Time for a cheerful thread, and just in time for Christmas

Keep America Great! 

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Or even a better one:

Or for a more colorful gift:

And of course this one will be very popular:

So, come on all you Freedom lovin' Americans and Trump supporters, get yours today and send us all your hard earned $$ so you can show all your friends and family members what a classy guy or gal you are!

            

Updates on a couple of the ex-president's escapades

Gutting federal agencies and diversity

Remember when the EXP (ex-president) moved the Interior Department to Colorado a couple of years ago? Yes, we all remember it. A Washington Post article points out some of the ramifications. For context, the EXP and ARP (authoritarian Republican Party) both hate the Interior Department and its Bureau of Land Management, along with most of the rest of the federal government except the military, courts and law enforcement. The WaPo writes:  

As Trump officials were moving the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management from Washington, D.C., to Colorado two years ago, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, issued a stark warning to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt: The department risked a “significant legal liability” by driving Black employees from an agency that was overwhelmingly White.

The agency’s major reorganization was also done without a “strategic workforce plan,” laying out how the changes would advance the agency’s goals, the report added.

As a result, “BLM lacks reasonable assurance the agency will have the workforce necessary to achieve its goals in managing millions of acres of public lands,” the report said.  

While Trump administration officials argued that moving the BLM West would put employees closer to the lands they manage — primarily located in 12 Western states — current and former employees have described how, in fact, the move derailed the agency by breaking up teams that once worked closely together and scattered people across several Western cities. Most of those ordered to move West chose to quit or retire rather than accept new jobs.

So, as usual for the EXP, there was no plan and the agency's ability to do its job was probably significantly impaired. It was just more seat of the pants ARP anti-governance in the name of tearing democracy down and discrediting it. That stunt gives the ARP an excuse to (i) criticize BLM for failing to do its job, and (ii) push for outsourcing the work to private companies who will be free to fleece the taxpayers. As an added bonus, it got rid of some Black employees. It was a twofer for the EXP and ARP! 

The creepy, scary memo

2nd to last bullet point:

When he assumed his role, he vowed to be apolitical
(In American Democracy, the military is supposed to be apolitical) 

In a truly creepy, scary story, the WaPo reports on a memo that a young, inexperienced but raging authoritarian extremist, Johnny McEntee, in the White House wrote. The WaPo writes about the memo in an opinion piece:

[The] evidence comes courtesy of ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, who has unearthed a memorandum from Johnny McEntee, Trump’s director of presidential personnel, listing 14 reasons for ousting Esper. That document was dated Oct. 19, 2020. Three weeks later Esper was fired by a Trump tweet.

The very premise of McEntee’s memo was both sinister and ludicrous — a 30-year-old of no professional or intellectual distinction, whose path to power was carrying Trump’s bags, was making the case for getting rid of a senior Cabinet officer for insufficient loyalty to the president. This revealing and chilling document deserves to be read not as a historical curiosity but as a terrible portent of what could be in store if Trump wins another term. He appears determined to turn the military into his personal goon squad.

One of McEntee’s first complaints was that Esper had “approved the promotion of Lt. Col. [Alexander] Vindman, the start [sic] witness in the sham impeachment inquiry, who told Congress that the President’s call with Ukraine ‘undermined U.S. national security.’”

The next item in the indictment of Esper: “Publicly opposed the President’s direction to utilize American force to put down riots just outside the White House.” This was a reference to Esper’s brave decision in June 2020 to resist Trump’s desires to deploy active-duty troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests.

The most damning and telling grievance against Esper was near the bottom of this pathetic document: “When he assumed his role, he vowed to be apolitical.” Normally being apolitical is a sine qua non for leading the armed forces. That’s why President Biden chose retired Gen. Lloyd Austin as defense secretary and President Barack Obama decided to keep Republican Robert M. Gates in the post. But Trump tried to destroy the professional, apolitical ethos of the armed forces — and if given the opportunity, he will almost certainly do so again.  

Well, the next time around, Trump would want to ensure that the “guys with guns” are on his side. If he wins a second term, Trump’s next defense secretary (Johnny McEntee perhaps?) would almost certainly be somebody more devoted to him than to the Constitution. For anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy, that should be a cause of considerable alarm at a time when Trump and Biden are running almost neck and neck in polling matchups.

This is more clear evidence of the deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic character of the EXP, and arguably the ARP too, most of which still supports the guy and his politics and policies. The EXP demanded loyalty to himself, not the Constitution, the rule of law, truth or anything else. That is a key marker of a full-blown tyrant including a fascist tyrant. 

