranormal phenomenon, then by definition it’s not paranormal. It just reflects a deeper reality and points in the direction of new science. Yeah!

Regardless of what you believe deep down about the ultimate nature of reality (and honestly, I couldn’t care less, as long as you don’t think you have the right to impose that view on others), the science is the science. Science follows methodological naturalism, and is agnostic toward the supernatural question. .... So you can have your faith, just don’t mess with science.

ESP and psi believers become apoplectic when you mention scientific plausibility. In my experience, they have to misunderstand what it is and how it is used, no matter how many times or how many ways I explain it to them, in order to maintain their position. For example, I recently had an exchange where the e-mailer responded:

Dr. Novella, your argumentation here is more reasonable, even if it still displays scientism. I’ll point to your statement, “This is especially true since they are proposing phenomena which are not consistent with the known laws of physics.” Here you’re making the known laws a determining factor for rejecting the prospect of the phenomena. The very point of the investigations is to see if something exists beyond the known laws. Again, the evidence is the authority. The known laws don’t disallow what isn’t known. You seem to think you’re making a very sound argument, all the while exhibiting pure scientism.

Of course, I said nothing of the kind, and no matter how many times I corrected this fallacy, he returned to it. The idea is that since science is trying to discover new things, that already established findings or laws don’t matter and can be comfortably ignored. “The evidence is the authority” – just like with alternative medicine. He pairs this with the straw man that plausibility is “a determining factor”.

Here is how science actually works. First of all, science builds upon itself. We have to take into consideration prior knowledge, because that affects how we interpret new information. If, to give an extreme example to illustrate the point, I make an observation that seems to contradict 1000 prior observations, do we chuck out the prior observations? What is the probability that the 1 observation is wrong vs the 1000 observations?

[There are some] people who claim that they have evidence for information going from the future to the past, or for information being transmitted from one brain to another without any detectable signal, and any known mechanism. The fact that these observations appear to contradict the known laws of physics is not “determinative”. But it is also not just a prior bias. It affects how rock solid [plausible] the evidence has to be before we conclude we have a genuine anomaly [inexplicable data or phenomenon] on our hands. In my opinion, this evidence (for ESP) is orders of magnitude too weak to conclude we have a genuine anomaly. The effect sizes are small, the researchers don’t have a great history for rigor, and the protocols cannot be reliably replicated. So we have relatively weak evidence being put up against rock solid laws of physics. It is not “scientism” to say that the evidence is not sufficient. And it is not scientific or logical to dismiss this dramatic lack of plausibility.

This exemplifies the ongoing disagreement between people who believe ESP and psi phenomena are real and mainstream science consensus that denies that ESP and psi are real. One of the believers, is researcher Daryl Bem. In 2011, Bem published an analysis of data from nine separate ESP experiments that showed that precognition is real. Precognition is knowing that an even will happen before it happens. 

In 2015, Bem and others published a paper that analyzed 90 experiments from 33 laboratories and found that precognition is a real phenomenon. The statistical significance from the 90 experiment analysis was vey high, even higher than the significance that physicists demanded for belief in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. For context, the FDA requires statistical significance of there being a 5% (1 chance in 20) or less chance of the data for a new drug being a statistical fluke. That is usually expressed as p ≤ 0.05 (p means probability of a fluke). The lower the p number, the smaller chance there is of data being a fluke or an anomaly. 

The significance of Bem's 90 experiment analysis was p = 1.2 × 10^-10 or p = 0.00000000012. In other words, the chance of the data being a fluke is extremely low, 1.2 in 10 billion. Despite that, mainstream science still rejects psi phenomena as real, citing the implausibility of precognition in view of the laws of the universe. Mainstream science looks for explanations that do not violate the any law of the universe. Here, the violation is knowledge of a future event flowing backward in time and being accurately sensed by the human brain-mind before the event occurs. 

An expert rejects psi phenomena

One expert on Bem's work expresses a major concern about the entire scientific enterprise in view of Bem's analysis. E.J. Wagenmakers writes:

James Randi, magician and scientific skeptic, has compared those who believe in the paranormal to “unsinkable rubber ducks”: after a particular claim has been thoroughly debunked, the ducks submerge, only to resurface again a little later to put forward similar claims. 

Several of my colleagues have browsed Bem's meta-analysis and have asked for my opinion. Surely, they say, the statistical evidence is overwhelming, regardless of whether you compute a p-value or a Bayes factor. Have you not changed your opinion? This is a legitimate question, one which I will try and answer below by showing you my review of an earlier version of the Bem et al. manuscript.

I agree with the proponents of precognition on one crucial point: their work is important and should not be ignored. In my opinion, the work on precognition shows in dramatic fashion that our current methods for quantifying empirical knowledge are insufficiently strict. If Bem and colleagues can use a meta-analysis to demonstrate the presence of precognition, what should we conclude from a meta-analysis on other, more plausible phenomena?

Disclaimer: the authors [Bem et al] have revised their manuscript since I reviewed it, and they are likely to revise their manuscript again in the future. However, my main worries call into question the validity of the enterprise as a whole.

I urge the authors to convince themselves of the absence of psi and try and replicate one of Bem's experiment in a purely confirmatory setting, with a preregistered analysis protocol. When they monitor the Bayes factor they will, as N grows large, obtain massive evidence in favor of the truth. One good, preregistered experiment is worth a thousand experiments where the results are based on cherry-picking. To indicate that cherry-picking is a problem, I have never seen a preregistered experiment that monitored the Bayes factor and ended up supporting psi. Never.

In another publication Wagenmakers writes:

Research on extra-sensory perception or psi is contentious and highly polarized. On the one hand, its proponents believe that evidence for psi is overwhelming, and they support their case with a seemingly impressive series of experiments and meta-analyses. On the other hand, psi skeptics believe that the phenomenon does not exist, and the claimed statistical support is entirely spurious. We are firmly in the camp of the skeptics. However, the main goal of this chapter is not to single out and critique individual experiments on psi. Instead, we wish to highlight the many positive consequences that psi research has had on more traditional empirical research, an influence that we hope and expect will continue in the future. 

It is evident that even the smallest psi effects are worth millions if applied in games of chance. An online betting facility that requires the gambler to predict, say, whether a picture will appear at the left or on right of the screen should go bankrupt as soon as extraverted females [??] are allowed to predict the location of erotic pictures (we are happily prepared to invest in such a casino). If psi is demonstrably effective in generating cash, it would quickly be accepted in the pantheon of scientifically credible phenomena.

 

An economic argument 

against psi

A problem is that some people are making

money from homeopathy and tarot card readings