NOW REPORTING FROM BALTIMORE. An eclectic, iconoclastic, independent, private, non-commercial blog begun in 2010 in support of the federal Meaningful Use REC initiative, and Health IT and Heathcare improvement more broadly. Moving now toward important broader STEM and societal/ethics topics. Formerly known as "The REC Blog." Best viewed with Safari, FireFox, or Chrome.
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Final decision day of the current Supreme Court term. Absent a (preposterous) declaration dismissing the Special Counsel’s DC indictment outright, will the current conservative majority provide Donald Trump with a Melt-Clock “remand” off-ramp ruling sending his case back down for further lower venue proceedings, imposing an additional procedural delay that would principally serve to push the DC J6 Insurrection case out past the November 5th presidential election?
We should know shortly after 10 a.m. eastern time. Trump claims that his every act occurring during his time in office was an “official act” consequently shielded by blanket constitutional immunity from all subsequent judicial matters civil or criminal. In MedMal lingo, this would be known as permanent comprehensive “tail coverage.”
JULY 1 UPDATE
6-3 to remand to the DC trial court for bench-level determination (subsequently yet again appealable all the way back up to SCOTUS) of exactly what constitutes "unofficial acts" pertinent to the Trump J6 case. Essentially the Melt Clock Offramp ruling favorable to Trump.
119 page opinion (pdf). I spent the day reading all of it.
UPDATE
TRUMP v UNITED STATES 2024: JUSTICE BARRETT CONCURRING IN PART …If the statute covers the alleged official conduct, the prosecution may proceed only if applying it in the circumstances poses no “‘dange[r] of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.’” Ante, at 14 (quoting Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U. S. 731, 754 (1982)). On remand, the lower courts will have to apply that standard to various allegations involving the President’s official conduct. [2] Some of those allegations raise unsettled questions about the scope of Article II power, see ante, at 21–28, but others do not. For example, the indictment alleges that the President “asked the Arizona House Speaker to call the legislature into session to hold a hearing” about election fraud claims. App. 193. The President has no authority over state legislatures or their leadership, so it is hard to see how prosecuting him for crimes committed when dealing with the Arizona House Speaker would unconstitutionally intrude on executive power. ______
[2] This analysis is unnecessary for allegations involving the President’s private conduct because the Constitution offers no protection from prosecution of acts taken in a private capacity. Ante, at 15. Sorting private from official conduct sometimes will be difficult—but not always. Take the President’s alleged attempt to organize alternative slates of electors. See, e.g., App. 208. In my view, that conduct is private and therefore not entitled to protection. See post, at 27–28 (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting). The Constitution vests power to appoint Presidential electors in the States. Art. II, §1, cl. 2; see also Chiafalo v. Washington, 591 U. S. 578, 588–589 (2020). And while Congress has a limited role in that process, see Art. II, §1, cls. 3–4, the President has none. In short, a President has no legal authority—and thus no official capacity—to influence how the States appoint their electors. I see no plausible argument for barring prosecution of that alleged conduct.
Read & re-read that passage and footnote closely. Trump has NO constitutional immunity for trying to overturn the 2020 election. It simply does not matter which of his subordinates he enlisted in his efforts. They wera all "private acts."
UPDATE
"Perhaps you think Trump is exaggerating when he calls for a military tribunal to prosecute and execute the January 6th Committee members. Perhaps you think the idea of rounding up and punishing political opponents of Trump is some distant fantasy.
You could not be more wrong." - Rick Wilson
_____
OFF-TOPIC PERSONAL ERRATUM
July 1st is always a crappy day for me. On July 1, 1998, now 26 years distant, my elder daughter Sissy, succumbed to cancer in L.A. in the wake of 26 months of Hell. She'd just turned 30. It will always seem like last week.
I have been harshly critical of calls for President Joe Biden to step down. I have argued with people across the political spectrum about this, including friends and colleagues. I think Biden has had a successful first term and that his age has been no barrier to his effectiveness as a leader. I still believe that. And if the choice this fall is between Biden and a man who I believe is a mentally unstable menace to American democracy, I won’t think twice about my vote.
But Donald Trump must be defeated, and after last night’s debate, I am no longer sure that Biden is electable. Politics can be a miserable business that too often turns on perceptions, and for the president, the debate was a full-blown, Hindenburg-level disaster. Biden’s performance was unnervingly bad, and it has led to a chorus of calls, including in this magazine, for Biden to step down…
I know that, for Biden loyalists, the gathering consensus around last night’s debate must feel like a betrayal: Friends and coalition partners now seem to be lining up with knives behind the back of the man who saved America from Trump in 2020. Political loyalty, although often useful and sometimes admirable, should not override practicality. Blind support of one man, after all, is the hallmark of Trump’s cult; the prodemocracy coalition is larger, and should be more resilient, than any single person in it.
Before we think about next steps, it’s important not to wave away what happened last night, and it’s especially important not to engage in random blame-storming. Biden had one job—don’t look old and befuddled—and he failed. Biden supporters are raging away on social media about how the CNN moderators should have intervened with more fact-checking (read: debating Trump themselves and saving Biden), but Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did a reasonable job of keeping the debate moving and giving Biden multiple chances to unload any number of haymakers on Trump had he wanted to do so.
