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Sunday, February 9, 2025

Is Donald Trump now beyond the reach of the law?

It certainly appears that HE is betting on it..
  
 
Who, precisely, is primus inter pares? It has long been the overwhelming US legal consensus that it's SCOTUS. but,

"HOW MANY REGIMENTS DOES
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS HAVE?"
 
Paraphrasing a reported musing of Josef Stalin (?) regarding the Pope—"how many Divisions does the Pope have?"
 
"Separation of Powers?" "Checks and Balances?" "Co-equal Branches?" 

Our "Originalists / Textualists" might have a few surprises in store.

 
I am no lawyer, nor a Constitutional historian, but I have been through every word of it multiple times. The 4th Amendment was a particular focus of my 1998 graduate thesis. The foregoing summation is from the output of a text analyzer I used on the complete Constitution. Below, the top 25 words sorted by decreasing frequency.
 
 
Unsurprising that the word “shall“ is right near the top (3). The old programmer in me couldn’t help, but notice the and / or / not frequently “boolean” operators (conjunctive, disjunctive, negation). More on that stuff later. It’s also germane that the combinatorial collections of the individual words are what really count linguistically to derive the prescriptions and proscriptions comprising constitutional governance language. Syntax that begets rational and clear meaning. 

UPDATES
Trump Signals He Might Ignore the Courts
Yesterday, the president said that no judge “should be allowed” to rule against the changes his administration is making.
By Jonathan Chait

The United States is sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis. Not only has the Trump administration seized for itself extraconstitutional powers, but yesterday, it raised the specter that, should the courts apply the text of the Constitution and negate its plans, it will simply ignore them.

The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz once theorized that presidential systems are more likely than parliamentary systems to undergo constitutional crises or coup attempts, because they create dueling centers of power. The president and Congress both enjoy popular elections, creating a clash of popular mandates when opposing parties win simultaneous control. “Who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people,” Linz asked, “the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies?” Presidential systems would teeter and fall, he argued, when the president and Congress could not resolve their competing claims to legitimacy.

A dozen years ago, when Republicans in Congress presented their majorities as having negated Barack Obama’s electoral mandate and began threatening to precipitate a debt crisis to force him to accept their domestic economic plan, Linz’s ideas began attracting renewed attention among liberal intellectuals. And indeed, the system is teetering. But the source of the emergency is nearly the opposite of what Linz predicted. The Trump administration is not refusing to share power with an opposing party. It is refusing to follow the constitutional limits of a government that its own party controls completely.

Donald Trump is unilaterally declaring the right to ignore spending levels set by Congress, and to eliminate agencies that Congress voted to create. What makes this demand so astonishing is that Trump could persuade Congress, which he commands in personality-cult style, to follow his demands. Republicans presently control both houses of Congress, and any agency that Congress established, it can also cut or eliminate.

Yet Trump refuses to even try to pass his plan democratically. And as courts have stepped in to halt his efforts to ignore the law, he is now threatening to ignore them too. “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X yesterday morning. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”... 
SCOTUS has now ruled (Trump v US) that an incumbent President is immune from both civil suits and criminal indictment should they stem from any "official acts." It would not be much of a distant further stretch for the "conservative" majority to soon declare that, given that SCOTUS has no independent armed enforcement entity, to simply find unequivocally that the only extant "remedy" is House impeachment and Senate conviction & removal.

Ain't gonna happen in this judico-political climate. Recall, we've already been down that path twice. How did that work out?

How can we prevent our suicidal patients from killing themselves? That’s an important question for a primary-care physician like me. I am often in the position of trying to assess—in 15 minutes or less—which patients need urgent treatment. The type of guidance that might help me can be found in a paper that was published in 2022 on PSNet, the Patient Safety Network, a federally funded initiative. “Few considerations are more critical,” the authors wrote, “than identifying a person at risk for taking their own life.”