Questions: 

1. Is this more clear evidence of the deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic character of the EXP, and/or the ARP, which has not criticized the memo or its anti-democratic implications? If not, what is it evidence of, just harmless politics as usual?

2. When the EXP stated that he would hire only the best people, is it reasonable to now believe that by 'the best people' he meant people most loyal to him, not the most competent or devoted to democracy or the Constitution? 

3. Should anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy be considerably alarmed, or is this just another the EXP's harmless exploits, even if he did fire Esper after the McEntee memo came to his attention?  

The political polarization tar baby snags the gerrymander rabbit

To reduce polarization and political extremism, some states got rid of gerrymandering by the party in state power and transferred power to independent commissions. The tactic is apparently backfiring and failing in at least some states that tried the experiment. The New York Times writes:

Independent commissions to oversee the redrawing of electoral maps were thought to be the solution to an age-old problem. Instead, they have become bogged down in political trench warfare.

In Wisconsin, a court battle over redistricting is already unfolding between Republicans who control the Legislature and Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.

In Virginia, members of a bipartisan panel were entrusted with drawing a new map of the state’s congressional districts. But politics got in the way. Reduced to shouting matches, accusations and tears, they gave up.

In Ohio, Republicans who control the legislature simply ignored the state’s redistricting commission, choosing to draw a highly gerrymandered map themselves. Democrats in New York are likely to take a similar path next year.

And in Arizona and Michigan, independent mapmakers have been besieged by shadowy pressure campaigns disguised as spontaneous, grass-roots political organizing.

[A]s this year’s once-in-a-decade redistricting process descends into trench warfare, both Republicans and Democrats have been throwing grenades at the independent experts caught in the middle.

In state after state, the parties have largely abdicated their commitments to representative maps. Each side recognizes the enormous stakes: Redistricting alone could determine which party controls Congress for the next decade.

In some states, commissions with poorly designed structures have fallen victim to entrenched political divisions, leading the process to be punted to courts.

New York Democratic state legislators, who can override the state’s independent redistricting commission with a supermajority vote, have disregarded the draft proposal that the commission made public in September. In New York, Democratic state legislators are likely to ignore recommendations made by the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission. 

Last week, Utah Republicans adopted their own maps, ignoring proposals from a redistricting commission that voters approved in 2018. On Monday, Washington State’s redistricting commission missed a deadline to finish its maps, sending drawing authority to the State Supreme Court.

For decades, well-meaning people saw independent commissions as a crucial way to eliminate gamesmanship that exasperates many voters and distorts American politics: the incumbency protection, the devaluing of people’s votes, the polarization and stridency that it all fuels.   

The poisonous divisions and intolerance that decades of toxic dark free speech has fomented has come home to roost. Extremists got what they wanted, including anti-democratic toxins such as deep social division, a broken democracy, lost of trust and legitimacy in democracy, the press, experts and political opposition, loss of compromise, and loss of political good faith in day to day operations. Included on the list casualties is partisan hostility to transparent, competitive, fair and honest elections. 

In at least 17 states that the ARP (authoritarian Republican Party) controls have passed laws intended to suppress non-Republican votes, and/or to allow state politicians, officials or legislatures the freedom to simply overturn election results the ARP dislikes. The lie behind that, the "stolen" 2020 election, fools no one maybe except some of the ARP elites and most of its rank and file supporters. America's radical right hates free and fair elections and it has been that way among elites at least since the 1980s. The 2020 elections were probably the last transparent, free and fair nationwide elections this country will have for a very long time, maybe forever. The ARP will not make the mistake of allowing that kind of election again as long as it holds power.

In their 2016 book, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels pointed out that well-intended attempts to make democracy better and more responsive tend to either fail to work, or have the opposite of the intended effect. Power in politics is elusive, subtle and it quickly flows wherever there is room for it. For example, in the case of term limits that many voters supported, power tends to flow from termed-out elected politicians and newly elected politicians to career bureaucrats and special interests, making governance outcomes even less responsive to the will of the people. 

In another example, ARP deregulation of businesses is always falsely sold by the ARP, the business community and radical right anti-government ideologues, as means to increase personal freedom and free markets to do good things like trickling prosperity down. In fact, the opposite is the norm. Power flows from government protecting personal freedoms via regulations to the special interests who were regulated. The newly freed business and religious interests (i) reward the politicians who freed and protected them, and (ii) become free to do bad things such as screwing consumers or trampling on civil liberties, which they do not hesitate to do.

