News: Climate science, capitalism and government, etc.

Utilities oppose clean air regulations until government 

incentivizes them to support regulations

Capitalism really does work when one understands that profits are everything. The NYT writes:

With Federal Aid on the Table, Utilities Shift to Embrace Climate Goals

As billions in government subsidies were at stake, the electric utility industry shed its opposition to clean-air regulation and put its lobbying muscle behind passing President Biden’s climate bill.

Just two years ago, DTE Energy, a Michigan-based electric utility, was still enmeshed in a court fight with federal regulators over emissions from a coal-burning power plant on the western shore of Lake Erie that ranks as one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-changing air pollution.

But in September, Gerard M. Anderson, who led DTE for the last decade, was on the South Lawn of the White House alongside hundreds of other supporters of President Biden, giving a standing ovation to the president for his success in pushing a climate change package through Congress — a law that will help accelerate the closure of the very same coal-burning behemoth, known as DTE Monroe, that his company had been fighting to protect.

Mr. Anderson’s position reflects a fundamental shift among major electric utilities nationwide as they deploy their considerable clout in Washington: After years of taking steps like backing dark-money groups to sue the government to block tighter air pollution rules, DTE and a growing number of other utilities have joined forces to speed the transition away from fossil fuels.  

Their new stance is driven less by evolving ideology than the changing economics of renewable energy, fueled in part by the sheer amount of money the federal government is putting on the table to encourage utilities to move more quickly to cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy like solar and wind.

The priorities of most (~90% ?) big businesses cannot be much clearer than this. Profit talks and everything else walks. 

Despite Republican Party ideology vilification of, and vehement opposition to, Biden’s attempt to deal with climate change, businesses go for the cash. Ideology, hate of government and everything else be damned. Profit is king. Everything else is worthless peasantry. The government hater wing of the fascist GOP, i.e., the entire GOP leadership, must hate news like this. One can bet that Faux News won’t be mentioning this inconvenient little development.

A bit of bipartisanship about same-sex marriage happened!

The NYT writes:

The Senate passed landmark legislation on Tuesday to mandate federal recognition for same-sex marriages, as a lame-duck Congress mustered a notable moment of bipartisanship before Democrats were to lose their unified control of Capitol Hill.

The 61-to-36 vote put the bill on track to become law in the final weeks before Republicans assume the majority in the House of Representatives at the start of the new Congress in January.

The bill would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex couples. It prohibits states from denying the validity of an out-of-state marriage based on sex, race or ethnicity. But in a condition that Republican backers insisted upon, it would guarantee that religious organizations would not be required to provide any goods or services for the celebration of any marriage, and could not lose tax-exempt status or other benefits for refusing to recognize same-sex unions.

Notice the Republicans protected Christianity and its precious tax-exempt status. That is kleptocratic theocracy in action. Christian nationalist churches remain free to discriminate as much as their bigoted black little hearts desire. But on balance, this is still good news. 

One step at a time. One fight at a time.

Time for cognitive biology!: Fostering prosocial behavior

Some research suggests that getting people to think about the future can foster prosocial behavior. A recent social science paper comments:

Previous studies suggest a link between future thinking and prosocial behaviors. However, this association is not fully understood at state and trait level. The present study tested whether a brief future thinking induction promoted helping behavior in an unrelated task. In addition, the relation between mental time travel and prosocial behaviors in daily life was tested with questionnaire data. Forty-eight participants filled in questionnaires and were asked to think about the future for one minute or to name animals for one minute (control condition) before playing the Zurich Prosocial Game (a measure of helping behavior). Results revealed that participants in the future thinking condition helped significantly more than participants in the control condition. Moreover, questionnaire data showed that dispositional and positive orientation toward the future and the past was significantly associated with self-reported prosocial behaviors. The present findings suggest that thinking about the future in general has positive transfer effects on subsequent prosocial behavior and that people who think more about the past or future in a positive way engage more in prosocial behavior.