On January 31, however, the authors of that paper received a notice that their peer-reviewed article had been struck from the PSNet website. Apparently, it violated Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” signed by Donald Trump on his first day in office.

In addition to being a physician, I happen to be a woman, so I was curious why women needed defending from an analysis of how health professionals might better help suicidal patients. In the paper, the authors reminded clinicians to keep in mind which patient groups are known to be at higher risk, citing peer-reviewed data: “High risk groups include male sex, being young, veterans, Indigenous tribes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ).” The acknowledgment of transgender people, however peripheral, was apparently enough to invite the ax.

The memo came out on a Wednesday, and agencies had until 5 p.m. on Friday to scrub their websites—as well as their agencies, grants, contracts, and personnel—of anything that might “promote or inculcate gender ideology.” As a result, hundreds of government websites were shorn of articles, pages, and data sets about transgender issues, along with information on contraception, HIV, and abortion.

Much of the information that was stripped came from the CDC website, but even pages on the Census Bureau and the National Park Service sites came down. The tech-news publication 404 Media has estimated that more than 2,000 data sets have disappeared from government websites since Trump took office…
Infuriating. Dr. Ofri is one our most eminent physicians. I have cited her many times.

More coming...
_________
  

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Hold My Bier™

Happy Birthday to me... 
   

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Trump Attorney General Pam Blondi is sworn in,

and promptly declares all DEI initiatives presumptively "criminal" pending "investigation."
  

The Department of Justice is committed to enforcing all federal civil rights laws and ensuring equal protection under the law. As the United States Supreme Court recently stated, "[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it." Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181, 206 (2023). On January 21, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, 90 Fed. Reg. 8633 (Jan. 21, 2025), making clear that policies relating to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" ("DEi") and "diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility"("DEIA") "violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws" and "undermine our national unity." Id. at 8633.

To fulfill the Nation's promise of equality for all Americans, the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division will investigate, eliminate, and penalize illegal DEi and DEIA preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities in the private sector and in educational institutions that receive federal funds

Full Pam Blondi 2-page memo here (PDF).

Of personal interest to me:
 
 
Below, to my specific concern:

Sux.
 
My Granddaughter-in-Law KJ, wife of my elder Grandson Keenan and mother of my Great Grandson KAI. She loves being a teacher. Had I the money, I'd pay for her to go to the MIT Early Childhood Cognition Lab operation.
 
 
I've been trying to help with her graduate studies options. 

Will AG Blondi go after MIT?

PRIVATE SECTOR DEI TO BE TARGETED?
 
A bit a quick searching led me here forthwith, Institute for Diversity Certification (IDC), Inc
 

An E-Z Blondi bullying target?

ERRATUM: PRESIDENT MUSK


I'm not sure it's possible to overstate the threat at this point.
 

MORE AG BLONDI

CLICK HERE
___
 
THE NEW YORKER: MORE STUFF
    
With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the long-held conservative grudge against affirmative action and programs designed to upend the effects of racial discrimination has transformed into a witch hunt. In the past decade, conservatives have cycled through attacks on wokeness, affirmative action, critical race theory, and the diversity-equity-and-inclusion initiatives known, now pejoratively, as D.E.I. The target has moved, but the message is the same: anti-racism is divisive and discriminatory and should end at all costs.

Today, D.E.I. is in the crosshairs. Its elasticity has made it vulnerable to a wide-ranging blame game. D.E.I. can be many things, from efforts to increase the diversity of a workplace through hiring initiatives to the creation of affinity groups that bring underrepresented workers together. It may also include workplace trainings on topics such as racism, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment. Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted D.E.I. programming that is intrusive or even alienating, making workers feel that they are being told what to think or how to feel. But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone…

