Trump sues New York AG who hit him with $250M fraud lawsuit for “intimidation” — in Florida

Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit in Florida state court against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

In a 41-page filing before the Florida State Circuit Court in Palm Beach, County, the former president sought to shield his Florida state revocable trust from any investigation by the state of New York.

The filing argued any investigation would violate his right to privacy and violate his rights as a grantor and beneficiary of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust.

“Extraordinary wrongdoing requires extraordinary relief,” the lawsuit began. “As set forth below, James has repeatedly abused her position as Attorney General for the State of New York to pursue a relentless, pernicious, public, and unapologetic crusade against President Trump, a resident of Palm Beach County, Florida, with the stated goal of destroying him personally, financially, and politically.”

The lawsuit claimed, “James’ war of intimidation and harassment on President Trump, his family, his business interests, and his associates is longstanding and continuing.”

The lawsuit went on to accuse the attorney general of ethical misconduct by seeking restitution in her $250 million lawsuit against the Trump Organization.

“In truth, James knows that no restitution is owed but seeks only attention for herself and retribution against President Trump,” Trump lawyer Timothy W. Weber alleged.

Trump also complained about the New York attorney general on his Truth Social website, calling her, “Letitia ‘Peekaboo’ James.”

“While James does nothing to protect New York against these violent crimes and criminals, she attacks great and upstanding businesses which have done nothing wrong, like the very successful, job and tax-producing Trump Organization that I have painstakingly built over a long period of years,” he said of the family business he inherited.

The lawsuit would not apply to the Trump Organization.

Transmission impossible: Are Democrats punting on permitting reform?

Massachusetts has to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, the deadline the United Nations says is consistent with a livable planet, under a sweeping climate law signed by the state’s Republican governor last year. In order to do that, the Bay State plans to pipe in hydroelectric power from Canada. But the project has run into a roadblock: stiff opposition from the nearby state of Maine.

Last year, Maine voters rejected the buildout of a proposed transmission line, which would run through its western flank and carry power from dams in Quebec to customers in Massachusetts. As a result, the clean energy project is stalled, maybe indefinitely — the most recent legal setback occurred last week — and Massachusetts’ effort to wean itself off of fossil fuels has suffered a serious blow.

New England Clean Energy Connect, as the troubled Massachusetts project is called, is representative of a larger issue: Building new infrastructure in this country is a torturously slow process that often gets slowed down further by community opposition and legal challenges. Renewable and clean energy projects are particularly vulnerable to delay. Unlike natural gas pipelines, which are under the authority of an independent federal agency called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, transmission lines are at the mercy of the states they run through.

As more states commit to new climate plans, more interstate transmission lines like the one Massachusetts is fighting to build will have to crisscross the United States. There are precious few other ways to get clean power from renewable sources like wind and solar farms, geothermal plants, and hydroelectric dams, often sited in rural areas, to the dense urban centers that want to plug into it. Congress could speed up transmission construction by becoming the ultimate referee on interstate power lines, but so far lawmakers have declined to step into that role. The issue has taken on new urgency ahead of the midterm elections, which could wrest congressional control away from Democrats and shake up the power dynamics in Washington. If Democrats can’t figure out a way to reform the permitting process before the end of the year, they may not get a chance to revisit it for a long time.

Meanwhile, experts predict that interstate squabbling over where transmission lines can go and who should shoulder their costs will continue to jeopardize new renewable energy projects as the nation scrambles to pump its patchwork of power grids full of renewable energy and make the tardy transition away from fossil fuels. “If you have an interstate transmission line, any state that that line is going through can veto the project,” John Larsen, who leads U.S. energy system and climate policy research for the independent research firm the Rhodium Group, told Grist. “It happens all the time.”

The ease with which a state can nix another state’s transmission line could derail the nation’s green aspirations and even undermine the historic climate change bill Congress passed in August, the Inflation Reduction Act. The Rhodium Group estimates that nearly a quarter of the emissions reductions that are expected to take place by 2030 won’t come to fruition if no new transmission is built in the U.S. Other groups say the climate bill would take an even bigger hit without reforms that shorten the review processes for renewable energy projects and spur the construction of new transmission lines.

Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, proposed a plan in late September that would have made the green transition promised by the Inflation Reduction Act happen faster. He aimed to pass a permitting reform bill, legislation that would have prevented states from squabbling over some long-distance, interstate transmission projects and sped up the permitting process for all types of energy projects. But the bill fell apart in the Senate less than a week later after facing opposition from both Republican and progressive lawmakers.

Some GOP legislators didn’t support it because it was proposed by a Democrat and also because they were loath to hand transmission permitting, something that has long been in states’ remit, over to the federal government. Among progressives, one issue was that Manchin’s bill included a carveout for a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia called the Mountain Valley Pipeline that threatens water resources and communities in Appalachia and would add some 90 million metric tons of emissions to the U.S.’s carbon ledger every year. Another problem was that the bill revised and shortened the process by which federal agencies review the environmental impacts of major and minor infrastructure projects, which environmental justice advocates worried would increase the amount of pollution faced by low-income Black and brown communities.

But experts say that, despite its drawbacks, lawmakers blew a rare opportunity to address the country’s transmission problem by failing to pass Manchin’s bill. “The United States cannot reach its emissions goals, be a climate leader, or ensure that our energy is clean, affordable, reliable, and secure without permitting reform,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Third Way, told Grist.

Some Democratic members of Congress think so, too. “The good outweighed the bad, and there was definitely bad,” Sean Casten, a Democratic U.S. representative from Illinois, told Grist, referring to Manchin’s bill. (Prior to running for office, Casten occasionally wrote blog posts for Grist between 2007 and 2014.) Most Democratic senators — including another Democratic climate hawk, Brian Schatz of Hawaii — appeared prepared to pass the legislation, too.

Members of both political parties have bemoaned the barriers to expeditious permitting, but Congress rarely takes up legislation to reform the process. Larsen, who has been tracking these types of bills for decades now, said that, prior to Manchin’s bill, Congress had only seriously considered permitting reform twice in the past 20 years — first, in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and then again in last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. Both laws tweaked the nation’s permitting rules, but neither resulted in the federal government taking control of the permitting process for transmission lines, which is, in Larsen’s view, the biggest permitting obstacle to the renewable energy transition.

Manchin’s bill, if it had passed, would have allowed FERC to permit some long-distance lines that are “consistent with the public interest,” in addition to simplifying the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and giving FERC jurisdiction over hydrogen pipelines. “The windows of opportunity for this stuff are very infrequent,” Larsen said.

But Manchin’s bill would have also made it easier for all types of energy projects to move forward, something that made progressives queasy. Casten said that that was a tradeoff he was willing to take. “My calculus, for better or for worse, is that if you streamline transmission permitting you will bring on clean energy assets at a rate that will economically neuter the fossil energy assets,” he said. In other words, he was comfortable making the gamble that easing the permitting process for transmission would result in large-scale renewable energy deployment. Eventually, renewables would become so cheap that new fossil fuel infrastructure wouldn’t be necessary.

Manchin pulled his bill from the government spending package it was attached to before senators could vote on it, knowing he didn’t have the Republican votes he needed to make it happen. In the coming weeks, experts anticipate that he could try to hitch a new version of the bill to an existing legislative package and pass it that way before the end of this congressional session. The only two viable candidates are the omnibus spending bill, a big package of appropriations bills, and the National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA, which funds the military through the 2023 fiscal year. Congress will turn to those sometime between the midterm elections and the end of this year, the period known as a “lame-duck session.”

But there are risks to attaching permitting reform to one of these other bills, especially the NDAA, Casten said. Manchin will likely work with Republicans to come up with a new permitting reform bill that has their support, and that version of the bill could gut the National Environmental Policy Act, leading to the approval of infrastructure projects without adequate environmental reviews, or include provisions that allow states to drill for oil and gas on federal land within their state borders with less oversight than is currently in place. Such a bill already exists — it was proposed by Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Manchin’s fellow senator from West Virginia — but it failed to pass after Democrats blocked it. It’ll be much harder for Democrats to nix a new permitting bill if it is attached to the NDAA because voting against military spending is politically unpopular.

“If there is a package that the Senate can accept in the NDAA, it will in all likelihood be worse,” Casten said. “How many Democrats are going to peel off over permitting and shut down military spending? That’s a really politically hard question.”

There’s also a scenario in which Republicans take back one or both houses of Congress next week and permitting reform is revisited under their terms. On Tuesday, Politico reported that House Republicans are planning an energy agenda that centers around much more aggressive permitting reforms that would significantly shorten environmental reviews for all types of energy projects. But they’re unlikely to be successful in the next two years.

“In the scenario where we lose one chamber, I’m not sure you do any of this,” Casten said. “For all the lip service Republicans pay to oil and gas permitting reform and NEPA repeal, they won’t have a White House that will sign off on it.”

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. “We’re 28 years away from 2050,” Larsen, from Rhodium, said. “The longer we wait the less it’ll help.”

Are we living in dystopia? Not even close — but let’s learn from history this time

The next world war has begun.

Or perhaps, if you’re a philosopher, you’ll say our ongoing existential conflict continues.

Either way, on the annual Day of the Dead, (celebrated as a joyous affirmation of life, no less), the world is a hot mess.

The hot side of that is visible in Ukraine, where this week Russia doubled down on its threat of nuclear conflagration, sparking a New York Times report that senior Russian military officials have recently discussed how and when to use tactical nukes in the Ukrainian theater of war.

At the same time, North and South Korea exchanged missile fire off each other’s coastlines. North Korea stands accused of shipping weapons to Russia for the continuing war in Ukraine (demonstrating how desperate Russia is becoming). Iran is reportedly threatening Saudi Arabia and China is threatening Taiwan. There is considerable unrest in Africa. There is an Ebola outbreak in Uganda, COVID concerns remain high across the globe and scientists tell us that climate change has screwed us all. Inflation is a worldwide problem, largely because of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. To top it all off, the largest oil companies are projecting record profits. And, yes, I realize how many times I’ve had to write that sentence in my lifetime.

Of course the ongoing Republican narrative in this country is that all of this is President Biden’s fault, and what remains of the Grand Old Party will solve the problem with cuts to Social Security and Medicare if they take over the House and the Senate after next week’s election.

Trump, Biden and America’s destiny: We’re about to face the consequences. How bad will they be?

That’s it. That’s their solution.

And by God, they’re sure they will prevail, or at least they want us to believe that — because if they don’t prevail, we all know they will scream “election fraud” and encourage more violence.

President Biden finally and firmly spoke to that Wednesday night, calling out Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters (a minority of the Republican Party, or so Biden informed us) for the “Big Lie.” As for Trump specifically, Biden said the former president had fanned the flames of sedition, “abused power” and put loyalty to himself above loyalty to his country. It almost sounds like America is becoming a dystopia.

Some believe we are already living in a dystopia, while others believe that would be more like a “Mad Max” movie, or like the half-forgotten 1975 classic “A Boy and His Dog.”

Those who dwell in the daily news of unrest may ask: What would you call attacks against women, minorities and people of different faiths, different sexual preferences, different religions and different lifestyles, by a minority that represents authoritarian interests and money, if not a dystopia?

Our morning newsfeed is not filled with tales of wonder so much as tales of woe. We don’t get news about settlements on the moon or Mars, or discoveries that enthrall the planet. Instead our news feed makes us uncomfortable. Elon Musk takes over Twitter, and social media makes us even more uncomfortable. An evidently disturbed 42-year-old man breaks into Nancy Pelosi’s house and attacks her husband with a hammer — and it isn’t just an apparent assassination or kidnapping attempt directed at the speaker of the House, but an attack on sanity and democracy. What else would you call a man physically attacking someone old enough to be his grandfather? The GOP has some randy asides, poor attempts at humor and various conspiracy theories to explain it. And they want to fill you with fear and hatred while spreading their misinformation. Musk did no one any favors by bringing his tone-deaf analysis to Twitter. Yes, for many, the news is bad and apparently getting worse.

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But in fact we’ve been here before — and within my lifetime.

Let’s revisit 1968. The year began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam — a significant setback for the U.S. military campaign. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The rise of Richard Nixon began shortly thereafter. North Korea captured the USS Pueblo. During an Olympics medal ceremony, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a silent demonstration against racial discrimination in the United States. Riots raged in Washington, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Louisville and Baltimore following the King assassination. I remember “riot warnings” broadcast on radio and TV, warning us to stay inside. As a child I imagined a roiling, boiling mass of humanity rolling through my neighborhood like something from a Mad magazine cartoon drawn by Jack Davis. The riots in Louisville, as it turned out, were exacerbated by misinformation about civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael’s planned visit.

In November, “Star Trek” aired American television’s first interracial kiss. The year ended with a greeting from the astronauts aboard Apollo 8, Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders, wishing us all a Merry Christmas as the crew became the first to travel to and orbit the moon. “The moon is essentially gray, no color,” Lovell said as he gave the first closeup description. “Looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand.”

We’ve been here before, and within my lifetime: Political assassinations, rioting, protests against racial injustice, a message from outer space and the rise of a right-wing populist. All of that happened in 1968.

All of those events occurred under the overarching umbrella of the continuing threat of nuclear conflagration as we spoke of “missile gaps” in the arms race with the Soviet Union. Once a month at school we conducted “duck and cover” disaster drills. An ominous-sounding siren blared and every student dutifully filed out of the classroom in single-file. Then we’d face the walls in the hallway, sit down and put our heads between our legs — that was supposed to protect us, somehow or other, from a Soviet nuclear bomb.

Every day seemed surreal. We talked constantly about the war in Vietnam, which I was convinced I would grow up to serve in, and likely die. I ate my morning cereal digging around for rub-off stickers from “Yellow Submarine,” while wondering if I’d ever see adulthood. Allen Hemburger, one of the most decent men I ever worked with in news, remembered slogging through rice paddies that year while serving in Vietnam. “I heard about Apollo 8,” he said, remembering that he’d realized one night on patrol that he was using the moon to guide his movements through the jungle. “I realized there was quite a distance between here and there,” he said.