Biden, however, was simply not present. Opportunity after opportunity to call out Trump passed him by as he garbled a basket of statistics and talking points. The president’s staff clearly overprepared their candidate, stuffing his head with factoids about Pell Grants and climate targets and tax rates and other things that are completely irrelevant in a debate with a deranged bully. If this was the work of the White House prep team, then they are guilty of egregious political malpractice—but in the end, the candidate is always responsible for what happens in the campaign.
I now accept that the Biden we saw last night is as good as we’ll get in the election, and that Americans—unfortunately—are likely to decide that an entertaining autocrat is less of a risk than a decent old man…
Today, in North Carolina, Biden was full of energy, self-deprecating humor, and fury. I suspect that this is Biden in a kind of late–Ronald Reagan phase, in which he is able to give a barn burner of a speech but not capable of heavier lifting; even during the North Carolina event, he looked vacant and slack-jawed while he watched others speak. He was animated at the podium—but that’s likely not going to be enough to win an election in which so many undecided voters think Biden is too old to be president…
Time is running out. The operatives out there trying to soothe nerves by invoking Reagan’s first disastrous debate in 1984 forget that Reagan was ahead in the polls at the time, with plenty of electoral cushion under him. Biden has no such margin. My friend Greg Sargent at The New Republic has argued that Joe and Jill Biden need to assure America that last night was the exception, not the rule. But I suspect that Biden has, at most, about a week to either make up his mind not to run or reassure America that he can take on Donald Trump and win. At this point, it’s very hard to imagine that such reassurance is possible…
3,007 days since I first posted about candidate Donald Trump. Zero days to the first Biden-Trump "debate."
[Below] I first posted about candidate Trump on April 3rd, 2016
Where’s the “Pre-Crimes Unit” when you need one? Put aside the endless onslaught of reflexively arrogant, belligerent, and vulgar P.T. Barnum bombast. Forget the neurotic, tellingly insecure “The-Beautiful-Thing-About-Me-Is-I’m-REALLY-Rich” fixation, replete with gauche, ostentatiously cheesy gold-plated fixtures and escalators, and the “Finest Polished Marble.” Never mind the (made in China) monogrammed shirts and pastel silk ties, redolent of arriviste exhibitionist 60’s Manhattan throwback 4-Color Glossy tabloid “Style and Elegance.” Forget the creepy, objectifying, lecherous “Nice Tits,” “Down on Your Knees” sash, bikini, big hair, and spike heels misogyny. Forget that everyone who dares dispute Him is “A Loser,” “Weak,” “Stupid,” “A Moron,” “Disgusting,” “3rd-Rate,” “A Stiff,” “A Dope,” “A Low-Life” — someone to perhaps be the target of the latest 500 million dollar empty Trump lawsuit threat du jour.
Let pass the patently phony “I’m a Strong Evangelical” whose “favorite book” is “da BIBLE!” Forget the low-intellect Moths-To-The-Flame Totem comprising that stupidass Mexican Wall proposal. Forget the equally phony “I Have Many, Many Great Friends Here in ______________.” Forget the blindingly obvious time-worn boiler room grift M.O. of “Trump University®,” “Trump Network®,” “Trump Baja Ocean Resort®,” and “Trump Institute®.” Put aside that in the net worth ranking of world billionaires he’s a rounding error (Update: I’ve coined the hashtag “#BiglyFakeBillionaire”).
Forget his eye-rollingly fatuous “only rich people should be allowed to play golf.”
Forget that “maybe protestors should get roughed up.” “Maybe I’ll pay the [attackers’] legal expenses.”
Forget that “women must be punished” (well, uh, maybe not, at least until after Wisconsin).
Put aside all of that, along with the the rest of the maudlin, panoramic accruing expanse of its kindred lowbrow, cognitive-pollution Time Share Closer bullshit (see, btw, Harry Frankfurt’s instructive book “On Bullshit”).
Focus on, remember, and act against the truly important stuff.
Call them our Pre-Crimes Portents. He’s dog-whistling war crimes. Without much subtlety, as is his style…
That was eight years ago. It's only gotten recursively worse.
I am SO sick of Donald Trump.
INTERESTING AND TIMELY DOCUMENTARY NOW ON NETFLIX
Six episodes, roughly one hour each. [Update] I just finished all 6 episodes. Episode Two (the concomitant rise of German & Italian populist Fascism) is disturbingly comparable to our current times.
An unmitigated disaster for President Biden. Depressing.
FRIDAY MORNING ARTICLE HEADLINES, THE ATLANTIC
A Disaster for Joe Biden Watching the president at the first debate was at times almost physically uncomfortable
Someone Needs to Take Biden’s Keys The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
Biden’s Loved Ones Owe Him the Truth Those who have cared for Biden the longest cannot allow him to continue Fore More Years Two presidential candidates argue about who’s better at hitting a ball. Nobody wins Dropping Out Is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option If he believes that Trump is a unique threat, the choice is clear
Time to Go, Joe Biden needs to step aside—for the sake of his own dignity, for the good of his party, for the future of the country
The Unadorned Truth About Donald Trump We must treat him like any other candidate for high office who is emotionally and mentally unstable Trump Should Never Have Had This Platform The debate was a travesty—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency
Moreover, let's be perfectly clear about the intentions of the Alito camp allies.
The 900+ page Project 2025 "Action Plan Playbook" (pdf) negatively cites the word "abortion" 198 times (repeatedly conflating it with other hated "liberal" policies), and is utterly clear regarding its reactionary "Christian conservative" goal of establishing constitutionally-protected, vigilantly-enforced "Personhood at Conception."