What critiques of D.E.I. tend to imply, but never quite openly say, is that competent white people are being replaced with incompetent Black people. Just as universities were blamed for displacing qualified and deserving Asian American students with unqualified and undeserving Black students in the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court’s sacking of affirmative action, liberals are now accused of compromising the health and safety of the public to appease the special-interest demographic of incompetent and unqualified Black workers. D.E.I. has been blamed for the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, the wildfires in Los Angeles, and the midair collision of a helicopter and a plane that killed sixty-seven people in Washington, D.C. Trump is using D.E.I. to scythe through the federal government’s disproportionately Black and female workforce and to upend programs that he and his adviser Elon Musk declare to be wasteful and superfluous. Among federal health workers, Black employees have reportedly been the focus of a right-wing “D.E.I. watch list,” which published their names and salaries alongside their alleged D.E.I. crimes…

In 1986, Gilda Radner, one of “Saturday Night Live” ’s original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer, at the age of forty. She underwent a hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation, entered remission, and became the public face of a support group for cancer patients called the Wellness Community, which focussed on positive thinking. She appeared on the cover of Life magazine with the headline “Gilda Radner’s Answer to Cancer: Healing the Body with Mind and Heart.” Then she learned that her cancer had spread.

Overwhelmed by fear and despair, Radner, who had a history of eating disorders, was drawn to members of the Wellness Community who followed a strict macrobiotic diet. “They seemed the least nervous and most in control of their lives,” she observes in her memoir, “It’s Always Something.” A beautiful woman with lymphoma made macrobiotic meals for Radner and told her that the diet has “cured a lot of people.” Radner hired a live-in macrobiotic chef, who fed her rice cream, miso soup, bean curd, and puréed vegetables, and instructed her to walk in her “stocking feet on the stones in the driveway” to help her intestines. She began to spend more time alone; her friends “asked too many questions about macrobiotics.”

Soon, Radner writes, “I was in outer space—feeling pure, chewing my food, blessed by God, sure that I had cancer under control and that it was disappearing from my body.” In fact, her blood levels of CA-125—an antigen that can be measured to detect ovarian cancer—had tripled, and her weight had dropped to ninety-three pounds. When she re-started chemotherapy, she was severely underweight, dehydrated, and required blood transfusions. Radner died in May, 1989, and it’s possible that her macrobiotic experiment hastened her death…

I know this problem all too painfully well. See here also.

More to come...
_________
  



Tuesday, February 4, 2025

TOO MUCH CRAZY FOR ONE DAY...


The abject cluelessness is rather breathtaking. More shortly, but, 


 
During a live TV joint press conference with Israeli PM Netanyahu tonight, President Trump called for all Palestinians to be permanently removed from the Gaza Strip to other neighboring Arab countries, so the U.S. could come in and re-develop it into a U.S. owned "Riviera of the Middle East."
 
I am not making that up.

 
Uhhh....

Monday, February 3, 2025

Two weeks after Trump's 2025 Inauguration,

this is what I saw on my iPhone when I awoke.
   

Are we having fun yet?

 
…Musk is no reformer. He’s the mad king’s Hand, seizing real power with zero legitimacy.

Meanwhile, Trump’s meltdown is setting fire to American finances with a senseless tariff war. Between the two of them, they’re out to demolish America’s credibility, sabotage its economy, and unravel its global standing. They’re shutting down programs on aesthetic whim and personal pique, ignoring that an executive order doesn’t magically supersede the Constitution. The Democrats, so far, are mostly blinking in shock. The Republicans, once the party of checks and balances, have quietly hopped on board the carnival ride, letting Trump and Musk run the show.

We are under attack from a deranged billionaire and a senile narcissist. They’ve got the nuclear codes, the national treasure, and the might of the U.S. government in their sweaty palms. Unless we snap out of this trance, no one will save us but ourselves. The history books are littered with cautionary tales of mad kings and the ruin they wrought.

We’re living the sequel, folks, and it’s on us to change the ending.
Ugh...
 
"HOW MANY DIVISIONS DOES JOHN ROBERTS HAVE?"
 