So by those standards 2022 doesn’t seem like a dystopia to me. It seems like more of the same, brought to us in acutely painful fashion by the likes of Musk, who purchased Twitter at an inflated price to match his inflated ego, so he can crow alongside the other robber barons who own media companies. Yes, social media has definitely helped spread the fear.

When I was younger I read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic “Foundation,” which warned us: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” That sounds a lot like geopolitics today. It describes Putin in Ukraine. It describes Trump and his raging troglodyte incompetents, who use social media to try and terrify us into the submission they could not achieve with traditional media. They are like cancer cells thriving in the unregulated dark places of human communication, driven by the need for power, raging insecurity, prolific ignorance and the delusion that anyone who thinks differently is a threat to human existence — or at least to their personal wealth.

‘Tis madness. But it is the particular madness spread by the rich and the powerful to keep us fighting with each other while they continue to make bank. And we fall for it every damn time.

I won’t leave Twitter and I won’t give up Amazon — but we should definitely bust up the monopolies controlled by this new generation of robber barons.

The rich have exploited the poor for far too long. I want that word to reach as many people as possible. So I have no problem using Twitter to criticize Twitter. I have no problem selling books through Amazon that speak to the evils of concentrated media ownership. I’m merely returning the exploitation delivered by the rich at the cost of the poor. Some may call that exploitation. Some call it justice. Pick your poison. It’s the most expedient way to get the word out. I won’t leave Twitter and I won’t avoid Amazon. I also won’t use either exclusively. Who knew that Facebook would eventually seem like the lesser social media evil?

The media czars of today are nothing more than the robber barons of old. Single ownership of such a large concentration of content distribution must be regulated when the business is news, media content and other forms of communication, especially information meant to educate or inform the public. Certain standards of service must be applied — or better yet, let’s bust up the monopolies.

We don’t yet live in dystopia, but we are afflicted with the fear and insecurity that has raged inside the human heart and mind since we crawled out of the caves. Today we are dealing with long-standing problems that the Republicans would love you to believe were created by Biden and his administration. I can’t think of one of those problems that actually began under Biden’s watch — not inflation, the war, climate problems, gas prices, antisemitism or anything else. The roots run deep and we have been forced to deal with these things over and over again because we refuse to learn from history. Donald Trump and his minions in the Republican Party exploit those problems to their own ends precisely because we don’t learn our lessons.

John Kirby, press spokesperson for the National Security Council, told a Zoom gaggle with reporters on Wednesday that we need to grasp the key issues. I asked him to outline the “big picture” when it comes to Republican claims about Biden’s responsibilities for our current geopolitical problems. Reminiscent of Jason Robards in “Parenthood,” Kirby said that many of our problems have been with us a long time and we can never “spike the football.”

To keep to that metaphor, we have to build teamwork and engage everyone, even our enemies, on issues we have in common whenever we can. Violence isn’t the answer. Working together is the only solution and Biden has sincerely tried to model that course of action. “The president believes no one nation” can solve the world’s problems, Kirby explained, and is “pursuing opportunities of cooperation” with many countries around the globe.

The founding fathers never had to deal with the specific complexities of today’s world, but history has not taken us far away from the fundamental truths that they faced, and we still face today. Some people are selfish. Some are scared and some want to take food off of your plate and put it on their own. Some of those people are in power, and quite a few of them shouldn’t be.

By building “alliances and partnerships, even limited ones,” according to Kirby, the president believes we can avoid the worst aspects of the dystopia we all fear.

We are less than a week away from finding out how this will play out over the next decade, or perhaps much longer.

Once again: Vote. The U.S. remains the most viable option for forestalling dystopia — if we can manage to retain our democracy and show the rest of the world that a government of, by and for the people can work against all odds — and against the authoritarian leanings of the worst of our own politicians.

For perhaps the last time in my lifetime, the choice is still ours to make.

from Brian Karem on Joe Biden’s America

Legal experts: DOJ “going after Trump” by granting immunity to aide to testify about Mar-a-Lago docs

Justice Department prosecutors agreed to grant limited immunity from prosecution to Trump adviser Kash Patel to force him to testify in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, according to multiple reports.

Prosecutors investigating national security documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence granted immunity to Patel to compel his testimony in the case after he previously invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, The Guardian first reported. Patel is “set to soon testify” before a grand jury in D.C. after a federal judge ruled that the DOJ could not force Patel to testify without assurances that his statements would not be used against him, according to The Wall Street Journal, though he could still potentially be charged using information independent form his testimony or if he lies under oath.

Patel, who aided former Rep. Devin Nunes’ efforts to undercut the Russia probe before serving on Trump’s National Security Council and later as the chief of staff at the Defense Department, has publicly claimed that he was in the room when Trump “declassified” documents that he took home but declined to repeat his claim to prosecutors. Trump’s lawyers have similarly declined to provide any evidence that he “declassified” any of the documents before leaving office despite repeated public statements. Patel, who was named by Trump as one of his representatives to the National Archives, in numerous interviews also discussed plans to publicly release secret documents related to the Russia investigation.

“They’re closing in”: Experts say DOJ may “force” Trump aide to testify after he pleads the Fifth

Prosecutors granted Patel partial immunity to force him to testify in the probe because he cannot plead the Fifth if he is immunized from charges. The DOJ’s move is “presumably to get him to admit under oath that his statements were false, thereby undercutting a potential defense Trump could raise,” predicted former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “Now that he has immunity… he has to testify,” he tweeted.

Prosecutors have also offered similar immunity deals to other Trump associates involved in the Mar-a-Lago mess, including Trump attorney Christina Bobb, who “declined” and insisted “she didn’t need it,” according to the Journal. Bobb signed a declaration affirming that all documents had been returned in response to a grand jury subpoena this summer before the FBI found more documents marked classified during a raid in August. Bobb has since hired her own attorney and has said she is willing to cooperate with the DOJ, The Washington Post reported last month.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he declassified the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, even falsely suggesting that the president has such broad declassification powers he could do it with his mind.

“Different people say different things but as I understand it, if you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity earlier this year.

Patel, whom Trump wanted to name to a senior position at the CIA or the FBI before senior officials rebelled, also repeatedly claimed that he was in the room when Trump declassified the documents.

“Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves,” he told Breitbart earlier this year. “I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information.'”

But Patel declined to answer questions when he was asked about it by prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers similarly pushed back on a request from federal Judge Richard Dearie — the special master appointed in the case at their request — when he asked for evidence of the declassification.

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Investigators have also sought further interviews with Walt Nauta, a former White House military valet who went to work at Mar-a-Lago, according to the Journal. Nauta previously changed his story in interviews with investigators and said that Trump ordered him to move boxes of documents after the May subpoena. He has refused to provide more testimony “out of concern that prosecutors are considering charges against him,” according to the report.

Mariotti, the former prosecutor, said Patel’s immunity deal shows that the DOJ’s “target is Trump.”

“This suggests that DOJ is seriously considering charges against Trump and building a case,” he wrote.

“This is a big step for prosecutors,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade. “Granting a witness immunity is not done lightly, but sometimes you must sacrifice a small fish to land a big whale.”

Though the DOJ agreed to the partial immunity deal, it “does not mean that the DOJ has promised not the prosecute” Patel, added former appellate lawyer Teri Kanefield. “It means that Patel’s direct statements can’t be used, but the prosecutor can use the statements indirectly.”

Patel could also be prosecuted if he lies under oath.

“The deal with DOJ will spell out he’s subject to perjury charges,” wrote former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman, “and it’s the kind of situation where they would aggressively bring them if they thought he lied on the stand.”

about the Mar-a-Lago probe

How centuries-old whaling logs are filling gaps in our climate knowledge

A little after 7:30 in the morning on Wednesday, December 7, 1887, in the aftermath of remarkably strong northeasterly winds, Captain William A. Martin instructed the crew of the Eunice H. Adams, a whaling ship from Massachusetts, to anchor in cerulean water roughly 24 feet deep, close to Port Royal, South Carolina. Around 9 a.m., Charles Hamilton, a desperate crew member, jumped overboard — deserting his post, with the intention of swimming to land. He was intercepted mid-route by another ship, which returned him to the leaking brig he had tried to escape.

Later that day, an act of near-mutiny occurred. According to the ship’s logbook, a signed letter from the majority of the crew was sent ashore to Port Royal authorities. In it, the men complained that the vessel they sailed on was “unseaworthy,” unhappy with the unplanned stop and delay for repairs merely months into their voyage, in the hope that they’d be released from duty. Authorities did nothing. A sheet of rain beat down on the Eunice H. Adams, and the miserable crew was forced to continue to carry on to Cabo Verde, an archipelago on the westernmost point of Africa.

Logbooks, like the nearly 200-page document kept aboard the Eunice H. Adams, served as legal reports, necessary for insurance claims, which meant log keepers kept exhaustive records of the crew’s day-to-day exploits. They tracked the ship’s location, other vessels encountered, and both weather and sea conditions along the routes they sailed. But they also kept clues for the future: Stored within the pages of the 18th and 19th-century whaling logbooks is a cache of ancient weather records, meticulously logged by crews traversing the world’s oceans.

“One of the most important pillars in understanding how events are, or are not, changing is observations,” said Stephanie Herring, a climate attribution scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “These historical data collection efforts help us extend back the historical record so we can better see what changes might be ‘natural,’ and which we might be driving due to human influence.”

Researchers believe that these handwritten whaling logbooks could be novel guides to understanding the course of climate change. By seeing how the climate once was, they can better understand where it’s going. “This is the language of the sea,” said Timothy Walker, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “The whaling industry is the best documented industry in the world.” Walker and Caroline Ummenhofer, an oceanographer and climate scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, are working with a team of scientists and volunteers mining archival documents to help inform temperature and weather models — weaving records from a nearly-obsolete industry with modern climate predictions.

Analyzing nearly 54,000 daily weather records from whaling ships, the Woods Hole historic whaling project has mined 110 logbooks to date, from a total cache of about 4,300. The data includes everything from latitude and longitude to ship direction, wind direction and speed, sea state, cloud cover, and general weather. The records are housed in private and public collections across New England, once a key hub for whaling ships returning from across the globe. Those results have been codified and added to a database that cross-compares the data points from these records with modern global wind patterns, doing things like compiling wind observations made in a specific area during a clear period of time. Large-scale wind patterns influence rainfall, drought, floods, and extreme storms — and more accurate measures of these patterns increases the accuracy of today’s forecasts.

“Whalers go to places where other ships don’t go. The whalers are going out in the middle of nowhere,” said Walker. “That’s great from the perspective of weather data collection, because they’re often the only people reporting weather from 200 or 300 years ago, from the regions where they happen to be hunting whales.”

Walker says they’re currently using these documents to identify geographic ranges where the strongest winds were encountered by whalers and comparing the strength of those wind patterns in the same areas in recent years.

With that data, the team hopes to establish a baseline for long-term wind patterns in remote parts of the world where “very few” instrumental data sets prior to 1957 exist. Currently, the project is only focused on wind data, but they hope to eventually focus on other information in the logs such as rainfall, cloudiness, the condition of the sea, or whether the surface was choppy or calm on a given day. The more data points they collect, the better the accuracy of existing climate models — a 2020 study published in the journal Nature found that a lack of predictability in wind patterns above many of the world’s oceans has led to unreliable rain forecasts.

Historical records have already informed everything from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to NOAA’s 20th Century Reanalysis Project. Resources like these not only regularly assess and communicate the impacts of climate change to better inform policy, but also produce global datasets that provide the best possible estimates of past weather conditions. (The 20th Century Reanalysis Project’s digitally accessible resources were cited in 217 scientific studies published in 2022 alone.) Through them, scientists can expand our comprehension of climate change and what’s to come.

Take the Data Rescue: Archives and Weather project, known as DRAW, for instance. Launched in 2017, the initiative has brought together hundreds of volunteers who digitally transcribe information from historical weather logs dating as far back as 1863, which are stored at McGill Observatory in Montreal. As of late, at least 456 users have contributed to that platform and transcribed 1,292,397 pieces of weather data, out of an estimated 9 million.

Then there’s NOAA’s Old Weather project, a major inspiration for the Woods Hole historic whaling logbook project. Since 2010, thousands of volunteers with Old Weather have digitally explored, marked, and transcribed logs, compiling data on more than 14 million past weather observations and contributing more than 1.5 million page images to the U.S. National Archives. They’ve analyzed everything from the Navy’s World War II records to Arctic records from whalers as far back as 1849.

In the latest phase of the project, the Old Weather team has transcribed over 1 million lines of data, where each line represents the weather for one hour of the day, and collected more than 4.6 million individual items of weather data and at least 34,000 reports of sea ice conditions.

That data transcription is mainly the work of volunteers like Michael Purves. “To me, it’s like a job,” said 75-year-old Purves, a retired meteorologist who has spent over a decade volunteering his time for the project. “I probably average at least 40 hours a week.” One of the logbooks Purves most recently worked on is from the USS Omaha, a sailing warship commissioned in 1872. He transcribes wind patterns, temperatures, and other events observed from the military ship that sailed the Arctic seas at the turn of the 20th century, and talks about the voyage as if he had been part of it — something he says many of the citizen scientists involved with the project do. “My first ship I was on was the HMS Grafton, which was a British cruiser,” Purves said. “When I joined it was 1915, and so they were taking part in World War I.”

Research collected through initiatives like these has contributed to the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction Global Forecast System. It’s been used in discoveries ranging from the climate effect of historic volcanic eruptions to investigations into bird migratory patterns and the recorded time and height of water levels over a 50-year-period in the 19th century at a tidal island in the United Kingdom. It’s also been used to track weather conditions recorded during a 1939 extreme snowfall event in New Zealand.

The success of these projects is pivotal for models like the 20th Century Reanalysis Project and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast’s ERA-20C; both rely on independent, historic weather observations to form a baseline for climate research and address contemporary climate questions. Most recently, historic data has contributed to global marine heat wave forecasts and helped identify drivers behind long-term droughts in Hawaii.