JOHN OLIVER ON PROJECT 2025
134 days to the November 5th 2024 U.S. elections.
RELENTLESS WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST THEOCRATS
I have no problem with any of these reactionary people and groups advocating for their fatuous causes (look up the two doozy books depicted above). Where they cross over from advocacy to (more and more overt) coercion is where my red line resides.
Below, just ran across these two beauts on TwitterX:
JUNE 25 UPDATE
"Trump 2024 examines the presidency of Donald Trump through the eyes of 25 Evangelical Leaders. These leaders include:
Dennis Prager, Franklin Graham, Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins, Irvin Baxter, Jerry Boykin, Damon Friedman, Brigitte Gabriel, Jack Graham, Harry Jackson, Jack Hibbs, Dr. Robert Jeffress, Alveda King, Mike Lindell, Bob McEwen, Eric Metaxas, Star Parker, Tony Perkins, Sammy Rodriguez, Dave Robbins, Don Stewart, Stephen Strange, Randall Terry, Paula White, Jeff Wickwire."
Quite the crew.
BRIAN KLAAS
Five Reasons Trump 2.0 Would Be Worse There's a widespread misconception that a second Trump term would be just like the first. That's a catastrophic misreading of American politics—and the unprecedented risks if he wins.
This was totally impulsive. Saw it mentioned on TwitterX. The topic looked to be of relevance. I guess I'll find out. I have zero idea who this writer is. Add one more to my pile.
8-1, Clarence Thomas in irascible Ouija Board Jurisprudence dissent.
I'd just gotten this book. Timely, in light of today's SCOTUS ruling.
The Fifth Circuit is one of the thirteen federal appellate courts that sit below the Supreme Court and above the country’s district courts. Its jurisdiction covers Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and it is often the last word on the law for the roughly thirty-seven million people who live in those states. Like the district court in Perez-Gallan, the circuit court in Rahimi had to rule on the constitutionality of a federal statute that bans gun possession for people who have protective orders against them. The Fifth Circuit had heard and rejected this exact challenge multiple times, concluding that the statute was reasonably adapted to the compelling government interest of reducing domestic gun violence. But the court was asked to reconsider its jurisprudence in light of Bruen. The court accepted the invitation to reevaluate its precedent and concluded that there was no sufficiently analogous law when the country was founded, so it struck the statute down. Even though there were historical statutes that prohibited gun possession for certain people, the court distinguished those laws away by highlighting that the Founding-era laws disarmed classes of people—specifically, Native Americans and enslaved Black people—in order to protect the discriminatory social order and prevent armed rebellion, while the statute in question disarmed people after individualized findings of credible threats to their partner or child. This rationale encapsulates the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the originalist ideology. Rahimi concluded that intimate partner violence was not a constitutionally acceptable reason to place limits on gun possession and instead lifted up rank bigotry as the standard to which today’s gun laws must be held. Originalism observes that white supremacy dominated the country’s past and reasons that it must also dominate the country’s future. The Department of Justice petitioned the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s decision, and the Court heard oral argument in United States v. Rahimi in November 2023. Soon it will have the opportunity to clarify how Bruen applies to statutes disarming people subject to orders of protection. Perhaps the Court will twist itself into an originalist pretzel to avoid further damaging its reputation by affirming the Fifth Circuit’s horrific reasoning. Perhaps not.
The ominous implications of the district court’s decision in Perez-Gallan and the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Rahimi should make even the most ardent gun lovers nervous. Taking the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence seriously empowers lower courts to strip us of innumerable freedoms if they have any reason to think that we would have been unfree in early America. Originalism is regressive by nature: an outsized focus on the alleged original meaning of the Constitution at the time of drafting means the rights of modern-day individuals—and the ability of legislatures to protect those rights—must be constrained by the outdated concerns of the Framers, like keeping British soldiers out of their living rooms. Former justice Stephen Breyer’s dissenting opinion in Bruen spotlighted how originalism binds lawmakers from meeting the present needs of their constituents. Even if the justices were trained historians (which, remember, they aren’t), Breyer argued that “laws addressing repeating crossbows, launcegays, dirks, dagges, skeines, stilladers, and other ancient weapons will be of little help to courts confronting modern problems.” This, to be sure, was the plan all along. The originalist ideology declares that random historical windows of conservatives’ choosing are society’s high-water marks, and we are constitutionally powerless to surpass them without formal amendment. The core function of originalism is providing aesthetically pleasing legal flourishes around the uglier idea that things shouldn’t get better than they’ve been. And if originalism is left unchecked, things will keep getting worse.
Dennie, Madiba K. The Originalism Trap (pp. 13-15). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I have yet to read the full opinion, including the several divergent concurrences, and Justice Thomas's reportedly cranky lone Dissent.
I've been episodically crackin' on "Originalist / Textualism" since my 1998 grad thesis (pdf):
Kinda jumped the line from the stuff I've been contemplating in my prior post. "Overbooked" as usual. Still working on my new M3 Mac Air migration, too.
...The artificial-intelligence apocalypse is a new fear that keeps many up at night, a terror born of great advances that seem to suggest that, if we are not very careful, we may—with our own hands—bring forth a future where humanity has no place. This strange nightmare is a credible danger only because so many of our dreams are threatening to come true. It is the culmination of a long process that hearkens back to the origins of civilization itself, to the time when the world was filled with magic and dread, and the only way to guarantee our survival was to call down the power of the gods.