_________
  

Friday, January 31, 2025

Black Hawk Don

...President Trump walked into the White House briefing room late on Thursday morning for a press conference on the previous night’s tragic plane crash over the Potomac, the first deadly accident involving a commercial airliner near Washington, D.C., since 2009. He read prepared remarks calling the country “one family” in the face of tragedy. Then he looked up and discarded the platitudinous talking points to bash his Democratic predecessors, air-traffic controllers themselves, and an amorphous “diversity push,” baselessly suggesting that all were somehow responsible for the crash. He said that Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Administration’s Transportation Secretary, had run the agency “right into the ground with his diversity,” and insisted that both Barack Obama and Joe Biden had rejected his proposed standards to insure that only those air-traffic controllers of the “highest intellect” could be hired. “Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse,” he said.

These were hardly the consoling words needed by a grieving nation. But, in the end, Trump’s performance was, perhaps, the day’s most revealing, with little of the obfuscation that came from his nominees on Capitol Hill. Trump said loud and clear what those surrounding him often try to hide on his behalf: He does not care about facts. He does not care about leading the country. He will seek political advantage in anything, even the death of sixty-seven people in a horrific accident in the second week of his Presidency.

It was hard to turn back to the confirmation hearings after listening to him. The maga-palooza in the Senate, after all, was but a reflection of Trump himself—these are his nominees, his choices, the fights that he has chosen to pick. He overshadowed any of the crazy or outrageous or disturbing things they had to say with his own words. Gabbard, Kennedy, and Patel are not the crisis in America set off by his reëlection, they are the consequences of it. Trump is the crisis—is, was, and will continue to be. Want to know how the next four years are going to go? Rewatch, if you can stand it, that press conference. This is it.

BUT WAIT: THERE’S MORE… 


 
SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE
 
DEFCON-47
 
YALE HISTORIAN DR. TIMOTHY SNYDER
The Logic of Destruction
And how to resist it

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow…
From his Substack. Read all of it.
 
JOYCE VANCE WHITE
The Anti-President
I don’t want to be an alarmist—I try to avoid that—but as I’m writing this, it looks like we are in the middle of a five-alarm fire. It’s day 13 of Trump 2.0. From day one, it was clear that Donald Trump was not playing by normal American constitutional rules. Of course, it has long been obvious that he didn’t intend to play by the rules, but any pretense of lawfulness was stripped away when he tried to cancel birthright citizenship with an executive order that ran afoul of the clear language in the Constitution, as confirmed in short order by two federal judges. In the following days, it became more clear that we were not okay, that nothing was right.

During his second week in office, Trump illegally fired 18 inspectors general, the people who ferret out corruption, waste, and fraud in federal agencies. It sounds like, under Trump, there will be no more of that. No independent inspectors general to poke around. Trump has made it clear that personal loyalty to him is more important than principle. Government employees, including those with civil service protections, now serve at his pleasure…
 
On the Wednesday evening of a Washington week defined by a blitzkrieg of executive orders, vituperative confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, and an effort by the new President to suspend much of the federal budget, an American Airlines jet approaching Washington, D.C., from Wichita collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan National Airport. Everyone on board both aircraft was killed, sixty-seven people in total, some of them young ice-skaters. The next day, President Trump called a press conference. He began by expressing his condolences and described the “icy, icy Potomac—it was a cold, cold night, cold water.” He then said, “We do not know what led to this crash,” but, he added, “we have very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now.”

That statement could be a motto for this Administration, but what Trump meant in this case was that diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Administration had somehow caused the calamity. It is essential, Trump said, that air-traffic controllers be hired for their “intellect, talent—the word ‘talent,’ ” but, instead, the Democrats “came out with a directive: too white.” (He also complained about Pete Buttigieg—Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary and an occasional liberal antagonist on Fox News, who is reportedly considering a run for the U.S. Senate in Michigan—claiming, “He’s just got a good line of bullshit.”) Apparently quoting old reports in the New York Post and from Fox News, Trump listed conditions that he implied the F.A.A. had been giving preference to in its hiring practices—including “severe intellectual disability,” “psychiatric disability,” and “dwarfism.”