Non-partisan means to draw non-partisan voting districts to try to keep elections more competitive and candidates less extremist is failing if the NYT analysis is basically correct. It seems to be correct. Given the stakes and how close the US is to becoming some sort of an aggressive Christian authoritarian autocracy-plutocracy, maybe it is time for blue states to get rid of the experiment. Red states sure as death and taxes are not going to protect transparent, free and fair elections -- they are clearly moving in the opposite direction of building the legal infrastructure for opaque, unfree and unfair elections.

So, for example, if California repealed its independent redistricting commission law and went back to the good old days of the gerrymander rabbit running free and wild, districts could be drawn to obliterate mendacious authoritarian freaks such as Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy from the House of Representatives. What is left of the ARP in California could be decimated and wiped out, which happens to be exactly what it would love to do to those evil, tyrannical, socialist-communist Democratic pedophiles, sinners, atheists, minority people and other deplorables. 

Questions: 

1. Should the CA legislature get rid of independent redistricting, return to the gerrymander and use it to push toxic authoritarian radicals like the mendacious, treasonous Devin Nunes and the mendacious, treasonous Kevin McCarthy out of the House? Or are those two politicians just valiant patriots fighting the insane tyranny and cannibalistic pedophilia of deep state, false flag, socialist-communist-atheist Democrats (or is that wording a bit over the top, if so, how much so?)?

2. Should Blue states pass Republican voter suppression and election rigging laws like the 17 Red States have already done and will continue to do if election results are not to the ARP's liking, or, are the laws the 17 states passed either (i) not voter suppression or election rigging laws, or (ii) actually necessary due to actual proven widespread voter and election fraud in the 'stolen' 2020 election? 

3. Does power really flow to wherever there is room for it and whoever has the wealth and/or power to take it, such as power to gerrymander voting districts or power to abuse consumers who were previously protected by regulations that got taken away? 

An advance in understanding previously unexplained chronic pain

The New York Times writes on a significant advance in understanding the origins of otherwise unexplained chronic pain. In short, experts now believe that most kinds of unexplained chronic pain are caused by glial cells that malfunction. Those cells are complex in their functions and their ability to do the same things, e.g., foster feelings of unexplained pain, by multiple pathways. Glial cells are found in the nervous system in close, complex association with neurons. Glia help neurons function properly and they carry food to neurons and waste away. They are believed to have much more impact on neuron signaling than was believed just a few decades ago.

This finding tells researchers to increase their focus on glial cells, which have not been studied nearly as much as neurons. That's the good news. The bad news is that even if a drug is found that targets and shuts down one pathway that glial cells use to create feelings of pain, they can use other pathways to generate pain.

 

There are six main kinds of glial cells as shown in the diagrams below, four in the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and two in the peripheral nervous system (everywhere else), and subsets of at least one of those main kinds are being found and described[1]:

The NYT writes:

Although glia are scattered throughout the nervous system and take up almost half its space, they long received far less scientific attention than neurons, which do the majority of signaling in the brain and body. Some types of glia resemble neurons, with roughly starfish-like bodies, while others look like structures built with Erector sets, their long, straight structural parts joined at nodes.

When first discovered in the mid-1800s, glia — from the Greek word for glue — were thought to be just connective tissue holding neurons together. Later they were rebranded as the nervous system’s janitorial staff, as they were found to feed neurons, clean up their waste and take out their dead. In the 1990s they were likened to secretarial staff when it was discovered they also help neurons communicate. Research over the past 20 years, however, has shown that glia don’t just support and respond to neuronal activity like pain signals — they often direct it, with enormous consequences for chronic pain.  

If you’re hearing this for the first time and you’re one of the billion-plus people on Earth who suffer from chronic pain (meaning pain lasting beyond three to six months that has no apparent cause or has become independent of the injury or illness that caused it), you might be tempted to say that your glia are botching their pain-management job. 

And you’d be right. For in chronic pain, researchers now believe, glia drive a healthy pain network into a dysregulated state, sending false and destructive pain signals that never end. Pain then becomes not a warning of harm, but a source of it; not a symptom, but, as Stanford pain researcher Elliot Krane puts it, “its own disease.” 

It is still the case that we know far less than what we don't know. And, in the way science understood glial cells since the mid-1800s reflects human nature and the scientific method. Humans, including scientists, are biased to look at what appears to be the coolest, most important stuff and to ignore or even downplay the significance of what initially appears to be dull or even "junk," such as in junk DNA which was originally thought to have little or no function. 