The Woods Hole historic whaling project hopes to add to the growing library of historic climate data, but in contrast to a global effort like the Old Weather project, these whaling logbooks have had less than two dozen researchers assessing them. Actual results from their work don’t exist beyond illustrative examples as of yet (they expect to have definitive data to share within the next nine months), but by the time the submission deadline for the next IPCC report rolls around, the team hopes their work will help inform it and eventually be incorporated into similar datasets that use results from Old Weather.

“What we want to see is, ‘Where did the whalers experience the strongest winds? At what latitude? And was that where the strongest winds are being experienced today? Or was that further north or further south, and how has it varied over the 100 years or so that the whalers went to this area?'” said Ummenhofer.

With this work, Ummenhofer and her team aim to minimize what’s missing in climate reporting: usable information from data-sparse regions of the world.

On Monday, May 14th, 1888, as a moderate trade wind blew from the northeast between Cabo Verde and the Caribbean, the crew aboard the Eunice H. Adams killed two sperm whales found in the middle of the Atlantic.

“At 10 AM, lowered the two port boats,” wrote Arthur O. Gibbons, the vessel’s log keeper. “Larboard boat went on and struck a small whale. Soon after the waist boat went and struck a larger one,” wrote Gibbons. “Cut in the small whale. So ends this day.” Six days later, the crew caught and killed another two sperm whales.

When whaling in North America hit its peak in the mid-1800s, hundreds of ships armed with gun-loaded harpoons set off on hunts in the South Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. In 1853 alone, more than 8,000 whales were killed by American whalers, making sales of $11 million. The industry was in high demand as Americans had begun to rely on whale oil as fuel for lamps, ingredients for soap, and lubricants for everything from guns to typewriters to machinery.

There’s a curious element to using historic whaling records to inform modern climate models, records that only exist because of the commercial popularity of whaling, which drove what may have been the largest culling of animals in terms of biomass and even increased global emissions. When a single whale carcass sinks into the deep sea after death, it sequesters an average of 33 tons of CO2. This is released back into the atmosphere when whales are captured by ocean fisheries. A 2020 study published in the journal Science Advances found whaling has contributed significantly to climate change, releasing at least 730 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since 1950.

Walker is quick to point out that the global, modern, industrialized whaling industry — which operated with steam and diesel factory vessels from the 1920s until whaling bans went into effect in the 1980s — was responsible for “more than eight times as many whale captures over a much shorter period of time.” An estimated 2.9 million whales were killed worldwide in the 20th century — the majority in the Southern Hemisphere.

On Sunday morning, December 16th, 1888, a few dozen miles off the coast of the Portuguese island of Pico Azores, the most remote oceanic archipelago in the north Atlantic, a light breeze stirred the waters as the Eunice H. Adams sailed to its next destination for repairs: Horta Faial, Portugal.

Onboard, Captain Martin was up against a nearly impossible task — placating an exhausted, downtrodden crew working hard to keep the badly leaking boat afloat, all while attempting to do his job: catching and killing whales. The logbook reflects dozens of times the captain had to write to the ship’s owner requesting funds for emergency repairs needed throughout the vessel’s 29-month, transatlantic voyage.

More than a century later, a lack of funds continues to be a theme for the Eunice H. Adams, and other ships associated with the Woods Hold historic whaling project. Investing in historic projects like this one can be notoriously difficult. The DRAW project, for instance, was started in 2017 by climatologist Victoria Slonosky out of her home in Quebec and relied on volunteers to digitize the open-source project. “It is not easy to find funding to transcribe historical records,” Slonosky said.

Without citizen scientists, she estimates the scope of their project would take a single researcher around 45,000 hours of work, and cost at least $200,000 to transcribe around 4 million weather observations. A recently published study reported that more than 16,000 volunteers contributed to reviewing 66,000 sheets of historic rainfall records from the United Kingdom and Ireland — in just 16 days. Crafting blog posts and placing ads in the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Slonosky invited volunteers to help her transcribe. From there, the work caught the attention of researchers at McGill University before ballooning out to incorporate partners at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal and Geothink; with the team launching a web platform devised by climatologists, geographers, archivists, data scientists and programmers. “This became an interdisciplinary project to say, ‘Come explore our records. And see how we can use these records to further our understanding of climate change,'” Slonosky said.

Like DRAW, the Woods Hole whaling project is costly in terms of time and money, and while Walker and Ummenhofer have received some funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and private foundations, they are actively looking for more to underwrite their work. Walker sees the effort as a decade-long endeavor that dovetails whaling records in the U.S. with those stored in museums across the world. He spent the summer in Portugal setting up a collaboration with the University of Lisbon that will incorporate about 3,800 logbooks containing Portuguese naval records, spanning 1760 to 1940, into the whaling project’s purview.

“There are a lot of avenues that historians can explore, to work hand in glove with scientists,” Walker said. Whether it’s ancient medical records or port records, he sees centuries-old documentation as an untapped asset in our long-term understanding of climate change. “There is a gold mine in our backyard for finding out information on past weather patterns globally.”

The expedition of the Eunice H. Adams officially came to an end in the spring of 1890.

“The ship was leaking badly from the beginning of the voyage in October 1887 to its end in March 1890,” said historian Stephen Luce, one of the historians currently logging data for the Woods Hole whaling project. Captain Martin was a Black sea captain, Luce said, suspecting that the captain being given a leaky ship may have been reflective of racism.

Roughly one month before the Eunice H. Adams returned to Massachusetts, Martin was replaced by another member of the crew. The ship’s logbook offers no explanation. What it does offer is a look into the captain’s struggles as one of the only Black sea captains leading such expeditions at the time. “My guess is that all the better ships, the good ships that were out there, went to the white captains,” said Luce.

Luce says he doesn’t know what happened to Martin after he left the Eunice H. Adams. Records suggest that the transatlantic voyage aboard the dilapidated brig was his final journey at sea, with one account saying he fell ill and resigned of his own accord, returning home as a paralytic.

What Luce does know is that Martin died in 1907 and that he was laid to rest in a humble plot beside his wife in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, close to the place the Martins once called home. “I was actually thinking about visiting his grave,” said Luce.

Helping the liver regenerate itself could give patients an option other than a transplant

The liver is known for its ability to regenerate. It can completely regrow itself even after two-thirds of its mass has been surgically removed. But damage from medications, alcohol abuse or obesity can eventually cause the liver to fail. Currently, the only effective treatment for end-stage liver disease is transplantation.

However, there is a dearth of organs available for transplantation. Patients may have to wait from 30 days to over five years to receive a liver for transplant in the U.S. Of the over 11,600 patients on the waiting list to receive a liver transplant in 2021, only a little over 9,200 received one.

But what if, instead of liver transplantation, there were a drug that could help the liver regenerate itself?

I am the founding director of the Pittsburgh Liver Research Center and run a lab studying liver regeneration and cancer. In our recently published research, my team and I found that activating a particular protein with a new medication can help accelerate regeneration and repair after severe liver injury or partial surgical removal in mice.

While the liver can regenerate itself, it can’t be endlessly donated for transplants.

Key players in liver regeneration

The liver performs over 500 key functions in your body, including producing proteins that carry fat through the body, converting excess glucose into glycogen for storage and breaking down toxins like ammonia, among others.

Liver cells, or hepatocytes, take on these many tasks by a divide-and-conquer strategy, also called zonation. This separates the liver into three zones with different tasks, and cells are directed to perform specialized functions by turning on specific genes active in each zone. However, exactly what controls the expression of these genes has been poorly understood.

Over the past two decades, my team and other labs have identified one group of 19 proteins called Wnts that play an important role in controlling liver function and regeneration. While researchers know that Wnt proteins help activate the repair process in damaged liver cells, which ones actually control zonation and regeneration, as well as their exact location in the liver, have been a mystery.

Liver disease progresses in four stages.

To identify these proteins and where they came from, my team and I used a new technology called molecular cartography to identify how strongly and where 100 liver function genes are active. We found that only two of 19 Wnt genes, Wnt2 and Wnt9b, were functionally present in the liver. We also found that Wnt2 and Wnt9b were located in the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels in zone 3 of the liver, an area that plays a role in a number of metabolic functions.

To our surprise, eliminating these two Wnt genes resulted in all liver cells expressing only genes typically limited to zone 1, significantly limiting the liver’s overall function. This finding suggests that liver cells experience an ongoing push and pull in gene activation that can modify their functions, and Wnt is the master regulator of this process.

Eliminating the two Wnt genes from endothelial cells also completely stopped liver cell division, and thus regeneration, after partial surgical removal of the liver.

Liver regeneration after Tylenol overdose

We then decided to test whether a new drug could help recover liver zonation and regeneration. This drug, an antibody called FL6.13, shares similar functions with Wnt proteins, including activating liver regeneration.

Over the course of two days, we gave this drug to mice that were genetically engineered to lack Wnt2 and Wnt9b in their liver endothelial cells. We found that the drug was able to nearly completely recover liver cell division and repair functions.

Lastly, we wanted to test how well this drug worked to repair the liver after Tylenol overdose. Tylenol, or acetaminophen, is an over-the-counter medication commonly used to treat fever and pain. However, an overdose of Tylenol can cause severe liver damage. Without immediate medical attention, it can lead to liver failure and death. Tylenol poisoning is one of the most common causes of severe liver injury requiring liver transplantation in the U.S. Despite this, there is currently only one medication available to treat it, and it is only able to prevent liver damage if taken shortly after overdose.

We tested our new drug on mice with liver damage from toxic doses of Tylenol. We found that one dose was able to decrease liver injury biomarkers — proteins the liver releases when injured — in the blood and reduce liver tissue death. These findings indicate that liver cell repair and tissue regeneration are occurring.

Reducing the need for transplantation

One way to address liver transplantation shortages is to improve treatments for liver diseases. While current medications can effectively cure hepatitis C, a viral infection that causes liver inflammation, other liver diseases haven’t seen the same progress. Because very few effective treatments are available for illnesses like nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and alcoholic liver disease, many patients worsen and end up needing a liver transplant.

My team and I believe that improving the liver’s ability to repair itself could help circumvent the need for transplantation. Further study of drugs that promote liver regeneration may help curb the burden of liver disease worldwide.

Satdarshan (Paul) Singh Monga, Professor of Pathology and Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Humans are 8% virus – how ancient viral DNA in your genome plays a role in disease and development

Remnants of ancient viral pandemics in the form of viral DNA sequences embedded in our genomes are still active in healthy people, according to new research my colleagues and I recently published.

HERVs, or human endogenous retroviruses, make up around 8% of the human genome, left behind as a result of infections that humanity’s primate ancestors suffered millions of years ago. They became part of the human genome due to how they replicate.

Like modern HIV, these ancient retroviruses had to insert their genetic material into their host’s genome to replicate. Usually this kind of viral genetic material isn’t passed down from generation to generation. But some ancient retroviruses gained the ability to infect germ cells, such as egg or sperm, that do pass their DNA down to future generations. By targeting germ cells, these retroviruses became incorporated into human ancestral genomes over the course of millions of years and may have implications for how researchers screen and test for diseases today.

Active viral genes in the human genome

Viruses insert their genomes into their hosts in the form of a provirus. There are around 30 different kinds of human endogenous retroviruses in people today, amounting to over 60,000 proviruses in the human genome. They demonstrate the long history of the many pandemics humanity has been subjected to over the course of evolution. Scientists think these viruses once widely infected the population, since they have become fixed in not only the human genome but also in chimpanzee, gorilla and other primate genomes.

Research from our lab and others has demonstrated that HERV genes are active in diseased tissue, such as tumors, as well as during human embryonic development. But how active HERV genes are in healthy tissue was still largely unknown.

To answer this question, our lab decided to focus on one group of HERVs known as HML-2. This group is the most recently active of the HERVs, having gone extinct less than 5 million years ago. Even now, some of its proviruses within the human genome still retain the ability to make viral proteins.

We examined the genetic material in a database containing over 14,000 donated tissue samples from all across the body. We looked for sequences that matched each HML-2 provirus in the genome and found 37 different HML-2 proviruses that were still active. All 54 tissue samples we analyzed had some evidence of activity of one or more of these proviruses. Furthermore, each tissue sample also contained genetic material from at least one provirus that could still produce viral proteins.

HERVs have influenced humans in ways researchers are still figuring out.

The role of HERVs in human health and disease

The fact that thousands of pieces of ancient viruses still exist in the human genome and can even create protein has drawn a considerable amount of attention from researchers, particularly since related viruses still active today can cause breast cancer and AIDS-like disease in animals.

Whether the genetic remnants of human endogenous retroviruses can cause disease in people is still under study. Researchers have spotted viruslike particles from HML-2 in cancer cells, and the presence of HERV genetic material in diseased tissue has been associated with conditions such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, as well as multiple sclerosis and even schizophrenia.

Our study adds a new angle to this data by showing that HERV genes are present even in healthy tissue. This means that the presence of HERV RNA may not be enough to connect the virus to a disease.

Importantly, it also means that HERV genes or proteins may no longer be good targets for drugs. HERVs have been explored as a target for a number of potential drugs, including antiretroviral medication, antibodies for breast cancer and T-cell therapies for melanoma. Treatments using HERV genes as a cancer biomarker will also need to take into account their activity in healthy tissue.

A developing fetus shares a few commonalities with viruses.

On the other hand, our research also suggests that HERVs could even be beneficial to people. The most famous HERV embedded in human and animal genomes, syncytin, is a gene derived from an ancient retrovirus that plays an important role in the formation of the placenta. Pregnancy in all mammals is dependent on the virus-derived protein coded in this gene.