Anecdotal reports have linked future thinking to increase in prosocial behavior or conflict resolution, even in international conflicts. One example is the Camp David Accords stating the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978. After several days of negotiations without an agreement at Camp David, the American president Jimmy Carter introduced grandchildren to the discussion. This was a turning point in the negotiation. Later that day, Begin, Sadat and Carter signed the Camp David Accord. It is possible that evoking grandchildren shifted the focus from the present to the future, thereby increasing the willingness for compromise and conflict resolution.

Evolutionary considerations also argue that mental time travel may guide decision-making and lead to cooperative behaviors by bypassing opportunistic motivation, impulsive choices, and the effects of time discounting. In particular, it has been suggested that episodic future thinking [the ability to imagine oneself vividly in a specific future event] might foster prosocial intentions as well as behaviors. Several studies have provided evidence establishing the link between episodic future thinking and prosocial intentions.

If this is true, it suggests that climate news reporting should usually mention plausible future scenarios such as adverse effects of climate change on species extinction and on the next and future generations. 

Time for physics! α - the Fine Structure Constant: ~1/137

Don't try to understand all of this ~16 minute video. For a thought experiment, instead try to follow the gist of the reasoning. Just go with the flow and don't sweat the details. The line of thought reveals some of the limits of human understanding and some of what physics and mathematics are grappling with. 

News bits 'n whatnot

A lot of people are slow to see reality

The NYT writes:

Jewish Allies Call Trump’s Dinner With 

Antisemites a Breaking Point

Supporters who looked past the former president’s admirers in bigoted corners of the far right, and his own use of antisemitic tropes, now are drawing a line. “He legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters,” says one. “And this scares me.”  

But last week, Mr. Trump dined at his Palm Beach palace, Mar-a-Lago, with the performer Kanye West, who had already been denounced for making antisemitic statements, and with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and Holocaust denier, granting the antisemitic fringe a place of honor at his table. Now, even some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters say they can no longer ignore the abetting of bigotry by the nominal leader of the Republican Party.

“I am a child of survivors. I have become very frightened for my people,” Morton Klein, head of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, said on Monday, referring to his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. “Donald Trump is not an antisemite. He loves Israel. He loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”

Seriously? Really? It took this long and something this blatant to scare another self-deluded radical right right winger? This is what scares me about people who can delude themselves into believing they are pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties while supporting a bigoted fascist who is blatantly anti-democracy and anti-civil liberties.

This reminds me of the Indian scouts that Col. Custer used to track down tribes the scouts hated so that Custer could slaughter them. Later after the main event slaughter was complete, the scout tribes got what was coming to them. 

So, a question pops right up. How stupid and/or deluded are some people? Apparently, pretty stupid and/or deluded. Look at how Mr Recently Scared rationalized Trump’s antisemitism into a false reality, i.e., He loves Israel. He loves Jews. That is nonsense. Trump loves Trump. Stupid, deluded, both and/or something(s) else, Mr Scared is Custer’s Indian scout who still doesn’t get it.

Stolen election hardball in Arizona

The AP writes:

GOP-controlled Arizona county refuses to certify election

State Elections Director Kori Lorick wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs is required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and will have to exclude Cochise County’s votes if they aren’t received in time.

That would threaten to flip the victor in at least two close races — a U.S. House seat and state schools chief — from a Republican to a Democrat.

As usual, there is no evidence of widespread vote or voter fraud in Cochise County. That inconvenient fact does not matter. What matters is subverting those elections based on lies about vote and/or voter fraud or irregularities.

So, a question pops right up. How ignorant, stupid and/or deluded are some people who still cannot see blatant Republican Party fascism and its hostility to elections and other targeted civil liberties? Elections and voting are civil liberties. Stupid, deluded, ignorant and/or something(s) else, most rank and file Republican voters are Indian scouts who still don’t get it. If the fascist beast they support gains enough power, it will turn on them sooner or later.