Apotheosis has always haunted the soul of humankind. Since ancient times we have suffered the longing to become gods and exceed the limits nature has placed on us. To achieve this, we built altars and performed rituals to ask for wisdom, blessings, and the means to reach beyond our capabilities. While we tend to believe that it is only now, in the modern world, that power and knowledge carry great risks, primitive knowledge was also dangerous, because in antiquity a part of our understanding of the world and ourselves did not come from us, but from the Other. From the gods, from spirits, from raging voices that spoke in silence.
At the heart of the mysteries of the Vedas, revealed by the people of India, lies the Altar of Fire: a sacrificial construct made from bricks laid down in precise mathematical proportions to form the shape of a huge bird of prey—an eagle, or a hawk, perhaps. According to Roberto Calasso, it was a gift from the primordial deity at the origin of everything: Prajapati, Lord of Creatures. When his children, the gods, complained that they could not escape from Death, he gave them precise instructions for how to build an altar that would permit them to ascend to heaven and attain immortality: “Take three hundred and sixty border stones and ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, as many as there are hours in a year,” he said. “Each brick shall have a name. Place them in five layers. Add more bricks to a total of eleven thousand, five hundred and fifty-six.” The gods built the altar and fled from Mrtyu, Death itself. However, Death prevented human beings from doing the same. We were not allowed to become immortal with our bodies; we could only aspire to everlasting works. The Vedic people continued to erect the Altar of Fire for thousands of years: with time, according to Calasso, they realized that every brick was a thought, that thoughts piled on top of each other created a wall—the mind, the power of attention—and that that mind, when properly developed, could fly like a bird with outstretched wings and conquer the skies.
Seen from afar by people who were not aware of what was being made, these men and women must surely have looked like bricklayers gone mad. And that same frantic folly seems to possess those who, in recent decades, have dedicated their hearts and minds to the building of a new mathematical construct, a soulless copy of certain aspects of our thinking that we have chosen to name “artificial intelligence,” a tool so formidable that, if we are to believe the most zealous among its devotees, will help us reach the heavens and become immortal.
Raw and abstract power, AI lacks body, consciousness, or desire, and so, some might say, it is incapable of generating that primordial heat that the Vedas call tapas—the ardor of the mind, the fervor from which all existence emerges—and that still burns, however faintly, within each and every one of us. Should we trust the most optimistic voices coming from Silicon Valley, AI could be the vehicle we use to create boundless wealth, cure all ills, heal the planet, and move toward immortality, while the pessimists warn that it may be our downfall. Has our time come to join the gods eternal? Or will our digital offspring usurp the Altar of Fire and use it for their own ends, as we ourselves stole that knowledge, originally intended for the gods? It’s far too early to tell. But we can be certain of one thing, since we have learned it, time and time again, from the punishing tales of our mythologies: it is never safe to call on the gods, or even come close to them…
In the mid-nineteenth century, the mathematician George Boole heard the voice of God. As he crossed a field near his home in England, he had a mystical experience and came to believe he would uncover the rules underlying human thought…
Before Boole, the disciplines of logic and mathematics had developed quite separately for more than a thousand years. His new logic functioned with only two values—true and false—and with it he could not only do math but analyze philosophical statements and propositions to divine their veracity or falsehood. Boole put his new type of logic to use on something that to him, a deeply religious man, was a spiritual necessity: to demonstrate that God was incapable of evil…
Boole was a man inhabited by the spirit of his time, a spirit that was very different from ours: he believed that the human mind was rational and functioned according to the same laws that shape the larger universe; by painstakingly uncovering those laws, not only could we understand the world and reveal the hidden mechanisms that produce and guide our own thoughts, we could actually peer into the mind of Divinity. After confronting the problem of evil, he continued to develop his ideas, trying to create a calculus to reduce all logical syllogisms, deductions, and inferences to the manipulation of mathematical symbols, and to cast a precise foundation for the theory of probability. This resulted in his greatest work: An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, a book that laid out the rules of his new symbolic logic and also outlined, in the opening chapter, his grand intention to capture, with mathematics, the language of that ghost that whispers within the tortuous pathways of our minds:
The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic and construct its method.
Boole was convinced that our minds operate on a fundamental basis of logic, but he died without having reached his goal of creating a system to understand thought
His work was inconsequential during his lifetime and ignored for more than eighty years after his death, until one day a young graduate student at MIT chanced upon The Laws of Thought, immersed himself in Boole’s strange algebraic logic, and created a practical application that has, since then, affected every aspect of our lives.
His name was Claude Shannon, a mathematician and electrical engineer who was working on the most advanced thinking machine of his time (Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer, an early computer as big as an entire room), when he realized that Boole’s two-value logic was the perfect system with which to design electronic circuits. Electrical switches use binary values (0 for off and 1 for on), and they can be controlled by the logical operations created by the English mathematician. Incredibly complex computations can be made just by exploiting a simple duality: true or false, on or off, 1 or 0. That duality is the cornerstone of the Information Age…
A couple of additional titles will soon come into play.
Inheritance has yet to be released. The blurb:
“An insightful and breathtaking exploration of humanity’s evolutionary baggage that explains some of our species’ greatest successes and failures.” —Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens
The ancient inheritance that made us who we are—and is now driving us to ruin.
Each of us is endowed with an inheritance—a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it’s failing us. We find ourselves hurtling toward a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier war, and irreparable environmental destruction.