Similarly, mice, cats and sheep also found a way to use endogenous retroviruses to protect themselves against the original ancient virus that created them. While these embedded viral genes are unable to use their host’s machinery to create a full virus, enough of their damaged pieces circulate in the body to interfere with the replication cycle of their ancestral virus if the host encounters it. Scientists theorize that one HERV may have played this protective role in people millions of years ago. Our study highlights a few more HERVs that could have been claimed or co-opted by the human body much more recently for this same purpose.

Unknowns remain

Our research reveals a level of HERV activity in the human body that was previously unknown, raising as many questions as it answered.

There is still much to learn about the ancient viruses that linger in the human genome, including whether their presence is beneficial and what mechanism drives their activity. Seeing if any of these genes are actually made into proteins will also be important.

Answering these questions could reveal previously unknown functions for these ancient viral genes and better help researchers understand how the human body reacts to evolution alongside these vestiges of ancient pandemics.

Aidan Burn, PhD Candidate in Genetics, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trial shows Oath Keepers never wanted January 6 to end, and GOP candidates plan to grant their wish

For most Americans, January 6, 2021, was a harrowing day, as a mob ransacked the Capitol, looking for politicians to terrorize or even kill in revenge for their unwillingness to steal the presidency for Donald Trump. For the Oath Keepers, however, the saddest part of the day is how quickly it ended. The right wing militia had been planning the insurrection for months, but when the day itself came, their hopes for political assassinations and the overthrow of democracy were largely dashed. Trump never showed up, as promised, to lead the mob to victory. The politicians targeted managed to escape. Eventually, it became clear the insurrection had failed, and Trump finally, with great reluctance, told the mob to go home.

But, as revealed in the seditious conspiracy trial for five Oath Keepers on Monday, they weren’t quite ready to throw in the towel. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Stewart Rhodes, the militia’s founder, texted in a group chat.

“We aren’t quitting!!” member Kelly Meggs texted the team. “We are reloading!!” He promised that the Oath Keepers would return to the Capitol to finish the job and grumbled that they had not been able to find Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi after another Oath Keeper expressed disappointment over not seeing her “head rolling down the front steps.”

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The Oath Keepers did not go back to the Capitol but instead convened at a nearby Olive Garden to plot the next steps in their not-yet-abandoned plan to finish the insurrection. Joshua James, an Oath Keeper who turned state’s witness, testified that, at the dinner, the group started spitballing plans to interrupt President Joe Biden’s inauguration. “Declaration of illegitimacy is step 1,” Rhodes texted in the middle of a dinner of middlebrow Italian-American cuisine. But the planning was cut short when members began to fear the police finding them chowing down on endless baskets of breadsticks. They decided to flee after divvying up the enormous weapons cache between three cars. Four days afterwards, Rhodes was still trying to send messages to Trump, a witness testified, saying it was not too late to call on groups like the Oath Keepers to take the government by force.

The group never did get it together to make one last big attempt to prevent Biden from assuming office. Now, unlike Trump, they are facing legal consequences for their role in the violence. With all the evidence against them, these five Oath Keepers are likely facing stiff prison sentences. But even with Biden in office, the sad fact of the matter is their goal on January 6 — installing Trump in office against the will of the people — is now a lot more likely to happen than it was the day they stormed the Capitol.

The Oath Keepers are using the “we were just kidding” white privilege defense

That’s because insurrectionists are poised to take power across the country in an election that looks like it may be determined mainly by low-information voters who know little about the threats to democracy and are focused instead on incorrectly blaming Biden for inflation. In the purple states that determined the 2020 election, most Republican candidates running for major offices have spent months dog-whistling to the GOP base their intentions to steal the 2024 election for Trump, even as they play dumb about it to media outlets that might attract swing voting audiences.

Insurrectionists are poised to take power across the country in an election that looks like it may be determined mainly by low-information voters who know little about the threats to democracy.

“In a typical year, we are not often faced with the question of whether the vote we cast will preserve democracy or put it at risk,” Biden said in a speech from Capitol Hill on Wednesday night. “But we are this year.”

Sometimes Republicans do say the quiet parts out loud. On Monday, the far-right election-denying candidate running as the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin, Tim Michels, flatly declared, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.” His campaign office followed up with an attempted clean-up, telling the Washington Post he only meant “voters will reward the Republicans at the ballot box” after the great job he intends to do. This is a transparent cover — Michels has backed Trump’s Big Lie and has repeatedly refused to answer reporter questions about whether he would certify a Democratic win in 2024.

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Lots of Republicans are playing the “will they or won’t they” game this cycle, though anyone who is paying attention knows they have no wish to accept, much less certify, statewide elections where the Democrat wins. The Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, Kari Lake, has only agreed to accept the election results if she wins. In Pennsylvania, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, was part of the “fake elector” scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and participated in the events of January 6. The GOP candidate for Michigan governor, Tudor Dixon, also has declared the 2020 election fraudulent, making it likely, if not certain, that if elected she would find her way to refusing to certify a Biden win in her swing state in 2024.

As Mother Jones reported, insurrectionists touting the Big Lie met for a conference over the weekend. In attendance were “the Republican candidates runsning for secretary of state—the guardians of election integrity—in the crucial swing states of Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan, respectively, Mark Finchem, Jim Marchant, and Kristina Karamo.” The GOP targeting of election denialists for roles as state secretaries is not a coincidence. The positions would give them control over how elections are run in the state, making it that much easier for the party to pull some of the illegal stunts Trump demanded in 2020. Finhem, like Mastriano, was at the January 6 riot. Finchem’s lawyer was deep inside the plot to stop the real electors from registering Arizona’s vote in 2020 in favor of a slate of illegal electors sent to vote for Trump instead.

Kari Lake dodges questions about election results in interview with CNN

Unfortunately, there are few safeguards in place to keep this motley crew from pulling off the “fake electors” plan in 2024 if they are in office. They are not only running with “coup 2024” as their top-of-mind goal. They’ve also been able to spend the past couple of years gaming out strategies to get away with it, time that was not available in the failed scramble to throw out the results of the 2020 election. The Oath Keepers may go to prison, but alas, the people who were organizing the paperwork aspects of the coup have mostly been left untouched and are therefore free to try again in 2024, only this time with more power and know-how. If they win office this election cycle, it’s unclear if there’s much that can be done to stop them.

about Jan. 6 and the Big Lie:

Is America ready to trade democracy for cheap gas? That’s fascism in a nutshell

This recent New York Times headline offers a perfect prospective epitaph for America’s ailing democracy and its potential imminent demise: “Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority.”

The details are grim. Voters “overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger,” with relatively few calling it “the nation’s most pressing problem,” according to a new poll conducted for the Times by Siena College. More than one-third of independent voters in the poll “said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election,” because economic concerns were more urgent. While 71 percent of voters agreed that “democracy was at risk,” only 7 percent said that was the country’s most important problem.

The Times’ analysis conformed to a depressing current of conventional wisdom, concluding that “for many Americans, this year’s midterm elections will be largely defined by rising inflation and other economic woes,” reflecting a deeply rooted “cynicism” about government. This particular portrait reinforces what political scientists and other experts have long known about voting and other political behavior in this country.

Most Americans are relatively unsophisticated in their understanding of politics and public policy, and tend to be disengaged on issues beyond the few that appear to be of immediate concern to them, their families or their communities, barring a national emergency or crisis that demands collective attention. But even that kind of increased salience does not necessarily translate into an accurate or factual understanding of the policies in question. For example, the COVID pandemic certainly became a major national issue, but also fueled widespread disinformation about vaccines and public health measures. The 2020 election transfixed the nation for weeks, but Donald Trump’s Big Lie narrative about that election has not faded away.

NeverTrumper Rick Wilson on the midterms: “Democrats are about to pay a terrible price”

There are exceptions. Because of their experience navigating the color line, the contradictions of American democracy and the country’s long history of white supremacy and racism, Black Americans, as a group, often tend to be more sophisticated than white Americans in terms of political decision-making.

Most Americans are not ideological, meaning that they do not possess a coherent and consistent worldview that drives voting and other political behavior. In the aggregate, the American people tend to take their cues from trusted elites about how they should think about politics and what they should do about it. Partisanship and voting are proxies for other social identities, not independent of them.

It is often said that the American people are increasingly polarized on politics. That’s true enough, but it fundamentally reflects how the political elites, opinion leaders, and a small percentage of highly politically engaged individuals drive mass behavior.

Many Americans don’t think systematically about politics, and are disengaged or poorly informed on important issues. Moreover, the political and economic elites like it that way.

As the New York Times/Siena College poll and accompanying analysis reinforces, immediate financial concerns and judgments about the economy (aka “pocketbook issues”) appear to influence political behavior for many Americans. But even this commonplace observation is more complicated than it appears. “The economy,” as a political decision tool, is fraught with pitfalls and inconsistencies. In the aggregate, it may not even matter nearly as much in determining political decision-making as many experts and other observers have long assumed. Political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels make this intervention in their book “Democracy for Realists“:

[I]t is by no means obvious that voters can ascertain how incumbents have performed simply by assessing changes in their own welfare. If jobs have been lost in a recession, something is wrong, but is that the president’s fault? If it is not, then voting on the basis of good or bad economic conditions may be no more efficacious than killing the pharaoh when the Nile fails to flood or voting against Woodrow Wilson when sharks attack the Jersey shore…. Or, as Theodore Roosevelt put it while he coped with the Panic of 1907, “When the average man loses his money he is simply like a wounded snake and strikes right or left at anything, innocent or the reverse, that presents itself as conspicuous in his mind.”

An even more fundamental problem is that voters may have great difficulty accurately assessing changes in their welfare — even with respect to national economic conditions, which are highly salient and carefully monitored by professional economists in and out of government.

Many Americans do not think systematically about politics, society or the economy and are not likely to make connections between an apparently abstract concept like “democracy” and the specific issues they care about. But it’s also true that political elites, media commentators and other opinion leaders who claim to believe in democracy have failed to explain to a broad public audience how and why democracy has a substantive impact on the average person’s daily life.

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There is an even more cynical explanation: As a group, America’s elites do not particularly want a well-informed and highly engaged public. Such a public might pose an effective challenge to the outsized power of those elites, and by doing so expose how far they have imposed their narrow set of interests on public policy. Here is Chris Hedges, in a recent essay republished at Salon:

The step from dysfunctional democracy to full-blown fascism was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred for the ruling class, embodied by the establishment Republican and Democratic parties, which have merged into one ruling party, is nearly universal. The public, battling inflation that is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S. household an additional $717 a month in July alone, will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.

The reconfiguration of society under neoliberalism to exclusively benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and privatization of public services, including schools, hospitals and utilities, along with deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of state funds and resources into the war industry, at the expense of the nation’s infrastructure and social services, and the building of the world’s largest prison system and militarization of police, have predictable results.

At the heart of the problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms of government and democratic solutions.

In a recent interview with me for Salon, social psychologist Shawn Rosenberg offered similar observations, saying that “the Achilles heel of democracy is that the people, meaning the citizenry, do not understand the larger political and governmental system and its values,” and are therefore “susceptible to a populist message.” He mainly attributes this to America’s dysfunctional educational system, which has “failed to educate the public to understand complex questions of society and politics”:

It’s not that large parts of the American public are inherently evil or bad. It’s just that when they look around at the world, they don’t understand what’s going on. They don’t understand why it’s so hard to solve some of these problems we’re facing, why it’s so hard to govern and why they’re supposed to respect people who they believe are obviously wrong. … Right-wing populism offers simple answers and simple solutions and simple characterizations of what the world is like. Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and other such Republican leaders are offering that vision and those answers.

Scholar who saw all this coming: Americans “do not really understand liberal democracy”

Meanwhile, members of the media and political classes often make the error of generalizing from their own experience and knowledge to the public as a whole, leading to a whole range of incorrect assumptions, misguided conclusions and overall misunderstandings. Thus we get the perpetual of real or feigned shock and surprise from pundits, commentators and mainstream political leaders when faced with the Republican Party’s fascist campaign against American democracy. Political scientist Jonathan Renshon addressed this in an interview with Politico last June:

Absolutely nothing is stopping elites from using the same public opinion data that academics or the public has access to, and yet we still see compelling evidence that elites misread public opinion, either because of stereotypes they hold about the public, over-weighting their own preferences, or unequal exposure to particular constituencies or special interests. As we saw in the 2020 presidential election campaign, it’s also not unusual for politicians to discount or dismiss public opinion polls when they don’t like the results. In a larger sense, this is not surprising: There are many domains in which access to more or more accurate information doesn’t necessarily reduce the tendency for bias to creep into our judgments.

In total, the recent New York Times poll just offers further evidence that the American people may claim to be concerned about “democracy,” but are fundamentally unclear as to the cause of the crisis and have no idea what to do about it. It’s actually worse than that, in that many Americans don’t even pretend to care about democracy and are more concerned about lower prices for gas and groceries — and have no problem trading away their rights and freedoms for the promise of ending inflation.

In a similarly dark vein, a new CBS News poll finds that 63 percent of likely Democratic voters believe that a functioning democracy is more important than a strong economy, but that those numbers are more than reversed among Republicans, 70 percent of whom rank a “strong economy” (whatever that means) above a functioning democracy.

It’s not hyperbolic or metaphorical to describe those numbers as a textbook example of how democracy gradually, and then more swiftly, rots away and succumbs to fascism. The naive faith that “it can’t happen here” is severely misplaced: It’s happening here right now.

about the midterms and the rise of fascism

A helium shortage might mean you can’t get the medical scans you need. Here’s why

The MRI machine is one of the greatest achievements of modern medical imaging. Short for magnetic resonance imaging machine, MRIs are essentially magnets that look like giant tubes and use radio waves to take extremely detailed images of your inner organs. MRIs are so common that today they are used to diagnose everything from cancers and organ injuries to concussions (which, some argue, they should not be used for). They are valued both because of the accuracy of their images and because, unlike computerized tomography (CT) scans, MRIs do not expose patients to radiation. In other words, they have revealed and saved thousands and likely millions of lives by peering into the body in ways that only a surgeon could do before.

What if all the MRI scanners on Earth suddenly stopped working?