From the crumbling rule of law files:

Rut roh!! Be afraid: The Supreme Court is at it again 

The NYT writes:

Supreme Court Seems Poised to Limit Public Corruption Cases

The fraud convictions of Joseph Percoco, a former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Louis Ciminelli, a contractor in Buffalo, appeared likely to be overturned.

The Supreme Court, which has become increasingly skeptical of federal prosecutions of public corruption in state government, seemed poised on Monday to hand prosecutors two more defeats.

The question in the first case, Percoco v. United States, No. 21-1158, was whether Mr. Percoco could be prosecuted under a federal law that makes it a crime to deprive the government of “honest services” for conduct that took place after he resigned his government position to run the governor’s 2014 re-election campaign.

Yaakov M. Roth, a lawyer for Mr. Percoco, said the law applies only to people who exercise the authority of the government, a power he said his client had lacked when he received the payments.

“What he did have, like many lobbyists and donors and interest groups and others, was influence — in his case, influence drawn from years of public service, from a close relationship to the Cuomo family and from his senior campaign role,” Mr. Roth said. “But none of that creates a fiduciary duty to the public.”

Justice Clarence Thomas asked whether an official could resign for an afternoon, just long enough to take a bribe. Mr. Roth responded that such a bribe would very likely be in exchange for government action after the official’s return, which he said would be covered by the law.

“The State of New York doesn’t seem to be upset about this arrangement,” Thomas said of the payments to Mr. Percoco, adding, “It seems as though we are using a federal law to impose ethical standards on state activity.”

Once again, the hard core pro-corruption capitalism that the Christofascist Republican Party leadership supports is on public display for all to see. What the Christofascists on the Supreme Court are aiming for in this case is severance of federal law enforcement reach into state corruption. The underlying truth is that it is easier to corrupt a state government and state law enforcement than it is to corrupt their federal counterparts. 

This is why Republican brass knuckles capitalist elites are so hell-bent on shifting as much power  as possible from the federal government and law enforcement to the states. That opens the door to more corruption with less danger for the criminals and bent politicians and bureaucrats. In turn, more corruption amounts to more wealth and power for the capitalists.

The Republicans have been chipping away at anti-corruption laws for years. This is just another step on the fascist Republican road to legalizing blatant corruption in government.

Big businesses hate labor unions

Vice writes:

Federal Judge Orders Amazon to Stop Firing People for Organizing

A cease-and-desist order filed against the company demands it stop retaliating against unionizing workers.

A federal judge filed a cease-and-desist order against Amazon on Friday, demanding that the company stop firing its employees for participating in union organizing.

Once again, brass knuckles capitalism shows its true colors. The rule of law does not matter much. Profits matter.

Federal judges and judicial independence; Radical right RINO hunting

Unaccountable federal judges 

A NYT opinion piece discusses judicial independence and how it can be two-edged sword, one edge pro-democracy, the other anti-democracy. The author, Jamelle Bouie, raises two interesting questions about lifetime tenure for federal judges. Bouie writes:

The most striking detail in the recent investigation by The New York Times into another potential Supreme Court breach is not the evidence that Justice Samuel Alito or his wife may have leaked information to conservative friends in 2014 about the outcome of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which extended “religious liberty” to the actions of family-owned corporations.

No, the most striking detail is the extent to which a number of Republican justices, Alito included, appear to have been the targets of a sophisticated and well-funded influence operation designed to notch as many legal and constitutional victories for moneyed and conservative interests as the justices were willing to give.

The framers of the Constitution wanted an independent judiciary — strong enough to resist corruption as well as the influence of public opinion. As such, federal judges enjoy tenure during “good behavior.” Barring impeachment and conviction, they cannot be removed.  