Trump offered no evidence that diversity had anything to do with the crash and, at other points, seemed to place the blame for it on the pilot of the Black Hawk. (Helicopters have “the ability to go up or down,” Trump noted.) When a reporter asked him if he had any proof that diversity hiring was responsible for the deaths, the President of the United States pursed his lips and said, “It just could have been.”

As recognizably Trump as these crude ramblings were—in their sheer self-absorption in the midst of a tragedy, and in their reflexive racial insinuations—they matched the spirit of the moment. Throughout the government, new appointees have been touting their reversals of diversity standards—the signal feature of what has been a rapid two-week effort to remake the preëxisting bureaucracy with an America First agenda…

In other instances, there has been a more general anti-idealism: a stop-work order issued by the Administration suspended the pepfar program, which supplies H.I.V. medication, largely in sub-Saharan Africa, and has saved an estimated twenty-six million lives. Foreign aid, the order argues, is “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”

The new Administration has been moving fast and operating almost exclusively by executive order—Trump seems largely uninterested in Congress, and his Inaugural Address offered barely any legislative agenda. (Congressional Republicans, of course, remain highly invested in Trump; they held a retreat last week at his golf club in Doral, Florida, where the President’s name had been scorched onto the hamburger buns.) When, on Monday, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget published a memo ordering federal agencies to “identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities” to be sure that they reflected “administration priorities” and not “wokeness,” it fell to the Democrats to point out that a President has no authority to suspend legally authorized congressional spending. Senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, called the suspension a “constitutional crisis,” and, if it wasn’t obviously that, it also wasn’t obviously not that…

Was Trump just “weaving” when he used a press conference following a horrific plane crash to rant about diversity initiatives, or was he getting his Administration back on an anti-woke message, after overreaching in withholding federal funds? The smart money is on the latter. For all the glee and the diligence with which its staffers have tried to upend the liberal regime, they haven’t bothered to replace it with anything beyond a sour anti-principle. An agenda that casts doubt even momentarily on a basic social program like Medicaid can’t honestly be said to be either populist or “America First”; and Trump’s vows to install a government based on merit were undermined by his roster of clearly unqualified nominees. The operating credo at the outset of the Trump Administration has a transactional, Tammany Hall logic: there is no rule except power…
It is a crazy time...
 
'eh?
_________
  

Monday, January 27, 2025

In the wake of Inauguration Day 2025...

INDEED
 
It was, if not that, Executive Order Day. Papers flowed. At the Resolute desk, an aide handed Trump orders for signing from a tall stack of navy-blue binders. Within a few hours, the United States was pulling out of not only the Paris climate accord but also the World Health Organization, which it had helped to found, in 1948. On immigration, the President reinstated his Remain in Mexico policy, and cancelled interviews for asylum applicants; in a Latino neighborhood in Detroit, ice agents were reportedly going door to door. Federal diversity programs, some dating back to an executive order signed by L.B.J. in 1965, were eliminated. Offshore wind projects were paused, restrictions on drilling lifted. Fifteen hundred people were pardoned for their roles in January 6th, including some of the most violent actors; Politico speculated that many would soon run for office themselves.

…Basic rules were being rewritten. Trump declared that the policy of the United States is that there are only two sexes, male and female: “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” Since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, any person born in the United States has been a citizen, but, on Monday, Trump signed a document declaring that this is no longer so—that from now on someone born to parents who are in the country illegally, or even legally but only temporarily, will not be an American. The effect of these executive orders was to convey, much more effectively than in 2017, an open season, in which virtually nothing—from the boundaries of the U.S. and the solidity of jury verdicts to who gets to be an American citizen—is guaranteed.