Yet what if all the MRI scanners on Earth suddenly stopped working? This isn’t a thought experiment; experts believe that they may indeed happen, and for a reason you might not expect: We are facing a shortage of helium, the first noble gas and an element perhaps best known for its utility in party balloons. In addition to making your voice sound high-pitched and funny when you inhale it, however, helium can also play a vital role in allowing MRIs to function.

As a helium shortage looms, “vacuum balloons” could save physics, medicine, and birthday parties

Why could a helium shortage suddenly affect our ability to create MRI images? It all comes down to keeping things cool — literally.

MRI machines use superconducting magnets to take high-resolution images of the inside of your body in slices, like loaves of bread. Each scanner includes magnetic coils that, in order to be superconductive, must be cooled to the point that an electric current is capable of running through them. That, in turn, allows the MRI scanners to create the high-intensity magnetic fields necessary to function properly. Liquid helium is essential because it cools the coils to the point that the current can run through it. As such, they are vital to the design of MRI machines that are used all over the world.

Unfortunately, liquid helium is a limited resource. It is also a popular one, procured for everything from rockets and weather balloons to various aviation projects. As anyone familiar with the ongoing supply chain crises can tell you, this is a serious problem.

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“Helium has become a big concern,” Mahadevappa Mahesh, a professor of radiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Baltimore, told NBC News. “Especially now with the geopolitical situation.”

There are many issues with the existing helium reserves. Aside from the fact that there is a limited amount of liquid helium in the ground, there is also the fact that America’s federal helium reserve in Texas is dwindling and tied up in attempts at privatization. In January there was a fire at an eastern Russian helium facility, further compromising access to helium in the United States, and that was before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

These machines not only “recycle what is there, but very little helium is stored in the device.”

“Liquid helium, the coldest element on Earth, is invaluable for hospitals that use MRI scans to detect cancer, spinal cord injuries and liver diseases,” wrote Becker’s Hospital Review, a leading magazine about the hospital industry. The publication reiterated the importance of liquid helium to MRIs, emphasizing that “liquid helium is necessary to keep the magnetic current at an extremely cold temperature,” and was ominous about the prospect of liquid helium becoming scarce.

Not everyone is pessimistic about the helium crisis. Dr. Lawrence L. Wald Ph.D., a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School’s A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, told Salon by email that the industry is adapting to the crisis. “MRI technology has already adapted to the helium shortage in that scanners produced for the last ~5 years do not consume significant quantities of helium,” he noted. Likewise, while current MRI machines do use up to 1000 liters of helium in their cryostats, “they do not let it evaporate as they did a decade ago; they recycle it. Therefore there is no need to regularly fill these scanners,” which are known as “‘zero boil-off’ magnets.” (Although technically, the amount of helium boil-off is not zero — just much lower than before.)

Wald also described a “next generation of magnets” that is coming soon to new MRI machines, and which will use even less helium. These machines not only “recycle what is there, but very little helium is stored in the device. The amount of helium contained in the magnet is less than 20 liters and it is recycled in the same way as above (and thus does not need regular filling).” He cited as examples of more efficient MRI scanners models currently sold by Phillips, Siemens and General Electric.

In other words, the medical industry is innovating its way out of a helium shortage. Soon, Wald thinks, it will be a non-issue.

“I do not see any significant impact on clinical MRI due to the helium shortage thanks to these advances in cryogenic technology; helium is becoming less and less relevant,” Wald concluded. “We will depend more and more on cryo-coolers for getting the magnets cold and less and less on helium.”

Of course, there are still hundreds of older MRI machines operating today using older, more helium-intensive technology — meaning the helium shortage problem may go away eventually, but we are not there yet.

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Zelenskyy says Russia’s peace calls are “crazy”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with Czech television on Tuesday that negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin are impossible as long as Moscow keeps firing missiles into Ukraine.

“You don’t have time for this diplomacy because they lie. It’s not diplomacy. They lie, you know, they want to find ‘diplomatic directions’ to stop the war. It’s lying. Yesterday they said, ‘we are ready, Ukraine is not ready. And today they attacked us by fifty-four rockets. What? They are crazy,” Zelenskyy said.

Putin launched his unprovoked and illegal “special military operation” on February 24th. But the invasion has turned into a quagmire for Russia, whose forces were ill-equipped and unprepared to take on the Ukrainians, whom the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization have provided material support.

Tens of thousands of Putin’s troops have been captured or killed, and Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons – and baselessly accused Ukraine of planning a false-flag operation to detonate a radiological bomb that it would then blame on Russia – to blackmail the West into cutting off aid. That bluster has not worked. Meanwhile, Russia has also targeted civilians and infrastructure in what has devolved into an attritional campaign of terror. Thousands of Ukrainians have lost their lives, and many of those who have perished are believed to be victims of war crimes at the hands of the Russians.

Zelenskyy blasted the Kremlin for claiming that it wants peace while it continues the relentless destruction of Ukraine.

“So they are ill – I can’t understand – on their head. So what are they speaking about? How can we speak if they attacked us with fifty-four rockets? This day – half of the day. What about are they speaking now? I think they live on another planet,” he added. “It’s not about compromise or no compromise, of course, only victory.”

Watch here:

"They just lie. Are they crazy? Are they ill? I can't understand what's in their heads. How can we talk to them if they fire 54 rockets on us in half a day?" – @ZelenskyyUa commented on the possibility of negotiations with Russia. pic.twitter.com/YraRSIR3UH

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) November 2, 2022

All 60 million wage earners at the bottom make less than the top 237,000 executives

Last year the 237,000 highest paid employees in America together made more money than the lowest paid 60 million workers, my analysis of the latest federal wage statistics shows.

The top employees collected $659.3 billion for their work last year.

The worst paid 60 million workers earned $628.3 billion, about 5% less than the fat cats at the top of the pay ladder.

These pay figures illustrate a long-term trend, heavily influenced by federal government policy, to restrain wages paid to the vast majority and to focus pay increases at the top, especially Congressional antipathy to unions. Without unions, workers have little to no bargaining power.

The bosses hold Executive Class jobs—which DCReport defines as those paying $1 million or more. Million dollar and up positions are the fasted growing jobs in America both in growth rate and pay. And the rate of growth is accelerating.

Over the last three decades the Executive Class grew 325%, ten times the growth in the overall workforce, which increased 33%.

Last year alone, however, the number of Executive Class jobs grew 95 times faster than jobs overall, my analysis of the latest Social Security Wage Statistics report shows. Total jobs grew by 0.3% in 2021 while Executive Class jobs grew by 28.5%.

The 60 million workers at the bottom all made $25,000 or less. That means many of them worked part-time.

Looking only at full-time workers, those making at least $15,000, still shows a huge pay gap. The lowest paid 30 million full-time workers made less than the total paid to those 506 bosses at the top, my analysis of the wage data shows.

This deep and rapidly widening chasm in pay between those at the top and bottom is likely to continue growing under existing federal labor laws, tax policies and spending policies. Last year the 97% of full-time workers making less than $325,000 got pay raises averaging 2.7% while inflation ran 4.7%, leaving the typical worker $1,200 worse off in terms of buying power.

Who is responsible for this? Ultimately the voters are because they chose the Representatives, Senators and President who create the policies that encourage more for the haves and less for 97% of full-time workers and more than 99% of all workers, including part-timers.

Stark Divide

The stark divide between those at the very top of the pay ladder and the 166 millions people earning less than $250,000 a year, especially those in the lowest paying jobs, illustrates how the fruits of America’s economic success are benefitting only a thin sliver of society at the top.

I’ve been analyzing the annual pay statistics for more than a quarter of a century, documenting the steady shift in the share of all American wages and salaries going to those making more than $100,000, and especially to the $1 million and up Executive Class, with flat to falling wages for everyone else.

The savings and investments that the best paid employees can afford only widen the distance between America’s once vibrant but now hollowed out Middle Class and the Executive Class.

This divide plays a major role in fueling the rejection of democracy by many millions of Americans who, both polls and vote results show, are willing to throw away their liberties in the false hope that a dictatorial system will somehow alleviate their financial stress. Donald Trump and other would be dictators promise to alleviate financial pain but their policy pronouncements would do the opposite, instead further enriching the already rich.

The problem in may disparities traces back to voters abandoning the New Deal in 1980 and adopting the pro-business, pro-rich policies proposed in 1980 by Ronald Reagan.

In 1991 the Executive Class collected 2% of all pay. Last year they pocketed 6.7%. Search for this indisputable fact and the only place you will find it is at DCReport and the news organizations we let reprint our work for free.

In 1991 just 55,823 workers made $1 million or more in today’s money. [See footnote] Now that group totals 237,331 people, more than four times as many.

About one in 2,300 people got Executive Class pay in 1991. By 2020 one in 900 workers got Executive Class pay. Last year one in 700 did. This trend shows how Corporate America turns a firehose of greenbacks on its leaders but provides only a trickle of coins for the people whose labors generate the profits.

Revealing Indicator

The most revealing indicator of how the national wage pie is being resliced to favor those at the top is shown by the rapid increase in Executive Class jobs paying more than $50 million per year.

The $50 million and up jobs category was added by Social Security in 1997. The number of these super high paying jobs increased 38-fold in the next 24 years.

Just 13 employees made $50 million or more in 1997.

Last year 506 people held such highly paid jobs. Their average pay: $151 million. To be exact: $150,992,544.25. In all they collected more than $76 billion.

These pay figures illustrate a long-term trend, heavily influenced by federal government policy, to restrain wages paid to the vast majority and to focus pay increases at the top, especially Congressional antipathy to unions. Without unions workers have little to no bargaining power. Congress has passed numerous laws that hobble unions and require intensely detailed reporting of salaries and expenses, rules that Congress doesn’t apply to business.

Congress puts additional downward pressure on wages by keeping the minimum hourly wage at the $7.25 level that took effect in 2009.

Why Isn’t This MSM News?

Try as you may, you won’t find these fact and many more anywhere except DCReport and outlets that we let republish our work for free. I’ve analyzed the annual wage statistics report for more than a quarter century but have been unable to persuade any of our major news organizations to follow suit since I left The New York Times 14 years ago.

It’s hard to imagine any work so distasteful that it requires a paycheck of neatly $3 million a week to motivate performance. Of course, that’s not how pay works. The worst jobs tend to pay the least. Think underground construction and mining, foundries, dishwashing, and janitorial service. Physical drudgery, often combined with low status, equals bad pay no matter how much we need minerals mined underground, molten metals to form products, clean dishes in eateries and clean public toilets.

Jobs that pay a million or more per week come with lavish fringe and retirement benefits, corporate jet travel (with massive subsidies for personal use) and a retinue of aides to handle every care, all paid for by investors. Public and coworker adulation and even envy enrich these jobs even more.

Executive Class expense accounts also subsidize Executive Class lifestyles. In the late 1980s I was shown the financial summary of a CEO’s expense account. It totaled more than $2 million (almost $5 million in today’s money). The document was supposed to be introduced into the public record the next day but wasn’t so I couldn’t use it. But still, it gives you an idea of Executive Class lifestyles at the very top.

Not everyone in what DCReport calls the Executive Class is an executive. Anyone who gets a wage or salary and an end of the year W-2 wage statement is included in the annual Social Security wage reports. Bestselling novelists, Major League home run hitters, top actors, and singers show up in this data.

Trump Tax Law Effects

The number of $50 million and up employees has exploded since the Trump/Radical Republican tax law took effect in 2018 and the Trump Administration lavished taxpayer funds on big companies during the pandemic.

There were just 205 such super high paying jobs in 2017 the last year under the old tax law. There were 201 such jobs in 2018, 222 in 2019, a figure that jumped to 358 in the pandemic year 2020 and then to 506 last year.

The number of these super paying jobs rose as companies grew flush with cash from years of enjoying the much lower tax rates that started in 2018. That year corporate tax revenues fell by a third.

Donald Trump and his allies promised this money would fuel investments that create jobs. But much of the money was used instead for stock buybacks, which enhance the value of executive stock options, and to increase Executive Class paychecks. Buybacks and fatter Executive Class paychecks don’t stimulate growth, don’t create new jobs and certainly don’t encourage paying more to the vast majority of workers.

There is a bit of good news in the rise of Executive Class pay. In 2020, the Executive Class raked in 82% of all the increased pay in America, DCReport showed a year ago. In 2021 they raked in just 29% of all pay hikes.

The difference between those years?

Hardly anyone got a pay raise in 2020 as the pandemic savaged the economy—except those in the Executive Class—while in 2021 modest pay raises for the hoi polloi were widespread.

Average pay raises for those below the Executive Class averaged just $76 in 2020, not that anyone would notice.

Median pay—half make more, half less—rose in 2020 by a mere $26. That’s for the entire year so it’s less than 50-cents a week. Many workers in the lower half of the pay scale got no raise. Nearly all 2020 pay raises went to the top tenth of the workforce, those making at least $100,000, with nearly all of that flowing to the Executive Class.

Last year full-time workers making up to $250,000 got an average raise of $1,600. Executive Class raises averaged $840,500 or 500 times as much.

These pay disparities explain much of the widespread discontent in America that fuels support for politicians who would take away our liberties and replace our democracy with dictatorial policies, a concern I have been writing about for more than a quarter century.

That fewer than a quarter million of America’s nearly 170 million employees collected close to a third of all the pay increases last year shows how our elected leaders have allowed the corporate rich to rig our economy in their favor. Government indulgences dating back four decades that have minimized competition and encouraged monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies also favor the Executive Class over rank-and-file workers. So do contracts that prohibit many workers, even some blue collar workers, from taking a job at another company in the same industry.

I documented many of these subtle and severe policies of upward redistribution of income and wealth earlier in this century in my award winning and bestselling economic trilogy, “Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch, and The Fine Print.” All remain in print.

The First Part and today’s Second Part of my reporting on the new wage statistics focused on full-time workers. Part Three will look at part-timers, the one in four American workers making less than $15,000 a year. The pay story for these 41 million people is a mix of good and bad news.