My colleagues in the newsroom, Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker, describe a kind of revolving door, where wealthy donors to conservative causes invite justices to meals, vacation homes and private clubs; where they contribute money to the Supreme Court Historical Society for the purpose of meeting with and influencing the justices; and where the former head of one such influence operation, Faith and Action, went as far as to purchase a building across the street from the court so that he could cultivate the people who worked there.

But what if lifetime tenure, rather than leading judges away from temptation, makes it easier to tempt them? In an era in which the Supreme Court is as powerful as it has ever been — and which, not coincidentally, the wealthiest Americans have an almost unbreakable grip on our politics — what if lifetime tenure, rather than raising the barriers to corruption, makes it easier to influence the court by giving interested parties the time and space to operate? And beyond the question of undue influence, what if lifetime tenure works too well to sever the court from the public, rendering it both unaccountable and dangerous to the popular foundations of American government?

No modern radical right Republican federal judge would admit to being influenced by rich and powerful people. They all vehemently deny it. But those people are skilled liars. And probably significantly self-deceived. Rich and powerful people are who federal judges tend to socialize with and listen to. America's political system is widely known as a pay-to-play system.[1] To get influence, i.e., to play, one can pay with cash or with whatever perks that power can afford. 

See the two-edged sword here? When Republican politicians choose morally rotted, radical right and Christian nationalist judges, why believe in their moral rectitude or their reading of the US Constitution? They are called by God himself to fix what is broken in America. They have their morals and infallible, God given Christian Sharia laws. They don't care about our morals or secular laws. 

Radicalism and violence

The NYT editorial board published an interesting argument in an essay, How a Faction of the Republican Party Enables Political Violence:

On Oct. 12, 2018, a crowd of Proud Boys arrived at the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan. They had come to the Upper East Side club from around the country for a speech by the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes. It was a high point for the Proud Boys — which until that point had been known best as an all-male right-wing street-fighting group — in their embrace by mainstream politics.

The Metropolitan Republican Club is an emblem of the Republican establishment. It was founded in 1902 by supporters of Theodore Roosevelt, and it’s where New York City Republicans such as Fiorello La Guardia and Rudy Giuliani announced their campaigns. But the presidency of Donald Trump whipped a faction of the Metropolitan Republican Club into “an ecstatic frenzy,” said John William Schiffbauer, a Republican consultant who used to work for the state G.O.P. on the second floor of the club.

Republicans at the New York club have not distanced themselves from the Proud Boys. Soon after the incident, a candidate named Ian Reilly, who, former club members say, had a lead role in planning the speech, won the next club presidency. He did so in part by recruiting followers of far-right figures, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, to pack the club’s ranks at the last minute. A similar group of men repeated the strategy at the New York Young Republicans Club, filling it with far-right members, too.

Many moderate Republicans have quit the clubs in disgust. Looking back, Mr. Schiffbauer said, Oct. 12, 2018, was a “proto” Jan. 6. 

In conflicts like this one — not all of them played out so publicly — there is a fight underway for the soul of the Republican Party. On one side are Mr. Trump and his followers, including extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. On the other side stand those in the party who remain committed to the principle that politics, even the most contentious politics, must operate within the constraints of peaceful democracy. It is vital that this pro-democracy faction win out over the extremists and push the fringes back to the fringes.

It has happened before. The Republican Party successfully drove the paranoid extremists of the John Birch Society out of public life in the 1960s. Party leaders could do so again for the current crop of conspiracy peddlers. .... A healthy democracy requires both political parties to be fully committed to the rule of law and not to entertain or even tacitly encourage violence or violent speech. A large faction of one party in our country fails that test, and that has consequences for all of us.

It is impossible to fully untangle the relationship between conspiracy theories and violence. But what Americans do know should sound alarms: A survey this year found that some 18 million Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and that force is justified to return him to power. Of those 18 million, eight million own guns, and one million either belong to a paramilitary group or know someone who does. That’s alarming because violent people who belong to communities, online or offline, where violence is widely accepted are more likely to act. A portion of the G.O.P. has become such a community.