In Inheritance, renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our biases have shaped humanity’s past and imperil its future. He argues that three biases—conformism, religiosity, and tribalism—drive human behavior everywhere. Forged by natural selection and harnessed by thousands of years of cultural evolution, these biases catalyzed the greatest transformations in human history, from the birth of agriculture and the arrival of the first kings to the rise and fall of human sacrifice and the creation of multiethnic empires. Taking us deep into modern-day tribes, including terrorist cells and predatory ad agencies, Whitehouse shows how, as we lose the cultural scaffolding that allowed us to manage our biases, the world we’ve built is spiraling out of control.
By uncovering how human nature has shaped our collective history, Inheritance unveils a surprising new path to solving our most urgent modern problems. The result is a powerful reappraisal of the human journey, one that transforms our understanding of who we are, and who we could be.
Superconvergence, from the Science Magazine review:
…Replete with unprecedented opportunities and existential risks hitherto unimaginable in life’s history, the new world we are entering transcends geographical boundaries, and—as a result of humankind’s global interdependencies—it must, by necessity, exist in a no-man’s-land beyond the mandates of ideologies and nation-states. Its topography is defined not by geological events and evolution by natural selection so much as by the intersection of several exponential human-made technologies. Most notably, these include the generation of machine learning intelligence that can interrogate big data to define generative “rules” of biology and the post- Darwinian engineering of living systems through the systematic rewriting of their genetic code.
Acknowledging the intrinsic mutability of natural life and its ever-changing biochemistry and morphology, Metzl is unable to align himself with UNESCO’s 1997 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights. To argue that the current version of the human genome is sacred is to negate its prior iterations, including the multiple species of human that preceded us but disappeared along the way. The sequences of all Earth’s species are in a simultaneous state of being and becoming, Metzl argues. Life is intrinsically fluid.
Although we are still learning to write complex genomes rapidly, accurately, without sequence limitation, and at low cost, and our ability to author novel genomes remains stymied by our inability to unpick the generative laws of biology, it is just a matter of time before we transform biology into a predictable engineering material, at which point we will be able to recast life into desired forms. But while human-engineered living materials and biologically inspired devices offer potential solutions to the world’s most challenging problems, our rudimentary understanding of complex ecosystems and the darker sides of human nature cast long shadows, signaling the need for caution.
Metzl provides some wonderful examples of how artificial species and bioengineering, often perceived as adversaries of natural life, could help address several of the most important issues of the moment. These challenges include climate change, desertification, deforestation, pollution (including the 79,000-metric-ton patch of garbage the size of Alaska in the Pacific Ocean), the collapse of oceanic ecosystems, habitat loss, global population increase, and the diminution of species biodiversity. By rewriting the genomes of crops and increasing the efficiency of agriculture, we can reduce the need to convert additional wild habitats into farmland, he writes. Additionally, the use of bioengineering to make sustainable biofuels, biocomputing, bio foodstuffs, biodegradable plastics, and DNA information–storing materials will help reduce global warming.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) can free up human time. By 2022, DeepMind’s AlphaFold program had predicted the structures of 214 million proteins—a feat that would have taken as long as 642 million years to achieve using conventional methods. As Metzl comments, this places “millions of years back into the pot of human innovation time.” The ability to hack human biology using AI will also have a tremendous impact on the human health span and life span, not least through AI-designed drugs, he predicts.
Metzl is right when he concludes that we have reached a “critical moment in human history” and that “reengineered biology will play a central role in the future of our species.” We will need to define a new North Star—a manifesto for life—to assist with its navigation. Metzl argues for the establishment of a new international body with depoliticized autonomy to focus on establishing common responses to shared global existential challenges. He suggests that this process could be kick-started by convening a summit aimed at establishing aligned governance guidelines for the revolutionary new technologies we are creating.
My first post with my new fully racked-out 15" M3 Mac Air. Set me back a bit more than $3,000. Came in yesterday afternoon to the Apple Store in Towson. I wasn't expecting it until next Monday.
Pre-loaded with Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro. Bought the Microsoft Office 365 Suite. Will also upgrade from my current Adobe Suite to Adobe Cloud. Setup has thus far been a breeze, overall. Lots of migration work yet to go.
. It is analytic contemporary sociopolitical history journalism at its dispositive BEST. One of those relative rarities—a writing style SO good as to be “invisible."
“Invisible?” I didn’t begin college until 1980 at the age of 34. Tested off the charts verbal. Intended to major in corporate/industrial advertising. Still recall my copywriting prof’s wise admonition: “If your writing style calls attention to itself, you’re NOT doing your job.”
Do yourselves a favor. Buy and carefully study this book. Blog review coming.
Indeed. I'm more of a sucker than most folks when it comes to a Jones for eloquent prose, but the excellence of the writing here goes principally to its transparent cover-to-cover delivery of the history and the searingly fraught issues. The clarity, man...
…you were alive long before you possessed a developing nervous system, let alone the fancy three-pound brain housing your conscious mind as an adult. Leaving speculations about consciousness in engineered artifacts for later, a living organism is needed to support consciousness. But it is not sufficient. The central nervous system, assuming the organism has one, must be structured in a certain way; it must have a sufficient level of differentiation, complexity, or “something” to support the type of consciousness we are familiar with. What this “something” is will become clearer in a bit.
Fetal Consciousness
Uncovering the dawn of consciousness isn’t just a narcissistic endeavor or a Proustian search for lost memories; it has drastic consequences.
