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.

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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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The party of Liberty and Limited Government

No, sadly, that is not hyperbolic. Our priorities could scarcely be more out of kilter.

 

"Pro-life" attorneys in numerous states are elbowing each other aside to file ever-more draconian anti-choice bills. 

 

...If, as expected, the Supreme Court abolishes the constitutional right to abortion in its forthcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, scenarios such as the one that killed Savita Halappanavar will become more likely to occur in the United States. Twenty-six states are likely to ban or criminalize abortion if Roe is overturned, including thirteen with “trigger bans.” These typically include a “life of the mother” exception, but the language of these exceptions varies in its scope and specifics state to state. Texas’s current six-week ban—its proponents call it the “heartbeat bill”—allows exceptions for “a medical emergency.” North Dakota would permit abortion “to prevent the pregnant female’s death.” Louisiana invokes “death or substantial risk of death,” or “permanent impairment of a life-sustaining organ,” but also requires “reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of her unborn child.”

The questions implicit in these phrases—What constitutes an “emergency”? How does one define “substantial” or “reasonable”?—are left unanswered. “These laws presume a certainty that doesn’t exist in medicine,” Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal-medicine physician in Salt Lake City, said. “How ‘life-threatening’ the situation has to be—I don’t know what that means.”

“In states where abortion becomes illegal, and particularly in states where there are criminal penalties for doctors or anyone who assists in an abortion, I fear that it will send a chill through the entire medical community,” Audrey Lance, an ob-gyn in Michigan, said. “People are going to be scared to intervene until the last minute or perhaps until it’s too late.” According to the Guttmacher Institute, the reproductive-rights think tank, as many as twenty-two states are likely or certain to enforce felony bans on abortion, with potential penalties including jail time and fines. A doctor who is inclined to provide an emergency termination would have to weigh her medical judgment against the possibility of criminal charges, losing her license, and never being able to practice medicine again. “There’s a very real fear: Will they force people to prove that they really had a miscarriage?” Heuser said…

I have long been an intransigent pain in the ass regarding "definitions." 

I INVENTED GILEAD. THE SUPREME COURT IS MAKING IT REAL
I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale.
By Margaret Atwood

In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.

In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.

Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?

For instance: It is now the middle of 2022, and we have just been shown a leaked opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States that would overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, and is not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition.” True enough. The Constitution has nothing to say about women’s reproductive health. But the original document does not mention women at all.

Women were deliberately excluded from the franchise. Although one of the slogans of the Revolutionary War of 1776 was “No taxation without representation,” and government by consent of the governed was also held to be a good thing, women were not to be represented or governed by their own consent—only by proxy, through their fathers or husbands. Women could neither consent nor withhold consent, because they could not vote. That remained the case until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, an amendment that many strongly opposed as being against the original Constitution. As it was…

Read all of it.

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