…Trump’s instincts are transactional, and he has his eye on Greenland (and its mineral deposits) and on the Panama Canal. (“America’s ships are being severely overcharged,” he insisted, during a long riff in his Inaugural Address, and vowed, “We’re taking it back.”) Having spent much of the past decade inveighing against what he saw as Chinese perfidy, and promising a policy of high tariffs, he now indicated that he’ll forget all about that if Beijing will sell fifty per cent of TikTok to U.S. investors. (Shou Zi Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, was in the Rotunda, too, seated next to Tulsi Gabbard.) Were these gambits made on behalf of the country, or certain supporters, or Trump himself? The President’s family, at least, got into the action early, issuing a $trump meme coin a few days before the Inauguration, which briefly surged to fifteen billion dollars in market capitalization, before falling to around half that. The day before the Inauguration, they rolled out $melania.

The Trumps are always the Trumps, of course, but what has given the President a second political life is the way much of the country emerged from the pandemic—frustrated with rules, strictures, and instructions of all types, and with the principles behind them. What was once a niche campaign against diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs has metastasized into a general anti-idealism. In pardoning the violent January 6th criminals—and Ross Ulbricht, who created the crypto-enabled online drug bazaar Silk Road—Trump made it clear that accountability is for him to decide. Some billionaires, in particular, seemed to detect a societal shift in Trump’s election: Mark Zuckerberg, not long after cancelling Meta’s fact-checking program, told Joe Rogan that the “culturally neutered” corporate world could use more “masculine energy,” and that it would be good to celebrate “the aggression a bit more.” It took only a few days for the new President to take that sentiment and run with it, right through the rule of law.

Is he going too far for his own good, again? Trump is often self-waylaying (as with, last time around, the Muslim ban and the never-ending boondoggle of the wall), and last week even his supporters in the Fraternal Order of Police condemned the January 6th pardons. Twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general filed suit to block the executive order threatening birthright citizenship—on Thursday, a federal judge blocked it temporarily—and at the National Cathedral Trump had to endure a sermon from Bishop Mariann Budde, urging him to show compassion for “the people who are scared now.” But it is both bewildering and alarming to remember how furious and how widespread the resistance was to Trump’s first Presidential acts, in 2017—the Women’s March, the airport protests over the Muslim ban—and to notice how the response to a much more confrontational agenda has so far been marked mostly by a lone woman’s voice from a pulpit. One working week in, it looks as if Trump is right that he learned a lot from the past eight years—and more than his opponents did. This January, what’s missing is the heat.
_________
  

Friday, January 24, 2025

Imagine our surprise

The Trump White House is moving to paralyze a bipartisan and independent watchdog agency that investigates national security activities that can intrude upon individual rights.

The move comes as the new administration is vowing to put its own stamp on federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It also comes ahead of a new conflict over whether or how Congress should renew a warrantless surveillance law that is set to expire in 2026.

Congress established the agency, called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, as an independent unit in the executive branch after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It has security clearances and subpoena power, and is set up to have five members, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, who serve six-year terms. Some members are picked by the president, and some are selected by congressional leaders of the other party.

It needs at least three members in order to take official actions like starting a new investigative project or issuing a board report with a policy recommendation. Its work has included scrutiny of surveillance and bulk data collection activities, terrorism watch lists and the use of facial recognition and other biometrics at airports...
(NY Times)
Recall my prior "Total Information Awareness update" post?

TRUMP EVANGELICALS UPDATE
 
What is psychologically intriguing is how bracing and electrifying a figure Trump is to many evangelicals. It is as if his disinhibitions have become theirs. Parents who disapproved of their children saying “damn” are now enthralled by a man who says “motherfucker.” Those who championed modesty and purity culture celebrate a thrice-married serial adulterer who made hush-money payments to a porn star. Churchgoers who can recite parts of the Sermon on the Mount are inspired by a man who, on the day he announced his candidacy for reelection, promised vengeance against his perceived enemies. Christians who for decades warned about moral relativism are now moral relativists; those who said a decent society has to stand for truth have embraced countless lies and conspiracy theories. People who rage at “woke cancel culture” delight in threats to shut down those with whom they disagree. Men and women who once stood for law and order have given their allegiance to a felon who issues pardons to rioters who have assaulted police officers…

…Many evangelical churches, the pastors who lead them, and the people who comprise them are doing enormously good work. I have witnessed this with my own eyes, and been the recipient of those who are dispensers of grace. Faith, not politics, is their priority, and many of them have tried in good conscience to align their politics with their faith. When it works, as it did with the abolitionist movement, the global AIDS initiative, refugee resettlement, and protecting religious liberty around the world, it has advanced justice and healing.