Consider the 2022 landmark decision by the US Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It overruled two long-standing legal precedents concerning abortion (Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey), invalidating the long-standing fetal-viability rule, which held that abortion should be legal until the fetus can survive, with proper medical assistance, outside the uterus at around twenty-three to twenty-four weeks’ gestational age.
The decision before the court involved lengthy, erudite, and passionately held legal, religious, historical, philosophical, and political considerations on both sides. One justification for overturning the viability rule was the argument that the fetus is conscious as early as fourteen weeks’ gestational age and would thereby suffer extreme pain during abortion. This is a scientific-clinical matter that I commented on by joining an amicus brief, filed in the Supreme Court, to support Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The evidence for this startling claim was ultrasound imaging of the fetus in utero, demonstrating that the fetus reacts to touches of the mother’s belly, to her voice, or even to painful surgical procedures, with facial grimacing and limb movement. These actions imply consciousness and therefore a capacity to suffer.
It is true that the second-trimester fetus has rudimentary behavioral capacities, such as withdrawal from painful stimuli. Yet these are limited and stereotyped reflexes, called nociceptive responses, that adults show without any conscious awareness. Both nociceptive reflexes and pain can be associated with action, including the release of stress hormones and an increase in blood pressure, but only the latter triggers a subjective, aversive conscious experience. Nociceptive responses occur during deep sleep, as when the sleeper withdraws a limb without waking up. Likewise, patients with severe brain injuries that leave them in a near coma can still withdraw their hand if a fingernail is pinched hard. Indeed, tiny fruit fly larvae react to a flame by bending away from the source of the heat. Yet few would advocate for larval sentience.
There is no question that the fetus, like other nascent organisms, is a living entity with regulatory feedback loops supporting stereotyped sensory-motor behaviors that protect it from harm. Yet, for a stimulus to be consciously felt as a painful experience—“ouch, that hurt”—a reflex is not enough. For a person to become conscious of a noxious stimulus, signals from pain receptors in the skin must be relayed, via the spinal cord and the thalamus, to the neocortex, where they set off an alarm perceived as painful. This requires a byzantine, sophisticated network of neocortical cells and their partners in satellite structures, such as the thalamus, closely associated with the neocortex.
The birth of neurons, called neurogenesis, starts around the fifth week and is largely completed by the end of the sixteenth week. For the most part, you were born with a full complement of nerve cells. Yet these are immature and will continue to grow, to differentiate, and to extend their processes and tendrils to contact other neurons until well into adulthood. For example, neocortical neurons of a fetus are not properly wired up to receive any peripheral signals until about the thirtieth week. Until this time, the fetus responds to a stimulus such as a heel lance (a quick puncture of the skin to draw blood from the foot) but is unlikely to experience it. Indeed, a preterm infant born at thirty weeks gestational age—not a fetus anymore—will not even wake up following a heel lance.
Based on the way these circuits develop, peripheral pain signals can trigger reflexes but fail to ring the consciousness alarm until well into the third trimester. This implies that a previable fetus does not experience pain—does not suffer. It still must cross the great Divide of Being separating something that does not experience from someone who does. The former is nothing to itself, while the latter is a subject, albeit still a rudimentary one.
In the final analysis, the supreme court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization not on scientific but on constitutional grounds, returning the authority to regulate abortion to individual states.
Koch, Christof. Then I Am Myself the World (pp. 26-29). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
Lots to yet consider.
I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time (my older blog). See also here.
In 2016 a federal district court struck down HB 1523 for the obvious reason that it favored one set of religious beliefs over others. In 2018, however, an appeals court set aside that decision on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case, so the law remains in force until some individuals suitably harmed by its manifestly discriminatory intent, and in possession of the bottomless resources that will be required for the inevitable battle with deep-pocketed Christian right legal groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, decide to come forward to oppose it.
The Blitzers understand at some level that their agenda will not command majorities of public opinion. Indeed, the premise of their work is that they can’t win in a fair and open debate. Increasingly, Christian nationalists have become comfortable embracing this kind of minority-led politics. As J. Randy Forbes, founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, put it, “Our studies and what we have seen is 10 percent of the people in any country in the world can change that country if they have the right strategies, if they persevere, and if they will just find a way to put their differences aside and come together. And that’s what we’re seeing happening across this country.” Referencing David Barton’s assertions about the American Revolution, Forbes claimed that “only 10 percent of the population ever did anything in the fight, just 10 percent, and that really hasn’t changed much today. Ten percent of the people in this country can change this country. We just have to find that 10 percent, get them together, get the right strategies, the right commitment, and watch how the Lord how he can change this country.”
Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers (p. 166). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
WEDNESDAY UPDATE
More stuff to read and consider, Lordy Mercy:
Foreword
The problem of the twenty-first century,” Jamal Greene argues, echoing W. E. B. DuBois, “is the problem of the rights line.” Rights talk has become the driving force of American political discourse, a chief source of the contortion of American courts, and an engine of American political polarization. Rights wars are battles of all against all, absolute and unrelenting. It is the argument of this important book that until Americans can reimagine rights, there is no path forward, and there is, especially, no way to get race right. No peace, no justice.