Footnote: For 1991, I included in the Executive Class those paid $500,000 and up because that threshold in 2021 money was $1 million because prices doubled over those 30 years.

Trump lawyers settle with protesters in Trump Tower beating case

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has decided to settle with protesters who alleged they were beaten by his security guards outside Trump Tower seven years ago — and it’s reportedly because they feared jurors would pummel him.

The Daily Beast’s John Pagliery reports that Trump’s lawyers made a “last-minute decision” to settle “after struggling to find Bronx jurors who didn’t have strong feelings about Trump and his eponymous company.”

The settlement was delivered to the plaintiffs after prospective jurors were sent out to lunch on Wednesday, as Trump lawyers had apparently concluded that taking the case to trial would result in a financial disaster for the twice-impeached former president.

“The Bronx — a diverse, blue collar borough known for its no-nonsense street smarts — is famous for the way juries there often reward plaintiffs with outsized awards, especially when punishing corporations and the rich,” notes Pagliery.

Terms of the settlements are still not known, but the plaintiffs in the case — Efrain Galicia, Florencia Tejeda Perez, Miguel Villalobos, and Norberto Garcia — quickly signed on after being presented with the offer.

The agreement also stated that “the parties all agree that the plaintiffs in the action, and all people, have a right to engage in peaceful protest on public sidewalks.”

Biden: “We’ve never given up on the American experiment, and we can’t do that now”

With midterms just around the corner, President Biden delivered a prime time speech on Wednesday pleading with voters to not give up on Democracy and the “American experiment.”

Speaking from the Columbus Club in Union Station, near Washington’s U.S. Capitol, Biden reminded that this isn’t the first time Americans have prepared to vote in the midst of chaos, and it won’t be the last, but we should all do so anyway in a combined effort to turn back the tides.

“There’s been anger before in America,” Biden says. “There’s been division before in America. But we’ve never given up on the American experiment. We can’t do that now. The remarkable thing about American Democracy is this: Just enough of us, on just enough occasions, have chosen not to dismantle Democracy, but to preserve Democracy. We must choose that path again.”

Trump, Biden and America’s destiny: We’re about to face the consequences. How bad will they be?

“Even in our darkest moments, there are fundamental values and beliefs that unite us as Americans,” Biden furthered. “And they must unite us now.”

Listing those values, Biden highlighted the belief that a vote in America is sacred.

“A vote is not a partisan tool, to be counted when it helps your candidate, and tossed aside when it doesn’t.”

Looking into next week’s elections, Biden readied voters for the challenges and obstacles that will present themselves at the polls.

“As I stand here today,” Biden says, “there are candidates running for every level of office in America . . . who won’t commit to accepting the results of the election that they’re running in . . . it’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. It’s un-American. I’ve said it before, you can’t love your country only when you win.”

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“This is no ordinary year. I ask you to think long and hard about the moment we’re in. In a typical year, we’re often not faced with questions whether the vote we cast will preserve Democracy, or put us at risk, but this year we are.”

As President Biden went further into his hopes for the midterms, he asked voters to consider if, while casting their votes, the people they’re hoping to elect will actually accept the results of the election.

“In the answer to that question, hangs the future of the country we love,” Biden says. “Because we’ve enjoyed our freedoms for so long, it’s easy to think they’ll always be with us, no matter what. But that isn’t true today.”

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Parkland shooter sentenced to life in prison

After rejecting prosecutors’ calls for the death penalty, a Florida jury has agreed upon a sentencing of life in prison with no possibility for parole for Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz.

The official sentencing, handed down by Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer on Wednesday, reflects each of the 17 counts of murder which Cruz has pleaded guilty to in light of the February 14, 2018 shooting which took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In addition, Scherer “imposed a sentence of life in prison with a minimum of 20 years to serve on 14 of the 17 counts of attempted murder, and life without the possibility of parole for the remaining three counts of attempted murder. All counts are to run consecutively,” according to CNN.

After Parkland, everything is different: NRA’s in decline and gun control is possible

Although the sentencing is not what the families of Cruz’s victims had hoped for, a number of them are expressing relief that the man who claimed the lives of their children will spend the rest of his behind bars.

“It is heartbreaking how any person who heard and saw all this did not give this killer the worst punishment possible,” said Annika Dworet, mother of 17-year-old victim Nicholas Dworet, in testimony delivered prior to sentencing. “As we all know the worst punishment in the state of Florida is the death penalty. How much worse would the crime have to be to warrant the death penalty?”

“You robbed Alyssa (of) a lifetime of memories,” Lori Alhadeff, mother of 14-year-old victim Alyssa Alhadeff, said during her own impact testimony. “Alyssa will never graduate from high school. Alyssa will never go to college, and Alyssa will never play soccer. She will never get married and she will never have a baby . . . My hope for you is that you are miserable for the rest of your pathetic life. My hope for you is that the pain of what you did to my family burns and traumatizes you every day.”

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“Nikolas Cruz sat through the entire trial & sentencing without showing the least indication of humanity,” one person said on Twitter following the sentencing. “Only occasionally laughing with his dirtbag bird flipping atty. He’s simply been an empty shell of a human figure, with empty dead eyes behind his glasses.”

“You make me sick!” said father of victim Alex Schachter during his victim impact statement.

"You make me sick!"

The father of #Parkland victim #AlexSchachter spoke directly to Nikolas Cruz's defense team during the victim impact statement portion of today's sentencing hearing.

WATCH #CourtTV LIVE – https://t.co/xxb1xrYwbC pic.twitter.com/zA9GZmKCnZ

— Court TV (@CourtTV) November 1, 2022

Watch footage from the sentencing below via WSVN 7 News.

WATCH LIVE: The sentencing hearing will soon conclude with Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer formally sentencing Nikolas Cruz for the 2018 massacre at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. https://t.co/wTgRqASGBY https://t.co/NwfQY6Rgpo

— WSVN 7 News (@wsvn) November 2, 2022

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Intuitions about justice are a consistent part of human nature across cultures and millennia

“Thou shalt not kill” may be the most recognizable moral prohibition in societies around the world.

But where does your sense of justice come from?

Throughout history, justice and laws about wrongdoing have been attributed to one god or another. More recently, justice has been traced to moral truths that can be discovered by judges and other legal experts, and to social norms that vary across cultures.

However, our research instead suggests that the human sense of justice, and criminal laws, is generated by the human brain.

Put simply: Being human makes you a decent lawmaker even if you’ve never stepped foot in law school. To an important extent, criminal laws appear to be the end products of gut feelings about justice that are a part of human nature.

Here’s how we investigated just how universal these intuitions are:

Testing the human brain’s sense of justice

Human conflict ranges from the mild, as when neighbors disagree about the appropriate loudness of music, to the serious, including cases of fraud, robbery, rape, homicide — the stuff of criminal law.

Laws and litigation come in handy when you’re butting heads with someone. But your brain automatically generates intuitions about justice when there is even the potential for conflict, long before you set foot in court. People, even young children, have strong feelings about what counts as a wrongful action and how much punishment a wrongdoer deserves.

These justice intuitions come naturally to everyone. They’re like human lungs or human retinas — part of being human.

So maybe the standard-issue human brain forms the basis of formal and informal justice. If so, a distinctive prediction follows: Laypeople will make decent lawmakers using their sense of justice even when they have no training in law. Further, laypeople will be able to intuitively recreate core features of actual criminal laws from cultures they are totally unfamiliar with.

We devised a study to test those predictions. We showed participants various offenses drawn from actual criminal codes but not the punishments that the law establishes for those offenses.

Some of the offenses we presented came from a modern and culturally familiar society, drawn from Title 18 of the Consolidated Pennsylvania Statutes. But other offenses were truly ancient and culturally foreign. Some participants evaluated offenses from the Laws of Eshnunna, a 3,800-year-old Mesopotamian legal code — one of humanity’s most ancient legal codes. Other participants saw offenses from the Tang Code, a 1,400-year-old legal code from China.

These archaic laws are the next best thing to time travel. They are like fossils that preserve the legal thinking of ancient lawmakers.

To give some examples, some of the Eshnunna offenses shown to participants included: biting out the eye of another man, seizing a boat fraudulently and failing to keep one’s aggressive ox in check, resulting in a slave being killed by the ox. Such were the offenses of an ancient Mesopotamian society.

Despite the massive cultural differences between the ancient city-state of Eshnunna and modern societies, if the sense of justice, and laws, originates in the human brain, then the king who decreed the Laws of Eshnunna and the participants in the study may be of one mind.

So next we asked participants to rate each of the offenses they saw. Some participants were asked to imagine they were lawmakers; they were asked to mock-legislate the fines each offense would deserve by law. Other participants mock-legislated prison sentences for each offense. To make sure participants were giving their untrained intuitions, we excluded from analyses participants who attended law school.

Indeed, the Eshnunna king and the participants in our study did display a shared sense of justice. The more study participants judged an ancient offense as serious, the higher the actual punishment provided by law for that offense.

This match between participants’ intuitions and ancient laws wasn’t perfect, but it was substantial. It suggests that human beings share a sense of justice and that people today can recreate the core of criminal laws from faraway societies that are thousands of years in the past.

Cultural effects on the sense of justice

A shared sense of justice that is part of human nature does not deny cultural differences.

Consider this Tang offense: “All cases of a master who kills a slave who has not committed an offense are punished by one year of penal servitude (NB: redeemable by paying a fine of 20 copper chin).” The Tang Code considers this offense to be relatively mild — consider, for example, that “beating and killing a person in an affray” was punished by the Tang Code with strangulation or a fine of 120 copper chin. In contrast, study participants judged “killing a slave who has not committed an offense” a very serious transgression.

And yet, participants’ intuitive responses generally matched the responses called for in the ancient criminal codes. For instance, participants agreed with the Tang lawmakers that beating and killing a person in a fight is a worse offense than betting goods and articles in games of chance.

To us, this mix of cross-cultural differences and similarities suggests that the brain machinery that generates the sense of justice combines universal principles with open parameters that are filled in with local information. The universal principles may explain why participants generally saw eye to eye with the Eshnunna king and the Tang lawmakers. The open parameters may explain cultural variation.

Evolutionary roots of a sense of justice

Conflict is evolutionarily ancient. Organisms, including nonhuman animals, can offend against others — for example, by preying on them. And so natural selection would have endowed organisms with means that help them solve conflicts in their favor: fangs, antlers, neurotoxic venoms. These defenses and weapons are useful. Our ancestors lived in a world without police, and so they had to be their own police if they were to survive and thrive.

But human conflict is special. With their ingenuity and knack for cooperation, people can produce a huge array of goods and services that other people can swindle, rob, adulterate, counterfeit, embezzle and destroy. So the scope of human conflict is vast.

Brawn may help in human conflict, but brain is key. Humans live in an information-dense world, where it’s important to know precisely how much harm is being done to you when someone offends against you. Accurately appraising wrongs allows victims to demand or deliver an amount of punishment that is, as in the story of Goldilocks, just right: neither too small that an undeterred offender will re-offend, nor too great that the offender will counter-punish the original victim. Our human ancestors didn’t have price tags or written laws to appraise wrongful actions, so they needed to appraise wrongful actions with their brains.

The brain mechanisms for appraising wrongdoing appear to be part of human nature — the same in all times and places humans have lived in. Of course, justice intuitions and criminal laws vary across cultures. Grand theft auto wasn’t appraised in Sparta because there were no cars 2,500 years ago. Written criminal laws are absent in societies without writing systems.

Nevertheless, the human sense of justice seems to be fundamentally similar across space and time. And criminal laws everywhere may be shaped by a sense of justice and offense-appraising mechanisms that are universal — akin to how universal mechanisms of taste perception give rise to the world’s diverse cuisines.

Daniel Sznycer, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Oklahoma State University and Carlton Patrick, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies, University of Central Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AI is changing scientists’ understanding of language learning

Unlike the carefully scripted dialogue found in most books and movies, the language of everyday interaction tends to be messy and incomplete, full of false starts, interruptions and people talking over each other. From casual conversations between friends, to bickering between siblings, to formal discussions in a boardroom, authentic conversation is chaotic. It seems miraculous that anyone can learn language at all given the haphazard nature of the linguistic experience.

For this reason, many language scientists — including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics — believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.

Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience — or so the thinking goes.

This template, for example, might contain a “super-rule” that dictates how new pieces are added to existing phrases. Children then only need to learn whether their native language is one, like English, where the verb goes before the object (as in “I eat sushi”), or one like Japanese, where the verb goes after the object (in Japanese, the same sentence is structured as “I sushi eat”).

But new insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.

Grammatical language without a grammar

Even if their choice of words is sometimes strange, nonsensical or contains racist, sexist and other harmful biases, one thing is very clear: the overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them — they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be.

GPT-3, arguably the most well-known of these models, is a gigantic deep-learning neural network with 175 billion parameters. It was trained to predict the next word in a sentence given what came before across hundreds of billions of words from the internet, books and Wikipedia. When it made a wrong prediction, its parameters were adjusted using an automatic learning algorithm.

Remarkably, GPT-3 can generate believable text reacting to prompts such as “A summary of the last ‘Fast and Furious’ movie is…” or “Write a poem in the style of Emily Dickinson.” Moreover, GPT-3 can respond to SAT level analogies, reading comprehension questions and even solve simple arithmetic problems — all from learning how to predict the next word.

Comparing AI models and human brains

The similarity with human language doesn’t stop here, however. Research published in Nature Neuroscience demonstrated that these artificial deep-learning networks seem to use the same computational principles as the human brain. The research group, led by neuroscientist Uri Hasson, first compared how well GPT-2 — a “little brother” of GPT-3 – and humans could predict the next word in a story taken from the podcast “This American Life”: people and the AI predicted the exact same word nearly 50% of the time.