But something is amiss. Today the evangelical movement is an essential part of a much larger, and largely destructive, political and cultural movement. Evangelicalism has in many instances become more tribal, unforgiving, and cruel. The world is noticing.

“As a general rule,” the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor has said, “I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus. It’s a bad trade.


Peter Wehner
Recall my prior "Christian Nationalists" posts.

Erratum:
JUST IN (WaPo)

Supreme Court to decide whether states can allow religious public schools
The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider whether the state of Oklahoma may fund a proposed religious charter school, the first of its kind in the country

Decision not expected anytime soon.
_____
 
ERRATUM

SecDefBro confirmed in the Senate 51-50 (VP tie-breaker).
 
SOME OF MY CURRENT READS
 
 

 
Trying to get back on track.

A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING?
 
Hmmm... How 'bout we Begin Wth The End In Mind?
AFTERWORD
 by Richard Dawkins

Nothing expands the mind like the expanding universe. The music of the spheres is a nursery rhyme, a jingle to set against the majestic chords of the Symphonie Galactica. Changing the metaphor and the dimension, the dusts of centuries, the mists of what we presume to call “ancient” history, are soon blown off by the steady, eroding winds of geological ages. Even the age of the universe, accurate—so Lawrence Krauss assures us—to the fourth significant figure at 13.72 billion years, is dwarfed by the trillennia that are to come.

But Krauss’s vision of the cosmology of the remote future is paradoxical and frightening. Scientific progress is likely to go into reverse. We naturally think that, if there are cosmologists in the year 2 trillion AD, their vision of the universe will be expanded over ours. Not so—and this is one of the many shattering conclusions I take away on closing this book. Give or take a few billion years, ours is a very propitious time to be a cosmologist. Two trillion years hence, the universe will have expanded so far that all galaxies but the cosmologist’s own (whichever one it happens to be) will have receded behind an Einsteinian horizon so absolute, so inviolable, that they are not only invisible but beyond all possibility of leaving a trace, however indirect. They might as well never have existed. Every trace of the Big Bang will most likely have gone, forever and beyond recovery. The cosmologists of the future will be cut off from their past, and from their situation, in a way that we are not.

We know we are situated in the midst of 100 billion galaxies, and we know about the Big Bang because the evidence is all around us: the redshifted radiation from distant galaxies tells us of the Hubble expansion and we extrapolate it backward. We are privileged to see the evidence because we look out on an infant universe, basking in that dawn age when light can still travel from galaxy to galaxy. As Krauss and a colleague wittily put it, “We live at a very special time . . . the only time when we can observationally verify that we live at a very special time!” The cosmologists of the third trillennium will be forced back to the stunted vision of our early twentieth century, locked as we were in a single galaxy which, for all that we knew or could imagine, was synonymous with the universe.

Finally, and inevitably, the flat universe will further flatten into a nothingness that mirrors its beginning. Not only will there be no cosmologists to look out on the universe, there will be nothing for them to see even if they could. Nothing at all. Not even atoms. Nothing.

If you think that’s bleak and cheerless, too bad. Reality doesn’t owe us comfort. When Margaret Fuller remarked, with what I imagine to have been a sigh of satisfaction, “I accept the universe,” Thomas Carlyle’s reply was withering: “Gad, she’d better!” Personally, I think the eternal quietus of an infinitely flat nothingness has a grandeur that is, to say the least, worth facing off with courage.