Claiming that your rights have been violated has become the best and in many cases the only way to pursue your political interest. Instead of seeking political change in pursuit of my interest in the realm of political debate and the making of law—where my interest will compete with your interest, and we will likely arrive at a compromise—my remedy is to claim that my interest is not an interest but a right. You do that, too. And then we go to court. As a result, conflicts that don’t need to be settled in the courts are settled in the courts, where the winner takes all. In a contest between your rights and my rights, the courts decide whose rights win based on each judge’s preferences. This is neither fair nor democratic. And, as Greene writes searingly, “it divides us into those who have rights and those who don’t.”
Greene is not the first legal scholar to point out that rights claims have run amok. In 1991, in Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon argued that “discourse about rights has become the principal language that we use in public to discuss weighty questions of right and wrong, but time and again it proves inadequate, or leads to a standoff of one right against another.” Under this regime, Glendon argued, “a tendency to frame nearly every social controversy in terms of a clash of rights (a woman’s right to her own body vs. a fetus’s right to life) impedes compromise, mutual understanding and the discovery of common ground.” Glendon saw the much-vaunted “rights revolution” as having begun in the 1960s. But, as Greene argues here, it has a much longer and more complicated history, calling for different solutions. It is one of the hallmarks of Greene’s work that he looks to other countries for those solutions, finding, in their different rights discourses, a world of possibilities. And he looks, as well, to the past.
Like Glendon, Greene finds the origins of the hardening of rights discourse in the 1960s. But he begins his inquiry in the eighteenth century, because he’s particularly keen to figure out exactly when and how and why things went awry. “American courts draw firm lines, often in morally arbitrary ways, between the interests they consider rights and those they don’t,” Greene writes. “The interests that courts count, they protect robustly from democratic politics, while those that they don’t count remain wholly at the government’s mercy. We sometimes describe this fetishism about rights—but just some rights—as foreordained by the Founding Fathers, but America wasn’t born this way.” It was only born this way in this sense: to be a human being held as property is to be a person without any rights. Dividing people into those with rights and those without began at the beginning.
Read this book to find out what Greene means about how rights went wrong and what he proposes, and then decide whether you agree. But I suggest keeping your eye on the ball, which is racial injustice. The oldest national organization in the United States founded to pursue constitutional rights is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which began in 1909. Six years later, the NAACP concluded that the Supreme Court “has virtually declared that the colored man has no rights.” The NAACP embarked on a strategy to seek fundamental rights, as guaranteed under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Led by this organization, the Progressive movement marked a turning point in the history of rights seeking by way of lawsuits, down through Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the criminal justice cases addressed by the Warren Court in the 1960s. Rights asserted by way of a remedy to rights for so long and so violently denied did not end the battle of rights but instead turned it into a war when, beginning in the 1970s, modern conservatives, adopting methods used by liberals, asserted not liberal claims to rights, but conservative claims to rights. Rights fights became politics by other means.
How Rights Went Wrong is an essential and fresh and vital history of constitutional law and American politics. It is also a cautionary tale, with a sober warning for judges and lawyers. “Courts should be reminding litigants of what they have in common, not encouraging them to view their opponents in the worst conceivable light,” Greene writes. How Rights Went Wrong is an argument against judicial supremacy, in the interest of justice.
The courts in plenty of other countries avoid this mess. One of the most valuable contributions of this book is its comparative approach, looking especially at the resolution of rights conflicts in Germany and the United Kingdom as models of rights mediation. Those courts aren’t perfect, and Greene doesn’t pretend that they are. But he wants to shake Americans loose from the fiction that the courts own the Constitution. It is, instead, ours.
—Jill Lepore Greene, Jamal (2021-03-15T23:58:59.000). How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
A Money shot for me, right outa the chute:
“Courts should be reminding litigants of what they have in common, not encouraging them to view their opponents in the worst conceivable light,” Greene writes.
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. Ill will and bad faith everywhere you look (to the extent you've paid attention). "Winner-take-all," "Zero-sum" ethos, Trump MAGA "Patriots" vs "Libtard Traitors," "competing against" vs "competing with..." etc.
Update. Gotta say, Jamal Greene is pretty badass:
Mediating Rights The law can respond to the proliferation of competing rights in one of three ways: it can minimize rights, it can discriminate between them, or it can mediate them. Only the last of these choices makes sense in a diverse and complex society. Only rights mediation fits this precarious moment in our collective life.
Minimizing rights is the strategy once associated with social conservatives. Their subsequent abandonment of this strategy attests that it doesn’t work. A rights minimizer believes that only the barest, most fundamental of rights deserve constitutional recognition. Justice Holmes was this way. For minimizers like him, the few rights the Constitution protects might be identified by what is most specific in the constitutional text—the right to freedom of speech or the right against racial discrimination, perhaps. Or else judges might choose to preserve those rights that have an unbroken tradition of constitutional protection, such as the right to a jury trial.
The strategy of minimizing rights is harder to pull off than it might seem. The U.S. Constitution is not just the world’s oldest written constitution but is also very nearly its shortest. (Monaco has us beat, alas.) Many of the rights it provides are couched vaguely in terms of “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws.” Most of the rights that anyone disagrees about are barely mentioned in the Constitution. This is true even of core rights like freedom of speech, which doesn’t self-evidently apply, say, to running a super PAC or burning a flag and which the Constitution only textually shields from Congress, not state or local officials or courts or the president. The Constitution also, for example, doesn’t specifically forbid racial discrimination or provide for the right to vote. It doesn’t specify that criminal defendants be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, nor does it specifically prohibit warrantless searches or coerced confessions. Denial of these rights might be perfectly rational or fit within long traditions of intolerant or abusive behavior by the government.