Just look at how human perceptions of glial cells progressed: glue → janitorial staff →  secretarial staff → middle level management, or something about like that. It took about 170 years for that mental progression or understanding to occur. Notice how the perception of researchers is still trapped by the implicit human perception of neurons as the top of the heap, i.e., they are the CEO and Chairman of the board? The question now is, can glia rise above middle level management to senior management status? More research will reveal that answer, preferably sooner than later.

Question: Is this way cool or what, even if a chronic pain cure isn't on the horizon yet? 

Footnote: 
1. Glial cell subpopulation research is in early days. A 2020 paper in Nature Communications, Identification of region-specific astrocyte subtypes at single cell resolution, included this:

Astrocytes, a major cell type found throughout the central nervous system, have general roles in the modulation of synapse formation and synaptic transmission, blood–brain barrier formation, and regulation of blood flow, as well as metabolic support of other brain resident cells. Crucially, emerging evidence shows specific adaptations and astrocyte-encoded functions in regions, such as the spinal cord and cerebellum. To investigate the true extent of astrocyte molecular diversity across forebrain regions, we used single-cell RNA sequencing. Our analysis identifies five transcriptomically distinct astrocyte subtypes in adult mouse cortex and hippocampus. Validation of our data in situ reveals distinct spatial positioning of defined subtypes, reflecting the distribution of morphologically and physiologically distinct astrocyte populations. Our findings are evidence for specialized astrocyte subtypes between and within brain regions. The data are available through an online database (https://holt-sc.glialab.org/), providing a resource on which to base explorations of local astrocyte diversity and function in the brain.

In this research, bits of DNA with fluorescent dye attached was used to visualize individual astrocytes in fluorescent light under a microscope and to differentiate one subtype from another using different dies that fluoresce in different colors, i.e., at different wavelengths. 

Republicans threaten Democrats

The Washington Post writes in an article entitled, In wake of Bannon indictment, Republicans warn of payback: 

Republicans are rallying around former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon after his indictment on charges of contempt of Congress on Friday, warning that Democrats’ efforts to force Bannon to comply with what they say is an unfair subpoena paves the way for them to do the same if they take back the House in 2022.

Bannon, like former president Donald Trump, has refused to comply with an order from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection to turn over records and testify about his actions leading up to the attack, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol trying to stop the certification of President Biden’s electoral college win.

Bannon is expected to turn himself in to law enforcement Monday ahead of a court appearance that afternoon. Democrats and a handful of anti-Trump Republicans argue that the indictment was necessary to enforce subpoenas issued by the Jan. 6 committee to Trump associates who are resisting cooperation and to witnesses summoned by other congressional panels.

Many GOP leaders, however, are seizing on Bannon’s indictment to contend that Democrats are “weaponizing” the Justice Department, warning Democrats that they will go after Biden’s aides for unspecified reasons if they take back the House majority in next year’s midterm elections, as most political analysts expect.  

“For years, Democrats baselessly accused President Trump of ‘weaponizing’ the DOJ. In reality, it is the Left that has been weaponizing the DOJ the ENTIRE TIME — from the false Russia Hoax to the Soviet-style prosecution of political opponents,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the third-ranking House Republican, tweeted Saturday.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) suggested that Republicans would seek payback if the GOP regained control of the House, signaling that in challenging the doctrine of executive privilege, Democrats were making it easier for Republicans to force Biden’s top advisers to testify before a future GOP Congress.  

“Joe Biden has evicerated Executive Privilege,” Jordan wrote on Twitter. “There are a lot of Republicans eager to hear testimony from Ron Klain and Jake Sullivan when we take back the House.” Sullivan is Biden’s national security adviser, and Klain is the White House chief of staff.

Various thoughts come to mind here. In no particular order:

• Maybe Democrats are, to at least some extent, trying to give the DoJ back some of the teeth it used to have, which is a good thing in view of how neutered it was under anti-rule of law Republicans
• Threats to force advisers to testify before congress doesn't seem to amount to much since advisers should talk to Congress and not just operate in secrecy as was the case under our corrupt, mendacious, treasonous ex-president with his corrupt, mendacious, treasonous advisers
• If a politician has done nothing grossly inept or illegal, then they have nothing to fear in testifying before Congress
• Being able to force an adviser, and IMO a president, to honestly communicate with Congress is a force for less corruption and more transparency, both of which are in short supply
• Yes, forcing an adviser or president to testify before Congress can amount to unwarranted harassment, but if no laws were broken that would just be part of the job, and the unreasonably harassed individual should be able to publicly criticize their attackers
• If Republicans get power and start issuing good faith subpoenas to Democratic advisers, there is nothing wrong with it, but if they do it in bad faith, then they are open to criticism for abuse of power and should be harshly sanctioned 
• By making these threats, Republicans make clear that they see the rule of law as subordinate to partisan politics and are thus reasonably seen as generally anti-rule of law, which is anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian
• Based on their behavior over the last couple of decades, it is likely that Republicans will not operate in good faith with this or most anything else, but there is no clear law that prevents this kind of rotten behavior, so this will be the new norm for the foreseeable future 
• If voters tolerate corrupt, mendacious bad faith politics and politicians then that is what the situation has come to for better or worse
• The DoJ under Biden has done a terrible job and anything that reinvigorates DoJ vitality and the rule of law is democratic and good if it is in done in good faith, and authoritarian and bad if done in bad faith
• Courts have ruled that the ex-president cannot claim executive privilege for the kind of information the Democrats are trying to get about the 1/6 insurrection, but at least some House Republicans and the ex-president claim otherwise, which suggests Republican bad faith (later court rulings might change this) 
  
  

Questions: 

1. Are these Republican threats a sign of respect for the even-handed rule of law, or a sign that the rule of law is to be used as a partisan weapon for partisan advantage?

2. How can a person distinguish a good faith House subpoena from one issued in bad faith?

Democrats will probably lose the House in 2022

In normal times, the party in power tends tom bet booted out of the House and/or the Senate. These are not normal times. New gerrymandered voting districts appear to make it almost certain that the ARP (authoritarian Republican Party) will regain control of the House. That will be the end of significant legislation at least until the 2024 elections, maybe longer than that. The New York Times writes:

A year before the polls open in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans are already poised to flip at least five seats in the closely divided House thanks to redrawn district maps that are more distorted, more disjointed and more gerrymandered than any since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.

The rapidly forming congressional map, a quarter of which has taken shape as districts are redrawn this year, represents an even more extreme warping of American political architecture, with state legislators in many places moving aggressively to cement their partisan dominance.

The flood of gerrymandering, carried out by both parties but predominantly by Republicans, is likely to leave the country ever more divided by further eroding competitive elections and making representatives more beholden to their party’s base.

At the same time, Republicans’ upper hand in the redistricting process, combined with plunging approval ratings for President Biden and the Democratic Party, provides the party with what could be a nearly insurmountable advantage in the 2022 midterm elections and the next decade of House races.  

All told, Republicans have added a net of five seats that the party can expect to hold while Democrats are down one. Republicans need to flip just five Democratic-held seats next year to seize a House majority.

A recent NYT article analyzed and explained gerrymandering and the current process in detail.

Gerrymandering is used to rig both House and/or state legislature voting districts in most states. On top of gerrymandering that gives an ARP minority power to dictate control of the House, at least 17 states controlled by the ARP have passed laws intended to suppress Democratic votes and/or rig elections after votes are cast. Republican judges who support gerrymandering and voter suppression have been put on the bench. They are now in firm control of the Supreme Court.

 

Unless congress does something now to allow voters to pick their politicians in free and fair elections instead of the opposite, it looks like voters are going to get cracked, packed and fracked in future rigged elections. Federal courts will not save free and fair elections. Republican federal judges rationalize acceptance of rigged elections by calling it "just politics," which is not something that judges should interfere with. America could very well be on the verge of what turns out to be a long period of harsh, corrupt, authoritarian minority rule.

In hindsight, one can see the wisdom of decades of divisive, polarizing ARP propaganda and lies. By tearing American society apart and constantly vilifying Democrats as Godless radical socialist or communist tyrants, or something worse, most Republican voters are unlikely to ever vote for a Democrat. That seems to be the situation no matter how immoral, corrupt, inept or mendacious the ARP candidate is. The ARP is at least tribal, but arguably cult. For whatever reasons, there is asymmetry in how bad a successful politician can be between the two parties, with the strong advantage going to the ARP. In a cult, bad traits in your own leaders are denied or forgivable, but the same in the opposition is a horror that must be stopped at any cost by any means, including packing, cracking, fracking, deceiving, lying and cheating.

Questions: 

1. Are we witnessing just politics as usual, or is America more likely than not on the verge of a long period of rigid partisan rule or even a form of tyranny by an ARP minority?

2. Since congress is needed to suppress gerrymandering but that probably won't happen, should democratic states like California get rid of non-partisan districting and go back to the gerrymander to get rid of as many Republicans in the House as possible?