The researchers recorded volunteers’ brain activity while listening to the story. The best explanation for the patterns of activation they observed was that people’s brains — like GPT-2 — were not just using the preceding one or two words when making predictions but relied on the accumulated context of up to 100 previous words. Altogether, the authors conclude: “Our finding of spontaneous predictive neural signals as participants listen to natural speech suggests that active prediction may underlie humans’ lifelong language learning.”

A possible concern is that these new AI language models are fed a lot of input: GPT-3 was trained on linguistic experience equivalent to 20,000 human years. But a preliminary study that has not yet been peer-reviewed found that GPT-2 can still model human next-word predictions and brain activations even when trained on just 100 million words. That’s well within the amount of linguistic input that an average child might hear during the first 10 years of life.

We are not suggesting that GPT-3 or GPT-2 learn language exactly like children do. Indeed, these AI models do not appear to comprehend much, if anything, of what they are saying, whereas understanding is fundamental to human language use. Still, what these models prove is that a learner — albeit a silicon one — can learn language well enough from mere exposure to produce perfectly good grammatical sentences and do so in a way that resembles human brain processing.

Rethinking language learning

For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models prove otherwise. They demonstrate that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned from linguistic experience alone. Likewise, we suggest that children do not need an innate grammar to learn language.

“Children should be seen, not heard” goes the old saying, but the latest AI language models suggest that nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, children need to be engaged in the back-and-forth of conversation as much as possible to help them develop their language skills. Linguistic experience — not grammar — is key to becoming a competent language user.

Morten H. Christiansen, Professor of Psychology, Cornell University and Pablo Contreras Kallens, Ph.D. Student in Psychology, Cornell University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Racists will be taking out loans”: Trevor Noah slams Musk’s “ridiculous” Twitter verification plan

Trevor Noah criticized Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, including his “ridiculous” plan to charge users $8 per month to be verified with a blue checkmark, during the opening monologue of Tuesday’s edition of “The Daily Show.”

“For months now, Musk has said that he wanted to own Twitter. The reason he wanted to own Twitter is because he wanted to make sure that it became a haven for free speech,” Noah said. “. . . Because let’s be honest, up until now, people have really held back on Twitter.”

Elon Musk has officially dubbed himself “Chief Twit”

Noah noted that use of the N-word had increased 500% in the first 12 hours following Musk’s acquisition, adding that such trolls don’t “want free speech, [they] just wanna hate on people.”

“So, here’s my question: If you’re trying to create equality on Twitter, why charge anyone to be verified? Just give everyone a blue checkmark then,” Noah continued. “Why are you charging people? . . . It doesn’t make sense to offer it as ‘equality,’ and then put a price on it. Do you get what I’m saying? Can you imagine if MLK was out there like, ‘I have a dream. I have a dream, and I’ll tell you all about it for $8.99 a month.’ It wouldn’t be the same thing.”

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Musk reportedly had initial plans to increase the price of the Twitter Blue subscription plan from $4.99 to $19.99, which prompted online backlash and a since-viral reaction from Stephen King. On Tuesday, Musk took to Twitter to announce the new price, writing, “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”

Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022

To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022

In his monologue, Noah ridiculed the decision, saying “with $8 a month, you can subscribe to Netflix, you can get Paramount+, you can get Hulu . . . or you can pay so that people verify that they’re actually sh*tting on you.”

“It’s all about ‘equality.’ No, you’re trying to make money. I get it,” he added. “I think this $8 a month thing is ridiculous. If you ask me, if Elon Musk wants to make money from Twitter, what he should do [is], don’t charge people for blue checkmarks. Charge white people to say the N-word. Twitter will be the most profitable company in history. Racists will be taking out loans.”

You can watch the full segment below via Twitter:

Charging eight dollars a month to be verified on Twitter? Is Elon Musk hoping everyone else makes terrible financial decisions like him? pic.twitter.com/fwJKCEGtPR

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) November 2, 2022

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Expert calls out lax state laws as guns at voting sites spark fears of intimidation and violence

A couple in Mesa, Arizona, was dropping off their ballots on Oct. 21, 2022, for the forthcoming midterm election when they saw two people carrying guns and dressed in tactical gear hanging around the Maricopa County drop box. The armed pair left when officers later arrived.

It wasn’t an isolated incident. A lawsuit filed Oct. 24 by Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino noted that on several occasions “armed and masked individuals” associated with the group Clean Elections USA had gathered at drop boxes in the county “with the express purpose of deterring voters.”

Voter intimidation is a crime in Arizona — as it is throughout the country. In the case of Maricopa County, a judge ruled on Nov. 1 that the actions of the individuals — who present themselves as anti-voter fraud activists — crossed the line and issued a restraining order. Under the order, people associated with Clean Elections USA are now barred from openly carrying firearms within 250 feet of a ballot box. Concealed firearms will be permitted, though, and the restriction only affects individuals connected to Clean Elections USA.

The presence of armed individuals at voting sites adds to concerns over the prospects of election-related intimidation and violence, which have deepened in recent years.

As Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment, recently reported to the congressional committee looking into the Jan 6. attack on the Capitol, political violence “is considered more acceptable” by the public than it was five years ago.

False charges of stolen elections — such as those repeatedly made by former President Donald Trump — are “a major instigator of political unrest,” Kleinfeld noted, although she added that extremists in both political parties have reported a greater willingness to resort to political violence.

These concerns are far from hypothetical: As of this fall, more than 1,000 threats to election officials — some explicitly mentioning gun violence — were under review by federal law enforcement agencies. Responding to the situation in Arizona, the Department of Justice on Oct. 31 noted that the presence of armed individuals raises “serious concerns” of voter intimidation.

Such concerns are fanned by the fact that only seven states ban all gun-carrying at polling places. Five more states bar the carrying of concealed guns at polling places. But in swing states like Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, people are allowed to carry guns even while they are voting.

The lack of a federal ban on firearms at voting sites has prompted Senator Chris Murphy, D-CT, to introduce in Congress the Vote Without Fear Act, proposed legislation that would “prohibit the possession of a firearm within 100 yards of any federal election site.”

Pitched battles, and voter intimidation

To be sure, election-related violence is a part of America’s past. For example, the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party of the 1850s often employed armed violence using an array of weapons, and Democrat-Whig party battles erupted in the 1830s. Throughout the middle of the 19th century, such cities as Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans at times witnessed pitched battles between warring political factions at election time. And lethal violence was used extensively after the Civil War to systematically terrorize and disenfranchise Black voters in the South.

Yet many people in the United States also believed from the start that guns and violence were contrary to the values of a democratic nation, especially, though not limited to, during times of elections. As early as 1776, Delaware’s state Constitution stated: “To prevent any violence or force being used at the said elections, no person shall come armed to any of them.” It further stipulated that, to protect voters, a gun-free zone would be put in place within a mile of polling places for 24 hours before and after election day.

In its state Bill of Rights of 1787, New York decreed that “all elections shall be free and that no person by force of arms nor by malice or menacing or otherwise presume to disturb or hinder any citizen of this State to make free election.”

In my own research on historical gun laws, I found roughly a dozen states that specifically barred guns during elections or at polling places in laws enacted between the 1770s and the start of the 20th century. But even more importantly, from the 1600s through the 1800s, I found that at least three-quarters of all Colonies and later states enacted laws criminalizing gun-brandishing and display in any public setting — and that would certainly include voting stations at election time.

As I discuss in my new book, “The Gun Dilemma,” early American lawmakers well understood that public gun-carrying, by its very nature, was intimidating. And that extended not only to brandishing a gun, meaning displaying one in a threatening manner, but also to mere gun display — simply showing a gun in a public setting.

Modern studies confirm this understanding. Analysts in fields including psychology and criminology have concluded that the mere presence of guns increases aggression and violence. To cite a different analysis, a study of over 30,000 demonstrations in the U.S. from 2020 to 2021 found that when guns were present, protests were over six times more likely to turn violent or destructive.

Creating an ‘island of calm’

According to polls, wide majorities of Americans oppose public gun-carrying. A 2017 study reported that from two-thirds to over four-fifths of respondents opposed public gun-carrying in various settings, including at the polls. And as recently as 2018, the Supreme Court affirmed that Election Day polling places should be “an island of calm in which voters can peacefully contemplate their choices.”

Both history and modern research support the conclusion that the presence of guns in public defeats this goal. Indeed, they can induce “great fear and quarrels,” or so said New Jersey in a law passed in 1686.

Robert Spitzer, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the Political Science Department, State University of New York College at Cortland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Daniel Radcliffe is no Voldemort: “Harry Potter” actor assures that Rowling doesn’t speak for him

Mere days after Ralph Fiennes defended author J.K. Rowling in The New York Times, his co-star in the “Harry Potter” franchise is taking a different tactic. In a new interview, Daniel Radcliffe, who starred as Harry in the film adaptions of Rowling’s books, condemned the comments of Rowling, who has expressed increasingly vehement transphobic views. He joins fellow cast member Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy, in distancing himself from Rowling — and in trying to separate the creator from the creation.

Harry Potter and the retconning of Dumbledore: It’s no longer about the story

Two years ago, Radcliffe published an open letter on the Trevor Project website where he stated bluntly: “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo [Rowling] or I.” Radcliffe has been a supporter of the Trevor Project, a nonprofit which focuses on suicide prevention for queer youth, for over 10 years.

In an interview with IndieWire, Radcliffe said the reason he believed “very, very much as though I needed to say something when I did was because, particularly since finishing ‘Potter,’ I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter … seeing them hurt on that day I was like, I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way.”

Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the series, said in a 2020 statement, “I firmly stand with the trans community,” while Emma Watson (Hermione) expressed her support on Twitter: “I want my trans followers to know that I and so many other people around the world see you, respect you and love you for who you are.”

I want my trans followers to know that I and so many other people around the world see you, respect you and love you for who you are.

— Emma Watson (@EmmaWatson) June 10, 2020

Fiennes, who portrayed the villain Voldemort in the films, said in a recent interview that the criticism directed at Rowling was “disgusting, it’s appalling” and paradoxically described her as “not some obscene, über-right-wing fascist. It’s just a woman saying, ‘I’m a woman and I feel I’m a woman and I want to be able to say that I’m a woman.’ And I understand where she’s coming from.”

But other actors like Felton seek to distance themselves even further, downplaying Rowling’s hand in the films. “She wasn’t part of the filmmaking process as much as some people might think. I think I only recall seeing her once or twice on set,” Felton, who has a new memoir out, said in an interview with The Independent, where he called himself, “pro-choice, pro-discussion, pro-human rights across the board and pro-love.”

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Radcliffe, who stars as the title character in the new “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” told IndieWire, “I don’t think I would’ve been able to look myself in the mirror had I not said anything” about trans rights. As for what Rowling might be thinking to double-down on her stance? The “Harry Potter” star said, “it’s not mine to guess what’s going on in someone else’s head.”

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Using the ocean to fight climate change raises serious environmental justice and technical questions

Heat waves, droughts and extreme weather are endangering people and ecosystems somewhere in the world almost every day. These extremes are exacerbated by climate change, driven primarily by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases that build up in the atmosphere and trap heat at the Earth’s surface.

With that in mind, researchers are exploring ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away — including using the ocean. But while these techniques might work, they raise serious technical, social and ethical questions, many of which have no clear answers yet.

We study climate change policy, sustainability and environmental justice. Before people start experimenting with the health of the ocean, there are several key questions to consider.

Ocean carbon dioxide removal 101

The ocean covers about 70% of the planet, and it naturally takes up carbon dioxide. In fact, about a quarter of human-produced carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean.

Ocean carbon dioxide removal is any action designed to use the ocean to remove even more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it already does and store it.

It spans a wide range of techniques — from increasing the amount and vitality of carbon dioxide-absorbing mangrove forests to using ocean fertilization to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton that absorb carbon dioxide to building pipelines that pump liquid carbon dioxide into formations under the seabed, where it can eventually solidify as carbonate rock.

There are other forms of carbon dioxide removal — planting trees, for example. But they require large amounts of land that is needed for other essential uses, such as agriculture.

That’s why interest in using the vast ocean is growing.

Would these methods store enough carbon?

The first crucial question is whether ocean carbon dioxide removal techniques could significantly reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and store it long term, beyond what the ocean already does. Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing globally, which means that ocean carbon dioxide removal would need to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for a long time, at least until greenhouse gas emissions have fallen.

Initial evidence suggests that some forms of ocean carbon dioxide removal, such as those that rely on short-lived biomass like kelp forests or phytoplankton, may not keep captured carbon stored for more than a few decades. That’s because most plant tissues are quickly recycled by decay or by sea creatures grazing on them.

In contrast, mechanisms that form minerals, like the interaction when carbon dioxide is pumped into basalt formations, or that alter the way seawater retains carbon dioxide, such as increasing its alkalinity, prevent carbon from escaping and are much more likely to keep it out of the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.

Ecological risks and benefits

Another key question is what ecological benefits or risks accompany different ocean carbon dioxide removal approaches.

Research shows that some options, such as supporting mangrove forests, may promote biodiversity and benefit nearby human communities.

However, other options could introduce novel risks. For example, growing and then sinking large amounts of kelp or algae could bring in invasive species. Dissolving certain types of rock in the ocean could reduce ocean acidity. This would enhance the ocean’s ability to store carbon dioxide, but these rocks could also contain trace amounts of metals that could harm marine life, and these risks are not well understood.

Each process could also release some greenhouse gases, reducing its overall effectiveness.

Interfering with nature is a social question

The ocean affects everyone on the planet, but not everyone will have the same relationship to it or the same opportunities to have their opinions heard.

Much of the global population lives near the ocean, and some interventions might impinge on places that support jobs and communities. For example, boosting algae growth could affect nearby wild fisheries or interfere with recreation. People and communities are going to evaluate these risks differently depending on how they are personally affected.

In addition, people’s trust in decision-makers often shapes their views of technologies. Some ways of using the ocean to remove carbon, such as those close to the shore, could be governed locally. It’s less clear how decisions about the high seas or deep ocean would be made, since these areas are not under the jurisdiction of any one country or global governing body.