Truly protecting constitutional rights requires more than staring intently at the document or staging a dramatic reading on the House floor. The Constitution requires interpretation, and interpretation seems to require courts to discriminate between those rights the vague text captures and those it doesn’t. Discriminating between rights is the dominant strategy across the political spectrum in the United States. For many conservatives, the rights to be protected are those the Framers or those in their generation would have thought encompassed within the Constitution. Progressives typically reject this “originalist” approach, which seems inconsistent with the right to birth control or abortion or even racially integrated schools. But like conservatives, progressives also feel compelled to discriminate between rights they deem more fundamental and those, such as the right to commercial advertising or to carry firearms, that they see as insubstantial or destructive. Everyone’s a little bit “rightsist.”
But “rightsism” gives judges much more power than they deserve in a democracy. For the rightsist, whether education or abortion rights, gun rights or rights against police brutality, religious conscience or same-sex marriage, are protected depends on the judge’s interpretive philosophy or political background. Given the backgrounds of judges, it should come as no surprise that many of the problems invested with the solemnity of constitutional rights are the worries of First World men—access to politicians, to pornography, or to open-shop workplaces. Rights more essential to the poor, such as the right to food or shelter or health care, are left out altogether within our system. Judges do not justify their decisions to recognize some rights but not others through the moral reflection that these choices seem to demand. Rather, driving the judges’ analysis are their skill and creativity with historical research or textual exegesis and their ability to apply their legal training to the parsing of previously decided cases. Judges treat disagreements about rights as little more than a mystery to be solved by good lawyering, as if it is their business, like that of another Holmes, to know what other people do not.
But rights conflicts are not mystery novels. They are principled, often reasonable disagreements about political morality that affect the intimate lives, the hopes and dreams, of actual people. We don’t disagree about rights because some of us are correct about the rights we have and others of us are wrong, lacking the clues needed to solve the mystery. We disagree about rights because we are human beings who are different from one another and yet must live together.
We need a different strategy for responding to competing rights, a strategy of rights mediation. U.S. courts recognize relatively few rights, but strongly. They should instead recognize more rights, but weakly. In determining that someone holds a constitutional right, judges should be more generous, more respectful of the differences among us, of the idiosyncrasies of our personal values and commitments. But that same respect should lead judges to be more discerning in deciding how far my right goes as it comes predictably into conflict with the rights of others. Mediation is not about deciding, for all time, which side of a rights conflict is right and true—the campus speaker or the student, the baker or the same-sex couple, the shop owner or the protester. Mediation is also not about simply “balancing” one side against the other or maximizing social welfare in the way of a crude economic formula. Mediation is about paying unwavering attention to the facts of the parties’ dispute.
Mediating rights would mean shifting our collective emphasis from whether the Constitution includes particular rights to what the government is actually doing to people and why. Courts should devote less time to parsing the arcane legalisms—probes of original intentions, pedantic textual analysis, and mechanical application of precedent—that they use to discriminate between the rights they think the Constitution protects and the ones they think it doesn’t, and spend more time examining the facts of the case before them: What kind of government institution is acting? Is there good cause, grounded in its history, procedures, or professional competence, to trust its judgments? What are its stated reasons? Are those reasons supported by evidence? Are there alternatives that can achieve the same ends at less cost to individual freedom or equality? Knowing that courts will ask these kinds of questions makes other government actors ask them, too, as they craft their own policies and structure their own behavior. It makes rights recognition and enforcement a shared enterprise, one that is of, by, and for all the people and not just the judges.
None of which is to say that rights shouldn’t matter. Of course they should. But the one indispensable right in a democracy is the right to participate in one’s own governance. That is the right a state denies when, for example, it keeps Blacks from voting or participating equally in civil society; when the government investigates college professors or prosecutes labor organizers for espousing communism; or when a state outlaws birth control, keeping women permanently homebound. But acting through its judges, the state can also deny us the right to govern ourselves when it too easily allows an individual claim of a right to spoil the fruits of self-governance—the law.
A twenty-first-century court shouldn’t earn its keep by declaring rights but rather by reconciling them. The American experiment rests on the audacious belief that liberalism and pluralism are not just compatible but also mutually constitutive. Until we can turn the language of rights that dominates our politics into a language of reconciliation, the experiment will remain in peril. The last century gave us the constitutional tools to fight political exclusion. In this century, we need the tools to build a politics of pluralism.
The benefits of this approach don’t end at self-governance. A strategy of rights mediation also would bring U.S. rights in line with those of the rest of the world, while at the same time recovering the most essential lessons of the American Founding. It would reforge the necessary connection between rights and justice, so that whether rights are given effect depends on the real world rather than legal fictions. It would accommodate conflicts among rights instead of erasing the values and commitments of one side or the other. In doing so, it would lower the stakes of those conflicts, enabling us more readily to see each other as friends who disagree instead of enemies who must annihilate each other. And it would treat judges, legislators, and other legal decision-makers as human beings who, because they are prone to error, should treat their decisions about matters of dignity and democracy, of life and death, with a measure of humility that they too often lack. Greene, Jamal, [Kindle loc 145-196]
Yeah, but, again, that Bad Faith, Ill Will thing that addles us.
UPDATE:
MORE PREVIOUSLY CITED TOPICAL BKG READING
And, an intriguing new find:
Razor-edged radically inclusive, unapologetic analytics. She ("they") takin' no prisoners.