But if something can flatten into nothing, can nothing spring into action and give birth to something? Or why, to quote a theological chestnut, is there something rather than nothing? Here we come to perhaps the most remarkable lesson that we are left with on closing Lawrence Krauss’s book. Not only does physics tell us how something could have come from nothing, it goes further, by Krauss’s account, and shows us that nothingness is unstable: something was almost bound to spring into existence from it. If I understand Krauss aright, it happens all the time: The principle sounds like a sort of physicist’s version of two wrongs making a right. Particles and antiparticles wink in and out of existence like subatomic fireflies, annihilating each other, and then re-creating themselves by the reverse process, out of nothingness.

The spontaneous genesis of something out of nothing happened in a big way at the beginning of space and time, in the singularity known as the Big Bang followed by the inflationary period, when the universe, and everything in it, took a fraction of a second to grow through twenty-eight orders of magnitude (that’s a 1 with twenty-eight zeroes after it—think about it).

What a bizarre, ridiculous notion! Really, these scientists! They’re as bad as medieval Schoolmen counting angels on pinheads or debating the “mystery” of the transubstantiation.

No, not so, not so with a vengeance and in spades. There is much that science still doesn’t know (and it is working on it with rolled-up sleeves). But some of what we do know, we know not just approximately (the universe is not mere thousands but billions of years old): we know it with confidence and with stupefying accuracy. I’ve already mentioned that the age of the universe is measured to four significant figures. That’s impressive enough, but it is nothing compared to the accuracy of some of the predictions with which Lawrence Krauss and his colleagues can amaze us. Krauss’s hero Richard Feynman pointed out that some of the predictions of quantum theory—again based on assumptions that seem more bizarre than anything dreamed up by even the most obscurantist of theologians—have been verified with such accuracy that they are equivalent to predicting the distance between New York and Los Angeles to within one hairsbreadth.

Theologians may speculate about angels on pinheads or whatever is the current equivalent. Physicists might seem to have their own angels and their own pinheads: quanta and quarks, “charm,” “strangeness,” and “spin.” But physicists can count their angels and can get it right to the nearest angel in a total of 10 billion: not an angel more, not an angel less. Science may be weird and incomprehensible—more weird and less comprehensible than any theology—but science works. It gets results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupiter on the way. We may not understand quantum theory (heaven knows, I don’t), but a theory that predicts the real world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be wrong. Theology not only lacks decimal places: it lacks even the smallest hint of a connection with the real world. As Thomas Jefferson said, when founding his University of Virginia, “A professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution.”

If you ask religious believers why they believe, you may find a few “sophisticated” theologians who will talk about God as the “Ground of all Isness,” or as “a metaphor for interpersonal fellowship” or some such evasion. But the majority of believers leap, more honestly and vulnerably, to a version of the argument from design or the argument from first cause. Philosophers of the caliber of David Hume didn’t need to rise from their armchairs to demonstrate the fatal weakness of all such arguments: they beg the question of the Creator’s origin. But it took Charles Darwin, out in the real world on HMS Beagle, to discover the brilliantly simple—and non-question-begging—alternative to design. In the field of biology, that is. Biology was always the favorite hunting ground for natural theologians until Darwin—not deliberately, for he was the kindest and gentlest of men—chased them off. They fled to the rarefied pastures of physics and the origins of the universe, only to find Lawrence Krauss and his predecessors waiting for them.

Do the laws and constants of physics look like a finely tuned put-up job, designed to bring us into existence? Do you think some agent must have caused everything to start? Read Victor Stenger if you can’t see what’s wrong with arguments like that. Read Steven Weinberg, Peter Atkins, Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking. And now we can read Lawrence Krauss for what looks to me like the knockout blow. Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe from Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.


Krauss, Lawrence. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (pp. 187-192). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Yeah.
 
Ended up going down this path owing to som prior relevant reading.
 
More to come...
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