People’s perceptions will likely also be shaped by such factors as whether or not they see ocean carbon dioxide removal as interfering with nature or protecting it. However, views of what is acceptable or not can change. As the impacts of climate change increase, tolerance for some unconventional interventions seems to be growing.

It’s also an ethical question

Ocean carbon dioxide removal also raises a variety of ethical questions that do not have straightforward answers.

For example, it forces people to consider the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Are humans obliged to intervene to reduce the impact on the climate, or ought we avoid ocean interventions? Do people have the right to purposefully intervene in the ocean or not? Are there specific obligations that humans ought to recognize when considering such options?

Other ethical questions revolve around who makes decisions about ocean carbon dioxide removal and the consequences. For example, who should be involved in decision-making about the ocean? Could relying on ocean carbon dioxide removal reduce societies’ commitment to reducing emissions through other means, such as by reducing consumption, increasing efficiency and transforming energy systems?

Who pays?

Finally, ocean carbon dioxide removal could be very expensive.

For example, mining and then adding rocks to reduce the ocean’s acidity has been estimated to cost between US$60 and $200 per ton of carbon dioxide removed. To put that into context, the world produced more than 36 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from energy alone in 2021.

Even macroalgae cultivation could be in the tens of billions of dollars if done at the scale likely necessary to have an impact.

These methods are more expensive than many actions that reduce emissions right now. For instance, using solar panels to avoid carbon emissions can range from saving money to a cost of $50 per ton of carbon dioxide, while actions like reducing methane emissions are even less expensive. But the harm from continued climate change has been estimated to be in the hundreds of billions annually in the United States alone.

These costs raise more questions. For example, how much debt is fair for future generations to carry, and how should the costs be distributed globally to fix a global problem?

Ocean carbon dioxide removal could become a useful method for keeping global warming in check, but it should not be seen as a silver bullet, especially since there isn’t an effective global system for making decisions about the ocean.

Sarah Cooley, a former research scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and director of climate science at the Ocean Conservancy, contributed to this article.

Sonja Klinsky, Associate Professor and Senior Global Futures Scientist, Arizona State University and Terre Satterfield, Professor of Culture, Risk and the Environment, University of British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Signatures of alien technology could be how humanity first finds extraterrestrial life

If an alien were to look at Earth, many human technologies — from cell towers to fluorescent light bulbs — could be a beacon signifying the presence of life.

We are two astronomers who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — or SETI. In our research, we try to characterize and detect signs of technology originating from beyond Earth. These are called technosignatures. While scanning the sky for a TV broadcast of some extraterrestrial Olympics may sound straightforward, searching for signs of distant, advanced civilizations is a much more nuanced and difficult task than it might seem.

Saying ‘hello’ with radios and lasers

The modern scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence began in 1959 when astronomers Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison showed that radio transmissions from Earth could be detected by radio telescopes at interstellar distances. The same year, Frank Drake, launched the first SETI search, Project Ozma, by pointing a large radio telescope at two nearby Sun-like stars to see if he could detect any radio signals coming from them. Following the invention of the laser in 1960, astronomers showed that visible light could also be detected from distant planets.

These first, foundational attempts to detect radio or laser signals from another civilization were all looking for focused, powerful signals that would have been intentionally sent to the solar system and meant to be found.

Given the technological limitations of the 1960s, astronomers did not give serious thought to searching for broadcast signals — like television and radio broadcasts on Earth — that would leak into space. But a beam of a radio signal, with all of its power focused towards Earth, could be detectable from much farther away — just picture the difference between a laser and a weak light bulb.

The search for intentional radio and laser signals is still one of the most popular SETI strategies today. However, this approach assumes that extraterrestrial civilizations want to communicate with other technologically advanced life. Humans very rarely send targeted signals into space, and some scholars argue that intelligent species may purposefully avoid broadcasting out their locations. This search for signals that no one may be sending is called the SETI Paradox.

Leaking radio waves

Though humans don’t transmit many intentional signals out to the cosmos, many technologies people use today produce a lot of radio transmissions that leak into space. Some of these signals would be detectable if they came from a nearby star.

The worldwide network of television towers constantly emits signals in many directions that leak into space and can accumulate into a detectable, though relatively faint, radio signal. Research is ongoing as to whether current emissions from cell towers in the radio frequency on Earth would be detectable using today’s telescopes, but the upcoming Square Kilometer Array radio telescope will be able to detect even fainter radio signals with 50 times the sensitivity of current radio telescope arrays.

Not all human-made signals are so unfocused, though. Astronomers and space agencies use beams of radio waves to communicate with satellites and space craft in the solar system. Some researchers also use radio waves for radar to study asteroids. In both of these cases, the radio signals are more focused and pointed out into space. Any extraterrestrial civilization that happened to be in the line of sight of these beams could likely detect these unambiguously artificial signals.

Finding megastructures

Aside from finding an actual alien spacecraft, radio waves are the most common technosignatures featured in sci-fi movies and books. But they are not the only signals that could be out there.

In 1960, astronomer Freeman Dyson theorized that, since stars are by far the most powerful energy source in any planetary system, a technologically advanced civilization might collect a significant portion of the star’s light as energy with what would essentially be a massive solar panel. Many astronomers call these megastructures, and there are a few ways to detect them.

After using the energy in the captured light, the technology of an advanced society would re-emit some of the energy as heat. Astronomers have shown that this heat could be detectable as extra infrared radiation coming from a star system.

Another possible way to find a megastructure would be to measure its dimming effect on a star. Specifically, large artificial satellites orbiting a star would periodically block some of its light. This would appear as dips in the star’s apparent brightness over time. Astronomers could detect this effect similarly to how distant planets are discovered today.

A whole lot of pollution

Another technosignature that astronomers have thought about is pollution.

Chemical pollutants — like nitrogen dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons on Earth are almost exclusively produced by human industry. It is possible to detect these molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets with the same method the James Webb Space Telescope is using to search distant planets for signs of biology. If astronomers find a planet with an atmosphere filled with chemicals that can only be produced by technology, it may be a sign of life.

Finally, artificial light or heat from cities and industry could also be detectable with large optical and infrared telescopes, as would a large number of satellites orbiting a planet. But a civilization would need to produce far more heat, light and satellites than Earth does to be detectable across the vastness of space using technology humans currently possess.

Which signal is best?

No astronomer has ever found a confirmed technosignature, so it’s hard to say what will be the first sign of alien civilizations. While many astronomers have thought a lot about what might make for a good signal, ultimately, nobody knows what extraterrestrial technology might look like and what signals are out there in the Universe.

Some astronomers support a generalized SETI approach which searches for anything in space that current scientific knowledge cannot naturally explain. Some, like us, continue to search for both intentional and unintentional technosignatures. The bottom line is that there are many avenues for detecting distant life. Since no one knows what approach is likely to succeed first, there is still a lot of exciting work left to do.

Macy Huston, PhD Candidate in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State and Jason Wright, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

North Carolina Republican wants “rape panels” to decide whether victims can get abortions

A North Carolina Republican congressional candidate floated a proposal to create a community review process that would determine whether survivors of rape and incest can get abortions.

Bo Hines, the GOP candidate for North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District, wants to outlaw all abortions unless the mother’s life is at risk.

“He wants victims of rape and incest to be allowed to get an abortion on a case-by-case basis through a community-level review process outside the jurisdiction of the federal government,” local news outlet WRAL reported.

The proposal was widely panned by critics.

Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall described the proposed review boards as “rape panels.”

The 3 biggest lies Republicans use to avoid admitting they plan to ban abortion

“Something from a nightmare,” wrote civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill.

When I was raped in grad school, I had a pregnancy scare. I was lucky in that I didn’t end up getting pregnant. If I had, I cannot imagine the trauma of undergoing a community-level review so that perfect strangers could decide if I should be sentenced to motherhood bc of a crime https://t.co/Z3ciIXsVqb

— Miranda Yaver, PhD (@mirandayaver) November 1, 2022

“The anti-choice agenda is about removing women’s control over their own lives, and making them subject to the rule of others. They differ on who they think those others should be—fathers, husbands, random vigilantes, local jerks—but they agree that women will not rule themselves,” wrote Moira Donegan, a gender and politics columnist for The Guardian.

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Hines’ comments are a backtrack on his previous remarks to the Raleigh News & Observer, in which he said he would support blanket prohibitions on abortion.

His changing stance on reproductive rights is an example of how Hines is trying to appeal to North Carolina’s far-right conservatives, as well as more centrist voters who could be the deciding factor in the midterm election.

His more moderate statements on abortion and immigration also come after greater criticism from outside groups and his Democratic opponent, state Sen. Wiley Nickel.

After winning the May 17th primary, Hines removed the “life and family” section from his website, which previously included links to a fundraising page that claimed “life begins at conception” and the “rights of the unborn” must be protected, the 19th News reported.

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Like a “fire in the brain”: COVID can cause brain inflammation that mimics Parkinson’s symptoms

We typically think of SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID, as a respiratory virus. That makes sense, given that it is airborne and typically infects humans via the nose and lungs, and causes respiratory symptoms like cough and sore throat. But maybe we should start thinking of SARS-CoV-2 as a brain virus, too.

After all, we have hard evidence that SARS-2 can infect the brain, causing long-lasting or even permanent damage. This can result in life-threatening strokes and encephalitis, inflammation of the brain, or what is colloquially called “brain fog.”

Even anosmia, the loss of taste and smell — considered hallmark symptoms of this disease, though that is changing — is a neurological disorder, a category of conditions affecting the brain and central nervous system. It includes strokes, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and meningitis. Remarkably, SARS-CoV-2 seems able to play a role in all of these neurological dysfunctions and more.

SARS-CoV-2 even seems to activate the same mechanisms in the brain that can causes Parkinson’s disease, a brain disorder distinguished by involuntary movements, shakiness and balance difficulties.

Fortunately, developing these neurological conditions from COVID seems to be rare. One’s propensity to show such symptoms also depends on how severe the infection is or was, with vaccinated people generally experiencing more mild or temporary symptoms. Medical history may also play a role in how likely it is to develop neurological disorders. However, age does not seem to be a major factor, as children can be affected, too.

As the virus mutates, the most common COVID symptoms appear to be changing, too

We also don’t know how much of a role repeat infections could play in this pathology or if certain viral variants are more prone to neurological damage than others. With a “variant soup” apparently ready to ravage North America and Europe this winter, there are lot of questions experts still have about COVID and the brain, but what we’re learning isn’t reassuring.

What we know is that SARS-CoV-2 seems to activate the same mechanisms in the brain that can causes Parkinson’s disease, a brain disorder distinguished by involuntary movements, shakiness and balance difficulties. A new study in the journal Molecular Psychiatry shows for the first time that SARS-2 can trigger the same inflammatory processes seen in patients with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

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The good news is that these researchers identify a way to shut this process down using a medication, meaning that in the future there may be a pill to take to prevent brain damage from COVID. To learn how, an international team of researchers led by Professor Trent Woodruff at The University of Queensland performed several different experiments, including with mice, African green monkey kidney cells, and human immune cells called microglia, which act like white blood cells but specifically protect neurons.

In each of these experiments, the scientists were looking for NLRP3, a type of protein called an inflammasome, that defends the brain from attackers by releasing a mess of inflammatory markers. NLRP3 has been widely studied, with some research incriminating this protein for the underlying causes of Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Albornoz Balmaceda described this inflammation cascade like a “fire” in the brain, which sweeps through, killing neurons in its wake.

In each of these trials, whether it was Petri dishes or animal models, NLRP3 was found to be activated. What that means is that SARS-2 infection in the brain seems to also activate NLRP3, which could put people at greater risk of developing Parkinson’s disease or related neurological conditions.

“We studied the effect of the virus on the brain’s immune cells, ‘microglia’ which are the key cells involved in the progression of brain diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s,” Prof. Woodruff said in a statement. When his team grew human microglia in the lab and infected these cells with SARS-2, they showed signs of intense inflammation that is familiar to neuroscientists studying Parkinson’s. “We found the cells effectively became ‘angry’, activating the same pathway that Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s proteins can activate in disease, the inflammasomes,” Woodruff said.

Dr. Albornoz Balmaceda, another of the study’s authors, described this inflammation cascade like a “fire” in the brain, which sweeps through, killing neurons in its wake. “It’s kind of a silent killer, because you don’t see any outward symptoms for many years,” Balmaceda said in the same release.

An angry fire in the brain sounds bad, but this inflammation actually serves a purpose; it’s not a mistake of evolution. When a pathogen like a virus crosses the blood brain barrier, a shield around the brain to filter out unwanted substances, it can start causing damage, infecting neurons and forcing them to shrivel up.

This can trigger the release of NLRP3, which then spreads more inflammatory proteins called caspases. These start telling damaged cells to die in order to stop the spread of the invader, clear out damaged cells and start repairing. This process is called pyroptosis, from the Latin “pyro” for fire and the Greek “ptosis” for falling off, like the leaves of a tree. This type of inflammation causes a chain reaction that can kill a lot of neurons like a bursting string of firecrackers.

A little of this inflammation is natural and can be protective, like a controlled burn. But too much pyroptosis and you go from a contained bonfire to flaming down the whole woods. As more neurons die, the brain starts to malfunction.

To further confirm this theory, the researchers repeated the experiments using a drug that blocked this pathway. Obliquely called MCC950, this drug stops NLRP3 from signaling and has been used in similar studies related to this inflammation pathway. MCC950 binds to NLRP3, preventing inflammation and stopping the brain from essentially angrily setting itself on fire.

MCC950 is actually in development as a way to treat Parkinson’s disease, although some research in mice suggests MCC950 could have side effects, such as kidney damage. But other, similar drugs that stop NLRP3 in its tracks could be down the pipeline, so hypothetically, a drug like this could also stop some of the damaging effects of SARS-CoV-2. We now know at least one of the ways that SARS-CoV-2 can wreak havoc on the brain, but we’re also one step closer to finding a treatment for it and other neurological conditions like Parkinson’s disease.

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