It is unclear to me how powerful “moderate Republicans” in the GOP might be. One does not hear much from them. Most of the Republicans in congress voted to protect Trump and they currently treat the 1/6 coup attempt as no big deal and not worth investigating. The RNC still calls the 1/6 coup attempt “legitimate political discourse.” Radicalized, extremist Republican theocrats control the Supreme Court and in a few weeks they will control the House. 

The NYT’s Editorial Board may misapprehend the weakness of moderate Republicans and the strength of the radical extremists. The moderates have been RINO hunted out of power, influence and/or the party. Sure, there are some moderates left, just like there are some atheists, gays, pro-abortionists and people who support some gun regulations. But their presence in the party is insignificant. 

It’s a safe bet that most of the Nazis (~99.9% ?)  

don’t support Biden or democrats generally[2]

Footnotes: 

1. Wikipedia on pay-to-play in politics:

While the direct exchange of campaign contributions for contracts is the most visible form of pay-to-play, the greater concern is the central role of money in politics, and its skewing of both the composition and the policies of government. Thus, those who can pay the price of admission, such as to a $1000/plate dinner or $25,000 “”breakout session”, gain access to power and/or its spoils, to the exclusion of those who cannot or will not pay: “giving certain people advantages that other[s] don't have because they donated to your campaign.” Good-government advocates consider this an outrage because “political fundraising should have no relationship to policy recommendations.”

But as we all know, political fundraising has a direct relationship to actual policy.

2. The Guardian wrote in 2016:

American Nazi Party leader sees 'a real opportunity' 

with a Trump presidency

Chairman Rocky Suhayda says on radio show that a Donald Trump presidency could give American Nazis the chance to build a ‘pro-white’ political caucus 

“It doesn’t have to be anti, like the movement’s been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It’s kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don’t go around and act like a bigot. That’s what the movement should contemplate. All right.”

On what human sense are sensing: We simulate reality

What we sense really isn't exactly reality. The brain-mind has to create illusions and narratives to explain things that are very probably not fully understandable because they far too complex for probably any form of life to comprehend. An article by Discover Magazine goes into this for a general audience: 

How Quantum Mechanics Lets Us See, Smell and Touch

How much of the quantum world can we experience in our daily lives? And what sort of information can our senses glean about the true nature of reality? After all, as the origin of the theory itself makes clear, quantum phenomena can lie just under our noses. In fact, they may be taking place right inside our noses.

The Quantum Schnozz

What’s going on in your nose when you wake up and smell the coffee, or the slice of bread browning in your non-lethal toaster? For such an in-your-face sensory organ, the nose is poorly understood. No less a luminary than Enrico Fermi, who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, once remarked to a friend while frying onions that it would be nice to understand how our sense of smell works.

So you’re lying in bed, and someone has thoughtfully brewed some freshly ground Sumatran dark roast. Molecules from the elixir waft through the air. Your inhalations draw some of these molecules into a cavity between your eyes just above the roof of your mouth. The molecules stick to a layer of mucus on the upper surface of the cavity, embedded with olfactory neurons. Dangling from the brain like the tentacles of a jellyfish, olfactory neurons are the only part of the central nervous system constantly exposed to the outside world.

What happens next isn’t quite clear. We know the molecules bind to some of the 400 different receptors on the surface of the olfactory neurons; we don’t know exactly how that contact creates our sense of smell. Why is smell such a difficult sense to understand?

“In part, it’s the difficulty of setting up experiments to probe what’s going on inside the olfactory receptors of the nose,” says Andrew Horsfield, a materials scientist at Imperial College London.

The conventional explanation for how smell works seems straightforward: The receptors accept very specific shapes of molecules. They’re like locks, which can be opened only by the right keys.

But there’s a fundamental problem with the lock-and-key model: “You can have molecules of wildly different shape and composition, which all give you the same odor perception,” says Horsfield. It seems that something more than shape must be involved, but what?

A controversial alternative to the lock-and-key model suggests our sense of smell arises not just from the shape of molecules, but also from the manner in which those molecules vibrate.

Feeling Your Way

Now back to that cup of coffee. The cup feels substantial, a solid chunk of matter firmly in contact with the skin of your hand. But that’s an illusion: We never really touch anything, at least not in the sense of two solid slabs of matter coming together.[1] More than 99.9999999999 percent of an atom consists of empty space, with nearly all its stuff concentrated in the nucleus.

When you exert pressure against the cup with your hand, the seeming solidity comes from the resistance of electrons in the cup. Electrons themselves don’t have any volume at all — they’re just fleeting, zero-dimensional flecks of negative electric charge that surround atoms and molecules like clouds. And the laws of quantum mechanics limit them to specific energy levels around atoms and molecules. As your hand grasps the cup, it forces electrons from one level to another, and that requires energy from the hand’s muscles, which the brain interprets as touching something solid.

Our sense of touch, then, arises from an exceedingly complex interaction between electrons around the molecules of our bodies and those of the objects we encounter. From that information, our brain creates the illusion that we possess solid bodies moving through a world filled with other solid objects. Touch doesn’t give us an accurate sense of reality. And it may be that none of our perceptions match what’s really out there. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, believes that our senses and brain evolved to hide the true nature of reality, not to reveal it.

“My idea is that reality, whatever it is, is too complicated and would take us too much time and energy [to process],” he says.

Hoffman likens the picture our brain constructs of the world to the graphical interface on a computer screen. All the colorful icons on the screen — the trash can, the mouse pointer, the file folders — bear no resemblance at all to what’s really going on inside the computer. They’re abstractions, simplifications that allow us to interact with complex electronics.

In Hoffman’s view, evolution has shaped our brains to operate in much the same way, as a graphical interface that doesn’t reproduce the world with any sort of fidelity. Evolution doesn’t favor the development of accurate perceptions; it rewards ones that enhance survival. Or as Hoffman puts it, “Fitness beats truth.”  

So while one organism might construct a more accurate representation of reality, that representation doesn’t enhance its survivability. Hoffman’s studies have led him to a remarkable conclusion: “To the extent that we’re tuned to fitness, we will not be tuned to reality. You can’t do both.”  

As Hoffman’s work shows, we haven’t yet come to grips with the full meaning of quantum theory and what it says about the nature of reality. Planck himself struggled for most of his life to understand the theory he helped launch, and always believed in an objective universe that exists independently of us [I believe that too]. He once wrote about why he decided to go into physics against the advice of his mentor: “The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.” Maybe it will take another century, and another revolution, to prove whether he was right, or as mistaken as Professor von Jolly.

The article is long and this is only about half of it. But I hope that one can get some feel for how complicated the concept of reality and human perceptions of it are. 

Footnote:

1. I have a quibble with the argument that we do not touch a solid thing. That feels wrong to me. When our hand picks up a rock or other solid thing, there is very close contact. Atoms or molecules of both are coming up against each other and a few diffuse into each other. Atoms of solid gold and other metals in contact with each other diffuse into each. Measured diffusion rates for metals was being published long ago, e.g., this 1950 paper, The diffusion rates of some metals in copper, silver, and gold. An 1896 paper commented: "The diffusion of molten and solid metals has long demanded investigation, their molecular mobility being of great interest in relation to the constitution of matter, and its results of much industrial importance." 

Just because atoms and molecules are mostly empty space, does not mean that atoms and molecules do not interact at the atomic level when they come in contact with each other. If the mixing of atoms and molecules of two different solids, liquids or gases does not constitute touching, then I don't understand what touching means. 

Acknowledgment: Thanks to ulTRAX for bringing this article to my attention.